Nature's Transcendence and Immanence: A Comparative Interdisciplinary Ecstatic Naturalism 9781498562768, 9781498562751, 1498562760

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Nature’s Transcendence and Immanence

Nature’s Transcendence and Immanence A Comparative Interdisciplinary Ecstatic Naturalism Edited by Marilynn Lawrence and Jea Sophia Oh Foreword by Robert S. Corrington

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lawrence, Marilynn, editor. Title: Nature's transcendence and immanence : a comparative interdisciplinary ecstatic naturalism / edited by Marilynn Lawrence and Jea Sophia Oh ; foreword by Robert S. Corrington. Description: : Lanham : Lexington Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017050062 (print) | LCCN 2017048263 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498562768 (electronic) | ISBN 9781498562751 (cloth : alk. paper) LCSH: Philosophy of nature. | Naturalism. Classification: LCC BD581 (print) | LCC BD581 .N377 2017 (ebook) | DDC 146--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017050062 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Foreword Robert S. Corrington

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction Marilynn Lawrence, with Jea Sophia Oh 1 Chaosmic Naturalisms: Cosmological Immanence, Multiplicity, and Divinity in Corrington and Faber Austin Roberts 2 Trinitarian Naturalism? Tehom, Word, and Spirit: A Constructive and Contemplative Journey through Panikkar, Tillich, and Corrington Rory McEntee 3 Wild Air: Toward a Poetics of Ecstatic Naturalism Rose Ellen Dunn 4 Driven from the Bottomless Lake of Consciousness: Neuropsychoanalysis, Peirce, and an Ecstatic Naturalism Wade A. Mitchell 5 Groundwork for a Transcendentalist Semeiotics of Nature Nicholas L. Guardiano 6 The Meaning of Nature: Toward a Philosophical Ecology Leon Niemoczynski 7 Landscapes of the Unconscious and the Longings of Nature Elaine Padilla v

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Contents

8 Mystic Pluralism: James, Blood, and the Experience of Ecstatic Nature Thomas Millary 9 Vulnerable Transcendence of Nature: A Naturalistic Reading of Hybridity, Beginning, and Colliding in Chinese Creation Mythology Jea Sophia Oh 10 A Post-Naturalist Idea of Ec-stasy: An East-West Dialogue in a Trans-Human Age Iljoon Park 11 Daseok’s God in Dialogue with Deep Pantheism and Process Panentheism Hiheon Kim

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Contributors

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Foreword Robert S. Corrington

I am honored to have this opportunity to write a foreword to the anthology Nature’s Transcendence and Immanence: A Comparative-Interdisciplinary Ecstatic Naturalism, so carefully and brilliantly edited by Marilynn Lawrence and Jea Sophia Oh. The chapters contained herein cover a vast array of topics and show the growth potential in my ecstatic naturalism as it passes through creative younger hands. Comparisons are undertaken, respectful criticisms are made, new horizons are opened, and the richness of Asian thought is brought into the dialogue. In short, ecstatic naturalism has taken on wings and I am very pleased to engage in discussion with a new generation of interlocutors. I wish to formally thank the editors for bringing us this new world. Two tasks are undertaken in this foreword. The first is to write a brief history of my version of religious naturalism and the second is to outline a few of its regnant categories with the new reader in mind, although seasoned hands might find something of value in what follows. The goal is to provide a template for helping to understand and appreciate the eleven chapters and the wonderful introduction in this anthology. The former task involves autobiographical material, while the latter is more categorial in nature with an interest in what C. S. Peirce would call “architectonic.” My first encounter with what I later would call and shape as ecstatic naturalism came in high school when I had a decisive epiphany in reading Ralph Waldo Emerson in my junior year. His ecstatic understanding of and participation in the ecstasies of nature have been one of the grounding tones of my life’s work. I also discovered the Advaita Vedanta (non-dual) version of Hinduism as above all presented by the unknown writers of the Upanishads—perhaps the greatest religious texts ever composed. These twin influences have remained with me as I have attempted to create a new Transcenvii

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dentalism and a radical version of Hinduism. While I am not a Hindu, I do accept much of its worldview, when stripped of some of its unjust features. All of this took place in the late 1960s. As an undergraduate at Temple University I had the privilege of taking a seminar on American philosophy with the Peirce and Dewey scholar Philip P. Weiner, famous for his anthology of Peirce’s essays and his book, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism. It was in this course that I had my second leap forward when I came to realize that I was a naturalist. Peirce and Dewey attracted me the most and they remain two of my chief interlocutors to this day. Dewey gave me a sense of a thoroughgoing naturalism in which the organism is fully embedded in nature. His Darwinism shook the last vestiges of teleology from my thinking. Also, his commitment to education and democratic socialism are models of good philosophy. Peirce intrigued me for the vastness of his mind and his combination of conceptual intricacy in making super-fine distinctions with a daring cosmology that was broader in scope than any I had encountered. This love affair was later exhibited in my 1993 book on Peirce, An Introduction to C.S. Peirce: Philosopher, Semiotician, and Ecstatic Naturalist. It was also as an undergraduate philosophy major that I discovered the work of Heidegger. I must have read Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) six or seven times until I had attained mastery of this epoch-making text. I later moved on to his later works and attained similar mastery. Unfortunately, I spouted Heideggerian language to my colleagues and professors until they grew tired of hearing it. I have long since cured myself of this obsession. But without Heidegger I would not have attained the beginnings of my sense of the human process and a sense of worldhood (Weltheit). Later, of course, we all discovered his horrid political views and behavior. In graduate school at Drew University I was very fortunate to work in an interdisciplinary context in which one could study philosophy, theology, and depth-psychology, among other subjects. My focus, of course, was on philosophy, both American and continental, yet I also studied the work of the liberal theologians Schleiermacher and Paul Tillich, both of whom I teach to this day. But C. G. Jung, discovered when I was about twenty, always set the tone for my depth work in the psychology of the unconscious. After graduate school, I came to appreciate the work of Otto Rank and Heinz Kohut, but always with a stress on the deeper layers of the unconscious. I finished my PhD with a dissertation on the American idealist philosopher Josiah Royce and his theory of the community of interpreters, which I radically rewrote with added material from Gadamer and Justus Buchler, and published as my first book, The Community of Interpreters: On the Hermeneutics of Nature and the Bible in the American Philosophical Tradition, in 1987. It was reissued in 1995 with a new preface.

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It was in the 1980s that the idea of an ecstatic naturalism formed itself in my mind. Before, I had the pieces but they weren’t woven together. This came to full fruition in my second book, Nature and Spirit: An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism, in 1992. The die had been cast and the rest of my books and some eighty articles were devoted to the creation of my version of religious naturalism. Ecstatic naturalism is a hard-core Dewey-style naturalism and yet has a religious sensibility for the sacred in nature, but not beyond. In the decades that followed I continued to make ecstatic naturalism a viable and capacious philosophy. I brought in the semiotics of Peirce, Umberto Eco, and Thomas Sebeok to enhance my sense of worldhood. This was done most explicitly in my book Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World (1994) and above all in my A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy (2000). But all my books are semiotic through and through, going from zoosemiotics to anthroposemiotics and the connections between them. Semiotics tied in perfectly with Jungian psychology and the discovery of the collective unconscious—a semiotic system as well. Thus, ecstatic naturalism is a semiotic perspective that roots all sign activity and all sign vehicles in nature and never “beyond” nature into the alleged supernatural. The religious tonality of ecstatic naturalism was first presented in my book Nature’s Religion (1997), with an important foreword by Robert C. Neville. This was preceded by a book on the human process, Nature’s Self (1996). Yet I had not fully understood the religious aspect of ecstatic naturalism until writing my trilogy, Nature’s Sublime: An Essay in Aesthetic Naturalism (2013), Deep Pantheism: Toward a New Transcendentalism (2016), and above all Nature and Nothingness: An Essay in Ordinal Phenomenology (2017). In each I privilege the aesthetic over the religious as its culmination, thus making revelation inferior to the sublime. This locates religious experience under artistic contrivance and assimilation. I was thus able to understand religious tribalism versus the universalism of art. In the last book, I also grapple with religious violence and the human tendency to sink into barbarism and genocide. I use Reich, Jung, and Herbert Marcuse in my social/ political analyses, especially of the fascist mindset. Previously I had written books on Wilhelm Reich (2003), and manicdepressive (bipolar) disorder (2003), from which I suffer, although it grows much milder with the newest medicines. This has given me an inner sense of the ravages of pathology in the human species and how an analysis of it must be on the front burner as it drives our politics and the will-to-power. This is entwined with a critique of extreme eschatologies, the most glaring of which is the belief in an impending Armageddon with its attendant Rapture. Of course, during the Rapture most of humankind will be left behind to suffer in a sadistic version of hell. The egomania in such a view of history is not hard to spot.

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Currently I have several interests that I hope to bring together in one book. Among these are (1) an understanding of the Great Mother as a religious archetype of great antiquity, (2) an understanding of the birth trauma and its relation to attachment theory and Kohut’s “self-objects,” (3) a renewed focus on all aspects of Peirce’s system, (4) more work on the fascist personality and how it can be deconstructed, (5) social justice, and (6) world mythologies. It is unclear that these interests can be brought together under one roof, but they are key to an expansion of the scope of ecstatic naturalism. Turning to the conceptual part of the foreword, I want to exhibit the key traits of naturalism and ecstatic naturalism. A key commitment of naturalism, in any form, is the belief that nature is all that there is and that there is no supernatural realm. For example, if souls and angels exist they exist within the one nature that there is, only in a different modality than we are accustomed to. A healthy naturalism need not, indeed does not, reduce itself to an aggressive and superficial mechanistic materialism. The philosophical idea of “matter” is hopelessly confused and has little role to play as the foundational category. In fact, naturalism, in its ecstatic mode, affirms that there can be no one trait found in each order of nature. Every order has just the indefinite number of traits that it has and these are ramified in and as nature. Philosophers seem addicted to the quest for just such a universal trait. A few examples of such an imperial move are actual occasions, monads, substance, sense data, ideas in the mind of god, proper names, spirit (Geist), the dialectic, forms, organism, and internal relations. Since there is no direct connecting link between and among the innumerable orders of nature, there is no way to get outside of them via some super order-of-orders. Nature prevails as innumerable orders in certain respects. More directly, the word “nature” has no referent as it cannot be defined, that is, located in a genus with a specific difference. Ironically, to define nature is to automatically posit a supernaturalism that could be the larger genus under which nature is defined. If nature is all that there is and if it has no outer boundary or circumference, then it is beyond any philosophical nomenclature. Of course, as language users we must do our best to make sense of socalled nature, always remembering that the word is held under erasure. Within the one nature that there is, ecstatic naturalism uses a key distinction that has medieval provenance, but is most commonly associated with Spinoza; namely, that between natura naturans (nature naturing) and natura naturata (nature natured). I define natura naturans as “Nature perennially creating itself from out of itself alone from its unconscious ground.” Here Schelling is in mind with his concepts of abyss (der Abgrund) and the unruly ground (das Regellose). Natura naturata is defined as the innumerable orders of the World without any collective integrity. These orders can no more be counted, as each ramifies indefinitely, nor, as noted, can they be brought under one allegedly universal trait. Natura naturans and natura naturata do

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not represent two distinct and opposite “natures” but function as a perennial fissuring within the one nature that there is. There is no chance of closure in this event-ing. For ecstatic naturalism, as opposed to most other forms of naturalism, great emphasis is placed on the unconscious triad: the personal unconscious, the collective unconscious, and the unconscious of nature. An ordinal psychoanalysis has been created just to deal with the former two modes of the unconscious as they correlate with and are fully implicated in nature’s unconscious. This has required a radical recasting of “traditional” patriarchal forms of psychoanalysis, such as those found in Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, Abraham Brill, Alfred Adler, Sándor Ferenczi, and others, for more matriarchal forms as found in Jung, Rank, Kristeva, and Kohut, to name just a few. The emphasis shifts away from the male-centered notions of the Oedipal castration complex and penis envy to the pre-Oedipal experiences between mother and child as they form, or fail to form, attachments. As noted, Rank’s central notion of the birth trauma (Trauma der Geburt) shows how this primal event haunts the individual throughout her or his life, not to mention the trauma to the mother herself. The self struggles to find a womb substitute, without knowing that it is doing so. Kohut’s self-objects form ersatz womb alternatives that bring some comfort and relief, but nothing can ever totally fill the hunger for the primal origin. Combined with the birth trauma is the equally unconscious quest for the mythological Great Mother—the oldest religion of humankind and one that perennially makes reappearances in contemporary culture. This enables the self to honor both the biological mother (wherever possible) and the archetypal Great Mother. The womb gets cosmologized and the biological mother gets more fully understood. The most complete, if still partial, answer to the trauma of birth is precisely this encounter with the Great Mother, whatever her ontological status is held to be. In the end, ecstatic naturalism honors the archetype of the Great Mother as one of its key instruments of healing. Further, the method of ordinal phenomenology has been created to augment and partially replace Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology. While the latter is superior to the former, it still lacks the ordinal framework. By transforming phenomenology into one that fully embeds the “phenomenon” in both natura naturans and natura naturata, the ordinal approach allows the natural complex to manifest its indefinite array of traits and it links to the unconscious of nature (der Abgrund or das Unbewusst). This requires an ongoing process of rotating the order through as many of its ordinal locations as time and energy allows. The terminus is also a pragmatic one, not a static goal set in advance. Ordinal phenomenology is a communal process that requires all hands on deck. However, this can only happen within a certain type of community.

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For ecstatic naturalism, there are two main types of community (on a changing continuum). The first is called, following Josiah Royce, a “community of interpreters,” while the second is called a “natural community.” The former is the more fragile and episodic of the two, while the latter is characterized by inertia, semiotic density, self-referentiality, and a tendency toward fascism. The natural community polices its signs, symbols, and interpretants (new signs) and does not allow for novelty or interpretations outside of the patriarchal “norm.” All of semiotics is controlled by the State and its unwitting or unwilling citizens are held in check by a carefully planned procedure of creating what Reich aptly called “emotional or characterological armoring.” This armoring is imposed by the State to radically limit the likelihood of a group or individual from stepping out of line. The insidious genius of armoring is that the self does it to itself through being vulnerable to propaganda and other unconscious means. To be armored is to block life energy from healthy expression and cathect it toward the all governing State. Sexual energy becomes under the control of a patriarchal elite, such as in fundamentalist groups of all strips and religions. Insofar as it is allowed expression, it is only in highly circumscribed situations, all designed in the end to serve the needs of the natural community. A community of interpreters emerges out of a natural community and is its critic. Further, if robust it generates great works of art and science through those geniuses (cultural creatives) who are now freed from their shackles to do genuine work. Such an emancipatory community values novelty and creativity among its citizens and develops institutions to further and protect democracy. But, as noted, communities of interpretation are fragile and rare in human history. Once one is painfully attained it is subject to entropy and outright conquest, both from within and from without. Perhaps more tragic is when a democratic community of interpreters collapses from within through duplicitous foreign intervention and/or by a bullying narcissistic leader. This can set back the course of democracy and liberation for decades and the damage done must be repaired. Finally, ecstatic naturalism is a form of religious naturalism that honors the sacred within nature but does not see nature “itself” as sacred. The true sphere of the sacred is found in what I call “sacred folds” that are complexes of nature and the World that have unusual semiotic density. They are created and sustained by a host of human projections that continue to fold in on themselves and gain in “heat” over time. Further, they are intensified by a transference relationship that divinizes them in the process. Examples of sacred folds could include a sacred grove of oak trees, a divine figure, a historical event (however mythologized), a sacred text, a love relationship, a non-sacred text, a work of art, a grand scientific theory, a culinary quest, one’s community, the process of creating art or science, or a non-divine figure. Ultimately, in either the short or long run, sacred folds are subject to

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entropy and loss of semiotic “heat.” They punctuate human history but without a collective contour or one linking web of so-called internal relations. They each rest on their own bottom and are often in direct conflict with one another. This “holy” struggle becomes most extreme in religious violence where textual literalism (a hermeneutic impossibility) places one “sacred” text in competition with another, especially if they have different ideas of deity and the human process, both during and after life. I hope that the reader finds something congenial in the chapters that follow. It is a heartwarming thought that ecstatic naturalism has such excellent interlocutors and innovators. They both honor the foundational categorial structures, but are not afraid to modify them and create novel interpretants, as in any good community of interpreters. As this process continues to unfold, from my high school days to the present, I marvel at the creativity of the human spirit and its capaciousness when the conditions allow. Above all, it is in furthering the quest for justice and the renewal of democracy that is the most basic goal of ecstatic naturalism.

Acknowledgments

Marilynn Lawrence I would first like to acknowledge Leon Niemoczynski for introducing me to ecstatic naturalism. On his recommendation, I purchased Robert S. Corrington’s Ecstatic Naturalism. Although it sat on the shelf for at least two years, when occasionally rifling through it I noticed that something very special and powerful was conveyed. Not until after attending my first conference ecstatic naturalism congress at Drew University was I ready for this unique recipe of new and old philosophies. Next, of course, I would like to thank Robert Corrington for his tireless creative productivity and for the enlightening and comforting conversations that have encouraged me and others to think outside of the typical academic discourse. Jea Sophia Oh should be thanked for enthusiastically lighting the fire under this project. It has also been a pleasure working with all of the authors of this volume, from whom I’ve learned a great deal. Most importantly, I’d like to acknowledge that my life-partner Adam Berenson has been very understanding and supportive during the time that was needed for fine-tuning these chapters. Σε φιλῶ. Jea Sophia Oh I offer my appreciation to Robert S. Corrington for his mentorship and guidance. Without it, this book would not have been possible. I would like to thank my colleague and editor of this volume, Marilynn Lawrence, for her major contribution to this process. Without her sacrifice, we would never have been able to complete this project. I would like to thank the authors of the chapters included in this anthology for their patience through the process of this project. I offer my appreciation to the publisher, Lexington Books, xv

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and the editor, Jana Hodges-Kluck, for her efforts and patience in the publication of this book. I offer this book to anyone who loves nature and peace.

Introduction Marilynn Lawrence, with Jea Sophia Oh

The drama of self-transcendence is stretched between divine energies and its own internal momenta of infinitizing. —Robert S. Corrington 1

Robert S. Corrington’s recent book Deep Pantheism: Toward a New Transcendentalism (2016) represents the culmination of several decades of his work on a metaphysics of nature and its relationship to concepts found within the history of philosophy, theology, and psychology. 2 Deep pantheism, primarily but not exclusively rooted in Western thought traditions, is the theological offshoot of the metaphysics, semiotics, and phenomenology that is called “ecstatic naturalism.” Deep pantheism and ecstatic naturalism identify nature’s self-transforming and self-transcendent potential, ek-stasis, and, at the same time, recognize natura naturans (nature naturing) as nature’s eternal abyss, fecundity, power of life, and immanence. Nature’s Transcendence and Immanence is a collection of works that extend the scope of ecstatic naturalism by comparing and applying it to other lines of thinking and traditions within philosophy and theology of East and West as well as other disciplines. Not all chapters presented here focus primarily on ecstatic naturalism (or its theological arm of deep pantheism), though the authors relate it, or particular aspects of it, to a constellation of similar perspectives such as process philosophy and constructive theology. The contributions to this volume are also interdisciplinary while maintaining the conceptual vision of philosophy, and involve a wide range of concerns such as neuropsychoanalysis, theology, semiotics, mythology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. The transcendence and immanence of nature is expressed in a variety of ways throughout this work, given each author’s

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particular engagement with ecstatic naturalism as it is compared to or integrated with other philosophies and disciplines. Our increasingly complex world requires new approaches to nature and the role human beings must play within it if we are to reverse trends that are destroying the environment and harming ourselves and others. An interdisciplinary and pluralistic approach to the unprecedented crises we face is necessary. Novel approaches can often be discovered through juxtaposition of traditional theories and ways of life (from East and West). Such exchange of ideas offered in this book would be called an “interpretive community,” to use an ecstatic naturalist term. The challenge for professional academics is to extend the community beyond the walls of universities, as well as to inspire right action and right living from an interdisciplinary combination of new and old ideas. ALTERNATIVE FORMS OF NATURALISM For readers unfamiliar with Robert Corrington’s philosophy, we offer a brief background of where it fits as a form of “naturalism” and describe some of its key concepts, as incomplete or unavoidably simplified as this may be. The word “naturalism” has been used in philosophy’s history to describe a wide range of positions, so use of this term requires qualification for the sake of establishing a shared understanding. In recent years, the term has been more popularly co-opted by the New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Alex Rosenberg. This type of naturalism holds to a selfdescribed “scientism” and a belief that nothing that can be commonly described as supernatural exists, especially God, angels, ghosts, an afterlife, and psychic phenomena. 3 This naturalism is aligned with classical skepticism of the unseen and the view that science is on track to successfully describe all of reality, at least for the most part. This conception of naturalism is thought to have nothing to do with metaphysical concepts, and is even considered to be antithetical to them. The divine, sacred, and religious do not fit into this understanding of naturalism except insofar as natural processes such as neurological patterns and genetic dispositions are used to describe the emergence of human concerns, beliefs, and experiences. In contrast, various philosophies grouped as “religious naturalism” hold to a non-reductive view of nature that would likely disappoint proponents of New Atheism and the naturalism just described. Nature’s sacredness, along with our sacred obligation to it, serves as the fundamental motivating force for the emergence of religious naturalism. Another impetus for non-reductive views of nature is to correct the misunderstandings of and neglect of nature in movements of Western philosophy and religion—ones that place natural phenomena at the bottom link of the chain of being. Ecstatic naturalism

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developed in dialogue with other religious naturalisms, sharing their spiritual, sacred, and aesthetic concerns. Religious or sacred naturalism receives inspiration from a variety of sources. The pragmatism of William James, John Dewey, and Charles Sanders Peirce lies at the heart of some naturalist ideas, while others are inspired by the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The spectrum of religious naturalism ranges from an emphasis on natural processes accessed through scientific inquiry to theological speculation using the tools of metaphysics. At one end of the spectrum we find Ursula Goodenough, a biologist and author of The Sacred Depths of Nature, or Wesley J. Wildman, an anthropologist who integrates neuroscientific research in the study of religious experience. 4 At the more speculative end one may find Charles S. Peirce in his more religious writings, or Charles Hartshorne, as a representative of process naturalism. This end may also include theologian Robert Cummings Neville, a contemporary theologian who has been in dialogue with religious naturalism and ecstatic naturalism while seeking to preserve a creator god. Neville had at one point defined himself as a pan-naturalist to distinguish his position from panpsychism, but generally avoids the naturalist label. 5 Corrington’s ecstatic naturalism and deep pantheism fall somewhere in the middle, holding stakes in evolutionary theory and observable natural processes, as well as in metaphysical theory. 6 His view of nature is differentiated by nature’s self-transcendence (hence, ecstatic naturalism), an attribution of soul or psyche to nature (nature’s immanence—although he is critical of the panpsychism of Emerson’s later works and process philosophy), 7 the use of ordinal phenomenology and psychoanalysis to access the potencies of nature, and the idea of an underconscious or unconscious of nature. The current work represented in this volume introduces and interweaves additional sources of thought and contemporary concerns into a dynamic and rich naturalism. These sources include, for example, Chinese creation stories, the Tehom of constructive theology, the Korean theology of Daseok, the interconnectivity of Caribbean philosopher Edouard Glissant, the philosophical ecology of John William Miller, new research in neuropsychoanalysis, and the apprehensive but crucial dialogue concerning artificial intelligence and transhumanism. THE DEVELOPMENT OF ECSTATIC NATURALISM AND GOD WITHIN NATURE Robert S. Corrington founded ecstatic naturalism through a series of works spanning approximately 25 years. His books dedicated to this philosophy include Nature and Spirit (1992), Ecstatic Naturalism (1994), Nature’s Self

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(1996), Nature’s Religion (1997), A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy (2000), Nature’s Sublime (2013), Deep Pantheism (2016), and Nature and Nothingness (2017). 8 His other works on Charles S. Peirce, Wilhelm Reich, and bipolar disorder are also written from an ecstatic naturalist perspective. 9 Corrington discusses and synthesizes a large number of intellectual influences (too innumerable to list here), and the context for his philosophy’s development includes a combination of American naturalist positions, such as those of John Dewey and Justus Buchler, as well as conversations and debates within a community of theologically oriented thinkers in search of a fuller perspective of nature—a perspective that neither excludes nor dismisses spiritual or religious life and phenomena, nor rejects the metaphysical tradition exemplified, for instance, by the revival of Whitehead’s process philosophy. An early development of Corrington’s naturalism can be found in the essay “Ordinality and the Divine Natures,” in Nature’s Perspective: Prospects for an Ordinal Metaphysics, a 1991 edited volume dedicated to the work of American naturalist philosopher Justus Buchler. 10 Here, Corrington critiques the inadequacy of both process thought and post-modernism’s metaphorical language for addressing the divine and the ways it is “embedded in the orders of nature.” 11 He further describes the expansiveness of nature in relation to God: Nature, as itself without an outer circumference or ultimate contour, is in many respects a more encompassing reality than God. It makes no sense to say that nature is some sort of “collection” of individuals or that it is bound by an eternal outer limit within which all complexes prevail. It is more compelling to understand nature as without any limitations or extrinsic framework. 12

The influence of Justus Buchler’s ordinal metaphysics is apparent here, where God is (as anything that conveys meaning through corresponding semiotic relations) one “natural complex” among many rather than the summit of a hierarchical ontology or a supernatural entity. Considered in this way, God is necessarily finite, though Corrington’s extension of Buchler’s metaphysics maintains two aspects of God—finite and infinite. In this 1991 essay, Corrington also relates a two-sided nature to theological concerns, particularly to several dimensions of the divine. Nature as natura naturata and natura naturans, a concept used by ninth-century John Scotus Eriugena and later picked up by Spinoza and Schelling, is characterized by Buchler in this way: Natura naturata (nature natured) is the whole of all complexes, while natura naturans (nature naturing) is the active source and ordering power of complexes. Outlining the dimensions of God or the divine, Corrington recognizes God as an eternal power of naturing, and not just a complex within nature. 13 This is not a power over or power against

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nature, or even a causal power, but a “providingness” that enables the innumerable complexes within nature natured through the act of letting be. The divine complex differs from other natural complexes in that it is both a function of nature’s self-generating process and within natura naturata: This tension within the divine natures locates God on both sides of the ontological difference. In Heideggerian terms, the ontological difference is that between Being and a being. In ordinal terms, the ontological difference is between natural complexes and “providingness.” 14

We find here an early development of Corrington’s pantheism and adherence to a nature with transcendent and immanence dimensions. But this is not Spinoza’s God/Nature. In this earlier work, Corrington leaned toward the panentheism of process thought; however, one can notice that his discomfort with pantheism was concerning the Spinozistic reliance on the category of substance. 15 In Deep Pantheism, Corrington clarifies his relationship to Spinoza vis-à-vis his own particular pantheism, which finds more resonance in Schopenhauer’s understanding of the nature naturing/nature natured distinction. Spinoza’s God/nature identification does not place God strictly on the naturing side, for the divine substance permeates the natured through and through. The stasis of a substantive God/nature can be corrected by the dynamic, renewing power of Schopenhauer’s naturing nature: Unlike Spinoza, [Schopenhauer] sees the dimension of nature naturing as an active energy that molds and shapes the orders of nature natured. The Will is the noumenal potency that ripples through the human process both consciously and within the unconscious of the self-in-process. One could say that the churning chaotic Will is deeply correlated to nature naturing, while its objectifications in and as the phenomenal realm, that is, nature natured, receive their inner dynamism from the Will that never rests. 16

Deep pantheism, the theological position that works alongside the philosophy of ecstatic naturalism, accepts the equivalence of God and nature “only insofar as the uncanny depths of nature are allowed to manifest themselves within the orbit of nature natured with its depth-connection to nature’s unconscious.” 17 A key factor that distinguishes this pantheism from Spinoza’s is the emphatic gesture toward an unconscious of nature. This also differentiates ecstatic naturalism from the physicalist naturalisms that separate the self, particularly the human self, from any naturalistic structures. Corrington insists on deep pantheism’s rejection of panpsychism, so nature’s unconscious is not to be considered a manifestation of a consciousness or mind that was always there (Peirce’s position, as he argues) but emerges out of evolutionary processes. 18

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In his more recent works, Corrington is more apt to speak of “god-ing” rather than the natural complex of “God.” God-ing highlights the dynamic process of such a reality, leaves open a plurality to divine processes and experiences, while avoiding a word saturated in significance and metaphysical assumptions from various but mostly monotheistic traditions. God-ing and the related process of “selving” happen within the divide of natura naturans/natura naturata and are phenomenologically accessible. As noted in Deep Pantheism, one can be an ecstatic naturalist without being a deep pantheist, but the reverse doesn’t hold since this religious perspective rests on the foundation of this naturalist metaphysics. 19 Several chapters in this book will link more closely with deep pantheism than the overall position of ecstatic naturalism, considering their theological or religious orientation. NATURE’S UNCONSCIOUS, THE SELF, AND COMMUNITIES Corrington’s ecstatic naturalism accepts that nature is all that there is, and there is no supernatural force, entity, intelligence, mover, or providence, outside of nature. Yet, as he points out in Nature and Spirit, the Buchlerian ordinal naturalism that is akin to ecstatic naturalism is not reduced to materialism: 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. 20

Corrington’s naturalism, while holding that the self is in and part of nature, does not neglect the metaphysical principle of transcendence and phenomena that express it. The descriptive naturalism of Buchler, while accepting the two aspects of nature, emphasizes the boundaries and finitude imposed by nature on the development and potential of human selves. An ecstatic naturalism that extends the scope of nature “becomes sensitive to the possibilities of self-transcendence within the orders of the world (nature natured)” and “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.” 21 In this regard, ecstatic naturalism finds the trajectory of psychoanalysis useful in conjunction with a naturalist metaphysics. Nature has melancholic and manic moods, and an

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unconscious (or underconscious), as do its intelligent beings that are given an opportunity to become selves. The relationship between the self and the world, within nature, involves a “selving” process. We should say a little more about selving as several authors of this volume incorporate this concept in their chapters. Borrowing this term from poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Corrington writes, “God, while not a person or a self, lives as the energy that makes selving and individuation possible. Individual thus emerges from the eternal creative interaction between spirit and the propulsive energy of selving.” 22 One might detect in this statement the influence of Schopenhauer’s Will as the force of nature naturing working on and within the human being, a force without an entelechy and largely indifferent to human ends. Selving may be described as a process of self-transcendence, moved by grace, the spirit principle that leads beyond ego-directed intentions. Nature as a whole is indifferent to the individual (there’s no providence or telos for the human being in ecstatic naturalism). It is as monstrous as it is beautiful. Nevertheless, hope remains for the integration, thriving, and wholeness of selves and communities. In A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy, Corrington describes selving as akin to Carl Jung’s concept of individuation (which necessitates creativity and integration of content of the psyche beyond the ego-self), though it is a process in which the self becomes aware of both the personal unconscious and its ur-source, the unconscious of nature. 23 The selving being, as artist, is an aware conduit and shaper of the creative forces of nature. In ecstatic naturalism, there is no distinct boundary between the divine and the aesthetic. In Nature’s Sublime, Corrington dedicates a chapter to further delineate selving along with “ordinal psychoanalysis” as the method for accessing and furthering the process. 24 Nature’s unconscious, which originates from nature naturing and the self’s rapturous encounter with this potency rather than from day-to-day encounters with nature-natured, is accelerated through aesthetic sublimity. It should be clear at this point that the metaphysics of ecstatic naturalism does not separate conceptual structures and categories from the human motives underlying their conception, arrangement, acceptance, and usefulness. Certain values self-reflectively guide and emerge from the ecstatic naturalist perspective, and this holds at both the personal and societal levels. Ordinal psychoanalysis, as a type of “psychosemiosis,” aims to unite semiotics with psychoanalysis for the examination of the psychological well-being and pathologies of selves and communities. 25 Toward this purpose, Peirce’s triadic system of object, sign, and infinite chain of interpretants is employed. 26 Corrington’s analysis combining ordinal phenomenology and ordinal psychoanalysis uncovers two types of communities called “natural communities” and “communities of interpreters.” He also discusses “postmodern communities” as an overreaction to the inertia and closed semiotics of natu-

8

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ral communities. 27 A natural community is described as “one in which there is a shared life world, often not much more sophisticated than a prethematic Umwelt in which signs have an assigned meaning within a highly habit-filled context. This is the realm of tribal affiliation, in which there is a strong dyadic structure of inclusion and exclusion.” 28 Racism, sexism, nationalism, and xenophobia emerge from such communities in which selving can be stunted by the community’s inability to grow in awareness through assimilation of outside ideas—also by resistance to overcoming the natural conditioning of in-group tribalism. We all belong to natural communities just by being born into a family, a gender, a language, or an ethnic group; but sign systems of natural communities are generally closed off to novel interpretants on account of the sharply defined borders. “Insofar as the human process remains on the level of mere natural communities, it cannot achieve political and ethical transformation.” 29 Interpretive communities emerge out of and critique the enclosed signs of natural communities through probing into the personal and social unconscious, but without going to the other extreme of postmodern semiotics, where significance is threatened by the relativism of infinite ciphers. 30 Borrowing the democratic sense of Dewey’s “universal community,” but without reading universal as totalizing and lacking in diversity, Corrington describes communities of interpreters as emancipatory, holding kairotic rather than chronic temporality, and requiring a genuine intersubjectivity. Communities of interpreters are only possible when comprised of self-reflexive individuals undergoing the selving process. They embrace a type of pluralism that does not lead to relativism, one that holds to an openness of signs (or symbols) that is curbed by a need for social convergence. A community of interpreters also “refuses to let private goods eclipse social goods.” 31 Corrington pushes Dewey’s social semiotics and pragmatic naturalism further by allowing for, or rather insisting upon, the numinous. Selving’s course exceeds Maslow’s summit by being transpersonal, self-transcending, and open to the divine, numinous dimensions of nature whose source is in natura naturans. The ethical dimension of ecstatic naturalism is reflected in the value of understanding ourselves (“know thyself”) and our worlds through selving and the psychosemiosis of communities. This frame for understanding has wide application to the most pressing issues of in-group out-group dualism that surface from today’s desperate global situation of violence and fearbased insular movements in reaction to immigration and terrorism. Existing interpretive communities that have been making strides to end racism, sexism and ecological disaster, for instance, are met by the gathering resistance of natural communities for whom such strides indicate an encroaching danger to the stability of their communities and lifestyles. Introduction of the Other in such communities is often interpreted as cultural, spiritual or racial devolution or even the destruction of the community through assimilation.

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Awareness of forces and directions within nature’s unconscious, the social unconscious, and personal unconscious might go a long way toward a peaceful co-existence in this age of global humanitarian and ecological crisis. Ecstatic naturalism’s semiotics, combined with the ordinal metaphysics of natural complexes, offers a middle path between the optimistic, utopian view of nature (and human nature) where everything will work itself out as a self-corrective process, and the pessimistic, Hobbesian naturalism which sees a thin veil of rationalism covering over a brutal and permanent human nature. It also provides an alternative to faulty or potentially dangerous views of nature. A metaphysical framework that treats nature as a deterministic chain of causalities, in which human beings are merely motivated by biological or genetic programming, has its well-known problems of agency. A traditional metaphysics that places nature at the bottom of an ontological hierarchy is in danger of insensitivity to the irreversible negative impact human beings have had on the climate and ecosystems. A metaphysical tradition that places a human intelligence outside of nature may be at the root of the inclination to pursue technological mastery and advancement of immortality (as cyborgian intelligence). Rather than solve for our global environmental desecration and political disasters, the current planet (and the non-elite) can be left behind, or the human being can dissolve into a database of memories. CHAPTER THEMES The three chapters in the first section of this volume offer perspectives on the topics of the immanent and transcendent dimensions of nature. In “Chaosmic Naturalisms,” Austin Roberts compares the deep pantheism of Robert Corrington and the process transpantheism of Roland Faber, and sees them as “chaosmic pantheisms.” While both Corrington and Faber express dissatisfaction with panentheism, the alternatives offered by each highlight different answers from process theology and ecstatic naturalism to questions of ontological priority and parity, teleology of nature, and the interrelatedness of the “things” that comprise nature. Although Corrington has expressed specific critiques of process thought, Roberts carefully draws out an alignment between Faber and ecstatic naturalism through Faber’s use of Deleuzian empiricism as an update to Whiteheadian metaphysics. Our next author, Rorty McEntee, looks beyond the binary partition of immanence and transcendence as discussed in traditional theology, and posits a trifold or trinitarian ontology. A trinity of “dependently co-arising” Tehom, Word, and Spirit gives birth to an entanglement of transcendence, immanence and the world of embodiment, space and time. Divinity, humanity, and the cosmos are intertwined in this creative procession. This interreligious mystical-prophetic ontology draws upon mystical thought from vari-

10

Introduction

ous religious traditions, different degrees and types of silence, Raimon Panikkar’s “cosmotheandric vision,” and Paul Tillich’s discussions of nonbeing and the mystical. The resulting concepts are put in dialogue with the twosided nature and the Encompassing within Corrington’s ecstatic naturalism. McEntee offers another rapprochement of ecstatic naturalism and process thought, particularly through use of constructive theology, in this creative exploration. Rose Ellen Dunn’s “Wild Air: Toward a Poetics of Ecstatic Naturalism” takes us further into the relation of the human being to nature by observing the role of mindfulness (Besinnung) in the selving process. Dunn fills out the meaning of “ecstatic” in ecstatic naturalism as the locus of the human being capable of experiencing and interpreting this ontological difference (or “natural difference” as Corrington defines it in contrast with Heidegger’s ontological difference of Being and beings) within the twin unfolding of transcendent nature naturing and immanent nature natured. 32 While very much a part of nature as it is comprised of natural complexes, the human person is in a unique position of dwelling ecstatically. Attunement to nature’s rhythms and songs through mindfulness produces poetic expression. The poetic productivity of this language draws the human selving process to the edges of its meaning horizons—edges at which the potencies of nature naturing light up in unconcealment through nature natured. Such expressive speech, as Dunn further suggests, becomes a “poetics of place” that beckons others into mindful encounters with nature. In Section II we draw together the themes of semiosis and nature’s unconscious—the former, a significant tool of ecstatic naturalism’s phenomenology, the latter, the abyss-like Abgrund of nature that is discovered as immanent within nature natured but sourced from the transcendent potencies of nature naturing. The authors of this section draw upon semiotic and psychoanalytic theory and tools for understanding the relationship between language, the unconscious, and nature. The religious and poetic potencies of ecstatic naturalism shouldn’t distract us from its science-friendly basis as a naturalism. Wade A. Mitchell outlines critiques of Corrington’s philosophy by non-religious naturalists, particularly concerning the forces postulated that lack scientific causal or explanatory power, and concerning the use of Schopenhauer’s Will to Life as the force that makes selving and god-ing psychologically and metaphysically possible, respectively. Mitchell focuses on ecstatic naturalism’s use of metaphors and categories from psychoanalysis, and finds an ally in neuropscyhoanalysis founder Mark Solms in the task of setting this naturalism on firmer scientific ground. Neuropsychoanalysis is an emergent interdisciplinary field that aims to reformulate drive theory, among other Freudian ideas, using evidence from affective neuroscience. Mitchell proposes the use of Peircean constructs to integrate ecstatic naturalism with neuropsychoanalysis.

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Nicholas L. Guardiano next offers a Peircean-inspired “Groundwork for a Transcendentalist Semeiotics of Nature.” Peirce’s semeiosis (Peirce’s spelling of the word) was unique in its time for its application to nature and its observations of sign systems beyond human language and culture. Creatures across the biosphere, inanimate physical objects, and even the universe as a whole in its ontological structure are described as inherently semiotic. Guardiano identifies in Peirce’s writings about semeiotics key consequences for a semeiotics of nature, and makes use of them to describe the metaphysical grounds of the intelligently representative and expressive aspects of the natural world. He then relates these ideas to a philosophy of “aesthetic transcendentalism” that is compatible with ecstatic naturalism. The semiosis of nature is next carried forth by Leon Niemoczynski who applies the philosophy of “naturalistic idealist” John William Miller to a philosophical ecology. Miller’s concept of “midworld” can, on the theoretical side, contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between organisms and environment and nature as an encompassing entirety. On the applied side, midworld serves to clarify key issues in today’s environment crises. Niemoczynski argues that Miller’s midworld also allows us to maintain human-based perceptual universes that contribute to the value of the whole while being affected organically by other values enabled by the whole. The whole (nature) is not to be thought of as a container for or totality of all things, but one linked to values and perceptions of all organisms. Elaine Padilla then leads us into the depths of nature’s unconscious with her Jungian-based study of artist Myrna Báez’s “El Mangle.” The trees, whose entangled roots are immersed in Caribbean waters, exemplify Jung’s “Philosophical Tree” and a religious longing for a mystical harmony that has the potential to become actual through processes similar to entering a mother’s womb. This can be related to Corrington’s Kristeva-influenced ordinal psychoanalysis, where such longing would be for a lost object, thus the reason for melancholy, one of the two moods of the horizon bound-self (the other being jouissance). Padilla makes use of the Caribbean philosophy of Edouard Glissant to bring out the themes of the unconscious desire for mutually beneficial interconnectivity (the trees), melancholic expressions of nature, and the maternal as the womblike depth of nature that nurtures selving or human awakening and creativity. Padilla describes them as “grounding opacity,” and uses the imagery from Báez’s archetypal trees, along with Corrington’s lightning-like clearing (as derived from Heidegger’s Lichtung) to support this reading of the unconscious and melancholy of nature. Our final section focuses on the relation of pluralism and hybridity to the transcendence and immanence of nature. Thomas Millary explores the influence of poet and self-styled philosopher Benjamin Paul Blood on his friend William James, particularly in regard to a mysticism that is compatible with a pluralistic view of nature. In James’s last published essay, “A Pluralistic

12

Introduction

Mystic,” he describes Blood’s approach to mysticism based on firsthand spiritual experience. James’s essay serves as an example of how a philosopher can gain insight from a non-academic writer’s claims to experiencebased deep knowledge of nature’s ecstatic potencies. The mystical pluralism of Blood and James is compatible with the selving process insofar as the numerous mystical paths bring forth an experience of the numinous potencies of nature. In “Vulnerable Transcendence of Nature,” Jea Sophia Oh provides a comparative study of Chinese creation mythology, particularly Nüwa (yin) and Fuxi (yang) as the background story of the I-Ching (i.e., The Classic of Changes or Book of Changes), and the ecstatic naturalist perspective of nature’s process of beginning-colliding-encompassing. Oh points out that Corrington’s notion of intersubjectivity is similar to the self-containment and mutual transformation of the yin-yang principle, where new things originate from cessation. The self-othering hybridity of yin-yang is like the “betweenizing” of nature natured and nature naturing. Nüwa’s transformation of myriad things is compared to Corrington’s selving process through which life comes from yin (the feminine force), chaos, darkness, abyss, and the ground Mother. Oh discusses how the process of nature naturing producing nature natured from itself, accompanied by the god-ing process, is like the endless becoming of the encompassing Hanul (“the divine” in Korean). The use of Chinese and Korean concepts helps illuminate these “trans-human” processes (in the Teilhard de Chardinian sense) of selving and god-ing. Using “trans-humanism” in the more contemporary sense of the word, along with “post-humanism,” Iljoon Park next argues that ecstatic naturalism has the potential to serve as the philosophical ground for the Second Machine Age in which the natural and artificial are hybridized. Post-humanism and trans-humanism mark the end of the modern human being. Park notes that the ecstasy in ecstatic naturalism doesn’t mean a mystical union but literally ek-stasis, a movement outside of one’s state. Nature is incessantly moving beyond itself and is ecstatically self-transforming. The co-existence and hybridization of the biological and mechanical blurs the boundaries of dualisms such as nature/culture, biological/mechanical, and naturally-born/artificiallyborn, particularly when redefining the human being as natural-born cyborgs. Park argues that nature as ec-static is very close to the East Asian idea of nature as “Self-So-Ing.” The Korean idea of Ul (the Spirit) is also useful in understanding the process of the interpretive community as guided by the spirit-interpreter. The final chapter in this section continues the comparison of ecstatic naturalism and East Asian concepts. In this instance, Hiheon Kim puts ecstatic naturalism’s deep pantheism in dialogue with both process panentheism and the naturalistic theism of Daseok (the pen name of Yu Young-Mo). Kim describes Daseok’s form of theism as a viable option in current theological

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enterprises that attempt to overcome the extremities of scientific reductionism and religious supernaturalism. Kim locates Daseok’s idea of God between Corrington’s deep pantheism and Whitehead’s process panentheism in order to discuss the viability and creativity of contemporary Korean theology. He also suggests that deep pantheism and process panentheism both successfully include scientific and religious ideas within a comprehensive philosophical framework, though their differences remain in tension. Placing Daseok’s naturalistic theism at the midpoint may further the conversation between these emerging religious alternatives. Nature’s Transcendence and Immanence: A Comparative Interdisciplinary Ecstatic Naturalism is the fruitful outcome of ecstatic naturalism’s influence on an inspired young generation of scholars from the East and West in different but related disciplines. Thus, this book opens dialogical space for a comparative and transdisciplinary naturalism that is not limited to readers within philosophy and theology, but invites all who care about nature and life in environmental ethics, process theology, ecofeminism, and comparative studies. NOTES 1. Robert S. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime: An Essay in Aesthetic Naturalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 142. 2. Robert S. Corrington, Deep Pantheism: Toward a New Transcendentalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016). 3. Alex Rosenberg fully embraces and encourages the term “scientism” as a positive description of New Atheism’s naturalism. The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), 6-8. 4. Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Wesley J. Wildman, Religious and Spiritual Experiences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 5. Robert S. Corrington, A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 27-30. Also see Neville’s essay, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Robert S. Corrington,” in A Philosophy of Sacred Nature: Prospects for Ecstatic Naturalism, eds. Leon Niemoczynski and Nam T. Nguyen (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015) 1-8 for his updated position vis-à-vis religious naturalism. 6. The religious naturalism of Donald A. Crosby also falls in the middle of this spectrum. Crosby shares with ecstatic naturalists an interest in metaphysical positions (particularly claimed from the Aristotelian tradition) and accepts the view that there is no supernatural beyond nature, although he holds fewer speculative commitments found in ecstatic naturalism. His focus is more toward establishing a religious or sacred attitude and responsibility toward nature. See, for instance, his A Religion of Nature (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002). 7. Corrington, A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy, 26. 8. Robert S. Corrington, Nature and Spirit: An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992); Robert S. Corrington, Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994); Robert S. Corrington, Nature’s Self: Our Journey from Origin to Spirit (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); Robert S. Corrington, Nature’s Religion (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997); Robert S. Corrington, Nature and Nothingness: An Essay in Ordinal Phenomenology (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017).

