Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty

A comprehensive synthesis of the thought of Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty.

Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty sets out to answer a simple question: "What kind of phenomenologist is Merleau-Ponty?" While debates regarding the status of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology typically fall along transcendental or existential lines, author Andrew Kirkpatrick shows how Merleau-Ponty's thought fails to fit neatly within either category. Drawing on Whitehead's process metaphysics, he demonstrates how Merleau-Ponty's thought transcends the limitations of both transcendental and existential descriptions and results in a new style of phenomenology altogether: a process phenomenology. More than just a Whiteheadian reading of Merleau-Ponty, this is a synthesis that also offers novel insights into Whiteheadian thought. It is in this sense that the question "What kind of phenomenologist was Merleau-Ponty?" also results in a novel interpretation of Whitehead. In uniting Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological description of lived experience with Whitehead's process metaphysics, a process phenomenology ultimately enlarges the philosophical dictionary. It does so by providing the method, vocabulary, and conceptual means through which we can embody, describe, and live out a process of process metaphysics of everyday life.