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In this essay, the author seeks to demonstrate the remarkable resemblance between the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead and those of Henri Bergson concerning the role of art and aesthetic experience generally in revealing the appearance of immediate experience. The two philosophers agree that this reality is usually concealed from human considerations about practical possibilities of using reality, including considerations about the communicability of the nature of reality. Both men also agree that this revealing has the form of the harmonization of the usual unfocused experience of things and feelings. Nevertheless, in this article the author seeks to demonstrate that harmonization assumes the form of rhythmic arrangement, and art and aesthetic experience therefore generally show immediate reality as rhythm. The fact that immediate experience is rhythm appears, when seen from the standpoint of the conception of Whitehead and Bergson, to be natural, because all reality has the nature of a spectrum of rhythmic movements. By comparing the ideas of the two philosophers, the author aims not only to provide a more precise outline of their thinking on this subject, but also to point out that the similarities of their views enable us to explain them, make them more precise, and to develop them.

The article is a discussion of Alfred North Whitehead’s and Henri Bergson’s considerations of the difference between creativity and stagnation in art. A comparison of the ideas of these two thinkers is then made with the intention of demonstrating the similarity of their approaches to the nature and meaning of fundamental innovations in art. The article also emphasizes that, according to the two thinkers, such innovations are derived from the artist’s relationship with multifaceted reality and are inspired by a true revelation of it. Finally, the article considers Whitehead’s and Bergson’s ideas about the relationship between artistic creativity and the future: the future of universal harmony in Whitehead and the future of artistic production in Bergson.