Whitehead, Dewey, Metaphysics, Aesthetics, Experience and Our World(s).

This chapter uses the ideas of Dewey and Whitehead to attempt to reorient the role and status of the aesthetic. It argues that the aesthetic is not so much about questions of beauty and art but about perception and feeling. This involves a move beyond Kantian notions and a foray into Whitehead’s (metaphysical) placement of feeling and perception as more-than-human elements which suffuse existence. The abstraction involved in such an account is counterbalanced with Dewey’s insistence upon examples and the here-and-now, which also leads to a (brief) consideration of the relations of the aesthetic to capitalism.