Process and Aesthetics

An Outline of Whiteheadian Aesthetics and Beyond

Ondřej Dadejík, Martin Kaplický, Miloš Ševčík, Vlastimil Zuska

KAROLINUM PRESS

Karolinum Press is a publishing department of Charles University

Ovocný trh 560/5, 116 36 Prague 1, Czech Republic

www.karolinum.cz

© Ondřej Dadejík, Martin Kaplický, Miloš Ševčík, and Vlastimil Zuska, 2021

Translation © Ivan Gutierrez, Anna Pilátová, Nicholas Orsillo, and Derek Paton, 2021

Copyediting by Tereza Sloupová

Cover image of Robert Delaunay’s Endless Rhythm courtesy of Wikimedia

Cover by Jan Šerých

Epub and mobi conversion by Stará škola

First edition

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of the Czech Republic

ISBN 978-80-246-4729-6 (epub)

ISBN 978-80-246-4727-2 (pdf)

ISBN 978-80-246-4728-9 (mobi)

ISBN 978-80-246-4726-5 (print)

Contents

1. Preface

2. I. Whitehead’s Aesthetic Philosophy and Implicit Aesthetics

3. II. Whitehead and Dewey on the Aesthetic Experience and Art: Parallels and Differences

4. III. Whitehead and Bergson: Immediacy, Harmony, Rhythm, and Innovation

5. IV. Aesthetic Experience Reconsidered from a Process Perspective

6. Bibliography

7. Index

Preface

The aim of this book is to contribute to a discussion of form and some of the main motifs of aesthetic theory based on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead did not write any books or articles dedicated to aesthetics specifically, but aesthetic motifs permeate his entire philosophical opus. One could thus say that Whitehead’s aesthetics is implicit in his philosophy. Nonetheless, this absence of an explicitly formulated aesthetic theory is probably the reason why Whiteheadian aesthetics have not attracted the attention of aestheticians. Most attempts to reconstruct Whitehead’s aesthetics have come from process philosophers. But even in the context of process philosophy, aesthetics has never occupied a central position. Whiteheadian aesthetics has therefore long remained overshadowed by process-oriented theology, theory of education, and psychology.

Although Whitehead’s thought has often served as a source of inspiration for new systems of aesthetics (works by Susanne Langer or Charles Hartshorne), there have been few attempts to systematically develop his theory of aesthetics. Donald Sherburne undertook the first such attempt in A Whiteheadian Aesthetic: Some Implications of Whitehead’s Metaphysical Speculation (1961). Among later attempts, let us note Steven Shaviro’s Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (2009) and Steve Odin’s Tragic Beauty in Whitehead and Japanese Aesthetics (2016). Each reconstructs Whitehead’s aesthetics from a different perspective. Sherburne bases his approach mainly on Whitehead’s notion of propositional feeling and reconstructs Whitehead’s aesthetics based on a close reading of the aesthetic theory of Benedetto Croce. Steven Shaviro’s main starting point is Whitehead’s notion of beauty as a process of harmonization, and he compares Whitehead’s ideas to those of Kant and Deleuze. Steven Odin bases his book on the idea of beauty as a “penumbral shadow and the tragic beauty of perishability” and compares this Whiteheadian motif with traditional Japanese aesthetics. And while one might dispute some of their particular conclusions, we believe their books are valuable contributions to a better understanding of Whitehead’s aesthetics. These texts also helped form our own views on the subject.

Our book aims to provide another angle from which Whitehead’s aesthetics might be reconstructed. We pay special attention to the notion of aesthetic experience, which we analyze from the perspective of certain antinomies, such as abstraction versus concreteness, immediacy vs. mediation, and aesthetic contextualism versus aesthetic isolationism. For our interpretation of Whiteheadian aesthetics, the concepts of creativity and rhythm are crucial. Using these concepts, we interpret the motif of the processes by which experience is harmonized, the sensation of the quality of the whole, and directedness towards novelty.

In chapter one, we introduce Whitehead’s philosophical method of descriptive generalization. This method assumes that every philosophical system is based on a particular entry point. We show that for Whitehead, this entry point was aesthetics. This is why his entire philosophical system was imbued with aesthetic ideas and also why the various concepts that constitute the scaffolding of his system can be used to reconstruct his aesthetics.

