Figure and Ground

Whitehead focuses not on the figure or the ground but the interaction, the derivative. The relationship, in all aspects, is the focus. This makes the ground and figure, relative to the relationship, dynamic and variously subjective and didactic. The ground is derived  from the relationship, the figure is the relationship. What are they "saying" to each other? And as interpretants, what are we sensing? We have been trained to see things as they change in relationship. Can we move to seeing the relationship as the primary ground of interaction? Can we see the interaction as formative? That forms consist of nothing but the interaction with other forms?

Beauty Will Save The World

It is vain to affirm that which the heart does not confirm. In contrast, a work of art bears within itself its own confirmation: concepts which are manufactured out of whole cloth or overstrained will not stand up to being tested in images, will somehow fall apart and turn out to be sickly and pallid and convincing to no one. Works steeped in truth and presenting it to us vividly alive will take hold of us, will attract us to themselves with great power- and no one, ever, even in a later age, will presume to negate them. And so perhaps that old trinity of Truth and Good and Beauty is not just the formal outworn formula it used to seem to us during our heady, materialistic youth. If the crests of these three trees join together, as the investigators and explorers used to affirm, and if the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light—yet perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar up to that very place and in this way perform the work of all three.