| abstract | This dissertation analyzes how consumption is a reaction to human ontological woundedness, specifically that individuals grieve
their separation from the Other as well as their unfulfilled nonmaterial needs. In the resulting angst due to separation, people amass consumable goods in an effort
to build a figurative bridge which would connect them to those around them and satisfy their need for self-fulfillment and love. This continuous acquisition of material
goods to meet nonmaterial needs leads to a schizophrenic distortion in the human perception of the actual planetary limits of such consumption. Furthermore, as fallible
individuals, with complex subconscious drives and insecurities, the acquisition of consumer goods feels, in turn, cognitively appropriate and emotionally satisfying.
Cognitive dissonance arises when one recognizes that their consumption has a negative impact on themselves and others, leading to a growing separation from their own
selfhood and from the Other. This project uses ecstatic naturalism as a foundational metaphysics, specifically as a theological and semiotic base. Ecstatic naturalism
animates this project by placing primacy on experience, favoring the unconscious, privileging ontological woundedness and ontological parity, and extricating the tendency
toward honorific or eulogistic classifications of the past and/or of material reality. An essential part of this project is naturalism’s ordinal phenomenology: the
practice of clearing away everything extraneous from a particular phenomenon, while still employing all of the senses to fully experience such. This approach is
valuable to this project as it is common for systems of economics and understandings of capitalism and consumerism to suffer from bad metaphysics; specifically,
they are subject to (mis)understandings of cause and effect. Second, ecstatic naturalism as a metaphysical system is dedicated to providing glimpses of the threefold
process of the self, the community, and the world, which help to uncover the deep and often suppressed motivations behind acquisitive behavior, the ethical challenges
accumulation creates for communities, and the treacherous implications consumerism has on an ever unfolding nature. |
