Nature and spirit: an essay in ecstatic naturalism 9780823213627, 9780823213634

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NATURE AND SPIRIT

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An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism by

ROBERT S. CORRINGTON

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Fordham University Press New York 1992

© Copyright 1992 by Fordham University : All rights reserved. Lc 92-361 ISBN 0—8232-—1362—5 (clothbound)

ISBN 0—8232-1363-3 (paperback)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Corrington, Robert S., 1950Nature and spirit : an essay in ecstatic naturalism / by Robert S. Corrington.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8232-1362-5 (hard). —ISBN 0-8232-1363-3 (pbk.)

1. Naturalism. 2. Phenomenology. 3. Order (Philosophy) 4. Relevance (Philosophy) I. Title. B828.2.C65 1992 146 —dc20 92-361 CIP

Printed in the United States of America

Nature is intricate, overlapped, interweaved, and endless. RALPH WALDO EMERSON

*“Fate,’’ 1860

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Preface ix 3. Worldhood 120 Bibliography 197 Index 203 CONTENTS

Introduction: The Method and Scope of the Treatise 1

1. The Human Process 40 2. The Signs of Community 83 4. The Divine Natures 162

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PREFACE CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY are concerned more

with the elaboration of methodologies than with probing into the most pervasive features of nature and spirit. A corroding pseudopluralism has made it increasingly difficult to articulate a perspective that has generic import. The main outlines of the human process, communal life, the world, and the divine are effaced so that the free play of semiotic possibilities can fill in the remaining conceptual landscape. This sheer symbolic plentitude, while not without its own aesthetic power, veils the deeper traits of reality and, in turn, alienates the human process from those impulses and potencies that give shape and meaning to life. The perspective developed in this treatise is concerned with breaking through this con-

temporary obsession with nonreferential signs so that a more generic and judicious categorial framework can emerge to guide inquiry and the assimilation of meaning. The concepts of “nature” and “‘spirit”’ have been chosen because

they have the unusual status of being both conceptual and, in a very different respect, preconceptual. In their conceptual role, they serve to remind us of the utter ubiquity of the natural and the spiritual within our understanding of the world. The concept of the “natural” is not seen to contrast with some alleged realm of the nonnatural. All orders of the world are natural if by natural is meant that any given order has some relation to some other orders. That is, no order is free-floating or somehow outside of the world. Yet the concepts of “nature” and “spirit” are preconceptual in the sense that they point to that which has no outer shape or circumscribed dimension. These concepts enable us to sharpen our sensitivity to the abyss separating an order of nature from nature per se. Thus these two precategories make it possible to frame or experience categories of lesser scope. In this sense, the concepts of

“nature” and “‘spirit”’ provide the clearing within which subsequent ontological and phenomenological work can proceed. They are the ultimate enabling concepts of thought. Existentially, the postmodern awareness of our utter separation from nature and spirit makes it especially compelling that we open 1X

x NATURE AND SPIRIT out a sense of the constant, if ambiguous, availability of the spirit

as it moves within and through the fragmented orders of the world. The spirit lives between and among selves and opens out the possibility of a renewed awareness of the innumerable orders of nature and their various forms of relevance to the human process. While we cannot return to a romanticized or eulogistic understanding of nature, it is possible to realign the human process with

those natural and spiritual potencies that give shape to meaning and communication. Ecstatic naturalism is a perspective that honors the self-transcending potencies within nature which continu-

ally renew the orders of the world. ,

In the plurality of methods available to the philosopher or theologian, it is imperative that a method be used that will manifest the most pervasive features of nature. Ordinal phenomenology combines the sensitivity of phenomenological description with the metaphysical insights of ordinality. The principles associated with ordinality, a perspective originally developed by Justus Buchler, make it possible to show how any given order is or becomes relevant to another. The concepts of “scope,” “integrity,” ““weak”’ and ‘‘strong relevance” (as augmented by the concept of “sheer relevance’’), and “ordinal location” function throughout the treatise to show how any ‘object’ of investigation or analysis will prevail (that is, obtain). and become available to the human process. Phenomenology, insofar as it is stripped of its narrow Husserlian concern with transcendental subjectivity and constitution, provides the descriptive clearing within which nature and spirit can become manifest and, where possible, intelligible. When phenomenological description is combined with the insights of ordinal metaphysics, the generic features of what is can begin to reappear from the chaos of perspectives. Ordinal phenomenology shares Hegel’s commitment to generic exploration of the orders of nature and the spirit. However, it recognizes the estranged and alienated character of all methods and human conceptual aspirations. Hegel’s triumphalist drive toward categorial encompassment gives way before a more tentative and open-ended description of the pervasive features of the world. Our awareness of the ontological difference and of our postmodern

fragmentation compels phenomenology to move more slowly within the recalcitrant orders of the world. At the same time, or-

PREFACE x1 dinal phenomenology listens to the traces of the spirit and provides a linguistic space for their appearance.

Throughout the text, I take issue with a number of contemporary thinkers and viewpoints. Husserl’s project of transcendental phenomenology is regrounded and transformed to serve the interests of a more self-consciously metaphysical conception of phenomenology. Heidegger’s astute analysis of worldhood is transfig-

ured to fit in better with the ordinal account of nature and the innumerable orders of the world. This is further augmented by contrasting this perspective with that of Buber. Eco’s semiotic theories, both early and late, are examined as they shed light on the reference relation and the nature of the “‘open work.” In attempt-

ing to describe the divine natures, I deal with the philosophical theologies of Tillich, Schleiermacher, and Hartshorne as they shed light on the various dimensions of God. Throughout the text there

is an implied dialogue with depth psychology, especially that of C. G. Jung, and deconstruction. On the more positive side, there is an attempt to become sensitive to a number of discoveries that aid ordinal phenomenology toward its description of various orders of relevance. Bloch’s evocative and multilayered description of the phenomenon of hope enters into the work at several key junctions to provide a metaphys-

ical and political goad to phenomenological descriptions. Throughout the text, some of the major insights of American pragmatism augment and deepen phenomenological description, so that it can remain attuned to the larger neo-Darwinian and evolutionary perspectives that remain compelling for thought. In particular, the descriptive naturalism of Peirce and Dewey, which seeks to develop generic categories that are applicable to nature as a whole but ignores or downplays nature’s spiritual and self-transcending potencies, is transformed to show its relevance to ecstatic naturalism. Finally, John William Miller’s key metaphor of the ‘“‘midworld”’ is used to enhance the sense of the locatedness of meaning horizons within larger orders of relevance. This work is continuous with my first book, The Community of Interpreters, in which I develop the concept of “horizonal hermeneutics.”’ The method of horizonal hermeneutics is used whenever the focus is on the basic features of human interpretive horizons as they function within communal life. The more generic method of

Xi NATURE AND SPIRIT ordinal phenomenology probes into those features that make horizons possible in the first place. All meaning horizons are in and of orders of relevance that may or may not be human horizons. ‘To understand the setting of hermeneutics, it is necessary to understand the most general features of any order of relevance. This is the task of the present work. The analyses of my first book suggest the more generic framework developed in this work. Yet the two methods reinforce each other and serve to sharpen our understanding of the most compelling traits of nature. The recovery of nature is one of the most important tasks facing contemporary thought. The recent emphasis on texts and textuality serves to overvalue the traits of the human process and its manipulative dimension. The consequent denial of the supremacy of nature alienates thought and experience from the true sources of measure and empowerment. At the heart of nature is the power of the spirit that enlivens and directs our interpretive life. The unity within nature, a part of nature itself, comes from the ever-protean

spirit that lives as the bond for the innumerable orders of the world. In a striking sense, ordinal phenomenology belongs to the spirit as one of its own forms of self-manifestation.

Throughout the work I use two distinct bracketing conventions. When I am using a word in its technical sense, usually as developed

by another thinker, I put it in double quotation marks, e.g., ‘“‘measure”’ (Mass) from Heidegger. When I use my own term, or a term taken from ordinary language, but want to steer the reader

away from spatial, temporal, or more literal connotations, I put the term in single quotation marks, e.g., “sum,’ where the concern in this case is with conveying a vastness or totality that cannot be enumerated. This second convention is especially important where spatial language clouds the issue.

I owe a debt to many people who helped me shape the perspective exhibited in this work. Among them are Jim Campbell, Manfred Frings, Carl Hausman, John McDermott, Ed Petry, Jr., and Beth Singer. I especially want to thank Felicia Kruse, John Lachs, and my colleague Peter Ochs, each of whom read an earlier version of

this book in its entirety and offered detailed and helpful comments. I also want to thank the American Academy of Religion

PREFACE Xi for sponsoring a general session on my first book, The Community of Interpreters, during their 1989 annual meeting. The papers presented at that session by Douglas Jacobsen, Robert Hammerton-

Kelly, Carol Newsom, and Charles Long compelled me to augment some of my key concepts. The present text has attempted to incorporate several of their insights. In addition, I want to thank the editors of Metaphilosophy for allowing me to reprint substantial

portions of my article, “Horizons and Contours: ‘Toward an Ordinal Phenomenology,” (22, No. 3 [1992], 179-89). Finally, I want to acknowledge my debt to the late Justus Buchler, with whom in years past I discussed many issues that led to the development of ordinal phenomenology and ecstatic naturalism. Drew University

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NATURE AND SPIRIT

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INTRODUCTION

The Method and Scope of the Treatise FROM TRANSCENDENTAL TO ORDINAL PHENOMENOLOGY

PHILOSOPHIC METHODS MUST CONFORM to their specific subject

matters. Insofar as any subject matter is elusive or recalcitrant, methods must be evolved that can overcome the forms of its elusiveness or recalcitrance. There is always a tension between the more narrow and specific goals of a given method and the general needs of a philosophic perspective. If philosophy can be defined as the quest for the most pervasive features of the world, then methods must be created that will enable those features to emerge. For many, the quest for the generic seems to hark back to a conception

of metaphysics, or onto-theology, that is no longer compelling. On the one side, methods are held to be far too self-referential or too subjective to be of any use in generic analyses or descriptions.

On the other, the world is held to be far too fragmented or filled with radical modes of difference to make any general metaphysics possible. The concern of this treatise is with showing an alternative possibility for philosophy. From the side of method there are several

distinctive possibilities within both hermeneutics and phenomenology that promise to move reflection away from the purely subjective or private. Hermeneutics, insofar as it frees itself from a narrow concern with human linguistic artifacts, can enter into the horizonal features of communal and personal life. Horizonal hermeneutics has as its object the innumerable signs and interpretations that emerge from communication and the creation of shared meanings. Phenomenology, insofar as it frees itself from a narrow concern with human subjectivity and the constitutive acts of an alleged transcendental ego, can learn to probe more successfully 1

2 NATURE AND SPIRIT into the most pervasive features of phenomena. By the same token, it must avoid a return to the merely spectatorial view of the world and acknowledge the various forms of social and moral engagement that govern and shape all forms of phenomenological insight.

As this treatise shows, all phenomena are orders of relevance that can become available for human analysis and description. The

concept of ordinal phenomenology has been developed to show how phenomenological description is actually directed toward these orders of relevance. Once this is recognized, the method of phenomenology can attain far greater generic power than preordinal forms of phenomenology have displayed. The method to be used here is that of ordinal phenomenology. Unlike horizonal hermeneutics, which confines itself to sign systems within personal and communal life, ordinal phenomenology probes into the most basic and pervasive features of the world. The categories employed in horizonal hermeneutics are implicitly derived from ordinal phenomenology. This connection will emerge more clearly in the specific analyses of the text.

Traditionally, phenomenology has been held to be in conflict with metaphysics. The concern of preordinal phenomenologies has been with a careful description of the traits of the human subject as it constitutes and forms its perceptions of phenomena. Tran-

scendental subjectivity, that is, the ultimate depth dimension of the knowing subject, occupies a unique ontological position. It thus constitutes world and phenomena, and is hence held to be outside of any alleged structures of the world. Like the eye which is not in the world but is the source of all world illumination, the transcendental subject is held to be premetaphysical. Phenomenology is compelled to confine itself to the phenomenal field opened

out by the transcendental subject and to avoid any metaphysical claims that would take it outside of this specific and limited subjectivity.

Ordinal phenomenology marks a distinct departure from this more traditional way of understanding the tensions between phenomenological method and metaphysical aspiration. It redefines both phenomenology and metaphysics in such a way as to show that they require each other. Ordinal phenomenology is, as noted, the analysis and description of orders of relevance. As such, it does

INTRODUCTION 3 not privilege consciousness by assuming that it must be the mysterious origin of all phenomenal features. The concept of “‘order’”’ is in a sense pre-phenomenological in that it enables phenomenol-

ogy to proceed toward a description of any order no matter how constituted or how located. Without such a metaphysical concept, phenomenology would be confined to finite subjectivity, that is, to an idiosyncratic order that has only dubious relevance to all others. Metaphysics, in this view, is not a spurious enterprise that wants

to leap outside of the confines of the transcendental subject. Rather, it is the attempt to find the most basic categories through which phenomena (orders of relevance) can become available to the human process. To engage in metaphysics is to probe into the most generic features of a given order and to isolate those features for special treatment. This process moves from the less to the more generic, so that private or limited traits‘ are located within larger orders of relevance. For many, of course, the quest for the “‘generic’’ sounds like the imposition of identity onto material that is self-othering or marked by radical difference. It must be shown that the concern for the generic does not attempt to efface difference or novelty, but recognizes precisely how differences contrib-

ute to the trait constitution of orders of relevance. Put in other terms: generic-level analysis honors difference and allows such differences to enhance our understanding of the orders within which they appear. Terms like “‘order’’ are meant to signal a sensitivity to the ways

in which traits emerge before phenomenological analysis and description. Phenomenology has long been concerned with general features of experience even if preordinal versions often err in the direction of a privileged subjectivity. Husserl, for example, did not see his enterprise as being confined to an analysis of twentiethcentury European forms of transcendental subjectivity, but saw it as being concerned with the most general features of the self per

se. This is not to say, of course, that such a quest can prescind from social epistemology and forms of domination. Rather, it is to assert that all philosophic methods, regardless of their polemical presentations, seek the generic.

In deconstructive strategies, for example, the concept of “textuality” is held to pertain to anything whatsoever. To many, this

4 NATURE AND SPIRIT attempt to preserve difference through the archmetaphor of the text might appear to deny genuine metaphysical differences by ignoring those orders that cannot, in any meaningful sense, be rendered as texts. Lines of relevance may emerge connecting textual and nontextual orders, thereby bringing further orders into the realm of textuality. Yet, as will emerge, preformal potencies represent orders or domains that are at best pre-textual and hence outside of textual semiosis. Deconstruction as a method has its own generic intent and its own attitude toward competing metaphysical frameworks. ‘To say that deconstruction 1s somehow post-

metaphysical is to fall prey to a very narrow conception of metaphysics that compresses all ordinal differences into one metaphor or analogy. Metaphysics, as the quest for generic features within and among orders, need not limit itself to a search for origins or for bare identities. Origins and goals are, themselves, finite and fragmented, and must be explored with sensitivity and care. Identities are always ordinal, that is, always pertinent to specific orders in specific respects. If metaphysics is polemically reduced to ontotheology and its search for an ultimate genus or first principle, then it will indeed have no role to play in ordinal phenomenology. If, however, metaphysics is seen in its less imperial guise as the search for general features that themselves locate and honor difference, then it is clearly indispensable to any sustained form of human query. The concept of “ordinality”’ serves to remind us that all traits belong to specific orders of relevance. In a sense, the principle of ordinality, namely, that all traits are order-specific, is akin to pluralism with its commitment to the notion that there are no strictly universal features of the world. Ordinal analyses thus strive to show how a group of traits must be located within other traits even while locating traits within themselves. For example, consider Wittgenstein’s well-known use of the image of the game. He insisted that there could be no common genus linking together all types of games, but that they were linked through a series of family resemblances. While this view is certainly not incorrect, it is less sophisticated than the ordinal view. From the ordinal standpoint, each game is constituted by its own traits which collectively

form an identity for that game in particular. Any given rule or structure will relate to some other rules within the game, but may

INTRODUCTION 5 not relate to all others. Put differently: there are family resemblances within the game, and there are incommensurate features between and among some of these internal structures. For those games which involve playing pieces, such as chess or darts, there may be strong lines of relevance affecting the relation among the pieces, while for those games which involve shared goals or forms of behavior, such as street games, there may be only the weakest form of relevance among events. The ordinal perspective denies that the world is constituted by some kind of overarching meaning or structure that can be somehow read off the features of particulars. Whereas Leibniz or Royce

could argue, respectively, that any particular mirrored either a pre-established harmony or an actual infinite series, the ordinal perspective takes a much humbler approach by insisting that any given order (complex) is in some sense unique and has features that cannot be found in any other order. A specific trait is always in and of an order. However, the principle of ordinality is not strictly identical to that of pluralism because it continues to honor the sheer presence of nature as a prehuman force locating and establishing orders. Pluralist perspectives tend to privilege human features, such as consciousness, and thus deny the utter ubiquity and pre-eminence of nature. Thus William James’s pluralism relies on an ontology of centers of awareness or conscious transforming

energy to establish its claims to sheer diversity. Were James to move beyond an anthropomorphic ontology, he would have difficulty framing a coherent pluralism. Ordinality does not assign any such features to nature as a whole and lets each order appear in its own unique way. The concept of “trait” is ontologically neutral in that it does not

entail any special kind of “‘whatness”’ for the world or for any given order. An order is made up of traits. The order, when looked at from a broader perspective, is itself a trait. To continue our example from above: a game of darts is constituted by innumerable traits. It has a specific type of regulation board, carefully crafted and weighted darts, complex rules of sequence, spatial and

temporal parameters, forms of counting and enumeration, and historically secure color configurations. Each one of these features

(traits) has little or no value alone. Together they constitute the game itself. In addition, the game has a variety of social features

6 NATURE AND SPIRIT that form part of its trait contour. Dart games appear in pubs or in homes and, in each case, have a penumbra of meanings and values that help to form the communal meaning of the game. In this sense, then, the game is composed of innumerable internal and relational features and is highly complex. Yet, when looked at from a much larger order of relevance, say, in terms of the history of leisure or professional competition, the game of darts becomes but one trait among competing traits, one order within this larger history.

This is not to say that the game is complex in one order and simple in another, but that different perspectives isolate out different traits for emphasis. No order is simple if by “simple”’ is meant that it has no relevance beyond itself or has no internal features.

“Complexity” and “simplicity” are not metaphysical terms so much as heuristic devices for advanced communication and inquiry. The game of darts is thus seen as being simple or complex, depending on the goals of the pertinent form of analysis. Phenomenology has evolved a number of central concepts that have by now become well known. In order to clarify the transition from transcendental to ordinal phenomenology it is necessary to re-examine these concepts and to reconstruct them in such a way that they can serve the more generic concerns of the ordinal approach. Chief among these concepts, especially as developed by Husserl, are “essence,” “genetic analysis,” “the evident,”’ “‘constitution,” “temporality,” “‘the natural standpoint,” and “‘horizon.”’ The concept of “‘horizon”’ is the most important for our purposes and will receive more extended historical and categorial analysis. It is a transitional concept marking the realm that stands between the subject and its innumerable objects and keeps both realms open and available to each other.

The concept of “essence” (Wesen) betrays a particular kind of metaphysics that seeks foundations or atemporal genera. More important, such a concept imposes a hierarchy on the world by insisting that all phenomena are underway toward some kind of essentialization, where their pre-eminent features become freed from particular forms of embodiment. The quest for essences is of a piece with metaphysical foundationalisms that refuse to acknowledge the fragmented and ofttimes fitful quality of many orders. At the same time, the search for essences is held to require a

INTRODUCTION 7 unique type of insight (Wesensschau) that alone can make essences

and their relations appear before phenomenological insight. On this model, to show an essence is to emancipate a general. trait from its given order. While Husserl denied the claim that essences were eternal or “more real” than particulars, his emphasis on the special intuition of essences moved phenomenology away from the

possibility of an analysis of ordinal traits toward a more limited metaphysical perspective that tied itself to the genera of perception.

The primary problem with the drive toward essences is that it ignores the sheer locatedness of traits, whether they be regional or merely local, within given orders of relevance.! No trait can be lifted outside of its own order and somehow detached from its various ordinal locations. A trait is order-specific or not a trait at all. As will emerge shortly, the concept of essence betrays an impoverished metaphysics that attempts to prescind from relations and from the temporal processes of nature. The concept of “‘genetic analysis” has been used to cover everything from Nietzsche’s genealogy of Western morality to the specific stages of development within our apprehension of a perceptual phenomenon. Genetic analyses, unlike essentialist strategies,

are more sensitive to historical and temporal traits within the world. Often, an essentialist description will be grafted onto a genetic account, as if to acknowledge that there are teleological or fulfilled stages within the genesis of a phenomenon. Clearly, the genetic account can be very illuminating, especially when it shows how a given phenomenon (order of relevance) arrived at its present trait configuration through a process of transformation. Yet genetic accounts often privilege conditions of origin and assume that there must be a primordial core that lies within the now contaminated heart of the phenomenon. In the case of Heidegger, we see how a kind of genetic and historical phenomenology works in consort with etymological derivations to cast doubt on the current status of a phenomenon. Conditions of origin often assume a numinous quality that, ironically, betrays the actual phenomenal

data. At the other extreme is the Hegelian phenomenology that eulogizes the telic or consummated conditions of spiritual phenomena, and thereby puts origins and means into the dubious status of the “‘less real.”’

3 NATURE AND SPIRIT Metaphysically, it is important to recognize that not all orders of relevance are temporal or admit change. There may be orders

that admit new traits, but not in the orders of temporality. Or there may be orders that are only partly temporal. In terms of the human process and its inevitable finitude, there are orders that remain forever beyond the reach of phenomenological insight. Neither an essentialist nor a genetic account would be possible in such a situation. Genetic phenomenology is a subclass within ordinal phenomenology. It is of value when dealing with those orders of relevance

that are temporal or that have some predominant temporal features. When dealing with the human process and the signs of community, which are both fully but not exclusively temporal, genetic analyses can be of great value in exhibiting stages of development

or forms of pathological decline. The traits that are isolated by genetic phenomenology must themselves be located within larger orders of relevance that may have different temporal or even nontemporal features. As will emerge much later in the text, there are orders that are pretemporal as well as orders that are postemporal. Genetic phenomenology must honor these pervasive features of the world.

On the deepest level, namely, that pertaining to nature itself, genetic descriptions will be impossible. Nature is not some kind of superorder that can be mapped by phenomenological description but the seedbed of innumerable potencies that are not yet themselves orders of relevance. When dealing with nature and its potencies, phenomenology can proceed only with a cautious and tentative grasp of the movement from potency to order. Ordinal phenomenology remains bound to its own conception of naturalism. At the heart of Husserl’s project is the concept of “‘the evident”’ or “‘the self-evident.”’ The quest for foundations and essences is of

a piece with the movement toward the evident. This well-known Cartesian strain in Husserl betrays a concern for the fixed, the stable, and the certain. Phenomenological intuition into given orders is held to yield that which shows itself on its own terms. In his Cartesian Meditations of 1929, Husserl links the concept of “‘evidence” (Evidenz) to the various forms of self-givenness within

phenomenal fields: ,

INTRODUCTION 9 In the broadest sense, evidence (Evidenz) denotes a universal primal phenomenon of intentional life, namely—as contrasted with other consciousness-of, which is capable a priori of being “empty”, expectant, indirect, non-presentative—the quite preeminent mode of consciousness that consists in the self-appearance, the self-exhibiting, the self-giving, of an affair, an affair-complex (or state of affairs), a universality, a value, or other objectivity, in the final mode: “‘itself there’, “immediately intuited’’, / “given originaliter.’”

It is important to note that Husserl applies the concept of “‘evidence”’ to a wide variety of phenomena such as universals (essences), values, and facts. In each case, the phenomenon under investigation gives itself directly to the phenomenologist and lies beyond any mere empirical forms of investigation. The true phenomenon, as opposed to the mere semblance, emerges into the clarity of the evident and abides as a fixed intentional object or trait. Of course, the evident trait may be fully temporal but it is self-giving in its purity nonetheless.

Ordinal phenomenology sounds a very different note when it acknowledges that orders of relevance may be highly refracted and ambiguous in their various forms of self-giving. The evident, so called, is always but one trait configuration within a larger integ-

rity or order that itself may reshape what shows itself. In this sense, ordinal phenomenology is friendly to pragmatism and its denial of first principles and certain knowledge.* Evidence is al-

ways order-dependent and preliminary. The clear and distinct traits sought by traditional phenomenology are elusive at best, and

imperial at their worst. Nothing is more damaging to the free movement of phenomenology than the obssesion with self-givenness in its alleged purity. Insofar as phenomenology is bound to carefully describe shifting or highly ramified orders of relevance, it must adopt a much humbler tone in its dealings with the world. Further, finite investigators simply do not have the insight or sheer perceptual power

to probe into the vast ordinal relations that prevail in any given phenomenon. Ordinal phenomenology can only function within a communal context that values the communication of shared meanings over the alleged purity of a self-giving appearance. The move from mere semblance toward the true phenomenon in its fullness is only possible within the context of a community of

10 NATURE AND SPIRIT interpreters for whom all phenomenal traits must be, to some degree, public. Since there is nothing analogous to a pure transcen-

, dental ego for the community of interpreters, there can be no specific ‘place’ for the evident to show itself. Evidence is always tentative and amenable to further analysis and collective probing. The concept of “constitution” has been a major one in the his-

tory of the phenomenological movement. It has enabled phenomenologists to understand the various ways in which intentional acts give shape to present immediacies. Each particular facet of a phenomenon is sustained and molded by a set of intentional acts that collectively make phenomenal appearance possible. Needless to say, constitution remains in tension with evidence insofar as the acts of the subject are, themselves, partly determinative of the selfshowing of the phenomenon. The ordinal perspective recognizes that the human process gives shape and texture to innumerable orders of relevance and that it will continue to do so. At the same

time, it recognizes that nonhuman orders arrange themselves without human help and that phenomenology is as much an act of discovery as it is an analysis of internal acts of constitution. Where ordinal phenomenology differs from more traditional forms is in its insistence that phenomena often co-constitute the human process and give it its unique shapes. Put differently: the self undergoes and assimilates contours and shapes not of its own making, and this assimilation actually provides the background for the more limited and less powerful constitutive acts of the self. The human process is in and of nature, as noted by Dewey, and cannot prescind from the power and potency of extrahuman orders. The concept of constitution functions within an analysis of the transcendental ego as it actively and passively builds up its apprehension of given phenomena. Since a given phenomenon, whether a fact, a value, or an essence (universal), emerges into its specific form of self-givenness through a series of intentional acts, it follows, for Husserl at least, that the phenomenon is constituted by the self. In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl contrasts active and pas-

sive forms of genesis (constitution): “In active genesis the Ego functions as productively constitutive, by means of subjective processes that are specifically acts of the Ego. . . . In any case, anything built by activity necessarily presupposes, as the lowest level, a passivity that gives something beforehand; and, when we

INTRODUCTION 11 trace anything built actively, we run into constitution by passive generation.’* Active constitution builds up the facets of pre-given phenomena and gives them some concrete experiental shape. Yet passive constitution is more basic in that it makes the phenomenal field possible in the first place. Passive synthesis supplies the “‘ma-

terial” for more refined acts of constitution. The self derives its original acquaintance with things through passive constitution. Were the self confined to active syntheses, it would have no subject matter given over to it to work on.

Ordinal phenomenology accepts the distinction between active and passive modes of constitution, but acknowledges the greater scope of passive modes. This is not to say that the self is somehow a mere product of its world, but that the various shapes of awareness usually follow highly grooved and historically dense patterns. Active constitution is limited in its options precisely because the self rarely has the lucidity or self-control necessary to make awareness thematic. On the most basic level, passive constitution functions within an even more basic fact of sheer embeddedness. The meaning and structure of the human process emerge from natural enabling conditions that are prior to any act or function of the self. Passive synthesis is always in and of a world that is antecedent to any movement of experience, whether human or not. The concept of “‘temporality” has become central to the phe-

nomenological analysis of the human process. Heidegger expanded upon Husserl’s 1905 lectures on internal time-conscious-

ness to analyze the ways in which the self stands out into its worldly involvements through the modes of temporality. Early on, phenomenology rejected the Aristotelian notion of “clock time” with its reduction of time experience to a series of spatially extended now-points. Experienced time is qualitatively distinct from the time of prehuman orders. For Heidegger, of course, tem-

porality becomes the means by and through which the human process can become open to the elusive question of Being (die Seinsfrage). Without the ecstases (Ekstasen) of temporality, the self

would remain closed in on itself and the world would be opaque -to it. Temporality is thus the clearing within which the self and its world can become radically open to each other.

Ordinal phenomenology remains friendly to this subtle and evocative analysis of the internal constitution of the time sense. Yet

12 NATURE AND SPIRIT it insists that temporality is only one mode of access to the world, and that it is not pre-eminent in all respects. The human process is certainly temporal but it is not only that. More important, the self participates in pretemporal as well as post-temporal orders of relevance. Temporality is best defined as one specialized access structure that enables the self to become permeable to the nonself. Other access structures are as much a part of the self, and therefore as important for world-clarification. These structures will be the focus of the first chapter of this treatise. As will become clear, the metaphor of the “midworld,”’ as tied to the concept of ““horizons,”’ will better serve to exhibit the correlation of the human process to orders of intelligibility and to the innumerable orders of the world. The concept of ‘‘access structure’’ is meant to refer to the ultimate enabling conditions of human awareness. These structures, e.g., temporality, are not simply located within the self but stand in the realm between the self and its world. All access structures are part of nature and represent ways in which beings funded with mind become open to the orders of the world. These access structures should not be referred to as transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience because such a conception denies, or at least downplays, the natural conditions that surround the self and its world. Access structures are not a priori conditions of cognition so much as evolutionary products that continue to sustain the human process and its various forms of interaction with the world. Temporality and horizonality, as will emerge shortly, are access structures that permeate each other on the social and personal levels of interaction. For Husserl, the concept of the “natural standpoint”’ refers to what he would call a naive belief in the psychically independent

status of the orders of the world. Allied to this is his critique of naturalism, which is held by him to entail belief in the causal efficacy and lawfulness of the orders of nature. For Husserl, naturalism is a false metaphysical view, mistakenly tied to a particular conception of science. The movement toward transcendental phenomenology requires the bracketing out of the natural standpoint and the rejection of naturalism. The natural standpoint, that of critical common sense, is held to limit the reach and scope of phenomenological intuition by overemphasizing the primacy of space-time particulars. This limiting, in turn, de-emphasizes the

INTRODUCTION 13 imagination and internal forms of constitution. Naturalism, as a deliberate metaphysical formalization of the natural standpoint, seems to deny the free space of the transcendental ego and its constitutive acts. In Husserl’s eyes, naturalism is actually a form of physicalism that squeezes out the very phenomenon which lies at the heart of transcendental phenomenology: namely, the “‘wonder of all wonders,”’ subjectivity. In his 1911 ‘“‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Sci-

ence,’’ written as he was moving toward the transcendental perspective, Husserl gives a precise summation of his conception of naturalism: “‘Characteristic of all forms of extreme and consistent

naturalism, from popular naturalism to the most recent forms of sensation-monism and energism, is on one hand the naturalizing of consciousness, including all intentionally immanent data of consciousness, and on the other the naturalizing of ideas and consequently of all absolute ideals and norms.’’”> Naturalism imposes a monistic conception of nature and natural events onto subjectivity and its unique intentional acts and objects. Norms collapse into

natural causal events that can have no form of validation or evidence. For Husserl, naturalism is thus a metaphysical perspective that stands in the way of any successful phenomenological program. The natural standpoint can thus be seen as the preformal attitude

of naturalism, and thus as a primary roadblock that must be removed before the intuition of free essences can take place. Transcendental subjectivity must emerge from a place prior to the natural standpoint and formalized versions of naturalism. Ordinal phenomenology relies upon a very different conception of naturalism and the natural standpoint. The ordinal perspective understands naturalism to be inevitable and to entail that the human process be fully embedded within a nature that is forever beyond its own making. Yet naturalism, in this view, does not entail materialism, physicalism, or any other type of reductive monism. Ordinal naturalism rejects the very notion that nature can be characterized as a specific ““what”’ or “essence.”’ Put simply: nature is the constant availability of orders of relevance, and not some kind of material substrate that obeys rigid causal laws. The ordinal perspective embraces its own kind of natural stand-

point when it refers with approval to Peirce’s notion of “critical

14 NATURE AND SPIRIT common sensism.”’ Critical common sense 1s operative within personal and social orders of meaning and has deep evolutionary roots. It is not a naive ‘positing’ of an extrasubjective realm, but a recognition of prior forms of meaning and interaction that have been carefully preserved by the ‘“‘community of interpreters,” a concept to be dealt with in the second chapter. Critical common sense is directly correlated to the ordinal conception of naturalism.

Nature, in its infinite complexity and potentiality, is beyond the conceptual reach of monistic systems of explanation. Ordinal phenomenology thus adopts its own version of naturalism and the natural standpoint, and insists that they are not blocks in the path of phenomenological insight. More specifically, ordinal phenomenology embraces what we have called an “‘ecstatic naturalism” that emphasizes the self-transcending potencies within nature. More barely descriptive natur-

alisms stress sheer causal interaction and are insensitive to the realm of the potencies that enter into and transform the orders of the world. At the other extreme are those honorific or eulogistic forms of naturalism that celebrate sheer spiritual power, as if the spirit itself were somehow a supernatural power or force. Ecstatic naturalism stands between these two extremes by acknowledging the utter breadth and scope of nature, while honoring the constant creative rhythms that enter into the growth of meaning within the world. Put in different terms: ecstatic naturalism insists that orders

transcend themselves whenever they become permeable to the presence of the spirit, which always appears between and among embodied orders of relevance. Traditional versions of phenomenology have operated out of a radically truncated and weak conception of nature and nature’s potencies. Before redefining and relocating the concept of “horizon,’’ it is

important to clarify the metaphysical concepts that underlie and support ordinal phenomenology. It is necessary to reinforce the idea that metaphysical analyses and concepts are inevitable within the human process, and that they make it possible to transform nongeneric and self-serving perspectives into ones that are generic

and emancipatory. Phenomenology often set itself up in tension with the tradition of metaphysics, and thereby denied itself more probing and general resources for the discovery and communication of meaning. The term “‘ordinal”’ in the phrase “‘ordinal phe-

INTRODUCTION 15 nomenology” is meant to signal the intimate correlation of phe-

nomenological descriptions with the general principles of ordinality.

The technical term “phenomenon” can, and often will, be re-

tained in this broadened conception of phenomenology. As a term, it has a high degree of flexibility and can thus cover a rich variety of the ‘things’ available to phenomenology. Yet the term often connotes the particularity of the space-time complex, and is thus somewhat clumsy when applied to such complexes as temporality, possibility, potency, law, or event. Within the phenom-

enological movement, of course, the term “phenomenon” has been used to cover all these complexes and more besides. Even ‘“‘worldhood”’ has been understood as a kind of phenomenon, or at least a pre-phenomenon. Throughout this treatise, the term “‘phenomenon”’ and its derivatives will still be used to denote the ‘object’ of all intentional

acts. Yet the reader will keep in mind that the phrase “order of relevance” is more generic and gives phenomenology a higher desree of flexibility. While the imagination may have to stretch to see a potency as a phenomenon, it will be less taxed to see the potency as an order of relevance, although strictly speaking, as will become clear later in the treatise, a potency is, in some sense, preordinal, and thus not yet a given order of relevance. The concept of “‘relevance’”’ will function in several ways in what

follows. At this point all that needs to be stated is that any trait may become relevant to another if it affects it in some way. This effect can be quite minimal, or it can be fundamental to the selfdefinition of the complex under study. Of course, a given trait may have absolutely no relevance to another, and thus not be pertinent to the analysis. There are three forms or modes of relevance: weak, strong, and sheer. The differences among these three forms

will emerge as the text moves toward the analysis of worldhood and the divine natures. Anything whatsoever is an order of relevance and need not connote a space-time particular or something given to finite forms of immediate perception. The term “‘ordinal,’’ as noted, refers to the fact that all orders are relevant to some other orders. The concept of “‘order’’ does not entail that a given complex is somehow orderly or has a specific formal integrity. Some orders are quite disorderly, or even

16 NATURE AND SPIRIT random, in their constitution. Some orders are fleeting or mere augmentations of dominant orders. The principle of ordinality merely affirms that lines of relevance connect traits to each other within orders, and between one order and another. In any case, an order is what it is largely because of its correlation with other orders. Ordinal phenomenology is committed to the careful description of all the orders that are pertinent to any given order under analysis. FROM HorRIZONS TO CONTOURS

At this point we are ready for the more technical analysis of the concept of “horizon”’ as it functions within ordinal phenomenol-

ogy. Concepts introduced earlier will reappear in light of the transformed notion of horizon that will function throughout the rest of this treatise. At the same time, the phenomenological understanding of the ontological difference will emerge from within the ordinal perspective. The location of horizons must lie in a realm that stands between subject and object, and that keeps both open to each other in mutual transparency. The philosoher John William Miller coined the metaphor of the ““midworld”’ for this seedbed of all so-called inner and outer horizons.°®

The mysterious origin of horizonality lies beyond the reach of direct phenomenological evidence although we can gain access to this origin by indirection. While the horizon is the source for those transparencies that punctuate and enliven the human process, it is never, itself, the object of an intention or a self-giving appearance.

Consequently, we are forced to work our way toward the inner logic of horizons by less direct means. Before doing so, certain historical reflections are in order. The concept of “the” horizon or “‘a horizon” has both a meta-

phoric and literal meaning. The literal meaning governs and directs the scope of those metaphoric enhancements that give the concept its full philosophic value. One thinker who recognized the connection between these two dimensions is Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his 1836 book Nature, he says: ““The tradesman, the attor-

ney comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds

INTRODUCTION 17 himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.’”” The horizon serves

as the clearing within which identity can be generated and sustained. The landscape can be understood as that part of the horizon

which is given to us as the meaning structure of human interaction. Using Peircean terms: the landscape is the dynamic progenitor of the immediate analogical and metaphoric enhancements that give the concept of horizon its various hermeneutic meanings. Of course, such meanings often transcend the more literal and visual

aspects of the landscape. Eventually, the concept of the horizon must be stripped of all spatial analogues. Emerson denies that this horizon can become part of any individual’s domain. It cannot be owned. In this context it can be seen as a fleeting reference point that recedes from view precisely as it grants each order within nature its proper placement. More importantly, the horizon, in its interplay of gift and absence, services to provide unity and coher-

ence to all dimensions of the human process. While it has no ‘whatness’ in itself, it enables us to comprehend the traits constitutive of that which is interior to itself. Emerson used the metaphor of the circle to enhance his categorial grasp of a spirit-filled nature. The horizon prevails as the origin for those subaltern circles that locate orders of lesser scope. Within the more narrowly defined phenomenal field, these smaller horizons serve to gather together the facets or traits of complexes, and to provide the ‘space’ within which more facets may emerge. All phenomena point toward their ‘own’ more immediate horizons and toward the horizonality of worldhood itself. Husserl, writing in his 1913 Ideas, describes the process whereby we move from the immediate objects of our field of perception toward the “halo” that surrounds perceptual fields. What is now perceived and what is more or less clearly co-present and determinate, (or at least somewhat determinate), are penetrated and surrounded by an obscurely intended to horizon of indeterminate actuality. I can send rays of the illuminative regard of attention into this horizon with varying results. Determining presentations, obscure at first and then becoming alive, haul something out for me; a chain of such quasi-memories is linked together; the sphere of determinateness becomes wider and wider, perhaps so wide that connection is made with the field of actual perception as my central

18 NATURE AND SPIRIT surroundings. But generally the result is different: an empty mist of obscure indeterminateness is populated with intuited possibilities of likelihoods; and then only the “‘form” of the world, precisely as

“the world,” is predelineated. Moreover, my indeterminate surroundings are infinite, the misty and never fully determinable horizon is necessarily there.®

Any given phenomenon will contain the two modalities or dimensions of presentness and co-presentness. That which is present is the object of a direct phenomenological seeing, whereas the copresent must be arrived at through a process of adumbration that brings it into a form of elusive or muted presence. This process moves from a co-presence that is fairly determinate toward a copresence that is indeterminate and, in Husserl’s language, “‘infinite.”” The more determinate horizon of the co-present can be seen in the traits of the immediate phenomenal object, such as the flickering of light on the other side of a tree. The co-presence of the perceptual field gives way to the increasingly indeterminate structures of the worldly horizon itself. As our phenomenological acts move away from the co-present traits of finite phenomena toward that elusive horizon which points to the worldhood of the world itself, the status and structure of the co-present changes dramatically. Immediate content gives way to formal possibility as horizonality emancipates itself from that which is environed or specifically located. Thus, on this level of analysis, we have two limiting dimensions for the scope of horizonality, namely, that pertaining to the object itself (its missing facets), which is the horizon of least scope, and that pointing toward the world within which the object is embedded, the horizon of greatest scope. The third dimension defined by Husserl is that of temporality which, from the standpoint of consciousness, undergirds the first two. Husserl’s analysis of “‘protention” and “retention” delineates the fundamental access structures by and through which horizons of whatever degree of scope become manifest. Just as the phenomenon has co-present actual or potential traits, it prevails within a halo of temporality. In Ideas, Husserl states: The specific physical thing seized upon has its perceptively co-appearing physical surroundings, lacking particular positing of factual existence. . . . It is, to a certain extent, a unity of potential positions.

The situation is similar in the case of memory and its memorial

INTRODUCTION 19 background; or also in the case of perception or of memory with _ respect to their halo of retentions and protentions, retrospective memory and anticipations which press forward in greater or lesser fullness and change in their degrees of clarity, but are not effected in the form of actual positings.°

Co-present traits may be either physical or temporal. The power of internal time-consciousness is that which enables the self to en-

compass attained or possible traits. The halo of protention and retention expands to gather in all co-present phenomenal aspects, and thereby to make them available to phenomenological sight. The ‘stretch’ of the co-present, as a larger domain than that of the merely present, is a gift of sovereign temporality. Actuality and possibility, as realities that must be seen as both phenomenal and ontological, depend upon internal time-consciousness for their manifestation. The internal temporality of horizons became further developed by Gadamer in his analysis of the primal traits of understanding. In Tiuth and Method, Gadamer broadens the account of temporality

as found in Husserl to include the historical dimension of horizonal intersection: The historical movement of human life consists in the fact that it is never utterly bound to any one standpoint, and hence can never have a truly closed horizon. The horizon is, rather, something into which we move and that moves with us. Horizons change for a person who is moving. Thus the horizon of the past, out of which all human life lives and which exists in the form of tradition, is always in motion. It is not historical consciousness that first sets the surrounding horizon in motion. But in it this motion becomes aware of itself.'°

Cultures and individuals carry the burden of opening out the scope and power of their horizons to enhance the process of fusion

by and through which historical horizons become modified and deepened. The temporal processes operating on the level of the perceptual field, enabling consciousness to sustain the adumbration process and to grasp an evolving trait configuration in the object, are continued on the vastly more complex level of cultural intersection. The indefiniteness of phenomenal fields is analogous to the more ramified and complex indefiniteness of cultural horizons.

20 NATURE AND SPIRIT Historically, then, the concept of horizon has evolved from its initial designation as a literal and metaphoric limit of sight toward

an understanding of horizonal intersection on the cultural and communal levels. All horizons are orders occupied by humans, who move from fairly determinate horizons of minimal scope toward those horizons which emerge on the very edges of historical and social evolution. Each phenomenon carries traces of its historical embeddedness. From the adumbration of co-present traits in the immediately perceived object to the indefinite complexity of horizonal intersection within interpretive communities, the human process lives under the lure of horizonal expansion and articulation. Temporality serves as one of the more fundamental access structures for human consciousness as it becomes open to a world whose horizonal structures exceed its grasp. The concept of the horizon thus operates in several distinct, if connected, ways. In one order, it is the clearing within which hidden and co-present phenomenal facets may become available to phenomenological intuition. In another and larger order, it lives as the phenomenon of worldhood within which all lesser horizons wax and wane. In a third order, it is the internal time-consciousness, manifest as protention and retention, that makes it possible to experience the first two dimensions of horizonality. The temporal dimension of the horizon is broadened to include historical and cultural time-consciousness. These larger forms of temporal-

ity enable one horizon to become permeable to another and thereby to increase the scope of each intersecting horizon. For Husserl, as for Gadamer, all these horizonal dimensions are copresent, even though selective analysis may privilege one or more for specific purposes. On each level the horizon has order-specific traits that govern the paths of phenomenological probing and in-

tuition. , |

If horizons are humanly occupied orders, then some sense must be made of the nature of all orders, whether human or not. More fundamental than an analysis of horizons is an account of the ordinality that underlies all orders and their traits. The redefinition of horizonal phenomenology requires that it be located within a phenomenology of greater scope. This more encompassing phenomenology must understand the nature of horizonality, in all of its modalities, against the backdrop of an ordinal nature that func-

INTRODUCTION 21 tions as the ultimate ‘place’ for all horizons and their subaltern configurations. Not all orders function within human horizons; nor can human orders encompass all complexes. Unless we wish to postulate a radical form of panpsychism, which insists that all complexes are perspectival and to some degree mental, or unless we wish to insist that all objects of query are structurally tied to the traits of human subjectivity, we must broaden the scope of phenomenology to include prehuman and prehorizonal orders. This, as noted, entails the transition to an ordinal phenomenology.

While the human process has indefinite boundaries and an intrinsic hunger for generic expansion, it remains the finite process that it is. Perspectives (another term for horizons on the most generic level) stand between subject and object and enable both poles to become more fully actualized and clarified. Perspectives always illuminate two classes of complexes: other perspectives, and those actualities that are not perspectives. Our concern in what follows is with the second class.

