Nature's Self: Our Journey from Origin to Spirit

Description

In Nature's Self, Robert Corrington develops a dramatic new perspective on the self-in-process, probing the tension between our origins in the material and our fragmentary fulfillment in the spirit. Between the self's origin in that Kristeva calls the "material maternal" and its transition into the public world of signs Corrington sees a tension expressed in a dialectic of melancholy and eros. This tension would remain static were it not for the entrance of the spirit that lies in the heart of nature The drama of the unfolding of the spirit, Corrington argues, is one of the most powerful struggles within the human process. The spirit is in and of nature and can never lift the self outside of nature. For Corrington's ecstatic naturalism, there is no realm of the supernatural, only dimensions and orders within nature Nature's Self avoids the pitfalls of both contemporary materialism, which can reduce the self to either blind behavior or dimly understood brain states, and poststructuralism, which often sees the self as the locus of an explosion of free-floating signs and meanings that have no intrinsic contour. Instead, Corrington argues that, while the self emerges from and is embedded in an infinite and inescapable nature, it harbors possibilities of transcendence. Introduction: Nature's Self and the Ontological Difference -- Ch. 1. Finitude and Embodiment. A. Positioning and Origins. B. Depositioning and Loss. C. Repositioning and Return -- Ch. 2. Fitful Transcendence. A. Public Intersections. B. Developmental Teleology and the Unconscious. C. The Spirit-Interpreter -- Ch. 3. Potencies and Infinitesimals. A. Self-Othering. B. Fissuring. C. Providingness -- Ch. 4. Nature's Self-Disclosure. A. Disruptive Grace. B. Eschatology and the Heart of Nature. C. Transfiguration