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Articles

Whitehead As Existentialist

Colin Wilson pays attention to Whitehead’s awareness of meaning.

The title sounds almost self-contradictory. What has the creator of the Philosophy of Organism in common with Kierkegaard, Sartre or Heidegger? The answer is: more than at first appears. “Speculative philosophy,” says Whitehead at the beginning of his book Process and Reality, “is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.” And what does he understand by ‘experience’? The answer can be found in Chapter XV of Adventures of Ideas:

“Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk and experience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking, experience drowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experience self-forgetful, experience intellectual and experience physical, experience religious and experience sceptical, experience anxious and experience care-free, experience anticipatory and experience retrospective, experience happy and experience grieving, experience dominated by emotion and experience under self-restraint, experience in the light and experience in the dark, experience normal and experience abnormal.”

Even the words “experience drunk and experience sober” make us recognise that Whitehead is thinking in the same categories as Kierkegaard and Sartre: everyday experience, not philosophical abstractions.

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