Nature's Religion

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Nature's Religion Corrington, Robert S. Rowman & Littlefield 084768699X 9780847686995 9780585080758 English Nature--Religious aspects, Philosophical theology. 1997 BL435.C67 1997eb 210 Nature--Religious aspects, Philosophical theology.

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Nature's Religion Robert S. Corrington ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham Boulder New York Oxford

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ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Maryland 20706 12 Hid's Copse Road Cummor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ, England Copyright © 1997 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Corrington, Robert S., 1950 Nature's religion / Robert S. Corrington. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8476-8699-X (cloth : alk. paper). ISBN 0-8476-8750-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. NatureReligious aspects. 2. Philosophical theology. I. Title. BL435.C67 1997 210dc21 97-17894 CIP ISBN 0-8476-8699-X (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 0-8476-8750-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) Printed in the United States of America TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

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. . . let us not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, natura naturans, the quick cause, before which all forms flee as the driven snows, itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and multitudes, (as the ancient represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd) and in undescribable variety. It publishes itself in creatures, reaching from particles and spicula, through transformation on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate results without a shock or a leap. Ralph Waldo Emerson "Nature" 1844

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Contents

Foreword By Robert C. Neville

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Preface

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Introduction: The How of Nature and the Where of the Sacred

1

Chapter One: Sacred Folds

23

Chapter Two: Intervals

61

Chapter Three: Unruly Ground

97

Chapter Four: Spirit's Eros

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Author

193

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Foreword Robert Cummings Neville This profoundly insightful, imaginatively brilliant, and rhetorically revolutionary book by Robert S. Corrington calls to mind the extraordinary fact that philosophical theology today is distinguished by three projects sharing three uncommon commitments: to naturalism, to engaging and reconstructing the theological traditions of Western philosophy and Christianity, and to doing this in thoroughly public and nonconfessional ways. I refer, in addition to Corrington's, to the projects of William Desmond and (never one for modesty) myself. By naturalism we mean, negatively, a rejection of any supernatural transcendence for a god beyond the most encompassing categories (nature for Corrington, being for Desmond and me) and, positively, an interpretation of the divine as grounding in various ways the public and accessible world in which we live, which Corrington calls, after Spinoza, nature natured. William Desmond in many books, most recently and systematically in Perplexity and Ultimacy (1995a) and Being and the Between (1995), has developed a theory of metaphysics calling for four kinds of complementary analysis. The first is univocal, aiming at a unified theory of reality. The second is equivocal, showing what falls out of any univocal analysis and revealing the intrinsic ambiguity of thought. The third is dialectical, uniting the univocal and equivocal approaches by a process of reintegrating self-mediation. The fourth he calls the metaxological by which he means the logic of thinking in the middle, where the things thought are again set in opposition to the thinker and to one another and appreciated as falling outside the knowledge and experience of them. This theory of metaphysics is reminiscent of that of Paul Weiss in Modes of Being in which he says things are to be understood in their own terms, in terms of how they are for others, in terms of how those two ways are integrated, and in terms of how the things integrated are also to be conceived to be apart, conjoined but not swallowed by a cognitive whole.

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With this theory of metaphysics, Desmond develops a metaphysical theory treating such topics as (to cite the chapter heads of Being and the Between) Origin, Creation, Things, Intelligibilities, Selves, Communities, Being True, and Being Good; the first two are particular places for theological themes. Although there are many fascinating similarities and contrasts, and piquant challenges, to Corrington's theory in Desmond's metaphysics, the most pertinent for Corrington's current book is the thematic contrast Desmond draws between eros and agape. Eros is associated with dialectical self-othering and mediation; it provides apt metaphors for the movement of the human mind, lacking wholeness, toward its origin and fulfillment. Agape can be appreciated only by metaxological otherness and is associated with: . . . a dynamic excess of giving being . . . There is a rupture here, but not in any negative sense; it is the rupture that institutes metaphysical separation. Metaphysical separation is not dualistic opposition; in fact, this rupture or spacing is instituted out of agape and not out of opposition. The agape of the origin would be the origin prior to the Heraclitean father, polemos. Polemos may come to be in this rupture, but this is because the goodness of separateness also allows the free finite being to turn against the agapeic source that gives it being in the first instance. War, like erotic being, is only possible because of the metaphysical priority of the agape of being (Desmond 1995:261). For Desmond, agape and agapeic origin are more profound than eros. That this is not so for Corrington, that the erotic is more profound than the agapeic, is the central insight of Corrington's system, I believe. It ripples throughout his treatment of a host of topics. This contrast needs to be tempered with the qualifications that would come from an extended analysis of the technical ways in which Desmond and Corrington define eros and agape; in particular, Corrington is reacting against theological uses of the notion of agape in recent Protestant theology, uses that do not register in Desmond's system, and so Corrington's distinction between eros and agape is more polemical than Desmond's. Nevertheless, the contrast between Corrington's privileging of eros and Desmond's of agape is intelligible enough in a rough way for a Foreword.

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To get at the significance of eros for Corrington, we can think first of his method. Like Desmond and me (and very few others in our time), Corrington is at home with metaphysical speculation; he rises most significantly from Spinoza and Justus Buchler. From the former he takes the profound distinction between nature naturing and nature natured; from the latter he takes the notions of traits, orders, and the principle of ontological parity, namely, that anything that is something is just as much as anything else. But in addition to, and as a corrective of speculation, Corrington insists upon a phenomenology of experience; Desmond does the like in his discussions of equivocity and metaxological thought, and I pair speculation and phenomenology as correctives in Normative Cultures (1995). Corrington's conception of phenomenology is far richer than most of those deriving from Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger because he takes up their contributions into a semiotic approach deriving from Charles Peirce. (I, though not Desmond, agree with this move.) Indeed Corrington's descriptive phenomenology that lifts up phenomena as being in semiotic relations is correlated with intuitions of origins just as his cosmology, if I may use that term, correlates nature natured as a complex sign process with nature naturing as the origin and opening up of the possibilities for sign process. Correlation is not the right word, because there is a profoundly asymmetrical relation between the origins, nature naturing, and the processive, semiotic world, nature natured; but it is okay for a Foreword. The most distinctive feature of Corrington's method, however, with no parallels in Desmond's or my project, is his use and metaphorical extension of psychoanalytic theory. His central claim, stated baldly and without his subtle qualifications, is that the unconscious gives rise to the conscious, as nature naturing gives rise to nature natured, and that, although it helps to bring the unconscious to consciousness where we can, we have no access save for longing to the unconscious as such. There is a powerful semiotic dynamism within nature natured as the blind processes of nature sweep us along. And there is an even more powerful dynamism between nature naturing and the process of nature natured as a whole and at every place along the line. Because of the relation between conscious life and the unconscious, ontologically as well as psychologically considered, eros thus has a double thrust: a longing for wholeness in a return to origins, but a longing that can be played out only within the forward thrust of life within nature natured.

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Hence arises the plot of the present volume. There are within the nature that we encounter special complexities or "sacred folds" of things that slow the horizontal flow of our attention and direct our sensibilities to the vertical dimension of origins. At one level these are merely elements within nature natured: mountains, groves, peculiar persons. But they also, under some circumstances, call attention to their ontological ground, at least for some people. Corrington has a brilliant analysis of how these sacred folds can function sacredly because of the semiotic categories and interests we bring and project upon them. The sacred folds are interesting, however, only because of the space between them, as it were, their nonsacred contexts, which Corrington calls "intervals." The intervals are not mere extensions but extensions shaped by the peculiar sacred folds that punctuate them so that we can approach the sacred in the dynamic context of human life. Corrington conjoins his Peircean semiotics with psychoanalytic thematics to show how nature (naturing and natured) has religious traits when approached with profound human semiotic projections. These traits are real, in nature itself when engaged with the right religious semiotics. Religious semiotics gets real answers just as mathematical scientific semiotics does. Corrington never suggests that all religious experience is a kind of Feuerbachian projection, a mere false projection of human interests and wishes upon a religionless reality. Rather he defends a kind of Peircean realism in religion as in science. On the other hand, and here is the central polemical point of this book, traditional religions usually have indeed gone beyond semiotic projective engagement falsely to project anthropocentric wishes onto nature. Nature natured is a rush of blindly interacting processes in which the temporary and not-charmed environmental habitation for human life is very fragile. To find the sacred and profane within this is valid, revealing the pulsive power of nature naturing. But it is not valid to project a moral personal character onto the origins such as in many theisms. The principal force of the psychoanalytic method in philosophy, therefore, is to teach us the attitude of suspicion. When do our semiotic projections, shaped by merely human needs and longings, read onto nature what is only in our wishing rather than discern what is there? Corrington stresses that we can never be certain about where to draw the line between projections shaped by engaged discernment and those shaped by imposed human needs. But being aware of the distinction opens the possibility of religious realism. The sacred might be folded into the nature within which we live, but the

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sacred is not Daddy or the Wise King. (Actually, Corrington would be happier with saying that the sacred reveals the Mother, the matrix, the unconscious womb of being; but his Mommy is not nice, for the following reason). For Corrington, the central ontological fact is that the Mother, nature naturing, gives birth to us and nature natured leaves us like foundlings. We are whelped and then abandoned. We are thrown into existence and then left with no help but what can be manipulated from the brutal powers of nature and our semiotic inventiveness. Between the powers of origin and our world there is an abyss. We long to rejoin those powers but cannot get across. We can understand our longing, and thereby understand something of what we miss, as unconscious material can be brought to consciousness; but we cannot become whole with our ground. Thus Corrington's existential last word, if I might use that phrase, is that life is lonely and sad, alienated from its ground and beat up by a blind nature that has no special place or protections for things of the human scale. Only deceptive projections from false religions make us think that our world is a special garden (it rather is filled with snakes) and that our ground is a still-present god who loves us. So our strongest existential resource is interpretive semiotics that can guide our erotics toward origins and the future toward realism. We do the best we can, as Freud would say, bravely attempting realism in our erotic passions and fending off the temptations to death wishes in the face of the abyss or to grandiose fantasies in the face of the future. The problem with agape, for Corrington, is that it is the false projection of a need to be loved as weak sinners by a god who loves us despite our unworthiness; applied to ourselves, it is too self-congratulatory. Eros recognizes the passion of our existence. It is not a god, as in Plato, that dialectically integrates the grounding gods, nature naturing, with the earth, nature natured. But it shapes our passions to be aware of the ground and of its absence, and to reach out from ourselves in spiritual creativity to make the best of our possible places within nature. Now the problem with Corrington's theory, if I might be so bold, is that it falsely projects a particular psychoanalytic model of a separation, an abyss, a gulf, onto the relation between nature naturing and nature natured. It imposes a space where there cannot be any space at all. There is nothing between nature naturing and nature natured, not a thick ontological Nothing, just nothing. To put it the other way, the very

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originating activity of nature naturing is to be nature natured. Without the determinateness of something natured, there is no naturing. Nature naturing is to be found as the ontological presence in every item of nature natured. In my own preferred language of creation ex nihilo, the determinate processive dynamic creative world is the immediate terminus of divine creative act. The divine act has no nature except what it creates. The created determinate world has no existence save as riding the creative activity of the creator. Because determinate things are related temporally, and therefore in constantly changing relations, the creative act is not in time but should be characterized in metaphors of eternity. Divine eternity is not static but infinitely more dynamic than mere processiveness or temporal advance because the relations between past, present, and future are constantly changing in their togetherness in the divine eternity. At any time we human beings are both temporally related to the past, present, and future, and eternally resident in the singular divine creative act. The nothingness is not between the creator and us but behind the creator creating. God is the making of the world out of nothing. So much Corrington acknowledges in his faithful and generous discussion of my theory in Chapter 3 below. Over what do we disagree, then? The point already mentioned is a metaphysical or speculative one: Corrington runs too fast metaphysically when he thinks he can insert a gulf between nature naturing and nature natured. That simply cannot be conceived, I think, and the illusion that it can, comes from a projection of the dialectic between the unconscious and consciousness in psychoanalysis onto the ontological relation between being and beings. To the contrary, the hard conceptual problem is to conceive enough distinction between the ground and the world to acknowledge the integrity of the world. The effort to conceive this distinction is a chief motive behind Desmond's stress on agape as the giving of being out of excess rather than need. I myself do not see that Desmond's Thomistic theory of excess is a help; the creative move to make finite things be is an asymmetrical creation of novelty, not a shaping or trimming or externalization of divine pleroma: the divine act, not any divine resources, is what counts. More profound than the metaphysical difference, however, is the phenomenological one. Now I agree thoroughly with Corrington's stress on the impersonality of nature and its processes. Whitehead earlier in this century knew something of this when he cited the line, ''the stars, they blindly run.'' But Corrington draws out the impersonality with greater

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thoroughness than did Whitehead who held to a personal god moved to poetic extravagance. Where we differ phenomenologically is that Corrington finds the last word to be sadness and I find it to be the bliss of belonging in the vast impersonal world and to its infinite creative ground. We both know that life can be painful because gravity pulls us to be broken in falls and the ecosystems breed germs that consume us. Corrington goes beyond calling nature brutal, however, and calls it cruel: that is reverse anthropomorphism. Nature is not cruel except in frustrating our wishful projections. It only treats us like straw dogs. Nature's ground is never far from us but always holds us. We can embrace that in grateful delight if we also embrace the impersonality, finitude, failure, and entropy of that with which we are held. Can we give thanks to the Ground for the brief life of a dead child? Corrington says no and I say yes. This book presents a profound spiritual vision for our time. It illustrates the strengths and also possibly the limitations of its complex method. I myself engage this vision with an array of metaphysical arguments and phenomenological analyses as cited in his bibliography, but in the end am pushed to the limits of my own vision. At best, from my own standpoint, I would hope that if the reader follows out the scope and profundity of this book, and still concludes that my vision is the truer, then my philosophy will have been shown to be far more profound than its rhetoric, which aims at plain flatness, would make it seem. At worst from my standpoint, the reader might conclude that Corrington's vision, with all its complexity and sadness, is the truer. I would be disappointed but not surprised, and reluctantly glad to be corrected. To engage Corrington's vision including its arguments and analyses, especially with one's own alternative like Desmond's or mine, is to cross the intervals of philosophic conversation into a sacred fold. BOSTON APRIL 19, 1997

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Preface For a number of years I have been hoping to cash in the promissory note I made in the final chapter of my 1992 work Nature and Spirit. There I made a highly truncated description of what I termed the "four divine natures," as they correlate to the world and to each other. Among my writings, those thirty some pages have provoked the most intense commentary, not least because of their abbreviated nature (cf., Hartshorne 1992, Gelpi 1993, Grange 1994, Cruz 1995, Ryder 1995, and Woodward 1997). At the same time, the rather unconventional portrayal of god, coming at the end of generic descriptions of self, community, and worldhood, appeared to be in some tension with the other foundational principles of my ecstatic naturalism. My own awareness of these tensions within my perspective came from two sources. The first appeared in Robert C. Neville's review of Nature and Spirit (Neville 1994) in which he argued that the ontological difference between nature naturing and nature natured, which figures so prominently in ecstatic naturalism, does not require a third being of unlimited scope, although finitely located, named "god." The second source was the brilliant and theologically independent essay on my work by my graduate student Roger A. Badham (Badham 1997). He came to the same conclusions concerning my use of god as had Neville, and proposed his own alternative model. This second confirmation of an internal categorial tension that needed amelioration started me on a fairly rapid series of reflections in which the god problematic was rotated 180 degrees. The following work is the result of that conceptual rotation. Interestingly, the categorial delineations in Nature and Spirit remain very much present in the current enterprise. However, there is a movement to invert the concept of god so that deeper phenomenological structures can emerge. Readers of both works will notice certain shifts of emphasis

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and certain sublations, but in neither case is there any attempt to return to the patriarchal monotheisms. The religion that is manifest in nature and its innumerable orders is one that slumbers within the heart of all significant humanly generated religions. The ultimate goal of this work is to provide a categorial clearing within which nature's religion can emerge on its own terms. Finally, I want to acknowledge my appreciation and thanks to Robert Neville whose Foreword to this work shows him to be a creative and challenging interlocutor.

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Introduction: The How of Nature and the Where of the Sacred Our pictures of nature are too small while our pictures of the sacred are too large in some respects and too small in others. The delineations to follow in this treatise struggle against this double bondage to our historically inadequate portrayals of nature and nature's most important manifestation, the sacred. It seems almost inevitable in the history of thought that nature becomes confined to one trait structure or to one region of relevance. Thus, for example, nature is seen as the domain of matter or as the domain of the nonhuman. Nature is contrasted with culture, art, god, eternal form, or an extranatural and esoteric mystery that lies beyond space-time. At the other extreme, god is seen as an omnipotent creator who brings nature into being by an act of will (divine will being a precarious concept at best). Once the innumerable orders of the world are created, god retains a position of all-determining power over whatever is in whatever way. In the end, we only perceive a small dimension of the utter vastness of nature, combined with a provincial, and often self-serving, portrait of a divine power that is in all respects superior to its product. Philosophical theology has remained in this deep rut for centuries, rarely venturing a more adequate understanding of nature and its own how, let alone daring to ask in an unrelenting way if its understanding of god remains little more than a result of anthropomorphic and anthropocentric longing. The strategy of traditional analysis is as predictable as it is moribund. One starts from a description of the unified omnipotent creator who creates both space and time, and all therein contained, by a specific act. Even if one relocates this act within the context of contemporary cosmology and the big bang singularity (which remains distinct from Hawking's no boundary proposal, Hawking 1988/1996), the shop worn categories remain in force. Through whatever means, god brings its own other into being out of nonbeing, and in the process secures and retains control over both law and event. Even where genuine contingency is

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allowed within certain orders of nature, god is hem to use that contingency for noncontingent purposes, such as a progressive self-disclosure (cf. Pannenberg 1993). It is astonishing how little movement has been made toward a more philosophically adequate portrayal of the correlation between the sacred and enveloping nature. Merely shifting discourse to metaphor (cf. McFague 1982), as if the softening of the epistemic and ontological edges somehow brings liberation and insight, fails to bring us closer to the how of nature and the emergent properties of the sacred. Allied to this is the parallel notion that a sustained discourse about ecological structures and their survival in the hoped for postpatriarchal age, will bring us into the promised land of natural justice and organic renewal. But all of this brings us little insight into the utter indifference and scope of nature. Theological romanticism and wish fulfillment have replaced the kind of foundational categorial analysis that is now binding on thought. Often, honorific, not to mention self-righteous, categories are conflated with descriptive categories in a confusing tangle that convinces many authors that they have somehow moved us down the road toward nature's salvation. As will emerge in the treatise, salvation is a deeply fragmented and ambiguous concept, and the human process, for all of its alleged glory, has little to say in the matter. It is imperative that we unfold an understanding of nature that struggles to honor the utter vastness and indifference of that which cannot be confined to any of its traits, regions, or dimensions. Whatever nature is, it does not conform to our theological needs, nor does it always conform to the alleged divine natures that can only shape nature in finite ways. Put in the strongest terms, nature is the genus of which the sacred is a species. Of course, strictly speaking, nature is beyond all genera and cannot be located within a higher genus. In more dynamic terms, the sacred is an eject from nature and not some kind of personal creator out of nothing. These very stark categorial assertions can only earn their keep as the phenomenological descriptions of nature and the sacred unfold. It is hard for the human ego to accept the fact that nature is far more than we ever suspected, and that "god" is in some respects far less. The traditional cluster of traits assigned to god, namely, omnipotence, omnipresence, self-consciousness, creator, and sustainer, need to be either eliminated or reconfigured within the context of an ecstatic naturalism that has little patience for anthropomorphic hubris. Initially there is a kind of chastening effect in ecstatic naturalism. Many cherished and deeply felt structures are swept away by a more capacious conception of nature, a nature that has no

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interest whatsoever in our theological hungers and their condensations in philosophical theology. Yet this theological chastening prepares the way for a more intimate and finitely compelling relation to a sacred dimension that is as much a foundling of nature as is any other order within the world. Santayana once wrote, "Naturalism, Sad" (1905). This sadness in the face of a nature that we did not shape or make, is a necessary first stage in the reconfiguring of our relation to nature and the sacred. However, as only dimly sensed by Santayana, who remained trapped in a bare descriptive naturalism, sadness gives way to ecstatic transformation on the edges of our horizons of meaning and interaction. The correlation of the sacred and ecstasy, as manifest in eros, is central to the delineations that follow. If the utter indifference of nature to human need makes us melancholy, the transformative prospects emergent from the spirit bring us into the erotic embrace of something that transcends all other orders. The crucial point here is that nature per se cannot be conceived in any but the most elliptical way. It is impossible to give a definition of nature. To define nature would be to locate it within a genus with a specific difference. What genus would this be? What would its specific difference be? As will become clear, these are meaningless questions. In the barest sense, nature is the availability of orders, as well as the "sum" of the orders themselves. Nature has no location, that is, it is not in anything. It is the nonlocated location within which all container relations obtain, as well as the innumerable relations that are not container relations, such as laws (Peirce's "generals")or betweenness relations (Corrington 1994). We can say more than the minimal claim that states that nature is the sheer availability of whatever is. Within nature there is a fundamental divide that remains the most basic divide that can be experienced by thought. This divide is that between nature naturing (natura naturans) and nature natured (natura naturata). When Heidegger developed his own version of this ontological difference, he contrasted the idea of a being with that of Being itself (Heidegger 1927). The being-thing (better, thing in being) is a cluster of traits, but, following Kant, Heidegger insisted that Being was not such a predicate that could be added to the being-thing by an act of thought. Rather, Being faces the beingthing from across an abyss that can only be traversed, if at all, by a leap into another kind of thinking. Ecstatic naturalism reenacts this insight into the ontological difference but radicalizes and broadens it to open up the even more basic divide between the potencies of nature naturing and the attained and emerging orders of nature natured.

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Even though this distinction emerges in the twelfth century Latin tradition, thus predating Spinoza by centuries, it is as old as thought itself. However, inadequate categorial equipment has made it difficult to probe into the depth logic of this divide within nature, and has thereby placed the distinction on the margins of thought. Ecstatic naturalism appropriates this distinction through a kind of "emancipatory reenactment" so that it can come to life in a much richer way. It is impossible to even begin to exhaust the mysteries of nature naturing, let alone the full complexity and scope of the innumerable orders of nature natured. Yet it does not follow that we must remain philosophically mute before the great fissure that enters into our lives in innumerable ways. As shown in the previous treatise, Nature's Self (Corrington 1996), the fissure between the potencies and the orders of the world enters into our awareness through the unconscious. Put differently, the 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. This does not mean that nature is a dreamer per se, but that the energies of the potencies are akin to dreams, even though they have far greater efficacy and sheer power than their human analogues. This is profoundly difficult terrain to negotiate. How does one move dialectically in and out of the potencies to the powers and structures of the self and the sacred, and then back again? More importantly, how does one actually overcome anthropomorphic projections so that they do not weave themselves into the fabric of a foundational portrayal? Peirce celebrated the centrality of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism in his delineations of the cosmos and god (Peirce 1892a). Does this celebration betray a deeper lack of elasticity and richness in his categorial array? The current perspective remains persuaded that Peirce, and countless thinkers before and after him, lacked the courage to prune their longings and aspirations, all deeply human, from their portrayals of nature and the sacred. Naturalism as a generic philosophic perspective has at least acknowledged the utter seriousness of the problem. But in the preecstatic forms of naturalism, there has been a lack of insight into just how anthropomorphisms enter into the architectonic of philosophy, and, more pointedly, philosophical theology. What makes the ecstatic regrounding of naturalism any less prone to erect a human god upon an all-too-human nature? The answer is clear: ecstatic naturalism has been chastened by a thorough psychoanalytic understanding of the correlation between depth-semiosis and the structures of desire that mark conscious analysis of the basic structures of the world. It is no accident that the analysis of the sacred orders as presented in this volume

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had to wait until the basic structures of world semiosis, Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World, (Corrington 1994) and of the self, Nature's Self: Our Journey from Origin to Spirit, (Corrington 1996) were completed. Put in different terms, it is imperative that the traits of the world and of the self who defines both world and the sacred become articulated before the holy or sacred orders are. The where of the sacred must await the description of the how of both the world (nature natured) and the self. Further, the more basic distinction between nature naturing and nature natured had to be unfolded before any other delineations could find their purchase within an expanding and openended categorial scheme. Religious traditions have often insisted that there is a direct analogy between the form of god and human form. It is assumed that the bare assertion that we are born in god's image somehow clarifies the relation between a human order that is deeply finite and a divine order that both is and is not finite. Such assertions have a strong appeal for the obvious reason that they serve to deepen our narcissistic desire to be mirrored by an ultimate reality. God mirrors us, and we mirror god. As will emerge in the body of the treatise, any such mirroring is deeply complex and is often one that has nothing to do with our narcissistic hunger to be reconfigured along the lines of our projections. There is even a sense in which the holy/self correlation involves forms of transference energy. That is, this primal correlation activates deeply unconscious emotional and semiotic material that fills in, for good or ill, the contour of the sacred. Yet the transference relation is precisely one that must be transfigured so that projections give way before the real. Desire and projection may be reciprocal, but they do not have the last word. Insofar as it makes sense to talk about what the sacred desires from us (a shaky notion at best, it does not follow that it is anything like what our anthropomorphic longing would dictate. It would be too bald to assert that the philosophical theologian must undergo psychoanalysis before undertaking the development of a system of thought, yet there is a deeper sense in which any such constructive and deconstructive work must be prepared for by a careful encounter with desire and the unconscious, both personal and collective. Philosophers have been loath to acknowledge the role that their own psyche plays in thought, especially when that thought is driven to build a categorial array that is held to be in some sense generic. This very abjection or denial of the unconscious actually betrays a suppressed awareness that their work may be tainted by a longing that is only dimly sensed. For fairly straightforward reasons, tied to early object relations within the surrounding emotional and

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semiotic field, such a failure to probe into the rhythm of projection and longing will result in a god that is tailored to satisfy the great no longer and the even greater not yet that surround the self in process. The cynic will reply that all gods are human products. We simply choose the portrayal that fits into our own damaged or wounded narcissism. Ecstatic naturalism makes the more daring claim, which can only be vindicated in the analysis itself, that it is possible to move past and through at least the more regnant forms of anthropomorphism if one is willing to enter into the sheer vastness of nature and the complex rhythms of the sacred. Further, insofar as the holy obtains as orders of power and meaning in their own right, it will be present precisely in those places where our projections are overturned in the face of that which refuses to harbor them. In simpler terms: the sacred ultimately refuses the dubious gifts of our desire. The sacred per se is no more shaped by and to human ends than is nature. This fact may distress the human process, but it remains perennially manifest none the less. In probing into the rhythms of the psyche, where the ontological difference is manifest in human form, thought can begin to move away from finite projections that attempt to pull the infinite (with its finite correlatives) into a specific shape. In the encounter with the unconscious of nature (nature naturing) the unconscious of the self is opened to its own depth and shown that nature is infinitely greater in scope and complexity than any projection. Projections move too quickly with finite means to enclose nature and the sacred. The movement past and through projections is both possible and necessary, especially if theology is to be more than some kind of gender, race, or class autobiography. In fact, the current effort to deconstruct such finite loci of exclusion, in spite of its metaphysical ineptness, is actually a crucial moment within the unfolding of a postanthropomorphic understanding of the sacred dimensions of nature. Ecstatic naturalism thus remains friendly to these emancipatory deconstructions of patriarchal powers. The demonic energies of these powers are fairly clear to those for whom theology should be an effort to encounter the sacred rather than prop up corrosive or violent systems of power. However, when such analyses claim to be ends in themselves, or to be doing the work of the spirit in a privileged way, they become provincial and betray the more important task of reconstruction within the foundational categories of nature and the sacred. When moral fervor and an antimetaphysical bias are recklessly combined, the human process will be deeply betrayed in the long run, left to its cloudy abjections and uprooted from nature. Yet, when these deconstructions are turned toward

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the task of weeding out projections that cloud the self/holy correlation, they aid ecstatic naturalism in its task of reconfiguration of the sacred. How do we articulate the how of nature so that we can in turn illuminate the where of the sacred? The concept of the where is not confined to its obvious spatial connotations, although these will also be evident. To speak of the where of the sacred is to speak of the various locations of power and meaning that appear within nature and that signal that a unique complex is encountered. If there is a sense in which we may speak of the ubiquity of the sacred, this must be delineated with great care. Usually, the finite and nonfinite locations of the sacred are conflated, and the correlation between these two distinct aspects of the sacred is not fully expressed. In general, panentheism, which asserts that its god is both in and beyond nature, struggles to move toward the right conceptual articulation of the sacred, in its finite and infinite dimensions (cf. Hartshorne 1967). However, the categorial equipment of panentheism, especially in its process forms, remains incomplete. Distinctions that need to be drawn are effaced, while connections that should have been seen are ignored. This claim will be vindicated when several dimensions or locations of the sacred are contrasted with its sustaining relation (third dimension). At this point it is enough to say that ecstatic naturalism remains friendly to panentheism, but only insofar as it becomes open to a depth-reconstruction of its categories. As will become clear, the sacred is located within the world of nature natured and prevails as a muted ubiquitous presence tied to the betweenness structures sustaining the tension between nature natured and nature naturing. Any philosophical theology that does not start and end with the ontological difference will fail to understand anything of the complex where of the sacred within nature itself. If the difference is acknowledged at all, and there are profound psychological reasons that over-determine its abjection, then one side of the difference will be privileged. The sacred will be compelled to reside on one side rather than both, and in turn, because of this inadequate and restricted location, will be dubiously inflated to cover the missing terrain and smooth over the abyss at the heart of nature. In psychological terms, the where of the sacred is constricted to protect the psyche from the ever opening abyss that comes to the self out of nature. Consider a comparative analogy. Peirce had a truncated, and deeply abjected, understanding of the unconscious (Corrington 1993 & 1995). He understood that semiotic activity must be fueled by some source outside of consciousness and its manifest semiotic fields. Yet he was reluctant to let this source be some kind of hidden and uncontrollable depth-momentum

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that could overturn consciousness. Consequently, he developed his concept of panpsychism, which asserted that matter was merely effete mind, as a prophylaxis against the sheer otherness of the unconscious (cf. Peirce c. 1890). By importing mind down into the most primitive structures of the self and the world, Peirce was able to cover over the ontological difference between the unconscious and consciousness (the human analogue to the distinction between nature naturing and nature natured). Thus, for Peirce, even the semiotic material at the heart of his own unconscious was mental in some respect, and hence, at least in principle, correlated to the sign series that coursed through his conscious mind. His doctrine of panpsychism, which resurfaced in even more robust form in process metaphysics, served to close the ontological difference and mute the heterogeneity lying beneath consciousness. Insofar as most forms of panentheism rely on the doctrine of panpsychism to sustain their theory of relations, they also reenact Peirce's betrayal of the fissure opened up by the ontological difference. The irony is that many such perspectives also see themselves as champions of difference, while effacing the most important difference within nature, and, in turn, within the human process. In process thought, the concept of creativity is meant to relate to the depth field of the world, and, in this sense, to point to the potencies of nature naturing. On the other side, the concept of the actual occasion with its complex internal and external features, refers, albeit poorly, to the domain of nature natured. However, neither concept even begins to look into the heart of nature and the ontological difference. Both work in consort to clean up the disturbing presence/absence of the ontological difference, serving to mask abjection and to domesticate the sacred in a way that makes both the how of nature and the where of the sacred palatable to our narcissistic longing. Lest this critique seem too harsh, it must be remembered that the primary purpose of most panentheistic frameworks is to create a picture of the sacred that will smooth out the edges of nature and the irrational and surging power of the potencies. At the same time, such perspectives import teleology into the heart of nature natured so that the utter indifference of nature is covered over by a pleasing picture of the growth of complexity and value in an evolutionary context that is not really Darwinian. Not only are the edges of nature smoothed over, but the more frightening edges of the sacred are wrapped in a panpsychist and prehensive (feeling of feeling) cloak that makes the sacred little more than a partner on the journey of enhanced meaning in epochal time.

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It is no accident that process forms of panentheism have become popular in an age that is marked by technocratic holocausts. The narcissistic hunger for a meaningful theodicy rarely waits for the evidence before importing meaning into the historical process. Even though most process thinkers see history as open-ended, there remains the temptation to see creative meaning as a part of the innumerable histories that mark the transformations of actual occasions as they become objectively immortal. That is, the actual occasion (a drop of experience) fulfills its own internal state (subjective aim combined with subjective form) and passes on this semiotic richness to subsequent occasions. There is no genuine tragedy in this process, as the process god retains the wealth of each occasion in its eternal memory. Ecstatic naturalism sounds a very different note in its understanding of the holy/world correlation. The world (nature natured) locates the sacred, but in splintered and fragmented ways. Whatever efficacy the sacred has is limited to the actualities and possibilities that already obtain within the innumerable orders of the world. Teleology is recognized for what it is, a fitful and deeply precarious product in an indifferent world. Peirce's concept of developmental teleology will prove to be the more effective one in that it points to the limiting conditions within which selfcorrective purposes emerge (cf. Peirce 1892a). Most purposes fall by the wayside, and many are brutally severed by the hand of nature. The ones that survive do so in an environment that continually impinges upon them. For them to survive, let alone flourish, their own cunning must be equal to the cunning of nature. Nature, then, is far more capacious than has been envisioned by even the most advanced philosophical theologies. Process panentheism does remind us of the possibilities inherent in metaphysical boldness. This categorial work must be honored in its intent, even though the categories deployed are profoundly flawed. It has never been easy to look into the heart of nature and to endure the self-fissuring that lies under our feet and within our own unconscious. Yet the sacred orders themselves are caught up in this eternal abyss and have negotiated their way toward a consummatory and ecstatic reality within nature. Natural grace, which comes to us from the heart of nature, makes it possible to work toward a categorial framework that does justice to the potencies of nature naturing. Both the sacred and the human process are recipients of natural grace, and this gift from nature makes manifestations of the sacred possible. At the same time, we inherit this grace from the abyss within nature as it comes to us most forcefully through the collective unconscious.

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This understanding of grace reverses the usual understanding that assumes that all forms of grace come from a personal god. There are two forms of grace in the world. Natural grace comes from nature itself, rather than the sacred per se, yet also impinges on the sacred orders. However, in the second form of grace, the grace of the spirit, the human process is deeply correlated with the sacred, and through this more specific form of grace deepens even further its experience of the more ubiquitous grace of nature. In the fulfillment of life, both forms of grace are erotically entwined within the heart of the human process. The sustaining power of natural grace is quickened and transfigured by the grace of the spirit. The quickening power of the grace of the spirit rests upon the quieter grace of nature. We are now ready to say more about the how of nature as it serves to locate all complexes, including the sacred in its several natures or dimensions. It must be repeated that there is nothing whatsoever outside of nature. The sacred is in and of nature and cannot outstrip nature. The sacred is the holy of nature, and must unfold its internal and external travail within that which encompasses it. Great care must be used in assimilating the following distinctions so that it remains clear just how the sacred remains encompassed by the nonsacred. Above it was asserted that the sacred is an order (or orders) within the innumerable orders of nature natured. Yet it is also the case that the sacred is an order (or orders) with great scope within ''creation.'' There are innumerable nonsacred orders that lie outside of the holy and that often serve as spheres of resistance to the sacred. The spirit of the sacred will be able to work in and through some orders to bring them closer to transparency and a new kind of power, but this process is limited by the sheer resistant otherness of many aspects of the world. The orders of the world thus encompass the sacred in the special sense that they limit its power in fairly clear ways. The plot thickens, however, when we move to the sustaining dimension of the sacred. Here we will see that the sacred is coextensive with whatever is in whatever way, but not in the mode of power. The sacred presence sustains each and every order of nature natured but has absolutely no power to transform any trait of any order, remembering that Being, or sheer Being, is not a trait per se. At this point it does sound as if the sacred is coextensive with nature and thus is no longer a finite order(s) within the world. Yet this sense soon dissolves when it is remembered that the orders of nature natured constitute only one-half of nature. The potencies of nature naturing lie outside of the sacred and can never be exhausted by the holy. The sacred orders ride on the back of natura naturans and they are as much a product of the

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potencies as is any other order. From the perspective of the sacred, if we may be briefly allowed this anthropomorphic way of speaking, the potencies of nature naturing are filled with mystery and represent the unconscious of nature for the sacred. That is, the orders of the sacred have their own encompassing otherness in the potencies that can never be wrenched into the clarity of a kind of cosmic awareness. We begin to see the utter cunning of nature in its eternal how. From the pretemporal and preformal potencies there emerges, by a process filled with negativity, the innumerable orders of the world and the preeminent order or dimension, the sacred. It is impossible to ever enumerate the potencies, let alone isolate one for specific phenomenological treatment. We only know of the potencies through a semiotic process of reading backward from traces within signs, objects, and interpretants (new signs generated from the sign/object relation), toward their elusive origin in the unconscious of nature. The strategy is not, however, a simple logical analysis like a Kantian transcendental argument that moves from the conditions of the observed to their alleged transcendental conditions in the prespatial and pretemporal intelligible realm. Nor is the strategy identical to Peirce's notion of abduction that moves from a case under analysis to a general rule that is held to explain the case. Both of these strategies will be revisioned later as they indirectly contribute to the more basic phenomenological analysis. The move from an order of relevance toward the potencies is more akin to the reception of a phenomenological shock as the rhythms of nature naturing indirectly manifest themselves in semiotic material that itself hungers for the lost object that lies in the ejective ground of nature. When nature naturing births any sign, object, or interpretant, it separates itself from its issue by a powerful draft of negativity. The potency is pretemporal and prespatial and thus must protect its own surging momentum from its space-time products. In the previous work, Nature's Self (1996), it was argued that Peirce's concept of the infinitesimal, when reconfigured, provides the most apt concept/reality for describing how a pretemporal and prespatial potency can give birth to something spatial temporal. The infinitesimal lives on the cusp between nature naturing and nature natured. In more technical terms, the infinitesimal is a quantity that is infinitely small yet greater than zero. If the potency is analogous to the zero-point, and the order within nature natured is analogous to an actual finite number, then the infinitesimal stretches itself across both realities and brings them into correlation. The infinitesimal does the work of the

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potencies and makes it possible for nascent realities to cross the ultimate abyss within nature. When the potency hands itself over to the infinitesimal, its pretemporal and prespatial reality is transformed into one that has the necessary features for intraworldy interaction. Yet just as the potency delivers its heart to the infinitesimal, it places the wall of otherness, of negativity between itself and its vessel. By the same token, this process is reenacted when the infinitesimal births the space-time point(s). One can no more see an infinitesimal than one can see a potency. Can the sacred see infinitesimals or potencies? The answer to this must await further phenomenological descriptions, yet it is clear at this point that there are profound mysteries that lie outside of the what might be called "divine" knowledge. We can approach this problematic from another angle. When Hartshorne rewrites Anselm's ontological argument with the aid of modal logic (Hartshorne 1965), he points to a dimension of what he means by the divine life that is absolutely crucial for ecstatic naturalism. The Anselmian proposition asserts that god is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Hartshorne augments this by asserting that god is also infinitely self-surpassable. The current perspective takes this one step further by asking the question: what is the reality that makes it possible for the sacred to be infinitely self-surpassable? That is, what is other to the sacred and that stands before it as both a goad and a lure? This other is the how of nature in the dimension of nature naturing. The sacred, which is never (ultimately) a person, cannot penetrate into or exhaust the richness of the potencies of nature; they remain forever beyond reach. Yet these same potencies encompass the sacred and compel it to become infinitely more encompassing in scope and infinitely richer in ontological integrity. Without the unconscious of nature, the sacred would reiterate its own plenitude and remain bereft of its own shipwrecks in the face of the ever receding abyss of nature naturing. The primal negativity that separates infinitesimals and orders from the unconscious of nature also closes off any alleged divine omniscience into the heart of nature. The how of nature also stretches across several distinct notions of time. The potencies are pretemporal, that is, they do not have an inner unfolding that can be plotted along clock time. It is as if the potencies swallow up time and space and have no relation to what the orders of nature natured mean by time. When we enter into the orders of creation we see a variety of forms of time, each of which unfolds along a thermodynamic line that moves forward from more to less order. This time-directionality cannot be reversed, but it can operate at varying rates according to the velocities of

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the systems involved. Yet there is also a flickering sense of the posttemporal in nature that operates on the edges of semiosis. Hints of this come to the human process in the form of the kairos in which time takes on a qualitative transfiguration within chronos. Clock time opens up an abyss within which the enrichment of time and meaning can enter for a brief time. As will become clear, the sacred operates in several modes of time. Time thus gives itself to the human process in a variety of ways. By the same token, it also manifests itself within the sacred in ways that parallel their appearance within the self. Both the sacred and the self enter into the basic triadic structures of the pretemporal, the temporal, and the posttemporal. However, as will emerge in the analysis, the sacred orders have a fuller understanding of the momenta of time as they work within their respective orders of relevance, or, where pertinent, within the preordinal potencies of nature naturing. Within the fully temporal order, we of course encounter the three modes of thermodynamic time in which time must move in only one direction. The thermodynamic model is deeply tied to the modal understanding of time. The arrow of time moves forward, yet each form of temporality has its own relation to the modal logic of possibility and necessity. Past time has lost its relation to possibility, at least within the causal order, while present time is an arena in which possibility and necessity act out their final drama. The future remains more open than the present, although never fully open, and allows for a kind of dress or technical (in theatre, the use of lighting and sound in a final test of equipment) rehearsal of the drama of possibility and necessity. When the present unfolds its own modal space, the final scene must be enacted and the curtain rung down. What is rarely completely grasped is that the sacred orders participate in the thermodynamic arrow of time as fully, even if differently, as do finite selves. This is not to say that the sacred orders or dimensions are subject to entropy and decay in an every possible sense, although they will, as natural, feel entropic forces whenever and wherever they occur. The antientropic power of the sacred will manifest itself in the spirit, and will be empowered by the potencies of nature. Thus, the sacred orders both are and are not entropic, but in very different respects. Insofar as the sacred feels the rhythms of the arrow of time, entropy will be allowed into its evolving momentum. Insofar as the sacred is also manifest as the spirit, the holy will reshape entropy along the lines of renewed growth and complexity. The self has access to antientropic forces within the collective unconscious, the human gateway to nature naturing. The sacred is more

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fully antientropic within its own natures, especially as those natures are transformed by the potencies. Temporality, which is only manifest within the orders of nature natured, is entropic through and through. The physical universe, to name no other, is getting colder and more disordered. Ecstatic naturalism does not, however, simply equate nature natured with the universe of astrophysics, but insists that there are innumerable worlds and orders within nature that may never be fully known, and that they are as real as the world of energy and matter. Be that as it may, these worlds too, insofar as they belong to nature natured may well be subject to some form of thermodynamic time, and hence, entropy. Since the sacred fully, if in a fragmented way, participates in the orders of the world, it also encounters the downward spiral of all that is. The pretemporal dimension of nature is not subject to entropy, and, by implication, thermodynamic time. The potencies have neither beginning nor end as such predicates have no meaning in this domain. The traditional dogma of creatio ex nihilo rests on the profound mistake that assumes that anything in time must have been created by a specific act by something outside of time. This is only half right. The potencies are certainly outside of time, but the concept of act is inappropriate here, especially when crudely applied to the ontological difference. The potencies are not agents, nor do they have some kind of consciousness that would somehow choose to create space-time structures and their contents. Agency is always between and among orders of relevance, not between the two halves of the ontological difference. The concept of a creator god shares strong family resemblances with Peirce's concept of panpsychism, even if Peirce muted a radical doctrine of creation in his cosmology. In both cases, the concepts serve to domesticate nature and bring it into the orbit of the anthropomorphic horizon. As we saw with panpsychism, human semiotic consciousness becomes the paradigm within which the irrational power of nature is tamed and dramatically shrunken. With a creator god nature is reduced to the status of a dependent step child who must beg nourishment from an extra-natural hand. When the stress is on the freedom of god from matter/world in the sheer creative power of bringing nature natured into its provenance, the concept of creator takes on a deep patriarchal hue. This is the case because the creator god has no genuine other, no resisting matter or secondness that would challenge its power over and against whatever is. The argument here is that there is a fundamental tension between an ordinal notion of power(s), where there must be reciprocity in some fundamental

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respects, and the patriarchal notion that is asymmetrical and lacking in proportion between creation and product. Finally, god's own where is never probed in this confused asymmetrical notion, nor is any thought given to the correlation between the otherness of the creator and the momenta of the orders of nature natured. On first blush it might seem as if the deconstruction of the creator god is merely an attempt to bring god down to size so that divine glory and majesty is abjected to glorify the human. In certain perspectives this may indeed be the motive behind such categorial shifts and redefinitions of the god/world correlation. For ecstatic naturalism, however, the loss of this artificial construct actually prepares the ground for a phenomenologically dense and religiously compelling encounter with sacred dimensions not of human contrivance. In psychoanalytic terms, the belief in a creator god is little more than a narcissistic projection of feelings of omnipotence and control. At the same time, such a belief comes from a deeply felt need to abject the unconscious and the potencies that cannot be brought under the aegis of a panlogos. The rarely questioned relation between god and logos must be continually challenged in the light of our understanding of the irrational ground of the world. The concept of the logos cannot function in any thoroughgoing naturalism, nor can it be predicated of the sacred without some severe qualifications. Creation, then, is continual, but not in the magical sense long denied in physics. The transition/leap, from nature naturing to nature natured goes on eternally in the nexus where the potencies meet the infinitesimals, as they in turn meet/become the orders of the world. The sacred, as an order (or orders) of the world, resides in this nexus as well, although it does so in unique ways. Sacred orders can create, but only under the laws of ordinality that assume that all acts of creation occur within and are bound by other orders of relevance which limit the scope and power of these acts. Even more precisely put: the sacred quickens actualities and possibilities within the orders of nature natured but does not create out of nothing. Nothingness is an enabling ground, part of betweenness, but is not some kind of nonlocated place from which the world emerges through alleged divine agency. The scared orders feel the power of the unconscious of nature, as pretemporal, while struggling with the actualities and possibilities all encircled by thermodynamic time within the world. At the same time the sacred enters into the rarer yet urgent momenta of the posttemporal. This process is deeply embedded in the self as well, yet our finite movements from the original position, to re- and depositioning achieve far less clarity

