Ecotheological Community and the Question of Non-Human Animals Understood as Persons

Abstract

Reading Michael Raposa's Theosemiotic: Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning (2020) was certainly an eye-opening experience for this author who approaches theosemiotic questions from the perspective of a speculative naturalism.1 “Speculative Naturalism” is an offshoot of “ecstatic naturalism”—a religious naturalism created by the American theologian Robert S. Corrington, whose theology I have developed and extended in religious terms in what I have chosen to refer to as “bleak theology,” outlined in writings such as Charles Sanders Peirce and a Religious Metaphysics of Nature (2011), “Speculative Naturalism: A Bleak Theology in Light of the Tragic” (2014), and the forthcoming Speculative Naturalism: Philosophy After Nature (2021).2Speculative naturalism (and subsequently bleak theology) seeks to extend the basic principles of ecstatic naturalism by first, honoring the most capacious sense of nature's breadth, depth, and scope that determines what is and what can be (ontological parity) and second, acknowledging the limits of nature's interminable yet always present-as-finite horizon which determines an ever-becoming whole that itself is never complete as a mere part (ontological ordinality). With those two pillars in mind—ontological parity and ontological ordinality—speculative naturalism, that is, “bleak theology,” can make for an abductive and transcendental field of vision that is tethered to a firm yet ever-becoming empirical boundary of reality which is “nature” understood as “whatever is and whatever way it is,” to quote the words of one Justus Buchler, who Corrington has identified as not only an ordinal phenomenologist, but a proto-ecstatic naturalist.3 In other words, speculative naturalism struggles to be as radically pluralistic, processive, and panentheistic as possible within a transcendentally naturalist framework of thinking.This is all to say that within the speculative naturalist perspective Raposa's book reads as an exercise both in possibility and humility, at least by this author's account. I go to pains to describe my own perspective through which I read Raposa's book only because I hope to contextualize the background behind the thesis of the present article, which is a gentle criticism of what I understand to be an implicit danger of anthropocentrism informing Raposa's theosemiotic. The speculative naturalist perspective wishes to render in the widest possible sense nature's ontological and semiotic reality. A key in allowing this to happen is de-coupling nature's expressivity to the human being as interpretant and re-coupling it to the non-human, or perhaps more generally, the intelligence of any “subject of a life,” as interpretant. Thus, my suggestion for a gentle-corrective to the possibility of anthropocentrism which could result from within Raposa's theosemiotic is one intended to achieve a more capacious sense of environmental justice and community that would include human and non-human alike. I should be clear to qualify here that I do not intend to claim that Raposa's theosemiotic necessarily leads to such a radical degree of anthropocentrism. In fact, it appears that Raposa's theosemiotic and my own perspective within theistic naturalism both do in fact address different sides of the same coin, namely the semiotic of animal life and the natural world—in Raposa's case the human side things and in my own case the non-human side of things. My contention is, however, that beginning with anthropomorphism and attending to the human without remaining vigilant to the inclusiveness of semiotic activity throughout the whole of nature and all of life, one could easily slip into emphasizing the human side of the equation to the result of an unnecessary anthropocentrism which excludes the non-human side of the spectrum. Raposa's own project does not do this, but the danger is indeed present within the sort of anthropomorphism he engages.My gentle criticism really has just one line of argument which I wish to lay out in the next few pages. If the universe is perfused with signs—that is, the universe understood as nature—and human experience of that universe is interpretational, can we, or more normatively, ought we, consider other forms of experience which may be interpreting that same perfused universe if we are to hope to achieve the most inclusive sense of community which would match our most inclusive understanding of nature? My answer is “certainly,” if the universe's readability simply doesn't depend upon human interpretation alone for its meaning and “certainly,” if to recognize anything at all is to encounter it by some “inveterate way of thinking.”4 For, as Raposa suggests, “community exists wherever such interaction occurs” or “wherever persons direct attention to one another for the purpose of communicating or discovering meaning.”5 In the widest and most inclusive sense of community possibly