Castoriadis's Ontology: Being and Creation

Conclusion: The Circle of Creation

Conclusion The Circle of Creation The present study has taken the reader through the figurations—and recon figurations—of Castoriadis’s philosophical path through ontology, and into the ‘‘crossroads in the labyrinth’’ emerging beyond. It offered a hermeneutic reconstruction of Castoriadis’s ontological path, with a particular emphasis on his central concept of ‘‘creation.’’ Its argument was twofold: First, it showed that over the course of his philosophical trajectory , Castoriadis extended his notion of ontological creation beyond the human realm to include regions of nature as well; that is, he shifted from a regional ontology of social-historical creation (as nomos) to a transregional ontology of creative emergence (as physis), but without diluting the productive tension between the two orders. Second, it argued that Castoriadis made an implicit hermeneutical turn at the end of the IIS that relativized his notion of absolute creation to contextual creation. In this regard, it detected an interpretative element integral to creation (and a creative element to interpretation), and opened onto a tension between the ontological and hermeneutical dimensions of Castoriadis thought, especially in light of the phenomenological problematic of ‘‘the world horizon.’’ By focusing on the nomos and physis problematic, we have been able to chart a path through Castoriadis’s changing philosophical approach to being and creation. Over the course of the present study, the shifting con- figurations of physis and nomos in Castoriadis’s thought, and the significance this held for his rethinking of being and creation in relation to 214 nature, or, to be more precise, the significance this held for his rethinking of the place of anthropos within the natural world defined. The need to respond to a third question in addition to the physis and nomos problematic —that of the world horizon—emerged from the reflections (in Chapter 4) on the implications of the social-historical creation of ‘‘its world as the world.’’ The need was reinforced on consideration of Castoriadis’s polyregional ontology of the for-itself (Chapter 7). One implication that emerged from the later polyregional ontology was the need to elaborate an enlarged phenomenal field that went beyond the merely anthropic, and, concomitantly, a phenomenology that approaches the world of the living being with a view to elaborating more than ‘‘anthropological preconditions ’’ (contra Heidegger). Although I would agree with Castoriadis’s repudiation of biological autonomy, recognition of the world as a ‘‘metaorder ’’ going beyond the orders of physis and nomos, yet simultaneously drawing into itself an overlapping of those orders, especially in the polyregional modes of the for-itself and its instauration of the ‘‘subjective instance ,’’ calls for a rethinking of the phenomenal field in question. The orders of nomos, physis, and the meta-order of the world, in turn, open onto three interweaving dimensions of creation—ontological, hermeneutical and phenomenological—and span physical, living, psychical, and social -historical regions of being. Although important shifts in Castoriadis’s ontological approach are evident , it is important to note that some of his other insights into being and creation were more enduring. These included, for example, the intimate nexus between time and creation; the notion that creation could only be understood as (auto)creation ex nihilo, that is, creation as immanent and absolute; and the qualitative and heterogeneous levels or regions of being as creation, and creative being, which illuminate being as irregularly stratified. At the time of the IIS, Castoriadis’s interrogation of ‘‘being and creation ’’ was restricted to an elucidation of human modes of ontological creation. In particular, the being of creation was limited to excavating the region of nomos ‘‘for which no ontological place exists’’ (at least in conventional philosophical thought). As Castoriadis acknowledged, he could not explore the properly philosophical aspects of the ‘‘imaginary element’’ in the IIS, though its presence was increasingly felt, especially as the ‘‘being of doing’’ gradually became less important to his explicit elucidation , and the ‘‘being of signification’’ correspondingly more so. The creative imagination spanned the human psyche to the social-historical, but whereas the social-historical was emblematic of nomos and the project of autonomy, the psyche, although part of anthropic being, was of a different Conclusion: The Circle of Creation 215 ilk: It was more than physis, yet not quite nomos. Although the autonomous subject (and the psychoanalytic perspective) became integral to his elucidation of autonomy, a few of his proposed solutions that emerged from the psychoanalytic domain, such...