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concerning the three primal modes of time. Unlike the human complex, the sacred dimensions are both finite and infinite and thus share in the three modes of time in a fuller and more comprehensive way. In deconstructing the creator god we have not diminished the sheer infinitude of the so-called divine, we have merely relocated it within a richer understanding of its where within the ontological difference and its halves. The pretemporal domain can be seen as the domain of the no longer, while the posttemporal domain can be seen as the domain of the not yet. The sacred orders are fully stretched across this already/not yet and feel the powerful pull in both directions. While we will not speak of the originator or creator, we must speak of the pull of origins for both the self and the sacred. And while ecstatic naturalism remains profoundly skeptical of apocalyptic thinking or of unidirectional eschatologies, it fully embraces the power of the not yet that hovers over the orders of the world and the sacred itself. The Western obsession with a linear time line that culminates in a global kingdom of god at the end of history, is deeply self-serving and must be purged from a more encompassing framework. The eschaton (emerging fulfillment of history) is within the orders of the world (and time) or not at all. In what follows, then, many cherished theological categories will be profoundly reconfigured to fit in more precisely with the ordinal nature of the world. Naturalism in its several forms has always insisted that any major category must be located within nature and that any attempt to portray an extranatural use of a category is guilty of the deepest form of hubris. The categories of creation, time, salvation, divine evolution, divine sympathy, teleology, sustaining presence, power, consciousness, and theodicy are now seen to be intraworldly and ordinal concepts that function only within certain orders and only in certain respects. Time, as noted, prevails in three distinct ways, and each of these ways is correlated with a domain of relevance that may or may not admit the other forms of time. Creation is in and of certain orders at certain times and is not an extra-natural event or act that relates to all orders simultaneously. Socalled divine creativity is never a creativity in a void of absolute nonbeing, but a creativity within orders that have finite nonbeing (Tillich's "stigma of finitude" 1951: 188). We must be especially attentive to the issue of so-called divine consciousness. To be conscious is to have a center of awareness that has objects and signs over and against it. Insofar as we wish to translate or carry over this natural definition into the sacred, we must do so with great care. The sacred orders are not a like a human-centered self. Rather, the

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sacred is akin to a mobile field that has different momentary centers, no one of which is strictly analogous to a human center of awareness. It will require rotating thought through a very different axis in order to probe into the forms of consciousness pertinent to the sacred orders. Categorial laziness has frequently made the human/divine analogy central to its delineations because of a fundamental lack of resourcefulness in the face of a unique form of cosmic and local awareness. In more negative terms: the sacred is not a located self with a form of self-consciousness that is merely an enlargement of human self-awareness. Even as masterful a thinker as Hegel was unable to free himself from the Geist/self analogy in his analysis of the consummate religion and its god (Hegel 1827). His struggles with a philosophical reconstruction of Lutheran theology represent one of the high-water marks of Western speculation (Olson 1992), and his sensitivity to the shapes of self-consciousness know no equal in our tradition. Yet his abjection of nature, which is manifest in innumerable places in his corpus, serves to warn us against his counter-affirmation of a Geist that, in a dazzling form of concupiscence, eats up its foundling and turns it into spirit. Ecstatic naturalism moves in the exact opposite direction by insisting that nature is the clearing within which spirit does its work of transforming semiosis. It is not enough, of course, to merely turn Hegel on his head. His categorial structure is flawed at both ends: he makes nature too small and makes spirit too large. His triumphalism is profoundly antinaturalistic and this in turn contaminates his understanding of the march of spirit toward total categorial lucidity. A deeper and truer note was sounded by his historical antipode Schopenhauer, who, while less powerful as a metaphysician, had a more reliable intuition into the irrational ground of the world. In spite of his ensnarement in a Kantian theory of knowledge, Schopenhauer correctly understood that the heart of the self opens out into a muted form of the ontological difference. His analogue to nature naturing is the domain of the irrational will to survival that underlies all phenomenal forms (a shadowy version of nature natured). Like his will, nature naturing has no humanly analogous knowledge of either its own existence or of anything else (Atwell 1995: 26). Schopenhauer states, "The will, considered purely in itself is devoid of knowledge and is only a blind, irresistible urge, as we see it appear in inorganic and vegetable nature and in their laws, and also in the vegetable part of our own life" (1819: 275). In some respects, this can stand as a direct corollary to our understanding of natura naturans. Neither reality can be selfconscious or in some kind of direct awareness of its other. His shattering of panrationalism made it

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possible for him to peer into the heart of the unconscious of nature and to correctly gauge its relation to a time-bound self. Naturalism and pessimism have often flowered together. For Schopenhauer, the entire phenomenal realm is fraught with tragedy and the only remedy is the elevation of the self, first through the aesthetic/Platonic forms, and then, more securely, through the denial of the will to live. His trajectory is limited by his phenomenalism that denies the full reality of the orders of the world. This in turn makes him insensitive to the extrahuman prospects that obtain within the nature that both supports and encompasses the human. Yet he did succeed in linking the transformation of the self with an understanding of the hidden depths of the world. The current lack of interest in his intuitive metaphysics lies more in the abjection that refuses to embrace the irrational (the potencies) than in any real or alleged defect in his perspective. Schopenhauer is the most problematic of the precursors of ecstatic naturalism. Very little of his actual categorial scheme can carry over into the current perspective, yet his primal intuitions, while still trapped in an inadequate Kantianism, can goad us past the kind of triumphalism found in Hegel. He pierced the veil of the ontological difference and thereby put pressure on any eschatological or progressive framework that would paint nature in terms congenial to human longing. At the same time, with the aid of powerful Hindu and Buddhist concepts, he refused to shrink the world (even if only phenomenal) to the kind of linear and self-centered reality that continues to flourish in the militantly self-defensive Western monotheisms. The finite reconfiguring of the major categories of traditional philosophical theology is not, however, a capitulation to currently fashionable forms of pluralism. Ecstatic naturalism remains within the spirit of both Hegel and Schopenhauer with its insistence that generic descriptions of the world are possible, and even necessary. As a metaphysical perspective, pluralism is utterly lacking in self-consciousness about the intrinsic claims of its own categories. Pluralism is no less ambitious than any of the historical forms of monism. Any pluralistic perspective will present categories that are held to be descriptions about whatever is in whatever way. To say that the world is nothing more than language games, or of finite perspectives, is still to argue that other portrayals are false. It is much more valuable to trace out the ways in which certain orders are different from others, and, at the same time, connected with others. Continuity and discontinuity are never absolute terms, but operate in finite ways within those orders that are selected (or often privileged) for

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disclosure. Pluralism is meaningless unless it is structurally and phenomenologically connected with forms of identity that prevail in nature. The moral smugness of the practitioners of metaphysical pluralism is once again a clue to forms of abjection that lurk just beneath the surface. On the deepest level, the popularity of pluralism represents a flight from the utter sovereignty of nature and its unconscious heart. Like Peirce's doctrine of panpsychism, pluralism serves as a kind of prophylaxis that protects thought against anything that would break into its insular shell(s). In claiming to honor difference against the alleged colonialism of identity philosophy, pluralism actually renders semiotic communication across and through horizons difficult. This in turn makes nature and the spirit opaque to thought and magnifies the human. The alternative is never between pluralism and identity, but between those perspectives that honor both realities as they unfold within nature natured, and those that close off any connecting bridges. Ecstatic naturalism is neither pluralistic nor monistic, as these are fairly simple-minded distinctions at best. Each order of relevance is rotated through its relational connections as these in turn exhibit both continuity and discontinuity. Internal to any order will also be innumerable forms of continuity and discontinuity, all adding up to a highly complex form of identity and difference. The genius of the method of phenomenology is that it compels thought to slow down long enough to encounter the actual breaks within continua, and the emergence of new continua from prior breaks. Neither eulogizing breaks nor celebrating continuities, ordinal phenomenology locates each within an evolving contour that allows for traits to be at least roughly what they are. Of course, in certain urgent forms of discourse, it may become momentarily appropriate to stress one aspect over another, but this should never be confused with the slower and more careful work of metaphysics. The task of metaphysical description, while historically quite rare, has its own muted urgency, especially in a climate that has little patience for the rhythms of the real itself. In this sense, perhaps the best historical example is the archnaturalist Aristotle, who took the greatest pains to work through the genera and their features. In doing so he often freed himself from many of the eulogistic features of early Hellenistic culture and prepared the way for a deeply transformed understanding of the divine and nature. Finally, we must face the difficult question of validation. How is it possible to validate a metaphysical perspective, especially when the very notion of validation is tied to finite structures of predictability within nature natured? The problem becomes even more acute when the focus of

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phenomenological description is on the sacred orders as they are in themselves and within nature. In the theological tradition, the concept of revelation serves to point to the posited god's self-disclosure in human history. For some, this disclosure takes place in scripture, or more fully, in the Word that is embodied in, but not confined to, scripture. For others, this disclosure can take place in the history of religions (Pannenberg 1988) as they all point to the religion of the incarnation. In this sense of revelation, human experience collectively, because of its internal sense of the infinite, points toward the ultimate manifestation of the infinite in the resurrection. For yet others, revelation is manifest in the epiphanies of the holy (Otto 1917) that surround the human process in striking and unpredictable ways. Finally, for a large group of theologians, god's self-disclosure is deeply manifest in the church councils that serve as loci of the spirit's work in giving shape to god's image for the particular community, a community that is in principle universal. Ecstatic naturalism, while not insensitive to these conceptions, moves in a different direction. Some negative prescriptions can be offered initially-Revelation, that is, the sacred's self-disclosure under the conditions of finitude, can never be confined to a human linguistic artifact or historical tradition. These will be pointers, or, to use Jaspers's term, ''ciphers,'' of the sacred, and their claims must be examined with care and respect (Jaspers 1962). Yet these claims must all be brought before the bar of metaphysical adequacy if they are to serve a more capacious perspective on nature and the sacred. There are few things more puzzling to the metaphysician than the claim that an alleged infinite being, even with its finite aspects, can be compressed into one human document. What a given scripture can do is to serve as a record for a particular sacred/human encounter that has its own unique features, all worthy of analysis and appraisal. What it cannot do is to generate a compelling framework that does complete justice to the utter sovereignty of nature and the elusive quality of nature's sacred orders. Needless to say, the generic move will vex those for whom a particular text or tradition are somehow the sacred's only chosen vehicles. Yet this initial vexation may, albeit under the unusual circumstances of a grace-filled hermeneutics, turn to appreciation when the richness of each locus of the spirit is seen to be a birthing ground for further disclosures of the sacred dimensions of the world. How then, does this sense of validation emerge in a perspective that moves within and through other perspectives while struggling to honor what is held to be the more adequate conception of the sacred found within ecstatic naturalism?

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No description of the sacred can be compelling if it is not already located within a metaphysics that has already proven its descriptive value. The strategy in the unfolding of ecstatic naturalism has been to lay the general categorial foundations first, without extended reference to the sacred, and then to carefully locate the sacred orders within this antecedent framework. For some, this procedure moves in the wrong direction: first we encounter a posited god in revelation, then we try to understand the world that this god has made. But this procedure only makes sense if one already presupposes a smaller conception of nature and a creator god who encompasses nature. The minute this basic presupposition is challenged, it becomes clear that a metaphysics of nature must precede a description of the sacred. Hence the initial aspect of validation has already been addressed in the delineation of the generic framework. Insofar as ecstatic naturalism sheds important light on signs, objects, interpretants, selves, communities, time, space, betweenness, archetypes, the material maternal (lost object), meaning, and nature in its two primal dimensions, it is in a position to shed further light on the sacred. The worst thing that a metaphysical perspective can do is to bring an alleged god into the framework to solve antecedent problems with the initial delineations. If the initial categorial array stands on its own feet and delivers its phenomenological treasures without fundamental gaps or inexplicable breaks, it is fair to assume that it will continue to do so when it moves, with fear and trembling, toward an encounter with nature's sacred orders. It would be absurd, of course, to assert that even a generic perspective has no roots and no antecedent affiliations that may continue to appear in the phenomenological descriptions. Sensitive readers will no doubt note that the religious heart of ecstatic naturalism, while firmly post-Christian, has some continuing relation to the broad history of Christianity. Within that history both the mystical and liberal Protestant aspects appear as meaning horizons that compel further articulation of the sacred orders. But it is precisely these aspects that are moving with increasing power toward a self-overcoming and hence toward a depth transformation of thought. Within the heart of Western monotheism is a universalist momentum that may emerge from a defensive and constricted position to overcome the demonic temptations of origin and tribe. Is this movement toward universalism, both in theory and in practice, the work of the spirit? It is far too dangerous to simply answer this in the affirmative. We can hope that the movement of the spirit of nature flows in and through our horizons of meaning, thereby freeing thought from concresced and antecedent horizons

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that are manifestations of blind habit and even blinder abjection. Should we be lucky enough in our deliberations to encounter this spirit in a thematic way, we may be in a position to aid its work. This, of course, can never be assumed at the outset. As all pragmatists know, the fruits of reflection will reveal the legitimacy of their soil.

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Chapter One: Sacred Folds Nature exhibits unusually layered orders that have a special intensity as manifest to the self. These intense complexes act as if they were folds within nature, folds that double back from a point of origin and manifest an increase in semiotic scope and power. Nature's folds have an astonishing variety of textures and represent an unlimited prospect for an increase in meaning. The question naturally arises: where do these folds come from and are they more than human projections? In what follows, this question will represent the goad that compels us to clarify the ways in which the folds of nature work with and against the momenta of the human unconscious. In traditional language, these folds have often been referred to as epiphanies of power. As epiphanies they show forth something that is extrahuman, although not extranatural. As manifestations of power they stand out from their natural and enabling ground to show the self-transcending potencies within nature. An epiphany or fold within nature stands out in its own terms. 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. There is no sense in which a numinous fold can be ignored or rendered into purely semiotic terms. Its status is different from that of any other finite order encountered. Numinous folds participate in the powers of origin that point back to the unconscious rhythms of nature naturing. Within the 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. Numinous folds are found throughout the orders of space and time, to mention no others. Spatial folds have been held to be more dangerous than temporal ones because they can lead the self back to an affirmation of, and blind participation in, the powers of blood and soil. However, there are innumerable cases in which these powers of origin enhance and quicken the orders of space with which they are connected. A numinous and liturgically rich natural setting, such as the Temple of

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Apollo in Delphi or the Sedona Hills in Arizona, can be a locus for a fold that sustains and empowers selves and their communities. It does not follow, of course, that such powers of space are always free from demonic distortions, only that space is no more nor less demonic than time. A numinous fold within chronos (clock time), manifest as the kairos (fulfilled time) that brings forth eschatological or even apocalyptic meanings and energies, can run the same risk of demonization and exclusivity as any epiphany of space. The image of fold is meant to connote a movement outward and backward at the same time. For some reason a particular order of the world seems to pulsate with a special energy and meaning that also, in an equally mysterious move, doubles back on itself so that its energies are layered and intensified. The fold invites us forward with its open and fragmentary power, promising us a glimpse of the mysteries of nature itself. Simultaneously, it invites us backward to our own lost object (the childhood point of origin in the unconscious) and the lost object of nature itself. It is endemic to the human process that these numinous folds also take on a personal dimension so that the self is greeted by something analogous to itself, thus mitigating the seeming coldness of the heart of nature. Epiphanies of power, rooted in the hidden potencies of nature naturing, gather up human projections and house them around an otherwise prehuman core of meaning. This seems to be an almost inevitable and natural process. An order of nature folds back on itself, not necessarily in a literal spatial or temporal way, so as to increase its semiotic charge. It is impossible to know why this happens, or to know when and where the next numinous fold will occur. The fold, having emerged, will compel the self to enter into its orbit, thereby drawing unconscious complexes from the self into the new semiotic field. It is as if the fold is a kind of gravitational center that shakes the orbiting complexes of the self so that they must enter into a much larger orbit. These complexes, personal and collective, have their own history of growth and development within the self and its communities. When a numinous fold within nature crosses the path of these complexes, there is a foundering that calls for a realignment that pulls the self into a zone of betweenness. The human process is now more clearly stretched between its own complexes and the emergent fold of nature. As it responds, usually in an unconscious way, to this new gravitational center, the self begins to fill in the elusive new center with material from its own internal sign systems. The classical term for this

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process is "projection," in which is connoted the movement to color a moving but partially empty target with finite and manageable content that can then be read backward and reintroduced into the psyche as if it were external. On the deepest level there is the momentum of the unconscious of nature that mysteriously moves some orders of the world into folding in and around on themselves, combined with a movement in the human unconscious to externalize its sign systems and complexes around a numinous center that draws these contents out with an uncanny force. This process is directly analogous to the drama of projection between and among persons. Internal material is drawn outward into projection because of some semiotic hook that grasps it. The hook, of course, brings back far more material than is semiotically appropriate, thus contaminating the relation between selves. By the same token, the numinous folds within nature represent hooks of a higher order of power and complexity, often drawing forth projections from entire communities. By the same logic, this drawn-forth material will be much more laden with personal and collective human content than the numinous fold of nature that activated it. Looked at from the outside, if this is not too abstract a formulation, there seems little connection between the fold, if it is seen at all by the outside observer, and the wild personal and transpersonal content that comes to meet it. Looked at from the inside, if this is not too optimistic a formulation, the numinous fold is seen to be little more than the projected content of an unsuspected unconscious. The unconscious of nature is as self-masking as is the unconscious of the self. Once the hidden origin is transcended, although this is possible in only the most minimal sense, contents emerge that fill in the heterogenous momentum of nature naturing. Traditional accounts of the topology of these natural folds have imported teleological notions that have little warrant in the perspective of ecstatic naturalism, which is very reticent to talk of purposes outside of the human order. Even within the human order, purposes are encompassed by causal sequences and sheer semiotic drift. When looking at epiphanies of power it is important to start the long and difficult process of stripping away those anthropomorphic projections that bring comfort to the human process, but which suppress the deeper and more uncanny logic of nature's folds. One way in which human projections can be withdrawn is through an increasing openness to the how of

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nature's folds as they enter into and transform the self in ways that cut across purposes and aspirations. There is a kind of ontological resistance to human longing that is especially strong in epiphanies that don't reinforce an antecedent commitment to a mere augmentation of meaning and power. The old English term "shriven" is appropriate here; namely, that the human process is broken open and rewoven by something that is far greater than the sum of personal and collective projections. That is, the self is shriven of one kind of horizonal plenitude to make way for another kind. It makes no sense to import inflated theological language at this stage. Encountered folds within nature are neither personal nor eternal. Nor can the standard divine attributes be predicated of them, i.e., omniscience, omnipotence, or omnipresence. The folds are purely natural events, without seeming rhyme or reason. They do not form a collective integrity that can be mapped or understood from an alleged standpoint outside of the sum of all actual and possible folds. It is impossible to know why nature folds back in on itself in some orders, or why most others are bereft of this semiotic intensification. All that we can say is that nature occasionally happens to give itself to the human process in this way. Nor can we assume that ethical predicates can be applied to the folds, whether taken singly or in a group. Since each fold is rooted in the heterogenous momenta of nature naturing, momenta that have absolutely no moral or ethical force in themselves, it follows that folds are prior to the divide between good and evil. Thus the folds of nature are preethical, both as to their upshot and their intrinsic power. Ethical predicates can be applied later in the process when the epiphany enters into the orbits of individual and communal forms of interpretation. But even here, the reverberations of any given fold are ambiguous and fragmented. If we strip away divine attributes, while also denying any normative predication, we seem to have deprived nature's folds of any traits that would be congenial to the human process. We are left with raw power that overwhelms the self and which fails to give either wisdom or guidance. There is a striking sense in which this is true, and this primal fact must be endured and assimilated before any further delineations are in order. At this stage we can only say that the folds prevail and that they have an uncanny ability to enter into the human process and change it in profound ways. We have ruled out any theory that would attempt to give an account as to why they are there or what they add up to in the

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short or long run. The minimal commitment at this point is to assert that nature's folds are uncanny orders of enhanced semiotic density, scope, and power that often seem to have deeply human traits because of unconscious projections that clothe them with material that is not intrinsic, and that these projections are somehow called forth by the folds themselves. Nature's folds can also be described as moments within nature that point to a fragmented origin. They all participate in the most basic origin/abyss of all, nature naturing. At the same time, they point backward to this origin in a nonuniform way. That is, they have neither collective integrity nor uniform antecedents. Since the heterogenous momenta of nature naturing are self-masking, any sense of origin that derives from their manifestations must, at least in this domain, be fragmented. There are innumerable origins manifest in the folds of nature, and these origins contain deeply buried traces of the ultimate origin. Yet these traces are profoundly difficult to isolate and examine at this stage. The folds of nature thus move ecstatically outward from nature naturing but only carry a fragment of that origin into the world of semiosis. Put in more phenomenological terms, one can examine several distinct epiphanies of power and yet will fail to encounter one fundamental sense of origin that binds them. There are hints of unity, but the epiphany itself is so strong that it seems to gather its own unique origin into itself and thus to deny all others. The more traditional way to put this is to speak of a jealous god who does not allow for competing epiphanies of power to have equal ontological status. Put even more prosaically, each fold of nature rests on its own bottom. The concept of fold might seem sparse at this juncture, especially when dealing with something within nature that represents an ecstatic transformation of nature naturing. But the force of the term is precisely to dampen the kind of language that has too quickly upped the ante and has allowed hidden anthropomorphisms to enter into the analysis. The term comes from catastrophe theory where it represents one of the four primal shapes within nature. The other terms, each representing an increase in semiotic complexity, are cusp, swallowtail, and butterfly. Each term is an iconic representation of the type of shape involved in a given order of relevance (Woodcock & Davis 1978). In the current context, the concept of fold is used in a fully generic sense to cover any dramatic increase in semiotic density and scope that can be described through the analogy with the folding together of plane surfaces around

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points of tension. More detailed phenomenological descriptions of specific sacred folds would develop commensurate language to differentiate types of folding. The human process is rich in its semiotic contents and projections. All significant unconscious material moves outward through unconscious projections that color the world in a variety of ways. This process may very well have evolutionary roots, especially in the orders of sexuality and human bonding. Without an idealization of the other, many sexual relations would not occur, and the species might suffer from a diminution of procreative possibilities. And one can ask the rather stark question: if it weren't for projection, how would internal semiotic material get externalized and hence available for some kind of scrutiny? My projections can come back to me in the form of the resistance of the other to the idealization or demonization. This shock of reversal, in which a mirror is suddenly held up in front of the projections, represents part of nature's cunning, i.e., the way in which hidden sign systems become unhidden. It is analogous to the birth process, and often as painful. Projections move outward and, when the conditions are right, return to consciousness with their hidden content exposed and transformed. Nature's folds serve a special role in this process because they break into the human-tohuman form of projection and move these dynamics into a vaster sphere of interaction. Like black holes they draw the material of the self into their hidden center. Unlike black holes they also radiate strong semiotic currents outward into the self and its communities. Are these folds of nature conscious? The answer should be clear. Since the fold in itself, if we may use this rather strong formulation, is nonpersonal and nonteleological, it follows that it cannot be a center of consciousness with intentional acts and objects. Persons have centered consciousness and a field or horizon of intentional objects. Nonpersons have neither horizon nor a distinct sense of otherness. Nature's folds appear and disappear through a logic that we cannot grasp. It may seem as if they are intentional agents, but this appearance is strictly a result of projection. And projection, by definition, is unconscious. Of course, encountering a fold of nature without projection is a limit condition that can only be approximated. The first step toward this limit is the awareness that any form of divinized humanity found in nature and nature's folds is by definition a projection of an idealized, and sometimes abjected, self.

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The analogy that applies here is to see a fold of nature as very much like an overwhelming wave that comes crashing into finite structures, whether water borne or land-based. No one would say that the wave is conscious of its power or that it is a person who looks toward specific agents or structures as it expends its energy. Rather, we would simply say that the wave is a momentum within nature that participates in the surrounding orders of the sea, but which does not render these orders conscious. When the human unconscious encounters the wave, strong unconscious complexes are activated that are compelled to see the wave as something other than what it is in its unconscious unfolding. Keeping to our analogy we would be inclined to see the wave as a unique locus of power and meaning for our tribe, or as a message-laden epiphany that holds a specific revelation within its embedded semiotic code. The irony here is that the wave does represent an expansion of power and meaning for the sign-using self and its groups, but this expansion is not one that brings in new content. All content comes from the other orders of nature natured, whereas the movement of the wave, as analogous to a fold of nature, comes from the presemiotic momenta of nature naturing. Folds do not add any information to the world, except in their phenomenal appearance as shaped through projection and unconscious desire. They do radically transform the semiotic systems that currently obtain, and often bring about a spoliation of some possibilities as well as an augmentation of some others. The fold per se is innocent of its effects, since none of them could have been intended. It does not follow, of course, that the effects are always innocent. It is at this point that the human hunger to import axiological categories into the heart of nature falls apart. Nature's folds have nothing in them that would automatically enhance the growth of humanly desired consequences. As noted, it makes no sense to look for a general topology of nature's folds. While they have their hidden roots within the ultimate ground of nature naturing, a ground that is itself without texture or shape, they have no principle of connectedness within the orders of nature natured. We cannot say why nature has epiphanies of power. By the same token, we cannot isolate some alleged principle of unity that would bring all of nature's folds under some kind of governing logic or schema. There is a sense in which we encounter an ultimate form of irrationality when we become exposed to nature's folds. We can only know that they obtain, and we can gain some insight, through a glass darkly, as to how they obtain.

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A phenomenology of the folds moves by a different momentum than a phenomenology of the orders of nature natured. In the latter case, it is possible to rotate an order through many of its natural locations and to gain some elliptical sense of its emerging contour. In the former case we enter more fully into the ontological difference between the potencies of nature and the innumerable orders of the world. This difference cannot be bridged by analogy (e.g., the Medieval concept of proportionality) or by enumerating specific traits. There is something like a shipwreck awaiting phenomenological inquiry as it struggles to illuminate the ever self-closing domain of the potencies of the unconscious of nature. A fold of nature will have traits available to human probing and assimilation, but it will also show traces that reach back into the presemiotic and preformal fragmented ground from which it has come, for whatever reason. Put in different language, there is nothing like Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason that would link consequent to ground much like the formal structure of logical entailment. The principle itself asserts that nothing within the orders of the world can exist that does not have some sufficient reason behind it. For Leibniz's unique form of theism, the divine principle of the maximal perfection of possible subaltern worlds governs the why, how, and what of the world's orders. For ecstatic naturalism, which distances itself from any antecedent form of theism, there can be no principle of sufficient reason to explain the existence of the world per se. Specific orders become what they are because of other orders, and, in a very different way, because of the unconscious potencies of nature naturing. The folds of nature are even more dramatically removed from principles of necessity or sufficient reason. They appear before the human process by masking their conditions of origin and by withdrawing with an equally uncanny momentum. The structure of betweenness linking the human process with epiphanies of power is occupied by the intersection of the human unconscious with the unconscious of nature. Hence the human process becomes permeable to the ultimate fissure of nature through its unconscious structures. Consciousness is brought into the process much later, if at all. The role of consciousness, and its task is an extremely demanding one, is to work tirelessly to withdraw the projections that color nature's folds and to learn to see nature in all of its starkness. Needless to say, the psychoanalytic concept of denial can also apply to the refusal to look into the dark cleft of the ontological difference between nature naturing and nature natured.

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This intersection of human consciousness with the natural unconscious is one of the most dramatic in the known semiotic universe. It is as if a vast subterranean stream connects two different terrains, one basking in the sunlight of consciousness, the other hidden away in a recess that is beyond the prying reach of the self. Yet much of the most important semiotic material that impinges on the human process traverses this stream. Strictly put, this material is both semiotic and presemiotic. It is semiotic insofar as it has some vector force and directionality that can birth specific signs and sign series. It is presemiotic insofar as it surges forward and backward as a kind of pulsating energy without any shape or texture that could be identified by the self in process. The unconscious of the self is the link to the ontological difference. Insofar as the self encounters manifest content with some semiotic shape, it is becoming more and more permeable to the prospects within nature natured. Yet when the self stumbles against a momentum that overturns shape and texture, or which brings forward energies that are outside of instrumental forms of control, it encounters the unconscious powers of nature naturing. Depth psychology, because of a justifiable historical need to isolate the individual psyche from the innumerable orders of nature, needs to rethink its categorial structures so that it can encompass, and be encompassed by, the depth structures and momenta of nature. Freud's insistence on a deterministic reading of everything from slips of the tongue (parapraxes) to the transactions among the layers of the psyche (e.g., super-ego, id, and ego), combined with a not always sophisticated materialism, failed to understand the true roots of the unconscious in a sphere outside of the human process. Jung entered into this larger sphere but was unable to escape from his Kantian dualism that put too much weight on the phenomenal/noumenal distinction, thereby making him too much of an agnostic on the issue of nature itself. Yet his Kantianism is far more robust than most other forms precisely because it was open to pulsations that were not brought under the strict powers of sensibility and the categories. Dreams, for example, ply the terrain between the phenomenal and the noumenal and open up aspects of both domains. Thus far we have isolated out several elements for phenomenological description. First there are the folds of nature that have no why, even if they have a muted how, and a very distinct that. Second there is the movement of projection that exteriorizes the material of the personal and collective unconscious. Third there is the relation between these

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projections and the folds of nature that called them forth while simultaneously repulsing them, even though the human process rarely sees this second momentum. Finally, there is the deep link that connects the human process to the folds of nature, likened to an underground stream, that has its own inner logic, combining semiotic and presemiotic material. If one rushes too quickly to divinize the folds of nature, the other three dimensions of the process get covered over. Historically this has had disastrous social and political consequences, with an eruption of a war of the powers turning the adherents of one fold, or fold-cluster, against another. Psychologically this has cut off the human process from its actual natural location and natural momentum, thereby abjecting the unconscious in such a way as to re-empower it to wreck havoc on the unsuspecting psyche. Unless all four elements are fully integrated, insofar as this is possible under the conditions of finitude, there is no real hope that these vast powers can find a proper measure within human community. The folds of nature are silent yet powerful loci of projection and longing. It must be stressed again and again that these folds are not conscious agents analogous to a kind of superhuman order of awareness. They are mute powers whose origin is shrouded in mystery and whose telic structures, if they exist at all, are unavailable to human scrutiny. There is a clear sense in which the human need to project its unconscious complexes onto these folds is doubleedged. On the one hand, such projections at least make it possible for the self to read its own inner material on an external reality. Yet there is a darker logic at work in the play between the power of the folds to pull forth projections, thereby magnifying them, thus giving them their own divine status. It is as if you were to take something dangerous and dramatically amplify its power so that it could do even more damage in the personal and social sphere. For example, the failure to deal with one's contrasexual dimension could turn into a massive patriarchal projection, supported by a fold that is divinized, that in turn could generate violence to the abjected gender. In talking about the deconstruction of patriarchy, in itself a commendable project, it must be remembered that far more than social construction is at play. Nature's premoral folds can be the locus for profoundly immoral acts and structures if they succeed in pulling forth complexes that should be integrated through consciousness rather than cast out through the unconscious. For ecstatic naturalism, which has its own emancipatory

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hungers, unconsciousness is itself a sin. This is so precisely because of the demonic irruptions that can emerge when unconscious material is allowed to remain unconscious and hence available for projection and amplification by nature's folds. Projection always has its screen. A great deal of phenomenological effort has been spent looking at the inner logic of projection between and among humans and their groups. Yet little effort has been devoted to examining how nature and nature's unconscious are implicated in the projection process, and at how the self is caught in vast currents that call forth the most strenuous efforts if the self is to keep from drowning. It is one thing to see the other person as a screen for one's projections, it is another altogether to see the folds of nature as vast powers that intersect the human process with both good and ill effects. And screens are never innocent. They have their own gravitational mass that pulls projections toward them like gravity bends light waves. Let us look more closely at the underground link between the self and the folds of nature (our fourth element). Container images and analogies have for too long clouded our understanding of the human process and its relation to nature. Some powerful moves have been made by both phenomenologists and pragmatists to deconstruct any such imagery that would suggest that the self has some kind of delimited boundaries that could somehow be mapped. For phenomenology, the self is actually a sphere of openness in which and through which phenomena can become unhidden. For pragmatism, the self is an organism in an environment that combines stability with precarious events, and hence it must be radically open to subtle or dramatic shifts in the local environment. Habit and instrumental reason bind the self to a world not of its making. In spite of such important philosophic work (paralleled by other philosophic approaches) there is still a tendency to see the self as somehow standing over and against something that is alien to it. In one order of analysis, this is certainly correct, especially when dealing with alienation or estrangement from the self-effacing ground of nature naturing. Yet when we are dealing with the actual transactions, both semiotic and presemiotic, between the self and nature as a whole (nature natured), it is imperative that the sheer permeability of the self to the world be exhibited. The self is radically open at both ends; namely, at the bottom in which it rests on the powers of the human and natural unconscious, and at the top in which it participates in the actual infinite of world semiosis (Corrington 1994).

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This dual permeability makes it impossible to draw any sharp divide between internal and external material. A given sign or sign system can come to the self from innumerable locations within the world, as well as emerge spontaneously from the well of the unconscious. Peirce argued with some force that we read external signs first and then internalize them (1868a). This argument went too far, however, when he also implied that the life of introspection was but a pale shadow of external semiosis. There are complex reasons for this second move tied to his abjection of the internal life, but the categorial confusion stands regardless of any psychoanalytic considerations. Hence no sign can be given a bounded and specific location. It has roots outside of the self, as well as a complex trajectory within the self and its ongoing dialectic of conscious and unconscious semiosis. The difficulty for philosophical theology lies precisely in how we are to understand this underground domain of transaction, linking the self and its internal/external signs, with the folds of nature. It is not enough to say with Rudolph Otto that we are dealing with some overwhelming sense of awe and mystery. While this is not incorrect, it completely begs the issue of the ontological status of the radiating epiphanies that come back to the self from its own hidden reservoir. Certainly we have seen some careful efforts to develop a phenomenology of the holy, and to find language for rendering the holy into terms that can become at least roughly commensurate with the rest of our discourse. But it is a far cry from this descriptive enterprise to one in which the presence or lack thereof of a divine origin and goal is articulated and defined. Put in terms of the current perspective we ask: do the folds of nature point to an originating god, personal or otherwise, from whom they derive their being and power? The cumulative force of the above descriptions and distinctions should make it clear that ecstatic naturalism remains reticent to assign a divine origin to the folds of nature. On the other hand, the current perspective does not want to simply assume that we somehow come upon epiphanies of power ready made and thus can describe them phenomenologically without further metaphysical analysis. The third option that is being explored here is that the folds of nature are indeed events and powers within nature, albeit events of tremendous semiotic power, density, and scope, but that we cannot hope to understand them unless we probe more fully into the realm between the self and nature's folds. Does this third perspective move us back to the delineations of Feuerbach for whom any

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talk of the divine was actually an indirect way of talking about the species-being and species-longing of the self? For example, ''The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or, rather, the human nature purified . . . All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature'' (Feuerbach 1841: 14). No. Ecstatic naturalism does not reduce nature's folds to human projection, any more than it reduces human projection to a private desire or wish fulfillment. Folds have power in themselves, regardless of how they are colored by the human process. And projections often come from a deep natural well that is far from being personal. To summarize our delineations thus far we can say that nature's folds emerge from the heart of nature and represent loci where nature bends back on itself for reasons that are beyond our ken. These folds have a gravitational attraction to and for the human process and magnify projections that come back into their orbit. The human process has an innate recognition of the folds and opens itself to their attraction. At the same time, a layer hidden beneath the self directly connects the self to the fold so that the energies moving back and forth between them can flow with an often astonishing force. Simultaneously, as if the fold had something analogous to an ironic core, the projections that swirl around it are repelled and shown to be emergent from the human side of the divide. Of course, most persons only catch brief glimmers of this moment of repulsion, often experienced as a form of alienation or deep anxiety, and the waters quickly cover over the gap between the projection and the fold. Human history is filled with the suffering that comes from the failure to withdraw projections from the genuine powers within nature that can accelerate the human process without any ethical upshot. Schopenhauer was clearly right when he made the Buddhist move to see existence as a form of suffering. The root cause of this suffering is not so much desire or ego as it is the inevitable momentum of projection in which undigested complexes get thrown out into the folds of nature that seem to beckon them. Each projection becomes inflated to a superhuman status and seems to take on a life of its own. This life, were it a mere aesthetic phenomenon, would not be a danger to the species. However, it soon becomes a power in its own right and, by definition, cannot abide other powers that compete for scarce semiotic resources. Any strong projection that is left alone and unexamined will run the risk of shortening the prospects of other selves.

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Why does the human process divinize these folds of nature and give them an ontological status that actually violates their internal logic? Few problems have been more resistant to analysis than this one. For those who refuse to take a psychoanalytic look into the momenta of complexes and their outward projection, the issue is one of merely choosing between the gods that are offered up to the fragmented communities of power. For those who have taken the psychoanalytic turn, but who refuse to locate that perspective within the larger orders of prehuman nature, the issue is one of merely rejecting the divinization process as if it could be purged by cleansing the finite human psyche. For good or ill, the problem runs much deeper. Clearly, the psychoanalytic turn is absolutely essential to species growth, and perhaps species survival. If projections are not seen as such, and turned into independent structures of power and meaning, they quickly move beyond our abilities to probe and modify them. It must be understood that projections can take on a life of their own and feed themselves on public forms of abjection and desire. On the other hand, few things can be as chilling as a totalizing and Feuerbach-like psychoanalysis that confines itself to either the intra- or interpsychic domains. Projections then become almost too easy of access, insofar as they derive their power from human mechanisms alone. This is not to downplay the forces of repression or displacement, but to talk of a kind of lowering of the power equation to the human sphere. The current perspective assumes that projections originate in the domain beneath the divide between the self and the folds of nature, from which it follows that projections can take on a force and directionality that may be beyond psychoanalytic persuasion. Insight collides with the powers and often fails to find any leverage with them. Philosophical theology must humble its own aspirations by entering into this dialectic between psychoanalysis and a renewed understanding of the ontological difference in nature. If the former perspective deconstructs all of the gods and goddesses that have emerged in human history, the latter remains open to the prospect that it is possible to become permeable to something that is not a human projection, even if it is extremely difficult to find out what that something is. What psychoanalysis provides, and it is absolutely indispensable, is a constant reminder that in almost all cases we will create a god or goddess of our own making, and that this transference object will come to dominate the psyche even though it is partially a product of that very psyche (in consort with the relevant folds(s) of nature).

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Some would say that this analysis leaves us with a rather pessimistic conclusion; namely, that the theological enterprise is primarily one that works with psychoanalysis to dethrone almost all candidates for divinization, while having little to say as to the remainder. Is this pessimism warranted? No. For in the analysis of projection, transference, and the presemiotic and semiotic domain of the between, we come much closer to grasping, and being grasped by, the uncanny logic of nature that binds epiphanies of power to human desire. This domain has not been explored by psychoanalysis. On the other side, previous philosophies of nature have failed to look into the how of the ontological difference between nature naturing and nature natured, and have thus lacked the categorial equipment and phenomenological insight to show how the unconscious of the self merges with the unconscious of nature. It may be probable that our species will fail to understand the logic of the nature that spawns selves. Nature does not exhibit a theodicy that would somehow guarantee a successful outcome to the self/nature transaction. Of course, the self is never detached from nature in the sense that it could somehow enter into a transaction. The human process is simply one unusually complex process within the innumerable orders of nature. Neither nature naturing nor nature natured owe anything to the human process. The concept of debt or obligation is absolutely absurd from the side of nature. The concept of debt could make sense from the human side insofar as we are born from a vast antecedent realm of signs and objects that make our existence possible and actual. But to whom do we pay this debt? No one. Ecstatic naturalism, unlike earlier forms like the descriptive (which stresses causal chains), the honorific (which divinizes spirit), and process (which posits atomic units of experience), affirms that nature both encompasses and permeates each of its products, while simultaneously living as an unconscious and heterogenous momentum beneath the orders of the world. Whatever the human process is, it is also, and in a deeper sense, a semiotic matrix rooted in the unconscious of nature. Hence, projections, seemingly a finite human and internal product, have their ultimate source in the unconscious of nature that has no outer shell or circumference. The energy within a projection is certainly a product of intrapsychic conflict, but its relation to a fold of nature, which is itself an intensified product of nature naturing, moves it into both interpsychic and natural space. There is an ecstatic self-transcendence within the projection that moves it past the purely personal sphere. Personal

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complexes, which at this stage are still unconscious, open themselves to archetypal powers that themselves live out of the ontological difference. After all is said and done, does ecstatic naturalism end up with atheism or a form of theism? It should be clear that atheism is not a live option, simply because it makes the absurd claim that there can be no power that we might call divine (or, sacred in an extrahuman sense) within nature. How it is possible to rule out such a prospect, remains unclear. One would have to know almost everything about all of the orders of the world, and know what possibilities have been eternally excluded by these orders. Which leaves us with the second prospect. If ecstatic naturalism unfolds a form of theism, does it have family resemblances with antecedent forms, and if so, can these links be strengthened? Of course, the answer to this question will occupy the entire treatise, but some hints can be made at this stage in the analysis. There is something like a divine power within the orders of nature, but this power is in no sense supernatural. It is a momentum within nature that has a compelling presence. However, in the process of working past and through projections and transference relations, one traditional trait after another drops away. This process should be unending for finite creatures addicted to seeing their inner powers writ large on the vast canvas of nature. Yet this momentum of withdrawing and integrating projections should not strip nature of powers and momenta that it does have outside of the human order. It is a vexing issue as to whether or not to name these powers under the blanket term "god." We will delay a decision on this important point until the conclusion of our phenomenological and categorial analyses. In probing into the great between that underlies the self and the folds of nature we can ask an inaugural question: is there a sense in which humans not only use projections but are used by them? The former case is fairly clear. We are the locus for an indeterminate number of unconscious complexes that have as part of their inner logic the need to become externalized through projection. Each complex, say one pertaining to the sadistic need to control others, has tremendous power and momentum that constantly seeks some kind of expression, whether through somatic symptoms, dream material, uncontrolled acting out, or unconscious projections. By definition, a projection cannot be aware (consciously) that it is a projection. It moves directly to an object pole that is suddenly contaminated with its inner content. In our example, the sadism/power/control complex gets located in an external agent who is

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compelled, often against his or her knowledge or will, to stand as the semiotic field that represents the complex to the individual. As history reiterates in one tragic form after another, this projection can condemn an entire group to torture, banishment, and even death. Contrasexual projections often have an unusual violence and power. When they also become linked with religious complexes there seems to be no end to the scope of violence unleashed. The innumerable 'witch' burnings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries attest to the blind ferocity of projections to assault the personal and social orders. Again, for ecstatic naturalism (not to mention other perspectives) unconsciousness is a sin. More strongly put, unconsciousness can lead to a violent overturning of form, measure, and justice. Hence, the power of complexes, when externalized through projection, is one of the primary foci of the transforming work of psychoanalysis. When religious complexes are added to the equation, even more vigilance is required by individuals and groups to prevent a kind of social psychic epidemic. The case for the power of personal projections is clear enough. To balance our account it should be stressed that projections can also have a positive role to play in the economy of the psyche and the community. Insofar as a projection attempts to liberate a complex from darkness and bring its possible enriching prospects forward, the good of the individual and or the species is enhanced. Yet even in this process, the object of the projection should get the last word. The plot thickens, of course, when the object is another person whose own complexes somehow resonate with the complexes of the person from whom the initial projection arose (or was called forth). The complex intertwining of the two projection fields, especially if they are contrasexual in some literal or figurative sense, may require a third hermeneute for their unraveling. The second part of our question has to do with the ways in which projections may use individuals. Since all projections (at least in their initial stages) are unconscious, there is already a sense in which a projection can use its host to bring about an increase in semiotic meaning. That which is internal and unconscious desires to become external and conscious. How does it do so other than through a cunning that uses the conscious self to read its content on an alien object? If the conscious self fails to make the right inference that the projected field is just that, then the blind power of the complex will have an external field of operation. But what about the above mentioned place of betweenness that connects the finite self with the folds of nature? Is there a sense in

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which this uncanny location can itself spawn projections that envelop the self and compel it into a different relation to the world? The current perspective is concerned with overcoming those lingering spatial models of the self that would see it as a bound container from which projections emerge. The self is better seen as the locus of innumerable semiotic fields, some of which are conscious while most, especially the phylogenetic, are unconscious. These fields have no natural terminus, either in nature or in the self. Insofar as there is an overwhelming number of intersection points, we have the prospect of consciousness. Already, and in all respects, the self is the locus for some of nature's most intense and subtle sign systems. The self can shape this antecedent material in a variety of ways, but it is also bound to structures and momenta that it cannot control. It is here that we gain some insight into this second question of the movement of projections out of the between. Above, the phrase "the cunning of nature" was used to denote a non-teleological momentum that nevertheless drives the sign-using self in certain directions, often against its will. This cunning is not tied to a conscious agent, as it makes absolutely no sense to see nature as having anything like personal or human features, but emerges again and again from semiotic vectors and gradients that have their own logic. The human process is unique among the currently known semiotic orders because it participates in these semiotic vectors in two dimensions simultaneously. Like other sign-processing systems, the human process is immersed in unconscious forms of semiosis, e.g., metabolic or bacteriological structures. Yet there is the extra fold of consciousness that hovers above this ancient unconscious material and struggles to shape its own forms of semiosis, as well as those moving below it. This second process takes place even when consciousness seems to be unaware of the unconscious, e.g., in those projections that form so much an indirect part of the life of consciousness. When these two layers or dimensions intersect, the dialectic and cunning of nature take on another fold. Consciousness is both expanded and contracted by its contact with the unconscious. It is expanded insofar as it lets new semiotic material into its orbit and struggles to find a place for it. In many processes, this is a simple and inevitable result. However, consciousness may also find itself faced with material that is held to be deeply alien to its self-image and aspirations. Freud's theory of repression, while often overstated in his texts, does point to a

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dimension of interaction in which there is a dimly-lit awareness that something from unconscious semiosis is deeply problematic to the conscious sign-user. A helpful image in this context is to envision the dialectic between consciousness and the unconscious as like a pulsating shape that will recoil in one direction, thus contracting around a hidden center point, while expanding, slowly or rapidly, in other directions. This process of changing shape does not seem to have an antecedent blueprint, although certain forms of repetition will manifest themselves in time. Yet even these are subject to transformation under specific conditions (and perhaps interventions). More is at stake in the dialectic of contraction and expansion than the avoidance of pain and the furtherance of pleasure. Sign systems intersect with the self on their own terms, regardless of any real or alleged pleasure principle. It must be stressed that the self that is stretched between consciousness and the unconscious, is also, and in similar ways, permeated by the infinite momenta of world semiosis. This is not to say that the self is a passive victim of overwhelming semiotic forces, but it is to say that it has finite and well-bounded prospects for transformation. When we probe more fully into the space of betweenness linking the unconscious of the self with the unconscious of nature (as manifest in the folds) we see just how circumscribed the self is by archetypal powers that carry their own nimbus of divinity. Nature's cunning uses primal forms of projection to move the human process toward some sense of the numinous. The interpretation to be avoided is that all projections come from the finite self as it works through personal transference issues or merely pushes the outer shells of its complexes out into the world. Of course, this happens over and over again, but it is the tip of the iceberg. Beneath these projections and transference bonds is the undulating presence of the unconscious of nature that also moves outward into expressive forms, but without any cumulative plan or goal, precisely because, as noted, nature cannot be an agent or consciousness. It is an unending providingness of actualities and possibilities, as well as the sum of these ejects. If consciousness is one of the ejects of nature, it doesn't follow that nature is somehow satisfied that a decompression has opened in its center so that some creature can finally turn around and see what spawned it. Rather, this very decompression will, as must be the case, quickly become the locus of the projections that emerge from the point of origin.