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9. Robert S. Corrington, An Introduction to C. S. Peirce: Philosopher, Semiotician, and Ecstatic Naturalist (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993); Robert S. Corrington, Wilhelm Reich: Psychoanalyst and Radical Naturalist (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003); Robert S. Corrington, Riding the Windhorse: Manic Depressive Disorder and the Quest for Wholeness (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2003). 10. Robert S. Corrington, “Ordinality and the Divine Natures,” in Nature’s Perspective: Prospects for an Ordinal Metaphysics, eds. Armen Marsoobian, Kathleen Wallace, and Robert S. Corrington (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991). 11. Ibid., 347. 12. Ibid., 349. 13. Ibid., 358. 14. Ibid., 359. 15. Ibid., 361. 16. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 10. 17. Ibid., 8. 18. Ibid., 71. Corrington’s objections to panpsychism are based on this definition on the same page: “The doctrine of panpsychism asserts that whatever is in whatever mode it is, is mental all the way down, even though the mental aspects may be submerged from view by the limited capacities of the human process.” 19. Ibid., 8. 20. Corrington, Nature and Spirit, 13. 21. Ibid., 34-35. 22. Ibid., 34. 23. Corrington, A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy, 36. 24. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 33-73. 25. Corrington, Nature and Spirit, 77. 26. Corrington’s semiotics is more extensively described in the “Infinite Semiosis” chapter of Ecstatic Naturalism, 67-115. Application of it can be found in the “Communal Vistas” chapter of Nature’s Sublime, 75-112. 27. Corrington, A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy, 132-34. 28. Ibid., 127. 29. Corrington, Nature and Spirit, 97. 30. For more on the distinctions of these communities see, Nature and Spirit, 94-103, and A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy, 127-41. 31. Corrington, Nature and Spirit, 102. 32. In Nature’s Sublime (45-46), Corrington discusses the difference between Heidegger’s ontological difference and the “natural difference.” “Betweenness” rests in the opening that separates the two aspects of nature, as described in Ecstatic Naturalism (122-38).

Chapter One

Chaosmic Naturalisms Cosmological Immanence, Multiplicity, and Divinity in Corrington and Faber Austin Roberts

INTRODUCING CHAOSMOS In his classic novel Finnegans Wake, James Joyce coined the term “chaosmos” in a sentence that has been subsequently quoted by others many times: “Every person, place, and thing in the chaosmos of Alle anyway connected to the gobbleydumped turkery was moving and changing every part of the time.” 1 In recent decades, Joyce’s notion of the chaosmos has been widely interpreted by various thinkers as an attempt to name a pluralistic cosmos that dynamically fluctuates between order and chaos, or ground and abyss. As a concept, it therefore deconstructs the binary of an orderly cosmos and disorderly chaos, resulting in a kind of coincidence of opposites. A chaosmic sense of temporality is consequently non-linear, implying that nature’s productivity is without absolute origin, end, or grand purpose. Accordingly, the orders of a chaosmic nature emerge contingently, at the edge of an “unruly ground,” to borrow F. W. J. Schelling’s potent image. Since Joyce’s time, the chaosmos is a concept that has gained some traction, as it has become increasingly clear to both philosophers and scientists that ours is not a neatly ordered cosmos. For example, prominent European philosophers like Gilles Deleuze and Umberto Eco appropriated the Joycean chaosmos to describe aspects of their works. Thus, Deleuze found in the chaosmos a way to illustrate his pluralistic metaphysics that he initially developed in his magnum opus, Difference and Repetition. In later works, he wrote, “In a same chaotic world divergent series are endlessly tracing bifur15

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cating paths. It is a ‘chaosmos’ of the type found in Joyce,” 2 a “composed chaos—neither foreseen nor preconceived.” 3 Similarly, in his important essay on Joyce, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos, Eco wrote, “If Finnegan’s Wake is a sacred book, it tells us that in principium erat Chaos,” conveying a “vision of a polydimensional reality” that is characterized by a “ceaseless process of cosmic metamorphosis.” 4 Such readings of the Joycean chaosmos thus express a cosmology that significantly diverges from medieval beliefs in a divinely ordered, hierarchical cosmos, as well as early modern views of nature as a deterministic machine. 5 Beyond academic philosophy, a number of major theorists within the natural sciences have implicitly gone chaosmic. For these scientific thinkers, the Joycean concept of the chaosmos might now be fruitfully connected, not just to metaphysical speculations, but also to empirical observations of the “paradoxical coincidence of order and disorder” in nature. 6 As Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers write, while “classical science emphasized order and stability; now, in contrast, we see fluctuations, instability, multiple choices, and limited predictability at all levels of observation.” 7 Thus, chaos and complexity theorists argue that relatively stable orders within nature emerge at “the edge of chaos.” As Stuart Kauffman suggests, I suspect that the fate of all complex adapting systems in the biosphere . . . is to evolve to a natural state between order and chaos, a grand compromise between structure and surprise. . . . We will find a place in the sun, poised at the edge of chaos, sustained for a time in that sun’s radiance, but only for a moment before we slip from sight. 8

Additionally, in their early and influential work on chaos and complexity theory, Order Out of Chaos, Prigogine and Stengers explained that as “fluctuations” in nature become amplified through positive feedback, a critical moment or “bifurcation point” occurs. At this instant, they write, it is “impossible to determine whether the system will disintegrate into ‘chaos’ or entropy, or leap to a new, more differentiated, higher level of ‘order.’” As such, Prigogine and Stengers argue that order is spontaneously generated out of chaos through chance “fluctuations and deterministic laws.” 9 It seems to me that the image of a chaosmos also resonates with the contemporary theocosmologies of Roland Faber and Robert Corrington. Their different philosophical strategies intriguingly converge at points through shared emphases on nature’s complexity and chaotic spontaneity. It might therefore seem plausible to relate them as fellow “chaosmic naturalists”—although this proposal is admittedly not without certain difficulties. While he was originally trained as a systematic theologian in Austria, Faber has in recent years become one of the leading process philosophers in the United States. In a series of complex works over the last decade, he has

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developed a highly unique interpretation of Alfred North Whitehead’s writings in conversation with the ideas of poststructuralist thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. In fact, it is apparent that Faber’s rather unorthodox process cosmology is now equally informed by both Deleuze and Whitehead, as he creatively entangles them in often surprising ways, while also moving in his own direction altogether. With Deleuze, Faber frequently describes his own cosmology in chaosmic terms, interpreting the world as a “chaosmos of intercommunicating, yet unconquerable multiplicities in the mutual mapping and tracing of their series of divergences and convergences.” 10 However, he does not explicitly identify with “naturalism,” despite apparently sharing many of the same basic convictions as philosophical naturalists. Conversely, Corrington strongly identifies as a pragmatic naturalist, but without ever explicitly using the seemingly pertinent image of the chaosmos to describe his work. At a deeper philosophical level, any comparison of these two philosophers’ works is further complicated by the fact that Corrington has often unfolded his own project of ecstatic naturalism in sharp opposition to the process tradition that Faber continues to work within. Indeed, Corrington is firmly convinced that process thought is fatally “flawed in its very foundations,” and that it is an “anthropomorphic . . . quasi-naturalist . . . cosmology of optimism.” In his view, process thinkers ultimately turn a blind eye to “the entropic violence,” evolutionary waste, meaningless suffering, and randomness within nature. 11 In other words, Corrington finds in process metaphysics an essential defect: not enough chaos, and far too much order. But despite this apparent divergence between Whiteheadian process philosophy and ecstatic naturalism, in this chapter I want to show how Faber’s chaosmic process thought resonates in certain ways with Corrington’s philosophical naturalism. Without eliminating certain irreducible differences between the two thinkers, hopefully this comparison will disclose some productive connections between a certain style of process thought and ecstatic naturalism, and perhaps even stimulate further critical explorations between these two vital schools of thought in the future. CONTRASTING COSMOLOGIES An initial point of contact between these two chaosmic naturalists can be made through the tradition of process empiricism, which includes important thinkers like Henry Nelson Wieman, Bernard Meland, and Bernard Loomer. Although a great deal of contemporary process theology developed during the latter half of the twentieth century under the influence of John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin at Claremont School of Theology, the process empiricism that blossomed at Chicago Divinity School is in fact an older school of

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thought, going back to Wieman’s work in the 1920s. 12 As Gary Dorrien explains, the early Chicago process theologians were characterized by a resistance to supernaturalist, rationalist, and overly abstract thinking, and also by a strong emphasis on the ambiguous “flow of experience within the creative social matrix.” 13 In this sense, they were deeply influenced by the radical empiricism and pluralistic metaphysics of William James, which also led them to develop naturalistic ideas about the divine as a “creative event” (Weiman) and as the pantheistic “web of life” (Loomer). 14 Especially in his most recent writings, Faber has made it quite clear that he is closer to the Chicago school of process empiricism than to process rationalism—the latter of which, it would seem, is most often the main target of Corrington’s blistering critiques. Similar to the process empiricists who, as Demian Wheeler points out, typically read process philosophy through a Jamesian lens, Faber’s Deleuzian-empiricist approach to Whitehead’s metaphysics diverges from the more Hartshornean style of process rationalism. 15 This is not entirely surprising when one takes note of the fact that Deleuze was, like the Chicago empiricists before him, deeply influenced both by Whitehead’s process cosmology and by James’s radically empiricist metaphysics of pure experience. 16 In fact, Deleuze explicitly claimed that his own pluralistic metaphysics of pure immanence was grounded in a JamesianWhiteheadian radical empiricism. 17 Working within this particular philosophical milieu, Faber thus interprets process empiricists like Loomer as “following the lead of Whitehead’s later thought,” which tended toward a greater “integration of the tragic” in nature. 18 As I will explain below in greater detail, Faber has also recently aligned his own theocosmology with Loomer’s process-relational pantheism. 19 Implicitly tightening the connections that I am attempting to establish between Faber and Corrington, Wheeler has persuasively argued that Corrington’s naturalism also has much in common with Jamesian process empiricists. In fact, Wheeler finds in the works of Chicago empiricists like Loomer a way to potentially develop a process form of ecstatic naturalism. 20 Both schools of thought ultimately converge on a number of crucial points, including equally strong arguments that nature cannot be sugarcoated, but must be fully accepted in all of its quasi-chaotic ambiguity, radical contingency, and tragic loss. Especially in his most recent publications, Faber echoes this naturalist-empiricist resistance to philosophical tender-mindedness, alternatively affirming a more tough-minded realism about nature that the process empiricists and ecstatic naturalists similarly maintain: “The chaosmos is not our keeper,” Faber writes, but is “uncertain, impermanent . . . [and] dangerous.” 21 In addition to this important connection to the tradition of process empiricism, I also note three broad agreements between Faber and Corrington. First, they boldly affirm metaphysical speculation in a time when anti-meta-

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physical thinking has become influential. While Faber is friendlier to French deconstruction, 22 he is nevertheless in basic accord with Corrington’s critique of nihilistic “pantextualism,” which “asserts that whatever is in whatever way is a text, or intratextual interpretation . . . that all hermeneutic acts are arbitrary on the deepest level . . . [generating] a kind of solipsism that makes it impossible to engage in joint forms of query and social critique.” 23 Second, both hesitate to describe their work as “theology” without careful qualification, lest they be mistaken for traditional theists, Christian apologists, or rationalists. In fact, while both once identified with liberal forms of Christianity, their theocosmologies are now shaped more by post-Christian perspectives. 24 Finally, both reject panentheism and affirm some form of pantheistic naturalism. I am particularly interested in exploring this latter convergence, but it will be necessary to first consider four specific metaphysical issues that seemingly divide these two thinkers: (1) natural complexes, (2) ontological parity, (3) relationalism, and (4) the ontological difference. After analyzing these themes as they relate to the works of Faber and Corrington, I will then transition to explore the implications of these issues in regard to each thinker’s conception of divinity. One of the core disagreements between process and ecstatic naturalists is over how to identify the “things” that nature produces or is composed of. Drawing on the philosophical naturalism of Justus Buchler, Corrington argues that whatever exists can be most adequately named “natural complexes,” which are differentiated by particular traits and ordinal locations in nature. On the one hand, this phrase reminds us that “nature is ubiquitous and that whatever there is, in whatever mode it is, or in whatever sphere it is, it is fully and always a part of the one nature that there is.” 25 On the other hand, the idea of a natural complex points to the fact that complexity is ubiquitous, so there are no simples in nature: Starkly put, the simple cannot be a prevalence within nature. It is complexity all the way up and all of the way down. There is no ultimate simple that could serve as the foundation of the world or nature as a “whole.” In this view, all posited simples are always and in all ways already infinitely complex. 26

Corrington thus differentiates his position from the process philosophy of Hartshorne, who explicitly argued for simples as a logical necessity in contrast to the existence of complex entities. However, Corrington insists that this is “a purely verbal argument” because “one simply cannot envision something without traits, internal and relational, as such a bare creature would have no possible connection with anything else.” 27 Although it is undoubtedly true that Hartshorne argued in favor of simples, it is hard to see how Whitehead could have consistently affirmed the same position. After all, his perspectival actual occasions—“the final real

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things of which the world is made up” 28—are so densely intertwined with everything else in varying degrees of relevance that it would be impossible to disentangle a purely simple entity from its endlessly complex web of constitutive relations. 29 Thus, at least in Faber’s chaosmic metaphysics, Whitehead’s actual occasions are rendered much more comparable to Corrington’s natural complexes. In fact, resistance to simples and unities is largely what drives Faber’s provocative reading of Whitehead through a Deleuzian logic of multiplicity. As he writes, “Although simplicity is an important heuristic instrument, as a philosophic method . . . it is vicious” because it “betrays the infinite complexity” of becoming. 30 Faber is also greatly assisted here by the radical pluralism of James, who wrote in the final chapter of A Pluralistic Universe, “for pluralism . . . nothing real is absolutely simple. . . . Every smallest bit of experience is multum in parvo plurally related, [and] each relation is one aspect, character, or . . . way of its being taken, or way of its taking something else.” 31 As such, Faber argues in a very Jamesian way that actual occasions are certainly not simples in any strict sense, but are better interpreted as “multiplicities,” or “internally related complexities.” 32 As he writes, In a rhizomatic world of the infinitely moving seriality of differentiations and interrelations, “unity” always appears only as a finite convergence of multiple relations or as a unique togetherness of divergences. . . . Nothing is fixed; nothing is perfect; nothing is forever; and on the other hand, nothing can be abstracted to formulate a general function of relationships. 33

Faber therefore suggests that the notion of simples is, at best, an occasionally useful abstraction from endlessly complex processes of becoming. In his interpretation of Whitehead, an actual occasion’s synthesis of potentials does not dissolve complex differences but temporarily holds them in contrast. Thus, not unlike Corrington’s natural complexes, Faber ultimately describes actual occasions as dynamic “folds of difference,” precisely because “‘unification’ is always ‘multi-pli-cation’” within the infinitely complex “rhizomatic chaosmos.” 34 Although the first metaphysical divergence between Faber’s process thought and ecstatic naturalism has now been effectively minimized, Corrington also argues that while he is committed to the Buchlerian principle of ontological parity, process philosophers typically affirm ontological priority. Ontological parity, which Corrington sometimes compares to a spiritual practice, means that there are no “degrees of being [but] only diverse ways or kinds of being.” 35 In other words, this anti-imperialist principle “insists that all complexes are equally real, even if not of the same value from a human perspective.” 36 Corrington contends that most Western metaphysicians have been committed to ontological priority, which permits degrees of being. Con-

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sequently, a “privileged order or complex that is paradigmatic for all other orders” is affirmed, as with Platonic Forms, the Kantian Transcendental Ego, or Hegelian Spirit. 37 In my view, Corrington’s commitment to ontological parity is thus comparable to Deleuze’s principle of “univocity,” in which Being is said equally “of all its individuating differences.” 38 The principle of univocity thus leads Deleuze, much like Corrington, to a naturalistic insistence on immanence that opposes all forms of otherworldly transcendence, metaphysical hierarchies, and foundations. Drawing on both Deleuze and Whitehead, Faber similarly insists on a radically immanent, anti-foundationalist, and “flat” ontology. 39 He therefore unfolds a cosmology that does not permit degrees of being, noting that this is his attempt to maintain what Whitehead called an “insistence on immanence,” which “counters the imperialistic unifications that coercively occupy the manifold in the name of the self-sufficient transcendence of the . . . One.” 40 By employing his own metaphysical principle of “plurivocity”— which is analogous to both Corrington’s principle of parity and Deleuze’s principle of univocity—Faber denies that there could ever be a more “real reality” behind phenomena. Thus, the principle of plurivocity affirms “nothing but the pure manifold of voices” in the chaosmos. 41 Like Corrington, Faber compares plurivocity to a kind of spiritual exercise that “releases an ethical impulse . . . for difference.” 42 Even the divine and pure potentials are not exceptions to his metaphysical principle of plurivocity, which are interpreted by Faber as dynamically “real on their own terms”—or as Corrington would put it, “differently real.” 43 Against certain rationalist and idealist readings of Whitehead’s metaphysics, even the eternal objects are subject to Faber’s radically empiricist principle of plurivocity. The eternal objects therefore “do not enter the actual process as hierarchically fixated structures or a pre-established harmony.” Neither do they “represent the ‘essence’ of an actual world, which can only be the synthesis of its actual and possible worlds in its singularity that cannot be generalized.” 44 On Faber’s reading, eternal objects ultimately form an infinity of “virtual intensities” or creative “values” that are just as “impermanent as . . . actualities, but in a different way.” 45 A third issue that seemingly divides process and ecstatic naturalists is the Whiteheadian view that everything is in some way related to everything else. As Whitehead argued in Process and Reality, “In fact if we allow for degrees of relevance, and for negligible relevance, we must say that every actual entity is present in every other actual entity.” As such, Whitehead views each actuality as a “particular concrescence of the universe,” 46 leading him to conclude that “each is all in all.” 47 But for Corrington’s ordinal metaphysics, a given natural complex can be related to any others, but it will not be relevant to all other complexes, as actual occasions are to one another. As Corrington writes,

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Chapter 1 From the ordinal perspective any given subaltern will be relevant to some other subalterns, but it will not be relevant to all of them. Ordinality asks us to accept the fact that there is genuine diremption . . . sheer indifference (part of the Darwinian piece that the “evolutionary” process framework tends to abject), and genuine spoliation . . . in nature. 48

Thus, for him, to insist with Whitehead that everything is related to everything else foolishly romanticizes nature. 49 According to Corrington, process relationalism is ultimately blind to the violent breaks and fractures, the “nonrelationality . . . and loss in nature.” 50 When process thinkers “eulogize” nature as a “great web of being,” Corrington writes, they conveniently forget “that the image of the web is derived from a creature that uses it primarily as a finely-tuned killing machine.” 51 But Faber is perhaps more attuned to these important concerns than many process thinkers. His process relationalism certainly does not suggest a utopian celebration of holism or the bliss of universal interconnectedness. On the contrary, he links his understanding of relations to that of Loomer’s, who suggested that process-relationalism intensifies the “problematic character of the world as such.” 52 Thus, Faber emphasizes the fragility of mutual relations, which not only enable communication and creativity, but also bring about “rivalry and war, power-struggle and destruction.” Thus, as Faber argues, Process relationality is inherently problematic. Becoming is always a matter of emphasis. Relationality is always selective. Hence, processual relationality is value-laden and, thereby, inherently controversial. Relationality is always a movement of . . . competing interests. . . . In fact, insofar as the world is a multiplicity of becoming, it is not led by the ideals of a relational heaven, but by a multiplicity of relationships that . . . always generate “the problematic”: differences, alternatives, mutual exclusions, and paradoxes. 53

The immensely complex web of relations that interconnect everything to everything is therefore “not an ideal reality” to be naïvely celebrated, but rather “a problem” that is finally inescapable. To merely romanticize relations is ultimately to abstract them from the often-violent flux of “becoming and vanishing, of life and death, of a process whose only ‘character’ is impermanence,” Faber insists. 54 One final issue must be noted as a precursor to my discussion of pantheism in Faber’s and Corrington’s work. At the center of Corrington’s naturalism is his post-Heideggerian concept of the ontological difference between nature naturing and nature natured. Like Schelling’s unruly ground, nature naturing is a chaos of “self-othering” potencies that spontaneously erupt on the side of nature natured, thus giving rise to natural complexes. 55 For Corrington, Whiteheadian creativity is insufficient as an ultimate principle be-

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cause it is rare and “very expensive” in nature. 56 He argues that process thinkers eulogize creativity as an ultimate, and thereby “domesticate” nature, which is more chaotically resistant to our human desires. 57 Unlike the principle of creativity, Corrington views nature naturing as “beyond good and evil.” 58 Faber agrees with Corrington that Heidegger’s static notion of the ontological difference is inadequate. But in its place, he affirms creativity as “Whitehead’s version of . . . [the] ontological difference . . . not between Being and beings, but . . . between activity (creativity) and actuality (event). It is not the ground of the being of that which is, but of the becoming of events.” 59 For Faber, creativity is merely “the name of the process of differentiation as such,” thus functioning similar to Corrington’s idea of the selfothering potencies in nature. 60 And significantly, Faber has freely translated Whitehead’s principle of creativity into Schelling’s unruly ground, Deleuze’s virtual plane of immanence, Derrida’s différance—and even natura naturans. 61 As such, the differentiating activity of creativity is “neither good nor evil,” Faber writes, so it does not smooth out nature’s wildness and ambiguity. 62 Striking a Schellingian tone, he finally describes creativity as the “(bottomless) darkness” from which all actualities emerge—including God. 63 CHAOSMIC PANTHEISMS Even if one concedes that Faber’s cosmology sufficiently diverges from the more upbeat and orderly style of process rationalism, an important question must now be asked: what about God, the so-called poet of the world? By continuing to affirm a version of Whitehead’s God-concept, is Faber ultimately concealing a naïve theological optimism behind his chaosmology? It must be acknowledged that it is often difficult to discern clear answers to such questions in Faber’s writings, with their oscillations between rigorous philosophical argumentation and a poetic, even mystical expressiveness. But in certain moments of clarity, Faber does present a forceful critique of process panentheism and in its place affirms a kind of pluralistic pantheism. With this, he again converges with Corrington, who has made his own “passage from panentheism to pantheism.” As my prior analysis of his basic metaphysical commitments suggests, Corrington has made it very clear that ecstatic naturalism has absolutely no room for naïvely optimistic theological claims. His naturalistic worldview is deeply committed to a tough-minded realism that refuses to turn away from the ambiguous character of reality. As such, nature has no essential goal or transcendent Creator. Initially affirming a process-inspired ordinal panentheism, Corrington later came to the conclusion that this position was unable “to truly reflect the depth-categories of nature naturing and nature natured.” 64

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He now insists that the “half-way god of panentheism” inevitably “[softens] the edges of nature,” implying a “muted eschatology,” and an anthropocentric optimism. 65 Furthermore, it violates the principle of ontological parity since it makes God into the foundational Order of all orders. Consequently, Corrington argues that process panentheists present a nature that is too small and a God that is too big. He even asserts that the process God is “so ontologically distinct and superior as to fall outside naturalism.” 66 The alternative that Corrington develops is what he calls deep pantheism, which locates the divine “within the infinite and oftimes bewildering worlds of nature natured.” But this pantheism does not simply identify the divine with nature: “We reject the idea that god and nature naturing are identical,” Corrington writes. 67 Rather, the divine is ejected from nature naturing as “a highly complex . . . natural complex.” 68 This is not a personal, omnipotent, or benevolent creator God who is a being with conscious intentions. He finds such views to be crassly anthropomorphic, dismissing them as human projections. 69 At the same time, Corrington’s divine also functions as a kind of “lure,” which he carefully distinguishes from the more teleological divine lure affirmed by some forms of process theology. For the ecstatic naturalist, the divine lure is “developmental and self-organizing” rather than being “unidirectional or imposed, or encouraged, by some kind of an ‘initial aim.’ . . . [It] is more like a general invitation to a new self-organization on the edges of the chaos” of natural processes. 70 Corrington unfolds his pluralistic concept of divinity as “god-ing energies,” suggesting that they release a kind of “opening power” that works to prevent the eternal return of the same, or to pry open “what is enclosed” in nature. 71 This “finite/infinite” divinity holds open a future for other natural complexes, and “loosen[s]” semiotic clusters to aesthetically “intensify” the finite. 72 Also resisting panentheism, Faber’s transpantheism is remarkably close to Corrington’s deep pantheism. In sharp contrast to his own position, Faber defines panentheism as the “doctrine that God encompasses and permeates the world without being exhausted by it.” Because it imagines God to be the “unifying Whole of the world’s multiplicity,” panentheism ultimately “reserves an excess for God as the unity of the whole that is not mutually suspended with the multiplicity of the chaosmos.” 73 Most forms of panentheism are therefore imperialistic, according to Faber, and they domesticate the chaosmos by “excluding its shades of ambiguity, that is, by being compromised by the Logic of the One.” 74 But like Corrington, Faber does not then follow the pantheistic strategies of identifying God with nature as a whole or with the principle of creativity. In his view, such moves still permit one ultimate to contain all others, and they also attribute to God an ultimate power that is unacceptable to Faber. For similar reasons, this was not Whitehead’s strategy either, who “contextualizes the divine in a multiplicity of ultimates in mutual immanence,” Faber argues. As such, no single metaphys-

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ical ultimate can be permitted “to encompass all others”—whether “creativity, khora [the extensive continuum], values (eternal objects), the world” or the divine. 75 Unlike many process theologians, Faber therefore rejects the panentheistic assumption of a cosmic Whole or unifying Order of orders. 76 His postmonotheistic transpantheism means to consistently hold to Whitehead’s multiple “antitheses” in Process and Reality: It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent. It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God is many. . . . It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God. 77

Reflecting on this important passage, Faber argues that the divine is “not granted eminent reality over against multiplicity” by Whitehead, but is “situated in a multiplicity of syntheses [as] a synthetic multiplicity.” 78 The divine thus relates to all other multiplicities in a “symmetric rhythm” 79 of “mutual transcendence, mutual otherness and mutual creativity.” 80 As such, Faber’s nondual, processual divinity is fully within the chaosmos, and cannot be cleanly differentiated from other actualities in terms of certain properties with a higher degree of reality. 81 He also resists the excessive sentimentality that is sometimes associated with the divine consequent nature in process theology, emphasizing instead the complex interplay between “Harmony” and “Discord,” of both “hope” and “horror” that continually emerge in the chaosmos. 82 Furthermore, this God does not provide a final answer to “the mystery of existence,” even as some might discern a “trace” of the divine in things as “Tragic Beauty.” 83 To be sure, the existential or spiritual significance of Faber’s immanent divine is not dissolved by this admission of radical ambiguity in the chaosmos. In fact, his view is arguably similar to Corrington’s divine lure, which helps to prevent the eternal return of the same and to intensify finite processes. In Faber’s Deleuzian interpretation of Whitehead’s God, it names the “desire to become,” which keeps other multiplicities from “stalling into a final state” of static unity by affirming and insisting on nothing but the “process of multiplicity.” 84 This chaosmic God ultimately blurs the line between the opposite categories of order and chaos in its soteriological functions: while hindering things “from deteriorating into purely indefinite chaos,” 85 the divine manifold also “disturbs the seamless ‘presence’ of the One” by endlessly insisting on multiplicities. 86 But crucially, this pluralistic divine does not “insist” on a pre-established essence or specific “blueprint” for other multiplicities. As Faber explains, Different from Leibniz’s God, the “Great Monad” that pre-establishes the harmony of becoming in Being, Whitehead’s God is rather the “Great Nomad”

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Chapter 1 that disturbs any stabilization, insists on divergences and . . . saves them from being “rationalized” into subjection to the One. 87

Accordingly, this immanent divine-process offers far less security than most humans desire, as it never seeks “preservation or self-presence, but only [aesthetic] intensity.” 88 Ultimately, Faber differentiates his position from those of many other process theologians while claiming to be closer to the chaosmic vision of Whitehead, for whom the preservation of “societies”—a metaphysical category that includes all living organisms—is always subordinate to God’s “absolute end” of evoking intensities in momentary events. 89 This chaosmic God is “a little oblivious as to morals,” Whitehead wrote, and offers no guarantees for enduring orders of any kind in the future. 90 Precious little comfort, indeed. But like Corrington, Faber rejects nihilism, embracing instead a kind of apophatic mysticism with his transpantheistic philosophy. However fleetingly, he affirms a hope for liberation and joy, precisely because of the unpredictable and open-ended character of chaosmic becomings—or, better, because of what he calls “polyphilia,” the “love of multiplicity.” 91 CONCLUSION I have certainly not resolved the differences between Corrington and Faber, nor have I argued one to be more coherent than the other. To be sure, they employ different strategies that are sometimes in tension. Process and ecstatic naturalists will continue to debate thorny philosophical issues, including the metaphysical status of novelty, relations, and whether anything in nature is changeless, or if process is finally ubiquitous. But if this comparison is any indication, some process thinkers also converge at crucial points with ecstatic naturalists: the chaosmos is complex all the way down; it is not grounded in anything beyond itself; nature is ambiguous, often frustrating human desires; nothing has a greater share of being or existence than anything else; the divine must be located within, not beyond, the chaosmos; and the divine offers little security beyond a capacity to disturb fixed orders and hinder sheer chaos. 92 Lastly, surely they can agree that no single metaphysical system is sufficient, but that we require “a variety of partial systems of limited generality,” as Whitehead argued. 93 For the chaosmic naturalist—whether process or ecstatic—we must therefore construct and contrast our concepts with care, between the poles of an orderly rationalism and a chaotic relativism: on the precarious edge of a chaosmos that infinitely churns.

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NOTES 1. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Reissue edition, (New York: Penguin Classics, 1999), 118. 2. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 81. 3. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 204. 4. Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce, trans. Ellen Esrock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 87; Ibid., 73. 5. Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1997), 34. 6. Philip Kuberski, Chaosmos: Literature, Science, and Theory (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), 5. 7. Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature (New York: Free Press, 1996), 4. 8. Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 15. 9. Quoted in Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003), 188. See also Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984). 10. Roland Faber, The Divine Manifold (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 89. 11. Quoted in Demian Wheeler, “American Religious Empiricism and the Possibility of an Ecstatic Naturalist Process Metaphysics,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 8.2 (2014): 157. 12. Ibid., 159. 13. Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900-1950 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 282. 14. Ibid., 273; Larry E. Axel and William Dean, eds., The Size of God: The Theology of Bernard Loomer in Context (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), 20-51. 15. Wheeler, “American Religious Empiricism,” 169. 16. For more on James’s metaphysics of pure experience, see the essay “A World of Pure Experience” in William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996). 17. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy, 47. See also Simone Bignall, Sean Bowden, and Paul Patton, eds., Deleuze and Pragmatism (New York: Routledge, 2014), 5. 18. Roland Faber, God as Poet of the World: Exploring Process Theologies (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 33. 19. Faber, The Divine Manifold, 43-45. 20. Demian Wheeler, “Is a Process Form of Ecstatic Naturalism Possible? A Reading of Donald Crosby,” American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 37, no. 1 (January 2016): 85100. 21. I am here referencing James’s division of temperaments between the “tender-minded” and “tough-minded”: William James, Pragmatism (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981), 10-11; Faber, The Divine Manifold, 454. 22. See Faber’s critical engagement with John Caputo’s Derridean philosophy of religion, which leads him to defend a Deleuzian-Whiteheadian approach to metaphysics: The Divine Manifold, 500-501. 23. Armen Marsoobian, Kathleen Wallace, and Robert S. Corrington, eds., Nature’s Perspectives: Prospects for Ordinal Metaphysics, (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991), 3. 24. This is implied in Faber’s recent work, but explicit in Robert S. Corrington, Nature’s Religion (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 122. 25. Robert S. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime: An Essay in Aesthetic Naturalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 10. 26. Robert S. Corrington, Deep Pantheism: Toward a New Transcendentalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 4.

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27. Robert S. Corrington, “An Appraisal and Critique of Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality—corrected edition (1929 & 1978) and Justus Buchler’s Metaphysics of Natural Complexes—second, expanded edition (1966 & 1990)” (Published by the author, 2009), 8, https://.users.drew.edu/rcorring/downloads/APPRAISAL%20&%20CRITIQUE%20COPYRIGHT.pdf 28. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Corrected ed., Gifford Lectures: 1927-28 (New York: Free Press, 1929), 18. 29. This is also James’s position in William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 271. 30. Faber, The Divine Manifold, 247. 31. James, A Pluralistic Universe, 322. 32. Faber, The Divine Manifold, 78. 33. Ibid., 81. 34. Ibid., 81-82. 35. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 13. 36. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 41. 37. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 14. 38. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 36. 39. Faber, The Divine Manifold, 31. 40. Ibid., 74. See also Alfred North Whitehead, Religion In the Making (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 71. 41. Faber, The Divine Manifold, 153. 42. Ibid., 470. 43. Ibid., 517. 44. Ibid., 518. 45. Ibid., 517. 46. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 50-51. 47. Ibid., 348. 48. Corrington, “An Appraisal and Critique,” 11. 49. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 28. 50. Corrington, “An Appraisal and Critique,” 11. 51. Corrington, Nature’s Religion, 97. 52. Faber, The Divine Manifold, 44. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 42. 55. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 17. 56. Leon Niemoczynski and Nam T. Nguyen, eds., A Philosophy of Sacred Nature: Prospects for Ecstatic Naturalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 13. 57. Corrington, Nature’s Religion, 8, 90. 58. Ibid., 98. 59. Faber, God as Poet of the World, 76. 60. Ibid., 178. 61. Roland Faber and Jeremy Fackenthal, eds., Theopoetic Folds: Philosophizing Multifariousness (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 234. Catherine Keller and Anne Daniell, eds., Process and Difference: Between Cosmological and Poststructuralist Postmodernisms (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002), 215. Faber, God as Poet of the World, 178. 62. Faber, The Divine Manifold, 502. 63. Ibid., 455. 64. Robert S. Corrington, “My Passage from Panentheism to Pantheism,” American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 23, no. 2 (May 2002): 1. 65. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 12. 66. Quoted in Wheeler, “American Religious Empiricism,” 157. 67. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 3. 68. Niemoczynski and Nguyen, A Philosophy of Sacred Nature, 13. 69. Corrington, Nature’s Religion, 2.

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70. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 76. 71. Ibid., 91. 72. Corrington, Nature’s Religion, 161. 73. Faber, The Divine Manifold, 436-37. 74. Ibid., 438. 75. Ibid., 444. 76. This includes the Whiteheadian extensive continuum, or Faber’s chaotic nexus/khora: an open-ended connectedness without specific or imposed order. See Luke Higgins’s helpful discussion of the concept in Faber and Fackenthal, Theopoetic Folds, 204-5. 77. The full list of the antitheses are in Whitehead, Process and Reality, 348. 78. Faber, The Divine Manifold, 439-40. 79. Ibid., 440. 80. Ibid., 439. 81. Faber and Fackenthal, Theopoetic Folds, 28. On the paradoxical inverted difference of God and World (in terms of their seemingly exclusive properties), see Faber, The Divine Manifold, 114. 82. Faber, The Divine Manifold, 450. See also Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1933), 266. 83. Faber, The Divine Manifold, 226-27. 84. Ibid., 45. 85. Ibid., 227. 86. Ibid., 412. 87. Ibid., 227-28. 88. Ibid., 189. 89. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 105. 90. Ibid., 343. 91. Faber, The Divine Manifold, 10. 92. Drawing on Deleuze’s pluralistic image of the “rhizome”—a non-linear, non-hierarchical, subterranean root system—I suggest rhizotheism as a theological model that can include Faber’s transpantheism and Corrington’s deep pantheism. Although “pantheism” helpfully emphasizes immanence, it does not immediately suggest the cosmological multiplicity that Corrington and Faber affirm. By contrast, rhizotheism enfolds both the immanence and pluralism that characterize chaosmic naturalisms. 93. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 145.

Chapter Two

Trinitarian Naturalism? Tehom, Word, and Spirit A Constructive and Contemplative Journey through Panikkar, Tillich, and Corrington Rory McEntee

Tehom, Word, and Spirit, three co-constituent dimensions of Reality—each dwelling within the other—are making space for the other, dependently coarising, or pratityasamutpada, as the Buddhists would say. In this playful mélange of possibility, transcendence and immanence entangle with the world, giving birth to an entwinement of eternal and temporal, finite and infinite—humanity, divinity, and cosmos. It is a creative procession embedded with potency, punctuated by a silent nothingness at the center of each and all. In Robert Corrington’s recent work Deep Pantheism: Toward a New Transcendentalism, he relates his belief that “the philosophy of ecstatic naturalism has an inner telos toward the religious dimension of the depths of the nature/sacred dialectic.” 1 In this vein, I will construct here a mystical trinitarian ontology I believe to be in harmony with an ecstatic naturalist vista. It is offered in a spirit of solidarity and symbiosis, where tensions and differences are meant to serve as catalysts for new horizons of semiotic expansion and embodied life. Mystical Christian theology and ecstatic naturalism have long had such a synergistic relationship. 2 However, it is important to state up front that I place this constructive theological endeavor well outside the boundaries of Christian doctrine, as it attempts to bring together mystical insights from multiple religious traditions, balanced with a prophetic spirit that sees clearly the divine importance of the world of time and space. 31

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Throughout, I will make extensive use of the work of twentieth-century inter-religious philosopher-theologian Raimon Panikkar, especially his Opera Omnia: Vol. 1, Mysticism and Spirituality: Part One: Mysticism, Fullness of Life—a work he calls the “indispensable hermeneutical key” to all his writings. 3 My goal is not an exegesis of Panikkar. We might think of this more as a symphony of my conducting in which Panikkar plays the role of virtuoso. I will also contrast various ideas with the work of Paul Tillich (in particular views of mysticism and “nonbeing”), using his Systematic Theology and The Courage to Be. Finally, I conclude in dialogue with Corrington’s own apparent trinitarian delineation of Nature into that of nature naturing, nature natured, and “the Encompassing.” THE MYSTICISM OF PANIKKAR’S COSMOTHEANDRIC VISION First, I would like to ground our forthcoming trinitarian ontology at an anthropological level through what Panikkar calls his “cosmotheandric vision.” This will help us to understand the mutually indwelling trinitarian relations, as well as the (perhaps surprising) mystical experience from which this vision proceeds. For Panikkar, the human being’s experience of life is caught up with three indissoluble and mutually indwelling dimensions: the cosmos, the theos, and anthropos, or the World, Divine, and Human dimensions. This he calls his cosmotheandric vision. The key here is the term “indissoluble.” Each is a constitutive dimension of life. Panikkar worries about modernity’s reduction of the human being to a “rational animal” by leaving out the realm of the spirit. For Panikkar, this has disastrous consequences for human life, for solutions to our world’s problems can never be solved as long as the contemplative dimension of life is left unacknowledged and unaccounted for. Therefore, mysticism is “not a specialists’ field but an anthropological dimension, something that belongs to human beings as such.” 4 Let us then look more closely at this mystical, anthropological dimension. The dimensions of the senses, the intellect, and the mystical form for Panikkar another tripartite, perichoretic anthropology (perichoresis, or the mutual indwelling of trinitarian relations, will be discussed more explicitly below). As a constitutive dimension of Reality, and in particular for human beings, the mystical opens up “a new order of reality that manifests itself.” 5 This is not a higher order of reality, but rather a co-constituent one, though it has effects across dimensions. The mystical “harmonizes all human energy and channels it toward Good, Truth, and Beauty in their many manifestations.” 6 It is “something definitive” in and of itself, as are the senses and the intellect; and it rests on its own foundation (as do the senses and the intellect).

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Panikkar’s cosmotheandric mysticism does not equate with Paul Tillich’s description of mysticism (or most academic accounts), which places mysticism in the realm of “supernatural” experience that leaves the ordinary world behind. For Tillich, “mysticism does not take seriously the concrete. . . . It plunges directly into the ground of being and meaning, and leaves the concrete, the world of finite values and meanings, behind.” 7 For Panikkar, nothing could be further from the truth, as the world of finite values and meanings can never be left behind. In cosmotheandric mysticism, the dimensions of human, earthly, and divine life are revealed as one whole that cannot be reduced into its constituents. These are not three modes of one “undifferentiated reality” nor elements of a pluralistic system; rather they reflect the trinitarian structure of Reality. They imply that everything is related to everything else, and that in each event or happening (or person), in every “spark of the real,” there is a representation constitutive of the whole (a mikrokosmos, or image of Reality, which goes beyond even the imago Dei). The mystical experience reveals “a center that is not in God, nor in the cosmos, nor even in Man. It is a moving center that can be only found in the intersection of the three.” 8 It is important to note that this mystical experience does not imply uniformity. 9 It is personal and unique. It is not that mystics experience the same “thing” but use different language to reveal it. Panikkar considers this notion a crypto-Kantian bias often inherent in Western thought that wants to refer to the “thing-in-itself.” 10 While the mystic experience remains an invariant in human life—since it is a constitutive dimension, just as the senses and intellect are—the wide array of human cultures interpret these invariants in their own way. 11 As I see it, if the mystic experience harmonizes the dimensions of human, divine, and material reality, and if particularity is already inherent in those dimensions, then clearly mystical experience retains its own uniqueness and cultural expression for each person. This is related (though not equated) to the discovery of a “radical relativity” within the mystic experience—a contingency of interdependence, relationality, and perspectivalness. The constructedness of all reality is revealed not through the intellect, which is one (valid) way of understanding multiplicity, but rather through a direct “seeing,” a vision of what in Buddhism is called pratityasamutpada, the radical interdependence of all things. The mystic experience emerges out of, and is embodied by, Silence. Panikkar relates four types of silence. First, silence that stems from violence, fear, or oppression. Second, silence that stems from a lack of appropriate words, disorientation, or foolishness. Third, silence from the inadequacy of words, or stupor before the mystery. In this third silence a choice arises to “affirm life or choose rationality.” Rationality will try to translate the ineffable into concepts and words, while affirming life means risking being

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swept away into a deeper silence. Hence emerges the fourth silence, “the absence of words.” 12 It is here that one finds the Silence of the Word. “‘What cannot be spoken of’ (Wittgenstein) is exactly that which must be experienced as silence. . . . At this deeper level, word and silence . . . go together.” 13 This silence is deeper than an ineffable experience that cannot be put into words (the third silence). It is “not what we discover as unutterable but rather what we grasp as unsaid.” It is “the experience of the void.” 14 Silence and the Word are revealed in an a-dual, or advaitic, relationship. This advaitic relationship is “not-two,” but it is “not-one” either. Rather, it is trinitarian and “can only be generated by the Holy Spirit—that is to say in the Trinitarian realm of mutually intimate relations.” 15 There is no longer an individual to experience it, so it is said to be the experience of the Holy Spirit, and “provides evidence for the fact of a bond between the utterable and the unutterable, between form and nonform, between word and silence, between Being and the void.” 16 TEHOM, WORD, AND SPIRIT: A TRINITARIAN ONTOLOGY When in the beginning God created heaven and earth, The earth was without form, and void; Darkness was upon the face of tehom, And the Spirit vibrating upon the face of the waters . . . 17 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word was there with God from the beginning. Everything came to be by means of it. 18

It appears, biblically speaking, that “in the beginning” there were three: Tehom—the abyss, the deep, the void, Nonbeing; Word—Creation, Life, Being; and Spirit—vibrating, activating, unifying, mediating, serving. Tehom is the Hebraic term for the “great deep” or the “abyss” of the “waters of creation.” Here, it will be most associated with Silence and Nothingness, and I will develop it in contrast to the dialectical notion of “nonbeing” found in Tillich’s work. 19 For Tillich, nonbeing is always experienced “as a threat to being.” It is an “omnipresent” nothingness that negates being and produces both finitude and anxiety at an “ontological level.” 20 Hence, it remains a menacing specter that posits anxiety as a structural necessity for human life. 21 Nevertheless, it plays a fundamental role in the movement of life. It is the source of the creative and dynamic function of life. 22 Yet for Tillich this occurs in a negative rather than positive way. Nonbeing, as the negation of being, creates a tension within life, a “threat,” which forces life,

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being, to overcome this existential threat, “to affirm itself against nonbeing”—or better said, to be in spite of it. 23 Nonbeing “opens up the divine self-seclusion,” revealing God as power and love and making possible the courage to be. 24 Tehom, in my use here, is not the dialectical nonbeing of Tillich. It is not set up over and against being. Rather, it is in a mutually synergistic relationship of perichoresis, of mutual indwelling with the Word and Spirit while remaining irreducibly other and unique. Tehom is not a negation of being, but an absence of Being. Better said, it is the Silence before the Word. Panikkar relates “Nonbeing” to the Buddhist “void” or vacuity (sunyata), and to the “nothing” at the core of mystical experience. 25 The mystical experience, or what Panikkar calls the advaitic or trinitarian experience, makes this dimension known, revealing it not to be “above” or “beyond” creation, but rather co-constituent with creation (the Word) in the building up of reality. Panikkar is insistent that this is not a dialectical relationship, “We do not arrive at vacuity through the negation of being,” nor can we arrive at Being by beginning with the void and filling it with contents. 26 Nor is tehom to be confused with the nondialectical “nonbeing” from the doctrinal creation ex nihilo. Tillich calls this “nothing” ouk on (contrasting it with the Greek me on, the dialectical form of nonbeing), and follows traditional Christian doctrine in saying that ouk on has “no relationship to being”—while our use of tehom here is seen to have the most intimate relationship with Being. 27 Silence (tehom) “speaks” the Word, and Panikkar places the Word as the “mediator at the origin of Being.” Therefore (and in a stunning proclamation), “Language is more powerful than Being; it embraces nothingness, in that it is possessed by silence.” 28 Silence, then, is the experience of the void, of the source that is “before” the Word, and “Words, if they are genuine, should be the revelation of silence.” 29 This is of course not a temporal “before,” but is revealed mystically, in an immediate experience outside of time yet also co-extensive with time, or in “tempiternity,” as Panikkar would say. Therefore, the Word becomes co-extensive with Being and Creation, with the finite realm of time and space. Finally, Spirit is representative of the unifying principle in life, mediating the relationship aspect of the trinity, and is the source of the transfigurative movement within the Word, a process of theosis, or divine becoming. PERICHORESIS: THE DIVINE DANCE Perichoresis is a Greek term the early Church fathers used to describe the trinitarian relationship. It stems from the word chorea, “to make space for,” and is the root word for “chorus” and “choreography.” I have always found it exquisite to envision a dance as “making space” for the other. Peri simply

