Alfred North Whitehead published no book or article strictly on aesthetics. Nonetheless, in his philosophical writings he mentions several times that aesthetic experience is the key to his metaphysics. In fundamental places of his philosophical system, moreover, he uses expressions like 'aesthetic experience', 'aesthetic fact', 'aesthetic unity', and 'aesthetic order'. These expressions do not, however, refer to human conscious experience alone, but to all entities of the universe. That has led some scholars to the conviction that these terms are used in a purely technical sense and therefore do not refer to the sphere of aesthetics. The author of the current article seeks to demonstrate that these terms do refer to the sphere of aesthetics. The argument set out here consists in three steps. In the first, the author presents Whitehead's philosophical method of imaginative generalization. In the second step, the author presents the fundamental ontological unit (the actual occasion) of Whitehead's philosophy, and points out that Whitehead describes it using aesthetic terms that are employed in a broad sense. In the third step the author presents Whitehead's view of aesthetic understanding. At the end of the article, it is demonstrated that although Whitehead did not develop his analysis of aesthetic understanding into a consistent theory, it forms the background to all his metaphysical books.
This text concentrates on the investigation of relations of two books of Alfred North Whitehead: Process and Reality and Function of Reason, both being published in the same year 1929. Author of the text first exhibits Whitehead's conception of method of speculative philosophy as it is presented on the initial pages of Process and Reality. He points out at Whitehead's rejection of mathematical axiomatic method and position of rigid empiricism as appropriate methods of construction of philosophical scheme and shows Whitehead's own philosophical method: method of descriptive generalization, which can be shortly summed up as imaginative construction of basic speculative scheme which is based on former empirical observations and is subsequently tested by new empirical observations. It is shown that Whitehead does not presents in Process and Reality the process of imaginative construction of his philosophy. One phase of Whitehead's method of descriptive generalization is therefore missing in Process and Reality. It is argued that this missing phase of descriptive generalization can be found in Function of Reason.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.