Ecstatic Naturalism

The broad horizons of Ecstatic Naturalism

Asher Walden, PhD

Dr. Walden introduces Ecstatic Naturalism, a metaphysics similar to Idealism but less committed to mind as we know it. While proposing that the archetypes—an eminently mental concept—serve as conduits to a fundamental layer of reality that is both transcendent and immanent in the so-called physical world and the human mind, it remains open to the possibility that such a layer may transcend our very understanding of what mind is.

Ecstatic Naturalism is a philosophical perspective based on the work of the contemporary philosopher and theologian Robert Corrington. In metaphysical scope, it sits side by side with Pantheism, Whiteheadian Panentheism, Panpsychism, and Analytic Idealism. Like many readers and authors associated with Essentia, it is committed to the idea of world philosophy, a modern approach to philosophical analysis that benefits not only from the Judeo-Greek traditions of Europe, but also Indian, Chinese, and even Shamanic traditions. Generally speaking, I see Ecstatic Naturalism as an attempt to formulate the most generic possible account of the foundational ideas that live at the heart of various historical forms of Non-Dualism. Corrington in particular has gradually incorporated more explicitly Theosophical and Advaita Vedanta perspectives, while my own approach is more heavily influenced by Neo-Confucian and Zen Buddhist perspectives, and so bears a closer affinity to the Kyoto School. My hope is that this approach will be of interest and benefit to the Essentia community. The purpose of this essay is to give a brief overview of some of the basic ideas of Ecstatic Naturalism, with some attention given to points of tension between EN and Analytic Idealism.

The shared mistake of Panpsychism and Idealism is to take human consciousness as the norm or standard, and then project that definition of (phenomenal) consciousness out into the rest of reality. This is the kind of anthropomorphism that makes those doctrines suspicious. Ecstatic naturalism argues that human explicit self-consciousness is one species of a much larger category. We can’t say much, or at least, not as much as we would like, about that broader category. We know what the colors of the visible spectrum look like. What would we say to someone who asked, what would microwaves look like if we could see them? We know about the kinds of interests and motivations that drive human life. As to other forms of life, the more distant they are from the human in environment and structure, the less capable we are of imagining them. We could say, as a matter of definition, that everything that is, is consciousness. But the price would be to admit that we only know what consciousness is in the human context. Thus, we could say that other powers and potencies that dwell within, and emerge from, the unruly ground of being are conscious in substance: but we would not know what that means. No doubt certain aspects of that singular plurality of consciousness would be more or less continuous with the energies that are funneled through the archetypes into human realms; but what about others? Thus, despite its very close affinity to Analytic Idealism, Ecstatic Naturalism remains methodologically committed to Jamesian pluralism.

Nature's Unruly Unconscious

Robert Corrington

...It is customary to contrast three basic forms of religious metaphysics; namely, theism, pantheism, and panentheism.  Theism, following Karl Barth, asserts the utter transcendence of divinity, whereas panentheism, following Whitehead, correlates the otherness of the divine with its embeddedness in nature.  Pantheism, following some readings of Spinoza, equates the divine with nature.  Deep pantheism, in distinction from the other three systems, probes into the depth-dimension of the divine through an evocation of "nature's unconscious."  However, the notion of the "divine" is replaced by the more capacious notion/experience of nature naturing and its pulsations that activate the archetypes in the human process.  The term "god" is transliterated to the more natural sacred folds that punctuate the human process through its transference relation to the fold that activates the numinous archetype.  The idea of the "fold" denotes increasing semiotic and symbolic density as the fold spreads within the community. The monotheistic god is recognized to be splintered into archetypal projections of gods and goddesses that, while sharing mythos, are not the same ontologically.  Along with the fold is the "interval" that provides a cooler space that can keep the fold from turning demonic.

  A key question is how to correlate Plotinus' notion of the One with nature naturing.  The One has no traits and is not a creator, while nature naturing is more vividly manifest through its potencies, but is also not a creator in the sense of "creatio ex nihilo."  The idea of emanation applies to both, but differently.  While Plotinus has specific emanations, a kind of overflowing rather than creation, deep pantheism, following Emerson, sees an unlimited series of emanations with no collective contour that could be mapped.  It is more like an unending cascade with no beginning or final end...