Castoriadis's Ontology: Being and Creation

7. Rethinking the World of the Living Being

7 Rethinking the World of the Living Being The living being emerges as a central theme for Castoriadis’s rethinking of creative physis.1 His reengagement with the mode of the living being sees the simultaneous reappearance of the physis and nomos problematic, although it is reconfigured at a new level. In line with the more general trend evidenced in Castoriadis’s philosophical path during the 1980s, the living being is now less characterized as self-organizing—which implies an ensidic logic—and more properly theorized in terms of self-creation. Castoriadis’s elucidation of the living being to some extent obscures the previously clear boundary between anthropic and non-anthropic regions of being. As will become clearer, this is particularly the case with respect to his emergent polyregional ontology of the being for-itself (pour soi). In revisiting the living being, Castoriadis not only deepens his long-term discussion with Francisco Varela, but also continues to radicalize and fuse key motifs in Aristotle and Kant in innovative ways. With the growing elaboration of the living being as ontologically creative, nonhuman nature came to be seen more in terms of continuity with anthropic modes of being in Castoriadis’s thought. Indeed, in the 1980s, Castoriadis reassessed the lines of continuity and discontinuity between anthropic and non-anthropic being and, as a result, redefines them in variety of ways. Nonetheless, there remain crucial points of difference between them; that is, Castoriadis does not reduce the human world to the animal world. This becomes especially clear in Castoriadis ’s elucidation of autonomy as it pertains to the various regions and modes of the for-itself, as his discussions with Varela’s notion of biological 181 autonomy show. Not only was the living being autopoietic in the wider sense of being qua being, it also signified the emergence of an archetypal self as autopoietic and to that extent an imaginary element is present in its self-creation that ruptured with physical regions of being. This appearance of what Castoriadis was to call ‘‘the subjective instance’’ entailed the ‘‘self’’ and the emergence of ‘‘the world’’ as a horizon of (proto)meaning (PSS 119). Previous chapters have provided a close reading of a single text to critically interpret and elucidate Castoriadis’s philosophical trajectory (with amplification from selected additional primary sources). This chapter takes a slightly different approach, however, as Castoriadis’s elaboration of the living being depends for much of its theoretical import on its contrast with other modes of being; in the first instance, with respect to the spectrum of the polyregionality of the various modes of being for-itself (for example, the living being, the psyche, or the social-historical); in the second instance, in comparison to nonliving nature. There is an abundance of material on the living being to be found in Castoriadis’s various essays and seminars, but no single text that focuses exclusively on it. For this reason, the strategy of the present chapter is to take the most relevant passages—especially in ‘‘The State of the Subject Today,’’ ‘‘Pour soi et subjectivité,’’ and from the posthumously published seminars from SV (Seminar IV, 21 January 1987, and Seminar V, 28 January 1987), as well as important passages from DD, PA, and OIHS that engage directly with the problematic of the living being—that will be discussed in order to paint an overall picture of the shifts in Castoriadis’s conception of these strata of being and heterogeneous regionality of the for-itself. The puzzle of the living being had long interested Castoriadis. He elucidates it in three distinct phases over the course of his ontological trajectory . The first stage encompasses the period up to, and including, the publication of the IIS in 1975. As early as 1971 in MSPI, as well as in the IIS, the living being was a recurring if somewhat marginal theme. In these publications, Castoriadis’s theorizing of the living being incorporates a preliminary interlacing of both ontological and epistemological aspects. In the 1970s, however, the regional ontology of the social-historical was his prime concern; the living being figured either as a limit case, or as an interesting point of contrast to anthropic modes of being. Prior to the mid-1980s, Castoriadis tended to describe the living being in terms of ‘‘self-organization’’ rather than ‘‘self-creation,’’ and from as early as MSPI, Castoriadis situated his discussion of the living being as a critique of information and cybernetic theory. The...