This chapter argues that a new aesthetic paradigm requires a new paradigm of aesthetic education. I elaborate what this paradigm looks like in Whitehead’s work, starting with his educational writing and moving through his meditations on abstractions and ‘aesthetic significance’ in Modes of Thought (1968, first published 1938). Throughout, I show how Whitehead turned to aesthetics to combat what he saw as the primary intellectual evil of his age: the problem of disciplinary specialization, which he regarded as the institutional manifestation of the modern habit of letting nature bifurcate. Arguably, this problem is with us more than ever, with the added danger that many disciplines – those that fall short on research-based metrics – are in the process of being cut from the university entirely. Whitehead’s notion of aesthetic education, framed to address this threat but made ever harder to grasp because of it, forces us to ask: how can we justify and institute modes of thought that fall outside the ‘knowledge factory’ model of the modern research university?