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means “around.” Perichoresis then is a divine dance, a movement where each “makes space” for the other; an intimate relationship of mutual indwelling or “circumincession.” As Panikkar says, “Word and silence are therefore in a relationship that is not dialectical but dialogical—Trinitarian. They are not mutually exclusive but actually inclusive of each other. This is the perichoresis . . . being one in the other.” 30 Here the Word (Being, Creation) and tehom (Nonbeing, the Abyss) are neither opposites nor are they contradictory. The “Non” of Nonbeing is not the negation of Being. It is the void, silence, “nonword.” The Word is the “organ of Being.” 31 Further, we cannot see, as Tillich does, Nonbeing as a kind of threat to Being, “as though Being were limited by Non-Being.” 32 As a non-dialectical relationship of mutual indwelling, it is more a matter of coarising, of “dependent origination,” or again pratityasamutpada, to use a Buddhist concept (though in a different context). Nonbeing dwells within Being, not as a threat but as co-constitutive of Reality. Being dwells within Non-Being, the Word within the tehom, Silence within the Word, and both within the Spirit. Since the Word is co-extensive with Creation, with Being, we see that the world itself is co-constitutive of Reality. This means that the world cannot, ever, be ultimately left behind, no matter how deep into the abyss one may dive. At the same time, this vision does not eliminate a transcendent “nothingness,” which is an eternal dimension to Reality. This trinitarian ontology directly affirms an ontological equality between the eternal and the finite, between the tehom and the Word, between the transcendent and immanent, and between Creation and the void. Neither of these can be held in hierarchical esteem over the other, and neither can be reduced or subsumed by the other. This brings a balance into Reality itself, breeding lessons for both mystical experience as well as activist and prophetic expressions of human life (and for religion and theology, as well). The eternal dwells within the temporal, yet the temporal also dwells within the eternal. Expressions of divine or human life from either side become unbalanced when they fail to emphasize the other as co-constitutive of Reality. Mysticism that escapes the world dismembers its Self, while human life without recognition (and realization) of the transcendent and immanent too often fails to blossom. IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE In an earlier work, The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man: Icon— Person—Mystery, Panikkar offers clues to how we might think about transcendence and immanence specifically in terms of our trinitarian ontology. 33 In it, Panikkar rejects the notion of transcendence as “above” and immanence as “within,” with humanity somehow at the center. Transcen-

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dence cannot be thought of as some aspect of exteriority or “otherness,” and neither can immanence be thought of as “enclosed in our inner being.” Panikkar finds this “extremely narrow and limited” and “without doubt incapable of accounting for what the mystics of all times and of all culturoreligious contexts have experienced of the true transcendence and immanence of God.” 34 Rather, transcendence and immanence must be thought of in terms of a perichoretic, cosmotheandric worldview. Immanence here is in many ways analogous to Tillich’s “ground of being.” Panikkar describes it as “like the hidden and always submerged bed of a river, like the stable floor over which the moving stream of existence flows . . . like the cosmic matrix without which the fecundation of nothingness could come to pass.” 35 Immanence is such an intrinsic part of all that is, it doesn’t even make sense to speak of it as being revealed: “Immanence is incapable of revealing itself, for that would be a pure contradiction of terms; an immanence which needs to manifest itself, to reveal itself, is no longer immanent.” 36 Immanence is rendered here as an aspect of the Spirit, a unity or ground within all of life. Transcendence, meanwhile, is an attribute of the first “person” of the Trinity, or for us tehom. 37 Panikkar describes it as absolute nothingness, the un-nameable, and the “kenosis of Being at its very source.” Again, Panikkar will situate the Buddhist experience of nirvana and sunyata (emptiness) here. 38 Furthermore, it is Silence in all its “unfathomable profundity . . . the silence of Being—and not only the being of silence.” In it is a movement toward “no place,” a prayer always open toward “the infinite horizon which, like a mirage, appears in the distance because it is no-where.” 39 It is the “unnoticed force which sustains, draws, and pushes us,” 40 but in the end can never be seen, for no one can see the face of God and live. 41 It cannot even be said to exist—that is, it has no ex-sistence, “not even that of Being.” 42 Yet it can be known in the advaitic experience. Transcendence is not outside of one’s self, but rather “there exists in us a dimension—the deepest of all—that corresponds to this total apophatism.” 43 It is the Word then that takes on the attribute of relationship, since it correlates with the created order. The Word even becomes the source of a personal relationship with “God.” 44 It is the Word with whom we can “speak, establish a dialogue, enter into communication,” and eventually be united to through love in the Spirit. 45 Here we find that “Divine immanence is founded upon divine transcendence and vice versa,” while humanity “is situated at the very heart of their complementarity, or better, reciprocal, intimacy.” 46

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IN DIALOGUE WITH DEEP PANTHEISM The above trinitarian development is particularly well suited for dialogue with ecstatic naturalism, especially with Robert Corrington’s “deep pantheism,” described by Corrington as ecstatic naturalism’s “religious focus.” 47 In fact, Corrington’s deep pantheism reveals its own trinitarian structure. For Corrington, the three fundamental and ever present (“perennial”) distinctions within Nature are nature naturing, nature natured, and “the Encompassing.” The first two represent an intrinsic “process of fissuring” in nature, with nature naturing defined as “nature perennially creating itself out of itself alone,” while nature natured represents “the innumerable orders of the World—what monotheists call ‘creation.’” 48 Nature natured has a certain homeomorphic resonance with what I have called “the Word”—the totality of the orders of nature, all of creation, is delineated by these terms. It is worth noting, as mentioned previously, that even manifest divinity falls within the dimension of the Word, such as in the case of a personal God. This is in consonance with Corrington’s notion of manifest divinity as a “natural complex” within the one nature there is. Nature naturing has a more nuanced relationship. In one sense, nature naturing has structural corollaries with the immanence of the Spirit. Both can be seen as a kind of ground of creativity, novelty, and transformation; though in our trinitarian ontology, the creative act itself is best thought of as synergy generated by the mutually indwelling trinitarian relationships rather than residing in any particular one. Perhaps the same can be said for Corrington. Following Justus Buchler, Corrington describes nature naturing as “providingness, that is, as the sheer generative force that makes the World possible at all. It permeates the orders of the World . . . as the provider for the uncountable orders of nature.” 49 Yet the potency of this providingness would seem to come, at least somewhat, from what Corrington calls “the Encompassing.” The Encompassing, also described by Corrington as “the abyss” or “nothingness,” is scintillatingly analogous with tehom, as I have used it. Corrington tells us the Encompassing can never be “plumbed or rendered into categorical terms,” yet it “gifts nature with all of its riches, terrors, potencies, and powers,” serving as the “ultimate fore-structure of both nature naturing and nature natured.” 50 It is described further as a “traitless nothingness” that “encircles the boundlessness of nature naturing” while surrounding the orders of nature natured. It is not to be thought of as some kind of “container or ultimate circle,” but rather an “ultimate clearing-away,” related to nature itself “in a non-dialectical way.” 51 The similarities with tehom are striking. Both seem to represent—or, better said, symbolize—a kind of dynamic emptiness at the very heart of all that is. I cannot help but point out a certain poetic beauty in the Silence of the tehom as the “ultimate fore-structure” of

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the Word. 52 The discovery of these trinitarian vistas on the semiotic horizon of the “one nature that is” is at the very least seductively alluring. There are, of course, important differences, as well. Foremost is that for Corrington, “Nature is all that there is and the divine is a natural complex within the one nature.” 53 God is but “one natural complex among others, although vast in scope” with which humankind has a relationship. 54 The greatest consequence of this is that Corrington’s nature has a fundamental indifference toward its innumerable orders that contrasts strikingly with the inherently divine structure outlined here—where the underlying trinitarian energies both ground creation and reside always and ever for creation and its transfiguration into greater expanses of revealed divinity. Nevertheless, there does remain a chastened but important teleological movement for humanity present in Corrington’s work, which allows for a spiritual maturation process of human potentiality into a more individuated and “spiritual” nature. 55 IN CONCLUSION The Panikkarian development (in seed form) of a pluralistic yet unified reality, which consists of non-hierarchical, co-constituent dimensions, holds an intriguing integrative metaphysical vision for our times. Perhaps it can help to serve as a bridge for understanding between varying wisdom and religious traditions, between the depths of mystical and prophetic experience, and between philosophical, theological, and secular traditions. In its affirmation of mutually indwelling or perichoretic dimensions, we are able to move beyond a sense of the “supernatural,” allowing our semiotic horizon to reorient toward the unfathomable mysteries of Life itself—imbuing divine life within the world as well as the world within divine life. In constructing the trinitarian ontology above—tehom, Word, and Spirit—I have taken but my baby’s first steps, tentative and unsure, in an ongoing adventure to weave together mystical insights from various religious traditions while integrating them with a prophetic spirit. The prophetic spirit, also an insight into the nature of Reality, sees clearly the divine importance of the world of time and space. My trinitarian ontology attempts to bring together the eternal and temporal, infinite and finite, and transcendence and immanence into an ontologically equivalent relationship mediated by the Spirit. This relationship is envisioned as advaitic (non-dual, not-one, not-two) and trinitarian in nature, where everything that is, inasmuch as it is, is constituted by it. As such, the historical time process and societal structures (the Word) become as important as the eternal dimension(s) of divine life. Indeed, only together in the unity of the Spirit do they make up divine Life. Therefore, movements for social justice are part and parcel of that very divine Life— while the need for contemplative wisdom within these movements is also

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affirmed. One-sidedness leads to imbalance, to forgetfulness of a dimension of Reality, and to dismemberment of our very own Self. This vision is offered in the hope of preventive care of such violence—and in the hope that we may manifest in and through our lives a more potent force for actual change in the structures of this world than a more incomplete harnessing of our Selves could ever hope to accomplish. NOTES 1. Robert S. Corrington, Deep Pantheism: Toward a New Transcendentalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 7. 2. To give but one example, John Scotus Eriugena, one of the most distinguished Christian apophatic theologians, synthesized Greek and Latin traditions in the 9th century in one of the great works of Christian mystical philosophical theology, the Periphyseon, which came to be known as “On the Division of Nature.” In it, according to Eriugena scholar Deirdre Carabine, the “understanding of natura [nature] includes not only the created universe but also its creator; both together signify universal nature.” Deirdre Carabine, John Scottus Eriugena (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 31. 3. Raimon Panikkar, Opera Omnia: Vol. 1, Mysticism and Spirituality: Part One: Mysticism, Fullness of Life (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2014), xiii. Raimon Panikkar was a Catholic priest and inter-religious mystical theologian, born to a Catholic mother and Hindu father. He held doctorates in philosophy, chemistry, and theology, spoke eleven languages, and wrote extensively in six of them. His work flows eloquently across the boundaries of religious traditions, philosophy, theology, and science—while remaining beholden to none—or one might say beholden to all. (He once famously remarked, “I ‘left’ as a Christian, ‘found’ myself a Hindu and ‘return’ a Buddhist, without having ceased to be a Christian.” Cosmotheandric Experience, v). I will use certain Panikkarian notions throughout to construct my own trinitarian ontology, but I make no claim to remain true to Panikkar’s work in my construction, though I do believe deep resonances remain. I should note up front that Panikkar does not always use “nonbeing” in the way I will, neither does he use tehom at all, as far as I know. Nevertheless, the spirit of the concepts presented here I believe appear clothed in other language consistently throughout his body of work. Cf. in particular, Raimon Panikkar, The Cosmotheandric Experience (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), The Rhythm of Being (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010), and A Dwelling Place for Wisdom (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993). 4. Panikkar, Mysticism, xiv. 5. Ibid., 114 6. Ibid., xxiii. 7. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, second edition, 2000 printing), 186. 8. Panikkar, Mysticism, 29. 9. Ibid., 62. 10. Ibid., 213. 11. Ibid., 115. 12. Ibid., 77. 13. Ibid., 76. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 77. 16. Ibid. 17. Genesis 1:1-2; my own paraphrase with help from the translation in Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep (New York: Routledge, 2003), xv. 18. John 1:1-3.

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19. My use of tehom is also indebted to and finds resonance with Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep, in which she used biblical exegesis to successfully argue against a static notion of creation ex nihilo. There “the deep,” the tehom, is bubbling with chaotic and inchoate energy. We might see this bubbling here as the “view from the abyss,” as it were, of the mutually indwelling of Word and Spirit within tehom itself. 20. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology: Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 190-91. 21. Tillich, Courage to Be, 180. 22. This function in some ways parallels Corrington’s use of “the Encompassing,” as we will see. 23. Tillich, Courage to Be, 179. 24. Ibid., 180. 25. I also think here of nirguna Brahman, or “Brahman without attributes.” 26. Panikkar, Mysticism, 174-75. 27. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 188. 28. Panikkar, Mysticism, 73. Panikkar will also remind us that it is not just Christianity but Hinduism and African indigenous tribes that place “the Word” as a progenitor of creation. 29. Ibid., 84. 30. Ibid., 77. 31. Ibid., 82. 32. Ibid., 83. 33. Raimon Panikkar, The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man: Icon-Person-Mystery (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books), 1973. It is worth noting that here Panikkar will argue that the trinitarian insight is far from an exclusive Christian insight or revelation, but rather is to be found throughout the world’s religious traditions (viii). In fact, he states, “My aim at present is simply so to enlarge and deepen the mystery of the Trinity that it may embrace this same mystery existent in other religious traditions but differently expressed” (42). 34. Ibid., 30. 35. Ibid., 33-34. 36. Ibid., 59. 37. Panikkar, in Trinity and Religious Experience, refers to this “first person” as “Father” (what I call tehom), and the second person as “Son” (what I call “Word”). 38. Panikkar, Trinity, 47. 39. Ibid., 48. 40. Ibid., 50. 41. Ibid., 44. 42. Ibid., 46. 43. Ibid., 48. 44. I am reminded here of Jesus’s statement, “No one can come to the Father except through the Son.” John 14:16. 45. Panikkar, Trinity, 52. 46. Ibid., 31. 47. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 7. 48. Ibid., 1. 49. Ibid., 16. 50. Ibid., 103. 51. Ibid., 94-95. 52. Yet another potent and, I believe, fruitful place for dialogue lies in the relationship between nature naturing, nature natured, and the Encompassing. Indeed, when Corrington does speak of it shades of perichoresis abound. To give one example: “The is a real sense in which nature naturing and the Encompassing are the Same, although there is another sense in which the Encompassing ‘surrounds’ nature naturing and nature natured . . . [they] are different ways of speaking about the Same thing . . . there is both identity and difference, a belonging together, rather than an identity . . . within the Same” (Ibid., 94, italics mine). 53. Ibid., xi. 54. Ibid., 16.

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55. This is Corrington’s “Selving” and “God-ing” processes. In addition to Deep Pantheism, see Robert S. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime: An Essay in Aesthetic Naturalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013).

Chapter Three

Wild Air Toward a Poetics of Ecstatic Naturalism Rose Ellen Dunn

In his philosophy of ecstatic naturalism, Robert Corrington describes Nature through the twofold potencies of nature naturing (understood as “nature perennially creating itself out of itself alone”) and nature natured (understood as “the innumerable orders of the World”). 1 Corrington locates the human person as a natural complex arising within and through the unfolding rhythms of nature naturing and nature natured and suggests that the human person is uniquely poised to engage and interpret the natural difference between these twin unfoldings of Nature. In this chapter, I will suggest that it is through mindfulness (Besinnung) that the human process of selving opens in releasement to the ecstatic song of nature naturing and nature natured. Through mindfulness, the human person stills, becomes attentive, and learns to dwell ecstatically in these unfolding rhythms of Nature. I will further suggest that within this ecstatic dwelling, poised between the twin unfoldings of the transcendence of nature naturing and the immanence of nature natured, the human person engages and founds the ecstatic songs of nature naturing and nature natured through expressive speech. The poetic productivity of this language draws the human selving process to the edges of its meaning horizons—edges at which the potencies of nature naturing light up in unconcealment through nature natured. Such expressive speech unfolds as a poetics of place that in turn beckons others into mindful, transformative encounters with Nature.

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ON DWELLING One of the central themes within ecstatic naturalism is the understanding that Nature is the encompassing, unfolding origin of all the orders within the world. In order to explore the comportment of the human person to Nature within the bounds of this commitment, I will return initially to one of Martin Heidegger’s questions, namely, “What is it to dwell?” 2 What does it mean to dwell—how does one dwell—within the capacious potencies of nature naturing and nature natured? Unfolding through the orders of nature naturing and located as a natural complex within nature natured, the human person is born in a state of indebtedness to Nature, the bearer of a natural debt to Nature itself. Dwelling in this state of natural indebtedness to Nature, human beings find themselves living out the natural difference between nature naturing and nature natured. Ideally, the human person becomes an interpreter of this difference. The potential for this interpretive work lies within the human person as such and unfolds through dwelling in openness to nature naturing and nature natured. “Dwelling,” Heidegger suggests, “is the manner in which mortals are on the earth. . . . The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell.” 3 Engaging and interpreting the natural difference between nature naturing and nature natured first involves learning to dwell ecstatically in this difference. Ecstatic naturalism calls human beings into ecstatic dwelling. The human person, attuned to the unfolding potencies of Nature through ecstatic dwelling, opens in releasement to Nature in order to interpret the natural difference between nature naturing and nature natured. In response to the twin unfoldings of Nature, there is also an unfolding of the human person dwelling mindfully in openness to Nature, a twin unfolding of attunement and releasement. Through an attunement to nature natured, the human selving process opens in releasement to nature naturing. For Heidegger, the human person becomes fully authentic as Dasein through poetic dwelling: “Poetry and dwelling belong together. . . . The poetic is the basic capacity for human dwelling.” 4 To dwell poetically is to dwell in readiness—in attentive mindfulness—to find in the gathering of earth and sky, divinities and mortals, the concealed “hail” of Being as it lights up in unconcealment through the worlding of the world. 5 “Mindfulness,” Heidegger writes, “is attuning of the grounding-attunement of man insofar as this attunement attunes him unto be-ing, and unto the groundership of the truth of be-ing.” 6 Meditative thinking participates in and experiences the unconcealment of Being. Corrington’s ecstatic naturalism revises Heidegger’s unfolding of Being by arguing that “the Being (Sein) problematic itself must be transposed to the place where it encounters the dark fissuring between nature naturing and

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nature natured, which is deeper down in reality than the polarity of Being/ Non-being.” 7 For Heidegger, the human person, as Dasein, as being-in-theworld, is a clearing for the coming-to-presence of Being. For Corrington, Dasein is “the clearing within which and as which being-in-the-world as a totality becomes the opening onto the innumerable orders of nature natured.” 8 The human process is a process of “selving,” a process that is embedded in nature and “shriven”—“opened up and shaken by the natural difference” between nature naturing and nature natured, a difference that empowers and frames the process of selving. 9 The encounter with and openness to this natural difference between nature naturing and nature natured requires, Corrington suggests, “a natural piety that honors the innumerable ways in which orders of relevance impinge on the human process.” 10 This natural piety emerges, I would suggest, from mindfulness, from a meditative attunement to nature in its twin unfoldings as nature naturing and nature natured. Natural piety is the disposition of one who is mindful. Within ecstatic naturalism, this is a mindful attunement to the unfolding of nature in the natural complexes of the world. It is a mindfulness to the natural folds which, as nature natured, point back toward the origin of nature naturing. It is an openness to the spirit which moves within the natural “betweenness” of nature naturing and nature natured. On rare occasions, Corrington suggests, “the self-in-process . . . can open up the depths of nature and transform the lives of those fortunate enough to encounter and understand them.” 11 For Heidegger, the encounter with the unconcealment of Being is preserved in the words of the poet; the creative language of poetry gathers Dasein into Being. For Corrington, it is the artist who gathers others into the selving process by opening up the depths of nature through aesthetics: “The sphere of the beautiful becomes the summum bonum and the artistic genius is ‘chosen’ by nature to render the orders of nature natured into contrivances that house and magnify the beautiful.” 12 The radiant beauty of the aesthetic sublime draws the human person into transcendence, enriching the selving process by bringing-into-view nature naturing through nature natured. It is through the encounter with the sublime that the selving process reaches the edges of its meaning horizons—edges at which the potencies of nature naturing light up in unconcealment. “The encounter with the sublime,” Corrington writes, “transforms the self by illuminating the edge of its horizon of meaning and lifts that edge from its attachment to the world. From within the experience of the sublime it is as if one sees the power and potency of one’s horizon for the first time, especially as it lights up so much of the world of experience and ideation.” 13 This lighting-up comes through the movement of “involution,” a movement “seeming to come into the world from elsewhere” bringing with it the “potency of an opening that has its source in something larger than human, something divine or religious.” 14 Corrington further describes involution as

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“god-ing,” emphasizing that this is “the activity of a natural energy or potency that enters into the selving process as-if from a deity.” 15 God-ing works through the beauty of the aesthetic sublime to prevent semiotic closure in the selving process. 16 The poem, the work of art, the beauty of the natural world—each beckon the self into the selving process through the event of the aesthetic sublime. As Corrington suggests, in each encounter with the sublime “we reach the extreme edges of our meaning horizons” where we are invited to live in the “betweenness” of nature naturing and nature natured. 17 Through the aesthetic sublime, the self is beckoned into Nature, intertwined with the capacious potencies of nature naturing; through the aesthetic sublime, the self is gathered as nature natured into nature naturing. From this gathering, the self is positioned to engage and found the unfoldings of Nature in the saying of the poem and in the beauty of art. ON BEING IN PLACE Even while living in this “betweenness” of nature naturing and nature natured, the human person lives within the context of particular communities and is situated in particular places. How does community and place shape the selving process? In his essay in A Philosophy of Sacred Nature, Robert Neville observes that a type of phenomenology is at work in Corrington’s thinking, “a philosophical sensibility that says in the long run we read nature’s traits off of nature” providing, he suggests, “a priority to the given, however mediated by signs.” 18 Neville suggests that this phenomenology might be further enriched with metaphysics and an accompanying cultural analysis. The phenomenology at work in ecstatic naturalism, he argues, should “recognize that the critical analysis of intentionality requires metaphysics and that the mediation of phenomenological openness requires a cultural analysis of what makes a thing a potential sign for engaging ultimacy.” 19 In another essay in the same volume, Wesley Wildman suggests that “Corrington does not give the social construction of reality its due.” 20 Arguing for the potency of human participation in the constitution of the sacred, Wildman notes that it seems as if ecstatic naturalism “knows too much about where and when sacred folds arise and allows too little for the way that human beings participate in constituting them as sacred and as folds.” 21 My reading of ecstatic naturalism raises a similar concern, namely that ecstatic naturalism would benefit from an analysis of the comportment of the human person and of human communities toward nature naturing and nature natured and an attentiveness to the relationships that human persons and communities hold with their surrounding natural landscapes. This would allow for a cultural analysis of the constitution of signs and symbols as well as an

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exploration of social constructions of reality, addressing the concerns raised by Neville and Wildman. It would also bring ecstatic naturalism more fully into conversation with ordinary (everyday) human encounters with and expressions of the twin potencies of nature (nature naturing and nature natured). In exploring a poetics of ecstatic naturalism that will describe and celebrate nature naturing as the origin of nature natured, I would like to return to phenomenology, and specifically to phenomenology of place. For the phenomenologist, every perceived phenomenon, every “thing” in itself is experienced by the human person as existing within a surrounding world-horizon— the Lebenswelt, the life-world—that is present in every act of consciousness. In Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, this is the surrounding world of possibilities that is immediately present to the experiencing subject. It is “the world in which I find myself and which is, at the same time, my surrounding world.” 22 For Heidegger’s existential-ontological phenomenology, the human person, as being-in-the-world, dwells in the worlding of the world through which all things are given in the gathering of the fourfold of earth and sky, divinities and mortals. 23 Building on the thought of Husserl and Heidegger, Edward Casey’s phenomenology of place argues that “place” is “the phenomenal particularization of ‘being-in-the-world.’” 24 For Casey, “To be in the world, to be situated at all, is to be in place.” 25 Being-in-theworld, then, is being-in-place. A phenomenology of place has the potential for enriching our discussion of ecstatic naturalism through its exploration of particular social and cultural contexts. “Implacement itself, being concretely placed,” Casey suggests, “is intrinsically particular. It is occasion-bound; or more exactly, it binds actual occasions into unique collocations of space and time.” 26 We find ourselves in a particular place at a particular time within a particular community. For Casey, “Implacement is an ongoing cultural process. . . . We partake of places in common—and reshape them in common. The culture that characterizes and shapes a given place is a shared culture, not merely superimposed upon the place but part of its very facticity.” 27 As the human person mindfully opens in releasement to the vast potencies of nature as nature naturing and nature natured, this process of selving unfolds from a human person who is a being-in-place. As Casey suggests, “To do a philosophy of place requires recourse both to the luminosity of conceptual distinctions and to the felt density of actual occasions.” 28 These conceptual distinctions and felt densities are historically etched into the expressive speech of particular communities. The folklore, poetry, sacred texts, and narratives of communities reflect the process of selving in the context of particular places. Implacement, with all of its intrinsic particularities, is part of the selving process. David Abram, in The Spell of the Sensuous, suggests that there is a nearly hidden depth to the life-world; we might even suggest that there is an origi-

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nary implacement in the life-world. Beginning with Husserl’s suggestion that the earth is the “original ark,” Abram argues that, for Husserl, “the earth is . . . the secret depth of the life-world . . . the encompassing ‘ark of the world,’ the common ‘root basis’ of all relative life-worlds.” 29 It is through “place-centered discourse,” Abram observes, that “the encompassing earth become[s] evident, once again, in all its power and its depth as the very ground and horizon of all our knowing.” 30 Abram suggests that the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty opened the possibility of “a philosophy which would strive, not to explain the world as if from the outside, but to give voice to the world from our experienced situation within it, recalling us to our participation in the here-andnow.” 31 For Merleau-Ponty, there is a participatory relationship between the perceiving subject and the life-world; Abram describes this relationship as the body’s “silent conversation with things.” 32 This “silent conversation” is what Merleau-Ponty would describe as a chiasmic intertwining of perceiver and perceived. Through perception, the perceiving subject unfolds into the sensible as the sensible unfolds through the perceiving subject. “As I contemplate the blue of the sky,” Merleau-Ponty so richly suggests, “I abandon myself to it and plunge into this mystery, it ‘thinks itself within me.’” 33 The perceiving subject and the sensible contemplate one another in this unfolding of perception. “I am the sky itself,” he continues, “as it is drawn together and unified, and as it begins to exist for itself; my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue.” 34 As our gaze turns to that which is perceived—the sky, the garden, the forest, the ocean—we intertwine for a brief moment as one celebrates the other. “Look, how beautiful,” we might remark to those with us. At that moment, we enter into a “sympathetic relation” with the perceived; a relation in which, as Merleau-Ponty argues, “it cannot be held that one acts while the other suffers the action, or that one confers significance on the other.” 35 In this rhythm of perception, the beauty of the sensible transforms the beholder as the beholder intertwines the sensible into a particular context. The perceiving subject participates in the phenomenal world in a very particular way; this participation unfolds in a particular context, at a particular time, in a particular place, and within a particular community. Perception is often accompanied by some type of expression—poetry, art, music—as the perceiving subject describes for others these encounters with the sensible world and with the aesthetic sublime. For Merleau-Ponty, expressive speech is language that continually unfolds through “gaps” and “expressive silences” that are present in the language itself. 36 Expressive speech continually invites further transformations, further descriptions, and further possibilities. As Abram suggests,

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At the heart of any language, then, is the poetic productivity of expressive speech. A living language is continually being made and remade, woven out of the silence by those who speak. . . . And this silence is that of our wordless participations, of our perceptual immersion in the depths of an animate, expressive world. 37

For Abram as well as for Merleau-Ponty, this language is a language wild with meaning—a “[w]ild, living speech” 38—this language “is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests.” 39 Just as nature natured points ecstatically outside and beyond itself toward the potency of nature naturing, so too does expressive speech point ecstatically outside and beyond itself as it founds the experience of nature natured within the potency of nature naturing, as it becomes the wild, living language of Nature. Dwelling in a natural betweenness—between nature naturing and nature natured—the human unconscious intersects with the unconscious of nature and, as Corrington suggests, “becomes permeable to the ultimate fissure of nature through its unconscious structures.” 40 When open ecstatically to this between, as Corrington proposes, “the ‘pulses’ of nature transform the human process and enable it to move outward toward larger horizons of meaning and power.” 41 In these ecstatic moments, in these moments of transformation, Wildman suggests, We create venues for ecstasy; we are not just grasped by ecstatic power from out of the blue. Whether we create them or we stumble upon them—and it is probably both at once in most cases—we encounter with thankfulness these awesome manifestations of nature’s depths, with perspectivally fractured testimony, and with superfluity of meaning channeled through the structures of our own underconscious, as those dark structures limn the interstitial spaces of the underconscious of nature itself. 42

Nature unfolds through natural complexes as nature natured, in time and place, beckoning attention to nature naturing. As the perceiving subject becomes attentive to the sensible, a venue for ecstatic transformation is created, one that is specifically contextualized in time and place. The encounter with and openness to nature naturing and nature natured requires, as Corrington suggests, a comportment of “natural piety”—the piety that emerges from an attentiveness, an attunement, a mindfulness to these twin unfoldings of Nature. 43 Natural piety includes a willingness to be transformed by revelations that, for Corrington, “light up the personal complexes and make them available to consciousness in a new way.” 44 I would further suggest that natural piety is accompanied by, as Wildman would argue, “perspectivally fractured” testimony. This testimony serves as an attestation that in this place, at this time, through this natural landscape, in the midst of this cultural location, this particular human person, this particular human com-

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munity encountered and was transformed by the sheer potency of Nature in its twin unfoldings. Abram traces such testimonies through a number of diverse cultures and places, paying close attention to indigenous oral communities, whose words, charged with meaning, point toward the unfolding mysteries of Nature. “The ‘manifested,’” for Abram, “is that aspect of phenomena already evident to our senses, while the ‘manifesting’ is that which is not yet explicit, not yet present to the senses, but which is assumed to be psychologically gathering itself toward manifestation within the depths of all sensible phenomena.” 45 In indigenous communities, Abram argues, the stories, chants, and poetry coax the manifesting into presence through the manifested: “Language, in indigenous oral cultures, is experienced not as the exclusive property of humankind, but as a property of the sensuous life-world.” 46 Oral language is particularly attuned to the surrounding natural world: “Our eyes and our ears are drawn together,” as Abram suggests, by phenomena within the natural world; and “wherever these two senses converge, we may suddenly feel ourselves in relation with another expressive power, another center of experience.” 47 The poetic productivity of this language draws the human selving process to the edges of its meaning horizons—edges at which the human self is transformed by an ecstatic relation with something more than the self. ON POETICS An example of this poetic productivity may be found in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. For Corrington, Emerson was “a deep pantheist and stands as the fountainhead of the contemporary form(s) of ecstatic naturalism.” 48 As Catherine Albanese suggests, “Emerson saw and celebrated each object he encountered. The precision of his verbal imagery often captured a hidden essence by means of which each thing divulged its particularity and uniqueness.” 49 The hidden essence, for Corrington, is Nature in its twin unfoldings of nature natured and nature naturing. Emerson’s poem “Each and All” celebrates a converging of sight and sound through the sensuous experience of Nature—an experience through which nature naturing is brought into presence through nature natured: Over me soared the eternal sky Full of light and of deity; Again I saw—again I heard, The rolling river, the morning bird: Beauty through my senses stole,— I yielded myself to the perfect Whole. 50

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For Emerson, the perfect Whole is Nature itself. Through the experience of nature natured—sky, light, river, bird—the senses are immersed with beauty and drawn into an ecstatic relation with nature naturing. While Emerson’s writings appeal to a wide audience, they too are “perspectivally fractured,” indebted to the particular spirituality of Transcendentalist thought as it framed an American religious sensibility tied, in part, to the natural landscape of New England. Emerson shared with his fellow Transcendentalists, as Albanese notes, a sense of profound intimacy that “was reflected in a predilection for the interior life and a cultivation of mystical themes . . . [as well as] in a celebration of nature as an abode of spirit.” 51 Emerson’s essay “Nature” is immersed in this mystical intimacy between Nature and self: “In the woods, we return to reason and faith . . . Standing on the bare ground— my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.” 52 The encounter with nature draws Emerson to the edges of his meaning horizons, enabling the experience of the universal; correspondingly, Emerson’s expressive speech draws the reader into the very same experience. Throughout his philosophy of ecstatic naturalism, Corrington’s own expressive speech offers a rich and insightful philosophical exploration of Nature from its wildest depths to its most sublime unfoldings. In his recent work Deep Pantheism: Toward a New Transcendentalism, Corrington begins to explore mindfulness as an attunement of the self-in-process to the unfolding pulsations—the self-publishing—of nature naturing as nature natured. 53 He also develops a phenomenology of the Encompassing that places the self-inprocess in an ecstatic betweenness. This deepening attention to mindfulness and betweenness provides further categories to more fully explore the relationship of the human person to Nature. Corrington situates the human person as a self-in-process in a betweenness saturated with god-ing energies and spirits. The selving process is continually beckoned by these energies and spirits to ecstatically release the self into the pulsating movements of nature naturing and nature natured. This releasement allows the self-in-process to be transformed, as Corrington suggests, into “an artist not only of great and transforming products but also an artist of the psyche.” 54 Ecstatic naturalism affirms “that the human process can be improved in ethical and aesthetic ways through the intervention of nature” and insists, as Corrington continues, “that nature remains open to structures and events of great healing power and potency.” 55 In Deep Pantheism, Corrington proposes that “the impact of the potencies is always perspectival and horizon-dependent in the human and other sentient processes.” 56 The god-ing energies and spirits are contextual, experienced within a community of interpreters. As a being-in-betweenness, Corrington suggests, the self-in-process experiences the god-ing energies of the Wisdom luring “the

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Selving process toward continual self-transcendence through the potencies of the aesthetic.” 57 The self-in-process experiences what Corrington describes as the “grace of the spirits” and opens to the twin potencies of Nature, potencies which awaken “the creative artist slumbering in each person and society.” 58 The artist then turns to the community, unconcealing Nature through the aesthetic sublime. Emerson suggests that “Nature is the vehicle of thought . . . the symbol of spirit.” 59 For Emerson, “Spirit primarily means wind.” 60 The wind, the “blithe air,” is an unfolding of Nature that brings the human person into a direct encounter with Nature that is simultaneously nature naturing and nature natured. “The air,” Abram so richly suggests, “is the soul of the visible landscape, the secret realm from whence all beings draw their nourishment. As the very mystery of the living present, it is that most intimate absence from whence the present presences, and thus a key to the forgotten presence of the earth.” 61 For Emerson, poetic inspiration is found in the air. The poet, he writes, should find delight in the “common influences” of nature: “His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water.” 62 Emerson urges others to immerse themselves in Nature, to directly, sensuously, encounter and experience the unfoldings of Nature, to be mindfully implaced in Nature: Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, Drink the wild air’s salubrity. 63

Wild, living language—the expressive speech that describes these experiences of Nature—is caught up and circulates in the wild, living air that gives life to beings-in-place. Since nature naturing unfolds as nature natured in particular places at particular times, the self-in-process is transformed into an artist within a particular community. As these artists describe their experiences for their communities, their poetic words—as expressive speech—are released into the air, the wild, living air that is at once nature naturing and nature natured. As Nature continually beckons expressive speech, a poetics of ecstatic naturalism—one that calls others into communion with Nature— lives in the air, in the wild, living air that is the very breath of Nature. NOTES 1. Robert S. Corrington, Deep Pantheism: Toward a New Transcendentalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 1. 2. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), 143. 3. Ibid., 146, 159. 4. Ibid., 225-26. 5. Ibid., 43, 51.

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6. Martin Heidegger, Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), 40. 7. Robert S. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime: An Essay in Aesthetic Naturalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 22. 8. Ibid., 7. 9. Ibid., 34, cf. 60. 10. Robert S. Corrington, Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 58. 11. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 33. 12. Ibid., 125. 13. Ibid., 172. 14. Ibid., 114-15. 15. Ibid., 115. 16. Ibid., 116. 17. Ibid., 168. 18. Robert Cummings Neville, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Robert S. Corrington,” in A Philosophy of Sacred Nature: Prospects for Ecstatic Naturalism, ed. Leon Niemoczynski and Nam T. Nguyen (Lanham, Boulder, New York, and London: Lexington Books, 2015), 6. 19. Ibid., 7. 20. Wesley J. Wildman, “Robert Corrington’s Ecstatic Naturalism and the Social Construction of Reality,” in A Philosophy of Sacred Nature: Prospects for Ecstatic Naturalism, ed. Leon Niemoczynski and Nam T. Nguyen (Lanham, Boulder, New York, and London: Lexington Books, 2015), 96. 21. Ibid., 96. 22. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague, Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 53. 23. See Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 43, 147-48. 24. Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), xv. 25. Ibid., xv. 26. Ibid., 23. 27. Ibid., 31. 28. Ibid., 273. 29. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 43. 30. Ibid., 216-17. 31. Ibid., 47. 32. Ibid., 49. 33. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 214. 34. Ibid., 214. 35. Ibid., 214. 36. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 41. 37. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 84. 38. Ibid., 84. 39. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 155. See also Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 86. 40. Robert S. Corrington, Nature’s Religion (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 30. 41. Corrington, Ecstatic Naturalism, 21. 42. Wildman, “Robert Corrington’s,” 97. 43. Corrington, Ecstatic Naturalism, 57-58. 44. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 44. 45. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 192.

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46. Ibid., 154. 47. Ibid., 129. 48. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 7. 49. Catherine L. Albanese, Corresponding Motion: Transcendental Religion and the New America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977), 171. 50. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Each and All,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Volume IX Poems: A Variorum Edition (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2011), 15. See also Albanese, Corresponding Motion, 171. 51. Catherine Albanese, ed., The Spirituality of the American Transcendentalists: Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1988), 3. 52. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in The Spirituality of the American Transcendentalists: Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau, ed. Catherine L. Albanese (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1988), 45-75, 48. 53. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 11. “Self-publishing” is in reference to Emerson’s description of the process of Nature as “publishing” itself through its creatures, or what Corrington calls “ejecta.” 54. Ibid., 103. 55. Ibid., 102-3. 56. Ibid., 27. 57. Ibid., 89. 58. Ibid., 102-3. 59. Emerson, “Nature,” 54. 60. Ibid., 54. 61. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 226. 62. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Volume III Essays: Second Series ed. Catherine L. Albanese (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2011), 3-24, 17. 63. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in “Considerations by the Way,” The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Volume VI, The Conduct of Life (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 129.

Chapter Four

Driven from the Bottomless Lake of Consciousness Neuropsychoanalysis, Peirce, and an Ecstatic Naturalism Wade A. Mitchell

A CHALLENGE TO ECSTATIC NATURALISM Any viable religious naturalism must brave detractors from several sides at once. 1 Throughout his numerous books and articles, Robert Corrington has been most interested in positioning ecstatic naturalism against honorific or romantic naturalisms—perspectives he chides for being too comfortable and cozy in the upper reaches of philosophical naturalism. 2 Through steady doses of respectful and poetic yet often scathing critique, he challenges these higher naturalisms by deflating their theological extravagances, 3 epistemological pretensions, 4 and metaphysical flourishes. 5 Corrington, however, has spilled little ink when situating ecstatic naturalism against more descriptive projects—perspectives which reside in realms lower than his own. 6 This chapter, therefore, critically appreciates ecstatic naturalism from the bottom, that is, from scientific foundations up. It is an initial attempt to address and even anticipate concerns about ecstatic naturalism generated by scientifically-savvy readers of Corrington’s work. It is my contention that exploring some of the vulnerabilities highlighted by critics may actually open up exceptional prospects for ecstatic naturalism in the future. The challenge to ecstatic naturalism inspiring this chapter emerges from a recent article written by Wesley Wildman entitled “Religious Naturalism: What It Can Be and What It Need Not Be.” 7 This is an important article. The breadth and details of Wildman’s “interpretive hypothesis” for how to conceptually formalize religious naturalism deserves much more attention than I 55

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can give them here. Instead, I will focus on one concern Wildman raises about ecstatic naturalism because it cuts straight to the viability of Corrington’s perspective for certain readers. Wildman argues that non-religious naturalists, and I would add scientifically grounded religious naturalists, may find reason to reject Corrington’s unique brand of naturalism because it apparently postulates “proxies for imaginary forces that do no causal or explanatory work.” 8 In this context, Wildman is questioning Corrington’s recent use of Schopenhauer’s Will to Life. He wonders whether this particular “force” is “fully consistent with evolutionary biology,” as claimed by ecstatic naturalism. 9 Because Schopenhauer’s Will to Life returns to the fore in Nature’s Sublime as the culmination of Corrington’s creative revision of classical Freudian drive theory, Wildman’s concern can be generalized and properly situated alongside other critical readers of Corrington’s work who have similarly questioned ecstatic naturalism’s reliance on psychoanalytic dynamics, categories, and metaphors. 10 Since its inception, Corrington has had to defend ecstatic naturalism’s reliance on psychoanalysis. 11 In this effort, he typically deploys two strategies. The first attempts to persuade his interlocutors that metaphysical applications of psychodynamics are entirely appropriate. Included within this hermeneutic strategy is Corrington’s assertion that psychoanalytic metaphors and categories are warranted if properly understood as strategic Kantian transcendental arguments or instances of Peircean abductions “whereby you go from an instance under study to a rule that explains it. A transcendental/ abductive argument goes from the conditions of the observed to the positing of a cause behind the scenes that must be there to explain the fact that is observed.” 12 This, incidentally, is the precise strategy Sigmund Freud used to defend his “discovery” of the dynamic unconscious from skeptical colleagues. 13 Corrington’s first strategy illustrates that abductions can be used in certain prescribed ways, and will be pragmatically clarified within the explication of his ordinal metaphysics. 14 Persuasive as his “naturalistic pragmatic realist” 15 hermeneutics may be, such articulations sway philosophical types more than scientific types. In order to appease the latter, Corrington’s second strategy is to unequivocally assert that no proposed force coursing through his philosophical theology of nature “contradicts the Neo-Darwinian synthesis” and that every postulated potency “operates in such a way that it is consistent with evolutionary laws as they have come to be established in science and, differently, in metaphysics.” 16 The trouble with this assertion, as Wildman’s criticism suggests, is that it arrives without sufficient justification or empirical elaboration. It is clear that Corrington sees ecstatic naturalism as entirely consistent with evolutionary processes. So much so that he frequently challenges proponents of higher naturalisms for being insufficiently accountable to contempo-

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rary science. He has, for example, argued that “current panentheists” want it both ways. That is, these romantic naturalists want a god that is both somehow equivalent to nature yet cognitively beyond nature in different modalities, a conception that both gives panpsychism some running room and sprinkles sugar discretely over Darwin so as to hide the overwhelming secondness and entropic violence pushing ever madly toward extinction after extinction. 17

Such naturalistic perspectives, according to Corrington, blunt the sharp edges of Darwinian evolution because they are motivated by antecedent theological or cosmological commitments. Their tenaciously held commitments are incommensurate with a picture of nature that is indifferent to our hopes and dreams. While I generally agree with Corrington’s strategies, this chapter seeks what Corrington leaves out, namely, an evolutionarily grounded and empirically verifiable psychodynamic account of what’s driving his unique brand of naturalism—an account that would begin to address concerns about ecstatic naturalism’s recourse to psychoanalysis. In what follows, I will first describe how Schopenhauer’s Will to Life is related to Corrington’s revision of Freudian drive theory. Then, I will articulate how Freudian drive theory is being alternatively revised through contemporary neuroscientific research. Understanding this latter effort will be largely guided by the work of Mark Solms, a neuropsychologist, psychoanalyst, and translator of Freud who is updating Freudian thought, including his theory of drives, using evidence from affective neuroscience in conjunction with the dynamic neuropsychology practiced in his own clinical and analytical work. Solms has given a name to this emergent, integrative scientific effort, calling it, and the journal dedicated to its flourishing, neuropsychoanalysis. 18 Finally, given their mutual indebtedness to and appreciation for psychoanalysis, it is entirely fitting that one might attempt to put Solms and Corrington into conversation, as I am just beginning to do here with respect to drive theory in particular. However, because they operate within different disciplines, appropriate bridges are needed to better connect the scientist and the philosopher. In the final section, I will suggest that convergences become possible through the philosophy of C. S. Peirce. Both neuropsychoanalysis and ecstatic naturalism have been vigorously working to transform psychoanalysis for over two decades. By the end of this chapter, however, we must consider whether the influential metapsychology, scientifically updated, might also transform ecstatic naturalism in turn. Keeping Wildman’s critique in mind throughout, we must finally ask: might neuropsychoanalysis help ecstatic naturalism be what it can be?

