The preceding essays have established the metaphysical conditions from which this essay begins. They need not be reconstructed here.
The Primacy of Relation argued that relation is constitutive rather than merely secondary to independently existing substances.
Reality as Open Relational Becoming explored the dynamism of such a relational reality.
The Metaphysics of Overcoming asked how anything persists within continual becoming.
While Stable Worlds Within Becoming considered how coherent and embodied worlds may maintain sufficient continuity to endure without becoming immutable.
A further question now follows:
What happens when such worlds exist among other worlds?
Persistence does not remove a coherent reality from becoming. Nor does coherence make it self-sufficient. Whatever persists continues within relational conditions it did not independently create and cannot completely control.
A stable world therefore does more than endure.
Its continuing existence becomes consequential.
It affects and is affected. It constrains and enables. It inherits conditions produced by earlier becoming and contributes conditions encountered by what becomes afterward.
This essay names that metaphysical activity participation.
Participation should not be confused with relation itself. Relation is more fundamental. Nor should participation be restricted to conscious intention, social cooperation, or ethical responsibility. Those are richer forms of participation whose investigation belongs later.
Here the question remains metaphysical.
What does participation mean within a reality of differentiated but relationally constituted worlds?
The proposal of this essay is that participation names the consequential involvement of relational realities within one another's conditions of becoming.
Whatever persists does not merely remain.
It participates.
And whatever participates may alter what becomes possible next.
The emergence of stable worlds creates an important metaphysical distinction. A coherent world may possess boundaries without becoming isolated.
Boundaries distinguish. They allow a configuration to maintain sufficient organization to persist as this world rather than another. But boundaries need not sever a world from the relations through which its existence remains possible.
Indeed, many boundaries function precisely by regulating relation.
A cell membrane distinguishes a cell from its environment while enabling exchanges necessary for cellular life. An organism possesses an identifiable organization while depending upon ecological and material conditions extending beyond itself. A person remains distinguishable from other persons while carrying biological, linguistic, historical, and social inheritances that no individual creates alone.
The point is not that all realities possess boundaries of the same kind.
It is that differentiation need not imply metaphysical independence.
Essay 20 described this condition as relational embeddedness.
Coherent worlds exist within wider relational fields.
Participation begins from this fact but adds something more.
To be embedded is to exist within relational conditions.
To participate is to become consequential within them.
This distinction is crucial.
A participant need not consciously choose to participate. It need not understand the wider field within which it exists. It need not cooperate with other participants. Participation need not even be reciprocal in equal measure.
Participation means that the existence or activity of a differentiated reality enters into the conditions encountered by other becoming.
The movement can therefore be expressed:
Relational embeddedness → Consequential involvement → Participation
Participation is thus neither an external addition to relational reality nor another name for relation.
It is what becomes possible when differentiated realities persist within relational fields and their continuing activity begins to matter within those fields.
A stable world does not merely occupy reality.
It contributes to the conditions of reality's further becoming.
II. Participation as Consequential Relation
The word participation ordinarily suggests conscious activity. People participate in conversations, communities, institutions, traditions, political life, religious practices, scientific inquiry, and artistic creation.
Metaphysical participation must be understood more broadly. At its most basic level, participation requires neither consciousness nor intention. It requires only consequential relation. A reality participates when its existence or activity affects the relational conditions within which other becoming occurs.
This formulation avoids two opposite errors.
The first would be to anthropomorphize reality by imagining that all forms of participation resemble human participation.
They do not.
The participation of a physical system is not the participation of an organism. The participation of an organism is not the participation of a conscious person. Different forms of organization possess different capacities for responsiveness, interaction, memory, adaptation, and consequence.
Participation therefore occurs in different forms and degrees.
The second error would be to restrict participation so narrowly that only conscious beings can participate. That would overlook the deeper relational history from which conscious participation eventually emerges.
Long before conscious organisms interpret their worlds, realities already affect and are affected by other realities. Configurations constrain subsequent configurations. Environments shape possibilities. Organisms alter environments. Ecological relationships modify the conditions under which later life develops.
Participation in this metaphysical sense does not require awareness.
It requires consequence.
This allows a useful distinction:
Relation establishes relational possibility.
Embeddedness situates differentiated realities within relational fields.
Participation makes their involvement consequential within those fields.
Participation therefore adds something to the grammar of relational becoming.
Essays 17–20 asked how relational realities become, cohere, persist, and form relatively stable worlds.
Essay 21 then asks what those achieved worlds do simply by continuing to exist among other becoming.
They become conditions.
Their presence changes possibilities.
Their activity may sustain or disrupt.
Their persistence may constrain some futures while enabling others.
And their consequences may outlast the particular interactions through which those consequences arose.
Participation is therefore not simply coexistence.
It is coexistence becoming consequential.
III. Participation, Difference, and Reciprocity
Participation requires participants.
That apparently simple statement carries an important metaphysical implication.
A relational philosophy must preserve difference.
If relation were interpreted as the dissolution of every distinction into an undifferentiated whole, there would no longer be identifiable participants capable of entering into distinctive relations. Participation would disappear precisely because differentiation had disappeared.