In chapter two, we compare Whitehead’s and Dewey’s philosophical systems to show that both thinkers viewed aesthetic experience in terms of complex rhythms. We also show that they help us to better understand both the differences and the continuities between everyday experience and art. This chapter draws on two studies published in Czech – namely, Ondřej Dadelík’s “Překonávání dualismu života a umění ve filosofii Johna Deweyho a A. N. Whiteheada” [Overcoming life-art dualism in the philosophy of John Dewey and A. N. Whitehead] (Acta universitatis Carolinae: Philosophica et historica, Studia aesthetica, 2018) and Martin Kaplický’s “Whitehead versus Dewey: O filosofii, rytmu a estetické zkušenosti” [Whitehead versus Dewey: On philosophy, rhythm, and aesthetic experience] (Acta universitatis Carolinae: Philosophica et historica, Studia aesthetica, 2018).

In chapter three, we compare Whitehead’s ideas with those of Henri Bergson. On this basis, we try to show how art reveals the form of immediate experience and how the aesthetic experience of art relates to truth. This chapter is based on the following studies by Miloš Ševčík, published in Czech: “Umělecká tvořivost v úvahách A. N. Whiteheada a H. Bergsona” [Artistic creativity in the writings of A. N. Whitehead and H. Bergson] (Acta universitatis Carolinae: Philosophica et historica, Studia aesthetica, 2017), “Odhalování, harmonizace a rytmus bezprostřednosti ve Whiteheadových a Bergsonových úvahách o roli uměleckého díla a povaze estetické zkušenosti” [The disclosure, harmonization, and rhythm of immediacy in Whitehead’s and Bergson’s writings on the role of the work of art and on the nature of aesthetic experience] (Acta universitatis Carolinae: Philosophica et historica, Studia aesthetica, 2018), and “Rytmus jako proměna na základě opakování a potřeba její variace: K Whiteheadově pojetí estetické zkušenosti s uměním” [Rhythm as transformation based on repetition and the need for variation: On Whitehead’s conception of the aesthetic experience of art] (Algoritmy obrazov – obrazy algoritmov. K povahe výskumov v súčasnom umení [Pictorial algorithms – algorithmic pictures], 2019).

The aim of chapter four is to explain in closer detail the processes which constitute aesthetic experience in a narrower sense. We approach this theme by analysing aesthetic experience from the perspective of the types of abstractive processes it involves and the complex types of experience it produces. This chapter is based mainly on two studies by Vlastimil Zuska, likewise published in Czech: “Rytmus a událost krásy” [Rhythm and the event of beauty] (Acta universitatis Carolinae: Philosophica et historica, Studia aesthetica, 2018) and “Proces abstrakce jako faktor v umění a estetický princip” [The process of abstraction as a factor in art and the aesthetic principle] (Acta universitatis Carolinae: Philosophica et historica, Studia aesthetica, 2017).

This book was made possible by the grant project GA16-13208S “Process and Aesthetics: Explicit and Implied Aesthetics in the Process Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.” For translation into English and editing of the English text, the authors would like to thank Ivan Gutierrez, Anna Pilátová, Nicholas Orsillo, and Derek Paton.

I. Whitehead’s Aesthetic Philosophy and Implicit Aesthetics

1. Aesthetic Experience as a Source of Philosophy

In a philosophical context, Alfred North Whitehead is known primarily as the creator of an original philosophical system (according to Gilles Deleuze, “the last great metaphysical system” of Western philosophy) based on a conception of reality as a set of closely related and interconnected processes. Whitehead seeks to show that the notion that the world as a set of stable objects with precisely determinable temporal and spatial coordinates could be the fundamental underpinning for a philosophical system of the highest generality is highly problematic. In his view, it is problematic because its basic elements are already highly abstract. The idea of a stable, independently existing solid object removes from its processes the interactions with the environment that co-determine what the object is. It ignores the fact that each real object undergoes, either slowly or quickly, noticeable changes. However, Whitehead’s ontology stands in even starker opposition to an understanding of existing material objects, whether stable or changing, in the sense of the scholastic substance-action distinction, because the fundamental “building block” of Whitehead’s universe is neither a substantial objectivity nor an idea, but an event. Consistent with this ontological and cosmological (the subtitle of Whitehead’s magnum opus is “An Essay in Cosmology”) scheme, in the conceptual being-becoming dichotomy, becoming is primary – in contrast with the prevailing tradition of Western philosophy, including that of Heidegger, for example.