We have made the distinction between the ‘“‘halo,”’ or the ‘more’ (to use William James’s conception), that surrounds immediately perceived phenomena and the “‘halo”’ that functions on

the extreme fringes of all phenomena. The first notion of a “more” is found in all complexes and prevails as the mobile domain of hidden or emergent traits. This ““more”’ itself points to the sheer locatedness or embeddedness of the given complex in other

orders or domains that eclipse it in scope. Further, it serves as a goad to the adumbration process protecting it against the premature foreclosure of systematic query or analysis. It does so by providing the ever-growing ‘space’ within which the search for traits

moves. The second notion of a “more” is best understood as

pointing toward the phenomenon of worldhood. The phenomenon of worldhood is sharply contrasted with that of orders and serves as the ‘other’ to all orders delineated by the human process. If worldhood is not an order, or order of orders, it follows that ordinal phenomenology must move to a different dimension if it is to trace out the elusive aspects of worldhood. Put simply: worldhood is that side of nature that is most directly available to the human process. As will be shown in the treatise itself, nature is the potency that enables worldhood to prevail at all. Na-

22 NATURE AND SPIRIT ture is that which is most radically other to the human process and lives as the ultimate enabling condition for ordinal phenomenology. At the same time, however, nature prevails as the ultimate

support for the human process as its enabling ground and goal. Nature contains its own “‘more”’ or “not-yet” that guides and impels query into all natural and cultural traits. At the heart of nature is the spirit that encompasses all complexes, including the divine. Ecstatic naturalism, as a formal perspective on nature, affirms that the “‘not-yet” operates throughout nature to goad orders to a growth in power and meaning. The spirit obtains within the world as the locus for the expansion of semiotic and hermeneutic possibilities. The spirit is fully natural and functions ecstatically to hold open the “‘not-yet”’ to those orders that can respond to its evocative lure. To facilitate a grasp of the nature of those orders which are not, themselves, perspectives but which may become part of any given perspective, a few further concepts need to be introduced. Within the tradition of American naturalism, a perspective always honoring the sovereignty of that nature which is not of our own contrivance, the importance of the integrity of orders has been defined in terms of the close correlation between traits and that which locates them. While this tradition does not affirm an ecstatic natu-

ralism, it does provide a number of the key concepts that make such a naturalism possible. It does insist that all human products and contrivances are as much a ‘part’ of nature as the complexes which lie outside of human interaction. John Dewey, writing in his 1925 Experience and Nature, argues: The fact is that all structure is structure of something; anything defined as structure is a character of events, not something intrinsic and per se. A set of traits is called structure, because of its limiting function in relation to other traits of events. A house has a structure; in comparison with the disintegration and collapse that would occur without its presence, this structure is fixed. Yet it is not something external to which the changes involved in building and using the house have to submit. It is rather an arrangement of changing events such that properties which change slowly, limit and direct a series of quick changes and give them an order which they do not otherwise possess. '!

INTRODUCTION 23 The order of the house is defined by the structures that are fully embedded in it. These relatively stable events govern and order the subaltern configurations that collectively constitute the actuality of

the house. In his aesthetic writings, Dewey elevates the status of quality to that of a higher ordering principle that enables local traits to become defined and presented within more encompassing regional orders. For our purposes, the main consideration is with the ordinal integrity of the complex itself. In the writings of Justus Buchler, in many respects an heir to Dewey, the integrity of orders, whether perspectival or not, is presented with considerable subtlety. In his 1966 Metaphysics of Natural Complexes, Buchler argues: All natural complexes are relational, though not only relational. Any complex is related to others, though not to all others; and its traits are related to one another, though not necessarily each to every other. Whatever is, is in some relation: a given complex may be unrelated to another complex, but not unrelated to any other. A complex related to another complex in one respect may not be related to it in another respect. !

On the one hand, Buchler rejects the Whiteheadean notion that any given complex must be related to all other complexes by his insistence on real discontinuity and diremption. On the other, he rejects the notion that relation is less real or less intrinsic than the relata. A complex has its own innumerable subaltern traits and is located in innumerable other complexes. There can be no limit to the sheer proliferation of relations for any given complex. However, it does not follow that this complex stands in real relation to all others. The principle of ordinality insists that complexes are part of a densely ramified nature that has no predetermined shape or boundary. A complex is an order of traits, and the terms ‘‘order” and “‘complex”’ are commensurate and can be used interchangeably. Buchler stresses the utter complexity of each and every complex.

In order to understand any given complex, whether it be a space-time particular, a thought, a possibility, a gesture, an utterance, or anything whatsoever, it becomes necessary to rotate it through its vast relational chains so as to gain some sense of its overall shape. The ordinal perspective takes Husserl’s notion of

24 NATURE AND SPIRIT adumbration one step further and insists that the ‘horizon’ of the complex is, itself, indefinitely ramified and of infinite complexity. From this, it does not follow that the horizon is purely indefinite or impossible to grasp. The rotation of a complex occurs on two levels, both interconnected. On the first level it entails that the subaltern traits ‘within’ the complex become articulated and defined. In examining the phenomenon of hope, for example, this would involve an analysis of all its constitutive components, whether material or formal. On the other level it entails that hope be examined as it prevails in all its ordinal locations. The ‘material’ components would be manifest in the bodily transformations wrought by the emergence of hope over against its counterphenomenon, anxiety. The transition from the experience of constriction and bodily distress to the expansive sense of new bodily and material possibilities would form

the matter for phenomenological probing. How the sense of worldly embeddedness breaks free from the antifuturial experience of anxiety becomes thematic for the understanding of the material order of hope.

On the formal level of the phenomenon, the structure of the entertainment of bare propositions in the form of concrete beliefs gives way to a contentless expectation that can never be expressed as a series of beliefs. Phenomenological intuitions into hope are bound to the radical and unique phenomenality of that which has no ideational content. Hope, as the expectant counteremotion to anxiety, does not have the formal property of any specific assertion or knowledge claim. Its unique phenomenal power resides in its formal indefiniteness. While hope has fairly clear material corollaries, such as physiological and social embodiment, it is bereft of the formal traits that would make it analogous to a content-filled belief.

Hope, as the ground structure of the human process, has an indefinite number of ordinal locations. Ordinal phenomenology must trace hope through these locations in an effort to find its elusive contour. Thus, thought is compelled to probe into the social and communal dimensions of hope as they are manifest in a variety of actual or possible orders. The cultural history of hope also forms part of the phenomenality of the phenomenon. Its religious dimensions and orders also form horizons of intelligibility

INTRODUCTION 25 within which each specific manifestation appears. The economic and class-derived dimensions of hope enter into an ordinal phenomenology and frame the analysis of the specific genetic components of a given expression of hope. Ordinal phenomenology is larger in scope than those genetic or essential phenomenologies that would restrict the focus of the query into recurrent and important traits. The “more” that surrounds the phenomenon of hope cannot be confined to its co-present spatio-temporal features but contains all its cross-ordinal traits. While it makes no sense to search for the

‘essence’ of the experience of hope, it does make sense to ask about its overall contour. Buchler distinguishes between a complex’s integrity and its contour: “‘A complex has an integrity for each of its ordinal locations. The continuity and totality of its locations, the interrelation of its integrities, is the contour of the complex. The contour is itself an integrity, the gross integrity of that which is plurally located, whether successively or simultaneously.’’!? Each complex will be located in more orders than can be defined or known to finite human query. While we can never fully know the contour of any complex, we can gain some sense of its general outline. However, as noted, ordinal phenomenology, always sensitive to the radical openness of complexes, rejects the notion that we must somehow achieve essentiality or find the selfgiving of the evident. Ordinal rotation moves away from the assumed clarity of immediate traits toward the inner movement of the “more’’ that serves as the contour for any complex.

Phenomenology must trace out each integrity as it becomes clarified amid the wealth of actual and possible ordinal locations. While methodological priority may be given to actual traits, the search for real possibility must continue alongside of the delineation of actualities. While any given trait may occupy only one order, every effort should be made to see how it may appear or be modified in a different ordinal location. Freedom for the full exploration of integrities is best preserved in a strategy that affirms the full reality of anything discriminated. Where Husserl demands the epoché that brackets the so-called natural standpoint, ordinal phenomenology insists on the deeper sense of what Buchler calls “ontological parity.’’ Unlike the tactic of bracketing, which privileges consciousness and its alleged transcendental and constitutive

26 NATURE AND SPIRIT acts, the sense of parity functions to open query to all traits, no matter what their ordinal location. Whatever is, in whatever way, is real. The commitment to ontological parity is one which relentlessly undermines metaphysical hierarchies. While a given natural

complex may be more fundamental in specific respects, it is not more fundamental in all respects. By the same token, it cannot be more real than that which is of lesser scope or is dependent upon it. Contrasted to parity is the perennial commitment to metaphys-

ical frameworks structured in terms of ontological priorities, where some complexes are held to be more real or more fundamental than others. The commitment to parity does not force investigation to flee to some alleged neutral standpoint, but opens out query so that each integrity is allowed to be just the integrity that it is. While philosophers rarely acknowledge implied commitments to ontological priority, they betray them by persistently overlooking or downplaying traits that fall outside of the operative paradigm. Representational theories in the philosophy of religion, for

example, privilege the reality of the denotative dimensions of space-time particulars and often ignore the symbolic and expressive qualities of the phenomena of religious devotion. Such a strategy limits the generic force of the theory and makes it difficult to probe into the traits of the divine nature. The commitment to on-

tological parity, in contrast, compels any theoretical appraisal of phenomena to recognize traits that emerge on the fringes of established conceptual paradigms. From the exploration of integrities emerges the sense of the con-

tour that sustains and articulates each integrity. In a very real sense, this movement from integrities toward the gross integrity or contour is a movement outward rather than a movement downward toward self-evident foundations. Ordinal phenomenology is both anti-essentialist and antifoundationalist. While the commitment to essentiality does not entail a commitment to nontemporal genera, it does reinforce those habits of mind that find comfort in the stable and foundational. In the ordinal perspective, no one or-

dinal location can be more basic or more foundational than another. To return to the phenomenon of hope: an ordinal phenomenology does not limit its concerns to the genesis of the phenomenon

INTRODUCTION 27 within the human process; nor does it seek some kind of essential

and formal structure for understanding all phenomenal appearances of hope. The genetic concern, while not inappropriate, limits the probing into traits to those orders that are temporal and sequential. The essentialist strategy is more difficult to defend because of its metaphysical ineptness. Hope cannot be reduced to an essence because of the sheer complexity of each of its ordinal locations. More important, no natural complex can be reduced to an essence. In some of these locations it may be temporally conditioned, while in others it may not be. Rather than seek an essence, it is far more compelling to trace out each integrity in terms of the evolving grasp of the elusive contour. The concept of essence has remained compelling for many philosophers because of its promise of stability and universality amid the confusing wealth of sense experiences and their fitful conceptual portrayals. Yet the quest for essences, like the quest for certainty, betrays subjective bias. In the words of Dewey: Essence, as has been intimated, is but a pronounced instance of meaning; to be partial, and to assign a meaning to a thing as the meaning is but to evince human subjection to bias. . . . Thus the essence, one, immutable and constitutive, which makes the thing what it is, emerges from the various meanings which vary with varying conditions and transitory intents. When essence is then thought to contain existence as the perfect includes the imperfect, it is because a legitimate, practical measure of reality in terms of importance is illegitimately altered into a theoretical measure."

Thus, the desire for essentiality, and for the corollary comforts of foundations, emerges from the confusion of tactical and pragmatic strategies with the theoretical and antecedent commitments that such strategies are actually struggling to overcome. The selection of pervasive, recurrent, or pre-eminent features from a given complex is necessary for any organism in quest of meaning and security. But it does not follow that such selections are somehow discoveries of an antecedent realm of genera. Some traits may be more significant in some respects for some purposes, but it does not follow that these traits prescind from their particular ordinal locations. Each order within which a complex is examined has order-specific traits that may or may not be constitutive of that complex in another order.

28 NATURE AND SPIRIT Thus, for example, it is necessary to show how the phenomenon

of hope appears within certain orders of psychopathology in which its structure and dynamics are altered to fit into a distorted framework. Ordinal phenomenology traces out the specific ways in which such pathology shrinks and relocates the futurial drives of hope. In this order, it makes no sense to seek for an underlying essence that could somehow become normative for other orders. Moving to social orders, an ordinal phenomenology shows how hope serves millennial or even apocalyptic expectations for a given group. The correlation between psychopathology and social structures involves yet another order of analysis. As each integrity begins to appear to phenomenological probing, it adds its trait constitution to the evolving contour of such integrities. Hope is the opening to the eschatological potency that liberates the human process from the structures of mere autonomy. As will be shown in the treatise, hope creates the space within which the self attains the New Spirit that lies beyond antecedent structures and powers. Hope lives out of the ontological difference between the orders of nature and the spirit that speaks from the heart of nature. To be in hope is to feel the encompassing sweep of that which locates even nature itself. Ordinal phenomenology is bound by the encompassing potency of the spirit. Instead of seeking an essence that would underlie all these orders, ordinal phenomenology struggles to show how any given integrity relates to the contour or gross integrity. The identity of the phenomenon of hope could be determined only through this detailed analysis of given integrities and the contour. More importantly, the contour of hope must itself be seen as a gift of nature in its sheer potency. As noted, this nonessentialist conception of phenomenology should not be confused with a “family resemblance’’ model. Such resemblances do prevail in these various or-

ders, but the ordinal regrounding of phenomenology seeks a richer and more detailed understanding of the subaltern traits of orders and of the relations that may prevail between and among orders. To say that one order has a trait in common with another and that the second order has a different trait in common with a third is merely to assert traces of continuity across integrities. Such an analysis, while not incorrect, is incomplete in its conceptual portrayal and its aspirations. Ordinal phenomenology recognizes

INTRODUCTION 29 and exhibits resemblances where they prevail but is bound by ordinality and the potencies of nature. The sheer otherness of world-

hood, nature, and spirit cannot be exhibited through resemblances, no matter how protean. Ordinal phenomenology thus struggles to allow each complex its full ordinal complexity and its multiple forms of actuality and

possibility. There can no more be an absolute starting point for investigation than there can be an ideal end point. Investigation ceases when the needs of the interpretive community have been momentarily met. The movement from integrities to the contour is analogous to the far more difficult movement from contours toward some sense of nature or worldhood. The concept of nature is unique in that it is a fundamental precategory that cannot be directly characterized.

Rather, it is an enabling category that makes it possible to make any discriminations at all. Worldhood, as noted by the phenomenological tradition, is that side of nature which is distinctively tied to the human process. The ordinal perspective denies that world-

hood can be equated with the ‘sum’ of all horizons. As noted at the beginning, Miuller’s notion of the “‘midworld”’ best serves as a metaphor for the location of horizons. Such horizons emerge from that which is not, itself, an environment. Miller states: ‘“The midworld meets the two conditions: it is not cognitive, and it launches,

spurs, and controls all cognition. It is actual. It is not ‘real.’ It is not ‘apparent.’ Unenvironed, it projects the environment.’ Horizons constitute the environment for the human process. Strictly speaking, the concept of “‘the environment”’ or ‘“‘an environment” per-

tains to prehuman orders. The human process transforms the prethematic environment into a meaning horizon. But such horizons are themselves emergent from that which is not a horizon. More encompassing than the “‘midworld” is that nature which cannot be exhausted by an enumeration of all actual and possible horizons. As Heidegger has repeatedly argued, the phenomenon of worldhood is an integrity in its own right and must receive its own ca~ tegorial treatment. We have already distinguished between several key meanings of the concepts of “horizon” and “‘contour.”’ On the least generic level is the “halo” or “‘more”’ that surrounds any natural complex. On the next generic level is the horizonality of human perspec-

30 NATURE AND SPIRIT tives. On yet another level is the correlation between integrities and contours that prevail in all complexes, whether perspectives or not. On the next level is the “midworld”’ that prevails as the clearing within which human perspectives function to open out the traits of both sides of the so-called subject-object dichotomy. On the most generic level, we find the phenomenon of worldhood which ‘underlies’ all complexes and which sustains the historical evolution of the “midworld.”’

Nature prevails as the constant and open-ended availability of complexes and horizons. It is neither the ‘sum’ of all complexes nor the horizon of horizons that would govern all finite horizons. Rather, it sustains and cancels that which is of lesser scope than itself. Nature has no contour or shape. As such, it is the ultimate clearing within which contours may emerge. That which is without contour is the enabling condition for the sheer proliferation of contours, whether they be human perspectives or the “‘more’”’ that

surrounds given complexes. Ordinal phenomenology places itself in the service of the ordinality of a nature that is forever beyond its grasp. It carefully traces out the integrities of that which is natured, while remaining open to the naturing processes that provide it its free space of movement. In the transition from specific integrities to specific contours the way is prepared for the more difficult transition to that which makes all contours possible. Worldhood, that is, nature as natured, encompasses all complexes but is not, itself, a complex. On the deepest level it is the ordinality that provides complexes with their trait configurations and possibilities. Our sense of worldhood is most clearly manifest in the experienced tension between our grasp of finitude, with its attendant sense of sheer embeddedness, and the sense of encompassment which flickers at the edges of all our horizons. Worldhood is the nonlocated location for all horizons and contours. Ordinal phenomenology is thus not only bound to the richness of contours but participates in that deeper bindingness that comes from the phenomenon of worldhood itself. SIGNS, POTENCIES, AND THE DIVINE NATURES

Signs and sign systems portray and render intelligible the orders of the world. At the same time, they provide the ‘matter’ for the

INTRODUCTION 31 community of interpreters, so that such a hermeneutic community can transcend antecedent signs and live within the lure of tran-

scendence. Ordinal phenomenology is bound to the semiotic wealth of interpretive life and must find the proper place (topos) for signs and their referents. However, this semiotic wealth gives way

before the phenomenon of worldhood, which cannot be rendered into sign systems. The sheer otherness of worldhood limits the scope of any semiotic framework that would claim totality.

Nature, as noted, lives as the potency that empowers worldhood. Whenever the community of interpreters encounters that which is not a sign or sign system, it experiences a shipwreck in the face of radical otherness. Worldhood is the clearing within which human intelligibility prevails but is not, itself, intelligible in the same respects. It lives as the “not-yet”’ for interpreters. But the elucidation of worldhood is, itself, incomplete until it is grasped

as the ‘outward’ face of nature. The potency of nature itself is manifest in innumerable potencies, the premier of which is worldhood. The human process is embedded in worldhood and shriven of its hubris by the nature that speaks within and through worldhood. Such an understanding of nature precludes any metaphor or analogy that would suggest a container or encompassing order. Nature is not an order.

The human process, emergent in terms of the community of interpreters, encounters the “not-yet’’ of worldhood and the primal potency of nature in its naturing. In a striking sense, the community and worldhood stand as dimensions of the “not-yet’’ for the finite interpreter. Nature is the ultimate “‘not-yet”’ and cannot be articulated or ‘filled in’ by positive semiotic content. Nature itself is open to the spirit that is the ground of both otherness and the incarnation. Most difficult to articulate is the nature of the divine as it lives within the potencies of nature. As the treatise will show, God is

both a product of nature and the ground that sustains the sheer prevalence of all orders. God lives within the heart of the ontological difference and is stretched between the orders of nature and spirit. Traditionally, the ontological difference is understood as that pertaining to the difference between Being and a being. In the ordinal perspective, this becomes transformed into the difference between nature in its naturing, manifest as the spirit, and any given

32 NATURE AND SPIRIT order. The incompletion of the divine is the most radical instance of the tension between orders and the spirit. Traditional doctrines of the divine natures fail to show how God participates in the mystery of the ontological difference. Process theology has successfully probed into those divine dimensions that

are finite and ordinally located. God is a product of nature and lives within the elusive intelligibility of worldhood. Yet God experiences its own travail in the face of spirit. This travail is eternal and leaves its own traces within the fitful evolution of the human

process; a process that runs parallel to the divine evolution and participates in God’s struggles. Moving beyond the process account, it is necessary to exhibit four aspects of the divine in order to show the tension between the finite and nonfinite aspects of God.

Spatial analogies are fraught with difficulty and must be used with care. To say that God is located in nature is not to say that God is a space-time particular or a cluster of such particulars. Rather, it is to assert that God is manifest in the potencies that stand before the interpretive community and give it some sense of the holy. Insofar as an order has greater sacramental or aesthetic power than most others, it participates in the finite and naturally located dimension of God. The human process is compelled to respond to these traces and to participate in their sheer power of Being.

As the treatise will show, God is finite in its first two dimensions. The word “dimension” is chosen with care. Such a metaphor serves to undermine spatial and hierarchical language that would reintroduce a form of ontological priority. Vertical associations, while endlessly recurrent in the history of thought, are not compelling in a framework that insists on the equal reality of all complexes, divine or otherwise. As Tillich has persuasively argued, God is manifest in the depths of nature and the psyche, and speaks through the sacramental potencies of nature. As will become evident, the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo will have to be recast so as to reflect different insights into nature and the spirit.

The first divine dimension is thus to be understood as the frag-

mentary and fitful presence of God in the orders of nature and history. In this dimension, God lives as the nonunified ground of the holy. This ground is nonunified because it does not prevail in

INTRODUCTION 33 all orders of the world. Some orders seem to be opaque to the divine presence. Ordinal phenomenology serves the divine whenever it patiently and carefully traces out these epiphanies of the holy and renders them intelligible through language or other media of expression. A judicious use of phenomenology preserves the sense of mystery attendant upon each manifestation of the divine. Like the first dimension, the second is also finite and fragmentary. Yet unlike the first, this dimension is not related to the powers of fragmentary origin. God lives as the lure for personal and communal transformation and is most fully expressed in the symbols of expectation. As will be shown, God works in the human process through the gift of hope that enables the self to become permeable to the divine presence. In a striking sense, the second divine dimension works in tension with the first to free the human

process from the tyranny of unmediated origin. Using the language of Tillich, the power of time works to free us from the idolatry of the gods of space. In its fullest expression, this dimension lives as the potency behind social eschatology. The faithful community of interpreters responds to the divine call for justice. Such justice is manifest in the communal drive toward its own form of ontological parity in which each autonomous self is given an equal share in the goods of creation.

Ordinal phenomenology not only is descriptive but is compelled to render judgment on the phenomena under its investigation. Unlike more traditional conceptions of phenomenology, which prescind from the tensions of the social order, ordinal phe-

nomenology must test the powers to see which ones are truly emancipatory and which are demonic. This can only take place when each manifestation of power is rotated through its actual and

possible ordinal locations to determine its effects and consequences on the human process. Description is merely one moment within the deeper and more important process of evaluation.

The eternal tension between the epiphanies of power and the lure toward justice occupies the divine life as well. In biblical terms, the power manifest to Job is always located with and by the

vision granted to the prophets. Both dimensions are necessary, even though they must be constantly readjusted to each other. The third divine dimension is not finite. The sheer prevalence of the orders of the world is made possible by the quiet power of

34 NATURE AND SPIRIT Being that is the fullest expression of divine love. The spirit at the heart of nature ‘surrounds’ each order and stands as its otherness. God secures each complex against bare otherness and lets individuality flower. As noted by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, there is a drive toward “‘selving”’ within the orders of the world. God, while not a person or a self, lives as the energy that makes selving and individuation possible. Individuation thus emerges from the eternal creative interaction between spirit and the propulsive en-

ergy of selving. The sheer otherness of the spirit provides the ‘space’ within which each order can emerge and become the unique order that it is. In this dimension, God is the unified ground of selving and, within the human process, of personality. Each complex struggles against the tyranny of its genus and attains some degree of uniqueness. The universe is no more a static realm of eternal genera than the individual order is an instance of a class. The third divine dimension is most clearly manifest as natural grace. Ordinal phenomenology lives within this natural grace and re-

sponds to the unified origin that quietly empowers it. The true source for phenomenology is not in the ‘sovereign’ power of the transcendental ego but in that grace which quickens interpretation and judgment. Phenomenology does not constitute grace but responds to the power of Being that comes from the infinite scope of God. The third divine dimension is experienced in the mode of what Schleiermacher called “‘sheer dependence.”’ God lifts the self out of its finite projects and acts of will and regrounds human nature within the liberating power of natural grace. Here, we may speak of the infinite scope of God. No order or complex is bereft of the

sustaining power of the divine, even if it remains opaque to the divine import. This sustaining power is not to be understood in the traditional terms of omnipotence. God retains just the power that it has, but cannot cancel the deeper reality of the encompassing spirit that ‘surrounds’ itself and the innumerable orders of the world. In the face of that which is neither an order nor the divine itself, God must experience its own travail and eternal growth. The fourth divine dimension is the most difficult to articulate because it speaks most intimately from within the tensions of the ontological difference. In this dimension, God is both finite and

INTRODUCTION 35 infinite but in different respects. Hartshorne, in his reconstruction of the ontological argument, brings us into the domain where we can gain access to the self-surpassability of the divine. While God is in some sense that than which nothing greater can be thought, God is also that which is eternally self-encompassing. God faces its own “more” or “‘not-yet”’ insofar as the divine recognizes the clearing within which it must grow. This clearing is the spirit that speaks from within and without the innumerable orders of nature. God has its own sheer dependence on the encompassing abyss that cannot be delineated in any of the terms appropriate to the orders of creation. Process theology has correctly understood the evolutionary di-

mensions of the divine, but has failed to probe into the encompassing reality that makes such evolution possible. The spirit of the world is neither a process nor an order. By the same token, it is to be understood not as a mere synonym for worldhood, but rather as the potency that makes worldhood possible. Nature, when understood in the most generic sense possible, is spirit. The spirit, in a striking sense, no thing or nothingness, is analogous to Meister Eckhart’s concept of the Godhead (die Gottheit). The Buddhist philosopher Keiji Nishitani describes these relations: Absolute nothingness signals, for Eckhart, the point at which all modes of being are transcended, at which not only the various modes of created being but even the modes of divine being—such as Creator or Divine Love—are transcended. Creator, he says, is the Form of God that is bared to creatures and seen from the standpoint of creatures, and as such is not to be taken as what God is in himself, as the essence of God. . . . Godhead is the place within God where God is not God himself.'¢

The finite divine dimensions are bared to the human process and are often thought to exhaust the divine itself. Absolute spirit lies ‘beneath’ all orders of the world, including the divine. God is both a complex and the power that sustains all orders of creation. The innermost aspect of the divine is its own awareness of the spirit of nature. Put in symbolic terms: God experiences its own crucifixion and resurrection through the spirit. The other divine natures are attuned to the spirit and receive their measure from that which cannot be measured or probed. The creative tensions between and

36 NATURE AND SPIRIT among the four divine natures are preserved and located by that which has no location. | Spirit gives of itself to create and sustain worldhood and the divine natures. God lives out of the eternal self-giving of spirit that

wills to become finite, to become the innumerable orders of the world. Nature in its naturing is the birthing ground of all complexes, divine or otherwise. Lecturing in 1827, Hegel makes this self-othering clear: Spirit, if it is thought immediately, simply, and at rest, is no spirit; for spirit’s essential [character] is to be altogether active. More exactly,

it is the activity of self-manifesting. . . . Thus spirit that manifests itself, determines itself, enters into existence, gives itself finitude, is the second moment. But the third is its manifesting of itself according to its concept, taking its former, initial manifestation back into itself, sublating it, coming to its own self, becoming and being ex-

plicitly the way it is implicitly.” , While the ordinal perspective affirms the notion of the self-manifesting of spirit, it rejects Hegel’s third moment, where spirit allegedly returns to itself through the transparency of the concept. Spirit is never transparent to itself or conscious of its othering or its products in a way that would be analogous to human self-consciousness. Insofar as we wish to retain the metaphor of spirit’s return to itself, we must understand this return to be without con-

ceptual and experiential content. The spirit returns to itself through agape, not through the concept. God is thus the ‘place’ where nature and spirit become open to each other. Even though nature is interrelated to spirit, the human process usually remains bound to the orders of nature, to nature as natured. Only by probing into the divine natures, as they themselves live out of the spirit, is it possible for the self to understand the deeper logic whereby nature reveals that it is not an order or order of orders. God thus gathers us into the potencies of nature in its naturing, and frees us from the idolatry of orders. Through this divine appropriation, the self becomes permeable to the spirit that lies ‘beyond’ the innumerable orders of the world. The human process participates in all four divine dimensions and struggles to enhance the divine life. When philosophers speak of the divine sympathy for the sufferings of creation, they also

INTRODUCTION 37 invoke the countersympathy of the created for the divine itself. As William James argued, God needs the richness of the human process in order to fulfill its own inner growth. In rejecting the imperial model of omnipotence, it follows that we must recognize just how

the life of interpreters, whether human or not, aids the divine in its struggles against internal diremption. Ordinal phenomenology does not rely on a modal analysis of the ‘necessary’ features of the divine. Rather, it patiently rotates our encounters with God through all the applicable orders of experience and ideation. Does it follow that the resultant conceptual portrayal is merely metaphoric or imaginative, and thus cannot be binding on thought? This unhappy consequence is avoided when it is recognized that conceptual adequacy has its own forms of validation. The burden of any complex articulation of the generic features of reality is to combine precision with imaginative richness and scope. In a striking sense, all our conceptual arrays are infinitely removed from the realities of nature and the spirit. Yet in another, equally compelling sense, some portrayals are more evocative and supportive of the human process than others. This sup-

port would not be possible were it not for some correspondence between thought and its object, no matter how elusive that ‘object’ may be. Sheer conceptual boldness would have no legitimacy were it not balanced by a sense of the mystery that lies at the heart of all en-

counters with nature and the spirit. Ordinal phenomenology is not confined to the clear and distinct any more than it wishes to remain dumb before the orders of creation. While boldness and humility are incompatible on the verbal level, they are not incompatible on the deeper level of finite human experience. Wisdom consists in the proper balance between the two attitudes. Any systematic and sustained probing into the traits of reality encounters some aspect of the “more.” Initially, following Husserl, we pointed to the co-present traits that ‘surround’ any given phenomenon. The co-present of any order soon becomes permeable to the co-present of its cross-ordinal locations. The indefinite exploration of these multiple integrities itself becomes permeable to the phenomenon of worldhood, a phenomenon that cannot be delineated in the terms appropriate to orders. The radical alterity between orders and worldhood limits the semiotic and hermeneu-

38 NATURE AND SPIRIT tic reach of interpreters. Worldhood is not a sign or body of signs.

If worldhood can be understood as that side of nature which is turned toward us, then the depth dimension of worldhood is the potency of nature that forever turns its face away from human interpreters. The reticence of nature is not the result of human incapacity, but part of the inner logic of the potency that sustains all orders. The divine complex is unique among all orders, in that it is both intelligible within the orders of nature that we encounter and hidden in the sheer otherness that is nature itself. Ordinal phenomenology thus is gathered up into the ever-receding power of the various dimensions of the “‘more”’ or “‘notyet” that speak from within and around all orders. Without the Open space continually created by the spirit, no order could become available to the human process. Ontologically, no order could be just the order that it is without the power of the spirit that allows for individuation. Most important, the divine, in its several natures, would be bereft of the lure that gives it its own _ measured space for eternal self-overcoming. Nature’s God is at the same time the child of the spirit, and derives its own empowerment from that which is without a specific voice or shape.

NOTES

1. For an analysis of the differences between “‘local” and “regional” traits, see my The Community of Interpreters (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1987), pp. 47-67. 2. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorian Cairns (The Hague: Niyhoff, 1977), p. 57.

3. For an analysis of the correlation of phenomenology and pragmatism, see Pragmatism Considers Phenomenology, edd. Robert S. Corrington,

Carl R. Hausman, and Thomas M. Seebohm (Washington, D.c.: Center

for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1987).

4. Pp. 77, 88. 5. Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), p. 80. 6. John William Miller, The Midworld of Symbols and Functioning Objects (New York: Norton, 1982), pp. 7-19. 7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, edd. Robert

INTRODUCTION 39 E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 13. 8. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book, trans. F Kersten (The Hague: Nyhoff, 1983), p. 52.

9. Ibid., p. 267. 10. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury, 1975), p. 271.

11. John Dewey, Experience and Nature (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1925; repr. New York: Dover, 1958), p. 72. 12. Justus Buchler, Metaphysics of Natural Complexes (New York: Co-

lumbia University Press, 1966), p. 24. A second, expanded edition, coedited by Kathleen Wallace, Armen Marsoobian, and Robert S. Corrington, was published in 1990 by SUNY Press. The same pagination was used in the second edition. 13. Ibid., p. 22. 14. Experience and Nature, pp. 182-83. 15. Midworld of Symbols, p. 13. For a more detailed treatment of the concept of ““midworld,”’ see my “John William Miller and the Ontology of the Midworld,”’ Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society, 22, No. 2 (Spring 1986), 165-88.

16. Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 61, 67. 17. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. I. Introduction and the Concept of Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 176-77.

1

The Human Process FINITUDE AND [TRANSCENDENCE

NOTHING IS MORE BASIC to the human process than the perennial

tension between finitude and transcendence. These two dimensions encompass all aspects of experience and ideation, and govern the various ways in which persons encounter themselves and their

world. Finitude is most sharply manifest in the boundary situations that limit and alter the outward movement of the self. Transcendence is most clearly manifest when the human process is grasped by a natural grace that relocates the center of the self within the New Spirit, which serves as the measure for transfigured life. Neither dimension can assume priority, even though one will certainly prevail at a given time. Transcendence should not be understood, however, as a power that can lift us beyond or outside of the constraints of finitude. Transcendence is always operative within and against finitude and cannot cancel or annul the various traits of our finite existence. When examining the self in the context of the world, it becomes clear that no final goal or meaning can be isolated or defined that would give the human process some sense of its overall direction. All goals are finite and conditioned by the fitful conditions of origin. These conditions are ambiguous and fragmented and are most clearly manifest in the powers of history, the irreversibility of the

time process, and in the innumerable potencies of nature. Sheer Opacity and resistance surround the self in its quest for some sense

of the ultimate upshot of the human process. Transcendence 1s thus always transcendence in the face of that which has no ultimate

intelligibility. From this, it does not follow that no meanings or sign values can emerge and guide the self. Insofar as we are signusing organisms, we can secure and stabilize regional values and 40

HUMAN PROCESS 41 meanings in the face of a deeper mystery that lies just beyond all of the semiotic richness of our interpretative life. Embodiment radically limits the reach of the self and binds it to the fragmentary conditions of origin. Our vulnerability to disease and bodily decay serves to remind us of the constant penetration of alien structures and powers into our seemingly sovereign selfconsciousness. While Hegel evokes a metaphoric sense of the death

of the various shapes of self-consciousness, it is clear that his triumphalist anthropology clouds the more literal and compelling ways in which the self is buffeted by the powers of an indifferent nature. For Hegel, all alien and destructive forces are grist for the mill of an evolving spirit and serve to enhance the generic reach and internal complexity of the human process. Consequently, all otherness is reduced to a mode of momentarily hidden sameness. However, from the death of possibilities to the death of our bodies, we witness the ways in which nature destroys its offspring. Every time we make a choice or fall prey to a compulsion, we lose part of our self’s future contour. Bodily death is merely the most striking instance of the pervasive logic of finitude. Of course, the human process is not confined to its sheer embodiment but moves outward through its products and utterances. The creation of an external product, whether it be a physical artifact, an idea, a moral stance, or an aesthetic rendering, extends the

scope and reach of the self. No account of self-identity can be compelling that fails to acknowledge the innumerable products of the self. The human process must be understood in terms of the indefinite web of relations emergent from the self-in-time, as well as in terms of the fitful and multilayered life of introspection and self-awareness. A judicious phenomenological account carefully traces the limits of embodiment and the scope of the self’s products in order to make the full reach of the human process clear. The human body prevails (that is, obtains) in numerous orders and partakes of some of the governing traits of these orders. Most basic to our sense of embodiment is the sheer resistance of orders and complexes outside of the body as well as the resistance felt within the body itself. Embodiment is best understood as the locus of a center of resistances that groove and shape the self in its

trajectory through time. From the simplest felt pressures of the atmosphere to the subtle resistance of social structures, the self is

42 NATURE AND SPIRIT placed and located by powers of origin that limit its reach and mark it for death.

Consider the constriction felt in confined places. The body, while not directly touched by physical complexes, feels that its physical horizon is dramatically shrunken and its powers muted. This primal sensation points to the larger and more attenuated sense of compression that the body feels in its world. Social horizons wax and wane with the internal potencies of the body and represent analogues to the felt scope of the body. Our grasp of worldhood is initially made possible by the unique spatiality of the body. Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between bodily space and socalled external space: ‘““The word ‘here’ applied to my body does not refer to a determinate position in relation to other positions or to external co-ordinates, but the laying down of the first co-ordinates, the anchoring of the active body 1n an object, the situation

of the body in face of its tasks.’"! The coordinates of the world, that is, of the world as rendered intelligible through the human process, are made possible by the movement of the body outward.

From the control of the proximate world, the body extends its scope to the larger horizons of value and meaning. Of course, this outward movement is governed by the innumerable spheres of resistance that constitute the world. The human process is as much a product as a producer of this tension and always lives within it.

In grasping an idea, for example, the body undergoes subtle changes and modifications, as if to parallel the processes of conscious, Or even unconscious, awareness. Thoughts are not disembodied but have a unique and highly diffuse form of embodiment. If bodies can have a natural history, so too can thoughts. Even in the play of ideas, what Peirce calls “‘interpretive musement,”’ the

structures of embodiment are manifest as the felt locus for the movement of thoughts and signs. This is not to say, however, that

thoughts are merely physical events, but that embodiment is a broader actuality than the human body which is one of its most dramatic instances. Much has been made of the historicity of the human process and its embeddedness in finite and often idiosyncratic meaning hori-

zons. The self is the locus of innumerable interpretive horizons and must struggle to give some shape to these diverse sign systems. Signs and meanings are embodied in selves and communi-

HUMAN PROCESS 43 ties, and also live within the fitful powers of origin. We can extend the notion of ““embodiment”’ to include the signs and interpretations that define the scope of the self. Sign systems are as much a part of human self-definition as are physical attributes and conditions. Sign systems can expand and constrict the self in ways that are continuous with the ways in which physical space can produce these sensations. A narrow and rigid sign system, such as a racist

ideology, blunts and distorts the outward movement of meaning horizons and produces a kind of claustrophobia for the self that is victimized by living in such a system. We are as much embedded in signs as in the vast forces and powers of the environment. Animals and plants have environments that are often constituted by signs and sign systems. Many animals, as well as some plants,

respond to events that have some semiotic meaning and can be rendered into discrete signs. The human process, on the other hand, transforms the environment into a meaning horizon, where signs and interpretations can be apprehended and consciously communicated. The individual human interpreter is not confined to bare percepts or a realm of disembodied genera, but moves in the realm of interpretations that link percepts and concepts. The human process is interpretive through and through, and struggles to find some convergence and meaning for the various sign systems that surround it. Interpretations become concrete when they are embodied in signs that are to some degree potentially public and communicable. The individual interpreter is thus embedded in an infinite number of signs and their attendant interpretations. These signs form

into systems in which each sign has some relation to some, but not necessarily all, other members of that system.” In some sense, these sign systems have their own internal logic and momentum that is given over to the self. The individual assimilates and endures the highly compulsive sign networks that mark its outward expansion into community and the world. Repetition and convergence mark these sign systems. Inertia and habit bring comfort and ensure stability for the sign-using organism. Sign systems have a tendency to become self-contained and self-referential, and thus remain impervious to alternative interpretations and values. Our introspective life is governed by meaning systems that emerge from antecedent powers of origin. Any attempt at self-

44 NATURE AND SPIRIT understanding is burdened with the inertial mass of inherited sign material, and must struggle against these finite and highly charged

embodiments. As noted, the concept of embodiment is far broader in scope than that of physicality, and extends to many dimensions of the human process. Finitude and embodiment are at least commensurate terms and together point to the limitations built into the human process. When signs are communicated to other persons, they begin to move beyond the limitations of origin and assume new meanings that might not be anticipated in the prior habits of interpretive life. The human process seems driven toward communication of internal sign systems and toward some sense of social convergence and communal validation. Here, too, the powers of origin are manifest in the highly grooved mechanisms of sign translation and interpretation. Whenever a sign moves into the sphere of intersubjectivity, it engages more pervasive sign frameworks that limit its interpretive spread and internal complexity. Any novel sign configuration may become flattened out so as to fit the pre-established patterns of communal life. The underside of personal and social habit is an

abiding fear of adding new pressures to the semiotic stock. The powers of origin reinforce their imperial claims by denying or

transforming new signs and interpretations. |

It should be noted that the powers of origin are not necessarily imperial or demonic. The human process cannot prescind from origins, even though all origins are fragmented and incomplete. Origins become demonic when they refuse to acknowledge transcendence, or when they become self-validating. The positive di-

mension of origins is manifest in their empowerment of those qualities that are necessary for evolutionary survival. In certain contexts the demonic dimension of origins must be stressed, while in other contexts the necessary and empowering dimension must be emphasized. In any given case, both the demonic and the nondemonic aspects will be present, but in different degrees.

Self-identity is thus directly tied to the internal signs that are usually available to introspection. Of course, not all signs are accessible to introspection and many operate at a level that can best be described as unconscious. Integral to the felt contour of the self are numerous unconscious complexes that have their own uncanny

power and dynamism. As noted by C. G. Jung, these complexes

HUMAN PROCESS 45 must be taken seriously in terms of their contribution to the identity of the self. Unconscious complexes belong to the powers of origin, and contribute to the shape and self-understanding of consciousness. Jung notes two dimensions of these complexes: “The feeling-toned content, the complex, consists of a nuclear element and a large number of secondarily constellated associations. The nuclear element consists of two components: first, a factor determined by experience and causally related to the environment; second, a factor innate in the individual’s character and determined by his disposition.”? The core of the complex contains elements that are assimilated by the self in its journey through time. Yet within this core are powers and structures that cannot be traced back to finite human experience. At the heart of the complex lies what Jung calls an archetype, which gives the personal complex its deeper meaning and value to the self. Put differently: the complex is an unconscious sign system which has its own autonomy and which makes itself felt on the conscious sign systems of the individual. No account of the human process is complete that fails to describe the interaction between conscious and unconscious sign systems. The powers of origin are impersonal and lie outside of the introspective reach of the self. We can extend the concept of embodiment to cover the realm of the unconscious in both its personal and its collective dimensions. No sign or sign system is free-floating or without a given location in the self. The concept of “location” should not be understood in purely spatial terms. Anything that has an effect on the self has some location, even if that location cannot become part of a threedimensional system. Spatial analogies and metaphors, while inevitable in any phenomenological description, must always be used with caution. The human process is no more or less spatial than other complexes within the world, and frequently transcends spatiality altogether. Many of the self’s products are obviously spatial and participate in the social and physical traits of the world. The self externalizes its conscious and unconscious sign material whenever it produces something that is publicly observable. The artifact will ‘contain’ traces of origin that point to the powers and features of the self which brought it into being. Of course, in modern technological production, the unique features of any given self are effaced, so

46 NATURE AND SPIRIT that the product is indifferent to the specific features of origin. A technical artifact will still contain traces of origin, but they will be muted and without more specific referents. The technical artifact and its producer share in the process of the attenuation of origins.

In a sense, the forms and modes of contemporary production mask the inner logic of the externalization of internal sign material. The integrity and richness of the self can be read through a careful analysis of its products. Anything that emerges from the

human process is a product, whether it be a breath, a physical structure, a gesture, a communicated thought, an action, or an aesthetic array of traits. The human process leaves innumerable traces of itself in its products, even if these products do not always

contain unique or distinguishable features. Our footprint in the sand is as much a product as the most complex work of thought. While the self is more than the ‘sum’ of its products, it defines its scope and effect through its productions. Many of our products die with us and many are quickly absorbed into the indifferent realms of nature. Most of our products are not consciously created and exhibit little if any purpose or meaning. The drift and waste of the human process are as striking as the occasional and prized irruptions of novel and purposeful creativity. Because of the constant erosion of our products, the scope of the self is always changing. Possibilities ‘surround’ the self and create the room within which new products may emerge and be-

come efficacious. Rarely is the self satisfied with its productive life. The compulsion to add new products and utterances to the scope of the self is fundamental to the human process.* Can we always ensure that any given product will maximize all of its latent possibilities? ‘This would only be possible if we could envision all of the orders within which a product could be meaningful. Since any product of the self may contain traits and signs that lie beyond the conscious awareness of its creator, it 1s always possible that some new lines of relevance will emerge. My casual footprint on a beach may mean little to me, while it could evoke a strong sense in another person who sees it as a symbol of human finitude. Or consider how a new aesthetic classification can rescue an entire genre of art from historical oblivion. Paintings that were once vaguely classified as belonging to a postclassical period can assume new power and relevance if seen to belong to a distinct and

HUMAN PROCESS 47 relatively autonomous creative period. Long after the creator of an artifact is dead, the product can receive new actualization and reenter the lives of interpreters.

The human process can thus be approached either through a description of its interior semiotic life or through a description of its products. Such descriptions run along parallel courses even if they do not entirely converge. Within the self lies a core of mystery that cannot be exhausted even through a complete survey of its sign systems. By the same token, the innumerable products of the self, some consciously formed and some mere random expressions of physical embodiment, contain values and meanings that lie forever beyond human assimilation. A phenomenological account of the so-called inner and outer reaches of the self must honor the elusive and mysterious traits of the self and its products. The shifting domains of our products can either empower us for further growth and transformation or limit and blunt the evolution of the self. Past products can develop a kind of inertial mass that makes it difficult to alter the basic traits or direction of the self. In our creative life we are often bound by those powers of origin that were once original with us. A past aesthetic array, for example, a book which once represented a powerful transformation of energy and insight, can, precisely because of its continuing potency, blind

us to novel and more generic possibilities in a current process of production. Part of the irony of the human process lies in the subtle bonds that hold us to antecedent powers, even when those powers cannot sufficiently guide us in new orders of productivity. William James speaks of habit as the “great flywheel of society,” but

ignores the numinous and almost mythological qualities of past products of the self. The concept of habit, especially when broadened to cover cosmic laws and regularities, is certainly of value to philosophy. But the habits and products of the human process, both personal and social, participate in the myths of origin and live off of the potencies of origin. Emerson sounds a stronger and truer note when he states that ““Iemperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung.” The “beads” are the various moods endemic to the human process, and temperament becomes more and more bound to the conditions of origin that foreclose novel possibilities.

