The Apocalyptic Sublime (interview questions #3)
Dr Simon Ussher has started emailing me interview questions about my recent books on aesthetics (see here). Over coming weeks I’ll post my responses to his questions.
In the preface to your book SMPLCTY, you discuss the ‘apocalyptic sublime’. What do you mean by this intriguing but slightly unsettling turn of phrase?
When I speak of the ‘apocalyptic sublime’, I am trying to name a peculiar existential mood of our age – a mixture of dread and awe that emerges when humanity confronts the possibility of ecological and civilisational collapse. It is ‘apocalyptic’ because we increasingly sense that industrial civilisation is unstable, perhaps terminal, driven toward breakdown by ecological overshoot, unplanned energy descent, the threat of nuclear war, and the internal contradictions of consumer capitalism.
But it is also ‘sublime’ in the philosophical sense associated with thinkers like Burke, Kant, Nietzsche, and the Romantics: an encounter with forces so vast, terrifying, and overwhelming that they exceed our ordinary categories of comprehension. We can be humbled before a great mountain, inducing a fearful humility that is also somehow pleasurable. But it only remains pleasurable while we remain at a safe distance from what gives rise to the sublime. The point I made in the preface to SMPLCTY is that I fear the apocalyptic sublime is fading, because we are no longer a safe distance from the apocalypse (and some people never were). We are always and already involved in a perpetual state of crisis that is not imminent, but immanent. In many ways, the apocalypse has already arrived.
This mood, however, is not treated simply as despair. Rather, I suggest that the confrontation with limits – with finitude, collapse, death, and cosmic insignificance – can become spiritually and aesthetically generative. The apocalypse strips away illusions. It exposes the emptiness of consumer culture and the fragility of the industrial order. Yet precisely in that exposure there arises the possibility of renewal, of reimagining civilisation on different foundations. After all, the term apocalypse has a dual meaning, not simply referring to the ‘end of the world’ but also signifying a ‘great unveiling or disclosure of knowledge’. There is hope in this ambiguity.
That is why SMPLCTY is not merely a critique of industrial society or a warning about collapse. It is an attempt to develop an ‘aesthetics of existence’ grounded in voluntary simplicity, creative labour, and aesthetic experience. I am convinced that human flourishing does not depend on endless growth or material affluence, but on cultivating our capacities as an aesthetic species in an aesthetic universe.
The apocalyptic sublime, therefore, names the threshold condition out of which my ambitious project emerges. We are living at a moment when the dominant civilisation appears increasingly monstrous and unsustainable, yet this very recognition can awaken a deeper hunger for beauty, meaning, and transformation. As the Marxist aesthetician Georg Lukács put it: ‘the bleaker and emptier life becomes under capitalism, the more intense is the yearning after beauty.’
The task, then, is not merely to survive collapse materially, but to respond creatively and spiritually. I believe that one way or another there will be a ‘Great Simplification’ of the global industrial order – either by design or disaster. By the end of this century industrial civilisation will be an historical phenomenon. The question, therefore, is whether humanity can transform ‘collapse’ into some form of ‘artful’ or ‘prosperous’ descent. This would signify a conscious movement toward simpler, lower-energy forms of life that are nevertheless richer in culture, beauty, community, and aesthetic depth.
But this societal resilience is far from guaranteed. The coming descent could just as well be a collapse into ever-deepening barbarism, and sadly that is threatening to be the most likely scenario. But the future has not yet been written, and that fact dissolves the temptation to despair since there is always meaningful work to be done, no matter how bad things get.
So the ‘apocalyptic sublime’ is both diagnosis and invitation. It is the feeling of terror and awe that is appropriate to a civilisation colliding with its social and ecological limits, but also the opening through which a new ecological civilisation – what I call SMPLCTY – might begin to reimagine itself.
