The concern of this work is with developing an alternative to standard categories in theology and philosophy, especially in terms of how they deal with nature. Avoiding the polemics of much contemporary reflection on nature, it shows how we are connected to nature through the unconscious and its unique way of reading and processing signs. Spinoza's key distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata serves as the governing framework for the treatise. Suggestions are made for a post-Christian way of understanding (...) religion. Robert S. Corrington's work represents the first sustained attempt to bring together the fields of semiotics, depth-psychology, pragmaticism, and a post-Monotheistic theology of nature. Its focus is on how signification functions in human and non-human orders of infinite nature. Our connection with the infinite is described in detail, especially as it relates to the use of sign systems. (shrink)

In the wake of both the semiotic and the psychoanalytic revolutions, how is it possible to describe the object of religious worship in realist terms? Semioticians argue that each object is known only insofar as it gives birth to a series of signs and interpretants (new signs). From the psychoanalytic side, religious beliefs are seen to belong to transference energies and projections that contaminate the religious object with all-too-human complexes. In Nature's Religion, distinguished theologian and philosopher Robert S. (...) class='Hi'>Corrington weaves together the concept of infinite semiosis with that of the transference to show that the self does have access to something in nature that is intrinsically religious. Corrington argues that signs and our various transference fields can and do connect us with fully natural religious powers that are not of our own making, thereby opening up a path past the Western monotheisms to a capacious religion of nature. With a foreword by Robert C. Neville, Nature's Religion is essential reading for philosophers of religion, scholars of the psychology of religion, and theologians. (shrink)

Semiotic theory, which has restricted its focus largely to human forms of significations, is transformed by Robert S. Corrington into a semiotics of nature itself. Corrington situates the divide between "nature naturing" and "nature natured" within the contest of classical American pragmaticism and postmodern psychoanalysis. At the heart of this new metaphysics is an insistence that all signs participate in larger orders of meaning that are natural and religious. Meanings embodied in nature point beyond nature to the (...) mystery inherent in positioned codes and signs. (shrink)

Nature’s Sublime provides a radical new vision of infinite nature and its deepest aesthetic dimensions as they are encountered by finite human sign users. Rather than looking to religion for healing and salvation, Nature’s Sublime argues that the arts provide a deeper relationship to the vast depths of nature.

The drama of the unfolding of the spirit, Corrington argues, is one of the most powerful struggles within the human process. The spirit is in and of nature and can never lift the self outside of nature. For Corrington's ecstatic naturalism, there is no realm of the supernatural, only dimensions and orders within nature.

This book explores four types of nothingness as found in nature: holes in nature, totalizing nothingness in horror, naturing nothingness, and encompassing nothingness. Robert S. Corrington argues that though nothingness takes many forms, they are all guises of the same vast Nothingness.

The purpose of this essay is to map out the perspective of ecstatic naturalism and its corollary theology of deep pantheism. Ecstatic naturalism begins and ends with the fissuring between nature naturing (nature perennially creating itself out of itself alone) and nature natured (the innumerable orders of the world). Nature naturing and its pulsating potencies could also be named: der Wille (Schopenhauer), firstness (Peirce), the transcendental psychoid (Jung), and creativity (Whitehead). Deep Pantheism rejects theism, with a fully transcendent deity, and (...) panentheism, with its deity both in and beyond nature. The “deep” in my form of pantheism refers to the otherness of the unfathomable depths of the unconscious of nature. The theism entailed is that of gods and goddesses, finitely located, that are archetypal images. The symbol of the Great Mother is a premier locus for grounding and enveloping the human psyche. The travail of mind involves the fitful and precarious transitions between finite and embedded mind within nature natured and the emergence of an awareness of the depths of the human, cultural, collective, and natural modes of the unconscious via nature naturing. (shrink)

The metaphor of the “midworld” refers to Emerson's conception of the realm between the human process and nature. In his earlier writings, poetry served as a linguistic midworld that made it possible for the self to relate to the innumerable orders of nature. By the 1840's Emerson's thought had taken a much more skeptical turn and had moved decisively away from his earlier linguistic idealism. As a consequence, his conception of the nature of the midworld changed. The more humble work (...) of the farmer came to represent more clearly the actual development of the midworld. In agricultural production, the basic features of nature became more directly available to the self. By the 1870's Emerson recognized that the farmer and the poet were both representatives of the midworld that made nature actual to the human process. (shrink)

This book introduces Robert Corrington’s “ecstatic naturalism,” a new perspective in understanding “sacred” nature and naturalism, and explores what can be done with this philosophical thought. This is an excellent resource for scholars of Continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and American pragmatism.