conceived surely attention directed among others for the purpose of communicating meaning extends from homo sapiens to other forms of life, that is, to other subjects of a life.It may seem odd to question whether we ought to broaden our consideration of forms of life beyond that of the human in a theosemiotic, for surely theology is a human affair, is it not? It is important to note that Raposa's explanation of “theosemiotic” and his goal of the book in answering such a question. He reveals that he coined the word to “serve as a label for Peirce's worldview (from which he perceived the universe as ‘a great work of art, a great poem’)” indicating a framework within which religious belief and practice can be reconfigured to be pursued within a less exhaustive and more inclusive sense of community.6 “Semiosis”—the view that the world is perfused with, and largely an activity of, signs—means that human experience of the world is always a matter of interpretation where “even the simplest of perceptual judgments take the form of interpretive inference.”7 As applied to the intersection of theology and religious questions, it is Raposa's claim that “a theosemiotic perspective expedites the task of understanding what makes a community worth caring about . . . ”8 While he cites a number of explicitly religious questions, Raposa nevertheless admits that these questions depend upon the pragmatists’ “healthy suspicion” of “alleged sharpness” between historically prominent contrasts or binaries: individual/community; subject/object; natural/supernatural; self/other; nature/culture; and so on.9 This relates, I believe, to the possibility of an implicit anthropocentrism in two ways. First, we must be careful to acknowledge that the interpretability of perceptual judgment is a feature of intelligence broadly conceived—not just human beings but other forms of life, too, judge and interpret their experience of the natural world. Thus, in being skeptical of binary contrasts we must also be skeptical of a strict contrast between human and non-human interpretive perception and communication of meaning. Second, in seeing the natural world as being perfused with signs divinely authored, “God's great poem,” that the body of God—nature—if we are to accept the panentheistic Peircean cosmology—includes the many forms of plant and animal life that live and experience and interpret alongside human forms of life.10 They, too, are part of the theosemiotic universe and hence belong to the community. As such it may be possible to claim that theosemiotic does not just belong to theology per se, but in a broader sense to an animal or ecotheology—especially if theosemiotic is intended to expedite a broader and more inclusive sense of community where “community” includes forms of interpreting beings other than the human.Raposa does acknowledge that there are “dark realities” which may elude semiosis altogether, lurking beyond even the vaguest forms of conscious human representation. If these dark realities are not mediated by (human) consciousness does this mean they do not ever rise to the level of determinate sign and symbol? Raposa has this in mind when he asks, “When the indeterminate puts on determinacy in the flow of semiosis, meaning grows; but what else . . . might be lost in or occluded by this process?”11 What of meaning's more primordial other? In following Peirce's synechism concerning the line of continuity between the vague depths of feeling and intelligible sign or concept, theosemiotic, we are told, does “preserve a space for deliberation about human beings as sign-using species—that is, about our special capacities and experiences as homo symbolicus.”12 So theosemiotic is indeed grounded in the symbolic interpretation of sign-using creatures. But the question of anthropomorphism and subsequently anthropocentrism arises precisely at this juncture. Despite symbolic interpretation requiring a certain level of abstraction or consideration of linguistic, social, or cultural generalizing tendencies, this need not be conflated with recognizing that we are already enculturated within a larger, more encompassing context of nature and culture. It is this common belongingness Raposa appeals to so as to secure the possibility for arriving to common conclusions regarding the outcome of interpretation. He writes, “Despite important differences, at a certain level of vagueness it should be possible to discern the similarities or continuities among our experiences that derive from the fact that we are the same kind of creatures, with similar brains and bodies, that we share certain natural capacities and predispositions, some of which may be religious significant.”13Now, I do understand that the focus of Theosemiotic is the religious significance of meaning interpretation. However, the central question involved is that of meaning interpretation within the community of interpreters. The sort of religious community under discussion gains its religiosity from Peirce's