Yet the opposite extreme is equally inadequate.
If participants were absolutely self-contained, their relations could contribute nothing constitutive to what they are or become. Participation would become an external exchange among entities whose identities were already complete.
Relational participation requires neither extreme.
It requires differentiation without isolation.
Participants possess enough coherence to be distinguishable while remaining open enough to affect and be affected by relations beyond themselves.
Thus:
Difference without relation becomes isolation.
Relation without difference becomes undifferentiated holism.
Participation preserves difference within belonging.
This also clarifies the role of reciprocity.
Participation frequently involves reciprocal influence, but reciprocity should not be confused with symmetry.
Relations are often unequal.
One participant may possess far greater capacity to affect another. A larger system may constrain a smaller one more strongly than the smaller constrains the larger. An organism may alter its environment while simultaneously depending upon environmental conditions vastly beyond its control.
Participation therefore does not require equal exchange.
Nor does it require mutual benefit.
It requires only that relational involvement becomes consequential.
We might describe this more carefully as asymmetrical reciprocity: participants may affect and be affected without affecting and being affected in equivalent ways.
This protects relational metaphysics from romanticizing relation. To say that realities participate together is not to say that they exist harmoniously. It is to say that their becoming is not completely independent. Their histories intersect. Their conditions overlap. Their possibilities become entangled with consequences arising from realities other than themselves.
Participation therefore preserves both difference and dependence.
A participant is real enough to matter.
Relationality is real enough that what the participant does may matter beyond itself.
IV. Participation and Further Becoming
The deepest metaphysical significance of participation appears when participation is considered through time. Every participant inherits a reality already underway. Its conditions are not self-created. Whatever becomes encounters structures, constraints, possibilities, histories, and consequences produced through prior becoming.
But inheritance moves in two directions.
What is received from the past becomes material for present becoming.
What present realities do with that inheritance may then alter the conditions inherited by what follows.
Participation therefore closes a recursive loop:
Inheritance → Becoming → Participation → Consequence → Further Inheritance
This is where participation adds something genuinely new to the grammar developed thus far.
Persistence alone explains how an achieved configuration may continue.
Participation explains how what persists becomes consequential beyond its own persistence.
A coherent world does not merely retain a history. It enters history. Its activity becomes part of the relational environment within which other realities become. This can occur in many ways.
A physical configuration may alter subsequent physical conditions.
An organism may modify its environment.
A species may reshape an ecosystem.
A technological innovation may alter the possibilities available to generations that did not invent it.
A language inherited from the past may make certain forms of thought and communication possible for people not yet born when that language first developed.
The mechanisms differ enormously.
The metaphysical pattern remains:
achieved becoming can become inherited condition.
This is why participation is intimately related to generativity.
Generativity does not mean that every relation produces novelty or that reality inevitably advances toward greater complexity.
It means that relational configurations can become consequential in ways that alter the field of possibilities from which further becoming proceeds.
What emerges can matter to what emerges next.
Participation is one of the principal ways this occurs.
The sequence can therefore be expressed:
Achievement → Participation → Consequence → Inheritance → Further Becoming
And further becoming may itself achieve coherence, persist, participate, and become consequential again. Thus the movement is recursive rather than linear.
Reality continually inherits the consequences of its own history.
Not every consequence persists.
Not every achievement is preserved.
Not every possibility is realized.
Some configurations disappear without leaving significant traces. Others alter subsequent conditions profoundly. The important point is more modest:
the future becomes from a world already changed by participation.
This means that reality possesses history not merely because events occurred in the past, but because past becoming can remain consequential within the conditions of the present.
Participation is one of the ways the past enters the future.
V. The Ambiguity of Participation
If participation makes relational realities consequential to one another,participation cannot so simply be assumed to be beneficial.
This is perhaps its most important limitation.
Relation does not guarantee harmony.
Participation does not guarantee cooperation.
Generativity does not guarantee progress.
The same relational openness that permits worlds to sustain, enrich, and transform one another also permits disruption, constraint, fragmentation, and loss.
Participation is therefore fundamentally ambiguous.
Some patterns of participation sustain coherence.Others diminish it.
Some enlarge possibilities.Others foreclose them.
Some enable new forms of organization.Others destabilize existing forms.
Some relationships are mutually sustaining.Others are exploitative, parasitic, competitive, destructive, or simply incompatible.
None of this makes them less relational. Indeed, vulnerability is partly a consequence of relational existence itself.
Whatever can be affected through relation can potentially be sustained through relation.
It can also potentially be harmed through relation.
This means that participation introduces risk into relational becoming.
But risk should not be treated as a defect that could simply be removed while preserving everything else. A reality incapable of being affected would also be incapable of many of the responsive and generative relations through which novelty, adaptation, complexity, and shared worlds become possible.
Openness permits possibility precisely because outcomes are not guaranteed.
This prevents participation from becoming a hidden teleology.
Reality does not necessarily progress toward greater coherence.
It does not necessarily become more complex.
It does not necessarily become conscious.
It does not necessarily become morally better.
And it does not necessarily preserve what has already been achieved.
Participation creates consequences, not predetermined destinations.
