Publication date:
23 January 2017Length of book:
186 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498545174
Is nothingness found in nature or is it in some realm disconnected from nature? Nature and Nothingness: An Essay in Ordinal Phenomenology argues for the former and explores four types of nothingness as found in nature: holes in nature, totalizing nothingness in horror, naturing nothingness, and encompassing nothingness. Using ordinal phenomenology, Robert S. Corrington reveals the great perennial fissuring within the one nature that there is. The book includes a detailed analysis of religious violence as it correlates to the hoes in nature, such as anxiety, bereavement, loss, fear of fragmentation, and loss of identity. It also examines the various ways in which horror is encountered in a literary context, using the work of Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. The analysis is comparative and makes use of feminist philosophy as well as Buddhist, Taoist, theosophical, and American philosophy. Using resources from ecstatic naturalism and deep pantheism, Corrington argues that though nothingness takes many forms, they are all guises of the same vast Nothingness.
This book is an important continuation of Robert S. Corrington’s Ecstatic Naturalism and further expands his thesis on the dangers of tribalism and dogmatic religion within the context of the nothingness that individuals and communities encounter in nature. Corrington’s signature aptitude for drawing on a broad range of philosophical, theological, and psychoanalytic thinkers to inform his ideas is especially pronounced in this book, which is one in a series of works on Ecstatic Naturalism that focuses on the inherent challenges and potencies of the Selving process. Nature and Nothingness is a must-read for anyone who is interested in gaining a keener insight into the semiotic richness of the realm of nature that is often underestimated or simply ignored.