Beyond a socio-centric concept of culture: Johann Arnason's macro-phenomenology and critique of sociological solipsism

Cultural articulations of the world

Arnason developed his theory of culture (in the strong sense of an orienting and shaping force of society) from the early 1980s as a part of the broader cultural turn in the human sciences. His shift to culture was simultaneously a turn towards hermeneutics (and Weber) and a distancing from critical theory (and Marx). ² His most systematic theoretical reflections on the culture problematic appear in two instalments. They are, first, Praxis und Interpretation (1988), in which he articulated a cultural hermeneutic of modernity in response to Habermas’s one-sided emphasis on reason and rationality, ³ and, second, Civilizations in Dispute (2003a), in which he enlarged the cultural hermeneutic of modernity to a framework explicitly amenable to comparative civilizational analysis and multiple modernities. Although Arnason pursued ‘roads beyond Marx’, there was no comparable break with phenomenology. In this sense, Arnason’s Marxian approach was always a phenomenological Marxism, and his hermeneutics always a phenomenological hermeneutics (and a hermeneutic phenomenology). ⁴ Indeed, he has identified the most enduring thematic in his thought as the phenomenological problematic of the world (Adams and Arnason, 2016: 152).

Arnason’s cultural hermeneutic framework fuses philosophical and sociological insights to produce a framework for understanding the human condition in its macro-dimensions. Philosophical hermeneutics and phenomenology tend to emphasize the subject-self as source of meaning; these currents of thought have been less adept at theorizing the social dimension of the human condition, whereas sociology is apt to emphasize society (however understood) as the source of social worlds, rather than the individual self. ⁵ However, philosophical accounts – especially those in hermeneutics and phenomenology – emphasized being-in-the-world as central to articulating human meaning, whereas sociology tended to neglect the world problematic. Arnason extends and radicalizes these insights further; in his hands, (hermeneutic-)phenomenology, which has often (in sociology at least) been reduced to micro-analyses of the self (or: the self in dialogue with others) in everyday life, is rethought as a macro-phenomenology suitable for historical analyses of the social-historical domain: institutions, societies, cultures, and civilizations. Unlike philosophical hermeneutics and phenomenology, however, Arnason foregrounds sociological hermeneutic insights on the centrality of ‘society’ (which he then expands to ‘civilizations’) for understanding the human condition in its collective aspects, although, as this essay will argue, he does so in a way that explicitly emphasizes and clarifies the ‘trans-subjective’ dimension of sociality, in contrast to more conventional approaches which take ‘intersubjectivity’ as a model for sociality.

Arnason develops his account of meaning as a theory of culture through critical engagement with Max Weber, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Cornelius Castoriadis. Culture, on his account, is the domain of meaning. Distinctively, he casts it as not only characterized by its relation to sociality but also by its relation to the world horizon (Arnason, 1988). For Arnason, meaning in the full sense always appears at the cultural level – that is, it is always already inclusive of the ‘imaginary element’ – which, in turn, opens onto the world, and is trans-subjective – that is, the impersonal, unmotivated, and anonymous level of sociality that is irreducible to intersubjectivity (I return to ‘trans-subjective’ in greater detail below).

Fundamental to Arnason’s cultural hermeneutics was the critique of Marx, and concomitant turn towards Weber. Arnason’s first reconstruction of Weber, Rationalisation and Modernity: Towards a Culturalist Reading of Max Weber (1982), provisionally outlined the importance of Weber’s early reflections on culture for his analysis of modernity and put Weberian thought into contact with phenomenological debates on the world horizon. Arnason’s reading of Weber emphasized the importance of culture, meaning, and world in interplay with processes of rationalization instead of the conventional reduction to the elaboration of forms of rationality and processes of rationalization.