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Schelling refers to this point of origin, this ground, as that which is unruly (das Ursprungliche[Ursprüngliche]). As without measure or law, this self-effacing ground cannot be equated with logos or universal reason. It has intense momenta that are manifest in an infinite number of ways, but any measure or law comes after the fact, not before. The human process will never be able to look into the heart of the unruly ground, but can isolate some more pertinent effects, part of the how of the ground, and bring these forward for phenomenological probing. One of these highly pertinent effects, lodging somewhere between nature naturing and nature natured, is that of the projective power of prehuman and presemiotic nature as it encounters semiosis in the human order. Projections are always unconscious in their initial stage. When they come out of the space between nature naturing and nature natured this logic becomes especially clear. It is almost as if the betweenness domain sends forth powerful rays of energy and light that are filled with numinosity. This may sound a bit fanciful until it is remembered that numinous powers, especially in their most intense forms, cannot be reduced to finite products of consciousness. These rays or zones of numinosity play into and through finite selves, filling them with content that is both dangerous and transforming. The danger is obvious in that the structures of consciousness, especially when they are already pressed upon by unconscious complexes, cannot withstand something that has as its goal the shattering of form. For some, self-divinization is the result, which has often produced horrendous social and political consequences. For others the shattering of form may produce a crippling affective or thought disorder that can only be healed, if at all, by dramatic forms of intervention. The projections that seem to emerge spontaneously from the heart of the ontological difference carry the human process away from finite and self-referential semiosis into an encounter with the folds of nature that, as epiphanies of power, alter the self's understanding of the nature and forms of power in the world. At this stage we can talk of a number of intersecting realities. First we have the finite self and its finite projections, emergent from the complexes of the unconscious. Second we have the folds of nature that face the self from across a seeming abyss. Third we have the infinite projections that seem to emerge without a governing logic. They often explode into the human process with a profoundly disorienting effect. Sometimes they are barely felt at all, leaving the self with a sense of being gently nudged in a different

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direction. What is pertinent is that these projections from the heart of nature serve to bind the self to nature's folds in such a way as to make the encounter compelling and even normative for the sign-using self. The crucial issue for philosophical theology lies in the problematic of separating out personal from transpersonal elements. The logic should be clear. Insofar as a personal projection is also propelled outward by a spontaneous projection from the heart of nature, it gains a power that can be both intoxicating and revealing (without losing its dangerous prospects). This is where the self, with or without its conscious assent, enters into the sphere of religious numinosity. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the finite complex-driven projections will deeply color and shape the projections of nature. Finite idols quickly become infinite gods or goddesses, and the battle over control of the numinous order begins. Again, it must be stressed that we are not dealing with mere human delusion or, more positively, straightforward human disclosure of the real, but with powerful surges from the unconscious of nature that automatically raise the stakes in the religious orders of the world. The image is that of a hidden surge that moves forcefully into the nascent unconscious of the self, propelling it into its own projective network in which personal and transpersonal elements move outward into the more powerful semiotic fields of nature. The initial surge, rising like a wave out of the dark recesses of the realm between nature naturing and nature natured, develops a kind of open vector-directionality insofar as it intersects with material already in place within the unconscious of the self. At the moment of connection there is a dialectical unfolding in which the presemiotic wave from below the self energizes and shapes the material that comes from the self's unique trajectory in time and space. What was only a personal complex the moment before suddenly becomes a transpersonal or archetypal gradient that can explode outward through a deeply grooved projective field. From the standpoint of the observing consciousness this sudden momentum can seem like a visitation from powers that transcend the human. In one sense this is a correct and highly compelling inference. Yet in another sense, such an inference moves too quickly to equate the energy and power of the projection with the fold upon which it lands. But at this point in the process it would be highly unlikely that anyone could make the relevant distinctions among: the wave of the presemiotic potency, the personal complex as it is invaded by the wave, the pro-

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jection outward from both a personal and transpersonal source (both shrouded in mystery), and the neutral but powerful fold that represents the terminus of this fierce momentum. From the standpoint of the finite consciousness there is only the explosive recognition of dramatically enhanced meaning in one order of the world. Suddenly that landscape, that person, that community, that historical myth, or that event becomes charged with ultimate meaning. The sacred temple, the leader out of our spiritual slavery, the holy community with its own special revelation, the founding myth that finally unlocks the meaning of history, or the river crossing by the pilgrims, all become loci for an epiphany of power that seems to have its own origin and self-validation. Demonic events obviously can also wear this nimbus of ultimacy, such as the Battle of Blood River in 1838 in which the Afrikaners defeated the Zulus, thus showing their election from god to control the southern part of Africa. Insofar as an epiphany of power is held to be self-validating, the process that brought it into being in the first place is completely effaced. Tribal longing, such as that of the Afrikaners, gets moved into a cosmic drama of the elect and the nonelect, the saved and the damned, or the linguistically pure and the linguistically depraved. Tragically, epiphanies of power are, as noted, jealous of competing epiphanies, especially when they take on very specific semiotic and symbolic textures that render them hostile to sign systems that fall outside of their omnivorous hunger for self-justification. Put differently, an unexamined epiphany of power will refuse to intersect with a larger meaning field that might humble some of its claims. Thus the three gods of the Western monotheisms remain at war with each other, and there are few signs that this war will abate. The way past and through this tragic reality is to renew once more the psychoanalytic turn that looks directly at the epiphany of power and asks it to reveal its antecedent history. Once again we are edging rather close to anthropomorphic language when we talk about asking an epiphany to tell us something about itself. Perhaps a better formulation would be to look directly and dispassionately at one of nature's folds and to probe beneath its surface of radiant power to see how it links back to the selves that actually give it much of its power. Nietzsche put it well, although from a somewhat inept metaphysical perspective, when he saw a power economy between the self and the divine. In his view, whatever the self pours into the divine, it takes away from itself. Hence, whatever energies go into the fold of nature are derived from the projective self. However,

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there is a reverse movement here that enables the self to take back its projection but in an enhanced form. It is as if the epiphany of power is a magnifying agent that increases the power of projections before returning them to their originating hosts. It may jar on our common sense views of projection to say that a human projection, even if intensified by a presemiotic potency from nature naturing, can return to us with even more power than it had when it left our unconscious for the external fold. Yet this is precisely the logic of the case. This intensification process deeply complicates the moral issues that emerge from these seemingly external powers. Consider the less dramatic case of charisma. If a screen actor, who may have far less talent than a gifted, but relatively unknown, stage actor, takes on our transference longings every time he or she appears in a film, it is no wonder that their appearance in public can create such a flurry of activity. The cumulative effect of these projections and transferences renders the object far more powerful than its intrinsic worth would justify. These effects can be so dramatic that even a mediocre actor can become the leader of a great nation, even when there is no obvious social or political genius in the individual. Let us look at what happens to an actual sign as it moves through the stages delineated above. That is, we will look at how a sign evolves from its nascent stage in the presemiotic field, its passage into the personal complex of a human agent, its projection outward, via personal and transpersonal forces, and its terminus in the neutral but powerful fold of nature. To enhance this portrayal we will examine a sign that lives on the boundary between the aesthetic and the religious spheres. These aspects of the sign will give it an extra dimension of tension and creative energy. Our example will be that of the emergence of a kind of genius loci, that is, a personified semiotic field that is tied to a specific natural location. The figure will be made up from components that have traditionally been embedded in unconscious and conscious semiotic fields. The initial stage is perhaps the most difficult to describe as it emerges from a surge that is presemiotic and prerational, a surge that is itself a mysterious product of nature naturing. This vast field of potential semiosis is a kind of spawning ground of nascent signs. We can speak here of presigns that have a kind of hunger to become fully clothed with manifest and communicable semiotic content. How do presemiotic and nascent signs emerge into some kind of contour?

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We are left with a kind of philosophic silence as to the specific mechanisms by and through which a potential sign becomes an actual, if radically incomplete, sign. The presemiotic field, acting as a kind of wave, has an intense energy that by definition moves outward into expressivity. A nascent sign is like a bubble on the crest of the wave that suddenly appears with its own unique parameters and shape. Many of these bubbles simply dissolve again and recede into the wave that spawned them, yet some manage to detach themselves from the condition of origin and to take on a unique vector directionality that propels them into stronger forms of manifestation and eventual interaction. Sticking to the image of one sign, although we are obviously dealing with strong sign systems or aggregates, we can see our chosen sign start its journey away from its conditions of origin toward an intersection with the human process. The fictitious sign under study begins to take on some robust semiotic material that has a coloring that will eventually become manifest through a kind of social semiotic contrast. It will become more fully the sign that it is when it encounters otherness, as well as some forms of identity or similarity. When it escapes from its originating wave, through an ecstatic pulsation that severs the bonds of origin, in however incomplete a fashion, it becomes available for an intersection with a finite self. It has its distinct coloration (remembering that we are actually talking of a massive community of signs in an intense harmony) that will move in specific ways and not others. In this case, our sign has a charge that ties it to epiphanies which are natural. That is, if we may stretch our images to the breaking point, the sign has a kind of hunger to become embedded in natural locals that also have a deep religious force. What can this way of talking actually mean? Is it that the sign has a kind of radar that looks for a pastoral scene within which to express itself? Needless to say, such a formulation would be absurd and so deeply anthropomorphic as to turn this enterprise into an absurd joke. What is sought here is a means for expressing the unique trajectory of this sign as it prepares to intersect with the human. We can easily understand the idea that each and every sign has some unique features that tie it to one object rather than another. A sign of growth will not serve as a sign of death, unless, perhaps in a rich literary context, it can also, but in a different respect, house a sign of decay or loss. In this case we actually have two signs merged into one, rather than one sign that fails to find its object. By a similar logic we can say that a sign emergent

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from the presemiotic field will have its own object pole and not another, and it will seek this object in an unconscious and natural way. The image is not so much that of radar as it is of multishaped building blocks that can only fit together is a certain way. This is not to say that there is a cosmic builder who/that struggles to put the blocks together, but that there is a kind of robust tumbling together of elements that for some reason produces an astonishing array of fits. Hence our nascent sign, now free from the antecedent conditions of the presemiotic field, takes on a specific shape that will only fit with a certain object or object type (it should be understood that the word ''object'' is being used in an extremely generic sense; namely, as pertaining to anything whatsoever from a gesture, to a tree, to a mathematical possibility, to a betrayal, to a genetic mutation, to an empire, or to a fading sun set). This shape will have its own attractive possibilities. That is, the sign will fit with some personal complexes and not others. And it will fit with these friendly complexes in a variety of ways, some of which will be more fruitful for its expression, while others may frustrate its ultimate drive to link with its proper object. The sign has now become free for its intersection with a personal complex. Since we have said that our fictitious sign (sign aggregate) is one that has as its eventual object some natural setting that becomes or is personified, it follows that its intersection must be with those complexes that are already embedded, via projection, in some divinization of a natural setting. The host complex, as a strongly bound emotional and cognitive field, must have a predisposition to find the same object or object field that the intersecting sign has. Like the tumbling blocks, the fit either will or will not appear. If it does appear, then the sign will enter into the orbit of the personal complex and add its own gravitational and semiotic mass to the complex that resides in the unconscious. This charge will enter into the power equation in a number of different ways. It can be a mere augmentation, or it can, at the other extreme, set off a series of semiotic intersections within the complex that move almost geometrically to intensify the unconscious semiotic field. The personal complex is rarely purely personal. It will have deep roots in phylogenetic archetypes that shape and transform personal material. In fact, the entrance of personal material into the unconscious is already shaped by how the archetypes govern sign systems. A given experience of the individual, say one involving either parent, will have a gradient of energy and emotion that is partly determined by its commensurateness

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with archetypal patterns that reach back millions of years. Peirce talks about how each and every finite experience of consciousness unites two unconscious elements: the percept (or that which comes into the mind from outside) and the perceptual judgment (or the category, that is, class inclusion, that comes from an unconscious inference). Together the percept and the perceptual judgment form what he called the "percipuum," which can be seen as the total perceptual and intelligible field of awareness (cf. Peirce 1903c). Something like this also takes place more deeply in the unconscious when a sign (analogous to our percept) enters into the strongly determined field of the complex (analogous to our class inclusion or judgment). The sign gives the complex some more matter to ingest and shape, while the complex gives the sign further definiteness. That is, the complex helps the sign to become more fully what it is, while the sign gives the complex more life energy to expand its small empire of affect and ideation. This is a symmetrical process with sign shaping complex (in a lesser way) and complex shaping sign (in a greater way). As noted, all of this presupposes a prior fit between the emergent trajectory of the sign that has come from the domain of presemiotic potencies, and the already located and functioning complex. The complex has both personal and transpersonal elements, but the so-called personal dimension is already transpersonal in some respects. No finite experience can be purely personal, whatever that would mean in the orders of semiosis. Early childhood traumas, such as physical, mental, or sexual abuse, have tremendous affective charges in their own right, but their force is exacerbated when they find themselves in intersection with strong archetypal forces. Abuse of the child in all of its forms stems from the rage of the origin for its product, even though the expression of the abuse will depend upon specific antecedents in personal history. Therapy that focuses only on personal aetiology will fail to move the self into those transpersonal powers that can both destroy and heal. The sign and the complex move by a commensurate logic, each clothing the other with more semiotic material, giving each pole in the relationship more semiotic scope and depth. What happens when there is an increase in the gradient of psychic energy connecting the sign to the complex? It is here that we move toward the third stage of the movement of semiosis toward ultimacy. The first stage was characterized as a wavelike movement of a presemiotic potency to produce a bubblelike sign that could live on its own. The second stage involved the

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intersection of this now liberated sign with the personal and transpersonal elements of the complex embedded within the unconscious of the individual. The next stage involves the sudden movement outward into a projective field that encompasses and alters the life of the self. The model used here is actually quite simple, namely, that there is an inner pressure felt in and by the complex to externalize its material. Since, by definition, the complex is unconscious, its expression, unless consciousness becomes aware of it and intervenes, will be unconscious. Freud described this intervention in rather crisp language, "Where id was, there ego shall be. It is work of culture, not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee" (Freud 1933: 100). The "id," in German literally the "it," is the unconscious that lies outside of the sphere of conscious control. Both Freud and Jung insisted that the movement toward consciousness was a moral imperative, although Jung rejected the above stated view that there was a delimited terrain that could be drained. For Jung, the unconscious sea would always fill in faster that it could be drained by the ego. For the current perspective, the complex is an actual infinite that remains unconscious even if some aspects of its internal semiosis can be transformed into ego. But the power ratio remains no matter how much consciousness fishes up from the unconscious sea. The ego will always orbit around its complexes, rather than vice versa. From this it follows that the unconscious complex must find other means of expression or manifestation than the alleged lucidity of the ego. Somatic symptoms are always present when a complex is on the march. But a much more pervasive manifestation is that of projection. It must be stressed again and again that sign systems have their own vector directionality and inertial momentum. They do not need to be entertained by a consciousness in order to obtain or to be efficacious in shaping orders of the world. The directionality of a complex is somewhat imperial; namely, there is a desire to clothe the relevant terrain with affects and ideas that can only bring honor to the sending complex. Again, this might sound anthropomorphic, but the stress is on the momentum by which a powerful but specific semiotic field moves from one location, which happens to be internal, to another, which happens to be external. When the internal semiotic field, tied to an affect-laden (feeling centered) complex which has both personal and transpersonal dimensions, reaches a certain momentum there is something like a sudden centrifugal force that

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pushes/pulls its material outward. This is a purely natural phenomenon and does not require consciousness or intentionality. When the relevant conditions are met, the complex explodes into an unconscious projection that finds its object for good or ill. Sometimes, especially in the human order, this object conspires in the process, while sometimes the object is shattered and even annihilated by a tragic projection. Here we need only think of religious and racial wars. And sometimes the object is simply unaware, perhaps because it belongs to the preconscious orders, that any new semiotic content has invaded its contour. As we probe into this third dimension of the movement of semiosis and projection, it soon becomes obvious that there is a new reality at play other than the two elements of sign and complex as they become joined. This new reality is neither a sign nor a complex, but it underlies both forces and makes their complex intersection possible. Most of the time this third dimension recedes from view, thus masking its own unique rule in empowering projection and in maximizing the force of signs as they move through complexes and into the world. Yet this third dimension can announce itself with some clarity when the power of the transference, as tied to projection, becomes acute. In recent years this third dimension of projective semiosis has received the label "interactive field" as a way of showing how it is both dynamized to bring together elements and how it lives not as a particular region, power, or sign, but as the matrix within which such objects receive their measure. Nathan Schwartz-Salant describes the field phenomenon this way: Experiencing the field and being changed by its process is a way of transforming internal structures. New forms that order affects, which were previously overwhelming and fragmenting, can come into existence. Field dynamics also play a central role in the process of incarnating archetypal experience into an internal felt reality. One may take the view that every child knows levels of the numinosum at birth and then loses this awareness to one degree or another, depending on how the mother-child dyad is able to contain its sacred presence. (Stein, ed. 1995: 9) Thus the interactive field, in which sign and complex are brought together and allowed into public space via projection, is a reality that

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opens out and sustains the great betweens. First there is the noted between that sustains the tension between internalized sign and externalizing complex. Next there is the between that lies around selves, creating a subtle but knowable field that is sustained in the transference and countertransference energies. And we can also speak of the role of the interactive field in bringing in and partially shaping the archetypal structures of the collective unconscious. Using Peirce's language, this interactive field is also the ground relation that keeps signs, objects, and interpretants (new signs) in relation to each other. The ground/field has no intrinsic semiotic content, but brings contents into intersection. For Schwartz-Salant, this field/ground plays a crucial role in therapy because it enables both analyst and analysand to deal with their transference energies in a healthy way that preserves the boundaries required by the analytic work. That is, the field allows these energies their play while providing a kind of built-in framework that focuses attention on the field rather than on the erotic energies between the two individuals. Further, the interactive field is deeply incarnational precisely because it helps the individual to become open to the hidden or repressed language of his or her body, thus releasing somatic memories that might not otherwise emerge in analysis (cf. Stein, ed. 1995: 2425). Of course, the interactive field exists outside of the analytic context, and is a pervasive, if often ignored or repressed presence. It is a bit like a Kantian condition for the possibility of semiosis. That is, it lives as an enabling ground for what takes place within it rather than as an object that could be quickly pointed to by the sign-using organism. So, like Kant's sense of space or time, it is not something that is seen within something, it is that something itself. Yet, unlike Kant's mysterious transcendentals, the interactive field can be directly felt and its operation can be observed under the right conditions. When one's conscious mode of awareness loosens its hold on particular objects, it can enter into a more free-floating state in which alien material can suddenly start to appear from the elusive margins of awareness. This material may come from the interactive field, and one test for this is whether or not it serves to illuminate semiotic material that might otherwise remain opaque. Put differently, the interactive field is a living interpreter that has as its how the movement to connect, incarnate, shape, and interpret the relations that obtain between the sign and the complex, or the sign/complex constellation and its projection onto a fold of nature or

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other self. It must know something about the material that lives within its parameters, and use this knowledge to enhance the growth of meaning in time. This is not to say that the interactive field is some kind of omniscient spirit that can know each and every element and each and every intersection. Rather, this knowledge is more like an unconscious feeling that somehow gathers together things that have a hidden affinity. The image is more like that of a pool of water that moves slowly into each and every hollow space, making connections between objects that weren't there before. The pool itself is less obvious to the casual observer than the objects that emerge into sharp profiles within the landscape. Yet their connection to each other, their mutual relevance, comes from the water that holds them into one larger contour. The transference or interactive field has the quality of holding together discrete yet mutually relevant realities. It also underlies the subjectivities between and among selves, helping those subjectivities to become open to a horizon of meaning and power that can transform personal structures. In another dimension, the field that lies between transference and countertransference energies also moves outward into the complex space of projection. In this third dimension of what can be called "religious semiosis," there is a movement away from internal material toward some object or domain that can become, for whatever reason, the terminus of the projection. What was before an internal energy field of great power now becomes a quasi-external reality that comes back to meet the self as if from an alien terrain. Why do projections exist? Earlier we said that it is part of nature's cunning to move internal semiotic material into public space so that it can be disclosed for the first time. Insofar as it remains merely internal it remains hidden, and hence it retains its power to shape life in uncanny ways. When a projection carries internal material outward it has the chance of becoming the object of a more circumspect and thematic gaze. While this may be the rarer case, the unconscious act of projection may be at least a necessary condition for psychic translucency. There seem to be no sufficient conditions for this semiotic unveiling, and only the most naive account of the psyche would argue that this is a concrete hope for finite and multilayered sign-users. But there seems to be another aspect to the cunning of nature, moving beyond the hermeneutic goal of helping the self to see its internal makeup so that it won't live out unconscious complexes in a blind and dangerous fashion. Phenomenologically we are pointing to a kind of

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rhythmic unfolding from out of the heart of the transference field that automatically casts strong projective feelers into the world. Here the experience is not so much that of the given self as it rides on the back of its unconscious complexes and hopes to see them writ large on the face of the world. Rather, the experience is one in which the self becomes open to a deeply mysterious field/ground that undulates across the horizon of the self like a great tidal wave carrying many structures in its wake. The depth-dimension of the transference field is rooted in the surging potencies of nature naturing, and provides a means for the cunning of nature's unconscious to enter into the human process. Here it is not the case that humans are merely projecting their internal material onto external realities. Rather, the entire transference field itself floats on something more basic that uses this field to push great projective energies out into the world. It is this aspect of projection that should be the most interesting to the phenomenology of religion, precisely because it is in the transference field of nature naturing that the strongest and most recalcitrant energies emerge to engulf or transform religious life. Ecstatic naturalism, unlike its prosaic descriptive cousin, positions itself around these energies that emerge from the ontological difference. Because these energies are transpersonal, even while having striking manifestations that are deeply relevant to the human process, there is no room in ecstatic naturalism for any kind of humanism that would deny the utter supremacy of the transfiguring potencies of nature. Traditionally, humanism and naturalism have seen themselves as allies in the battle against supernaturalism and political heteronomy (imposition of alien law on human autonomy). Ecstatic naturalism remains friendly to both of these agendas without sundering the depth-connection between the self and nature. Humanism without the ontological difference is a form of detached autonomy that can only end up being exposed to alien semiotic fields that can usurp its alleged sovereignty. The field/ground that surrounds and sustains projection is thus both human and transhuman at the same time. It is human insofar as it is directly correlated to the complexes of the personal unconscious and moves them outward via unconscious projections. It is transhuman insofar as it remains gathered under the infinite potencies of nature naturing and moves its own translation of these potencies into public space. This public space can enter into a human individual or into a community of selves. And it can seem to invade the human process from

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a point outside of the conscious/unconscious dialectic. It is this latter experience that immediately moves the encounter with the field into the domain of the religious. It is as if the projective field encompasses each and every finite projection of the individual. The logic of projection is double-edged. We have pointed to the cunning of nature in which internal material might become known by becoming externalized. Yet there is also a sense, tied to the momentum of abjection (unconscious fear, denial, and desire), that projection gives the self a means of fleeing from the arduous task of coming to terms with its own complexes. This process can move from something like the projection of a certain kind of sexual license seen in a given group, to something as overwhelming to the world as genocidal projections that condemn millions to death. It must be remembered that there is a continuum between my projection that so and so is the woman or man of my dreams, and the projection that a certain race or group of people must be eliminated to cleanse the body politic. The transference field may very well be beyond good and evil in its own rhythms. An entire people can have an intense transference relation to a Hitler or a Stalin, while another may have a far less dangerous transference to the founding mothers or fathers of the group, however mythical may be their narrative. These delineations move us into the fourth dimension of the logic of semiosis and the drive toward the sacred. The interactive field has now appeared beneath the individual and the unconscious and collective forces that enter into the individual. The interactive field, never a person or a consciousness, has its own projective momentum that is beyond (or prior to) good and evil. It projects where it will and the human process has little to say in the matter, unless and until it exerts the most strenuous efforts to bring the matter of these projections into consciousness. Again, it is as if the self rides on a moving surge of water that gets thrown onto one object after another, coloring the appearance of that object. Here our numinous or sacred folds return, but now their own structure can become somewhat clearer. There is an internal connection between the seemingly blind projections emerging from the interactive field and their termination (perhaps consummation) in folds of nature. We have been arguing that nature's sacred folds are sacred for intrinsic reasons, that is, they have certain semiotic and presemiotic qualities that announce themselves to sign-using organisms. The projections of the interactive

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field arch out into the world of public semiosis and find the folds that stand there with their own sacred quality. Again, this is a fully natural process and no supernatural agency is entailed or implied in any way. Folds exist and projections exist and they find each other. The conception to be avoided is the anthropocentric one that insists that no sacred folds could exist in their own right; i.e., that all such numinous orders derive their so-called numinosity from human projection alone, perhaps aided by certain aesthetic harmonies that appeal to the organism. It is not often recognized that it is a profound form of hubris to insist that there can be no sacred folds within nature per se. Ecstatic naturalism strives through a variety of means to undermine the arrogance of the human standpoint by showing how nature's potencies can emerge in dramatic ways to alter the qualitative configuration of certain orders. It is no accident that humanism and descriptive naturalism usually go together. Humanism denies any numinous measure outside of the autonomous self (confusing theonomy with heteronomy), while descriptive naturalism reduces nature to a series of causal sequences that have no qualitative differentia. Such a naturalism forecloses possibilities for nature as if it ironically had an extranatural standpoint from which to make such judgments. Ecstatic naturalism insists that nature is inexhaustible in its transformative possibilities, even if, in the orders of nature natured there is an astonishing regularity among orders that do obtain. Nature's sacred folds thus invite the strong projections emergent from the interactive field. From its side, the interactive field seeks these termination points so that it can release its semiotic and presemiotic charge into public space. For the finite individual who participates in this drama it is as if real supernatural forces are acting in an intentional way to uplift, cast down, or transform the human process. There is an overpowering human need to assign moral values to the process whereby a sacred fold suddenly appears before a community. The problem with this strategy, as ancient as it is dangerous, is that it moves finite moral concerns into a sphere where there is only a blind momentum of powerful forms of semiosis. Nature's folds cannot be moral or immoral per se. That would be analogous to saying that a hurricane is immoral. We can and must discuss the moral effects of hurricanes and sacred folds, but these effects are not intended by nature or by nature's sacred orders. Using older language, we have a god that/who is truly beyond good and evil.

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We can say very little about what a fold is in itself. We know its way or how of manifesting itself in terms of its ability to gather up the strong projections from the interactive field. These projections are augmented by the finite projections of human individuals who unconsciously add their own complexes to the mix. The essence of the fold is hard to find precisely because it is so colored by the projections that come from nature. Returning to our example of the numinous place within a natural setting that has some sort of divinity attached to it, we can say that the setting may have certain aesthetic features that make it a congenial home to one of nature's sacred folds. The semiotic potencies of nature bend back upon themselves and become intensified in that very process. This intensification, whose origin is ultimately shrouded in mystery, becomes the locus for the work of the interactive field. Projections meet a semiotically dense order and the intensification process increases. Consider again the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Here we see a striking mixture of a powerful landscape, where mountains rise up from the bay of Corinth, whose slopes are shrouded in ancient olive trees. The Temple is nestled within the heart of a natural cleft within the landscape and houses the god who governs the place, remembering that Dionysus also resides as a reigning deity in other parts of the year. The worshiper thus participates in what could quite literally be called a geological fold within the landscape where mountains and bay reflect each other's contours. At the same time, the projections coming from the interactive field bring in strong human and social content that divinizes that landscape ever further. The Delphic oracle adds a vertical dimension that unites the human and the natural by bringing time and space together. Her predictions, quite ambiguous as to content and upshot, show the power of time and fate over the gods and mortals who live under the aegis of space. The geological fold enables the sacred fold to attain stability across time so that the interactive field can gather together nature's self with the sacred dimension. The fold has the uncanny ability to draw certain projections to itself, while ironically overturning them for those with the right eyes to see. In aesthetic terms this is the domain of the sublime where a nonfinite reality overwhelms the bound and rather fragile structures of mere beauty. Yet nature's sacred folds are far more than mere aesthetic powers, for in their form-shattering momentum they enter into the region of ultimacy. Put differently, this kind of religious sublime can also contain much that is ugly or deformed, and no amount of

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aesthetic longing, such as that manifest in process theologies, can still this deep and corrosive undercurrent. Falling into the hands of a numinous fold is akin to entering into a firestorm in which we are shriven of those components that cling to mere aesthetic augmentation. The firestorm aspect of a sacred fold is not, however, the only, or always primary, one. Quieter manifestations may appear that augment rather than shatter subjectivity. In either case, the form of empowerment that comes from nature's sacred folds is asymmetrical. That is, the numinous fold can empower finite subjectivity to simultaneously enhance and overcome the products of the interactive field, while remaining indifferent to the effects of its 0own presence. It can transform the self but the self cannot transform its life. This indifference, this ontological asymmetry, is an insult to human longing, a longing that wishes to see itself mirrored on the face of that which is held to be ultimate. The history of religions is the history of our repeated disappointments in the face of gods and goddesses who have utterly failed to return our projections to us in the form that enhances our narcissism. If Pannenberg wants to talk about god's progressive self-disclosure in the history of religions (Pannenberg 1988a), ecstatic naturalism prefers to talk about the innumerable shipwrecks of our narcissistic projections, projections aided by the fierce momentum of the interactive field. The fold in itself is beyond our understanding, while its way of interacting can be partially grasped by a cumulative series of phenomenological descriptions. We know that it welcomes the deliverances of the interactive field, and can intensify them even further by anchoring those projections in intersubjective space. Again, this is never to say that nature's sacred folds are conscious of what they are doing, any more than they have a center of intentionality. The phenomenon of intentionality is fairly rare within the orders of nature natured. Intentional beings have a centered awareness that can send conscious acts outward toward signs and objects in such a way as to demarcate an intentional field. This field of otherness is sustained by a centered agent who must have some reflexivity, that is, an internal countergaze that opens up subjective material in another intentional act. On this definition of intentionality, nature's folds cannot be intentional agents. It would make no sense to ask a fold (as if it could even respond in the first place) what its intentional acts are. A fold does not say to itself: I will return these human-all-to-human projections back to group A, while simultaneously confounding group B. Just the opposite takes

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place. The sacred fold can take in and enhance any relevant projection from the interactive field and return it to its relevant loci without so much as a hint of subjectivity or consciousness on its part. While we seem to be perennially driven to see these folds as personal, there is absolutely no personal location within the fold for our desires to find a home. In many senses, ecstatic naturalism insists on a rich universe of signs and objects, rather than a kind of desert landscape envisioned by many philosophers. But when it comes to the final object of religious semiosis, a kind of holy minimalism enters into the framework, a minimalism that struggles to protect the human process from importing personal predicates where, for good or ill, they simply do not obtain. Once one has made the primary move of rejecting the concepts of providence and theodicy, as all naturalists must, it follows that no honest naturalism can then somehow discover that the universe was created to be congenial to human desire. The concept of creation is a fairly limited one in the current perspective, pertaining to some orders in some respects, but never referring to an act ex nihilo that is responsible for the very generation (and continuing determination) of the innumerable orders of the world. By the same token, nature's sacred folds have no extranatural rhyme or reason that would somehow make their irrational intrusion into our lives fully intelligible. They are simply there like grand presences that come and go as our species makes its fitful way toward probable extinction. It would be impossible to make some kind of cost-benefit analysis of the effects of these folds over time, that is, to ask whether or not their benefit in our personal and communal lives outweighs the tremendous costs that come from their form-shattering momenta. Understanding the how of nature's numinous folds is only one step on the longer road of learning to transform our interactions with them into ones that can truly augment personal and communal life. The demons that continue to lurk within the three Western monotheisms, to mention no other religious perspectives, should remind us that the task of coming to grips with these folds has some urgency. Without a continuing psychoanalytic study of the rhythms of projection and transference, it will be impossible to find a location within communal space for taking the fangs out of the worst of our amplified projections. Again, it must be stressed that religious projections and their corollary transferences, are larger than human. That is, each religious projection is what it is because it emerges out of the interactive field and becomes amplified in its

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contact with a sacred fold. Any model that confines itself to human autonomy, such as most forms of humanism, is doomed to failure in the face of these overwhelming projective and transference fields. Given the disproportion between the powers of the human process and the strength of nature's sacred folds, how is it possible to find some means for negotiating our way toward some sense of measure in personal and communal life? The answer is simple, although its statement will require a full phenomenological treatment. If there is a lack of symmetry between two different powers, the move to find some balance between them must come from a third power that approximates the larger power, but which moves in a different direction from it. Nature's numinous folds represent fragmented powers of origin. As such they participate in the self-effacing dynamic of nature naturing as it recycles back on itself from its ecstatic manifestations. The countermove to these folds comes from another dimension of the unfolding of nature naturing that is manifest in the guise of fragmented goals. This second aspect of the appearance of the depth dimension of nature manifests itself in the opposite way from the folds or powers that bend back in upon themselves in order to become epiphanies of power. If the fragmented origin appears in and as the folds of nature, the fragmented goal(s) appears in the form of intervals that punctuate the more manic aspects of the folds. The sense of the term ''interval'' to be portrayed in what follows comes from a 1634 use (OED): "The space of time intervening between two febrile paroxysms, or between any fits or periods of disease." Nature's sacred folds can be likened to the fevered (febrile) paroxysms that punctuate the human process. While the calm spaces between these fits represent intervals in which the organism can recover its proper measure. Hence, the answer to the fragmented power of origin comes from the intervals that open the sign-using organism to lifetransforming goals.

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Chapter Two: Intervals Nature's sacred folds reach back into and illuminate the conditions of fragmented origin from which they have emerged. They have no collective integrity, nor do they embody a common teleological pattern. They obtain prior to the divide between good and evil precisely because they unfold their power without any regard whatsoever for the desires and needs of the human process. As epiphanies of power they represent those uncanny moments in which nature, for whatever reason, folds back upon itself to achieve a dimension of enhanced semiotic scope and density. The increase in semiotic scope is manifest in the ability of the fold to enter into many intersecting transference fields simultaneously, while the increase in semiotic density is manifest in the dramatic enhancement of projective and counterprojective meaning that hovers around the fold. The human process cannot help but be caught up in these manic swirls of energy and meaning. We have isolated three major power regions in this analysis: the human process with its unconscious complexes, the fold of nature that can shatter the boundaries of the self, and the interactive transference field that connects the two. In a simple ratio of power, the fold seems to have the most, even though its power is actually intensified by both the self and the underlying field. In some sense its power is borrowed, while in another sense it has an uncanny power in its own right that drew forth the projections in the first place. To use the language from the previous chapter, each fold must have some kind of hook that can gather strong projections to itself. We have gained some access to the how of these hooks, but we have not become open to the depth logic that comes from nature naturing as it perennially births nature natured, while sustaining the space between them from whence these hooks come. Sometimes there are fairly clear aesthetic reasons as to why one order of nature rather than another becomes a fold or epiphany of power. But even here the so-

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called aesthetic domain is permeated by many other semiotic and presemiotic elements. How does the human process survive in the face of the dazzling power of nature's sacred folds? By now it should be clear that its own resources are profoundly limited in the face of what seems like an infinite field of compressed meaning. Since the human process has survived its encounters with the epiphanies of power, at least in the short run of conscious evolution, there must be something outside of the self that has an equal vector-force to nature's sacred folds, thus providing a counterbalance to their overwhelming presence. This complementary force or momentum does not come from the interactive field, because the field is primarily the locus of connection and amplification. It is not the object of amplification, even though it is indispensable in the process. Consequently, the only place where a competing power can appear is somewhere in the locus of the folds themselves. The image of manic power was invoked at the end of the previous chapter to signal that any encounter with nature's sacred folds would accelerate and heat up the human process with material that might be too strong to integrate. In this chapter, the complementary notion of the interval will be used to show that there are nonmanic moments within the world/interactive field/self correlation that have an equal ontological and existential status with that of nature's sacred folds. Like the term "fold" the term "interval" seems prosaic in its provenance. However, there is a strategy here that bears repeating. In dealing with a phenomenology of religious orders of relevance there is a strong tendency to move from descriptive to honorific language and thus to burden the descriptive enterprise with cryptotheological claims that are completely unwarranted. By insisting on language that does not lend itself to such an inflation and transgression of boundaries (between the descriptive and the honorific), ecstatic naturalism can sustain the naturalist undertone of the indifference of nature to human aspiration, while allowing for those genuine but fitful moments of genuine transfiguration to emerge on their own terms. These transfigurations do not add up to some kind of grand epiphany or theodicy, and often play out their drama in historical darkness. The term "interval" can connote a kind of static resting period between parts of a drama. In this model, the drama is the primary center of attention, while the interval merely serves to recharge the self for another encounter with the enticing semiotic material that has been momentarily left behind. Or the term can connote a period of analysis in which the

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more manic aspects of the previous semiotic field can be sorted through with greater integrity and insight. In another connotation of the term, the interval can be a period of recovery in which the human process can repair a torn semiotic fabric. A common theme in these implications of the term is that of a shift from a kind of semiotic plenitude toward a moment in which that very plenitude can become the object of a more circumspect probing and assimilation. We must not overemphasize the idea that the interval is something that happens within the human process as if it is something that can be chosen at will. While this does happen in many lesser ways, the primary momentum for the intervals that surround more intense semiotic fields comes from the space between nature naturing and nature natured. By analogy, the fissure between the unconscious and consciousness in the self becomes the personal locus of the struggle between nature's folds and nature's intervals. It is an obvious temptation, fueled by a built-in narcissism, to confine the tension between epiphanies and intervals to the self. It is much harder to work through the actual phenomenological material to see just how this tension is carried forward and backward by the interactive field as it gathers up the folds and intervals of the self with the folds and intervals of nature. It seems endemic to the human process that plenitude is privileged over emptiness. Certain East Asian and South Asian philosophical perspectives have spent some of their greatest energies in struggling with this issue, hoping to move the human process away from the obsession with maximally dense semiotic fields. Within the Western monotheisms this tension does not seem to be named with such clarity, although there are moments of extreme lucidity that punctuate the tradition (such as the concept of a kenotic or emptying Christology). In either case, it is recognized that a kind of ontological priority is in place, putting the semiotic fields above their surrounding enabling conditions. If we shift to the notion of ontological parity (Buchler 1989), which insists that nothing is either more or less real than anything else, even if it may be seen to have more value, then it becomes easier to give the same phenomenological attention and weight to the intervals of nature as has often been reserved for its sacred folds. Intervals and folds are real in different ways, and these differences are never differences in degrees of being or reality. In what respects, then, are nature's intervals different in their how from nature's sacred folds? Are the intervals themselves sacred, or are they

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mere empty interstices that happen to appear within the spaces between and among folds? Are there any teleological patterns to these intervals? Finally, what religious implications can be drawn from the open spaces that almost seem to protect us from the manic plenitude of the folds? The temptation in moving toward our phenomenological descriptions, from which alone we can answer these questions, is to start with an unexamined but habitual presupposition that these interstices must be spatial in all respects. Philosophy has tended to privilege both sight and spatial or container images that are so congenial to the sense of sight. To move away from the ubiquity of sight and space takes a great deal of effort, requiring a careful movement toward more encompassing images and access strategies. Even the very word "encompassing" connotes some sense of containedness, although the term can be reconstructed to stress a sense of enabling and clearing away that does not restrict itself to boundaries that can be circumscribed. We begin to gain access to the intervals of nature through a strong sense of contrast. Intervals are always intervals in the midst of epiphanies of power, and have their own how in direct correlation to the how of the folds that seem to have a more dramatic presence within selves and their communities. The sacred folds of nature fitfully point back to a fragmented ground that has no collective integrity or shape. Where do the contrary intervals point? Initially the face of the interval seems to turn away from us. It is more like a black hole that pulls all light back into its hidden center. Yet this appearance is deceiving. We can find astronomic black holes by observing their effects on other objects that intersect with their strong gravitational fields. In one sense, we can encounter an interval this way; namely, through its hidden effects on folds that surround it. These effects can be seen in the way in which an imperial fold will founder on its own semiotic plenitude and fail to consume the entire semiotic universe. The interval(s) that surrounds a fold actually affects its own radiation of signs so that they are also partially bent back to a hidden point that can humble their claims. But this hidden operation has a manifest side in that the interval can become available to the self as interval and not just a hidden deflector of semiotic plenitude. Let us examine each dimension in turn and see if they have an inner connection that points to a different sense of whence and whither than that manifest by the sacred folds of nature. In the phenomenological descriptions to follow it is again assumed that we are dealing with a third reality over and against the self and the underlying

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interactive transference field. Of course, to do so requires what Peirce called an act of "prescinding" in which deeply embedded elements are untangled from each other so that they can be examined separately. While this process is hard enough, it must be followed by a reweaving of the elements so that we can then understand the collective integrity of the elements both separately and in consort. We begin by working out of the black hole analogy. This analogy is especially fruitful because it puts tremendous pressure on the priority of sight and spatial images. Both light, the enabling condition of sight, and space, as the container for whatever is, are put under a kind of suspension or even erasure. We are now accustomed to talk about how light and space can be bent by something of extreme mass, and this astronomic reality has direct philosophic translations (although extreme care has to be exercised when making these moves so that relevant disanalogies are not ignored). The basic model goes like this: the astronomic black hole stands to light and space the way the interval stands to the semiotic field of nature's sacred folds. Deepening the analogy we can say that the folds of nature are like radiating stars as they enter into the fierce gravitational pull of black holes. The fragmented powers of origin, radiating outward into human communities, are measured and challenged by a counter pull that comes from the opposite direction. What is this opposite direction? Asked differently, what can we disclose about the whence and whither of those intervals that indirectly affect the momenta of nature's folds? We sense that the fold of nature moves outward to express and embody its condition of origin. No matter how far the fold moves, it is still a child of fragmented origin and lives to express that antecedent enabling condition. By the same logic, the interval of nature must move in the opposite direction, not from an antecedent point but toward a consequent. If nature's sacred folds are emergent from a fragmented origin, then nature's intervals must be underway toward fragmented goals. It will take some time to work out the specifics of this contrary how within nature, but the initial dimensions can emerge fairly quickly. The interval stands to its relevant fold as consequent to ground, and the fold stands to its relevant interval as origin to goal. It must be stressed that this relationship is one filled with dynamic tension embodied in an unending dialectic of plenitude and clearing away. While ecstatic naturalism shies away from process terms like "prehension" (feeling of

