This panel explores the intersection of art, poetics, and participatory metaphysics, focusing on how creative expression mediates between visible and invisible realities. Drawing on philosophical, theological, and artistic traditions, it examines how poetic and artistic forms both disclose and complicate participation in transcendent sources of meaning. Particular attention is given to the tension between representation and transcendence, and to the role of imagination, symbol, and aesthetic experience in shaping participatory understanding. This session engages themes of mediation, embodiment, and formation, considering how artistic practices render metaphysical claims experientially accessible whilst resisting reduction to conceptual clarity. In exploring the relationship between poetics, broadly construed, and participation, this panel explores the generative power of the arts to articulate the irreducible through the particulars of human artistic creation.
In the standard Platonic use of the concept of participation there is a dominant interest in fulfilling formulas of unity such that the wilder side of entering into formations of life, unprogrammed creation and association with other worldly beings, goes unappreciated. This paper proposes to correct this ontological bias and do justice to our richer ordinary sense of meaningful engagement by partnering the centering ideal of participation with the extending ideal of involvement, illustrating this move with a significant transition in Western art history. Raphael's High Renaissance Transfiguration shows a convincing domination of physical nature by eternal form, while Caravaggio's Baroque Calling of St. Matthew shows a meaning-determining materiality, contingency, and "horizontality" in similar subject matter. Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin can be read as an icon for the union of participation and involvement.
Raphael’s fresco cycle in the Stanza della Segnatura offers a poetic and participatory definition of Platonism at the birth of modernity. Rather than focusing on a Platonism of specific doctrines, I propose that Raphael articulates the essence of Platonism visually through two interrelated principles: a henological commitment to the One as ontological ground and a psychological orientation in which the soul mediates between unity and plurality. Read as a whole, beyond the iconic The School of Athens, the room presents philosophy, theology, poetry, and justice as interdependent modes of participation in a unified cosmos. The unrepresented One and the centrally positioned observer function as absent presences structuring the composition. Raphael’s poetics thus renders participatory metaphysics experientially accessible, demonstrating how artistic creation itself can enact and communicate the Platonic tradition’s vision of reality.
In one of his notebooks, the Romantic poet and theologian Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote that superstition was "the Giant Shadow of Humanity with its back to the setting Sun of True Religion." This paper uses Coleridge as a lens to explore the role of superstition in a metaphysics of participation, wherein a combination of ignorance, wonder, and myth serve as the starting point of philosophy. This exploration will then link participation and poetics in two ways. The first is the role of the preternatural in Coleridge's poetry and philosophy, where the unknown in nature manifests in poetry as ambiguous spiritual forces. The second is the vulnerability of the person to supernatural forces beyond explanation, a participatory metaphysic that travels both ways, as expressed by Coleridge in his notebooks and poetry on dreams and nightmares.
Poiēsis and participatory metaphysics exist in an irreconcilable tension between ascension to the Forms and descension to representation. Yet, two well-known 20th century Platonists, Simone Weil and Irish Murdoch, identify this tension as a generative site of poetics. Taking a cue from these thinkers and the work of Kevin Hart, and Jean-Luc Marion, I attempt to show that the tension between poiēsis and participation is a guise of the problem of onto-theology: can one participate in metaphysical theism without thereby rendering God an idol? Transcribing the poiēsis/participation tension into a theological register will enable us to better understand Weil and Murdoch’s reappraisal of Plato, and will suggest that the poiēsis/participation tension can only be navigated via an appeal to a transcendent divinity, which wills to render itself accessible through sacramental signs. To test this hypothesis, I turn to the poetics of Seamus Heaney.