panentheistic, immanent yet transcendent all-encompassing God, which is to say that the significance of nature's signs is ultimately relative to the divine and that the religious community either includes or at the very least relates to nature understood as God's creative activity.14 Thus nature is the common denominator for community, even religious community. It seems that if a common belongingness to nature is what secures the continuity and possible agreement upon the meaning of interpretations derived from “similarities or continuities among our experiences that derive from the fact that we are the same kind of creatures,” and, to follow Peirce, continuity in the interpretation of meaning is a matter of degree and not of kind, then invariably it must be that non-human creatures do in fact belong to this community or at the very least relate to it in significant ways. In order to address this observation and more fully offer a suggestion of how we might address non-human animals within a community of interpreters understood more justly, I now turn to what I take to be the two central chapters in Theosemiotic as regards this question, namely chapter 2, “Signs, Selves, and Semiosis,” and chapter 3 “Love in a Universe of Chance.” This will allow us to articulate the very important theme of self and community within Raposa's book while also allowing us to examine whether a more complete understanding of community—that of ecotheological community—is compatible with theosemiotic.The question pursued here is not whether Raposa's theosemiotic is itself anthropocentric and dismissive of non-human persons. As we shall see, Raposa is clearly aware of the danger of anthropocentrism concealed within anthropomorphism. Rather, the more legitimate question, I believe, is whether theosemiotic's anthropomorphism leads too easily to anthropocentrism if specific qualifications remain unstated when determining the meaning of specific, central concepts. I would like to determine whether such a situation is indeed the case and how one might carefully reevaluate the meaning of a few key terms so as to avoid the danger of anthropocentrism in the practice of theosemiotic.The pragmatist and semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce is the inspirational centerpiece for Michael Raposa's theosemiotic.15 Whereas the pragmatist F.C.S. Schiller had preferred the term “humanism” to describe pragmatism, Peirce preferred the word “anthropomorphism.”16 Peirce preferred this term because it communicates the “affinity of the human soul to the soul of the universe, imperfect as that affinity no doubt is.”17 This is to say that conjectured hypotheses concerning the world are led by an instinct-led form of inquiry born of the natural world which is in tune with it. Thus pragmatism understood as anthropomorphism is “buttressed by an evolutionary theory explaining how our capacity for reasoning must have developed in continuous adaptation to the natural world in which human beings live and move and have their being.”18 Raposa continues to clarify that, “Human reasoning, especially in its initial phase as abductive or hypothetical inference, is rooted in instinct and shaped by practical concerns.”19 As regards anthropomorphism and theism, in a letter to William James Peirce defended anthropomorphism as “strong pragmatism,” adding that “the human mind and the human heart have a filiation to God.”20Theosemiotic accepts Peirce's contention that logic is semiotic.21 Further, that all signs and symbols are to some extent vague, and the fact that nature is pervaded by sign and symbol, one finds that the natural world at large—that is, “Nature”—is interpretable. Nature is, in a significant sense, hermeneutic. The theosemiotic, being a hermeneutic of nature, looks upon the natural world as an expression of the divine creator—“God's great poem”—a sign activity that affords the gift of meaning to the creatures who experience, interpret, and render signs more determinate (hence the subtitle of Theosemiotic being Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning). In so far as signs are rendered more determinate there is an attuned calibration which takes place between organism and environment, or semiotically, between sign and interpretant. Here a certain Peircean “logic of relations” opens way for a “logic of dialogue” in that relations are just as real (and significant) as relata. No one thing is absolutely unrelated to anything else. There are no absolute discreta, no “absolute individuals” without connection to some other. Given this relationship there is a form of continuity and connection among logical terms of the semiotic—whether those terms are creature and sign, creature and creature, or creature and Creator. In some sense all things are signs as nature is in its essence sign activity. We are thus given Peirce's synechism—the ontological reality of continuity that allows for genuine communication and connection between subjects and other selves.The logic of relations