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feeling between two occasions, one becoming, one objectively immortal), it does stress that even such elusive realities as folds and intervals must somehow become relevant to each other in a strong way, even if there is nothing in the relation that is analogous to consciousness. By saying that the relation involves strong relevance (Buchler 1989) we are saying that folds and intervals deeply affect each other not just in terms of their scope or reach in the world, but more deeply in terms of their inner structures and possibilities. Like the black hole and the radiating star that forever change their respective prospects, folds and intervals are embedded in a dialectic from which neither side can prescind or remain unchanged in fundamental ways. Now, a black hole in the astronomic world can stretch matter as it comes into its event horizon. Here we may make a clear analogy between the sacred fold (matter) and its relevant interval (black hole). Epiphanies of power are without guile or reason, they simple stand out from the fragmented origin and intersect with transference fields and the human unconscious. In this sense, they are like any other form of radiating matter that occupies its own domain in a local region. But this seemly straightforward radiation is actually punctuated and shaped by the hidden presence of the interval that moves in the exact opposite direction; namely, away from semiotic place and density toward semiotic inversion and emptiness. The sacred fold is thwarted in its outward momentum by something that simply will not fall into its semiotic field of power. In fact, the relationship is even more complex, precisely because the interval can weaken the pretensions of the fragmented powers of origin by breaking them open to the fragmented goals that surround all powerful semiotic fields. Keeping to our analogy, the epiphany of power moves into public and unconscious semiotic space, carried forward and backward by the momentum of the transference field. Yet its momentum is checked and often even inverted by the more subtle presence/absence of the intervals that embody fragmented goals. What happens in concrete terms? A given epiphany of power, say our examples of a strong aesthetic and natural location that becomes divinized (Delphi, Greece or Sedona, Arizona), will have their own terrain of operation that reaches deep down into the interstices where consciousness and the unconscious intersect within the human process and within human communities. One or more selves can come to see the sacred grove as the true locus of divinity, and, in a sense, they would be right. Any sacred grove can become filled with

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greater and greater semiotic density until it becomes the one and true location for the finite/infinite participation that can center and ground community. Hence any community member can go to such a place to be healed, transformed, challenged, or quickened in his or her prospects. The literal soil or ground that houses and welcomes the sacred fold has certain intrinsic features that enter into a dialectical relation to the emergent fold. In turn, the fold/grove conjunction serves as a hook for the unconscious. Returning to the basic analogy, we can say that the sacred grove and all therein contained points to and participates in a living infinite. It is a center of radiating mass that has a set, although augmented, gravitational pull. The unconscious is pulled into its orbit, and the conscious mind stumbles along behind at first, only to become a coconspirator as the attraction of the grove becomes the object of some form of thematic appreciation. Where is the interval in this process? No gravitational mass stands alone, and must exist in a kind of larger Darwinian universe of competition and survival. The interval that surrounds the sacred fold seems to have far less mass than the fold itself. In fact, the interval is often seen to have no mass at all. In its hidden dimension the interval radiates no signs or interpretants, and thus is like the black hole (remembering that strictly speaking, black holes do radiate, cf. Hawking 1996: 128143). In this dimension, the effect of the interval must be measured on its effects on the sacred folds that intertwine with it. How does this work? The sacred grove is full of the radiating power of signs and interpretants that shape the individual and his or her community. This power is unique to the selves involved because it has maximal semiotic density (as intensified by the transference field). Yet there are moments within this religious semiosis when cracks may appear, when doubts or forms of desire and hunger may punctuate the equilibrium of the epiphany. The interval serves as a kind of decompression in nature that must be filled in by the maximal field of the epiphany. The plenitude of signs that animate the sacred grove suddenly move into a gathering heterogeneous momentum that pulls them apart so that they cannot radiate outward in a simple manner. They fall into the decompression and are stretched to the breaking point. Intervals and folds prevail in an unending dialectic in which the fold will arch out from its fragmented origins, while the interval will pull some of the semiotic plenitude of the epiphany into its ever opening decompression so that these now broken signs can be humbled and allowed to reconstitute in the direction of the not yet. This latter process

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will be delineated later after further preparatory descriptions are completed. At this stage the important thing to remember is that neither the fold nor the interval are intentional agents and it makes no sense to see one order as more real than the other or to envision one as having a greater prospect of victory within the time process. In fact, there is a very clear sense in which epiphanies could not unfold the way they do without their surrounding interval(s). Nature's sacred folds are always maximal semiotic fields that stand out against openings that have minimal semiotic density. Even if there were no interaction between them, their phenomenal structure already and in all respects points to their necessary co-implication within the struggle for semiotic survival. But the intervals of nature are not only decompressions that pull in semiotic matter from imperial folds. They also can radiate out in their own right. The manifestation of an interval is, of course, not through a living or actual infinite of signs and interpretants. Rather, it is through what could be called an open infinite that surrounds the actual signs that have unusual religious power for the human process. The open infinite is not some kind of abstract frame of all frames within which actual epiphanies can appear. Its functioning is more particular than that. Put in rather prosaic terms, each fold has its relevant interval(s), and no other(s) will be appropriate for it. Using our analogy, no two black holes are alike. And, of course, a given black hole is what it is partially because of the masses that enter into its event horizon. There is thus a fit, never teleological in origin, between both the fold and its order(s) within the world, and between a fold and its relevant interval(s). Again, these fits come after the fact and are not prearranged structures that some extranatural agent puts into place. Fold, order, and interval all belong together because of a built-in measure that obtains prior to the entrance of unconscious complexes in the human order, and the corresponding transference field that carries and amplifies projections. The human process adds greatly to what is there, even though it did not create the original fold/order correlation. The irony is that religious consciousness grasps half of the truth. It sees that the fold to which it is bound is not reducible to its own projection. Yet religious consciousness usually makes the next fatal step by assuming that the fold is tied to a personal and/or extranatural power that somehow created it or is directly expressed by it. So a burning bush is both a manifestation of deity and an aspect of deity. Leaving aside this magical example, the move seems automatic that the self will translate a fold/order/interval dialectic or

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configuration into some kind of creator who can stand behind nature and its most pertinent orders guaranteeing certain local forms of divinization. The intervals around the manifest and power-laden folds now become even more important for the human process, since the self seems incapable of distinguishing between a natural event/power of great scope that lives purely out of nature, and an alleged divine agent who is held to be behind the epiphany of power. The interval, when properly understood, can humble the fold in a way that religious consciousness cannot. It bounds it and sets limits to its actual infinite pretensions by less directly manifesting an open infinite that is not filled in with manic power. This is the first step in the humbling process; namely, in the exhibition to the self that is caught up in the swirl of the transference field, that the all-powerful sacred fold is in fact a circumscribed and finite event that stands over and against other events that do not honor its claims to ultimacy. There are other sacred groves, other epiphanies of power that could compete with the one manifest to the self that stands in its own rigid locale. The second stage in the humbling process is even rarer in its realization than the first, which is rare enough to begin with. If the first stage is integrated completely, that is, if the self comes to see the differences among its projections, its transference field, and the object of the projection, then the object, as fold, can be deflated in its status as the center and circumference of the horizon of meaning. This is not quite analogous to the transition from monotheism to polytheism as genuine monotheism may not even exist for a creature who must find the numinous through complexes and their projections. Rather, it is more like a movement from a false infinite toward a deeper grasp of what the finite/infinite correlation is really about, however and wherever this correlation is manifest to the sign-using self. The second stage in the transformation of religious consciousness as it encounters nature's intervals is to put the question of agency to the fore. In the unending dialectic between an interval and its fold there is a horizontal movement around fragmented origins and a vertical movement toward fragmented goals. The horizontal movement (as epiphany) bends back on itself over and over again as it intensifies its power around the fragmentary whence. Yet it is also compelled to bend toward the vertical by the interval that wishes to humble the often destructive effects of nature's sacred folds. Combining our images we can say that the most realized form of the dialectic is a spiral in which origins and goals can

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measure each other without either being reduced to a shadow of its former existence. On those rare moments when the self sees this spiral for what it is, religious self-consciousness can become free from a demonic temptation toward divinized origins, while giving content to the goals that seem to come so effortlessly out of the decompression in the world. Insofar as the sign-using self can work past and through its projections and come to see folds and intervals on their own terms, it becomes possible for it to understand powerful natural momenta that do not require some ersatz agency to move them along. Folds and their relevant orders in the world appear and manifest their presence in a variety of ways. Intervals appear, but in a much more self-effacing manner, to engage in a dialectical transformation of their respective folds so that neither origin nor goal will come to dominate semiosis and its enabling spaces. This ongoing process works its way into and through the unconscious and the transference field, yet neither can exhaust the power and richness that comes through them. On the other side, of course, the folds and the intervals also receive much of their shape and amplification from the internal work of the self and the internal/external work of the transference field. If the whence can be shriven of its overwhelming and unmediated power, what of the goals that come from the vertical movements of the intervals? It must be pointed out that the image of verticality must be understood from the perspective of a fold that bends back in on itself in an eternal repetition of origins. Anything moving in the other direction, that is, away from the fragmented origin, must appear to be an ascent. Looked at from the perspective of the interval, semiosis comes toward it (analogous to light falling into the event horizon of the black hole). So the movement from this perspective seems like a descent from a height. Of course, there are no agents here doing the looking, but only sign-using selves creating a picture of what the semiotic streams must look like in their own terms. Consequently, the term ''vertical'' will stand duty for the ascent seen from the side of the fold, and the descent seen from the side of the interval. The relevant point is that it is never an infolding or return to a point of origin but a perpetual opening and gathering momentum that deflates manic semiotic plenitude. The open infinite that becomes manifest here has nothing to do with general laws or with great powers and epiphanies. On the contrary, such an infinite is very specific in its locations and serves to enhance the

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principle of individuation. For each fold there is a relevant interval (or intervals), while each interval will find itself working with and against a fold (or folds). The concept of infinity is pertinent here because such momenta stand over and against the self as great powers that cannot be circumscribed by the individual, even if they can be circumscribed by other powers. This is a kind of lesser infinite, but an infinite none the less. The concept of openness is crucial here because it denotes the fact that there is no closure in the fold/interval complex, and that the infinite continues to open up the dialectic in a variety of ways, only a few of which may be detectable by the self in process. The fold, as a kind of semiotic and radiating mass, gathers its signs and interpretants, fueled by projections, back into itself over and over again. It is a bit like Nietzsche's eternal return of the same, if you amplify his concept with the idea that there is augmentation and reconstruction going on at the same time. In this sense, the fold is an actual infinite, that is, one that obtains as an actual interpretant field, even while adding to its stock through the fierce momentum of unconscious human projections. The open infinite that is manifest by and through the interval is anything but an actual infinite of interpretants. Shifting our analogy a bit we can envision the relationship between the actual infinite of the fold and the open infinite of the interval as like the relationship between the blackened body of the sun during a total eclipse and the corona that flickers around the edges of the moon's intervening circumference. The sun remains as the dense semiotic field that radiates outward, actually drowning the corona under ordinary circumstances. When this dense body of interpretants is suddenly covered by the minuscule body of the moon, the open-ended and flickering light of the hidden corona can appear to show just how the original semiotic mass (sun) is actually illuminated in a more dramatic way by the far less instantiated light of the corona. Of course, all analogies break down at certain points, and the image of sun-to-corona as equivalent to fold-to-interval doesn't begin to capture the subtle relationships between the actual semiotic mass of the fold and its surrounding and particularized interval that can only be seen under those conditions in which we are less blinded by the sun itself. Yet it does convey something of the problem in learning to see the less brilliant, but equally present, movement of interpretants that swirl around the overwhelming light of the epiphany of power. The actual infinite of the fold can seem to obliterate the much more tenuous and diaphanous

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light of the corona, but that open field of light represents the ever elusive horizon within which the fold can find any measure at all. The open infinite of the interval creates and sustains a gap between the manic plenitude of interpretants that rotate around the heart of the fold, and the other folds and powers that punctuate the human process. There is a semiotic space or clearing between folds, just as there is a particularized clearing around each fold reminding it that it can never fill in the entire semiotic world. The open infinite works in two fundamental ways. In one dimension it serves to humble the pretensions of the fold as it gathers yet one projection after another into its expanding network of powerful interpretants. In the other dimension it provides spaces or gaps that can provide novel directions for the fold as it augments its semiotic stock. The horizontal return to origin that refuses to take on goals or refuses to become open to other folds and their prospects is challenged by the vertical movement of the interval that opens up a means and way of ascent away from the repetition of blind origins. In more concrete terms we can ask: just what does this mean within human experience? What is at stake here is the relationship of power between the origin and the goal. Folds seem to have a greater share in the power of this semiotic universe in that they can return again and again to the spawning ground that gives new power to any returning offspring. At the same time, the fold is also the recipient of those unconscious projections that serve as the hidden telos of human history. Of course, folds have their own natural evolutionary history and can die or diminish just like any order that obtains. Put differently, folds suffer from the eventual ravages of entropy, and have their own growth patterns. Yet while they wax strongly in their intersection with the human order, they seem to take the lion's share of semiotic power to themselves. The plot, however, is much more complex. Power is never as straightforward as it seems and semiotic plenitude is deeply ambiguous in its own right. Subaltern configurations within a fold can represent tears in the fabric of an epiphany, and the powers within the epiphany can often swirl in competing directions at the same time. But on a deeper level, the power manifest in nature's strongest decompressions, the intervals, works in its own way to insure that there is a balance of plenitude and emptiness in the semiotic world, and that the human process is never totally abandoned to the ravages of nature's sacred folds. The power of a decompression is different in manifestation from

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the power of an epiphany. But it is a competing and equal power in its own right. The open infinite is an enabling condition that surrounds the actual infinite. The open infinite of the interval has its own directionality. It is in no sense a static container within which the manic plenitude of the fold can simply express itself. Rather, the open infinite is characterized by its movement toward those clearings within which the powers of origin can be broken open by the power of the future and its innumerable goals. The concept of goals being used here must be approached with great caution. For ecstatic naturalism it makes no sense, as has been reiterated, to say that nature harbors a set of goals that are somehow congenial to the human process. Nor can we say that folds or intervals are in any sense conscious agents or persons that/who could somehow entertain goals. All goals, where they obtain at all, are fitful probes sent out by the self into an indifferent nature that may or may not have the resources for fulfilling those goals. In what follows, the concept to be rejected is that goals are extrahuman powers. However, there is a sense in which the concept of goals can be stretched to connote those gaps or openings within nature where semiotic plenitude and the power of origins can give way to novel prospects that surround and challenge the human process. If we have ruled out the notion that these goals are somehow intentional and future-driven acts of a conscious being, what is left of the concept that warrants use of this term? Here we are asking the term to step a little out of its usual provenance in order to provide a means, when we return to the human process, for connecting the opening momentum of the interval with its translation into human terms. Strictly, then, the term "goal" refers to what happens when the open infinite provides a space for the human process to transfigure origins around a conscious or dimly conscious aspiration. The interval has no goals but is the primary means by and through which goals can emerge into the self as it struggles against opacity and habit. The interval, as a decompression within nature natured opens up a clearing within which a given sacred fold can move away from the repetition of origins. Repetition enters into a dialectic with an opening future that lures the power of unmediated origin into a diminution of its powers. In human terms we can see the dialectic between folds and intervals as a dialectic between power and justice. This language might seem inappropriate on this level of generality, but should prove its efficacy as the descriptions unfold. The first half of the dyad already

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makes sense; namely, the correlation of the epiphany with the concept of power. Here the concept of power means the sudden and uncontained movement of a fold to express an almost blinding array of interpretants that course thorough the human process and shape it in ways that often stun the conscious mind. Of course, unconscious projections, tied to powerful internal complexes, have already moved through the transference field to enhance the ironic return of the fold into the economy of the psyche. This feedback loop has its own dark cunning that frequently combines tragic and liberating dimensions simultaneously. Nature's sacred folds are clear semiotic powers in their own right. Phenomenologically we can discover nothing in nature that has the same kind of power (even if the concept of amount becomes deeply ambiguous, e.g., does an earthquake have more or less power than the sacred grove?). The type of power is unique, precisely because it is so fully implicated in the deepest reaches of the human and natural unconscious. But what of the second half of the dyad? Can we make any sense of the correlation of the interval with the concept of justice, a concept that usually functions within social or political domains? The linking term that will make this correlation less jarring is that of "restoration." It is possible, and certainly consistent with the provenance of the concept, to see the heart of justice as a momentum involving the restoration of that which has been taken away. In a world in which powers seem to gravitate together to augment each other rather than to arch out over and through the human community, restoration represents a strong countermove to pull those self-enhancing powers down into a more equitable distribution within the pertinent human orders. As Nietzsche saw through his distorted metaphysical lens, powers hunger to cluster together, the alternative reality being a form of decline (which is the fate of mere preservation as well as that of genuine entropic decay). Were the religious orders exhaustively constituted by sacred folds, there would be an unending clustering of powers that would shatter the human process and that would promote a hierarchical structure for those selves who could withstand the onslaught of innumerable epiphanies. Jung would refer to this state of the invasion of the powers as a kind of psychosis resulting in psychic inflation, a kind of self-divinization. That such states do exist shows that nature does not work out these power equations in a fully equitable manner. The concept of restoration enters into the dialectic precisely where the manic plenitude of the epiphanies is broken open by the intervals that

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move toward a restoration of some kind of balance between plenitude and emptiness. But what of the links among the realities of restoration, justice, and goals? These three dimensions of the dialectic are deeply entwined. The interval, without consciousness or guile, takes away some of the ferocity of the power of fragmented origins by opening up a space within which that energy can dissipate. In the dissolution of the more extreme form of power, the resultant interpretants enter into a more open-ended horizon of meaning in which they loose some of their own fierce inertial momentum. It is as if the interpretants of the fold are spread more thinly within communal psychic space, providing a horizon that can assume aesthetic, ironic, or even playful aspects. These aspects remain religious in so far as they continue to point to the ultimacy of the origin and the moving ultimacy of fragmented goals. Goals emerge in that space where the human process encounters the intervals that save it from the burning power of origin. Lest this language of burning sound too extreme, it must be remembered that nature's sacred folds can produce psychosis, both personal and social, whenever they are unchallenged by nature's intervals. This is not to demonize the powers of origin, especially in so far as they are absolutely essential to religious consciousness, but to honor the piece of wisdom found in the older patriarchal traditions that warns us against falling into the hands of the living god. This warning, when translated into a more adequate and capacious metaphysical perspective (ecstatic naturalism), compels us to remain aware of what happens when only one half of a dialectic is allowed to dominate our horizons of power and meaning. Goals, then, can only emerge for the sign-using self when the powers of fragmented origin are measured and dampened by the decompression within nature denoted by the term interval. Here we must remind ourselves that we are talking of those goals that are religious in essence. Finite and developmental goals can always emerge, even if they too are measured by the iron hand of necessity. But religious goals, which live in and out of the infinite, both actual and open, are both more liberating and more dangerous than instrumental goals. One of the primary flaws of descriptive naturalism is that it failed to distinguish between these two types of goal; namely, the religious which enters fully into the deepest unconscious powers of nature, and the instrumental, which stabilizes the sign-using self in an environment that can be changed by finite forms of control and manipulation.

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The most inept expression of the relation between goals and the religious order is Dewey's A Common Faith, which utterly fails to probe into the depth dimension of nature's epiphanies and decompressions, while providing a kind of ersatz comfort to those humanisms that refuse to look into the ways in which the ontological difference enters into the human process. His stress is always on how the human process can unify its own instrumental and aesthetic nature: Because of their scope [religious ideals], this modification of ourselves is enduring. It lasts through any amount of vicissitude of circumstances, internal and external. There is a composing and harmonizing of the various elements of our being such that, in spite of changes in the special circumstances that surround us, there conditions are also arranged, settled, in relation to us. (Dewey 1934: 16) For Dewey, religious ideals, which have a kind of Kantian existence as regulative principles, serve to unify the ofttimes fragmentary quality of finite human life. Like aesthetic and qualitative wholes, religious values can provide a personal and social stability for the sign-using organism, although they do not, by definition, connect the self to the depth-dimension of nature nor do they acknowledge the extrahuman (but not extranatural) powers that enter into the human process. It is as if Dewey's descriptive naturalism rides on the surfaces of nature natured while being simultaneously oblivious to the transference field and the pulsations of nature naturing. His humanistic religion is no religion at all, and denies or even abjects those genuine potencies and powers that emerge from the heart of nature. Dewey's focus on the foreground is reinforced by the above mentioned tendency to rely on regulative ideals when dealing with realities that do not fall into the net of instrumental control. His sense of the whole is surprisingly Kantian: The idea of the whole, whether of the whole personal being or of the world, is an imaginative, not a literal idea. The limited world of our observation and reflection becomes the Universe only through imaginative extension. It cannot be apprehended in knowledge nor realized in reflection. (Dewey 1934: 1819)

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The world normally occupied by the sign-using self is one of finite "observation and reflection" by which Dewey means a world that eschews any depth-momentum that would honor the unconscious of the self and or of nature. Even though Dewey's concept of experience is one of the most generous and capacious of the tradition, it still fails to include within its domain any sense of genuine and resistant otherness. It is one thing to say that the world is a mixture of the precarious and the stable, it is another altogether to say that it is a realm in which many overwhelming powers can enter into and transform (or even destroy) human life. Dewey is right that our concepts of the whole are different in kind from our concepts of given orders of the world, yet it doesn't follow that such concepts are mere imaginative extensions of otherwise more secure knowledge horizons. In fact, it makes more sense to say that our encounters with nonlocated nature are not conceptual at all, but involve a dissolution of boundaries rather than an imaginative enhancement of them. Dewey's case is instructive because it represents the high-water mark of humanism in so far as it also reflects on religious phenomena. To show the starkness of the difference between the kind of descriptive naturalism animating Dewey's humanism, and the ecstatic naturalism of the current perspective, consider the abyss that separates this conception of religious ideals as quasi-aesthetic forms of existential unification, and the fierce dialectic between nature's sacred folds and the decompressions in nature manifest in its intervals. Humanism is a form of selfsupporting autonomy (a contradiction in terms), while ecstatic naturalism understands that the human process is fully, if ambiguously, embedded in the unconscious, both personal and natural, and in the transference field that is the enabling ground for religious life. Dewey's case is also instructive because of his focus on the concept of goals. For him, goals emerge whenever a problematic situation calls for remediation so that the organism can restabilize its life around communal goals that have some chance of enduring. Instrumental problem solving can almost be defined as the heart of the human process. Each goal should emerge from democratic forms of social analysis that insure the liberating power of the goal. Of course, there is much that is commendable in this perspective, and few thinkers have even approached Dewey in terms of his rich and complex understanding of democracy. But his autonomous perspective remains just that; namely, an uprooted

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framework that cannot truly understand how the self negotiates among the more powerful interpretants of inner and outer life. Goals are precarious, and this fact impressed Dewey. Ecstatic naturalism also understands goals to be fragile and subject to all kind of spoliation. Yet the difference between the two perspectives becomes clearer when a simple question is asked: just how are religious goals empowered? Descriptive naturalism would argue that religious goals derive their power in the world (and their antientropic momentum) from concerted social action. The current perspective argues that religious goals emerge from that ever elusive fissure within nature where the potencies of nature naturing eject the manifest orders of nature natured. In other words, religious goals are not finite instrumentalities tied to aesthetic longings for a whole, but genuinely infinite momenta that transform the self and its communities from a point outside of the sum of all finite selves. As must be stressed again and again, nature does not somehow contain a set of goals that can be handed over to the human process. There is nothing in the world at all analogous to Whitehead's primordial mind of god that would entertain eternal entities (Platonic forms) and make some of them relevant to any given order. What nature can do is to open up a space that provides room to maneuver against the eternal repetition of origins. Religious goals, that subclass of goals that fully participate in the actual and open infinities, are given to the self, but never in an externally specifiable way. The space for the emergence of religious goals is so powerful and so volatile, that it must be held open by the ontological difference, rather than by any of the forces of mere autonomy. Neither the fold nor the interval can be called cunning in the sense of the word used to describe the larger process of the transference field and its relation to the self and the movements within nature that can be called religious. Folds do not have any specific desires for our species, any more than intervals can experience joy in alleviating some of the ferocity of the folds. Nature's cunning emerges when the transference field works to bind the self to the emergent religious dimensions of the world. This cunning is especially manifest through the power of projection, as an unconscious eject from the complexes of the self, as it links up with those relevant folds that lure the self toward an ironic amplification of its own powers. To say that nature is cunning is not to say that it is some kind of mind that plays with the human process so that the self can read its internal material on external structures. Rather, it is to say that there

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are forces within the world that silently and quickly carry the self to where it needs to go, even though it is hardly aware that it is making the trip at all. And once the self is carried forward/backward by its projections, it is pulled into communal dimensions that would otherwise remain blocked. There is a striking sense in which unconscious projections serve evolutionary needs for the sign-using organism. When internal material gets too dense and powerful (in beings funded with mind and some form of self-reflexivity) it must find some release into the horizons that connect selves. Complexes by definition move outward into larger semiotic fields. Yet this process is never conscious in its initial stages. Consciousness is a much later player in the game of projection and its contributions to understanding the role of projection must be won at a high price. Complexes emerge in any complex mental sign-user whose experiences carry strong affective tones. Traumatic experiences combine with other recurrent patterns of experience to embed themselves around an autonomous feeling center that can dramatically shape the self/world interaction. In common speech we can say, "I am caught in the grip of my mother complex," and understand exactly what this phrase means. Strong emotional interpretants cluster together around either a powerful trauma or around abuse patterns that are slightly more attenuated to propel the self into a series of repetitions that act out the trauma in a variety of guises. We have seen how the interval, as a decompression in nature natured, interacts with the fold to produce a lowering of the sheer power manifest by the epiphany that seizes the self. The fold returns again and again to its point of fragmented origin and never, by itself, leaves its horizonal circling around its hidden center. The interval, by contrast, appears to the fold to move in an ascending/descending direction by pulling strong interpretants into its decompression. It is like an astronomical black hole in that it feeds off of the light of other radiating beings, while being a kind of depression in the world rather than a manic explosion of meaning. Yet there are some disanalogies between the interval and the astronomic black hole, and it is now time to focus on these and on the way the interval works in itself. In a technical sense, as noted, a black hole can emit radiation, but it is not a source of visible light. The interval has its own form of semiotic radiation but this is more analogous to visible light in that it is available to the self without any type of instrumentation or enhancement of the

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basic organs of sense. While we can not see an interval in the direct way in which we can see an epiphany of power, we can become open to it out of the corner of the hermeneutic eye. It is like a kind of elusive presence on the edges of consciousness that needs to be brought gently into the center of vision. Amateur astronomers know that you can find a number of galaxies by looking through a good pair of binoculars. Yet a direct look often makes it hard to delimit the galaxy from its surrounding space. By shifting the gaze to a point just past the galaxy other light sensitive elements of the eye come into play (from a point just off of the back of the eye). Suddenly the galaxy appears as a fuzzy patch with a reasonably clear outline. By moving the eye slightly backwards and forwards, the galaxy can become even more distinct. This experience serves as a good analogue to the difficulty involved in encountering an interval in such a way that it stands out from the surrounding semiotic fields. A direct gaze often produces little light contrast, while an indirect and slightly mobile gaze may bring the elusive form of radiation into view. Hence, intervals are like deep-space objects that need to be approached with a kind of semiotic stealth if they are to manifest any of their radiation to the self. To deepen the analogy one more level, there is also the phenomenon of ground light (mostly from mercury vapor and sodium light fixtures) that frustrates amateur astronomers who live in or near large cities. Fortunately there are special lenses available that filter out such humanly manufactured light frequencies so that only desirable light (coming from hydrogen and oxygen atoms) can enter into the instrument. This makes it easier to escape from the manic semiotic plenitude of the human world to look at a different kind of optical radiation in the larger world. Combining our two analogies we can say that by shifting the gaze of the eye to a position just off-center, augmented with the use of special hermeneutic filters that interfere with the semiotic/optical patterns of the surrounding world, we can approach the unique semiotic features of the interval as they obtain in their own right. Thus we live in the ironic duality of a reality that both absorbs and emits semiotic light. We have devoted our initial energies to the former aspect of the interval, namely, where it pulls in and humbles the manic unfolding of signs and interpretants that come from sacred folds. The given epiphany of power is a strong and dense center of radiation that can course through the self, filling it with content that may artificially stretch the boundaries of consciousness. Of course, the self also provides

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some (but not all) of the fuel for this semiotic engine through its unconscious projections. It is as if the self has one kind of engine that can get so much energy out of the burning of its fuel, while that same fuel, when placed in a more efficient engine (nature's fold) can produce far more explosive energies that come back to the very self that helped fuel the epiphany in the first place. The fold and the transference field each amplify the projections that come from the self, while also providing a path whereby they can return in their enhanced form as if they are purely extrahuman powers of the world. The interval appears at this point to absorb some of this surplus semiotic power and energy and to free the self caught in the middle of this drama from some of the potential inflation that could befall it. In this sense, the interval is not a semiotic kingdom in its own right but a kind of clearing within which manic semiotic energies can be dissipated. The irony, again, is that this very clearing is also a devouring abyss that hides its semiotic face from view as it works silently to measure the power of the fold by something that is almost presemiotic. But here we have to be especially careful. Is the interval merely a decompression that swallows up semiosis, and thus has no contour or presence of its own? The phenomenological evidence suggests otherwise, especially when we look at the ways in which intervals radiate their unique forms of betweenness to the sign-invaded self. Put somewhat baldly we ask: when the interval is not swallowing manic interpretants, what exactly is it doing? It is clearly doing something, even if we cannot see its activities with a direct personal or social gaze. Since the very beginning of thought and of recorded human experience we are accustomed to talking about the dialectic or momentum of hiddenness and unhiddenness, or of presence and absence. Some postmodern perspectives make entirely too much of the alleged inner logic of this process, turning this recurrent experience into an almost cosmic game of ironic hide and seek. In fact, the dialectic is much simpler in some respects, and far less like an ironic game in others. It is simpler in that it does not involve a hidden history of the dispensation of being or nature to explain what transpires when an interval both is and is not present. And it is less like an ironic game in that it actually involves potencies and powers that can shatter whole cultures, as well as drive individuals into forms of psychotic inflation. Nature's sacred folds can never be disempowered to become some kind of playful sign-cluster without a referent. The folds are the referents, and their power is far greater than that of the signs that

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point to them. The danger of many forms of postmodern semiotics is that they drastically overvalue human sign manipulation while just as dramatically undervaluing the intrinsic powers of nature's religious folds. What, then, of the less dramatic aspect of the presence/absence of the interval as it exists in itself? What does our phenomenological intuition see when we look indirectly at the way of the interval? The first thing we disclose is that in the region of the fold (and we must be very careful not to become trapped in purely spatial images here) there is a decided lack of semiotic radiation. This much is obvious. But this lack, this openness that does not contain an explosion of interpretants, is different in kind from what we see in the normal course of looking at and around the orders of the world. In everyday seeing, there are interpretant clusters that come and go through our involvements, but few of them grasp the self or seize it with overwhelming force. They appear within a normal economy of semiosis that is primarily practical. But the intervals represent a far less congested or delimited region of semiosis that actually seems to move in the opposite direction from that of the everyday sign-clusters. The everyday objects and signs within which the self moves, come toward the self and shape and groove its practical and social activities. We can see this reality as being shaped like a kind of three-dimensional field that surrounds the self and moves toward it one order at a time as the concerns of the self unfold. If I encounter another car driving in front of me at a slow speed, it stands into my own semiotic field as a challenge and an irritation. This is a middlelevel and everyday kind of presence for semiotic fields (which are, of course, emergent from dynamic objects that can cause real damage). The unique presence and absence of the interval moves in the opposite direction. Whenever I encounter an interval it announces itself quietly and may never be seen as an interval at all. Yet I can enter into its effects even when I do not have a consciousness that the interval has entered into my semiotic fields. It is, however, registered by the unconscious which has its own semiotic feelers that continue to scan the personal and public semiotic fields that surround the individual. What is this presence and absence like? We have noted that it is different in kind from the medium-sized semiotic/object fields that surround the self. It is anything but a coming-tothe-self in manic presenting. Rather, it is more akin to a kind of receding in which a gentle vacuum is created in which a space for the future emerges for the self.

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This last disclosure might sound especially fanciful until it is remembered that the interval is related to the emergence of fragmented goals, as these goals become available indirectly to and for the self. Goals cannot function without an open future, and this future is made open by the intervals that clear away the semiotic noise long enough for the self to make some judicious choices about future patterns of ideation and action. This is not to say that there is no reality called the future without intervals, but that the power and openness of the future need to be protected by something that is as strong (but in a very different way) as the past-driven repetitions of the folds. The interval clears away manic semiotic plenitude so that fragmented goals can hold their own against the blinding suns that radiate outward and engulf the open freedom of the self. In the older provincial ideation of the patriarchal monotheisms, the tension between folds and intervals was framed in terms of the mysterious dialectic between the god who blasted Job and the god who called Amos or Hosea toward justice. The god who used patriarchal might to harass the weary Job is analogous to the powers of fragmented origin that are manifest in nature's sacred folds. The god who spoke to the prophets of Israel is analogous to the intervals that work against the powers in the world, and, against the powers within god itself. Following Jung, it seems clear that the patriarchal god is at war with itself and has failed to find the right measure between the blind powers of origin, tied to a kind of past covenant with the orders of the world, and the opening momentum of the future that enables transforming and just goals to emerge. The monotheisms still work out their dark logic with shop-worn anthropomorphic categories that simply cannot deal with the phenomenological material that actually emerges into our horizons of meaning once manic ideation is transformed within the movement of finite experience. Let us probe more fully into the issue of fragmented goals as they work in a dialectical tension with epiphanies of power. Why is it assumed that the emergence of religious goals is somehow a positive phenomenon and that intervals want us to create and sustain just forms of communal life? Isn't this hope for justice a hangover from those very anthropomorphic monotheisms that ecstatic naturalism is struggling to overcome? How can any dimension within nature natured have any humanly-attuned aspirations? We seem to be at an impasse. On the one hand, we see the utter indifference of nature to its most semiotically dense product, the

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human self. On the other hand, we see this very self caught up in vast transferential and projective momenta that seem to enhance its drive for meaning. If the self seeks meanings it will find them, and, so our argument goes, will find them in extrahuman realities that are not reducible to the sum of all human projections. But what keeps these meanings from being anything other than sheer delusion, especially when we enter the religious dimensions of life where astonishingly complex and often conflicting ideations intersect? In the end, in spite of our best conceptual and phenomenological efforts, is Feuerbach right that all we find is our species-longing writ large on the social horizon? Are all religious goals merely disguised narcissistic hopes for immortality and the abjection of death? No philosophical theology can be long compelling that refuses to enter into these questions in all seriousness. Conversely, any philosophical theology that starts with some preaccepted notion of god's self-disclosure, whether through the history of religions (Pannenberg), or through a unique unveiling from above (Barth), utterly fails to acknowledge the ubiquity of projection and transference. Especially in the light of the fact that transference locks onto those very projected contents in the first place. Put in the simplest terms: the god or goddess that/whom I love is part of my would-be. Our task is to find out about that one percent that remains when these projections are reintegrated back into the self and its unconscious complexes. That one percent will turn out to be infinite (actual and open) in its own right. The transformation of finite instrumental goals into the infinite goals of religion takes place through the opening power of the interval as it flees the self from the intense semiotic noise that comes to it from those sacred folds that threaten to envelop it. The latter situation involves a kind of psychic inflation in which the conscious self is filled with interpretants that are too powerful to be integrated with proper measure. The movement of the interval, in contrast, represents a kind of deflation, sometimes manifest through a depression that pulls the energy of the self back into a narrower compass. But this movement is preparatory for another one that will pull the self back out into social space in a new way. Here we see the dual nature of the interval as it intersects with the human process. Initially it acts to pull the rich (and overburdened) sign-systems of the self out into a clearing where these signs disappear, or at least lose most of their manic energy. The self cannot help but feel depression when its rich contents, all pumped up by unconscious

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projections, get kidnapped by what seems like an alien invasion. However, this movement makes a sudden reversal when it returns to the self with a new kind of emptiness, an emptiness that holds open a space that pulsates with an invitation to intersecting goals. The first form of emptiness seems negative. It says ''no'' to all of those contents that have produced an almost ecstatically pleasurable intensification of the self. Needless to say, this way of describing the process radically prescinds from the process as lived in which there is almost always a strong tug of war between the semiotically manic and semiotically depressed dimensions of religious experience. No projected complex will let go of its selfexternalization and social incarnation without a fight. Again, it must be remembered that these complexes (which underlie ninety-nine percent of religious life) are autonomous centers of feeling and ideation and that they seem to want to survive against the hard-won insights of consciousness that from its side needs to transform them into less autonomous and less dangerous powers. The second movement of the interval, then, re-enters the self at that place where the loss of semiotic plenitude is most acute. Instead of providing the kind of powerful signs emergent from the folds, the interval provides a small clearing within which the self can come to grips with the very fact that projection has taken place. This insight, needless to say, is rare in our species, and can only take place when a highly conscious self recognizes that the withdrawal of the fold is somehow related to internal semiotic contents. The contrast here is dramatic. Before the entrance of the interval the self was almost choked with inflated semiotic powers that filled the meaning horizon to such an extent that all lesser signs and powers were drowned out by the fierce solar light of the fold. After the dual momentum of the interval, the self saw these solar epiphanies dramatically fade, only to be replaced with less intense but far more subtle forms of lighting and shade within a horizon that seemed to become open in a new way. A horizon that is filled with the manic plenitude of a sacred fold is actually a constricted one in that it returns again and again, usually without even seeming to move at all, to the point of origin. It lets no competing powers into its provenance. The horizon given over to and through the self by the interval is filled with more measured content that can, and will, admit new semiotic material into its increasing scope. The boundaries of the interval's horizon are open and permeable to genuine otherness. The horizon of a sacred fold is self-closed around its own

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blinding light. Here we begin to catch a glimpse of the difference between a value emergent from a sacred fold and a value or goal emergent from an interval and its horizon. On the positive side, the interval is open to an increase in the amount of semiosis, but only in so far as the accrued signs serve to open out a presemiotic space for the self. What does it mean to speak of a presemiotic space, especially in the light of the phenomenal fact that both the fold and the interval are semiotic? First we must remind ourselves of what it means to say that something is semiotic. The initial condition for some order of relevance to be a semiotic order is for it to be a sign itself referring to something other than itself in some respect. This is the standard definition that has been handed down since Peirce, who started probing into the highly complex reality of signification in the 1860s. An order of relevance that is a sign is so because it unveils something other than itself and emerges out of the conjunction of its intrinsic features and human habit. The important point in this context is the aspect of respect. A sign points beyond itself to something other than itself, with which it may or may not share common iconic features, but always in a certain respect. In other language we can say that the sign isolates or unveils a trait or traits in the object or referent. Signs are thus partial and incomplete in their referential or unveiling power. In the manic world of the fold its inflated signs all refer to some numinous power in some respect. The sacred grove of our previous example houses the god or goddess who has certain traits but not others, certain patterns of behavior but not others, certain relational traits but not others, and so forth. Here we reach a kind of maximal saturation of Peircean respects that live as the full embodiment of the sign-relation. These relations are fully semiotic, even though the ultimate whence of the sign is still dimly available on the edges of semiosis. When we make the leap to the presemiotic domain, the concept of respect becomes profoundly altered. The interval, when it moves to open up the self to nonmanic and quieter forms of semiosis, unveils the whence of signs in a new way. When talking about signs, references, and respects, we are still fully located within the innumerable orders of nature natured. All signs are in and of specific orders of relevance that can, in principle, become available for human circumspection. References, that is, the sign's pointing to something other than itself, are also potentially available in fairly specific ways. And respects, those aspects of the object that the

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sign wishes to make manifest, are fully traits within the orders of the world. But what happens when the interval moves toward the whence of signs while also moving away from the respects in which signs function? It is at this point that the opening cleft of the ontological difference between nature naturing and nature natured becomes manifest again. It is ironic, at least at first glance, that the interval, which moves away from origins toward goals, should also be responsible for the return of the whence in the domain of semiosis. This ironic contrast will dissipate when another dimension of the inner logic of the way of the ontological difference becomes clarified. The interval has moved to deflate the manic plenitude of the fold's all-powerful signs. They are pulled into the decompression within the interval that can, under the right internal conditions, empty the imperial sign of its omnivorous drives. But in a much quieter dimension of interaction the interval, without destroying the sign, pulls it away, however briefly, from its bond to the object and the object's respects, so that the sign can let go of its full semiotic participation. In this process the sign seems to make a 180 degree turn and face backward into the unconscious of nature from which all signs originally come. How does it do so? The interval, as decompression, surrounds the sign with an emptiness that has its own form of quiet radiation. This surrounding field of non-relation and nonreferentiality makes the sign stand on its own perhaps for the first time. That is, the sign is suddenly illuminated as a sign and not confused with its object or its surrounding semiotic field. The sign becomes a sign without a whither, and is shown to have an empty core that is presemiotic. By this is meant that the heart of the sign, its prerelational center, represents a trace that opens up to the presemiotic birthing ground of all signs and interpretants. The sign thus stands forth as a sign without a home or a whither within the orders of the world, while also, and because of this, opening out to the unconscious of nature that has no intrinsic semiosis. This seems like a return to origins, a move that the interval in other respects, seems to block. How can this contradictory move be reconciled with the other phenomenological data that show the interval opening up goals for the sign-using organism? Have we not gone down a blind path and ended up with a sheer contradiction? The contradiction is only a semblance, because we are talking about different orders of meaning and relevance that actually reinforce each other once the thread connecting

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them is seen. The sign, now that it is opened to its rootedness in the unconscious of nature, is seen to have an empty heart that is not filled with delimited semiotic content. In fact, the trace of nature naturing in the heart of each and every sign and sign system makes manifest the continuing pertinence of the ontological difference within semiosis. A sign is simultaneously a fully charged reality that refers beyond itself to something in some respect, while also and always housing a more elusive, but never less real, openness to its origin in a self-effacing ground. As the interval clears away some of the inflated semiosis that courses through the self, it creates another type of emptiness around signs that is analogous to that found within signs. The latter dimension, which we have called presemiotic, is one that becomes available to the self when the gods have briefly fled from the meaning horizon of the religious self. The former dimension opens up when the self finds a space for its whither that is not filled with the crushing content of the fold. The social whither, in which the self becomes compelled to seek parity for other orders of the world, is deeply connected to the traces of the sign that participate in the momenta of nature's unconscious. It is important to note that the traces of the sign do not so much point or refer to the self-effacing origin, as they open out into it or participate in its momenta. The interval works to open up the traces of each and every relevant sign to the whence in the unconscious of nature, a whence that is presemiotic and without position. Simultaneously, the interval opens up a mobile space especially around those signs and interpretants that have an uncanny power over the self. This clearing, a kind of semiotic penumbra, frees the sign-using self from any idolatry that would conflate the sign with its object. Of course, we don't want to leave the self with a wealth of nonreferential signs, as this quickly degenerates into the kind of solipsism of the so-called postmodern horizon. Rather, the self needs a momentary respite from those sign relations that serve to amplify projections and in turn to create dualistic structures that reign down into the social order. It must be remembered that in this context we are not talking about everyday forms of reference, e.g., "the weather is changing," or "it looks like there will be an economic upturn," but with strongly political/religious forms tied to unconscious and amplified projections that can return to the alienated and alienating self and its local or larger communities, e.g., ''those who stand outside of this picture of the sacred

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founder are demonic," or "this text, as we interpret it, is an exhaustive guide to any and all aspects of holy living." Here we see how manic and almost bloated interpretants become conflated with their referent to blot out alternative horizons of meaning. Textual idolatry is deeply antidemocratic, and serves to mask the depth of self-deception in those selves whose projections are omnivorous and even sadistic. The self becomes its chosen text, and its parameters, never open to self-examination, become commensurate with those projections that land on the hapless text (although no great historical text is ever innocent). Here the fold, the text, the community of coprojectors, the projections themselves, and the amplifications produced in and by the transference field, work to pull the self into the orbit of great and destructive powers. Thus, the movement of the interval to briefly pry the sign loose from its referent is not equivalent to an extreme semiotic idealism that would argue that only signs exist and nothing more. Rather, it is a move to take the most potentially dangerous signs and show how they are themselves products of antecedent states that are not genuinely related to extrahuman orders of relevance. Using Jaspers's language we can say that these religious signs suffer a kind of shipwreck or foundering in the face of an object pole that has become almost demonic in its power over the personal and social selves. The opening up of the very distinction between sign and object, especially in the religious sphere, can, under the right hermeneutic conditions, show the sign-using self that its projections have built up a kind of bad or destructive pseudoinfinite that has profoundly negative consequences. This hermeneutic transparency is hard to attain precisely because one projecting self will find itself intersecting with others for whom the projections land on a common object pole. "We" read the text in this way, "we" trace our sacred history to the one and only true migration in the promised land, "we" have found the proper social codes to guide our collective lives together, or "we'' stand under the unique apocalyptic dispensation that will divide the elect from the nonnelect. And in all of this social pathology, constantly knocking on the doors of democratic institutions, signs and objects are bound by the silent and uncanny power of transference and projection to produce a world that is all too real, while having nothing whatsoever to do with the perennial sweep of nature and its extrahuman orders. It may well be that the power of social pathology is too great for the countermomentum of the intervals and their realigning of the whence and

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the social whither. There are no extranatural guarantees that nature has anything in store for our species other than the constant availability of orders and a finite list of options and possibilities for negotiating among these orders. Yet it is also the case that folds and intervals are deeply bound together by their own inner logic, and that the folds could only manifest their borrowed powers because of the enabling spaces of the intervals that work with and against the folds to keep interpretants from consuming their creators and becoming lost in their own epiphanies. What, then, of the thread that connects the trace of nature's unconscious (whence) within the sign to the social whither that hovers around the sign from outside (whither)? Is there a depth-logic that binds these two processes together, insuring that the return to origins is at the same time the movement toward goals that can have social consequences? Is our initial sense of this dual directionality misleading? We begin to emerge from our hermeneutic fog when we recognize that the one thing connecting these two momenta is the clearing away of semiotic power so that something more genuine, and semiotically less noisy can emerge. Traces and goals are actually part of the common movement to show the sign that its how is not exhausted by plenitude or by its mapping out of a scope and place within the competing sign systems that encompass it. Of course, the sign is not a conscious agent observing this process, and we are using the language of showing in a highly metaphorical sense. What is shown is the space within and around the sign that is not another sign or interpretant but something like a self-effacing ground or goal that provides a different sense of measure for the unfolding of the sign's possibilities. The trace that opens the sign to its whence (in nature naturing) shows the sign-using self that there is a history to the (religious) sign that has its origins in the opposite direction from the manic object pole that seems to fill the horizon. This history is a kind of unconscious personal and social history. "We" have always come to this sacred grove to worship the gods, and "I" have participated in the numinous powers that envelop the place. Yet, the numinous signs themselves seem to have an origin that lies dimly outside of the radiance that now encompasses the self. There is a no longer or a question that suddenly announces itself in the epiphany. This tells me that the epiphany is not the same as world (worldhood), but might even have its own unique features and history that could admit other possibilities. Manic psychic inflation can give way to a kind of mourning, or irony, or a sense of betrayal, or a sense of liberation, or even a sense of rage. The

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fusion between self and epiphany must be broken so that the projection can have the chance of becoming a thematic object, that is, be seen as projection perhaps for the first time. The self is thus cut off from those inflating powers that brought it to the very edges of its own meaning horizons. Other affects eventually give way to a mourning, a melancholy that longs for the missing lost object. The newly decharged epiphany hovers just out of reach and the self craves the influx of erotic power that once came from the missing fold. This can be a profoundly fruitful or a profoundly dangerous time, precisely because the self can barely tolerate a semiotic vacuum or a loss of its powers, remembering that these powers are both internal and external (i.e., they are amplified projections that become introjected). If the self can stand into this lack with courage and insight, if it can hold itself open to possibilities that are not tied to manic inflation of its boundaries, then it can enter into the counterlogic of the interval that will enable it to return to the lost object but in a transformed manner. If, however, the self cannot enter into this depth-possibility, if its craving for a return to borrowed energy and meaning becomes too great, then the epiphany may return with even greater power to shatter the fragile boundaries of the other-directed ego. We are now accustomed to talk about addictions to everything from alcohol, to drugs, to sex, to gambling, to relationality, to boundary experiences, but we have as yet failed to probe into the far more dangerous reality of addiction to religious epiphanies. For here, somewhat like chemical addictions, there is a corollary process of self-validation and self-masking. The logic of the afflicted and inflated state rolls on in an unrelenting sweep that covers all counterarguments. Just as drug addicts have their communities that reinforce behavior, so too do religious addicts have strong and powerful communities that can feed and intensify the addiction to the powers that are ultimately rooted in their own deep narcissism and desire for sadistic control of alien otherness (an otherness that stems, of course, from their own unconscious and its abjected powers). The posited gods rage against the positing unconscious, and this tight and dark feedback loop is so powerful that it can destroy entire civilizations when the right conditions of social distress are present. This logic holds regardless of the content of the epiphany, insofar as that content represents unassimilated and archaic material from personal and collective complexes that gets amplified by the transference field. Sacred folds are regional powers that express gods of space that must

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enter into conflict with competing gods (or goddesses) of space. Each fold is omnivorous and seeks to dominate the meaning horizon of those who come under its sway (while simultaneously propping it up). Intervals, on the other hand, even though tied to particular sacred folds, are anything but tribal or spatial powers that wish to dominate the entire semiotic terrain. This is not to say that intervals are powerless, far from it, but that their form of power is less obvious to the untrained hermeneutic eye, and that they are often doing their most important work when their form of measure is most hidden. Assuming, then, that religious addiction can be overcome through the momentum of the interval, we have to again ask about the how of the interval as it surrounds the manic plenitude of interpretants and provides them with a measure that is not reducible to sign, object, or interpretant. Let us look at a specific example to see how a whence and a wither can become open to their inner lack, the inner nothingness that keeps the sign from becoming a monad with exhaustively infinite content (as there can be nonexhaustive infinities that allow for gaps and opening powers to obtain internally). Returning to our sacred grove that has built-in geological and local features of a highly compelling nature, we see a god who reigns over the place and gives it its nimbus of sacred power. The god can be petitioned and can be directly addressed, with answers returning out of the countertransference that does not come from a specific divine consciousness but from the reverse direction of the transference field. That is, my projections onto the god (which created the god in the first place) come to rest on a seemingly external reality that can receive them with care. The care envelops me and assures me that my semiotic material will come to rest in the place where it most surely belongs. Once it comes to rest there, it is weighed and given the right measure by the god who has received it. The measured, or remeasured, content comes back to me in the form of some kind of command, or affirmation, or query, or challenge, or even in a haunting silence, which, of course, quickly gets filled with semiotic projections as well. In the countertransference of the god of the place my own transference is vindicated and secured against doubt or semiotic entropy. If this process takes place with others, whether ritual priests or coreligionists, it can be further amplified by the larger transference field that underlies each and every self who comes to the sacred grove to genuinely address the god (themselves).

