Nature's Transcendental Creativity: Deleuze, Corrington, and an Aesthetic Phenomenology

I. Introduction: Natura Naturata and Natura Naturans

Ecstatic naturalism believes that a rich conceptualization of nature should emphasize the reality of a basic ontological difference between a ground that is responsible for generating the world and the encompassing yet incarnate processes of the world. The ontological difference mentioned here is a difference between "nature naturing" (natura naturans) and "nature natured" (natura naturata).¹ Ecstatic naturalism takes seriously the difference between nature naturing and nature natured because it is a philosophy that recognizes nature's immanent or incarnate processes of semiotic generation as well as the reality of nature's transcendental generative ground (a ground that "natures" via sign processes).² Thus, ecstatic naturalism is a philosophy with a capacious view of nature because it attempts to leave nothing out in its account of what is real, including the immanent, the transcendent, and the reality of an ontological difference between the immanent and the transcendent. For ecstatic naturalism, then, nature as a whole—the immanent, the transcendent, and the difference between—should not be interpreted to be a thing but must be said, rather, to be an encompassing reality whose dimensions include creativity and process (naturing naturing) but also what is created and actual (nature natured). More simply put: the reality of nature is "whatever is, in whatever way."³

For ecstatic naturalism, nature naturing represents a divine reality only in the sense that it is an "ungrounded ground" [Abgrund], that is, nature naturing is a transcendental or "ultimate" condition of nature's very own processive becoming, which is articulated in the products of nature natured. This means that nature naturing is a continual beginning point for cosmic development and thus is itself never a finished product. Nature naturing is "nature creating itself out of itself alone."⁴ Nature naturing retains a significant (and hence "divine") ontological integrity because, as a source of all creation, all of creation ultimately depends on it. Here, however, one may oppose nature naturing to "God the creator," that is, the God of classical theism, expounded upon by the medieval schoolmen whose substance ontology was that of ancient Greek metaphysics. How ecstatic naturalism engages deity is altogether different from the classical theistic view.

Unlike the classical theists' God, Corrington's nature naturing is a storehouse of potential and is a becoming rather than a subsistent actus purus (actuality) and being.⁵ Nature naturing knows no telos nor sufficient reason, nor is it a personal transcendent absolute. Nature naturing, while taken to be a "divine" reality in its creative power, is not the caring, personal God of Holy Scripture. On Corrington's view, nature naturing is indifferent to its creation, does not relate personally to finite creatures, and does not care for human needs. Robert Neville, in the foreword to Corrington's Nature's Religion (1997), sums up this notion by writing,

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 . . . 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 . . . Corrington's stress [is 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 thoroughness than did Whitehead who held to a personal god moved to poetic extravagance. . . .[C]orrington finds the last word to . . . belong to a vast impersonal world and to its infinite creative ground [nature naturing].⁶

Due to the impersonal nature of nature naturing, one must be apprehensive in delineating any specifically personal or pleasing human traits upon its face when one addresses it as a divine ground. For Corrington, it is important that, given an honest and thorough assessment of nature naturing's created orders (nature natured) and the vast scope of the moral and aesthetic value that those created orders entail, we need not...