Castoriadis's Ontology: Being and Creation

5. The Rediscovery of Physis

5 The Rediscovery of Physis If Castoriadis focused on an elucidation of a regional ontology of nomos during the 1970s, from the 1980s a shift becomes apparent in his thought as his writings become more infused with a growing realization of the importance of the creativity of physis. For convenience, we can date this with the publication of his 1980 review of Varela’s Principles of Biological Autonomy (1979). More broadly, by the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s Castoriadis shows a growing awareness of the importance of rethinking nature in relation not only to the political but also to the philosophical aspects of autonomy. In this vein, although it is apposite to note that Castoriadis’s debate with Cohn-Bendit on ‘‘ecology and autonomy ’’ took place in 1980, the impetus to rethink nature appears to have occurred slightly earlier with Morin’s La nature de la nature (1977).1 Castoriadis wrote a review of La nature de la nature in which his questioning of the scientific worldview begins to appear in tandem with a reevaluation of the Aristotelian notion of physis.2 In retrospect, the clearest published suggestion of an emerging shift toward a general ontology of physis as creativity occurs in Castoriadis’s second meditation on Merleau-Ponty’s thought—‘‘Merleau-Ponty and the Weight of the Ontological Tradition’’—which he composed just after the IIS in 1978.3 The essay highlights the overall centrality of the imagination and radical creation as anthropic modes of being, even though, in Castoriadis’s view, Merleau-Ponty ultimately remained caught in the impasses of the inherited ontological tradition and could not fully embrace 145 the radicalism of the imaginary element. In the same paper, however, we find Castoriadis’s earliest published indication of the shift toward rethinking the creativity of nature and the consequent move toward a general ontology of physis (and its continued interplay with his regional ontology of nomos). To my knowledge, this is the only place in his oeuvre where he explicitly brings together the idea of creative physis (which in that particular instance he terms ‘‘hyperphysis’’) and the notion of à-être as a polyregional or transregional understanding of being (‘‘to be’’). Even though he does not elaborate their connection at length, his discussion of a ‘‘hyperphysis ’’ in relation to the social-historical and beyond is a clear indication of his roads through and beyond nomos, and indicates a transitional interpretation that falls between his earlier interpretation in VEJP and the later PA (which I discuss later). It is worth quoting him in full: If, therefore, we want to think ‘‘the polymorphism of the wild Being’’ in relation to the being of the social-historical sphere and as something other than an external description; if we want, starting from the mode of being of this being (étant) that is the social-historical , to shed further light on the signification of to be, we ought to say that in truth this signification is: to-be (à-être). But then, also what Merleau-Ponty calls Being—namely, the reciprocal inherence of ‘‘that which’’ is and of ‘‘the manner in which’’ it is—can no longer be thought as Being-given, Being-achieved, Being-determined , but as continued creation, perpetual origination, which concerns not only ‘‘concrete existents,’’ and is not reproduction of other exemplars of the same, but also and essentially the forms, the eide, the relationships, the types, the generalities, which we are therefore unable in any way to exhaust within the horizon of any sort of determinacy whatsoever, be it real or rational, and which we see at work in its most eminent manner in human history. But then, neither can we say without equivocation that ‘‘everything is natural in us’’: to call ‘‘natural’’ the obligatory perception of another as traffic cop, Secretary General of the CPSU, or representative of Christ on Earth is to force the meaning of words. We can say that everything is natural in us (and outside us) on the condition that we no longer refer to a phusis, the production of what is in the repetition of what has been according to given norms, but rather to a hyperphusis as an engendering irreducible to the engendered, ontological genesis, emergence of other types, other relations, other norms. (1993: 24, emphasis in the original) This rethinking of physis entails a rediscovery of its creative element, and occurs as part of Castoriadis’s radicalization of...