The way we are use to seeing our materiality seems to not fully express what we are. The brain alone looks like an organ that is set to repeat itself.
Where do our sparks of creativity come from, then…?
Where is that thing called “inspiration” located…?
Can only God or the Gods explain it…?
Or perhaps our sensitivity does not yet allow us to perceive the complexity of geodesic lines, gradients, thresholds and attractors that shape such dynamic systems as WE-IN-COSMOS/CHAOS are.
Perhaps the stillness that our civilization imposes, this perpetual postponement of dancing always later, to the point of ending our lives without ever being alive, is an authoritarianism enforced on ourselves by none other than ourselves, by our fear of knowing that life is precisely that spark. Civilization is not life, but only a shelf to keep things on so we know where to find them when we need them, a factory to make tools to construct more factories to make more tools to construct... Civilization is a file cabinet with labeled folders, organized in alphabetical and numerical order.
We inhabit civilization with such familiarity that we can't conceive any other way of living, mistaking it for life itself.
In the origins of our civilization, already, the Ancient Greeks were suspicious of this "civilizationcentrism", and gave some thoughtful responses to this irreflexive belief in an infallible and superior order, different than, beyond and above the individual. An order that seems to come from the sum of all the individuals, that assures to reward the repression of the individual, self or imposed, with outstanding benefits for all.
They focused on the possibilities available to the individual, regardless of what was, and still is, believed about the benefits of civilization, being aware that it is only at the subjective level of the individual that life is perceived, and so everything, including the life of the individual itself, acquires its meaning. These answers are founded on the realization that the individual is always limited in its possibilities, as so is civilization in front of the immensity of the Universe, that a certain degree of detachment is needed to be able to avoid becoming overwhelmed by these limitations and incomprehensible multiplicity that surrounds us; that pleasure is a valid and necessary element in a life that ought to be lived; and self discipline is the only way to augment our limited individual power.
Beauty, as pleasure, belongs to the realm of what is perceived by the individuals. If civilization does not make life more enjoyable and beautiful to all, it is useless.