The bindingness of our products, reinforced by the complexes

48 NATURE AND SPIRIT of the unconscious that project their idiosyncratic demands onto much that we do, shape, and say, manifests itself in social conformity and personal habit. Yet, without this bindingness, the self would have no positive contour and would be incapable of interacting with the innumerable orders of community and the world. Peirce celebrated this positive side of human inertia with his notion of critical common sense. The self defines itself and attains momentary stability through accepting the successful products and horizonal patterns of the past. The evolutionary perspective has compelled us to take seriously the many ways in which survival is tied to the ability quickly to assimilate the wealth of past interpretive strategies and accomplishments. Philosophers are often too eager to celebrate our alleged manipulative prowess while ignoring or failing to appreciate the need for assimilative wisdom. Critical common sense serves as a necessary ballast in personal and social evolution.

The habits of our productive life are mirrored in the habits of interpretive life. Hermeneutic theories have struggled to find ways

of liberating products from predictable or politically charged modes of interpretation. Contemporary theories, such as New Criticism or Structuralism, reject earlier notions of the author’s intention or of mapping the evolving self-consciousness of the producer. By the same token, such theories insist on a kind of absolute freedom for interpretation that denies the possibility of validation. Unfortunately, this bid for a free interpretive space has made it more difficult to understand the forms of bindingness that characterize all interpretations. The habits of deconstruction soon become as predictable as the habits of earlier hermeneutic stratigies. Underlying any interpretive strategy is an implied conception of the human process and its possibilities and limitations. The rise of a variety of hermeneutic theories represents one more phase in the struggle to understand how we manipulate and assimilate our own products. Ironically, the desire to undermine all origins is,

itself, bound to the powers of origin that make interpretive life possible in the first place. Origins can be modified and transformed, but they cannot be effaced. The flight from origins is the flight from embodiment and finitude. A hermeneutic era is one that has profound doubts about the products of the human process. Many of these doubts are justified,

HUMAN PROCESS 49 especially those emerging from our greater awareness of social and political forms of privilege. Yet such recurrent doubts also mani-

fest a lack of faith in the numerous productive and interpretive successes of the past. More important, they ignore the emancipatory potencies still slumbering in past products and limit the concept of emancipation to the alleged free space of current interpretations. The issue is not whether we can still speak of an abiding “human nature,” but of whether we can broaden and deepen our grasp of the pervasive features of the human process as it relates to the innumerable orders of the world. Ordinal phenomenology refuses to privilege any order of interaction or any meaning horizon, and insists that all orders are relevant to our understanding of the human process.

Can we extend the concept of product to include the traits of our inner life? Such an extension is warranted if it is recognized that products need not be spatio-temporal or always available for public scrutiny. When Romantic philosophers speak of the productive imagination, as opposed to more passive forms of ideation, they imply that the self is the source for novel and complex sign systems. These sign systems are expressions of the conjunction of percepts and concepts in interpretations. All interpretations

seek embodiment in concrete signs. Introspective life is constituted by an indefinite array of semiotic material. This material is of much greater scope than the consciousness that apprehends it. As noted, the unconscious, which participates in embodiment, contains sign material that may or may not enter into the arena of consciousness.° Inner life exhibits its own unique forms of embodiment. The signs of introspection are products of the self, even if they seem to lack the essential features of external products. The self is neither a substance nor a mere moment in some kind of “‘species being.” It makes more sense to see the self as the locus of innumerable sign systems, all of which are products, than as a

static cluster of traits. In saying this, we must be careful not to assume that the self is nothing but its sign systems. Not only do we encounter mystery at the core of the person, but it is impossible in principle to exhaust and make conscious the full scope and complexity of the self’s signs. The self does not always create signs at will, but often inherits a complex semiotic legacy that sharply limits the novel delineations

50 NATURE AND SPIRIT available to it. Products, which may or may not be signs, do not always emerge from conscious deliberation or rational control. The self must often remain opaque to itself when confronted with sign systems that eclipse its powers of awareness. The human process is indebted to semiotic and interpretive horizons that give it its fundamental shape and direction. At no point can the full meaning of a horizon ever become available to the self. Horizons are products of the human process and have their own

distinct forms of embodiment. We must be careful not to let the metaphors of space and light mask the fact that all horizons are embedded in finite selves and participate in the fragmented and ambiguous powers of origin. The ultimate locus for all meaning horizons is the body that provides the ‘space’ within which meanings can be generated and sustained. Often, phenomenologists talk as if horizons are Platonic spheres of meaning that somehow prescind from the tensions of embodiment. This stance privileges consciousness and ignores the fact that the horizon is of and for a body, and cannot prevail except as a precarious and fragile order of meanings. In a sense, the horizon is the body’s way of extending its scope and power beyond immediate felt space. Heidegger’s metaphor of “thrownness” points to the ordinality

of the human process. The self is thrown into the innumerable complexes of the world and struggles to find some form of separation from these orders. We are indebted to numerous powers of origin and find ourselves involved in antecedent structures and processes not of our own making. On one level, this is an obvious insight. Yet the implications of natural indebtedness have not been fully drawn. The concept of thrownness overemphasizes the dynamism of the human process and easily lends itself to falsely heroic and politically destructive forms of embodiment. For exam-

ple, the self might see itself as “‘thrown’’ into a social transformation, like that of National Socialism, which has such an inner power that it refuses to examine its own symbols and forms

of behavior. The metaphor of indebtedness comes closer to expressing the phenomenological insights of ordinality. The human process is born in a state of natural debt (Buchler), and this debt cannot be canceled no matter how productive a given self might be.

Several forms of indebtedness show themselves. Externally, we

HUMAN PROCESS 51 are indebted to the past, present, and hoped-for signs that surround us as we move toward a stable and intelligible world. These

sign systems have both evolutionary and cultural histories, and provide the interpretive space within which the self must move. This is not to say that we blankly endure the signs of the community or of nature, but that the human process cannot prevail at all without signs that give it part of its contour. In ethical terms, the signs of the community have often emerged

through struggle and sacrifice, and represent momentary triumphs over opacity and what might be called the reticence of nature. The history of inquiry is, to some extent, a history of human sacrifice and self-effacement. To live within contemporary scientific sign systems, for example, is to inherit a wealth of interpretations that were often paid for through strenuous self-control and

self-denial. Peirce’s community of science, one instance of the more pervasive community of interpreters, passes on its accomplishments to present interpreters. To be is to be indebted to the semiotic achievements of the past. As noted, critical common sense represents a stabilizing influence within interpretive life. Our second form of indebtedness is to this implied and rarely self-conscious hermeneutic mechanism. Epistemologically driven philosophies have willfully ignored the

more basic and reliable techniques of critical common sense by desiring a certainty that is simply not available to the human proc-

ess. Ambiguity and incompletion are tolerated by our everyday interpretive strategies and find their rightful place in the common understanding of the world. We are thus indebted to a cumulative and practical hermeneutic that makes it possible for us to function with less conscious effort. The outward expression of critical common sense is personal and social habit. Such habits free reflection

for more intricate and attenuated tasks, thus serving the larger needs of the sign-using organism. Critical common sense is, of course, different in form and direction from the common sense of natural (i.e., preinterpretive)

communities. Common sense, when it is bereft of the forms of inquiry and exploration that mark its more critical cousin, can quickly become demonic and reduce the hermeneutic sensitivity

of the individual and his or her community. Sociologists of knowledge point out that forms of privilege or domination often

52 NATURE AND SPIRIT mask themselves behind the facade of common sense, thus hiding their deeper intent. Critical common sense, on the other hand, is unrelenting in its quest for forms of validation that transcend latent forms of power. Justus Buchler, in dialogue with Peirce and Santayana and their versions of the concept of critical common sense, clarifies the tensions between precritical and genuinely critical forms of common sense: And human orthodoxy, which is vastly erroneous and a matter of gambling in many respects, at least penetrates common consciousness, and that penetration of common consciousness is itself located in the midst of what is part of the sanity and part of the conditions feeding sanity which help to reassure man. . . . I have contempt for common sense in the ordinary version, but I have a certain confi-

dence in its tenability and its durability. In other words, I don’t think you can disregard it.°®

Critical common sense is indispensable for the stability and validation structures of the self and the community. The hermeneutics of suspicion, which is quite rightly hostile to ordinary common sense, is actually similar in intent to critical common sense. The moral tone of the two strategies might differ, with critical com-

mon sense adopting a more optimistic or even progressivist stance, but they are alike in their fear of latent forms of privilege and domination. Critical common sense seeks to locate the human process within antecedent forms of validation that have proven their worth for social stability and social transformation. It does not seek to justify destructive habits that serve only one segment of the community. On the third, deepest level, we are indebted to the innumerable powers of origin that emerge from nature. We inherit the procreative and life-enhancing powers of an inexhaustible world that generates complexity and continual growth. As we will see in later chapters, part of the evolutionary process is the pressure toward greater complexification in the orders of life, consciousness, and culture. Nature exhibits a certain restlessness that is manifest in the heart of the human process. We are indebted to the potencies that goad us beyond past configurations toward a more complex state. Of course, the self often resists these pressures and clings to antecedent traits and sign systems. But such resistance exacts a

HUMAN PROCESS D3 price in the loss of adaptability to changing environments and meaning horizons. Put differently: we are indebted to the ‘matter’ of the world, as expressed in past communal sign systems and the potencies of nature, and to the ‘forms’ of intelligibility expressed in critical common sense and the various forms of inquiry. The human process is neither more nor less “thrown” into the world than other complexes. Rather, it slowly discovers the innumerable lines of relation

that bind it to structures and powers not of its own making. One form of psychopathology is the inability to recognize and acknowledge the fundamental aspects of indebtedness that mark the human process. The self resists admitting that it is born in a state of natural debt and attempts to buy off its debts through a variety of subterfuges.? Our anxiety in the face of the world is a telling mark of this primal indebtedness. Finitude is thus manifest in our embodiment, the inheritance of sign systems, the sheer inertia expressed in our products, the continuing presence of the powers of origin, and our fundamental indebtedness to methods and meanings beyond our immediate powers. In the transformation of a natural environment to a meaning horizon, the self assimilates the potencies of nature and creates realms of communication and culture that represent part of the outward movement of nature itself. All the products of the human process are continuous with the orders of nature that govern and locate the self. Put in metaphorical terms: the human process is the place where nature in its naturing expresses its deepest potencies. The self is the locus for those evolutionary goads that operate in a

more muted form in the environments of prehuman organisms. This quickening of evolution is made possible by the richness and creativity expressed in those rare moments when the self briefly overcomes the antecedent and pervasive conditions of finitude.

Naturalism affirms the sheer locatedness of the self within an indifferent nature. More descriptive naturalisms, such as those of Peirce, Dewey, and Buchler, stress the finite and bound conditions of the movement of the human process, namely, our indebtedness. Yet even within descriptive naturalism lie new conceptual possibil-

ities that point toward ecstatic naturalism. Insofar as naturalism confronts the innumerable potencies of nature (in the dimension of nature naturing), it becomes sensitive to the possibilities of self-

54 NATURE AND SPIRIT transcendence within the orders of the world (nature natured). By the same token, naturalism, in its quest for a nonsupernatural understanding of transcendence, honors the wisdom of the self as it struggles to become permeable to the spirit. Ecstatic naturalism refuses to deny finitude, yet remains open to the genuine powers of transcendence within nature. In tension with the powers of origin, then, is the movement of

transcendence that lives within and against finitude. Transcendence is manifest in a variety of ways, no one of which assumes priority in all respects. Unlike finitude, transcendence is a more sporadic and less pervasive feature of the human process. There is no such thing as a free-floating transcendence or a transcendence that is without ambiguity and limitation. All transcendence is finite and conditioned transcendence. Does this mean that finitude is the genus of which transcendence is the species? In preordinal formulations such a conception may have some value, but it lacks the necessary complexity for the present enterprise. Transcendence is not an instance of finitude or a subclass within a larger genus. Nor is transcendence merely an expansion of the range of the fi-

nite, since such an expansion merely adds to the scope of given orders. In describing the various aspects of transcendence, it will be necessary to show how it is distinct from the finite conditions within which it is to some extent embedded. It is important to reinforce the concept of “‘tension’’ between finitude and transcendence. The ordinal perspective rejects the notion that there are discrete layers or levels of reality, or that nature

manifests something akin to a chain of being. If transcendence were somehow removed from the orders of the world or were discontinuous with nature, it is unclear just how it could become relevant to the human process. As always, spatial metaphors distort the issue when they envision transcendence in purely vertical terms. In the vertical conception, the human process would have to go beyond finite embodiment and the conditions of origin to attain the elusive and radically distinct realm of transcendence. While such a discontinuous view has continued to plague thought,

it lacks insight into the natural history of transcendence and its various ordinal locations. The various dimensions of transcendence do not destroy finite structures, but transform them so that they can become permeable

HUMAN PROCESS 35 to the spirit. The concept of “‘spirit’’ has been widely used in the history of philosophy to denote a power or a process that cannot

be circumscribed. Hegel imposed notions of intelligibility and self-consciousness onto his concept of “‘spirit,’”’ and thereby violated the principles of ordinality that would deny the application of such order-specific traits to the spirit. Hegel’s privileging of the

unique features of the human process cut him off from those aspects of spirit that do not mirror the traits of the human. Further, Hegel remained ensnared in a Christian triumphalism that saw the necessary progress of spirit in history as the outward expression of the divine life. Our concern in what follows is to naturalize spirit and locate it more properly in specific dimensions of the human process. The powers of origin, namely, those manifest in the powers of history, the irreversibility of the time process, and the innumera-

ble potencies of nature, serve to support and envelop the human process and give it the ‘matter’ within which to unfold and achieve evolutionary success. The metaphor of origin is chosen because it points to the antecedent and pre-personal nature of these powers.

From our perspective, these powers are fragmented and deeply ambiguous. They make it possible for the human process to prevail at all and provide evolutionary support for finite existence. Transcendence must thus be seen as it works within and against these powers of origin. While transcendence is not confined to the human process, our account will focus on the ways in which it reshapes and transforms personal existence. In the orders of history, the accumulated semiotic wealth of the

past lives as a kind of inertial mass governing the shape of the contemporary self as it struggles to assimilate and understand this material. The contour of the self emerges from this historical and horizonal embeddedness. Transcendence becomes manifest whenever this historical material becomes permeable to some sense of radical expectation. Theologically, we can speak of the eschatological moment that frees the self from the demonic temptations of the powers of origin. In individual terms, this means that the self is momentarily freed from its closure within self-validating and ofttimes imperial historical horizons. The semiotic wealth of the past often refuses to open itself to a hermeneutic clearing that goes beyond the boundaries established’ by origins. Transcen-

56 NATURE AND SPIRIT dence, one of the gifts of the spirit, overcomes these boundaries and enables certain key symbols to become signs of expectation. A sign or symbol becomes a sign of expectation whenever it lets go of its antecedent meanings and becomes the locus for the spirit.

The spirit breaks through the concresced shells of the past and relocates the past’s semiotic wealth under the signs of expectation. Does this movement of spirit destroy the power of origin? No, for

spirit remains in tension with the various powers of origin and cannot destroy the antecedent potencies of the world. Spirit provides a new measure within which the powers of origin can become freed from self-closure and temptations of the demonic. For example, the powers of history might be manifest in an aggressive nationalism that denies the claims of other social or polit-

ical groups. The individual self is embedded in the nationalistic power of origin and receives its meaning and validation from this horizon. Given the vast scope and covert nature of such a historical

horizon, how does the self become free from the mythologies of “blood and soil” and develop a more generic understanding of social life? The self is inflated with antecedent powers and fails to understand that another, less demonic form of empowerment is available to it. The spirit works against the demonic nationalistic power to show it that it is profoundly limited by an infinite spiritual potency that cannot be captured in any, let alone this, historical horizon. The powers of origin can become demonic when they block the paths of spirit, and assume a kind of ersatz totalization.

Looked at from the other direction, the spirit recognizes no boundaries and lures the human process beyond the powers of his-

tory. In doing so, it does not, of course, remove the self from history, but transforms the meaning and validation structures of history. The time process, as a manifestation of the power of origin, has its own unrelenting movement and seems to mock the possibility of transcendence. Nothing seems to secure our embeddedness in the world more than the flow of time that makes it impossible to alter the orders of the past. The presence of what Nietzsche calls ‘the hell of the irrevocable”’ stands before the self and forces it to

admit that it cannot erase its own history. In a sense, Nietzsche developed his striking concept of “‘the eternal return of the same”’ as a way of finding finite transcendence within and against time.

HUMAN PROCESS 57 The ordinal perspective requires a more modest approach that locates both time and transcendence within the innumerable orders

of nature. Time is no more an order of orders than space is. By the same token, transcendence is partially shaped by the orders within which it appears. While past orders cease to prevail, and thus cannot admit any alteration of their traits, they still remain available for further assimilation and transformation. This does not mean that the past can become other than itself, but that the past contains potencies and structures that await further actualization. This seeming paradox vanishes when it is recognized that the past, as past, has just the traits that it has. A given individual, for example, was born at a certain time and place, and nothing can change these past traits. By the same token, that individual had just the relations and friendships that he or she had, and no new ones can be added or subtracted. These traits are truly irrevocable. What can emerge from the past are new and present lines of relation and relevance provoked by those past traits. It is important to stress that these new relations are not merely new interpretations on the past, but they represent new traits of the past order under investigation. For example, Shakespeare added a large number of new words to the English language. Nothing can change the number of these words,

unless some new manuscript material is discovered. What can emerge from this now closed list are new possibilities within the continual growth of the language. Contemporary assimilation of this stock can derive new courage for linguistic invention and a , new freedom from antecedent and predictable patterns.

On a deeper level, the power of time can be transformed through the irruption of the above-mentioned power of expectation. Not all powers are powers of origin. The power of eschatological time is manifest in the transformation of the self that lives within the flow of time. When clock time (chronos) becomes eschatological time (kairos), the self is remade under the impress of spirit. Religious thinkers have long noted the intimate correlation between self-identity and time. The self of chronos is the semiotic self that endlessly reiterates its past signs, and allows these signs to form its self-definition. The self of kairos is raised to a new level of awareness and enters into the free space of a time that transcends everyday temporality. Again, it must be stressed that this transcen-

58 NATURE AND SPIRIT dence is always immanent and has its own natural history. The power of expectation cannot eliminate clock time any more than it can free the self from habit and semiotic inertia. What it can do is to provide a momentary space within which the self finds new possibilities for growth that are not prefigured. The signs of expectation that emerge from internal sign systems liberate the self from a static repetition of origin. Repetition and expectation are opposite poles on a tension-filled continuum. Time is never totally discontinuous with itself, even if it allows for novel irruptions of expectations within its flow. These pregnant moments remain in tension with the originating powers of the past.

Paul Tillich, writing in the face of the Nazi takeover of Germany, contrasts the myths of space and time, thus shedding further light on the ways in which time can transform the self and its community. He equates modern nationalism (neocollectivism) with polytheism and the gods of space. The myth of “blood and soil”? attempts to turn a finite nation-state into the realm of the holy, and places its gods against the gods of other nations. Polytheism leads to conflict because the gods of space are jealous and exclusivistic. Tillich envisions time as a single directionality that is most dramatically manifest in the kairos, in which the prophetic power of expectation struggles against the demonic gods of space: ‘The gods of space who are strong in every soul, in every race and

nation, are afraid of the Lord of time, history, and justice, are afraid of His prophets and followers, and try to make them powerless and homeless. But just thereby these gods help to fulfill against their will the purpose of history and the meaning of time.’’® For Tillich, prophetic Judaism stands against modern polytheism and works strenuously to place the powers of origin under the rule of justice and time. The myths of space and time that animate nations and cultural groupings unleash forms of power that can work for or against justice. The gods of space are manifestations of unmediated origin and work against genuine forms of transcendence. The god of time, on the other hand, transforms origins and reduces their demonic potency. Transcendence is most intimately involved with the innumerable potencies of nature. The orders of the world are sustained by those potencies that empower and secure all complexes against the threat of nonbeing. Nature’s potencies are manifest in two ways.

HUMAN PROCESS 39 On one level, they are strongly relevant to the orders they empower. By this is meant that they alter the integrity and identity of the empowered order. On the other level, they are weakly relevant to the orders they empower. By this is meant that they merely uphold the order against decay and spoliation. Weak and strong forms of empowerment thus emerge from the potencies of nature. Spirit is the force that makes nature’s potencies fully relevant to the human process.

The human process, as an order, thus lives within the tension between weak and strong forms of empowerment. As aspects of origin, these forms of empowerment give the self its ‘matter’ and place within which to unfold and achieve stability. While the orders of history and the time process are distinctively human in their manifestation, the potencies of nature prevail in all orders, both prehuman and human. Consequently, they have unlimited scope in the world and empower all dimensions of worldhood. In the third chapter, we will focus specifically on the phenomenon of worldhood as it relates both to the human process and to the potencies of nature.

The human process lives out of the basic empowerment that enables all orders to prevail and sustain their traits. We experience the weak form of empowerment through the still presence of natural grace. This grace is natural in the sense that it is a product of nature in its naturing, rather than a direct gift of the divine. Grace

is experienced as the constant availability of life-giving power. This power is not a power over against other orders, that is, it is not a will-to-power that seeks continual enhancement and selfovercoming. It is a power that gives itself over to the self and does

not seek to augment its scope or efficacy. Nietzsche confused strong and weak forms of empowerment when he posited the willto-power as the ultimate trait of the world. The ordinal perspective

separates weak and strong forms of empowerment precisely because the strong form is far less common in the world and has traits that cannot be generalized to all orders at all times. The weak

form of empowerment remains ‘satisfied’ with its manifestation and effaces itself before the innumerable orders of the world. Transcendence is operative whenever natural grace, which is our

experience of the weak form of empowerment, becomes a conscious and thematic center of the self. The human process rarely

60 NATURE AND SPIRIT acknowledges that quiet empowerment which enables it to be an order in the first place. The weak form of natural potency is recognized as a gift that transcends the limitations of origin. That is, the giving over of power to the self enables the human process to

become free from the opacity of origin and enter into the free space of awareness. The self transcends the potency to which it is indebted, and experiences the grace that makes it possible to endure its indebtedness. Of course, we must reject more literal interpretations that would see grace as the means whereby all debts are canceled. The human process is always indebted to the powers of origin, as are all finite orders, but can become permeable to the natural grace that both compels us to recognize our indebtedness and, at the same time, enables us to live without trying to buy off our debt.

The weak form of empowerment, as manifest to the human process in the form of natural grace, lives in creative tension with transcendence. Whenever the human process is recentered in the potencies of nature, and becomes thankfully conscious of these forms of empowerment, it transcends the conditions of mere origin and allows for the creation of a sphere of novelty and possibility. This sphere of natural possibility gives the self much greater

room within which to unfold and attain the type of complexity requisite for evolutionary success. SELVING

Strong forms of empowerment go beyond the weaker forms of natural grace that secure the self against nonbeing and the loss of its traits. Within the human process, the strong form of empowerment is manifest in the drive toward “‘selving,’’ which represents

the fundamental power of origin for the self. Personalist philosophies tend to see the movement toward selfhood as the fundamen-

tal trait of the world. They confuse the power of individuation with the movement of selving and, like many preordinal perspectives, impose order-specific traits onto the world as a whole. Selving is better understood as the most complete moment within the

power of individuation, and not as a ubiquitous trait of nature. Most orders of the world are not empowered by the dynamism of selving. It may be fitfully manifest in the animal kingdom, but is only fully present within the human process.

HUMAN PROCESS 61 Selving is the most striking manifestation of the power of origin, and is thus strongly relevant to the human process. The identity of the self is forged under the impress of selving. Insofar as the self has a fundamental direction (an entelechy), it comes from the potency of selving that is a product of the powers of origin.

Transcendence is manifest when the self recognizes and consciously furthers the directionality of selving. As carefully noted by existentialist philosophers, self-transcendence is a task requiring the greatest moral and aesthetic effort. Again, this must be seen as a finite transcendence that must work within and against the power of origin. Selving unfolds within the context of our embodiment and its various forms of finite existence. If the ancient concept of “‘entelechy’’ connotes a mechanical process, whereby an order grows from its nascent to its complete

stage according to eternal and inborn patterns, the concept of “‘selving”’ connotes something more unstable and unpredictable. The movement from infancy to old age occurs under the impress of the potency of selving, but this movement is not something that can be rendered into species terms any more than it can become fully self-conscious. The center of the human process is a shifting one and is partly determined by unconscious complexes that are, themselves, governed by the potency of selving. Jung’s metaphor of “individuation”’ conveys the aspect of uniqueness that is characteristic of the selving process. Each self is governed and formed by a distinctive internal trajectory that may or may not be thematized by the self. When theologians develop Christologies in order to shed light on the more pervasive features of the human process, they assume that the correlation between Christ and the spirit is one that also

Operates in a more muted form in the self. The presence of the spirit can be felt within the movement of selving. The transition from the potential self to a self actualized through its conscious participation in selving runs parallel to the transition from weak to strong forms of relevance as they emerge from the potencies of nature. A conceptual portrayal of this dynamism can often achieve an

even greater degree of expression by listening to the metaphors and images exhibited in poetry. The special cadence and solemnity of a poem, as well as the unique compression of images and novel

62 NATURE AND SPIRIT meanings, present a perspective that often deepens and transforms a bare categorial analysis. The concept of “‘selving”’ appears indirectly in many of the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who ad-

vanced our understanding of the human and divine natures by compressing many contemporary and medieval images into highly crafted and theologically rich works. The following poem, perhaps Hopkins’ finest, was completed on May 30, 1877, and exhibits both his Christology and his conception of the human process:

The Windhover: To Christ our Lord I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and

sliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, —the achieve of, the mastery of the thing! Brute beauty and valour and act, oh air, pride, plume, here Buckle! ANp the fire that breaks from the then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.?

The falcon is called the windhover because of its measured flight that gathers in the glance of the poet and serves as the place where spirit is most clearly present. Spirit, the energy behind selving, hovers over the orders of the world and provides the focus for the self. Hopkins refers to the togetherness of all aspects of the self as the ‘‘inscape,”’ which is the internal landscape of the human process. The flight of the falcon also gathers into itself the aspirations of the poet, who revels in the mastery attained by the windhover. Hopkins coined the additional term “‘instress”’ to denote the spiri-

HUMAN PROCESS 63 tual energy by which the inscape is preserved. In our terms, the falcon is an epiphany of those potencies of nature that are strongly

relevant to the human process. In its measured flight, it presents

us with an image of transcendence as it struggles within and against finitude. The poem begins by acknowledging the intimate correlation be-

tween the falcon and “Christ our Lord.” In this bold metaphoric conjunction, Hopkins relocates Christology within the orders of the world, and signals that his conception of transcendence will reinforce, rather than efface, the tension between the spirit and nature. The falcon draws the light (dapple-dawn-drawn) to itself and thus provides a measure for the horizon. In a sense, the falcon represents the place where the external landscape intersects with and pervades the inscape. By living on the boundary between inscape and landscape, the windhover conveys the mystery of selving, a mystery that only occurs where the power of worldhood invades and transforms the inner life of the self. As “‘minion,”’ the falcon is the servant of the morning, while, as “‘dauphin,”’ it is the lord of the daylight. This paradoxical ten-

sion between servanthood and lordship conveys the perennial movement between finitude and transcendence. The windhover is the servant of the dawning potencies or powers of origin. Yet, at

the same time, the windhover provides the measure by and through which the world attains clarity about itself. The falcon, as

Hopkins’ ultimate symbol for the human process, becomes the place where worldhood becomes transparent and thematic for the first time. The falcon moves and glides like a skater on a pond, experiencing the ecstasy that comes from mastering the winds of the land-

scape. Yet the falcon is not a passive spectator within the larger order of worldhood, but develops its own measured cadence as it rebuffs the “big wind.” The power of transcendence is exhibited in the “hurl and gliding” of the windhover. This mastery, a mastery that provides the proper measure for the tension between inscape and landscape, moves the poet to acknowledge a deeper instress that is just beyond the reach of his own heart. Hopkins thus brings us to the point where we experience the sheer power of spirit as it brings the falcon to its own higher measure. However, just as we are about to assume that transcendence is

64 NATURE AND SPIRIT an unambiguous expression of this power, the poem turns on a new axis and exhibits the deeper logic of the movement of spirit. Right after the poet’s praise of “the mastery of the thing”’ we are told that “Brute beauty and valour and act, oh air, pride, plume, here Buckle!’” The dynamism of the act and the confidence manifest in “pride” and “‘plume”’ are broken as the correlation of spirit

and power buckles under the pressure of something just beyond

the horizon. The poet, in his struggles to understand how the windhover illuminates the human process through the epiphany of the spirit of Christ, is caught up sharply with the insight that the falcon is hiding as much about the dimensions of the spirit as he is revealing.

The spatial imagery of the poem shifts to acknowledge how the more vertical notion of transcendence gives way to an interior and earthbound image. The light that is gathered by the hovering flight of the falcon gives way to a much stronger and “‘lovelier”’ light that explodes from the core of dying embers. Like the dark cleft of a furrow in a field, the ““blue-bleak”” embers of the fire symbolize the presence or absence of the elusive spirit. The pride of the windhover gives way to the darkness and seeming death of the fading coals. Yet within this loss of outward light and sheer exuberant power is found the new and much quieter light of the self. As the embers fall and expose themselves to internal rupture, they “‘gash gold-vermilion,”’ and thereby transform once again the inscape of the self.

The human process moves outward toward ‘“‘pride’’ and ‘“plume”’ in order to transcend the opaque conditions of origin. Ironically, this movement outward is filled with demonic tempta-

tion, as the self assumes that it is the measure by and through which the world becomes transparent to itself. Yet it is only in the buckling of pride that the self becomes permeable to something more basic to the human process than the powers of origin. The transition from pride to a less demonic form of transcendence is the most important one that the self is called upon to make. In this movement, the power of selving frees itself from the blind repeti-

tion of origins and enters the free space of transcendence. This form of transcendence is not limited to the circling power of the windhover, but receives its deepest measure from its embeddedness in the dark orders of the world.

HUMAN PROCESS 65 Insofar as the movement of selving is not recognized by the self,

the human process remains bound by the conditions of origin. Whenever the self becomes permeable to the directionality of selving, it can transcend and transform this strongly relevant form of empowerment manifest in nature’s potencies. In colloquial terms, we can speak of persons failing to become what they are. Critical common sense thus recognizes the sway of selving that lies at the heart of the human process. The innumerable potencies of nature manifest themselves in an infinite variety of ways, the premier of which is the power of selving that compels the human process to

transform finitude and become a locus of the various forms of transcendence. Nature’s restlessness can be seen in the complex evolutionary branchings that characterize animate life. This restlessness is quickened in the movement of selving, whereby the human process is goaded into new forms of experience and ideation. As we will see in later chapters, selving derives its fullest measure from the divine life itself. SIGNS OF THE SELF

Since selving is strongly relevant to the human process, it helps to shape the identity of the self and move it beyond the empty repetition of bare origins. The human process is constituted by an in-

definite number of internal signs and external products. Of course, signs, both internal and external, can be understood to be products of the self. There is no clear line separating the internal

from the external, and the human process cannot be described through static container analogies. Signs are products that have the added feature of meaning. Some of our products have no meaning, but all our signs, as the embodiment of interpretations, must have some meaning, no matter how trivial. The human process is thus

semiotic through and through, and represents the ‘place’ where nature’s signs can enter the realms of communication. All sign-using organisms, whether human or not, communicate their signs to others. The human process is unique in that it has the potential of articulating signs within the context of vast horizonal structures. Horizons are orders of meaning that ‘surround’ persons and communities, providing the ‘matter’ for thematic and pre-thematic transactions. Like every other fundamental trait of

66 NATURE AND SPIRIT the human process, horizons participate in the two dimensions of finitude and transcendence. The finite aspects of horizons have already been described in terms of semiotic inertia and habit, as well as in terms of the power of history. Horizons can constrain and distort meanings just as much as they can open out and expand the human process. There is no such thing as a nonembodied horizon. As noted, the horizon can be seen as the evolutionary mechanism by and through which the body expands its felt space. The signusing organism helps to ensure its evolutionary success by sustaining a strong and subtle horizon that can quickly adjust to shifting and unstable conditions. Horizons transcend themselves whenever they become perme-

able to signs and meanings that do not emerge from their own internal sign systems. Antecedent signs, as components of the powers of origin, sometimes let go of their semiotic plenitude and allow for novel and divergent forms of intersection. A given sign can enhance its meaning and its radii of involvement whenever it transcends antecedent powers. Horizons, as indefinitely ramified orders of meaning, become open to other horizons and sign values

whenever they experience the goads and promptings that come from the transformed time of the kairos. The human process is horizonal through and through, but these horizons have their own natural history and forms of embeddedness. Transcendence occurs within and against the embodied horizons of the self. Using hermeneutic language, we can speak of the difference be-

tween a hermeneutics of origin that would focus on the various antecedent powers which animate the horizon, and a hermeneutics

of transcendence that would locate these same powers under the signs of expectation which measure origins and transform them into meanings permeable to transcendence.'? The issue is not in choosing between these two hermeneutic strategies, but in correlating them in such a way that they remain in dialectical tension. The hermeneutics of origin rightfully preserves human signs and

products, and locates them against the background of the potencies of nature.

For example, the hermeneutics of origin takes the signs of personal empowerment and places them in the antecedent and prepersonal orders of the world. For a person from a marginalized group, such as a Native American living under the social and po-

HUMAN PROCESS 67 litical norms of Anglo-American culture, this can reground personal life in terms of the struggles and tragedies of his or her race or class. This hermeneutic move is necessary for preserving identity, and shows how the powers of origin can be strongly relevant to the individual. _ The hermeneutics of transcendence works creatively with the powers of origin to free them from demonic inflation and closure. To continue our example of the Native American: the same person who receives a new empowerment from group identification must also be protected from reducing personal identity to these antecedent traits. The hermeneutics of transcendence takes the traits and history of the group and transfigures them under the impress of a more pervasive conception of the human community. It is not that the person ceases to assume a strong group identity, but that this

identity derives its deeper meaning from its participation in the general processes of emancipation and social reconstruction. Put differently: the powers of origin (finitude) and the powers and signs of expectation (transcendence) interpenetrate so that all origins are directed toward a universal and hoped-for transformation of all selves. The hermeneutics of transcendence gives concrete ex-

pression to the Kantian conception of the “Kingdom of Ends.”’ All powers of origin must be transformed so that they point to the realms of justice that are not confined to given groups and communities. No account of the human process is complete that fails to articulate the political components of finitude and transcendence. This

analysis will be reserved for the next chapter. At this point it is necessary only to recognize that the human process is often caught between the necessary powers of origin and the fitful and essential powers of expectation. Ordinal phenomenology derives its impe-

tus from this tension, and moves from bare description toward normative evaluation when it responds to the signs of expectation that provide the human process with its sense of justice. Horizons thus experience transcendence when they allow their signs of origin to become signs of expectation. Does this mean that past semiotic wealth is distorted or denied any autonomy? No, for the movement from origin to expectation is one that actually gives antecedent signs a deeper self-understanding. Of course, signs are not centers of consciousness that become aware

68 NATURE AND SPIRIT of themselves, but represent moments within the full scope of the self. The human process goes beyond the mere reiteration of origin whenever its signs are opened into the power of expectation. Integral to the continuing tension between the hermeneutics of origin and the hermeneutics of transcendence are the various complexes of the unconscious. Jungian psychology stresses the powers of origin, especially when they are expressed in archetypal images. While the archetypes are never, themselves, objects of ideation, they generate a series of images that exert an uncanny power over the inner semiotic life of the self.!' By the same token, the archetypes often shape and direct the products of the human process. Personal unconscious complexes, whether or not they contain a

transpersonal archetypal core, represent crystallizations of the powers of origin. The hermeneutics of origin is thus confined to the assimilation and exploration of these complexes as they color affective and ideational life. Marxists such as Ernst Bloch rightly warn us against confining our analysis of the human process to these vast unconscious potencies. In his typical pungent language, Bloch links Jung’s concep-

tion of the “collective unconscious” to the fascist longing for primitive instinct and the will-to-power: Jung’s unconscious on the other hand [i.e., as contrasted with Freud’s] is entirely general, primeval and collective, it purports to be “the five-hundred-thousand-year-old shaft beneath the few thousand years of civilization,” particularly beneath the few years of individual life. In this basic ground there is not only nothing new, but what it contains is decidedly primeval; everything new is ipso facto without value, in fact hostile to value; according to Jung and Klages,

the only thing that is new today is the destruction of instinct, the undermining of the ancient basic ground of the imagination by the intellect. . . . Fascism too needs the death-cult of a dolled-up primeval age to obstruct the future, to establish barbarism and to block revolution. !

Bloch fails to recognize how Jung struggled to balance competing archetypes against each other precisely so that no one archetype could compel the self to return to a naive and demonic affirmation of the powers of origin. Yet a hermeneutics of origin that is not governed by a hermeneutics of transcendence remains vulnerable

to the pull of undifferentiated origin, as manifest in the gods of

HUMAN PROCESS 69 space (Tillich). For Bloch, the future, as the place where new potencies may emerge for both nature and history, is the “‘bursting front”’ that alone can bring about personal and social transforma-

tion. Unfortunately, the materialism inherent in the Marxist framework renders its adherents incapable of recognizing the power of the archetypal structures that animate personal and social existence. The fear of primeval origins, proper in its own sphere, blinds Marxism to the deeper potencies within the past, potencies that are internally linked to the potencies it seeks in the future.

The complexes of the self must emerge from the potencies of nature and become thematic and, to whatever extent possible, conscious. But the hermeneutics of origin, manifest in such strategies as dream analysis, active imagination, and cross-cultural comparisons, must be gathered up into the hermeneutics of transcendence that opens all complexes to the more elusive and content-free realms of transcendence. These realms remain in tension with the complexes and archetypes of origin and enable them to open out their deeper teleological aspirations. Jung was not always

sensitive to the hermeneutics of transcendence, even though his daring and largely successful phenomenological descriptions of the purposive dimensions of the human process brought him to an awareness of forms of natural transcendence. Jung is not alone in recognizing the teleological core of the hu-

man process. Many thinkers have struggled with the difficulties involved in finding a proper place for teleology within the neoDarwinian synthesis. Evolutionary theory remains skeptical of any notion of purpose and insists, instead, on the twin forces of random variation and natural selection. The concept of purpose plays little or no role in such accounts. However, Peirce, Whitehead, and Hartshorne, all friendly at least to the broad lines of evolutionary theory, found a place within biological and cosmic evolution for purpose. Teleological structures and forces do prevail in numerous orders of the world, the most striking of which is the human process. Phenomenologically, purpose is manifest whenever the human process is goaded by the prospect of new products

and a new internal contour, and pushes beyond the reiteration of origins to enter the free space of possibility. Semiotically, many of the signs of our internal and communal life become remolded under the power of the kairos and become signs of expectation.

70 NATURE AND SPIRIT Possibilities and expectations enter into the human process in or-

der to provide the ‘space’ within which concrete purposes can emerge. The human process is characterized by its transition from mere drift and randomness toward the generation of specific purposes. The signs and complexes of the unconscious are also caught between the repetitive powers of origin and the teleological impulses of growth. Whenever an unconscious complex disrupts the movement of consciousness, it points in two directions. In the first

direction, it points back to the powers of origin that compel the self toward neurotic forms of repetition. However, at the same time, the complex points toward growth possibilities within the self by providing a compensation for the one-sided conscious attitude. Therapy consists in helping the individual move from the first to the second form of interaction. Such teleological structures are developmental in that they only emerge from the transactions between the self and the world. No goal can be free-floating. Each finite purpose is fully embedded in a specific horizon and body. Consequently, goals must be continually readjusted to changing horizonal and environmental conditions. One form of psychopathology lies in the refusal to reshape goals in the light of ongoing experience. Purposes must always pay homage to the conditions of finitude, even when they struggle to serve the needs of transcendence. Philosophers often fail to describe the teleological dimensions of the human process because these dimensions are rarely exemplified in a pure form. Purposes emerge fitfully against the more pervasive background of semiotic drift and hermeneutic opacity.

Further, most purposes have a short life span, as the power of habit, useful for evolutionary success, assumes control of the self.

Finite purposes emerge out of the conditions of origin and preserve the realms of possibility and expectation from premature closure. On the deepest level, the impetus behind the developmental teleology of the human process is the spirit. The movement of spirit within the self is one that helps to create the clearing within

which purposes can push outward from the conditions of origin toward the realms of natural transcendence.

While efficient causality is far more pervasive in the orders of the world than final causality, it does not follow that teleological structures have no natural location. One way of understanding

HUMAN PROCESS 71 cosmic evolution is in terms of the slow but steady rise in the num-

ber and complexity of orders exhibiting some form of developmental teleology. The human process is unique, in that purposes can become the object of thematic appraisal and critical reconstruction. Put differently: cosmic evolution has as one of its products the creation of more and more room for finite transcendence. From this, it does not follow that transcendence will someday become emancipated from the conditions of embodiment. Poetic cosmogonies like that of Teilhard de Chardin violate the principle of ordinality, which insists that all traits, especially the features of transcendence, are order-specific. Purposes, by definition, point to the future. On a deeper level,

they participate in the power of expectation that lives out of the future. To have a purpose is to desire to remake the self in terms of a felt contour just beyond the reach of the powers of origin. The

new self is one that participates in the spirit as it transforms all horizons and their sign systems so that they point to that which has no specific content. Phenomenologically, the presence of spirit is most clearly manifest in the attitude of hope. The human proc-

ess empowers its developmental teleological structures when it lives out of hope. Finite purposes, often frustrated by an indifferent or hostile environment, fall away unless the principle of hope becomes their animating center. Put in social terms: utopian expectation represents the true potency behind social and cultural transformation. No unfulfilled purpose can long prevail that is not secured against doubt by the liberating presence of hope. Insofar as the human process becomes attuned to hope it receives the gifts

| of the spirit.

HOPE AND THE ONTOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE

The personal phenomenon of hope evolves through three broad stages. At this point, we are only concerned with the way hope serves the human process. In later chapters, we will correlate hope

with the concepts of community, worldhood, and the divine natures. As will be seen, hope, unlike anxiety, which is its counterphenomenon, serves as the most important attitude within the human process. It is through the phenomenon of hope, in its several ordinal locations, that the human process attains its completion.

72 NATURE AND SPIRIT Before describing the three main dimensions of personal hope, two preliminary aspects must be articulated. The first aspect is the correlation between hope and the self-world transaction. The second locates the phenomenon of hope within the ontological difference. The human process lives out of the ontological difference, an insight overlooked by some naturalist and pragmatic perspectives, and can only emerge into its more complete forms of awareness through this difference. As will become clear in later chapters, the ontological difference has several dimensions, and prevails in a variety of ways. The self-world transaction can no more be reduced to modes of physical behavior than it can be elevated to a kind of imperial consciousness, intending detached objects. The tensions between em-

bodiment and transcendence permeate all aspects of the human process. What makes transcendence possible at all is the power of spirit that quickens the self and brings it into regions of awareness which thematize worldhood and, in a different more attenuated way, nature. Hope is the highest gift of the spirit to the self, and prevails as an access-structure that enables the self to have a world at all. ‘Io “have a world” is to move beyond the awareness of specific orders to a sense of worldhood itself. Worldhood is far more than a mere environment and is a distinct phenomenon in its own right. Hope is the fundamental access structure of the human process, providing the experiential clearing within which the self can move beyond blind behavior toward purposive transaction. As an access

structure, hope is the means by and through which the human process enters into the most generic features of community and worldhood. More significantly, hope brings us into the presence of the divine natures and enables the self to participate in the divine life. This is only possible because hope moves us beyond specific contents toward the other side of the ontological difference, which is without delimited content.

Traditionally, the ontological difference is seen as that pertaining to the difference between Being and beings. The movement

from a being, or aggregate of beings, to Being is not one that proceeds through increments of scope. Rather, the movement is only possible through an absolute break that acknowledges the infinite difference between any given being (or order) and Being.

HUMAN PROCESS 73 No analogy or metaphor can overcome this difference through attempting to establish degrees of comparison. In terms of the current perspective, the most basic dimension of the ontological difference is that between nature in its naturing and nature natured (the innumerable complexes of the world). This distinction will function in several ways in this and later chapters. Hope is thus the access structure that holds open the ontological difference to the

human process. Of course, the phenomenon of hope is also exemplified in pathological ways, and these ways, precisely because of their pathology, indirectly illuminate the key features of the ontological difference. The three dimensions of personal hope are all access structures and participate in the ontological difference. They function as ac-

cess structures in moving the self away from an obsession with specific orders toward an understanding of the spirit. Hope holds open a clearing by and through which the self can become permeable to that which is not a circumscribed region or complex. The spirit is neither an order nor worldhood. Rather, it is emergent from nature in its naturing and is the most pervasive measure for the human process. The spirit can become manifest to the self only through hope. We live in hope whenever we thankfully reflect on the spiritual presence that frees the self from antecedent powers.