The notion of temporal and spatial coordinates is, according to Whitehead, an abstraction of an originally given duration; in that framework, we can distinguish various relationships between the individual components. From these relationships, according to Whitehead, we can then abstract linear time and geometrical space.[1]

Of course, Whitehead does not claim that linear time or geometric space are not useful concepts. On the contrary, he is well aware that they are key concepts that have made possible the unprecedented development of scientific knowledge and in many respects also orient our practical life. Their usefulness cannot be disputed. However, their universality and ease of application suggest, according to Whitehead, that we should see these abstract categories as unquestionable facts on which any philosophical reasoning should be based.[2] Whitehead points out that we should not forget their nature as abstractions; instead, we should consider them to be the most concrete things we encounter in the world. Whitehead criticizes this confusion of an abstract category for a concrete fact and calls it a “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” In his most extensive book, Process and Reality, he even maintains that the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is one of the two main dangers we face when constructing philosophical systems:

This fallacy consists in neglecting the degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certain categories of thought. There are aspects of actualities which are simply ignored so long as we restrict thought to these categories. Thus, the success of a philosophy is to be measured by its comparative avoidance of this fallacy, when thought is restricted within its categories.[3]

The aim of philosophy is indeed, according to Whitehead, to create a system of general ideas, but one that will have the potential to fully explain concrete reality without succumbing to the aforementioned fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Whitehead is aware that this aim is not fully achievable because reality is always given selectively, through some sort of simplification, to our perception and our thought. We always pick out those features of reality that are important from our perspective. A fully adequate philosophical system would have to respect all perspectives from which reality might be seen, and this is not within the power of human-made philosophical systems.[4] According to Whitehead, all any philosophical system can do is approach the ultimate aim of creating a complete conceptual scheme. Yet developing the most general philosophical systems possible is justified since through their categorical schemes we can see reality from perspectives that are neglected by our established ways of seeing. At the same time, such philosophical systems enable a certain cognitive distance from established ways of categorizing reality. According to Whitehead, the main purpose of philosophical systems should be to build on conceptions of reality that were once taken for granted, to encourage the search for previously neglected aspects of reality, and eventually to create conceptual schemes able to connect the previously established aspects of reality with the previously neglected ones. Based on this approach, philosophical systems should come as close as possible to concrete reality and be able to systematically organize the types of abstractions through which reality might be viewed. Whitehead summarizes this motif in his later book Modes of Thought: “Philosophy is the criticism of abstractions which govern special modes of thought.”[5] A philosophical system that succumbed to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness would fail to criticize abstractions. Indeed, a set of abstractions in such a philosophy would be regarded as fully concrete and unquestionable.

Whitehead believes the relationship between concreteness and abstraction is also tied to another main pitfall the construction of a philosophical system must avoid: the assumption that philosophical systems must be built on clear and distinct axioms that represent the only foundation upon which a consistent system of more complex statements can be built. In this regard, Whitehead notes that “the verification of a rationalistic scheme is to be sought in its general success, and not in the peculiar certainty, or initial clarity, of its first principles.”[6] He rejects here the idea of a philosophy based on a few fundamental claims that are taken to be self-evident, clear and distinct, and which constitute the basis on which further, equally clear and distinct conclusions can be deductively established. A conceptual system of this type is in fact built on the basis of these fundamental assumptions, which are conceived as self-evident. However, such conceptual schemes do not permit us to examine their fundamental assumptions with cognitive distance. Because these notions appear clear and distinct in consciousness, they are considered given and self-evident. Clear and distinct knowledge, however, according to Whitehead, represents only a minute part of our experience, the vast portion of which is based on processes that take place below the level of awareness and are therefore not usually given clearly or distinctly in consciousness.[7] For this reason, Whitehead claims that “the accurate expression of the final generalities is the goal of discussion and not its origin.”[8] An axiomatically constructed philosophical system is particularly prone to succumbing to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness because what appears to us to be clear and distinct is often not reality in its concreteness but our habitual ways of perceiving it and thinking about it.