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Consider the possibilities: the return of the alleged countertransference, the god's love and affirmation of my unique being, can erase any doubts that consciousness may have about the so-called independent status of the god, qua sacred fold. This return energy (produced, of course, by my own unconscious) can enter into me as a kind of languid and slightly warm semiotic undulation that supports the delusion that my own projected complex is actually the great god who has always reigned over this place. Or, at another juncture, this countertransference can blast back into my consciousness, fragmenting and rewelding the contents that were so laboriously built up over decades of world/self interaction. Or, on another occasion, the countertransference can be a staccato-like rhythm that continues to disorient and unbalance the self, while filling it with ambivalence about the alleged source of the countertransference. Thus, whether we are talking about undulations, blasts, or staccato rhythms the sacred fold will give its originating self no peace until its imperial demands are met. Finally, let us look more directly at the connection granted by the interval between the whence of the sign and the whither that opens up goals to the sign-using self and its potential communities of interpretation. Each powerful sign contains an often hidden trace that enables it to more fully participate in the dark unconscious of nature from which it has come. This trace is not another sign, interpretant, or object in its own right, but has its own unique configuration. It is more akin to an opening clearing than it is to something that holds forth a semiotic position. Traces, the link between the attained and positioned sign and the potencies of nature naturing, cannot be a positioned field of meaning. Rather, they move in the opposite direction to remind the religious sign that it too rests on something that is not a semiotic power. The whence of the sign is shrouded in mist, and can only come back (indirectly) to the sign when the sign itself lets go of its borrowed power and plenitude. There are innumerable ways in which this openness at the bottom of the sign has been expressed. On a more imaginative level it has been expressed in those polytheistic systems that elevate one god or goddess over the others. For the subaltern deities, there is a sense in which their secondary power is derived from something of greater measure that stands as a condition of origin (often made too explicit for the current model, but there nonetheless). In addition to the gender war between Hera and Zeus (tied to strong cultural shifts between autochthonous and

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invading cultures) there is the move to find one and only one originating power that lies within the heart of all others. Zeus's procreative adventures, whatever their moral evaluation, point to this insistence that something lies in the antecedent realm that demonstrates to the believer that all other divine powers are borrowed. When another form of measure makes its appearance, e.g., fate or the forms, the struggle to find some kind of presemiotic origin takes on a more capacious guise that may or may not become free from the temptations of tribalism and the numinosity of space or time. Each subaltern configuration, whether a divinity or a principle, has its own trace that opens it to an antecedent whence that is never fully intelligible. When philosophy succumbs to the temptation to establish first principles, perhaps by a principle of sufficient reason, it violates the logic of the transition from the preintelligible and presemiotic domain to the order of nature natured. There can be no structure or analogy linking the unconscious potencies of nature naturing to the innumerable orders of the world that have no collective integrity or shape. The interval opens up the trace of the religious sign/order to the sign-using self that is still carried along in its own transference and countertransference currents. The projection that connects the self to its object becomes slightly destabilized so that the sign loses some of its borrowed plenitude and can begin to show the emptiness at its heart. There is a kind of semiotic disequilibrium on the edge of chaos that represents a type of phase transition for the self in which one momentary stability can give way for another and (hopefully) more generic and insightful one. In this context, this movement on the edges of chaos can serve to pry the projection loose long enough so that the interval can reveal to the self that its chosen religious sign/object is itself rooted in something presemiotic. The link here is between the presemiotic realm of the human unconscious (personal and collective) with the presemiotic unconscious of nature. Put in simple terms: my link to my own unconscious is through those presemiotic traces that open up within my own signs, while my link to the unconscious of nature is through those signs (perhaps the very same ones) that show their rootedness in the presemiotic potencies. If I am blinded by the power of the epiphany, I lose all sense of the originating whence that links the fold to the conditions of fragmented origin. Antecedents are lost and the fold ceases to have any lineage, a lineage that would show its uniqueness and partial finitude. The fold then

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has only one option: to become world. The loss of the whence is correlated to this move whereby the sacred fold has no measure outside of itself (a condition feared by Plato as expressed in his dialogue Euthyphro). It is the measure for itself and for everything that comes under its rule. It has to be the measure for itself as there can be nothing (in this bizarre logic of projection) that could enter into it from outside. In fact, there is no outside for the divinized fold that has no whence, no trace opening it up to the infinitude of nature naturing. Even if we come to participate in the sacred fold in a particular place, that place, that grove, is merely the entrance point to something that is placeless. The fold becomes world, or in more precise language, worldhood. The epiphany of power stands duty for the worldhood of the world. This means that it becomes the not to be encompassed horizon-of-all-horizons that surrounds and locates the self. Since the fold has no parentage, no originating momentum, it comes full-blown into the world, and, by a rapid escalation, becomes worldhood itself. Worldhood is not so much a circle within which smaller circles can spin as it is the enabling condition, for signusers, for the encounter with anything whatsoever. While less conscious organisms can have environments that shape their brief trajectory through time, human selves enter into meaning horizons that all point to and come out of the nonlocated horizon of worldhood (Corrington 1992a: 120161). Insofar as worldhood has some specific content, say the god of the grove, it becomes demonic, precisely because worldhood needs to be free of content if it is to fulfill its depth logic of enabling horizons for human selves. If the logic of projection fills worldhood with a given epiphany, then the clearing granted by worldhood, which protects the self from demonic inflation by holdingforth other horizonal prospects, is closed around the given epiphany. The sacred fold lives by borrowed light and has its own uncanny will to power that is jealous of any other epiphany. When the fold becomes world, the self has no means for stepping outside of the provenance of the fold, and must do its bidding (even though, of course, it is ironically doing its own bidding). Tribal gods, if we may be permitted a brief personification, remain restless until they can swallow up worldhood and become the originating source of any and all meaning horizons. If Jung is right, this is precisely what happened in Germany in the 1930s when Wotan returned to reassert his dominion over and with the so-called Aryan tribe. Wotan became world and destroyed many other meaning horizons that dared to demand a place within the embrace

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of worldhood. Strictly speaking, Wotan has never existed as a humanly independent being, but this epistemological technicality brings no comfort to his victims. As an order of relevance, whatever his ontological location, he has affected human history. In the end, the real power of the interval is to open up a protective space between worldhood, which must remain free of content, and any epiphany of power that would attempt to usurp worldhood for its own purposes. Using our earlier language we can say that worldhood is akin to the open infinite that keeps clearing away semiotic density so that that which lies beneath and before signs may emerge. The sacred fold is akin to an actual infinite that has its own history and trajectory, as well as its own power economy that enters into personal and social life. Neither the actual nor the open infinite can exist alone, and their dialectical engagement represents the logical underpinning of religious life. The actual infinite lives as the mobile locus of all of those projections that gather under the impress of a dominant fold and thus return to the self in an amplified form. The open infinite lives in all of those interstices that cool the ardor of the actual infinite and which provide a measure for those epiphanies that attempt to usurp all measure. From the standpoint of ecstatic naturalism, there is no extranatural measure that could or would shape this dialectical process, or guarantee a desired outcome. Try as we might, no sign user and no community of interpreters can domesticate the religious powers that are an intrinsic part of the how of nature. But with the right combination of insight, luck, natural convergence, and natural grace, we can enter into a religious sphere that does not destroy the very creatures who intensify it with their abjected desires.

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Chapter Three: Unruly Ground The concept/experience of fragmented ground has been instrumental in providing an understanding of the whence that empowers nature's sacred folds. Reflection on origin is always deeply problematic precisely because the inner momentum of the fissuring between nature naturing and nature natured moves the sign-using self dramatically away from its semiotic and vital antecedent conditions. Further, it is as if a swordbearing angel bars the way back through the narrow pass that would enable the self to abandon the world of the actual infinite for the desired cooling waters of a nurturing origin. And yet even here things seem uncanny and out of focus because ecstatic naturalism has challenged those contemporary and highly romantic perspectives that envision nature as the great nurturing mother, always ready to enfold the wayward foundling in the great web of being (e.g., O'Hara Graft, ed. 1995: 173189); conveniently forgetting that the image of the web is derived from a creature that uses it primary as a finely-tuned killing machine. And, of course, the great mother can destroy her offspring or maim them in innumerable ways, as well as provide nutrition (for reasons that might have nothing to do with the well-being of the offspring themselves). There has been an especially strong tendency in the entire history of philosophy and theology to eulogize grounds rather than to probe with courage into their innumerable faces and manifestations. Among the truly great thinkers/intuiters of the Western traditions, only Schopenhauer and Schelling have had the courage to go beyond the shop-worn categories of their interlocutors and to face into the prospect of a ground that is not in all respects congenial to human desire. Their counterexample, hardly integrated in the current postmodern and narcissistic climate, shows us, by contrast, just how anthropomorphic our conceptions of ground have been. Schopenhauer's delineations of the will to survival are certainly more stark and contrary to human desire than Schelling's analysis of the unruly

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ground. Yet there are elements in Schelling's perspective that correct and modify some of the one-sided intuitions in Schopenhauer. These historical reflections are intended to remind us that there have been some equally uncanny breakthroughs in the past reflections on ground that can be brought forward by a movement of thought (emancipatory reenactment) that can bring out this unthought in new ways. But these historical antecedents serve primarily as a goad to the delineations of ecstatic naturalism rather than as an authoritative horizon within which thought would be compelled to move. The primary and rather pervasive defect of both thinkers lies in their ensnarement in the Kantian epistemological framework, a perspective that has done as much damage to the aspirations of a healthy naturalism as any in the tradition. Our contemporary neoKantianism, which privileges the manipulative over the assimilative aspect of semiosis, has put nature into eclipse and has been one of the primary mechanisms by which the postmodern narcissistic self has protected itself against genuine (rather than paper) otherness. Insofar as grounds remain viable for the neoKantian self, they are self-legislated categorial projections that give the self the illusion that it rests on something other than desire. Of course, in a wonderfully ambiguous reductio ad absurdum, this hidden victory of desire has become eulogized into a new metaphysical horizon that promises a kind of personal and even cosmic jouissance. But neither desire per se, nor some kind of transcendental imposition of an a priori ground of intelligibility, can even begin to show the utter complexity of the whence that is also coming to meet us out of the not yet of the spirit. Fragmented grounds contain both demonic and salvific seeds, and any privileging of either prospect distorts the phenomenological data. When we make the much more difficult (and slower) turn into the elusive traits of the nonfragmented ground, the issue of privileging becomes especially acute. Our preliminary claim (to be vindicated in what follows) is that the ground of all grounds is beyond good and evil and that it is not at all analogous to what the Christian tradition has called the logos. Schelling's key term ''unruly" (das Ursprungliche[Ursprüngliche]) serves as the primary image that will guide our delineations and descriptions. In order to sharpen the position taken by ecstatic naturalism on the issue of ground, this conception of the unruly aspect of our whence will be contrasted with perhaps the strongest counterposition in contemporary philosophical theology, namely, that of Robert C. Neville's striking revival and defense of a radical conception

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of creatio ex nihilo that repositions logos in the center of a fully created and determined world. Neville's perspective shares with the current one a strong suspicion of contemporary process forms of philosophical theology which eulogize creativity (as it is contrasted to god) in such a way as to cloud even further the issue of ground. We begin these historical/contemporary reflections with one of Schelling's most forceful and clear statements of the how of ground in the context of its relationship to and with the innumerable orders of the world: Following the eternal act of self-revelation, the world as we now behold it, is all rule, order and form; but the unruly lies ever in the depths as though it might again break through, and order and form nowhere appear to have been original, but it seems as though what had initially been unruly had been brought to order. This is the incomprehensible basis of reality in things, the irreducible remainder which cannot be resolved into reason by the greatest exertion but always remains in the depths. Out of this which is unreasonable, reason in the true sense is born. Without this preceding gloom, creation would have no reality; darkness is its necessary heritage. (1936: 34)1 The true unruly ground remains lost in the depths of mystery and gloom. It cannot be gathered up under the arms of reason and brought into a full transparency. In the act of nature's self-revelation (Selbstoffenbarung) it, qua ground, only reveals what it has made possible, never itself. If we 1 Nach der ewigen Tat der Selbstoffenbarung ist namlich[nämlich] in der Welt, wie wir sie jetzt erblicken, alles Regel, Ordnung und Form; aber immer liegt noch im Grund das Regellose, als konnte[könnte] es einmal wieder durchbrechen, und nirgends scheint es, als waren[wären] Ordnung und Form das Ursprungliche[Ursprüngliche], sondern als ware[wäre] ein anfanglich[anfänglich] Regelloses zur Ordnung gebracht worden. Dieses ist an den Dingen die unergreifliche Basis der Realitat[Realität], der nie aufgehende Rest, das, was sich mit der grossten[grössten] Anstrengung nicht in Verstand auflosen[auflösen] lasst[lässt], sondern ewig im Grunde bleibt. Aus diesem Verstandlosen ist im eigentlichen Sinne der Verstand geboren. Ohne dies vorausgehende Dunkel gibt es keine Realitat[Realität] der Kreatur; Finsternis ist ihr notwendiges Erbteil. (1808: 72)

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reverse this directionality we can say that the orders of nature natured (Schelling's Welt) stand in the light but cast an almost infinitely long shadow backward toward the ejective unruly ground (in the current perspective, nature naturing). No matter how hard reason works, especially in its quest to find sufficient reasons in antecedent principles, it can never bring into the open that which is always receding from view. This basis or ground is always unconditional or incomprehensible (unergreifliche Basis). Reason, whether in its ontological guise as the logos that governs the things of the world, or in its pale reflection in the human process, is a dependent product of the unruly ground, and cannot, as product, gain access to its indefinite and unconditional source. This is not to say that consequents cannot know antecedents, but to say that the antecedent to consequent relation between unruly ground and reason/logos is unique insofar as there is an absolute abyss separating the two spheres. At the same time, it is a perennial human hunger to convert the unruly ground into manageable principles that can directly correlate to the innumerable consequents of the world. This issue is especially tricky because there are any number of cases in which an appeal to mystery represents theoretical fatigue or a lack of conceptual resourcefulness, while in other cases a failure to stand into the presence of mystery can be a form of totalizing narcissism. Initially we can say that mysteries emerge in their true measure only after what Hegel calls the ''strenuousness of the concept" has been exercised. We can add yet one more layer to this complex issue of the role of mystery in understanding nonfragmented ground. If we cannot think our way directly into the heart of the unconditional and self-masking ground, and yet, as signusers, feel strongly compelled to render whatever we can into some kind of interpretant, how is it possible to find our way toward the unruly ground without violating its inner logic? Put differently, what makes us think that we even have access to the unruly ground other than through a kind of via negativa that merely overturns all analogical bridges? And if this latter prospect is the only viable one, what role could an ordinal phenomenology play in illuminating that which can never be a thematic object? It is one thing to talk about the traces within nature's folds (and our interpretants) that participate in fragmented grounds. It is another to try to speak (as our form of logos) about the unconditional per se.

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Schelling's "categorial intuitions" (to use a phrase that was congenial to both Husserl and Heidegger) may be little more than masked projections that impose his own unruly unconscious onto nature. After all, an argument of this type has been used in the preceding chapters to destructure almost all of the categorial architecture of philosophical theology. Why is this use of a categorial intuition any different? Why is Schelling to be privileged over someone like Aquinas, or Luther, or Pannenberg? Has he escaped from the illumination of the search light of suspicion that has been erected in the psychoanalytic turn? Finally, is not his romantic desire the mechanism of a merely antirational ground that has no relevance to the innumerable happenings within the domain of nature natured, most of which exhibit a high degree of law and reason? These questions seem to be damning to the enterprise here undertaken. Yet at the same time they also ask too much and too little. They ask too much insofar as they want to use the tools of reason pertinent to the orders of nature natured to illuminate something that puts these very tools into question (although this claim will have to be carefully worked out in the phenomenological descriptions to follow). These questions ask too little in that they do not probe deeply enough into the undercurrents that can be dimly sensed within objects, signs, and interpretants, that may flow out of something that is not fragmented. We can use a hydraulic analogy here (remembering that any analogy that enters into the complex play of the ontological difference simultaneously suffers shipwreck while also struggling to illuminate that which is never circumscribed by a bound image). What we initially encounter within any object selected by finite human query is that it generates, as well as swims in, a series of interpretants that represent its outward body. Each one of these interpretants (remembering that they can never be counted) manifests generality to the sign-using self. At the same time, each interpretant also participates in the fragmented ground that is manifest in its presence/absence through the trace that acts like a miniature stream to pull the interpretant back to its sources. Finally, each interpretant will also participate in the open infinite that comes from the not yet, which acts in this context more like an open pool of still water. If the link between an interpretant (and an object) and fragmented ground is like that of a small stream, and the link between an object (and interpretant) and the not yet is like a still pool, what is the analogical link between an object/interpretant and the unruly ground? What are the spatial analogies that have already appeared? A stream is a moving body

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of water that is embedded in a much vaster landscape such that it must come and go from a finite location. Obviously, there are an indefinite number of such streams. A still pool of water can envelop a semiotic island or object but is itself circumscribed by a landscape that eclipses it. Fragmented grounds and fragmented goals are all circumscribed by the orders of nature natured, while also participating in a different way in the unconscious of nature which has its own currents that flow, for us, through the transference field. The relationship between any object, sign, or interpretant (for our purposes these three terms can often, but not always, be used interchange, ably) and nonfragmented and unruly ground is more akin to that between a finite vessel that has its own vector directionality and an infinite ocean that is not located in any other landscape. The unruly ground is best understood through the image of the churning sea that is absolutely indifferent to whatever may occur on or below its surface, but which also provides nourishment to its creatures. Two aspects of this relationship assume priority: the encompassing quality of the unruly ground, which we will refer to as its providingness (Buchler 1989), and its nutritional dimension, which we will refer to as its form of natural grace. Yet these two aspects are part of one and the same reality; namely, the providing grace-filled unruly ground that is simultaneously enabling and destroying without being intentional in any respect. Natural grace is not necessarily congenial to human aspiration. What does the unruly ground provide? Everything whatsoever, even though this everything has no collective integrity or identity. It provides both actualities and possibilities, goods and absences, life and death, space/time and things in space/time, infinitesimals and points, form and chaos, growth and decay, movement and stasis, meanings and surds, invitations and closures, and innumerable complexes for which humans have no categories, and presumably never will. Given this overwhelming fecundity, it is no wonder that finite sign users will select-out regnant features for emphasis, thereby putting all others in a shadow. Among the candidates for the really real basic traits of nature are: matter, spirit, simples, actual occasions, monads, and even good old Jamesian stuff. In more colloquial terms we get: what I can stub my toe against, what my senses take in, those energy currents that enter my consciousness, everything that resists my will, or the great emptiness. Connecting the technical and the prosaic is the illusory sense that nature, qua providingness, can really be boiled down to some fundamental features

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that are ubiquitous and certainly more pertinent and valuable to us than any of their competitors. Here again we see where sophisticated philosophy joins hands with narcissistic mirroring to compress nature into a set of manageable images and concepts that mask the utter and overwhelming magnitude of that which has no contour, even for some alleged divine being. It is alien to the human process to look deeply into the heart of sheer providingness, and a significant part of the life of culture consists in building an imagistic economy that abjects the starkness of unfragmented origin. Far better to find congenial images of a ground that works toward the eventual good of the species, even if some of its members must fall by the wayside. And we certainly want a cleaned up ground that leaves no irritating or even terrifying debris around to slow down the upward-moving arc of the human process. So we have providingness but no provider, natural grace but no bestower of grace, sheer availability but no intentionality, and a seed bed for consciousness with no consciousness in the seed bed. The failure to live in the continual self-overturning of the ontological difference has meant that selected traits from pertinent orders of nature natured have been illegally smuggled over the border into the domain of nature naturing. Of course, the unconscious of nature swallows up any and all such imports and leaves no traces that they were ever there in the first place. What the human process sees is not a trait-filled nature naturing, but its own imported projections that place an illuminated screen between the self and the depth-dimension of nature. From particular examples of consciousness, a conscious intentional agent is projected into the nether side of the ontological difference. From finite instances of purpose, evident in only a few of the orders of the world, a kind of grand purpose is read into the unruly ground such that its continual correlation with the world manifests a built-in theodicy that has a clear directionality, at least for the elect. From specific acts of memory, tied to very fragile natural conditions, a cosmic memory is read into the unconscious of nature that guarantees that each and every order will have an eternal home within some being that/who allows its contents to ingress into its own mind or body. This particular form of projection has been especially congenial to process thinkers for whom a loss of their own being, even if only objectively immortal, is unthinkable. Ecstatic naturalism shares with its descriptive cousin the sense that whatever nature is, it is not first of all a magnification of those human

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traits that are privileged out of a psychic economy that desires immortality. Survival of bodily death may be a real actuality, but it does not follow from this that nature in all of its vastness and unruly fecundity must mirror selected human traits. There is a long historical connection between naturalism and stoicism around the issue of the ultimate import of the human process in the scheme of things. A stoic naturalist is far less concerned with asking the question "why are we here?" than with probing into the innumerable hows and thats that can be grappled with. The questions of the whence and the whither are not really why questions but much more like questions about the ways in which the self is impacted by forces and signs much greater than itself. This is not to say that there will never be an answer to the why question, perhaps in a state after death, but that there are no means of access to this sphere under the constraints of finitude. And there is also another reason for the reticence on the part of many naturalists to raise the larger why question and that has to do with the seriousness with which evil is taken. As a consequence of this seriousness, any answer given that would explain evil, a version of the why question, violates a deeper natural piety that refuses to explain away something of such magnitude and recurrent force within our world. Put differently, there is something almost obscene about a theory of evil. Both ecstatic naturalism and descriptive naturalism, then, share a stoicism concerning how we endure in a world that cannot provide us with an answer to the most painful and destructive aspects of nature natured. Where the two perspectives part company is in their respective understanding of the nature of unfragmented ground. For a descriptive naturalist like Santayana, Dewey, or Buchler, the ground, where spoken of at all, is anything but an unruly unconscious. It is more akin to a material substrate that is simply there. Buchler refines this sense considerably by talking, as noted, of providingness and availability, but he too fails to illuminate those aspects of unfragmented ground that Schelling partially disclosed. For the ecstatic naturalist, stoicism, which makes the most sense when applied to a material substrate of some kind, must be augmented by a kind of fitful jouissance that appears whenever the unruly ground somehow breaks into the world in specific ways. Existential thought understood a few of these primary experiences, even though it eulogized various forms of shipwreck or boundary situations. These encounters are often related to the unconscious of nature but there are many others that have a very different affective tone, such as

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moments of high creativity, sexual connection and release, a sudden illumination and expansion of a meaning horizon, and a rapturous sense of the sublime. This last experience is different in kind from an encounter with an epiphany of power that has a finite location, even though that epiphany often struggles to engulf the horizon occupied by the self. The terrors and ecstasies of the sublime are experiences that participate almost directly in the unruly momentum that comes from nature naturing. Put in strictly emotional terms we could define this as a mixed state that combines religious melancholy with a kind of nascent semiotic mania. To call this a pleasurable state would be a mockery and would underestimate the scope and power of the momenta involved. Religious melancholy is tied to the lost object (whence) and its promised delivery from out of the not yet (whither). Of course, there is no being or power that makes this promise. The promise comes from the phenomenological data itself. The stoic attitude entwines itself with an openness to ecstatic transfiguration. But again, caution must be exercised. The ecstatic movement outside and past a current configuration is not necessarily good in all respects, or, of course, evil in all respects. Anything coming from the unconscious of nature will have its origin in that which is beyond good and evil. Once the manifestation has occurred, however, strongly relevant moral traits may emerge that become pertinent to the individual and/or the community. Here nonecstatic criteria must be applied that will measure the experience against the collective wisdom of the community of interpreters. This latter claim is important, because many communities are merely natural in their constitution. By the term "natural community" is meant a human grouping that reiterates past signs and lives with fairly rigid boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, a species of tribalism. By the term "community of interpreters" is meant a much more fragile but open human fellowship that places priority on a sensitivity to novel semiotic prospects insofar as they can strengthen the life of the community and its members. The danger in a natural community is that it could take an ecstatic experience and either tie it directly to its chosen epiphanies of power, or make the countermove and reject it as contrary to communal self-definition. That very same experience could appear within the heart of a community of interpreters (which always finds itself within natural communities) and its genuine ambiguity and polyvalent quality would be allowed to unfold, without ignoring its potential demonic traits. Put in

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different terms, the natural community makes a clear dyadic judgment of inclusion or exclusion, whereas the community of interpreters would allow judgment to evolve according to the matter itself; a process that would take time and involve a number of subaltern decisions. Needless to say, there are no purely natural or purely interpretive communities, but these two forms of aggregation represent perennial poles between which we move, usually fitfully but occasionally with self-consciousness. It should be obvious that there are many ways in which the unruly ground can appear in personal and communal life, each one of which is directly tied to some unconscious projection that sees the unfragmented ground as something. Since this is an inevitable state of affairs, it makes no sense to bemoan the fact, but to come to terms with its depth logic, and thereby gain some access to its mysterious presence/absence outside of the most intense currents of the transference field. That is, while we can clearly gain some understanding of the innumerable ways in which the unruly ground is clothed with human content, the very fact that we understand this process itself makes it possible to probe into what lies on the other side of the projected screen. Of course, we will have to use a very different kind of phenomenological sight than that which has been so fruitful in the domains of nature natured, but we already and always have the help of providingness and natural grace. The world, as the sum of all orders of relevance, known or unknown, manifests innumerable fragmented grounds, and one nonfragmented ground. All grounds, fragmented and unfragmented, are unruly in some respects, although the nonfragmented ground is most clearly unruly in that it has no distinctive traits at all analogous to logos or Peirce's category of thirdness (law and generality). When we look at any ground we have a native tendency to pry into its antecedent, as if there were an unending series of grounds with no natural terminus. Insofar as we weary of this prospect, we envision a certain type of self-legislating ground that is unique among grounds. Traditionally, this selfstarting ground has been called god, insofar as this divine ground has traits that make it generate both itself, as knowable, and the world, as a divinely sustained totality. This issue of a divine being who creates the world-totality out of nothingness, both its own, and that of the cosmic womb (Plato's chora), can be approached in two ways: the first, by examining the motives that perennially lead us to posit such a creator, and the second, that of examining the inner logic of grounds and grounding that points to the

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unruly ground that is best seen from a post-Christian (i.e., postmonotheist) perspective. As Freud was among the first to show, all motives are overdetermined, and have many tangled roots that can never be fully disclosed. The issue of motive becomes especially acute when dealing with the ubiquity of grounds, as they impact on the self in a complex variety of ways. We cannot help but pour powerful psychic contents into any encounter with either a fragmented ground or the unfragmented ground. And, of course, these grounds have their own hooks that pull psychic content toward them. Our strategy will be to work out the categorial structures of a framework that places priority on a creator god. This is to be followed by an analysis of the issue of grounds and sufficient reason, which will then be followed by some general analyses of the motives that lead toward the instantiation of a radical sense of self-caused divine ground. In conclusion, the unruly ground will be reillumined from the standpoint of its historical antipode. As noted, the philosophical theology of Robert C. Neville, emergent from yet critical of process theology, makes the strongest claims in the current conceptual horizon for the utter necessity of a creator god, given the traits held by Neville to pertain to the created world. That is, for Neville there is a logical connection between the nature of the world as a bound totality and the creator god who created that bound totality while simultaneously creating itself. In his own way, Neville honors the ontological difference by envisioning a radical contrast between the creator god in eternity and the world that unfolds in and through the flow of time. There is an abyss separating this god from its products, and we must tread carefully when trying to march across this gap. Neville is persuaded that one of the chief obstacles facing many contemporary forms of philosophical theology is a serious misconception of the nature of time and the commensurate abjection of eternity. Both existential theology and process theology rely on a notion of finite epochal time as it envelops and transforms the human agent. The cornerstone for the existential understanding of finite time-ing is, of course, Heidegger's Sein und Zeit where any notion of eternity is placed in the periphery of thought. Any genuine sense we have of world and selfhood derives from the way time unfolds ecstatically within the Dasein:

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The world is transcendent, grounded in the horizonal unity of ecstatic temporality. It must already be ecstatically disclosed so that innerworldly beings can be encountered from it. Temporality already holds itself ecstatically in the horizons of its ecstasies and, temporalizing itself, comes back to the beings encountered in the There. With the factical existence of Da-sein, innerworldly beings are also already encountered. (Heidegger 1996: 334)2 The phenomenon of world (or worldhood) is held open by the temporalizing of the time of the self. It is as if time-ing creates the horizon within which all innerworldly beings can be encountered in any way. The ecstatic movement of time is one that arches out from the self and stands into the elusive clearing of the world. When time captures itself from its own tendency to flatten itself into clock time, in inauthentic existence, it can become open to the primacy of the future in the mode of being-toward-death. This future is one of possibility, but a domain of possibility that is different in kind from those that may obtain within nonhuman orders. For existential theology, the Heideggerian analysis of the ecstatic time-ing of temporality prepares the way for a deepened understanding of faith. The notion of faith is directly correlated with the notion of authentic existence in the face of death, an encounter of intimate possibility that impales the self on its own cross, thus breaking the hold of any theology of glory. Time-ing is the means by and through which authentic faith can be rescued from a perennial fallen or ensnared existence. Yet the intense focus of ecstatic temporality cuts off the god problematic in a dramatic way. There is a striking Kantian remnant in Heidegger's early project that ties time-ing too directly to the resolute acts of the finite self. Since the Da-sein is doing the temporalizing, even while also being temporalized, there is an ironic kind of closure, cutting 2 In der horizontalen Einheit der ekstatischen Zeitlichkeit grundend[gründend], ist die Welt transzendent. Sie muss schon ekstatisch erschlossen sein, damit aus ihr her innerweltliches Seindes begegnen kann. Ekstatisch halt[hält] sich die Zeitlichkeit schon in den Horizonten ihrer Ekstasen und kommt, sich zeitigend, auf das in das Da begegnende Seinde zuruck[zurück]. Mit der faktischen Existenz des Daseins begegnet auch schon innerweltliches Seindes. (Heidegger 1927: 366)

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the self off from any divine complex that might have a very different relationship to time. It was part of Heidegger's stated purpose to rescue faith from dogmatics. Be that as it may, this produces a different cluster of problems for philosophical theology which must ask about worldhood and time in a very different way. While it is indeed possible to approach worldhood and time from the standpoint of the human process, it is imperative that this strategy be augmented and challenged by a categorial approach that starts from a fully generic conception of nature. From the latter perspective, worldhood is an eject of nature naturing insofar as it encounters the human process (at least). We are enveloped by worldhood, a horizon beyond all subaltern semiotic horizons, because of the way of nature's self-fissuring. Time is itself something that can be probed from the side of a generic conception/experience of nature. The three modes of the pretemporal, temporal, and posttemporal, are all part of the how of nature. Human temporality, and there are other forms as well, is only one highly idiosyncratic mode of time. Process theology falls into an analogous trap around the issue of time. Neville is especially interested in showing how process thought has misunderstood the correlation of time and eternity, even though he is friendly to many aspects of process metaphysics as they allegedly apply to the world other than god. In the process view of time, the world is constituted by an indefinite number of units of experience that have their own internal forms of becoming in which they move from an open to a closed state. In the closed state, these units (actual occasions) cease becoming and become available to other later occasions insofar as these latter allow the earlier material into their own evolving contour. This process generates an ongoing series of ingressions in which closed and determined material is passed on down the line to become the matter of subsequent experiences. The time concept employed here is one of an endless series of finite becomings that collectively add up to a universal becoming, or, better, becoming of becomings. Each and every one of these becomings ends up in other becomings and in god's evolving body. Nothing is lost, and there is a cumulative augmentation of the complexity and scope of experience. God is defined as a dual reality that is both evolving with the world, and that/who stands outside of the web of becomings in primordial splendor. The god portrayed here is both intimate and bereft

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of unruly shadows that might vex the self as it moves along with the cosmic becoming. The first dimension of god, god's consequent nature, cannot possibly be a creator god as it must gather in what has already attained in the world of actual occasions. The primordial aspect is in some sense atemporal, but is not clearly related to the traditional concept of a creator god. In fact, in the process scheme, creativity becomes a separate and highly privileged principle in its own right, thus blunting the need for a creator god that/who can stand eternally outside of a determined creation. Epochal time is in some sense subjective, and hence analogous to Heidegger's time-ing of temporality, although the process view does not confine its notion of time to the human process. Its view of eternity is somewhat weak from a classical perspective because it does not also entail absolute creative power to generate and order the world. If Heidegger's perspective still carries an after-glow of Kantian anthropocentrism, the process view weakens the classical schema without putting an equally powerful and generic perspective in its place. There are two fundamental possibilities at this juncture: to return to a reconstructed version of the classical perspective, or to move thought decisively away from speculations that rely on a privileged being-of-all-beings toward an unrelentingly generic conception of nature. Neville, of course, deploys his own categorial framework in the service of the former goal, while ecstatic naturalism embraces the second alternative. Neville, in reviving the classical tradition with the tools that he derived from process thought, even while challenging that originating perspective, wants to reestablish the strong link between god and creativity as they unfold together in the act of world creation. Yet Neville's perspective has some striking subtleties that go beyond many of the antecedent formulations of the creator/creation dialectic. Neville's understanding of god is two-fold. On the deepest level, god is pure being-itself, without any determination or contour that could become available to the human process (or, by definition, for any other in the universe of existents). Being-itself is indeterminate and no outside principle (whatever that would be) could make it determinate. If being-itself is to become determinate, it must do so in and through itself. The second dimension of god is thus the one that emerges from being-itself as it acts from its own to generate its own self-definition. On this level of generality, analogies are pushed to the extreme, and usually break down. However, with proper caution, especially to avoid a

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premature spatializing of the being-itself/god-as-known correlation, some suggestions can be made as to what this act of internal creation is like. Perhaps a helpful analogy or simile is that of an infinitely vast ocean of water with no outer edge or ultimate contour. This ocean of all oceans is in eternity, and does not exhibit temporal sequence or anything like a thermodynamic/entropic arrow of time. Suddenly the ocean forms into an equally infinite shape that has specific traits that can be probed by some of the very creatures that come out of that shape. This shape (which is not, strictly speaking, a shape in any sense known to the human process) is also creative of its same/other, namely, the world. The ocean of all oceans cannot create the world until it itself becomes a creator in its own right. And it can only do this by a profound ontological change, a divine phase transition (analogous to water becoming ice or steam), in which its internal constitution is altered by purely internal means: The creator makes itself creator when and as it creates; in order to do this, it must be independent, in itself, of the products it creates and even of its own role of being creator. The role of the creator is the nature the creator has in virtue of its connection with the created determinations. (Neville 1968: 72) This is a subtle and rather dramatic formulation. One is reminded of Meister Eckhart's distinction between the feminine godhead (die Gottheit) and the masculine creator god (der Gott). When the former ground and abyss becomes the latter creator god, the world can emerge and take on determinate form. However, there is no hint of an emanation theme in Neville. God creates both itself and the world simultaneously by an act, not by an overflow of divine plenitude. In this sense, Neville's perspective remains within the provenance of the Western monotheisms. For Neville, god remains sovereign over the created world and does not need the world in order to grow ontologically larger. His perspective has little patience with a consequent god that can be changed by what creatures do. This Calvinist strain in Neville, modified by a gentler Wesleyan strain, keeps his god from become a tool of hidden anthropocentric longings that tend to shrink god into manageable size. Further, his sovereign creator god is not part of human eschatological longings, nor a guarantor of finite human projects, no matter how worthy

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in social or political terms. God resides in internal indifference and in eternity, and in this sense is fully, even radically, transcendent. Yet at the same time, Neville sees god as being fully immanent and part of the ordered structure of the determinate world; that is, god qua logos. Did god need to create the world in order to have a sphere in which to exercise divine majesty? Again, Neville is unrelenting in his insistence that human analogies and manifest or hidden aspirations must fall away when approaching being-itself and its self-constitution as creator. God as source creates the world, having no determinate need to do so but strictly and purely out of divine self-constituting grace. The universe is wholly dependent for its existence as a set of determinate things on God as source. That God is source is itself a function of the world's being created. (Neville 1991: 4041) There are no sufficient reasons (as totalizing antecedent forms of necessary compulsion) that caused god to create the world. In fact, one cannot even talk about god without talking about the world. God's self-constitution is ontologically identical to the world-constitution. For Neville, god could not form itself without doing so through and as (in the mode of immanence) the world. The dialectic between god's transcendence, as being-itself, and god's immanence in and as the world remains an internally consistent reality. Insofar as god creates itself and the world it overcomes its own transcendence. God thus creates itself and the world, which is fully determinate, that is, has conditional and essential traits for each and every order. God also creates time, or as Neville prefers to put it, time's flow. By talking of the flow of time in the created world, Neville wishes to overcome a static or spatial notion of time that would focus on discrete and almost self-contained moments in isolation from each other. Time is not an emergent from space, but a created product of god. It is rooted, not in extension, but in eternity. Time as we experience it, with its march into a determinate past, is ultimately rooted in a living eternity, ''Eternity is the condition for and inclusion of time's flow'' (Neville 1993: 112). Using Schleiermacher's language we could say that religious consciousness is constituted by an awareness of the presence of eternity in all three modes of time, even though each mode of time has distinctive and unique features.

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For Neville it is a mistake to start our analysis of time from the standpoint of temporal sequence, and from there to struggle to make some inferences about eternity. He is sharply critical of most recent philosophical theories of time precisely because they enshrine or privilege finite temporality as the norm for all modes of time. Anything not part of finite temporality is, as Heidegger would argue, a derivative or founded mode of time. Neville reverses Heidegger's directionality by taking eternity as the ultimate context within which any finite modes of time can be understood. Any moment of time experienced by finite creatures is what it is because it is gathered up already and always in eternity. The three modes of time are already together through an "ontological context of mutual relevance" (Neville 1993: 109). This mutual relevance is a kind of flow that is the way of time for finite sign-users. What is behind this mutual temporal relevance and flow that makes them possible in the first place? For Neville, finite temporality is not self-grounding, nor is it, of course, exhaustive of the nature of time. The modes of time and their togetherness are rooted in eternity, thus "Eternity is the condition for and inclusion of time's flow" (Neville 1993: 112). Time's modes are thus held together by the divine as it constitutes eternity. Hence, ". . . the only thing that could constitute an ontological context of mutual relevance is an eternal divine creative act and that the eternal dynamism of time's flow constitutes what we should mean by the life of God" (Neville 1993: 113). There is thus a dual positioning here. On the one side, time's modes are possible because eternity opens up the space within which mutual relevance can occur among the modes. On the other side, our relation to our own temporality is deepened and transformed when we enter into the rhythm of eternity as it guides and protects time's flow. What happens to the world side of the creator/created divide? Neville is far more friendly with process metaphysics when it deals with worldly structures than when it deals with god. We recall that he is most dissatisfied with the process divorce between god and creativity insofar as it tends to make creativity into an ultimate and dramatically mute the role of creatio ex nihilo. He is not afraid to retain some of the cosmology of Whitehead and Hartshorne, especially around the issue of the constituents of the world, namely, actual occasions. In particular, he is friendly to Whitehead's view that things embody a harmony in which a multiplicity is brought into a new unity. Of course, the term

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"harmony" does not connote that every order in the world is harmonic, only that there is a convergence of essential and conditional features. Neville is somewhat unique among contemporary metaphysicians in that he makes value more ultimate than form. Each order of the world is a harmonic integrity that embodies some value, and this value is not confined to the interaction of the object and human subjectivity. Value is not a human creation, but is built in to the very being of god's creation. The ultimate locus of value is in the divine, an immanent power that sustains its own creation and is the guarantor that values exist. This is not to say that all values are compossible in a given location, or that there can't be a tragic dislocation of values, but that no order of the world is bereft of some value in some respect. At the deepest level, god's creativity is present in the way in which things move themselves forward to enhance their own harmony. Here we see Neville retaining a process categorial commitment; namely, to the view that each finite particular, as a combination of essential and conditional traits, is sustained and even goaded along by the fully immanent creativity of god. The harmony of value in a thing is a dual product of that thing's own togetherness and the eternal creative act of god within the world. Yet, and here Neville diverges yet again from the process perspective, no thing will be related to all other things in the world. There is no absolute web of internal relations connecting each and every thing/event in the world. As if to deepen the antimonist strain in his perspective, Neville argues that field phenomena are themselves a product of the things contained in the field, and not the other way around. Any thing will have "multiple effective locations" (Neville 1989: 148), but will also have ineffective locations, and innumerable nonlocations. What makes this locatedness, this measure, possible? For Neville, the dimension of the divine that is responsible for the order and measure of the world is the logos. In more traditional terms, the logos is related to some kind of cosmic word or divine self-disclosure within creation. Neville echoes yet refines these conceptions. Because the world consists of all the things that are determinate, the Logos then is that in and by which the world is created as determinate. In this sense, the Logos is a general epiphany or revelation of the divine, whatever more specific revelations the world might contain.