We may therefore speak provisionally of constructive and destructive participation, or of healthy and pathological becoming, provided these expressions are not yet confused with ethical judgments.
Metaphysically, the distinction concerns consequences for further becoming.
Constructive participation sustains or enlarges capacities for continuing coherence, adaptation, organization, responsiveness, or possibility.
Destructive participation diminishes, fragments, constrains, or terminates such capacities.
But even here caution is necessary. The dissolution of one form may create positive or negative conditions for another. Stability can sometimes inhibit novelty. Disruption may destroy at one scale while enabling transformation at another.
Coherence therefore cannot simply be equated with goodness, nor decoherence with evil. Those judgments belong to later interpretation and ethics. At the metaphysical level, Essay 21 can claim only this:
Participation changes the conditions of further becoming.
How those changes should be interpreted or valued remains another question. For now, participation brings the grammar of relational becoming to an important threshold. Once conscious participants eventually become capable of recognizing their participation and reflecting upon its consequences, metaphysics will begin opening toward interpretation and ethics.
But we should not cross that threshold prematurely. The present task is simpler:
Before asking how we ought to participate,
we must first understand why participation belongs to reality at all.
Conclusion: Reality Becomes Together
The preceding essays established relation, becoming, persistence, and the emergence of relatively stable worlds. This essay has asked what follows once such worlds exist among other worlds.
Its answer is participation.
Participation does not replace relation as the ontological primitive.
It does not replace becoming as the dynamic expression of relational reality.
Nor is participation merely another word for relational embeddedness.
Rather:
Relation is constitutive.
Relational becoming is dynamic.
Relational embeddedness is contextual.
Participation is consequential involvement.
This final distinction identifies the particular contribution of Essay 21. Whatever persists within relational reality does not merely remain. Its existence may become consequential within the conditions encountered by other becoming. Participation therefore extends persistence into history.
What has become may affect what is becoming.
What affects present becoming may alter what becomes possible.
And those altered conditions may become part of the inheritance from which future realities arise.
The recursive movement can therefore be stated:
Achievement → Participation → Consequence → Inheritance → Further Becoming
This does not imply that every consequence is preserved, every relation is reciprocal in equal measure, or every form of participation generates richer worlds.
Participation remains differentiated, asymmetrical, and ambiguous.
It may sustain or disrupt.
Enable or constrain.
Preserve or transform.
Coherence and decoherence remain possibilities within the same open relational reality.
Participation therefore provides no guarantee of progress.
What it provides is consequence.
Relational realities matter beyond themselves because their becoming may enter into the becoming of others.
This also preserves individuality without returning to isolated substance. Participation requires differentiation. There must be participants. But participants do not first become completely self-contained and only afterward enter relation. They arise, persist, and become within relational fields that exceed them.
Thus the metaphysics of participation holds together two claims:
Difference without isolation.
Belonging without absorption.
A relational world is neither a collection of self-sufficient substances nor an undifferentiated whole.
It is a reality of differentiated participants whose histories, conditions, and possibilities continually intersect.
Essay 21 therefore adds one further movement to the grammar of relational becoming:
Relation → Relational Becoming → Coherence → Embodiment → Persistence →Relational Embeddedness → Participation → Further Becoming
The sequence remains provisional. It is not a cosmic ladder or predetermined path. It describes a recurring relational logic through which achieved becoming may become consequential for what follows.
And this returns us to the simple reflection with which the essay began.
No coherent world becomes entirely by itself.
Whatever persists inherits conditions it did not create.
Whatever participates may contribute conditions it cannot completely control.
And whatever becomes next does so within a reality already altered by what has become before.
Reality does not merely become.
Reality becomes together.
Aristotle. Metaphysics. Translated by W. D. Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924.
Heraclitus. Fragments. Translated by Brooks Haxton. New York: Viking Penguin, 2001.
Hartshorne, Charles. Reality as Social Process: Studies in Metaphysics and Religion. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1953.
Rescher, Nicholas. Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Free Press, 1967.
———. Modes of Thought. New York: Free Press, 1968.
———. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected ed. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978.
Relation, Organization, and Emergence
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Capra, Fritjof, and Pier Luigi Luisi. The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
DeLanda, Manuel. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum, 2006.
Holland, John H. Emergence: From Chaos to Order. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998.
Juarrero, Alicia. Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Kauffman, Stuart A. At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Meadows, Donella H. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.
Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature. New York: Bantam Books, 1984.
Participation, Experience, and Relationality
Dewey, John. Experience and Nature. 2nd ed. New York: Dover Publications, 1958.
James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Reference Works
Craig, Edward, ed. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1998.
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman.
Companion Essays
Slater, R. E.
———. Reality & Cosmology Series: Embodied Relational Reality.
———. Reality & Metaphysics Series: Open and Relational Process Metaphysics of Becoming.
———. The Primacy of Relation. Metaphysics XVII.
———. Reality as Open Relational Becoming. Metaphysics XVIII.
———. The Metaphysics of Overcoming. Metaphysics XIX.
———. Stable Worlds Within Becoming. Metaphysics XX.
No comments:
Post a Comment