Être, c'est participer — and Aquinas Knew It First

The Marginal Note That Changes Everything

In a bundle of moleskin notebooks salvaged from a Parisian home in 1949, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl had scrawled four words in the margin: Être, c'est participer — to be is to participate. João de Pina-Cabral's essay in Aeon treats this as the crowning insight of a philosopher who spent a lifetime circling toward it. The claim is that participation — the sharing of being among embodied, co-responsible, affectively bonded persons — is not a primitive cognitive quirk but the very ground of personal identity itself. We before I, always.

The essay is right that this is revolutionary. What it does not notice is that the revolution had already happened, seven centuries earlier, in a Dominican cell in Paris.

Substance-in-Relation

The Thomistic tradition never understood being as atomic self-enclosure. Norris Clarke[^1], drawing on Aquinas's own texts, argued that every finite being has two irreducible dimensions: an inward, substantive dimension — what a thing is in itself — and an outward, relational dimension by which it acts and receives. Clarke's formula is precise: to be is to be substance-in-relation[^1]. The person is not a monad who subsequently decides to relate. The person is constituted in and through relation, even as a real subject who is genuinely there to do the relating.

This is not a soft addendum to Aquinas. It flows from the esse itself. Hans Urs von Balthasar[^2] pressed the same point from the Thomist side of the ontological difference: an existent becomes actual only through participation in the act of Being, while the fullness of Being attains actuality only in the existent. Participation is not a property that persons possess. It is the structure of finite existence as such. Lévy-Bruhl's margin note is, in this light, a philosopher's re-discovery of what scholastic theology had theorized under the name participatio — a term the essay itself notes Lévy-Bruhl drew from medieval scholastics, apparently without knowing how far they had taken it.

Ferdinand Ulrich[^3], in Homo Abyssus, traced this participatory logic from ontology into anthropology and then into Christology, insisting that every aspect of the theory of participation is founded on an awareness of our human nature as at once spiritual and corporeal. That arc — from metaphysics to the concrete human body — is exactly the arc Lévy-Bruhl was attempting in his notebooks.

The Harder Question: Who Is the Subject?

Here the essay's secular framing runs into a difficulty it cannot fully resolve on its own terms. If participation is the ground of personhood, who or what is doing the participating? Pina-Cabral's reading of Lévy-Bruhl wants to say: we first participate, and only subsequently construct our singularity as persons. But this risks dissolving the person into the relational field. No inner self to share. No one home to do the giving.

Jacques Maritain[^4] diagnosed this danger with precision. The person is not exhausted by its relations, even though it is constituted through them. Personality, Maritain argued, is subsistence — the act by which a spiritual nature holds itself in existence and thus becomes capable of genuine self-giving. You can only give yourself if there is a self to give. The beloved is loved not for qualities but for this irreducible center, inexhaustible, capable of receiving another self as a gift. Remove the subsistent subject and participation becomes mere fusion; love becomes absorption rather than gift.

Karol Wojtyla pressed this into a distinction the Selner commentary on Clarke[^5] makes explicit: there is an ontological dignity rooted in what we are as persons from the very beginning, and an ethical dignity that unfolds through action and self-determination. The person is a someone ontologically before becoming more fully a someone ethically. This protects the relational account of personhood from collapsing into a purely developmental or social-constructivist one, where the person is simply the residue of participatory processes.

The essay treats these as refinements the anthropologists were working toward. The Catholic tradition insists they are load-bearing walls.

The Crisis: What If Participation Goes All the Way Down?

Pina-Cabral's Lévy-Bruhl reaches his most radical claim in those notebooks: participation is not just a mode of thought but the condition through which persons come into being. If we take this seriously — and we should — it means that there is no pre-social, pre-relational self lurking beneath the participatory processes. The I that emerges is always already shaped by the We.

This is the strongest version of the case, and it deserves a direct answer. Margaret Archer[^6], writing from a critical realist rather than theological perspective, holds that humanity as a natural kind defies transmutation — that the relational constitution of persons does not eliminate the sui generis properties of human beings that anchor moral responsibility across cultures. The thread of intelligibility between people of different times and places does not break, precisely because there is something that the participatory process is working on and with, a nature that is not simply produced by its relations.

The Thomistic account agrees and specifies: human nature is both body and soul. And as soul, human nature is an intellective principle that receives being, enters relation, and is genuinely transformed by it, without being identical to it. Participation in others shapes the person; it does not manufacture the person from nothing. The child who learns language from a caregiver is not simply absorbing the caregiver's being. The child is becoming, through that encounter, an irreducible subject who will one day be capable of love, knowledge, and worship — acts that no relational field can perform on anyone's behalf.

What the Notebooks Almost Said

The margin note Être, c'est participer is striking. The Catholic tradition wants to complete it, not correct it. To be is to participate — and participation presupposes a being that can truly enter relation rather than simply dissolve into it. The gift requires a giver. Sharing being requires beings who are genuinely there to be shared.

Lévy-Bruhl spent a lifetime approaching what Aquinas had articulated as the double structure of every finite existent: always inward enough to be real, always outward enough to be given. His notebooks, rescued from wartime rubble, point toward a metaphysics the secular academy is still recovering. The older tradition kept the notebooks intact.

What would it mean to read those four French words not as the conclusion of a career but as the opening of a question about gift — about why persons exist at all, and for whom? That question does not resolve into anthropology. It opens, quietly, into something else.

References

1. Clarke, Norris (n.d.). Person, Being, and St. Thomas. — "To be is to be substance-in-relation."
2. von Balthasar, Hans Urs (n.d.). The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 5. Page 457. — "An existent can only become actual through participation in the act of Being."
3. Ulrich, Ferdinand (n.d.). Homo Abyssus. — "Every aspect of the theory of participation is founded on an awareness of our human nature, which is at once spiritual and corporeal."
4. Maritain, Jacques (n.d.). The Person and the Common Good. — "Love seeks out this center…capable of giving and of giving itself."
5. Selner (n.d.). Thomistic Personalism and Creation Metaphysics: Norris Clarke. — "In the ontological sense the human being is a 'someone' from the very beginning."
6. Archer, Margaret S. (n.d.). Being Human: The Problem of Agency. Part I. — "Humanity, as a natural kind, defies transmutation into another and different kind."

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