Yoon, Ja Jung.  “A.N. Whitehead’s Theory of Perception and Aesthetic Experience.”  The Journal of Whitehead Studies 6 (June 2003):  9-42.

Abstract

For Whitehead, actual facts are simply aesthetic facts.  Whitehead’s philosophy is simply aestheticism, and his philosophical system itself is simply aesthetics.  Yet Whitehead’s aesthetics is much more than a “philosophy of art” in the traditional sense.  The former is composed of tiny units of actualities which make up complex organisms and whose counterparts extend through the whole universe.  The dualism between experience in general and aesthetic experience in particular is merely a sort of dogma in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism.  He uses “the nature of aesthetic experience” and “the aesthetic nature of experience” inter-changeably.

            Whitehead’s system posits universal conditions (categoreal obligations) as a basis for any experience.  These conditions coincide with principles, which aestheticians have appealed to in understanding aesthetic experience.  Insofar as Whitehead’s list of categoreal obligations is adequate and coherent to interpret experience, Whitehead is able to characterize the universal nature of an aesthetic experience.  This, in effect, means that the inquiry of aesthetic experience is based on the inquiry of experience in general.

            The aim of this essay is to elucidate aesthetic experience through Whitehead’s theory of perception.  I research aesthetic experience through Whitehead’s thought because of his successful explanation of the nature of human experience.  Aesthetic experience has the following three features:  (1) The dual aspect of subjective feeling and the objective, formal unit or structure that is felt in such experience.  (2)  The dual aspect of disinterestedness, which implies that the object is experienced for its own sake, and detachment, which stresses emotional distance.  (3)  The dual aspect of perceptual presentation to the senses and imaginative amplification, and a dimension of illusion counterbalancing this presentness.

            According to Whitehead’s theory of perception, aesthetic experience accords with symbolic reference and the two modes of perception – perception in the mode of causal efficacy and perception in the mode of presentational immediacy.  Aesthetic experience is representative of “value experience,” which Whitehead takes as the basis of all experience.  In this essay I seek an adequate account of aesthetic experience which explains the above three features.