also affords a “logic of vagueness” enabled by the fact that “no sign can be perfectly determinate in every respect.”22 Communities of inquiry are thus also communities of interpretation. Wed in communities by love and the Common Good, inquirers render ever more determinate signs as science and human wisdom proceeds into the infinite long run working toward an ultimate ideal generality, that of the summum bonum, or the divine life perfectly realized in, to follow Raposa in following Josiah Royce, a harmonious universal “Beloved Community.”23 Having “fallen in love with the universe,” Peirce believed that this community is a communion in “life and feeling” in harmony with itself.24 The meanings we read of nature are, ultimately, relevant to theos in that nature evolves according to the spiritual force of love, not mechanical determination or blind chance, and Peirce was quick to point out that “God is love.”25 Further, “love is not directed to abstractions but to persons.”26 Here it must be asked: what makes for a “person” so as to be included “in life and feeling” within the beloved community, given the logics of vagueness and relations just discussed? Raposa informs the reader that, “If there is anything like a ‘logic’ of community, it could be delineated by emphasizing those commitments that the individuals in any given community might be supposed to share—commitments to certain beliefs, goals, interests, practices, values, ideals, and so forth. Individuals would then be defined as members of a community in terms of what they share in common, much like a logical class is defined by a character that is possessed by all of the members of that class.”27As mentioned a moment ago, the beloved community of the theosemiotic is a community of persons wed by love united under a common good. It is important to observe how the theosemiotic underscores that the conception of theos operative within and through the becoming of the beloved community—the regulative ideal posited at the end of nature where cosmos completes its evolution as the body of divine life—is a spiritual reality that should be understood as a personal deity. In fact, the notion of a personal deity, Raposa informs the reader, is “necessarily central to our understanding of theosemiotic as a meaningful form of inquiry.”28 Rather than a “what” Raposa follows Peirce in suggesting the idea of a “who” inevitably arises when one muses upon the “beauty, ideality, and purposefulness (as growth)” of the natural world.29 For Peirce, and subsequently Raposa, only persons can be loved. Not “things” or objects, but only a “who.” As far as inclusion in the beloved community is concerned, then, it becomes necessary to determine what character is possessed by members of the class “person,” for only persons can be loved and hence only persons can belong to the beloved community. Here I should quickly note that while it is not within the scope of this essay to examine how one arrives to the conclusion that God is a personal being or more basically that God exists, it should be sufficient to establish that God's beloved community is a community of persons and that God, too, is thought to be best conceived as a person in order to address whether non-human persons ought to be included in the beloved community. The question is whether following Peirce's argument that God can be understood “in a more adequate way” if God is understood “vaguely like a man” that is, as a person, means potentially limiting rather than broadening the community's scope of membership and whether that would affect the range and power of sympathetic connection and communion afforded by the community and its love.30In order to make more precise the meaning of signs such as “love” or “person” and hence elucidate who is included in the beloved community—whether here community is taken to mean a Peircean community of inquirers or religious community of theosemiotic interpreters (I will use to term “beloved community” or simply “community” to reference both)—Raposa wishes to claim that anthropomorphism is the most adequate backdrop for clarifying what is meant by “person” when rendering that sign determinate.31 Anthropomorphism, or the view that there is affinity between human beings and cosmos and that the human perspective is a natural beginning point for inquiry, is “a conception that is natural to man” and can readily be translated into semiotic judgment.32 Raposa quite clearly and emphatically states, “I want to argue forcefully that anthropomorphism just is the form in which Peirce's naturalism most comfortably presents itself, concomitant with both his objective idealism and evolutionary theory.”33On Peirce's onto-cosmological evolutionary account and within the theosemiotic, God-understood-as-person best explains how the capacities of human reason alight upon correct conclusions when conjecturing about the natural world. Appearing as if the intentional design of a Creator were present, the light of human reason seems custom