Aesthetic Fact (Tony Sampson)

 The affect of the art elicits a very different kind of measure of fact. 

It appeals to an audience on an aesthetic register of experience, occasioning what Whitehead would call a ‘value’ based on ‘elements in feeling.’[i] 

This notion of feeling is not, as logical positivists would have it, opposed to fact. 

Feelings are not a personal or irrational felt experience. 

Feeling instead acts like a powerful, impersonal lure that draws an audience into the delightful experience of the fact. 

What is at once peculiar and fascinating about this Whitehead’s feely measure of fact is that he is the famed co-author of Principia Mathematica; a book that attempted to define the fundamentals of pure logic. 

So, one might assume that if Whitehead were around today, he would perhaps take a decidedly logical position on post-truth? 

He might even self-identify with present day logical positivists who continue to grasp post-truth as a preferential problem of appealing to irrational feelings, personal beliefs or cherry-picked desires rather than a necessary commitment to brutal fact. 

But no! Whitehead’s speculative philosophy would look to problematize the logician’s brutalist grip on fact. 

Shakespeare and the unfamiliarity of his use of language returns us to the state of immanence where we feel the intensities outside of those that we can datify and yet we continue to be impressed by our own     ability to explain ourselves away scientifically.

And why we ask is immanence even worth seeking

Is the truth in the emergence prior to the enlightened quest for a coordinated categorisation of a brutal fact  abstracted from connectedness? 

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[i] Ibid.