Participation is an old idea. Since Plato, it has come to mean a number of things and applied to a number of fields. We see it most notably used in metaphysics and in socio-political philosophy.

In this paper, I will expound on Marcel's theory of participation and its implications on the study of the philosophy of knowledge. My discussion of Marcel's theory of participation will be limited to what he wrote in his two-volume Mystery of Being [The Gifford Lectures, 1949-1950: vol. 1: Reflection and Mystery, trans. G.S. Fraser, 1950; vol. 2: Faith and Reality, trans. Rene Hague, 1951].

Marcel tells us in the first volume of Mystery of Being that participation is a "sharing," a "taking part in," a "partaking of" (137). He alerts us, though, that participation is not a univocal term. There is a range of meanings to it. At one extreme is objective participation. He uses the example of taking my share of a cake as only a share in a share-out. At the other extreme is non-objective participation where all trace of objectivity is gone. He cites participation in a prayer, as an example, where it doesn't matter at all who or how many has joined, or where and when it is done (138-40).

Marcel identifies many modes of participation. And these modes are classifiable under three levels which Marcel distinguishes. On the level of community, our experience of our togetherness in being are the modalities of feeling, acting, and sensing. On the level of communion, our free entrance into the relationship between I and Thou, are the modalities of creative fidelity, hope, and love. And on the level of transcendence, where we "plumb the depths of our possibilities in our experience of being," is the modality of ontological exigence. [For a more elaborate discussion, see Erwin W. Strauss & Michael A. Machado, "Gabriel Marcel's Notion of Incarnate Being," The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp & Lewis Edwin Hahn, vol. 15 of The Library of Living Philosophers, Open Court, 1964, p. 129. See also Eugene J. Fitzgerald, "Gabriel Marcel," Existentialist Thinkers and Thought, ed. Frederick Patka, 2nd paperback edition, Citadel Press, 1964, pp. 142-48. For the complete treatment by Marcel of the various levels: on the level of community, MB 1, ch. 6; on the level of communion, MB 1, ch. 9 and MB 2, ch. 9; on the level of transcendence, MB 1, ch. 3 and MB 2, ch. 3.]

Marcel considers participation as the ontological relation between man and everything else. It reveals the being of human existence as an always-in-relation-to, not as a windowless monad all alone with itself. We are always beings-in-participation. We have to understand participation, therefore, in relation to the human condition, from which we shall begin.

Participation, firstly, implies the presence of something other than the one who participates. In other words, it implies the reality of a non-self. It rejects outright any solipsism, that is, the claim that reality is nothing more than myself and that non-selves are only my projections. Instead, it demands that the reality of the other be recognized, a reality no less real than myself. This is a necessary presupposition because to posit reality as nothing more than myself and my projections would make the idea of participation meaningless. There is no more need to participate if there is no one else but myself. There is nothing to participate in without a real other. It is evident that Marcel supports us in this contention. [We have to be careful with the way we take in what is being presented here. We may initially conclude that Marcel's whole philosophy is grounded on the theory of participation. The reverse is true. The theory of participation is derived from the awareness that the existential indubitable is an existence in the world. Our presentation does not follow the same logic because our topic is mainly on the theory of participation.]

We see in his short definitions of participation the implicit recognition of the something other: "taking part in" can be fully extended and read as "taking part in something"; "partaking of" as "partaking of something." These definitions would be meaningless if they do not possess an implicit other to which the subject is to "partake of," is to "take part in." Furthermore, Marcel recognizes the natural eccentricity of the human being. He writes: "a human life has always its centre outside itself; thought it can be centred, certainly on a very wide and diverse range of outside interests ... a love one, ... on something trivial, a sport like hunting, a vice like gambling, ... on some high activity, like research or creation" (MB 1: 101).

Secondly, participation--if it is the ontological relationship--implies that the reality of the non-self is not established demonstrably, as Descartes tried to do earlier. Rather, the awareness, not necessarily cognitive, of the presence of the non-self must be immediate. The acceptance of demonstration as the primordial way of establishing the presence of the other also implies the acceptance that prior to the demonstration is a private, isolated self. Thus, if we are to be consistent with our claim that participation is already the primordial relationship, we have to reject the Cartesian method of arriving at the other.

It is such a rejection which prompts Marcel to argue that our idea of the non-self is always arrived at intuitively; in my awareness of myself, I am also aware of the other. The Cartesian ego is not the primordial principle upon which other ideas are to be derived; it is only a derivative principle; it is not the ultimate reality. Marcel points out that my awareness of myself only comes about with my awareness of the other's recognition of myself, when they respond to my presence. This response may not be a voluntary, linguistic response of fellow human selves. It may also be the mute, unconscious recognition of things, their very presence is already a presence for me. Thus, my awareness of the other's presence is logically prior to my awareness of myself.

Thirdly, if participation implies that the self always tends outward and that the non-self is always arrived at intuitively, then we must be always already situated right here, now, and surrounded by non-selves. In short, participation implies that we are beings-in-a-situation. We are not private, isolated beings who still have to grope outside of ourselves to try to establish the presence of other selves. In the words of Marcel: "if I am a somebody, a particular individual, I am only so at once in connection with and in opposition to an indefinite number of other somebodies, and this enables me to solve a priori and without any trouble at all, ... the problem of how I can be certain that anybody, or anything, other than myself, exists" (MB 1: 106).

Fourthly, participation implies that the participant-self shares something in common with that which it participates into. Participation is not only something intended, but also something actualized. It would indeed be a problem if nothing is common between two selves--e.g., between the self and the body, or between the self and the world--that seek to participate. How would they meet? Descartes tried to resolve this problem but ended up with a dualist position. This is because he conceived of both as mutually exclusive from each other and can only be mediated by thought.