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FREUDIAN DRIVE THEORY RECAST BY ROBERT CORRINGTON In A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy, Corrington insists that psychoanalysis has become ruinously narrow. He argues it suffers, ironically, from a disciplinary “narcissism that refuses to lift its gaze up from the surface of the pond upon which it is reflected so that it could become open to the location of the pond itself within a natural topography that has no outer edges.” 19 Psychoanalytic theory will flourish again, according to Corrington, if it performs “a radical downward turning.” That is, the discipline of psychoanalysis ought to become self-critical enough to break away from its own debilitatingly “tight narcissistic mirroring” so it may look up and see itself in “relationship to world semiosis.” 20 For Corrington, the transformation of psychoanalysis—its being able to understand itself within much broader contexts of meaning—will only come through metaphysical applications. When ecstatic naturalism gathers psychoanalysis within its own provenance, it is compelled to release its narcissism and to serve a more capacious framework in which anything that takes place in the self is an infinitesimal corollary to the perennial dialectic of nature naturing and nature natured. 21

Regardless of whether Corrington’s analysis and prescription is compelling from the perspective of psychoanalysis, ecstatic naturalism has clearly benefited from its use of psychoanalytic theories and themes. The desire to gather psychoanalysis into its own provenance explains why Freudian metapsychology resides at the center of Corrington’s metaphysical architectonic. Depth psychology’s dynamic unconscious merges with natura naturans (or nature naturing) to become the underconscious of nature. And it is within this deep convergence that we must situate Corrington’s revision of Freudian drive theory. Freud never finished his theory of drives. His thinking on the subject continued to evolve on several key points up until his death in 1939. These include, for instance, issues on taxonomy—how many drives there are and what distinguishes them; on function—what specific role(s) drives play within the dynamically layered mind; and on ontology—whether drives are primarily a mental or physical phenomenon. 22 While not resolving these issues, Freud did provide a description of what a drive is. In “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” Freud explains that a drive (Treib) appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection to the body. 23

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Working through this liminal description, Freud also claimed that certain notions are inherently connected to “the concept of a [Trieb],” namely, pressure, aim, object, and source. 24 We will utilize this basic outline of Freudian drive theory as a guiding framework to better compare Corrington’s and Solms’s drive theories. In Nature’s Sublime, Corrington recasts Freud’s theory of drives. I say recast because Corrington brings in several thinkers to play supporting roles, effectively changing the tone and scope of Freud’s original drama. Corrington’s creative revival of Freudian drive theory begins and ends with Schopenhauer. Along the way, he features the work of Wilhelm Reich and Heinz Kohut, among others. Corrington draws on Reich’s work for at least three reasons. 25 First, Reich firmly situates the source of drives in the body. 26 As we will see, however, the body is not the ultimate source of drive energy for Corrington. Reich understood drive pressure, like Freud, as “directly analogous to mechanical and fluid dynamics in the physical orders of nature.” 27 According to Reich’s model, drives within the body, often sexual in nature, “build-up and release.” This “flow of energy moves along a channel” and may meet “resistance from a repressing force which pushes that energy back against itself.” 28 This blocking action, the repression of a drive, does nothing to dissolve the rising tide, but rather forces the drive energy to “root around to find another place to express itself, this other place being a sublimated outlet that is only indirectly sexual and hence ‘safe’ for the organism.” 29 Reich assumed, quite literally, that his patients’ bodies were “armored” so the “normal flowing” of drive energy is “damned up thereby producing neurotic symptoms.” 30 The therapeutic aim, then, is not to invoke “memory images that in turn would unblock the psyche,” as happens in Freud’s “talking cure,” but instead is to physically break up that which is blocking the drive energy. This requires that the analyst get into the “musculature where the psychic armoring has its roots.” 31 If the therapist can successfully push through “the knot in the armored musculature,” “a great rush of emotion” will be released as the energy “is set free for direct expression.” 32 The entire process is physiologically grounded and psychologically efficacious for Reich. This echoes Corrington’s own sense of drive energy as both inherently embodied and psychically potent. The second reason Reich’s work is important for ecstatic naturalism is that he befriends drive energy. Convivial to Corrington’s own working conception, Reich believed drive energy could be a positive, even benevolent, life force. The human person, therefore, as a psychosomatic organism, should aspire to become the proper conduit for this energy. Unlike Freud, Reich was not overly concerned to pathologize drive energy, which is neither inherently aggressive nor simply sexually querulous. Instead, Reich rather optimistically believed that the general aim of drive energy is “life-enhancing in all respects.” 33 Corrington’s ecstatic naturalism runs with this idea paving the

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way for it to incur a much larger scope of relevance. The final reason Reich’s work is important for Corrington, then, is that Reich’s drives have metaphysical import, a “more cosmic dimension.” 34 Corrington justifies his metaphysical extension of drive energy because Reich thrust “the drive theory of Freud’s metapsychology into a broader energetics that went beyond the limited perspective of the infantile erogenous zones.” 35 This final point is important, but needs parsing. To fully advance the metaphysical applications of Freudian drive theory, Corrington needs to both generalize this potency and divorce it from its limiting, negative connotations. Because Reich’s approach alone, particularly given its own controversial legacy, cannot sufficiently free drive theory from its limiting associations, Corrington brings Kohut on stage. 36 Kohut, in his own way, “brilliantly outflanks Freud’s drive theory,” in part for not repeating Freud’s “big mistake” of confusing “a pathogenic state with a normal process of development.” 37 Kohut’s insight is that “the narcissistically healthy infant and child simply don’t need to become fixated on the erogenous zones.” 38 Like Reich, Kohut assumed that drive energy could have a larger, beneficial meaning for the self. Kohut’s understanding was that drive energy could help an individual locate a “stable self-object for the nascent self,” an image of the self typically generated by one’s parent or parents. 39 Only if a person fails to develop this stability, a “healthy narcissism” in Kohut’s sense, is the nascent self more likely to succumb to the “counter pull” of the erogenous zones “because at least there is a modicum of pleasure to be had and, through that, some minimal sense of identity and continuity.” 40 But the counter pull is not inevitable. The developmental process can proceed in healthier ways. If we pay attention to its aims and objects, drive energy can aid this constructive process, while providing an indication of an individual’s psychological maturation. With Kohut, then, Corrington argues that psychological maturation is an intricate, evolving process relying on the proper convergence of a developing self, its drives, and various external self-objects. Kohut, the proponent of self psychology, teaches ecstatic naturalism to foster an attentive psychological gaze on the selving process. This enhances the therapeutic sensitivity and existential applicability of Corrington’s work. Kohut’s perspective also supports ecstatic naturalism’s insistence that the discipline of psychoanalysis must look beyond the individual and notice how selves are inherently constituted by social and environmental contexts. While Reich opened up the metaphysical possibilities of drive energy, Kohut allows ecstatic naturalism to peer into the relational complexities motivating the self-in-community. Drawing from these psychoanalysts, Corrington can assert that drive energies (1) are intimately related to the body, (2) develop over time in close connection to an individual’s psychological maturation, (3) can be beneficial forces in the construction and maintenance of the self, and (4) are directed outward toward objects in an individual’s surround-

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ing environment. Without Schopenhauer, however, Corrington’s drive theory cannot emerge as a major act within ecstatic naturalism’s metaphysical production. To fully gather Freudian drive theory into the provenance of ecstatic naturalism, Corrington makes several connections to Schopenhauer’s philosophy explicit. First, Schopenhauer’s metaphysics maps onto his own. That is, natura naturans is to World as Will as natura naturata is to World as Re/ presentation. 41 Next, Schopenhauer’s understanding of Will—reinterpreted as that constant, up-rising depth potency of nature naturing—is the depth momenta beneath the selving process. The selving process, Corrington explains, can “be seen in terms of the strenuous momenta of the Will to Life as it surges through the human psyche and soma pushing the self out into personal and social space, personal and social time, and into the vast causal chains that permeate its life.” 42 The far-reaching Will to Life precedes an individual’s birth, is formative throughout the course of an individual’s development, survives an individual’s bodily death, and continues to emanate, in its ontological quintessence, through an individual’s subsequent reincarnations. 43 As such, the selving process is embedded within a metaphysical context and is ultimately rooted in an awareness of the seemingly fitful momenta of the fissuring of the natural difference where the potencies of the unconscious of nature enter into the awareness of the self through the self-objects in its life. In this sense, then, the highly charged and important self-objects are the gateway to the unconscious of nature and the potencies that emerge from the dark fringes of consciousness. 44

Within ecstatic naturalism, Schopenhauer’s Will to Life—the through-line upon which our entire lives are strung—becomes indistinguishable with Corrington’s expressions of the underconscious of nature. 45 In short, Schopenhauer’s Will to Life is drive energy writ metaphysically large, at least within the human orders of an ecstatic nature. It needs, therefore, a new name. Corrington calls it “involution.” First introduced over a decade ago, 46 involution resurfaces in Nature’s Sublime to designate that depth momentum driving Corrington’s unique brand of naturalism. Involution complements, but does not replace, the evolutionary go of things. He writes: In addition to the complexities of evolution, constituting descent with modification, adaptation, natural and sexual selection, and inheritance, there is another force at play in the drama of our species existence; namely, that of involution. This second force in no way contradicts the Neo-Darwinian synthesis nor does it have any relation to creationism or any argument from design or an appeal to teleology or acquired characteristics. 47

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Corrington argues that involution is “not some kind of magical divine intervention into the Darwinian world,” but, rather, is another kind of natural force—a second force—that operates differently than evolution. 48 “If evolution means descent with branching/divergence, then involution means ascent with internal convergence.” 49 For Corrington, “evolution marks the external fit between an organism and its macro/micro environments” while “involution works internally to open up spaces for semiotic growth within the individual organism, and sometimes, under the right conditions, the social self.” 50 Understood in this way, involution serves as a shorthand for what’s driving Corrington’s psychoanalytically infused metaphysical project using language that trades on Darwinian legitimacy. For critical readers, however, this “second force” may be difficult to accept as it stands. Even when bolstered by Corrington’s full cast of characters, involution sounds like a “florid [hypothesis] about life forces and telic comic urges” 51 and is vulnerable to criticisms that such a notion is either evolutionarily incongruous or explanatorily vacuous. Corrington, it appears, cannot avoid getting a taste of his own critical medicine. Criticizing involution invites Corrington to be as scientifically and empirically grounded as he demands of other philosophical naturalists. Regardless whether Corrington decides to address this essential critique, it strikes this author as necessary. As I hope to show, ecstatic naturalism can defend itself and effectively satisfy its scientifically savvy critics through consideration of recent explorations in neuropsychoanalysis. FREUDIAN DRIVE THEORY UPDATED BY MARK SOLMS Mark Solms’s updated Freudian drive theory is, he admits, a work in progress. 52 I refer to it as updated because, while remaining fundamentally beholden to Freud’s original insights, 53 Solms has benefited from a number of current fields of scientific inquiry. 54 Over the past several decades, Solms has worked to reinvigorate psychoanalytic theory and practice through contemporary neuroscientific research. 55 According to Solms, psychoanalysis— explicitly founded as a subjective science of the mind—has lost relevance because of its resistance to incorporating contemporary brain research. Like Corrington, Solms believes psychoanalysis needs to be transformed. Psychoanalysis must look up from its own disciplinary confines and attend to perspectives of the mind/brain outside of itself to better appreciate the larger horizons of understanding made available by more objective projects. Psychoanalysis, Solms argues, has to look within itself, a literal downward turning, and investigate the neuroanatomical substrates of its primary object of interest. For Solms, the various objective approaches to mental phenomena should be integrated with psychoanalytic thought and practice because such approaches have brought needed clarity to some of the mysterious mecha-

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nisms of the mind Freud first identified, and such an integration is what Freud had envisioned for psychoanalysis all along. Before proceeding with Solms’s updated drive theory, it is worth noting that Freud never assumed psychoanalysis would forever flourish while insulated from physiological accounts of the brain. He surmised, but could not confirm at the time, that surely there were biological correlates for all of the psychic mechanisms he found in his patients. “The deficiencies in our description would probably vanish,” Freud remarks in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “if we were already in a position to replace the psychological terms by physiological or chemical ones.” 56 Freud thus “viewed the separation of psychoanalysis from neuroscience as a pragmatic decision” and, according to Solms, he “was always at pains to clarify that progress in neuroscience would have the inevitable result that at some point in the future the neurosciences would advance sufficiently to make the gap bridgeable.” 57 In the estimation of Solms and many other neuropsychoanalysts, the future Freud was referring to is now. Like Corrington, Solms’s current orientation toward drive theory is decidedly embodied. With respect to its ultimate source, however, Solms seeks neurological specificity. He takes Freud’s definition of drive and asks a simple question: where in the brain does the body make its demands on the mind? 58 Solms and Zellner claim that there are good reasons to suspect the hypothalamus. This, however, is not the only structure pertinent to the origin of drives. Without going into unnecessary detail, and without intending to perpetuate a localizationist fallacy, the hypothalamus, situated at the uppermost portion of the brain stem, is a likely candidate because this deep-seated neural structure “contains a number of nuclei which serve key homeostatic regulatory functions.” 59 Homeostatic functions are those evolutionarily ancient, subcortical activations whereby a body keeps tabs on itself, attempts to keep itself in balance, and makes demands upon itself. Homeostatic regulation is a perpetual process attending to hormonal and chemical signals coming in from the entire body. This extensive communication is largely mediated by nuclei in the hypothalamus. According to Solms and Zellner, these nuclei contain receptors for hormonal, metabolic, and other messengers which indicate the state of the visceral body, including glucose, cholecystokinin, leptin, and other compounds which indicate relative hunger or satiety; sodium to monitor dehydration; and hormones produced by the reproductive organs which facilitate sexual receptivity and arousal. 60

Receptors in the hypothalamus are sensitive to the demands made by the body and communicate these driving needs to other areas of the brain for further processing. In Solms’s view, activity in the hypothalamus is a key

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step in this process. Its role is also highlighted because activation in the hypothalamus is neurologically connected to other structures relevant to how an organism goes about addressing its own needs. For our bodies to be motivated to act in ways that seek to redress internal imbalances indicated by feelings of hunger or thirst, there must be several levels of neurological communication beyond what occurs in the hypothalamus. Accordingly, the hypothalamus sends axons to the periaqueductal gray (PAG) and other more caudal brain stem regions. These structures are known to play “a key role in generating instinctual motor patterns associated with pursuing and consuming ‘rewards.’” 61 In this way, the body’s homeostatic activity communicates with the PAG and other brain stem areas to initiate basic, innate behavior patterns dedicated to seeking and acquiring whatever it is that may satisfy the body’s demands. The cumulative effect on the organism of these mechanisms is central to Solms’s theory of drives because they “make higher brain circuits relatively more or less sensitive to the presence of salient objects, and make the organism more or less likely to release appetitive and consummatory behaviors.” 62 Identifying the neural correlates of drive aim and object is more complex, however. Drives in themselves do not have intrinsic representational content or specific behaviors associated with them. Drawing on findings from affective neuroscience, Solms and Zellner suggest that Freud’s conceptualization of drive aim is consistent with the activities of what has been called the SEEKING system, “an all-purpose system” fundamentally preoccupied with an organism’s physiological desires prior to a feeling being associated with specific objects or goals. 63 According to Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven, the neural correlates of this wanting/seeking energy reside in the mesocorticallimbic dopamine system originating in the ventral tegmental area (VTA). 64 These researchers explain that, in animals, this system impels them to forage for the resources they need to survive. They look for food, water, shelter, or a mate. The SEEKING system also responds to greed as well as need. Even if one is no longer hungry, it is difficult to refuse an enticing sweet at the end of a fine meal. Indeed, this system is responsive to all the incentives of the world, both intrinsic and learned (e.g. money, fame, and power). 65

The SEEKING system, then, meaningfully corresponds to Freud’s understanding of the libidinal drive. “The general pleasure seeking tendency of the libidinal drive,” Solms informs us, “has a source and an aim but is inherently without an object” and correlates “remarkably well with the ‘objectless’ action tendencies that Panksepp attributes to the SEEKING system.” 66 It is another short, albeit neurologically complex step, to establish through learned patterns of behavior the object(s) of drive energy. In Zellner and Solms’s drive theory, the SEEKING system innervates a number of other

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neural structures, including the amygdala, which is associated with the emotional valence of events; areas of the medial temporal lobe, which is necessary for episodic memory and object recognition; and the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which executively “monitors relative reward/punishment value.” 67 Importantly, the combined activations of this consortium of neurological structures function to support an organism’s learning to associate specific emotions and mental representations of objects with certain actions that alleviate the pressure of a drive. Solms and Zellner are therefore positing a neurological account of the processes involved in learning to satisfy the bodily needs that compel us to forage in the first place, as we psychosomatically relate the objects found in the search with our own behaviors and experiences of bodily satisfaction or reward. What we eventually remember and associate are the “things” and acts that “gratify the drive.” 68 Over time these associations create patterns of behavior that can serve our survival, and can, in some cases, become completely automatized in the form of unconscious habits. Drive energy is projected from the mechanisms of homeostatic regulation which innervate the PAG and the general SEEKING system. This generates an internal motivation and initiates foraging activity. The repeated practice of this motivated search makes increasingly efficient use of experience to acquire what will satisfy that which drives us on. These initial neurological correlations require further experimental support and elaboration, yet this psychodynamic portrayal remains remarkably consistent with Freud’s basic insights about drives. First, the demands of drives are constant. In fact, “there is no point at which a living organism is relieved of vital pressures, even when it is asleep.” 69 Continuous demands on the body for work, according to Freud, create a nagging problem for the mind. Unlike our connections with the external environment, we cannot take flight from our own body and its wants that need to be satisfied. Second, Freud argued that different drives exhibit different degrees of pressure, and that these relative pressures are quantifiable. Given the technology at the time, however, he was not able to make any objective measurements but merely relied on subjective reports comparing the relative strengths of an individual’s bodily demands. 70 Clearly, neuropsychoanalytic drive theory proceeds from the bottom up, that is, from evolutionarily older subcortical activities to processes scattered throughout the more recently evolved cortical areas of the brain. The literal downward turn of neuropsychoanalysis has identified deep-seated neural correlates for drive energy and an empirical way to physiologically account for its upward, efficacious trajectory in the brain. 71 This burgeoning research illustrates that drives (1) are intricately woven into the activations of several neurological structures, (2) induce individuals to pursue objects found in their surrounding environments, (3) develop over time in close connection to

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an individual’s repeated patterns of behavior, and (4) are motivational forces with definite evolutionary histories and benefits. The similarities between Solms’s theory of drives and Corrington’s are striking. Solms and Corrington rightly acknowledge the inherent ontological ambiguity of drives. Like Freud, both thinkers realize that drives are not experienced directly. Drives, residing between the mental and the somatic, are subjectively rendered as something we feel, for example, the feeling of hunger that makes a demand upon the mind which compels us to stand up, put together a sandwich, and eat it. This hungry feeling, however, is not a drive but rather a drive derivative. Reminiscent of Corrington’s transcendental/abductive argument, the concept of drive is therefore a hypothesis to account for why you feel what you feel. The feeling itself is preceded and subserved by other, deep-seated mechanisms recognized by both ecstatic naturalism and neuropsychoanalysis. For neurospsychoanalysis and ecstatic naturalism, then, the intrigue of drive energy is the way it gestures toward the existence of deeper momenta, to the potent, internal forces Freud was convinced emerged from an unconscious source within our psyche. In Corrington’s metaphysics of nature, this tremulous depth at the heart of it all is nature naturing. As explained above, it drives through human orders as the process of involution. For Solms, the dopaminergic SEEKING system resides beneath it all and becomes “the central driver of the wishful nature of the dynamic unconscious.” 72 Solms and Zellner do not supplant Freud’s classic fourfold characterization of the dynamic unconscious; 73 rather, they explicate this depth as fundamentally beholden to “biological drives, not reality constraints; it is compulsive, needbased, and primitive.” 74 It seems, then, that both Solms and Corrington, neuropsychoanalysis and ecstatic naturalism, are similarly vested in and attuned to the very same dynamic depth structures in nature, albeit in different ways, under different names, and toward different ends. CORRINGTON AND SOLMS: COMPARISONS OF CONSEQUENCE The clearest difference between Corrington and Solms is specificity. When Corrington speaks about the body in general, Solms focuses on the brain. When Corrington discusses forces, potencies, and involution, Solms refers to hormones, neurotransmitters, and evolution. And while drive theory is about metaphysics for ecstatic naturalism, for neuropsychoanalysis is about metapsychology. It is this last difference that really matters. Actually, I submit, it harbors a much deeper convergence: both ecstatic naturalism and neuropsychoanalysis lean on classic Freudian views of the architecture of the human mind. As was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Corrington’s brand of naturalism has subsumed Freudian metapsychology into its

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own provenance. The underconscious of nature, Corrington’s unique psychophilosophical creation, interdigitates natura naturans (nature naturing) and Freud’s dynamic unconscious. This is the unruly ground beneath it all. From Solms’s research, however, a transformative insight emerges: there is reason to invert Freud’s mental architecture. Whereas the founder of psychoanalysis was convinced that the Id is unconscious and that the human mind, at bottom, is thus a cauldron of primary process thinking only to be known indirectly if at all, for neuropsychoanalysts like Solms, the mind at its deepest level is affectively conscious. 75 The Freudian architectonic is turned upside down. In this new science of the mind, unconscious pulsations do not reside beneath it all, at least not in the way Freud led us to believe. Instead, consciousness goes all the way down. 76 Just what are the prospects of an ecstatic nature at some point being able to accommodate this inversion? Can neuropsychoanalysis be gathered in? What might this even look like? Any answers at this point are partial at best. Before turning to C. S. Peirce for some guidance, we must understand, in part, how Solms arrived at his inversion. Consider again Solms’s drive theory. He suggests that drive energy is not exclusively contained within the neurological pathways sketched above. Like Freud, he hypothesizes that drive dynamics actually describes all mental activity. According to neuropsychoanalytic research, there is more than a theoretical link between drive energy and our general state of mental arousal, or wakefulness. 77 Solms and others pursue the straightforward question: Is there an area of the brain known to subserve our overall neural activity? In other words, is there an area of the brain that if damaged or compromised leads to a total cessation of mental functioning or basic wakefulness? Again, without intending to perpetuate a localizationist fallacy, there is, in fact, such an area. Situated along the brain stem are tiny patches of nuclei referred to in the literature, misleadingly, 78 as the extended reticular-thalamic activating system (ERTAS). In healthy brains, normal activations of these nuclei are consistently associated with general states of mental awareness. 79 In popular imagination familiarity with ERTAS comes from coma patients and numbers on the Glasgow Coma Scale. Within affective neuroscience, this system has been associated with the work of Antonio Damasio. 80 Damasio argues that the ERTAS is an essential neurological foundation for what he calls our “core consciousness.” Unlike more complex forms of consciousness, core consciousness cannot accommodate detailed perceptions or mental representations based on sense data. Core consciousness is rather primitive and fundamentally affective. Damasio calls it a simple, biological phenomenon; it has one single level of organization; it is stable across the lifetime of the organism; it is not exclusively human and it is

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While simple, core consciousness nevertheless subserves higher forms of consciousness or what Damasio calls “extended consciousness.” With the former, a “sense of self arises in the subtle, fleeting feeling of knowing” which is “constructed anew in each pulse.” In extended consciousness, on the other hand, “the sense of self arises in the consistent, reiterated display of some of our own personal memories, the objects of our personal past, those that can easily substantiate our identity, moment by moment, and our personhood.” 82 Extended consciousness thus constitutes the autobiographical self. This complex achievement, unique to humans for Damasio, is crucially dependent on the integrity of our core consciousness. This nascent consciousness “is the first step into the light of knowing” even if “it does not illuminate a whole being.” 83 If ERTAS nuclei are even minutely disrupted, all the lights go out. 84 Core consciousness is, therefore, the physiological basement of the human mind. This, for neuropsychoanalysts, is the Id. Solms and Damasio further speculate that this simple mental foundation is evolutionarily advantageous. The deep-seated system of core consciousness does not just support extended consciousness, but, more importantly, is the source and channel for primal feeling states such as fear or rage. As we saw with the SEEKING system, there are other feeling systems such as FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, and PLAY that generate emotional patterns and structures of behaviors. 85 These affective systems greatly influence an organism’s relationship to the world. The emergence of these interactive systems in evolutionary history is, according to Damasio, a “pathbreaking novelty” whereby the lower, “inner sanctum” of the mind is able to interact with its complex, upper regions. Consciousness opens the possibility of constructing in the mind some counterpart to the regulatory specifications hidden in the brain core, a new way for the life urge to press its claims and for the organism to act on them. Consciousness is the rite of passage which allows an organism armed with the ability to regulate its metabolism, with innate reflexes, and with the form of learning known as conditioning to become a minded organism, the kind of organism in which responses are shaped by a mental concern over the organism’s own life. 86

Locating this deep “life urge,” dare we say Corringtonian life force, has entailed getting to the bottom of Freud’s metapsychology. Freud believed that the murky workings of the unconscious Id needed to be illuminated before we could ever be able “to make sense of the volitional brain.” 87 Currently, as the works of Solms and Damasio illustrate, our capacity for anything like a volitional brain is possible only if the ERTAS functions

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properly. Freud was basically correct about the upward causal efficacy of the mind even if his mental architecture requires revision. For affective neuroscience, and by extension neuropsychoanalysis, our thoughts and behaviors emerge from deeper reservoirs of a feeling consciousness. Freud’s dynamic unconscious, then, is equatable with core consciousness. The Id is conscious. This insight will be difficult for both psychoanalysis and ecstatic naturalism to fully absorb. What, for instance, might Solms’s metapsychological inversion mean for ecstatic naturalism’s dramatic portrayal of the underconscious of nature? It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine ecstatic naturalism without the tremulous depths of nature naturing seething beneath it all. Fortunately, I am not sure Solms’s inversion necessitates its relinquishment. A vast depth structure remains, but could be reconceived in accordance with Charles Sanders Peirce’s philosophical taxonomy of consciousness. TOWARD A PEIRCEAN AQUATECTURE OF THE MIND Peirce’s profound philosophical categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness were certainly applicable to psychology in general and to trichotomies of the mind in particular. 88 Peirce’s burgeoning philosophy of mind came to eventually divide consciousness into quality, reaction, and mediation. 89 According to Nathan Houser, “Peirce’s first great division of consciousness is feeling-quality, the appearance of firstness. Often this division is simply called ‘feeling.’” 90 Within Peircean nomenclature, an ecstatic naturalist could exploit the deep resonances of meaning between firstness, quality-feeling, and Corrington’s underconscious of nature. What is said of one can surely apply to the others. Houser indicates this overlap in his discussion of Peirce’s sense of quality consciousness. In its immediacy, unanalyzed and alone, it is not consciousness, but is an element of consciousness, just as a mathematical point is not space, yet “the whole of space is made up of points.” Peirce said that feeling in this sense is not a psychological datum, but is a hypothetical entity. 91

An ecstatic nature—neuropsychoanalytically accountable—may be fashioned from this basic proposal because it opens up a slightly different approach to nature’s depth structure. Like the findings of neuropsychoanalysis, Peirce’s taxonomy appreciates a nascent, feeling consciousness beneath it all. This tentative link creates a potential bridge between the philosopher and this new science of the mind. This simple connection needs more elaboration than I can provide here, but Peirce left us with fluid imagery regarding consciousness. An ecstatic naturalist might one day be able to fully resuscitate it to craft a neuro-aquatecture of the mind. 92

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To be sure, this is a mere fragment but I think it begins to initiate an adjustment to Corrington’s religious naturalist metaphysics. And perhaps this would allow ecstatic naturalism to fully address Wildman’s criticism. It is not simply that Wildman insists ecstatic naturalism should rest on stronger scientific foundations. An important religious motivation allows ecstatic naturalism to take Solms’s research to heart. In Corrington’s metaphysical enterprise, the underconscious of nature is mysterious, fecund, and the generative source for the innumerable orders of the world. Through it, Corrington tries to account for how nature can perennially create itself out of itself alone. Psychoanalytic themes and metaphors are enlisted in this drama not only to fill out his metaphysical vision but also to put depth psychology’s portrayal of the relationship between the unconscious and conscious aspects of the mind to religious use, as it applies to the interactions of natura naturans and natura naturata. 94 The central dynamic at the heart of ecstatic naturalism is therefore complicated, ongoing, and fully charged with religious significance. Corrington is, after all, a philosophical theologian of nature. At issue for the religious naturalist, then, is transcendence. For Wildman, nature’s perennial self-creation, or self-transcendence, must arise within certain parameters. Transcendence, in his view, includes two different aspects—reflexive and purposive. Reflexive self-transcendence approaches every single natural force, potency, or event as “a side effect of cosmic development and biological evolution.” Purposive self-transcendence acknowledges that within this development “emergent creatures,” like human selves, can in fact “set and achieve goals” and establish “new forms of life that can become the basis for further novel goal-setting and goal attaining.” 95 For Wildman, nature houses transcendent possibilities and it is the task of religious naturalists to affirm them within these basic constraints. The temptation for many religious naturalists, Corrington included, is to transgress these parameters in hopes of evoking a sense of nature’s selftranscendence which would decisively distinguish one’s perspective from all other religious and non-religious naturalisms alike. Corrington’s notion of involution, in this sense, is out of bounds. While his unique expression of nature’s self-transcendence is able to set ecstatic naturalism apart from its more materialistic cousins, it does so “at the price of indulging in teleologically wistful ontological fantasies.” 96 Wildman’s parameters serve to both

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chastise fanciful metaphysical flourishes and encourage religious naturalists to recognize the sheer profundity of life’s emergent patterns as contemporary scientific inquiry reveals them to us. There is profound, religious value in Solms’s neurological account of drive energy. This emergent pattern, neurologically detailed, is spiritually evocative and religiously resplendent in Wildman’s view because it is “wholly explicable as a side effect of cosmic development and biological evolution.” 97 Neuropsychoanalysis and Corrington’s religious metaphysics can one day coalesce. Steeped in this new science of the mind emerges another sense of what resides beneath it all. Looking deeper into Peirce’s lake, perhaps we can begin to see other spiritually evocative founts perennially driving an ecstatic nature. There is more than enough depth to accommodate other gatherings. After all, the evolving all of nature is sparse and teaming; clear and opaque; variously layered and more than capacious enough to generate another way of thinking about the different depths we venerate differently. NOTES 1. Wesley Wildman, Science and Religious Anthropology: A Spiritually Evocative Naturalist Interpretation of Human Life (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 192-98. 2. See John Deely’s foreword to Corrington, Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), vii-xii, and Corrington’s own taxonomy, “Four Naturalisms,” in A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 22-31. 3. For example, pneumatology. Corrington has spent considerable energy expounding his own naturalistic pneumatology as a contrast to traditional or process-oriented renderings of the Spirit. See A Semiotic Theory, 212. For an analysis of how Corrington’s pneumatology has evolved, see W. A. Mitchell, “The Spirit of Robert S. Corrington’s Ecstatic Naturalism,” in A Philosophy of Sacred Nature: Prospects for Ecstatic Naturalism, ed. Leon Niemoczynski and Nam T. Nguyen (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 33-49. 4. See Corrington, Nature’s Religion (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 7. 5. Corrington’s work is a unique version of Buchler’s ordinal metaphysics. He views it as a deflated alternative to overblown Whiteheadian metaphysical projects predicated on maximizing the doctrine of internal relations. See Nature’s Sublime: An Essay in Aesthetic Naturalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 11. 6. There are two possible exceptions to this claim: “Evolution, Religion, and an Ecstatic Naturalism,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 31 (May 2010): 124-35; and his review of John Ryder’s The Things in Heaven and Earth: An Essay in Pragmatic Naturalism, in American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 35 (September 2014): 278-85. 7. Wesley Wildman, “Religious Naturalism: What It Can Be and What It Need Not Be,” Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences 1 (August 2014): 36-58. 8. Ibid., 48. 9. Ibid. 10. For example, Robert Neville has consistently questioned Corrington’s metaphysical use of psychoanalytic categories registering a “discomfort about knowing just how metaphorically or literally he means those signs.” “Reflections on the Philosophy of Robert S. Corrington,” in A Philosophy of Sacred Nature, 6. 11. “I have indeed been accused of trying to ‘psychoanalyze nature’,” writes Corrington in “Response to My Critics,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 26 (September 2005): 263-72.

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12. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 3-4. See also his monograph on Peirce, An Introduction to C.S. Pierce: Philosopher, Semiotician and Ecstatic Naturalist (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), 205-6. 13. In “The Unconscious,” Freud wrote: “Our right to assume the existence of something mental that is unconscious and to employ that assumption for the purposes of scientific work is disputed in many quarters. To this we can reply that our assumption of the unconscious is necessary and legitimate, and that we posses numerous proofs of its existence.” One such “proof” reads: “It is necessary because the data of consciousness have a very large number of gaps in them . . . which can be explained only by presupposing other acts, of which, nevertheless, consciousness affords no evidence.” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, ed. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1957), 166-71. 14. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 39-40. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 113. 17. Corrington, “Evolution, Religion, and an Ecstatic Naturalism,” 127. 18. Solms founded the International Society of Neuropsychoanalysis in 2000, which sponsors annual conferences and publishes the journal Neuropsychoanalysis. See www.neuropsa.org. Aikaterini Fotopoulou proposes the field be called “psychodynamic neuroscience” to better reflect the methodological and epistemological leanings of its proponents and to give their work “some recognizability within the neurosciences.” “Towards a Psychodynamic Neuroscience,” in From the Couch to the Lab: Trends in Psychodynamic Neuroscience, ed. Aikaterini Fotopoulou, Donald Pfaff, and Martin A. Conway (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 26. 19. Corrington, A Semiotic Theory, 42, 82. 20. Ibid., 82. 21. Ibid., 42. 22. While there have been considerable debates and numerous interpretive proposals relevant to each of these unresolved issues, our focus will primarily be on the ontology of drives. 23. Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” 121-22, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, ed. Strachey, J. (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1957). 24. Ibid., 122. 25. While Corrington focuses on Kohut in this work, he is also influenced by Kristeva and Rank. For a fuller treatment of Reich’s influence on ecstatic naturalism see Corrington’s biography, Wilhelm Reich: Psychoanalyst and Radical Naturalist (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). 26. “Reich started out as a fairly classical Freudian but quickly moved in the direction of a more literal physical understanding of psychic phenomena.” Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 5354. 27. Ibid., 49. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 53. 31. Ibid., 54. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 54-55. 34. Ibid., 55. 35. Ibid. 36. Kohut himself wanted to reformulate Freudian drive theory. See Kohut, The Restoration of the Self (Chicago University Press, 1977), xix–xx. 37. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 56. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid.

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40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 38. 42. Ibid., 66. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 60. 45. Ibid., 38-40. 46. Corrington, 263-72. 47. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 113. 48. Ibid., 120. 49. Ibid., 135. 50. Ibid., 113-14. 51. Wildman, “Religious Naturalism,” 48. 52. Mark Solms, “A Neuropsychoanalytic Perspective on Drives, Instincts and Affects,” lecture delivered at the Arnold Pfeffer Center for Neuropsychoanalysis of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, Saturday, March 7, 2015. 53. Mark Solms and Margaret R. Zellner, “Freudian Drive Theory Today,” in From the Couch to the Lab: Trends in Psychodynamic Neuroscience, ed. Aikaterini Fotopoulou, Donald Pfaft, and Martin A. Conway (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) 49. 54. Mark Solms and Oliver H. Turnbull, “What Is Neuropsychoanalysis?” Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences 13 (2), 2011: 6-7. The authors highlight contributions from affective neuroscience, neuropsychology, social neuroscience, ethology, and psychoanalysis itself. Affective neuroscience has been the most beneficial to neuropsychoanalysis and will be the primary point of interdisciplinary interest in this chapter. 55. For an accessible account see Mark Solms and Oliver. H. Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience (New York: Other Press, 2002). 56. Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920-1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, ed. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955), 60. 57. Solms and Turnbull, “What Is Neuropsychoanalysis?” 2. 58. Solms and Zellner, “Freudian Drive Theory Today,” 52. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., 52-53. 61. Ibid., 53. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 55. 64. Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven, “A Meditation on the Affective Neuroscientific View of Human and Animalian MindBrains,” From the Couch to the Lab, 154. 65. Ibid., 169. 66. Solms and Zellner, “Freudian Drive Theory Today,” 55. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 52. 69. Ibid. 70. Such as “I feel more thirsty than hungry.” In the contemporary neuropsychoanalytic context, “the effects of hormonal signals on the hypothalamus,” for example, can be studied and “we may indeed begin to . . . quantify the strength of a drive source, for example, by correlating the plasma level of a particular circulating hormone at a particular temporal moment” with certain manifest feelings and behaviors. Ibid. 71. Douglas F. Watt, “Theoretical Challenges in the Conceptualization of Motivation in Neuroscience: Implications for the Bridging of Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis,” in From the Couch to the Lab, 93-99. 72. Solms and Zellner, “Freudian Drive Theory Today,” 214. 73. According to Freud, there are four special characteristics distinguishing cognition exhibited by the unconscious id and the conscious ego, namely, primary process, tolerance of mutual

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contradiction, psychical reality dominates material reality, and timelessness. Solms and Zellner offer an excellent, clarifying summation of these characteristics. See “The Freudian Unconscious Today,” From the Couch to the Lab, 213. 74. Ibid., 213. 75. Mark Solms and Jaak Panksepp “The ‘Id’ Knows More Than the ‘Ego’ Admits: Neuropsychoanalytic and Primal Consciousness Perspectives on the Interface between Affective and Cognitive Neuroscience,” Brain Science 2 (April 2012): 147-75. 76. Marie Vanderkerkhove and Jaak Panksepp, “The Flow of Anoetic to Noetic and Autonoetic Consciousness: A Vision of Unknowing (Anoetic) and Knowing (Noetic) Consciousness in the Remembrance of Things Past and Imagined Futures,” Consciousness and Cognition 18 (August 2009): 1018-28. 77. Donald W. Pfaff and Helen E. Fisher, “Generalized Brain Arousal Mechanisms and Other Biological, Environmental, and Psychological Mechanisms That Contribute to Libido,” From the Couch to the Lab, 64-84. 78. Solms and Panksepp, “The ‘Id’ Knows More Than the ‘Ego’ Admits,” 155. 79. Solms and Zellner, “Freudian Drive Theory Today,” 54-55. 80. Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 180-83; The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt, 1999), 236-260; Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 258-65. 81. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 16. 82. Ibid., 196. 83. Ibid., 16. 84. Central to Solms’s inversion, the reverse is not true. Evidence from studies of children with hydranencephaly, where “the cerebral cortex as a whole is destroyed in utero,” indicates that these individuals are both awake and “experience and express a full range of instinctual emotions.” Solms and Panksepp, “The ‘Id’ Knows More Than the ‘Ego’ Admits,” 162-63. 85. “It is difficult to find words to characterize the seven basic affective/emotional systems. Affective feeling states do not lend themselves to linguistic descriptions any more than do fundamental perceptions. . . . One cannot know them unless one feels them. . . . Each of these capitalized terms represents a complex emotional system that exists in the brain of every mammal. We use the convention of capitalization to highlight that we are using a scientific term that designates specific and specifiable networks within ancient regions of mammalian brains where evolutionary homologies abound.” Panksepp and Biven, “A Meditation on the Affective Neuroscientific View of Human and Animalian MindBrains,” 153-57. 86. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 25. 87. Solms, “What Is Neuropsychoanalysis?” 2. 88. Nathan Houser, “Peirce’s General Taxonomy of Consciousness,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 19 (Fall 1983): 331-59. 89. Ibid., 332. 90. Houser continues by stating “We must keep in mind Peirce’s warning that as all three categories are invariably present in all experience ‘a pure idea of any one, absolutely distinct from the others, is impossible,’” Ibid., 332-33. 91. Ibid., 333. 92. The term “aquatecture” is Corrington’s from an exceptional essay of his, “American Transcendentalism’s Erotic Aquatecture,” in Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline, eds. Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). In this essay, however, Corrington finds Emersonian waters more congenial to his metaphysical architectonic. 93. C. S. Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 7-8: 335. CP 7.547. 94. “[T]he unconscious of nature (nature naturing) enters into our ken through the human unconscious. On the deepest level, our dreams are, by analogy, nature’s dreams.” Nature’s Religion, 4. 95. Wildman, “Religious Naturalism,” 43. 96. Ibid., 48.

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Groundwork for a Transcendentalist Semeiotics of Nature Nicholas L. Guardiano

“CATCHING ON” TO NATURE Charles Peirce’s philosophical musings about the semiotic lives of nonhuman animals and other natural beings lay the groundwork for a Transcendentalist semeiotics 1 of nature. To the goal of constructing such groundwork in this chapter is one of his most profound acts of reasoning in uberty when he infers that the lives of insects, birds, dogs, horses, chameleons, snakes, plants, flowers, crystals, and weather engage in semiotic behavior. These natural beings ranging across the biological spectrum and even into “the purely physical world” are capable of both sending and receiving signs. 2 Their semiotic lives combine to result in a dynamic and complex universe of sign activity, that is, a “universe [that] is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.” 3 Peirce’s hypothesis of a universal semeiotics is not an isolated or capricious thought but one based on firsthand observations of nature in scientific fashion. In his writings he recalls several episodes of communicating with nonhuman animals. For instance, he explains that he “can tell by the expression of face the state of mind of my horse just as unmistakably as I can that of my dog or my wife,” and thus concludes, “some kind of language there is among nearly all animals.” 4 Elsewhere, he adds other animals to the list of those whose thoughts he understands. “I am confident a man can pretty well understand the thoughts of his horse, his jocose parrot, and his canary-bird, so full of espièglerie.” 5 Peirce sees the expressive behaviors of these different animals as semiotic utterances. They are signs communicating thoughts that he interprets, just as his behaviors may stand as signs open to their 77

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interpretations. This interspecies exchange of utterances and interpretations suggests a broad definition of the sign and a wide range of intelligent signuse in nature. As Peirce will remark, every “sign certainly conveys something of the general nature of thought, if not from a mind, yet from some repository of ideas, or significant forms, and if not to a person, yet to something capable of some how ‘catching on,’ as a section of society says; that is of receiving not merely a physical, nor even merely a psychical dose of energy, but a significant meaning.” 6 A generation before Peirce, the Transcendentalist philosophers and artists of his New England “neighborhood” 7 described their own original ways of “catching on” to the semiosis of nature. In so doing they paved the way for Peirce’s more theoretical or formal elaborations on semeiotics. At the forefront is Ralph Waldo Emerson, who makes the following reflection at the beginning of his book Nature: “The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.” 8 Emerson further devotes the chapter “Language” to describing the existence of a spiritual “language” inherent in nature. This includes the following axioms: “Nature is the vehicle of thought”; “Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts”; and “Nature is the symbol of spirit.” 9 In the context of a Schellingian metaphysics that takes mind and matter, thought and thing, humankind and nature to be connaturally related entities—a metaphysics also held by Peirce when deeming objective idealism as the “one intelligible theory of the universe” 10—Emerson finds natural objects to be expressive of significant meanings. In addition to giving nature a semiotic value, this gives nature an aesthetic value. Hence, Emerson calls nature a “picture language” and a primordial “poetry,” whose sublime meters we are capable of reading. 11 As he says in his essay “The Poet”: “For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down.” 12 Other Transcendentalists attempted to catch on to these “primal warblings” and did so with success. The poet Emily Dickinson found her own piece of the semiotic life about her Amherst home and throughout her domestic life as a self-imposed recluse. She records in her poetry the sublime significance of her everyday interactions with her dog, the house mice, local birds, bees, butterflies, as well as flowering and herbal plants. In her private garden in particular she describes the “career of flowers” and how it “differs from ours only in inaudibleness. I feel more reverence as I grow for these mute creatures whose suspense or transport may surpass our own.” 13 The contemporaneous landscape painters of the Hudson River School in following these Transcendentalist writers also probed the significant meanings of nature. Their idealist-realist representations of North American land-

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scapes visually depict the wilderness as expressing deep metaphysical, moral, and religious truths. The painter Asher Durand in his “Letters on Landscape Painting” mentions the profound insight into nature this artistic method requires, insisting that the artist must “learn to read the great book of Nature, to comprehend it, and eventually transcribe from its pages.” 14 He, along with his friend Thomas Cole, philosophizes about nature as a beautifully expressive reality representative of “essential truths.” 15 The Transcendentalists and Peirce provide a unique perspective of nature that suggests a theoretical framework for a philosophy that adequately treats nature as a semiotic phenomenon. In this chapter, I present such a framework building upon their observations as contributions to the groundwork for a Transcendentalist semeiotics of nature. In particular, I expand on Peirce’s semeiotics and its formal descriptions of the sign, which by their generality or positive vagueness contain important consequences for the subject matter of nature. This will further involve delineating the metaphysical landscape underpinning Peirce’s ontological-semeiotics and showing its relationship to the philosophy of “Aesthetic Transcendentalism.” THE POSSIBILITY OF A SEMEIOTICS OF NATURE Peirce’s definition of the sign is an appropriate introduction to an investigation concerning the expansive scope of his semeiotics and its relevance for nature. As is well known, Peirce defines the sign as a representation standing in a triadic relation with an object and interpretant. Crucial to this definition is that it may apply to a broad realm of objects, as Peirce notes in his syllabi for his 1903 Lowell Lectures: “A Sign is a Representamen with a mental Interpretant. Possibly there may be Representamens that are not Signs.” 16 Likewise, he states in a draft of one of the lectures: “all signs convey notions to human minds; but I know no reason why every representamen should do so.” 17 Notwithstanding his concession or “sop to Cerberus” made elsewhere that the definition of the sign may be restricted to the human domain for practical purposes, Peirce is clear that its full import applies beyond the human Umwelt. 18 This follows from the logical structure of the sign qua sign. In its most general form as a representamen relating object to interpretant, it contains nothing that is uniquely human, or unique to any individual natural species. Mutatis mutandis, the same is true of the process of semiosis whereby the object determines the sign that determines an interpretant in some way. Neither of these triadic relationships have an a priori limitation to a particular domain of nature. This aspect of Peirce’s definition of the sign is further made evident when we consider his thoughts on the three kinds of interpretant: the “emotional interpretant,” the “energetic interpretant,” and the “logical interpretant.” 19

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These respectively include feelings, efforts or actions, and habits or general concepts. Also, they respectively correlate to the categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness, and maintain the same relationships of dependency whereby thirdness implies secondness, secondness implies firstness, and firstness implies nothing but itself. In this way an emotional interpretant as first does not involve an energetic (second) or logical (third) interpretant. In other words, a sign may determine an emotional interpretant alone without the production of a physical action or an intellectual idea. This is observed in processes of semiosis that produce a mere feeling in the interpreting subject of sentient being, such as any species of mammal, fish, or insect. Thus, here again, we see that the sign in terms of its fundamental aspects applies to a domain that is inclusive of a wide variety of natural creatures and promotes a unique perspective from which to understand nature as a semiotic phenomenon. 20 This brief examination of Peirce’s definition of the sign helps prepare for a fuller interpretation of his writings on semeiotics in relation to nature. It shows that motivating them is an intention to generate a theory that describes the most general characteristics of the sign and of semiosis regardless of the material context. That intention is apparent in his definition of the science of semeiotics, which he takes as “the doctrine of the essential nature and fundamental varieties of possible semiosis.” 21 This high level of generality is behind Peirce’s use of the classical spelling of the term “semeiotics,” contra “semiotics.” “Σημείωσις [semeiosis] in Greek of the Roman period, as early as Cicero’s time, if I remember rightly, meant the action of almost any kind of sign; and my definition confers on anything that so acts [by incorporating an object and interpretant] the title of a ‘sign.’” 22 In the history of philosophy, the broad scope of Peirce’s semeiotics is unique in comparison to the positions of other semioticians who restrict their theories to human sign-users. As John Deely explains, it notably contrasts with Ferdinand de Saussure’s “semiology,” which “was to be a branch of social psychology and linguistics a subspecies within that branch.” 23 Saussure’s theory, given its scope, is thus characterized by a “glottocentricism” and “idealism” by limiting the investigation of signs to the semiotic structures of human language and culture. In this way it also furthers the Kantian paradigm between phenomenon and thing-in-itself whereby there is no world knowable beyond the a priori structures of human understanding. 24 On the other hand, Peirce’s science “sees in semiosis a broader and much more fundamental process, involving the physical universe itself in human semiosis, and making of semiosis in our species a part of semiosis in nature.” 25 His semeiotics, thus, historically resonates with Emersonian Transcendentalism that, in Schellingian fashion, revised Immanuel Kant’s polarizing concepts in arguing for the connaturality and consanguinity of humankind and nature.