Arnason was particularly interested in Weber’s early reflections on culture as ‘the relations between man and world’ (Weber, 2013). Three things were especially important: first, it provided a way of articulating a theory of culture that went beyond socio-centric conceptions and limitations (Arnason, 1993b, 1982, 1988, 2003a), and thus could do justice to culture’s twofold aspects of sociality and world. The differentiation of culture from society (culture refers to the domain of meaning, whilst society is the configuration of institutions) is then, second, understood as a combination of ‘patterns of meaning with principles of choice’ (Arnason, 1993b: 92), that is, he notes that Weber distinguishes interpretative and evaluative aspects of culture. Arnason’s own approach emphasizes the interpenetration of the two aspects and looks to relativize what he considers to be Weber’s over-accentuation of the evaluative aspect (e.g. Arnason, 2003a). Finally, in invoking Weber’s theory of culture, Arnason draws on Weber’s understanding that ‘the transcendental presupposition of every cultural science lies not in our finding a certain culture or any “culture” in general to be valuable but in the fact that we are cultural human beings [Kulturmenschen], endowed with the capacity and the will to take a deliberate attitude towards the world and to lend it significance’ (Weber, 1949 [1897]: 81; translation modified, cited in Arnason, 2003a: 89). Arnason argues that, for Weber, the definition of culture was ‘evidently meant to capture a common ground which enables different cultures – in some degree – to understand each other, and which can therefore not be seen as the domain of sovereign and arbitrary world-making. Such considerations suggest a need for further reflection on being-in-the world as the most elementary level of meaning’ (Arnason, 2003a: 90; emphasis added). Thus, Arnason’s engagement with Weber’s early reflections on culture brings Weber’s thought into the realm of the trans-subjective analysis – that is, cultural meaning as the ongoing work of the anonymous collective. In so doing, Arnason emphasizes the twofold relation to culture – both to society (here understood to include culture) and to the world as a shared horizon. Through the emphasis on the world as a meta-social context, he goes beyond socio-centric approaches to cultural meaning that reduces it to a product or expression of society (I return to this below).

Weber’s casting of culture as the interplay of anthropos and world enabled Arnason to reflect on the phenomenological problematic of the world in relation to culture (instead of only focusing on the ‘sociality’ of culture as, for example, expressed via symbolic webs). The notion of the ‘world’, as understood within phenomenological contexts, does not refer to the set of ‘all existing entities’ or to ‘all naturally existing entities’; it is ‘not a concept and remains irreducible to the concept’ (Richir, 1989: 239). It refers rather to an overarching experiential and interpretive horizon – existential, cosmic, spatial, temporal, and, in historically important cases, transcendent – to which constellations of meaning refer. In a radicalization of the phenomenological critique of the subject/object distinction by recognizing our prior involvement in-the-world, Arnason elaborates the world as trans-objective horizon that is formed each time by the impersonal, properly societal dimension of culture as the trans-subjective dimension of human life (e.g. Arnason, 1993b, 1994, 2003a). The trans-subjective dimension makes interpretive diversity and conflict possible, as it ‘goes beyond the grasp of individual groups involved and thus remain[s] open to interpretive efforts and conflicts’ (Arnason, 2003a: 90).

Let us open a parenthesis: It is worth noting that the notion of ‘trans-subjective’ is often misunderstood. It refers to the impersonal, anonymous, and unmotivated dimension of the social. It has been equated in a negative sense in phenomenology, for example, with Heidegger’s ‘das Man’. Whilst the notion of ‘trans-subjectivity’ shares with ‘das Man’ a sense of indeterminate plurality and an anonymous level of sociality, the trans-subjective – at least in the way that it is utilized in this essay – does not refer to an inauthentic mode of being. The trans-subjective is instead better characterized as meta-normative. Castoriadis has offered the clearest elucidation of the trans-subjective level of the human condition, although he situates it within an ontological framework (Castoriadis, 1987 [1975]). For him, the trans-subjective is the mode of being of the social-historical as the ‘anonymous collective’ of society in its interplay of ‘instituting’ and ‘instituted’ aspects. It is always-already unmotivated, irredeemably historical, and irreducible to the intersubjective level of the social world. It appears as cultural projects of power that are embedded in institutions – understood here in the broadest sense – and which alter themselves in, through, and as time (and specific forms of temporality). The trans-subjective context thus consists in the interplay of instituted patterns and instituting irruptions of cultural meaning, social power, and collective movement that are both in-the-world and opening-onto-the-world. Some, such as Habermas (1987 [1975]), have criticized Castoriadis for losing sight of the subject in the ‘hurly burly’ of anonymous sociality. But the subject is not reduced to nor lost in the anonymous collective; rather, such trans-subjective contexts both open up and limit possible varieties of subjectivity within cultural and civilizational complexes. The trans-subjective comprises the broadest levels of the social world, such as institutions and civilizations, and affords the precondition for meaningful accounts of subject-selves and contexts of intersubjective action.

