Soteriological Aspects in the Naturalistic Philosophy of Robert Corrington and George Santayana

In this paper, I will discuss and characterize transcendental and salvational aspects of two naturalistic philosophical projects, those of Robert Corrington, a contemporary American Naturalist and George Santayana, the first identifiable American Naturalist. I am considering here soteriological pathways available for transformation or transfiguration of the self toward a state of spiritual optimization in an imminent natural cosmos where all but limited gains seem to be out of human hands. The individual, imbedded in Nature, is caught up in an unteleological stream of Nature's own formation. In my consideration of this subject in relation to Robert Corrington's work, I have found a helpful and insightful interlocutor in Charles D. Hardwick, who in his paper "Worldness, Betweenness, Melancholy and Ecstasy," dealt, in-part, with soteriological aspects of Corrington's Ecstatic Naturalism.¹ Corrington's response to Hardwick and Robert Neville in the same issue of the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy has also been substantially helpful in understanding his views on salvation and transcendence.² Regretfully, due to space limitations, I will not deal in any detail with the underlying semiotic mechanisms of Corrington's Ecstatic Naturalism. For Santayana, I have drawn from many sources, including my own book on Santayana's philosophy of religion³ and particularly from his essay "Ultimate Religion."⁴

I. Differences and Similarities in Naturalistic Viewpoint

I have chosen Corrington and Santayana for discussion and comparison based upon their commonalities and important differences as naturalistic philosophers, but more specifically based upon their more atypical engagement, as naturalistic philosophers go, with spiritual development of the individual. For both Corrington and Santayana, one can discern a "process" as an idiosyncratic form of "therapeutic" that is tantamount to a transfiguration of "self" and ultimately, a form of salvation. These are nonprescriptive processes or methods toward an individual salvation independent of a supernatural realm. Corrington, from a Protestant background, is substantially influenced by Peirce, Heidegger, Kresteva, Jung, and Tillich, and Santayana from a Roman Catholic tradition influenced by Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, and James, have both rejected Christian belief. They are grounded in one world and one nature circumscribing all events that conjoin in the world to appear numinous, miraculous, or supernatural. Indeed, if there is a place of empyrean bliss, a heaven, it will lie somewhere in nature.

Major transitions have occurred in Corrington's work; for example, God's sphere, the divine, has shifted from the "middle ground" or abyss of the ontological difference between nature naturing and nature natured and has become, in his "Deep Pantheism," more immanent as fully in nature natured.⁵ The Divine for Santayana has no epistemological relevance, and to impose the terms and concept of Pantheism onto Nature is simply a hypostatization of matter and an unworthy dignification.⁶ Neither Corrington nor Santayana, both following the view of William James, find any overarching meaning in nature, although meaning may be realized, Corrington suggests, in orders of nature natured.⁷

There is an important difference in Santayana's and Corrington's Naturalism that I believe has major influences on their ultimate conception of salvation. Santayana's Naturalism, he proclaims, "is the most brutal form of materialism" and is matter-bound materialism, resting upon "substance" alone, with thoughts, conceptions, and qualities as essences having "being" but lying "outside" of Nature as entelechal to matter.⁸ Nature for Corrington is not entirely substance-bound, and his ordinal phenomenology is "a description of anything that can be pointed to by the human process."⁹ We can say that Corrington's phenomenology is in flight on horizons far and deep, while Santayana's phenomenology always hearkens back to force, power, and work bound to matter. Santayana's phenomenological description and reflection on the world is more as a detached Spirit (consciousness) experiences Nature from the outside, while Corrington's is more intimately self-involved as he describes in psychosemiotic terms the mechanisms of self in worldhood. While Santayana, in his project, remains culturally absorbed and dependent upon the culture, metaphors, and symbolic language of Platonic thought and orthodox Catholicism, Corrington seeks a...