Castoriadis's Ontology: Being and Creation

2. Proto-Institutions and Epistemological Encounters

2 Proto-Institutions and Epistemological Encounters Since Kant and the transcendental turn, the status of ontology—in the sense of philosophical claims about being—has been questioned.1 In the previous chapter, Castoriadis boldly approached the subject of being in an elucidation of the social-historical, but he quickly encounters heightened epistemological issues and a corresponding Kantian problematic: Ontological foundations are inseparable from logical foundations. Similar to Kant, Castoriadis discovers the imperative of interrogating the frameworks and categories of thought through which the idea of being can even begin to be thought, although Castoriadis’s arguments are epistemologically and ontologically substantive. In this sense, the Kantian theme is one derived from the Heideggerian context of the Kantbuch. Like Heidegger, Castoriadis finds that ontology and epistemology cannot be definitively divided. Heidegger saw the necessity of interpreting Kant’s productive imagination as temporal, but Castoriadis further radicalized Heidegger’s interpretation from the egological Kantian imagination into the radical imaginary of the social-historical.2 Yet, as with Heidegger and Kant of the first Critique, Castoriadis, too, constructs an inescapable abyss between human and nonhuman nature (the makeshift bridge of Anlehnung notwithstanding ).3 At the time of the IIS, Castoriadis remains in dialogue with the Critique of Pure Reason.4 Although he attempts to bridge the gap between the social and the natural with the introduction of the idea of Anlehnung, ultimately it is not until he rediscovers the significance of Kant’s third Critique, as part of his shift toward creative physis, that he 60 can more fully come to grips with the problematic that it entails. The connection between the previous IIS chapter on the social-historical and the present chapter on the proto-institutions of legein and teukhein is that, for Castoriadis, Western logic prevents us from thinking the full sense of creation (p. 181). In this vein, the chapter on legein and teukhein continues the argument introduced in the chapter on the social-historical, in that the core of the inherited logic is ensemblistic-identitarian.5 In this chapter, Castoriadis’s articulation of a critique of elementary reason is in the foreground. His critique of elementary reason is intended as a preparatory step for his overall critique of totalizing reason. It centers on an elucidation of the primordial institutions of what he terms legein and teukhein, which are elementary forms of thinking and doing. A feature of Castoriadis’s critique of reason is seen in the analysis of the social-historical —that is, institutional—underpinning of ensemblistic-identitarian logic. Castoriadis, as with post-Husserlian phenomenological thought more generally, criticizes the idea of a transcendental subject of knowledge , and instead theorizes reason by way of institutions and the socialhistorical .6 For Castoriadis, reason and its operations are in central interplay with the imagination; indeed, for him, the imagination is at the basis of reason. Concomitantly, this can be extended to say that culture is the ‘‘other’’ of reason.7 Here the important novelty of Castoriadis’s approach to the imagination begins to emerge, in that he links the creative imagination not only to works of human creation but also to meaning.8 Castoriadis , however, goes beyond Kant’s use of the imagination. Kant took up the role of the creative (that is, productive) imagination in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, but modified it in the second edition.9 He subsequently rediscovered it in the third Critique, but could not lend it ontological weight. Castoriadis did not shy away from theorizing the ontological role of the imagination: He had already signaled this in his previous chapter on the social-historical. For Castoriadis, the imagination pointed the way to liberty, not chaos, as the inherited tradition was wont to think. In thematizing the role of the imagination, Castoriadis encounters the problematic of language, whereby he reflects on the structuralist —originally Saussurean—perspective that a critique of reason proceeds by way of a discussion of language, especially in its significatory dimension . Thought itself is only feasible through language, which in and of itself points to a social institution rather than a transcendental subjective constitution. There are two points to note about Castoriadis’s critique of reason. First, despite his critique of totalizing reason, Castoriadis’s own critique incorporates a totalizing aspiration in that he intends it to span the whole Proto-Institutions and Epistemological Encounters 61 of the philosophical tradition (both precritical...