Elevation and Descent: Aesthetics of Post Capitalism
- Haruto
- Dec 22, 2025
- 9 min read
Updated: Dec 30, 2025
I. Natural and Unnatural
What human beings perceive as “natural” or “unnatural” is inherently ambiguous. At first glance, one might suppose that the boundary lies simply in whether something is artificial or not. Yet human perception of nature is far more complex than such a naïve distinction allows. Consider, for example, the Parthenon rising at the center of the Acropolis in Athens: it stands in astonishing harmony with the rocky hill, the surrounding trees, and the vast sky above. Or consider Kyoto’s Kinkaku-ji: as its name suggests, it is clothed in gold—the very emblem of artifice—yet it transforms its appearance with the seasons, dissolving gracefully into the surrounding landscape. These monuments are apprehended by us not as intrusions upon nature, but as incomparable forms of nature themselves.
Eighteenth-century artists such as Hubert Robert and François Boucher had already discerned this faint yet vital rhythm of perception. Their aesthetics of ruins stand as a paradigmatic expression of it. Though created by human hands, ruins appear to melt into nature: they stand amidst trees, mingle with vegetation, coexist with birds and butterflies, and cultivate the landscape together with them, forming a single harmonious background. On this point, Georg Simmel argues as follows:
[...] it is the fascination of the ruin that here the work of man appears to us entirely as a product of nature. [...]What has elevated the building is human will; what gives it its present appearance is the brute, descending-dragging, corroding, crumbling power of nature. Still, so long as we can speak of a ruin at all and not of a mere heap of stones, this power does not sink the work of man into the formlessness of mere matter.[...]When we speak of "returning home," we mean to characterize the peace whose mood surrounds the ruin. And we must characterize something else: our sense that these two world potencies — the striving to elevate and the sinking into descent — are working serenely together, as we envisage in their working a picture of purely natural existence. Expressing this peace for us, the ruin orders itself into the surrounding landscape without a break, growing together with it like tree and stone [...].
From Babylon onward, human beings have sought to elevate themselves toward the heights, only to close the curtain upon failure. Every form of glory that once dominated an age, every brilliance that once dazzled the world, is ultimately returned to nature through the accumulated weight of history over long stretches of time. The beauty of ruins lies precisely in the harmony produced by the tension between the forces of elevation and descent. It bears witness to human frailty, the sublimity of nature, and that endless desire to ascend toward the heavens which embraces our world. Yet one must ask: why does our will so persistently resist nature, reject descent, and press upward, again and again? At its origin lies a single lineage in the history of ideas that has grounded humanity for millennia.
II. Feudalism as an Aesthetics of Elevation
One origin of elevation lies in a form of contrastive self-recognition that emerges in every age. First, human beings distinguish themselves from animals, producing a contrast between beings driven solely by passion and beings capable of governing desire through reason. Second, humans detach their reason—or their ideational dimension—from the animal, imagine it in pure form, and at times sanctify it. This is the realm of transcendent concepts and absolutes: Platonic Ideas, God, or the metaphysical dimension of humanity itself. The animal is placed in contrast to the human; through this difference, our originality comes into relief, and from it a higher-order dimension is consequently derived. Thus emerges the classical triadic structure symbolized by animal–human–god, in which god is placed as the highest being and animals as the lowest. To elevate oneself upward is to acquire reason, free will, spirituality, and spirit; to descend downward is to be marked as a passive being corroded by carnality and materiality. The aesthetics of elevation that began with Socrates were systematized by Aristotle in the definition of the human as a rational animal, and were carried forward through Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, and Lacan, reaching into the present.
Furthermore, the schema of the animal governed by passion, the human wavering between passion and reason, and god as the culmination of reason converged with Christianity through figures such as Origen, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, thereby acquiring immense authority in the history of ideas. In Genesis, humans are said to be created in the image of God and granted dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, the beasts of the earth, and every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. This structure, grounded in divine right, was transplanted into society through feudalism, where all beings were hierarchized according to their distance from God. In our manifesto, we proposed the concepts of vital values and ideal values, which correspond precisely to the dynamics of descent and elevation. Prior to modernity, animal or natural existence—mere survival—was subordinated to ideals. Survival, though an inescapable gravitational force constitutive of humanity, was suppressed by feudalism through the force of will. Feudalism thus represents the total victory of the aesthetics of elevation.
