(We continue now with the third of the four mean for us to participate in ultimate reality as pictured by Alfred North Whitehead.)
CREATIVE
In addition to the general and spiritual ways we connect to the Whitehead’s ultimate reality of organism and the creative advance, there remain two others – our individual creativity as a factor in the creative advance and our participation in the subset organism of humanity – civilization. We will start with individual creativity, specifically human efforts in the creation of beauty.
In setting context, Whitehead reviews the classical philosophical problem of Appearance vs. Reality. Traditionally, Truth is defined as the correspondence of Appearance with Reality. Indeed Truth is one of Whitehead’s five essential qualities of civilization, however the second, Beauty, is something more –
“a wider and more fundamental notion than Truth…the internal conformation of the various items of experience with each other, for the production of maximum effectiveness. Beauty thus concerns the inter-relations of the various components of Reality.”13
Then he makes two assertions that are quite unexpected, “The teleology of the universe is directed to the production of Beauty.”14 and “Beauty is left as the one aim which by its very nature is self-justifying.”15
From there he moves to the individual:
“Art is purposeful adaptation of Appearance to Reality. Now ‘purposeful adaptation’ implies an end…This end, which is the purpose of Art, is two-fold, namely Truth and Beauty [Truthful Beauty]” 16
(Art it turns out is another of the five essential qualities of civilization.) Art’s purposefulness occurs by its attempt to harmonize feelings of the parts for each other and towards the whole; the resulting harmony is beautiful. And Art neglects the future in the interest of immediacy instantiating Beauty in existing reality. Art originates in a craving for re-enaction that leads to novel content which reshapes it into its final phase of satisfaction while exhausting the creative urge.17
I think Whitehead is using these ideas of Beauty and Art loosely, not only signifying what is customarily called art, but the entire human project: literature, science, technology, society, even politics. When any of us assesses the world presented to us and makes efforts to clarify its meaning or improve it, we manifest a type of creative urge wherein we generate a kind of art or beauty that projects into the future organism of humanity and the universe.
(final continuation next post)
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13Whitehead, Alfred North, Adventures of Ideas. The Free Press, New York, 1973. Page 265.
14Ibid.
15Ibid., page 266.
16Ibid., page 267.
17Ibid., page 192.
