Nature's Primal Self: Peirce, Jaspers, and Corrington by Nam T. Nguyen (review)

Robert Corrington's ever-emerging theory of ecstatic naturalism is dense with possibilities for secondary studies. The task of attending to the rich theoretical territory of Corrington's philosophical world is in itself deserving of many monograph-length treatments. Nam T. Nguyen's Natures Primal Self not only takes on this task but also triples the workload by attempting to compare and contrast Corrington's ideas with the philosophies of Charles Peirce and Karl Jaspers, who are notably difficult to penetrate in their own right and conspicuously disparate from one another. As would be expected, Nguyen's study brings a plethora of interesting philosophical questions to the foreground with respect to these three extraordinary thinkers, making it difficult to know where to start in reviewing the book's most noteworthy ideas.

Granted, Nguyen starts with the question of the self. So putting other philosophical curiosities aside, this review will follow his lead. Nguyen's central thesis is that Charles Peirce and Karl Jaspers are both guilty of "anthropocentrically and anthropomorphically" privileging the self, of writing the self "too large on the canvas of nature" and thus deprivileging "nature's primal self and the self-transcending powers of nature," i.e., nature naturing (191). Subordinate to this thesis is Nguyen's claim that Peirce and Jaspers, in their anthropocentric "domestication" of the self, "overlooked the implications and demands of the metaphysical categories of the unconscious and the unconscious of nature, which play pivotal roles in the realms of nature naturing and nature natured" (6). Though Nguyen gives credit to both Peirce and Jaspers for widening "our understanding of the scope and prospects of the self" (6), he finds that neither theorist "had a real sense of the unconscious of nature" (6) nor probed deeply enough into the "mystery of nature's perennial self-fissuring of or ontological divide between nature naturing (natura naturans) and nature natured (natura naturata)" (4). According to Nguyen, neither Peirce nor Jaspers captured the crucial insight provided by Corrington's ecstatic naturalism, which is that "the self is but one frail perspective of and in nature" (2) and that the self exists in what Corrington calls a "primal indebtedness" to "nature's innumerable powers of origin" (5).

For those with any degree of exposure to Corrington's thought, the concept of "primal indebtedness" should be familiar. But some of the more subtle features of what he means by this should be highlighted for the sake of responding to Nguyen. First, remember that for Corrington, nature, when understood as nature naturing, is both presemiotic and precategorial. As Nguyen reminds us, it is best understood as a "'clearing' within which all prehuman and human orders of meaning originate." Considered by itself, it "neither manifests nor signifies anything in particular." It is "beyond good and evil and indifferent to its offspring" and "it does not possess any providential or teleological contrivances" (107). It is, as Justus Buchler once said, sheer "providingness." This means that any attempt to accuse Peirce and Jaspers of deprivileging our primal indebtedness to nature's powers of origin is going to be complicated by the fact that these powers of origin cannot be named or qualified and thus cannot be privileged to any determinate degree at all within a philosophical system. Insofar as these powers remain indeterminate and preformal, the most any philosophical system can do to show deference toward these powers is to deprivilege all other orders of meaning to a level that can accommodate a certain sense of metaphysical piety concerning that which cannot be named.

In a sense, this is precisely what Corrington's system does. By adopting Buchler's principle of ontological parity, Corrington signals his intention to keep all orders or "complexes" of meaning on an equal playing field by making sure that no order or complex is taken to be more "real," "ultimate," or "natural" than any other (122). This has the effect of at least keeping any order or complex...