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The special scope of Peirce’s semeiotics informs an interpretation of his other semiotic theories in relation to nature. In particular, his speculative cosmological-metaphysical remarks contribute to the formulation of the fundamental principles of a semeiotics of nature. My examination and expansion of Peirce’s semeiotics in this regard will take seriously Douglas R. Anderson’s advice that “we must recall that for Peirce signs are living, and we must avoid treating the classifications [of his semeiotics] in a strictly formal manner.” 26 Peirce makes an important claim about the sign when stating that it constitutes one of “the three Universes of Experience” or “three Modalities of Being” whose phenomeno-ontological status amounts to its thirdness as a process of mediation. 27 In the opening of “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” he describes this aspect of the sign as the “Sign’s Soul,” which is in connection with nature. The “Sign’s Soul,” he says, “has its Being in its power of serving as intermediary between its Object and a Mind. Such, too, is a living consciousness, and such the life, the power of growth of a plant. Such is a living institution,—a daily newspaper, great fortune, a social ‘movement.’” 28 The “soul” of the sign pertains to its power as a synechistic principle capable of intelligently coordinating two separate elements. It also pertains to the power of growth that consists in the creative activity of the object determining the sign that then determines the interpretant, which itself becomes a sign in an open-ended process of infinite semiosis. 29 “Omne symbolum de symbolo,” Peirce declares elsewhere. 30 This creative activity constitutes the “life” of the sign, and the sign’s “soul” or ψυχή is the animating principle of semiotic life. In this way the Peircean sign-soul is a semiotic correlate of the Platonic soul. As Socrates describes in the Phaedrus—a dialogue set outside the city walls in the scenic countryside—ψυχή is the fundamental source and origin of change immanently residing within all living beings. 31 Ψυχή in this capacity, for Plato, has broad application across the universe. In the Timaeus, not only are humans and other terrestrial creatures animated by soul, so are Earth itself, astronomical bodies, and the cosmos as a whole. Peirce’s account of the thirdness of the sign-soul enables a unique semiotic understanding of nature in terms of its organic and vital processes. First and foremost, it calls attention to the natural communicative behaviors of living creatures, including plants, animals, human beings, and other organic forms. In this way it opens up the studies of zoösemiosis and phytosemiosis, that is, investigations of the use of signs across the biosphere. Thomas A. Sebeok, who coined the term “zoösemiosis,” points out in his work the presence of semiotic phenomena in the signaling behaviors of animals across all five animal kingdoms. In addition, he explains that semiosis occurs in the signals of the encoded messages of DNA, which he takes as the molecular foundation of all higher-level semiotic systems appearing in the lives of

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natural organisms. 32 Such phenomena would find a metaphysical ground in the Peircean sign-soul. Similarly, Sebeok’s molecular foundation of semiosis relates to Peirce’s objective idealism of “matter as effete mind” and his discussion of the spontaneity and growth of the “life-slimes” of protoplasm that constitute the bodily organism. 33 These systematic connections to Peirce’s metaphysics are further transformations of the sign-soul in its vital power. Adding to Sebeok’s work on zoösemiosis, Peirce’s speculative grammar that details the formal properties of different kinds of signs can expand our understanding of the semiotic communication of animals, and thus further reveal the activities of the sign-soul. His typology enables the identification of prototypical animal utterances and interpretations in their sign-type. Restricting our discussion for practical purposes to Peirce’s three kinds of sign—the icon, index, and symbol—the ubiquitous presence of these signs in animal behavior reveals the richness of significant forms in nature. These three signs concern the relationship of the sign to its object and correspond respectively to likenesses, causal or existential connections, and conventional representations. Some examples of these in the utterances made by animals are a cat caressing an owner’s leg with his or her tail as an iconic expression of affection, a sunflower turning toward the sun as an index or indication of the location of the sun, and a whale vocalizing special sound patterns to his or her pod as symbolic representations of ideas. On the other hand, some examples of interpretations made by animals are a dog reading the emotional state of another dog by scent markings as an interpretation of an icon, a bat navigating in flight via echolocation as an interpretation of indexes, and a chimpanzee communicating with a human being via sign language as an interpretation of symbols. Peirce’s Universe of the Sign further shows its import for a semeiotics of nature when understood in its relationship to the other Universes of Being. The other two Universes are the Universe of “Ideas” and the Universe of “Brute Actuality,” which are the first and second, respectively, implied in the sign as third. The Universe of Ideas Peirce associates with the Platonic Forms taking each Idea or Form as an “airy-nothingness” that “denotes anything whose Being consists in its mere capacity for getting fully represented.” 34 These realities are the “idea-potentialities,” or indeterminate “vagues” or “would-bes,” that signs unceasingly embody in the evolutionary and “hyperbolic” growth of the universe. They also are a “living-feeling” with the ability to spread out, continuously affecting other ideas, as described by Peirce’s metaphysics of objective idealism and theory of the Law of Mind. 35 Thus, they are the vital and objectively idealistic core of cosmic semiosis that is “a part, perhaps we may say the chief part, of the process of the Creation of the World. . . . [T]he continual increase of the embodiment of the ideapotentiality is the summum bonum.” 36 As the permanently sustaining meta-

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physical ground of the continual growth of the universe, they likewise are the original creative ground of the origin of the universe. In Peirce’s cosmogony, the idea-potentialities constitute the cosmogonic stage of the “Platonic world” that consists in an infinitude of aesthetic realities, each a unique feeling or quality. 37 In the process of cosmic semiosis whereby idea-potentialities contract into the determinate things of worldly existence, that is, the Universe of Ideas transforming into the Universe of Actuality, the sign plays a crucial role because it is “everything whose Being consists in active power to establish connections between different objects, especially between objects in different Universes.” 38 Cosmic semiosis evidently, then, equates with Peirce’s universal growth of reasonableness or the “Reasonableness that Creates” whereby signs are its concrete products expressive of ideas. In other words, the cosmic “energizing reasonableness” in its endless generation of new signs equates with the mediating power of the sign-soul, which possesses the vitality of the idea-potentialities at its heart. 39 Building upon the role of the sign in the communicative life of organisms, the sign as the primary cosmic mediating power between the Universe of Ideas and Universe of Brute Actuality incorporates both organic and inorganic beings as part of the semiosis of nature in its full scope. Here, the essential triadic relationship of the sign appears in the sign mediating between an ideapotentiality as object and an actuality as interpretant. In other words, an interpretative process of semiosis occurs in the contraction of an idea-potentiality that grounds an actual existential thing in a determinate way, and once determined serves as its own idea-potentiality for future interpretants. Thus, the wealth of idea-potentialities of the Platonic world serve as the “repository of ideas, or significant forms” of the semiotic world, and these, as Peirce says, are capable of conveying their meanings “if not to a person, yet to something capable of some how ‘catching on.’” Language, art, science, social customs, and other human practices insofar as they are expressive of ideas are instances of cosmic semiosis. Equally so are the interactions of the forms of nature not specific to the human domain that intelligently structure the world of actuality. These include the gamut of natural tendencies and generalities including animal and plant species, weather patterns, geological features, gravity, electricity, space, time, chemical properties, planetary systems, and galaxies. Each natural form as a semiotic third involves the coordination of an idea-potentiality and a brute actuality when determining its existential embodiment according to general principles. Furthermore, these natural forms act as idea-potentialities in their capacities to spread and affect other idea-potentialities by operating within their regional ecologies sharing vital materials and information, and while possessing complex evolutionary histories sharing common origins in time that dictate the development of similar morphological structures both physical and psychical.

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Deely in his own way works out the semiosis of nature in its full scope by outlining a physiosemiosis at the foundation of phytosemiosis and zoösemiosis. He claims that physical things are “virtually” semiotic by containing a historical record of their causes, and that they become actual signs when they signify this record to a human interpreter. For example, a dinosaur bone is a virtual sign by its causal connection to its object, namely a past living dinosaur, and it becomes an actual sign when a human interpreter, namely a paleontologist, knowingly associates the bone with such a dinosaur. 40 Although Deely’s analysis provides one sense of describing the greater semiosis of nature, it problematically presupposes a kind of anthropomorphism (despite Deely’s efforts to the contrary). It takes human cognition as a necessary and sufficient condition of actual semiosis, and in doing so fails to adequately treat nature as an autonomous semiotic being. More specifically, it seems not to acknowledge non-human interpretants and the presence of intelligent processes beyond the human domain. Robert S. Corrington while interpreting the implications of Peirce’s semeiotics in regard to nature also resists accepting a complete Peircean universe “perfused with signs.” He says that following Peirce, his philosophy of “ecstatic naturalism asserts that semiotic processes, as manifest in the two triads [of sign/object/interpretant and utterer/interpreter/interpretee], are in all living orders.” 41 However, he follows Deely by taking some living and all non-living natural orders as merely virtually semiotic or “presemiotic,” subordinating their final status as semiotic realities to human interpreters. In conjunction he rejects a Peircean panpsychism that takes mind as ubiquitous in nature and privileges intelligent purposes in their semiotic role throughout the objects of nature. 42 Corrington’s postulate, however, seems untenable given recent scientific discoveries that have shown intelligent behavior to be far from something exceptional to human beings. Research is gradually uncovering a variety of intelligent and moreover semiotic practices in the lives of many mammals, insects, and even plants. 43 The results provide experimental confirmation of Peirce’s trenchant hypothesis that “[t]hought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there.” 44 Such a theoretical perspective is open to the ubiquity of intelligent activity across nature and allows for the sufficient treatment of the expression of significant meanings in a cosmic semiosis whose continual increase is the summum bonum of the universe.

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THE AESTHETICS OF A TRANSCENDENTALIST SEMEIOTICS In supporting a semeiotics of nature, Peirce’s theories further contribute to a philosophy of Aesthetic Transcendentalism that recognizes the qualitative and creative richness of nature in its real being. This final section connects the principles describing the semiosis of nature worked out in the previous section to the philosophy of Aesthetic Transcendentalism. It examines the aesthetic dimension of semiosis while arguing for its ontological primacy. Implicit in all semiotic phenomena is an aesthetic element by the interpretation and utterance of signs consisting in the exchange of meaningful qualities and feelings. One way to understand this aesthetic feature of semiosis is by examining the role of the emotional interpretant. As discussed above, the emotional interpretant is first to the energetic and logical interpretants. This means that a feeling must be present in all semiotic interpretations, and its occurrence is necessary to any determination of a physical response or change in habit. This is because the interpreting subject must foremost experience a sign and attain a vague sense (feeling) of its meaning. “Every sign whatever that functions as such must have an emotional interpretant; for under that head comes the feeling of recognizing the sign as such; and it is plain that a sign not recognized is not a sign at all.” 45 Also, if the interpreting subject is compelled by a sign to act in some way, or upon acting to make a change in habit, whether physical or psychical, then a feeling must be present to serve as a motivating impulse. As with the interpretation of signs, an aesthetic element is first in the utterance of signs as seen in the trichotomic relations that describe the different kinds of signs. In particular, the icon is first to the index as second and to the symbol as third. This means that for any kind of sign the way it stands to its object must involve some qualitative similarity or resemblance. This is evident by taking the example of the sign of a weathervane. Since it is caused by its object to point in the direction of the wind, it is an index. However, in serving as an index, it resembles its object by sharing the quality of facing or moving in a certain direction. Without embodying this or some other pertinent positive quality, it would lack the means of indicating its object. Emerson emphasizes the iconic foundation of all signs, especially the conventional signs of ordinary language. When explaining the axiom that “words are signs of natural facts,” he proposes that the historic origin of language lies in the pictorial imagery of primitive speaking, such as found in the “conversation of a strong-natured farmer or back-woodsman.” 46 This manner of speaking uses natural metaphors and analogies to convey meaning. As such, it is a form of poetry, and the poet recognizes this inherent iconic power of natural objects to express ideas: “Nature offers all her creatures to him as a picture-language. Being used as a type, a second wonderful value appears in the object, far better than its old value.” 47

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In Peirce’s speculative grammar of his 1903 lectures, he specifies two other semiotic trichotomies in addition to the trichotomy of the sign in relation to its object, and these also contain an aesthetic element at their basis. 48 Concerning the trichotomy of the sign in relation to its interpretant, the “rheme” is first to the “dicisign” as second and to the “argument” as third. The rheme focuses the interpreter on the qualitative aspects of the sign, and this feature is a necessary condition of all kinds of signs because a sign must at bare minimum present itself or appear in some vaguely meaningful way in order to be taken as having a representative function to an interpreter. Concerning the trichotomy of the sign in relation to itself or in its ontological mode, the “qualisign” is first to the “sinsign” as second and to the “legisign” as third. The qualisign is an indeterminate quality and the potentiality that grounds a determinate quality defining an actual sign, which may further combine with other actual signs to define a law as sign. Thus, the qualisign is a metaphysical ground of the reality of all possible signs. One way to observe the important role these aesthetic firsts play in the semiosis of nature is to consider the manifold iconic and rhematic aspects of the communicative behaviors of different species. Animals and plants perform countless meaningful acts in the form of qualitative utterances, which convey information to interpreters by means of their various sense-capacities. For example, cats and dogs release pheromones that convey information by smell, birds make calls and sing songs that communicate ideas by sound, bees perform complex dances that visually communicate information, and trees emit fluids that communicate information by taste and smell. Moreover, many utterances and interpretations depend on sense-capacities that vary greatly in range and kind extending beyond the ordinary iconic and rhematic capabilities of humans. Dogs interpret the signs of scent markings at 40 times the sensitivity of humans, bats create and interpret the signs of ultrasonic echoes that determine the precise location of objects in their environment, and butterflies interpret the optical signs of ultraviolet and polarized light through their several photoreceptors. These examples and many others suggest a profound aesthetic pluralism of signs streaming across nature on various sense channels. While we require special instrumentations and scientific analyses to access the aesthetic variety of signs in nature that operate off the grid of human sense-experience, so to speak, a wealth of these significant meanings remain available in our everyday lives. Natural creatures, given their shared evolutionary and ecological connections, synechistically participate within the greater aesthetic pluralism of the semiosis of nature, and thus they are capable of “catching on” to each other. One way this occurs is through feeling, such as the emotional exchanges between humans and other animals. From an aesthetically informed phenomenological perspective, Anderson in his essay “Peirce’s Horse: A Sympathetic and Semeiotic Bond” points out the

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meaningful feelings by which we communicate with nonhuman animals. Building on Peirce’s reminiscences about understanding the thoughts of his horse through body language, he explains that feelings can function as signs, and that this accounts for our experience of a sympathetic bond with nonhuman animals. 49 The feelings of desire, contentment, fear, fatigue, love, anger, gratitude, and many others that we experientially recognize in different animals, and apparently they in us, are further contributions to the aesthetic richness of the semiosis of nature. Moreover, this interspecies communication of meaningful feelings again shows the priority of an aesthetic dimension to semiosis. Anderson observes that “although some other animals may engage us with fully articulate signs, such as facial expressions and whimpers, even such forms of communication are made possible by the shared feeling of differential perceivers.” 50 This is true of the highly articulate signs of language that humans use to communicate with some animals, such as the vocal commands given to dogs and the sign language taught to chimpanzees. These animals must first possess a baseline feeling of trust for their human companions and at least a vague rhematic sense of the signs as signs. Also, communicating using linguistic symbols builds upon certain fundamental iconic cues to draw attention to possible meanings. This is similar to the way two human individuals who do not speak the same language depend upon hand gestures, imitative sounds, and pictures to convey their meanings. 51 Thus, whether regarding humans or other sign-users, an aesthetic element seems essential to semiosis. Another aesthetic feature of the semiosis of nature is creativity. (Here I use the term “aesthetic” in its artistic meaning.) This creativity corresponds to the process of signs creating signs by endlessly generating unique interpretants. As discussed in the previous section, Peirce takes this aesthetic aspect to be the fundamental principle or “soul” in the generative life of the sign, and it corresponds to his “Reasonableness that Creates” or “energizing reasonableness” of the cosmos. Emerson also recognizes the vitally creative power of signs when he insists that “all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.” 52 Hence, the value of the Emersonian poetic imagination is in its ability “to flow, and not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the color, or the form, but read their meaning; neither may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same objects exponents of his new thought.” 53 Signs only lose their value when they are confined to a single interpretant and become static, as the religious mystic who “nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false.” 54 An especially relevant case of the creativity of the semiosis of nature is the free play of signs in the imaginative behaviors of animals and exuberant displays of vegetable life. 55 Recall Peirce’s reflection about the “espièglerie”

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or playfulness in his gregarious and loquacious parrot and canary. The conduct of birds is a good example of this behavior because their many different vocalizations from calls to songs to mimicries are so many flourishes of possible signs. Other animal behaviors such as mock fighting, courtship displays, and games also present an element of free play. Rather than these acts being reducible to some determinate meaning or end, such as a utilitarian end of natural selection, they appear to involve a freely imaginative element or positive indeterminacy being open to a wide array of future interpretants. This is evident in many simple acts that seem to indulge in life for life’s sake, such as a fawn exuberantly frolicking in a meadow and a house cat happily rolling over on its back to show its belly. Equivalent displays of creativity appear in plant life and the greater organic world in the various colors of autumn; the myriad shades of green; the release of innumerable buds and pollen seeds; and the spontaneous ejections of wildflowers and mushrooms in so many shapes, sizes, and colors. 56 The free play of signs both in the creation of new significant representations and the imaginative contemplation of these indulge in semiosis for the sake of semiosis, that is, in the bare possibility of determining future interpretants. Like Kant’s aesthetic form of reflective judgment in its mode of purposeless purposiveness, the signs involve an imaginative freedom not restricted to any definite end yet still meaningfully suggestive. Likewise, they resemble Kant’s teleological judgment of nature as a collection of intrinsically purposive living organisms, which are not explainable on deterministic and mechanistic models that take nature as dead and insignificant. 57 However, unlike Kant’s philosophy, the creative play of semiosis is more than a merely subjective or regulative-only aspect of the human mind. Rather, it is a metaphysical aspect of nature itself that appears in the many reasonablenesses of an aesthetic pluralism of vitally active natural creatures. 58 Peirce’s typology of signs provides an appropriate conceptual framework to describe the creativity of the semiosis of nature. Signs in their aesthetically creative mode fit the profile of the rhematic-iconic-qualisign, which is a possible sign emphasizing its qualitative aspect while standing open to a variety of interpretants. This type of sign is uniquely defined by all three firsts of the sign trichotomies and thus is the most basic form of sign. As such it has the unique role of serving as the aesthetic core constituting all signtypes and processes of semiosis. Aesthetic Transcendentalism promotes the rich variety and importance of the qualitative, felt, and creative aspects of the semiosis of nature. It furthermore proposes a metaphysics that grounds the aesthetic pluralism and prolific generation of signs in the ontological structures of nature. Peirce’s Universe of Ideas or Platonic world consisting in an infinite multitude of aesthetic potentialities provides the framework for such a metaphysics. In cosmic semiosis these aesthetic potentialities are the qualisigns that condition the

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world of signs. That is, they are the metaphysical firsts embodied by all individual signs as seconds (sinsigns) and that further coordinate into the general regularities of nature as thirds (legisigns). Thus, they are the foundation of the universe “perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs,” and by their aesthetic nature provide that universe with its rich qualitative and felt character. This includes serving as an essential ingredient in logical interpretants, symbolic signs, and argument signs, according to the trichotomic relationships of Peirce’s sign-types. That is to say that even the most conceptual and abstract aspects of semiosis contain a primary aesthetic ground. Furthermore, these cosmic qualisigns provide the universe of semiosis with its creative character in its open growth of diverse interpretants. The Platonic forms in their firstness as potentialities are the ontological condition of sinsigns possessing a rhematic character. They promote the qualitative indeterminacy of the sinsign such that it itself may serve as a qualisign for future interpretants. In this way the forms play a chief part in the “hyperbolic” evolution of the universe, which has as its summum bonum the “continual increase of the embodiment of the idea-potentiality.” As a concluding remark, I would like to point out the qualisignificance of a central thesis of this chapter. Its argument for a semeiotics of nature, that is, for a theory that adequately attends to the extent and variety of a universe perfused with signs, rejects as its antithesis a semiology that separates human beings from nature and confines semiosis to the human species. A Transcendentalist semeiotics takes human sign-users as continuous with the sign-users of other natural organisms. Together, all natural forms may contribute to the complex network of overlapping and interacting processes of semiosis. In addition, their unique aesthetic features contribute to the rich qualitative and creative aspects at the core of semiosis. This diverse field of semiosis thus suggests further investigations of the many possible appearances of signs in nature beyond those presented in this brief chapter. In this way the principles of a semeiotics of nature have qualisignificance for future theoretical developments and interpretants. In other words, the very articulation of the groundwork for a Transcendentalist semeiotics in its connatural semiotic relationship with the greater semiosis of nature may contribute to the continual increase of the embodiment of idea-potentialities as the summum bonum of the universe. NOTES 1. Following Peirce I employ the traditional spelling of “semeiotics” as it designates the study of signs both human and nonhuman. The next section directly covers his understanding of the science of semeiotics as such. 2. Charles S. Peirce, CP 4.551. All of Peirce’s writings are cited according to standard practice. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 1-6, ed. Charles Hartshorne and

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Paul Weiss, vols. 7-8, ed. Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 193135 and 1958); cited as CP followed by volume and paragraph number. The Charles S. Peirce Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Library Microreproduction Service, 1963-66); cited as R followed by manuscript number and page number. The New Elements of Mathematics, ed. Carolyn Eisele (The Hague and Paris: Mouton; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1976); cited as NEM followed by volume and page number. Reasoning and the Logic of Things: The Cambridge Conferences Lectures of 1898, ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); cited as RLT followed by page number. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, vol. 2, ed. Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992 and 1998); cited as EP followed by volume number and page number. 3. EP2 394. 4. CP 7.379n. 17 and CP 7.379. Although it should be obvious to the reader, Peirce in grouping together his dog and wife is not depreciating the cognitive ability of women but elevating that of nonhuman animals. 5. NEM 4:313; and see CP 2.86, CP 7.456, and EP2 193. 6. R 318:211. 7. On the concept of “neighborhood life” based on Peirce’s theory of the “Law of Mind” and his own intellectual neighbors of the New England Transcendentalists, see Nicholas L. Guardiano, “Charles S. Peirce’s New England Neighbors and Embrace of Transcendentalism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 53, no. 2 (2017): 216-45. 8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Essays & Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983), 11. 9. Ibid., 20. 10. See EP1 293. 11. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in Essays & Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983), 452. 12. Ibid., 449. 13. Emily Dickinson, Letters, ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1958), L388. 14. Asher Durand, “Letters on Landscape Painting,” Letter III, The Crayon 1 (31 January 1855): 66. 15. For a fuller account of the philosophy of the Hudson River School painters, see Nicholas L. Guardiano, Aesthetic Transcendentalism in Emerson, Peirce, and Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), chap. 4. 16. EP2 273. 17. CP 1.540. 18. Peirce makes his “sop to Cerberus” when he states: “I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former. My insertion of ‘upon a person’ is a sop to Cerberus, because I despair of making my own broader conception understood” (EP2 478). 19. See EP2 430 and CP 5.475-76. 20. For another discussion of this consequence of Peirce’s three interpretants, see Felicia E. Kruse, “Nature and Semiosis,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 26, no. 2 (1990): 216-18. Kruse will further argue that Peirce’s concept of the dynamic object also implies a greater scope of semiosis than the human domain. 21. EP2 413; my emphasis. 22. R 318:101. 23. John Deely, Basics of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 4. 24. Ibid., 4-5. 25. Ibid., 6. 26. Douglas R. Anderson, Strands of System: The Philosophy of Charles Peirce (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1995), 49. 27. EP2 435 and 478. For the sign as a “third,” see EP1 281. Peirce will also claim that the sign is a “first”; see, for example, EP2 272. This latter view can be understood as recognizing

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the sign within a process of semiosis as it determines an interpretant as “third” by means of its object as “second.” On the other hand, the former view of the sign as “third” applies to semiotic expression and interpretation. 28. EP2 435. 29. Saussure’s conception of the sign, on the contrary, maintains a dyadic logic involving the elements of significant and signifié (signifier and signified). This fails to assign a mediating power to the sign, and the sign as such appears soul-less by maintaining a mere self-contained and self-important internal dialectic between signifier and signified. 30. EP2 10. 31. See Plato, Phaedrus 245c-46a; also see Phaedo 105d. 32. See Thomas A. Sebeok, “Review of Communication among Social Bees; Porpoises and Sonar; and Man and Dolphin,” Language 39, no. 3 (1963): 448-66. 33. See Peirce’s “Man’s Glassy Essence,” EP1 334-51. 34. EP2 434-35. Peirce’s descriptions of “airy-nothingness” and “airy nothings” show a historical provenance in Shakespeare’s play Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 5, scene 1 in the passage: “The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling, / Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; / And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.” A poetic aspect of the Platonic world will be discussed in the next section. 35. See Peirce’s essays “Architecture of Theories” (EP1 285-97) and “The Law of Mind (EP1 312-33). In the history of philosophy, Plotinus perhaps first clearly saw the Platonic Idea qua vital creative potentiality in his cosmic emanation and hypostases with the Intellect overflowing into the Soul that overflows into the finite embodied souls of nature. Emerson’s philosophy of Transcendentalism was greatly inspired by Plotinus’s Neoplatonism, and he spent his career describing the creative life of ideas. The first edition of his first book, Nature, opened with an epigraph quoting Plotinus’s Enneads. 36. EP2 388. This description of the evolutionary growth of the universe from a normative perspective is further enriched by comparing it to the passage in a draft of “The Three Normative Sciences” where Peirce records his ideal wish granted by a fairy as the experience of an impression of a “Reasonableness that Creates” in the form of “a drama in which numberless living caprices shall jostle and work themselves out in larger and stronger harmonies and antagonisms, and ultimately execute intelligent reasonablenesses of existence more and more intellectually stupendous and bring forth new designs still more admirable and prolific” (MS 310:7-9). See Guardiano, Aesthetic Transcendentalism, 70-77 for a full development of the philosophical implications of Peirce’s cosmological dream. 37. See RLT 258-59. 38. EP2 435. 39. EP2 68. 40. For Deely’s thesis about physiosemiosis and his example of the dinosaur bone, see his Basics of Semiotics, chap. 6. 41. Robert S. Corrington, Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 36. 42. See, for example, Corrington, Ecstatic Naturalism, 51; and Robert S. Corrington, An Introduction to C. S. Peirce: Philosopher, Semiotician, and Ecstatic Naturalist (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 1993), 212-13. 43. No matter the grounds on which one might attempt to defend humans as exceptional creatures in nature, these always seem to prove insufficient. Language, tool use, problem solving, facial recognition, complex emotions, play, culture, and self-awareness have all been found to exist in nonhuman organisms. For a discussion of recent scientific discoveries on this topic, see Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2016), and Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2016). 44. CP 4.551. See also R 672, where Peirce describes his personal observations of the use of reason by dogs and birds. 45. R 318:126-27.

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46. Emerson, “Nature,” 22. 47. Emerson, “The Poet,” 452. Also see my article “Metamorphosis in Art and Nature: Emersonian Poetry,” Southwest Philosophical Studies 33, no. 1 (2011): 2-10, especially its second section on the distinction between “primary” and “secondary” formation in writing. 48. See, for example, EP2 289-99. 49. See Douglas R. Anderson, “Peirce’s Horse: A Sympathetic and Semeiotic Bond,” in Animal Pragmatism: Rethinking Human-Nonhuman Relationships, ed. Erin McKenna and Andrew Light (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 86-88. 50. Ibid., 87. 51. See CP 7.456 and EP2 6-7, where Peirce makes some interesting arguments about this aesthetic foundation of language and human communication in general. For example, in the latter he says: “In intercommunication, too, likenesses [icons] are quite indispensable. Imagine two men who know no common speech, thrown together remote from the rest of the race. They must communicate; but how are they to do so? By imitative sounds, by imitative gestures, and by pictures. These are three kinds of likenesses. It is true that they will also use other signs, finger-pointings, and the like. But, after all, the likenesses will be the only means of describing the qualities of the things and actions which they have in mind.” 52. Emerson, “The Poet,” 463. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. I allude here to Friedrich Schiller’s notion of the spieltrieb (play instinct). Schiller’s idea and others from his Aesthetic Letters made a lifelong impression on the young Peirce. See David A. Dilworth, “Intellectual Gravity and Elective Attractions: The Provenance of Peirce’s Categories in Friedrich von Schiller,” Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia 15, no. 1 (2014): 37-72. 56. As Schiller explains when describing his idea of aesthetic play in nature: “Certainly Nature has given even to the creatures without reason more than the bare necessities of life, and cast a gleam of freedom over the darkness of animal existence. When the lion is not gnawed by hunger and no beast of prey is challenging him to battle, his ideal energy creates for itself an object; he fills the echoing desert with his high-spirited roaring, and his exuberant power enjoys itself in purposeless display. The insect swarms with joyous life in the sunbeam; and it is assuredly not the cry of desire which we hear in the melodious warbling of the song-bird. . . . Even in mindless Nature there is revealed a similar luxury of powers and a laxity of determination which in that natural context might well be called play. The tree puts forth innumerable buds which perish without developing, and stretches out for nourishment many more roots, branches and leaves than are used for the maintenance of itself and its species.” Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), 133. 57. See Kant’s Critique of Judgment, secs. 10-12 and 62-66. 58. Schelling is the post-Kantian who reconfigures Kant’s philosophy and stands as the major transitional figure to Emerson’s and Peirce’s universe of vitally creative semiosis. His greater metaphysics of freedom is provenance for their Transcendentalist semeiotics of nature, such as it appears in his pantheism of God as an absolute ground of positive freedom and in his naturphilosophie of the vital potencies of nature and “matter as effete mind.” For the influence of Schelling on Peirce, see David A. Dilworth, “Peirce’s Schelling-Fashioned Critique of Hegel,” Cognitio: Revista de Filosophia 16, no. 1 (2015): 57-85.

Chapter Six

The Meaning of Nature Toward a Philosophical Ecology Leon Niemoczynski

DISCOVERING JOHN WILLIAM MILLER My discovery of John William Miller (1895–1978) was by way of stumbling upon an essay about his philosophy written by the ecstatic naturalist Robert S. Corrington. Corrington, in his essay “Finite Idealism: The Midworld and its History,” places John William Miller somewhere between Hegel and Dewey in that Miller’s outlook is understood to be a unique blend of American philosophical naturalism and German idealism, paradoxically perhaps best described as a “naturalistic idealism.” 1 The tension between naturalism and idealism within Miller’s philosophy hinges on the practical freedom of the creature, what Miller called “local control,” and the sovereignty of nature, what Miller referred to as nature’s “spectacle” (or natura naturans in Corrington’s language, outlined in his many books on ecstatic naturalism). This tension enticed me from the very beginning. I very much became interested in Miller’s concept of the environment especially, noting how for him, as for Corrington, there is no nature per se, but an environment (or multiple environments understood as “perceptual universes”) that nevertheless is of a common ontological integrity or facticity all the while being projected by existential agents in the world. This has long been a trademark of Corrington’s perspective, and I was immediately attracted to it in Miller’s perspective, as well. Why is John William Miller so important? Miller’s concept of the “midworld” spoke most strongly to me, and I especially thought (and still think) his concept of the midworld can be applied within today’s understanding of philosophical ecology. It is my view that if philosophical ecology is suffi93

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ciently interpreted in light of Miller’s concept of midworld, then we might better understand how a properly philosophical ecology might be relevant for contemporary environmental concerns—in particular, not only how we relate to the environment, but also how it is possible for the environment to have some form of identity (however unfinished) that relates back to us. But let us not just confine ecological relation to humans and human environment, but include as well non-human animals, plants, insects, and their respective environments along with the whole gamut of organic beings who help to create the great ecosystem that we mean by the term “nature.” Nature is meant here in its most just and capacious sense, for nature is “whatever is, in whatever way it is.” 2 The notion of “us” is widened to include agencies in general who help to compose the common medium or environment referred to as “nature” in the broadest possible sense of the term. THE MIDWORLD The hallmark of Miller’s naturalistic idealism is what he called “the midworld.” The midworld is nothing short of a “cosmic locus.” As Miller described, “I may say that by the midworld I will be meaning . . . the locus and embodiment of . . . all constitutional distinctions and conflicts.” 3 We must note that the midworld does not encompass all worlds but is rather their continued and common environed projection by the creatures which inhabit it. The midworld is existential, as in “the act.” It “launches, spurs, and controls all cognition.” 4 It is actual and not apparent. It is real but also ideal. “Unenvironed, it projects the environment,” Miller writes. 5 Miller continues, “We like to inhabit a world . . . and so much like to give this habitation a name. I call it ‘midworld.’” 6 Local habitation within the midworld implies nothing less than a “here-and-now [that] bears within itself traces of the there-and-then.” 7 The living being that inhabits this pregiven, prethinkable, and “unenvironed” midworld is a being solidified and sedimented by its environment in the sense that the midworld provides for an “ontological status and authoritative function.” 8 All organisms therefore belong to “it.” (Although, the midworld is not a thing proper, as we shall see.) In the language of Schelling and later Merleau-Ponty commenting upon Schelling, the midworld is “wild being”—a common wilderness of Being before any being. 9 In this sense we may think of the midworld as a totality but one whose borders are not definite or closed. The midworld is a totality of possible projection for agents to act within respective environments accomplishing respective goals. 10 But in speaking of a totality we must also be explicit about what Miller might mean regarding what might be perceived as a one, unitary, or common totality of environment. For it is often confusing to think of the environment first to be a thing in which there are other things

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(like a container), but second, as some form of totality of things which is not much more than an aggregation (and so there is no circumscribable or generic character at all). As pointed out by the editors of a recent volume on the philosophy of John William Miller, The Task of Criticism, the notion of the midworld therefore “challenges at its roots” inherently dualistic presumptions of container and contained, subject and object, or creature and environment. 11 The midworld, for as much as it offers a new way to think about “the” environment, also affords challenges to address what an environment might mean whether generically or specifically, especially with respect to the creatures within it. Let us address some of these distinctions in the hope of making them clearer. SEMIOTIC ACTION: THE ACTION OF “FUNCTIONING OBJECTS” In Miller’s midworld, it is the actions of environed objects which seems to be most important. These actions are fundamentally semiotic because they are fundamentally expressive. As Miller writes in another text that builds upon ideas presented in his The Midworld of Symbols and Functioning Objects (1982), “There seems, in short, to be a whole world of such potential stimuli. These are all functioning objects, what I call the midworld. They are all ‘meanings.’” 12 Miller calls out how it is the action of the object which unites notions of “subject” and “object” in expressive meaning that creates an environment. Therefore, instead of “functioning object,” Miller tells us, we might speak of “symbols or signs.” 13 We cannot assume the object is a categorial property of pure reason, some static or unconditioned actor in the world where a corresponding environment would not affect it, nor it affects its corresponding environment. Still, the word “corresponding” might suggest too much. Agents are in no way separate or distinct from the “world” in which they live. Rather, agents are part of such a world, and indeed through semiotic or symbolic expression create it. As Miller writes, “What I am unwilling to say is ‘There is the world, and here are the signs.’” 14 There is a unity of thought and expression which cannot be severed from organisms inact within the environment. Anything within one’s environment might be considered a functioning object (or symbolizing sign or symbol). For example, Miller tells us that words, too, are functioning objects—the meaning of which is “objective and logical,” as much as the meaning of cloud is “storm” or “rain.” 15 Short of creating an environed space of meaning, functioning objects create the very universals we suppose are independent of contexts and experience. 16 In a maneuver very similar to that of Peirce, we are told that the knowledge created by such objects is neither monadic nor dyadic but triadic. 17 As Miller writes, “The functioning object is a mid-point at which subject and object

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meet. It alone gives objectivity to thought and subjectivity to object. . . . It points toward objectivity and subjectivity.” 18 In its capacity for abstraction, reason is certainly capable of grasping apparently immaterial facts of truth and essence, that is, universals. However, one must keep in mind that these are expressive forms always contained within an incarnated environment susceptible to “local control,” the agency of the producer or actor which has instantiated them. Drawing on the idealism of Hegel and Royce, but also the semiotic naturalism of Peirce, Miller takes a middle route between realism and idealism as he addresses how functioning objects embody universals. He attempts to ground the “psychical” or immaterial of universals, the idealistic, in the rooted seat of incarnated semiotic expression. This in turn naturalizes his idealism so that no semiotic expression can be entirely “disconnected” from its midworld. Hence the importance of the midworld to the agents which are found as constituting its embodied meaning through their active expressions. In this sense, agencies (whether creature or object) are producers as much as they are products. PRODUCER AND PRODUCT, CONSTRUCTOR AND CONSTRUCTED With the midworld’s composition being ontologically varied so as to include whatever is in whatever way it is (pace Buchler, Corrington, etc.), the theme of embodiment becomes even more central, for without embodiment we cannot say that a midworld would be. How is this so? First, let us look at the agents or creatures who inhabit the midworld, or better, who compose it, and how through their creative actions we might say that the midworld is “embodied.” Throughout Miller’s writings he emphasized the self-reliant agent who controls its immediate environment through actions of local control. These actions are tied to the functioning objects which are the co-constituting (but also constituted) agents of the midworld. At this point, agents construct things of the world, where in turn these things (if agents) help to create other things, and so on. Each thing helps to create the other. Insofar as agents constitute the midworld’s actuality, we may say that what we mean by “nature” is constructed. Miller’s favorite example is the yardstick which measures space yet also makes it actual. 19 The yardstick has a unique status of a functioning object, namely in the sense that it secures and stabilizes an immediacy (space) by way of action (being used within a measurement). It is what brings idealizations to life, pulling them into actuality. In much the same way, agencies

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within the midworld bring the midworld’s idealizations to life by incarnating them through controlled action. On the other hand, there is a sense in which the midworld is not just constructed, but a constructing process of “us” (human beings) or the other products who are co-producing each other. This is what Schelling means by calling nature pure production or “pure productivity.” 20 Now, I am not concerned here with Miller’s midworld insofar as it makes concrete certain immediacies through action—that is, how the particulars of the world help to create other particulars of the world. Rather, I am interested in how Miller’s notion of midworld can be said to represent a novel way of thinking about the basic concepts of “environment” and “organism”—a relationship which, specifically, allows us to both think of a whole that we refer to as “nature” or the natural world and then the distinct particular creatures within that environment whose controlled actions in a very unique way are constituted by that nature as much as they constitute it. For it usually is the case that we study how humans construct a world—how humans might construct society, social categories, and so on. But in the case of Miller, we have the opportunity to discuss how environments, indeed the common facticity of environments (midworld), construct or produce humans, as well as any other organism or artifact of the world. PERCEPTUAL UNIVERSES ABOUND ALL AROUND OF US The reciprocal relation of constitution and constituted implies a relation between what we may normally refer to as the “World” and one’s own personal world. Or, for example, there might be one who in a plane travels around the World, and then “the world of carpentry” or “the world of sports.” Personal worlds—let us call them “perceptual worlds”—are the worlds of any agent, object, self, or creature. These sorts of worlds are easy enough to attain. Yet how do we ever arrive to the World, a real common immediacy between them all? We cannot simply total the perceptual worlds in order to arrive upon some great container of World with a capital W or of Nature with a capital N if only because there would be no end to the series of perceptual worlds we would be aggregating. If, on the other hand, we were to suppose that Nature or World is always already pre-given as a total, then that pregiveness would have to be a determinate whole in the sense that being a real whole would mean no real separation could ever take place within it. Rather, we must begin in medias res and follow that whatever nature is, in its widest possible reach, it is still never given in any pre-given determinate sense. It follows that particularity and individuality always arrive as a process of individuation within a nexus of fellow-becoming individuations and are what they are by contrast to this whole, despite its indeterminacy. The individual

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worlds of agents—their own “perceptual universes” (Umwelten), as Jacob von Uexküll put it 21—retain their shapes even as those shapes pass through one another within a more common World or Nature. Therefore, to put it as simply as possible, things are fluid and interpenetrating rather than inert and fixed. And while there are things, this does not debar any common fact to be found among them that itself is not any particular thing. Each one’s identity is always fully relational. 22 It is to this point that Miller’s concept of midworld points most directly. THE ECOLOGICAL FEEDBACK LOOP: NAVIGATING REALISM AND IDEALISM Miller writes, “Nobody’s individual world is the world.” 23 There is a middle plane or a common nexus of immediacy or fact—which is the immediacy or factuality of the environment itself. The midworld has an ontological status and certain authority then, but it is also responsive to the agent that helps to revise and maintain the reality of its ongoing accumulations of fact (e.g., pace Bergson, Deleuze, and Whitehead). As Corrington explains, “Miller’s idealism no more denies an independent status to nature than it overstates the role of mind in determining the contour of things. Rather, it acknowledges the sheer locatedness of the human mind in a world which cannot be reduced to the totality of our finite categorical projects.” 24 As the environment or the world within which creatures articulate and individuate their own specific natures is responsive to processes of individuation, a sort of feedback loop is established. The feedback loop involves two modal poles as much as it does the creature or organism and, say, the organism’s environment. What we come to realize is that, ontologically, there is only a formal difference between what is real (actual) and what is ideal (potential)—as much as there is only a formal difference between an organism and the environment within which that organism is immersed; or, perhaps better expressed using the language of Miller, between the organism and its “world” and the factically common midworld. Each cannot be said to be strictly divided—both are equally real. But neither is each strictly unitary, for there is a difference between the two. In fact, there is enough of a difference such that the two can be identified as a basic contrast as two poles or a pair, but one subsists within the same basic reality, that is, nature. Let me take a moment to explore in further detail this responsiveness between creature and environment and try to articulate how precisely this comes to play within an ecological understanding of agency. From there it should become apparent as to why such an abstract distinction and its recon-

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ciliation can be helpful for thinking about philosophical ecology with respect to current environmental problems. Miller obviously is navigating tricky ground between realism and idealism. But we must remember that his idealism is a “finite” idealism, one that although acknowledging a whole does not see that whole as determinate and is therefore always limited to a common horizon of being. If the whole were determinate, then Miller’s idealism would fold over into an absolute idealism such that the real becomes something absolute, unconditioned by human categorial projections, but yet itself nevertheless an ideal Unconditioned that has been accomplished precisely through the act of consciousness unifying with its totality and nullifying itself. The basis of separation would swallow any real indeterminate actuality. Within this sort of idealism there would no longer be any “real” objects or particulars (meaning no real distinctions between organism and environment) because the reality of particulars would not have a reality apart from the one absolute REAL that is those objects in some modulated form (i.e., Spinoza, pantheism). Contesting absolute idealism Miller writes, “Idealism lacked an embodied order; realism lacked an apparent presence.” 25 For Miller, absolute idealism’s truths are therefore ephemeral or intangible—its ONE lacks any way to present itself aside itself. Realism, on the other hand, lacks an embodied order, for its truths lack any ground of coherent understanding or intelligibility, hence the resulting threat of nominalism (particulars without any coherent generality among them). The key to understanding how there can be a common nexus of perceptual world had by organisms, yet still a common enough midworld such that it be responsive to any organism, couples in reverse with the problem of how there arises without any determinate whole (i.e., “environment”) particulars (i.e., organisms) at all; that is, how can there be creatures that have identities of their own in a meaningful sense, not just their environment. Realism and idealism must be unified if there are to be both poles in any meaningful distinction. Miller’s answer to this problem is to identify the locus of any particular’s individuality, its uniqueness, its formal difference, found in “the acts” of that particular. This is to say that individuation occurs precisely when a creature’s agency, its acts, become reflective enough to different itself from its environment enough so that its own interests and satisfactions may become properly that act’s own. And so, agency is existential but it is also always reflective to the degree that such an agency realizes its own interests and satisfactions. And, as we have seen above, being reflective entails a specific degree of intelligibility, thus Miller’s naturalistic idealism. The degree to which nature’s pure production or act, the agency found within it, is reciprocally received and made activity is the extent to which a particular individual may be said to be distinct from its environment. Note well, however, that this distinction is never total in any more sense than a unifying phenomenon of

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action is total. The German idealist F. W. J. Schelling, in his First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799), for example, makes the same point that Miller does when he writes, “Individual products have been posited in Nature, but Nature implies a universal organism.—Nature’s struggle against everything individual.” 26 Yet the extent to which something can be said to be an individual requires “the deduction of the necessary reciprocity of receptivity and activity in everything organic.” 27 The extent to which the organic shows through its own interior compulsion preferences and subjects itself to external effects (agency, will, desire, longing for satisfaction) is the extent to which there is a degree of unique individuality to that organism. As Hans Jonas puts it: “The ontological individual, its very existence at any moment, its duration and its identity in duration is, then, essentially its own function, its own concern, its own continuous achievement. . . . In a word . . . needful freedom.” 28 Thus, it seems that creatures seem to relate to the satisfaction of goals within an environment first and foremost in order to achieve identity in line with their respective environments. The fact that this occurs is a generic trait of the midworld. PHILOSOPHICAL ECOLOGY AND MILLER’S RELEVANCE FOR CONTEMPORARY ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS Ecology is the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings. Philosophical ecology extends the analysis of these relations to creatures and their surroundings to a much broader scope of inquiry: perhaps metaphysically agents (creatures) relating to and within being qua being. In the words of Hans Jonas, as discussed in the context of this chapter, we are dealing with the “‘existential’ interpretation of biological facts.” 29 Using Miller’s concept of midworld we may say that there is a primal relation before any self and world that mediates all others, even within the transparency of selves within selves, agencies within agencies (think of the organs within your own body as agents, as individuals working to fulfill specific functions or goals, and then think of the cells within those organs working to fulfill the specific function of maintaining the form of that bodily organ, and so on). So, even though to be is to be related, and even though identity is fluid, there still does seem to be a primal identity (a primal “nonidentity,” so to speak, for it is no thing proper) whose value is to enable the goodness of a reality whose unity is not of me despite its being entangled with me. Axiologically speaking, the midworld, then, is that common immanent plane of goal-satisfaction (say, given our example, of the human body, the organs within it, or the cells making organs); it is the common horizon within

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which axiological goodness is achieved, satisfaction or importance, realized, as it is a univocal fact among the crossing trajectories and identities of agencies taking on their identities within a common nexus of environment. Given the very fact of goal-satisfaction, of agents finding importance in the realization of their goals, whether simple survival or sophisticated ambitions, we may say that an agent’s possession of relations is each as important as the next. This axiological relation is part of being itself; it is a feature of being, as it were. This, then, is to say that the midworld levels the ontological playing field, so to speak, even when it comes to satisfying goals, as the midworld is the precondition of value for valuing. Perhaps an instructive lesson learned from studying Miller’s notion of the midworld is that, in terms of perceptual worlds, we must see that relations on the level of the cat, the cow, or the rat, the plant, and the insect, and the environment, for example, are not only just as real as but are also just as important as any human being’s relation to its world and environment, because there is a facticity held in common among them. We must not take for granted that the non-human animals or other creatures, too, are cosmic loci, agents that are embodying local control, and mediating and revising the environment. In short, they too affect environment and are affected by it. This not only serves a purpose within the larger ecosystem, but the broader network of agencies that we call “environment” evidences its own purpose by enabling any organism to pursue their own purposes, as you and I do, but also as any other organism does. Therefore, I think Miller’s notion of midworld can add something to philosophical ecology and our understanding of environmental concerns in this one crucial respect: one gains a better appreciation for how other agents interact with their own environments, and how those smaller or larger environments affect other larger or smaller environments. Axiologically, value is one—as the midworld is the common horizon of value—even though the perspectives upon the satisfaction of goals are many. NOTES 1. Robert S. Corrington, “Finite Idealism: The Midworld and Its History,” in The Philosophy of John William Miller, ed. Joseph P. Fell, Bucknell Review, Vol. 34, no. 1 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1990). 2. This view of nature, which is shared by Corrington in his ecstatic naturalism, originates with the naturalism of Justus Buchler as a definition of “natural complexes.” See Justus Buchler’s Metaphysics of Natural Complexes: Second, Expanded Edition, ed. Kathleen Wallace, Armen Marsoobian, and Robert S. Corrington (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), 1. 3. John William Miller, The Midworld of Symbols and Functioning Objects (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982), 7. (Emphasis mine) 4. Ibid., 13. 5. Ibid.