III. The Capitalism as an Aesthetics of Descent
However, the world reverses itself within the span of a single century. Philosophy and theology yield their dominance to science; feudalism is supplanted by capitalism; and the movements of descent, long excluded for thousands of years, surge back in the form of revolution and secularization. This is the age of the dynamics of descent. From idealism to empiricism, from spirit to matter, from ideals to survival—since the twentieth century, we have witnessed a reversal of history itself. Wealth once sought will and authority, elevating itself toward kings and churches; now wealth seeks nature and desire, descending toward the masses. The seismic shifts that began with the disregard of survival and nature, and with asymmetry, ultimately shook philosophy as well, which had established logocentrism and the dynamics of elevation. These shifts crystallized in the form of fetishism articulated by the anti-Hegelian thinker Georges Bataille—that is, as an aesthetics of descent.
[...] whatever the role played in the erection by his foot, man, who has a light head, in other words a head raised to the heavens and heavenly things, sees it as spit, on the pretext that he has this foot in the mud. Although within the body blood flows in equal quantities from high to low and from low to high, there is a bias in favor of that which elevates itself, and human life is erroneously seen as an elevation. The division of the universe into subterranean hell and perfectly pure heaven is an indelible conception, mud and darkness being the principles of evil as light and celestial space are the principles of good: with their feet in mud but their heads more or less in light, men obstinately imagine a tide that will permanently elevate them, never to return, into pure space.
For Bataille, it is not the head but the foot that matters. His fetishism of descent extends from petals and roots, eagle and moles, spirit and matter, consciousness and the unconscious, to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. What this reveals is not merely the predilection of a single philosopher, but an ultimate configuration shaped by the watershed of modernity itself. In The “Old Mole” and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme, Bataille brings the aesthetics of descent to its peak by criticizing surrealism for relying on the dynamics of descent while nonetheless colluding with the dynamics of elevation. Surrealism, despite its fascination with the unconscious through practices such as automatic writing, simultaneously harbors a base impulse to transcend reality itself. As Freud invokes Virgil’s line—“If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell.”—in the epigraph to The Interpretation of Dreams, consciousness is the visible flower idealized by us, while the unconscious that shapes its contours is the foot, the root, the hell. Psychoanalysis is thus a philosophy of descent. This structure—in which descent overturns elevation—corresponds to Marx, who criticized religion as the “opium of the people” for obscuring vital crises with ideals, and who asserted that the base determines the superstructure. In another work, Bataille reinterprets Gnostic dualism as base matter and superior idea, identifies Hegel as its culmination, and argues that low materialism alone can destabilize ideas—thus aligning himself with Marx, the anti-Hegelian who set dialectics on its feet. Accordingly, Bataille characterizes surrealists as "bourgeois intellectual", eagle soaring in the sky, and positions himself, by contrast, as a proletarian mole digging into the earth. This lineage inevitably leads to Nietzsche. Its most emblematic expression appears in Bataille’s Nietzsche and Fascists, where he cites Alfred Rosenberg’s interpretation of Nietzsche. Rosenberg separates heaven and earth, situates Nietzsche on the side of the latter, yet seeks to sever the lineage of descent by subsuming Nietzsche’s philosophy into political logic. Bataille responds by asserting that insofar as fascism takes philosophy seriously, it adheres not to Nietzsche but to Hegel—thus critically reproducing this very structure.
