Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline

American Transcendentalism’s Erotic Aquatecture

 American Transcendentalism’s Erotic Aquatecture R O B E R T S . C O R R I N G T O N There are two high-water marks in the self-unfolding of the depths of nature within Euro-American thought. The earlier occurred in the neoPlotinian transfiguration of our experience of infinitizing nature in the metaphorical undulations concresced in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson . The latter emerged in the dazzling architectonic of the creator of pragmaticism and the greater triadic tradition of semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce—overpowering the subsequent dyadic semiological trajectory inspired by Saussure. For Emerson, the astonishing and fecund power of nature naturing held forth the fitful and often explosive power of the great One, while for Peirce sheer firstness, the predyadic dimension of immediacy, traitless fecundity an sich, and nonsemiotic radiance, served as the brake on the manic centrifugal force of the phenomenological and ontological categories of secondness (dyadic causal impact) and thirdness (concrete reasonableness in an evolutionary context). Peirce was profoundly transformed by the thought of Schelling, to whom he remained indebted, yet he sanitized the brooding and dangerous intuition Schelling had into the underconscious of nature—an underconscious from which even gods and goddesses emerge. While Peirce had a glimmering of the depth of nature, as the spawning ground of both signs and refracted light, he turned his back on this dimension over and over again in his flight toward evolutionary love and the conquest of sheer firstness by a blinding and self-enfolding categorial array awaiting 222 兩 t o wa r d a t h e ol o g y of e ro s him in the infinite long run of an evolutionary perspective that was only minimally Darwinian. For Peirce, the universe is like a great breathing architecture gathering up its distressed foundlings and weaving them into an increasingly crystalline realm of thirdness. Rather than stressing the evolutionary principles of random variation, natural selection, adaptability, and a minimal form of self-organization under the rare conditions emergent from a surplus value of evolutionary competence, he imposed a Lamarckian mythos of evolutionary love in which all variation served the higher good of convergence. Peirce’s fear of and complicit desire for the abyss of sheer firstness drove him into a titanic effort to pull thirdness out of a reluctant nature. This countermove to the Schelling-like domain of firstness was his biggest mistake—and one that Peircean scholastics reenact with him. Like the Wittgenstein of the 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Peirce, a chemist by academic training, felt most at home in crystalline imagery. If the boisterous and fuzzy universe was not yet a pure self-reflecting crystal, it would be. And the method of science serves to bring the counterfactual would be into the infinite facets of the divine crystal. The primary metaphor in his philosophical anthropology, taken from Shakespeare , is that we are a ‘‘glassy essence’’—our internal semiosis being a clear and distinct microcosmic mirror of the macrocosmic sign-series, always infinite, that molded it. The method of science provides the selfcontrol necessary to align the optics of the self with the optics of God. Yet the God problematic remains curiously incomplete in Peirce’s philosophical theology. It is truncated, contradictory, and self-masking. It reminds one of Michelangelo’s unfinished slave sculptures in which the figures are almost pushing their way out of stone, but are somehow held back by a mocking opacity. It may take another century for philosophy to fully grasp the legacy deposited in Peirce’s writings, but the case for Emerson seems different— seems, but may not be. For surely Emerson’s essays, journals, poems, and even translations have been the subject of much appreciative scrutiny . And they are certainly not as internally complex as are the writings of Peirce. But is this so, or only a delusion produced by an easy and lazy familiarity with a figure hoary with age and properly enshrined in the r o be r t s. c o rr i n gt o n 兩 223 North Atlantic pantheon of those who shaped the contours of our increasingly complex meaning horizons? The case to be made is a strenuous one, but not impossible; namely, that Emerson’s writings are among the most difficult, profound, and evocative of the One in the English language. For a philosopher of some sophistication to...