Deep Pantheism: Toward a New Transcendentalism

156 Pages·2015·1 MB·English

by  Robert S. Corrington

DEEP PANTHEISM
DEEP PANTHEISM
TOWARD A
NEW TRANSCENDENTALISM
Robert S. Corrington
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Corrington, Robert S., 1950-
Title: Deep pantheism : toward a new transcendentalism / Robert S. Carrington.
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2015. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015038820| ISBN 9781498529693 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781498529709 (electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy of nature. | Transcendentalism. | Phenomenology. |
Pantheism.
Classification: LCC BD581 .C668 2015 | DDC 141/.3--dc23 LC record available
at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015038820
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Printed in the United States of America
Pantheism, taken theoretically, is only naturalism poetically expressed.
—George Santayana, Reason in Religion , 1905
Preface
This book represents the culmination of several decades of work on the
foundations of what can best be called “a metaphysics of nature.” Since the early
1990s I have been unfolding the categories and phenomenological descriptions
of my ecstatic naturalism as it relates to the history of philosophy and theology.
My ongoing goal is to provide the broadest categories possible for rendering
what is, in whatever way it is, available to circumspect analysis and appraisal.
This has entailed the formation of a type of naturalism that is both capacious in
its scope, and radical in its depths. By “depths” I am referring to the underside of
nature, or put more directly, nature’s un conscious dimension. By “scope” I refer
to the utter unendingness of nature that has no outside limit.
Depth-psychologists, especially Jung, knew this terrain well even if they didn’t
have the metaphysical categories at hand to do it full justice. Post-Kantian
idealists also came to understand the unconscious of nature through their
analysis of the correlation of the infinite and the finite within human experience.
Schelling and Schopenhauer were both working out of a sense of the primal
chaos that lives in what Schelling called “the unruly ground” (das Regellose ).
For Schelling, even the divine hovers over the abyss of the ungrounded ground,
that is, it too must have its own unconscious depths that are rooted in nature in
its naturing. Schelling states: “Without this preceding darkness, creatures have
no reality; darkness is their necessary inheritance.” (p. 29)
While Schleiermacher did not have the same dark sense of chaos that Schelling
had, he phenomenologically unveiled the living infinite as an indeterminate
presence that grounds self-consciousness. It is rather Schopenhauer who came to
have the most perspicacious categorial framework for grasping nature naturing
in its “raw” state. Schopenhauer argued with some force that the Will to Life is
the underground unconscious of nature, namely, nature naturing, and that the
Will is without number or form—it simply wills in a blind and chaotic way by
objectifying itself in and as the innumerable orders of the world—that is, in the
phenomenal domain of space, time, and causality. This theme is picked up by
Emerson when he talks of how nature naturing “publishes” itself as nature
natured. The tricky part is in how to do a phenomenological description of
“objectification” or “publishing,” where you are dealing with a phase transition
of great mystery and complexity.
Part of the mission of ecstatic naturalism is to use its tools, among them an
ordinal phenomenology, to probe into and be probed by the vastness of nature.
The primal distinction within an ecstatic naturalist metaphysics is that between
nature naturing (natura naturans ) and nature natured (natura naturata ). In what
follows I will define nature naturing as “Nature perennially creating itself out of
itself alone,” while nature natured will be defined as, “The innumerable orders of
the World.” Note that this ontological distinction prevails within and as the one
nature that there is and does not comprise two separate realities with one being
more “real” or foundational than the other. Nature naturing and nature natured
belong together in the fullness that is nature in its encompassing. We approach
the Encompassing whenever we consciously and deliberately attain a more
expanded view of nature and its innumerable orders.
In what follows, we will analyze the human process through the perspective of
an ordinal psychoanalysis that probes into the complex rhythms of nature’s
unconscious as it entwines itself within the human collective and personal modes
of the unconscious. The phenomenological descriptions of the self/world
correlation will show the roles played by nature’s archetypes in shaping personal
and communal existence. Psychoanalysis itself will be regrounded in an ordinal
way to make it far more capacious and rooted in nature. The narcissism of
classical Freudian and some Neo-Freudian perspectives will be challenged by an
ordinal psychoanalysis that insists that the human process be understood not
only through inner drives or motives but through the ongoing and oftimes
precarious correlation between its own finitude and the vast infinities of both
nature naturing and nature natured. As this exegetical and hermeneutic work
unfolds, the human process will be seen as being guided but what I call
“Selving.” The Selving process unfolds most fulfillingly when it maintains the
perennial tension between its own place(s) within nature natured, always
shifting, and the potencies of nature naturing.
The scope of this treatment of the human self and the indefinite complexities of
nature encompasses detailed treatments of art and religion, the archetypes,
evolution and involution, culture, the spirits, and ultimately, of the
Encompassing “itself.” Throughout, the focus will be on nature in its ecstatic
fecundity.
Theologically, deep pantheism is a perspective that says: “Nature is all that there
is and the divine is a natural complex within the one nature.” As a form of
pantheism, it rejects the halfway house of process panen theism with its dipolar
deity that/who lives both within and without nature. Metaphorically, while