The axiomatic construction of a philosophical system is susceptible to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness because such philosophical systems present themselves as merely mediating the obvious facts or principles from which they then derive their basic categories and principles. By contrast, Whitehead claims: “Metaphysical categories are not dogmatic statements of the obvious; they are tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities.”[9] Thus, according to Whitehead, the aim of a maximally general philosophical system is, first and foremost, to create a categorical scheme, a conceptual network through which the connections may be shown between what appears to us as obvious and those features of reality that are not so obvious and yet fundamentally influence and determine what we experience. The aim of philosophical systems is therefore not to recapitulate what is given to us clearly and distinctly, but to attempt to discover new features of reality that are hidden in the background of conscious perception and to point out the connections between these newly formulated features and what is given to us clearly and distinctly. The main problem of philosophical systems that have succumbed to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness or to the conviction that philosophy can be construed by means of the axiomatic method is not only that their fundamental concepts conceal their abstract nature and are mistakenly considered to be the most concrete concepts we could encounter. Their main problem is that they only make reality visible in those features which they emphasize, neglecting all the other features that do not fit into their conceptual framework. Whitehead thinks that the goal of metaphysics is to create a conceptual scheme that will cover up as little as possible and be as close to the concrete as possible. As we have seen above, neither the deductive method of derivation from accepted axioms nor the creation of a conceptual network based on the classification of obvious facts is appropriate for the construction of such a scheme. The sought-after philosophical scheme may only be achieved through the imaginative elaboration of certain facts of our experience. In view of this, Whitehead claims:

After the initial basis of a rational life, with a civilized language, has been laid, all productive thought has proceeded either by the poetic insight of artists, or by the imaginative elaboration of schemes of thought capable of utilization as logical premises. In some measure or other, progress is always a transcendence of what is obvious.[10]

Thus, according to Whitehead, a philosophical system is valid to the extent that it shifts and expands our ability to recognize and systematize previously unrecognized facets of reality and link them to others. To do so, it requires an imaginative elaboration of observed facts; that is why Whitehead suggests there is a link between philosophy and art in the quotation above.[11] According to Whitehead, both philosophy and art should strive to modify language and other means of expression, allowing us to express in abstract, generally understandable terms the most concrete experiences possible that defy expression in general form. According to Whitehead, both philosophy and art require the modification of a commonly used vocabulary because they seek to go beyond what we already know about the world and to make our experiences which we are not clearly aware of present for us. While art progresses through the presentation of a certain basic insight, philosophy seeks to build the most appropriate conceptual scheme to describe all the features of reality.

Based on the above, Whitehead considers the imaginative elaboration of our own experience to be an essential part of constructing a philosophical system, claiming that “the primary method of philosophy is descriptive generalization.”[12] What are the basic features of the philosophical method Whitehead is putting forward and what role does imagination play in it? Whitehead compares this method to the take-off, flight, and landing of an aircraft and describes it as a comprehensive, self-reflective process with three basic phases or levels. The first level, according to Whitehead, is the plane of individual observations of reality (corresponding metaphorically to the aircraft’s take-off). Every philosophical system, claims Whitehead, has its origins in a particular area of human experience, “for example, in physics, or in physiology, or in psychology, or in aesthetics, or in ethical beliefs, or in sociology, or in languages conceived as a storehouse of human experience.”[13] This plane of descriptive generalization reflects the unattainability of a neutral, all-seeing viewpoint. The construction of a philosophical system is always based on a limited area of human experience and in the first phase what is sought is a description that is as accurate and complete as possible.