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6. John William Miller, “The Ahistoric and the Historic,” in The Task of Criticism: Essays on Philosophy, History, and Community, ed. Joseph P. Fell, Vincent Colapietro, and Michael J. McGandy (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 185. 7. Editor’s introduction to John William Miller’s “The Midworld,” in The Task of Criticism: Essays on Philosophy, History, and Community, ed. Joseph P. Fell, Vincent Colapietro, and Michael J. McGandy (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 203. 8. Ibid., 204. 9. “Wild being” (l’être sauvage) is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s term for Schelling’s “barbaric principle” or “barbarian principle” (barbarische Prinzip). See, for example, Jason M. Wirth and Patrick Burke, eds., The Barbarian Principle: Merleau-Ponty, Schelling, and the Question of Nature (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013). 10. Editor’s introduction to Miller’s “The Midworld,” 203. 11. Joseph P. Fell, Vincent Colapietro, and Michael J. McGandy, The Task of Criticism: Essays on Philosophy, History, and Community (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 24. 12. John William Miller, In Defense of the Psychological (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1983), 100. 13. Miller, Midworld of Symbols, 33. 14. Ibid., 75. 15. John William Miller, The Definition of the Thing with Some Notes on Language (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1983), 61-62. 16. Miller, Midworld of Symbols, 34. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 12, 40-43. Miller uses this example several times throughout the text. 20. F. W. J. Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith R. Peterson (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2012), 27, n. 2. 21. See Jakob von Uexküll, “A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men,” (1934) in Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, ed. and trans. Claire H. Schiller (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1957), 5-80. 22. For more on this point with respect to the philosophy of ecstatic naturalism, see Leon Niemoczynski, “Ecology Re-naturalized,” in A Philosophy of Sacred Nature: Prospects for Ecstatic Naturalism, ed. Leon Niemoczynski and Nam T. Nguyen (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 113-27. 23. Miller, Midworld of Symbols, 36. 24. Robert S. Corrington, “Introduction to John William Miller’s ‘For Idealism,’” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Vol. 1, no. 4 (1987): 258. 25. Miller, Midworld of Symbols, 43. 26. Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, 6. 27. Ibid., 7. 28. Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 80. 29. Ibid., xxiii.

Chapter Seven

Landscapes of the Unconscious and the Longings of Nature Elaine Padilla

Trees, as symbols of our longings for mutually beneficial forms of interconnectivity, arise out of the depths of the unconscious. 1 A tree like that of Myrna Báez’s El Mangle (below), which is depicted in water, can express nature’s longing for what Carl Jung likens to a mystical harmony potentially

Figure 7.1. El Mangle by Myrna Báez (1977, Museo de Arte de Ponce)

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attained through creative processes similar to that of human consciousness entering a mother’s womb and arising to conscious awareness. 2 My emphasis in this chapter is on the depths that Robert S. Corrington (primarily in Nature’s Sublime) compares to a dark matrix that I perceive the painting represents. 3 To me, the opacity of this archetypal tree image, of which entwined root systems are engulfed by oceanic waters, is symbolic of the eternal longings of nature arising through the human unconscious. The tree’s grounding opacity intertwines selves with the dark bodies that have suffered the wounds of the colonial impulse, and its potencies or energies can provoke bloodied seeds of hope to activate one’s inmost creative activities. A piece of art beckons beauty within selves and for selves to radiate the beauty of interconnectedness; it becomes an artwork-in-the-making of relationality, holding together co-artisans of themselves in union with others, and within communities where the whole can flourish. The maternal can resemble creative processes of nature that churn underneath surfaces seemingly at rest, where contrasting energies are conducive for human awakenings. This aesthetic state of disruption awakens the hoping self to the self that has suffered the wounds of oppression, as found in the principles of “poetics of relation” elaborated by Afro-Caribbean philosopher Edouard Glissant. 4 This chapter will highlight what can be inferred as an agitated unconscious arising from the Caribbean depths in order to reconsider how an ancient bodily wisdom infused by the enslaved of the colonial era, with the effects still felt today, is resurrected for the purposes of hope to overcome past wounds and to enact fuller expressions of relationality. If one perceives in an artwork such as El Mangle nature’s beckoning to human consciousness to enter into the depths of nature in ways where relational bonds can become expansive and non-tribal, this piece of art can serve as an example of how, for Corrington, artwork can be a cipher of the radiating and ancient wisdom of the not-yet-being in nature. As any tribal bonds, including those of African ancestry, are liberated from their colonial bondage, the repressed relational elements in the unconscious suffer the loss of horizons once viewed as the world. Interconnectivity navigates through a grounding opacity with the potential for de-essentializing selves, as described by the aesthetic thought of another Caribbean philosopher, Francisco José Ramos. Depths that extend via the root systems of El Mangle become navigational linkages for selves to become aware of their migration, wide interconnections, and impermanence. Dark bodies, dark souls, African ancestry, anybody, and even coloniality can undergo processes of not-yet-being, encounter a grounding opacity, and navigate through passageways of contrasting interconnectivities, so as not to repeat violent histories. Landscapes like Báez’s El Mangle, pulsating the eternal longings of nature through its somber colors, can resemble wombs of hopeful creative activity for selves to become artists who, once awakened to the unconscious

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of nature, can take on the task of becoming a work of art. Being aware of a moment’s presence ever so transient yet contrasting starkly enough with colonial realities can leave a memorable ancestral footprint. A hope suffused with its stubborn desire for non-tribal and expansive interconnectivities, for which one’s deep abysses long, can stir selves toward an aesthetic praxis. This distantly near and fragile trace, entangled in the deepening and widening roots, suffers the wound of uncertainties that pose an inquiry on socialities—this, to me, is an initial step toward what Jung calls a “mystical harmony” that leads to breaths of flourishing in all that there is. In this chapter, I’ll provisionally delineate this flourishing interconnectivity by hinting at how art can serve to create better life conditions based on the aesthetic principles of the above-mentioned Caribbean thinkers and Robert Corrington. DARK TREE LONGINGS Trees as symbols of a collective unconsciousness can be images that signify both feelings of alienation ailing societies and individuals, and various expressions of longing for and paths toward flourishing harmonies and mutually beneficial co-existence. According to Jung, while tendencies and desires smothered by social conditioning can be buried in the unconscious, there also lay subjacent energies, value intensities, or life instincts that are symbolized by primordial images such as a tree. These, which he calls archetypes, have yet to reach “the threshold of consciousness” and are in a continuous state of “creative activity.” 5 Furthermore, origins as past “lives” yet to be discovered in the root systems are embedded in the symbolic material of the tree. Yet, more than resembling a search for personal archives or lineage, something like an archetypal tree can reveal a tendency that sets itself apart from the personal unconscious and arrives at its most “impersonal” components even as its categories are inherited. Especially when contemplating on trees with visibly entangled root systems like El Mangle, the archival material latent in the tree can become the content of consciousness arising from multiple origins. For instance, archetypes that give rise to tree images, for Jung, “constitute a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us,” 6 because these tree symbols have been nurtured by a global stock from the East and West, South and North. Furthermore, as contents of the collective unconscious, archetypes are similar to Plato’s eidos, 7 such that “treeness” is archaic, primordial, eternal, as well as not fully graspable. As the archetypal tree unfolds from its “embryonic germ-plasm” state of entangled relations, an original way of conceptualizing oneself can result. The tree—an archetype image of oneself beyond one’s own horizons, as one whose origins are entangled with those of others, and whose roots are also

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grounded in the eternal—can awaken the imagination toward creative acts aimed at the flourishing of the self in relation to itself and others alike. 8 Nonetheless, questions can arise with regard to a colonizing uniformity or sameness when wrestling with issues of social marginality. What kind of aesthetic pathway would there be in such instances when a priori translations of an “impersonal” imaginary have already been employed as a tool for debilitating the creative components of some segments of society, and so repressing their impulses and potential for flourishing, in particular for those of African descent? A partial response to how an aesthetic pathway can activate creativity in ways that further liberate meaning from colonizing imageries comes from Corrington, who would ground the embryonic content of the tree in the dark substratum of the womb of nature or the dark matrix. Whereas for Jung, the process of delving into the unconscious resembles re-entering the maternal womb, in Corrington’s model, an archetypal image like the trees of El Mangle would arise from an intricate interaction between the human unconscious and the unconscious of nature, in which ancient wisdom is infinitely infolding. A longing for flourishing forms of life cannot be exhausted in this interaction since “sacred folds” in nature are “intensified semiotic fields that fold in on themselves over and again increasing in depth and power of meaning with each infolding.” 9 So a creative advance would be an outgrowth comparable to a fetal development of the aesthetic processes of nature naturing capable of undergoing multiple rebirths. Drawing from Schopenhauer, Corrington describes nature naturing as a “unified momentum ‘underneath’ the phenomenal world that we experience through the senses,” yet it has no form and no telos, and “plays no favorites in nature.” 10 Similar to how Jung abstracts the archetypes from the images that come to represent them, Corrington’s understanding of the unconscious of nature challenges sign-meanings segmented by present global imaginaries, and so the way that longings can cross temporalities and spaces. In other words, just as Jung separates out global archetypes from the individual images that represent them, 11 the global sign-meanings within Corrington’s unconscious of nature challenge the local signifiers that are isolated from the whole. Essentially, though, Corrington progresses several steps deeper into the collective unconscious than Jung when darkening the enlivening processes of creative activity of the unconscious as it pertains to the infinite inter-relationality of nature. What for Jung is “suprapersonal,” in the sense of an ancestral archaic stock, is progressed by Corrington into the deepening of the unconscious through the pathways of the dead as the seedbed of an infinite relational soil. As if buried in the depths of nature, by adopting a Hindu-like stance, selves are reborn through the unconscious. Similar to sign-meanings arising from quasi-reincarnating rebirths, one creates as if resurrecting the longings of those who have passed on. Unconscious processes of time and

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eternity, space and place, or of past lives and places are woven together with the yet to be defined in terms of communal bonds—for in nature lie subjacent interrelated selves. In this regard, an aesthetic process that entails contemplating on a painting, with a tree’s entwined root systems that ground a collective unconscious through the sand and into the watery depths of nature, is opaque due to its vast past interconnectivities. The long-past relations that have endured as desirable traits (and not as a result of an essence)—individual as well as generic traits, attitudes, and experiences—become part of the substrate of nature’s ancient wisdom. This ancient wisdom can arise as the stubborn longings of nature pulsating through the lungs of trees, continuously nourished by those who once dreamed of flourishing worlds. As I see it, the human unconscious, upon contemplating on multiply entangled roots like those of El Mangle, can unearth hope for the not-yet-being as an excess of “flourishing” (for the whole) already embedded in nature’s energies. Such energies are useful for an upsurge of regenerative impulses toward mutually beneficial relations. As for Corrington, the process of the unconscious of nature, in pouring “itself into the human collective unconscious and its archetypes,” 12 regenerates a surplus charge that lifts up the self “above the power of its regnant sign series and hold open free for creative and novel semiosis.” 13 The symbolic regains new meaning from nature’s vast stock of signs and significations, which to me incorporates the sedimented longings beyond selves that have found no rest. Meaning, embedded in the depths of nature are the energies—desires, the will, the impulse—to overcome constricting and repressive relationalities perceived as permanently conditioning the imagination through, for example, dominant images. This would be another way of describing the Jungian process whereby contents aiding consciousness can widen horizons for the development of self-uniqueness and for assimilation into “a plan of life” that to me resembles the way in which archetypes can play a role in the creative activity. 14 With regard to an artwork, the natural matrix or maternal unconscious can act as passage into consciousness by exposing the self to the powers and potencies of a relational ideal that, for Corrington, would be embedded in the work of art. This ideal holds the potential for rotating the human unconscious “toward the light of the not yet, toward an open and expanding future that beckons it onward toward a vision of wholeness that can’t be replicated by anything that is a mere object within the vast infinity of nature natured.” 15 Nature natured in art, as Corrington defines it, acts as a self-object such as “a sacred text, a history of (claimed) revelation, a powerful narrative . . . or anything that opens out the potencies of nature as appearing within key orders of the world.” 16 The emphasis is on the dynamic activity that results in the vision of representations of that which has yet to be that can turn selves toward that potential for relational flourishings.

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Subsequently, and more specific to a work of art like Báez’s painting of El Mangle, when comparing the concept of “womb” to the unconscious of nature, as in Corrington’s model, the tree as an archetypal image can act as a reservoir of meaningful relations because human consciousness enters a potential rebirthing process—one in which sacred folds fecund with potentialities and energies arise from nature with an increase of depth and power (intensity). The bonds of nature are not only vast and expansive, complex and multiple, but also unendingly potential. Each time consciousness arcs back away from its levels of consciousness into its unconscious, the human unconscious can become more fully aware of an infinite relationality embedded in the depths of nature (and not the human consciousness alone). Via the tree, human consciousness can awaken anew to its “connection with universal powers and structure that are part of shared communal energy and transindividual form” for the benefit of the various overlapping communities. 17 The opacity of the dark womb is due to its inexhaustible wealth of potencies and energies, longings for the not-yet-but-possible bonds, renewed hopes and stubborn desires for conscious and bodily expressions of an unending vast array of interconnectivities latent in nature. Thus, beyond the human self, as Corrington notes, because nature “harbors an astonishing array of communities ‘within’ it,” the commitment remains to “a strong ecological framework that affirms the intrinsic worth of non-human species.” 18 This moving away from the conscious back into the unconscious, which then arises back to consciousness, breaks free from tribal bonds in unforeseeable ways because of nature’s immeasurability that awakens selves to the significance of nature as such. With the deepening into the womb of nature that is useful in overcoming the human impulse toward employing dominant masks and exclusive personifications can also come expressions of interconnectivity with which to counter the prevalent androcentrism. The human who becomes conscious of her widespread entanglement can be an active communal member who minimizes practices that deplete resources or desecrate the land. Such relational bonds at a level of human consciousness would demand the continued assessment of relationality being turned exclusive and organized into hierarchical categories that thwart flourishing interconnectivities and that in the end perpetuate social marginalization. Nature, therefore, pulsates continuously, eternally longing for the activation of more mutually beneficial forms of relationality in the human psyche with planetary implications. Archetypal images such as trees can provoke a spark toward such mystical harmony. This burst of energy that fuels ongoing rebirths of relational bonds is a positive aspect in Jung’s model, especially when bolstered with an emphasis on nature’s unconscious and its relational quality beyond the human (as what is and what will be) in relation to the wholeness of nature implied in Corrington’s ecstatic and aesthetic naturalism.

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Nonetheless, a challenge remains when contemplating on a collective unconscious that has suffered the wounds of colonization such as those still oozing in the Caribbean. For many, being drawn into the wombic depths of nature can agitate the unconscious and resurface wounds caused by past and ongoing oppressions. A sense of flourishing ways of being in the world revive the self, yet it must first confront origins pillaged from one’s world that obscure the sight of a horizon with which to wed world and infinity. It would mean encountering the abysmal unruliness that evokes viscerally the feeling of an existence forever tainted, at least seemingly so, by the darkestmost events in history—events that even when unrepeatable are pregnant with pain and visions of a truncated telos. This too would be a needed step in the therapeutic processes of perceiving a tree like that of El Mangle, an archetypal image of the eternal longing in nature for interconnectivity. ETHNO-POETIC AGITATIONS A scrutinizing look at human histories can tell us that the actualization of Jung’s mystical harmony brushed as El Mangle in the collective consciousness might be seen when transposing the painting beyond the canvas’s frame; for not all interconnectivities have resulted in the flourishing of selves, communities, or ecologies. Much harm has been done as people groups have crossed oceans and have settled, as vampirizing economies have spread their tentacles into natural resources and annihilated entire ecosystems, and as dominant nations have created codependent bonds that threaten the wellbeing of the global population. Thus, one might ask, how would an archetypal tree soaked with the Caribbean imaginary like that of Báez’s El Mangle serve as a reminder of colonizing pasts, yet be a liberative source of a stubborn hope in the process of actualizing nature’s longings for interconnectedness? A path to flourishing forms of relationality entails wrestling with former forms of injustice, the blows of colonization, and the need to shatter ongoing shackles of oppression as the collective memory encounters the unutterable flux of past waters. As contemplated through the aesthetic eyes of Afro-Caribbean philosopher Glissant, in his poetics of relation, the Caribbean waters and their deepening root systems reveal an agitated unconscious that can result in a counter-poesis. In Jung, archetypal images can spur creative activity, yet how can one explain such instances when an inexplicable counter-movement suffuses the body’s sympathetic system, an effect in the viscera that can seem opposite to the desire for actualizing beauty? For example, when contemplating the landscape of El Mangle, one can feel as if the painting offers a horizon dimmed by the contradictions of life’s longings suffering the wounds of dominating bonds. For Glissant, this tree would depict an ancient cry prevalent among

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people groups of the African diaspora that continuously overflows the bounds of any awakening, especially when colonization caused its underground currents to churn up with an “agitation,” of which the Caribbean landscapes serve as reminders. This “agitated unconscious” 19 surfaces in the exposed sands (surfaces) enveloping the entangled root systems once the surging seas have clashed against them (depths)—these surges also continuously mutate the contours of the islands, at times violently in an instant. If any longing for the beautiful were to become manifest, it cannot be by simply putting to rest these waters by means of lulling memories, silencing the voices of history. The tree regenerates a sense of hope amid the many colonizing and violent undercurrents it suffers. This understanding of the tree would be in agreement with Corrington, for whom archetypes reflecting nature’s unconscious resemble a “vibrating reality that is a harmony of contrasts,” 20 the rich field of struggle with a regenerative quality of death and life from which beauty emerges. For Glissant in particular, in a work of art the landscape is a character depicting ceaseless disruptions to numbness or lethargy, from the inside out, and, again, from the outside in (the deaths of the ego for the rebirth of a new being). 21 But in partial agreement with Jung’s notion of an arche, an agitated unconscious is also swollen by sandy and oceanic movements that can resuscitate an ancient Caribbean longing for an ethic of intercollective becomings (what Jung would call a “mystical harmony”) that has yet to be actualized for numberless individuals of African descent, those whose dark bodies bear the marks of a slave trade. In the Caribbean, as Glissant keenly points out, undercurrents are symbolic of processes of erasure at the hands of colonialism uniquely and individually carried out by the English, French, Dutch, and Spanish. 22 What remain in place are economic dependencies, exploitations of the tourist industry, linguistic assimilations, loss of historical memory, and cultural denials or homogenization. In order for life to be tolerable in the Caribbean, its consciousness exists as a domesticated, calm surface. An unconscious repression at a personal level perpetuates itself when bedazzled by the disguise, like visions of light sparkling through the production of progress and development. The present-day Caribbean skirts around what is being perceived, and simply verifies or authenticates what is presumed to be normal in the existing co-dependent system. The result is the inner resistance and inner struggle between the onslaught of sameness and the search for intercollectivity. In light of Glissant’s descriptions of the unconscious, this inner struggle can be called the agitated unconscious of the Caribbean. For Glissant, to understand the Caribbean unconscious one must listen to the silences of its history characterized by numberless ruptures such as “the brutal dislocation” of the slave trade. 23 Deep within lay sedimented the longings for returning to “the point of entanglement” from which the Afro-populations have been “forcefully turned away.” 24 These he identifies not with a

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nostalgia for a singular origin as much as with a form of neurosis that foregrounds a primordial relation. The depths of Caribbean histories are characterized by both, an abyss of neurosis or sense of “relocation (in the new land) as a repressive phase,” and sense of a continuum, because the subterranean convergence of this neurotic abyss is “primarily the site of multiple converging paths.” 25 The Caribbean unconscious can resemble its landscapes tracing the underside of all its history because its roots “extend in all directions in our world through its network of branches” forming cross-cultural relationships; 26 of “the agitation of its beaches, forgetful of all who climbed its coconut trees” and for being the “ultimate frontier, visible evidence of our past wonderings and our present distress”; 27 and because its sea “explodes the scattered lands into an arc,” enrooting and diffracting, harmonizing in errantry, opening all elements to the unforeseeable. 28 In particular, the Caribbean unconscious becomes agitated at each stitch of interwoven past with a potential future, whereby the self undergoes counter-poesis. The dark soul of nature gravitationally spirals the Caribbean downward and into the depths of that which is opaque because it has been denied and erased, while simultaneously establishing its nonbeing as potentiality, as the yet to exist. Harmonies of contrasts ensue when spiraling down. As if immersing into the deep longing waters through the multiple roots of El Mangle, the depths of the self darken the line of descent with each twist and turn of linear histories, as multiple zones of contact recombine. El Mangle displays a dim horizon due to the counter-movements of nature’s oceanic depths. For Glissant, by undergoing a violent descent that appears to offer no path to recovery, the stone of time does not “stretch into our past” and calmly carry us into the future, but rather implodes “in us in clumps, transported in fields of oblivion where we must, with difficulty and pain, put it all back together if we wish to make contact with ourselves and express ourselves.” 29 Being drawn into the archetypal womb of Báez’s El Mangle results in counter-poesis because delving into an infinite hopefulness can be swollen by an ancestral blood violently being robbed of a present that runs through its entangling root systems. An ancestral arche agitates the unconscious, for the breathlessness of the Maroon longs within the root systems of El Mangle— dying, fleeing, and when alive building their dwellings without rooftops. Since it is a bodily hopefulness, the mangrove (conglomeration of Caribbean manglares) would then be no dreamland to settle in, but what Glissant would describe as a “knotted mass of somber greens” (swamp-like) where the Maroons once ago found death as much as an open-air refuge. 30 Its purplish depths are thus a submarine unity of decomposed remains of enslaved Africans—the shackled, weighed down, pursued, forced to hide entangle histories at the deepest levels of the unconscious with their “seeds of an invisible presence.” 31

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With a similar Hindu flavor as found in Corrington’s thought, but with a unique tragic tone, harmonies of contrasts erupt from within counter-poetically for regeneration of selves and more greatly for global ecologies. Histories reincarnate through the agitated unconscious, desperately pressing against the membranes of the bowels of the ego, seeking to birth novel frameworks and dynamics, hoping afresh, claiming anew, painstakingly propelling the self to move past mere survival, so as to build realities with the architectonics of the cosmos, and, when stepping into the unknown wilderness, to grow soiled wings that free ecologies from a victimizing past. While the collective unconscious might seem to resemble a land of neurotic ghosts, the emphasis here is on Caribbean landscapes that reflect processes of an unconscious poesis and counter-poesis that moves from an unrecognizable space that stems from a space that is an anti-space that for Glissant is “limited to the point of gnawing away at one’s being, but diverse enough to multiply it into infinity.” 32 By means of lament, this longing to enact liberation can result in an irreducible interweaving of ancestral voices, including those of non-humans. Entangled histories spread horizontally and deepen in the subterranean convergences of cultures and identities, mobilities among peoples and the non-human, communicating multiple origins, hopes, and potential becomings. Hence, entrance into the unconscious of nature radiating through El Mangle can turn subversive its agitation on account of the resistance to violence that the depths of nature have also buried. The fragile landscapes of the Caribbean weave together strange and denied beliefs, forbidden desires, and contrived imaginations with the syncopated rhythms of nature that, though threatened, survive as deferred and stubborn dreams of the Caribbean sedimented in the dense and opaque unconscious (Antillanitè). The “submarine roots” of a “cross-cultural relationship” provide passageway into subversive densities of irreducibility of the self and of the other, 33 what Glissant calls “ethno-poetics” or non-homogenizing and non-homogeneous ways of being future humans. Hence, the tragic seeds of contaminated survival that the slave trade carried are likewise made manifest through a hidden awareness of the stubborn unreason of the Caribbean unconscious (reincarnating the slave) with its capacity for metamorphoses. 34 TRACES OF EXCESS A potential for counter-poesis lies in the opacity of the eternal longings of nature churning within the sedimented wounds of violent histories that, at present, continue to suffuse a stubborn desire through the seemingly truncated hopes for flourishing interconnectivities. The point at which the unconscious submerges into the dim waters can result in flourishing metamor-

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phoses when the Caribbean consciousness frees itself from its emotional and mental shackles. When contemplating on a painting like El Mangle, for instance, an initial step already discussed in relation to Glissant would be to enroot oneself in the dark sands bloodied with the ancestral vitality and polluted by neo-colonial trade systems that remain in place in the Caribbean. For Afro-Caribbean philosophers, these waters, perceived as having a magnetic pole that runs through the former slave trade route, cannot be skipped. Nonetheless, the unconscious is drawn deeper. Upon immersion in the darkened matrix that grounds it, the unconscious passes through a site-event of unknowing. This is conducive for prolonged awareness of self-irreducibility that can result in metamorphoses, and through ethno-poesis, a further process of de-essentialization. In Jungian analysis, such an opaque site-event draws from the archetype of the “shadow.” Jung describes it as a “tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well.” 35 The opacity of the oceanic waters of El Mangle can be compared to the “dark psyche” acting as a deep mirror of the self. To darkly face oneself upon entering this opaque space-moment resembles what for Caribbean philosophers, such as Francisco José Ramos, involves a process of emptying that sheds off the layers of an “essential,” assimilated, domesticated, or “prepackaged” way of being human. This Jungian shadow can be for Corrington symbolic of the sublime in nature, which, although referred to with adjectives such as “clearing,” is not devoid of opacity. Earthquakes caused by encounters with the sublime compare to an experience of being shipwrecked that results in the unconscious spiraling “down a black hole” where the world “looms large and threatening.” 36 In an encounter with the sublime or opaque elements of the regenerative poesis, a world can seem infinitely expansive. In this encounter with the sublime boundaries are washed away, and a world’s limiting horizon loses its status as the world. This can be an aesthetic moment’s event where painting, for instance, extends far beyond the frame of its canvas. When one realizes that a horizon is not the same as “world,” one can experience a sense of vertigo, fear at the loss of world-meaning. But nature does not abandon itself, and so its impulses are toward awakening to an array of other horizons that selves must come to grasp. Without the many horizons coming to their aid, selves can fall into an abyss of meaninglessness. 37 More positively stated, selves in getting hold of the potential for becoming anew, by perceiving an expanded world-horizon, can gain a sense of newness despite the loss. Furthermore, the opacity of selves entering the shadows of an expanding world, seemingly without bounds, is instrumental in a liberative self-awareness as it de-clutters the space for visions of the not-yet-but-possible upsurging beauty from within nature. In a more Buddhist tone than found in Corrington, like that of Ramos, 38 the darkestmost purple potentialities and ener-

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gies brushed over the twisted veins of El Mangle momentarily awaken the ego to its non-being anywhere (non-subordination to any form of being, including non-being) by means of an overflow of vacuity or excess of emptiness of being (desbordamiento of sunyata). 39 Within that darkened rottenness, all things appear as they are, and as that which they are not. And so the “I am,” in being “non-being” (as potentiality or energy) with that opaque ground that is likewise related to everything, as if in union with El Mangle’s root system, experiences its capacity for nonbeing (one’s own death and rebirth)—not only its own, but the intercollective nonbeingness of the universe. Rather than being in shackles, might what is painted in El Mangle’s root systems be perceived as another way of being ligamented? Might we bring to image anew an already availed mystical harmony and interconnectivity within nature, oneself, and others including the non-human and the cosmic? Being in mystical harmony or in union with the multiple root systems, as portrayed in the archetypal El Mangle, can be described as a navigation or passage that free-flowingly links selves. Selves navigate through the waterways and the root systems created by the mangroves interconnecting one element with another via a dynamic flow. The mystical harmony of Jung, in becoming migratory, can free selves from the multitudinous harmful entwinements. For instance, Ramos would argue that by freeing El Mangle from the obligation to name itself, the aesthetic thought (that he speaks of) can navigate through an opaque passageway through which it can partake of infinity without censorship. The ego becomes vacuously full, meaning it indeterminately instantiates its unconscious as free from preconceived notions of being and non-being (like that of a dominant ancestry). In freeing itself from what is imposed by society on selves, it can transverse from the inside out (or migrate in and out of the self) and interrelatedly with the whole of the universe in concrete ways moment by moment. In the aesthetic thought of Ramos, the ego, awakened to its own impermanence, deepens by likewise giving itself through the root systems horizontally, rather than by floating above the world as if ultimately transcendent. In union with the mangroves, the ego passes over or migrates. In delivering itself to this mode of momentary existence, being in via can travel as yetbeing simultaneously with being (that which is yet to be in what appears to be)—the shipwreck of everything that is an essential being. Traversing as that opaque no-thing that is subjacent to impermanence, that nothing and no one can pre-determine, it can gain meaning from that which gives itself. It receives at each precise moment of givenness the totality of existence as the totality of pluriverses within. 40 And without becoming subject to any form of identification or personification, it can catch a glimpse of being giftedness and generosity, thankfulness and vulnerability, and as widespread interconnectivity anew time and again.

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Lastly, if transposing the potentially regenerative processes of El Mangle into what Corrington views as the radically new potencies of nature bursting through human consciousness, non-tribal content deepened in nature’s womb can arise in human consciousness. As with flashes of the “not-yet conscious within the potencies of nature,” 41 non-tribal powers can radiate through the watery depths of nature depicted in El Mangle. In perceiving the worldhorizon from a new vantage point, the artist comes to represent on the canvas the yet to become relationship that is churning in nature. In Jungian language, this would be the point at which the painting shines forth beauty in the making from its contact with the eternal realm of the archetypes—a beauty which for Corrington, as already stated, would be the sublime in nature. For the one contemplating on the artwork, a sharpened awareness of the beautiful can result via an opening at a conscious level to the non-tribal content embedded in the innumerable natural complexes. The human, as one complex among them, deepens into nature’s clearing to encounter that source of harmony of contrasts which is larger than human—an energy or potency that pulsates like a “microburst of pure expanding energy” and splits open stale and cemented meanings of being human to clear the path for novel ways of being one self (or “who one is”) within community. 42 For Corrington, through such pulsations of energy one can be filled with a sense of internal unity even when amid “swirls” of conscious existence. By reaching down into the unconscious, one befriends infinite depths, out of which to radiate beauty and become a work of art. This “friendship” with opacity, though an uncomfortable one since it can be experienced as a horizon being swept from under one’s feet, is needed for cultivating beauty in healthy relations with others in communities. 43 The notyet-being clears the path for communal forms of awareness—awareness of oneself and others and of mutual awareness—and so to a complex sense of community that welcomes contrasts and impermanence. The finite and adaptable content—the vast array of combinations of colors, brush techniques, schools of art—of the “always-opening potency of the not-yet-being” 44 can be forged democratically as an antidote to monochromatic utopias that come to light when one is awakened to injustices and oppressions, and one’s tendency toward homogenization and domination. The sacred power of energy can be distributed throughout the individuals in a community, as with multiple tones and shapes on a canvas, and can serve to create a plan for society that adapts through time to the various social and/or natural environments. 45 That which is at the heart of the consciousness of nature can be made manifest in the democratic processes of the human communities.

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BECOMING ART To conclude, an archetypal image like a tree depicted in a painting can bolster our aesthetic processes. In depicting the deepest longings in nature and in us for interconnectedness, it can awaken us to our deepest desires for becoming our most flourishing forms of relationality. These longings lie subjacent in our unconscious enrooted in the depths of the womb of nature, with a ground that is infinitely relational (like a continuum). In this regard, works of art like Myrna Báez’s El Mangle can aid in countering the effects of coloniality in the human psyche and societies, in particular for people of African ancestry. More widely put, as an aesthetic process, drawing meaning from the symbolic can move selves toward meaningfulness in relationships across multiple borders, and activate the inner creativity needed for selves to radiate from within their beauty—becoming works of art that expand selves beyond perceived world-horizons, and away from mere social conditioning, passivity, and personal inertia (and possible alienation). As described in this chapter, such aesthetic processes mean deepening oneself into the dark womb of nature, where relationality is infinite and a grounding opacity interconnects past and present selves with not-yet-being a work of art. These processes can aid a potential break in cycles of violence. The interwoven relational, as depicted in the root systems of El Mangle, counter-poetically serves as the opaque ground for experiencing an agitation in the unconscious due to a harmony of contrasts caused by encountering the “other-than” the selves who remains alive in the depths of the twisted roots of the mangroves. Glissant describes it as the “agitated existence” characteristic of the Caribbean islanders whose ancestors had obstinately endured the slave trade systems, 46 yet in a way similar to Corrington’s understanding of aesthetics that favors the non-tribal. Linking one with the other, hoping with one another, being interwoven, on the one hand, counters systems of balkanization in the Caribbean that perpetuate oppression, and, on the other, prevents wounds and feelings of alienation from turning the oppressed into an oppressor. In this manner, aesthetic processes involving the unconscious can be grasped anew. For while the fragile reality of the Caribbean will not cease to disturb a dormant consciousness, the inner workings of fragmentation by their different “social, political, and economic regimes,” in the words of Glissant, can be the landscape out of which an artist can create the possibility for “bonds of unity in the future.” 47 The artist who seeks to activate the collective life in reality can shift it to consciousness, presenting the possibility of a collective effervescence to which the artist might aspire. To tap into the fragility of the Caribbean landscape of diverse cultures, languages, ideas, races, political and religious systems can result in listening to how these root

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systems communicate among continents and through time interconnecting multitudinous ancestries. Consequently, this is how El Mangle can make life, 48 as Corrington would describe it. A form of loss to a stagnant and essential world would occur, without a total loss of the literal world of water and waves, roots and sand, air and sky as such. As opacity clears the path for the novel, consciousness becomes aware of the elasticity of horizons being expanded by worlds that spread in all directions and intertwine numberless elements. The opening can result in an “emancipatory reenactment . . . whereby the not yet opens out a hidden potency from the past and brings it forward into the present moment of creativity.” 49 When an ancient wisdom grounded in the Caribbean waters can become non-tribal, the rays of our longings for liberation can be embodied anew time and again—selves become icons of art-in-the-making. In this aesthetic process of emancipation, for Ramos, nature’s grounding opacity navigationally interconnects in time at the speed of an instant. What is left with each appearing is only a trace of the glory of El Mangle that dissolves all appearances. Since the phantasmagorical presence is a mere reminder of a far greater desire that cannot exterminate longing—infinitude—justice as a concept will thus come in many faces, movements, and will need to continue to create new pathways, grow new root systems, and become interconnected anew. With each life experience accompanied by feelings of dissatisfaction, desperation to capture that which appears can result in manifesting negative and positive forms of identification with desire; it can also result in selfish substantiations such as greed, oppression, and violence. In agreement with Ramos, with each moment of satisfactions accompanied by dissatisfactions, the point would be to celebrate with some form of melancholic enjoyment the beauty that is fanned by an unlimited pleasure. With an awareness of that which is always beyond any ego, there might also come the positive suffering of the ecstatic limit. We can ache with a Bacchic delirium each time that our unconscious longings for flourishing interconnectivities come to rest on some totality of the pluriverse being made partly manifest in art as in the hope-filled depths of El Mangle. NOTES 1. I want to thank The Louisville Institute for a year-long research grant that made this study possible, and my colleague and friend A.W. Barber, Professor of Asian Studies, University of Calgary in Canada, for the many conversations on Buddhism that have informed some of the insights contained in this chapter. 2. See, for instance, Carl G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido: A Contribution to the History of the Evolution of Thought, trans. Beatrice M. Hinkle (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd., 1946), esp. 136-39.

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3. Robert S. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime: An Essay in Aesthetic Naturalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013). 4. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1989). See also Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 5. See Morris Philipson, Outline of a Jungian Aesthetics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963), 47-48; quoted from Carl G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 278. 6. Carl G. Jung, The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 300. 7. Ibid., 301. 8. Philipson, Outline of a Jungian Aesthetics, 53; see Jung, Two Essays, 108. 9. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 4. 10. Ibid., 38. 11. For Jung, “The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear.” Basic Writings, 301. 12. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 67. 13. Ibid., 86. 14. See, for example, Jung, Basic Writings, 107-8, 117, and 143-45; and his Two Essays, 278, quoted in Philipson, Outline of a Jungian Aesthetics, 48. 15. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 65. 16. Ibid., 61-62. 17. Ibid., 75. 18. Ibid., 87. 19. This term “agitated unconscious” is employed by J. Michael Dash when describing Glissant’s poetics of the unconscious in the introduction to Glissant’s book Caribbean Discourse (xxi). To this term, I will add “of the Caribbean” because, to me, Glissant, while speaking mostly as a Martinique author, seeks to shed light on the Caribbean “agitated existence” in general (see, for example, Caribbean Discourse, 9). 20. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 161. 21. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 146. 22. Ibid., 5. 23. Ibid., 61. 24. Ibid., 26. 25. Ibid., 65-67. 26. Ibid., 67. 27. Ibid., 11. 28. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 33. 29. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 106. 30. Ibid., 10. 31. Ibid., 67. 32. Ibid., 159. 33. Ibid., 67. 34. Ibid., 3. 35. Jung, Basic Writings, 317. 36. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 170. 37. Ibid., 169. 38. Following the aesthetics of thought of Francisco José Ramos, I weave in the three basic principles of Buddhism into my arguments: dissatisfaction (dukkha), impermanence (anicca), and insubstantiability or lack of substance (anata). See Estética del pensamiento II: La danza del laberinto: Meditación sobre el arte y la acción humana (San Juan, PR: Editorial TalCual, 2003), 347. 39. He would call this aesthetic form of awakening navigational or the naontological, which resembles forms of maritime travel that have no destination. It is defined as that by which one neither “is” nor “is not,” and does not intend “to be.” It holds no specific location in that it

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cannot be subordinated to anything that “is” and “is not” or any condition under which it can appear, because it is related to “el todo,” which in English can be said to be “the all of everything.” For him the navigational state resembles being swollen by vacuity (vacuously full) or by what he understands to be the Buddhist concept of sunyata. Ramos, Estética del pensamiento II, 27. 40. I borrow the term “pluriverse” from Ernesto Cardenal to emphasize the element of multiplicity existent in the cosmos. See Ernesto Cardenal, Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems, ed. Jonathan Cohen (New York: New Directions, 2009). 41. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 96. 42. Ibid., 122. 43. Ibid., 136. 44. Ibid., 97. 45. Ibid., 109. 46. See Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 9. 47. Ibid., 235. 48. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 178. 49. Ibid., 184.

Chapter Eight

Mystic Pluralism James, Blood, and the Experience of Ecstatic Nature Thomas Millary

From early on in his career, William James was deeply influenced by his experience of taking nitrous oxide. Commonly known as laughing gas, this drug led James to moments of spiritual ecstasy that would greatly impact his philosophical thinking throughout his life. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, he writes that the inhaler of nitrous oxide experiences “depth beyond depth of truth . . . a genuine metaphysical revelation.” 1 How is it that the great American pragmatist William James came to see laughing gas as an essential means to experience the wonders of nature? As it turns out, this enthusiasm was the result of his strong admiration for another (much less well-known) great American thinker. Benjamin Paul Blood was a poet, an inventor, a gymnast, a self-styled philosopher, a mystic, and a longtime friend and correspondent of William James. His personal eccentricity and passion for human experience made him an excellent interlocutor for James, who found in Blood an experiential counterpart to his own philosophizing of the pluralistic qualities of nature. For not only did Blood turn James on to the powerful effects of mind-altering substances, his life and writings confirmed to James that mystical pluralism is as viable a category of mysticism as mysticisms of oneness. The crucial impact Blood had upon his thinking is evident from James’s writings, ranging from his 1874 review of Blood’s pamphlet, The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy, to James’s 1910 essay, “A Pluralistic Mystic.” 2 It is the latter work that I will focus upon here, staying close to James’s essay as James does therein to Blood’s writings. Simply that it was the final article published by James, penned in the year of his death, makes this essay notable. More importantly, though, it illus121

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trates a key aspect of James and his philosophy. In its enthusiastically expressed admiration for Blood and his writings, we see the deep-seated passion James had not only for theorizing the human experience of nature but for experiencing nature’s sacredness directly. In Blood, we have an American mystic of the pluralistic forces and potencies immanent to nature. In James’s essay, we have a powerful piece of writing that may be instructive to any thinker who takes seriously the multifaceted capacity of the one nature that there is to transform human experience. 3 James begins the essay by stating that it is written selectively for readers who have an irresistible taste for the higher flights of metaphysics. To those readers, he wishes to describe the many merits of Benjamin Paul Blood, making no attempt to disguise the extent of his admiration for Blood on both philosophical and literary levels. It becomes clear early in the essay that a prominent reason for this exuberant embrace of Blood’s thought is that it provided James with the means to reconcile two essential components of his own pragmatist philosophy. James had an enduring fascination with mystical experience in all its variety as well as a strong commitment to the idea that, in the end, nature is truly pluralistic. In “Pluralistic Mystic,” James confesses his often circumspect attitude toward those who profess to be mystics. The sovereign character of mystical claims concerning firsthand experience of essential spiritual truths does not immediately mesh with the Jamesian pluralistic and pragmatic mindset. Believing that it is not possible to effectively deny a mystical experience, James saw as the proper response to such experiences to either ignore or affirm them. However, faced with most mystical claims, James found neither of those responses entirely satisfactory. In Blood, though, he found a different kind of mystical expression, one that not only could be comfortably affirmed by James but that also adds a compelling experiential dimension to the pluralist argument. James seems both surprised and pleased to report that despite the inextricably mystical quality of Blood’s philosophy, it is not dissimilar from his own. The tradition that he calls “regular mysticism,” which he views as nearly unanimously entailing a commitment to some kind of monism, a viewpoint incompatible with James’s pluralistic account of the cosmos. In contrast, Blood articulates “a novel brand of mysticism,” one that locates peak spiritual experiences not in the One but in the inexhaustible multiplicity of nature. 4 The existence of such a mysticism is a relief for James, as it demonstrates the congruency of a life centered around mystical experience with a philosophy that sees nature as boundlessly plural. Blood is able to write consistently and authentically about his seeking of such experiences and the insights he gains from them without recourse to the concept of nature as singular totality.

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Further bolstering James’s fascination with Blood’s mystical pluralism is the fact that he finds Blood to be no stranger to the mysticism of oneness. He writes that those who espouse monistic accounts of nature must view Blood “not as a simple ignoramus or Philistine, but as a renegade and relapse.” 5 That those who view reality in terms of totality and wholeness should see Blood as a defector rather than someone who has not yet seen the light is understandable given that Blood’s earlier work takes a solidly monistic point of view. James describes Blood’s Anaesthetic Revelation pamphlet as beginning with the logic of Fichtean and Hegelian dialectic but ending with “a trumpet blast of oracular mysticism.” 6 That description may also apply to the trajectory of Blood’s writings as a whole. In James’s reading, Blood long entertained viewpoints such as Hegelian dialectics or Kantian idealism until his commitment to the lived experience of nature led him to embrace a new perspective. The pluralistic James took delight even in the most monistic stage of Blood’s writings. He quotes at length passages from Blood that contain radically monistic pronouncements, such as “Thenceforth each is all, in God. . . . The One remains, the many change and pass; and every one of us is the One that remains.” 7 James has affection for such declarations, writing that they unreservedly charm his own latent monistic tendencies. “I listen to the felicitously-worded concept-music circling round itself, as on some drowsy summer noon one listens under the pines to the murmuring of leaves and insects, and with as little thought of criticism.” 8 However beautifully articulated James finds Blood’s early monism to be, it is even more crucial for him that Blood’s later mysticism is expressed as a kind of “‘left-wing’ voice of defiance” which breaks into what James heard as having “a radically pluralistic sound.” 9 What drove Blood’s transition toward this novel expression of mysticism that was so entrancing to James? His dedication to “the primordial Adamic surprise of Life,” 10 the crystalline wonder and enchantment with which he viewed nature, at first with the help of substances such as nitrous oxide and ether, but then continuing throughout his life as an American poet and mystic. His was a life driven by the ecstasy of experiencing the variety of nature’s immanent forces, unmediated by any dogmas of totality or completion. Blood came to see that no philosophical attempt to fit the cosmos into a predictable whole can contain the vibrant and excessive ways that humans experience the capacious powers of nature. “There is no complete generalization, no total point of view, no all-pervasive unity, but everywhere some residual resistance to verbalization, formulation, and discursification, some genius of reality that escapes from the pressure of the logical finger, that says ‘hands off,’ and claims its privacy, and means to be left to its own life.” 11 Blood saw that our raw interactions with the things, creatures, and assemblages encountered within nature will always challenge and complicate the

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formulas that we impose upon the world. Having previously entertained various forms of monism he now comes to his heraldic device for a pluralistically mystical view of nature—“Ever not quite!” 12 In “A Pluralistic Mystic,” James highlights that not only does Blood find pluralism and mysticism compatible, but he melds them together into a thoroughly spiritual embrace of the mysteries of nature. Indeed, Blood makes no attempt to mitigate his preference for mystery over rationality. He declares that “reason is neither the first nor the last word in this world. . . . Nature is excess; she is ever-more, without cost or explanation.” 13 Variety is affirmed over uniformity, whimsy over consistency. Blood finds the idea of a greater purpose to eternity to be neither convincing nor appealing, as “the most sublime result, if it appeared as the ultimatum, would go stale in an hour.” 14 Similar to James’s philosophy, Blood’s mysticism forgoes the twin temptations to either deny or reify the concepts of truth and reason. Finding philosophies that see truth as either absolute or as non-existent profoundly unhelpful for navigating the complexities of nature, Blood “believes in truth and reason, but only as mystically realized, as lived in experience.” 15 It is no surprise that James reveled in the writings of a mystic who advised that you cannot be beaten if you adopt the formula of pragmatic use reason while denying that reason is absolute. Such an approach allowed Blood to experience nature with both tranquility and boldness. He recognized that his claims may be saddening or disenchanting to those who wish to find a grand purpose or master plan behind the complexities of nature. However, mystical pluralism’s denial that any accounts of nature, either religious or secular, should rely on teleology and totality is for both James and Blood cause for joy rather than disappointment. Attempts to domesticate nature in order to achieve certainty lead only to despair. Viewing the world in terms of plurality and dynamic evolution rather than static certainty and completion is a deeply affirmative perspective on life. As Blood puts it, “the inevitable stales, while doubt and hope are sisters. Not unfortunately the universe is wild—game flavored as a hawk’s wing.” 16 James reads Blood’s continual yes-saying in the face of the awesome and confounding plurality of nature as similar to Nietzsche’s amor fati. Blood had written to James that in regard to the mysteries of nature “we do not know.” 17 For both the philosopher James and the mystic Blood, humans must honestly admit that we can never know all of the secrets of nature, for there will always be cosmic forces that exceed our grasp. James finds it especially important in Blood’s mystical pluralism that admittance of ultimate unknowing is not seen as a moment of defeat but of enthusiastic, honest affirmation of the human experience of nature. In Blood’s own words, when “we say we do not know, we are not to say it weakly and meekly, but with confidence and content.” 18 In this way, looking upon the untamable vastness of nature

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and saying “we do not know” becomes a moment of experientially realized spiritual truth. Mystery is the beginning and end of Blood’s mystical pluralist journey. Our philosophies may be improved, our spiritual insights deepened, but there will always remain more mysteries of nature. Mystery—what Blood calls “the hymnic word”—is essential to a spirituality that finds fulfillment in the particularities of multiplicity rather than in an ultimate oneness. 19 In such an approach, Blood and James saw a capacity for humans to experience the same spiritual healing and wisdom as is found in more traditionally conceived mysticisms. Before his mystical journey, Blood saw the world as frightening and alienating. In a fascinating life that involved laughing gas, ether, spiritual contemplation, philosophizing, and poetry, he came to embrace nature with a spirit of openness and adventure. James was so impacted by the significance of Benjamin Paul Blood, that he wrote “A Pluralistic Mystic” close to his death. James found in Blood the realization that the honesty and humility of deep pluralism can go hand in hand with a spirituality that brings about “the wonder and assurance of the soul.” 20 Mystical pluralism may provide insight for anyone who wishes to think philosophically and theologically about nature’s vibrancy and complexity, including professional philosophers like James and non-academic spiritualseekers like Blood. As we pursue naturalisms that are grounded in Darwinian science and open to the spiritual powers active in the world, it is instructive to consider the dynamic between those two men. James was undeniably a man of action; a man who loved experience. Yet throughout his career, Blood’s influence on him was an important factor that kept him tethered not merely to the idea of experiencing nature but to the raw experience itself. In Blood’s poetry, his other writings, and in their correspondence, James was constantly reminded that theories about the plurality of nature should never stray too far from embodied encounter with the forces and potencies that ecstatically enliven the world. From the mystical Blood, the philosophical James was given the insight that the primordial Adamic experience of nature is readily available to us, whether through an attitude of mystical openness or the inhalation of nitrous oxide. James’s purpose in writing “A Pluralistic Mystic” was not to affirm every aspect of Benjamin Paul Blood’s worldview. Rather, it was to call attention to a striking and authentic manifestation of spiritual experience. My purpose in discussing James’s essay on Blood is not to simplistically affirm a mysticism of multiplicity over a mysticism of the One. It is rather to suggest that Blood can expand our imaginations concerning the possibilities of both pluralism and mysticism, just as he did for James. While all notions of oneness need not be discarded, it can be recognized that Blood’s spirituality of nature’s numberless multitude has the same power and beauty often attributed to mysticism oriented toward transcendent unity.

