Dissertation Abstract
Nature's primal self:
An ecstatic naturalist
critique of the anthropocentrism
of Peirce's pragmaticism and
Jaspers' existentialism
by
Degree: Ph.D.
Year: 2002
Pages: 00414
Institution:
Advisor: Robert S. Corrington
Source: DAI, 63, no. 03A (2002): p. 974
Standard
No: ISBN: 0-493-62120-2
Whether the self is situated in the semiotic
community (Peirce) or in the encompassing realm of Existenz (Jaspers), an
anthropocentric obsession with the self as the arbiter of knowledge has been
continuously privileged. And whether located by modernism or dislocated by
postmodernism, the anthropocentric self is still plagued with its own "crisis
of subjectivity" (Keller). As a foundling within nature, the self is
ontologically fissured. Ecstatic naturalism succinctly states: "At the
heart of the self is a cleft, a wound that emerges with the first dawn of
consciousness and remains with the self until its death." The self is but
one frail perspective of and in nature. One way in which the so-called nature's
"primal self" can be semiotically and metaphysically explored and
examined is through the perspective of ecstatic naturalism, which probes into
the ontological divide or difference between nature naturing and nature
natured. Because both Peirce and Jaspers affirmed the anthropocentric
principle, they ignored the self's metaphysical relations to the ontological
difference of nature naturing and nature natured as profoundly and radically
articulated by Corrington's ecstatic naturalism. Ecstatic naturalism, as a
descriptive (in its application to nature natured) and revisionary (in
its application to nature naturing) metaphysics, is well equipped to probe
deeply beneath the surface layers of the anthropocentric self theorized by
Peirce and Jaspers in order to elicit the self's hidden origin, which is
directly and infinitely sustained in its "primal ground," the
unconscious of nature.
SUBJECT(S)
Descriptor: PHILOSOPHY
THEOLOGY
RELIGION,
PHILOSOPHY OF
Accession
No: AAI3048019
Provider: OCLC
Database: Dissertations