The most basic division affirmed by ecstatic naturalism is that between nature naturing (natura naturans) and nature natured (natura naturata). Nature naturing is here defined as the unlimited realm of potencies. The potencies are not yet possibilities because possibilities can only arise within and among actualities, that is, within the orders of the world (nature natured). Nature natured is the created orders of the world: that is, the manifest orders within which the human process finds itself....The difference between nature naturing and nature natured is the fundamental divide within nature itself. That is, this divide does not separate off nature from some alleged realm of the non- or super-natural but lives out of the heart of a self-transforming nature (209).The border between these two realms of Nature is always in flux. As potencies become actualities through Nature's self-transfiguring evolutionary process, new orders of being create new potencies that in turn allow for still newer orders of being to emerge. The created world that is manifest to us is the living record of this evolutionary process of Nature's self-transformation and self-actualization.
Human intelligence participates in Nature's self-creative evolutionary process by means of a reasoning process originally described by Peirce as "interpretive musement." Musement is a species of abductive reasoning (reasoning that move from cases to general hypotheses that apply backwards to the case and others like it) in which the,
semiotic world of empirical knowledge becomes open to novel possibilities when musement works in its seemingly random fashion to let complex and different signs interact in ways that could not have been possible for the other more restricted forms of method. Interpretive musement opens up a free semiotic zone in which the self is actually brought into interaction with the depth structures of nature (212).Musement mines novelty from the realm of potentiality and transmits it into the realm of actuality. Musement is the creative play of the spirit as it strives to make itself manifest. It is the source of the creative processes by which human imagination becomes reality.
Music, amusement, amusing, musical, museum, bemusement....In ancient Greek mythology the Muses are goddesses that inspire the creation of poetry, literature and art. They were regarded as the sources of knowledge that humans pass from one generation to the next. In modern usage, a muse (uncapitalized) is said the be the source of inspiration for artists and writers. Museums are shrines to the muses that inspired artists of the past to create form and meaning out of matter. Libraries are the shrines to the muses that inspired writers to create form and meaning out of ideas.
But there are other forms of human creativity, for instance, science and technology, in which the hidden potentialities of Nature can become manifest. Culture, considered in the largest sense, as all of the knowledge and information that can be passed from one human generation to the next, the sum of all memes, is itself an emergent order of Nature. Culture is natura naturata as it has been expressed through human action. But we also are continually creating culture; it is self-transfiguring like Nature itself. This is perhaps why we place such a high value on novelty in art and literature and science. We are always seeking the ecstatic experience of discovery.
I find these thoughts quite amusing.
Corrington, Robert S. (1992). "Ecstatic naturalism and the Transfiguration of the Good". In Randolph Crump Miller (Ed.) Empirical Theology: A Handbook. Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press, pp. 203-221.