fit for the world of nature which it inquires about in its ultimate terms.34 Raposa's theosemiotic continues this line of reasoning in affirming that the success of instinct-led inquiry is due to the fact that the instinct behind reasoning (especially abductive reasoning) is naturally part and parcel of the “book of nature” we interpret. Raposa clarifies this point by asking, “Why should we think that a human mind would not be adapted to the purpose of understanding the natural world, that human reasoning is not productively guided by instinct?”35 So far, such an observation seems reasonable. However, as Vincent Potter has pointed out in his essay “Vaguely Like a Man: The Theism of Charles Sanders Peirce,” Peirce's theism “is a consequence of anthropomorphism” and is intrinsically “infected with vagueness.”36 This is to say that the ever-present vagueness which allows for the interpretability of signs simultaneously problematizes the drawing of key distinctions needed to identify the common characteristic required to define a “person” and thus reveal what makes for a candidate who might belong to the beloved community. Whether anthropomorphism or anthropocentrism, both are exclusively human-centered and both render the vague sign “person” as anthropo—exclusively pertaining to the human. This is the crux of my criticism for Theosemiotic.As we have stated, Raposa is aware of the danger of anthropocentrism contained in anthropomorphism. He writes, “Even if one were inclined to honor theosemiotic's pragmaticistic legacy and to embrace or defend some version of Peirce's doctrine of anthropomorphism, it would seem wise at least to try and avoid the charge of anthropocentrism.”37 Raposa then acknowledges that the two anthropo determinations of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism are regularly conflated and that the former contains the latter. “But is this necessarily the case?” he asks.38 His response is that Peirce's anthropomorphism is “natural to the point of being inevitable” and that it does not “entail the judgment that such a form [of thinking] should necessarily be preferred to other ways of thinking.”39 Laudable as such an admission may be, the theosemiotic nevertheless focuses upon semiotic cognition and determination of signs in human mind rather than upon the more general notion of objective mind thus referencing a more generic non-species-specific term. Here the argument seems to be that anthropomorphism is justified because we human beings perceive the natural world as we do, and such a beginning point, being just as good as any, is a good beginning point because we naturally inhabit it and have, so far, found consistent success in alighting upon truth given the various instinct-led hypotheses we venture.The conclusion that God-as-person must be “vaguely like a man” no doubt not only presents the challenges of sexism, racism, bias, and bigotry. In the most subtle and undetected way—thus perhaps making it the most dangerous—the challenge of speciesism is included and often overlooked. While the history of philosophy has for the most part been unkind to non-human animals and only recently have non-human animals been considered in light of philosophical theology, I would gently ask that the theosemiotic pause just a moment if only briefly to reconsider the notion of “person” vis-à-vis non-human animals and to consider whether non-human animals might be understood as persons to be included within the beloved community.40 But before moving on to begin such a consideration and suggesting some ways we might reevaluate the vague concept of “person” in order to more generously broaden the inclusivity of our beloved community, I hope the reader will allow me to quote Raposa in a footnote from Theosemiotic's chapter 5, which is titled “Communities of Interpretation.” I have included this quote at length so as to evidence that I am not claiming Raposa's own theosemiotic and anthropomorphism is anthropocentric, for he is obviously aware of such a danger and takes great pains to question it, if not avoid it. I only wish to point out how and at what point the danger of anthropocentrism appears before reevaluating personhood and claiming that we ought to shift our focus from “human” to “person” in order to include non-human as well as human persons in the community. Thus, the community would not only be theosemiotic and beloved, it would be inclusive of non-human animal persons and also be ecotheological.To be sure, philosophical personalists might insist that, minimally speaking, the members of a community would have to share the characteristic of all being persons. Nonpersons (not to be conflated with nonhumans) could not be regarded as a proper object of the love/loyalty that forms the communal bond. This raises all sorts of questions about the logical extension both of a label like “person” and of the concept of community itself. Would it be accurate to say that bonobos live in communities?41Let me now turn to suggest how