Marcel, on the other hand, rejected the dualist resolution. He argued that there is a certain unity which underlies everything in existence. Because of this more primordial unity, there is no need for the mediation of thought. [Marcel speaks of an underlying unity, although the context within which he discussed it is limited only to the unity among peoples in "A Broken World," MB 1, ch. 2. I have taken the liberty of extending such unity among all creatures, animate and inanimate, because of its implicit connection to the theory of participation.]

Let us see how we can elaborate this Marcellian position through the modalities of feeling and sensing. The self's participation with its body is made possible because of two conditions: the self is a "being that has feelings"; and the body as a felt body is "endowed with an absolute priority in relation to everything that I can feel that is other than my body itself" (MB 1: 125). The embodied self's participation with the world is possible also because of two conditions: the self is capable of sensation because of its sense-organs--eyes, ears, nose, etc.; and the world is also sensible--has color, shape, sound, odor, etc. These modalities of participation has no need to be mediated by thought to be present to the self, as the idealists conceive of them.

Participation, therefore, is the key to the surmounting of the problem of mediation. It ensures that we are not merely detached spectators, thinkers, in relation to the objects of the world. It allows us to cross the boundaries between the self and the body, and between the embodied self and the world--although there really are no such things as boundaries: for the self, the body, and the world are but fluid categories. [See Straus & Machado, 131.] The self and the body, the embodied self and the world are but moments of the same reality, each makes sense only in relation to the other. We are participants in our body and in the world. As participants we have a lived immediacy with them.

But, while these modalities of participation no longer need the mediation of thought, they cannot really do away totally with thought. The modalities of feeling and sensation are submerged, in contrast to "emergent," participation (MB 1: 140). A submerged form of participation is below the level of thought. It has not yet emerged into a conscious idea of its own intentionality. Before thought, our feelings already present our body to us; our senses already present objects to us. Thus, the feelings and senses are not something we passively endure or suffer, as idealism--in giving primacy to thought--has declared.

Nor are feelings and senses, in being pre-conscious, something opposed to thought. The idealism that Marcel rejects holds that feelings and sensations are simply raw materials to be interpreted by thought. On the contrary, Marcel asserts, they contain a latent idea, a rationality, an intelligibility, that is not immediately obvious. This latent rationality can be brought to the level of awareness by thought struggling with itself, by a persistent and faithful effort at reflection.

At this point of the paper, I think that it is already time to stop and reflect on, to explore, the epistemological implications of the theory of participation. We have already come up with enough materials to feed our thought process. And following the suggestion of Marcel, we are not going to apply our own categories on the materials. Instead, we are going to let the latent rationality of the materials emerge by reflecting upon them.

If the ontological condition of human existence is one of participation with the non-self, then it follows that the way we know the non-self would also be greatly affected. In other words, if the knower does not stand over and against his body, the world, and fellow knowers, then knowledge of them could not be, and could never be, absolutely objective; it could not be a knowledge which is without any taint of the subject. This is because the subject is never something external to the object of knowledge, but is already primordially related to it, already involved in the datum being studied even from the very beginning. There is no purely objective knowledge because there is no purely objective data. But we must caution against the naive accusation of subjectivism.

In the same way that there is no purely objective knowledge, there is also no purely subjective knowledge. The participation of the subject in the object of knowledge also entails that the subject can never be apprehended in its pure state. Rather, the subject is always there with the object of knowledge, and is never without this object. Thus, even such creatures of fantasy--as the "tikbalang" or the Maria Clara--are not created from out of nothing by an enterprising subject. The "tikbalang" is a cross between a horse and a big, cigar-smoking person. Maria Clara was based by Rizal on a real life character, his beloved Leonor Rivera.

The theory of participation, thus, provides a clearer description of the bi-polarity of knowledge. It alerts us that this bi-polarity is not really to be understood as the clash of two mutually exclusive elements, the subject and the object. The subject does not now by a sort of reaching out nor because the object impinges on the subject. Such descriptions on the part of the subject's act to know and the object's behavior imply that the object of knowledge is something external to the subject and has to be reached or must impinge in order to be known. They also imply that there are instances when the subject is out of touch with the object of knowledge: when the subject fails to reach our or in reaching out fails to contact, or when the object in impinging, misses the subject or fails to penetrate consciousness. The theory of participation reorients these notions of knowing in assuring us that there is no such breach between the subject and the object. But it does not go into the full length of claiming that there is already a identification of the subject with the object. The idea of participation already secures the impossibility of a complete identification, because to participate means only to be identical to a certain degree, but enough to secure that neither is isolated from the other. To use another description, the relation of the subject and the object to each other is one of interwovenness--like in a fish net, where the various threads crisscross with one another so as to be inseparable but never identical.

Another implication of the theory of participation on knowledge is that, we can never know everything. A knowing being who stands over and above the object can view the various sides and angles and know the object in its entirety. The same holds true for one who is beyond time and can view the unfolding of the object in consideration of its entirety. The being-in-participation, however, is restricted to the situation he is in as his source of knowledge. It is a limitation of which he can't do anything at all because it is the human condition. He may be able to broaden the scope of his knowledge but he can never expect to accomplish what Hegel expected for his Absolute Spirit, that is, total knowledge. A lot remains for him as grey areas, mysteries--in the Marcellian use of the term.

Marcel's notion of mysteries must be understood well. He refuses to consider the term as a sort of "No Entry" sign posted on locked doors to rooms which must remain unknown. For him, to consider something as a mystery is only to consider it as not wholly knowable, no wholly soluble. The resistance of the object under consideration to the attempts to know it, to solve it, is due to the fact that the subject is himself a part of that which is considered. That the subject is involved in what is to be known means that the object cannot be fully placed at a distance for complete consideration. Thus, complete knowledge is impossible. [END]