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Robert Corrington’s ecstatic naturalism is a philosophical project that affirms James’s insight that “the universe is both One and many but in different respects.” 21 Ecstatic naturalism holds an ordinal perspective, which understands nature “to be constituted by innumerable natural complexes.” 22 Corrington follows Justus Buchler in seeing those innumerable complexes as having ontological parity, meaning that “nothing is more or less real than anything else.” 23 While ordinal metaphysics is not identical to Jamesian pluralism, Corrington sees James’s pluralism as “proto-ordinal metaphysics.” 24 Though ecstatic naturalism has room for oneness as well as manyness, it “sometimes lends its weight to the side of the many when pluralism needs to be highlighted against an overemphasis on a monolithic One.” 25 Mystical pluralism is a spiritual perspective congenial to the ecstatic naturalist goal of highlighting the sacred powers within nature’s manifold, especially as they impact selving, which is Corrington’s term for “the overall arc and trajectory of the human process, as embedded in the one nature that there is.” 26 For the selving process to proceed in a healthy way, “integration of the potencies of nature” 27 into the human experience must take place. One way this can happen is through encounter with what Corrington refers to as goding energy, which momentarily and rapidly expands consciousness through “a pulsation or microburst of energy that seems to come from a supernatural (or vagrantly natural) realm.” 28 Inhaling nitrous oxide brought about intense god-ing experiences for James, though he also studied many spiritual experiences that came about through means other than laughing gas. Within Blood’s pathway of mystical pluralism, the self is opened up to nature’s astonishing plurality of ecstatic forces. In following James and Blood along that path, it becomes possible to cultivate a mystical lifestyle while affirming the principle of ordinality. The theorizing of nature can be melded with firsthand embodied experiences. Toward the end of “A Pluralistic Mystic,” James writes that when we (those of us who have a taste for the higher flights of metaphysics) are confronted with the mystery and inexplicability of nature, we must respond not only with logic but with action, willingness, and heroism. Significant differences exist between various theories of religious naturalism, and these strengthen the relevance of mystical pluralism to the conversations between them. By its very nature, mystical pluralism is fluid and multifaceted. Whether one philosophizes under the label of ecstatic naturalism or affirms the immanent complexities of nature in a different way, the approach of Blood and James is something to be embraced. Whatever combination of God, the gods and goddesses, god-ing energy, the spirits, and other personal or impersonal forces of nature that we affirm, the call toward the transformative spiritual energies present in the world remains just as pertinent. As conversations theorizing naturalism continue to unfold and evolve, those

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involved would do well to recognize one another as fellow travelers on the journey of the human experience of nature. In an ever-increasingly interconnected world, the value of a pluralistic approach to mysticism may grow still further apparent. Human beings are not going to stop being interested in spiritual experiences anytime soon. As social pluralisms continue to deepen, it will become more commonplace for people with disparate approaches to spiritual experience to have real encounters. If humanity is to use the resources of an intertwined world to cultivate its collective wisdom, then authentic conversations across dividing lines such as spiritual identity, academic discipline, and cultural background will become progressively more vital. An approach to mysticism that seeks to take spiritual experiences on their own terms, rather than immediately reifying them through dogmatic metaphysics, may be relevant and helpful in such a context. In this globalized pluralistic world, all those who seek to continually learn and teach about the one nature that there is should keep in mind the wisdom James gleaned from his friendship with Blood. Not all people will become naturalists (ecstatic or otherwise) but every single person experiences the powers and potencies of nature. There may indeed be many equivalents to Benjamin Paul Blood in the world today, waiting to enrich and inspire philosophers who seek to continue the Jamesian project of pragmatic pluralism. At times, Blood seemed to express to James that philosophy itself is past, no longer a productive exercise. For how could philosophical ideas ever hope to contain the radically pluralistic human experience of nature? Yet in the life of and writings of James (and others like him), it is evident that philosophy has the capacity to affirm alongside Blood that nature is contingent, excessive, and mystical. Philosophy and theology need not futilely attempt to domesticate nature but can participate in the surging vibrancies and buzzing complexity of the world. In the end, Blood himself agrees that philosophy has a future if it can “pass from words, that reproduce but ancient elements, to life itself, that gives the integrally new.” 29 If it is to cultivate greater understandings of nature, philosophy must involve not only detached analysis but also firsthand encounters with nature’s numinous potencies. Mystical pluralism affirms the value of philosophy while providing it with the essential resource of direct experience of the sacred. The intellectual discernment of philosophy and the spiritual exuberance of mysticism are combined in James and Blood’s heraldic affirmation of nature’s mysterious ecstatic complexity—“Ever not quite!”

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NOTES 1. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2013), 387. 2. William James, “A Pluralistic Mystic,” in Essays in Philosophy, ed. Fredson Bowers, Frederick H. Brukhardt, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). 3. “Naturalism affirms that there is only one nature even if it obtains innumerable orders and functions in an infinite variety of ways.” Robert S. Corrington, Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 17. 4. James, “A Pluralistic Mystic,” 173. 5. Ibid., 181. 6. Ibid., 173. 7. Ibid., 180. 8. Ibid., 178. 9. Ibid., 173. 10. Ibid., 183. 11. Ibid., 189-90. 12. Ibid., 189. 13. Ibid., 181. 14. Ibid., 188. 15. Ibid., 185. 16. Ibid., 189. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 186. 20. Ibid., 185. 21. Robert S. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime: An Essay in Aesthetic Naturalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 110. 22. Ibid., 9. 23. Ibid., 13. 24. Ibid., 111. Also see Robert S. Corrington, Nature and Spirit: An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), 4-5, 97. Corrington sees James’s pluralism as “proto-ordinal metaphysics” because it is based on a too anthropomorphic position while ordinal metaphysics honors nature (perhaps as nature naturing here) as a prehuman force that establishes the orders. In Nature and Spirit he writes, “Pluralist perspectives tend to privilege human features, such as consciousness, and thus deny the utter ubiquity and preeminence 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” (5). 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 33. 27. Ibid., 47. 28. Ibid., 122. 29. James, “A Pluralistic Mystic,” 190.

Chapter Nine

Vulnerable Transcendence of Nature A Naturalistic Reading of Hybridity, Beginning, and Colliding in Chinese Creation Mythology Jea Sophia Oh

BEGINNING: CREATIO EX YIN, NATURE NATURING The Classic of Changes (I-Ching, 易經) explains yin-yang as the two vital forces of life that make up everything that exists and that determine all the formations and transformations that occur in the universe. 1 The ancient Chinese thinkers observed the world around them and realized that the natural world and the human world are intimately connected and constantly changing. Zhu Xi, the Confucian scholar in Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE), recognized Fuxi (traditionally dated to the twenty-seventh century BCE) as the first Confucian sage and the legendary world ruler who observed the patterns of the world and created the hexagrams of I-Ching in order to explain the myriad things in the universe. 2 In Chinese mythology, Fuxi was known as the original writer of I-Ching while Nüwa was known as the creator of the universe who molded human beings out of clay and breathed into their nostrils the breath of life. Fuxi and Nüwa were depicted as having snake-like tails interlocked in an Eastern Han Dynasty (206–220 CE) mural in the Wuliang Temple in Jiaxiang County, Shandong Province. Fuxi is the manifestation of yang, the masculine force of heaven, yet he is depicted as holding the set square, which is associated with earthly measurement. Nüwa is the manifestation of yin, the feminine force of Earth, and holds the compass for tracing heavenly bodies. Through the circulation of these two vital forces, new things originate from their cessation. Each figure holds the tools that govern the other, so they are intimately connected, inseparable, and eternally 129

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intertwined. Interaction between these two equally important figures, representing the productive forces of yin and yang, is what has given birth to the complex ecosystem, humans, and myriad things. Why are their legs entangled? Fuxi is the personification of yang while Nüwa is the personification of yin. Yin and yang are inseparable from each other; therefore, they are two but at the same time one—both one and two, two in one—as their interlocking snake legs show. Dao De Jing (道德經) Chapter Forty Two teaches, “The Dao begot one. One begot two. Two begot three. And three begot the ten thousand things. The ten thousand things carry yin and embrace yang. They achieve harmony by combining these forces.” 3 Thus, there is no place in the entire universe where there is no yin-yang. They permeate various spectrums and levels of being in their exchanging and transforming into each other. Darkness exists with brightness. Gaining goes with lacking, within which there is gaining. When one takes yang, there is yin inside yang; when one takes yin, yang is discovered inside of yin. When one proceeds, there is a counter energy to push her back; when one goes backward, there must be a power to resist her stepping backward. We could learn the yin-yang principle of action and reaction from nature throughout observing four seasons, night and day, Moon and Sun, women and men, death and life, etc. Paradoxically, Yang, as the heavenly lord Fuxi, holds the set square, which symbolizes earth, while Nüwa, as Yin, the earthly mother, carries the compass that signifies heaven. Are their roles switched? These seemingly opposite positions of Nüwa and Fuxi from the traditional gender roles signify two important meanings. Firstly, yin and yang are not only the containment of each other but also a part of each other. In other words, yin controls yang and vice versa. In Robert S. Corrington’s earlier writing Ecstatic Naturalism, there is a similar notion of intersubjectivity of life to yin-yang’s self-containment: Each sign system intersects with others, and each thus participants in a process of communication in which the values of any one system become available to another. . . . These sign systems enter into other selves and point to the internal features of the other. An internal life is itself a partial product of external centers of resistance that help to shock the self in process into its own meaningful and self-controlled trajectory. 4

By the same token, yang signals yin a red light or a stop sign and vice versa. They are not only resisting each other but are also a partial body of the other, as the two opposite dots of yin-yang show. When one touches its extreme level, it transcends herself and transforms into the other with a natural curve. What, then, is the distinctive role of Nüwa by holding the compass? In Chinese mythology, Nüwa (女媧) is the goddess who created the world and saved the world from destruction. She molded humans in her image from

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yellow clay by her hands and breathed into them. She grew tired and dipped a rope into the mud and swung it around. The blobs of clay fell from the rope and became common people while the handmade ones became the nobility. In this story, Nüwa is not only the creator but also the savior who saves her creation from terrible flooding and destruction. The Judeo-Christian creation story is similar to the Nüwa’s creation story: “God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7, NIV). Traditionally, both the creator and the savior for Christians are males, Father and Son. I do not claim here a feminist argument against the Western male gods. What I would like to discover from Nüwa’s creation story is creation out of yin (creatio ex yin) as yin signifies the feminine force of nature. Creatio ex yin can be understood as nature naturing. This feminine force is probably best understood as the unconscious depth of nature described by Corrington as endlessly (re)creating myriad things (萬 物, wanwu). As he writes on the first page of his recent book Deep Pantheism, “Creation is constantly happening in the dark heart of nature.” 5 The product of creation for Corrington is nature natured, the innumerable orders of the World, therefore, yang, the manifested orders in myriad things. Corrington’s dark heart (nature naturing) and the innumerable orders (nature natured) resonate with Dao De Jing Chapter One: Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations. These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gate to all mystery. 6

Nonetheless, the concept of the perennial connotes continual renewal of nature naturing, the hidden forces of life, or yin energy. The tension between nature naturing and nature natured is like the yin-yang dynamics of hiddenness and manifestation. I-Ching teaches that the Dao of heaven is defined in terms of yin and yang. Qi, the material force, circulates the universe through the flows of yin-yang. Change and transformation begin with the images of Qi and only then go on to create physical forms. 7 When it is manifested, it is yang; when it is hidden, it is yin. Yin and yang both transcend one another and are transformed into one another. However, this transcendence doesn’t refer to any transcendental locations beyond nature. Yin transcends herself as she is transformed into yang, as does yang to yin endlessly. Yin and yang are mutually folding, unfolding, and enfolding. Thus, one’s ending is the other’s beginning and vice versa. Corrington states that nature natured can be defined as a term for the sum of all orders within the world by nature naturing. Nature naturing is the power of nature which “perennially creates itself out of itself alone,” 8 while nature natured is its innumerable manifestations in the world. By

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withdrawing, nature naturing “compels [nature natured] into its own complex forms of interaction.” 9 In this sense, like yin and yang, nature naturing and nature natured are not two. They are betweenized by the self-othering of nature. Perhaps it is more true to say that there is no beginning and ending but only endless betweenizing. COLLIDING: TEUM, VULNERABILITY AND HYBRIDITY As a deep pantheist, Corrington firmly rejects panpsychism and asserts that consciousness is not planted at the beginning, but is an emergent from evolutionary processes. 10 Nonetheless, there are spirits (as the plural term) that serve as connecting agencies which link nature naturing and nature natured together in the “betweenness” spaces that envelop the selving process. 11 Corrington writes, “‘Selving’ is a gift of that dimension of God that drives toward the future and the manifestation of greater actuality and consciousness.” 12 As the selving process is found through the orders of nature, it follows that this precarious gift must itself be nurtured from a source outside of itself. Needless to say, the source of the selving process, as Corrington sees it, is not the traditional transcendent God in Western monotheisms. It is nature that “struggles to give birth to selves.” 13 Yin represents nature, which was personified by Nüwa in Chinese mythology. 14 When Nüwa created humans and animals there was the sky and the earth already without life because Pangu, another creator, cracked the cosmic egg, divided the sky and the earth, then disappeared. Nüwa loved peace and delighted in making things: humans, mammals, birds, fish, and insects. She molded figures from the yellow mud and gave them life and the ability to bear children—this is how humanity was created. However, the creation was not stable. The four corners of the sky collapsed and the earth with its nine regions split open, causing floods and thunderstorms. When the parts of the sky fell, they caused the earth to crack. Nüwa decided to mend the creation and end this catastrophe. Nüwa split her own body in numerous pieces and repaired the brokenness of the sky and the earth with her parts; some of her parts became beautiful flowers, trees, and rocks. This Chinese myth tells us that Nüwa, as the Spirit of Nature, is still ceaselessly working toward creating and repairing myriad things of her creation. 15 Let’s focus on the cracks of the sky and the earth. The creation myth says that in the beginning when the sky and the earth were ripped, Nüwa was there. In between the sky and the earth, Nüwa the yin force was there and created all the living things. When the earth was broken apart, Nüwa was there to heal it. Nüwa’s standing position seemed to be spatially between the sky and the earth, between the creation and its destruction. But the problem is

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that the sky kept on falling apart and damaging the earth which requires perennial mending (probably) forever. It is hard to say that the crack where Nüwa stood and repaired was simply a space. Crack in Korean is teum, which also means in-betweenness. Teum signifies a hybrid space of spatio-temporality or spatiality of planetarity: 16 it means a blank or a margin in terms of space as well as a chance or opportunity in terms of time. 17 I define teum as a hybrid moment, place, or relationship which contains a before and after, a here and there, a reflection of one and/or the other. Yin (Nüwa) works in teum, this chaotic space and time to give life to the lifeless earth, to repair the brokenness, and to transform her body into the creation. Indeed, she transcends herself to be the other. This is a power of nature naturing (yin) that is manifested in nature natured (yang). This is also expressed in the Classic of Change as the forces of creation and chaos: “Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos.” 18 Does betweenness invite the transcendental power or is betweenness itself the power of transformation? Corrington insightfully states the following about betweenness: Betweenness is encountered phenomenologically as a great cleft that is a holding open, a clearing away of the impediments that make it so difficult to even partially encounter nature naturing. In this sense, betweenness is not only a state in the “middle” but a power that does and is the clearing. . . . It is the ultimate enabling condition for the encountering of the archetypes and the spirits. 19

This statement is incredibly powerful! For Corrington, betweenness embraces the spatio-temporality and even transcends the thirdness of Peirce, which is roughly equivalent to nature naturing. Thus, he defines betweenness as a form of “fourthness.” He recognizes fourthness and betweenness as the same cosmological and evolutionary concept that make the evolution of the archetypes possible and even compelling. 20 This is the dark energy that Corrington discovers in between nature naturing and nature natured. “The deep valley spirit that never dies. It is woman, the primal mother, the gateway of the sky and the earth” in Dao De Jing Chapter Six. 21 It is the power of nature, therefore, yin. Nevertheless, yin is not just femininity but “fecundity.” Beyond the dichotomy of masculinity and femininity, everything is endlessly creating myriad things in the process of becoming. In this sense every entity, both at the micro and macro levels, is as “a maternal body: birthing, dying, and renewing itself.” 22 This deep hidden power exists in nature and works not only between women and men but also in and through every living and non-living aspect of nature.

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ENCOMPASSING: HANUL, GOD-ING Every night when I am lying in bed, I look at Starry Night, one of the world’s most beloved paintings by Vincent van Gogh, on the other side of the wall. Every time I look at the indigo blue sky full of luminous spinning stars, my spiritual eyes imagine similar spirals, t’ai chi (太極, the yin-yang diagram), mandala (the Indian microcosmic circle), and labyrinth (λαβύρινθος, the path in Greek mythology). In Starry Night, van Gogh placed the little church tower below the night sky, pointing like a compass needle upward toward the spinning stars. I can relate that to Nüwa’s compass on the famous wall painting of Fuxi and Nüwa in the Wuliang Temple. The yin goddess Nüwa holds a compass, a symbol of heaven. She breathed the power of life. When she became tired of molding figures by her hands, she was spinning a rope endlessly. All the drops from the rope became microcosmic entities. Finally, she scattered her body to become myriad things (萬物, wanwu) from the earth to the sky, from microcosm to macrocosm. van Gogh’s Starry Night inspires me to this startling perspective; the sky and the earth are connected with the pinnacle of the tiny church; the spinning stars connect my spirit of nature to the vast multiverse, the mysterious cosmos. The sacred realm with its spinning stars illuminates van Gogh’s vision of the sacredness of the whole encompassing multi/uni/verse. T’ai chi (太極) and the trigram are the fundamental structures of I-Ching. Actually, yin-yang is unfolded as the trigram, which is again folded as the interlocking snake legs of Fuxi and Nüwa, like the double helix of DNA. We can discover this fractal structure everywhere in nature: in tiny sands and pebbles, snowflakes, whirlpools, tornadoes; in plants such as ferns and broccoli; in body parts such as eyeballs, the brain, the womb, and other organs; and even in the Solar System—the sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Milky Way, Pinwheel Galaxy—the encompassing cosmo/multi/uni/ verse. Carl Gustav Jung extended these shared circular symbols from his method of dream interpretation to the interpretation of the sacred realms. Corrington quotes Jung in Deep Pantheism: “The individualization of the subconscious is always a great step forward and has enormous suggestive influence on further development of automatisms.” 23 The fractal structures of nature are described in Corrington’s words: There is a unique kind of bindingness between the self and those folds that seem to envelop and transform the self as it negotiates its way among the other orders of the world. . . . Numinous folds participate in the powers of origin that point back to the unconscious rhythms of nature naturing. Within innumerable orders of nature natured, these folds represent a kind of punctuation of the seeming equilibrium of the causal sequences that move silently toward eventual entropic decay. 24

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Thus, nature always transcends itself to become higher consciousness, which Corrington calls the “selving process.” 25 For Corrington, selving is god-ing that is “experienced as coming to the self from a supernatural source and as having great intrinsic power,” 26 as a burst or a pulsation like yang and yin. However, Corrington’s god-ing is more yin than yang since god-ing “open[s] space for involution,” which is more immanent and local. 27 Thus, god-ing makes the individual self open into larger adaptive prospects on the spiritual level of spiritual evolution. When yang reaches its extremity, it touches the opposite and is transformed into the other by transcending his body, just as Nüwa tore her body to be myriad things. Her hidden spirit of yin is now manifested into physical entities, numerous (re)incarnations. She takes this vulnerable transcendence of nature naturing to be nature natured. As van Gogh’s church touches the sky in Starry Night, we touch the edges of others and expand and transcend ourselves to become together with others. For Corrington, nature does not refer to any thing, but is the dynamic entirety, the all-encompassing. Like the Korean term “hanul” (“the divine” in Korean), Corrington’s nature is an extremely wide and deeply vast reality that creates itself out of nature. That’s the divine drama of nature’s “selftranscendence.” 28 Corrington humbly states in front of the sublime beauty of nature: “But I remain shaky and uncertain in this new dazzling world, struggling with my desire to return to the ‘dreaming innocence’ (Tillich) of my earlier life.” 29 As an all-encompassing micro- and macrocosmic organism, hanul (the divine) indwells in nature; therefore, nature is hanul. “Hanul [the divine] reflects the cosmic life as one organic body which is the whole encompassing macrocosm and microcosm of salim [enlivening] without boundaries.” 30 The process of nature (chaos-colliding-betweenizing-encompassing) is recurring over and over eternally, just as the Moon waxes and wanes. By its numerous spinnings it extends its relations and expands its circles—nature transcends nature to be nature. Though the sky seems to be high I touch the sky with my skin I breathe the air and say hello As the land touches the sky Grasses, flowers, butterflies, Dancing in between the sky and the land I and you, We are the horizon . . . - “thank you for the spring sunshine” 31 - An End . . . and many Beginnings -

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NOTES 1. A famous wall painting of Fuxi and Nüwa from the Wuliang Temple in Jiaxiang County, Shandong Province, painted in an Eastern Han dynasty (206–220 CE): http://www. britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_ gallery.aspx?partid=1&assetid=992656001&objectid=6881 2. Joseph A. Adler, Reconstructing the Confucian Dao: Zhu Xi’s Appropriation of Zhou Dunyi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 48. 3. Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English eds. (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 89. 4. Robert S. Corrington, Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 98. 5. Robert S. Corrington, Deep Pantheism: Toward a New Transcendentalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 1. 6. Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, 9. 7. The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, trans. Richard John Lynn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 120. 8. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 1. 9. Corrington, Ecstatic Naturalism, 129. 10. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 71. 11. Ibid., 74. 12. Robert S. Corrington, “Divine Nature,” Nature’s Perspectives: Prospects for Ordinal Metaphysics in Armen Marsoobian, Kathleen Wallace, and Robert S. Corrington ed. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 354. 13. Ibid., 353. 14. Nüwa (女媧) is depicted repairing the creation from destruction: http://www.npm.gov. tw/exh98/religiouspainting/en_p3_item1.html. This is a painting by Xiao Yuncong (15961673) currently exhibited in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, China. 15. Chen Lianshan, Chinese Myths and Legends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 9-16. 16. Planetarity is the name for the third chapter of Death of a Discipline by Gayatri C. Spivak (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Spivak suggests this new term “planetarity” as a different kind of collectivity that goes beyond the limited examples of colonial hybridization or waves of migrations. 17. Jea Sophia Oh, A Postcolonial Theology of Life: Planetarity East and West (Upland, CA: Sopher Press, 2011), 82. 18. The Classic of Changes, 55. 19. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 74. 20. Ibid., 77. 21. Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, 17. 22. Oh, A Postcolonial Theology, 50. 23. Carl Gustav Jung, On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena (1902), 54, in Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 58. 24. Robert S. Corrington, Nature’s Religion (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 23. 25. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 79. 26. Robert S. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 145. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 142 29. Ibid., 141. 30. Oh, A Postcolonial Theology, 125. 31. Jea Sophia Oh, “thank you for the spring sunshine” (written on Feb. 28, 2016).

Chapter Ten

A Post-Naturalist Idea of Ec-stasy An East-West Dialogue in a Trans-Human Age Iljoon Park

Is ecstatic naturalism sufficiently overcoming the modern trauma of dualism? 1 So-called post-modernism is about overcoming the historical forms of dualism such as those of transcendence/immanence, the sacred/the secular, the mind/the body, mind/matter, and so on. These types of metaphysical dualism had extended over the relation of man and woman, the noble and the common people, humans and animals, the white and the people with colored skin, and many more pairs. Although we are facing the conceptual task to go beyond this era of post-modernism, some strong residues of such kinds of dualism still remain around us. The effort of ecstatic naturalism to overcome panpsychism and panentheism via the principle ontological parity converges with a stream of post-movements to overcome dualisms, modern and ancient. Both panpsychism and panentheism stress the ontological priority of consciousness-like mind, and in so doing they ignore the unconscious side of nature. According to Jung, oblivion to the personal and collective unconscious is “an analogue to sin” in that it “represents a disobedience to the demands for growth and wisdom that the selving process calls for from the self-in-process.” 2 According to Corrington, the commitment of ecstatic naturalism “to ontological parity” is “like a spiritual practice” because it should be “ongoing and continually renewed.” 3 In short, ecstatic naturalism has become a companion to such anti-dualism movements in terms of its principle of ontological parity. With this principle, it rejects the dualisms of mind and matter, of nature and culture, and especially of human and nonhuman. In this context, the terms such as “post-humanism” and “trans-humanism” can be understood. They are about the dualism of humans and nonhumans, which stretches over that of the natural and the artificial. In an age of the so137

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called artificial intelligence (or “artificial life”), 4 one of whose cultural symbols now would be identified with AlphaGo (the computer that beat the human champion at the board game Go in March 2016), the division between human and nonhuman, and between natural and artificial, cannot be maintained as before. For humans become “natural-born cyborgs,” as Andy Clark expresses it. 5 The conceptual boundary of being human has been breached ever since human beings became homo faber (man as tool-maker). I don’t memorize phone numbers anymore because my smartphone does it. I’m using the smartphone as my external memory. 6 My mind has extended beyond my biological skin bag, that is, my body. I am a hybrid of the natural and the artificial. This kind of hybridization has happened ever since we human beings have lived as homo faber on the earth. However, due to our conceptual habit to think of things and the world in terms of the dualist framework, we humans have set up a hierarchical structure between humans the natural and the nonhumans the artificial. In March 2016, a Go game match took place between the digital machine AlphaGo and the human champion player. The match was set up between human and nonhuman agents. After the match, media published the headline: “AlphaGo Beat the Human Champion!” What was concealed here is that the AlphaGo was actually a human-made digital computing machine with artificial intelligence based upon deep learning technics and connected to a network of information. Who, exactly, played in the match? A digitally extended mind played a Go game with a naturally born human mind. The issue is that we humans still tend to deny our hybridization with artificial instruments. This is the residue of the purity myth in the modern times in which mega-machines helped humans to build industrial achievements. We humans have already hybridized with machines. In other words, the artificial machines are part of nature in the sense of ecstatic naturalism. To make a case for this statement, I will examine the dualism of nature and culture, or of human and nonhuman artifice. It is said that we are entering into a post-human era in which humans and digital machines live together as ontologically equal beings. Prospecting such an era, this essay tries to show that ecstatic naturalism has the potential to be a kind of post-naturalism, which would overcome the nature/culture divide. Indeed, ecstatic naturalism has potential to be a philosophical idea for “the Second Machine Age,” where the natural and the artificial are hybridized. 7 Terms such as “post-humanism” and “trans-humanism” ring the bell for the end of the human being or of modern humanism. Ecstatic naturalism, especially Corrington’s idea of nature as ecstasy, points to the fact that there is no such thing as nature, for ecstasy here does not mean something like a mystical union but rather a movement out of its state, that is, ek-stasis. Nature is in incessant movement beyond itself, and it is “ecstatically self-transforming.” 8 The coming post-human era prospects the co-existence of the naturally born and the

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artificially born. This may be the hybridization of the biological and the mechanical. Kinds of dualism such as nature/culture, biological/mechanical, naturally-born/artificially-made, and their boundaries are already blurred and ambiguous when Clark defines human beings as natural-born cyborgs. Furthermore, Donna Haraway finds that the cyborg is “our (political) ontology” for marginalized beings. 9 Ec-static naturalism opens its door for these streams of post-humanism and trans-humanism by paradoxically defining nature as non-nature in its movement of ec-stasis. In this writing, I will argue that this idea of nature as ec-stasy is very close to the East Asian idea of nature as “Self-So-Ing”(自然, 자연). 10 Additionally, the Korean idea of Ul (the Spirit, 얼) shows that the interpretive community will be guided by the spirit-interpreter, both of which are one and the multiple. For a conclusion, I’ll insist that one needs to be a post-naturalist in order to be a real naturalist, and that this is the real meaning of ecstatic naturalism in the sense of ecstasy as ek-stasis. CORRINGTON’S THOUGHTS ON NATURE For Corrington, nature is “ecstatically self-transforming and ‘contains’ a deep unconscious that is the source for both the human and sentient collective unconscious and the human personal unconscious.” 11 He introduces the distinction used by Spinoza of natura naturans (nature naturing) and natura naturata (nature natured). Corrington interprets nature naturing as “Nature perennially creating itself out of itself alone” and nature natured as “the innumerable orders of the World.” 12 Here, nature is divided and cannot be captured in one conceptual boundary. How do we name “nature” at all? For to name is to define its imagery and/or conceptual boundary. What does it mean that nature has its “depth” or “the unconscious”? It can be summarized as this: nature cannot be conceptually and imaginatively captured by the human mind. It is always beyond our human grasp. No, nature cannot be captured in human concepts or notions. One has to accept even “the most primal distinction” of nature only “in thought.” 13 One cannot reach at the “fundamental process of fissuring” 14 in reality. Thus, one must interpret any pulsation from nature naturing with his or her thoughts, images, and/or words. The divided nature is not easy and simple at all. Indeed, notwithstanding the primal distinction of nature, nature is actually “complex and multilayered,” 15 and it does not have a universal or essential trait in it. That is, everything in nature is “a natural complex,” and it means that there are “no simples in nature.” 16 Each natural complex is almost infinitely connected and related to others, and the kinds of external relations it would have are almost infinite in number. This complexity of nature does not allow any simple and

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clear interpretation of it. Rather, nature is plural. There “are many ‘ones’ each shaping a region of nature natured, but no meta-one that houses and locates all of the many orders of the world.” 17 One can even say that “nature per se does not exist.” 18 Heidegger’s use of the word “Sein” or “Seyn” under erasure (Sein) is an example of an analogous concept. Rather, nature is “correctly defined as innumerable orders with no collective integrity or contour that could somehow be mapped either by a god or by humans.” 19 Thus, nature, “now rendered as ‘nature’ is an empty placeholder rather than the subject of a direct categorial reference.” 20 Thus, one needs to remember that nature is “a word that has no philosophical or theological content and must be ‘addressed’ through a kind of ongoing and unrelenting via negativa.” 21 Nature in itself does not exist, but it is rather “an empty placeholder.” In this context, just as “the nature/culture distinction is a pragmatic one that is not absolute,” so too is the human/nonhuman boundary. 22 One of the huge claims of ecstatic naturalism is that culture is part of nature, “an infinitesimal part of nature . . . manipulated by humans.” 23 This kind of thought about nature fits well into the concept of humans as natural-born cyborgs. In the idea of the natural-born cyborgs, there is no distinction between humans naturally born and cyborgs artificially made. Nature is just all that is there. Each and every thing in nature is that which is. Here, one can think of ecstasy. As Corrington writes, the “natural division between nature naturing and nature natured is the primordial ecstasy of nature itself.” 24 Why does nature have to be divided? Because there is the aspect which human cognition cannot perceive. This aspect is nature naturing. However, this ungraspable side of nature is not just outside of the human world, but it rather paradoxically breaches into the humanized world. It offers a momentum of ecstasy. Heidegger once said the essence of science is not within science. Rather its essence is a momentum to go beyond the established boundary of science. This momentum is experienced as “that which cannot be gotten around.” 25 This cannot be presented, but it can only be represented. However, that which cannot be presented holds sway in the essence of science. It points to the inability of science. That is the aspect of nature naturing that discloses the human incompetency to define nature. It can be called ‘nature unnaturalized,’ that is, post-nature: what we have regarded as nature is not nature. There is something unconceptualized beyond the conceptual boundary of nature, that is nature naturing. It is like Heidegger’s Sein under erasure. Žižek explains this procedure as “to mobilize the opposition of human and subject.” 26 The (self-conscious) subject tends to lean on for “a dangerous hubris, a will to power” 27 to domesticate humanity. In this context, true humanity does not exist within the conforming and tamed humanity confined by the conscious subject, but rather outside the regulated boundary of humanity. This outside is called “inhuman.” 28 Paradoxically, the inhuman

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refers to the authentic core of humanity, which cannot be described or captured. Following Heidegger’s phrasing, it can be humanity under erasure. These three things under erasure—nature, Sein, and humanity—refer to the same, that is, the Real. 29 One cannot say which is really real, but one is for sure: the real is divided. The unperceived side of the real always make a breach in the human-made linguistic wall of conceptual boundaries, de/constructing the Real into the reality one can express. It is a procedure, which cannot be stopped as long as humans communicate with each other via language. HUMAN BEING AS SEMIOTIC SYMBIOSIS: SOME REFLECTIONS ON TRANS-HUMANISM Kevin Kelly prospects a future of the co-existence of the naturally born and the artificially made. According to Kelly, life includes both the naturally born and the culturally and technologically made. 30 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the authors of The Second Machine Age (2014), predict that the imminent future will be that of symbiosis of humans and machines. In fact, human civilization has emerged with machine power using human labor force, exemplified by the Roman galleys, the great pyramid constructions, and so forth. Thus, human civilization began with the First Machine Age, in which man power had been used as the power source of the great machine of the civilization. 31 This means that the divide of humans and machines had not been based upon biology. In the Second Machine Age, Andy Clark re/describes human being as natural-born cyborgs. Also, we have heard Donna Haraway’s “manifesto for cyborgs,” which identifies the name “cyborgs” with the marginalized. All of these discourses indicate that the nature/culture and the human/nonhuman divides cannot be maintained in the Second Machine Age. By the same token, these are indications that human being does not exist. Heidegger uses the word “Dasein” for being human. By use of this term, it is not that Heidegger still clings to a kind of anthropocentrism but that he anticipates an era after the modern image of the human being. Although it is difficult to mark the originator of post-humanism, we at least know that Nietzsche cried out for the coming of der Übermensch (the Overman). Today, we can translate this as the post-human. We also know that Jacques Derrida critiqued the modern humanism of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, because their humanisms did not contain those who are not European-white-bourgeois-male-in-the-first-world. 32 The latter are not human beings. So, to be really human, Derrida deconstructed their humanisms. This de/constructive motivation constitutes any type of the socalled “post-” movements in the past decades.

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For Corrington, the human process is “what it is first and primarily by and through its embeddedness in the innumerable orders of the world (nature natured) and the depth dimensions of nature (nature naturing).” 33 Indeed, human being or being-human is the between, not a noun but something more like adverb, which animates some space for a verb. Indeed, to be human is to be in process. It is called selving. Selving is “the ongoing process of self-formation within the encompassing sweep of the innumerable orders of the human and extra-human orders of nature natured.” 34 When one sees being-in-the-world from the phenomenological perspective, one cannot miss that a (human) being is extended through his or her material prosthesis over the environment, that is, over the world. The being-in-the-world not only refers to human embeddedness in nature but also shows its extension over the environment via its biological medium, the body, and through its instrumental material like my eyeglasses. The Second Machine Age means the symbiosis of humans and nonhumans. Ecology has taught us that everything organic and nonorganic is related and connected. Modern individual-centered perspectives have so much focused upon the survival of individual that they have described the ecological world as the competition of individuals. Such a competitive perspective observed only predators and preys, disregarding the larger environment in which predators and preys respectively have their own niches. As everyone knows, life is coupled with death. Even death is a series of sign-objectinterpretation. Thus, Whitehead mentions that the environment, in which diverse living beings live, is none other than the “environment of friends.” 35 This does not mean that the environment of friends does not have any kind of predators. Rather, even death is regarded as a contribution to life. It cannot be denied that life is “robbery,” as Whitehead says. 36 However, the cycle of predator-prey constitutes the symbiosis of life and death. In this context, death works like nature naturing, and it is reasonable that we feel like foundlings who are thrown into the world without parents. Human process in “the between” exchanges signs with other beings and generates meanings for them. In fact, we humans as “the sign making and sign using animals” live “in vast streams of semiosis whose origins and goals are out of the range of even our most robust forms of vision.” 37 Signs work independently from sign-users. They follow their own grammar or their own structure. Most of all, every sign is part of a series in which semiosis takes place. In other words, there is “no such thing as a single sign for the simple reason that a sign is what it is by being a sign of something other than itself.” 38 A sign “points to something other than itself and enables the interpreter of the sign(s) to understand the nature of the referent of the sign.” 39 According to Peirce, a sign referring to an object generates “an interpretant, which is a new sign emerging from the initial sign/object correlation.” 40

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Remember that this semiotic reality exists independently from language. 41 That is, the semiotic reality is not a simple linguistic construction. As signs signify on endless sign series for semiosis, human beings exchange signs and communicate meaning in their communities. Thus, human being exists in community. There are two types of communities: natural and interpretive. 42 We human beings are thrown into our natural communities “that give us the basic semiotic parameters of our being-in-the-world.” 43 These natural communities condition our origins, that is, “our ‘whatness’ in terms of race, class, gender, language, religion, aesthetics, and all conditions of ‘origin.’” 44 They determine our collective or tribal identity. However, the communal aspect of being human is not always good in that “each sign system is a community in its own right and as such can include or exclude potential new members.” 45 The membership of natural community is “exclusivistic and primal,” and the natural communities are “inert and locked in place—they reiterate the vast ancient conditions of origin, the laws and rules of membership that exclude all non-tribal selves and which does so through a powerful demonization and abjection of Otherness.” 46 In other words, natural communities are “jealous of their semiotic stock and deeply suspicious of any actual infinite that comes from outside of its own conditions of origin.” 47 Natural communities, when under stress, tend to cling to their myths of some pure origin by reiterating their fictional pasts, and in so doing they demonize non-community members. In this context, the communal symbols are “enforced and protected against any use of hermeneutics in general.” 48 Interpretive community brings the hermeneutics of suspicion into the natural structure of community. An interpretive community is not outside a natural community, but it can exist “within natural communities and only under somewhat rare conditions.” 49 It “deconstructs the symbols of origin and the symbols of expectation.” 50 Although we human beings are never free from the natural conditions of community, the interpretation of signs takes place in moments when any existing structure of interpretation breaks down; and when there is a need “for novel and creative interpretants—the world can be lit up in new ways.” 51 In so doing, the interpretive community “truly opens the future by standing into the not-yet-being that stands before it as an invitation to transformation but not as a specific blueprint of a particular natural community.” 52 It gives birth to hope for the not-yet-future. Indeed, hope is “a gift of nature naturing as its potencies can dissolve the closures brought about by the anti-utopias of natural communities.” 53 The not yet is “part of the ‘how’ of nature naturing, part of the way in which the depthdimension of nature injects itself into the orders of nature natured.” 54 The not yet is “an actual ontological potency that lives by holding a space open within which utopian transformations can occur for the community of interpreters.” 55

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Note that the essence of sign is not in the sign, simply because the sign actually refers to something other than itself. Also, an object cannot exist alone because it has to be presented and/or represented by sign(s). The correlation between sign and object can be formed only with interpretant. This is none other than the ecology of life, in which human and nonhumans, organic and nonorganic beings, exist as companions. Also, in this structure of life, interpretation cannot capture the object (the real). It works via signs or the chain structure of signs. Actually, the interpretive agent deciphers interpretive meanings for itself from the semiotic structure. In this sense, interpretation is not subjective but rather structural. The triadic structure of signobject-interpretant virtually generates the structure of life and death. At the center of the semiotic process lies cognitive coupling of the organism with its environment. Whitehead says, “All we know of nature is in the same boat, to sink or swim together.” 56 In this context, it makes sense that humans have been hybridized with nonhumans, environment, and world. In this sign-traffic, the world may be the extension of the mind, or the mind externalized. Here I want to put a question mark on the term “ordinal.” As one knows well, ecstatic naturalism is based upon two ordinal methodologies of phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Corrington uses the terms “ordinal phenomenology” and “ordinal psychoanalysis.” Here, ordinal refers to “the general metaphysical view that everything whatsoever, be it a wisp of smoke or God, is an order within the one nature that there is.” 57 The world order here is equivalent to “complex” or “natural complex.” 58 For Corrington, everything that is is both complex and multiple, but it also has its own form of order. Here the word “order” can be understood as “relevance” in Whitehead. With these terms such as order, complexity and relevance, Corrington carefully avoids any unintentional introduction of the notion of chaos into his discussion. However, in order for any order to emerge, a kind of chaos cannot be gotten around. Chaos is the companion of order. We remember that Deleuze uses chaosmos to not forget the chaotic side of the whole. It means that the boundary of order is not like what we have thought, and that it could be different. CONTRIBUTIONS OF KOREAN THOUGHT TO NATURALISM According to our East Asian cultural tradition, nature is none other than selfso-ing. This self-so-ing nature is everywhere and nowhere. For it cannot be defined or grasped. As a matter of fact, everything is part of the self-so-ing nature, including life and death. In the Daoist text Chuang-Tzu, the reader becomes confused because the reader has to be a tree or a bird or a hole in order to follow the author’s story. Although the author of Chuang-Tzu never had in mind any idea of trans-human or post-human, one thing for sure is that

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the human being is not different from nonhumans, which are just part of the self-so-ing nature as humans are. Although the principle of ontological parity is strongly maintained in East Asian thought, it does not mean that everything is simply equal. In fact, there are two kinds of beings: being with awareness and being without it. Awareness comes from interpretation, which has to be acquired from scriptural readings, and this is why learning as well as reading are respected in the East Asian culture. When awareness comes, Ul (얼), the Korean term for spirit, arises to lead the self to emancipation or salvation. Ul as the spirit of interpretation is none other than the spirit-interpreter living in the between for the community of interpreters. In ecstatic naturalism, the self always belongs to a community or communities. Thus, the semiotics of the self is always communal. Ecstatic naturalism does not accept the traditional Christian theory of trinity. Instead, it seeks for “plural spirits, towards energies that enter into the moments of creative interpretation and facilitate the birthing of new interpretants.” 59 Note that interpretive spirits are not “the cosmic interpreter.” Rather, there is “a finite and context-specific spirit operative at each nexus where an interpreter and each sign or interpretant meets.” 60 In other words, the spirit of interpretation is the finite spirit, “not providing an interpretation, but enriching the prospects of interpretation.” 61 The spirit-interpreter emerges in its community of interpretation and opens it “to its genuine prospects but ‘leave’ the community to pick and choose from among them.” 62 A criterion for right interpretation is that the principle of ontological parity works in the community of interpretation. In this era of post-humanism, in which the map of concepts has to be drawn in a new way of thinking, we desperately need a spirit-interpreter to let us think of a way toward symbiosis with nonhumans, the artificially made digital beings. As Corrington says, nature does not exist. It comes from our construction of interpretation. In the movie Her, Samantha is an operating system in a future computer which is alive in a virtual time-space. She does not have a body, but she is alive. Is she part of nature? Should we regard her as our species companion? The tide of post-humanism asks us ecstatic naturalists for the answer. My answer, as an ecstatic naturalist, is that nature is always out of nature (out-of-stasis, that is, ek-stasis). The nature/culture divide or nature/artificial divide is no longer maintained. We need a new concept that can now embrace hybrids of human-machine. One can think that this essay is very optimistic of the future. However, this is not what I want to deliver. The so-called age of the AlphaGo is described by Yuval Noah Harari as the age of “Homo Deus,” in which humans become gods. 63 With the brilliant developments of biology, nanotechnology, robotics and so on, humans now have unprecedented abilities not possessed by all previous generations. Harari does not want to glorify this

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technological development that is changing the fundamentals of being human. Instead, he wants to ask us, what should we do with these amazing technological abilities? So do I. This is not an answer or an alternative but just rather a question, what are we going to do with these tools? The existing conceptual framework to define nature, humans, the artificial, and so on, does not seem to work any longer. What we need is a concept to deal with the new boundaries. Symbiosis of humans and nonhumans is not an answer at all. It is just what it is. The real problem for us is how. What I’m suggesting is that the invention of a new concept is a way to find an alternative to the collapsing Western modern world. NOTES 1. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2015K2A8A1068821). 2. Robert S. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime: An Essay in Aesthetic Naturalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 46. 3. Ibid., 16. 4. In his book Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), Steven Levy argues that the so-called artificial intelligence starts to gain its own life out of nonliving materials. Thus, instead of artificial intelligence, one should use the term “artificial life,” which means that the virtual form of the artificial has its own life and autonomy. 5. Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 6. David Chalmers, “Foreword,” in Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension, by Andy Clark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), ix. 7. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014). 8. Robert S. Corrington, Deep Pantheism: Toward a New Transcendentalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), xxiii. 9. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 9. 10. This translation of nature as “self-so-ing” can be found in David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking from the Han: Self, Truth, and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 52. This is not their philosophical idea exclusively, because nature as self-so-ing has long been in the East Asian cultural heritage of thought. Nevertheless, these authors deserve credit for calling attention to this idea. 11. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, xxiii. 12. Ibid., x. 13. Ibid, 1. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 3. 16. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 10. 17. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 4. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 5. 21. Ibid. 22. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 159. 23. Ibid. 24. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 8.

