Castoriadis's Ontology: Being and Creation

1. Toward an Ontology of the Social-Historical

1 Toward an Ontology of the Social-Historical If the 1964–65 section of the IIS announced Castoriadis’s farewell to Marx, the second section (written 1970–74) heralds his shift from phenomenology to ontology.1 It declares itself with the programmatic chapter on the social-historical as an occluded ontological region that has remained unrecognized by traditional philosophy. Castoriadis’s original purpose in the second part of The Imaginary Institution of Society was to elucidate the ontological preconditions of ‘‘autonomy.’’ Along the way, however, it became an elaboration of self-creation as the mode of being of the social-historical. His contention, forcefully made, is that Western philosophy has reduced the richness and plurivocity of being to an assumption of determinacy, and, as a consequence, is unable to come to grips with the notion of ontological creation without reducing it to ‘‘identity’’ and the ‘‘reproduction of the same.’’ Castoriadis proposes to critique the Western philosophical tradition—and its interpretation of being—through an elucidation of the social-historical as the very mode of being that eludes deterministic thought.2 In so doing, two dimensions of social-historical creation become central: First, its radical temporality as the ‘‘time of otherness’’; and, second, its fundamental connection to the creative imagination.3 For Castoriadis, ontological creation highlights the importance of history as the region of change, self-alteration, and the emergence of the radically new. The intimate nexus of time and being appear as history. Heidegger’s rethinking of being and time notwithstanding , Castoriadis argues that traditional philosophy lacks the 25 resources to think time qua time, especially in its connection to being qua being.4 We receive the clearest indication of Castoriadis’s philosophical focus in the opening sentence of the second section of the IIS: ‘‘Our aim in this chapter is to elucidate the question of society and that of history, questions that can be understood only when they are taken as one and the same: the question of the social-historical’’ (p. 167).5 Let us unpack this sentence. First to the term ‘‘elucidation’’: ‘‘Elucidation’’ is seldom used in philosophical parlance. Jaspers (1932) employed a similar idiom in his Existenzerhellung (Erhellung has been translated as elucidation in the English literature), where he sees the task of philosophy to elucidate existence , in the first instance, rather than to acquire understanding. Castoriadis ’s usage of ‘‘elucidation’’ is not unrelated in that he can be broadly interpreted as radicalizing existential currents. The achievement of phenomenology—in its various incarnations—was its emphasis on meaning as fundamental to the human condition.6 Castoriadis inherited this legacy, and concern for ‘‘meaning’’ remained crucial to the development of his thought. ‘‘Elucidation’’ itself incorporates notions of ‘‘making clear’’ or illumination, and is, in the broadest sense, to be understood as ‘‘making sense of’’ or the ‘‘putting into meaning of’’ our historical world and our world-as-history. In looking back, ‘‘elucidation ’’ as a philosophical task already appears in the 1965 section of the IIS, where, in contrast to the totalizing project of theorizing as reason/ rationality, Castoriadis’s practice of elucidation draws on the intellectual sources of phenomenology and phenomenological Marxism. This is especially strong in the 1964–65 section of the IIS but carries into his ontological phase. An interesting example can be found in the very final paragraphs of the 1964–65 section of the IIS (p. 164), for example. Castoriadis posits an ‘‘articulated unity’’ between elucidation and action in a radicalization of Marx’s eleventh thesis, where Marx no longer presents a stark choice between ‘‘interpretation’’ or ‘‘revolutionary action’’ but argues that the real purpose is to ‘‘interpret the world in order to change it’’ (p. 164). Elucidation then for Castoriadis is a kind of philosophical praxis, and philosophical action is a part of ‘‘social doing’’ and a vital aspect of the project of autonomy. In this sense, elucidation is inherently a form of la philosophie, as opposed to le philosophique.7 Crucially, as the above quotation indicates, elucidation is interrogative: It problematizes—in this case the questions of being and the social-historical—in line with philosophy in the strong sense of la philosophie. However, in a rare instance, and as the 1965 passage on Marx’s eleventh thesis reveals, Castoriadis also implicitly accepted an interpretative element of elucidation.8 I say ‘‘rare,’’ as, 26 Nomos in general, Castoriadis was hostile to the hermeneutic tradition of philosophy . For him ‘‘interpretation...