The Seba library treats Participatory Ontology in 8 passages, across 5 authors (including Abram, David, Richard Tarnas, Simondon, Gilbert).
If perception, in its depths, is wholly participatory, how could we ever have broken out of those depths into the inert and determinate world we now commonly perceive?
Abram identifies participatory ontology as the primordial structure of embodied perception and frames modernity’s disenchantment as a suppression of that foundational participation.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996thesis
a new openness to our own ‘other,’ our interior other: our unconscious, in all its plenitude of forms. For here, perhaps, we begin to encounter the interior mystery of the cosmos itself.
Tarnas advances a participatory cosmological ontology in which the encounter with the unconscious is simultaneously an encounter with the immanent interiority of the cosmos.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006thesis
relation, to the world and to the collective, is a dimension of individuation in which the individual participates based on pre-individual reality, which progressively individuates.
Simondon grounds participatory ontology in his theory of individuation, asserting that the individual’s relation to world and collective is itself a dimension of ongoing ontogenesis.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis
a second time it is a member of the collective, which is what makes it participate in a second individuation. The collective is not a milieu for the individual but a set of participations.
Simondon specifies that collective existence is constituted by participatory ontogenesis, not mere environmental belonging, extending participatory ontology into the transindividual domain.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
the challenges of analysis have been focused most pointedly. These challenges and the response which the analyst has had to develop out of his own experience lead inevitably to formulating an ontology of analysis.
Hillman calls for an indigenous ontology of analytical practice, implicitly gesturing toward a participatory rather than objectivist ground for the therapeutic encounter.
, Suicide and the Soul, 1964supporting
a more fluid astral divination (focused on intuiting the will of the celestial gods and responding to this perception through appropriate action, ritual, and supplication for divine favor)
Tarnas traces the historical regression from an originally participatory, dialogical cosmological stance toward mechanistic determinism, framing astrology’s origins as a participatory ontological mode.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting
The third question, by far the most complex and most inclusive, as it involves the very title of this work, concerns the specific dialectical structure of the relation between selfhood and otherness.
Ricoeur’s dialectic of selfhood and otherness approaches participatory ontology obliquely by framing personal identity as constitutively relational rather than substantialist.
, Oneself as Another, 1992aside
a reevaluation of a meaning of being, too often sacrificed to being-as-substance, can take place only against the backdrop of a plurality more radical than any other, namely that of the meanings of being.
Ricoeur critiques substance ontology in favor of an ontology of act and potentiality, creating conceptual space adjacent to participatory frameworks.
, Oneself as Another, 1992aside