In its most complete form, hope is not a product of the self, nor something that emerges from internal semiotic and emotional life. Rather, it is the spirit’s gift to the self, bringing it into the completion of selving for the first time. In its first aspect, personal hope becomes focused on a specific

order, and envisions that order in terms of emancipation and transformation. As an individual, I may focus my signs of expectation onto a given prospect or enterprise, and ignore the equal reality or potency of competing possibilities. For example, I may see a vanguard party or political group as carrying the emancipatory structures of a utopian future. In giving over to this group my own signs of expectation, I limit the phenomenon of hope to finite and historically fragmented forces that may or may not carry

heteronomous and destructive seeds. The particular group becomes the locus of a new anthropology that will remake the human process under the new measure of the kairos. The phenomenon of hope, in all of its forms, quests for the new self that will

714 NATURE AND SPIRIT cancel the inauthentic self of the past. The new self is born out of the future, as fulfilled time breaks through the relentless sweep of clock time. Personal hope becomes captured by a specific and ambiguous manifestation whenever it allows external structures to delimit the possibilities of the spirit. On this level, hope still contains remnants of calculation. Like belief, which is tied to assertions of the subject-predicate form, particularized hope envisions plans and actions that can be measured in terms of cost-benefit calculations. Insofar as the chosen object of hope continues to satisfy such cost-benefit aspirations, it will be deemed worthy of the self’s gift of its own signs of expectation. Self-identity is still shaped by a group that could, in principle, fail to live up to the terms of the new identity. On this level, hope is so limited in its scope and aspirations that it can easily fall prey to anxiety and despair. No finite group or enterprise can long sustain the utopian expectations that govern and color the phenomenon of hope. Pathology emerges when this particular focus becomes removed from the claims of other groups or enterprises. A demonic temptation begins to seduce hope away from its utopian expectations, and pulls it into a closed horizon that refuses to become permeable to seemingly extrinsic hopes. An uneasy tension exists between

the genuine emancipatory core of hope and the recurrent costbenefit calculations that demand some kind of payoff. As the par-

ticular group or enterprise fails to live up to misguided beliefs about impending benefits, the self becomes impervious to counterexamples, and refuses to acknowledge the destructive traits in its chosen object of hope. Returning to our example, the chosen vanguard party or group may lose its emancipatory attitude and make compromises with the governing powers of the social order. In doing so, its utopian future becomes flattened out, and it steps

outside of the phenomenon of hope. The new self quickly becomes the old self of power and domination. Tragically, the individual who defined himself or herself in terms of this group is often compelled to ignore the loss of genuine utopian expectation and participate in the demonic forces now being unleased by the group. Unlike a mere set of beliefs about the future, hope carries with it a unique form of empowerment. The self is carried into a

utopian potency that reshapes it. When this potency withdraws

HUMAN PROCESS 75 and the powers of origin return, the self is left with an anxietytinged vacuum that is often filled with a kind of fanatic blindness. As hope continues to degenerate into cost-benefit calculations, and

as these calculations turn out to be more and more negative, the self must either find means for denying the evidence or must, once again, transform its identity so that a more profound understanding of hope can emerge to recenter the self. This second strategy, made possible by the self’s acceptance of the spirit, moves the individual toward the second aspect of personal hope. In its own way, this first form of personal hope lives out of the ontological difference. Insofar as particularized hope opens the self

to a group or project that cannot be reduced to the sum of its members or constituents, it encounters a rudimentary form of the

difference between an order and that which is not an order or ‘sum’ of orders. This preliminary understanding of the ontological

difference is fraught with ambiguity. The group or project transcends all its components, yet often compels those same components to fall into a bare identity. Put differently: the group lives out of a radical expectation that cannot be reduced to any uniform sense of progress or mere continuity. In this sense, the group transcends the conditions of origin, and helps to free the individual from his or her absorption in a given order. Yet this same group can so absorb the individual that he or she is no longer a distinct self. Transcendence is muted so that there is a distinct continuity between the group and all of its members. Selving is blunted in its growth and diverted to serve interests that may violate the powers of selving. Whenever the ontological difference is effaced, the individual runs the risk of losing a deeper self identity that is not tied

to the structures of the group and the powers of origin. By the same token, a future project can goad the self into forms of praxis that destroy any autonomy. From the standpoint of the human process, the ontological difference is always manifest in an ambiguous way. However, there are degrees of ambiguity and degrees of clarity. As the phenome-

non of personal hope evolves from its particular and contentspecific form toward more generic forms, it opens out the ontological difference in increasingly clear ways. From the other side, the ontological difference opens the self by keeping the tension alive between orders and that which is not an order. The ontolog-

76 NATURE AND SPIRIT ical difference is not a structure but prevails as a clearing within which the self can become appropriated by nature in its naturing. As the personal phenomenon of hope moves beyond its material and particularized embodiments in given groups and sign systems,

it becomes more and more permeable to the ontological difference. The transition from material to formal properties is not a transition from the human body to a non-embodied state, but one from particularity toward a generic clearing that is devoid of specific content. All dimensions (integrities) of personal hope are embodied. Yet this embodiment takes different forms in different or-

ders. In the movement from the first to the second dimension of personal hope, the structures of embodiment change. If particularized hope constricts the body to the felt space of one given horizon, the more general expression of hope opens out new possibilities for embodiment and its relation to transcendence. The second dimension of personal hope is gathered up into emancipatory awareness and is tinged with an expectation that refuses to become confined to any given group. The human process becomes more open to the potency of selving and allows that potency to give birth to the new contour of the self. Hope now empowers the self to move beyond its previous ‘objects’ of hope and to participate in wider and more pervasive aspects of the commu_ nity of interpreters. The integrity of the self is expanded to include more ordinal locations and to become the locus for a greater array of traits. More important, the futurial dimension of hope becomes less tied to specific projects and more open to a general sense of ultimate transformation. The signs of expectation that redefine the self become even more transparent to the utopian potencies that emerge from the spirit. The individual no longer derives his or her identity from a specific group and its attendant sign systems, but moves outward toward an intersection with an indefinite array of

such sign systems. The felt horizons of the body permeate innumerable other horizons and the sense of embodiment is thus transformed. The opacity of particular embodiment becomes lightened, and a new more supple sense of embodiment emerges. The self develops translation strategies, whereby particular hopes can become attuned to each other so that they all converge toward a general emancipatory awareness. In more personal terms, the hopes and aspirations of the self are

HUMAN PROCESS 77 less tied to a particular life plan, with its attendant frustrations and reversals, and more open to the potency of selving that is not re-

ducible to a given set of projects. The spirit does not compress itself into a delimited and circumscribed life strategy, but goads and lures the self toward a continual growth that becomes less and

less dependent on specific signs and horizons. More important, hope empowers the self to maintain its struggle against the powers

of habit and the seductions of the powers of origin. Without the power of radical expectation, the self would soon fall prey to a paralyzing anxiety that would begin to close off one horizon after another. The second and more generic form of personal hope thus moves outward from the signs and interpretations of a given horizon toward those of other horizons. The individual is freed from a particular form of empowerment and becomes open to the larger and

more profound emancipatory forces of the community of interpreters. The semiotic wealth of the individual is not cast aside but becomes permeable to the power of expectation. The old self of origins is transformed into the new self of the kairos, and becomes a member of the elusive and often free-floating community of interpreters. The second form of personal hope has its own distinctive form of pathology that is manifest whenever the more generic emancipatory mood is reduced to an abstract conception of human com-

munity. Kant’s misguided formalism posited a disembodied human community that would live under the nonmaterial laws of the Categorical Imperative. Living outside of the tensions of finitude and embodiment, such a conception of community represents the

withering of genuine hope. The individual becomes merely a member of the genus humanity and holds open a ‘place’ within which the needs of universal Reason can be met. More demonic forms of pathology appear whenever the general utopian vision works against genuine human needs. In terms of the individual’s self-understanding, this pathology

is manifest in the denial of the unique potency of selving. In its place is a kind of general consciousness or persona that molds the self according to assumed communal roles and expectations. The desire to conform to antecedent personal and social powers represents an impoverishment of the self and the eclipse of hope.

78 NATURE AND SPIRIT Consider how this general, and highly abstract, utopian consciousness can become demonic in political life. Within American history the case of John Brown is a perfect example of how misguided formalism can actually cover over the intrinsic value of a particular social group and its needs. Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 was done in the name of general emancipation, even though his own messianic expectations made him insensitive to the genuine needs and possibilities of the slave population. Upon arriving at the Federal arsenal he stated, ‘‘ ‘I came here from Kansas and this is a slave State; I want to free all the negroes in this State; I have possession now of the United States armory, and if the cit-

izens interfere with me I must only burn the town and have blood.’ ’’3 Here is a perfect example of a blindness that is willing to sacrifice the innocent to sustain an apocalyptic vision. His own conception of hope was tied to a general vision of an emancipated population living under the impress of divine law and power. Yet,

in pursuing this dramatic vision, Brown did not enter into the deeper logic of the human process and the dynamics of selving. This is not to say that political action is antithetical to the movement of selving, quite the contrary, but that any social or political act, especially one involving violence and random bloodshed, runs

the profound risk of destroying the very thing that is sought. Brown remains a deeply vexing figure precisely because he used means that were later adopted by the established government in order to bring about a positive transformation of the social order.

In terms of the current perspective we can say that Brown belonged to the spirit in a deeply fragmented and ambiguous way, and thus did not enter into the final stage of transfiguration, in which hope becomes directly responsive to the liberating power of the ontological difference. Yet his own pathology is, itself, a powerful goad to a deepened reflection on the nature of genuine hope. The self is brought closer to the heart of the ontological difference whenever hope transcends particular forms of embodiment and moves toward a more generic sense of itself and its aspirations. The spirit opens out a deeper sense of the ontological difference by showing the self that its emancipatory core is not tied to any given order, but belongs to the movement of personal and social

selving. Pathological distortions of this movement narrow the scope of the spirit and reduce hope to an abstract sense of a lifeless

HUMAN PROCESS 79 human community. The spirit moves the human process beyond pathology whenever the self allows the ontological difference to emerge more clearly and permeate its emancipatory awareness. The third aspect (integrity) of personal hope emerges out of the self-giving of the ontological difference. While this is true of the

first two dimensions of hope, it assumes a thematic clarity that makes this aspect of hope distinctive. While a given self may not, of course, understand the terms “ontological difference,” it will become aware of the world in terms of what these words convey. Hope now becomes free from any specific vision, be it of a particular community or of the universal community of selves. Pathological distortions continue to plague personal hope, but they become far less powerful when hope is more completely gathered within the opening power of the ontological difference. The spirit quickens the movement of selving and brings it into clarity concerning the difference between the self and the phenomenon of worldhood. Hope lives out of this difference and empowers the self so that it can let go of its semiotic plenitude and reveal the emptiness that lies at the heart of the human process. The first two dimensions of hope are conditioned by semiotic and horizon-

tal structures that are still filled with some kind of content. The signs of the self still refer to meanings and values that are particular

and that can enter into the realms of communication. When hope enters into its final aspect, these contents fall away to reveal a transcendence that is without semiotic content. While the ontological difference becomes thematic (whether in these or other terms), the referent of the signs of the self becomes radically empty, so that all signs give way to the encompassing sweep of radical transcendence. All ‘communication’ of radical transcendence must be indirect and evocative of the New Spirit. The spirit becomes the “New Spirit” whenever it fully enters into and transforms the human process. This image harks back to St. Paul’s concept of the New Creation. Hope no longer has an ‘object’ and abides as the ultimate access structure within which worldhood and nature become available to the human process. The semiotic self is shriven of its semiotic plenitude and lives out of a content-free hope. This hope cannot be reduced to a project, enterprise, or concrete sense of community. By the same token, it cannot contain a set of beliefs or pre-

80 NATURE AND SPIRIT dictions about some future state of affairs. Radical hope emerges from the self-giving of the ontological difference as that giving is quickened by the spirit. The human process lets go of the old self and becomes the locus of the New Spirit that transforms all origins and all expectations. The death of the old self entails the death of the semiotic self. Transcendence permeates all dimensions of finite embodiment and points them toward the encompassing that ‘surrounds’ all horizons. Returning to the imagery of Hopkins’ “‘Windhover”’: this is the final transformation of the self where death is overcome and the dying embers “Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.”’ The dark embers symbolize the semiotic density manifest in the first two dimensions of hope. As these embers break open, they become the locus of the New Spirit that remakes the self on the other side of death. Of course, this process is manifest within the human process and may or may not take place after bodily death. Radical hope requires that the old self of finite expectations and projects die so that the content-free self may emerge. Selving is fitfully present throughout all stages and dimensions of the human process. It works within and against embodiment and finitude to goad the self toward transcendence. The self-giving of the ontological difference is obviously a presentation that takes place outside of the human process. The new self is thus a gift that brings the human process to itself for the first time. No account of the human process is long compelling that ignores that which eclipses the self and brings it into its own. Of course, the conditions of finite embodiment and the powers of personal and social habit live in tension with radical personal hope. The human process remains ambiguous and fragmented. The signs of origin quickly reassert their sovereignty and fill in the self with specific contents. Radical hope, which is empty of content and semiotic reference, must exist in dialectical tension with the powers of origin and the structures of embodiment. The human process participates in both sides of the ontological difference, 1.e., the difference between specific contents and orders and the phenomenon of worldhood, and must struggle to keep both sides of the difference pointed toward each other. As we will see, this tension is also manifest among the divine natures and the hu-

HUMAN PROCESS 81 man process derives much of its meaning and measure from the divine struggle.

Radical hope will thus always exist in an uneasy tension with concrete hopes. The human process lives at the nexus between emptiness and specific contents. In its more profound moments, the self allows emptiness to open out its conscious and unconscious sign systems so that they point toward radical transcendence. The dialectical movement between finitude and transcendence marks the human process during all its stages of growth and

decline. Neither dimension can assume priority in all respects. Wisdom consists in allowing the spirit to enter into this struggle, so that finitude is never bereft of those fitful moments of transcendence that move the self beyond the opacity of origins. Hope assures us that the destructive powers of origin will never completely overwhelm the human process, and that our radical expectations are secured against the forces of closure and death.

NOTES

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 100. 2. For a critique of the concept of internal relations, a concept which assumes that each member of a set (series) is internally related to all other members of a set (series), see my “Justus Buchler’s Ordinal Metaphysics and the Eclipse of Foundationalism,”’ International Philosophical Quarterly, 25, No. 3 (September 1985), 289-98. 3. C. G. Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, trans. R. F.

C. Hull, 2nd ed., Collected Works 8 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 11. 4. For a detailed analysis of the relation of the self to its products, see Justus Buchler, Nature and Judgment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955; repr. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985). 5. For a further elucidation of this issue, see my ““C. G. Jung and the Archetypal Foundations of Semiosis,”’ in Semiotics 1986, edd. Jonathan

Evans and John Deely (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987), pp. 398-405. 6. Robert S. Corrington, “Conversation Between Justus Buchler and Robert S. Corrington,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, N.s., 3, No.

4 (1989), 263. This conversation was recorded in August 1982 in the home of Professor Buchler.

82 NATURE AND SPIRIT 7. The metaphor of “‘natural debt” is taken from Buchler’s Nature and Judgment.

8. Paul Tillich, ““The Struggle Between Time and Space,” in Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 39. 9. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins,

edd. W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie, 4th ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 69. 10. For further elucidation of the tensions between a hermeneutics of origin and a hermeneutics of transcendence, see my ““Hermeneutics and Psychopathology: Jaspers and Hillman,” Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 7 No. 2 (Fall 1987), 70-80.

11. The term “uncanny” harks back to Heidegger’s concept of the unheimlich which connotes some sense of being without a home or loca-

tion. At the same time, the term connotes the sense of the numinous power of the archetypes. 12. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, 3 vols. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986), pp. 60, 63. 13. As taken from Stephen B. Oats, To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 291.

2

The Signs of Community SEMIOTIC TRIADS AND SERIES

THE HUMAN PROCESS PREVAILS within innumerable orders of com-

munity that are rarely self-conscious. The signs and interpretations given over to the individual self emerge from communal structures that have their own inner logic and history. The concept of community can be unfolded only through a detailed analysis of

the various forms and shapes of concrete communal life. More

important, the concept can only receive its full articulation through the analysis of the spirit as it governs the life of communal interpretations. The self is the locus of any number of intersecting

communities and must work through these often competing horizons to find a stable personal contour. The growth of the self is to a large extent governed by the signs of the various communities that groove and mold self-evolution. The human process is interpretive through and through, even if

many specific interpretations are unconscious or represent the mere reiteration of habit. On the most basic level, an interpretation emerges when a percept is ‘combined’ with a concept. Phenomenologically, it is impossible to isolate and describe either a pure percept or a pure concept. Peirce’s concept of “‘perceptual judgment” is appropriate here as it denotes the process by which a ‘bare’ percept becomes the object of a thematic judgment. Every act of perception entails some sort of judgment. For Peirce, such

judgments are usually instinctive and unconscious. More important, the self moves beyond perceptual judgments toward what Peirce called ‘‘abduction.” Like a perceptual judgment, an abduction moves beyond the bare immediate toward more general features of the world. It is a hypothetical leap beyond the given. Peirce called these general features examples of “‘thirdness,”’ and distin-

guished them from the immediacy of “‘firstness” and the sheer 83

84 NATURE AND SPIRIT resistance of ‘“‘secondness.”’ Ordinal phenomenology recognizes these categories insofar as they illuminate the ways in which any phenomenological account will go beyond the immediate data and

incorporate more general categories. There is a continuum between perceptual judgment and abduction. In the words of Peirce: ‘‘[A]|bductive inference shades into perceptual judgment without | any sharp line of demarcation between them; or, in other words, our first premisses, the perceptual judgments, are to be regarded as an extreme case of abductive inferences, from which they differ in being absolutely beyond criticism” (5.181).! If perceptual judgments are “‘beyond criticism,” then larger species of abduction belong within the purview of criticism and conscious appraisal. Phenomenology must rely on abductive inferences beyond the given and must test these abductions against critical common sense and collective communal analysis. These abductive leaps return to the original data and provide a conceptual horizon within which such material can be framed. Abduction is not a species of induction. An inductive inference

proceeds from sample to sample in order to make an assertion about a class of complexes. Abduction moves in the reverse direc-

tion, by framing a general class statement (rule) that is, in turn, applied to a particular (case). Peirce referred to abduction as a type of “‘retroduction,”’ in which the general returned to enhance the

meaning of the particular. Of course, deduction, induction, and abduction work in consort to secure the overall growth of meaning. At the heart of abduction is the method of “interpretive musement” that allows for the free play of signs on the other side of practical or scientific interests. Umberto Eco defines abduction in terms of a variety of strategies of semiotic decoding. These strategies all have in common the

notion that the world is a text that needs to be understood from the standpoint of a specific “universe of discourse”’ (that is, a Wittgensteinian “‘language game’’). Any given horizon of discourse is, itself, an abduction (general rule) that applies to cases. Eco states: Now a doctor looks both for general laws and for specific and idiosyncratic causes, and a historian works to identify both historical laws and particular causes of particular events. In either case historians and physicians are conjecturing about the textual quality of a series of apparently disconnected elements. They are operating a

SIGNS OF COMMUNITY 85 reductio ad unum of a plurality. Scientific discoveries, medical and criminal detections, historical reconstructions, philological inter-

pretations of literary texts (attribution to a certain author on the grounds of stylistical keys, “fair guesses’ about lost sentences or words) are all cases of conjectural thinking.*

The human process lives in and through abductive inferences that give shape to horizons of meaning and value. Eco argues that the earliest form of such semiotic decoding is medical diagnostics, in which general theories are framed to define and decode particular symptom clusters. The art of criminal detection is actually a species of abduction, rather than deduction, because it must create a total picture of the crime and read the conjectured picture backward onto the clues assembled. Abduction (conjectural thinking) is ubiquitous and inevitable. In what follows, a judicious use of abductive argument will amplify and deepen the more immediate phenomenological descriptions. Ecstatic naturalism takes Peirce’s concept of abduction seriously, even though it is reluctant to follow Eco’s vision of nature as an encoded text of texts that must be decoded by the semiotic

agent. Many orders are not rendered into textual or linguistic terms, and the innumerable potencies of nature are best seen as being pre-textual. Yet the method of abduction amplifies the phenomenological descriptions that wish to probe into the heart of nature and spirit. A sign emerges whenever an interpretation moves beyond the bare immediacy of experience toward the realms of communication. Consequently, the human process unfolds within a vast horizon of signs and sign systems that give some meaning to the life of introspection and to the products of the self. These signs are rarely, if ever, purely private and emerge into communal structures, where they are quickly transformed to serve the needs of communication and evolutionary survival. Signs are thus communal and shape both individual and group awareness. A so-called personal sign is gathered into sign series that already prevail within and around the self. The movement of

a sign outward is triadic. The first component of the triad is the sign as it emerges from an individual interpretation. The second component of the triad is the sign as it is handed over to another interpreter. The third component of the triad is the sign as it 1s

86 NATURE AND SPIRIT reinterpreted and handed back either to the original interpreter or to another individual. This semiotic triad is the simplest and most pervasive structure within the sign-using community. All signs become changed and modified when they enter into the semiotic triad. A sign interpreted is a sign that adds at least one more integrity to its contour. No interpreter takes over a sign

without some alteration of the original semiotic material. Not only is all communication surrounded with ‘noise,’ but the perennial intrusion of unconscious complexes and their projections makes it difficult to listen without bias to antecedent semiotic material. The community augments, as well as distorts, all signs that enter into the innumerable modes of communication. No sign can long exist outside of some semiotic series. As Peirce carefully showed, the origin of any particular sign series lies beyond the reach of any given interpreter. More important, because of the continuity between signs, the origin of any series is impossible to find in principle. Antecedent signs emerge from realms that must remain forever opaque to individual interpreters. By the same token, no community of interpretation can penetrate into the dark background from which sign series emerge. The concept of a “‘first sign’’ makes sense only on the verbal level. There is no phenomenological evidence for such a primal sign. Any attempt to describe such a sign would alter it in some respect, no matter how minimal the change might be. A sign becomes embedded in a series because of some sensed continuity between at least one of its traits and the governing traits of an antecedent series. The sign series has its own inner momentum and ‘hunger’ for new sign material. Sign series expand to in-

clude more and more signs within their scope, and often transform seemingly alien sign material so that it fits in with the felt contour of the original series. This hunger for generic expansion marks many, if not most, sign series, thus compelling new signs to conform to antecedent powers. A sign series serves the powers of origin whenever it pulls new signs into its own dynamism and momentum. The power of habit, operative throughout the human process, is also manifest in the signs of community. Any sign that emerges from a specific interpreter will feel the pull of social and communal habit. In an analogical sense, each sign series is a community in its own right.

SIGNS OF COMMUNITY 87 Put differently: signs form into systems that have concrete and specific forms of interaction. The concept of “‘system”’ should not always connote a rigid or static framework that simply locates signs according to preestablished categories. Each sign system has its own idiosyncratic traits and often evidences a high degree of flexibility. Some sign series are more systematic than others, and some exhibit only a minimal degree of system. When Peirce uses his concept of “interpretive musement”’ to provide another form of evidence for the existence of God, he intends a floating and creative sign series that has only a tangential relation to preestablished systems. Chance and novelty prevail in the unfolding of

many sign systems, and often transform what could be a rigid framework into one that is responsive to new semiotic material.

It must be shown how a specific sign enters into the semiotic triad and becomes embedded in one or more sign series. At this point, we are not concerned with the various forms of reference expressed by a sign, a topic to be described in the next chapter, but with how a sign enters into the realms of communication. For example, consider a simple gesture such as the rapid movement of the hand outward. The individual interpreter perceives this movement in another person and struggles to locate it within antecedent

interpretations. What might appear to be a simple hermeneutic process quickly becomes embedded in vast semiotic systems. Is the gesture expressive of contempt, or is it merely a manifestation of a high degree of agitation? How does one gauge the self-consciousness of the actor? What is the referent of the hand movement? The initial sign emerges from an almost instantaneous interpretation that locates the gesture against a dimly sensed pre-

thematic background. This sign immediately begins to interact with several distinct series. Initially, it is compared and contrasted with other signs that the interpreter has developed concerning the

agent of the gesture. The initial sign is quickly reinterpreted against this antecedent and highly specific sign system, and modified to conform to expectations and experiences crystallized in the past sign system. In this example, the interpreter is also the “‘interpretee,”’ i.e., the person for whom the interpretation is made. The same triadic logic also applies to intersubjective communication.

The initial sign thus assumes a new integrity as it is gathered

88 NATURE AND SPIRIT into the felt lines of convergence of the first sign system. Yet this first sign system is, itself, forced to acknowledge other competing

and potentially augmenting systems. The interpreter rotates the newly augmented sign through a new sign system to gain further insight into the meaning of the hand gesture. Other interpreters may have conveyed their insights about the self-consciousness of the agent of the gesture to the interpreter, and these now-internalized sign systems become mobilized. Another interpreter may insist that the agent is ofttimes cynical and hostile, and that the agent expresses these attitudes through compact and ritualized body ges-

tures. This semiotic structure is tested against the already-transformed initial sign, and the sign adds yet one more integrity to its evolving contour. By the same token, and at roughly the same time, the initial sign

is contrasted to the norms of critical common sense that usually have an established interpretation for a gesture of this type. The interpreter rotates the continually expanding sign through this vast semiotic structure and deepens his or her understanding of its

possible meanings. Of course, the sign could be further augmented if the interpreter asked the agent for his or her self-understanding of the gesture. Needless to say, such first-person reports are often distorted to satisfy social and political needs. Further, the gesture may be laden with internal meaning, or it may be a random product of the human process. Even where internal meanings are present, they may not be conscious to the agent. When taken together, these various sign series may or may not converge on a common meaning for the gesture under consideration. The first sign series, that of the interpreter, is contrasted to the series introduced by others, while critical common sense adds its own hermeneutic insights, and these are, in turn, contrasted to a possible first-person report. The sign has a distinct integrity for each of its series, and the ‘sum’ of these series produces the contour of the sign. Of course, the contour of even the simplest sign is never fully known. The individual interpreter struggles to find some harmony among these various integrities, so that the processes of interpretation can move on to other signs and sign series. The description of this process takes far longer than the process itself, which may reach completion in a few moments. Individual interpreters converge on signs that are held in com-

SIGNS OF COMMUNITY 39 mon. By definition, no sign can be private if by “‘private’”’ is meant

that none of its constituents are in any way relevant to external signs. In a striking sense, the life of introspection is an internalization of public and social sign material. Not only is internal semiotic life governed by universal archetypes, but it is also a multi-

layered realm that emerges out of social contrast. A self gains some sense of its inner nature and outer involvements through other selves that have contrasting needs and aspirations. The boundary between the I and the not-I is extremely difficult to draw, and no realm of the self is ever completely free from the presence of social semiosis. The integrity of an introspective sign system is partially formed through its continual readjustment to external semiotic structures. Since inner life remains permeable to social signs, it is not dif-

ficult to understand that communicated signs may belong to an indefinite number of interpreters. On the most minimal level, a community exists when two or more interpreters converge on the same body of signs. They need not be aware of each other, nor need they be in communication. Often, theories of community insist on highly ramified forms of consciousness or communicative competence before they admit that a kind of community exists. By shifting to external signs and sign systems, the ordinal perspective makes it possible to recognize more precisely the ways in which communities develop out of signs held in common. Signs partially determine and shape consciousness. A community exists when any sign system becomes strongly relevant to more than one interpreter. Signs could not become strongly relevant to interpreters if they were not embodied in some respect. The concept of embodiment is not reducible to the concept of matter. Some forms of embodi-

ment are material, while others are not, or are only weakly relevant to the orders of matter. To be embodied in the fullest sense is to be a publicly available locus of traits. Signs that are mostly private are also embodied, but in a less complete way. The signs of community thus participate in embodiment. A non-embodied sign is a contradiction in terms. It is only in the experience of radical transcendence (the Encompassing) that we gain access to that which does not participate in embodiment. The Encompass-

90 NATURE AND SPIRIT ing is also strongly relevant to the human process, but not directly to the self-as-interpreter. A community begins to emerge when two or more interpreters participate in common forms of embodied signs. These signs must be strongly relevant to the interpreters involved. By “strongly relevant” is meant that the signs must determine part of the integrity of the self. If self-identity is in no way altered, the signs cannot be said to be strongly relevant. That two or more selves interpret the various signs of gravity, such as stumbling or feeling the difficulties of climbing, does not establish that they exist in community. Our experience of gravity is so pervasive that it cannot affect the integrity of the self, or alter the movement of selving in a distinctive way. If, on the other hand, two or more selves assimilate signs pertaining to a specific enterprise, then the sign material may affect their integrity. Of course, there exists a continuum between weak and strong forms of relevance. Any sign that merely affects the scope or extent of the self (weak relevance) is not a sign that can serve to generate or identify community.

Signs that are held in common help to shape the self-understanding of the given community. Many of these signs are operative in an unconscious or pre-thematic way. Often a social crisis will break open semiotic meanings that were previously hidden. For example, a violent act against the member of a particular race

or gender could reveal underlying sign systems that routinely privilege other groups. Social self-identity is always precarious and shifting. Any given community will contain incompatible and

mutually hostile sign systems that engage in an underground struggle for supremacy. It is important to note that social conflict is as much the result of the collision among sign systems as it 1s the result of conscious deliberation and aspiration. The individual self is often caught in the movement of vast semiotic structures that have their own momentum and drive for power. If sign systems exhibit a hunger for generic expansion, they also attempt to make the human process a servant of covert interests. Does such a conception project anthropocentric traits onto sign systems, and see them as political agents? No, for we are not arguing that sign systems are centers of self-consciousness, but that they are crystallizations of power and momentum that attempt to bring specific interpretations under their jurisdiction. Whenever an individual in-

SIGNS OF COMMUNITY 91 terpreter articulates a sign, that sign will feel the pull of various sign systems that ‘desire’ to locate it within their respective orders. Semiotic inertia helps to preserve the various forms of identity that constitute a community. One of the key features of embodiment is the power to sustain a trait against competing traits. The community is embedded in innumerable signs, each one of which has its own inertia and fairly stable array of traits. Of course, any sign may also admit new traits into its meaning horizon and may let go of some of the traits that it has. Every interpretation adds at least one more trait to a sign, although most such additions merely augment the dominant trait configuration. Semiotic inertia is one

expression of social finitude. All communities participate in the tension between finitude and transcendence. This tension is vastly more complex than that manifest in the human process because of the scope of the competing semiotic systems involved. As noted in the previous chapter, the human process is contin-

ually adding products to the world. Some of these products are mere random expressions of embodiment while some may be the result of sustained and complex deliberation and contrivance. While the human process is certainly more than the ‘sum’ of its products, it continually generates products that, in turn, form the ‘matter’ for communal transaction. Some products may be bereft of meaning and beyond human assimilation. Many of our products are the locus of semiotic structures, and thus available for fur-

ther articulation and interpretation. Products that are not signs may also affect the scope of the community in ways that are not known. Certain communal possibilities may be forever frustrated because of products that prevail outside of the known horizons of meaning. Products that are known, that is, are present as signs, permeate the community and provide spheres of resistance and concrete possibility for collective action.

Consider a product such as a war memorial. Taking William James’s example of Memorial Hall at Harvard, a vast and highly idiosyncratic structure dedicated to Harvard’s Union men lost during the Civil War, we see how a public product conveys signs and meanings that continue to be assimilated and redefined. The brash and effusive architecture conveys something about the confident and triumphal sensibilities present toward the end of the nineteenth century. Latin inscriptions resurrect the perennial

92 NATURE AND SPIRIT American fascination with Roman martial virtues. Dark and taciturn woodwork, punctuated by stained glass windows that have little thematic continuity, embody personifications of power and male domination that point to a dangerous kind of social unconsciousness. Contemporary assimilations of this product struggle

to locate its innumerable signs and meanings within a dimly sensed communal past that yet continues to remain compelling. At the same time, such signs stand in sharp contrast to present communal aspirations and virtues. Memorial Hall manifests in a dramatic way the curious dialectic between semiotic inertia and the need for contemporary reinterpretation. How can a past and nowrejected social horizon continue to compel communal assimilation?

For Josiah Royce, the tension between past semiotic horizons and contemporary semiotic needs is expressed in the concepts, “community of memory” and “‘community of expectation.’’ Memorial Hall embodies powerful traits of the community of memory and compels contemporary interpretations of social life to rec-

ognize past deeds and events that continue to shape social interaction. Simultaneous with this assimilation are contemporary manipulations of the past semiotic stock that is presented by this

moral and aesthetic product. Por the generation of James and Royce, contemporary manipulations of this more recent “community of memory” were less problematic than they are for us. Their generation would praise virtues like self-sacrifice and obedience to authority as embodied in the will of God, and unity over diversity. Our ‘“‘community of expectation’ would impose a hermeneutics of suspicion on just those signs that were found meaningful at the end of the nineteenth century. By the same token, our own “‘community of memory” would isolate and assimilate different signs and meanings from the period of the Civil War, such as those pertaining to a latent paternalism, triumphalism, and thinly

veiled economic interest. |

Past communal products continue to goad the community into new interpretations. Consider the profound contrast between Memorial Hall and the Vietnam War Monument in Washington. Instead of the presentation of heroic and unself-conscious martial virtues, we see the stark presentation of the actual destruction of war. The dark granite cuts a scar into the Mall, and makes it im-

SIGNS OF COMMUNITY 93 possible to ignore the costs associated with such forms of conflict. Of course, future generations may find the minimalist features of

the Vietnam War Monument to be without social virtue. While Memorial Hall could, in principle, inspire future communities to embrace martial virtues, the mere listing of casualties that constitutes the Vietnam Monument could inspire contempt for a culture grown excessively self-conscious and too prone to paralyzing doubt. The tension between memory and expectation is manifest whenever products become relevant to communities. While no contemporary meaning horizon will be fully self-conscious, it will

impose its perspective onto all of the products inherited by the community. At the same time, the contemporary meaning horizon will establish subtle, and not so subtle, rewards and punishments that determine which new products will receive a respected place in the evolving communal horizon. Each community 1mposes its own cost-benefit calculation onto producers and their products. This not only invades hermeneutic strategies, but reshapes the mechanisms of contrivance. Semiotic structures that fail to aid the community fall by the wayside, and their producers become infected with self-doubt. Few things are more uncanny than a community’s ability to render otherwise powerful sign systems meaningless.

Social eschatology, Royce’s “‘community of expectation,” works against some forms of semiotic inertia by allowing the potencies of the future to redefine the still nascent powers of the past. These past powers contain seeds of growth that allow for profound alterations of the semiotic stock. Some sense of social transcendence emerges whenever signs of expectation allow for new historical assimilations to take place. Communities thus have their own temporality and live within the tension between chronos (clock

time) and kairos (fulfilled time). Whenever the community of memory, concretized in highly charged sign systems, eclipses the community of expectation, communal temporality becomes flat-

tened to clock time. Whenever the community of expectation opens out latent emancipatory possibilities in the past, communal

temporality emerges out of fulfilled time. Neither form of temporality can, or should assume priority in all respects. The dialectical tension between these two forms of communal time must keep

94 NATURE AND SPIRIT both forms of time open to each other. As we will see later, the divine natures participate in communal temporality and live at the heart of this dialectical tension.

The human process participates in communal temporality and often remains embedded in the power of the community of memory. Personal and social eschatologies rarely survive the corroding

forces of inertia. Communities unsure of their semiotic heritage

often fall prey to the powers of origin and become solidified against the emancipatory forces of expectation. Interpretive space is shrunken so that the signs of origin can take on unambiguous

and monolithic interpretations. Once the signs of origin eclipse the signs of expectation, rigid dyadic structures take hold of the community. The selected signs of origin become more and more imperial as they reject alternative sign systems. As signs of origin, they become the sole locus of illumination and cast a long shadow over other signs. Jung’s notion of the ‘‘shadow,”’ as the hidden and denied component in the individual psyche, can be applied to the community as well. In the 1930s, he became aware of the growth of a social shadow among his German patients. Looking back in 1946, Jung observed: There was a disturbance of the collective unconscious in every single

one of my German patients. One can explain these disorders causally, but such an explanation is apt to be unsatisfactory, as it 1s easier to understand archetypes by their aim rather than by their causality. The archetypes I had observed expressed primitivity, violence, and

cruelty. When I had seen enough of such cases, I turned my attention to the peculiar state of mind then prevailing in Germany. I could only see signs of depression and a great restlessness, but this did not allay my suspicions. In a paper which I published at that time, I suggested that the “blond beast”’ was stirring in an uneasy slumber and that an outburst was not impossible.°

The signs of origin cast their unacknowledged shadow onto extrinsic signs. When this is done, these now alien signs become the rejected half of the dyad and pose a threat to the community of memory. Jung’s German patients fell prey to a social shadow that compelled them to deny the full reality of divergent social groups.

Social solidity was paid for at the cost of mass destruction and social dislocation.

This social pathology can be manifest in rigid ideologies that

SIGNS OF COMMUNITY 95 assault the integrity of given groups. Each sign system is embedded in a particular social community and helps to shape the identity of that community. Whenever a larger social body rejects cer-

tain sign systems, it also rejects those who are defined by and through those systems. If the community of memory becomes impervious to the community of expectation, the mythological power of the signs of origin will unleash destruction onto those who fall outside of these imperial signs. By the same token, a smaller community within the larger body can reject emancipatory signs and cling to its own demonic signs of origin. NATURAL AND INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITIES

For the most part, communities remain opaque to themselves and

to their own sign material. It does not follow from the fact that certain signs are strongly relevant to two or more selves that these selves are aware of the extent of the meaning of this relevance. Most communities are free-floating, fragmentary, and oblivious to their very existence. The human process is wedded to far more communities than it will ever know, yet cannot help being formed by those hidden communal powers. Using Hegel’s phrase, one’s ‘shape of self-consciousness”’ is a communal product as much as it is an individual achievement. The striking thing about our communal embeddedness is that we participate in this “shape” without

always recognizing its origin in extrapersonal sign systems and meaning horizons. In saying that the self is a gift to itself, we are saying that it finds its contour through its innumerable forms of communal transaction. One of the hardest tasks facing hermeneutics is making this semiotic and interpretive wealth thematic and conscious. Democratic political transformation cannot take place if communal life remains opaque to itself.

Royce referred to these pre-thematic communities as “natural communities.”’ In particular, he meant that such communities were bereft of spirit and the internal spirit interpreter. The current perspective is sympathetic to Royce’s general appraisal of such nat-

ural communities, even if some of his honorific rhetoric must be rejected. Natural communities prevail in an indefinite number of ways and make it possible for the human process to prevail in the orders of meaning. These communities ‘contain’ our products,

96 | NATURE AND SPIRIT our signs, and our pre-thematic hermeneutic strategies. The chief mechanism for such communities is critical common sense, the premier hermeneutic strategy, which secures the validity of our habits for evolutionary survival. Without these pre-thematic and

largely unconscious natural communities, the human process would be unable to perform even the most simple tasks. Conscious deliberation would be ensnared in transactions that should be handled by habitual means. As William James argued, habit frees deliberation for more attenuated tasks. Pluralist perspectives are correct when they focus on the shifting and complex dimensions of these natural communities. Pluralists reject any concept analogous to Dewey’s “Great Community” or Marx’s emancipatory proletariat class. In carefully describing natural communities, ordinal phenomenology gives some credence to the pluralist metaphysical agenda. It is impossible to find any clear contour for these infinite communities. Any given self will be the

locus of far more communities than can ever be counted or isolated. Often these communities will conflict with one another and

assert divergent semiotic claims. Such communal conflict is quickly internalized by the human process, resulting in a kind of free-floating anxiety that has no obvious referent. Pluralists insist that the phenomenological evidence points away from social convergence toward the highly ramified realms of natural communal

transaction. |

The signs of community remain embedded in these indefinitely ramified natural communities. The individual will often be faced with the difficult task of sorting through these semiotic branchings so as to find some contour for personal life. Often, of course,

these natural communities will be compartmentalized and kept separate by the self. The building of semiotic walls is one way of perserving the human process from internal diremption. Tragically, most of human history is constituted by the inability to bring these natural communities into integration. By failing to create convergence and unity among these fragmentary communities, the self becomes open to demonic distortions in which one natural community will overpower or suppress the claims of another. Racism is one of the more dramatic manifestations of the conflict between natural communities. The pre-thematic and unexamined claims of a racial community assume an imperial

SIGNS OF COMMUNITY 97 status when they remain oblivious to those intersections with other races that are inevitable in natural life. Insofar as the human process remains on the level of mere natural communities, it cannot achieve political and ethical transformation.

Within human social history there are moments of transcendence, when the power of natural community gives way to a different kind of social life. Natural communities, characterized by Opacity and insensitivity, are occasionally quickened by hermeneutic forces that transform semiotic life. Within the heart of any natural community lies a community of interpretation that refuses to let the signs of community fall prey to inertia and closure. The community of interpreters is latent within the natural communities that surround and define the human process. Not all communities give birth to a community of interpretation but the highest

moral maxim for the human process is that they should struggle : to do so. The concept of such a community is one that can incorporate many of the key insights of pluralism, without falling prey to the relativism that plagues pluralistic frameworks. Within the logic of the community of interpreters is the movement toward social and personal convergence, so that all natural communities are tested and either validated or rejected according to the eman-

cipatory needs of interpreters. The limits of pluralism become more clearly defined when the structures of social convergence appear within any given community of interpretation. As noted, natural communities are free-floating and fragmentary. A community of interpretation briefly overcomes this fragmentary quality whenever it makes the signs of community thematic. However, like a given natural community, the community of interpretation also has a free-floating quality. This is manifest in the open-ended movement among the various sign systems of intersubjective life. But this free-floating quality is governed by the power of expectation that moves interpretive life in the direction of emancipation and democratic reconstruction. Natural communities are inherently conservative and jealous of their particular semiotic claims. Communities of interpretation, on the other hand, are emancipatory and free with their semiotic wealth. Put in other

terms: natural communities remain embedded in the powers of origin, while communities of interpretation serve the powers of

98 NATURE AND SPIRIT expectation that compel all origins to become open to transcendence.

The concepts of “natural community” and “community of memory” are not strictly equivalent. Whenever the focus is on the sheer power and embeddedness of some dimensions of our com-

munal life, the concept of “natural community” is uppermost. Whenever the focus is on the temporal quality of social life, the concept of “community of memory” is uppermost. It is important to note that these two concepts often coverge, especially when

we are dealing with pre-thematic but historically important sign systems. A community of interpretation does not cancel a given natural community, nor do its own signs of expectation overcome or ignore the past. Natural communities are quickened and opened to internal potencies that were not thematized or acknowledged. By the same token, signs of memory contain emancipatory seeds that can live out of the future. In its most complete manifestation, a community of interpretation lives within the power of expectation. The free-floating quality of a community of interpretation can also be seen in its partial detachment from institutional life. Dewey’s focus on the reconstruction of institutions, while not inappropriate, needs to be augmented by a description of the semiotic and hermeneutic components of noninstitutional life. Insofar as an institution becomes regimented, power is withdrawn from the signs _ of expectation and returns to the signs of origin. It is more appropriate to see the community of interpretation as a creative moment

within the life of an institution. A dialectical tension emerges within the institution between bureaucratic inertia and the emancipatory forces of the community of interpreters. Of course, institutional life remains hostile to the more open-ended hermeneutics

of the community of interpretation. One aspect of social reconstruction is this movement from origin to expectation within institutional structures. Dewey was fully aware of the correlation between social force and social symbols. While not using the language of “‘expectation”’

and “origin,” he probed into the nature of these communal traits and shed light on the potential liberation found in a renewed semiotic life. In 1927, Dewey argued: “‘A community thus presents an order of energies transmuted into one of meanings which are

SIGNS OF COMMUNITY 99 appreciated and mutually referred by each to every other on the part of those engaged in combined action. ‘Force’ is not eliminated

but is transformed in use and direction by ideas and sentiments made possible by means of symbols.”’* What we, following Royce, have called “natural communities,” can be seen in terms of energy awaiting its conversion into meaning. Natural communities are the

battleground of various forms of energy, most of which are unfocused and pre-thematic. Whenever a community probes into the directionality of its signs and symbols, it can transform force into meaning. It is important to recognize that such a transformation is

not possible without some kind of “‘combined action.’’ For Dewey, social transformation is not possible unless the members of a community converge on common projects and actions. Pluralism without some sense of convergence can become demonic, as energies compete blindly and generate only private meanings. New symbols serve to gather and focus communal energy around emancipatory projects that enable a nascent community of interpreters to conquer the opacity and reticence of the natural communities which attempt to frustrate its birth. Communication 1s facilitated whenever the signs of community enter into the realms of meaning sustained by the community of interpreters. Mere energies ‘communicate’ their intent whenever they impinge on each other and direct the flow of social power. But genuine communication can only occur when signs are consciously (that is, thematically) and deliberately explored by interpreters. Dewey was fully aware of the power of symbols to direct social communication: Symbols control sentiment and thought, and the new age has no symbols consonant with its activities. Intellectual instrumentalities for the formation of an organized public are more inadequate than

its overt means. The ties which hold men together in action are numerous, tough, and subtle. But they are invisible and intangible. We have before us the tools of communication as never before. . . . Communication can alone create a great community. Our Babel is

not one of tongues but of the signs and symbols without which shared experience is impossible.°®

Mere pluralism, which assumes that its emancipatory forces are unambiguous, degenerates into a confusion of tongues whenever

100 NATURE AND SPIRIT it celebrates sheer symbolic plenitude and denies the need for social convergence. Symbols are not simply the outward covering of interpretations, but live as autonomous powers in their own right. Social symbols, especially when rooted in the powers of origin as expressed in the archetypes, exert an uncanny power over the orders of communal life. In natural communities, such symbols are

not examined and tested. Consequently, they are not forced to expose their possible demonic traits. In genuine democratic reconstruction, all signs and symbols are probed so that their power can be directed toward positive social reconstruction. The community

of interpretation acknowledges the power of social symbols and compels them to face into the power of expectation. In the process, social symbols begin to serve the needs of communication. The community of interpreters is thus emancipatory and dedicated to the continual transformation of energies into meanings. These meanings enter into the realms of communication and become thematic. A community of interpreters emerges when several conditions are met. Initially, such 2 community must be con-

stituted by members who are self-reflexive. An individual becomes self-reflexive whenever he or she examines and tests the signs of so-called internal life. The human process is one of the most semiotically dense processes in nature. But these semiotic transformations are usually unconscious. Whenever an individual breaks free from this opacity and becomes aware of the vast complexity of inner semiotic life, self-reflection is born. The community of interpreters can only emerge from the communities of nature when each of its members enters into the inner dialogue that makes self-understanding possible.

Secondly, a community of interpreters must have its own unique forms of temporality. A mere natural community remains embedded in the powers of origin and in clock time. The temporality of the community of interpreters is one that expresses the continual tension between chronos and kairos. The signs of origin become shriven of their illusory plenitude and transform themselves into signs of expectation. Hope, which represents the most significant access structure of the human process, also lives within the heart of the community of interpreters. Personal hope is secured and deepened whenever it participates in the eschatological core of the community of interpretation.

