<![CDATA[This article examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “existential human” through the lens of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. The central question is the extent to which Merleau-Ponty’s description of the human as always being-in-the-world through the body, habit, and intercorporeal relations can be rendered coherent within Whitehead’s view of reality as process—composed of actual entities, prehension, concrescence, and personally ordered society. The study employs a qualitative philosophical approach with a one-way, heuristic reconstruction: key concepts from Merleau-Ponty are mapped analogically onto Whitehead’s process categories by means of explicit rules, then stress-tested via the deliberate search for failure points to assess coherence. Three principal findings emerge. First, both frameworks reject substantialism and dualism while emphasizing relationality and temporality; coherence can be maintained insofar as the difference between phenomenological-descriptive status and speculative-ontological status is preserved. Second, bodily habit and intercorporeality can be understood as the continuity of prehensive patterns, elucidating the relative stability of the self amid ongoing becoming. Third, clear limits remain: intentionality is not identical with prehension; la chair correlates only weakly with the extensive continuum; and there is a scale gap between phenomenological lived time and cosmological concrescence. The article concludes that the human can plausibly be conceived as an embodied process—a conclusion warranted only as a careful, heuristic reconstruction. Implications extend to action theory, relational ethics, and dialogue with enactive cognitive science.]]>
