UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA LIBRARIES COLLEGE LIBRARY .11* A Whiteheadian Aesthetic Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from LYRASIS Members and Sloan Foundation http://www.archive.org/details/whiteheadianaestOOsher A WHITEHEADIAN AESTHETIC Some Implications of Whitehead's Metaphysical Speculation By DONALD W. SHERBURNE with a foreword by F. S. C. Northrop New Haven, Yale University Press, 1961 © 1961 by Yale University Press, Inc. Set in Electra type and printed in the United States of America by Vail-Ballou Press, Inc., Binghamton, N.Y. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Library of Congress catalog card number: 61-7081 Published with assistance from the Henry Weldon Barnes and the William McKean Brown Memorial Publication Funds. Acknowledgments With the exception of one added chapter and minor re- visions, this book is the dissertation submitted in Sep- tember of 1959 to Yale University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. My debt to the scholarly atmosphere of Yale is great, as is my appreciation to a university which encourages scholar- ship among its students and junior faculty by such tangible methods as the publishing of this book illustrates. A book brought out immediately following graduate study inevitably bears the stamp of the many strong per- sonalities who have so recently left their mark on the author. Theodore M. Greene is the only man with whom I have formally studied aesthetics and I am greatly indebted to him for insight and enthusiasm. It is a tribute to the stature of Paul Weiss the philosopher, and the character of Paul Weiss the man, that though he disagrees strongly with many points made in this essay he has nevertheless encouraged me to think my position through and publish the results. Filmer S. C. Northrop and Frederick Fitch both read the original dissertation and urged its publication; I thank them both warmly. Nathaniel Lawrence introduced me to the philosophy of Whitehead and guided my disser- tation. Though our discussions rarely bore directly upon the topics I have written about, he has contributed enor- mously to my development and I am extremely grateful to him, as a person and as a philosopher. His final reading of vi Acknowledgments the Whitehead chapters was exceptionally thorough and relieved the text of many ambiguities and errors. Ivor Leclerc was spending a leave of absence from Glasgow at Yale when I began this study, and I had the great advantage of reading his book in manuscript at that time. Though I have taken issue with him concerning certain points, I do not want this difference of opinion to obscure the real debt I owe his scholarship and insight. Unfortunately William Christian's comprehensive volume did not appear until after the Whitehead chapters were in final form. He has read sections of my manuscript and offered welcome advice and encouragement. Nuel D. Belnap, Jr., with whom I shared office space at Yale, provided constant day-to-day stimulation while the manuscript was being written. Although he is making his reputation as a logician, his knowledge of, and interest in, Whitehead's metaphysics is deep. His reading of the Whitehead chapters greatly enhanced their clarity and readability, and his patience in the role of critical sounding board for many of the ideas developed in Part II is deeply appreciated. An unidentified reader for the Yale Press acutely probed the aesthetic theory; the book is stronger as a result of his suggestions. David Home, editor for the Yale Press, skillfully guided my manuscript through to publication; I thank him sincerely. Responsibility for inadequacies that remain is mine alone, and I am aware that they exist. Ralph Barton Perry noted that "there are dawning ideas that one would feign take account of, new books that one would feign have read." In the moment of releasing a manuscript to the printer one recognizes the validity of Perry's insight that "philosophy is never finished,—it is onlv suspended." I offer this book in the spirit of these quotations. Finally, I acknowledge my greatest debt—to my wife, Elizabeth Darling Sherburne. Without her constant en- Acknowledgments vii couragement and efficient handling of a thousand and one details the book could never have been brought into ex- istence. It is fitting that this volume, which explores ques- tions of value and beauty, be dedicated to her. Donald W. Sherburne Nashville, Tennessee December i960 Contents Acknowledgments v List of Figures xi Foreword by F. S. C. Northrop xiii Abbreviations xxx Part I. Systematic Framework i. Introduction 3 2. The Formative Elements 9 I. Creativity 10 11. Eternal Objects 25 in. God 35 3. Concrescence 41 I. Origin of Subjective Aims 41 II. Phase I of Concrescence 46 in. Phase