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. . . The Logos is thus the character of God expressed in each determinate thing by virtue of its determinateness, and it consists in the implications of form, components, actuality, and value. (Neville 1991: 45) Two dimensions of the logos assume priority: its epiphanic nature and its shaping power. The logos is that dimension of god that makes determination possible. The marks of the logos are found in each and every order of the world, precisely because nothing will be bereft of form, some intrinsic components, actuality, and, as noted above, value. Neville refers to these four features as transcendentals, in the sense that they obtain prior to instantiation, but he also argues that instantiation is absolutely universal; i.e., there is no place where the logos is not fully operative in giving shape to the innumerable orders of the world. The logos also functions as the primary epiphany of god and is directly correlated to divine love. With its traditional tie to the concept of speech, the logos is seen as the place where god becomes unbidden, manifest in a universal way to any person of faith. Neville's world has a certain thickness in that each order expresses the logos that made it and that sustains it. The principle of order and intelligibility lies deep in the heart of the orders of nature natured. And god, qua creator, is the source of the principle of order that marks each and every determinate thing with value, form, actuality, and components. It is impossible to separate god from god's aspect of logos, and the intimate relation between the creator and the created is continually being reenacted in the ubiquitous epiphanies that bring the logos into our purview. To summarize our analysis thus far, we can say that Neville envisions a dual-natured god that/who is both indeterminate and abysmal being-itself, and a creator god that/who is immanent in the created order as a governing logos. The world itself is fully determinate in the sense that each thing has both essential and conditional traits that exhaust what it is. From this it does not follow that the world is determined in a causal sense. Each thing has some intrinsic value that is related to its harmonic form. But this value is not reducible to human stipulations. God sustains value through the atemporal creative act that also created the world in the first place. The modes of time in which humans move are deeply connected in an ontological order of mutual relevance. Time cannot be understood to be constituted by discrete, and spatially bound, moments, but flows together in a continuum. On the deepest level, time's flow is

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sustained by the eternity within god. All analyses of time that start from finite temporalizing run the risk of failing to grasp the priority of eternity as the ultimate bringing together of the modes (or ecstasies) of time-ing. The identity within difference of time's flow and eternity is one aspect of the ground/grounded problematic. The relationship is fully participatory and brings creator and created together. Yet this relationship is also one of unequals. The creator god is of infinite majesty when contrasted with the finite and determined world of time and space. The power relationship is one-directional for Neville. Put differently, the creator/created relationship is asymmetrical. The true meaning of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is that the world is utterly dependent on the creative act by and through which god created itself as creator while simultaneously creating the world. This [i.e., creatio ex nihilo] is an abstract metaphysical way of saying that things cannot be together with genuinely other things, related to them but different, except insofar as they are jointly elements of the divine act of creation. They are together insofar as they are jointly created. Furthermore, their mutual conditioning of one another is subsidiary to the being together ontologically; their existence as creatures is the ground of their causal relations with one another . . . . The closure of the world itself depends on ontological divine creation. (Neville 1991: 35) In his categorial scheme, the concept of ontological creation applies only to the divine in its act that constitutes the world. The concept of cosmological creation applies to finite forms of creativity within the constituted world. From the standpoint of the divine majesty, the world is a closed and finite and fully determinate reality. From the standpoint of the world, if such a formulation may be allowed, objects are held together both ontologically and cosmologically. That is, the deeper togetherness comes from the logos structure that permeates the innumerable orders of the world, while the secondary type of togetherness (the cosmological) comes from actual reciprocities between and among things. Neville combines a strong notion of ontological creation with a kind of naturalistic piety. As a naturalist (of the process type) he accepts the

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intrinsic measure given by things to each other. Further, he also assumes that the world as created is largely (but not exhaustively) intelligible by sign-users like ourselves. He has developed a naturalistic process semiotics that is sharply critical of those postmodern, or as he would say, late modern, perspectives that grossly overvalue the role of sheer sign creation and play. We enter into sign series that have ancient roots and that have their own inner dynamism. These signs can be anything from: "that cloud indicates rain," to "turn left here," to "nature's signs point to the divine logos." We are never left without some signs to guide us toward a more or less stable existence within time's flow. Now that we have given an admittedly truncated analysis of Neville's philosophical theology, we can begin to probe more fully into the issue of grounds and consequents as they emerge from his revisionist yet surprisingly classical account, and an ecstatic naturalist account of the correlation between the unruly ground and the foundlings of the world. The most important issues to emerge at this juncture are: the nature of asymmetry, the status of power in the ground/grounded relationship, the status of time and eternity, and the problem of ontological connection. As will become clear, these issues are deeply interlaced, and it is only through an artificial process of prescinding that we can approach them sequentially. Without a concept of ontological asymmetry, especially as it pertains to the ground/grounded relation, it would be impossible to sustain either a classical conception of god or a generic conception of nature. In this sense, Neville's perspective has commensurate features with the current one. There is an extreme asymmetry between the creator god, emergent out of indeterminate being-itself, and the bound universe of existents. God has infinite power as creator and sustainer, while the bound and determinate universe has finite powers that obtain in mutual reciprocity. By the same token, nature naturing can spawn the innumerable orders of nature natured, but the orders of the world cannot turn back and reshape their spawning source. Neville's process naturalism is unrelenting in keeping god and creativity together (at least as ontological rather than cosmological structures). The power of divine creation is unique and cannot be seen as a mere enlargement of the types of creativity found in the cosmic (worldly) order. Let us probe more fully into the two types of asymmetry found in process naturalism and ecstatic naturalism. Again, both perspectives assume that there is a one-way trajectory from ground to consequent, and

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that, by definition, the consequent cannot affect the ground. Traditional process theology would want more of an intimate dialectic between ground and grounded, with the grounded being part of the augmentative life of the divine. Simply put for this perspective: the fuller the world, the fuller the divine body. For Neville, who, as noted, accepts only that part of process thought that does not deal with the divine, god's absolute infinite sovereignty cannot allow for the creation to augment its eternal creative act. The world is dependent on the creator for its being and its form. Here the creative act stands across from us by an absolute difference. For ecstatic naturalism, the asymmetry between nature naturing and nature natured is manifest differently from that asymmetry between god and the creation. In the latter case there is an alleged eternal act that co-constituted god as creator along with the world. In the former case, nature naturing is not, and cannot be, constituted by anything, and there is no sense in which it becomes a self (divine or otherwise) in its continual spawning of the constituents of nature natured. Note that the concept of creator has not been used to denote the inner drama of nature naturing, but the more particular and energetic concept of spawning, which connotes an ejection, but not from a circumscribable birthing ground. The most that one can say here is that there is spawning, or providingness. In Neville's process naturalism any determinate thing, as manifesting essential and conditional traits, will also be the locus for the manifestation of the logos, that part of the divine that crosses the ontological divide between the infinite and the finite. The concept of foundling, so central to ecstatic naturalism, has no place in Neville's logos and lovefilled determinate universe. This is not to say that such a naturalism cannot know tragedy or evil, far from it, but to say that the ontological underpinnings of the cosmological are always present and in some sense available. The ontological asymmetry between god and creation is muted by a depth-connection via the logos. From the standpoint of human community, the bridge between finite and infinite dimensions is sustained by the covenant. If we fail to honor the covenant we violate the loges. "To break the covenant is to treat the world as if its form, components, existential elements, and value were not the Loges of God" (Neville 1991: 65). Of course, it is part of the Christian (qua trinitarian) perspective that its god is fully planted on both sides of the ontological difference, and

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that there is an unbreakable ontological and grace-filled ground of the grounded that can be found on this side of the ontological difference. The existential clue for this more available ground is the covenant. At this point it should be clear that we have disclosed a symmetry within the heart of the asymmetry. The asymmetrical relation between creator and created is the larger relation, while the presence of the loges within creation is the smaller symmetrical relation. As in any symmetrical relation, both relata can be changed, and can also change each other. God qua loges can respond to our existential choices, even though that god doesn't grow in the process sense. Consequently this subaltern symmetry within the larger asymmetry is less like a finite to finite symmetry than is the process one. Ecstatic naturalism remains committed to the view that the primal asymmetry between nature naturing and nature natured has no place for a subaltern symmetry analogous to the Christian loges. Since there is no encounter with a creator creating itself and the created world simultaneously, the emphasis falls on the dark and taciturn spawning by which the unconscious of nature somehow generates the innumerable orders of the world. Once an order has emerged into its own measure and position, the spawning source disappears. It does not cross the ontological difference with the emergent order of relevance. In this sense, each and every emergent order is a foundling whose whence is shrouded in mystery. On the deepest level, the world itself is a foundling, an eject that has no direct link to the inaugurating and unruly ground. In Neville's process naturalism each and every order of the world is determinate and embodies a harmony of form and value. The world is bound by an external infinite. "To be sure, even the cosmos as a whole is finite; it could have been otherwise. Its existence consists in being the product of the infinite and self-finitizing creativity of God" (Neville 1991: 71). In this important statement we see the asymmetry relation, the subaltern symmetrical relation, and the sense of utter boundedness. God is both infinite (asymmetry) and self-finitizing (symmetry). The world is finite, it is a dependent product (asymmetry). There is a strong connection (perhaps ontologically contingent) between the assertion that the world is finite and bound and the assertion that its creator is infinite and self-finitizing simultaneously. An infinite creator had to become in some sense finite to be entwined in the world that it created.

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What can we say about the infinity of the world from the standpoint of ecstatic naturalism? The first thing that can be said is that nature is infinite when considering its two primal dimensions. The second thing to examine is whether or not the dimension that we inhabit is infinite and nondeterminate. If we confine ourselves to physical cosmology (astrophysics) we would have to say that the answer is one involving an extremely complex correlation of empirical data with foundational theory. It is clearly outside of the provenance of philosophy to attempt an answer to the question of the finitude or infinitude of physical space/time, especially since terms like "finite" have a special meaning in cosmological theory that may have no direct analogue in foundational perspectives in philosophy or theology. But does this exhaust the domain of nature natured? When we speak of the domain of the world as having innumerable complexes, known and unknown, enduring and effervescent, possible and actual, conscious and unconscious, physical and nonphysical, it soon becomes clear that there is no way in which this vast plenitude can be called finite or bound. From a semiotic perspective, nature is constituted by many infinite series of signs and interpretants. At the same time, each actual infinite is surrounded or enabled by an open infinite (Corrington 1994) that can never be exhausted. The correlation of the actual with the open infinite, that is, of attained signs with that which enables semiosis to expand, is found in the processive infinite which can be defined as an augmenting and growing sign series. No limits can be assigned to these three types of series, even though any given sign series will face extinction of its actualities and possibilities. The world of nature natured is thus infinite in a variety of ways, from the endless ramification of signs and interpretants, to the silently active open infinite that clears away spaces for meaning (akin to Peirce's ground relation), to the utter complexity of any order of relevance that can be discriminated in any way, to the robust collision of vast sign series as they enter into their own kind of struggle for survival. While it is possible to refer to this world as determinate, insofar as it manifests something like essential and conditional traits in each order, it makes more sense to stress the mobile open spaces within which causal and semiotic orders unfold. The ecstatic naturalist alternative to the concept of determination is that of availability where the stress is on the perennial renewal of prospects for each sign, each order, each event, and each epiphany. Prospects are available to the constituents of the world, and

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the constituents are available for each other. This ties in directly with the notion of providingness in which the stress falls on the utter fecundity of nature naturing as manifest, through a glass darkly, in and as the orders of nature natured. Thus if the world of Neville's process naturalism involves a larger asymmetry containing a subaltern symmetry, with the larger correlation being responsible for creating a bound and determinate world, the world of ecstatic naturalism involves an unbridgeable asymmetry in which the closer side of the ontological difference is left on its own within the ongoing provenance of its availabilities. This difference between determinateness and availability points to two very different concepts of fundamental ontological power. For Neville, retaining, as noted, a strong Calvinist theme, the larger asymmetry establishes a relation of absolute power between god and god's creation. This power is manifest in innumerable ways, but is certainly not reducible to the kind of persuasion found in process perspectives. It is absolute, ongoing, and enveloping of the world of creation. For ecstatic naturalism, on the other hand, once an order has emerged from the unruly ground it ceases to have any direct relation to its antecedent principle. The entire world of nature natured obtains without an enveloping omnipotence that would somehow locate it as a bound totality. For one thing, the world of nature naturing cannot be bound in any sense, literal or metaphorical (as it is indefinite in extent and continues to ramify actualities and possibilities). In another sense nature naturing cannot be envisioned as a creator out of nothingness as that would entail a centered structure for nature's unconscious that is simply not an ontological possibility. The power relationship between nature naturing and nature natured is best characterized as a kind of indifference where nature naturing always returns back to itself and refuses to envelop and overpower the world of orders. There is even a sense in which nature naturing is not even aware that a world exists, let alone one that of necessity must be enveloped by an infinite power. It is all too easy to caricature the concept of divine omnipotence, as if it boils down to a heteronomous imposition of law on a world that somehow chafes under the restraint. What Neville is in fact saying is that the divine is in eternal asymmetry with its world from the standpoint of power, and that there are no analogical bridges between the many types of power manifest in creation, and the absolutely unique type of power that is an intimate part of god's creative act. In the Christian meaning

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horizon god does not abandon the creation and remains a constant presence (quickened through the covenant) assuring creation that positive value, in a nontrivial sense, will prevail. For ecstatic naturalism, as a post-Christian perspective, the orders of nature natured are all foundlings, abandoned into a world of ofttimes fierce semiotic conflict. As noted, naturalism often carries with it a kind of melancholy or mourning about the status of the orders of the world. On the other hand it also insists that its sight is not clouded by anthropocentric longings or hidden transference currents that sustain a privileged being-of-all-beings against the deeper truth of the unconscious of nature. Putting the power issue more succinctly we can say that for Neville's process naturalism the creator god retains absolute power over the creation and that this sovereignty is manifest in the asymmetry between infinite and finite orders. For ecstatic naturalism nature naturing retains its powers and lets each eject or emergent move on its own into the complex intersections that will mark its finite/infinite trajectory. While Neville wants to confine the infinite to the divine part of the asymmetry, ecstatic naturalism insists that the orders of the world are (differently) infinite from the potencies of nature naturing. The world of orders does not need anything other than itself to do all that it has to do. The ground/grounded relationship of unruly ground to nature natured unfolds its uncanny logic by a twin movement in which the ground returns back into itself again and again while the world moves through its momentums on its own, with some of its orders perhaps longing for a return to the ground. Asymmetry (containing a subaltern symmetry between the creator god and the world through loges), when combined with omnipotence, cannot help but drive time into two modally different dimensions; the eternal and the finite flow of time's three modes. Whether or not there is a logical connection, there seems to be a historical affinity between doctrines of omnipotence and eternalistic conceptions of time. An omnipotent creator, emerging out of indeterminate being-itself to give shape to itself, cannot itself be pan of the time process that governs the created world. Yet in another sense, as developed most fully in the economic trinity (the trinity as active within the world), the omnipotent and eternal god does at least encompass the modes of time and the one-directional arrow of entropy. However, and this is crucial for Neville's perspective, the omnipotent and eternal god is not subject to the ravages or gifts of time's flow the way Whitehead's or Hanshorne's god would

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be. Encompassing the temporal is far different from being subject to it, ''Eternity is the ontological context for the mutual relevance of the temporal modes such that time flows'' (Neville 1993: 115). To be the relevant context for time is to be the always present principle for the holding together of the otherness of the modes of time in their modal distinctness. Neville's dualistic scheme of eternity and finite time as enveloped by eternity fits conceptually with the closure of the world and god's omnipotence. The god that is powerful enough to create the world (and itself) out of nothingness, and to make that world a finite bound and determined totality is a god that will reside on the nether side of the time characteristic of that world. God does not grow processively or fill-in its nature by what happens to the creatures of time. Yet god is also, in this scheme, closer to these creatures than they are to themselves. In certain mystical states one can come close to feeling the still presence of that eternity that is always operating to keep each mode of time from becoming disconnected with the other two modes. If there is at least a historical conjunction of omnipotence and eternity as predicates of the divine, then it would seem reasonable to assume that the loss of omnipotence might entail, or at least suggest, the loss of eternity. This is precisely where ecstatic naturalism finds itself. Having rejected the concept of an omnipotent creator and the commensurate concept of creatio ex nihilo, the question becomes one of gaining some phenomenological access to the ways in which time can obtain both in the heart of the ontological difference and within the orders of nature natured. In keeping with the idea that there are no traits that can be assigned to the unconscious of nature, other than some minimal relational traits, we can say that the dimension/domain of nature naturing is pretemporal. The pretemporal is in no sense the eternal, as the pretemporal domain has absolutely no awareness of the temporality of the foundlings of nature natured. This domain can best be understood as the not yet temporal. It is part of the unconscious cunning of nature that time, in the three modes known to sign-using selves, is birthed out of the recesses of the pretemporal. But here there is an even stronger asymmetry than that found in process naturalism. In the latter perspective eternity envelops and supports time (a kind of weak and one-sided symmetry), while in the former case there is no relation between the two spheres, other than the indirect one that takes place through memory; a kind of longing for the pretemporal.

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Earlier in this work we discussed the nature of time and laid out some of its features. In the current context it is only necessary to rotate these conceptions through a different problematic so that the nonclassical nature of ecstatic naturalism can be even further delineated. The contrast between eternity and the pretemporal could not be stronger. The unconscious momenta (if we can even say this much) of nature naturing do not have a sequential or developmental structure. On the other side we cannot see anything like a creator or mind that could entertain eternity and/or time in its flow. The unruly ground is only nascently temporal, never eternal. Yet time does emerge within the orders of nature natured, even if the whence of time is a mystery. This time is fully and exhaustively of the world of signs, objects, and interpretants. It is entropic and modal, and can obtain differently within different orders. More to the point, ecstatic naturalism takes issue with the contemporary obsession with time, as if one recurrent trait of nature should somehow be elevated to the status of a genus. Time becomes the genus of which all other orders are species. We saw how Heidegger did this from the lingering Kantianism of an anthropocentric standpoint, and how process thought did this by making its notion of epochal time an absolute universal. But there are no ultimately compelling reasons why time has assumed this privileged role in philosophy and theology. The current perspective assumes that time is but one order of signification among innumerable others, and even though it has great scope and even force within the world, it is not a universalizable reality. Is there not a deep historical bias toward time precisely because it is one trait that has been held to link us to the divine? Space has rarely been eulogized in such a fashion, and certainly no other trait recurrent within experience has seemed to bring us into some kind of symmetry with the infinite. Putting it somewhat prosaically, time is our ladder to eternity as the way of god. The pretemporal has no awareness of the temporal. But the temporal, as the sphere where awareness can occur for some sign-using organisms, has an awareness of the posttemporal. It must be stressed that the posttemporal is fully and exhaustively part of nature. It is a possibility available to temporality as temporality reaches out toward something that is at least momentarily antientropic. Here we must be careful, as entropy (understood in the physical sciences) can only be overcome by theft. An organism continues to grow and to hold back chaos by taking order from

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its surrounding environment. In this dimension an antientropic structure is a parasitical one, and even here the eventual destiny is dissolution and loss of heat. What of the intersection of the temporal and the posttemporal? Is the antientropic energy here different in kind? If so, how can we establish lines of relevance to something that would be so alien in configuration? Specifically, how is the antientropic momentum of the posttemporal different in kind from the type of theft by which one system sustains itself against chaos and heat loss by predation on another? As difficult as this difference might seem to delineate, the main rudiments of the answer have already appeared in a variety of guises. The classical understanding of the second law of thermodynamics applies to physical/energy systems within the domain of nature natured. Any momentarily closed physical/energy system will only survive past its internal measure by entering into (stealing) the order and heat of another. This is a straightforward nature natured to nature natured transaction. The relation between the temporal and the posttemporal is more complex. It involves a dimension that is directly nature natured to nature natured but it also involves a more elusive dialectic between nature natured and nature naturing. Temporality is fully within the orders of the world. The posttemporal is both within the orders of the world, as having ongoing relevance to some of those orders, and part of the abyss opened by the ontological difference. The second dimension of the posttemporal is antientropic in the very special sense that it does not play by the rules that are pertinent to the innumerable orders of nature natured. The antientropic momenta of the posttemporal are not analogous to eternity. There is a kind of restlessness even in the posttemporal that shows its continuing correlation to the ejective powers of the ontological difference. Whenever a temporally open sign-user encounters the posttemporal there is a quickening of awareness and a kind of pregnant stasis that becomes full of prospects, a kind of restless not yet. The antientropic power of the posttemporal does not come to the self through theft but out of natural grace, the providingness of prospects, for which, of course, there are no guarantees. The presence/absence of the ontological difference within the posttemporal is not something that could be taken, but something that enters into the rhythms of temporality as an opening power (analogous to the open infinite that surrounds signs, objects, and interpretants).

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Clearly we are talking about a different kind of entropy and a different antientropic momentum. The return of the unconscious of nature in the posttemporal becomes the link back to the pretemporal within the heart of the temporal. The temporal, in the concrete form of conscious sign-users, longs for the pretemporal from whence it has come. There are no direct roads back to the ejecting and unruly ground. The posttemporal, because of its depth-connection to the pretemporal, can provide an indirect route back to the material maternal (chora) by holding open some muted sense of the ontological difference for the self. In existential terms, the encounter of the time-ing creature with the posttemporal is one that stills the real and nascent chaos in its semiotic system(s). Unlike the taking in of food (a physical antientropic act) the encounter with the posttemporal is not taken from something. It has its source in the ever renewing/effacing draft of the ontological difference. It should be clear that the antientropic power of the posttemporal has no meaningful effect on physical entropy. Yet it gives us a foretaste of unmediated ground through a highly mediated form. All of the above problems are, as noted, interlaced. When analyzing the nature of asymmetry one is also looking at the power by which asymmetry may or may not be sustained. This entails an analysis of how time obtains in the two halves of the asymmetrical relation. Finally, all of these delineations impact on how the two dimensions of the real (creator/creation or nature naturing/nature natured) are connected. Process naturalism and ecstatic naturalism differ as to the nature and quality of the ontological connection between their respective central discriminada. Given the detailed analyses of the previous three problematics, we can give a more abbreviated analysis of this final issue. For Neville, the connection between the creator god and that god's creation is eternal and intimate. His doctrine of panlogos insures that no part of the determinate order is bereft of a kind of erotic participation in the divine plenitude. The covenant is that human/divine correlation that intensifies the bond between the infinite and the finite. In a sense, the covenant embodies its own muted form of the ontological difference. It is the always changing locus for the erotic coparticipation of the infinite creator with the finite social/political order. Unfortunately, anthropomorphic structures seem almost always to intrude on how the covenant is delineated; i.e., the concepts of will and disobedience enter into the ontological problematic and distort the phenomenological material. Be

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that as it may, the ontological connection between creator and created is unbreakable (except in finite social/political terms) and inescapable. For the current perspective, there is a much more complex ontological connection between the two primal dimensions of nature. There is certainly nothing analogous to the covenant, nor can one speak of an erotic participation of one dimension in the other (except in the most fitful sense that is subject to the conditions of nature natured). To put it in the most crystallized form: nature naturing has no ongoing relation with the innumerable orders of nature natured once they have been spawned, but a fragmentary relation does emerge when the posttemporal opens certain orders to their whence. Perhaps the obverse to the notion of covenant is the primacy of melancholy longing, punctuated with jouissance on the edges of the temporal. Put somewhat differently, ecstatic naturalism sees the ontological connection between nature naturing and nature natured to take place in the not yet. The directionality of connection is the converse in the two perspectives. For Neville, the relation between the creator god and its creation is an already attained and antecedent ontological structure. For ecstatic naturalism, the connection between nature naturing and nature natured is in the not yet and, under certain conditions, in the present. The only antecedent structure is that of ejection from the unruly ground. The ground disappears from view precisely as it is making the world possible. And the return of this ground in the posttemporal is never an encompassing presence/absence that sustains the human process. It is more like a fitful and ambiguous reappearance of something that was self-cloaking. In the world of process naturalism there are strong connections between god and creation that are incarnational through and through. For ecstatic naturalism, the image of the incarnation applies to orders of meaning when they enter into a realm of genuine mystery, but the image cannot be generalized to cover worldhood in all respects. The issue of grounds and the role of sufficient reason has emerged under different names and guises. All that is required is a summing up of the pertinent reflections. Insofar as a perspective wishes to import intelligibility into the ground/grounded relation it will be compelled to invoke some kind of principle of sufficient reasons. Such a principle will assert that there is nothing essential in the consequent that is not also present in the antecedent structures. Neville's process naturalism is actually twofold in its approach to sufficient reason. That side of god which he has called indeterminate being-itself has no intelligible relation

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to the creator god. Using our earlier simile, indeterminate being-itself underwent a phase transition, like water freezing in a seeming instant, in becoming the creator god. There is no place in the process for a rational analysis of consequent and antecedent. However, in the creator/created correlation, insofar as creation manifests panlogos, there is something like a sufficient reason connecting the two symmetrical halves. Some caution should be exercised here because Neville still preserves the mystery and sovereignty of the creator god over its creation, and in that sense puts pressure on any simplistic notion of sufficient reason. The presence of the logos is, however, the place where he does invoke (perhaps unintentionally) the correlation between a rational and complete antecedent that enters into the consequent. For ecstatic naturalism, there can be no locus for sufficient reason. It is absolutely impossible for finite sign-users to probe into the unconscious of nature and to see some kind of rational or even telic plan that has somehow been carried across into the orders of the world. The unruly ground is prerational, prepositional, presemiotic, pretemporal, and prespatial. Only the most minimal connections can be read backward into the ejecting and spawning ground. The shock of the opening power of the ontological difference makes any use of a rational or categorial connection inconceivable. The image here is that of looking into a vast expanse of churning waves that (individually) always submerge when they are approached. Now that we have worked through some of the more compelling issues surrounding the ground/grounded problematic, we need to probe into the motives that lead finite sign-users to posit some kind of self-caused ground of all grounds. Philosophers have been loath to use psychoanalytic categories because of a fear that the categorial and the personal will be conflated to the detriment of both. There is a very clear sense in which this fear is warranted. In the wrong hands such a strategy can be deeply destructive of an otherwise valuable categorial array. And it can deflect attention away from the very difficult task of exposition and critique. However, when used with care, a psychoanalytic strategy can shed light on the deep correlation between motives and conceptual structures. Yet it must be strongly emphasized that no depth-psychological analysis can affect the issue of conceptual validation. The categories must earn their keep on their own terms, regardless of what happens with the parallel analysis of motives. What a depth-psychological profile can do is to uncover those antecedent drives and desires that

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energized the problematic in the first place. Needless to say, neurotic motives can still produce a healthy philosophy, and healthy motives can produce a truncated and neurotic categorial scheme. What is being examined, then, are the motives that almost all sign-users display, causing them to find some ontological grounding that can secure reasonable stability within an indifferent and often unfriendly world. Why is a self-creating ground, that in turn grounds, so compelling to the human process? Why is this longing almost universal among self-conscious creatures? And what is the process of abjection (unconscious fear and desire) that continually reenergizes the movement toward translucent grounds? There seems to be a complex process of mirroring here in which the light of consciousness recoils from (is reflected by) the unconscious in such a way that a surplus value is generated. This increase in conscious energy gets tied to transference objects in which the abjected unconscious material comes back to the self through an underground parallel mirroring process. In spite of its best efforts, consciousness discovers its own abjected unconscious contents through the unrelenting stream of the transference. There is a great deal of wisdom in myths of a founding deity who stills the chaos of the deep in order to establish the ordered world of agriculture or the dangerous world of the hunt. We have been arguing that there is a direct link between the abjected unconscious of the self and the unconscious of nature. Here a judicious use of the microcosm to macrocosm analogy can be used. Finite human consciousness stands to its own unconscious in the same way that nature natured stands to nature naturing. In both cases primal chaos is conquered so that an ordered (or at least partially ordered) domain can emerge and prevail against that very chaos. For finite consciousness to survive and emerge intact from the waters of the maternal it must push away its spawning ground and see it as a devouring threat. To return to the unconscious (qua birthing ground) would be to lose all light and all order, to be dismembered by the uncanny power that lies in the whence. This drama is reenacted over and over again by the self in process. Often the only reality that emerges from the unconscious are the dreams that serve to remind the self of its ancient roots and its ongoing debt to chaos. The material that does not appear in the dream work is manifest in those projections that empower the transference field. Insofar as the projection is at all complete, it will embody aspects of the unconscious chaos that haunt and assault the alleged sovereignty of consciousness.

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It is small wonder that the self will abject those reminders of chaos that seem to rise like a frightening tide around the bulwark of conscious defenses. Ultimately, the power within the human unconscious comes from the unconscious of nature, an infinite unconscious with no recognizable shape. The motive for abjecting the personal unconscious is clear; it seems to have only one message, one plan, namely, the destruction of the self. The ultimate defense against the unconscious is to erect a personal ground, a personal whence that can serve like a hermetic seal letting nothing alien into the economy of the psyche. Such a ground can take innumerable forms, some socially inscripted, some generated by internal heroic acts. Regardless of the source, the ground/grounded relationship keeps the self away from the churning waters of chaos, and propels it into semiotic intersections that further protect it from its own depth structures. The move from this defensive self-grounding to that of a cosmic self-grounding is almost automatic. Because of the uncanny logic of projection, and the astonishing reach of abjected material, the self paints its own picture onto the infinite canvas of the whence of nature. The symmetry here between personal self-grounding and cosmic self-grounding is quite precise. A creator god protects me against my own unconscious and the unconscious of nature. But the price turns out to be high. By cutting off the unconscious of the self and the unconscious of nature, the individual becomes uprooted from those pulsations that live at the very heart of the ontological difference. There is a profound horizonal closure whenever grounds emerge to shape the self and its projected world. It is a closed (determinate) system. Yet this is an unsteady closure as abjected material will (and must) enter into the projective field thus contaminating the relationship to nature's sacred folds. To lose contact with the unconscious is to enter into a power system that can be deeply destructive of semiotic and human prospects. Consciousness becomes persuaded that it has abjected chaos, while it has merely attempted to encircle it with feeble and permeable defensive structures. On the slightly more positive side, the momentary harmonic convergence between a personal and a cosmic ground makes it possible to envision closed totalities, particularly to see the dimension of nature natured as a bound whole within which it makes sense to find a delimited position. The self is positioned at the center of the world (if not spatially

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then certainly metaphorically) and has a secure contained measure against any threatening infinity. The innumerable orders of nature natured are given an illusory contour, and this illusion reinforces the founded contour of the self. The depth dimension of nature is simply repressed as the whence of the self becomes finitized and brought under narcissistic control. The unconscious of nature can be seen as the seed bed of all infinities. Perhaps it could be referred to as a hyperinfinity, or an infinity of a different order from those infinities manifest within and as nature natured. It can also be referred to as a measureless measure, the spawning ground of whatever takes and gives measure. It follows that it is not measured itself, nor does it have a measure from within. Our rare and fitful encounters with the unruly ground can, as noted above, strike us with a sense of the sublime, or they can have a shattering experience for the illusory self-created ground of the individual. It makes perfect sense to abject that which we most fear, and also most desire through melancholy recollection. Yet this abjection, which is almost always unconscious, shrinks the prospects of both the self and the selfs conception/experience of nature. Fortunately, it does not take an Ubermensch[Übermensch] to enter into the momentum of the ontological difference and to become open to the measureless measure. The correlation between providingness and natural grace provides the self with the courage to enter into what puts its deepest self-portrayal at risk. The underground motive of fear of and desire for the hyperinfinite governs the transactions of the sign-using self. However, this motive with two faces can be directly addressed by natural grace. The unruly ground does not interfere with the orders of the world. Nor does it reign as an omnipotent power that creates and sustains simultaneously. Providingness, which does not have a power relationship with the orders of the world, has an infinitely quieter presence than any creator. It is part of the way of the unruly ground, but it has no traits that make it commensurate with any divine agency. Providingness is without guile or consciousness. It does not participate in either a Heilsgeschichte or a Seinsgeschichte. Whatever histories that do obtain, and they are innumerable; do so within the shifting terrain of nature natured. There are no eschatologies within providingness and no apocalyptic dramas. There is no salvation and no redemption, only the endless quiet availability of orders. Providingness is not a sustaining and conscious agent to whom the self can turn. It is part of the inner paradox of

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providingness that it always turns away from what it sustains, while sustaining that from which it turns. The kind of ontological courage that comes from providingness is one that operates at a point of stillness where consciousness encounters the unconscious. Jung referred to the place/power where consciousness and the unconscious could enter into dialogue as the transcendent function. For the finite self providingness obtains as a type of transcendent function, enabling the individual to enter into the once abjected domain of the unconscious. Again, providingness does not have a semiotic map or an internal mental life. It is more like a natural gradient that finds itself at the nexus where the ontological difference becomes open. It sustains whatever is while flowing into those gaps or interstices that allow the presemiotic to encounter the semiotic. Finally, what can the self expect from the unruly ground? Very little if what is sought is some ally in negotiating between and among the shoals of nature natured. It cannot answer a petition or be quickened by prayer. It cannot provide an entelechy for the self, nor can it become a guarantor of meaning. Strictly speaking, there is no it that could be addressed. There is no it that could be the bearer of semiotic bounty. There is no it that could rescue the self from its own blindness. In a very clear sense, providingness can only make available a type of healing and transformation that is far more subtle than most that we desire. It stands at the nexus where consciousness can begin to probe into its own unconscious and abjected complexes. It allows for a more capacious absorption of abjected material, and can free the ego from the illusion of being self-sustaining. And most importantly it can silently accompany the self as it makes its first tentative encounters with the abysmal unruly ground.

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Chapter Four: Spirit's Eros Few allegedly foundational distinctions have been as damaging to thought and culture as that between eros and agape. In Protestant neo-orthodoxy a deep wedge was driven between these two forms of connectedness and relation. Eros was pictured as a movement from that which is inferior toward that which lures it upward because of its innate superiority. Hence the chief motor force for eros was seen as a kind of desire, fueled by a felt lack within the heart of the lower reality. Agape, in contradistinction, was held to be the spontaneous and gracious giving of love by the perfect being to those that/who were imperfect. There can be no motor-force in agape as a perfect being cannot desire anything that is other to its plenitude. While eros is all too understandable (or so the story goes), agape remains wrapped in divine mystery. The undesirable and unworthy are given divine love in spite of who/what they are. The final assumption is that the human process can overcome eros when it is gathered up in the arms of an agape that stands outside of the ravages of time and space (via entropy). Once the doctrine of a perfect and loving being has been jettisoned by a seasoned naturalism, the role of agape becomes deeply problematic. An ecstatic naturalist can ask: just where is agape supposed to come from; i.e., who or what is to bestow it? In classical Protestant (and neoorthodox) doctrine agape is always ''in spite of.'' The object of love is undeserving and the divine agent must overcome what for us must appear as an ethical/aesthetic distaste in order to bestow this ultimate confirmation and seal on the human process. In colloquial terms we get: we are loved in spite of our sin or estrangement. This logic of the in spite of, of resistance and abjection, permeates the traditional delineations of this alleged divine momentum toward the inferior orders of creation. In the now classical statement of the tensions alleged to hold between eros and agape, Anders Nygren, Bishop of Lund, traces the history of Greek forms of eros as they impinge upon the Christian idea of agape.

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He argues that agape cannot be derived from eros and that it has an independent (and superior) status. The mistake is commonly made of representing Agape as a higher and more spiritualized form of Eros, and of supposing that the sublimation of Eros is the way to reach Agape. The thought of "the heavenly Eros" reminds us that that is not the case; for heavenly Eros may be a sublimation of sensual love, but it is not itself capable of further sublimation. The heavenly Eros is the highest possible thing of its kind; it has to be spiritualized to an extent beyond which it is impossible to go. Agape stands alongside, not above, the heavenly Eros; the difference between them is not one of degree but of kind. There is no way, not even that of sublimation, which leads over from Eros to Agape. (Nygren 1930: 52) Not only do we see a radical type distinction between eros and agape, we also get a glimpse at the fundamental Christian abjection of eros as a moment within the life of the spirit. Insofar as we wish to overcome mere eros, we must spiritualize it; that is, denude it of any possible link to the sensual or sexual orders that might not be controllable. For Nygren, the Christian tradition has been continually plagued with a reentrance of eros on the scene, confounding both laypersons and systematic theologians. Nee-Platonism carried this dangerous cargo into and out of the Christian harbor throughout the early and Medieval church, making it difficult to gain clarity of the so-called differences between human and divine love. Augustine stands as the chief exemplar of a theologian who moved fluidly between the Hellenistic and Christian worlds, thus conflating aspects of eros with aspects of agape in his own unique synthesis. For Nygren, the most urgent task now facing the church is that of unraveling these two threads so that agape can once again become free from its ensnarement with unredeemable eros. But suppose that we in fact live in a world of sacred folds and intervals, sustained by the unruly ground that has no place for loges or consciousness. Sacred folds can enter into the self in an unending variety of ways, ranging from the state of being shriven and broken open to the quieter reality of a mere augmentation of a meaning horizon and its sign systems. Since the fold has no consciousness, and since it is intensified by our projections via the transference field, it cannot possibly be the

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place where something like agape envelops and transforms the self. Its very entrance into our meaning horizons is facilitated by our own unconscious. If this is agape it seems suspiciously like a narcissistic feedback loop. That is, it is our projected would be or perfected self coming back to meet us in the fold that has seized our attention. The logic of the in spite of is profoundly different in this self/self correlation, even though there will be forces of abjection and even obsession holding the lesser self in their grip. Further, there is no center of all centers that gives all folds some kind of measure or contour. Folds come and go outside of any principle of sufficient reason or any structure of intelligibility. And most importantly, they are beyond good and evil, or, better put, prior to the emergence of good and evil traits within the human order (to mention no others). Among all of the innumerable things that come to us from nature's sacred folds, creative and/or destructive, there is no evidence of agape. What sense would it make to say, for example, that nature's sacred folds love us in spite of our projections on them? In the traditional schema, god can be misused, at least from the standpoint of human illusion, and hence can accept and overcome that misuse. Folds misuse the self and the self misuses folds, but an embracing agapastic forgiveness does not emerge from their contour. If the folds are too plural, filled with unconscious human projection, amoral, and without consciousness, what of the intervals that surround them like an open infinite? Can these intervals, operating by an inverse logic from the folds, be the locus for an agapastic offering to the self? This possibility is also ruled out because agape must, by definition, come from a perfect conscious being that/who chooses to love inferior creatures precisely because they are unlovable. There is a striking sense in which this god must exist in a form of indifference to its created orders and not be affected internally by their actions. Here we see that the agapastic relation is profoundly asymmetrical. God loves the self in a way that is utterly different from how the self must love the divine. While the erotic relation (in the traditional account) is also asymmetrical, it is far less so in that the inferior lover can take on some of the traits of the beloved. Intervals are bound by their respective sacred folds. They have a natural location that shapes their how. This is subject to augmentation and spoliation during the movement of time (thermodynamic arrow). Lacking a centered consciousness it is not clear how we can build an

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analogical bridge between their unique form of awareness and that traditionally assigned to the monotheistic god. Once naturalism started the long historical march to deprivilege human traits in its implied semiotic cosmology, the traditional scheme of divine traits, always parasitic on selected human traits, had to collapse. The psychoanalytic term, a key ingredient in the ecstatic form of naturalism, deepened and radicalized this process still further, freeing our delineations of nature from provincial compressions that have served to mask the utter vastness of that which has no contour in either of its primal dimensions. We are left with the unruly ground, a ground that does present itself to us in the entwined realities of providingness and natural grace. Is there a sense in which the sheer providingness of nature can correspond to agape? Again, the answer is clear: providingness is ubiquitous, without guile, and absolutely indifferent to the innumerable orders of the world, thereby not altering any traits in any way. It could no more bestow love than could the water coursing through the gills of a fish. It is an enabling condition for continuity within nature natured. In a sobering sense, it does not leave anything of itself in the world, and does not decide what will or will not obtain at a given moment. Insofar as that involves a decision, and here we are stretching thought to the breaking point, it comes from nature natured. Natural grace, as perhaps the depth manifestation of providingness, does not confer agape to its objects. In the human order natural grace is experienced as a kind of gentle sustaining relation, but one that does not come from a loving agent that/who accepts us in spite of being unacceptable (Tillich). It is there in utter simplicity, having no awareness of its beneficiary. Most persons never encounter it in a direct conscious way, although it may well be operative in the unconscious. Whenever we stand into its dispensation the experience is not one of divine love but of a mute and thin wall against the rushing tides of nonbeing. It would stretch the concept of agape too far to fit it into this encounter. Put another way, the concept of agape says far too much about special agency, and not enough about the abyss underneath the human process. Since we have ruled out the concept of agape by analyzing the three primal realities of nature's sacred folds, intervals, and the unruly ground, we are left with the other, and often abjected, half of the distinction. What role can eros play in a generic perspective that always remains suspicious of human traits attempting to do metaphysical work? First we have to be clear that it is impossible to fully remove anthropocentric and

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anthropomorphic categories from philosophical theology. We are always left with some measure of the human in a fundamental perspective. And in certain carefully delineated cases, some use of an anthropomorphic bridge can be illuminating. But what is not acceptable is the refusal to probe into the ways in which those very human-centered categories can impede the opening momentum of naturalism. And whenever it seems compelling to use a human trait at a key juncture in the framework, every effort must be spent to assure that it is rendered as generically as possible. We will see that this final qualification applies to the ways in which the concept of eros will be reconstructed within the horizon of ecstatic naturalism. In what follows, the negative view of eros, as the mere longing of the imperfect for the perfect (held to be a neoPiatonic misconception) will be bypassed in favor of a more naturalistic account of its role in enabling connections between and among certain orders of the world. Without the vertical dimension of agape, eros can be freed for its proper horizontal role, a role which also includes a powerful movement toward the depthstructures of the world. This in turn will make it possible to develop a naturalist account of the spirit, for some a contradiction in terms. However, the analysis of eros as the how of the spirit will show that a naturalist pneumatology is not only possible, but compelling. The erotic spirit of ecstatic naturalism has only a tangential relationship to the spirit of the economic (worldly) trinity, and is far removed from Christian (and Hegelian) triumphalism. We are approaching the spirit through its how or way, rather than directly. One reason for this is that the spirit is so elusive, and ontologically so unique, that it is difficult to engage in a direct phenomenological probing of its fundamental nature. Unfortunately, the monotheisms offer little more than shop-worn antecedent categories that have minimal phenomenological or metaphysical warrant. When all is said and done, in the Christian worldview we get a spirit that has a clear historical role to play and that is coconstituted by the other members of the trinity. It does the work of the Christ under the conditions of entropy and history. It is never seen as an order within nature natured but is given an antinaturalist role to play in the personal, social, and cosmic drama. Finally, this spirit is never subject to a genuine otherness that could locate it within structures over which it has no purchase. What then of eros? We have eliminated the dualistic and vertical cosmology that functioned within classical and neoorthodox forms of

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Protestantism. Consequently, we can dispense with the misguided notion that the movement of eros is a vertical one involving a profound restlessness and lack. Eros, for ecstatic naturalism, does not need to go anywhere more perfect nor does it find itself enveloped by a higher love that becomes its measure. Its way is much more akin to what Jaspers's described as the bond among the various modes of the encompassing. The modes of the encompassing, such as our embodiment (dasein), consciousness-in-general or as such (Bewusstsein uberhaupt[überhaupt]) and the depth dimension of the self (Existenz), are discrete and without ontological connection. Eros, in its manifestation as reason, becomes the bond by and through which these modes are held together as an identity in difference (Jaspers 1935). For Jaspers, eros is a silent presence and power that has no specific shape of its own. Yet it is absolutely indispensable in sustaining the most fundamental connections among the modes of the encompassing. While the current perspective is uncomfortable with talking about discrete modes of nature, it shares with Jaspers's philosophy the sense of sheer encompassment and the often underground connective tissue of eros. While eros has innumerable ordinal locations it occupies them in a highly elusive way. This means that it makes little sense to ask about the tridimensional where of eros. Like its inner heart the spirit, eros is movement and transformation, the most protean of all momenta that appear within nature natured. Is eros intentional? Again, ecstatic naturalism severely limits the concept of intentionality to a small group of signusing organisms (in the currently known universe). Without a centered consciousness, and perhaps even selfconsciousness, intentionality cannot become part of a semiotic field of transaction. Eros is certainly not a conscious agent (nor is its heart, the spirit) and has no center, conscious or unconscious, that could function to direct its movements. Even its connective momenta function in ways that bedevil phenomenological inquiry. How is phenomenology to position itself so that it can see eros on the wing? Are we left with a weak version of Kant's transcendental argument in which we posit a ground to explain an appearance that otherwise remains baffling? There are terrains where transcendental arguments seem to blend with what might appear to be innocent phenomenological descriptions. The human process has a native tendency to posit grounds and rules (as in Peirce's abduction) to explain what is enigmatic or vexing. A

