Art as Creative Process: Aesthetic Value and Its Emergence Within a Whiteheadian Ontology

Abstract

<p>The attempt is herein made to put forth a comprehensive analysis and explication of the art process and its aim at value based on and backed by Whitehead's metaphysics and scattered comments on the general notions of truth and beauty and on art as truthful beauty. The procedure and discussion is Whiteheadian. Value in general is seen to permeate all of reality. This value can be shown to arise in the explicit example of the art processes of creation and re-creation. The emergenoe of aesthetic value, as such, can be seen to be the result of two factors: the aesthetic object and the aesthetic experience. Thus a discussion of the object of the experience and the subject experiencing the object is put forth.</p> <p>Integral to this discussion is the notion that the work of art and the aesthetic object are distinct. The aesthetic object occurs only within an aesthetic experience. The work of art is a potential aesthetic object and within the experience becomes the raw data.</p> <p>Furthermore works of art are shown to have an inherent rather than an intrinsic value. Also, as a result of this and of the analysis of aesthetic experience it will be seen that there exists a mutual effect between art and society such that the one influences the other. The results of this lead one to conclude that art should be for life's sake rather than for its own.</p>