| Summary: | This dissertation develops a foundation for social theory on the basis of Whitehead's notion of aesthetic experience by tracing its role in the work of Talcott Parsons, G.H. Mead, and Bruno Latour. For Whitehead, all experience is aesthetic as it involves composing a perspective of the world through abstractions from feeling. Perception and thought are ways of coordinating activity based on emphasizing certain elements of experience to be felt at the expense of others. Thus, perspectives are aesthetic compositions that structure a field of feeling that accompanies all experience. From this perspective, individuals and societies can be examined in aesthetic terms. Speculation performs this function by producing concepts that foreground new relations for feeling in response to concepts that bifurcate experience and reality. Civilization complements Speculation as a notion for evaluating individual perspectives and societies based on the richness of experience they provide and the degree of real possibilities immanent in their structure. Taken together, these notions provide a mode for approaching individual identities and societies as aesthetic objects. From this foundation, social theory can be deployed to produce new modes of understanding reality that deepen the individual's sense of relation with others and to generate tools for experimenting with new modes of thought and action.
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