SIGNS OF COMMUNITY 101 Finally, a community of interpreters becomes possible whenever the realms of communication secure genuine intersubjectivity. Communication entails a reciprocity between a “‘sender”’ and a ‘“‘receiver”’ who work together to ensure that meanings conveyed correspond to meanings had. In genuine intersubjective communication, the media of sign production become thematically artic-

ulated and understood. One self communicates with another not only through sharing in common semiotic material, but in making the channels of communication objects of attention. For example, in interpreting signs in a written document, the “‘receiver’’ is as much concerned with the means and motives of writing as with the text itself. In the fullest sense, intersubjectivity explores the traits of signs, sign production, the media of sign transmission (encoding and channel), and the nature of adequate interpretation (decoding). Both “‘sender”’ and “receiver” share in the process of making these aspects of semiosis conscious and deliberate. Reflexive self-understanding works with and through intersub-

jectivity to transform energies into meanings. The shifting and multilayered realms of intersubjectivity cannot be reduced to some

kind of genus or species being. Individuals communicate more than they know, and receive more meanings than they apprehend. Intersubjective life cannot be fully understood through spatial metaphors, any more than it can be reduced to the concept of infor-

mation. By the same token, a community of interpretation ‘contains’ more than the sum of its interpreters. An individual only becomes a genuine interpreter within a community of interpretation. If a community of interpretation overcomes mere natural communities, then the natural individual becomes transformed into an interpretive self by participating in such a community. Dewey’s concept of the “Great Community”’ should not be taken to represent a universalism that denies semiotic diversity. While Dewey’s language may be eulogistic and evocative, his philosophic intent is not. The various energies that become remolded

by the community of interpreters do point toward the common good. But it does not follow from this that the social good is mon-

olithic. Each self knowingly participates in the generation of shared values insofar as it also secures its own semiotic wealth and value. Democratic reconstruction requires that each individual become a locus of semiotic renewal and that the emancipatory forces

102 NATURE AND SPIRIT of social life reinforce each other, rather than serve private interests. It must be continually stressed that emancipatory forces are precarious and fragmented. Social inertia and private power combine to blunt the liberating movement of the community of interpretation. If any emancipatory movement becomes the captive of special interests, it will soon lose its ability to participate in general social reconstruction. While it is often impossible to detail the traits of the emergent social good, it is necessary to secure such a good against those anti-emancipatory forces that govern natural communities. Social goods announce themselves through symbols that have a special power and force. Certain signs become symbols whenever they open out to something that is not clearly specified. Further, signs become symbols whenever they have the quality of “‘numinosity.”” The depth dimension of a symbol is religious, even if it does not have obvious religious content. The concepts of “‘sign”’

and “symbol” can be used interchangeably for ordinary philosophic purposes, but they must be distinguished when dealing with the depth dimension of the human process and with the core of the community of interpretation. Dewey would be wary of such an extension of social semiotic, and would distance himself from the concept of the “numinous.”’ Yet the inner logic of social semiosis compels us to move toward a dimension of empowerment that eluded Dewey’s pragmatic naturalism. Ecstatic naturalism understands the numinous to be part of nature and to represent the self-transcending momentum of the potencies. Natural communities have signs that contain power and unleash forms of personal and social action. These signs have a degenerate form of numinosity which can be dangerous to the health of the community. This numinosity is degenerate because it draws social power toward the sign and its referents rather than moving such power outward and away from the sign or sign system. This happens when sign users mistake mere signs for genuine signs of ex-

pectation. A true symbol becomes transparent to the spirit and refuses to become a finite locus of meaning. A mere sign becomes a sphere of power in its own right and thus works against the forces of democratic renewal. Consider how a particular social action either can remain on the

level of a sign of origin or can become a symbol of expectation.

SIGNS OF COMMUNITY 103 For example, consider the effects unleashed by Gandhi's 200-mile great Salt March in which thousands of his followers marched to the sea in 1930 to make salt. Such an act was illegal because the then-ruling British Government imposed a tax on all salt made and used in India. On one level, such an action fueled nationalistic interests and reinforced certain natural communities that were struggling for their share of power and freedom. Needless to say, such interests are often legitimate and not to be denied. Yet on another level, the level evoked by Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha (truthforce), this action pointed away from the claims of an emergent nation state toward a conception of a transformed human process in which the instruments of social transformation would be forever transfigured under the emancipatory power of nonviolence. That many of Gandhi’s followers failed to understand the inner logic of satyagraha does not deny its truth or importance. The Salt March was both a sign and a symbol, but in different respects. It is not appropriate to merely privilege one of these two dimen-

sions. Natural communities need their signs if they are to have some kind of identity. By the same token, the latent community of interpreters that is slumbering within these natural communities needs to receive its direction from those signs that become symbols. The eternal tension between natural and interpretive communities is manifest in the tension between signs and symbols. Every powerful social sign must be probed so that its internal symbolic possibilities are allowed a ‘space’ within which to appear.

In the process, local signs, such as the signs of nationalism, become permeable to the spirit. Gandhi himself well understood the tension between the concepts of self-rule and nationalism, on the one side, and the more general conceptions of nonviolence and truth-force, on the other. For good or ill, we do not live in a world of symbols only, but must derive our various identities from the signs of community. The community of interpreters is and must be democratic. The signs and symbols of community become open to the realms of communication only insofar as interpretive life is free from heteronomous and alien constraints. Hermeneutic theories do not often probe into the political dimensions of interpretive life, and somehow assume that the assimilation and manipulation of meaning horizons is done through language structures that have their own

104 NATURE AND SPIRIT dynamism or “‘play.”’ It is as if we merely had to enter into the toand-fro of playing language in order to allow our own horizon to

expand and embrace other selves and cultures. At the other extreme are those theories that are so suspicious of all sign systems that they over-politicize hermeneutics. Such theories assume that each personal or social sign is an imperial center of power masking covert interests. Of course, such a view is often warranted and has

proved to be of value in unmasking demonic and heteronomous traits in our semiotic life. Unfortunately, such a view also makes it impossible to find and accept truly emancipatory symbols. A more politically astute hermeneutics must balance the claims of suspicion against the more optimistic notions of horizonal play and fusion.

In the spirit of Dewey, we continue to affirm that the signs of community unfold and show their inner symbolic depth in demOcratic structures. Dewey argued, “Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself.’ Within emancipatory democratic structures, the human process unfolds its own inner logic and can keep alive the tensions between finitude and transcendence. By definition, the community of interpreters is a democratic community. The finite dimension of the human process is articulated and shown for what it is within democratic social structures. Such interpretive frameworks enable the individual to con-

front and delimit the ways in which embodiment and social embeddedness constrain the self. In nondemocratic social structures, it is easy to ignore the powers of finitude and to glorify some

kind of ersatz transcendence. Nondemocratic structures derive much of their power from their uncanny ability to mask finite limitation. A democratic community has the courage to acknowledge finitude and to make judicious decisions in the face of the finite. Of equal importance is the ability of a democratic community to understand the fitful and fragmented qualities of transcendence.

The same courage and wisdom that enable the democratic community of interpreters to probe into its finite limits empower it to recognize how transcendence is bound to finite and conditioned manifestations. As noted in the previous chapter, transcendence is always within and against finitude, and is not located in some kind

of detached and nonnatural realm. Insofar as a nondemocratic

SIGNS OF COMMUNITY 105 community ignores finitude, it will develop an inflated and idealized conception of transcendence. Democratic communities un-

derstand that the elusive powers of transcendence must be nurtured and protected against the ubiquitous powers of origin. A community that refuses to grasp its limits will not be in a position to become permeable to nondemonic forms of transcendence. SIGNS OF EMANCIPATION

Individual selves come more clearly to self-understanding within democratic communities. The human process remains in what Jung called an “‘inflated”’ state if it does not recognize how finitude

and transcendence relate to each other. If we reverse our angle of vision and look at how individuals generate communities, rather than at how communities mold individuals, it becomes clear that the human process finds itself unable to long sustain the honesty and clarity required of democratic structures. The self flees from the recognition of finitude and the consequent burden of nurturing emancipatory forces. This flight is covered over by a resultant psychic inflation that gives the self an illusory self-importance. This new form of pseudo personal empowerment can exist without admitting that its form of transcendence is hollow and potentially demonic.

Allied to this flight from finitude and its burdens is a profound misconception of the nature of emanicipatory structures. The in- dividual agent becomes more and more estranged from social impulses that tend toward the common good, and sees all transformation in purely personal terms. Often, the personal sphere will be slightly expanded to include the claims of a small homogeneous group but the inner logic is the same. Emancipatory structures and forces are shrunken to fit into the needs of an imperial self or social

subgroup. The common good is reduced to a personal good that is sought outside of the larger processes of social semiosis. Personal goods, by definition, find themselves in conflict with social goods, and can only assert their claims through a denial of extrapersonal realities. A purely personal good can only prevail if it challenges the ontological status of alternative personal goods. When some social theorists champion the claims of the self-reliant and sovereign individual, they unwittingly betray a metaphysics of priority that downplays the reality of other selves.

106 NATURE AND SPIRIT A merely private good survives by adopting two general strategies. First, such a good must become oblivious to alternative and potentially hostile goods. A kind of psychic anesthesia permeates the self, enabling it to ignore other goods and needs. This numbing can have pervasive and often dangerous effects. If a horizon extends only as far as personal good, then the individual cannot participate in the suffering of those individuals and groups who are denied their legitimate personal and social goods. By becoming oblivious to these other goods, one is no longer in a position to work for their furtherance. If the twentieth century is the century of holocausts, this horrible fact can be partially blamed on the psychic numbing that comes from the worship of purely private goods. The death of extrapersonal goods and selves cannot pene-

trate into my imperial consciousness unless my purely private good is at stake. Second, a purely private good survives by reducing emancipa-

tory powers to energies that are located within the powers and privileges of a given social order. The sovereign self refuses to participate in social reconstruction and general emancipation, but val-

ues and needs the energies associated with them. Emancipatory forces release great stores of energy and are necessary for any profound transformation. The imperial self, jealous of a private good, recognizes that the power for change comes from structures outside of the self. However, such an individual does not understand the deeper logic of emancipation and assumes that these energies can serve private interests. More important, a self-interested social group, constituted by members pursuing private goods, attempts to assume control of emancipatory forces for its own benefit. The

private self recognizes that it can attain its purely personal good only through a small social group that has similar interests. The group incorrectly participates in emancipatory life by capturing some of these liberating impulses for itself. Put in metaphoric terms: the deeper logic of emancipation is distorted to serve the “powers” that want control and domination of the social good. The second strategy of the imperial self lies in this move toward the ‘‘powers,”’ in which emancipatory forces are profoundly distorted to serve nonemancipatory needs. Psychic numbing and a capitulation to the “‘powers’”’ make it difficult for the individual to enter into the deeper logic of social

SIGNS OF COMMUNITY 107 reconstruction. Put in other terms: the particular claims of given natural communities often eclipse the more refracted light of the nascent community of interpreters. Natural communities them-

selves experience psychic numbing and the temptation of the ‘powers,’ and thereby betray the common good. This social pathology is so pervasive that it makes it difficult to recognize the genuine emancipatory forces of the community of interpreters. However, the very concept of “pathology”’ points to a nonpath-

ological state in which it is possible to recognize emancipatory forces for what they are. The community of interpreters participates in the process of emancipation and refuses to let private goods eclipse social good. Private goods continue to exist and to permeate the lives of interpreters, but they are deepened and redirected to serve the larger goods of the community. Put in different terms: the quest for autonomy (personal law and personal good) is

transformed into the recognition of theonomy (transpersonal good). The concept of “‘theonomy”’ does not connote an alien divine law that lifts the individual self into a special religious realm.

Rather, it refers to the depth dimension within autonomy that opens the private self to communal powers and goods which it must have if it is to actualize the movement of selving. As noted in the previous chapter, the inner logic of selving points toward the transcendence of the private sphere, and locates the self within the structures of nature and the community. Selving, in its most radical form, belongs with the emancipatory forces of the community of interpreters. The community of interpreters, while fragile and precarious in

its various incarnations, is what it is through the emancipatory forces found in the various forms of communal life. Before describing the nature of these emancipatory forces, it is necessary to exhibit in more detail the semiotic structures of the community of interpretation. This entails a description of how the semiotic triad works on given sign material. The semiotic triad unfolds whenever a given interpreter hands over an interpreted sign to another individual, and that individual hands it back to the first interpreter or to another. The sign becomes augmented or diminished in each of

these transactions. Of course, the semiotic triad also prevails in intrasubjective life as the self engages in an internal dialogue in which it is both interpreter and interpretee.

108 NATURE AND SPIRIT Natural and interpretive communities function by unfolding the semiotic triads that permeate social life. In a natural community, a sign will rarely be augmented with novel interpretations. Semi-

otic inertia governs each movement of the semiotic triad and makes sure that any addition to the semiotic stock serves antecedent interests and “‘powers.’’ When an individual takes over a sign,

he or she will locate it within antecedent meaning horizons that give it a specific and circumscribed value. Insofar as the same sign is given over to another (the interpretee, as the person for whom

an interpretation is made), it will be located within the same meaning horizon and remain ‘faithful’ to its assigned social role. If

we wish to use a spatial metaphor, we can say that the natural community functions by flattening out the semiotic triad so that there are no acute angles or abrupt changes. A community of interpretation, on the other hand, encourages

novel and divergent interpretations for the signs at its disposal. The semiotic triad can take many ‘shapes’ and forms, as each sign gives birth to a variety of meanings. A given interpreter will augment and transform a sign before handing it to another. The interpretee will carry forward the process by adding another integ-

rity to the contour of the sign. This is not to say that such additions are arbitrary or seek novel effects for their own sake, but

that interpretive life is open to an expansion and deepening of meaning.

Consider how natural and interpretive communities deal with the same sign. Of course, it is an abstraction to talk of “the sign”’ as if it were possible to isolate a sign from its series and from the other series within which it is or can be relevant. For example, consider what happens to a work of art as it is introduced to social life. Suppose the work to be highly abstract and devoid of obvious

referential qualities, and further suppose that it represents a profound transformation of the methods and goals of aesthetic contrivance. What happens to it when it becomes available to both natural and interpretive communities? If the painting is without obvious thematic content or extraaesthetic referents, then natural communities, always bound to more literal and more spatial imagery, will locate their various meanings within the inert sign series that generate communal identity. Because of its concern for the nonambiguous and the

SIGNS OF COMMUNITY 109 monolithic, a natural community cannot tolerate any sign that puts pressure on a one-dimensional interpretive perspective. The semiotic triad operates merely to rein in divergent semiotic material so that it conforms to the powers of origin. Spatial imagery is preferred by the natural community because it is less likely to slip out of clearly demarcated boundaries and assume more elusive and potentially threatening meanings. The painting will be quickly rejected because it is highly recalcitrant to quick assimilation and to the pressures of social habit. The movement of the semiotic triad will be predictable, and will add new integrities to the sign that are neither novel nor deeply augmentative. More important, the semiotic triad will stop short at the nonrepresentational sign, and reject its efficacy for furthering the needs of natural social life. When the same painting is introduced to a community of inter-

pretation, it will be far more likely to enter the realms of social communication. Genuine puzzlement, when sustained over time, is itself an interpretive stance that makes further meanings possible. The painting represents the first moment within the semiotic triad. That is, it is a product that embodies interpretations which can become available to interpreters. The initial moment of the semiotic triad need not emerge from a present self, but can represent the deposit of meaning in a publicly available product. The second stage in the triad unfolds when one or more interpreters confront the painting, and struggle to assimilate its meanings. The painting, as an embodied product, can compel interpreters to focus their divergent hermeneutic strategies onto its surface so that further meanings may emerge. The third stage in the unfolding semiotic triad appears whenever interpreters converse with themselves or with each other, so as to enhance the grasp of latent meanings. On the communal level, art critics function to open the semiotic triad to more complex and highly ramified meanings. Very quickly, the initial triad explodes into innumerable other triads and the process of social communication makes it possible to find novel and evocative meanings in the work of art.

The fluidity and openness of the semiotic triad has been described in somewhat different, but convergent, language by Umberto Eco. Referring to what he terms the “‘open work,’’ Eco ex-

hibits the main semiotic features of certain unique types of artwork. His paradigm example is that of the open work of music

110 NATURE AND SPIRIT that encourages the performer to vary the musical structure or sequence of musical units. The act of performing is internally related to the ontology of the work itself. For Eco, this special feature of avant-garde music can be generalized to illuminate all works of art. In our terms, the community of interpreters must be avant-garde in its assimilation and manipulation of the sign series that emerge from common symbols. Eco sees the open quality of the work of art as, itself, a symbol of the open quality of the world. Referring to Husserl’s analysis of Abschattungen (profiles) as presented in Cartesian Meditations, Eco sees the work of art as a locus of powers that can themselves goad further interpretations out of interpreters: It means that each phenomenon seems to be “‘inhabited”’ by a certain power—in other words, “‘the ability to manifest itself by a series of

real or likely manifestations.’ The problem of the relationship of a phenomenon to its ontological basis is altered by the perspective of perceptive “‘openness”’ to the problem of its relationship to the multiplicity of different-order perceptions which we can derive from it.’

The concept of “‘power’’ is perhaps better rendered in terms of the “potencies” that lie within and around each complex of the world. These potencies emerge from the various profiles of the phenom-

enon and encourage novel interpretations. The semiotic triad responds to these potencies by allowing new sign material to emerge before the community of interpreters. For Eco, this process is one that moves away from the static object of interpretation to the series of interpretations (interpretants) generated by the object. The open quality of the world is one that favors communication and the sharing of meanings. Eco is sensitive to the charge that his concept of the “open work”’ may produce an anarchy of competing interpretations (signs) that would make it impossible to know one object from another. Within the “powers” of any given work or complex is an active formal principle that serves to restrain and control the more absurd extensions of meaning. In several places, Eco invokes Peirce’s understanding of the “dynamic object”’ as an underlying controlling force over meanings. The dynamic object lies ‘within’ the work, providing a field of possibility for the immediate and sensed interpretations derived from the work. While the community of interpreters can add a rich variety of novel interpretations to any complex, it cannot add just any interpretation.

SIGNS OF COMMUNITY 111 Put in terms of the ordinal perspective: interpretive possibilities are always in and of orders of relevance that have certain forms of natural compulsion. These orders are, of course, indefinitely explorable, but they are not infinitely malleable. Eco presents this insight in his own terms when he links his concept of the “‘open work”’ to Einstein’s theory of relativity: The possibilities which the work’s openness makes available always work within a given field of relations. As in the Einsteinian universe, in the “work in movement”’ we may well deny that there is a single prescribed point of view. But this does not mean complete chaos in its internal relations. What it does imply is an organizing rule which governs these relations. Therefore, to sum up, we can say that the “work in movement” is the possibility of numerous different personal interventions, but it is not an amorphous invitation to indiscriminate participation.®

There are thus two dialectically related forms of restraint on interpretation. From the side of the work of art, or of any complex of the world whatsoever, there is the underlying ‘‘dynamic object”’

or “field of relations” that governs how given profiles may emerge. The “powers”’ or “potencies” of the work propel these facets into human awareness, but within a constrained field of relations. From the side of the community of interpreters, there are forms of intelligibility that are tied to critical common sense and

the historical transmission of signs and symbols. The powers within the complex, manifest in the profiles of the complex, intersect with the semiotic series already established by the community

of interpreters. The complex, whether a work of art or not, remains open to rich augmentations of meaning, but keeps an eye on how these meanings evolve and interact. ‘To return to our initial example, the community of interpretation will thus allow the painting to announce its various meanings.

Unlike a natural community, it will not force the painting into a literal or merely spatial hermeneutic framework. Natural communities do not understand the concept of latent meanings, and insist that all meanings are clear and distinct. One key difference between a natural and an interpretivé community is the ability of the latter to live within ambiguous and highly ramified sign systems. More important, an interpretive community will embrace

112 NATURE AND SPIRIT the tensions embodied in metaphor and visual symbol and probe into the variety of meanings manifest in nonliteral structures. The ‘matter’ of the semiotic triad is public. However, natural and interpretive communities have a very different conception of the public sphere, and this in turn governs how their respective semiotic triads function. For the natural community, the public sphere is actually a private sphere that has assumed control of social life. A given person or homogeneous group projects its private meanings onto the larger body, and argues that such meanings are

actually public. The hermeneutics of suspicion is appropriate when dealing with natural communities. It is imperative that these ‘public’ meanings are revealed for what they are, namely, private powers of origin that are fundamentally antidemocratic. It follows that the products of a natural community are quickly distorted to serve these covert private interests. The public realm does not really exist under these conditions, and is only a mask for the hidden powers of origin. An interpretive community, on the

other hand, sustains a genuine public that is concerned with strengthening the democratic and interpretive structures of the community. All products are at least potentially public insofar as they belong to the felt needs of the interpretive community. This is not to say that the community of interpreters does not recognize the sovereignty of private spheres of meaning. The interpretive community protects the private sphere from unnecessary invasion. The natural community will not allow for personal meanings, as they may threaten the community, and will invade all personal structures. Put differently: a community of interpretation will not spy on its members, while a natural community will not acknowledge that any meanings should be left alone. Ironically, the natural community will allow for only certain types of private meaning, and will attack all others. The community of interpreters, as a democratic social structure, understands the difference between covert private interests and goods and ones that are, and must be, personal and private. The semiotic triad unfolds most successfully whenever it is governed by emancipatory structures and forces. As Royce argued, the spirit lies behind our most profound interpretive strategies, and makes it possible for a genuine community of interpreters to emerge from the natural state. The spirit manifests itself whenever

SIGNS OF COMMUNITY 113 emancipatory forces free interpretation from inertia and bare pow-

ers of origin. These forces are deeply rooted in the orders of nature, but are not confined to the powers of origin. Nature is more than the innumerable orders of the world (nature natured), but is also the locus for the various forces of transcendence. Emancipatory forces are most clearly manifest in social life, and enable a natural community to transcend its opacity and enter the realms of genuine social communication. In what follows, it will be necessary to clarify the ways in which these emancipatory forces emerge within and through communal life, and provide the goads for continual transformation and renewal. UTOPIAN EXPECTATION

As noted in the previous chapter, personal hope is the most important access structure of the human process. Communal life becomes emancipatory whenever it lives under the liberating power of hope. A creative dialectical tension keeps personal and social hope attuned to each other, so that a deepening of transpersonal meaning is possible. There is no such thing as a purely personal hope. Insofar as an aspiration appears to be purely personal, it violates the deeper logic of the phenomenon of hope and quickly degenerates into a cost-benefit calculation of personal success. Emancipatory hope is not wedded to calculation, and is free of finite contents and specific predictions. Social and personal transformation can only occur together as guided by the spirit. The community of interpreters lives out of a positive utopian expectation that cannot be reduced to a clear and distinct social agenda. Human history is, to a large extent, the history of the rise and fall of positive utopian expectation. The thinker who makes this most fully thematic is Ernst Bloch, who lived on the boundary between orthodox Marxism and more democratic conceptions of

communal life. Our concern, here, is not with assessing Bloch’s own version of Marxism, nor with pointing to his own heteronomous commitments (and their latent Stalinist components), but with reconstructing his perspective to serve more liberal impulses.

Bloch’s lasting contribution to social and political theory is his phenomenologically rich analysis of the numerous ordinal locations of hope. Bloch sets the tone for our own analysis in the fol-

114 NATURE AND SPIRIT lowing statement: ‘“The act-content of hope is, as a consciously illuminated, knowingly elucidated content, the positive utopian function; the historical content of hope, first represented in ideas, encyclopaedically explored in real judgments, is human culture referred to its concrete-utopian horizon.”’? Human culture lives under the positive utopian expectation that gives focus to its products and sign series. Natural communities have a distorted understand-

ing of the utopian horizon, and do not consciously illuminate its structures. Interpretive communities make this “concrete-utopian horizon” thematic and render it available for further exploration and assessment. It is important to note that the transition from a natural community to an interpretive community can be marked through the transformation in their respective utopian horizons. A natural community has a content-specific utopian horizon that fills in and defines the aspirations of its controlling members. Such a utopian expectation is actually a captive of the opaque pow-

ers of origin. An interpretive community allows its utopian horizon to unfold without filling it in with specific contents. Positive utopian expectation frees the community from the idolatry of the powers of origin, and enables the human process to become transfigured by the spirit. Put differently: the difference between a natural community and an interpretive community can be seen in the degree in which their respective utopian expectations are permeable to the spirit. Few things are more dangerous than a utopian expectation that denies the spirit. The question emerges as to whether or not these positive utopian expectations are supported by something outside of the human process. Are all utopian hopes merely the manifestation of-a collective wish-fulfillment, or do they participate in the movement of extrapersonal and extracommunal realities? It is one thing to point to the social impact of a utopian vision; it is another to assert that such a vision is rooted in nature, and that communal transformation is a process which is empowered from an elusive source outside of itself. Bloch comes down firmly on the side of those who see the movement of hope in the “real itself’’: “the concrete imagination and the imagery of its mediated anticipations are fermenting in the process of the real itself and are depicted in the concrete forward dream; anticipating elements are a component of reality itself. Thus the will towards utopia is entirely compatible

SIGNS OF COMMUNITY 115 with object-based tendency, in fact is confirmed and at home within it.’'° This daring statement, while based on certain neoRomantic metaphysical commitments (Schelling in particular), moves reflection away from a purely psychological or sociological stance toward an appraisal of the emancipatory forces of nature.

The innumerable complexes of the world contain emancipatory seeds that can become actualized whenever a positive utopian ex-

pectation quickens an interpretive community. Many of the world’s complexes do not exhibit anything akin to an emancipatory force, and actively reinforce inertia and habit. Yet some of the orders of the world do seem to manifest a drive toward an open

future and toward a freedom from bare origins. The previous chapter briefly discussed the concept of “developmental teleology”’ as it relates to efficient causality. Teleological impulses become developmental when they step outside of a blind entelechy and ‘explore’ other possible goals. Of course, such explorations are usually pre-thematic and unconscious. However, the movement away from habit toward purpose is one clear manifestation of the emancipatory forces in the world. In broader terms, the evolutionary process exhibits the movement from habit toward purpose in those orders that are consti-

tuted by a high degree of internal complexity. Whether or not evolution ‘intended’ that purposes emerge in the world, they represent one of the forces for transformation and growth. It is incorrect to go back to nineteenth-century views of evolution that saw purpose as the basic constitutive feature of biological and cultural evolution. Purposes are finite and ordinally located and are fre-

quently frustrated by the opacity of nonpurposive orders. The concept of “developmental teleology”’ does not argue that evolu-

tion itself is purposive, but that purposes continue to emerge within certain orders, and that some of these purposes can become the subject of deliberation and exploration. By the same token, it is also incorrect to reduce emancipatory structures to finite purposes. While developmental teleological impulses are emancipatory in their own right, they do not exhaust or define the concept of emancipation. On the deepest level, emancipatory forces are rooted in the divine natures, and represent one of the gifts of the spirit. The ‘space’ within which social and per-

116 NATURE AND SPIRIT sonal growth can occur is preserved by the divine and this ‘space’ can only prevail through the divine. Bloch develops another metaphor for articulating the movement

of utopian expectation within the life of the community. Augmenting and deepening teleological language is the metaphor of the “‘not-yet’’ that governs social evolution: The Not as Not-Yet passes straight through Becomeness and beyond it; hunger becomes the force of production on the repeatedly bursting Front of an unfinished world. The Not as processive NotYet thus turns utopia into the real condition of unfinishedness, of only fragmentary essential being in all objects. Hence the world as process is itself the enormous testing of its satisfied solution, that is, of the realm of its satisfaction."'

The metaphor of the “‘not yet” points to the ‘space’ within which transformations can occur. The “not-yet’’is manifest in a rich variety of ways and in many ordinal locations. Bloch errs in giving too much license to the “not-yet” and argues as if it is free from finite constraints and conditions of origin. Yet the metaphor is a valuable one and will make it possible to illuminate the variety of ways in which emancipatory structures become available to com-

munities. Metaphysically, the concept or metaphor of the “notyet” represents one aspect of the ontological difference. That 1s, the difference between given orders and that which cannot be specified as a given order emerges more clearly through the metaphor of the “‘not-yet.”’ Those orders that are strongly relevant to communal transformation ‘contain’ a “‘not-yet’”’ that can help to free interpreters from the solidified powers of origin. The “‘not-yet”’ is not an empty void that stands outside of the

orders of the world, but is an opening power that has its own innumerable ordinal locations. In the next chapter we will detail the ways in which the “not-yet” is manifest in several forms of semiosis. Our present concern is with the correlation between the ‘“not-yet”’ and social transformation. Bloch’s language of the “bursting Front” is perhaps too strong, but it conveys some of the power of the “‘not-yet”’ as it goads finite communities beyond their concresced forms of interaction. A natural community reduces the

“not-yet” to a set of projects that merely reiterate its covert and private interests. Consequently, there is no radical difference be-

SIGNS OF COMMUNITY 117 tween concrete social projects and the ersatz utopian expectation. An interpretive community will recognize the profound difference between its current sign systems and projects, on the one hand, and its genuine utopian expectation, on the other. In its truest form, the ‘“‘not-yet”’ lives within social semiosis and allows interpreters to become free from the density of their sign

systems. A gap opens up within and around each sign system, compelling such systems to ‘recognize’ their limitations. No system can desire totalization if it is permeated with the “not-yet.”’ Put differently: the “‘not-yet’’ undermines that form of idolatry which confuses a sign system with the world that it is struggling to articulate. The difference between signs and the world becomes manifest through the “‘not-yet.”’ The imperial and opaque signs of a natural community do not admit the “not-yet,”’ and are conse-

quently mere tools of origin and of hidden interests. A natural community cannot be liberated from its own habits without the power of the “not-yet.”’ Royce’s concept of the ““community of expectation”’ converges with, but is not identical with, the concept of the “‘not-yet.”’ The community of interpreters lives out of the “‘not-yet”’ and has symbols that keep expectation alive. The concept of the “‘not-yet”’ is broader in scope than the concept of the “‘community of expectation.” The “not-yet”’ is manifest in precommunal orders, and pre-

vails within many of the orders of the world, whereas the community of expectation is, by definition, limited to certain types of human community. The ‘space’ that opens up developmental teleological possibilities is actually a gift of the “not-yet.”’ Selving, insofar as it is always incomplete, is held open as a process by the power of the “‘not-yet.’’ On the deepest level, the spirit is the elusive and protean power that lies ‘behind’ the “not-yet.”’

The community of interpreters remains free from antidemocratic forces whenever it becomes permeable to the “‘not-yet’’ and its spiritual core. Hermeneutic strategies become less opaque and

more open to the spiritual impulses that move the community away from destructive forms of interaction. Critical common sense, the most ubiquitous of all hermeneutic strategies, evolves toward a more thematic and conscious understanding of its inner possibilities. Common sense, when bereft of its self-critical edge, remains too close to the powers of origin. When common sense

118 NATURE AND SPIRIT becomes critical and understands its own limitations, it lives out

of the spirit. The “not-yet’’ of the future keeps common sense Open to an expansion of its semiotic stock, and thus makes it more flexible. New constructive habits emerge out of the ‘space’ of the

‘not-yet,”” and enable the interpretive community to adapt to changing circumstances. Interpretive communities thus become flexible and open to alternative sign systems. Democratic reconstruction is only possible

when the power of the “not-yet’’ frees the community from the “powers” that haunt communal life. Democratic reconstruction entails that all selves be granted an equal hermeneutic status within the community. Consequently, each self is encouraged to participate fully in the analysis and critique of communal sign systems. No interpretive stance is rejected out of hand; nor is the mystery of the spirit reduced to the notion of communal energy. As noted by Dewey, meanings emerge out of energies when these energies become focused into specific signs. The depth dimension of this transition from energy to meaning is the power of the spirit that is always ready to surprise interpreters with novel and more generic

interpretations of the common stock. The “not-yet”’ of the spirit preserves each interpretive addition from premature closure and protects the infinite worth of each interpreter against those who would privilege certain subgroups within the community as a whole.

Signs become symbols through the power of the “not-yet”’ which opens all signs to the more elusive realms of the spirit. Some signs seek to circumscribe their referents and to have clearly demarcated boundaries, whereas symbols efface themselves before

the spirit. The depth dimension of any symbol is religious. The concept of the “religious” should not be confined to some notion of a special religious sphere that is discontinuous with so-called secular spheres. The distinction between the sacred and the secular is arbitrarily drawn and does not reflect the phenomenological ev-

idence. Any order can become ‘religious’ insofar as it becomes permeable to the spirit. In rejecting the medieval distinction of degrees of participation in being, the ordinal perspective also rejects the concept that there are clearly marked boundaries between the religious and the nonreligious. Put in more positive terms: all orders are religious whenever they become loci of the spirit. Any

SIGNS OF COMMUNITY 119 sign can become a symbol whenever the spirit enables it to let go of specific referents. The “‘not-yet” of the interpretive community articulates itself through symbols of expectation. Positive utopian expectation, the social form of hope, is concretized in those symbols that let the spirit become available to the community. The concept of “grace”’ pertains to both personal and social life. Insofar as a community lives out of the “‘not-yet’’ of its concrete symbols, it experiences the grace that comes from the spirit. This grace comforts and emboldens the community so that it can continue to struggle against the heteronomous forces (the “‘powers’’) that would drag it back toward origins. By the same token, grace gives individual interpreters the courage to sustain the complexities of democratic life. NOTES

1. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce,

Vols. I-VI, edd. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1931-1935); Vols. VII-VIII, ed. Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958). References are given in the text in parentheses according to the standard convention of volume number followed by a period and paragraph number. 2. The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, edd. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Seboek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 205.

3. C. G. Jung, “The Fight with the Shadow,” Civilization in Transition, trans. R. F C. Hull, 2nd ed., Collected Works 10 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 219. 4. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Holt, 1927), p. 153.

5. Ibid., p. 142. 6. Ibid., p. 148. 7. Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 16-17. 8. Ibid., p. 19. 9. Principle of Hope, p. 146.

10. Ibid., pp. 197-98. 11. Ibid., pp. 308-309.

3

Worldhood THE “How” or WorLDHOOD DOES THE WORLD ‘HAVE’ WORLDHOOD, or is it merely a constitutive

feature of the human process? To answer this question properly it is necessary to probe into the various meanings of the ontological difference, and into the complex relations between signs and the

world to which they point. Ecstatic naturalism attempts to describe the phenomenon of worldhood as it becomes relevant to the

human process and to communities of interpretation. Most important, worldhood must be described as it emerges out of our contact with the divine natures as manifest in the phenomenon of hope. The phenomenon of worldhood is quite complex in its manifestation and cannot be reduced to a cluster of spatial or container analogies. Put in positive terms: worldhood is that which provides the clearing for our understanding of all intraworldly complexes. Each complex or order ‘contains’ its own “more,” which points to co-present traits that are not immediately available to phenom-

enological insight. By the same token, each complex points toward orders of relevance that may be either actual or potential. In rotating a complex through its various orders of relevance, it is

recognized that no final, or clear and distinct, contour will emerge. Even so-called past complexes may admit new interpretive traits into their contour, or may lose some of the interpretive traits that they have. Put differently: any given complex, no matter how ‘simple,’ will have its own horizon of intelligibility or relevance that eludes complete comprehension. The horizon of any complex will be distinct from the complex-as-then-interpreted. Of course, the concept of horizon is most fully expressed in the human process, where the main features of the horizon can move toward some form of intelligibility. Be that as it may, no horizon 120

WORLDHOOD 121 is ever fully available to interpreters, and is radically other to that which is embedded in it. The phenomenon of worldhood is of greater scope than the var-

ious horizons of the human process. It makes sense to speak of numerous horizons of meaning, but not of numerous worldhoods. In colloquial terms, it makes sense to speak of the “world of commerce”’ or the “world of finite sets,’” but such formulations point more directly to the nature of horizons than to worldhood. The concept of “worldhood”’ retains a special place precisely because it

cannot be pluralized, like the concepts of “world” or “horizon.”’ Worldhood is that which is ‘greater’ than any horizon of meaning,

and serves to hold open the realms of meaning for the human process. As noted in the introduction, the metaphor of the ‘“midworld” points to the realm within which horizons wax and wane. The phenomenon of worldhood is of greater scope than the “midworld”’ because it is not exclusively tied to orders of meaning as these orders remain bound to horizons. Horizons participate in the ontological difference insofar as they are radically distinct from that which generates and sustains them. Worldhood participates in the ontological difference insofar as it is radically other to all horizons and to all sign systems. The various

dimensions of the ontological difference cannot be brought together through some governing analogy or conceptual strategy. It is important to stress that the poles of the ontological difference remain in constant tension, and refuse to collapse together into an order of intelligibility. The nether side of the ontological difference, that is, the side that turns away from our gaze, is ‘responsible’ for opening out all realms of meaning and value to the human process. Worldhood is thus ‘beneath’ all finite sign systems and meaning horizons, enabling them to emerge into clarity in the first

place. !

Using slightly different language, Buchler sharpens the conceptual distinctions that make it possible to move toward a sense of worldhood. His term “‘world”’ is here seen to be equivalent to our term “‘worldhood.” Buchler is using the term “‘world’’ not in the colloquial sense, but in a technical sense: “The World cannot be located, for it would have to be located in an order which would

be more inclusive. The World cannot be included, for it would then be not the World but one more order, one more sub-com-

122 NATURE AND SPIRIT plex. The World cannot be environed, as every order can and must

be, for that which environs would be a complex distinctly additional to the World—an absurdity.’ All the features that pertain to complexes, namely, that they are located, environed, and inclusive of subaltern traits, cannot pertain to worldhood. It makes no

sense to ask where worldhood is “located,” any more than it makes sense to see worldhood as some container of all containers that would place all orders within some kind of antecedent framework. Of course, the human process is often compelled to reduce worldhood to intraworldly traits so that it can be assimilated and dominated. Worldhood has no ordinal location, and is an exception to the principle of ordinality, which insists that all complexes have an ordinal location. As always, the tensions within the ontological difference are often ignored so that a kind of ersatz intelligibility can conquer the nether side of the ontological difference.

Heidegger explored various features of worldhood from the standpoint of his Daseinsanalytik (analytic of the there-being of the person). Unfortunately, he often privileged the traits of the human process and tied them too directly to the various manifestations of transcendence. His procedure moves outward from human products and involvements toward the various horizons of interaction that govern our manipulation of the common materials of life. He

emphasizes the importance of our pre-thematic involvements in his 1927 work, Being and Time: “‘Being-in-the-world, according to

our Interpretation hitherto, amounts to a non-thematic circumspective absorption in references or assignments constitutive for the readiness-to-hand of a totality of equipment. Any concern is already as it is, because of some familiarity with the world.’’? The concept of “‘readiness-to-hand”’ (Zuhandenheit) refers to the immediate realm of equipment that is grasped and used within a pre-

thematic context of references and involvements. As the person uses equipment, he or she quickly becomes part of a totality of involvements that eclipse conscious apprehension and analysis. The web of involvements illuminates the basic features of the world and makes it possible to gain access to a preliminary sense of worldhood. In some sense, the human process could not use any form of the ready-to-hand were it not for a pre-thematic grasp of worldhood. From the grasp of equipment to the sense of the world-of-in-

WORLDHOOD 123 volvements, the human process becomes permeable to that which

is not an equipment or a world-of-involvement, namely, to the world per se. The concept of worldhood remains tied to the socalled primal phenomenon of “‘Being-in-the-world.” Heidegger adumbrates a semiotic theory insofar as he ties the use of the sign to the illumination of worldhood. We discover equipment (Zeng) in and through signs which have an immediate relation to the web of involvements surrounding given pieces of equipment. The sign (Zeichen) participates in the larger orders of relevance that make a

particular piece of equipment meaningful in the first place. Through signs we gain some sense of the world that supports and surrounds our equipment. In Being and Time, Heidegger describes this relation: “‘A sign is not a Thing which stands to another Thing in the relationship of indicating; it is rather an item of equipment which explicitly raises a totality of equipment into our circumspection so that together with it the worldly character of the ready-to-hand announces

itself.”’? Through the power of the sign, we open up the outer reaches of the equipmental totality and enter into the “worldly” character of the ‘“‘ready-to-hand.”’ It is important to stress that Hei-

degger embeds semiosis within the emergent orders of the world as they become manifest through human involvements. The signrelation is integral to the emergent sense of worldhood. While Heidegger advanced beyond Husserl’s subjectivism and emphasis on the cogito, he argues as if worldhood is one of several key traits of the human process. However, his own innovations have made it possible to develop a phenomenologically rich portrayal of worldhood. Writing in 1929, Heidegger advances a concept of worldhood, using the term “‘world,”’ that brings us closer to the ordinal perspective: 1. World means a How of the being [Wie des Seins| of Being rather

than being itself. 2. This How defines being in its totality. It is ul-

timately the possibility of every How as limit and measure (Mass). 3. The How in its totality is in a certain way primary. 4. This primary How in its totality is itself relative [relativ auf] to human Dasein. Thus the world belongs strictly to human Dasein, although it encompasses (umereift) all being, Dasein included, in its totality.‘

These four claims delimit the ways in which worldhood pertains to Being and to the human process. In order to reconstruct Hei-

124 NATURE AND SPIRIT degger’s perspective from the standpoint of ordinal phenomenology, we must examine each of these claims in turn. Heidegger moved through the human process (Dasein) toward an evocation of the question of Being (die Seinsfrage) so as to reawaken this elusive question that lies at the heart of the ontological difference. His conception of worldhood (“‘world’’) lies ‘between’ the conceptions of “‘a being” and “‘Being.”’ Consequently, worldhood has a unique ontological status. In our terms, worldhood emerges out of nature

naturing and represents the clearing within which the human process encounters nature natured. Heidegger’s first claim, ‘“World means a How of the being of Be-

ing rather than being itself,”’ points directly to the ejective quality of worldhood. That is, worldhood (world) is not Being, but is the “How” (Wie) for Being’s appearance within the confines of the

human process. It is as if Being ejects worldhood from itself in order to become relevant to the human process. This primal ‘“How”’ is that which makes it possible for persons to have and endure a world at all. All intraworldly complexes derive their meaning and value from the primal “How” of worldhood. It is important to stress that this “How” is not an intelligible or demarcated order that can impose itself on subaltern orders. The “How” of worldhood is elusive in its manifestations and points ‘backward’ toward Being. In our terms, the ‘“‘How”’ of worldhood

points toward nature naturing, toward the potencies of nature. Worldhood is transparent insofar as it ‘serves’ the potencies of nature, and ‘refuses’ to become an order in its own right. The transition from worldhood, as a primal ““How,”’ toward the more concrete understanding of ““measure’’ occurs in Heidegger’s second claim, which asserts, “This How defines being in its totality. It is ultimately the possibility of every How as limit and measure (Mass).’’ The primal ““How”’ of worldhood becomes ordinally located through the innumerable “‘Hows”’ of the world. Each or-

, der has its own “How”’ that provides the measure within which it unfolds and prevails. The concept of ““measure”’ points to the continuing dynamic tension between the primal “‘How”’ of worldhood and the innumerable “‘Hows”’ of the world. Each intraworldly order is measured by worldhood, and exerts its own counterpressure

on worldhood. However, worldhood is not, itself, measured by some order outside of itself. Nature in its naturing measures

WORLDHOOD 125 worldhood but is not, itself, an order. The ontological difference is manifest differently in each of these dimensions. The difference between worldhood and any given order is manifest in the tension between the primal “How” and the innumerable “Hows’”’ that govern and measure orders. The difference between worldhood and nature naturing is manifest in the tension between the primal “How” that is driven toward particular manifestations, and the preformal potencies of a nature that prescinds from particularity. Worldhood is the primal eject of nature naturing, and points in two directions. On the one hand, worldhood points toward the innumerable ‘‘Hows”’ of the world’s orders and infuses each of these “Hows” with its primal “How.”’ On the other hand, worldhood points ‘backward’ toward the preformal potencies that measure worldhood, without themselves being measured. Nature in its naturing is a measureless measure that makes all measure possible. Heidegger’s third claim, ““The How in its totality is in a certain

way primary,’ emerges from the first two considerations. Of course, the concept of “‘totality” is deeply problematic. The primal “How” of worldhood cannot be a totality in the sense of a ‘sum’ of all measures, or a ‘sum’ of all orders. It is impossible to enumerate all orders as if the concept of finite number can apply to the world. Nor can we somehow add together the elusive measures that govern orders. If the concept of “‘totality”’ is used to point to the sheer difference between orders and that which is not

an order or sum of orders, then it can function to demarcate worldhood from intraworldly actualities and possibilities. The limitations of Heidegger’s perspective become more obvious in his fourth claim, ““This primary How in its totality is itself relative to human Dasein. Thus the world belongs strictly to human Dasein, although it encompasses (umegreift) all being, Dasein in-

cluded, in its totality.’ Here, he ties the phenomenon of worldhood to the human process. His concepts actually move in two directions, reflecting the difficulty in showing how worldhood both is and is not independent of the human process. Worldhood, as the primal “How,” becomes manifest to the human process (Dasein), and is held to be relative to that process. If by “‘relative”’

is meant that worldhood cannot prevail outside of the human process, then Heidegger’s perspective privileges the human subject. If by “‘relative” is meant something like “relevant,” then we

126 NATURE AND SPIRIT are moving closer to the perspective of ecstatic naturalism. World-

hood may or may not be relative to the human process, but it is clearly relevant to all that persons experience and undergo. Put differently: worldhood is relevant to the orders of meaning that prevail within and around the human process because it provides the clearing within which it is possible to have meaning and measure in the first place. Worldhood may be relevant to other orders besides the human process, and it is presumptuous to assume that it is confined to one of its ‘places’ of actualization. Heidegger’s second statement in the fourth claim moves closer

toward the ordinal perspective in its image of encompassment. Worldhood encompasses the human process and the ‘totality’ of intraworldly orders, providing the measure by and through which each “How” can prevail and govern complexes. It brooks confusion to say that worldhood (or ‘‘World,”’ to use the technical term from Being and Time) “‘belongs”’ to the human process, as if it were

one trait among others that are somehow contained within the self. It is as though Heidegger remained unable to emancipate his concept of worldhood (world) from his Daseinsanalytik. Yet he was

able to show some of the features of worldhood as it becomes relevant to the innumerable Hows of the world. The concept of ‘““measure’’ (Mass) is crucial to the elucidation of the primal ‘““How,”’ as it exhibits the means by and through which the ““How”’

becomes relevant to the innumerable orders of the world. Worldhood, that is, nature natured, provides the measure for ‘all’ complexes ‘within’ the world. This measure is not a static imposition of place or sheer location, but lives as the enabling condition for all intraworldly forms of relevance. One complex becomes relevant (either weakly or strongly) to another as it ‘lives’ out of the clearing held open by worldhood. Of course, orders are or become relevant to each other on their own terms as well, but the primal “How” of worldhood makes any form of intraworldly relevance possible at all. If Heidegger envisions ‘“‘Being”’ as that which sends worldhood

forth, ecstatic naturalism prefers to speak of nature naturing. The concept of ‘‘Being,”’ in spite of Heidegger’s elaborations to the contrary, continues to invoke static conceptions of space-time particulars and their traits. Do possibilities have ““Being’’? Do the preformal potencies of nature have ““Being’’? What kind of “Being”’

WORLDHOOD 127 does a law (Peirce’s ‘“‘general’’) have? These and similar vexing questions point to the difficulty in finding a sufficiently generic meaning for the concept of “Being.”’ The concept of “‘nature naturing,” on the other hand, is of sufficient scope to ‘encompass’

all complexes, whether they satisfy the perennial model of the space-time particular or not. Nature naturing is pervasive and manifest in all orders, even though not an order itself. A law or cosmic regularity is a manifestation of a concresced potency and can be explored and manipulated fully as much as any spatial complex. Possibilities have ordinal locations and are themselves manifestations of nature in its naturing. It is not helpful to ask whether a possibility exists when not actualized. Insofar as a given possibility prevails in an order, it has relevance for that order, whether actualized or not. Nature naturing preserves the innumerable possibilities that prevail in the world. Potency is prior to possibility, in the sense that all possibilities emerge from the preformal potencies that sustain the world and its complexes. Potencies do not have ordinal locations but make it possible for possibilities and actualities to prevail and thus have their own ordinal locations.

