ontology, participation, and transformation

Jake differentiated three basic expressions or definitions of participation today in class.

• Epoch 1 – Platonic or formal participation

  • How does one engage the world/cup/body/sunset in such a way that it reveals its meaning?
  • Image may be NSFW.
    Clik here to view.Jake suggested that in formal participation the world/cup/body/potato recieves meaning from a form, and that in this epoch participation, to be is to be more than…  to be the overflowing of form…  the forms allow intelligibility, we can communicate because there is such intelligibility, and our journey is to look below the surface of the world/cup/body/bassinet and come to know the form…  What is a thing…  what is participation in relation to the form?

• Epoch 2 – Thomistic or existential participation

  • Image may be NSFW.
    Clik here to view.Jake mentioned several sources here, from Jewish rabbi’s (the man St. Thomas Aquinas called his rabbi for example, Maimonides), to Islamic philosophers, to pre-Socratic and Platonic philosophy, and yet this form of participation is most clearly seen in the works of Aquinas himself.  Jake wrote of this form of participation as based on the sense of something shared internally.  This subverts the subject-object distinction in important ways, where the bird flying by shares an internal something with me, whereby we can participate in one another.  Aquinas sees the ultimate internal something as the big to be Itself…  God itself participating.
  • What can we know about participation from the sentence…  That it is.

• Epoch 3 – Creative participation

  • Image may be NSFW.
    Clik here to view.Here Jake sees a slow progression, where no one name can be credited for “creative participation.”  He does look, however, to the Renaissance and the human power to name.  For some this rings in the “crisis of nominalism.”  The disenchanted world was upon us…  nihilism, skepticism, various other post/modern turns, and of course an array of religious fundamentalism as well.
  • What is in a name?  Co-creative participation?  Empty words?  To name is to…  this is the question you might ask yourself in the coming days and weeks as our class proceeds.

• Epochs 0 – 1 – Archaic, Magic, and Mythic Participation

  • Image may be NSFW.
    Clik here to view.As my own little aside to this conversation, and as you start to read next week’s offerings, I ask that you also consider some other forms of participation.  Jean Gebser differentiates at least three forms other than those outlined by Jake above.  He calls these Archaic, Magic, and Mythic.  I would like to quote a little from Martin Prechtel. (1998). Secrets of the Talking Jaguar: memoirs from the living heart of a mayan village.  I find Prechtél’s work to be coming largely from Gebser’s Mythic form of participation…  what does it mean to live in a world without a verb “to be?”  What would Archaic and Magic forms of participation look like?  I find that these usually get lumped into a term along the lines of the way Jorge and Jake are using the word Archaic in this week’s writings.
  • Speech is in all things.  The people of Atitlán believe that the nature of anything is its speech.  The nature of grass to grow is the speech of the spirit of grass… We humans eat words, grow words; we are made of holy speech (pp. 116-117).
  • Tzutujil was a language of carrying and belonging, not a language of being.  Time, for instance, did not exist, it had to be carried…  This is not because the Maya are untutored primitives, but because their lives are not built on the anxiety of absolute states or permanence.  With no verb “to be,” permanence becomes a comic hypothesis for most Mayans, who don’t believe anything will last on its own.  That’s wy everything in their lives is oriented toward maintenance instead of creation (p. 210).

Two questions seemed to bounce around the room today…

1. Is it real…  what is the real…  or… what is the ontological status of the real?
   • Jake tended to refer back to his history of participation on this question…  what do you think?   Is the answer to this seemingly ever-present question found in one of the three epochs above…  maybe elsewhere?
2. What good is all this talk of participation?
   • Jorge’s answer…  is the conversation transformative?  He spoke of Richard Rorty’s distinction between systematic and edifying philosophy, and suggested a third alternative…  transformative philosophy…  This of course relates directly to the question above….
     • is it/anything real…  should we systematize some ontological ground…  can we even do this….
     • might we simply relegate our conversation to the “edifying” realm of Rorty’s discourse
     • Is there another way….  what does Jorge mean when he says transformative philosophy?  What is all this thinking about participation good for anyway…  as always I have my own thoughts, but I would love to hear from all of you.

Resources

For a great counterweight to this social philosophical argument check out…  Frederique Apffel-Marglin. (2011). Subversive Spiritualities : How Rituals Enact the World (Oxford Ritual Studies)….    Frederique writes, “In this book I am at pains to show that rituals are radically creative: they enact the world in concert with its humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans” (p. 15)

Richard Rorty. (1999). “Analytic Philsoophy and Transformative Philosophy.”   This is a pretty easy read by Rorty on the history of analytic thought alongside his own take with regard a “transformational philosophy”

John A. Taber. (1983).  Transformative Philosophy: A Study of Sankara, Fichte, and Heidegger.… this is the text Jorge mentioned in class… you can find the entire text by following the link…    if interested, pay careful attention to the last two sections of chapter 4 – “Is Transformative Philosophy Edifying Philosophy?” and In “Defense of Transformative Philosophy.”

Thomas Wallgren. (2006).  Transformative Philosophy: Socrates, Wittgenstein, and the Democratic Spirit of Philosophy.…  I found it interesting to find this text, which appears to put for a brand of Wittgensteinian Rorty like edifying philosophy where transformation is left to the social realm…  I wonder aloud just how subversive spiritual transformation or co-creative ontological transformation can be to the received knowledge in the academy today.  This reminds us to keep in mind Jake’s use of Bruno Latour’s Nature-Social-God triune, as well as Sellar’s Myth of the Given and Myth of the Framework….

Every thinker is prone to claim that his conclusions are the only
logical ones, that they are necessities of universal reason, they being
all the while, at bottom, accidents more or less of personal vision
which had far better be avowed as such; for one man’s vision may
be much more valuable than another’s, and our visions are usually
not only our most interesting but our most respectable contributions
to the world in which we play our part. What was reason given to
men for, said some eighteenth-century writer, except to enable them
to find reasons for what they want to think and do?–and I think
the history of philosophy largely bears him out. “The aim of knowl-
edge,” says Hegel, “is to divest the objective world of its strangeness,
and to make us more at home in it.” Different men find their minds
more at home in very different fragments of the world.

William James, A Pluralistic Universe

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.