However, if we want to create the most general philosophical system possible, we cannot make do with a description of a certain area of our experience, or we will never achieve the maximum generality that Whitehead demands of philosophical systems. Thus, based on the observation plane, we must proceed to the second phase, that of the imaginative experiment (metaphorically, the aircraft’s flight), in which, on the basis of the material obtained, we create the general scheme of a conceptual system that is to be applied both within and beyond the area of investigation it came from. Thus, the meaning of the terms acquired in the original area are extended and modified. As Whitehead himself writes:

The success of the imaginative experiment is always to be tested by the applicability of its results beyond the restricted locus from which it originated. In default of such extended application, a generalisation started from physics, for example, remains merely an alternative expression of notions applicable to physics. The partially successful philosophic generalisation will, if derived from physics, find applications in fields of experience beyond physics. It will enlighten observation in those remote fields, so that general principles can be discerned as in the process of illustration, which in the absence of the imaginative generalisation are obscured by their persistent exemplification.[14]

As can be seen from the above quotation, the second phase of imaginative generalization leads into the third phase – the re-observation of experience (metaphorically, the aircraft’s landing), which, provided the conceptual system is successful, is deepened by being performed on the basis of a comprehensive system of concepts obtained through the imaginative elaboration of the original observations.[15] This process brings further facts that need to be linked once again with the conceptual system being created; as a result, there arise in turn new modifications of the basic concepts of the philosophical system being built, which must be incorporated before the system can reach its greatest possible explanatory potential.[16]

The account of descriptive generalization presented above gives rise to at least four interesting consequences: first, the phases of descriptive generalization mentioned above are closely interconnected. The starting ground of a philosophical system is chosen considering the possibility of generating general principles and we formulate these principles in turn with an eye to their applicability outside the original field of experience. Thus, the individual phases of descriptive generalization cannot be understood as linearly evolving moments but rather as different moments of the dominant activity of one process, the process of unfolding the consequences that enable us to view reality as a whole through the characteristics derived from one of its areas. The basic task of descriptive generalization is therefore to find a unifying organizational principle that can be used to construct the basic categories of a given philosophical system and subsequently to describe areas not originally associated with this unifying principle. However, this unifying principle must prove its legitimacy by showing that it is able to uncover those features of reality that we recognize retrospectively as being fundamental, even though we may not be directly aware of them. Not every area and not every organizational principle will stand the test.

Hence, the main goal of descriptive generalization is finding a particular unifying principle that enables us to see reality in its greatest possible wholeness and concreteness. But is something like this really necessary? Is reality not already given to us in its wholeness through our perception? Whitehead claims it is not. The second consequence of the method of descriptive generalization is that the fact that our normal grasp of reality is necessarily selective is highlighted. Each organism focuses only on those features of reality that are or might be important in the context of its own activities. This is inevitable, of course, but we should not succumb to the illusion that our conscious experience allows us to see reality in its concreteness, fullness, and wholeness. Below the level of conscious cognition, according to Whitehead, there are a number of only vaguely sensed processes that give rise to conscious experience. These deep-rooted primordial processes occur without us being fully aware of them. The method of descriptive generalization allows us to consider processes that slip through a selective net of conscious experience. As Whitehead himself notes in a discussion of the relationship between philosophy and the selective nature of perception: “The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection. It replaces in rational experience what has been submerged in the higher sensitive experience and has been sunk yet deeper by the initial operations of consciousness itself.”[17]

The third consequence that descriptive generalization draws attention to is that no philosophical system is, in its essence, a description of a reality that lies outside and is fully open to subsequent description. For, according to Whitehead, a reality that lies outside awaiting description is an abstraction from a certain initially imaginative and metaphorical intuition that does not gain a veneer of self-evidence until a certain time has passed. In this case, a sharp boundary between the knower and what is known is presumed.[18] According to Whitehead, newly emerging philosophical schemes should strive to take advantage of the metaphorical insights of previous philosophies; at the same time, however, they should subject their basic assumptions and repercussions to critical examination, assigning to them the degree of abstraction they entail. But this requires a new type of insight, the discovery of a new organizational principle, new metaphors. Whitehead maintains that any major philosophical system is speculative in nature (it is a far-reaching hypothesis) and cannot claim to deliver a full knowledge of reality. The main contribution such a system can offer is a new systematic insight that seeks to reverse the “slow descent of accepted thought towards the inactive commonplace.”[19] Thus, according to Whitehead, the value of a philosophical system lies not only in its capacity to illuminate different facets of reality, but also in the ability of its formulations to clear the way for new systems. Whitehead writes that “a new idea introduces a new alternative; and we are not less indebted to a thinker when we adopt the alternative which he discarded. Philosophy never reverts to its old position after the shock of a great philosopher.”[20]

The fourth consequence is that if descriptive generalization is extended and modified with terms derived from the initial domain, we can say that through a conceptual system constructed in such a manner, we may cast a fresh look not only at other areas of experience, but also at the initial domain because the meanings of the categories of the constructed philosophical system will have shifted to some extent from the original domains, making a certain cognitive distance possible within the framework of this hindsight.

