Castoriadis's Ontology: Being and Creation (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)
Suzi Adams
Language: English
Pages: 312
ISBN: 0823234592
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book is the first systematic reconstruction of Castoriadis' philosophical trajectory. It critically interprets the internal shifts in Castoriadis' ontology through reconsideration of the ancient problematic of 'human institution' (nomos) and 'nature' (physis), on the one hand, and the question of 'being' and 'creation', on the other. Unlike the order of physis, the order of nomos played no substantial role in the development of western thought: The first part of the book suggests that Castoriadis sought to remedy this with his elucidation of the social-historical as the region of being elusive to the determinist imaginary of inherited philosophy. This ontological turn was announced with the publication of his magnum opus The Imaginary Institution of Society (first published in 1975) which is reconstructed as Castoriadis' long journey through nomos via four interconnected domains: ontological, epistemological, anthropological, and hermeneutical respectively. With the aid of archival sources, the second half of the book reconstructs a second ontological shift in Castoriadis' thought that occurred during the 1980s. Here it argues that Castoriadis extends his notion of 'ontological creation' beyond the human realm and into nature. This move has implications for his overall ontology and signals a shift towards a general ontology of creative physis. The increasing ontological importance of physis is discussed further in chapters on objective knowledge, the living being, and philosophical cosmology. It suggests that the world horizon forms an inescapable interpretative context of cultural articulation - in the double sense of Merleau-Ponty's mise en forme du monde - in which physis can be elucidated as the ground of possibility, as well as a point of culmination for nomos in the circle of interpretative creation. The book contextualizes Castoriadis' thought within broader philosophical and sociological traditions. In particular it situates his thought within French phenomenological currents that take either an ontological and/or a hermeneutical turn. It also places a hermeneutic of modernity - that is, an interpretation that emphasizes the ongoing dialogue between romantic and enlightenment articulations of the world - at the centre of reflection. Castoriadis' reactivation of classical Greek sources is reinterpreted as part of the ongoing dialogue between the ancients and the moderns, and more broadly, as part of the interpretative field of tensions that comprises modernity.
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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
phenomenology and the linguistic turn of the structuralists. Indeed, Castoriadis writes in the concrete context of the structuralist debates of the 1960s and his work is often a polemic directed against Le´vi-Strauss and his notion of a ‘‘super reason.’’ Here a strong Merleau-Pontian element is apparent in Castoriadis: Meaning presupposes language but is not collapsible into language.32 For Castoriadis, there can be no linguistic meaning without reference to a translinguistic context, which,
figurations of the creative imagination are never quite exorcised but remain fruitful to his overall trajectory.33 Weber’s thought, too, has recently undergone a renaissance with more interest being shown in the cultural aspects of his thought. An important thinker here is Johann P. Arnason, who fused Weber’s early theory of culture as the ‘‘relations between man and world’’ (1982) and Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of mise en forme du monde, which Arnason further refined through a reconstruction
(in-der-Welt-sein) and, in a greater sense again, Hermeneutical Horizons of Meaning ................. 18033$ $CH4 04-15-11 15:51:51 PS 111 PAGE 111 as Merleau-Ponty has explicated, not merely ‘‘in’’ but also of the world (au monde). This is amplified further in a note that follows from Castoriadis’s observations (p. 149) concerning the mutual entwining of ‘‘world-image’’ and ‘‘self-image’’ (which Castoriadis still directly related to the being of social doing) that implies a relation to
repeatedly in his various writings, is best interpreted metaphorically. Part of what it shows is that once the transcendental realist turn is taken, it inevitably incorporates philosophy, and ultimately a philosophy of nature, within the very foundations of science. To lean on Merleau-Ponty, the problematic of science also takes us to the ‘‘true transcendental’’ of nature and culture in world articulation. Here Castoriadis radicalizes Kant and Heidegger’s Kantbuch in two ways: In terms of the