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transcendental argument assumes that it has a firm grip on what is manifest, the phenomenon in its full phenomenal appearance. Once this (often) illusory certitude is attained it is easy to push behind and underneath the phenomenon to some kind of governing principle. So for Kant we get: since all objects are in space and time, and since space and time cannot themselves be phenomenal appearances, it follows that space and time are introduced to objects by the only agent that can do so; namely, the human consciousness with its a priori structures. The argument appears to have the force of necessity. Yet the weakest link is the very first one. Objects are looked at in a highly selected way and distorted both as to their internal and their external features. For many transcendental arguments to work (again, going from the observed to the unobserved) a prior distortion of the phenomenal data is necessary, albeit, unacknowledged. One can put part of the difference between transcendental arguments and phenomenology this way: a transcendental argument moves quickly from consequent to alleged antecedent, while a phenomenological description rotates its chosen phenomenon (or phenomenal field) slowly through as many of its ordinal locations as time and energy and need allow. The minute a ground is posited, phenomenology is abandoned for a very different kind of strategy. In a fairly straightforward sense we are talking about two different rates of speed. As Wittgenstein observed after years of careful phenomenological descriptions of language and forms of life, genuine philosophy requires a different kind of effort, like that of trying to swim underwater. This effort has to wait on the measure coming from language and things. And in this waiting, the rush to posit hidden grounds must be stilled. In this slower process it becomes clear that many so-called grounds are simply not needed, once the phenomena show their full scope and integrity on their own terms. Is this to say that a transcendental style argument is never needed? No. In fact, it is impossible to sustain any vast categorial array without some use of the argument from observed consequent to hidden ground. Jung's archetype theory is a case in point: it involves very careful phenomenological descriptions of such things as dreams, cultic practices, pathology, art, and religious invariants, while also moving to posit some kind of hidden archetype for these archetypal images. Interestingly, the more careful and detailed the phenomenological descriptions, the more compelling may be the transcendental positing of antecedents. In other words, the choice is never between phenomenology and transcendental

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arguments, but between those arguments that rush in too soon before the phenomenological descriptions have cultivated their relevant fields of description, and those that wait until phenomenology has (for all practical purposes) exhausted its energies. In all that follows there will be an effort to describe first and posit second. Needless to say, such pure stages don't exist and we are really talking about a dialectic or larger hermeneutic circle in which there are creative tensions moving to expand and contract the circle in different respects. Yet to quote Kierkegaard, all positing must be done in "fear and trembling." Few topics have so inflamed philosophical and theological consciousness as that of the spirit. Astonishing claims are made for this person that/who can turn ordinary human history into a proleptic drama of the coming kingdom of god. The spirit can empower believers to speak in tongues that only a fellow intoxicant can interpret. It can empower entire groups of people toward concerted social action (whether demonic or benign) and can enlighten the lonely individual to stand against just such a group. The spirit, even in its economic trinitarian form as working through space and time, is eternal rather than (for the current perspective) posttemporal. It can heal, challenge, blind, uplift, inspire (both hermeneutes and writers), bind together, and even serve as a lover. How did we come by this almost manic cluster of traits? It should be clear that in the traditional hermeneutic pneumatological circle, the transcendental positing dimension overpowered the phenomenological one. More damaging from the standpoint of the prepsychoanalytic horizon of meaning, is that no effort was spent probing into the role of projection in filling the spirit with delimited content that had its roots in desire. It is as if the spirit functioned as a kind of mobile sacred fold, never confined to fragmented origins but riding over and through the more measured domains of folds and intervals. Few ideas are more astonishing to the current perspective than that which posited the spirit as a person. Even given the use of analogy and via negativa (sometimes combined in a curious way) to stretch the concept of person beyond anthropological bounds, it still seems puzzling that such a strategy would recur again and again. Clearly narcissism and a deep conceptual laziness combined to create an intimacy between spirit and self that belies the deeper phenomenological data. The conceptual tragedy is that the rise of the concept of spirit almost always entails the eclipse of nature. In practice, although not always in theory, spirit

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becomes the genus of which nature is the species. Given that the spirit has often been magnified by human desire, and given that nature is indifferent to human prospects, this preference should not be difficult to understand. But again, in the spirit of Wittgenstein, philosophy must learn to swim underwater, especially when culture is sailing on the surface at an ever accelerating speed. Ecstatic naturalism is thus concerned with inverting the positing to description ratio in the hermeneutic circle. In the process it follows that nature is allowed to emerge into our awareness as that which is absolutely indefinite and unlimited in scope and complexity. The spirit is reduced in cultural stature so that its way or how is truly commensurate with (embedded in) the how or way of nature. This latter point is especially tricky because the spirit shares with nature the sense that it is not locatable. As has been stated in various ways, nature has no location, it is the seedbed for locations, but cannot be located by something other than itself. So too, the spirit has a tenuous relation to location (locatedness), and, while it is measured by nature, it is also indefinite in scope in its own way. Put differently, nature and spirit are both infinite but nature is the larger infinity, yet even lesser infinities transgress location. How, then, do we proceed with an ordinal phenomenology of eros so that it can open up a path to the elusive spirit? Do we start with the urtext on eros, Plato's Symposium, hoping that some phenomenal contour will emerge from the conflicting narrative horizons? Do we seek a preeminent phenomenon, such as human sexuality, and use that as a descriptive and explanatory paradigm for all subaltern orders? Do we seize upon a fruitful analogy like that of field from physics (Pannenberg 1991) and apply it to the how of eros? Do we resurrect a key piece of process metaphysics, that of prehension as the feeling of feeling, and reconfigure it to cover an erotics of the spirit? Or do we sense where the antecedent framework lacks a key connective tissue and smuggle in eros to be the glue that is otherwise absent? Each of these five strategies has been tried in one guise or another, and each time some aspect of eros has been disclosed, along with much semblance that is alien to the phenomenon itself. In what follows, they will be used as starting points (since even phenomenology fails to be presuppositionless) for further delineations. However, once there is a sense that the strategy under analysis begins to cover over the phenomenon, it will be let go. One can see each perspective as sustaining

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a transference field that encounters/sustains an ontology of erotics in a unique way. This transference energy has a special gradient and makes all reflection on eros difficult and often overdetermined. For the philosopher and theologian, personal erotic complexes can intrude with a special urgency and deflect the phenomenological enterprise. This fact reminds us that the contemporary hostility toward depth-psychology among philosophers has negative consequences for any framework that must work through personal complexes in order to have any hope of creating a judicious perspective on these phenomena. Our first way station is that of the classical literary narrative of eros and its powers. Plato clearly is working through the most common views of the subject in his era (cf. Schleiermacher 1836). The tendency toward personification is especially strong, as eros, deeply correlated to beauty, becomes a young or old god who has a special relation to the human. Even Socrates envisions eros as a great spirit of the between, a kind of translator plying the dark terrain between the mortals and the immortals. Eros lives in a vertical universe in which the measure from above must be conveyed to those lacking measure in the polis. For Plato, at least on one reading, the impending death of the gods has produced a crisis that can only be answered by assuming that there is a measure over and above the gods themselves (Euthyphro), a measure that will endure after the gods have faded from the cultural horizon. Eros remains one of the links (along with dialectic [Meno] and poetic mania [Ion]) between the embodied and blind humans and the shining ones who have transcended the darkness of the senses. On the other side, eros is not personified or cast in the humorous guise of desire for a lost component (Aristophanes), but seen as a cosmic force. The physician at the banquet locates eros at the interstices of things where the opposites creatively combine to produce harmony and measure. Here we get a more interesting approach to eros that moves past some of the regnant anthropomorphisms in Plato's drama. For Eryximachus, eros transcends the human and the divine and is found throughout the other orders of the world. The influence of eros, ". . . may be traced both in the brute and the vegetable creations, so wonderful, and so all-embracing is the power of Love in every activity, whether sacred or profane" (Plato 1961: 539). For the medical practitioner, eros can be used to bring together the warring elements of the body, such as the wet and dry, or the hot and cold. It is also found in the heart of music where there is a ". . . rhythmic and harmonic

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union'' (Plato 1961: 540). By becoming permeable to the more temperate face of eros, the soul can unite its own disparate elements in a way that is directly analogous to the movement of the seasons throughout the year as they adjust temperature and moisture to the needs of growth and dormancy. Eryximachus concludes his speech with a rapturous encomium on the powers of eros to transform and bring into harmony each and every element of the cosmos. And so, gentlemen, the power of Love in its entirety is various and mighty, nay, all-embracing, but the mightiest power of all is wielded by that Love whose just and temperate consummation, whether in heaven or on earth, tends toward the good. It is he that bestows our every joy upon us, and it is through him that we are capable of the pleasures of society, aye, and friendship even, with the gods our masters. (Plato: 1961: 541) His slight personification aside, Eryximachus stretches his conception of eros to include all harmonic regulation and all just measure. The connection between eros and the good is fundamental, and this bond is the centerpiece in the arts of healing. To heal the sick is to participate in the cosmic erotics, i.e., in the how of eros. To create music is to add to the incremental wealth of eros in the world, both human and divine. And, one can assume from the very different and manic presentation of Alcibiades at the end of the dialogue, the craft of philosophy is more than the search for wisdom, it is fundamentally an erotics of being. Clearly, this perspective is more horizontal and less interested in the transference/countertransference flow between the gods and the mortals. When eros becomes personified it is easily located within a deep transference field that ties the self to the god/sacred fold. This depth-transference field is more intense and particular than the general transference field of the problematic itself. From a Freudian perspective the former field would be a libidinal extension that sublimates desire by directing it toward a nonreal object. There is some adequacy in this account, namely, that it shows the link between the unconscious of the believer and the object that is sustained by that very unconscious. This process is deepened by social reinforcement and the convergence of numerous transferences in a larger field.

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We must reconfigure the personified versions of eros it the dialogue, in spite of their wonderful presentation. For Phaedrus, the personification of eros takes the form of the most ancient of gods, a god who is responsible for establishing the bond between selves (male and male), especially in the case of armed conflict. For Pausanias, the personification occurs in the form of a split between a heavenly and earthly form of eros, the former having no, ''hint of lewdness" (Plato 1961: 535). Following our physician we hear from the comic playwright Aristophanes who uses the arch concept of lack to explain the often frenzied movement of eros in the human order. His myth of a primal person suddenly cut in half by an angry Zeus, spending the rest of its life looking for its lost partner, shows in humorous but stark detail the intensity of longing that animates human commerce. Aristophanes was able to probe into some of the depth structures of the unconscious in an indirect way by opening up what could be called an ontology of lack. For Agathon, eros is most clearly manifest in the power of inspiration behind great creativity, "Love is himself so divine a poet that he can kindle in the souls of others the poetic fire, for no matter what dull clay we seemed to be before, we are every one of us a poet when we are in love" (Plato 1961: 549). The creative hypomania that comes from eros is the essential ingredient in giving shape to new and more powerful aesthetic harmonies. Without divine eros the self would quickly fall into habit and inertia. It enlightens the city state as well as its artists. For Agathon, eros has its intemperate side, the side that is the most valuable for cultural life. Socrates, of course, envisions his great ascent or ladder of being moving from particularity to the general. This aspect of his speech, when stripped of its vertical dimension and its form of ontological priority (i.e., that the form is more real than its carrier), can serve as a lamppost insofar as it succeeds, however faultily, in leaving the anthropocentric starting point. With these reflections in mind, we can reverse Plato's own literary trajectory and elevate the more generic account of the physician Eryximachus for analysis. For here there is at least a hint of what it would look like to develop an erotics outside of the complexes and forces of the more personal transference field. The focus shifts away from the transaction between gods and mortals toward a more generic account of nature as the pervasive reality in need of harmonic forces. Eros becomes a field in its own right, a field that never rests and never allows entropy to have the last word (at least in the present). For Eryximachus, as we

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have seen, there is a measure that obtains between the eros-generated harmony of the world and the harmony of the soul. Eros permeates both the human and the nonhuman and cannot be compressed into one deity or power. What can be concluded from this brief purview of the urtext on eros? The initial, and most important, distinction is that between those narratives that stress personal and anthropomorphic structures, and the one narrative that moves into a more generic horizon. Without ignoring the irony and semiotic play of the other speeches, it is possible to locate their implied delineations within a personal depth-transference field that links the desiring self to its own projection in the social sacred fold that appears before the self as its divine other. This compresses the field of eros into a barely symmetrical transaction between the self and its own unconscious. Is it stretching credulity to see this circle as a form of auto-eroticism? The generic perspective of Eryximachus stands as a challenge to the anthropomorphic approach that ends by abjecting nature in favor of a linear soul/divine commerce. While there are clear hints of nature's intervals in Socrates' evocation of the between, as the space wherein eros moves, they are not fully developed nor seen as ontological powers in their own right. The generic move of the physician is quickly covered over so that the all-toopersonal can occupy the meaning horizon. It is small wonder that Christian dogmatics was able to twist this urtext into a morality tale against a narcissistic form of relation. Put simply: Plato had it coming, but only to the extent that he didn't follow the trail of one of his own delineations. Of course, Plato was an archdramatist and no drama can be successful that doesn't have conflict at its center. The needs of an exhibitive and dramatic structure are different from those of a more assertive and generic work. From the standpoint of phenomenology, this urtext provides us with an inside look at the human transference field as it struggles to satisfy desire through a projection of an ideal self. This is the drama of the lack felt by the lower for its own higher self. The hermeneutic circle is too tightly bound to be of direct service in a perspective that wishes to honor the ubiquity of nature. Yet this window on the self is extremely important for a metaphysics of the human process, a subaltern configuration within the larger enterprise. At the same time, it propels us outward toward the metaphysics of nature by showing us the depth-logic of personal and cultural eros. It is part of Plato's multi-faceted genius that he was able

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to reveal the powerful erotic currents circulating through a small (and privileged) part of his culture. And almost in spite of himself he pointed the way to a nonprovincial erotics. The sexual norms for the Athenian aristocratic males allowed for bisexuality under certain circumscribed conditions, tied to education. Be that as it may, Plato fully understood the often astonishing power of sexuality to overturn social order, hence the comic entrance of the promiscuous traitor Alcibiades as the final denouement of the drama. Seduction and betrayal, as well as intoxication and abandon mark eros when its mighty powers course through individuals and/or communities. There is clearly a profound respect and an equally profound fear of eros in the Greek psyche. It is a force that often lacks measure. The return of measure is signaled by the story Alcibiades tells on Socrates who refused to be seduced by him. In his ironic rebuttal Socrates admits to feeling a strong sexual attraction to this most handsome of men, but remains bound by the deeper eros, that of philosophy. The story of the physician Eryximachus has been lifted out of the tale and privileged insofar as it points to an ontological erotics. Yet we cannot leave this urtext without using one of its central speeches as a link to our next theme, that of human sexuality. As noted, Aristophanes grasped a central truth of eros and its way or how. His comic portrayal of the primal human situation and its tragi-comic ending by an act of the god, gives a mythical narrative that has an astonishing parallel to that of depth-psychology. The story is simple. In the beginning humans were fully rounded beings with two sets of every appendage. They could move by doing cartwheels. In addition to males and females a third race of hermaphrodites existed. All went along well until this early race of humans decided to scale the heavens and challenge the gods. This violation of measure had to be met by force. Rather than simply annihilate the three races, Zeus decided to cut each person in half and rearranged their appendages so they could function in a reduced capacity. This produced a profound distress. In the words of Aristophanes, "Now when the work of bisection was complete it left each half with a desperate yearning for the other, and they ran together and flung their arms around each other's necks, and asked for nothing better than to be rolled into one" (Plato 1961: 543). Thus from the very beginning of our current biomorphic state we have been characterized by a hunger based on an ontological lack. The term "hunger" better captures the depth of longing characteristic of our species than the term "libido,'' which can

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easily be reduced to an excitation in need of cathexis. This hunger is so pervasive, so deep, that it cries out from the darkest recesses of our being, those places where the patriarch Zeus left his mark, his cut into our flesh. How do we translate this uncanny narrative into a categorial analysis of the human process? The translation steps are fairly clear. The primal state of sexual containment, a dreaming innocence, is broken when consciousness reaches for autonomy (its own measure against the powers of origin). With the attainment of partial autonomy the basic ontological wound of the self becomes manifest (Corrington 1996: 1). The wound grows deeper and becomes more painful with each successful stride away from origin. The loss of the maternal (our necessary personification of origin) becomes too great to deal with in its own terms so it gets translated into a more horizontal movement that seeks a displaced origin in other selves. The strongest hunger felt by the self is for fusion with another in the mistaken belief (rarely conscious) that the original wound will be covered over and perhaps even healed. Thus we run to fling our "arms around each other's neck" meanwhile deepening the estrangement that hovers around us whenever we gain more consciousness. If we do have a momentary fusion with the other, especially in genital sexuality, we can escape the haunting presence of the lost object. Yet the worm always turns in the apple and the fusion is broken because of the nature of the hungers involved. If two persons see the lost object in each other they have already upped the ante to the breaking point; namely, by seeing the infinite in a finite self. In certain liminal states, tied to eros, the distinction between the infinite and the finite can be effaced. But the archetypal structures involved are too strong. The power of the infinite soon recoils against the boundaries of the finite and bursts forth, thus tearing open the wound again. This process is repeated over and over, aided by innumerable magical potions that can dull the sensibilities and keep the self in an artificial liminal state, but only for so long. Where is eros in this mythic/categorial process? Eros appears in sexual hunger, in sexual connection, in sexual fusion, in sexual release, and in the resurgence of the infinite to break that very fusion. Since the beginning of recorded history human sexuality has been seen as profoundly ambiguous, as divine and destructive, as pure hunger with no satiety and as endless satiety with no fulfillment. Sexual fantasies course thorough consciousness with such astonishing regularity as to be

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recognizable permanent guests of the inner self. The gap between these fantasies and their potential enactment is one of the most painful in life. Aristophanes was profoundly accurate when he focused on the primal lack that almost always drives people into hoped-for fusion. Eros emerged out of the lack. Yet by an ironic turn, eros strives to sustain the lack and overcome it at the same time. The power that moves the self toward fusion is also the power that makes total fusion impossible. Put in the most abstract terms, human sexuality manifests a painful dialectic between the principle of individuation and the principle of sheer identity, with only the briefest moments of reconciliation between them. Let us focus on the first element in human eros, that of its hunger for connection or fusion. In the western monotheisms there has been a sustained abjection of the depth correlation between eros and the spirit. The spirit has been de-eroticized or de-sexualized to such an extent that its role is confined to that of hermeneute or comforter. Its highly circumscribed ecstasies are limited to what might cynically be called meaning ejaculations. Whatever spirit is allowed to do is related to its links to the antecedent patriarchal god. This is both a historical link and a proleptic momentum, with each direction participating in an almost antiseptic cosmology of redemption and (for some) blessedness. When this tamed spirit does spill over the boundaries it does so in the larger context of a higher purpose and meaning. If we return to the sensed link between eros and the spirit, going back behind the monotheisms and their militant abjections, we see that the images of hunger and fusion are appropriate in both (allegedly separate) spheres. Sexual hunger is an inescapable manifestation of the ontological wound at the heart of the self. This is not to deny the deep evolutionary roots of sexual display and the need for reproductive success, but to show a parallel structure within the human order that adds another dimension of depth (not to mention pain and frustration) to the sexual economy. In the simplest economic terms, a being must live long enough to pass on its traits to another generation. An infinite variety of means are deployed within the sphere of biosemiotics to make this possible. When self-consciousness emerges (and there is no self-consciousness without an ontological wound) nature takes on another fold or semiotic layer that produces a sexual hunger much more complex and ramified than that found elsewhere in the known orders of nature. One distinguishing mark of this new semiotic/sexual layer is that it has an infinite and inexhaustible momentum within the lives of finite sign-

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users. Reproductive success, while still a biological imperative, takes on a secondary role in the sense that it is only one part of this new opening infinite that envelops the self and fills it with a kind of longing that is existentially unique. Insofar as the object of this longing, filled with infinite content via the sexual transference, is unavailable, or incompletely available, there is a momentum akin to that of the black hole invoked earlier. That is, the lack felt between infinite desire/need and finite frustration pulls psychic energy into a nether region that stands outside of the normal psychic economy. There is a decentering of the self as it struggles to hold onto the imagined promised land of infinite fusion while also seeing its unused content pulled into an abyss that seems to mock the original semiotic/sexual longing. The energy that is not received by the magical other spirals downward into the psychic black hole from which it may later emerge (bending our analogy) in a new context. Lest this portrayal seem extreme or slightly manic, it must be remembered that semiotic/sexual energy is both foundational and surplus, by which is meant that it surges through the entire psyche (although, contra Freud, not exhausting it), while also being something that can emerge on the edges of other forms of psychic energy. Any activity can take on a sexual hue (eating being a classic example celebrated in literature and film), and any movement from the finite to the infinite can be rendered into sexual terms without doing violence to the phenomenological data. This latter point can be understood when the emphasis is on the fusion that takes place between finite individuals as they each also project an infinite that is held to reside in the interstices of their conjunction. Insofar as Aristophanes invoked a kind of prehistorical golden age for the first protohumans, he was pointing to a kind of infinity that was a threat to the gods. We have translated his image of Zeus cutting these rounded beings in half into the existential structure of the ontological wound(ing) that still marks us in a figurative way. In the sexual terms just delineated we can see that the magical other (part real, part fantasy) stands as the lost infinity that still haunts self-consciousness in terms of both its whence and its whither. The infinite sexual whence is, of course, tied to the lost maternal, while the infinite sexual whither is tied to the spirit as the mobile infinite under the conditions of finitude. Why are the infinite whence and whither tied to sexuality? For the infinite to have meaning, for the self to have any purchase on/with it, it must be available in a finite container. By definition, finite

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sign-users must be able to encounter signs that come from a delimited region (at least initially). What region or container seems to have the most promise for the self? It is a region that must be semiotically dense and must also be able to address the self in return. The most obvious candidate for satisfying these criteria is that of another selfconsciousness. Yet this candidate has an extra advantage beyond density and mutuality, it is also, via analogy with the addressing self-consciousness, the locus for at least a muted version of the infinite. So, the magical other, who carries an intense projection, is the locus for the infinite, finite semiotic density, and mutuality. There is no greater or more compelling container in the known semiotic universe nor, of course, any that are more precarious due to an equivalent inner lack. The burden carried by any sexual partner is great. Not only must he/she carry the projection that turns them into the magical other (which, of course, can quickly fade), but they must also be the ongoing locus for the infinite whence that secures origin and the infinite whither that enters into the opening infinite of the spirit. While this language might seem hopelessly inflated within the experienced momentum of sexual fusion, the structures are clearly evident in the momentary loss of finite entanglements that accompany the drive for identity. The perennial correlation of sex and death has deep phenomenological warrant. The finite self momentarily dies in order to enter into the postfinite self. There is a tragic element in this dance of finite and infinite. Not only does nature use reproductive organs to transmit viruses and bacteria, there is the violence that so often accompanies the quest for fusion. Of course, there are innumerable degenerate forms of enforced sexuality that do not participate in any but a most twisted way in the search for the whence and the whither. Sexual pathology remains one of the most horrible reminders of the distortions that enter into the ontological lack. Eros gives way to power, connection to domination, fusion to annihilating rage, and the depth logic of sexuality becomes violated, often beyond any hope of repair. There is a certain risk in linking eros to the spirit precisely because there are more forms of psychopathology in this sphere than perhaps any other. It is at this juncture that some normative criteria are needed to augment sheer phenomenological description so that false eros can be separated from genuine eros. This is especially tricky because of the violent and controlling history of just such proposed norms.

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The concept of norm to be used here does not correspond to concepts like approved or disapproved, but is more akin to concepts like enabling or facilitating. The latter terms denote the role of sexuality in providing the most intense link between the finite and the infinite within the context of mutuality and embodiment. The function of a norm at this juncture is to highlight those correlations that are most likely to preserve the dialectic of finite and infinite while simultaneously providing some healing for the ontological wound that propels individuals into sexual relations. Even though fusion remains in the not yet, and cannot be an ideal in itself, there are innumerable betweenness states that reach down into the ontological wound with varying degrees of success. The embodiment of eros in human sexuality also has roots in the spirit. If eros is the how of the spirit, its most dramatic momentum within the orders of nature natured, then its fierce concrescence in sexual relations is also at the same time a powerful presencing of spirit. Once the vertical notion of agape has evaporated, the horizontal work of spirit's erotics can emerge into greater clarity. The paradigmatic case of eros sheds light on subaltern configurations, precisely because it breaks open traits that are usually concealed. Once again, the old English notion of being shriven appears as a near perfect descriptor for the erotics of human sexuality. The fierce entrance of the finite/infinite dialectic enters into the human process and breaks open its concresced shells of meaning and interaction. Yet one can be shriven and reconfigured at the same time, thereby showing the marks of the infinite on sexual partners. The basic norm, then, for human sexuality is seen in the way in which the finite/infinite transaction is individuated in mutuality. Neither the gender nor the number of partners is important under this more generic norm, only the depth structure by which, in mutuality, the infinite is allowed to enter into the eruptive sign systems of the individuals involved. Two absolutes do appear as ethical norms: a minimal age and a responsibility for antecedent commitments (including medical disclosures). How, more specifically, does the spirit's erotics work in human sexuality? It should be noted at the start that the spirit can work in innumerable other spheres besides human sexuality, and this becomes important for those for whom sexuality is either impossible (due to a vow) or too psychologically painful. Sexuality is chosen as a paradigm of the spirit for two reasons: because it has been especially abjected by the western monotheisms, and because it combines an extreme

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intensification of finitude with an astonishing openness (under the right conditions) for the infinite. Specifically, then, sexuality brings the pertinent individuals into an intensification of their own sign systems, a kind of magnifying and stretching of the now mood-filled signs of relation. In the mutuality of the touch and look of the other, these signs take on yet another intense fold of meaning, entering more and more into the space between the selves. The between starts to radiate meaning in its own right, almost like an extremely high-powered transference field that gathers the individuals around a common center. This field is both fierce in expression and fragile in nature. Yet it becomes the locus for some of the most semiotically dense structures in the human order. As this field grows it becomes hungry for the infinite that lies all around its edges. This hunger is in the field itself, not in any human decision. The sexual partners are gathered up in the momentum by which their own transference field becomes deeply permeable to the opening infinite of the spirit. Is this experience statistically rare? Not necessarily. Colloquial speech has its own ways of illuminating this experience, the most suggestive being the description of seeing the white light. If sexuality were not so overdetermined in the human world, through imagination, longing, mourning, and obsession, it would be less likely that some extrafinite meaning could be assigned to it. If it is part of nature's cunning that animals struggle to reproduce, then it is part of the cunning of spirit that the human animal learn, perhaps for the only time in a given individual's life, that sexuality can also lead to the infinite. One suspects that part of the abjection of sexuality (and of spirit's erotics) lies in the fact that it provides a competing and highly individual route to the infinite, thus relegating any monotheistic religion to the margins. We have examined the urtext on eros and focused on the key issue of human sexuality as a paradigmatic expression of the spirit as the opening infinite. In the process the image of the field has emerged as having some direct pertinence. Is there any phenomenological evidence for the field dimension of eros and the spirit? Here the answer seems more obvious. The above correlation of eros with a sexual transference field, experienced by sexual partners in the space between them, shows that at least in this intense concrescence eros is a field phenomenon, and, by implication, so too the spirit. Clearly, neither spirit nor its how eros are spatially bound, even though they appear within space. If the spirit can

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''blow where it wills," it can also be transordinal; that is, it can occupy more than one order of relevance simultaneously. The most conceivable way in which it can do so is as a field with shifting parameters. The German Protestant theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg has taken the field metaphor or image seriously. Perhaps in violation of Wittgenstein's warning against taking a term from one language game and placing it in another, he uses field theory in physics as a profoundly helpful model for explaining the how of the spirit, and for explaining the continuing relationships among the three members of the trinity. Thus he argues that the holy spirit of Christianity is itself operative as a field, while the transactions within the larger domain of the trinity (perichoresis) are fieldlike themselves. But insofar as the field concept corresponds to the older doctrines it is not a mistake, but does justice to the history and concept of spirit, if we relate the field theories of modern physics to the Christian doctrine of the dynamic work of the divine Spirit in creation. (Pannenberg 1991: 82) Here we see the field concept apply to the economic trinity; namely, the trinity as it works "in creation." The field of the spirit cannot be circumscribed in advance, although the current perspective differs from that of the Christian in that it is profoundly skeptical of the stated eschatology of the spirit in which it will envelop human history and bring it into the kingdom of god. However, one point of convergence between ecstatic naturalism and Christianity lies in the sense that the spirit is an opening power/process within nature natured, and that it has a different relationship to time than do the other orders of the world. The mobile field of spirit's erotics is posttemporal. As noted, the posttemporal differs from the eternal in that it has a continuing relation to time in its thermodynamic sense. It appears around the edges of temporality and provides a unique antientropic form of opening. This conquest of entropy does not, however, overcome the entropy found within the orders of the world, but holds open a space of possibility. While Pannenberg overstates the case, his analysis, here remaining within his understanding of physics, is instructive.

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This being so [occurance of microevents], the force field of future possibility is thus responsible for the fact that the process of nature, which as a whole tends toward the dissolution of creatures through increase of entropy, also offers space for the rise of new structures of increasing differentiation and complexity, as actually took place with the evolution of life. (Pannenberg 1991: 100101) The priority of the future makes possible the space within which novel variations can occur. Pannenberg's extrapolation from science might be unwarranted, but his sense of the future quality of the opening field is crucial. The field of the spirit lives to hold open a place for the entrance of the infinite, at least within the human order. This clearing away of horizonal opacity and embedded habit does free the human process for an encounter with that which is transhorizonal. And eros occupies one of the most powerful intersection points with the posttemporal. For whatever reason, the posttemporal is not initially manifest to the self through the whence but as a quickening of the whither. Through this quickening, the power of origin is reignited and allowed entrance into the human process in a dramatic new guise. The posttemporal is manifest around the edges of temporality. It does not split itself into three modally distinct forms, nor does it stand in an eternal now that is isolated from thermodynamic temporality. It intersects with the timeing of the self as a field that envelops the particular temporality of the individual or group. The opening and creating power of the erotic field of the spirit moves the self beyond finite goals (emergent from nature's intervals) toward the nonfinite realm that sustains a highly dynamized whither. Ironically, and at the same time, the posttemporal invokes the darkened whence and enables it to move past abjection and closure. The spirit, working through its outer circumference eros, opens up nonbound goals and origins, thus providing a means for negotiating with the dialectic of fold and interval. Spirit's erotics works to open the space of connectedness and to give the sign-using finite self the courage to enter into the fissures and breaks of nature natured that suggest the mysterious presence/absence of nature naturing. How does this modified field concept relate to the process concept of prehension? Few contemporary perspectives have so captured the liberal theological imagination as that of process metaphysics. And few

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perspectives have done such violence to nature by overly romanticizing certain privileged human traits to the exclusion of a more generic portrayal of nature's innumerable orders (which may share no one trait in common). Since some reflection on this issue took place in the third chapter, a brief statement of the divergence between process naturalism and the ecstatic form will suffice. The focus will be on the difference between transordinal erotics and internal universal relations sustained by feeling. For ecstatic naturalism, the concept of an erotic or spiritual field, while transordinal, will still have its own kind of finitude. The spirit is an opening infinite and thus without a contour that could be mapped. Yet the spirit is also subaltern to nature and is firmly located within nature natured. Nature, in both of its dimensions, contains every conceivable type of infinite, while the spirit expresses only one main type or form. There are innumerable orders, past, present, or future, where the spirit is absent. There are other orders where the spirit is manifest in a very weak fashion, and there are orders where the spirit is manifest in its plenitude. The Christian attempt to link spirit with human history not only privileges one temporal trajectory, but makes the profound mistake of seeing history as the genus of which nature is the alleged species, and this gives spirit too much scope and power. Spirit's erotics moves toward conjunction, disjunction (where required), and the enhancement of meaning. It is splintered in its operations by the orders of the world, yet gathers itself up from its imposed estrangement into a mobile unifying and opening presence that intersects with the human process. At no point is it omniscient or omnipresent. Lacking omnipotence, the spirit cannot appear anywhere it wants to but is dependent on natural conditions, even while ameliorating some aspects of the semiotic universe. Thus while it is appropriate to talk of the spirit blowing where it will in the sense that it is transordinal, it does not follow from this that it escapes the resistance and opacity of innumerable orders of the world. Hence it is finite and infinite in very different respects, the delineation of which remains a challenge. In process naturalism the power of relation is sustained by each occasion's prehension of all noncontemporary occasions. This drop of experience will have positive prehensions (feelings) of a vast number of past occasions and allow their relevant data to become internalized; namely, to ingress. At the same time each occasion will have negative prehensions of a vast number of past occasions qua their available data.

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Once this process of positive and negative prehension is completed the drop of experience ceases to become and freezes into its final form, thus making it available for other occasions down the line. It is a fascinating question as to whether or not god can have negative prehensions as a way of excluding certain data from heaven. Be that as it may, the process conception of relation is that it is ubiquitous and comprehensive in its quest for data. Here we see a kind of infinity that stems from a deeply flawed categorial array, one that flees from the ontological difference and imposes a romantic notion of relation onto the fissure ridden world of nature natured. Relation must be seen as a relative term. That is, anything in relation will only be related to some things in some respects. It will not be related to all things in any one respect nor will it relate to its sphere of relevant things in all respects. Some respects and not others are at play and some relations (within those respects) and not others are the limiting conditions, even for the finite/infinite field of the spirit. Put starkly: there are no compelling reasons for accepting the romantic and narcissistic myth of prehensive relation. On the other hand, there are any number of reasons for accepting the lack of infinite scope in any delineated order of the world. Finally, the question was raised of the arbitrary nature of eros and spirit within the context of a categorial array that may or may not need these concepts in order to complete its architecture. It has often been argued that Whitehead brings in his primordial dimension of god in order to solve some sticky issues with essence and instantiation. This could be a metaphysical version of the pseudo-scientific god of the gaps, imported whenever there is a temporary (or long term) break in an explanatory chain or framework. However, explanatory chains are rather rare as evidence is usually compiled through a series of intersecting or concatenating perspectives, each of which has its own evidentiary compulsion, but one that may be difficult to add to another as if it were a child's building block. The now classic case of this clustering of evidentiary trails is the neo-Darwinian synthesis, itself still growing and changing, but only insofar as the internal and external tensions compel a move into an altered conceptual horizon. Almost by definition, phenomenology is unfriendly to leaps of any kind, especially those that claim to go behind the phenomena to some explanatory principle, or principle of sufficient reason. There is, of course, a difference between a transcendental argument and an argument

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that attempts to solder together two broken ends that somehow need to connect. For example, consider the linguistic argument that says: children manifest the following linguistic traits; they somehow know how to creatively combine different parts of speech and they are very quick in their language learning. Behavioral analyses fail to account for these two observed facts, therefore something besides operant conditioning is at play. This something else must be a depth-transformational structure perhaps hardwired into the brain. Strictly speaking, this is not an empirical argument, but it is one that can be carefully examined and eventually accepted if none of its competitors has done as well. On the other hand, an argument from the gaps seems to move into a different order altogether to explain observed facts. Whether the argument functions on the edges of science or within a generic metaphysical horizon, the upshot is the same. There are fewer traces between the posited explanation and the phenomenon. It is one thing to posit archetypes or transformational grammatical structures, it is another thing entirely to posit divine intervention in evolution or within a conceptual scheme in which some relevance needs to be established among components. Hence, a judicious transcendental argument can enhance a conceptual array and bring some elusive phenomenon into clarity. Insofar as the posited explanation is always open to remediation or elimination, and insofar as it also deals with phenomena of roughly the same ontological type, it can serve a very important role in any knowledge horizon. At the other extreme, an argument of the gaps is not open to reconstruction, nor does it try to remain within a common ontological horizon. A god who/that interferes with the causal order is different from hardwired transformational rules that could become objects of more direct empirical study. How, then, does the analysis of spirit's erotics fare within the context of ecstatic naturalism? Have we made some phenomenological headway or has eros been smuggled in to close a gap in the antecedent framework? In looking at the latter possibility we can ask: just which real or alleged gap is being closed by talking of the erotic and transordinal spirit? Is it a gap between self and world, or a gap between selves, or a gap between folds and intervals, or a gap between nature naturing and nature natured? To even talk of a gap between self and world is to remain within a transactional dualism that utterly ignores projection and the transference field. Semiotically, the self is a locus for

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vast external sign systems that receive an extra layer of intensity when they enter into the complex structures of selfconsciousness. This argument extends to the alleged gap between selves. Semiotic convergence is highly compulsive and often highly directional. The projective and transference fields that connect the self to folds, also connect selves to each other. These two movements are inseparable. Any gaps that emerge are subaltern gaps tied to forms of abjection or conscious directionality that make other structures liminal. They are always gaps within the larger connective tissue. Folds and intervals are deeply connected by their own inner logic, and do not require an external agent to bind them together. One cannot appear without the other. Again, any gaps are subaltern within the configuration or between configurations. There is no phenomenological or categorial need for an overarching matrix of connection among all folds and all intervals. The last gap is, of course, unique. It is the perennial self-fissuring of nature, a fissuring that can never be closed or gathered together by some third linking reality. If nothing else is taken from the current perspective it should be this deep sense that the human process stands over a great fissure that permeates its own life via the interaction of consciousness and the unconscious. Eros can no more close this gap than a mite could sew together the north and south rims of the Grand Canyon. The most profound mood associated with a glimpse into the ontological difference is that of being shriven in the face of the sublime. And this experience transects the outer edges of the aesthetic into the opening edge of the religious. In passing through these five way stations of the erotic, as the how of the spirit, we have seen several key traits emerge from the phenomenological and ordinal rotation. From Plato, perhaps in spite of his intention, it has become clear that eros has a tendency to spread into and among the orders of the world, and is not confined to any sacred fold(s). At the same time, his reflections have illuminated the relation between eros and a profound hunger for the whence of the self, manifest in the ontological wound that accompanies all creatures endowed with selfconsciousness (in the currently known universe). By working through this urtext two insights have become compelling: the transordinal scope of eros (Eryximachus), and its rhythmic correlation with the primal wound that deepens with age (Aristophanes). From the sphere of human sexuality it has become clear that eros works in and through the hunger for fusion and differentiation, the former point

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being commensurate with that of Aristophanes. The latter point relates to the profound pull of the material maternal that must be countered by the momentum that secures relative autonomy. In both fusion and differentiation eros enters fully into the transference field between selves and provides access to the infinite. Insofar as eros has already been manifest in the transference field, it follows that it must be its own kind of field phenomenon. That is, it is transordinal (can occupy more than one order in more than one respect at a time) and available to the self only as a field. This field can concresce into an object, but this process is always potentially self-transforming since the concrescence alone without the field is dangerous. Finally, eros, qua spirit, is the locus for the posttemporal that intersects with time in its three modes. This intersection awakens the power of origin in a transfigured guise just as it makes the not yet vibrate with a nonspecific nonlocalized urgency (unlike the folds which are more fragmented and particular in theft whence). Spirit's eros is thus the posttemporal, transordinal, lack generated, infinity evoking, connecting, and differentiating momentum that lies deeply within the transference field (of the human order). We have honored the Greek experience that attests to the ofttimes ferocious power of this field of relation manifest in both pathology and creativity. The next and final step is to probe into that from which and through which eros comes. Eros is the outer circumference of the even more elusive spirit; its how under the conditions of finitude. In traditional phenomenological fashion we have started with an adumbration (shadowing/Abschattung) of the outer facets of the phenomenon in order to gain some sense of its provenance. The relative completion of the larger process comes when we work through the rhythms of the how (eros) into the rhythm maker itself (spirit). This step struggles to remain within the inner logic of phenomenology, yet must make a judicious use of transcendental arguments in order to give as complete a portrayal of the spirit behind eros as possible. Gathering the threads of previous descriptions we have seen that the spirit cannot be a consciousness because it does not have a center of intentionality. Because it must have less scope than nature (a lesser infinity) it cannot be omnipresent. Because it must unfold its own way within the context of resistant orders, it cannot be omnipotent. Because both it and history are embedded in nature, it cannot envelop human history and lift selves into a nonnatural kingdom of god or meaning. There are histories within nature, but there is nothing analogous to a

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sacred history or history of being. Because it is an opening infinite it cannot be a sign or interpretant as they are part of the actual infinite. And, because it is transordinal it cannot be confined to any portrayal that stresses a unique covenant or relation. No locus of the spirit is privileged, for selves, communities, or ongoing religious traditions. The spirit belongs to nature, not to Christianity (which still labors under a nongeneric understanding of spirit's eros). One obvious place to start our descriptions is with the location where the spirit stands over against signs and interpretants. There is a very long tradition, from St. Paul to Josiah Royce (18551916), that sees spirit as the great interpreter, the spirit-interpreter. This spirit-interpreter intersects with the human community whenever that community is called upon to interpret and ramify signs of great complexity and depth. Finite minds cannot open out the more elusive dimensions of certain signs, even when, ironically, many of these signs were produced by humans. The elusive dimension of these signs comes from their embeddedness in the unconscious, both of the self and of nature. Hence any powerful and shaping sign will manifest once conscious and currently unconscious contents. Emerging from the transference and projective fields that live among selves, signs, especially if they are religious, will have traces and potentialities that conscious agents will always fail to exhaust. The spirit does not add new signs to this mixture, nor does it have an antecedent interpretive code that could somehow be accessed. This latter point, in spite of its absurdity, is constantly forgotten by finite sign-users when they feel a special urgency to unravel powerful interpretants that allegedly hold the key to explaining boundary situations. The concept of code should be confined to human cultural artifacts. It is difficult to extend the concept to extrahuman nature without some serious modifications. And the only way it could be legitimately applied to the spirit is if one assumes that the spirit is constructed along the lines of highly routinized human forms of communication. The spirit is something far less delimited than a code, a sign, or a sign interpreted (i.e., an interpretant). It is more akin to an elusive ground relation that opens up prospects within and around codes, signs, and interpretants. Within the fierce momenta of religious consciousness, few lessons may be as hard to absorb as the foregoing; namely, that the spirit cannot provide a semiotic blueprint for life, and cannot provide an absolute barrier against nonbeing. It is not a body of signs waiting to be decoded, perhaps in some liminal state of consciousness. It cannot give the

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individual or community a road map of the future, nor can it rescue the self from what Nietzsche called ''the hell of the irrevocable." What, then, can the spirit do that makes it of some intrinsic interest? The answer is clear: the spirit opens up interpretive prospects without providing an actual interpretation. As an open or opening infinite, the spirit provides the connective tissue between and among signs, and opens up each relevant sign so that that sign's own inner momentum can become less hindered. As posttemporal the spirit is antientropic insofar as it can bring something like the "eternal now" (Tillich) to the present. But the spirit is antientropic in a second sense in that it is an enabling condition for semiotic expansion just when constriction and decay threaten the sign(s). Again, these forms of antientropy do not affect physical systems in a magical way, but work in a different dimensionality to allow for an increase in order and (interpretive) heat. The spirit has no internal semiotic content. It does not hold at its heart great life secrets. It is much more akin to the opening power of water as it washes away barriers to understanding. Here we have to be careful in our language. The concept to be avoided is that the spirit is somehow conscious of this clearing-away process, and that it somehow knows where and when to appear. What seems most likely is that the spirit is a fully natural gradient that moves through the semiotic terrain according to the dictates of the terrain itself. It is almost as if it is attracted to those semiotic clusters that cry out for loosening and connection to larger fields of meaning. Of course, the spirit can do little without the dialectical engagement of finite sign-users, willing to enter into the lesser infinite in order to intensify and transform the finite. All of this can be rotated through a different language game. The spirit is like a blemish-free body that can only appear to be inscripted, but which can help innumerable other bodies find the inscriptions that are appropriate to their measure. Never doing the writing, the spirit is unusually sensitive to the writing that has been and will be done. This is highly metaphorical of course, but it stresses the ground and self-othering quality of the spirit. The spirit is the ground in the sense that it provides the vast and stable clearing within which fuller semiosis can take place. The spirit is self-othering in the sense that no sign or interpretant can ever envelop it. Can the spirit live without its semiotic other? We cannot possibly answer this question. All that can be assumed is that the spirit is deeply wedded to semiosis in the world that we currently occupy.

