Castoriadis's Ontology: Being and Creation

Introduction to Part II: Physis and the Romanticist Imaginary of Nature

Introduction to Part II Physis and the Romanticist Imaginary of Nature As was evident by the final chapter of the IIS, Castoriadis had begun to extend the scope of magmas beyond the human realm and into nature. Not surprisingly, this expansion wrought changes in his overall philosophical reflections, in particular to his rethinking of the ontological signi ficance of the creativity of nature, on the one hand, and the lines of continuity and discontinuity between human and nonhuman nature, on the other. As with his rethinking of the being of human institution (nomos) after his break with Marx, Castoriadis returned to the ancient Greeks—most explicitly to Aristotle, but also to the pre-Socratics, and to the Hesiodian notion of chaos—to reflect more fully on the ontological modes of magmas in nature. This time, however, his focus was not so much nomos but physis. In particular, he began to foreground the creative aspects of physis, whereas earlier he had tended to view it in more normative terms, at least as far as the human world was concerned.1 Yet, as will become clear, although he increasingly emphasized the imaginary of physis , Castoriadis did not abandon the productive tension and configuration of the nomos and physis problematic. From another angle, we could say that he did not abandon his preoccupation with the human, political world as the ‘‘creative imaginary institution’’ of nomos to replace it with a reconsideration of the creativity of physis; instead, he brought a more sustained reflection on the creative aspects of nature into the wider field of his philosophical concerns. Drawing out the implications of these changes forms the focus of the second half of this study. 137 Can Castoriadis’s rethinking of physis be reconciled with the hermeneutic of modernity that was signaled in the General Introduction of this book? Recalling Johann P. Arnason’s pioneering reflections on the cultural horizons of modernity might be helpful at this point. Arnason’s cultural hermeneutics articulates modernity not as a ‘‘project’’ (as did Habermas), but as a ‘‘field of tensions’’ involving a historically changing, partially structured conflict of interpretations that emerge from the competing world articulations variously offered by Romanticism and the Enlightenment . Within his thought, Romanticism and the Enlightenment are not reduced to intellectual or historical movements, but are elaborated more broadly as cultural currents that are constitutive of modernity’s field of tensions. Arnason’s theory of cultural modernity insists moreover on the centrality of two other aspects: First, and most relevant for our current purposes, that the constitution of cultural modernity includes a rediscovery and reworking of classical sources; and, second, that the elaboration of ‘‘constitutive’’ (not just ‘‘significant’’) cultural others and ‘‘othernesses ,’’ both intracultural and intercultural, are fundamental to its selfinstitution (Arnason 1996). But can Castoriadis’s return to classical sources be situated within modern constellations? In rethinking nature, the main problematic concerns its bifurcation in modernity. In his Tarner lecture, Whitehead (1921, pp. 26ff) speaks of the bifurcation of nature into the objective quantities of physical nature and the subjective qualities of perceived nature . Four nodal points for discussion are identified: causality, time, space, and appearance. Castoriadis, too, addresses these themes in innovative ways, with some fruitful overlap with a Whiteheadian perspective. Castoriadis relativizes the radical distinction between the object and the subject through a criticism of Kant’s reluctant confession in the third Critique of a ‘‘glücklicher Zufall’’: On Castoriadis’s account, for the world to be able to be organized by us, means that it is ontologically organizable. However, he takes the subjective aspects of organizable nature, and uses this as a springboard to critique the determinacy-as-causality argument. He does so by radicalizing the concept of nature as the ontological capacity of not only human but also nonhuman or natural modes of being to create their own world of (proto)meaning as a new stratum of reality. Castoriadis’s rethinking and radicalization of physis, which was most evident during the 1980s, signals not only a return to ancient Greek sources, but to a critical reconsideration of the modern Romantic idea of nature (or of the Romanticist imaginary of nature). The rediscovery of the other, exceedingly creative dimension to physis, places Castoriadis within the discontinuous modern tradition of natura naturans/natura naturata, as 138 Introduction to Part II well as within the field of Naturphilosophie; these two currents...