The Role of Aesthetic Education (interview question #18)
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.
If art, broadly defined, is central to what it means to be human in a cosmological process of creative evolution, ‘aesthetic education’ must play a critical role in transitioning to the ecological civilisation you label SMPLCTY. Can you offer a few more words on why aesthetic education is so important to societal transformation?
Yes, absolutely. If one accepts the broad philosophical orientation I develop in my books SMPLCTY and Homo Aestheticus – namely, that human beings are fundamentally aesthetic creatures and that civilisation itself is shaped by forms of sensibility, imagination, and desire – then aesthetic education becomes indispensable. I believe it is the hinge upon which the entire civilisational transition turns.
The reason is at once straightforward yet profound: ecological civilisation cannot emerge merely through technological innovation, policy reform, or economic restructuring, necessary though those things are. The polycrisis we face is also a crisis of consciousness, culture, and desire. Consumer capitalism persists not only because of institutions and power structures, but because people have been educated – aesthetically educated – into particular ways of perceiving and valuing the world.
We learn to desire consumption. We learn to associate freedom with affluence, status with accumulation, happiness with acquisition, progress with growth. Advertising, entertainment, architecture, urban design, digital media, education systems, and work cultures all function pedagogically. They shape sensibility and aspiration. In this sense, industrial civilisation already possesses a very powerful form of aesthetic education – one oriented toward consumerism. Culture shapes our tastes, for better or for worse.
This is one reason why Plato remains relevant. He understood that art, music, poetry, myth, and education shape the soul and therefore shape the polis. Human beings often become what their culture trains them to admire, imitate, and desire. Schiller radicalises and deepens this insight by arguing that freedom itself depends upon aesthetic formation. Without aesthetic education, human beings remain fragmented – pulled between crude appetite and abstract rationalism. Beauty harmonises those dimensions and cultivates the capacities required for genuine freedom.
I find this persuasive. Politics cannot succeed if it attempts to impose ecological restraint upon populations whose desires remain fundamentally consumeristic. A civilisation addicted to growth cannot simply legislate itself into sufficiency while leaving underlying conceptions of the good life untouched. There must be an aesthetic transformation or re-education of tastes. This idea is crucial. The transition to SMPLCTY depends on people increasingly experiencing simpler, lower-impact forms of life not as deprivation but as meaningful, beautiful, and liberating. This requires new sensibilities, new aspirations, new aesthetic ideals, and ultimately new archetypes of flourishing.
That is one reason I develop figures like the ‘poet-farmer’ and homo aestheticus. They are not merely descriptive categories; they are pedagogical and mythopoetic images intended to reorient the imagination. Human beings need compelling visions of what a good life within ecological limits might actually look and feel like. Facts and warnings alone are insufficient.
Aesthetic education therefore involves far more than exposure to the fine arts, important though that may be. It concerns the cultivation of perception itself – learning how to experience beauty, meaning, sufficiency, and connectedness differently. It involves recovering attentiveness to nature, craft, slowness, community, ritual, embodiment, and creative participation in material provision. It means learning to see richness where consumer culture sees lack.
This is why thinkers like Thoreau and Morris are especially important to me. Both understood that civilisation shapes desire aesthetically. Thoreau showed how simplicity could become existentially abundant rather than impoverished. Morris showed how labour, architecture, and everyday life could become infused with beauty and creativity rather than alienation. Both were, in a deep sense, aesthetic educators.
Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse also influenced my thinking here. He argued that advanced industrial societies colonise imagination itself, narrowing the horizons of possibility. Under such conditions, art retains political significance because it preserves alternative visions of reality – glimpses of reconciliation, freedom, and non-alienated existence. I discuss this in terms of ‘aesthetic revolution’ or ‘aesthetic revolt’. Art can disrupt the apparent inevitability of the existing order by allowing people to feel that another mode of life is possible. Should a new sensibility arise, the emotional energy would be at hand to bring new worlds into existence through creative and sustained collective action.
Importantly, aesthetic education is not propaganda or indoctrination. Quite the opposite. Properly understood, it expands freedom by cultivating more reflective, critical, sensitive, imaginative, and autonomous human beings. It teaches us not what to think, but how to perceive more deeply and live more consciously. And I believe the aesthetic revolution needs to precede the transformation in political economy, for otherwise the new world will merely reproduce the old.
There is also a spiritual dimension to this. Industrial civilisation systematically distracts attention. People become hurried, fragmented, overstimulated, and disconnected from both nature and themselves. Aesthetic education can become a practice of reawakening – learning once again how to encounter the world contemplatively and receptively. As I mentioned earlier, in one passage of SMPLCTY, I discuss the story of the great violinist Joshua Bell playing Bach anonymously in a subway station while commuters rushed past without noticing the beauty before them. That anecdote symbolises something important about modern consciousness: our forms of life increasingly filter out our ordinary access to beauty and the sublime. The world is more beautiful than we know, but we are failing to pay attention.
Aesthetic education attempts to reverse that impoverishment of perception. It trains the capacities of wonder, attentiveness, and appreciation. It reminds us that beauty is not scarce. The stars, forests, oceans, music, friendship, language, craft, and creative labour all remain available sources of meaning – often requiring far less material throughput than consumer capitalism demands. This is why aesthetic education becomes essential for ecological civilisation. The transition to SMPLCTY ultimately depends not only on new infrastructures, technologies, or economies, but on new ways of seeing and feeling. Human beings must come to experience participation, sufficiency, creativity, and ecological belonging as intrinsically rewarding forms of life.
And perhaps this is Schiller’s deepest insight: freedom cannot simply be imposed externally through laws or institutions. A truly free civilisation requires human beings who have themselves become capable of freedom – noble souls whose desires, sensibilities, and imaginations have been aesthetically cultivated beyond domination, compulsive consumption, and barbarism. In that sense, aesthetic education is not peripheral to politics. It is the precondition for any enduring civilisational transformation.