The distinction between being and nonbeing operates within critical common sense to demarcate those traits which are held to

be efficacious from those which are held not to be. These twin concepts do not function within a thematic and generic perspective precisely because they imply degrees of being or degrees of nonbe-

ing, and tie these distinctions to immediate practical concerns. Does James Joyce’s literary character Leopold Bloom have less be-

ing than a contemporary reader? Does Bloom have more being than his now-dead creator? When Joyce was alive, did he have more

being that his products? Again, these questions only make sense in the orders of critical common sense, where certain practical decisions have to be made concerning degrees of efficacy. Yet, even here, these decisions may betray a lack of insight into the kinds of efficacy in the world. Insofar as Leopold Bloom generates novel and creative assimilations among new writers, he is more efficacious than his creator, whose actual efficacy is continually fading. Consequently, the concepts of “‘being”’ and “‘nonbeing”’ should play only a limited role in philosophy, even though they are indispensable to common sense. In probing into the traits of worldhood, the traits of orders and

128 NATURE AND SPIRIT of nature naturing become more sharply defined. The ontological difference functions in each of these realms, but prevails somewhat differently in each case. What emerges is an incremental series in which greater degrees of scope become elucidated. In the least generic realm is a given order or complex. In the next generic realm is a region of complexes that are relevant to each other. In the next realm is a given world, which has its own orders of relevance that encompasses orders and regions. In the next realm is the phenomenon of worldhood itself. Finally, what becomes manifest is nature naturing, which is not an order or order of orders. It is tempting to speak of these realms as “‘levels,’”’ insofar as each subsequent member of the series seems to transcend and encompass its antecedent realms. However, such a metaphor only reinforces the commitment to degrees of reality and would also fail to show the interconnections among these realms. Needless to say, the metaphor of “realms”’ has its own limitations because it spatializes something that need not be spatial. On the positive side, the concept of “realms” points to somewhat distinct spheres of relevance and the sense of degrees of encompassment. The metaphor can be retained if it is not confined to its spatial suggestiveness. Martin Buber exhibits the tensions between “‘realms”’ and the world (worldhood) in his 1951 essay, “Distance and Relation,” which contrasts the realm (Umwelt) lived in by an animal with the world (Welt) occupied by a person. His account is, in some respects, parallel to that of Heidegger, but displays much greater sensitivity to the actual movement that makes it possible to have some sense of worldhood at all. Animals cannot make the transition to an experience of worldhood because they lack the ability to set the world over against themselves, that is, to distance themselves from a totality. Buber sees the human process as living out of a twofold movement: In this way we reach the insight that the principle of human life is

not simple but twofold, being built up in a twofold movement which is of such kind that the one movement is the presupposition of the other. I propose to call the first movement ‘‘the primal setting at a distance’’ and the second “entering into relation.” That the first movement is the presupposition of the other is plain from the fact that one can enter into relation only with being which has been set at a distance, more precisely, has become an independent opposite. And it is only for man that an independent opposite exists.°

WORLDHOOD 129 To set the world at a distance is to make it possible for the self to make worldhood thematic. An animal lives in its Umwelt with no possibility of seeing the realm or environment as a realm or environment. The fish cannot make water a totality over against itself, and thereby render the water into a thematic presence. Put differently: no animal can experience the ontological difference between realms (orders) and worldhood. Once the human process had engaged in the universal and primal act of “‘setting at a distance,”’ it can enter into forms of relationality that are personal and not universal. Buber makes it clear that the human process is what it is because of the primal act of

distancing that makes an experience of the world, as a totality, possible. Of course, the concept of “‘totality”’ used here does not denote a closed or bounded actuality that surrounds the self, but refers to the utter infinity of worldhood as over against more circumscribed realms of interaction. Buber states: With soaring power he reaches out beyond what is given him, flies

beyond the horizon and the familiar stars, and grasps a totality. With him, with his human life, a world exists. . . . Man is like this because he is the creature (Wesen) through whose being (Sein) ‘“‘What

is” (das Seiende) becomes detached from him, and recognized for itself. It is only the realm which is removed, lifted out from sheer presence, withdrawn from the operation of needs and wants, set at a distance and thereby given over to itself, which is more and other than a realm. Only when a structure of being is independently over against a living being (Seiende), an independent opposite, does a world exist.°

The self moves beyond the confines of given realms or orders of relevance, and places each such order at a distance. All realms become distanced from the self, so that the more primal phenomenon of worldhood can become starkly thematic and present. Of course, worldhood is present to the self in a different way than a given realm will be present. Realms have local and regional features which are clearly delimited, and which thus serve to shape

the contour of the realm. Worldhood, on the other hand, is far more elusive, and has no specific contour that can be mapped by the self.

The human process enters into forms of mutuality only after its encounter with worldhood. “Entering into relation” requires a re-

130 NATURE AND SPIRIT turn to particular and finite forms of embodiment. The countermovement to distancing is thus one that allows other selves to become present in such a way as to open up communication and full reciprocity. Buber refers to this second process as the “mutuality of the making present.’’ One self becomes permeable to another only after returning from the sensed ‘totality’ of worldhood. Buber reminds us that the fullness of human encounter cannot occur without a primal sense of worldhood. The dimension missed by Heidegger is opened up in Buber’s analysis of ““making present,” where the human process reaches its depth dimension only insofar as it becomes radically open to another self.

The specific means of the transition from a bare and pre-thematic Umwelt to a sense of worldhood is that of tool use, and its later augmentation in decorative art. Buber argues that the development of tools made it possible for early humans to begin to distance themselves from the practical and ofttimes numinous realms within which tools function. The tools opened out the great ““between”’ that separates the self from its world. Once the “between” became dimly sensed, the movement toward worldhood was possible. Buber and Heidegger concur on the centrality of tool use in the preservation of our sense of worldhood. Buber augments and transforms the phenomenological description of tool use by showing how it relates to the twofold movement of setting at a distance and bringing into relation. More important, he opens out the psychological and anthropological corollaries of the movement toward a sense of worldhood, and thereby makes this primal transition more concrete. An order has its own spheres of relevance, power, and scope. It has traits that may or may not become part of specific other orders. As noted, each complex or order has its own ‘“‘more,”’ which becomes indirectly available to phenomenological insight. Every or-

der is limited and shaped by at least some other orders. Consequently, the efficacy of any order is determined by its various ordinal locations and their attendant preservation or cancellation of possibilities. The contour of this ““more’’ remains elusive even if it may show some of its general features. Insofar as a complex obtains at all, it does so within vast orders of relevance that exert their own forms of power. The difference between an order and its ““more”’ is an ontologi-

WORLDHOOD 131 cal difference because it cannot be reduced to a matter of degree. The “more” that ‘surrounds’ any complex lies forever beyond human assimilation. There is no such thing as a complete or finished order precisely because the “more” is indefinitely ramifiable. The complex can no more fill in its “more” than the “‘more’’ can become fully actualized and self-contained. The relation between an order and its ““more’’ remains fragmented and incomplete, thus exhibiting the profound difference between that which is an order and the innumerable lines of actual and possible relevance that “belong’ to it. While the human process often denies this form of the ontological difference, preferring to see orders as self-contained and circumscribable, it prevails nonetheless, and makes it clear that all thought systems are profoundly limited in their scope. Orders do not occur alone, however, but belong with other orders that share some traits in common. It makes no sense to talk

of an isolated or purely private order. Every order has its own suborders, and is located within larger orders. Orders are thus regionally constituted and help to shape and define specific regions of relevance. The concept of a “‘region”’ should not imply that such groupings are self-encapsulated and detached from other regions. Any given region may change its trait contour, and become trans-

formed into something else. By the same token, a given region will become relevant to some other regions, but not to all regions. From the standpoint of the human process, some orders seem to ‘announce’ their regional affiliations, while some others are clearly

brought into a region by human contrivance. The former case is exhibited in those natural groupings that are the subject of biological investigation. Thus, for example, phylogenetic identifications, while sometimes difficult to make in borderline cases, correspond

to certain features in organisms that show a high degree of conformity and regularity. The latter case is exhibited in a merely conventional semiotic scheme that brings disparate orders under a common typology by isolating insignificant or nongeneric features in the orders under analysis. Somewhere between these extremes are those regional designations that struggle with recalcitrant or highly ramified orders. This can be seen in certain cases of historical identification where is it difficult to know when a given order belongs to a regional configuration. For example, the movement known as ‘“‘midwest Hegelianism,”’ centering around

132 NATURE AND SPIRIT St. Louis and Cincinnati in the mid-nineteenth century, may or may not be seen as belonging to the larger historical movement of an autochthonous American philosophy. More encompassing than a region is a horizon or a world. The concept of ‘‘a horizon”’ is tied to notions of intelligibility and human assimilation, whereas the concept of ‘‘a world” need not be. In either case, various regions are brought under a larger order that gives them some sense of meaning and place. Worlds need not be thematic or consciously understood to function. For example, the world of gossip may function to redirect and alter the movement of a given self, even though that self may not be aware of its efficacy. Certain possibilities may suddenly appear, and certain others may recede, as the world of gossip expands its silent force. Worlds

have their own inner logic, and exert pressure on their regional configurations. Any complex or region that prevails within a world or horizon will be marked by its inclusion in that larger realm. If the human process lives within and among various communities, it also prevails within numerous worlds. The concept of ‘‘a world” is a broader ontological scope than the concept of “‘a community” but they both point to a dimension of the ontological difference. Worlds are distinct from the regions and complexes ‘contained’ within them, and are far more than the mere sum of their subaltern configurations. The difference between a region and a world (or a horizon) is unbridgeable by analogies or conceptual strategies. Put in hermeneutic terms: it takes a very different type of interpretive strategy to understand a world than to understand a region. The difference is not merely quantitative or even qualitative, but ontological. That is, worlds prevail in distinctive ways.

Worldhood is neither the ‘sum’ of worlds (horizons) nor the place of places that would provide clear and distinct forms of intelligibility for the human process. The phenomenon of worldhood cannot be intelligible in the same way that a world is intelligible precisely because it provides for the very possibility of understanding. From the standpoint of the human process, worldhood is the access structure that enables the self to transcend the opacity of origins and enter into the ‘space’ of awareness. While animals may experience a muted form of worldhood, the human process is what it is because it is gathered into this dimension of

WORLDHOOD 133 the ontological difference. As will become clear, the spirit lives in the outer circumference of worldhood as its empowering force. WEAK, STRONG, AND SHEER RELEVANCE

Throughout this discussion, I have used the concepts of ““weak”’ and “‘strong relevance.” A complex, region, or world is weakly relevant to another complex, region, or world whenever it merely affects its scope. Put differently: weak relevance obtains whenever something is slightly enhanced or diminished by something else. A complex, region, or world is strongly relevant to another complex, region, or world whenever it affects its integrity or identity. This type of relevance alters the more fundamental traits of something, and helps to shape a new contour. Which of these two forms of relevance is to be applied when describing the relation between

worldhood and the human process? Does worldhood affect the scope of the self by adding to, or diminishing from, any given order? No, for worldhood does not change any given trait configuration, or alter the self in a given order. Does worldhood affect the integrity of the self by giving it a new identity or a new contour? Again, the answer is no, because worldhood acts indifferently in all human orders, and does not affect one more than another. In a striking sense, worldhood is indifferent to all problems of scope and identity. Consequently, neither weak nor strong forms of relevance pertain to the correlation of worldhood and the human process. It is necessary to broaden the concept of relevance to include another form. In addition to weak and strong relevance, we can now speak of “sheer” relevance. The concept of “‘sheer relevance”’ harks back to Schleiermacher’s concept of “‘absolute dependence,”’ where he articulates the most basic feature of the human process as it encounters the infinite. Unlike finite forms of dependence, absolute dependence has a unique ‘object,’ and can prevail only insofar as it is connected to that object. Schleiermacher’s image of the absolute quality of this experience invokes a Romantic metaphysics that is inappropriate in the perspective of ecstatic naturalism. The metaphor of “sheer dependence”’ (or “relevance’’) is less obtrusive and better corresponds to the actual phenomenological data. Thus, the

relation between worldhood and the human process will be described in terms of “sheer relevance.”’

134 NATURE AND SPIRIT Worldhood is more relevant to the human process than any given order, region, or world (horizon) even though it seems to have far less efficacy or impact. But the impact of worldhood is such that it pervades all aspects of the human process, and lives within the tensions between finitude and transcendence. Heidegger erred in correlating worldhood with transcendence, thus ignoring its relation to finitude. Human forms of embodiment, human products, and all of the powers of origin emerge into the orders of relevance through the phenomenon of worldhood. By the same token, the various forces of transcendence that permeate the human process emerge into their forms of relevance through the phenomenon of worldhood. This is not to say that weak and strong forms of relevance are dependent on sheer relevance, but that these three forms prevail in different ways. Sheer relevance 1s

ubiquitous throughout nature, but is less obvious precisely because of its quiet manifestations. While not altering the scope or integrity of the human process, it is the access structure that brings the self into the innumerable orders of intelligibility. The human process is correlated to orders, regions, worlds, and worldhood. Weak and strong forms of relevance emerge from the ongoing relation between the self and intraworldly orders. Sheer relevance ‘underlies’ the weak and strong forms insofar as it correlates the self to the nonlocated phenomenon of worldhood. The

self is molded and located by innumerable orders and, in turn, helps to shape a number of these orders toward human ends. Worldhood, on the other hand, neither shapes nor can be shaped by the human process. It is the enabling condition (access structure) for the human apprehension of intraworldly complexes. Worldhood’s ‘indifference’ to the various ordinal locations of the human process precludes the possibility that it can be conquered for finite goals.

The primal “How” (Heidegger) of worldhood is indifferent to the orders that come under its measure (Mass). The concept of ‘“‘measure’’ must be broadly drawn to preclude any mechanical or causal imagery that would reduce it to the imposition of an alien form. In its broadest sense, measure is the enabling condition for

the various measures operative in intraworldly orders. Measure emerges from nature naturing and gives worldhood to the human process. The self experiences the sheer relevance of worldhood and

WORLDHOOD 135 participates in the ontological difference between horizons (worlds) and the primal phenomenon of worldhood. From the standpoint of the human process, sheer dependence is most clearly

manifest in the experience of radical hope. The phenomenon of hope is bound to the ontological difference and enters into the clearing of worldhood.

Heidegger quite correctly tied the phenomenon of worldhood to that of time, remembering that hope emerges out of the fulfilled time of the kairos. In his early work, The Basic Problems of Phenom-

enology, Heidegger attempts to articulate how time and intraworldly beings are transformed when approaching the phenomenon of worldhood: If we remain with the image of embrace, time is that which is further outside, as compared with movements and with all beings that move or are at rest. It embraces or holds around the moving and resting things. We may designate it by an expression whose beauty may be contested: time has the character of a holdaround |Um-halt], since it holds beings— moving and resting —around. In a suitable sense we

can call time, as this holder-around, a container, provided we do not take “‘container”’ in the literal sense of a receptacle like a class or a box but retain simply the formal element of holding-around.’

While Heidegger locates this particular discussion of time against the backdrop of Aristotle’s time theory, his basic delineations are appropriate for furthering the ordinal analysis of how time, hope, and worldhood are correlated. Heidegger firmly rejects any spatial (container) imagery that would reduce time to a box within which beings move from the present to the past. By the same token, his

image of the “holdaround” (Um-halt) gives some sense of how time, as fulfilled in the kairos, encompasses all orders (beings). Worldhood becomes available to the human process through the ““holdaround”’ of that time which appears within hope. The Heideggerian metaphors of the primal “How” and the “holdaround”’ point toward the unique phenomenality of worldhood. Even if Heidegger does privilege human temporality and its own powers of transcendence, he recognizes how the ontological difference transforms the human process as it maves closer to an understanding of worldhood. Unfortunately, his emphasis on the phenomenon of anxiety (Angst) as the most basic revelatory mood of the

136 NATURE AND SPIRIT human process made it impossible for him to penetrate into the deeper power of hope as it emerges from transformed temporality. If Heidegger remains in a subjective posture, in spite of his exten-

sive statements and strategic moves to the contrary, it is largely due to his failure to recognize the gift of hope as it comes to the human process from the self-giving of worldhood. The subjective stance can be overcome when the human process

experiences the natural grace that is the gift of worldhood. The self participates in a transpersonal reality that cannot be reduced to the ‘sum’ of human projections. Is worldhood understood as such? This is not an easy question. Certainly the concept of worldhood is rarely thematized. Yet some sense of the quiet power of worldhood always seems available to the human process. Whenever an horizon or world begins to show its limitations, the movement of encompassment becomes quickened, and the self passes from one self-contained realm of meaning to another. In going beyond the

earlier confines of one horizon, the sense of movement on the boundaries takes hold of the self, if only for the briefest moment. In a striking sense, worldhood is a process as much as a structure.

It is the enabling condition for the back-and-forth movement among horizons. Worldhood frees the self from the idolatry that

would cling to one horizon to the exclusion of all others. Of course, demonic distortions plague the human process and cloud the phenomenon of worldhood. Natural grace does not impose itself on the human process, and will only appear when the conditions are right. The concept of the “‘not-yet” pertains to the phenomenon of worldhood, and shows the human process that it is always incomplete and fragmented. Utopian expectations, whether personal or

social, belong to the phenomenon of worldhood as its concrete content. There is a dialectical tension between the human need for specific utopian imagery and the content-free phenomenality of worldhood. Were the human process different, it could emancipate

itself from utopian content, and enter into the empty space of worldhood. The tension between specific content and an empty worldhood mirrors the tension between finitude and transcendence. As finite, the self requires utopian contents that have time and place referents as well as expressive traits. As transcendent, the self seeks to become free of all such local or regional referents and

WORLDHOOD 137 to enter the pure process of worldhood. Whenever the finite needs of the self eclipse the phenomenon of worldhood, utopian expectation becomes demonic. Can the self enter into the process of worldhood without bring-

ing specific utopian contents? No, for the self must express its primal “‘not-yet”’ through configurations that carry forth its internal semiotic wealth. Consequently, the human process must endure this tension between content and radical emptiness and find some way of attuning all utopian contents to that which has no content. A specific utopian expectation, as a manifestation of the ““not-yet,’’ stands on ‘this’ side of the ontological difference, whereas the process of worldhood, as the source of all utopian hope, stands on its nether side, empowering yet judging all specific utopian contents. Worldhood empowers all utopian expectations by filling them with the restlessness of the “‘not-yet.”” Worldhood judges all utopian expectations by ‘forcing’ them to acknowledge that they are finite and cannot fill in worldhood.

The metaphors of the primal “‘How,”’ “‘measure,”’ “‘holdaround,” and the “‘not-yet,”’ all point to the sheer difference be-

tween worldhood and orders, regions, and worlds. From the standpoint of the human process, all these metaphors converge on the experience of expectation (hope) that allows worldhood to become relevant to the self. The products of the human process point in their own way toward worldhood whenever they present and preserve a free space of pure possibility. Ernst Bloch, from whom we take the metaphor of the “not-yet,’”’ developed a more specific metaphor for articulating how works of art relate to what we here call worldhood. His term is “‘Vor-Schein’’ (anticipatory illumination). The following comes from Gert Ueding’s essay on Bloch: The not-yet-become of the object manifests itself in the work of art as one that searches for itself, shines ahead of itself in its meaning. Here anticipatory illumination is not simply objective in contrast to subjective illusion. Rather, it is the way of being, which in its turn wakes utopian consciousness and indicates to it the not-yet-become in the scale of its possibilities.®

The work of art shines forward and illuminates something that is not a mere aesthetic trait or another human product. One way of judging the greatness of a work of art is in terms of its ability to

138 NATURE AND SPIRIT evoke worldhood. Bloch replaces Freud’s concept of “‘libido”’ with that of “hunger.”’ A great work of art awakens the human hunger

for the “not-yet.’’ Anticipatory illumination is unique in its phenomenal appearance precisely because it mocks and overturns all content, while yet depending upon some form of embodiment for its expression. Of all manifestations of the “‘not-yet,”’ anticipatory

illumination is the most wedded to finite conditions of origin. If the human process seems compelled to create and assimilate aesthetic products, this fact can be explained by the primal hunger for the “not-yet”’ that lives at the heart of the phenomenon of worldhood. The notion of natural grace points to the quiet dimen- sion of our encounter with worldhood, while the notion of hunger points to the more dynamic and restless dimension. Both dimensions are present, even though Bloch privileged the more restless

aspect. :

NatTurE NATURING

The transition from worldhood toward nature naturing is a difficult one. While phenomenological description can move forward toward the features of worldhood, it finds itself in a precarious position when attempting to describe natura naturans. The temporal and processive analogies that function to point toward worldhood drop away when the ‘ground’ of worldhood comes under view. At the very least, worldhood is constituted by orders and can be made thematic through a description of the movement sensed on the boundaries of orders. All analogies and metaphors become strained when pushed in the direction of nature naturing. It does not follow that the concept of natura naturans is a mere fiction that only serves to provide a kind of inner and purely conceptual dynamism for worldhood. Worldhood, that is, nature natured, is the eject of nature naturing. The concept of “‘eject”’ is meant to convey the forward-moving quality of worldhood as the seedbed of the “‘not-yet.”” When

probing into the elusive features of nature naturing, it becomes necessary to sharpen our sense of the ontological difference. The tensions between worldhood and nature naturing are the most important in nature and can be best understood in terms of the spirit. It must be remembered that both worldhood and nature naturing

WORLDHOOD 139 are dimensions ‘within’ nature, not separate or disconnected orders. The concept of nature naturing will become especially important when describing the divine natures. If worldhood can be understood as the innumerable orders of the world, then nature naturing can be seen as the preformal potencies that empower all orders. These potencies are preformal in that they have no internal forms themselves and do not have specific entelechies. They give birth to all traits and all general features of the world, but are not, themselves, specific or general. Natura naturans is somewhat analogous to Peirce’s notion of pure firstness, where he is speaking of the “not-yet”’ distinct realm of pure possibility that moves toward distinctness. The term “potency” is chosen with care. Possibilities are without empowerment, whereas potencies are filled with the dynamism that creates and sustains the orders of the world. Peirce’s pure firstness seems bereft of the necessary world-sustaining dynamism that is exhibited in the concept of potency. Of course, the image of a “‘pure’’ potency is somewhat mislead-

ing. By definition, potencies express themselves in orders, and thereby become ‘impure.’ It is more accurate to speak of primal and preformal potencies. Nature naturing is ejective at its heart, and this ejective power is part of the life of the spirit. The spirit moves ‘between’ worldhood and nature naturing and preserves the

tensions between them. From the standpoint of the human process, the spirit is manifest on the circumference of worldhood, where the innumerable orders of the world point ‘backward’ toward their empowering source. It is important to note at the outset that nature naturing is not only a power of origin. Within the potencies of nature lies the forward movement of the “not-yet” that lives within and against the powers of origin. Natura naturans ‘con-

tains’ both origin and the “not-yet,’’ and neither dimension assumes priority. If we confine the concept of nature naturing to the dimension of origin, it loses its forward momentum and becomes a demonic power. It would function only to secure general and opaque features of the world, and could serve to reinforce a conservative or even reactionary social theory, both tied too exclusively to the conditions of origin. Such a theory would emerge out of a mere natural community as it sought to legitimate its claims through a

140 NATURE AND SPIRIT static conception of natural law. If, on the other hand, the forward

movement of nature naturing became the exclusive focus of thought, the stabilizing potencies of nature would give way to an endless process of transformation and revolution. A kind of metaphysical anarchy (an-archic, i.e., without first principles) would prevail, destroying the very possibility of communal and personal life. The potencies of nature are both stable and forward-moving. All natural laws are concresced potencies that become cosmic habits (Peirce) and prevail to govern and locate orders of the world. Yet these same potencies contain the restlessness of the “‘not-yet”’

that makes evolution and transformation possible. Within the heart of natura naturans is the eternal and creative tension between cosmic habit and cosmic growth. Peirce’s concept of “‘agapism,”’ in spite of its excessively optimistic overlay, captures some of the sense of the movement of nature’s potencies. For Peirce, agapism, i.e., the growth of concrete

reasonableness and cosmic love, converges with his concepts of “tychism”’ (novelty) and “‘synechism”’ (continuity) to portray a universe in the process of gaining increased self-control. Writing

in 1893, Peirce contrasts three views of the development of thought, and argues that the third, i.e, the agapastic, best conveys the sense of cosmic convergence and growth: The agapastic development of thought is the adoption of certain mental tendencies, not altogether heedlessly, as in tychasm [that is, by fortuitous variation], nor quite blindly by the mere force of circumstances or of logic, as in anancasm [that is, by mechanical necessity], but by an immediate attraction for the idea itself, whose nature is divined before the mind possesses it, by the power of sympathy, that is by virtue of the continuity of mind. . . (6.307).

Peirce, while not using the language of natura naturans, recognizes how cosmic regularity, as manifest in general laws, remains in cre-

ative tension with cosmic growth. His own version of evolution challenges the Darwinian emphasis on fortuitous variation and insists that such variations serve the larger goals of the growth of cosmic love. While his language is romantic and conveys a progressivist mind-set, he correctly insists that the movement of nature is toward some kind of “not-yet”’ (his ““would-be’’). This ““not-yet”’ stands before all concrete general laws, and goads them

WORLDHOOD 141 toward an internal transformation so that they become permeable to the potencies of nature. Unlike Peirce, however, ecstatic naturalism insists that the directionality of nature is infinitely complex

and impossible to predict. Yet, in sympathy to Peirce’s later (1890s) cosmic speculations, ecstatic naturalism affirms the continual growth possibilities within natural law.

The power of Peirce’s “would-be” is radicalized to that of an apocalyptic “‘not-yet”’ that opens out its negating momentum within each present moment. Bare descriptive naturalism becomes

ecstatic naturalism when it recognizes that the pulsations of the “not-yet”’ are continually exploding within each order in the present. Peirce tied the ““would-be”’ too closely to cosmic history, and thus failed to understand the presence of the “‘not-yet”’ within each concresced moment of time. Orders express a restlessness that lies

far deeper than a mere “‘would-be”’ that simply points toward some sort of ideal consummation at the end of evolution. The ‘“not-yet”’ is fully present in the immediacy of time’s flow.

Worldhood, as the eject of nature naturing, embodies the tension between static natural law and the emancipatory impulses that transform such general laws. While nature does not exhibit a goal,

it does manifest the restlessness that goads structures toward a more encompassing and creative display of their potency. Peirce may have gone too far in his teleological reconstruction of Darwin,

but he made it clear that no account of nature is complete which ignores the irruption of both novelty and new general growth. In the terms of the current perspective, such growth is one of the products of the “not-yet” that refuses to become confined to antecedent structures and powers. Nature naturing is always more than the ‘sum’ of the innumerable complexes of the world (nature natured). This “‘more”’ is forcefully manifest in the internal movement of so-called natural laws toward less regional forms of efficacy.

The tension between nature natured and nature naturing is sustained by the spirit. The concept of “‘spirit”’ has functioned in a vast number of ways in the history of thought, and the ordinal and

ecstatic naturalist use of the term must be sharply demarcated from other possible uses. Of initial importance is the recognition that the spirit participates in both the preformal potencies of nature and in the orders that are related to such potencies. Put in

142 NATURE AND SPIRIT slightly different terms: the spirit participates in both dynamics and structure, and keeps both attuned to each other. Often, the spirit is envisioned as a mere movement or power that prescinds from any structural embodiment. In such a framework, spirit has no shape or contour, and cannot appear before human modes of apprehension. At the other extreme are those frameworks that see spirit as the outer cloak of a vast cosmic structure. In Hegel’s perspective, the spirit is intelligible and fully embedded in the structures of the world. We can call these two views the anarchic and the structural. The perspective of ecstatic naturalism struggles to balance the sense in which the spirit both is and is not embedded in structures. Parallel to this is the attempt to articulate the ways

in which the spirit both is and is not intelligible. Like Plato’s “eros,’’ the spirit lives in the realm between the two primal dimensions of nature, and shares traits in common with both.

Our initial access to the phenomenality of the spirit comes through its continuing relation to the human process. The spirit is encountered at the circumference of worldhood and makes it possible for the self to assimilate and understand that which is not an

order or a world. While the various orders of the world convey their own forms of intelligibility, the spirit works in a different way to secure the enrichment of intelligibility per se. If we wish to invoke an older metaphor, we can speak of the lumen Naturalis, or the light of nature, that has a dynamic and continuing relation to

the human process. The spirit has its own internal potency that struggles to make worldhood intelligible to the human process. Insofar as we respond to this spiritual presence, we transcend the boundaries of given orders. The encounter with the spirit produces a pervasive sense of freedom, even if this freedom does not cancel or annul the conditions

of finitude. The freedom of the spirit is not a freedom over and against the world, but a freedom within worldhood and its orders. The spirit works relentlessly to free the self from its idolatrous clinging to given worlds and horizons. Consequently, it is experienced as the breath of quiet power that helps to fulfill selving. No self can attain its own proper measure if it is bereft of the presence of the spirit. The freedom from closure that comes from the life of the spirit is the most basic dimension of self-overcoming.

WORLDHOOD 143 Hence, the spirit is recognized as that which brings the self to itself for the first time. Of course, the quiet empowerment of the spirit often gives way to a more dynamic impulsion that moves the self in a new direc-

tion. While it would be hopelessly anthropomorphic to see the spirit as a consciousness with specific goals in mind, it is clear that the spirit often seems to work against the purposes of the individual self. When the self is tested by the spirit, it comes to recognize

that the process of selving is moving in the wrong direction and must be modified accordingly. This is especially the case when the self has a limited (nongeneric) perspective on its various functions within the world. Whenever hope is reduced to a mere cost-benefit calculation, the spirit moves, with whatever degree of success, to

return the self to a more generic and content-free conception of hope. Hope lives out the spirit and is intimately correlated to the phe-

nomenon of worldhood. Specific expectations and beliefs remain tied to orders and their possible futures. Genuine hope emerges when worldhood becomes thematic (in whatever terms or concepts) for the human process. Through hope, the self becomes a locus for the spirit and welcomes its often mysterious movements. Whether the spirit manifests itself in a quiet or more dynamic way, it is the measure for the self’s own life. More important, the spirit is the locus of those forms of intelligibility that make it possible to understand the ontological difference. Since the spirit moves back and forth across the various dimensions of the ontological difference, it is in the ‘position’ to make both sides of the difference open to each other. The community of interpreters, itself attuned to the ontological difference, also lives out of the spirit whenever social eschatology quickens the life of interpretation. Social hope provides the empowerment for democratic reconstruction and makes it possible for the community to overcome the temptations of origin. The potencies of nature permeate the community of interpreters, and enable it to understand some sense of worldhood. The religious core of the community is a gift of the spirit. Josiah Royce, in dialogue with Peirce and the Christian tradition, describes the connections among community, the life of interpretation, and spirit:

144 NATURE AND SPIRIT And, if, in ideal, we aim to conceive the divine nature, how better can we conceive it than in the form of the Community of Interpretation, and above all in the form of the Interpreter, who interprets all to all, and each individual to the world, and the world of spirits to each individual.?

Royce implies that the divine nature is emergent from the community of interpreters, and lives through the interpretations of the community. The ideal Interpreter (the spirit of Christ) ensures that the community attains truth in time and finds the proper ethical and social attitude that saves the individual from a self-centered

existence. The self becomes permeable to the world (worldhood) and to the spirit whenever the ideal Interpreter guides personal and social life. The ordinal perspective remains in sympathy to this analysis of community, even if it must downplay the Christocentric elements. The spirit empowers all valid interpretations, and provides the ‘space’ within which communal growth can occur. Social eschatology lies within personal hope and gives it broader scope. No individual hope can long prevail if it is detached from those social impulses that struggle for communal transformation. The phenomenon of worldhood stands before the community of interpreters whenever it becomes free from its natural forms of interaction and becomes sensitive to that which is not a specific meaning horizon. The communal sense of worldhood is not derived from the personal sense, but actually lives as the enabling potency within personal experience. As Royce persuasively arsued, the individual self emerges from social contrast and is as much a product of community as a contributor to the full meaning of community. In either case, the spirit lives in and through its gift of hope.

The spirit is not an abstact structure that somehow fits the self and the community into a thematic and intelligible network of meanings. Insofar as the spirit guides the life of interpretation, it does so by freeing past interpretations from opacity. The spirit does not hand specific interpretations over to interpreters so much as goad the interpretive process toward worldhood and the potencies of nature. The semiotic life of the community becomes open and flexible to new meanings whenever the breath of spirit frees interpreters from the confines of specific horizons. Of course, the spirit must work against the forces of semiotic inertia and social

WORLDHOOD 145 habit. Tragically, the community rarely acknowledges the presence of spirit and ignores those gifts that could bring it into closer proximity to nature. The community encounters the spirit whenever it has the courage to face into its own heteronomous elements. Most communities ignore their demonic features because such a recognition would profoundly alter the relations of power within social life. The spirit emboldens the community so that it can probe into those orders that distort democratic transactions. Hope is the most basic enabling condition for social transformation. What is not often recognized is that hope works against political forms of ontological priority that would privilege certain individuals or groups. Within hope, all selves are seen to be of equal value, both metaphysically and politically. The community becomes permeable to nature naturing through

the liberating power of hope. The potencies of nature serve the community in two ways. In the first dimension, they provide the stability for general laws that protect the worth of each community member. In the second dimension, they provide the emancipatory ‘“‘not-yet”’ that goads the community beyond current forms

of interaction. Natural laws are as much forward looking as they are antecedent forms of empowerment. The core of the community of interpreters is the power of the “‘not-yet”’ that comes from the spirit. The innumerable potencies of nature cannot become concrete without the movement of the spirit. The spirit transforms a given preformal potency so that it can become efficacious in a particular location. The transition from natura naturans to worldhood, and from worldhood to efficacious orders, is made possible by the spirit, which participates in both sides of the ontological difference. The community lives through the spirit and becomes Open to nature naturing through the spirit’s concrete transformation of natural potencies.

The spirit is thus both formal and preformal in its modes of participation. It is formal in that it has its own “hunger” to make potencies concrete and efficacious in the orders of the world. It is preformal in that it is fully open to the potencies of nature as they empower the orders of the world. The spirit is relevant to the human process insofar as it sustains our encounter with worldhood and quickens the life of interpretation. The relation of the self to

146 NATURE AND SPIRIT the spirit is that of ‘‘sheer relevance” insofar as the spirit does not always alter the basic features of the self. However, unlike worldhood, the spirit can also be weakly or strongly relevant to the self.

The spirit is weakly relevant to the self whenever it affects the scope and reach of the self. The spirit is strongly relevant to the self whenever it alters the direction of selving. An example of the former case (weak relevance) can be seen whenever the self becomes permeable to a new field of meanings that broaden and deepen its understanding of the world. Hence, the scope of the self is augmented. An example of the latter case (strong relevance) can be seen whenever the self changes its more basic self-understand-

ing, and responds to impulses that come from a realm outside of its internal semiotic systems. The ongoing relation between the self and the spirit thus exhibits all three modes of relevance. By the

same token, these modes of relevance also apply to the relation between the community and the spirit. SEMIOSIS OF THE WORLD

The correlations among orders, regions, worlds, worldhood, and nature naturing can also be described in terms of the evolution of sign systems and semiotic life. Signs function differently in each of these realms, and represent a more specific and concrete way of making these realms intelligible. A semiotic analysis will run parallel to the account just completed and will flesh out these relations more completely. The relations among the various sign systems, particularly as they pertain to communal orders, mirror the relations among the realms of nature. Unfortunately, many semiotic frameworks fail to acknowledge the more basic ontological structures that make any form of semiosis possible in the first place. They function as if signs were free-floating and self-referential. Consequently, such systems fall prey to a kind of relativism that refuses to acknowledge extrasemiotic meanings and referents. The perspective of ecstatic naturalism insists that all semiotic analyses remain attuned to the realms of nature as they become thematic in their own terms. Signs are always of and about orders other than themselves, even if this correlation is often clouded by the metaphors of textuality. While a given sign is indeed like a text in that it has its own internal references, it is also like a clearing within

WORLDHOOD 147 and through which something else can emerge. Needless to say, some signs are more efficacious than others, but the fundamental principles of extratextuality and semiotic reference must be preserved.

It is important to stress that sign systems are both natural and conventional, but in different respects. The natural dimension of a sign system can be seen in its participation in presemiotic powers and orders. When signs are functioning in the more natural mode, they illuminate traits of the world, and make them available to the community of interpreters. The conventional dimension of a sign system can be seen in cultural artifacts and forms of communication that have a more tenuous relation to the orders of the world. When signs are functioning in the more conventional mode, they refer to other signs within a cultural network that may or may not participate more directly in the world’s orders. Unfortunately, semiotic theories often privilege the conventional dimension of sign production and communication, and argue that semiosis is a mere cultural function with no footing in the realms of nature. Umberto Eco expresses this contextualist and conventualist view: “Every attempt to establish what the referent of a sign is forces us to define the referent in terms of an abstract entity which moreover is only a cultural convention. . . . What, then, is the meaning of a

term? From a semiotic point of view it can only be a cultural unit.””!° For Eco, any given sign will function within a code that provides the rules for its production and its interpretation. Such codes are self-referential and generate an endless series of interpretants that serve to elucidate and ramify previous signs in the series. An “‘interpretant”’ (Peirce’s term) is a new sign that is generated by the previous sign as it struggles to exhibit the features of an object.

The string of interpretants emergent from a code will be cultural artifacts that have no bearing on the orders of the world. For Eco, all sign systems are akin to semantic games that play by their own internal rules. The concept of reference is muted. In his novel The Name of the Rose, set in the fourteenth century,

Eco uses his central character, William of Baskerville, to express this nominalist and contextualist conception of semiosis. At the beginning of the tale, Brother William constructs a complete and valid image of the abbot’s fleeing horse, Brunellus, from a few natural signs discovered on the road leading to the abbey on the

148 NATURE AND SPIRIT mountain. Such signs include hoofprints, broken twigs, and horsehairs. Brother William tells his assistant, the young monk Adso, that all ideas are signs: “And so the ideas, which I was using

earlier to imagine a horse I had not yet seen, were pure signs, as the hoofprints in the snow were signs of the idea of ‘horse’; and signs and the signs of signs are used only when we are lacking things.’’!! All objects and ideas are mediated by signs, and come into patterns of relevance only insofar as they are part of a vast web of signification. The order of signs is arbitrary, and functions as a tool for aiding communication and discovery. The value and interpretation of these signs is determined by human language and social practice rather than by an eternal “book of nature.”’ At the end of the novel, Brother William further expresses his

nominalistic commitment by denying any positive role to the status of the referent of the sign. Eco invokes the spirit of Wittsenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus when he has William com-

pare human sign systems to a ladder: I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe . . . The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.”

In the context of the murders in the abbey, William is guilty of imposing a religious and symbolic universe onto the deaths, and thereby misreads the actual causal sequence of events. His return to a sober nominalism comes through his recognition that none of his elaborate decodings have any referential power. When he comes to see all interpretive stances (decoding strategies) as tools rather than as constitutive structures, William is free to open out more appropriate semiotic networks. Put differently: William lets go of the view that nature is an encoded system with clear signals rendering it transparent to interpreters. The current perspective denies that all signs are merely functions within arbitrary, if evolving, cultural codes. Of course, many signs are primarily concerned with illuminating other conventional signs within a given sign system, but many other signs point directly or indirectly to the orders of the world. More important, signs, natural and conventional, point to the primal phe-

WORLDHOOD 149 nomenon of worldhood, as shown by Heidegger, and participate in the potencies of nature. What follows is an account of the vari-

ous dimensions of signs as they refer both to the orders of the world and to each other. As noted, this account fleshes out the ontological analysis of orders, worldhood, and natura naturans. A sign participates in an order insofar as it exhibits some of the

key features of that order. The sign refers to something in some respect (Peirce), and makes that reference available to an interpreter. When a sign refers to a given order, which has its own subaltern traits, it can share features in common with that order, or it can function out of a conventional code which enables an interpreter to understand that the sign refers to a particular order and not another. The former relation is easy to see in so called “iconic” signs that share some pictorial or sense-specific features with the referent. For example, a road sign that displays the abstract and abbreviated features of a truck tipping over on its side points to the fact that a sharp curve is coming up and that caution must be exercised by the driver. The sign participates in the order

of the road configuration by depicting one possible result of speeding. The sign is natural insofar as it exhibits the physical results of inertia and mass-in-motion. The latter and more conventional relation of the sign to its referent could be seen in the same situation if a sign stating “‘sharp curve’ were substituted for the iconic representation. The English words “sharp curve’’ function within a specific language at a specific time, and operate conventionally. It is important to stress the fact that signs are not simply codified markers which are thrown out over the world in an arbitrary manner. The orders of the world ‘suggest’ ways in which they should be rendered into the orders of communication and human contrivance. For example, a vast and multilayered canyon can communicate its vastness to an individual, and impose certain constraints on sign production. As noted by Buchler, this is an asymmetrical form of communication in which the canyon is not aware that it conveys its vastness. The sense of vastness, akin to the experience of the sublime, lies on the boundary between semiotic and presemiotic structures. The canyon will generate sign possibilities to an artist or a travel guide that have a fairly stable and persistent core.

Some signs will clearly be inadequate while others may move

150 NATURE AND SPIRIT closer toward a proper exhibition of the key features of the canyon. An artist, for example, assimilates the vastness of the canyon, and is compelled to find the right means for making this available to other interpreters. Critical common sense has its own methods of selection, whereby the individual recognizes what is and is not appropriate. Sign production and consequent interpretation is far less arbitrary than is often thought. An order thus has its own traits that enter into the human assimilation of meaning. Some sign theorists write as if the general evolutionary perspective were not operative in communicative life,

and thus were not instrumental in showing how signs function. For any sign-using organism, it is essential that signs function to denote those features of an order that further the needs of the organism. Insofar as a sign fails to participate in its referent, it fails to advance the needs of interpretive life. Conventional signs have their own forms of validation, and must satisfy their own criteria of adequacy. Natural human languages are highly adaptive to changing circumstances, and show a high degree of wisdom. The distinction between natural and conventional signs must often be drawn with care, as these dimensions usually feed off each other and enhance the overall growth of meaning. A given natural language will experiment with new conventional additions to its stock, and the more successful ones will survive to assume their own form of naturalness and cultural embeddedness. Conventional distinctions or class designations may seem to serve arbitrary or extranatural interests, but they actually point toward orders that have been discriminated and isolated for specific practical purposes. Even in the free play of musement, signs refer to extrasemiotic orders that have their own distinctive features.

The relation between a sign and an order is reciprocal and involves a back-and-forth movement. The sign ‘struggles’ to isolate and exhibit those features of the order than can advance the needs of the sign producer. By the same token, other sign users will exert their own pressure on the semiotic process to ensure that the initial sign is of value to their own instrumental or aesthetic needs. Even in the case of an ironic inversion of meaning, the sign is compelled to exhibit the features of its ‘chosen’ order. An ironic reversal of meaning makes sense only insofar as it reilluminates the in-

itial meaning that clarifies the given order. If, for example, a

WORLDHOOD 151 colleague is ironically referred to as “‘the saintly one,” it follows that the initial sign designated and exhibited demonic traits in an accurate fashion. The ironic inversion is parasitic on the initial par-

ticipation of the sign in its referent. The transition from “‘demonic”’ to “‘saintly”’ has its own natural compellingness that cannot be reduced to an arbitrary imposition of a merely conventional code. That people can laugh at ironic inversion proves that the sign refers to its order in a nonarbitrary manner.