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Perhaps the most striking aspect of the work of the spirit is the movement it initiates to move unconscious material into consciousness. In the classical Freudian world there are structures of resistance and displacement that are very hard to overcome without hard therapeutic work rooted in the transference. In the Jungian world there is little sympathy for the concepts of resistance or self-censuring. The stress is on the almost overwhelming power by which the unconscious moves its contents into a partially unwilling consciousness. In both frameworks, dreams are crucial indicators of the unconscious/conscious dialectic. If Freud relies on a decoding model, in which displaced and condensed primal material has to be rescued from its manifest cover, Jung focuses on the process of conscious amplification in which dream material can begin to take on deeper layers of meaning. Freud, of course, would strongly resist any notion of a transordinal spirit that could aid in interpreting the dream work (movement from latent to manifest content). Jung, on the other hand, took the concept of the spirit very seriously and concluded that there was some kind of extrapersonal hermeneutic guide operating at the nexus where the unconscious encounters consciousness (the transcendent function). Jung's sensitivity to this interpretive ground transformed his dream theory into one that went beyond the myths of resistance and decoding, and enabled him to enter into the momentum of the open infinite as it facilitated the slow process of clarifying the signs and interpretants of dreams. The transference field between analyst and analysand is one of the locations for the appearance of the spirit-interpreter, enabling each person to work past complexes and projections into the primal unconscious material. Again, the spirit does not possess something like a dream code, as the unconscious already knows what its manifest signs are about, but can enter into the process of dream interpretation when there is a danger of inertia and highly coerced interpretation. Like the Socratic version of eros, dreams ply the greatest between in nature, that separating the unconscious (both personal and natural) from consciousness. As noted, the human unconscious stands to consciousness as nature naturing stands to nature natured. The abyss that continues to open up in the ontological difference (nature's selffissuring) can never be closed, even though it can be abjected in an infinite variety of ways. Even the elusive presence of the unruly ground, as manifest in providingness and natural grace, fails to energize and transform this great fissure. Folds and intervals can send traces into the abyss, but this is not

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the same as transforming the between into some kind of shaping event. In this last series of reflections we begin to see the most important role that the spirit plays within the human order (to name no others). We have seen that the spirit-interpreter (i.e., that how of the spirit that is part of the life of signs) has no internal script but can empower sign-users to become better readers of the scripts of nature and selves. It does so by hovering in and around signs and sign systems as a mobile open infinite. The spirit can clear away alien condensations that have accrued to signs, and can provide a series of clearings within which sign linkages can become more readily apparent. These processes can be called horizontal in the special sense that they do not necessarily enter into the depth dimension of the ontological difference. Without them interpretive life runs the risk of being trapped in a repetition of origins. With them there is the possibility that the posttemporal can still the unrelenting sweep of chronos within an embracing kairos. The vertical dimension of the spirit's erotics is the more important for the self. For here the spirit opens out the fundamental abyss that lies beneath each and every sign, each sign system, each fold, each interval, and each personal unconscious. If the unruly ground can sustain the things in being, only the spirit can provide a glimpse into the ontological difference that both protects and transforms sign-users. The enterprise of ecstatic naturalism is itself dependent upon the spirit-interpreter for its understanding, however primitive and (still) anthropomorphic, of the eternal self-fissuring of nature. This is not to say that the spirit-interpreter can help sign-users across the abyss so that they can grasp the unconscious momenta of nature naturing. That door is forever shut to finite selves. What the spiritinterpreter can do is to enable selves to see the ontological difference as the difference that it is. Insofar as the worst forms of anthropomorphism have been left behind, it can hold before us some sustained awareness of the radical difference between the infinite and the finite. In traditional Christian dogmatics, the (holy) spirit is the counselor, abiding with those selves who wish to enter into the historical power of Jesus who is the Christ (Tillich). The spirit can comfort and can guide. Like Socrates' daemon it may even be able to warn the self when psychic danger lurks. In the economic trinity the spirit is self-othering from the father and the son, while also being bound up with them for its self-definition. The spirit can teach and can enflame, it can goad and can heal. The spirit keeps the radical future open by linking the community

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to the emerging kingdom of god. And its field dynamics can keep closed systems from becoming totally isolated from each other. Ecstatic naturalism, as a post-Christian universalist perspective, has little sympathy with grand historical dreams tied into special forms of revelation and textual control. Sign-using selves are ill-served by those religions of the book that use their privileged sign systems as concresced interpretive horizons. The elevation of any text or texts above all others is a form of semiotic imperialism that actually runs directly counter to the work of the spirit-interpreter. While Christianity has grasped some of the more pertinent dimensions of the spirit, it has domesticated them into a provincial framework that has slowly cut off the sustenance the spirit needs to unfold as the opening infinite. Put in more dramatic terms: the spirit has its own unruly nature that can never be bound by any human (or allegedly divine) tradition. How, then, does spirit's eros relate to the three other great religious dimensions of nature? In answering this last question the focus will be on the role of erotics in the place between the self and nature's religious momenta. The overarching quality of the spirit's life as it circulates among these dimensions of nature is that of clarifying continuity and discontinuity for the sign-using self. There are innumerable hidden and manifest spheres of relevance within these structures, but opacity or abjection make many of them difficult to see. The spirit-interpreter moves to erode the power of abjection so that the self can become consciously open to what has been a nourishing source or goal all along. This openness is not possible, however, without a kind of energy to meaning transfer that gives the self the courage to face into its abjected material. When the self enters into the blinding power of one of nature's sacred folds, it enters into the dialectic of fusion and denial. The temptation toward fusion with the fold makes the finite forget that it is finite. The spirit enters into this tension by opening out a small space within which the self can see the fold in its otherness, while still taking on some of its powers for its own semiotic trajectory. This is not to say in a simplistic fashion that the spirit matches the power of the fold, but that it can provide a kind of ontological transformer within which some of that power is decreased before it enters into the self, via the transference field. The spirit's erotics provides a mobile connective tissue (field) that sustains and measures relation. At the same time, in its mode as spirit-interpreter, the spirit helps the self find a nexus of meaning in which the

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finite and the infinite are brought into a nondestructive correlation. Thus the spirit works through its erotic field by transforming both power and conscious meaning. As noted in the second chapter, catching sight of one of nature's intervals is difficult. It is a bit like trying to see a deep space object through a telescope. Only an indirect look using the sides of the inner eye will bring out reasonable outline. So too with the interval, which is often overwhelmed by its corresponding fold. It is very hard to see directly and must be approached with a kind of second sight. The spirit serves as the source for this second sight, precisely because of its own lack of signs and interpretants, it can become permeable to the most subtle of signs. Put differently, the spirit's body has no marks, but is unusually sensitive to even the faintest signs that can become inscripted on it and, in turn, on those selves who intersect with it. The sign-using self has no trouble encountering the manic signs of the folds, but needs some extrahuman help to see the elusive traces and signs of nature's intervals. The unruly ground shares with the spirit its primary quality of being unruly; that is, of having a rhythm that is without logos or form. Insofar as the self comes to understand the unruly quality of the nonubiquitous spirit, it can, by analogy, begin to sense the unique features of the ubiquitous (within nature natured) unruly ground. The spirit, especially in its erotic how, is far more intimate with the self than the unruly ground, which can be sensed in the less intense availability of natural grace. There is a clear difference between the power of spirit's eros, and the much gentler sense of providingness that can sometimes envelop the self. But the presence of spirit as both power and meaning, opens out into the unruly ground that is the whence for the innumerable orders of the world. Nature's religion is not always a comforting one. It is as protean and complex as any of the other dimensions of nature. Never friendly to anthropomorphic longing (except by accident), it overturns almost all of what we usually mean by the word ''religion." Yet it always has a way of breaking into our concresced human religions and of showing them a measure beyond the shells that we have erected. At the outset the question was raised: is it still possible to use the word "god" in ecstatic naturalism? This question can be translated into one slightly different: is there any categorial or existential role for the god complex within a generic perspective that makes the ontological difference between nature

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naturing and nature natured central? The answer, however painful to some antecedent perspectives, is clear. Within the vast sweep of nature's sacred folds, nature's intervals, nature's unruly ground, and nature's spirit, all gods and goddesses, however long-lived or powerful, are always enveloped in the end by the mystery of nature's abyss.

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Bibliography The following bibliography contains: 1) All works cited in the text, 2) All works directly relevant to the writing of the text but not specifically cited, 3) My own publications, where pertinent, and 4) Secondary literature, including appropriate reviews, on my Ecstatic Naturalism. ATWELL, John E. 1995. Schopenhauer on the Character of the World: The Metaphysics of the Will, (Berkeley: University of California Press). BADHAM, Roger A. 1997. "Windows on the Ecstatic: Reflections upon Robert Corrington's Ecstatic Naturalism," Soundings, Vol. LXXX (forthcoming). BARTUSIAK, Marcia. 1993. Through A Universe Darkly: A Cosmic Tale of Ancient Ethers, Dark Matter, and the Fate of the Universe, (New York: Harper Collins). BIBLE. 1991. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version, (Oxford: Oxford University Press). BRENT, Joseph. 1993. Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). BUCHLER, Justus. 1955. Nature and Judgment, (New York: Columbia University Press).

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1989. Metaphysics of Natural Complexes, Second Expanded Edition, eds. by Kathleen Wallace and Armen Marsoobian with Robert S. Corrington, (Albany, NY: SUNY Press), based on the original 1966 edition. BULLER, Cornelius A. 1996. The Unity of Nature and History in Pannenberg's Theology, (Lanham, MD: Littlefield Adams Books). CASSIRER, Ernst. 1929. Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer). English translation, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, in 3 Vols., trans. Ralph Manheim, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). CASTI, John L. 1994. Complexification: Explaining a Paradoxical World Through the Science of Surprise, (New York: Harper Collins Publishers). CORRINGTON, Robert S. 1982. "Horizonal Hermeneutics and the Actual Infinite," Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1 & 2, pp. 3697. 1985. "Justus Buchler's Ordinal Metaphysics and the Eclipse of Foundationalism," International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. XXV, pp. 289298. 1987. The Community of Interpreters: On the Hermeneutics of Nature and the Bible in the American Philosophical Tradition, (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press). 1987a. Pragmatism Considers Phenomenology, coedited with Thomas Seebohm and Carl R. Hausman, (Washington: The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and The University Press of America). 1988. "Being and Faith: Sein und Zeit and Luther," Anglican Theological Review, Vol. LXX, No. 1, pp. 1631. 1988a. "Semiosis and the Phenomenon of Worldhood," Semiotics 1987, ed. John Deely, (Lanham, MD: University Press of America). 1989. "Faith and the Signs of Expectation," Semiotics 1988, eds. Terry Prewitt, John Deely, and Karen Haworth, (Lanham, MD: University Press of America).

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1990. "Emerson and the Agricultural Midworld," Agriculture and Human Values, (Winter), pp. 2026. 1990a. "Transcendence and the Loss of the Semiotic Self," Semiotics 1989, eds. John Deely, Karen Haworth, and Terry Prewitt, (Lanham, MD: University Press of America). 1991. "The Emancipation of American Philosophy," APA Newsletter, Vol. 90, No. 3, pp. 2326. (With a reply by Cornel West). 1991a. "Josiah Royce and Communal Semiotics," The Semiotic Web 1990, eds. Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok, (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter), pp. 6187. 1991b. Nature' Perspectives: Prospects for Ordinal Metaphysics, co-edited with Armen Marsoobian and Kathleen Wallace, (Albany, NY: SUNY Press), article, "Ordinality and the Divine Natures," pp. 347366. 1992. "Ecstatic Naturalism and the Transfiguration of the Good," Empirical Theology: A Handbook, ed. Randolph Crump Miller, (Birmingham: Religious Education Press), pp. 203221. 1992a. Nature and Spirit: An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism, (New York: Fordham University Press). 1993. An Introduction to C.S. Peirce: Philosopher, Semiotician, and Ecstatic Naturalist, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers). 1993a. "Beyond Experience: Pragmatism and Nature's God," American Journal of Theology & Philosophy, Vol. 14, No. 2, May, pp. 147160. 1993b. "Nature's God and the Return of the Material Maternal," The American Journal of Semiotics, Vol. 10, Nos. 12, pp. 115132. 1993c. "Peirce's Abjected Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Profile," Semiotics 1992, ed. by John Deely, (Lanham, MD: University Press of America). 1994. Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World, Advances in Semiotics, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). 1995. "Peirce's Ecstatic Naturalism: The Birth of the Divine in Nature," American Journal of Theology & Religion, Vol. 16, No. 2, May, pp. 173187.

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1996. Nature's Self: Our Journey from Origin to Spirit, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers). CRUZ, Eduardo. 1995. Review of my Nature and Spirit: An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism, The Center for Theology and Natural Sciences Bulletin, Vol. 15, No. 4, Fall, pp. 1719. DAVIES, Paul. 1992. The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World, (New York: Simon & Schuster). de CHARDIN, Teilhard. 1955. Le Phenomene[Phénomene] Humain, (Paris: Editions du Seuil). Citations are from English translation, The Phenomenon of Man, trans. William Wall, (New York: Harper & Row, 1961). DE MARZIO, Darryl Matthew. 1997. Robert Corrington and the Philosophy for Children Program: Communities of Interpretation and Communities of Inquiry, MA Thesis at Montclair State University, Montclair, New Jersey. DEAN, William. 1986. American Religious Empiricism, (Albany: SUNY Press). 1988. History Making History: The New Historicism in American Religious Thought, (Albany: SUNY Press). DEELY, John. 1969. "The Philosophical Dimensions of the Origin of Species," The Thomist, XXXIII (January and April), Part I, pp. 75149, Part II, pp. 251342. 1982. Introducing Semiotic: Its History and Doctrine, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). 1987. "On the Problem of Interpreting the Term 'First' in the Expression 'First Philosophy'," Semiotics 1987, ed. John Deely (Lanham, MD: University Press of America), pp. 314. 1988. "Semiotics and First Philosophy," Hermeneutics and the Tradition, ACPA Proceedings Vol. LXII, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Washington, DC), pp. 136146. 1990. Basics of Semiotics, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

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1994. The Human Use of Signs: Or Elements of Anthroposemiosis, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers). DELANEY, C.F. 1993. Science, Knowledge, and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C.S. Peirce, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press). DESMOND, William. 1995. Being and the Between, (Albany: SUNY Press). 1995a. Perplexity and Ultimacy, (Albany: SUNY Press). DEWEY, John. 1927. The Public and Its Problems, (New York: Henry Holt & Company). 1929. Experience and Nature, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company). 1934. A Common Faith, (New Haven: Yale University Press). DRISKILL, Todd A. 1994. ''Beyond the Text: Ecstatic Naturalism and American Pragmatism," American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, Vol. 15, No. 3, September, pp. 305323. ECO, Umberto. 1976. A Theory of Semiotics, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). 1980. In nome della rosa, (Milan: Bompiani). English translation, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver, (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983). 1988. Pendolo di Foucault, (Milano: Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri Bompiani, Sonzogno Etas S.p.A.). English translation, Foucault's Pendulum, trans. William Weaver, (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989). 1990. The Limits of Interpretation, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). EMERSON, Ralph Waldo. 1844. "Experience," Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, (Boston: Phillips, Sampson & Company, 1855). Reprinted in, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, Critical Edition, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

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FERGUSON, Kitty. 1992. Stephen Hawking: Quest for a Theory of Everything, (New York: Bantam Books). FEUERBACH, Ludwig. 1841. Das Wesen des Christentums. English translation from second edition (1843), The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot, reprinted by (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1989). FISCH, Max H. 1986. Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism, eds. Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). FOUCAULT, Michel. 1975. Surveiller et penur, (Paris). English translation Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977). FREUD, Sigmund. 1920. Jenseits des Lustprinzips, (Vienna). English translation, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989). 1933. Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einfuhrung[Einführung] in die Psychoanalyse, (Vienna), New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, The Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989). GADAMER, Hans-Georg. 1960. Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzuge[Grundzüge] einer philosophischen, (Tubingen[Tübingen]: Mohr). English translation, Truth and Method, (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1982). GELPI, Donals L., S.J. 1993. Review of my Nature and Spirit: An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism, Theological Studies, Vol. 54, No. 2, June, pp. 369370. GRANGE, Joseph. 1994. Review of my Nature and Spirit: An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism, Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy Newsletter, No. 68, June, pp. 3637.

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GRIBIN, John. 1993. In The Beginning: After COBE and Before the Big Bang, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company). HANN, Lewis Edwin. 1991. The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, Library of Living Philosophers Vol. XX, (La Salle, IL: Open Court). HARTSHORNE, Charles. 1948. The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God, (New Haven: Yale University Press). 1962. The Logic of Perfection and Other Essays in Neoclassical Metaphysics, (La Salle, IL: Open Court). 1965. Anselm's Discovery, (La Salle, IL: Open Court). 1967. A Natural Theology for Our Time, (La Salle, IL: Open Court). 1973. Born to Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). 1984. Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, (Albany: SUNY Press). 1992. Personal 2 page correspondance of October 30th. HARVEY, Van. A. 1995. Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). HAUSMAN, Carl R. 1993. Charles S. Peirce's Evolutionary Philosophy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). HAWKING, Stephen W. 1988. A Brief History of Time, (New York: Bantam Books). 1993. Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, (New York: Bantam Books). 1996. The Illustrated A Brief History of Time, (New York: Bantam Books). HEGEL, G.W.F. 1807. Phanomenologie[Phänomenologie] des Geistes, (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952). English translation, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).

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IRWIN, Alexander C. 1991. Eros Toward the World: Paul Tillich and the Theology of the Erotic, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). JASPERS, Karl. 1935. Vernunft und Existenz, (Groningen), English translation, Reason and Existence, trans. William Earle, (New York: Noonday Press, 1955). 1962. Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung, (Hamburg: R. Piper & Co., Verlag). English translation, Philosophical Faith and Revelation, trans. E. B. Ashton, (New York: Haper & Row, 1967). JUNG, Carl Gustav. 1917. ''Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse," (Zurich). English translation, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, second edition, Vol. 7 of The Collected Works, trans. R. F. C. (Princeton: Bollingen, 1966). 1925. Analytical Psychology: Notes of a Seminar Given in 1925, ed. William McGuire, (Princeton: Bollingen, 1989). 1927. "Die Erdbedingtheit der Psyche," (Darmstadt). English translation, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, second edition, Vol. 8 of The Collected Works, trans. R. F. C. Hull, (Princeton: Bollingen, 1968). 1934/1954."Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious," Eranos-Jahrbuch, (Zurich). English translation, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, second edition, Vol. 9.1 of the Collected Works, trans. R. F. C. Hull, (Princeton: Bollingen, 1968). 1938. "Die psychologischen Aspekte des Mutterarchetypus," (Zurich). English translation, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, second edition, Vol. 9.1 of The Collected Works, trans. R. F. C. Hull, (Princeton: Bollingen, 1968). 1950. "Zur Empirie des Indivuationsprozesses," (Zurich). English translation, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, second edition, Vol. 9.1 of The Collected Works, trans. R. F. C. Hull, (Princeton: Bollingen, 1968).

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1954. "Von den Wurzeln des Buwusstseins," (Zurich). English translation, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, second edition, Vol. 9.1 of The Collected Works, trans. R. F. C. Hull, (Princeton: Bollingen, 1968). KANT, Immanuel. 1781. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, (Riga, second edition 1787). English translation, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Normen Kemp Smith, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1929). 1793. Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, (Koningsberg[Köningsberg]). English translation, Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson with an essay by John R. Silber, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960). KENNEDY, David. 1994. "The Five Communities," in Analytic Teaching, Vol. 15, No. 1, November, pp. 316. KRIKORIAN, Yervant H., ed. 1944. Naturalism and the Human Spirit, (New York: Columbia University Press). KRISTEVA, Julia. 1974. La revolution[révolution] du langage poetique[poétique], (Paris: Editions du Seuil). English translation, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 1985. Au commencement etait l'amour: psychanalyse et foi, (Paris: Hachette). English translation, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). 1987. Soleil Noir: Depression[Dépression] et melancholie[mélancholie], (Paris: Editions Gallimard). English translation, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 1991. Etrangers[Étrangers] à nous-memes[mêmes], (Paris: Librairie Artheme Fayard). English translation, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

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1993. Les Nouvelles maladies de l'ame, (Paris: Librairie Artheme Fayard). English translation, New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Guberman, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). KRUSE, Felicia E. 1990. "Nature and Semiosis," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. XXVI, No. 2, pp. 211224. LACAN, Jacques. 1966. Ecrits[Écrits], (Paris: Editions du Seuil). English translation, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977). LECHTE, John. 1990. Julia Kristeva, (London: Routledge). LEIBNIZ, G.W. 1686. "Primary Troths," from English translation, G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989). 1695. "A New System of the Nature and Communication of Substances, and of the Union of the Soul and Body," from English translation, G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989). LEWIN, Roger. 1992. Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos, (New York: Macmillan). LIGHTMAN, Alan. 1991. Ancient Light: Our Changing View of the Universe, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). MACHTIGER, Harriet Gordon. 1982. "Countertransference/Transference," as anthologized in Jungian Analysis, ed. by Murray Stein, (La Salle, IL: Open Court). MANN, Thomas. 1924. Der Zauberberg, (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag), English translation, The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, (New York: Random House, 1927).

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MARITAIN, Jacques. 1957. "Language and the Theory of Sign," Language: An Enquiry into Its Meaning and Function, ed. Ruth Nanda Anshen, (New York: Harper & Row), pp. 86101. MATES, Benson. 1986. The Philosophy of Leibniz: Metaphysics and Language, (New York: Oxford University Press). McFAGUE, Sallie. 1982. Metaphorical Theology: Models of God, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). MOORE, A.W. 1990. The Infinite, (London: Routledge). MORRIS, Richard. 1993. Cosmic Questions: Galactic Halos, Cold Dark Matter, and the End of Time, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.). NESHER, Dan. 1984. "Are There Grounds for Identifying 'Ground' with 'Interpretant' in Peirce's Pragmatic Theory of Meaning?," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. XX, No. 3, pp. 303324. NEVILLE, Robert C. 1968. God the Creator: On the Transcendence and Presence of God, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Reprinted with new Preface by SUNY Press in 1992. 1974. The Cosmology of Freedom, (New Haven: Yale University Press). Reprinted with a new Preface by SUNY Press in 1995. 1980. Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology, (New York: Seabury Press). Reprinted with new Preface by SUNY Press in 1995. 1989. Recovery of the Measure: Interpretation and Nature, (Albany: SUNY Press). 1991. A Theology Primer, (Albany: SUNY Press). 1993. Eternity and Time's Flow, (Albany: SUNY Press). 1994. Review of Robert S. Corrington's Nature and Spirit: An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism, International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. XXXIV, No. 4, Issue No. 136, December, pp. 504505.

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1995. Normative Cultures, (Albany: SUNY Press). 1996. The Truth of Broken Symbols, (Albany: SUNY Press). NOTH[NÖTH], Winfried. 1990. Handbook of Semiotics, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). NYGREN, Anders. 1930. Eros och Agape, (Stockholm: Svenska Kyrkans Diakonistyrelses Bokforlag[Bokförlag]). English translation, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953). O'HARA GRAFF, Ann ed. 1995. In the Embrace of God: Feminist Approaches to Theological Anthropology, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books). OLIVER, Kelly. 1993. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double Bind, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). OLSON, Alan M. 1992. Hegel and the Spirit: Philosophy as Pneumatology, (Princeton: Princeton University Press). OTTO, Rudolph. 1917. Das Heilige, (Munich), English translation, The Idea of the Holy, trans. by James W. Leitch, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). PANNENBERG, Wolfhart. 1988. Metaphysik und Gottesgedanke, (Gottingen[Göttingen]: Vandenhoek & Reprecht), English translation, Metaphysics and the Idea of God, trans. Philip Clayton, (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1990). 1988a. Systematische Theologie, band 1, (Gottingen[Göttingen]: Vandenhoek & Reprecht), English translation, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromily, (Grand Rapids: William B. Erdmans, 1991). 1991. Systematische Theologie, band 2, (Gottingen[Göttingen]: Vandenhoek & Reprecht), English translation, Systematic Theology, Vol. 2, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromily, (Grand Rapids: William B. Erdmans, 1994). 1993. Toward a Theology of Nature: Essays on Science and Faith, (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press).

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PEIRCE, Charles Sanders. Note: The designation CP abbreviates The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. IVI eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 19311935), Vols. VIIVIII ed. Arthur W. Burks (same publisher 1958). The abbreviation followed by volume and paragraph numbers with a period between follows the standard CP reference form. The designation W followed by volume and page numbers with a period in between abbreviates the ongoing Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, ed. Max H. Fisch, Vols. IV, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 19821993). 1866. "The Logic of Science; Or, Induction and Hypothesis," in, W 1.358. 1867. "On a New List of Categories," CP 1.545567; W 2.49259. 1867a. "Upon Logical Comprehension and Extension," CP 2.391426. 1868. "Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic: Further Consequences of Four Incapacities," Journal of Speculative Philosophy, (2), 193208, reprinted in CP 5.318357, W 2.242. 1868a. "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man," Journal of Speculative Philosophy, (2), 103114, rerpinted in CP 5.213263, W 2.193. 1868b. "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities," in CP 5.310317; W 2.241. 1877. "The Fixation of Belief," Popular Science Monthly, (12), 115, reprinted in CP 5.358387, W 3.242. 1878. "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," Popular Science Monthly, (12), 286302, reprinted in CP 5.388410, W 3.257. 1878a. "The Order of Nature," Popular Science Monthly, (13), 203217, reprinted in CP 6.395427; W 3.306. c. 1890. "A Guess at the Riddle," CP 1.354416. 1891. "The Architecture of Theories," The Monist, (1), 161176, reprinted in CP 6.734.

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1892. ''The Doctine of Necessity Examined," The Monist, (2), 321337, rerpinted in CP 6.3565. 1892a. "The Law of Mind," The Monist, (2 July), 533559; reprinted in CP 6.102132. 1892b. "Synechism and Immortality," CP 7.565578. 1893. "Evolutionary Love," The Monist, (3), 176200, reprinted in CP 6.287317. c. 1893."Of Reasoning in General," of the "Short Logic," CP 7.555558. c. 1896. "The Logic of Mathematics; An Attempt to Develop My Categories from Within," CP 1.417520. c. 1897."Fallibilism, Continuity, and Evolution," CP 1.141175. c. 1897a."Ground, Object, and Interpretant," CP 2.227229. 1898. Cambridge Conference Lectures: Reasoning and the Logic of Things, ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner with and introduction by Kenneth Laine Ketner and Hilary Putnam, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 1898a. "Detached Ideas on Vitally Important Topics," CP 6.6687. 1898b. "The Logic of Continuity," CP 6.185213. 1898c. "The Logic of Mathematics in Relation to Education," CP 3.553562. 1900. "Infinitesimals," CP 3.563570. Letter in Science, Vol. 2, pp. 43033, March 16, 1900. c. 1902."Syllabus," CP 2.7277, 28384, 29294. 1903. "Degenerate Cases," CP 1.521544. 1903a. "The Reality of Thirdness," CP 1.343352. 1903b. "The Reality of Thirdness," CP 5.93119. 1903c. "Telepathy and Perception," CP 7.597688. 1903d. "Variety and Uniformity," CP 6.88101. 1905. "Issues of Pragmaticism," The Monist, (15), 481499, reprinted in CP 5.438462. c. 1905."The Basis of Pragmaticism," CP 5.497537. c. 1907. "Pragmatism," manuscript 318," draft of Lowell Lecture. 1908. "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," Hibbert Journal, (7), 90112, reprinted in CP 6.452493. c. 1910. "Notes for My Logical Criticism of Articles of Christian Creed," CP 7.97109.

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PLATO. 1961. Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, (Princeton: Bollingen Books). POINSOT, John. 1632. Tractatus de Signis, subtitled The Semiotic of John Poinsot, extracted from the Artis Logicae et Secunda Pars of 16311632. Bilingual edition, ed. John Deely, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). PROGOFF, Ira. 1956. The Death & Rebirth of Psychology, (New York: McGraw-Hill Paperbacks). 1973. Jung, Synchronicity, and Human Destiny, (New York: Delta). RAPOSA, Michael L. 1989. Peirce's Philosophy of Religion, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). ROYCE, Josiah. 1899. The World and the Individual, 2 Vols., (New York: The Macmillan Company). 1913. The Problem of Christianity, 2 Vols., (New York: Macmillan Co.). Citations are from the 1968 edition, ed. John E. Smith, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). RYDER, John. 1995. Review of my Nature and Spirit: An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism, Metaphilosophy, Vol. 26, Nos. 1/2, January/April, pp. 138146. SAFRANSKI, Rudiger[Rüdiger]. 1987. Schopenhauer und die wilden Yahre der Philosophie, English translation, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, trans. Ewald Osers, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). SANTAYANA, George. 1905. The Life of Reason: or The Phases of Human Progress, (New York: Charles Scribner). 1923. Scepticism and Animal Faith, (New York: Scribner).

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1925. "Dewey's Naturalistic Metaphysics," The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XXII, No. 25, December 3. Reprinted in, Dewey and His Critics, ed. S. Morgenbesser, (New York: The Journal of Philosophy, Inc., 1977), pp. 343358. SARTRE, Jean-Paul. 1943. L'Etre et le Neant[Néant], (Paris: Gallimard). English translation, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes, (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). SAVAN, David. 1987. An Introduction to C.S. Peirce's Full System of Semeiotic, (Toronto: Toronto Semiotic Circle). SCHELLING, F.W.J. 1809. Uber[Über] das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, (Stuttgart: Reclam). English translation, On the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. James Gutmann, (Chicago: Open Court, 1936). SCHLEIERMACHER, Friedrich. 1821. Die Glaubenslehre, (Berlin), English translation of second edition, The Christian Faith, trans. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart, (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1928). 1836. Schleiermacher's Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato, trans. William Dobson, (New York: Arno Press, 1973). SCHOPENHAUER, Arthur. 1819. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, (Leipzig). English translation, The World as Will and Representation, 2 Vols., trans. E. F. J. Paine, (Indian Hills, CO: The Falcon's Wing Press, 1958). SEBEOK, Thomas A. 1989. The Sign and Its Masters, second edition with Preface by John Deely, "A Global Enterprise," (Lanham, MD: University Press of America). 1991. Semiotics in the United States, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). 1991a. A Sign is Just a Sign, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

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SHEA, William M. 1984. The Naturalists and the Supernatural, (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press). SHERIFF, John K. 1989. The Fate of Meaning: Charles Peirce, Structuralism, and Literature, (Princeton: Princeton University Press). SINGER, Milton. 1984. Man's Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). SMOOT, George, with DAVIDSON, Keay. 1993. Wrinkles in Time, (New York: William Morrow and Company). SPIEGELBERG, Herbert. 1982. The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, third revised and expanded edition, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers). STEIN, Murray, ed. 1995. The Interactive Field in Analysis, (Wilmette, IL: Chiron Publishers) Essay, "On the Interactive Field as the Analytic Object," by Nathan Schwartz-Salant, pp. 136. THORNE, Kip S. 1994. Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy, with a forward by Stephen W. Hawking, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company). TILLICH, Paul. 1912. Mystik und Schuldbewusstsein in Schellings philosophischer Entwicklung, (Berlin), English translation, Mysticism and Guilt-Conscousness in Schelling's Philosophical Development), trans. Victor Nuovo, (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1974). 1919. "Uber[Über] die Idee einer Theologie der Kultur," in Religionsphilosophie der Kulture, (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard). English translation, What is Religion?, trans. James Luther Adams, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1973). 1925. "Religionsphilosophie," in Lehrbuch der Philosophie,(Berlin: Ullstein). English translation, What is Religion?, trans. James Luther Adams, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1973).

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1933. Die sozialistische Entscheidung, (Potsdam: Alfred Protte), English translation, The Socialist Decision, trans. Franklin Sherman, (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). 1951. Systematic Theology, Vol. I, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). 1952. The Courage to Be, (New Haven: Yale University Press). 1957. Systematic Theology, Vol. II, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). 1963. Systematic Theology, Vol. III, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). ULANOV, Ann B. 1982. ''Transference/Countertransference: A Jungian Perspective," as anthologized in Jungian Analysis, ed. by Murray Stein, (La Salle, IL: Open Court). von UEXKULL[UEXKÜLL], Jakob. 1940. "Bedeutungslehre," Bios 10, (Leipzig). English translation, "The Theory of Meaning," in Semiotica Vol. 42, No. 1, 1982, trans. Barry Stone and Herbert Weiner, pp. 2582. WALDROP, M. Mitchell. 1992. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, (New York: Simon & Schuster). WEST, Cornel. 1989. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Geneology of Pragmatism, (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press). WHITEHEAD, Alfred North. 1929. The Function of Reason, (Boston: Beacon Press). 1929a. Process and Reality, (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc.). Citations are from Process and Reality: Corrected Edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, (New York: The Free Press, 1978). WHITMOND, Edward C. & PERERA, Sylvia Brinton. 1989. Dreams, A Portal to the Source, (London: Routledge).

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WITTGENSTEIN, Ludwig. 1921. Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung, (Annalen der Naturphilosophie). English translation, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness with an Introduction by Bertrand Russell, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963). WOODCOCK, Alexander & DAVIS, Monte. 1978. Catastrophe Theory, (London: Penguin). WOODWARD, Guy. 1997. Cleaving the Light: The Necessity of Metaphysics in the Practice of Theology, MA Thesis at Loras College, Dubuque, Iowa on the metaphysics of ecstatic naturalism and Catholic theology. ZRINSKI, Tara M. 1997. The Desire to Love and the Will to Suppress: A Thesis Concerning the Evolution of Western Civilization and the Human Process, BA Honors Thesis in Philosophy and English at Drew University, Madison, New Jersey on the cultural applications of ecstatic naturalism.

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Index A abjection, 54, 84, 107, 129-132, 134, 158 actual infinte, 71, 73, 97, 160 agape, x, xiii, 133-137 Amos, 83 Anselm, 12 anthropomorphism, xv, 1-2, 4, 6, 27, 46, 49, 83, 97, 126, 137, 145, 163, 165 Aquinas, 101 archetype(s), 38, 43, 47-48, 139, 147, 157 Atwell, John E., 17, 167 Augustine, Saint, 134 B Badham, Roger, xvii, 167 Barth, Karl, 84 Bartusiak, Marcia, 167 black holes, 28, 64-68, 70, 79, 149 Brent, Joseph, 167 Buchler, Justus, xi, 63, 66, 102, 104, 167-168 Buller, Cornelius A. 168 C Cassirer, Ernst, 168 Casti, John L., 168 catastrophe theory, 27 Christian, vii, 98, 118, 121, 134, 137, 145, 153, 155, 160, 163-164 chronos, 13, 24, 163 collective unconscious, 9

community of interpreters, 105-106 covenant, 118-119, 122, 126-127 creatio (creation) ex nihilo, xiv, 14, 58, 99, 113 Cruz, Edwardo, xvii, 170 D Darwin, Charles, 8 Davidson, Keay, 184 Davies, Paul, 170 Davis, Monte, 27, 186 de Chardin, Teilhard, 170 De Marzio, Darryl M., 170 Dean, William, 170 Deely, John, 170-171 Delaney, C. F., 171 Desmond, William, ix-xi, xiv-xv, 171 developmental teleology, 9 Dewey, John, 76-78, 104, 171 divine natures, 2 dreams, 31, 38, 139, 162

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Driskill, Todd, A., 171 E Eco, Umberto, 171 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 171 encompassing, the, 64 entropy, xiv, 13-14, 72, 122, 124, 126, 133, 153; anti-entropic, 13-14, 78, 124-126, 153, 161 epiphany of power, 44, 61-62, 64, 66, 69, 71, 80, 95, 105 eros, x, 3, 133-138, 141-148, 150-152, 154-160, 162, 164 F Ferguson, Kitty, 172 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 34-36, 84, 172 Fisch, Max H., 172 fold(s), sacred, xii, xv, 23, 26-30, 32, 34, 36, 44, 51, 54-59, 61-73, 74, 78-81, 83, 85, 87-88, 90-93, 95-96, 100, 134135, 143, 158, 164-166 Foucault, Michel, 172 Freud, Sigmund, xiii, 40, 49, 107, 143, 149, 162, 172 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 172 Gelpi, Donald L., S. J., xvii, 172 god, xiv, xvii, 1-2, 5, 10, 14-15, 21, 38, 44, 55, 107, 110-112, 115, 117, 119, 123-124, 128, 135-136, 143 grace, 10; natural, 10, 96, 102-103, 131, 136, 162; of the spirit, 10 Grange, Joseph, xvii, 172 Gribin, John, 173 H Hann, Lewis E., 173 Hartshorne, Charles, xvii, 7, 12, 122, 173

Harvey, Van A., 173 Hausman, Carl, 173 Hawking, Stephen W., 1, 67, 173 Hegel, G. W. F., xi, 17-18, 100, 137, 173-174 Heidegger, Martin, xi, 3, 101, 107-110, 113, 124, 174 Hera, 93 Hitler, Adolf, 54 Hookway, Christopher, 174 Hosea, 83 human process (the), 24, 26, 28, 30, 35-36, 40, 61, 63, 73, 75-77, 103-104, 129, 136 Husserl, Edmund, xi, 101 I infinitesimal(s), 11-12 Innis, Robert E., 174 interactive field, 50-52, 54-58, 61-63, 65 interpretant(s), 11, 67-68, 71-72, 75, 79, 82, 84, 87, 89-90, 92-93, 100-102, 120,

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124-125, 157, 160, 162, 164 interval(s), 59, 62-65, 67-73, 75, 78-80, 82-85, 87-90, 92, 94, 135, 157-158, 165-166 Irwin, Alexander C., 175 J Jaspers, Karl, 20, 89, 138, 175 Job, 83 Jung, Carl Gustav, 31, 49, 74, 83, 95, 132, 139, 162, 175-176 K kairos, 13, 24, 163 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 17-18, 31, 51, 76, 98, 108, 110, 124, 138-139, 176 Kennedy, David, 176 Kierkegaard, Soren, 140 Krikorian, Yervant H., 176 Kristeva, Julia, 176-177 Kruse, Felicia, 177 L Lacan, Jacques, 177 Lechte, John, 177 Leibniz, Gottfried, 30, 177 Lewin, Roger, 177 Lichtman, Alan, 177 lost object, 24, 147 Luther, Martin, 101 M Machtiger, Harriet G. 177 Mann, Thomas, 177 Maritain, Jacques, 178 Mates, Benson, 178

McFague, Sallie, 2, 178 Meister Eckhart, 111 Moore, A. W., 178 Morris, Richard, 178 N natural community, 105-106 naturalism, ix, 4, 16, 18, 53, 58, 98, 104, 122, 133, 136; descriptive, 53, 55, 76-78, 103-104; ecstatic, xvii, 2, 4, 6-7, 9, 12, 15-21, 32, 34, 37, 39, 53, 55, 57-58, 73, 75, 77-78, 96, 98, 103-104, 110, 117-124, 126-128, 137-138, 141, 155, 157, 163, 164-165; process, 117-119, 121-123, 126-127, 155 nature, 1-4, 110, 141, 145, 155, 158; nature natured, xi-xiv, xvii, 3-5, 7-12, 14-15, 17, 19, 23-24, 29-31, 33, 37, 42-43, 55, 57, 61, 63, 73, 76, 78-79, 83, 86-87, 97, 100-103, 106, 115, 117-127, 129-132, 136-137, 151, 153-157, 162, 166; nature naturing, xi-xiv, xvii, 3-13, 15, 17, 23-27, 29-31, 33, 37, 42-43, 45, 53, 59, 61, 63, 76, 78, 87, 90, 93, 95, 97, 100, 103, 105, 109, 117-119, 121-127, 129, 154, 162-163, 165-166 Nesher, Dan, 178

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Neville, Robert Cummings, xvii-xviii, 98-99, 107, 109-119, 121-123, 126-128, 178-179 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 44, 71, 74, 161 Noth[Nöth], Winfried, 179 Nygren, Anders, 133-134, 179 O O'Hara Graff, Ann, 97 Oliver, Kelly, 179 Olson, Alan, 179 open infinite, 71-73, 101, 150, 160-162, 164 Otto, Rudolph, 20, 34, 179 P panentheism, 7-9 Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 2, 20, 57, 84, 101, 153-154, 179 panpsychism, 8, 14 patriarchy, 32, 148 Peirce, Charles Sanders, xi, xii, 3-4, 7-9, 11, 14, 19, 34, 48, 51, 65, 86, 106, 120, 138, 180-181 percipuum (Peirce), 48 Perera, Sylvia Brinton, 185 phenomenology, 11, 15, 28, 30, 33, 37, 52-53, 57, 59, 64, 74, 82, 84, 100, 106, 123, 139, 141-142, 145, 152, 156, 159 Plato, xiii, 95, 106, 141-146, 158, 182 pluralism, 18-19 Poinsot, John, 182 post-Christian, 21, 107, 122, 164 pragmatism, 22, 33 Progoff, Ira, 182 projection, 25, 28, 32-34, 38-43, 47, 50, 53-54, 56, 58, 69, 74, 78-79, 84-85, 89, 91, 103, 106, 129, 140, 157-158, 160 providingness, 41, 102-104, 118, 121, 131-132, 136, 162 psychoanalysis, xiv, 4, 15, 34, 36, 58, 128, 136

R Raposa, Michael, 182 Royce, Josiah, 160, 182 Ryder, John, 182 S sacred, (the), xii, 1, 4-5, 7, 10, 12, 14-16, 20-21, 54, 59 Safranski, Rudiger[Rüdiger], 182 Santayana, George, 3, 104, 182-183 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 183 Savan, David, 183 Schelling, F. W. J., 42, 97-101, 104, Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 112, 142, 183 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 17-18, 35, 97-98, 183 Schwartz-Salant, Nathan, 50-51 Sebeok, Thomas A., 183 Sedona Hills (Arizona), 24, 66

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semiotic(s), xii-xiii, 5, 14, 23, 25, 29, 31, 33, 37, 40-42, 44-45, 47, 50-51, 54-56, 61-63, 66-68, 71-72, 80-83, 85-86, 90-92, 94, 98, 105, 109, 117, 120, 122, 130, 155, 157-158, 161, 164; presemiotic, 31, 45-48, 55, 61, 81, 86, 94, 128 sexuality, 148-152, 158 Shea, William M., 184 Sheriff, Johm K., 184 Singer, Milton, 184 Smoot, George, 184 Socrates, 142, 144-146, 162-163 Spiegelberg, Herbert, 184 Spinoza, Benedict (Baruch), vii, ix, 4 spirit, 17, 21-22, 98, 102, 140-141, 148, 150-157, 159, 160-166; interpreter, 160, 162-164 Stalin, Joseph, 54 Stein, Murray, 50, 184 sufficient reason, 127-128, 156 T Temple of Apollo (Delphi), 23-24, 56, 66 Thorne, Kip S., 184 Tillich, Paul, 16, 136, 161, 163, 184-184 time, 12, 16, 107, 109, 112-113, 123-124; eternity, 17, 109-110, 111-113, 116, 123-125; time-ing, (Heidegger), 107-108, 110, 116, 126; post-temporal, 13, 15-16, 109, 124-127, 153-154, 159, 161, 163; pretemporal, 12-13, 15-16, 109, 123-124, 126, 128; temporal(ality), 13-14, 109, 123, 125-126, 154; thermodynamic, 13-15, 111, 135, 154 transcendental arguments, 138-140, 156 transference, 5, 41, 51-53, 61, 69-70, 77, 81, 84, 89, 91-92, 106, 129, 134, 142-145, 149, 152, 157-160, 162, 164;

countertransference, 51-52, 92-93 U Ulanov, Ann B., 185 unconscious of nature, 25, 41, 87-88, 90, 94, 105, 121, 126, 129-131 unruly ground (the), 97, 100-102, 106, 121-122, 124, 127, 131-132, 136, 162, 163, 165-166 V von Uexkull[Uexküll], Jakob, 185 W Waldrop, M. Mitchell, 185 Weiss, Paul, viv West, Cornel, 185 Whitehead, Alfred North, xiv-xv, 78, 113, 122, 156, 185 Whitmond, Edward, 185

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 139, 141, 153, 186 Woodcock, Alexander, 27, 186 Woodward, Guy, 186 Wotan, 95-96 worldhood, 90, 95-96, 108-109 Wotan, 95-96 Z Zeus, 93-94, 144, 146-147, 149 Zrinski, Tara M., 186

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About the Author Robert S. Corrington is Associate Professor of Philosophical Theology in the Graduate and Theological Schools of Drew University. He has written fifty articles in the areas of American philosophy, semiotics, theology, and metaphysics and has authored five other book-length studies, The Community of Interpreters (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987, second edition in 1995), Nature and Spirit: An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), An Introduction to C. S. Peirce: Philosopher, Semiotician, and Ecstatic Naturalist (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1993), Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World, Advances in Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), and Nature's Self: Our Journey from Origin to Spirit (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1996). As coeditor he worked with Pragmatism Considers Phenomenology, (Savage, MD: The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and the University Press of America, 1987), Justus Buchler's Metaphysics of Natural Complexes, second expanded edition (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), Nature's Perspectives: Prospects for Ordinal Metaphysics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), and Semiotics 1993 (New York: Peter Lang, 1995). He has also written a full-length play, Black Hole Sonata, and a one-act play, 1, 2, 3. Past president of the Karl Jaspers Society of North America, he has also served on the executive boards of the Semiotic Society of America and the Highlands Institute for American Religious Thought. Dr. Corrington is an active member of the Unitarian Universalist Association.

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