Nature's Sublime: An Essay in Aesthetic Naturalism by Corrington Robert S

Author:Corrington, Robert S. [Corrington, Robert S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2013-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

God-ing and Involution

In addition to the complexities of evolution, constituting descent with modification, adaptation, natural and sexual selection, and inheritance, there is another force at play in the drama of our species existence; namely, that of involution. This second force in no way contradicts the Neo-Darwinian synthesis nor does it have any relation to creationism or any argument from design or an appeal to teleology or acquired characteristics. It operates in such a way that it is consistent with evolutionary laws as they have come to be established in science and, differently, in metaphysics.

Our species has no special reason for being other than the simple fact that it was able to adapt to its proximate environmental conditions for a sustained period. Nor is there a guarantee that our species will continue to exist in the indefinite long run. It has been astonishingly adaptive but for a comparatively short period by evolutionary standards. And it currently has a number of maladaptive traits that were once adaptive in earlier times of scarcity and intense food and reproductive competition. The continued habits from Paleolithic era adaptations may ill serve us now.

Involution works in a very different way from evolution and exists only in a rare and seemingly sporadic fashion. If evolution marks the external fit between an organism and its macro/micro environments, involution works internally to open up spaces for semiotic growth within the individual organism, and sometimes, under the right conditions, the social self. The external organism has fitness criteria related to reproductive success that can be fairly easily plotted by evolutionary biologists. The inner work of involution is much harder to grasp by external empirical methods and requires a kind of empathic phenomenology that can ease its way into the pulses of consciousness that emerge when there is an involutionary moment for the organism under study. Ordinal phenomenology becomes empathic when it learns to empty itself even further and stretch its intuitions in such a way that they enter into the stretching that occurs in the moment when involution takes place. Phenomenology is itself stretched by involution and represents one of the ways that involution becomes known to itself.

Involution occurs in only a few species, primarily the hominid ones. It was operative in those of our ancestors who are now extinct and is operative in a number of animal species. The requirement for its presence is a minimal degree of semiotic complexity and at least the rudiments of consciousness. It is most affective where the organism has some form of self-consciousness. Involution is a potency within nature that works in tandem with evolution at the ‘upper’ end of the scale of life.

It can be best approached through a phenomenological description of its most complete manifestation, which is in that of the human selving process. We will focus on the individual self at first and then on the social process. Involution will at first appear as a religious process within the momentum of selving and will be described as such using the language that is appropriate for its appearance in that modality.

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