An order has both local and regional traits, and both may become the subject of a sign reference. In a work of music, for example, local features may be manifest in the variations within a given chord progression, while the regional features will be manifest in the chord progression itself. These musical structures may not refer to specific orders within the world, but they will be orders in their own right. Expressive orders are obviously self-referential but, here again, we should not be misled by assuming that this self-reference is purely arbitrary or without extrasemiotic meaning. The referent of the music may be elusive, but it is there nonetheless. The music generates and sustains orders of meaning that are as much a part of the world as are space-time particulars. Music pushes beyond its own tonal patterns to generate musical orders that themselves ‘compete’ with each other for the attention of interpreters. A Mozart symphony may not refer to a given person, event, or place, but it will create orders of meaning that belong to the more pervasive features of the world. Insofar as the symphony evokes the presence of the “‘not-yet” (through anticipatory illumination), it will point more directly toward the phenomenon of worldhood. No sign occurs alone, and each sign will participate in other signs as they converge on a given order or region. Signs form into semiotic series that run parallel to their respective orders. A regional configuration will have its own subaltern orders that receive fairly independent semiotic treatment. Of course, these subaltern

orders will also serve to illuminate the features of the larger region. Sometimes a given order will be only weakly relevant to its region, while at other times another order will be strongly relevant to its region. Signs form into series that have their own trajectories and their own inner dynamism. Throughout the orders of nature, some kind of semiotic process occurs. It is exceedingly difficult to

152 NATURE AND SPIRIT find some sort of absolute boundary separating off semiotic from

presemiotic orders. Ecstatic naturalism assumes that there are nonsemiotic orders, and that these remain forever beyond the reach of semiosis. It does not follow that these orders can be named, for the act of naming them would make them semiotic. More important, the current perspective argues that worldhood and nature naturing are not, themselves, directly semiotic in the same way that orders and regions are. Sign series emerge by their own internal compulsion and suggest new augmentations to interpreters. To say that sign series are free-floating is to assume that sign-using organisms have no practical needs. Even aesthetic refashioning, no matter how attenuated or formal, serves some “‘hunger”’ within semiotic life. Peirce’s “‘interpretive musement,”’ while free-floating in its immediate instrumentality, functions to reveal key features of nature and the divine

life to interpreters. Signs struggle to become permeable to other

signs, and to those orders that serve to empower and validate them. Signs link together to form a series of interpretants. Eco, in

spite of his latent idealism and overt contextualism, makes this clear in his own appropriation of Peirce: The series of clarifications which circumscribed the cultural units of a society in a continuous progression (always defining them in the form of sign-vehicles) represents the chain of what Peirce called the interpretants. . . . The interpretant is not the interpreter (even if a confusion of this type occasionally arises in Peirce). The interpretant is that which guarantees the validity of the sign, even in the absence of the interpreter.°

The individual interpreter is thus gathered into an evolving and changing chain of interpretants that have a complex web of internal and external relations. Eco stresses the internal relations to the detriment of the external reference relation, but the same logic applies in either case. A given interpretant emerges out of the relation between a sign and its object. This interpretant becomes ramified and possibly validated by subsequent interpretants. Each new interpretant struggles to illuminate earlier interpretants and the object from which they all spring. If the theory of interpretants is pried loose from the original dynamism of the object (order), a semiotic idealism that believes in only internal relations takes the

WORLDHOOD 153 place of an ordinal account that would root all interpretants in the orders of nature. The consequence of semiotic idealism is that it remains unable to articulate the basic features of human finitude and communal forms of embodiment. If all sign series are freefloating and self-validating, then no sign can become relevant to the struggles of the human process. A chain of interpretants illuminates a region whenever its own

general traits are of sufficient scope to encompass a number of orders and their own local configurations. Sign series have their own generic hunger, and stretch themselves to correspond to the various orders with which they are correlated. Often, the interpretants cannot unfold to their required extent until a sufficient amount of time has passed, thus illuminating the regional features of a realm under investigation. For example, a series of actions in the 1850s may not have been seen to have helped prepare the way for the American Civil War. A political speech or an economic decision could have been understood in a merely local fashion, thereby precluding an understanding of its contribution to the impending national tragedy. For example, consider John Brown’s paramilitary actions near Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas, in 1856 that led to the execution of five proslavery men. Such an event could be interpreted in regional or national terms, and thus function within sign systems of vastly different scope. The interpretants generated by such actions would not link together to form a larger series with more serious import. Interpretants may belong together, even if no human interpreters recognize that fact. Idealists such as Royce dealt with this seeming paradox by positing an ideal interpreter, who would recognize the hidden regional features in interpretants and bring them together under one sign series. From the standpoint of the human process, such an atemporal

structure is not possible. Communal and personal forms of inquiry probe into local interpretants in order to find any latent or emergent regional features that might guide decision making. Whenever a community fails to find regional features in its innumerable interpretants, it runs the risk of wasting or misdirecting precious social energy.

Interpretants, as noted, emerge from the correlation of a sign with its object. ‘The object serves as the ballast that keeps the interpretant from floating away from its referent. This process is fairly

154 NATURE AND SPIRIT clear when dealing with orders and regions. When correlating in-

terpretants with worlds (or horizons), the same logic holds. A world of meaning is expressed and embodied by a complex interconnection of interpretant series. That is, no world can be illuminated by only one interpretant series, and must be articulated by

an indefinite number of augmenting series. Of course, a given world will contain contradictory and competing series, and this interpretive wealth makes worlds ontologically distinctive. A given region will be fairly homogeneous by comparison. A world, on the other hand, will often contain more series than it can govern, and will spawn more interpretants than it can properly assim-

ilate. A world is “more” than the ‘sum’ of its interpretants, and has its own inexhaustible core. At the heart of any world or horizon is the mystery of semiotic origins. Worlds spawn, support, and cancel interpretants, and remain elusive in their inner nature. Worldhood, as itself ‘larger’ than all worlds, remains just beyond the reach of sign series. Worldhood is not a sign, sign series,

or interpretant series. As the enabling condition for the human process (at least), worldhood provides the clearing within which interpretants can grow and become more efficacious. As such, it is sheerly relevant to interpretants, and enables them to prevail or cease to prevail within the innumerable orders of the world. But worldhood does not affect the scope or integrity of interpretants. An interpretant will have its scope or integrity affected by other interpretants and by the orders within which and from which interpretants arise. By the same token, the richness or poverty of the various realms of interpretants will have no effect on worldhood. The fundamental semiotic clearing provided by worldhood remains what it is, regardless of what appears within it. The semiotic life of individuals is preserved by the phenomenon

of worldhood. In a sense, worldhood is presemiotic insofar as it does not directly participate in the generation of interpretants. In another sense, however, worldhood is especially relevant to semiosis because it makes it possible for sign systems to prevail and become available to each other. Signs become transformed when they point toward the unique phenomenon of worldhood. While signs can refer, either directly or indirectly, to orders and regions, they must become more directly permeable to the spirit when they struggle to evoke a sense of worldhood. The concept of “refer-

WORLDHOOD 155 ence’’ must now be augmented by the concept of “‘evocation’”’ so as to illuminate the unique features of the semiosis of worldhood. A sign becomes a symbol when it evokes that which has no given content or contour. The spirit opens signs (and interpretant series)

to worldhood by goading them past their reference relations, so that they can become symbolic clearings onto what is not an object or another sign. A symbol effaces itself before worldhood and be-

comes the locus of the spirit for human interpreters. If a given symbol becomes an order in its own right, it degenerates into an idolatrous sign that claims its own sphere of power and domination. True symbols direct interpretive life away from their specific

forms of expression and embodiment, and become empty of all content. Worldhood thus becomes available to the community of interpreters through symbols. All communities live within sign series,

but only the community of interpretation lives within genuine symbols. A mere natural community may be convinced that its signs are true symbols, but the imperial intent of its signs belies their claims. Symbols refuse to serve the “powers” and evoke the unique powerlessness of worldhood. The spirit goads certain signs toward their own symbolic fulfillment, even while ‘recognizing’ that this transition remains fragmentary and fraught with peril. A national flag, for example, may become a genuine symbol when it transcends the power relations that emerge from a nation-state, and instead points toward the free realm of the spirit that cannot be confined to a people or the myths of space. Symbols serve the spirit and not the powers.

Worldhood is preserved for the community of interpreters through those few signs that become symbols. Of course, no symbol remains forever within the free space of the spirit. The processes of semiotic inertia work against the life of the spirit and compel symbols to become signs of origin. Symbols can overcome this

pull by living within the gift of the “not-yet” that struggles against the demonic temptations of pure origin. A genuine symbol does not compete with other symbols as if it needed to declare a

sphere of domination, but evokes the mystery of worldhood toward which all other symbols point. At the core of a genuine symbol is a sense of mystery that cannot be rendered into specific semiotic terms. Following Tillich,

156 NATURE AND SPIRIT ecstatic naturalism insists that the depth dimension of the symbol is religious. In his 1925 essay, ‘““The Philosophy of Religion,”’ Tillich affirms that symbols move us beyond the conditioned realms of culture, and become permeable to the liberating power of the holy: The symbolic character of religious ideas in no way deprives them of their reality, but it lifts this reality out of the conditioned into the

unconditioned, that is, into the religious sphere. . . . The sacred object is therefore never holy in itself but rather only through a negation of itself; and this negation of itself includes the negation of everything existent. Every sacred reality becomes the vessel of the duality of absolute fulfillment through meaning and the absolute abyss of meaning."

Tillich’s technical term “the unconditioned”’ (das Unbedingte) is analogous to our term “worldhood,”’ even though it also points toward the concept of natura naturans. A symbol evokes the sense of the unconditioned that cannot be rendered into order-specific terms. It is important to note that a genuine symbol is not a mere product of the human process. It lives out of the spirit and grasps the self or community. Symbols are thus beyond human manipulation, and actually serve to bring the human process toward that which cannot be a human product or the result of human manip-

ulation. If a symbol is looked at historically and in terms of its embeddedness in evolutionary processes, it can be seen as an archetype. The concept of the “archetype”’ is central to the ordinal delineation of symbolic life. However, if the symbol is understood only from the archetypal perspective, the equally important quality of the “not-yet’”’ may be ignored. Tillich’s concept of “the unconditioned” points both toward the archetypal origins of a symbol and toward the eschatological (“‘not-yet”’) fulfillment of the symbol. The archetypal and the eschatological dimensions remain in creative tension, and serve to keep the symbol alive for the community of interpreters.

The spirit lives within genuine symbols and makes it possible

for them to evoke our sense of worldhood. Tillich coined the phrase “‘gestalt of grace’’ to elucidate the way in which aesthetic symbols enter into the human process. While not all symbols are aesthetic per se, all have an aesthetic dimension that may or may

WORLDHOOD 157 not assume priority. Symbols, as the masks of the spirit, fill the human process with meaning and grace. The process of selving is quickened and deepened through the symbols that transform the self from a producer to a recipient of the grace of the spirit. Of course, the self remains fully embedded within its own sign systems and their respective claims. Signs and symbols augment each other and make self-identity possible. The continual tension between nature natured and nature naturing is also expressed within the life of symbols. A symbol points toward the sheer relevance of worldhood and also participates in the preformal potencies of natura naturans. Put differently: symbols

empty themselves of specific contents, thus evoking a sense of worldhood, and express the energy of the potencies of nature. In both dimensions, the symbol unrelentingly moves beyond specific referents. Tillich continually juxtaposed the images of ‘‘ground”’ and ‘‘abyss” to convey this dual sense of symbolic expression. In its ground relation, the symbol evokes the worldhood that makes all intraworldly meanings possible. In its abyss relation, the symbol participates in the preformal potencies of nature that swallow up all meaning contents. If worldhood preserves the innumerable orders of meaning, while not ‘containing’ any specific meanings, nature naturing continually shakes the foundations of meaning so that the unconditioned quality of nature can emerge. Nature naturing ejects worldhood, and thus enables meaning to prevail for the human process. But the ultimate status of meaning

is an ambiguous one. The orders of the world, as expressed in signs and interpretants, have given meanings that can become thematic for the human process. Worldhood, as the enabling condition (access structure) for the human process, empowers all intraworldly meanings, while being bereft of its own meanings. Nature

naturing actively overturns all given meanings insofar as they claim any kind of totalization for themselves. The symbol, as a mask of the spirit, lives within the eternal tension between world-

hood and nature naturing, and expresses the correlative tension between a general enabling ground of meaning and a self-effacing abyss of meaning. Looked at from the archetypal perspective, a symbol is more concerned with evoking the ultimate ground of all meanings. Looked at from the standpoint of the “not-yet,” a symbol

153 NATURE AND SPIRIT | participates in the self-effacing abyss of meaning. Of course, in the actual life of the symbol, both dimensions will prevail, and neither should assume priority. Worldhood becomes most fully what it is when it participates in the preformal potencies of nature.

The spirit preserves the creative tension between the ultimate ground of meaning and the self-effacing abyss of meaning. The symbols of religion, insofar as they have matured beyond their local expressions, live out of this eternal tension and provide the human process with its most dramatic sense of this mystery.

Nature naturing becomes available to the human process through symbols that are self-effacing and open to other symbols.

The divine natures emerge into the realms of intelligibility through those symbols that participate in natura naturans. It is important to stress that the religious core of a genuine symbol does not have a specific revelational content which can enter into the orders of information. Symbols are loci of revelation, but derive their particular power from the fact that this revelation is beyond all conditioned content. The history of religions manifests the perennial tragedy of the conversion of genuine content-free revelation into delimited content. In Christianity, for example, Christological symbols often serve given race, class, or gender interests, and thereby betray their deeper intent. The struggle to free religious symbols from such finite interests marks the most important and dangerous task of theology. Symbols are rarely understood in terms of their own potency, and serve semiotic interests that are foreign to their deeper hunger. The potencies of nature are ignored by interpreters, and delimited powers and structures cloud personal and communal vision. In the battle between religion and culture, the conditioned images and powers of culture usually win by compressing symbols into confined orders. Put in political terms: few things are more dangerous

than the effort to rescue symbols from the powers that distort them for their own purposes. Since the primal phenomena of worldhood and nature naturing are distorted by the continual denial of the symbol, it is imperative that the human process learn how to live within, and acknowledge the potencies of, nature that enable true symbols to enter into the free space of interpretation. The spirit, while not omnipotent or

WORLDHOOD 159 omnipresent, moves within interpretive life to preserve some sense of the depth dimension of symbolic life. The potencies of nature remain beyond the reach of hermeneutic life until the spirit goads signs toward a symbolic inversion, whereby they can become permeable to these potencies. When the human process is seized by a

symbol, it can momentarily let go of its semiotic plenitude. The self emerges into the generic realm of the archetypes, and experiences more fully the scope of the human process. At the same time, the self is shaken by the primal “‘not-yet” that frees it from a mere immersion in the archetypal powers. Hope lives out of the “not-yet,’’ and keeps symbols attuned to worldhood and nature naturing. As noted, hope is one of the gifts of the spirit and enables the human process to overcome its idolatrous obsession with specific orders and their possible futures. Worldhood becomes thematic (in whatever terms) through the phenomenon of hope. Hope participates in the ontological difference in its various forms, and keeps the dimensions of the difference open to each other. Worldhood is other to orders and worlds,

and this radical otherness (alterity) can only be experienced through hope. Mere beliefs always remain intraworldly, and are generated by practical instrumentalities. Hope, on the other hand, is not a product of any method or human contrivance, nor does it confine itself to a region or world. In the liberating power of hope, the entire world is transformed and not merely a part.

The spirit is, itself, one of the most important attributes of the divine. While it is tempting to equate God and the spirit, thereby making it easier to articulate the divine natures, it is important that the concept of God retain some uniqueness in the current perspective. As will emerge in the next chapter, the spirit is directly correlated to the first two divine dimensions, while indirectly corre-

lated to the third. The fourth divine dimension will be distinct from the spirit. The first two divine dimensions pertain to the ways in which God is embedded within the orders of nature (nature natured). The third divine dimension will be correlated with natura naturans. ‘The fourth divine dimension will live out of the tension between the first three divine natures and the radical alterity of the encompassing.

God, in the modes of spirit, preserves the human sense of worldhood and makes it possible for the human process to enter

160 NATURE AND SPIRIT into the ontological difference. God lives on both sides of the on-

tological difference, and thus is metaphysically unique. In the modes of spirit, God moves in and through the orders of the world. In these dimensions, God is fragmented and only fitfully relevant to the world’s orders. In the third divine dimension, God preserves the orders of the world and is thus sheerly relevant to all orders and worlds. Worldhood is sheerly relevant to the human process, whereas God is sheerly relevant to the world itself. In the

fourth divine dimension, God struggles toward its own eternal srowth and transformation. Hope is thus given over to the human process by the first two divine dimensions. As will emerge in the next chapter, the first divine dimension is manifest in the epiphanies of power (the holy)

that prevail in certain especially meaningful orders. The second divine dimension is manifest in personal and social eschatologies that move toward a transformation of human nature. The spirit is thus both a power and an eschatological lure. Hope enables us to participate in the divine life and to further the growth possibilities within God. Spirit is an attribute of God, as is nature, and must be brought into unity with the divine life. Nature naturing is the fullest manifestation of the divine life and represents God’s plenitude. The difficulty in describing the divine natures derives from the fact that God is both an order within nature and the ultimate potency within nature naturing. Thus far, it has been possible to describe nature natured and nature naturing without reference to the divine natures. The concept of “‘the spirit’’ has emerged as the key linking element between nature natured and nature naturing. It is now necessary to exhibit the ways in which the spirit serves the evolution of the divine life itself. God moves ‘outward’ into the realms

of the world through the agency of the spirit. At the same time, God sustains the innumerable orders of the world through its sheer relevance to nature natured. The human process participates in all four divine dimensions and is measured by the divine potencies. The spirit represents God’s self-externalization in the world’s or-

ders, and is responsible for bringing the human process back toward the potencies of nature. At the same time, the spirit keeps God and the world from becoming irrelevant to each other. Whatever relevance is found in the human process is ultimately derived from the forms of relevance preserved in and by the divine life.

WORLDHOOD 161 NOTES

1. Justus Buchler, “On the Concept of “The World,’ ” The Review of Metaphysics, 31, No. 4 (June 1978), 573. This article is reprinted in the second edition of Buchler’s Metaphysics of Natural Complexes, pp. 224-59.

2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 107.

3. Ibid., p. 110. 4. Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons, trans. Terrence Malick (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), p. 51. 5. Martin Buber, The Knowledge of Man, ed. Maurice Friedman (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), p. 60.

6. Ibid., p. 61. 7. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 252. 8. As quoted in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Litera-

ture: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zips and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1988), p. xxxiv. The original essay is entitled ‘Bloch’s Aesthetik des Vor-Scheins,”’ and appeared in Ernst Bloch, Aesthetik des Vor-Scheins I, ed. Gert Ueding (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974). 9, Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity, ed. John E. Smith (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 318. 10. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), pp. 66, 67. 11. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), p. 28. 12. Ibid., p. 492. 13. Theory of Semiotics, p. 68. 14. Paul Tillich, What Is Religion? trans. James Luther Adams (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), pp. 71, 82.

4

The Divine Natures EPIPHANIES OF POWER

GOD IS ONTOLOGICALLY UNIQUE in being both a complex within

nature and the ground for the sheer prevalence of all complexes. The divine natures participate in both sides of the ontological difference, and keep nature natured and nature naturing attuned to each other. As a complex, God is both weakly and strongly relevant to the other orders of the world. As a dimension within nature naturing, God is sheerly relevant to all orders. Traditional conceptions of God often emphasize only one side of the ontological difference, and thus have an insufficiently generic conception of the divine natures and the divine life. It is necessary to keep the tensions within the ontological difference alive if an adequate and compelling conception of God is to emerge. Unlike a modal analysis of God, which attempts to establish the logical necessity for certain features within the divine life, ordinal phenomenology carefully traces out the various ways in which the divine becomes relevant to the human process. Insofar as God is a natural complex, and thus fully embedded within the orders of the world, phenomenology isolates and articulates those traits that are available to personal and communal assimilation. Under the principle of “‘ontological parity,” which insists that anything discriminated in any way is real, ordinal phenomenology is not concerned with establishing the ‘existence’ of God, or with relegating encounters with God to some special realm, such as that of the imagination. The current perspective assumes that God is real in some basic respects, and that those respects are clarified in the analysis. Such questions, while not unimportant to the self and the community, are secondary. It is often extremely difficult to establish the extramental status of a given religious referent. Critical common sense and enlightened communal analyses sift through these 162

DIVINE NATURES 163 religious traits to establish degrees of relevance and importance. Our concern is with probing into the more basic orders of relevance that make any conception of God compelling. Metaphysical and phenomenological analyses work in concert with communal and personal forms of evaluation, but their enterprises are somewhat distinct. Before describing the four divine natures, some preliminary reflections are in order. These pertain to the most general features of God as they, in turn, relate to the innumerable orders of the world. The most basic distinction within the divine life is, of course, that between natura naturata and natura naturans. Insofar as God is one order within the world, God has the same basic features of any natural complex. Consequently, the divine is ‘part’ of the realm of

nature natured. Insofar as God is not a complex, and thus not plurally located, God is emergent from the preformal potencies of nature naturing. Within the divine life, this ontological divide releases energy for divine growth and self-overcoming. God qua natural complex is located within nature and is eclipsed by nondivine orders. Like any complex, God locates traits within itself, while being located within other complexes. Some orders are only weakly relevant to God, while others are strongly relevant. God is plurally located and has limited scope. While the divine has greater scope than any other complex, God’s scope is not limitless. The divine scope will be without limitation in the preor-

der of nature naturing, but will be sharply bound within the orders of nature natured. Is God qua complex omnipotent? By now, the answer to a question of this nature should be obvious. The divine cannot be omnipotent if by omnipotent is meant that God has the ability to alter the trait configuration of any complex at will. If God is one order among many, and is thus located and fragmented by other orders, then the divine powers are themselves

limited to the orders within which God is or may be relevant. If God were somehow outside of nature, i.e., in some sort of supernatural realm, then the concept of omnipotence could still function. Since God is as much a part of nature as any other complex, God must endure the same limitations and genuine discontinuities that face any complex. God, as a dimension of natura naturans, is not omnipotent because it remains indifferent to the orders that prevail and cease to prevail.

164 NATURE AND SPIRIT It follows that God cannot be simple in its nature. The very concept of “‘simplicity’’.is rendered dubious by the concept of natural complex, which insists that all traits are located within other traits. Insofar as God interacts with the world at all, God must be

complex in its constitution. The concept of divine simplicity would only make sense if God were irrelevant to the orders of the world, or were without an internal history. If process metaphysics has taught anything, it is that God’s growth and self-surpassability make God infinitely complex in its various dimensions of interaction. God is thus limited in its power, and indefinitely complex in its various forms of interaction with other complexes. Continuity and discontinuity are both traits within nature. To locate these pervasive features outside of nature is to violate the

, principle of ordinality, which insists that all orders are ‘part’ of nature. God cannot be totally discontinuous with nature any more

than God can be simply continuous with all orders in the same respect. God has continuities and discontinuities within its own natures, and is both continuous and discontinuous with nondivine orders. Some perspectives, such as that of Whitehead, stress the continuities within the divine life, thereby ignoring or downplaying the diremptions within divine evolution. Other perspectives, such as that of Barth, stress the discontinuities between the divine life and the world, and make it difficult to gain access to the plenitude and potency of God. Consequently, the human process remains disconnected from God, and must rely on a special incarnation or unique historical appearance of the divine. It is important that the concepts of continuity and discontinuity function within

their proper ordinal locations, and do not serve either to isolate God from the world or to impose a bare identity between the divine and nature. Both continuity and discontinuity are orders in their own right, and thus located within other orders. Can God create the world out of nothing? No, for God is a complex within the world, and is emergent from the preformal potencies of nature. It makes no sense to speak of some nonlocated

and preordinal realm of “nothingness” within which the divine can become efficacious. Complexes have always prevailed and, presumably, always will. If, as Peirce argued, the universe is becoming more complex and adding more new and novel traits to its scope, then God is expanding and growing with the universe.

DIVINE NATURES 165 To argue for the traditional conception of creatio ex nihilo is to deny

both the internal complexity of the divine and the sheer locatedness of the divine natures within the orders of the world. The traditional conception of a creator God must be amplified by the conception of a sustaining God which struggles against the powers of

annihilation and death within the world. ,

God is thus incomplete, fragmented, plurally located, a ‘part’ of nature, and not its creator out of nothingness, limited in scope and power, and eternally self-surpassable. Yet God is creatively active

in the innumerable orders of the world, goading many of them toward growth and transformation. Process thinkers have well understood that the divine must be subject to growth and the pressures of nondivine orders, and have located the divine natures within a larger conception of an evolving universe. They have often erred, however, is assuming that God is internally related to all orders in the same respect, and is subject to no radical discontinuities among these orders. As we will see, God is sheerly relevant to all orders in its third dimension, but this relevance is different in kind from that envisioned by process thinkers.

The four divine natures are related to each other and can only be isolated by a process of prescinding. In what follows, they will be treated as if they were separable. The interconnections among these dimensions will be exhibited when we probe into the divine life, as a self-actualizing unity of the divine natures. It is important to stress that God experiences internal diremptions, and struggles

to overcome the fragmentary quality of its own life. Divine incompletion in the face of the encompassing is the ultimate “notyet”’ within the life of God.

In the first dimension, God is a natural complex within the innumerable orders of the world. From the standpoint of the human process, this dimension of the divine is manifest in epiphanies of power that emerge from certain complexes, but not from others.

The concept of “epiphany” is meant to convey the clarity and pressure of God within particular orders. God announces itself within those orders that seem to have a special potency and presence. This manifestation is most obvious in aesthetic works, whether they be liturgical or not. To use slightly different language: this is the realm of the sacramental, in which God empowers and illuminates many of the orders and traits of nature.

166 NATURE AND SPIRIT In this first dimension, God becomes available to the human process as a fragmented origin. The origin is fragmented precisely because it is located within orders that may remain opaque to the divine import. There is little unity among the various locations of the sacramental. Some orders seem to actively resist the divine presence, whereas others seem to welcome it and to provide a place for the divine epiphany. From our finite perspective, this fragmentary quality remains a mystery. Why some orders are more sacramental than others, or why some seem to reinforce the divine power, remains forever outside of human comprehension. The problem is deepened when it is recognized that given orders may manifest the divine power to some persons, and have absolutely no power for other persons. The fragmentary quality of the divine appearance is tied to the power of origin because it is antecedent to its assimilation by given orders. That is, God, in the dimension of the epiphanies of power, stands ‘behind’ each sacramental appearance and enables it to stand

out from the more opaque background of the world. It is important to stress that the traits of sacramentality are not limited to those sacramental complexes which traditionally belong to socalled religious communities. A liturgical object derives its power from the more pervasive sacramentality of nature itself. Paul Tillich exhibited the correlation between nature and the sacramental, and located the assimilation of the sacred within the powers of the unconscious: We must consider the unconscious and subconscious levels of our existence so that our whole being may be grasped and shattered and given a new direction. . . . If nature loses its power, the sacrament becomes arbitrary and insignificant. Of course, the power of nature

alone does not create a Christian sacrament. Nature must be

brought into the unity of the history of salvation. It must be delivered from its demonic bondage. And just this happens when nature becomes a sacramental element. '

Nature and nature’s God are thus the empowering sources for any

sacramental object. God works within the orders of nature to make some of them permeable to the sacramental dimension. Tillich, in agreement with Jung, ties the assimilation of the sacramental to the unconscious. Archetypal powers are directly correlated

DIVINE NATURES 167 to the divine in this first dimension. Known to the human process through archetypal images, archetypes are themselves powers of

fragmented origin, and enhance the scope of the divine life. A given sacramental object will embody the power of the archetype

and all of its symbolic plenitude. By the same token, the sacramental object will overturn this symbolic plenitude, so that the power of the divine may appear without dilution. Of course, plenitude and emptiness remain in dialectical tension, and give the sacramental object its unique power over the human process. This sense of the holy is fitful and elusive. The human process struggles to stabilize and secure these epiphanies, as if they could somehow be captured for routine assimilation and control. Communal habits often deaden the intrinsic power of sacramental orders, and thereby cover over the power of the divine. The divine origin remains fragmented, and cannot overcome the inertia of the human process by some kind of divine fiat. If we wish to speak of a kind of natural or even aesthetic grace, then it follows that this

grace must wait upon the proper personal and communal conditions for its manifestation. Once again, it becomes clear that God cannot be omnipotent, insofar as God is one complex among others that limit its modes of appearance. In this first dimension, the divine speaks from the past and the present. Epiphanies of power speak of the ancient powers of origin that may or may not be tied to a specific sacred history. Even nonhistorical religions, such as Hinduism or Buddism, participate in

the ancient powers of origin, while denying anything akin to an evolving and changing sacred history. The individual self derives some sense of its place and efficacy through the fragmented powers that transform the human process. These originating powers may be seen as time-bound or as atemporal. In either case, they are antecedent to the human process and its current needs and fears.

For Rudolf Otto, the psychological corollary of the epiphanies of power is the sense of the numinous. While Otto fails to develop an adequate metaphysical framework for articulating the divine natures, his phenomenological analyses detail several dimensions relevant to the human process and its assimilation of the divine power. Our initial encounter with the numinous order or complex provokes a sense of awe, often accompanied with a kind of shud-

163 NATURE AND SPIRIT dering. Connected to this is a sense of fascination, a sense of divine

majesty, and a sense of urgency. The epiphany of power, associated with the divine in its first dimension, pulls the human process outside of itself, and compels it to recognize the divine powers that lie within many orders of the world. It is very important to stress that the numinous object need not appear in a positive or friendly guise. Otto is quite clear that the numinous or sacramental complex may invoke dread and terror. The first divine dimension, when it appears alone and without the necessary contrast of the other three dimensions, is beyond good and evil. Consequently, any given epiphany of power may be both demonic and divine in its manifestation. For Otto: The daemonic-divine object may appear to the mind an object of horror and dread, but at the same time it is no less something that allures with a potent charm, and the creature, who trembles before it, utterly cowed and cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to it, nay even to make it somehow his own. The “mystery” is for him not merely something to be wondered at but something that entrances him; and beside that in it which bewilders and confounds, he feels something that captivates and transports him with a strange ravishment, rising often enough to the pitch of dizzy intoxication; it is the Dionysiac-element in the numen.?

The experience of “horror,” “dread,” ravishment,”’ and “‘intoxication,’’ would make no sense were it not assumed that the numinous object prevailed outside the self and represented a threat to _ the self. By the same token, the numinous object empowers the self to go beyond previous assimilative strategies and to find new means by and through which to approach the divine. The numinous object will remain demonic insofar as it is not correlated with hope. If the numinous object remains tied too exclusively to the fragmented conditions of origin, it will become a power in its own right and resist other powers. It will ‘insist’ on a sphere of pertinence in which it will deny the reality and import of other numinous complexes. In metaphorical terms, this will generate a “war of the powers” in which each numinous complex

will struggle to usurp all others. Insofar as a numinous object comes under the influence of hope, it will provide ‘space’ for other epiphanies of power and will correlate the powers of origin with the powers of expectation. Hope, as one of the gifts of the spirit,

DIVINE NATURES 169 works against the demonic temptation of the powers of origin, and moves all origins toward the future. The divine is bound to the innumerable orders of the world that resist its expansion and augmentation. Complexes often resist be-

coming permeable to the divine presence, and thereby limit the power of God within the world. Not only do many orders limit the efficacy of the divine, but novelty and creativity emerge within the world in ways that could not have been predicted by the divine

complex. As Hartshorne has argued, many orders of the world exhibit some kind of creativity and self-transformation. For Harts-

horne, God’s power is, in some sense, without limitation, but in

another sense, the world strongly affects the scope of divine power: The notion of a cosmic power that determines all decisions fails to make sense. For its decisions could refer to nothing except themselves. They could result in no world; for a world must consist of

local agents making their own decisions. Instead of saying that God’s power is limited, suggesting that it is less than some conceivable power, we should rather say: his power is absolutely maximal, the greatest possible, but even the greatest possible power is still one power among others, is not the only power.?

The distinction between two conceptions of divine power will become refined in what follows. The current perspective is friendly to the notion that God has greater power than any other complex. At the same time, it is essential that this divine power be under-

stood as one among many other powers. Hartshorne rejects the traditional notion of omnipotence, as it would deny the freedom of complexes within the world. At the same time, the concept of omnipotence fails to acknowledge that God’s efficacy is always intraworldly, and does not relate to some kind of divine order of orders that lies outside of the innumerable complexes of the world.

If God’s power is limited by nondivine orders, it follows that God must, in some way, respond to these orders. Process theologies have well articulated the concept of divine sympathy and have insisted that God remains fully responsive to the complexes which lie outside of its immediate powers. Put differently: nondivine orders are either strongly or weakly relevant to God, and the divine must assimilate the recalcitrant traits of these orders. God admits

170 NATURE AND SPIRIT new traits into its evolving life, and allows the world to ‘matter’ to

its own growth. Since God admits traits into its contour, God changes its scope and self-definition. The divine sympathy for the struggling orders of creation is made possible by the permeability

of God to that which is otherwise outside of its forms of prevalence.

In the first divine dimension, the orders of the world may or may not respond to the divine influence, experienced by the human process as epiphanies of power. Looked at from the other side, God allows all orders to become relevant to its own life, even while acknowledging that many of these orders will remain reti-

cent toward the divine power. God’s scope is being continually augmented or decreased by the innumerable nondivine orders of the world. Does God feel the tragedy of its own limitations? Such a question might seem hopelessly anthropomorphic, and hence outside of the purview of ecstatic naturalism. However, when looked at metaphorically, such a question illuminates several possible features of the divine life. Insofar as God recognizes its “‘other”’ in the nondivine orders of

the world, it becomes clarified about the actual and possible life histories of all complexes. Those complexes which lie outside of the divine powers are still understood for what they are. The divine cannot but be sensitive to complexes not within its power, and thus must recognize the potential for spoliation in many orders of the world. Consequently, God must be sympathetic toward any complex that is destroyed or tragically altered before its fulfillment. If this is true of God’s relation to all complexes, it must be especially true when God confronts the human process and its fitful movements toward the fulfillment of selving. There must be some sense in which it is meaningful to speak of God’s frustrations when confronting the many hindrances to the selving process. Since selving is far more complex than the mere fulfillment of a pre-given entelechy, its precarious tenure must be an issue for the divine life. The divine sympathy is especially prevalent within the tensions of the human process. That this sympathy is rarely felt is not an argument against its operation throughout all dimensions of the self. It is certainly felt and understood during

those rare moments of grace that enable the self to face into its own destructive tendencies.

DIVINE NATURES 171 God is thus sympathetic to all nondivine orders, and experiences frustration when faced with limitations to its efficacy. Further, as exhibited by Hartshorne, genuine creativity and genuine novelty are manifest in many nondivine orders, and thereby enhance and enrich the divine life. God assimilates all traits of the world even if discontinuous with many of them. God is continuous with all nondivine orders insofar as it allows them to become relevant to the divine life. God is discontinuous with many orders of the world insofar as they remain recalcitrant to the divine presence.

We have been speaking of divine power and of divine powers. The question arises as to whether there is one divine power, and one God, or whether there are several powers, and hence several Gods. Traditional debates concerning monotheism and polytheism often distort the issue by using static and preordinal concepts of substance. Phenomenologically, it is clear that there are distinct orders of divine appearance, which may or may not have an internal connection. To intrude a substance metaphysics at this stage of the analysis forecloses other possibilities and makes it difficult to find a compelling answer to the question of divine unity. It is more helpful to correlate each divine epiphany with a larger divine contour and to show how God is augmented with each appearance. Polytheism is inadequate because it only acknowledges the fragmented conditions of origin. That is, divine unity is ignored be-

cause the conceptual focus is only upon those powers which emerge within the orders of the world. There is no sensitivity to the powers of convergence that lie within these varied epiphanies. Traditional monotheism is inadequate because it effaces the genuine discontinuities within the divine life and relegates many manifestations of the divine to a secondary metaphysical status. In a striking sense, both polytheism and monotheism display some insight in the divine life. What is needed is some conceptual refinement that will exhibit God’s varied ordinal locations. Ecstatic naturalism embraces what can be called an “‘ordinal monotheism.”’ Such a monotheism insists on the ultimate unity of God, even when plurally located. By the same token, it fully acknowledges the fragmented and evolving quality of the divine life and attempts to participate in the divine self-evolution. God is a complex within the world, and thus has an integrity for each of its

172 , NATURE AND SPIRIT ordinal locations. The ‘sum’ of these integrities is the contour of

God. God’s identity is the continuing correlation between any given integrity and the overall contour. God is thus both singular and plural, but the growing plurality does not destroy the deeper divine unity.

In the first divine dimension, God lives within innumerable complexes, and enhances their own scope and identity. At the same time, God finds a new integrity (trait configuration) whenever it becomes relevant to a given complex. This process is endlessly complex and eternal. For example, consider what happens when the divine power enters into a work of art. The work itself assumes an ultimate import that was not manifest before. Insofar

as the community of interpreters responds to this epiphany of power, it enriches its own hermeneutic life. Any individual who assimilates this work of art, and does so in recognition of its ultimate import, deepens the scope of the divine life. The community and the individual both augment God’s forms of prevalence when-

ever they assimilate the divine power. God is augmented at the same time that the community is enhanced. This symmetrical relation permeates both God and the complexes concerned. God is manifest as a spiritual presence living within distinctive numinous orders. In the first divine dimension, God enters into sacramental orders, and makes it possible for them to participate in the fragmented powers of origin. These divine potencies may be arrested or diminished by the sheer resistance of the world’s orders. Yet they may also be quickened and augmented by those orders that seem to have a unique permeability to the divine import. For good or ill, God must depend upon nondivine orders for its appearances within the world. In this first dimension, God is fully temporal and embedded in the past and present. The epiphanies of power that enliven human community remain reticent to quick assimilation and easy domination. If such epiphanies are captured for finite purposes, they may be used for demonic ends and thereby betray more just social needs and expectations. EXPECTATION AND JUSTICE

The second divine dimension, also correlated to the spirit, emerges in creative tension with the first dimension. While the

DIVINE NATURES 173 first dimension emerges out of a fragmented origin, the second appears from the fragmented powers of expectation. In this second dimension, God is still to be understood as a natural complex, and thus retains its plurality and fragmented quality. The goals of the divine life are fragmented because they must become efficacious

against the backdrop of an inert and often hostile world. Finite purposes, as components within developmental teleology, work within and against powers that would like to see all purposes flattened into antecedent habits. God struggles against personal and social inertia by providing goads toward creative transformation. Social eschatology is, itself, sustained and reinforced by the second divine dimension. The power of hope is a gift of the divine, as it works through the spirit of expectation. No utopian expectation could long prevail were it not for the divine lure that moves selves beyond the opacity of origins toward the community of justice. Since the powers of expectation are fragmented, it makes no

sense to speak of a unified social goal. Rather, distinct yet commensurate goals emerge before communities of interpretation, making it possible for them to move toward just conditions. The second divine dimension is thus intimately correlated with the demands of justice. If the first divine dimension enriches and intoxicates the human process with its epiphanies of power, the second dimension makes it possible for the community to judge the powers, and to make them responsive to the claims of justice. The powers of origin, necessary in their own right, become measured by the symbols and powers of expectation which insist that no power be private alone. All epiphanies of power are transformed when they come into dialectical tension with the fragmented powers of expectation. Social eschatology and aesthetic or sacramental assimilation are not incompatible. In a striking sense, all social eschatologies have a sacramental core, and derive their rootedness from this core. A sacramental power bereft of its own eschatological momentum is demonic, while a social eschatology without a sacramental core is empty and without relevance to the human process and its needs. If God is thus the goad toward justice, it follows that the divine remains fully embedded within social tragedy and social triumph. Divine sympathy is as manifest in the second divine dimension as

in the first. The power of expectation stands within interpretive

174 NATURE AND SPIRIT communities ready to transform them into communities of justice. The transition from a natural community to an interpretive one is not possible outside of the second divine dimension, which speaks through the spirit. The spirit of justice remains in creative tension with the spiritual presence of the holy (first divine dimension), and these tensions enrich the divine scope. In the second divine dimension, God also experiences profound

limits to its power. As a natural complex, God has innumerable integrities and an elusive contour. Each social order participates in the divine life and adds to the divine contour. The divine sympa-

thy responds to each of these integrities, and allows them to become relevant to divine growth. At the same time, it follows that God is not aware of all of its integrities, as many of them are emergent and novel. Since it makes no sense to speak of a kind of social

superorder, it follows that God must endure the fragmented and competing social orders of human history. As any given interpretive community returns to its pre-thematic and possibly demonic natural state, the divine sympathy expands to encompass the constricted social order. Any time the powers of origin eclipse the powers of expectation, the divine feels a loss which narrows its own inner life. Social expectation is thus far more than a collective and purely human attitude. On the deepest level it is a gift of the divine and serves to empower the emancipatory community. Origin and expectation remain in creative tension, thus preserving the ‘space’ for the manifestation of the divine life within the human process. Tillich, writing in the context of the then-emergent Nazi movement, makes this correlation clear: The concept of expectation unites origin and goal in a twofold way: the goal is the fulfillment of what is intended by the origin, while

the origin engenders the power by which the goal is realized. . . . Expectation as such, expectation as a human attitude, comes into being in terms of a definite content of expectation at a particular time. . . . It [expectation] possesses a content that is dependent on the spiritual or social group involved, yet it transcends this content.*

The fragmentary powers of origin provide the energies that must be transformed and fulfilled in expectation. While expectation is certainly a human attitude, it also is a potency that transcends the

DIVINE NATURES 175 ‘sum’ of all personal and social conditions. Human social orders live within these tensions, and must struggle to correlate origin and expectation. The divine life cannot prescind from these tensions, and thus

serves as the goad for human transformations. God is both the epiphanies of power (as manifest to Job) and the power of expec-

tation (as manifest to the prophets). The dialectical tension between origins and goals remains central to divine evolution. In a very real sense, human social evolution is a microcosmic analogue

to divine evolution. God remains caught in the war between a plenitude of origins and the content-free lure of justice. When Til-

lich reminds us that the power of expectation is larger than its concrete social embodiments, he points to the eternal struggle within the divine life itself. While the biblical accounts of this struggle are hopelessly anthropomorphic, they nonetheless point toward a divine drama which remains eternal. While it might jar to assert that God ‘prefers’ one type of political association over another, it is clear that there must be an intimate correlation between the structure of communal life and di-

vine evolution. When Dewey asserts, quite correctly, that the concept of democracy is equivalent to the concept of just communal life, we gain access to some sense of how the divine and the social are connected. While Tillich stresses the concept of “‘religious socialism,”’ and makes a very strong case for its adequacy as a framework, ecstatic naturalism speaks instead of a ‘“‘theonomous

democracy.”’ The second divine dimension is deeply concerned with the creation and support of theonomous democratic structures, no matter how tenuous their position within social life. In a theonomous democracy, the conditions of social life are governed by the liberating power of expectation that comes out of the future. The second divine dimension is active within all forms of social transaction, and coaxes each self toward a vision of a transformed future. Individual autonomy receives its depth dimension in a theonomy. Such a theonomy does not impose an alien law (as in heteronomy), but fulfills and deepens the claims of

autonomy. The sense of the future consequent upon this divine lure is not that of infinite progress. There must be a radical break between past and present social conditions and the power of expectation. Social hope is not a set of beliefs about the infinite long

176 NATURE AND SPIRIT run (Peirce’s “would be’’), but a total inversion of the values of privilege and power. Within the fitful and fragmented life of a theonomous democracy, the divine continues to move the community toward a sense of ontological parity. Each self is shown to be of unconditional worth and power. The ontological status and value of personality is preserved by the second divine dimension. While God is not, strictly speaking, a person, God is the ground of personality. The selving process, a process that can only reach fulfillment within a theonomous democracy, 1s quickened and preserved against closure by the second divine dimension. While most complexes within the world do not

exhibit the traits of personality, the human process is what it is because of the power of the spirit. God qua spirit lives within the propulsive power of personality. Tillich makes it clear that God, while not a person, cannot be less than personal: “ “Personal God’ ” does not mean that God is a person. It means that God is the ground of everything personal and that he carries within himself the ontological power of personality. He is not a person, but he is not less than personal. . . . The divine life participates in every life as its ground and aim.’’> God participates in the human process

by providing the goad toward the emergence of personality. A personal center of power and meaning is deepened whenever the second, and future-directed, divine nature permeates the self. The ofttimes astonishing energy within selving is a gift of the divine. In a striking sense, God ‘desires’ the emergence of personality within the world. It would grant too much metaphysical license to see the entire universe as infused with personality. Personalist thinkers, justly intrigued by the emergence of personality within the world, go too far by reading it backward into prehuman orders. The key traits of personality are confined to the human process. The divine

has these traits in a preformal way, and they live as potencies within the divine life. While it makes sense to speak of the traits of personality, such as conscious centeredness, self-identity, horizonal growth and articulation, and internal semiosis, as integral to the human process, such features cannot be applied to the divine except in an analogous way. God is not so much a center of personality as the ground that propels and goads finite personalities

into existence.

DIVINE NATURES 177 Personality, as the ‘matter’ of the selving process, emerges into

its fullest measure within a theonomous democracy. Insofar as God ‘prefers’ one type of social order to another, it is that which empowers selving and makes sure that all origins serve the demands of justice. Social eschatology provides the ‘space’ within which selving can be fulfilled. The second divine dimension acts in a fragmented way to goad the social order toward theonomy. Of course, recalcitrance and sheer resistance frustrate the divine and sharply curtail the divine power. God can no more create a theonomous democracy at will than it can force any given complex to become the locus of the numinous. The divine may or may not have an overall plan for the human process. All attempts to ‘read’ such a plan fail because of the finitude of the human process. Of course, the human process is continually compelled to envision such plans, and to make them instrumental in social transformation. Inevitably, such enterprises become demonic and impose a heteronomous law upon the community. This is because the movement from a preformal plan to a content-specific one asks too much of the latter, and forces it to convey a divine measure that is beyond its reach. Consequently, the specific plan becomes inflated with an illusory form of empowerment to compensate for its lack of intrinsic power. The second divine dimension acts in a much less literal way in providing the energy for selving and social transformation. Insofar as a social utopia has clearly delimited contents and structures, it may function demonically. Insofar as a social utopia remains free from specific content, it may function to liberate the human process from antecedent powers.

The concept of “revelation” must be reconstructed to better correspond to the phenomenological data. Revelation is not a semiotic process that conveys information or conceptual content. Rather, it is a continual process of transformation in which the human process is compelled to return to its theonomous center. It makes little sense to ask about “‘what is revealed.”’ Revelation

comes from the ‘nether’ side of the ontological difference and opens the human process to the potencies within nature and the divine life. The ‘content’ of revelation is preformal and presemiotic. Part of the tragedy of human history lies in the continual failure to recognize the content-free quality of revelation.

