Process and Aesthetics

An Outline of Whiteheadian Aesthetics and Beyond

Ondrej Dadejík, Martin Kaplický, Miloš Ševcík, Vlastimil Zuska

• Publisher: Karolinum Press, Charles University
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9788024647296
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

A groundbreaking analysis of Alfred North Whitehead's thinking on aesthetics. Though philosopher Alfred North Whitehead did not dedicate any books or articles specifically to aesthetics, aesthetic motifs nonetheless permeate his entire body of work. Despite this, aestheticians have devoted little attention to Whitehead. In this book, four scholars of aesthetics provide another angle from which Whiteheadian aesthetics might be reconstructed. Paying special attention to the notion of aesthetic experience, the authors analyze abstraction versus concreteness, immediacy versus mediation, and aesthetic contextualism versus aesthetic isolationism. The concepts of creativity and rhythm are crucial to their interpretation of Whiteheadian aesthetics. Using these concepts, the book interprets the motif of the processes by which experience is harmonized, the sensation of the quality of the whole, and directedness towards novelty.

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

In the chapter that follows, we would like to examine the remarkable kinship between the aesthetic views of Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson, particularly along two axes.

On the one hand, the kinship comprises the role of art and of aesthetic experience generally in revealing the form of immediate experience. Both agree that this is usually obscured by considerations regarding the practical possibilities for exploiting human reality – including considerations regarding the communicable character of reality. Both authors are equally convinced that this revelation takes the form of aharmonization of what is usually an unconcentrated experience of things and feelings. We will, however, try to particularly show that the harmonization itself takes the form of a rhythmic pattern, and that, therefore art and aesthetic experience generally disclose reality as rhythm. The fact that immediate experience is rhythm seems natural from the point of view of both authors because the whole of reality has the character of a spectrum of rhythmic movements. The following study seeks to delineate more precisely the views of both authors on these topics not only by comparing them but also by pointing out that the proximity of the views of Whitehead and Bergson makes it possible to interpret, refine, and complement them.

On the other hand, we will consider the ways Whitehead and Bergson conceive of the difference between inertia and dynamism in art. The purpose of this comparison is to draw attention to the remarkable similarity in the emphasis the two authors place on fundamental innovations in the history of art and also on the fact that these innovations derive from relationships to a multifaceted reality and are incited by a true disclosure of reality. We also draw attention to the connection between the reflections of both authors on the importance of innovation in art along with their conception of a creative tension that forgets itself and, in this connection, their conception of the way the work of a particular artist is related to the work of other artists and to the future in general. We believe a comparison of this sort can help illuminate the contours of the two authors’ views on art, which are contemplated in ever broader contexts in the late work of each.1

1. The Artistic Disclosure of Immediacy

In Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect (1927), Whitehead speaks of the “fundamental” symbolism that we often encounter in life.2 This symbolism consists, for example, in the transference of color and shape onto an object. In reality, we see a colored shape but we say it is a chair, for instance. Whitehead contrasts this commonplace approach of fundamental symbolism with the ability of the artist. The artist “does not have to” jump to this impression of a chair and is able to come to a halt at the “pure contemplation of beautiful colour and shape.”3 The rest of us, in the course of our daily routines, move directly from the perception of color and shape to the experience of a chair, which we approach from the perspective “of use, or of emotion, or of thought.” No special training is required for such a transition; on the contrary, it is quite easy. Both people and higher animals are predisposed to it. The transition is “natural.” Whitehead points out that people – and puppies, too, for example – act in the above situation based on the hypothesis of a chair that can be sat on or jumped on. However, in order to acquire the perception of color and shape, elaborate training is required – even in the case of an artist; we are only able to accede to the mere contemplation of color and shape with a considerable amount of “labour.”4

Whitehead qualifies this perception of color and shape without a symbolic transition to a subject as “presentational immediacy.”5 In presentational immediacy, no “abstract” or “universal”6 features are available. For example, in the case of the perception of a wall, the presentational immediacy has the character of a reality that is the “colour away on the wall for us,”7 not an abstractly defined color or area, or even a type of object. This abstractly defined color or area, or explicit definition of a type of an object, is a “veil” posed on the fact that it is a “colour away on the wall for us” in presentational immediacy. This abstracted wall is derived from the connection of presentational immediacy with another type of experience; namely, from a conceptual analysis of the causality of things – i.e., from a conceptual grasp of their character and functional continuity that we are able to express with the help of words. Whitehead calls this connection “symbolic reference.” Within its framework, we perceive colors and shapes as features of objects that may be relevant to us.

In Bergson’s thought, we encounter a very similar motif. Bergson repeatedly points out that we are not usually able to perceive the individuality of things or of our own feelings. That is why art exists: art mediates or, more precisely, it suggests this individuality of things we have probably seen and yet have not noticed in their own right.8 In Laughter, Bergson draws emphatic attention to the fact that one usually moves about in the sphere of “generalities and symbols”9 which are substituted in perception and sensation by individual characteristics. This is because generality is what is necessary and sufficient for practical activities. To carry out activities that benefit us, it is quite sufficient to distinguish kinds; focusing on special or individual traits is superfluous. This tendency is further reinforced by our use of words. Words always provide a record of the general aspects of things and feelings – aspects anyone could share or communicate. This sort of practically motivated approach to reality is quite ordinary. Only artists are freed, in a particular direction and in a particular sense, from this predominance of practical benefit.10 Artists are able to see, hear and feel reality, and they communicate this individual reality – or, in Bergson’s terms, impose it upon others.11 Through an artist’s inspiration, other people can go on to remove the “veil”12 that conceals reality for them. Then, they, too, can glimpse the individuality of things and of their own lives. They, too, can approach the immediacy of themselves and of things; they can – here we can add to Bergson – accede to reality as aesthetic experience. Affected by the example of the artist, other people can at least pull back a part of the veil and resonate in some way “in harmony with nature”; they can “carve out in space and fix in time the most inimitable of pictures.”13 What is at issue is “nature” in inimitable and unrepeatable “colours and shapes,” the reality of sensation, “the simple state of the individual’s soul,” and in the end, the reality of the individual “law” of the variability of sensations, the harmony and co...

Table of contents

• Preface
• I. Whitehead’s Aesthetic Philosophy and Implicit Aesthetics
• II. Whitehead and Dewey on the Aesthetic Experience and Art: Parallels and Differences
• III. Whitehead and Bergson: Immediacy, Harmony, Rhythm, and Innovation
• IV. Aesthetic Experience Reconsidered from a Process Perspective
• Bibliography
• Index