Thus, the method of descriptive generalization described above is a way of creating a general conceptual network for a philosophical system that retains the closest possible relationship to the concrete and has, at the same time, the potential to avoid succumbing to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This is Whitehead’s alternative to the philosophical-scientific methods of induction and deduction, which he believes often succumb to the fallacy.[21] However, imaginative elaboration also recalls a third method, notably developed by Charles Sanders Peirce – that is, abduction.[22] On the way to expressing what is most concrete, Whitehead thinks the imaginative elaboration of our own experience is indispensable because that which is concrete does not take the form of objects waiting to be described but that of the processes thanks to which we perceive those objects. These concrete processes are constantly active in the background of our interactions with our surroundings, so we cannot simply point a finger at them. Indeed, they are what makes any finger pointing possible. It is only by means of a metaphorical intuition that recognizes the fundamental principles of reality through the phenomena offered to conscious experience, that these fundamental concrete principles of reality can be approached. However, conscious experience is already highly selective and therefore abstracted, far removed from the concrete situation in its totality. Isolating an object is always a symptom of abstraction. According to Whitehead, concrete reality takes the form of a network of relationships in which we are implicated. Philosophy, therefore, is an attempt to formulate the structure of the total situation based on a group of differentiated fragments. It is in this respect that an analogy between art and philosophy is important to Whitehead. Both art and philosophy seek to link the obvious aspects of reality with those that lie in the background. That is why the ability of metaphorical discernment to trace the form of certain appearances to the form of other facts is crucial for both disciplines.

Of course, Whitehead does not claim that art and philosophy have the same aim. While the aim of a work of art is to induce some highly significant and complex experience, the aim of speculative philosophy is to create a conceptual system for the global understanding of reality. However, he does point to the metaphorical nature of both disciplines. Metaphors, in his view, are not mere adornments of speech, but an essential epistemological tool, precisely because they break through fixed conceptual systems and established abstractions whose abstractness and limits recede from awareness. Moreover, Whitehead often relies on references to works of art in his complex philosophical examinations – particularly in those of romantic poetry. For Whitehead, art – and aesthetic experience generally – is not only an interesting object of philosophical investigation, but also often serves as an explanatory tool. So, the philosophical method of descriptive generalization emphasizes the connection between art and philosophy and thus provides an important lead for investigating Whitehead’s aesthetic philosophy. This analogy, however, does not exhaust the relationship between the field of aesthetics and Whitehead’s philosophical system. For the method of descriptive generalization is always based on a certain limited area of experience, which it describes and on the basis of which, through imaginative elaboration, it builds the basic scheme of its conceptual system. According to Whitehead, each philosophy also retains a certain “taint” of its original area. As far as we know, Whitehead does not explicitly describe the manner in which he arrived at his own philosophical system. However, in one of his later studies titled “Remarks” (1937), he claims that in his view “at present the most fruitful, because the most neglected, starting point is that section of value-theory that we term aesthetics.”[23] We find a similar consideration in his much earlier book Religion in the Making (1927), in which he states directly that “the metaphysical doctrine, here expounded, finds the foundations of the world in the aesthetic experience, rather than as with Kant in the cognitive and conceptive experience. All order is therefore aesthetic order, and the moral order is merely certain aspects of aesthetic order.”[24]

Thus, the question arises as to whether Whitehead, in building his philosophical system, grounded his thinking in an analysis of aesthetics, on the basis of which, applying the method of descriptive generalization, he created his basic conceptual scheme. Although in the above quotation he recognizes aesthetic experience as a source for his philosophy, nowhere does he provide a comprehensive analysis of this idea in the context of a complete aesthetic theory, as far as we know. Nevertheless, in key places his texts make references – in addition to the analogies of art with philosophy noted above – to aesthetic experience or aesthetic values. It is these references that might be read as clues to the original area from which his own philosophical system was born through the method of descriptive generalization. In this case, however, his entire philosophical system should manifest a marked aesthetic “taint.” We will attempt to develop this idea in the next section.