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25. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Perennial, 1977), 174. 26. Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephane (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), xxv. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., xxvi. 29. According to Lacanian psychology, the “Real” is something that cannot be revealed to human subjects but is required for the subject to function. The only way to see it is to see it obliquely because the symbolic (structure of the world) is constituted on the basis of the void of the Real within it. In this context, the Lacanian Real seems to work like the unspeakable in the negative theology, although the Real has nothing to do with any theological idea for Lacan. 30. Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 4. 31. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, with a new “foreword” by Langdon Winner, originally published in 1934 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 3. 32. Jacques Derrida, The Margins of Philosophy, trans., with additional notes, by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 116. 33. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, xix. 34. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 29. 35. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World: Lowell Lectures, 1925 (New York: Free Press, 1953), 206. 36. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (Corrected Edition), ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 105. 37. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 72. 38. Ibid., 73. 39. Ibid., 76. 40. Ibid. 41. Although J. Derrida said that there is “nothing outside of the text [there is no outside text; il n’ya pas de hors-texte],” the core of naturalism would be that there is nature outside the text, whatever it is called or named. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158. 42. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 89. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 81. 46. Ibid., 89. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 94. 49. Ibid., 89. 50. Ibid., 94. 51. Ibid., 91. 52. Ibid., 95. 53. Ibid., 96. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, originally published in 1920 (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 148. 57. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, xxii. 58. Ibid. 59. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 127. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 128. 62. Ibid., 129. 63. Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London: Harvil Secker, 2015), 71.

Chapter Eleven

Daseok’s God in Dialogue with Deep Pantheism and Process Panentheism Hiheon Kim

The purpose of this chapter is to locate Daseok’s idea of God between deep pantheism and process panentheism, and to discuss the meaning of the Godtalks in the theological enterprise of naturalistic theism. 1 Daseok Yu YoungMo (1890–1981) is a Korean thinker whose lifelong project is to put together “the marrow of western culture and civilization into the eastern bone.” 2 His religious idea is deeply based on the Eastern concepts of emptiness and nothingness in ontology and cosmology, and yet, it is very different from most Eastern immanentism, or mere pantheism, because of his adoption of the Christian idea of God. However, thanks to its Eastern heritage, his understanding of God and nature is hardly compatible with understandings proposed by traditional Christian theology, or classical philosophical theism. His idea is one of the third ways between the opposite extremities of the reductionist science and the interventionist theology. The third way is called here “naturalistic theism” or “theistic naturalism.” We don’t have to figure out general characteristics of naturalistic theism in this short chapter, but will directly get into the discussion on the three distinctive third ways, that is, Daseok’s idea of God as emptiness, Corrington’s deep pantheism, and Whiteheadian panentheism. This chapter attempts to seek a possible locus of Daseok’s idea between the other two positions. I’ll first summarize Daseok’s idea of God and briefly describe my understanding of the other two positions. Then, I will discuss some issues that arise from the debates between process panentheism and deep pantheism.

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DASEOK’S GOD OF EMPTINESS Daseok Yu Young-Mo has a special position in Korean religious/intellectual history. As a philosopher, he made a creative bridge between Eastern and Western thinking; as an educator, he led the desperate Korean people during and after Japanese colonialism to the way of enlightenment; and as a religious mystic, he maintained a lifelong practice of simple living. His practiceoriented religiosity has had a great influence on later theologians of culture and minjung theologians. His idea called “ssial” (씨알) thought was one of the strongest intellectual foundations in the development of Korean democracy movement in the 1970s. 3 His pupil Ham Seok-Heon promoted that movement and spread this thought. Basically, Daseok’s philosophy represents a non-dualistic and relational understanding of God and nature. In his ripening age, Daseok expressed God as “the Abba in non-being.” He says, “Existence cannot extinguish nonbeing. Non-being cannot be turned into the existence although it was erased. Existing fragments cannot remove the whole. We cannot but say that all things are embraced within the void.” 4 He interprets God on the basis of the Buddhist idea of emptiness and the Daoist nothingness. Perhaps, as once a young physicist, he knew the limits of the Newtonian physics based on substance philosophy and precisely conceived of the void as the major state of being. Such an idea gradually became sensible through his long study of the East Asian classics. At age 66, he writes, Existence is not real; the real is in void. Therefore, existence does not differ from non-being, and vice versa. Alas! I falsely regarded the earth as being real because of its rigidity and the heaven as non-being for its ungrabability. Yet, the heaven is more real than the earth. Things generate from the one whole. This tiny I should return finally to the whole. That is true and thankful knowing. 5

In comparison with analytic descriptions within Western studies, Daseok’s idea is often misunderstood for two reasons. One is due to his paradoxical conceptualization that the ontological basis of existence is posited on nothingness. The other is for his vigorous searching for the raison d’être of one’s present being that ends in the answer of emptying oneself. His practicecentered idea is not irrelevant to the religious concern itself, in which both ontology and axiology contribute to reaching at pious devotion. Philosophically, we need to justly estimate the virtue of his ideas as a criticism of logocentric philosophy, which operates under the light of reason, and as a protest against “the ontology of desire.” He cries out, “Turn off the light!” That is, his philosophy is “the maximum provocation against the ontology of being and the metaphysics of light, the relentless insistence on the change of the

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direction of the hermeneutic of will, and the robust demand of critical reflections on the materialist science and the subjectivist theory of desire.” 6 Daseok’s idea of God as emptiness directly opposes interventionist theism and religio-political elitism. For him, the supernaturalistic interventionism is linked to a distortion of religiosity as well as to a false metaphysics. He says, “The real God does not manipulate the order of nature. The everlasting God has no need to display evanescent extraordinary miracles.” 7 While a theology with sensationalist epistemology cannot agree with this naturalistic mode of divine presence, Daseok paradoxically finds divine sincerity in the everlasting God of emptiness. Christian piety recommends to “rejoice in what was suffered for our neighbors’ sake, and to fill up what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions” (Col. 1:24) instead of divine intervention. For even Jesus cannot jump off from the cross in the Abba’s silence. Daseok’s onto-cosmological ideas are deeply interwoven with religious ethics and faith. He connects the idea of God with the Confucian filial piety so that theistic speculation innately calls for religious and social practices. For him, the purpose of speculation is not only for understanding facticity, but more importantly for having us move toward the depth of life in longing for God. Daseok expresses his belief as “the looking and longing for the absolute emptiness.” 8 This belief is a form of Korean panentheism, a relational idea of God and nature, in that the creative becoming of all things is deeply related to God, while emptiness is the basis of reality. This kind of panentheism does not merely acknowledge the intrinsic relation between God and nature but also requests religious practices of emptying oneself in order to go beyond obsessive craving. The emptiness-centered perspective seems to focus on self-discipline alone, and, therefore, it was once criticized in the circle of political theologians for its seeming lack of a sense of structural social evil. However, in his relational ideas, the suspicion is resolved. A genuine spirituality does not avoid a spirit of social transformation, and social concerns should be undergirded by a deep religiosity for their strength. Rather, we can see Daseok’s practice-oriented panentheism as revolutionary since it cures the habitual mindset that observes the world through the eyes of elites such as “the wise and the influential in human standards” (1Cor. 1:26). Daseok uses an analogy of a flower and the void. A flower can be seen and acknowledged because of the void that surrounds it. He says, “It is false without knowing the void. The void is real and true.” 9 We also need to interpret social phenomena not by adoring the flower (elites) but by coming closer to the void (the oppressed), which is hardly seen but real. Daseok’s God of emptiness is a form of Korean panentheism in which the wisdom of Eastern classics and Christian faith come together in a confluence. It is both a relational worldview and a responsible ethic in which both mystic and prophetic voices resonate. His pioneering work is still becoming an

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alternative theoretical framework for religious studies, social educations, and political and ecological movements in Korea. PROCESS PANENTHEISM AS NATURALISTIC THEISM Alfred North Whitehead attempts to solve a central problem of modern philosophy by providing a coherent metaphysical philosophy of organism. He understands the fundamental error of traditional metaphysics to be the presupposition of an enduring substance possessing the quality of permanence. While substance is regarded as a thing that “requires nothing but itself in order to exist,” says Whitehead, 10 there is no such kind of entity, not even God. Each and every entity is “in its essence social and requires the society in order to exist.” 11 He points out that the materialistic assumption of the enduring substance applies only “to very abstract entities, the products of logical discernment.” Rather, the concrete enduring entities in nature are organisms. 12 In his philosophy of organism, Whitehead outlines four crucial ideas about nature: First, there is no sharp division between mentality and nature. We live within nature. Second, in nature there are mental operations that are the factor for constituting it. Third, there are no “idle wheels” but only creative advances in the process of nature. Fourth, an essential task for defining nature is to understand how mental occurrences are operative in the course of nature. 13 One of the most fascinating aspects of his philosophy is the elimination of the long-lasting mutual anathema between religion and science and the harmonization of them “into one rational scheme of thought.” 14 Process panentheism is an attempt to provide a proper philosophical framework that can be integrated with religious beliefs. Its demand is to satisfy both philosophical insights and religious sentiments so that the God of believers could be apprehended in philosophical coherence. Whitehead’s dipolar concept of God, as having both primordial and consequent natures, explains the dynamic interaction between God and nature. That is, God’s primordial envisagement of all possibility is always held together in harmony. This harmonious envisioning is actualized in the transformation of the world. 15 This “mutual interaction” is a key concept of process panentheism in overcoming philosophical problems caused by two opposite extremes. The one is the classical monotheistic doctrine that God is “essentially transcendent and only accidently immanent.” The other is pantheism such that God is “essentially immanent and in no way transcendent.” 16 The dipolar idea of process panentheism combines the teachings of traditional theism and pantheism by modification of both of them. On the one hand, process panentheism affirms the transcendence of God over nature like traditional theism. Also, it understands, like pantheism, nature as internally

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related to deity. On the other hand, it criticizes the philosophical framework of classical theism, or what Charles Hartshorne calls “pure transcendental deism.” 17 It attempts to save the religious adequacy from pantheism which dissolves God into immanent orders of nature. Through its panentheism, process thought illuminates an important aspect of nature. In contrast to traditional theism, in which nature has no ultimate significance because God’s perfection is complete without recourse to it, process panentheism provides nature with its ultimate significance because it enriches the divine life. With this changed understanding of nature, process thought provides alternative doctrines of God. DEEP PANTHEISM AND ECSTATIC NATURALISM Robert S. Corrington summarizes his ecstatic naturalism as affirming “the absolute supremacy of nature and its internal tensions as manifest in the fundamental divide between nature naturing and nature natured.” 18 The religious aspect of this type of naturalism is called by Corrington “deep pantheism.” It shares two common ideas with pantheism—that “nature is all there is” so that there is nothing beyond/outside nature, and that there is “absolute parity” among orders in nature. However, it is a distinctive form of pantheism in its depth that allows room for both God-talks as well as nature’s supremacy. For Corrington, the divine emerges from nature’s sacred folds. The divinity prevails as an order within nature. Therefore, it can be translated into “natural grace” that appears out of the depth of chora and not from an extra-natural agent. Ecstatic naturalism regards process naturalism as a “foreshadow” by taking “the self-transforming character of nature seriously.” 19 Furthermore, its companion theology of deep pantheism is “congenial” to process panentheism in the sense that both criticize reductionist science and supernaturalistic religion. While both apparently oppose interventionist theism of traditional theology, each maintains a unique voice when it comes to the idea that God exists within the nature. From here, deep pantheism diverges from process panentheism. “While process theologians look up to the primordial mind of God as the summum bonum,” says Corrington, “a deep pantheist will look down into the depths from whence all divinities emerge.” 20 If we define panentheism as the view that the world is contained within God although God is also more than the world as a whole, our discussion must begin at the meaning of the “more.” While process panentheism makes a space for divine transcendence in the primordial nature of God, deep pantheism negates it by locating all divinities within the depth of nature, namely, nature’s unconscious side. Deep pantheism dissolves the “more” in nature in two ways. First, it speaks of our peculiar experience of “god-ing” as

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a form of numinous experience that seems as though “coming to the self from a supernatural source and as having great intrinsic power.” 21 However, god-ing is one of the nature’s traits rather than an extra-natural force. Second, it interprets the seemingly “more” through C. S. Peirce’s concept called “agapism” in nature’s evolution. While process panentheism dedicates the agapastic trait to God, deep pantheism does not. 22 The divergence becomes larger in the discussion of the issue of theodicy. Corrington pushes process panentheism much closer to traditional theism with the charge of its “implied theodicy” in which nature is understood as heading to “a form of ideal consummation.” 23 He criticizes that process naturalism does “not go far enough in showing how the open infinite relates to the innumerable interpretants within a self-transcending nature.” 24 This is because of the process idea of “relevance” that “God determines which eternal entities are relevant for a given occasion as that occasion moves to satisfy its subjective aim.” 25 For Corrington, process’s internal version of naturalism “goes too far in its evocation of harmonies and self-organizing organisms.” 26 A DISCUSSION ON THEISTIC BELIEF IN CONSTRUCTING A WORLDVIEW We need to alleviate the tensions between process panentheism and deep pantheism because their similarities appear to be bigger than differences. If not, there must be unwanted simplification or rigid classification. We can observe common theoretical concerns of ordinal phenomenology and process metaphysics. Despite their outward differences, both of them share two critical ideas. The one is their postmodern sensitivity that opposes the concept of “dreams of meta-whole.” 27 The other is their agreement with the unavoidability of pragmatic use of metaphysical ideas because there is no pure theory, or even phenomenology, “free from metaphysical commitments.” 28 In the same moderate spirit, ordinal phenomenology does not seek the essence of phenomena unlike traditional phenomenologies, and yet utilizes “meta-narrative” pragmatically. 29 Similarly, process metaphysics adopts “descriptive generalization” as its philosophical method and takes on the role of “experimental adventure” in order to avoid static dogmatism. 30 Nevertheless, we cannot eliminate a fundamental difference of pantheism and panentheism in their theistic scheme. Perhaps, Samuel Alexander’s concept of deity could be a bridge between them and attenuate conflicts. As Alexander describes deity as emergent out of evolving space-time, Corrington also understands deity as a form of nature’s sacredness. As Alexander understands “God as universe possessing deity” and suggests the mind-body analogy for the relation of God and the world, 31 Whiteheadians develop their

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panentheistic cosmology. Using the evolving concept of deity, all of them can apply a common insight into the illumination of nature’s vastness, depth, and fecundity. However, the concept has an ambivalent element for constructing a theistic cosmology. A crucial problem is the role of God/deity in nature’s creativity. Is God necessary for nature’s evolution? Ecstatic naturalism answers this question negatively because of its idea of ontological parity. According to this view, anything in nature is not “more real, more primal, or more foundational than others” so that the evolving deity cannot assert its alleged right of ontological supremacy over nature. 32 With this affirmation of ontological parity, ordinal phenomenology can take a spiritual practice for “a radical openness to the rich and unending complexity of phenomena (natural complexes) in nature.” 33 However, this is not only the case for ecstatic naturalism. Process naturalism also has a similar critical approach. Process philosopher C. Robert Mesle asks: “Why do we need God to make sense of the world in the process-relational vision? What difference does the process God make in the world of our experience?” 34 Mesle discusses the process naturalism that is espoused, for instance, by Henry Nelson Weiman, which answers negatively to the question about the necessity of God. For Weiman, the source of good lies not in a God or a transcendental realm but in the natural world. 35 Given the same question, however, John B. Cobb, Jr. responds positively with his theistic belief that “the deeper truth is that we need to find that which is trustworthy and to trust it even when we do not know where this will lead.” 36 Why do we have two opposing responses to the same question, although they are based on the same process naturalism? To answer this question, we need to consider the role of religious belief in constructing a worldview and in making judgments for action. Corrington’s criticism of religion as “tribal” and a “lethal force” needs to be mitigated. We can observe religion as a lethal force indeed in history and in our contemporary religious service to globalized neoliberalism, as many political theologians have warned. Religious zeal must be adjusted aesthetically for the health of religion as a whole. Yet, we don’t have to conclude that religious ultimate concern is the necessary cause of tribal effects. As Whitehead finds “the ascent of man” in the advance of religious consciousness, 37 Daseok appreciates religion as “the habit of life” toward the ultimate. Our philosophical discussions must continue to promote concepts and images for the abundant meanings of life—and that includes religious ultimate concern. Our God-talks do not depend on scientific credibility. Theism as a theory stakes a wager. There is an ill-advised wager between the choice that God determines the evolving process of nature by interventions, or natural process has nothing to do with God. In this chapter, we saw a third way. Daseok’s God can be located between deep pantheism and process panentheism. This

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obtains expression in a panentheism that embraces nature’s depth and power, while providing ethical practices based on the conception of God as emptiness. It is the void or emptiness that grounds all nature and all reality. In turn, an emptiness-centered ethics brings the disadvantaged, mute, and forgotten into focus. Daseok’s theism is not a device to design the universe but an attitude to seek meaning of life. Even the fullest evidence cannot reveal the origin of nature’s creativity. As Ham Seok-Heon says, “without knowing the meaning, the origin is always veiled. Without thinking of the meaning, to speak of the origin is absurd.” 38 Daseok understands knowing as returning to God, and the returning is participation in divine life which is evolving with the creative advance of the cosmos. A theism can win when it provides rich metaphors to deeply see evolving God and nature. NOTES 1. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2015K2A8A1068821). 2. Yu Young-Mo, Daseok’s Lectures (da-seok-gang-ui), ed. Daseok Society (Seoul: Hyunamsa, 2006), 310. Author’s translation. 3. Ssial is a composite word of two Korean letters, ssi and al. Ssi stands for the seed of a plant, and al for the egg of an animal. Both indicate the ending of a preceding life and at the same time the beginning of a new life, meaning the continuity and revival of life. 4. Heung-Ho Kim, Study on Daseok’s Diary, vol. 3 (Seoul: Sol Press, 2001), 385. Daseok’s Diary (da-seok-il-ji) is Daseok’s hand-written notes from 1955 to 1974, and is the primary text for the study of Daseok’s thought. Because of the semiotic difficulty of these notes, English translations in this essay depend on the Korean commentary of Daseok’s pupil HeungHo Kim. 5. Ibid. (Oct. 14, 1956), i. Author’s translation. 6. Ki-sang, Lee, Daseok Yu Young-mo’s Eastern Thought and Theology, ed. Kim HeungHo and Lee Jung-Bae (Seoul: Sol Press, 2002), 40. 7. Yu Young-Mo, Daseok’s Lectures, 932. 8. Ibid., 452. 9. Ibid., 458. 10. Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making, Lowell Lectures 1926 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 94. 11. Ibid. 12. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Lowell Lectures 1925 (New York: Free Press, [1925] 1967), 79. 13. Alfred North Whitehead, Mode of Thought (New York: Free Press, 1968), 156. 14. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1985), 15. 15. Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, God, Christ, Church (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 34. 16. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1967), 121. 17. Charles Hartshorne, Man’s Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1964), 347. Hartshorne prefers to use the term “transcendental deism” in opposition to pantheism (or what he calls “pandeism”). “The term theism, which is more commonly used for the contrary of pantheism, suggests that the doctrine conforms to religion, really describes the theos, the God of worship, and that is open to dispute. . . . Deism here means that God is the super-cause taken as self-sufficient, a complete being, in abstraction from any and all of his effects.”

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18. Robert S. Corrington, Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 60. 19. Ibid., 23. 20. Robert S. Corrington, Deep Pantheism: Toward a New Transcendentalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), xi. 21. Robert S. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime: An Essay in Aesthetic Naturalism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 145. 22. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 72-76. 23. Corrington, Ecstatic Naturalism, 21. 24. Ibid., 147. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 25. 27. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 4. 28. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 7. 29. Corrington, Deep Pantheism, 5. 30. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 9. “Rationalism never shakes off its status of an experimental adventure. The combined influences of mathematics and religion, which have so greatly contributed to the rise of philosophy, have also had the unfortunate effect of yoking it with static dogmatism. Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought, progressive and never final. But it is an adventure in which even partial success has importance.” 31. Samuel Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity, Volume 2 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith Publishing, Inc., 1979), 353. 32. Corrington, Nature’s Sublime, 13. 33. Ibid., 16. 34. C. Robert Mesle, Process Theology (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 1993), 126. 35. Ibid., 132-3. 36. Ibid., 135. 37. Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 38-41. 38. Ham Seok-Heon, “The Creation of Life,” Ham Seok-Heon Collections (Seoul: Hangilsa, 2009), 17:53.

Bibliography

SELECTED WORKS BY ROBERT S. CORRINGTON Books Deep Pantheism: Toward a New Transcendentalism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994. An Introduction to C. S. Peirce: Philosopher, Semiotician and Ecstatic Naturalist. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993. Nature and Nothingness: An Essay in Ordinal Phenomenology. Landham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. Nature and Spirit: An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism. New York: Fordham University Press, 1992. Nature’s Religion. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. Nature’s Sublime: An Essay in Aesthetic Naturalism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013. Riding the Windhorse: Manic Depressive Disorder and the Quest for Wholeness. Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2003. A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Wilhelm Reich: Psychoanalyst and Radical Naturalist. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

Articles “American Transcendentalism’s Erotic Aquatecture.” In Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline. Edited by Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. “An Appraisal and Critique of Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality—Corrected Edition (1929 & 1978) and Justus Buchler’s Metaphysics of Natural Complexes—Second, Expanded Edition (1966 & 1990).” Published by the author, 2009. https://users.drew.edu/ rcorring/downloads/APPRAISAL%20&%20CRITIQUE%20COPYRIGHT.pdf (Accessed February 7, 2017) “Evolution, Religion, and an Ecstatic Naturalism,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 31 (May 2010): 124–135.

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“Finite Idealism: The Midworld and Its History.” In The Philosophy of John William Miller. Edited by Joseph P. Fell, Bucknell Review, Vol. 34, no. 1. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1990. “Introduction to John William Miller’s ‘For Idealism,’” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Vol. 1, no. 4 (1987): 257–259. “My Passage from Panentheism to Pantheism,” American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 23, no. 2 (May 2002): 129–53. “Ordinality and the Divine Natures,” In Nature’s Perspective: Prospects for Ordinal Metaphysics. Edited by Armen Marsoobian, Kathleen Wallace, and Robert S. Corrington. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991. “Response to My Critics,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 26 (September 2005): 263–272. “Review of John Ryder’s The Things in Heaven and Earth: An Essay in Pragmatic Naturalism,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 35 (September 2014): 278–285.

REFERENCES Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Albanese, Catherine L. Corresponding Motion: Transcendental Religion and the New America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977. ———. ed. The Spirituality of the American Transcendentalists: Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1988. Alexander, Samuel. Space, Time, and Deity, 2 vols. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith Publishing, Inc., 1979. Anderson, Douglas R. “Peirce’s Horse: A Sympathetic and Semeiotic Bond.” In Animal Pragmatism: Rethinking Human-Nonhuman Relationships, 86–94. Edited by Erin McKenna and Andrew Light. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004. ———. Strands of System: The Philosophy of Charles Peirce. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1995. Axel, Larry E., and William Dean, eds. The Size of God: The Theology of Bernard Loomer in Context. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987. Barbour, Ian G. Religion and Science. San Francisco: HarperOne, 1997. Bignall, Simone, Sean Bowden, and Paul Patton, eds. Deleuze and Pragmatism. New York: Routledge, 2014. Brynjolfsson, Erik and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014. Buchler, Justus, Metaphysics of Natural Complexes: Second, Expanded Edition. Edited by Kathleen Wallace, Armen Marsoobian, and Robert S. Corrington. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990. Carabine, Deirdre. John Scottus Eriugena. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Casey, Edward S. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the PlaceWorld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Chen, Lianshan. Chinese Myths and Legends. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Clark, Andy. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. ———. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi. Translated by Richard John Lynn. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Crosby, Donald A. A Religion of Nature. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, Press, 2002. Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.

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Index

Abram, David, 47–49, 50, 52, 160 Abgrund, x, xi, 10 abyss, x, 1, 10, 12, 15, 34, 36, 38, 41n19, 104, 110, 113 actual occasion, x, 19–20, 21, 47 Advaita Vedanta, vii aesthetic naturalism, ix, 7, 45 agitated unconscious, 104, 109–110, 111–112, 112 Albanese, Catherine, 50, 51, 160 AlphaGo, 138, 145 animals, 64, 73n64, 74n86, 77, 81–82, 83, 86–87, 87, 90n4, 91n43, 93, 101, 102n21, 132, 137, 142 anthropocentrism, 23, 141 anthropomorphism, 17, 24, 84, 128n24 archetypes, x, xi, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 108–109, 109–110, 111, 113, 115, 116, 118n11, 133 artificial intelligence, 1, 3, 12, 137–138, 140, 146n4 artist, 7, 11, 45, 51, 52, 78, 104, 115, 116 attunement, 10, 44, 45, 49, 51 being-in-the-world, 44, 47, 142, 143 being-in-place, 47 betweenness, 14n32, 45, 49, 51, 132, 133 Blood, Benjamin Paul, 11, 121–126, 127 The Book of Changes (See I-Ching.) Buchler, Justus, viii, 3–4, 6, 19, 20, 28n27, 38, 71n5, 96, 101n2, 126, 160

Buddhism, 31, 33, 35, 36, 37, 40n3, 113, 117n1, 118n38, 118n39, 150 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 141, 146n7, 160 Caribbean philosophy, 3, 11, 104, 109, 112–113 Casey, Edward, 47, 53n24, 160 chaos, 12, 15–16, 17, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27n7, 133, 135, 144, 164 chaosmos, 15–16, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27n4, 27n6, 144, 161, 163 Chuang-Tzu, 144 Clark, Andy, 137–138, 141, 146n5, 146n6, 160 The Classic of Changes (See I-Ching.) colonialism, 103–104, 110, 112, 116, 136n16, 136n17, 150 communities, xii, 2, 3, 6, 7, 7–8, 14n30, 46, 47, 48, 49–50, 52, 102n6, 103, 108, 109, 115, 143, 163; of interpreters, viii, xi–xii, xiii, 2, 7–8, 12, 51, 143, 145; natural, xi–xii, 7–8, 143; self-incommunity (Kohut), 60; universal (Dewey), 8 Confucian, 129, 136n2, 151, 162 consciousness, 5, 47, 48, 49, 61, 66–69, 69–70, 72n13, 81, 99, 103, 104, 105, 107–110, 115, 126, 128n24, 132, 137, 161, 162, 164, 165; Caribbean, 110, 112, 116–117; collective, 109, 116; extended, 68; of nature, 115, 135 167

168

Index

constructive theology, 1, 3, 9, 31 cosmotheandric vision (Panikkar), 9, 32, 33, 37, 40n3 counter-poesis, 109, 111, 112 cyborg, 9, 12, 137, 140, 141, 146n5, 146n9, 160 Damasio, Antonio, 67–68, 74n80, 160 Dao/Daoism, 130, 131, 136n2, 144, 150, 162 Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), 131, 133 Daseok (See Yu Young-mo.) Deely, John, 71n2, 79–84, 80, 90n23, 91n40, 161 deep pantheism, ix, 1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 12, 24, 29n92, 38, 50, 132, 149, 152–153, 154, 155, 159 Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 16, 18, 20–21, 23, 29n92, 98, 144, 160, 161 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 23, 141, 147n41, 161 Dewey, John, viii, ix, 3, 8, 93 Dorrien, Gary, 17, 161 drive theory (Freud), 10, 56, 57, 58, 59–61, 62–63, 64, 65, 66–67, 72n36 Eco, Umberto, ix, 15, 161 ecology, 3, 11, 93, 98, 100, 101, 102n22, 142, 144 eidos (See Platonic Forms.) Emerson, Ralph Waldo, vii, 3, 50, 51, 52, 54n53, 74n92, 78, 80, 85, 87, 91n35, 92n58, 160, 161, 162 emptiness, 36, 37, 113, 149–150; God as, 149–150, 151, 155 emptying, 113, 150, 151 environment, 2, 9, 11, 13, 60, 62, 65, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98–100, 100–101, 115, 142–144 ethno-poetics, 112 evolution, viii, 3, 5, 17, 22, 56, 56–57, 61–62, 63, 65, 66, 68, 70, 82, 83, 86, 89, 91n36, 124, 132, 133, 135, 153, 154, 159 Faber, Roland, 9, 16–106, 18, 19–21, 22–23, 24–26, 27n22, 27n24, 29n76, 29n92, 161 Freud, Sigmund, xi, 10, 56, 57, 58, 58–60, 61, 62–63, 64, 65, 66, 66–67, 68,

72n13, 73n46, 73n73, 161 Fuxi, 12, 129–130, 134, 136n1 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, viii Glissant, Edouard, 3, 11, 104, 109–111, 112, 116, 118n19, 162 god-ing, 6, 7, 12, 24, 42n55, 45, 51, 126, 134, 135, 153 God, 2, 12, 33, 34, 126, 149; as creator, 3, 23, 24, 130; as emergent, 23; as emptiness. See emptiness, God as.; as energy, 7; as ground of freedom (Schelling), 92n58; as immanent, 25, 37, 152; as a natural complex, 4, 38, 39, 144; as transcendent, 36, 37, 132, 152; identified with nature, 5, 24, 51, 57; in deep pantheism, 5, 24, 153; in panentheism, 23, 24, 151, 151–152; in process theology, 23, 25, 152, 154, 155 goddess, 126, 130, 134 Goodenough, Ursula, 3, 162 Great Mother, x, xi hanul, 12, 134, 135 Haraway, Donna, 138, 141, 162 Hartshorne, Charles, 3, 18, 19, 152, 156n17, 162 Hegel, G.W.F., 20, 93, 96, 123, 141, 161 Heidegger, Martin, viii, xi, 5, 10, 11, 14n32, 22–23, 44, 45, 47, 139–140, 141, 162 hermeneutics, viii, xi, xii, 18, 32, 56, 143, 150 Hinduism, vii, 40n3, 41n28, 106, 112 Husserl, Edmund, xi, 47, 162 hybridization/hybridity, 11–12, 132, 133, 136n16, 137–139, 144, 145 I-Ching, 12, 129, 133, 134, 160 icon, 36, 117, 163; Peircean, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 92n51 idealism, 81, 82, 93, 94, 96, 98, 99, 123, 160, 161 immanence, vii, 1, 3, 5, 9–10, 11, 18, 20–21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29n92, 31, 36–37, 37, 38, 39, 43, 81, 100, 121, 123, 126, 135, 137, 149, 152 index (Peirce), 82, 85

Index interconnectivity, 3, 11, 22, 103, 104, 106, 108–109, 109, 112, 113–114, 116, 117, 127 interpretant, xii, xiii, 7, 79–80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87–89, 90n18, 90n27, 142, 143–144, 145, 154 intersubjectivity, 8, 12, 130 involution, 45, 61–62, 66, 70, 135 James, William, 3, 11, 17–18, 20, 27n21, 121–123, 124–126, 127, 128n24, 162 Jonas, Hans, 99, 100, 162 Joyce, James, 15–16, 161, 162 Jung, Carl Gustav, viii, ix, xi, 7, 11, 103, 104, 105, 106–107, 108, 109–110, 113, 114, 115, 134, 137, 162 Kant, Immanuel, 20, 33, 56, 80, 88, 92n58, 123, 162 Keller, Catherine, 40n17, 41n19, 159, 162 Kelly, Kevin, 141, 163 kenosis, 37 Lebenswelt/life-world, 47, 47–48, 50 McAfee, Andrew, 141, 160 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 48–49, 94, 102n9, 163, 165 midworld, 11, 93–94, 95, 96, 96–97, 98, 99, 100–101, 163 Miller, John William, 3, 11, 93, 94, 95–96, 96–97, 98–101 mysticism, 11, 26, 32–33, 36, 121–123, 123–125, 126–127 naturalism, viii, x, xi, 2, 6, 16, 55, 93, 125, 128n3, 144, 147n41; ecstatic (general features of), ix, x–xii, 3–9; pragmatic, 8, 16, 56, 160; process, 152, 155; religious, vii, ix, xii, 2–3, 13n5, 13n6, 55–56, 70, 126 natural complexes, xi, xii, 4–5, 6, 9, 10, 18–19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 38, 39, 43, 44, 45, 49, 101n2, 115, 126, 139, 144 natural difference, 10, 14n32, 22, 43, 44–45, 61 natural grace, 7, 52, 153 natura naturans (See nature naturing.) natura naturata (See nature natured.)

169

naturalistic idealism (Miller), 93, 94, 99 nature naturing and nature natured: definitions, x, 4, 22, 38; nature naturing not identical to god, 24; relation to human person, 43–44, 45–46; in Schopenhauer, 5, 7, 61; in Spinoza, 5, 139 nature’s unconscious, x–xi, xi, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 49, 58, 61, 104, 106–107, 108, 110, 112 neuropsychoanalysis, 1, 3, 10, 57, 62, 63, 65, 65–68, 68, 69, 71, 72n18, 73n54, 73n70, 163, 164, 165 Neville, Robert Cummings, ix, 3, 13n5, 46, 53n18, 71n10 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 124, 141 nothingness, ix, 13n8, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 82, 91n34, 149, 150, 159 Nüwa, 12, 129–130, 130, 132–133, 134, 135, 136n1, 136n14 ontological difference, 5, 10, 14n32, 18, 22–23 ontological parity, 9, 18, 20, 23, 126, 137, 145, 155 ontological priority, 9, 20, 137 ordinality, 4, 22, 126, 160 ordinal metaphysics, 4, 9, 14n10, 16, 56, 71n5, 126, 128n24, 160, 163 ordinal phenomenology, ix, xi, 3, 7, 144, 154, 155 otherness, 25, 36, 143 Panikkar, Raimon, 9, 32–33, 35, 36–37, 40n3, 41n28, 41n33, 163 pantheism, 5, 18, 22, 23, 29n92, 92n58, 99, 149, 152, 154, 156n17; chaosmic, 9, 23; deep (See deep pantheism.); transpantheism, 9, 24–25, 26, 29n92 panentheism, 5, 9, 12, 18, 23, 24, 137, 149, 151–152, 152–154, 155 panpsychism, 3, 5, 14n18, 57, 84, 132, 137 Peirce, Charles Sanders, vii, viii, ix, x, 3, 5, 10–11, 56, 57, 67, 68, 69, 77–89, 95–96, 98, 142, 161, 162, 163, 163–164; abduction, 56; categories, 69, 74n90, 79, 89, 92n55, 161; semeiotics (See semiotics/semeiotics.) perichoresis, 32, 35, 41n52

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Index

phenomenology, xi, 1, 10, 46–47, 47, 48, 51, 154, 162, 163; hermeneutic (Heidegger), xi, 47; ordinal, ix, xi, 3, 7, 144, 154, 155, 159; transcendental (Husserl), xi, 47 phytosemiosis, 81, 84 planetarity, 133, 136n16, 163 Plato, 81, 90n3, 91n34–91n35, 164; Forms, 20, 82–83, 88–89, 105; Platonic soul, 81 pluralism, 2, 8, 11, 15, 17–18, 20, 24, 25, 29n92, 33, 39, 86, 88, 121, 122–127, 128n24 post-humanism, 12, 137–138, 141, 145 Prigogine, Ilya, 16, 164 process philosophy, 3, 17, 20, 26, 155, 165 process theology, 25–26, 149, 152, 153–155, 159, 161, 163, 164 psychoanalysis, 10, 11, 56, 57–58, 60, 62–63, 66, 69, 70, 71n10, 71n11, 144; neuropsychoanalysis (See neuropsychoanalysis.); ordinal, xi, 3, 144 psychosemiosis, 7, 8 Ramos, Francisco José, 104, 113–114, 117, 118n3, 118n39, 164 realism, 18, 23, 96, 98, 99, 161 Reich, Wilhelm, ix, xii, 3, 59–60, 72n25, 72n26, 159 relativism, 8, 26 representamens (Peirce), 79 Royce, Josiah, viii, xii, 96 sacred folds, xii, 46, 106, 108, 134, 153 Schelling, F.W.J., x, 4, 15, 22–23, 78, 80, 92n58, 94, 97, 99, 102n9, 161, 164, 165 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 5, 7, 59, 60, 106; Will to Life, 10, 56, 57, 61; Schopenhauer’s nature naturing, 5, 7 Sebeok, Thomas A., ix, 81–82, 164 Second Machine Age, 138, 141, 142, 160 self-transcendence (nature’s), 1, 3, 6–7, 51, 70, 131, 135 selving, 6, 7, 7–8, 10, 11–12, 43, 44 semeiotics (Peirce), 11, 77–78, 79–81, 82, 84–85, 86, 89, 89n1, 92n58, 160 semiotics, ix, xii, 1, 7–8, 9, 14n22, 80, 81, 95, 107, 141, 142–144, 145, 161

signs, ix, xii, 7–8, 11, 46, 71n10, 77, 79–84, 85–89, 95; legisigns, 86, 88; qualisigns, 86, 88–89; sinsigns, 86, 88–89 silence, 9, 33, 34, 34–35, 35–36, 37, 38, 110, 151 Solms, Mark, 10, 57, 59, 62–64, 64, 66–67, 68, 68–69, 70, 72n18, 74n84, 74n85, 163, 164 soul(s), x, 3, 52, 91n35, 104, 111, 125; Peircean sign-soul, 81–82, 87 Spinoza, Baruch, x, 4, 5, 99, 139 spirit, x, 6–7, 9, 12, 32, 45, 132, 134, 135, 138, 145; Hegelian, 20; Holy Spirit, 34, 34–35, 36, 37, 38, 39 spirit-interpreter, 12, 138, 145 ssial, 150, 156n3 Stengers, Isabelle, 16, 164 sublime, ix, 3, 45–46, 48, 51, 78, 113, 115, 124, 135 sunyata, 35, 37, 113, 118n39 supernatural/supernaturalism, ix, x, 2, 4, 6, 12, 13n6, 17, 33, 39, 126, 135, 151, 153 symbol/symbolism, xii, 8, 38, 46, 52, 78, 103, 105, 107, 110, 113, 116, 130, 134, 137, 143, 147n29, 162, 163; in Peirce, 81, 82, 85, 87, 88; in Miller, 95 Taoism (See Daoism.) tehom, 3, 9, 31, 34, 34–35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40n3, 41n19, 41n37 teum, 132, 133, 163 Tillich, Paul, 9, 32, 33, 34–35, 36, 37, 135, 164 transcendence, vii, 1, 6, 9, 11–12, 20–21, 25, 31, 36–37, 39, 43, 45, 70, 137, 152, 153; selving, 51 transcendental deism, 152 transcendentalism, ix, 3, 74n92, 80, 91n35, 159, 162; aesthetic, 11, 79, 85, 88, 162 trans-humanism (See post-humanism.) tribalism, ix, 7 Uexküll, Jacob von, 97, 102n21, 164 ui (spirit), 138, 145 Umwelt, 7, 79, 97 unconscious: agitated (See agitated unconscious.): collective, ix, xi, 103, 105, 106–107, 109, 112; of nature (See

Index nature’s unconscious.); personal, viii, xi, xii, 7, 8, 49, 56, 66, 68, 105, 106 Whitehead, Alfred North, 3, 9, 12, 16–17, 18, 19, 20, 21–22, 22–23, 24–26, 165 Wildman, Wesley J., 3, 46, 49, 55, 56, 57, 70, 165

yin-yang, 12, 129–131, 134 Yu, Young-mo (Daseok) Žižek, Slavoj, 140, 165 zoösemiosis, 81–82, 84

171

About the Contributors

Robert S. Corrington is Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Philosophical Theology at Drew University. His work contributes to philosophical and theological inquiry through the development of ecstatic naturalism. He is the author of twelve books and around seventy articles in the areas of semiotics, American philosophy, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and Continental philosophy. His most recent books are Deep Pantheism: Toward a New Transcendentalism (Lexington Books, 2016) and Nature and Nothingness: An Essay in Ordinal Phenomenology (Lexington Books, 2017). Rose Ellen Dunn (PhD, Drew University) is associate dean for academic administration at Princeton Theological Seminary. She is the author of Finding Grace with God: A Phenomenological Reading of the Annunciation (Pickwick Publications, 2014). Her research interests center on phenomenology and include the intersections of phenomenology with philosophy, religion, and theology. Nicholas L. Guardiano is a research specialist and visiting lecturer at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has published on Emerson, Peirce, and North American artists. His work is committed to a close analysis of the ideas of American philosophers in order to properly adjudicate their contribution to the greater history of world philosophy. Simultaneously, it aims to creatively amplify the progressive ramifications of this tradition, especially on the topics of metaphysics, aesthetics, and nature. Hiheon Kim is Research Fellow at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul, Korea. He completed his Philosophy of Religion and Theology (PRT) Program at Claremont Graduate University, California, by submission of a PhD disserta173

174

About the Contributors

tion titled Minjung Messiah and Process Panentheism, in 2007. He has mainly taught minjung theology and process theology at Hanshin University and Sungkonghoe University. He published several books, including Minjung and Process (Peter Lang, 2009), Philosophy of Suh Nam-Dong (Ewha Woman’s University, 2013), and Minjung Theology in Panentheism (Your May, 2014), and 30 articles. He names his theological idea political panentheism, which is a viable form of minjung theology in the changed milieu of postmodernism intended for Christian religion’s retrieval of the liberative logic of faith. He actively participated in the religious movement for social transformation, while having served as editorial chair of the online journal Ecumenian and General Secretary of Life Peace Madang. Marilynn Lawrence currently teaches philosophy at Immaculata University outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her primary research interests have included Neoplatonism, ecstatic naturalism, and aesthetics. She is a member of the board of directors for the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies and has organized panels for ISNS topics such as providence and fate in Neoplatonism, the relationship of Neoplatonism and divination, and the influences among ancient Greek philosophical and religious schools. Her publications include book chapters such as “Akrasia and Enkrateia in Simplicius’s Commentary on Epictetus’s Encheiridion,” in The Neoplatonic Socrates (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); “Who Thought the Stars Are Causes? An Exploration of the Astrological Doctrine Criticized by Plotinus,” in Metaphysical Patterns in Platonism (The Prometheus Trust, 2014 reprint); “The Young Gods: The Stars and Planets in Platonic Treatment of Fate,” in Perspectives sur le néoplatonisme (Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2010); and “The Place of Chance or Fortune in Platonic Fate,” in Conversations Platonic and Neoplatonic (Academia Verlag, 2010). Rory McEntee, author, educator, and contemplative activist, works at an intersection of spirituality, education, and culture. Rory co-wrote “New Monastic Manifesto” with Adam Bucko and is co-author of The New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Living (Orbis Books, 2015), as well as numerous articles on new monasticism and interspiritual theology. Before becoming a PhD student in Theological and Philosophical Studies at Drew University, Rory did doctoral work in mathematics at the University of Southern California and served as a high school vice principal and a math and physics teacher while bringing meditation practices into secondary education. He co-founded and is executive director of the Foundation for New Monasticism, where he works with some of the world’s leading contemplatives and social activists to develop formation processes for young people and to facilitate dialogue among varying faith traditions and emerging spiritualities.

About the Contributors

175

Thomas Millary received his MA in theology from Drew Theological School. His research interests include spiritual pluralism, Western esotericism, and the American philosophical tradition. In particular, his work has focused on continuities between Hermeticism and American philosophical approaches, such as pragmatism and ecstatic naturalism. He is the editor of Plural Experience, an interdisciplinary group blog that seeks to explore and popularize pluralistic perspectives. Wade A. Mitchell is currently a PhD student at Drew University in the Graduate Division of Religion. His academic interests include the philosophical legacies of C. S. Peirce, William James, and other American pragmatists; the ethical and spiritual prospects of religious naturalism; the cognitive science of religion; and the scientific study of memory. He currently lives in New York City. Leon Niemoczynski is visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. His research focuses mainly on the philosophy of nature, especially within the Continental philosophical tradition. He also maintains interests in a diverse range of topics including philosophical ecology, logic and metaphysics, German idealism, aesthetics, animal ethics, and the philosophy of religion. Philosophers most relevant to his current research include Plato, Hegel, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Deleuze, and Merleau-Ponty. Niemoczynski is the author of Speculative Naturalism (forthcoming 2018), Speculative Realism: An Epitome (Kismet Press, 2017), and Charles Sanders Peirce and a Religious Metaphysics of Nature (Lexington Books, 2011), and co-editor of A Philosophy of Sacred Nature: Prospects for Ecstatic Naturalism (Lexington Books, 2015). Jea Sophia Oh is assistant professor of philosophy at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. Her research is highly interdisciplinary and cross-cultural for it arrives at the intersections of philosophy and theology, religion and ecology, Asian philosophy, and process studies. Her book, A Postcolonial Theology of Life: Planetarity East and West (Sopher Press, 2011), is the first approach to bridge postcolonialism and ecological theology. She contributed her book chapter, “Nature’s Spontaneity and Intentionality: Ecocracy, Doing Non-Doing Principle of Donghak [Eastern Learning], and Ecstatic Naturalism,” in A Philosophy of Sacred Nature: Prospects for Ecstatic Naturalism (Lexington Books, 2015). Her essay in this anthology, “Vulnerable Transcendence of Nature,” won the Charles Emerson Prize in the 2016 Ecstatic Naturalism Congress.

176

About the Contributors

Elaine Padilla is assistant professor of constructive theology at New York Theological Seminary. Her theological analysis constructively interweaves current philosophical discourse with Christianity, Latin American and Latino/a religious thought, mysticism, ecology, gender, and race. She is the author of Divine Enjoyment: A Theology of Passion and Exuberance, published by Fordham University Press (2015); and co-editor of a three-volume project with Peter C. Phan, Theology and Migration in World Christianity, published by Palgrave Macmillan: Contemporary Issues of Migration and Theology (2013), Theology of Migration in the Abrahamic Religions (2014), and Christianities in Migration: The Global Perspective (2015). She is currently drafting a manuscript tentatively titled “The Darkness of Being,” in which she explores views on the soul with implications for race and gender. Padilla has also published several chapters and articles. She is a member of the American Academy of Religion, where she serves on various steering committees, and is a member of the Catholic Theological Society of America. Iljoon Park is a researcher/lecturer at the Christian Research Institute for Integral Studies at Methodist Theological University, Seoul. His research interests have focused upon the subjects of being-human in contemporary philosophies, cognitive science, evolutionary theories, evolutionary psychology, artificial life, and related topics. His main publications include “An Ontology of the Between in Evolutionary Theories: The Ontology of Event in a Post-Human Age” in Korean (2014), “Evolutionary Theory and the Ontology of Event: Post-Human Implications of Evolutionary Theories” in Korean (2014), “A Methodology of Religious Studies After the Post-Modern Age,” and “Karl Raschke’s Suggestion of Religious Study as a Discourse of Justice.” He is also a contributor to A Philosophy of Sacred Nature: Prospects for Ecstatic Naturalism (Lexington Books, 2015). Austin Roberts is a PhD student at Drew University in the Graduate Division of Religion. He received an MA in theology and philosophy at Claremont School of Theology and a BA in religious studies from Humboldt State University. His research centers mainly on the intersection of process thought and Continental philosophy of religion, which flows into his interests in ecological theology, post-secularism, and radical theology.