Whereas the Greek gods he writes were the heroes of light and of the heavens, the gods of non-Aryan Asia Minor assumed all the characteristics of the Earth.... Dionysos (at least his non-Aryan side) is the god of ecstasy, of luxury, of the unfettered bacchanal.... For two centuries, the interpretation of Greece has continued. From Winckelmann through the German classics to Voss, there was an insistence on light, the gaze turned to the world, the intelligible.... The other—romantic—current was fed by the secondary movements indicated at the end of the Iliad by the feast of the dead, or in Aeschylus by the actions of the Erinyes. It was fortified by the chthonian gods, established against the Olympian Zeus. Speaking of death and its enigmas, it venerated the mother-goddesses, and first among them Demeter, and it finally blossomed in the god of the dead—Dionysos. It is in this sense that Welcker, Rohde, and Nietzsche made the Earth-mother a creator of life who, herself unformed, perpetually returns through the death in her womb. High German romanticism shuddered with adoration and, as always darker veils were placed before the sky-god’s radiant face, it plunged ever more deeply into the instinctive, the unformed, the demonical, the sexual, the ecstatic, the chthonian—into the cult of the Mother.
Thus, Bataille sutured Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche—figures who may be called the very origins of contemporary philosophy —into a single configuration as a dynamics of descent, thereby completing their aesthetic sublimation and their trinitarian unity. For this reason, Bataille stands as the symbolic theorist who identified philosophy since modernity as a dynamics of descent, systematically bound its disparate strands together, and brought them to fruition within his own aesthetic. Yet this very achievement determines the aesthetics of monotheistic capitalism. For Bataille’s aesthetics—which portrays the failure of elevation through the figure of Icarus—mirrors the tragedy uncovered by Weber: the very genesis of capitalism sought the heavens and fell back to the earth. Capitalism, gestating within theology, tore open its womb and established its own dominion. Unlike the nineteenth century, capitalism today has severed itself from theology, becoming an economic order that colludes with the death of God. Thus, the current of descent, which once bore materialism and secularization, has ironically come to reinforce the monotheistic order of capitalism itself.
Conclusion
In our manifesto, we mourn the contemporary moment in which ideal values collapse amid the rise of vital values, and we propose a Faith Economy as a return to a lost movement of elevation. Certainly, human beings cannot live without bread. Yet human beings do not live by bread alone. At the same time, feudalism and the aesthetics of elevation immobilized progress through ideals and brought survival itself into peril. Capitalism and the aesthetics of descent, however, likewise hollow out meaning through survival, pushing ideals to the margins.
For this very reason, what we seek is not victory. What we desire is that harmony. If our activity were nothing more than a reaction, it would merely repeat the struggle between elevation and descent. Any excessive imbalance will, in time, destroy itself. Thus, the vision articulated by the Faith Economy is to join hands with the genuine achievements of contemporary capitalism, while at the same time healing its sins, and—through their mutual complementarity—to re-enact, here and now, that former beauty which once guided them toward a single harmony. As Simmel writes:
Here, as in the case of the ruin, with its extreme intensification and fulfillment of the present form of the past, such profound and comprehensive energies of our soul are brought into play that there is no longer any sharp division between perception and thought. Here psychic wholeness is at work—seizing, in the same way that its object fuses the contrast of present and past into one united form, on the whole span of physical and spiritual vision in the unity of aesthetic enjoyment which, after all, is always rooted in a deeper than merely aesthetic unity. Thus purpose and accident, nature and spirit, past and present here resolve the tension of their contrasts—or, rather, preserving this tension, they yet lead to a unity of external image and internal effect.
And thus, the aesthetics of ruins is a form of prophecy,
for the eighteenth century comes to its end in the great Revolution.
Bibliography
Georg Simmel. The Ruin.
Jacques Derrida. The Animal That Therefore I Am.
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics.
René Descartes.
Treatise of Man;
Discourse on the Method;
Letter to the Marquess of Newcastle (23 November 1646);
Letter to Henry More (5 February 1649).
Origen. Contra Celsum. In Opera, vol. 4.
Augustine of Hippo. The City of God.
Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae.
Georges Bataille.
The Language of Flowers;
The Big Toe;
The “Old Mole” and the Prefix “Sur” in the Words “Surhomme” [Superman] and “Surrealist”;
Base Materialism and Gnosticism;
Nietzsche and the Fascists.
Sigmund Freud. The Interpretation of Dreams.
Karl Marx.
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right; Capital (Das Kapital).
Alfred Rosenberg. The Myth of the Twentieth Century.
Max Weber. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
