Heidegger and Whitehead

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time can be broadly termed a transcendental inquiry into the structures that make human experience possible. Such an inquiry reveals the conditions that render human experience intelligible. Using Being and Time as a model, I attempt to show that Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality not only aligns with Being and Time in opposing many elements of traditional Western philosophy but also exhibits a similar transcendental inquiry. With this reading, Process and Reality contains concepts much like Being-in-the-world, ecstatic temporality, and others found in Being and Time . More important, this interpretation considers Whitehead’s treatment of human experience paradigmatic for understanding his cosmological scheme in general. Finally, the results of this study are employed to sketch a phenomenology of holy experience. — Prefatory Note to Heidegger and Whitehead