Abstract
Although Alfred North Whitehead did not write any book on aesthetics, his aesthetic theory is involved in implicit way in his philosophical works. He mentions the relevance of aesthetic experience, beauty and art at the crucial places of his philosophical and cosmological system and they relate strongly to his concept of creativity as the "Category of Ultimate" (cf. for example PR 1978, p. 21 - 22).
In Religion in the Making he even writes, that "the metaphysical doctrine, here expounded, finds the foundations of the world in the aesthetic experience, rather than as with Kant in the cognitive and conceptive experience" (RM 1927, p. 91). But his concept of aesthetic experience is much broader than the traditional aesthetic use of that term, because it matters not only to human experience, but every actual occasion of experience.
It is related to inanimate entities and even to physical entities, such as electrons. It the proposed paper I will concentrate on Whitehead's understanding of art and I will proceed in three steps. 1) I will try to show, that Whitehead's use of the concept of art is also extremely wide and we should read the excerpt from Adventures of Ideas, where he states, that "consciousness itself is the product of art in its lowliest form" (AI 1947, p. 348-349) in this context. 2) I will try to interpret his considerations on the relations of beauty and truth in the context of art.
On one hand he states that beauty is more fundamental concept than truth and truth can even diminish beauty (AI, p. 341-341), on the other he states that final purpose of art is "Truthful Beauty" (AI, p. 344). My goal in this step is to concretize the type of truth required for the successful art. 3) The considerations in the third step will focus on the ideas of Susanne Langer and Andrew Ushenko.
At this stage I aim to interpret Langer's concept of "nondiscursive symbol" and Ushenko's concept of "aesthetic vector field" and show that they can be understood as a kind of later answers to the question of the relation of beauty and truth in the works of art.