2. Whitehead’s Aesthetics

If we were looking for a motivational area for Whitehead’s philosophy based on his biography or on the themes of his published monographs and were unfamiliar with the quotations noted at the end of the previous section, we would probably consider the mathematics, physics, philosophy of science, religious theory, and pedagogy to which he devoted the greatest attention in his books and scholarly essays. However, based on the considerations presented in the previous subchapter, we might also be well advised to take his aesthetics into account. After Whitehead identifies aesthetics as the most fruitful starting point for the construction of a philosophical system in the citations above, he continues as follows: “Our enjoyments of the values of human arts, or of natural beauty, our horror at the obvious vulgarities and defacements which force themselves upon us – all these modes of experience are sufficiently abstracted to be relatively obvious. And yet they disclose the very meaning of things.”[25] Whitehead considers our aesthetic experiences to be abstracted enough to be consciously grasped, but at the same time they can potentially involve the most fundamental processes of experience operating below the level of conscious (conceptual) cognition. Whitehead is expressing the view that it is aesthetic experience that can overcome the antithesis between the concrete and the abstract. An analogous idea can also be found in a passage from his book Modes of Thought in which Whitehead compares specific aspects of logical and aesthetic understanding: “The distinction between logic and aesthetics consists in the degree of abstraction involved. Logic concentrates attention upon high abstraction, and aesthetics keeps as close to the concrete as the necessities of finite understanding permit.”[26] As a result, aesthetics reveals itself to be an ideal point of entry for the method of descriptive generalization to build a philosophical system.

Unfortunately, Whitehead does not give any account of how he arrived at his own system of fundamental philosophical categories by means of the method of descriptive generalization. Such an account would necessarily have included, based on his own thoughts on descriptive generalization, a determination of the fundamental area on which it is based, an analysis of its essential characteristics and a specification of its basic explanatory concepts (the aircraft’s take-off). This would have been followed by an imaginative elaboration of these concepts with the aim of creating a conceptual network able to encompass the whole of reality in its widest breadth (the aircraft’s flight). A complete account of this method would then result in the application of the imaginatively elaborated conceptual system to the fundamental areas of reality. However, Whitehead never carries out the first step of this procedure in his texts. In them we find the determination of his fundamental categories and detailed descriptions of their relationships; we may also encounter analyses of previous philosophical systems and the themes they deal with seen from the perspective of Whitehead’s own philosophy. However, Whitehead never provides an account or an analysis of any foundational area. All we can find are the references mentioned above to the field of aesthetics as a source of his philosophy and thoughts on the proximity of aesthetic understanding to a concrete reality.

In this context, it is surprising that Whitehead did not devote a book or at least a study to aesthetics. Aesthetic themes and categories can be found in his work, particularly when he deals with other philosophical themes. Nevertheless, there is no systematic investigation into the field of aesthetics in Whitehead’s oeuvre.[27] It appears, therefore, that Whitehead’s aesthetics is organically integrated within his own philosophy. So, if we want to examine the nature of Whitehead’s conception of aesthetics, we must study his philosophical system as a whole and look for the “aesthetic taint” within it. We should not be surprised if, in the process, we find three different but closely related uses of aesthetic terms in Whitehead’s works corresponding to the three levels of descriptive generalization.

The first way Whitehead uses aesthetic terms is characterized by the fact that he does not use his philosophical vocabulary based on the notion of the actual occasion; instead, he uses aesthetic terms in relation to human experience. The relevant passages might be understood as a basic characteristic of the original experience on which his philosophy is based (the aircraft’s take-off) and can be found both in Whitehead’s early texts and in late texts such as Modes of Thought or “Remarks.”

The second way he uses aesthetic terms, tied to the vocabulary of his metaphysical system, is with a view to thematizing the nature of various categories of existence and the relationships between them – especially the categories of the actual occasion, nexus and society, and their interrelationships. In this usage, aesthetic terms refer not only to human experience but to any actual events and their interconnections. In this broad usage, Whitehead might employ the term “aesthetic experience” even in relation to physical vibrations. For example, in Religion in the Making, he states, “Thus physical quantities are aggregates of physical vibrations, and the physical vibrations are the expression among the abstractions of physical science of the fundamental principle of aesthetic experience.”[28] Aesthetic concepts used in such passages have very broad meanings and often take on the character of an ontological description of reality. They can thus be understood as examples of a metaphorical examination of reality as a whole by means of aesthetic concepts (the aircraft’s flight). Such use of aesthetic terms can be found primarily in Religion in the Making, in Process and Reality, and in certain passages in Science and the Modern World.

