Ecology and Piety

Dewey's concept of 'religiosity' can be understood as 'ecological piety'--an entity's awareness of itself as inherently implicated in a system of Nature.  It, thus, challenges traditional 'piety', which is conceived as consisting in a supernatural relation between Soul and God, plus, it stands as a critique of the profiteering exploitation, theologically sanctioned, or not, of Nature.  However, his Functionalism hampers Dewey from attributing piety to the intra-natural process of the self-cultivation of an entity, which seems difficult to interpret as an instance of adjustment to, or of, and environment.  In contrast, Spinoza's concept of ecological piety, as consisting in the awareness of an entity as an instance of natural creativity, does accommodate such a process.  Now, while, for the most part, Dewey seems to treat Spinozist Modality as an abstraction from a Functionalist context, his own concept of purposeless Artistry, of which self-cultivation can be conceived as a special case, eludes Functionalist interpretation, thereby implying that Spinoza's concept of ecological piety is the more fundamental one.