process theologians look up to the primordial mind of god as the summum
bonum , a deep pantheist will look down into the depths from whence all
divinities emerge. The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is rejected, and a sense of
endless emanation upon emanation takes its place. As we shall see, Emerson
grasped the inner logic of creation with his Neo-Platonic sense of unending self-
emanating for nature as a “whole.”
Culturally and historically, ecstatic naturalism and deep pantheism represent an
“emancipatory re-enactment” of nineteenth-century New England
Transcendentalism. This fecund and universalizing movement represents a
reformation within liberal Protestantism that shook orthodox theology to its
roots. Emerson in particular pushed hard on the edges of his Unitarian tradition
and came out of his intense struggle as a post-Christian deep pantheist. His life
arc is one of the purest expressions of ecstatic naturalism, in deed and act, that
the world has seen. While there have been numerous ecstatic naturalists both
before and after Emerson, his expression of this form of naturalism is exemplary
and paradigmatic.
This new Transcendentalism positions itself on the other side of both traditional
theism and contemporary process panentheism. Deep pantheism has its own kind
of piety toward nature and the natural grace that mysteriously flows out from
nature to the human process. Nature and the human process are entwined
together as each beacons to the other. As we shall see, genius, art, and the
sublime are all categories that receive a new meaning in the post-monotheist
ecstatic world of nature naturing as it gifts itself toward and as nature natured.
This new Transcendentalism will be post-tribal and open to the liberating
potency of what Ernst Bloch calls “the Not Yet Being,” which emerges both
from the human unconscious but also, and importantly, from the bosom of nature
itself. The principle of hope, in the personal and collective human orders, is a
gifting of nature naturing to the larger and more capacious orders of the world of
nature. Under the right conditions of horizonal growth hope emerges as the
opening power of the Not Yet that clears away the psychic debris that blocks the
fitful evolution of consciousness in its quest for encompassment under the
stringent conditions of finitude.
The Not Yet is not a purely human attitude that gets projected onto the world but
The Not Yet is not a purely human attitude that gets projected onto the world but
is part of the depth-rhythm of nature naturing as it provides transforming
energies within the innumerable orders of nature natured. Put differently, the Not
Yet is an ontological potency within the one nature that there is and exists
around the edges of humanly occupied horizons of meaning. This energy at the
boundaries of thought and experience represents the moving process of what I
shall call “involution” to quicken and transform evolution on the level of the
indefinitely complex human process. Evolution is the ubiquitous process within
nature, while involution functions as a moment of self-overcoming and
transparency for the attendant self as it struggles to locate itself within the
infinite world of nature’s extra-human orders.
Acknowledgments
I especially want to acknowledge five colleagues who have read the various
chapters as they have been written and have rendered sage and helpful comments
on the manuscript: Rose Ellen Dunn, Marilynn Lawrence, AJ Turner, Guy
Woodward, and Martin Yalcin. Each comes from a different philosophical
perspective and collectively these perspectives have helped put my book in a
more capacious context. I am deeply grateful for their efforts. I also want to
acknowledge the participants in the past five Congresses on Ecstatic Naturalism,
held every April at Drew University, for their lively discussions and brilliant
papers on various aspects of my perspective and, as importantly, on their own
versions of naturalism.
Introduction
Classical and Ordinal Phenomenology
The phenomenological movement is so vast and multi-layered that it will be
impossible to give even the barest analysis of it in this introduction. However,
we will be able to give some indication of its early provenance by an analysis of
Husserl and Heidegger, truncated though it must be. With Husserl we will be
looking at his Logical Investigations, Book II (Logische Untersuchungen II ),
especially the section so important to the young Heidegger, and his Cartesian
Mediations (Méditations cartésiennes ). With Heidegger we will briefly focus on
his Being and Time (Sein und Zeit ). The proximate goal will be to till the soil for
an ordinal phenomenology. But first some preliminary words about the
relationship between phenomenology and metaphysics are in order.
Originally, phenomenology was developed as a kind of post-epistemological
method-of-methods to enable us to avoid pre-established metaphysical
commitments—that is, it was designed to be metaphysically neutral, to see the
“things themselves” as they give themselves to phenomenological intuition
(Anschauung ). In this process, the ontological or metaphysical constitution of
things was bypassed in favor of a more direct kind of letting beings become
unhidden (Anwesen ) to phenomenological seeing. The whatness (quidditas ) of
the thing was postponed until a description could be made of the essence (Wesen
) of the phenomenon in its giving of itself, its self-arising, to phenomenological
fore-sight. The so-called “essence” could never be determined in advance and
emerged only after an extremely careful process of patient and detailed
phenomenological seeing.
Yet, it soon became evident that phenomenology had its own hidden
metaphysical commitments. Heidegger well noted the Cartesian and Kantian
elements in Husserl, even if he ignored metaphysical commitments of his own,
such as a lingering neo-Kantianism. Here we are calling Kant a metaphysician
insofar as he grounded his thought in posited notions of substance and modified
Aristotelian categories. Kant’s alleged transition from metaphysica generalis to
epistemology did not fool the post-Kantians who knew that more was afoot than
Kant had suspected. Perhaps Schopenhauer grasped it best when he saw direct
implications in Kant’s notion of the ding an sich for metaphysics in the