The third way Whitehead uses aesthetic terms is self-reflective in nature and is characterized by the fact that the conceptual network of Whitehead’s philosophy is oriented towards aesthetic issues. Terms like “beauty” and “art” are interpreted in terms of the categories of Whitehead’s philosophy, with the notion of the actual occasion taking pride of place. Although these considerations are directed primarily towards human aesthetic experience, they still emphasize the continuity of this experience with the events that take place generally in reality. These considerations could be understood as a re-examination of the field of aesthetics with the help of a developed system of philosophical categories (the aircraft’s landing). This type of interpretation of aesthetic concepts can be found primarily in the chapters titled “Beauty” and “Truth and Beauty” in Adventures of Ideas.

However, these three ways of using aesthetic terms must not be understood as a simple linear sequence describing a historical development from the first use to the third. The first use mentioned above can be found, for example, in Whitehead’s late Modes of Thoughts. At that time, Whitehead had already established, long before, the basic conceptual scheme of his philosophy that was the background to his thought. These three ways of using aesthetic terms should therefore be understood as distinct explanatory strategies, each drawing attention in its own fashion to Whitehead’s conception of aesthetics.

Whitehead’s reflections on the method of descriptive generalization are mainly related to his metaphysics, which sought to “frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.”[29] This intention is first elaborated in the second part of Science and the Modern World, particularly in the chapters titled “Abstraction,” “God,” “Religion and Science,” and “Requisites for Social Progress,”[30] and it may be said that Whitehead developed it until the end of his life. In his books devoted to the elaboration of his metaphysical system, we also find frequent references to the field of aesthetics. But what about his earlier texts, in which he develops his conception of the philosophy of the natural sciences and tries to draw out the relationship between scientific concepts and sensory knowledge? We are referring in particular to An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), The Concept of Nature (1920), and The Principle of Relativity (1922). In these books, Whitehead practices what he calls “homogeneous thinking about nature” and explores nature in terms of how it is given to us in perception and thought. It does not yet involve its own self-reflective considerations on the nature of thought and perception itself (which it associates with “heterogeneous thinking about nature”); it also avoids the issue of values. There are hardly any direct references to aesthetics in these books. In The Concept of Nature, he directly states: “I also take the homogeneity of thought about nature as excluding any reference to moral or aesthetic values whose apprehension is vivid in proportion to self-conscious activity. The values of nature are perhaps the key to the metaphysical synthesis of existence. But such a synthesis is exactly what I am not attempting.”[31]

Whitehead suggests here that the issue of aesthetic values may be fundamental to the construction of a metaphysical philosophical system. At the same time, however, he indicates that it is not the subject of his philosophy of nature. Does this mean, then, that Whitehead did not broach aesthetic issues at all in the period between 1914–1924? We do not think so. While Whitehead was formulating the main theses of his philosophy of nature, he was also writing articles on various topics in education and science, collected primarily in The Organization of Thought, Educational and Scientific (1917) and later also in The Aims of Education and Other Essays (1929). In these articles, Whitehead deals with aesthetic values, ascribing great importance to them. Although he does not directly develop the issue of aesthetic values in his books on the philosophy of nature, at the time he wrote his books he was already interested in them, and we may assume that the issue of aesthetic values could have implicitly influenced his considerations. This is also confirmed by F. S. C. Northrop, who writes in his preface to Donald W. Sherburn’s Whiteheadian Aesthetic, “In the early 1920s, when he took me page to page and chapter to chapter through The Principles of Natural Knowledge and The Concept of Nature, he often stopped to point out the aesthetic character of the concrete fact from which all science, philosophy and reflection take their inception. Upon one occasion he added that, unless one finds something aesthetic in the concrete facts from which anyone starts his knowledge, be he philosopher, scientist or man of common sense, he will never come out at the end of his reflections with an adequate theory of art.”[32]

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