Castoriadis's Ontology: Being and Creation

8. Reimagining Cosmology

8 Reimagining Cosmology Castoriadis’s cosmological considerations emerge from his reflections on the interconnectedness of time and creation. He seeks to offer a philosophical articulation of the physical universe—as one reducible neither to a purely scientific nor a religious imaginary—by an elucidation of the overarching meaning of time.1 Castoriadis’s dialogue with—and continual movement between—the ancients and the moderns continues to inform his elucidation, and he also draws on archaic mythopoietic motifs to anchor his image of the kosmos. Castoriadis’s philosophical cosmology, in its radicalization of Aristotle via a rethinking of Kant, continues to resonate with pre-Socratic—more specifically Ionian—visions of nature (not least as composed of primordial elements), and the relationship between physis and being. Links to the ‘‘poetic ontologies’’ of Hesiod or Homer become discernable, particularly in his ancient Greek seminars (CQFG). His elucidations revise the interplay of scientific and philosophical articulation of the world, and in so doing, revive an older sense of philosophical cosmology (Gusdorf 1985). As Brague (1999) argues, cosmology implies an opening onto anthropology, as it presumes a reflexive relation to the world: As such the two are linked.2 For Castoriadis, proper time as such has not been thought by the inherited tradition. A primary part of his concern with philosophical cosmology is to question the inherited interpretation of time—as it is variously expressed—and its tendency to reduce time to a dimension of space, especially as it pertains to the physical world. As a consequence, he seeks to 195 offer an interpretation of time at the cosmological level that would not be reduced to space, which he does through an articulation of time as qualitative , creative, and content-rich. From the time of the IIS, and in Heidegger ’s philosophical wake, Castoriadis has argued that the only way to think being was to think time; here he continues to expand and deepen this proposition. Castoriadis argues that traditional approaches to time— both in physics and philosophy—consistently theorize it as a dimension of, or as complementary to, space. In so doing they occlude the core aspects of temporality. He maintains that time as the emergence of alterity is not thematized; instead the conception of time remains caught within frameworks of identity, and, as such, cannot account for creation. He extends the notion of time as the concrete emergence of forms through which its content is constituted. His underlying proposition is that a new understanding of creation depends on a rethinking of the philosophical notion of time and vice versa. Castoriadis offers an interpretation which draws on the Greek imaginary as a distinctive grasping of the world, and highlights the radical temporality and heterogeneity of being as à-être as the incessant autocreation of other forms. His interpretation also foregrounds the image of being as creative physis and as à-être—a radically heterogeneous, always-becoming being.3 In the same way that the regional ontology of the living being needed to be contextualized within a wider polyregional—or dimensional—ontology of the for-itself, so, too, does Castoriadis’s philosophical cosmology exceed strictly regional limits, and provides a bridge to the transregional ontology of creative physis. Here time as the medium of creation links to Castoriadis’s cosmology and simultaneously to the general ontology of transregional physis. Indeed, as Castoriadis notes elsewhere, ‘‘Ontology is also, necessarily, cosmology’’ (DD p. 362). As the creation of alterities and the time of alterity, overarching time is inseparable from transregional being. Before proceeding further, it is worth returning to the early paper MSPI. In this essay, Castoriadis’s discussion pursues a wide-ranging interrogation of the current state of the natural and the human sciences.4 One conclusion to be drawn from his analysis is that each discipline has a particular grasp upon the world (upon a particular stratum of being), and has partial overlap with neighboring—and sometimes, too, with less related— disciplines: Each contributes to the elucidation of being qua being. As discussed earlier in Chapter 1, moreover, MSPI is best interpreted as the initial recognition and articulation of the social-historical as a separate region of being in need of its own philosophical elucidation, rather than as a setting out a programmatic research agenda that would lead to the 196 Physis development of creative physis. Simultaneously, however, MSPI is a defense of philosophical autonomy, although...