178 NATURE AND SPIRIT The community of interpreters becomes theonomous whenever it lives under the impress of symbols of expectation. Such symbols have no specific semiotic referents, and open themselves to the transformative power of the divine. Social energies become redirected toward social symbols, and these symbols serve to measure

personal interactions. The community needs its epiphanies of power, as centers of divine appearance. Yet these very centers also need to become redirected and shriven of their illusory plenitude.

Within any epiphany of power lies the “not-yet”’ that opens the power of origin to the power of expectation. The sacramental orders of communal life point toward the “‘not-yet’’ whenever they become permeable to the symbols of expectation. Within the divine life, the tension between origin and expectation marks the temporality of God. In its first two dimensions, God is fully temporal and interacts with the other temporal orders of the world. The fragmented powers of origin belong to the past and present. Yet within these powers lie seeds of the “‘not-yet”’ that

point toward the future. In divine evolution, the three modes of time interact to enrich the divine scope. God remains embedded in its past and present, and open to its own future growth. The tensions within the human process and the community, both‘natural and interpretive, mirror the tensions within the divine life. From simple space-time particulars to the growth of natural and cosmic law, the divine interacts with temporal orders, and allows these temporal orders to become relevant to its life. If God is not less than personal, then God (in its first two dimensions) is not less than temporal. It should be remembered that nature does not have one time or one form of temporality, but that time is always a trait within and among orders. The principles of general relativity remind us that even the divine life must have a complex relation to time. Whitehead took pains to show why general relativity made it impossible

for there to be a universe-wide prehension of contemporary events. That is, for Whitehead, all prehension of one actual occasion by another involves the awareness of a past occasion. The limitations built into the speed of light affect the prehension process, and limit simultaneity to immediate orders of relevance. It follows that the divine cannot have a simultaneous awareness of all orders, as if they participated in a unified field of time. God is thus

DIVINE NATURES 179 caught in the same temporal relativity as are all other orders of relevance. Further, since God participates in both sides of the ontological difference, the divine life is also pretemporal in its originating potencies. God is pretemporal, temporal, and enmeshed within the relativity of spatio-temporal orders. Ecstatic naturalism concurs with the process reading of time, even while enriching the categorial structure of Whitehead to honor the utter complexity of divine temporality.

God is thus a natural complex in its first two orders, and remains fully embedded in the world. As a component within nature

natured, God is bound by all of the constraints of any complex. While God has more scope and power than any other natural complex, this scope and power remains limited by other orders. If we wish to use mathematical images, we can say that God is finite in its first two dimensions. In its third dimension, that is, the dimen-

sion correlated to nature naturing, God is nonfinite, and not a complex within the world. If God qua spirit is embedded within the unnumerable complexes of the world, God in its third dimension is coextensive with all orders, whether they are temporal or not. MUTUAL SUSTAINING

The third divine dimension is radically distinct from the first two. The first two dimensions emerge within nature natured, while the third is correlated to nature naturing. It is important that the dis-

tinction between God and nature naturing remains. God in its third dimension is one of the manifestations of nature naturing and is not equivalent to the preformal potencies as a ‘whole.’ It must be understood that nature is of indefinite scope, and that its potencies cannot be circumscribed. The distinction between orders and potencies is crucial to the analysis of the third divine dimension. God sustains all the orders of the world and has its own potencies, but does not exhaust all the potencies in nature. As will emerge in the analysis of the fourth divine dimension, nature naturing ‘“contains’ the eternal tension between God and the encompassing. God

is subaltern to nature, even while sustaining the complexes that prevail at any given time. Natura naturans is not limited to the world’s complexes, even though it permeates all that prevails.

180 NATURE AND SPIRIT God sustains the complexes of the world, but is not the creator of the world itself. In its first two dimensions, God is one of the innumerable complexes of the world, and thus could not create the world as a whole. In the third divine dimension, God represents one of nature’s primal potencies, and expresses the plenitude of nature. This primal potency is manifest in numerous subaltern potencies, such as those pertaining to the epiphanies of power, but all have their source in the primal potencies of nature. God sustains the orders of the world but is, itself, sustained by nature. In certain metaphorical contexts, it is appropriate to use the language of “‘be-

ing’’ when describing the third divine dimension. Thus, God is the ground of being that sustains all orders against the threat of nonbeing. This Tillichian language is invoked whenever the sustaining relation is understood from the standpoint of the innumerable threats posed to the orders of the world. As a dimension of natura naturans, God is preordinal and pretemporal. God is preordinal in the sense that it cannot be defined in terms applicable to natural complexes. Thus, it makes no sense to say here that God is plurally located or finite. God is infinite in its scope insofar as it is coextensive with ‘all’ the complexes of the world. There is no complex that is not sustained by God, and there

is no realm where God is absent. However, unlike the first two divine dimensions, where God is both weakly and strongly relevant to various orders of the world, God is sheerly relevant to the support of the innumerable complexes of the world. God is sheerly relevant insofar as it affects neither the contour nor the scope of complexes. The being or nonbeing of a complex (or, in less metaphorical terms, the prevalance or nonprevalance of a complex) depends upon the divine support. God is pretemporal in the third dimension in that God stands outside of the time processes that occupy some orders and not others. The sustaining relation is one that does not augment or diminish the temporal features of complexes. Thus, God is fully temporal in its first two dimensions, while pretemporal in its third. The image of ““pretemporal”’ is preferred to that of “‘atemporal” because it suggests that time may emerge out of nature, and that there is more of a continuity between the temporal and the nontemporal dimensions of God. Process perspectives insist that all complexes are inherently temporal (epochal), and that God

DIVINE NATURES 181 participates in the internal life of each complex (actual occasion). The doctrine of internal relations is used to show the intimate intrusion of God into all orders of the world. By “internal relations”’ is meant that both relata are internally modified in the relation, and that God and the world must be strongly relevant to each other in all respects. For Whitehead, all occasions are strongly relevant to God. The current perspective sharply contrasts the doctrine of internal relations with that of sheer relevance. The divine is internally related to some, but not all, complexes. The relation of sheer relevance is one that does not change the two relata in an internal way. In metaphorical terms, God in its third dimension is reticent to intrude into the orders of the world, and does not invade their internal life. Ordinal monotheism denies that the concept of internal relations can be applied to the third divine dimension. From the standpoint of the human process, the third divine dimension becomes available to us through natural grace. Natural grace is ubiquitous throughout the orders of the world and has no

limitations to its scope. Whenever the self experiences natural grace, it becomes aware of the sustaining power of the divine. Schleiermacher developed a rich and subtle phenomenology of the religious consciousness and correlated the feeling of absolute or

sheer dependence with the manifestation of the absolute. In the second edition of his Glaubenslehre, modified as a partial response to the criticisms of Hegel, Schleiermacher states: “‘Now this is just

what is principally meant by the formula which says that to feel oneself absolutely dependent and to be conscious of being in relation to God are one and the same thing; and the reason is that absolute dependence is the fundamental relation which must include all others in itself.’’® There are, he holds, two forms of dependence. One form pertains to finite dependence on certain or-

ders within the world, while the second pertains to the God relation. Schleiermacher contrasts three levels of consciousness: the animal grade, which is prior to the subject-object diremption; the middle grade, which lives in the full reciprocity of freedom

and dependence within the world; and higher consciousness, which is the God relation manifest as the feeling of absolute dependence. Middle consciousness is grounded in higher consciousness, and receives its own self-understanding through the feeling of absolute dependence. In our terms, higher consciousness is that

182 NATURE AND SPIRIT which is permeable to God’s sheer relevance to the innumerable complexes of the world. Middle consciousness is that which is permeable to the strong and weak forms of relevance that prevail between God and some of the complexes of the world. Schleiermacher’s analysis of the divine natures is incomplete and lacks some of the key insights of ordinal monotheism, but it nonetheless represents a forceful analysis of the human process and its

correlation to the divine in its third dimension. The feeling of absolute or sheer dependence is unique within the self and measures all other experiences. Natural grace is the ‘outer’ side of sheer dependence, while the feeling of sheer dependence is the ‘inner’ side of God’s manifestation in its third dimension. Where the first two divine dimensions may alter the scope or integrity of the self, and thus be either weakly or strongly relevant to self-understanding, the third dimension ‘underlies’ the first two, and fills the self with natural grace. In existential terms, this is the moment of total acceptance, in which the self is freed from the claims of death. The world and God have the same scope or extent. No complex is bereft of divine support, and God grows with the universe. The question arises as to whether God supports itself, that is, whether the third divine dimension, as sheerly relevant to all complexes, supports the first two divine dimensions. Such an idea seems farfetched at first, until it is remembered that God must struggle with its own dimensions and bring them into unity. Many perspectives are friendly to the idea that God can be aware of itself, and that the divine can take ‘care’ for its own growth. Ordinal monotheism takes seriously the idea that God has components, and that the divine life is always, to some extent precarious. God thus supports all complexes, including its own fragmentary nature, in its first two dimensions. We can understand this relation through analogy with the human process. Insofar as the self has components that are subject to growth and the pressure of other selves or complexes, it is vulnerable to alterations and transformations that may distort the selving process. Yet the self can rely on a deeper dimension of awareness that recognizes the ultimate safety of its trajectory through time. In the depth dimension, the self discovers that the changes manifest in other orders of its life are not such as to destroy the ultimate integrity of the self. Extending this analogy to the divine natures, we can assert that God

DIVINE NATURES 183 is secured against its own internal diremptions by the third divine dimension, which provides the creative and sustaining ground for the first two dimensions. In the Introduction, Meister Eckhart’s distinction between God and the Godhead was used to illuminate

a key tension within the divine life. In the present context, this distinction sheds light on the correlation between the first, second,

and third divine dimensions. If the first two dimensions correspond to God, then the third corresponds to the Godhead. God is sustained by the Godhead, and is protected from those diremptions that would splinter the divine life. The third divine dimension is thus that of a unified pretemporal ground for the first two dimensions. By the same token, the third divine dimension lives as the sustaining ground for all complexes that currently prevail. Peirce, writing in 1906, draws together several of these themes in a way that foreshadows the main features of ordinal monotheism, as it portrays the third divine dimension: I am inclined to think (though I admit that there is no necessity of taking that view) that the process of creation has been going on for an infinite time in the past, and further, during all past time, and further, that past time had no definite beginning, yet came about by a process which in a generalized sense, of which we cannot easily get much idea, was a development. I believe Time to be a reality, and not the figment which Kant’s nominalism proposes to explain it as being. As reality, it is due to creative power (6.506).

Peirce rejects the traditional notion of creation out of nothing, and

insists that creation is a continual process. To some extent, this follows from his commitment to continuity (synechism), which asserts that all events are part of a continuum with no first term. Of course, there are many continua in nature, and the question arises as to whether there is a continuum of continua. Needless to say, the ordinal view rejects such a conception, even while sensitive

to the many forms to continuity within the world. God and the orders of the world are continuous in the sense that neither could prevail without the other. It makes no sense to speak of ‘God before the creation’ any more than it makes sense to speak of a world without God. Peirce further links the concept of real time to that of creativity, and seems to argue as if creativity is the genus of which time is the

184 NATURE AND SPIRIT | species. This conception allows for the correlation between the pretemporal creative power of the divine and the emergence of time within many orders of the world. Peirce makes his metaphysical commitment clear when he states, “I think we must regard Creative Activity as an inseparable attribute of God,” (6.506). Process perspectives tie the concept of time too directly to that of creativity, and apply temporal categories to whatever is, with the

exception of the Primordial aspect of God. This linkage of time and creativity makes it difficult to understand the potencies that are prior to temporality, even if many of them give birth to the temporal. The concept of “creativity” must be protected from two philosophical distortions. On the one hand, it must be directly correlated to the world as a whole, and not seen as a power completely outside of the innumerable complexes of the world. That is, creativity, divine or otherwise, is always active within and through the world, and is not a power that could generate a world. On the other hand, creativity must be understood as pretemporal, even if it will often manifest its activities within time, and perhaps even create time itself, as Peirce seems to suggest. In the third divine dimension, God is creative in the strict sense that it sustains the innumerable orders of the world, some of which are temporal

while others are not. By the same token, God sustains its own fragmented activities within the world, and ensures that the epiphanies of power and the powers of expectation remain relevant to the human process. God gives creative license to many complexes,

goading them into a transformation of their traits. This second form of creativity, i.e., one that is not correlated to the sheer power of being, spawns creativity within nondivine orders. This form of creativity is much quieter than that found in correlation with the first and second divine dimensions. In the third divine dimension, God remains detached from the orders of the world. The metaphor of “‘detachment”’ is meant to augment the concept of “‘sheer relevance.’’ Insofar as God is sheerly relevant to all orders, God does not interact with them or alter their traits. In this dimension, God cannot function as an epiphany or as a goad, but quietly sustains what is. Consequently, the divine cannot be attached to any complex, no matter what its life history. If God may be strongly relevant to the selving process in the second dimension, it is detached from the human process in

DIVINE NATURES © 1385 the third. Peirce, in sympathy with the elder Henry James’s Substance and Shadow (1863), states how he sees the role of detachment

in the divine life: “In general, God is perpetually creating us, that is developing our real manhood, our spiritual reality. Like a good teacher, He is engaged in detaching us from a False dependence upon Him” (6.507). This passage illuminates the tension within the divine life itself. In the second divine dimension, God enhances our “spiritual reality,’’ and goads the selving process toward its fulfillment, a fulfillment that has no preordained goal. Yet, at the

same time, the divine is compelling the human process to seek independence from the divine powers that animate it. The freedom

envisioned by Schleiermacher in the relation of absolute dependence stems from the divine detachment from the details of the selving process. A “false dependence” on God would cling to the powers that emerge from the divine potencies, and would thus run the risk of self-divinization. A true dependence would actually entail detachment from the powers that are manifest in the first two divine dimensions and an acceptance of the natural grace that is a gift of the third divine dimension. From the standpoint of the human process, the third divine dimension serves to measure and encompass the first two divine di-

mensions. The epiphanies of power that intoxicate and augment the human process are brought into creative tension by the powers of expectation that secure the community against demonic infla-

tion. The third divine dimension ‘underlies’ the tension beween the numinous and the expectant by sustaining the ‘space’ within which both may work out their inner logic. If God can give natural grace to the human process, whether recognized or not, it can also

give grace to its own inner life. That is, the divine tensions and possible diremptions can be sustained against rupture by the quiet relevance that emerges from the third divine dimension (the Godhead of Eckhart). God can give birth to its own possibilities and actualities, and can also secure these traits against foreclosure. Traditional concepts of divine simplicity cloud the issue by failing to recognize the tensions within divine evolution. God can be aware

of its own dimensions, and can feel the pull and power of these dimensions. The third divine dimension lives quietly to sustain these tensions and to keep them from shattering divine unity.

186 NATURE AND SPIRIT BEFORE THE ENCOMPASSING

The fourth, and final, divine dimension emerges out of the perennial contrast between God and nature naturing. Even in its third dimension, the divine is subaltern to the innumerable potencies of nature. God is coextensive with all prevalent complexes as their sustaining ground, but God cannot be coextensive with nature naturing. Even in its sustaining relation, God is an eject of nature and

represents part of the plenitude of nature itself. The plenitude of nature is strongly manifest in God’s power to secure the being (prevalence) of all complexes. In the fourth dimension, the divine stands out more sharply against nature naturing, and ‘recognizes’ that nature eclipses it in scope and power. From the divine standpoint, nature lives as the encompassing for its own life. Consequently, the fourth divine dimension is best described as living out of the tension between God and the encompassing. It is important to stress that the concept of the “encompassing” is actually a metaphorical corollary to the concept of “‘natura natur-

ans.’ That is, to speak of the encompassing is to illuminate the way nature stands to God. Nature encompasses the divine in all of its natures, and provides the ultimate ‘place’ for divine growth. Both God and the human process live with some sense of the encompassing potency of nature, and derive their highest measure from this encompassing. The concept or metaphor of the ‘“‘encom-

passing”’ should not be hypostatized into some kind of order, or complex of complexes. In describing the correlation between God and the encompassing, it is necessary to use a kind of via negativa that does not impose order-specific analogies onto the encompassing. Indeed, to speak of the encompassing, as if it were the object of a specific referent, is to violate its unique ontological status. It is perfectly appropriate to equate nature naturing and the encompassing. However, the metaphor or concept of the encompassing conveys the sense of a pervasive lure that might not be conveyed by the concept of nature naturing. Put differently: the encompassing is the ultimate “not-yet”’ for the divine life. The most important insights into the elusive nature of the encompassing can be found in the writings of Karl Jaspers. In his brilliant and detailed analyses of the human process and its place within the world, Jaspers exhibits the ways in which the encompassing radically transcends all human meaning horizons:

DIVINE NATURES 187 We always live and think within a horizon. But the very fact that it is a horizon indicates something further which again surrounds the given horizon. From this situation arises the question about the Encompassing. The Encompassing [das Umereifende] is not a horizon within which every determinate mode of Being and truth emerges for us, but rather that within which every particular horizon is enclosed as in something absolutely comprehensive which is no longer visible as a horizon at all.’

All human horizons remain limited and bound to specific spheres of meaning and embodiment. The horizon is the extension of the human body into larger orders of semiosis and value. All horizons remain embedded within the other orders of nature, and represent

the insertion of human apprehension into the world. On the ‘other’ side of all horizons, both actual and possible, is the encom-

passing, which is not a horizon of meaning. The encompassing cannot be embodied or ordinally located the way a horizon can. By definition, it eludes such finite embeddedness. The fourth divine dimension, like the human process, acknowledges the encompassing (nature naturing) as its own radical other.

While God is not other to nature natured, it is radically distinct from the innumerable potencies of nature. God faces into the encompassing, and thereby gains a sense of its own locatedness. This insight forces us to modify Hartshorne’s surpassability thesis. For

Hartshorne, God is that than which nothing greater can be thought but is, itself, self-surpassable. The perspective of ecstatic naturalism reinforces this claim, but modifies it by placing divine self-surpassability in the context of the encompassing. Put in positive terms: divine growth is possible because of the ‘space’ continually provided by the encompassing. Divine evolution would be impossible were it not for the eternal “not-yet’’ that confronts the divine life. Put in negative terms: the encompassing ‘reminds’ the divine that it is eternally incomplete, and that no stage of divine fulfillment is adequate. The restlessness within the divine natures derives from the lure for self-transcendence provided by the encompassing. God cannot fill in the encompassing any more than the human process can encompass nature. The divine is fragmented and incomplete in its first two natures, while living as the sustaining ground for the world’s complexes in its third dimension. In the fourth dimension, God experiences its

188 NATURE AND SPIRIT own travail in the face of that which is forever beyond its scope. While God can interact with complexes within the world, even though many of them remain recalcitrant to the divine infusion, God cannot become strongly relevant to the encompassing. The relationship between God and the encompassing is asymmetrical in that the encompassing is strongly relevant to God, while God

cannot be strongly relevant to the encompassing. That is, God experiences a transformation of its identity and integrity when standing before the encompassing, while the encompassing, by definition, is beyond the reach of any counter influence. Does the encompassing acknowledge God and the divine travail? For good or ill, this question cannot be answered, at least from the standpoint of the human process. When confronting the encompassing,

the ordinal perspective must acknowledge an ultimate mystery that can only be partially understood. The divine confronts its own incompletion in the face of the encompassing (nature naturing). Consequently, the divine life lives under the lure of eternal self-transcendence, and moves toward greater scope and fulfillment. The fourth divine dimension thus experiences the “not-yet” that provides a unified goal for divine growth. If God prevails as a fragmented origin in its first dimension, as a fragmented expectation in its second dimension, and as a unified ground in its third dimension, then God lives as a unified goal in its fourth dimension. The goal remains unified because it is not embedded in the innumerable complexes of the world, and does not face the inertia and splintering that confronts the second divine dimension. Of course, we are prescinding the fourth dimension from the other three and must modify our description when we speak of the unity within the divine life. In the present context, it is appropriate to describe the fourth dimension in its independence from the other three divine dimensions and from the world’s complexes.

God is a product of nature naturing, yet the ground of nature natured. Nature naturing fulfills its own plenitude in the creation of a God that is both finite and infinite, but in different respects. God is finite insofar as it is a complex within nature. By finite is here meant that God has limits to its scope and power, even though its scope and power is without equal within the world. By infinite

is here meant that God has scope that is coextensive with the

DIVINE NATURES 189 world’s complexes (third dimension), and thus is found wherever there are complexes. In the fourth divine dimension, the tensions between the finite and infinite aspects become deepened. God is finite in that it faces its own other in the encompassing, while God

is infinite in that it remains that than which no greater can be thought. The encompassing cannot be ‘thought’ in the same way that God can, and thus is not an exception to the basic meaning of the surpassability thesis. God responds to the lure held open by the encompassing, and refuses to become bound by its own history. Divine freedom is a gift of the encompassing. Were there no encompassing lure, the divine life would forever reiterate its own plenitude and remain bereft of growth and self-transcendence. Using religious metaphors, we can say that, in the fourth divine dimension, the divine life is perennially resurrected. The crucifixions that plague the divine life in its first two dimensions are balanced and measured by the more powerful resurrections emergent from the fourth divine dimension. The encompassing allows God to constantly give birth to itself, so that divine evolution is forever guaranteed. In the lure held open by the encompassing, the divine becomes a child to itself and renews its innumerable relations with the world. God cannot fill in the innumerable potencies of natura naturans, but derives its own life and dynamism from these potencies. The “not-yet”’ of the encompassing keeps God forever underway toward divine fulfillment. Process perspectives acknowledge the ways in which the divine holds open an encompassing perspective for the human process, but do not articulate the divine need for

such a ‘space.’ Divine evolution would be little more than the ‘sum’ of all evolving complexes were it not for the encompassing

that stands before the divine life. Peirce was not fully clear on whether God was, itself, a sign of something else (Peirce’s concept of ‘‘agape’’) or beyond all semiosis. Ecstatic naturalism insists that

God is indeed a sign of something beyond itself, namely, nature in its naturing. God points toward the encompassing, and is thus a cipher (empty symbol) of the depth dimension within nature. God empties itself into the encompassing, and struggles to transcend its own limitations. The divine travail stands before the human process as the ultimate image of growth of all kinds. Cosmic evolution, whether it

190 NATURE AND SPIRIT be manifest in the growth of centers or consciousness or in the development of Peircean generals, points directly toward the growth possibilities within the fourth divine nature. God’s restlessness before the encompassing is the seedbed for all forms of growth. It makes no sense to equate God and an evolving universe,

as if God were the mere additive product of all complexes. The encompassing is the final potency within which all evolution occurs. Put differently: God would remain satisfied with its plenitude and power were it not for the ever-receding lure of the en-

compassing that goads the divine beyond itself. The tensions between the encompassing and God permeate all complexes, either directly or indirectly, and infuse all complexes with a restlessness that stems from the heart of nature. This divine travail opens God to the various manifestations of the “not-yet”’ within the world. Divine sympathy is not confined to the other divine dimensions, but is quickened and focused by the continual presence of the “‘not-yet”’ within the orders of the world. God senses the ‘‘not-yet”’ in and around a given order and

participates in the lure held open by that “not-yet.’’ From the standpoint of the human process, this sympathy is felt whenever we derive the courage to shatter our illusory plenitude on our own “not-yet.”” The courage occasionally manifest in the human process is itself a gift of the fourth divine dimension as it enters into the “‘not-yets”’ of the self. From our perspective, this presence is manifest as a unified goal that enables us to transcend the opacities of origin, and find a renewed life within the divine. This unified goal underlies the fragmented goals that come to us from the second divine dimension. Nature thus gives birth to a God that preserves its own innumerable complexes, while yet being an order within the world. In addition, nature lures its God into greater orders of growth and self-fulfillment. God’s struggles with and against the encompassing do not isolate God from the other orders of the world. In fact, this divine travail continually reminds God of the innumerable travails within the world, and makes it impossible for the divine to worship its own plenitude. Within the divine life is the continual dialectic between plenitude and emptiness. The plenitude of the other dimensions is measured against the emptiness of the fourth divine dimension. The sheer power of being (third dimension) that

DIVINE NATURES 191 sustains the world receives its deeper measure in the emptiness that is the gift of the encompassing. Most perspectives fail to recognize

the eternal play between plenitude and emptiness, and locate the divine solely on the side of plenitude. Such frameworks remain one-sided and fail to understand the correlation between nature naturing and the divine life. God is thus subaltern to nature and lives as the most striking of nature’s manifestations. Yet, the divine is of indefinite scope in the dimension of nature natured and thus sustains the world and the human process. Invoking mathematical images, we can say that both God and nature are infinite, but in different respects. The infinity of God pertains to its scope and sustaining power (manifest as sheer relevance). The infinity of nature pertains to its innumerable potencies that transcend all orders and all given potencies, including the divine. From our finite perspective, these are different dimensions of the infinite, and nature’s supremacy in no way eclipses that of the divine life. Yet it is important to avoid a simplistic equation of God and Nature, as if such a conceptual strategy solved the problem of divine growth and the interaction of the divine and the world. The divine dimensions do not, of course, prevail in separation, but continually interact to enhance the divine life. The divine life is what it is because of the tensions among its dimensions, and would have little relevance for the world without these eternal conflicts. In what remains, we will describe the correlation of the four divine dimensions both from the standpoint of the human process

and from the standpoint of the divine life itself. Of course, the latter perspective transcends our direct phenomenological insight,

but certain meaningful implications (abductions) can be drawn from our previous conceptual elaborations and insights. From the standpoint of the human process, the four divine dimensions are manifest in the creative tensions among power, justice, sustaining love, and the restlessness of the “‘not-yet.”’ When the self encounters an epiphany of power in some sacramental order, it is filled with the power of the divine to enliven and deepen the world’s complexes. The manifestation of the holy gives the self its own plenitude, and enables it to find some external measure for its own evolving life. These epiphanies are fitful and often elusive, yet they punctuate ordinary experience and evoke the fragmented

192 NATURE AND SPIRIT powers of origin. Were the self to remain bound only to the first divine dimension, it would remain caught in the demonic temptations of mere origins and ignore the future directed lure of justice.

The second divine dimension becomes relevant to the self as it transforms and judges the epiphanies of power. The human process deepens its sense of time under the impress of the eschatological and social manifestations of the divine. Power and justice remain in tension, so that all sacramental orders are broken open to reveal their rootedness in the ever-emergent community of Justice. The past and present powers are gathered up into the lure of an expectant future, and the self begins to participate in the rhythm of the divine life. God’s plenitude never is rejected or denied its efficacy, but is transfigured so that it can serve the needs of social hope. From the standpoint of the self, the first and second divine dimensions are forever in creative interchange, each deepening and reinforcing the claims of the other. Epiphanies of power are actually augmented when they live within the lure of justice. By the same token, the lure of justice enhances its own forms of embodiment whenever it becomes open to the power of fragmented origins.

The third divine dimension is experienced as a quiet divine life that secures the self against internal bifurcation. This third dimension underlies the first two, and holds them open to each other. The ofttimes fiery dialectic of power and justice is stilled in the ubiquitous presence of love. The self participates in the preordinal

and pretemporal sustaining love of God, and derives the quiet courage that enables it to enter into the eternal play of power and justice. Without the encounter with the third divine dimension, the self would remain forever caught in the erratic movement between fragmented origin and fragmented goal. The third divine dimension enables the first two to rest secure from their labors, and to ‘recognize’ that divine love transfigures all powers and all goals.

The fourth divine dimension is experienced by the human process in the restlessness of all the specific “‘not-yets” that punctuate life. The fragmentary quality of finite goals is gathered into a nonfragmentary goal that has no specific content. If the second divine dimension seems to empower the self with given social hopes, the

DIVINE NATURES 193 fourth speaks out of the ultimate gift of hope itself. This hope is not that which is envisioned in a social utopia, but is the hope that comes out of God’s own eternal travail. Fragmented goals are gathered into the unified goal that lives before the divine life. The sustaining love of the third divine dimension is also beneath and within the struggles of the fourth divine dimension. From the perspective of the human process, this eternal struggle is manifest in the surety that all social goals are of ultimate import to the divine life, and that no fragmented goal is bereft of the liberating power of unified hope. The four divine dimensions actualize themselves through mu-

tual interaction and participate in the movement toward divine unity. Io move beyond the confines of the human process: some final implications can be drawn of the self-actualization of the divine. These involve the forms of relevance that prevail among the divine dimensions and indicate the ways in which the divine is transforming its interactions with the world. The first and second divine dimensions can be weakly and strongly relevant to each other. Insofar as an epiphany of power can infuse a given social goal, it is strongly relevant to the integrity of that goal. This is a symmetrical relation in that the same social goal can be strongly relevant to its correlated epiphany of power. By the same token, the epiphany of power and the social goal can

be weakly relevant to each other insofar as they merely augment each other’s scope. Put differently: God’s first two dimensions, as components of nature natured, become relevant to each other in innumerable orders and in innumerable ways. It is important to note, however, that no epiphany and no social goal can ever be sheerly relevant to another. By definition, the first two divine dimensions transform the traits and scope of the orders with which they become relevant. The third divine dimension is sheerly relevant to the first two, and sustains them against the threat of nonbeing. Divine love, because of its indifference to its objects, cannot be strongly or weakly

relevant to the first two dimensions. Looked at from the other side, the first two divine dimensions ‘recognize’ the third dimension and acknowledge its sheer sustaining power. Again, this is a symmetrical relation in that the relation of sheer relevance goes in

both directions. The first two divine dimensions ‘allow’ divine

194 NATURE AND SPIRIT love to become sheerly relevant to their struggles, but do not ‘ex-

pect’ to have their scope or integrity changed. The third divine dimension is sheerly relevant to the first two, and the first two are sheerly relevant to it. That is, the third divine dimension does not allow specific traits to enter into its actualization. The fourth divine dimension is strongly and weakly relevant to the first two dimensions and is sheerly relevant to the third dimen-

sion. Again, these relations are symmetrical. The fourth dimension can enter into the epiphanies of power, and enable them to point toward divine growth and transformation. The fourth dimension can enter into given social hopes, and open them to the ultimate hope that has no content. Looked at from the other direction, concrete powers and specific hopes can enrich the movement of the fourth divine dimension and help it to enhance its integrity and scope. The fourth dimension is sheerly relevant to the third in

that it derives its own sustaining love from the third dimension. The third dimension sustains the first, second, and fourth, without ‘expecting’ anything in return. The fourth dimension is that which compels the divine to remain forever self-surpassing. By living out of the “‘not-yet”’ of the encompassing, the fourth dimension gives birth to new stages in divine evolution. The unity of the divine life is not the product of any one dimension, or of any two or three in consort. Divine unity is sustained by the continual interaction among all four divine di-

mensions. The self-actualization of God is fraught with tension and internal transformation but is never, itself, in doubt. In spite of the differences between origins and goals, both fragmented and unified, the divine life grows and manifests itself throughout the innumerable orders of the world. The presence of spirit is manifest most directly to the human process in the first two divine dimen-

sions, even though it lives between and among all the divine dimensions. In a striking sense, the spirit of God is most forcefully manifest in the unity that sustains all the divine dimensions and keeps them relevant to each other and to the world within and through which the divine fulfills its own life. NOTES

1. Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, trans. James Luther Adams (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 112.

DIVINE NATURES 195 2. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1923), p. 31. 3. Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), p. 138. 4. Paul Tillich, The Socialist Decision, trans. Franklin Sherman (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 106, 132. The original text, Die sozialistische Entscheidung, appeared in 1933.

5. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology 1 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 245. 6. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, trans. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1928), p. 17. 7. Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, trans. William Earle (New York: Noonday, 1955), p. 52.

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Rosenthal, Sandra B. Speculative Pragmatism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986. Royce, Josiah. The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce. Ed. John J. McDermott. 2 vols. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969. ——. The Problem of Christianity. Ed. John E. Smith. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. The Christian Faith. Trans. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1928. ——. Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts. Trans. James Duke and Jack Forstman. Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1977. ——. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Trans. Richard Crouter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Sia, Santiago. God in Process Thought. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1985. The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. Edd. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Seboek. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Singer, Beth. Ordinal Naturalism: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Justus Buchler. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1983. Spiegelberg, Herbert. The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction. 3rd rev. and enl. ed. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982. Tillich, Paul. The Protestant Era. Trans. James Luther Adams. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1948. ——. The Socialist Decision. Trans. Franklin Sherman. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. ——. Systematic Theology 1. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967.

——. Theology of Culture. Ed. Richard C. Kimball. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. ——. What Is Religion? Trans. James Luther Adams. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969. Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: Corrected Edition. Edd. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978. Williams, Robert R. Schleiermacher the Theologian: The Construction of the Doctrine of God. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1953. ——. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D. FE Pears and B. EK McGuiness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963.

Aristotle, 11 Jacobsen, Douglas, xi James, Henry, Sr., 185

Barth, Karl, 164 James, William, 5, 21, 37, 47, 91, 96 Bloch, Ernst, ix, 68-69, 113-14, 116, Jaspers, Karl, 186

137-38 Joyce, James, 127

Brown, John, 78, 153 Jung, Carl Gustav, ix, 44-45, 61, 68Buber, Martin, ix, 128-30 69, 94, 105, 166 Buchler, Justus, viii, xi, 23, 25, 50, 52—

93, 121, 149 Kant, Immanuel, 66, 77

Campbell, Jim, x

Kruse, Felicia, x

Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de, 71 Lachs, John, x Leibniz, Gottfried, 5

Darwin, Charles, ix, 140-41 Long. Charles. xi Dewey, John, ix, 10, 22~23, 27, 53, %6, Ss :

98-99, 101-102, 104, 118, 175 Marx, Karl, 69, 96, 113

. McDermott, John, x ne oan te Ix, 84-85, 109-11, Meister Eckhart, 35, 183, 185 oo. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Einstein, Albert, 111 aa _?42

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 16-17, 47 Miller, John William, tx, 16, 29

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 151

Freud, Sigmund, 138

Frings, Manfred, x Newsom, Carol, *

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 56, 59

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 19-20 Nishitani, Keyji, 35 Gandhi, Mahatma, 103

Ochs, Peter, x

Hammerton-Kelly, Robert, xi Otto, Rudolf, 167-68 Hartshorne, Charles, ix, 35, 69, 169,

171, 187 Paul, Saint, 79

Hausman, Carl, x Peirce, Charles Sanders, ix, 13, 17, 42, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, viii, 48, 51-53, 69, 83-84, 87, 110, 127,

7, 36, 41, 55, 95, 142, 181 139-41, 143, 147, 149, 152, 164, Heidegger, Martin, ix, x, 7, 11, 29, 50, 176, 183-85, 189-90

122-26, 128, 130, 134-36, 149 Petry, Ed, Jr., x Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 34, 62-63, Plato, 142 80

Husserl, Edmund, viii, ix, 3, 6-13, 17— Royce, Josiah, 5, 92-93, 95, 99, 112,

20, 23, 25, 37, 110, 123 117, 143-44, 153 203

204 NATURE AND SPIRIT

von, 115

Santayana, George, 52 Tillich, Paul, ix, 32-33, 58, 69, 155Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 57, 166, 174-76, 180 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, ix, 133, Veding, Gert, 137

181-82 Whitehead, Alfred North, 23, 69, 164,

Shakespeare, 57 178, 181

Singer, Beth, x Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 4, 84, 148

SUBJECT INDEX Abduction (retroduction), 83-85, 191 185; Life, 160, 162-63, 165, 167,

Absolute Spirit, 35 170-72, 174-75, 179, 183, 185, 188, Access Structure(s), 12, 72-73 190-92, 194; Natures, ix, 32, 35-36,

Actual Infinite, 5 62, 72, 139, 160, 162-63, 165, 182, Adumbration (Abschattung), 18-19 187; Sympathy, 36, 169-70, 173-74,

Agapism, 140 190; Travail, 32, 188-90, 193

Anxiety, 24, 71, 135 Dynamic Object, 110-11 Archetypes, 68-69, 100, 156, 159,

166-67 Embodiment, 6, 41-45, 47, 50, 54, 71-

Autonomy, 28, 75, 175 72, 76, 78, 80, 89, 130, 134, 138, 153, 155, 187, 192

Categorical Imperative, 77 Encompassing, The, 89-90, 159, 165, Clock Time (Chronos), 11, 57-58, 93, _ 17, 186-91, 194

100 Entelechy, 61, 139, 170

Community, 43, 48, 51, 71, 83, 86, 89, Epiphanies of power, 33, 160, 165-68,

91, 90, 93, 107, 132, 143-45, 153, 170, 172-73, 175, 178, 180, 184-85, 156, 172, 178, 185; Natural, 51, 95- 191-94 100, 102-103, 107-109, 111-14, 116, Epoche, 25

155, 178; of Expectation, 92-93, Eros, 142 117; of Interpretation, 97-98, 100— _ Eschatological (fulfilled) Time (kairos), 102, 107-109, 111, 120, 173; of In- 57-—58, 66, 69, 73, 77, 93, 100, 135 terpreters, 9-10, 14, 31, 77, 97-101, Essence (Wesen), 6-7, 10, 13, 25, 27-28 103-104, 107-108, 110-13, 143-45, Evident (evidence), The (Evidenz), 6, 8 147, 155, 172, 178; of Memory, 92,

94—95, 98 Family Resemblances, 4-5, 28

Constitution, 6, 10-11 Finitude, 40, 44, 54, 63, 65-67, 81, Contour(s), 25, 29-30, 41, 55, 69, 86, 105, 134, 136 108, 120, 133, 142, 155, 170, 172, Foundationalism, 6 174, 180

Creatio ex nthilo, 32, 165 God, ix, 31-32, 34-38, 87, 159-60, Critical Common Sense(ism), 13-14, 162-66, 169-73, 176~80, 182-87,

51-52, 65, 88, 117, 150, 162 189-92

God of time, 58

Deconstruction, 3—4, 48 Godhead, The (die Gottheit), 35, 183, Demonic, 33, 44, 51, 56, 58, 64, 68, 185 74, 77, 99, 104-105, 137, 139, 145, Gods of space, 58, 68-69

151, 168-69, 177, 185, 192 Ground, 138, 157, 187; nonunified, 32; Developmental Teleology, 70-71, 115, unified, 188 173

Divine, The, 31, 169, 171, 178, 191— Habit, 47-48, 83, 86, 115, 173

93; Evolution, 32, 164, 171, 178, Halo, The, 17, 21, 29 205

206 NATURE AND SPIRIT Hermeneutic(s), x, 1, 17, 48, 51, 66, Naturalism, 12-14, 22, 53, 72; De103, 109, 111, 117; Horizonal, ix, 1- scriptive, 53, 141; Ecstatic, ix, 14, 2; of Origin, 66, 68-69; of Suspi- 53—54, 85, 102, 120, 126, 133, 141-

69 189

cion, 52, 112; of Transcendence, 66— 42, 146, 152, 156, 170-71, 179, 187,

Holy, The, 32, 156, 160, 174, 191 Nature, vii, x, 8, 14, 21-22, 29-32, Hope, 24-28, 71-81, 100, 119-20, 36-38, 51-52, 63, 65, 113, 139-40, 135-37, 143, 145, 159-60, 168, 173, 152, 164-66, 179-80, 186, 190-91

175, 192-94 Nature Natured (natura naturata), 30, Horizon(s), x, 6, 12, 14, 16-17, 20-21, 54, 73, 113, 138, 141, 157, 159-60, 24, 29-30, 42-43, 50, 53, 56, 63, 65- 162-63, 179, 187-88, 193 67, 74, 76-77, 85, 104, 106, 120, Nature Naturing (natura naturans), 36,

121-22, 132, 134-36, 144, 186-87 53, 73, 76, 124, 125-27, 138-41, How (Wie), 123-25, 134-35, 137 145-46, 149, 152, 156-60, 162-63, Human Process, 27, 31, 40—45, 47, 52— 179-80, 186-89, 191 55, 59-60, 63, 68, 72, 75-76, 79, 81, | New Criticism, 48

91, 113, 120-22, 124-26, 129, 136, New Spirit, The, 28, 40, 79-80 142, 156, 158, 160, 164, 166-67, Not-yet, The, 22, 31, 35, 38, 116-19, 170, 173, 176-77, 182, 184, 187, 136-41, 145, 151, 155-57, 159, 165,

190-91, 193 178, 186-92, 194

Individuation, 60-61 Omnipotence, 34, 37, 158, 163, 167,

Inscape, 62-63 169

Instress, 62 Ontological Difference, 16, 28, 31-32,

Integrity, viii, 25-28, 30, 46, 76, 90, 71-73, 75-76, 78-80, 116, 120-22,

172, 174, 188, 194 124—25, 128, 130—32, 135, 137-38,

Interpretant(s), 147, 152-54, 157 143, 145, 160, 162, 177, 179 Interpretive Musement, 42, 84, 87, 152 Ontological Parity, 25-26, 33, 162,

Intersubjectivity, 44, 101 176

Ontological Priority, 26, 32, 145

Judaism, 58 Onto-theology, 1, 4 Open Work, 109-11

Language Game, 84 Order(s), x, 3, 15, 21, 23, 36, 58-59,

Lumen Naturalis, 142 73, 83, 85, 127-29, 131, 145-46, 149-51, 154, 165, 167, 171

Memorial Hall (Harvard), 91-93 Orders of Relevance, viii, 2-3, 9, 14Metaphysics, 1, 3-4, 14, 163, 171 15, 111, 120, 128 Midworld, The, 12, 16, 29-30, 121 Ordinal, 5, 14-15, 23, 29, 54, 57, 111,

Monotheism, 171 122, 135, 141

More, The, 21-22, 25, 29-30, 35, 37— Ordinal Monotheism, 171, 181-82

38, 120, 130-31, 154 Ordinality, viii, 4-5, 16, 23, 164 Origin(s), 40-41, 43, 45-47, 50, 55-

National Socialism, 50 56, 64, 67, 69, 75, 77, 86, 98, 109, Natural Debt, 50, 53 113, 116, 138-39, 143, 166-69, 173Natural Grace, 34, 59, 136, 138, 167, 75, 192; Fragmentary (fragmented),

181-82, 185 33, 55, 166-67, 172-74, 178, 192,

Natural Standpoint, 6, 12-13 194; Unified, 194

SUBJECT INDEX 207 Passive Synthesis, 11 109, 112, 118, 137, 144, 146-47, Perceptual Judgment, 83-84 149, 151-53, 155, 159, 178

Phenomenology, vii, viii, 1-3, 6, 8, Shadow, 94 10, 14, 20, 25, 33-34, 41, 84-85, Sheer Dependence, 34, 133, 181-82 130, 142, 163, 167, 171, 184; Essen- Sign(s), vii, 30, 38, 42, 51, 65-67, 70,

tialist, 8; Genetic, 6—8, 10; Hori- 83, 85-91, 100-103, 108, 110-11, zonal, 20; Ordinal, viii, ix, x, 2, 4, 118, 123, 146-51, 153-55; of Expec6, 8-10, 13-16, 21, 24-26, 28-31, tation, 56, 58, 69, 74, 94; of Origin,

33-34, 37-38, 49, 67, 84, 96, 124, 80, 94, 102 162; ‘Transcendental, ix, 6, 12-13 Sign Systems, 30-31, 43, 45, 49, 51-

Pluralism, 5, 96-97, 99 53, 81, 87, 90, 118, 121, 146-47

Polytheism, 171 Spirit, vu, vin, x, 14, 31, 34~38, 55Potencies, viii, ix, 8, 14, 29-33, 36,40, 96, - 62, 64, 70-71, 77, 79, 83, 102, 52-53, 55-56, 58-61, 63, 65, 68-69, 112-13, 115, 118, 138-39, 141-46, 71, 74, 85, 102, 110-11, 127, 139-199 157-60, 168, 179, 194 42, 144-45, 157-60, 163-65, 172, Structuralism, 48 177, 179-80, 184-86, 189, 191 Symbol(s), 56, 99, 100, 102-103, 110-

Pracmatism. 9. 72 11, 118-19, 155-58, eee a ea.ix.Synechism, 140, 183173, 178

Pre-established Harmony, 5 ynec , ,

Preseneness 18; Co-presentness, 18-— Temporality, 6, 8, 11-12, 18-20, 57,

Process Theology (process metaphys- 74, 178

Textuality (texts), 3-4, 101, 146

ics), 3, 164-65, 169, 180, 184 Theonomous Democracy, 175-77

Protention, 18 Theonomy, 107, 175, 178 Thrownness, 50

Relevance, 4-5, 15, 46, 125-26, 130- , Traits, 4-5, 7-8, 28. 59, 89, 91, 122 31, 133, 160, 163, 193-94; sheer, = 197 162-65, 171-72; Local, 7, 151: viii, 15, 133-34, 146, 160, 162, 165, Regional, 7, 151 180-82, 184, 191, 193-94; strong, Transcendence, 40, 54-59, 64, 66, 72, vill, 15, 59, 65, 90, 133-34, 146, 75, 80-81, 104-105, 113, 134, 136 162-63, 169, 180-82, 184, 188, 193- Jr anscendental ego, 1, 13, 34 94; weak, vii, 15, 59, 90, 133-34, Transcendental subjectivity, viii, 2-3 146, 151, 162-63, 169, 180, 182, Tychism, 140 193-94

Religious Socialism, 175 Unconscious, The, 44—45, 68, 70, 81,

Retention, 18 99, 166

Unconscious Complexes, 45, 68, 70 Salt March (Gandhi), 103

Satyagraha (truth-force), 103 Vietnam War Monument (WashingSelving, 34, 60-62, 64-65, 78-80, ton), 92-93 107, 117, 142-43, 146, 170, 176-77,

182, 184-85 Worldhood, 17-18, 20-21, 29-32, 36-

Semiosis, 89, 187, 189 38, 59, 63, 71-73, 79, 120-30, 132Semiotic(s), ix, 31, 41, 49, 55, 58, 66, 39, 141-46, 149, 151, 154-59 79, 84-85, 87-88, 91-93, 100, 107— Would-be, 140-41, 176

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