The book transcends and transforms current work in the field of religious naturalism, gives pantheism new life over against the more fashionable panentheism, radicalizes and deepens the thought and practice of psychoanalysis with its creation of ordinal psychoanalysis, and creates a whole new way of doing phenomenology called ordinal phenomenology.

A collection of papers from a conference held in 1984.

Review article. Joseph Brent, Charles Sander Peirce: A Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

In this most recent book in an evolving series of foundational works in philosophy, semiotics, and theology, Neville probes into the nature and function of that class of signs that have an astonishing power to transform selves and communities. In unfolding what, for him, are the essential ingredients in religious symbols, he uses some of the categories and phenomenological descriptions that have done service in his other works. Particularly, he brings to bear on symbols his analysis of the creator/creation relationship, (...) his privileging of value over form, and the nature of determinateness and its boundary. At the same time, he puts pressure on any semiotic theory that would engulf the uniqueness of religious symbols under a pseudogeneric understanding of codes. (shrink)

There are some intriguing and inviting complexities around the twin concepts of nature and naturalism. For too many evolutionary biologists, and even evolutionary psychologists, who should know better, Nature with a capital "N" is rarely analyzed and when done so it is with the crudest of instruments. And for those of us who do know better, we register with some vexation that the reigning concept of naturalism has been flattened into a dull-witted colorless perspective that veers toward some kind of (...) materialism; a belief in the exhaustive correlation of chance and law, alas, with no help from Peirce; a tendency toward a mind/brain identity thesis; an emergentism vis-à-vis consciousness (and the corollary rejection .. (shrink)

This is a wonderful and important book that highlights a conception of naturalism that has its roots in the Columbia School. Readers of this journal are very much aware of and have often participated in the work of the Chicago School of religious naturalism, but the Columbia School, more secular and less religiously inclined, may not be as well known. John Ryder brings the Columbia School to life in his account of how this more secular naturalism aligns itself to the (...) work of Dewey, Woodbridge, Randall, and above all Justus Buchler. Santayana was an important source of inspiration for the Columbia naturalists who preferred his cooler naturalism to more religiously hot varieties. The philosophers at Columbia .. (shrink)

Nature and Spirit: An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism develops an enlarged conception of nature that in turn calls for a transformed naturalism. Unline more descriptive naturalisms, such as those by Dewey, Santayana, and Buchler, ecstatic naturalism works out of the fundamental ontological difference between nature naturing(natura naturans) and nature natured (natura naturata). This difference underlies all other variations within a generic conception of nature. The spirit operates within a generic conception of nature. The spirit operates within a fragmented nature and (...) has its own unique locations. Ecstatic naturalism does not eulogize spirit nor impose a process theodicy upon nature as a whole but carefully describes the ways in which spirit emerges from finite locations within the world. Methodologically, the text radically regrounds phenomenology so that it can work more closely with a metaphysics seeking the most generic forms of nature. The move from a transcendental phenomenology, which rests upon a profound misconception of the parcel of a radicalized naturalism, makes it possible to show how all orders of relevance are related to nature and to the spirit. This, in turn relocates the human process, with its dialectical tension between finitude and transendence, and places the self fully within the emergent structures of the community of interpreters as that community lives out of hope. The concept of worldhood is regrounded in pragmatic and semiotic terms, thus putting pressure on Heidegger's formulations. Peirce's pragmatic categorical structure is used to show how worldhood differs from any other order within the world. The correlation of the potencies of nature, which are presemiotic and preordinal, wit the orders of the world itself, is possible only through an ordinal phenomenology that remains attuned to the fundamental difference between nature naturing (the potencies) and nature natured (the orders of the world). Finally, the text redefines the divine natures in the light of an ecstatic naturalism that sees god as an order within the world that experiences the fragmented quality of nature. Process theology is challenged for its inability to grasp the tensions between god and the encompassing. Four divine natures are laid bare as they relate to nature and to each other. The work concludes with a description of the divine life in the face of the encompassing. (shrink)

In the history of religious naturalism, Santayana’s 1905 Reason in Religion, the third book of The Life of Reason, stands as a foundational text and is also among the most important texts that Santayana ever wrote. In it he lays out his highly unique conception of the religious life on the other side of traditional religious belief and creates an agnostic, even atheistic, perspective that yet finds a key place for the sheer poetry and transforming power of religion in personal (...) life. His own history made him deeply attuned to the ritual and poetry of the Roman Catholic traditions, and he had an almost inverse hostility to or at least distain for the Northern Protestant traditions.Some of his most delicious and... (shrink)