II of Concrescence 49 Conceptual Reversion 51 Transmutation 53 iv. Phase III of Concrescence 55 v. Phase IV of Concrescence 62 vi. Satisfaction 69 4. Some Extensions of the System 72 1. Nexus and Society 72 II. Symbolic Reference 82 ix Contents Part II. Aesthetic Theory 5. Metaphor and Explanation: An Introduction to the Aesthetic Theory 9 1 6. The Aesthetic Object 98 1. Ontological Status 98 11. The Theory of Propositions 102 in. The Aesthetic Object as Proposition 107 Psychical Distance 108 The Performer Arts H3 Architecture and the Nonperformer Arts 128 7. Aesthetic Experience *34 1. Cobb's Theory *35 11. Weaknesses of Cobb's Theory 138 in. The Present Theory of Aesthetic Experience 142 iv. Aesthetic and Nonaesthetic Attention v. Beauty 8. Artistic Creation 160 1. Ulteriority and Transmutation 161 11. Artistic Expression 167 in. Croce 170 iv. God and Artistic Creation 180 9. Truth in Art 185 10. The Function of Art *93 1. Art for Life's Sake 195 11. Art for Art's Sake 199 in. Synthesis 201 11. Conclusion 203 Bibliography 207 Index 213 Figures i. Phases of Concrescence 56 2. Transmutation 58 3. Reversion in Datum 60 4. Reversion in Subject 61 5. Perceptive Propositional Feeling 66 6. Imaginative Propositional Feeling 67 7. Unauthentic Perceptive Propositional Feeling 68 8. Nexus 75 Foreword by F. S. C. Northrop Whitehead's prose is paradoxical. Upon a first reading it seems to be unnecessarily artificial. With later readings, however, one awakes of a sudden with the startling realiza- tion that for almost the first time one is observing the facts of experience freshly, directly, and in the concrete. To read Whitehead with understanding is to realize why. We suppose that we observe directly the data of our ex- perience. In one sense this is true. Obviously we sense what we sense. But human beings are more than their sense or- gans. Each one of us has an association area in his brain. This area, or more exactly one's introspected imagination which is its correlate, acts upon the aesthetically impres- sionistic images given by our senses to infer the common sense and scientific objects or persons which the sensory images signify. What we believe we see is, therefore, always the product of the presented, impressionistic images and our habitually conditioned or conscious inferences from them. To confuse the latter with the former is obviously to commit an error. Kant called this error "dogmatic slumber- ing." Whitehead calls it the "fallacy of misplaced concrete- ness" or "the confusion of an entity of thought with a concrete factor of fact." That this is an error, the reader can check for himself. xiv Foreword Who has not had the experience of seeing the image of a person in the near distance which one believes to be that of one's friend Tom, only to find on closer scrutiny of sub- sequent images that one has inferred the wrong person and that the successive impressions signify a complete stranger instead. Nor is this a rare occurrence. Any courtroom con- tains it as a prevalent phenomenon. Whenever several direct witnesses of even a recent event try honestly to describe what they saw, rare indeed is it the case that they do not contradict one another on at least some points about what they "saw." Of course in some cases there may be deliberate liars. But the real difficulty in determining what the law calls the "facts of the case" does not arise solely from the perjurers. Its source also is the failure of the average well- intentioned witness to distinguish with sufficient precision between what he infers from the impressionistic images he senses and the images themselves. Such dogmatic slumber- ing which produces the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, 7 the legal profession calls the error of mistaken identity . In any proper courtroom, precisely because this error is so frequent, cross-examination of each witness is required before his testimony is allowed to stand. What a competent cross-examiner does is to shift the attention of the witness, the court and the jury from what the witness says he saw, let us say the defendant Tom Smith, to a more precise de- scription of the images which led him to infer that the person he saw was Tom Smith. If the witness' description of the images is such that they are compatible with its being someone else, then doubt is thrown on the witness' state- ment of what he "saw." If, on the other hand, the witness describes certain details of the images which are peculiar to the images of Tom Smith, then the effect of the cross- examination is to substantiate rather than to shake his testimony. Unfortunately most people in arriving at their home- Foreword xv made, amateurish, common-sense scientific and philosoph- ical beliefs are not subject to such cross-examination.