Whitehead and Aesthetic Experience

The detailed references in Process and Reality to Locke and Hume distract from Whitehead's interpretation of experience as fundamentally an Aesthetic, rather than as a Cognitive or Moral, phenomenon. That is, on that interpretation, the arc from sensation to knowledge, or from desire to satisfaction, is a special case of that from creative urge to organic harmonization. Thus, Whitehead's critique of Hume is, at bottom, not of the inadequacy of Impressions to found either Cognitive or Moral experience, but of the derivative, delimited nature of either of them. Still, he does maintain agreement with Hume that experience originates in a sentient moment, i. e. in an awareness, of some sort, of an object, of some sort. Hence, he precludes the possibility that an internal motor process can be an original creative impulse, and, hence, that e. g. graceful physiological motion constitutes an Aesthetic experience.