the anthropomorphic conception of person might be reevaluated within the Peircean metaphysic so as to produce a more inclusive sense of personhood, despite the potential danger of anthropocentrism present within certain features of Peirce's thought. I should state here that I do not wish to offer a simple recipe or concrete corrective to anthropomorphic conceptions of persons, but only to suggest ways in which we might consider persons and personhood to include non-human animals in the beloved community. Despite the danger of anthropocentrism initially being present in Peirce's thinking, it is from the fecund resources of Peirce's metaphysics that a reconceptualization of persons and personhood is still possible.Peirce's anthropomorphism is detailed in two significant places: his 1908 essay “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” published in the Hibbert Journal, and his 1893 Monist article, “Evolutionary Love.” In these pieces, although in different contexts, Peirce argues that the God hypothesis is vague enough to defend an extremely qualified sort of anthropomorphism. In stating that God is “vaguely like a man” vagueness is intended to be determinate enough so as to be subjected to rational inquiry but indeterminate enough to suggest a generality of community. Correspondingly, we find that love's evolutionary teleology presupposes the existence of a relationship between persons, a continuity and connection which is developed in Peirce's doctrine of synechism and augmented by his onto-cosmological and phenomenological realism. While Peirce explicitly has human persons and the personal deity of God in mind, it is nevertheless possible to think that the continuity of relations required for the reality of sympathetic communion and communication of meaning between various persons can admit non-human persons, animals, into the beloved community. Yet here several questions immediately appear. Are non-human animals personal enough to relate to this personal God? Are human persons somehow closer to the creator God than non-human persons? My response is that the inclusion of non-human animal persons in the beloved community does not require answers to these questions outright; only that, as a suggestion, non-human animals, if considered as persons, ontologically can be, and ethically should be, regarded with inclusion and sympathetic attention—what Peirce would call out as agape. In questioning whether non-human animals are persons I believe that we ought to err on the side of caution and propose that they are as a working hypothesis jut as we would in the case of considering whether other human beings really have a mind. Even though we cannot be sure that animals are not conscious subjects with feelings, it is wise to at least treat them as persons with dignity in order to both affirm our current ethical obligations to other persons as well as not chance irredeemable moral error.Raposa's theosemiotic follows Peirce's understanding of persons as signs, or as Raposa succinctly puts it, “ . . . every person is a living sign or symbol.”42 As all thinking is a sign activity, cognition, then, is semiosis. Thinking—semiotic cognition—or “mind,” is not limited and privileged to belonging to any one possible locus of incarnation. As mind and matter are continuous, mind can be found in bodies both human and non-human and therefore is present throughout the natural world. Psyche (Ψυχή) here meaning soul, mind, is present throughout the natural world. Here one glimpses not only Peirce's panpsychism, but his panentheism: Hen kai pan (Ἓν καὶ Πᾶν), “One is in All.” Psyche, but also Mind—in this case the Mind of the personal Creator—is in All. Yet in other respects Mind, soul, the reality of God, is “beyond” All. Raposa clarifies, “Far from being identical with the universe, the Absolute Mind infinitely transcends it, just as a continuum is infinitely greater than any number of determined oars of it.”43 God is not merely immanent in the world, but transcends it. “Indeed, divine transcendence, on Peirce's model, entails divine immanence.”44Despite the immanence of Absolute Mind Peirce felt “forced to accept the doctrine of a personal God.”45 He preferred “the old fashioned God” rather than a “modern patent Absolute.”46 An Absolute God, Peirce tells us, becomes abstract, empty. If to have an effect and inspire practical action as well exist as a proper object of belief, God must be “intimately related to” and “concerned with” what human beings do.47 This is to say that God must make a difference to human conduct and be rooted in human experience and action. Beyond the attributes typically associated with God, whether omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent for example, God must refer to something personal—God must be the “one incomprehensible but Personal God.”48 And so we must ask: what does it mean for God to be personal? What is, after all, a “person?”According to Peirce, “a person is not absolutely an individual.”49 Even a