Returning to the substantive discussion: Arnason looked to Merleau-Ponty to deepen the phenomenological articulation of culture. Of particular importance was his rendering of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of mise en forme du monde as ‘cultural articulations of the world’ (e.g. Arnason, 1988, 1993b) in connection with Weber’s early understanding of culture as the ‘relation between man and world’. Indeed, Weber’s formulation allowed Arnason to give a cultural twist to Merleau-Ponty’s famous formulation that ‘because we are in the world we are condemned to meaning’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962 [1945]: xi). In this way, Arnason articulates an account of cultural meaning that is mediated between ‘world and society’. Culture is no longer reducible to society (as a configuration of institutions) but becomes an ‘element of the world’ in Merleau-Ponty’s rethinking of the Pre-Socratics’ use of ‘element’ (Arnason, 1993). Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of ‘element’ is epitomized in his elucidation of ‘flesh’ in The Visible and the Invisible (1968 [1964]). He tells us that:

[t]o designate it, we should need the old term ‘element,’ in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an ‘element’ of Being. (1968 [1964]: 139)

Central to Merleau-Ponty’s transformation of phenomenology was his interest in – and dialogue with – the human sciences and their foundations (Arnason, 2013), especially sociology and comparative history. As such, Merleau-Ponty’s interest in the philosophical dimensions of society and history enables a productive encounter with Weber’s historical sociology. For Merleau-Ponty, the human condition as being-in-the-world is the most elementary modality of meaning. Merleau-Ponty sought to provide an alternative understanding of the human condition to the structuralist (objectivistic) approach to society. In particular, his response to Lévi-Strauss, who ultimately reduced ‘meaning to a surface effect of structural determinants’, was to radicalize the very notion of structure to an understanding of a ‘structure of structures’ (Arnason, 1993b: 88). Such a ‘structure of structures’ would be understood as a ‘latent and comprehensive framework that would throw light on the relations and transitions between more local and visible patterns’ (Arnason, 1993b: 88); that is, the ‘structure of structures’ becomes the world as the ‘horizon of horizons’. Arnason maintains that Merleau-Ponty discerns two fronts upon which to develop his phenomenology of the world as a meta-context of society as a ‘counter-offensive’ to structuralism. First, in insisting on the openness and ambiguity of the social complex of structures, a plurality of (conflicting) interpretative patterns co-exist; second, the social context is always embedded in a meta-social context, ‘that of culturally diversified coexistence in the world’ where the ‘human order of culture’ is understood as an ‘inexhaustible source of meaning’ (1993b: 89). ⁷

Overall, Arnason found Merleau-Ponty (in conjunction with Weber) a fruitful interlocutor for his developing macro-phenomenology of civilizations (in conjunction with his cultural hermeneutic of modernity), as he articulated an ‘interpretative patterning of the human condition – including its social and historical dimensions’ (1993b: 89). Instead of constructing ‘formal invariants’ to understand the universal implications of cultural patterns, Merleau-Ponty preferred the notion of ‘lateral universals’ (Arnason, 1993b: 89), which can only be discovered through comparative historical analyses but presumes the minimum of cultural commonality essential to Weber’s approach. Because the overarching world horizon is common to cultural humanity it is interpreted in a diversity of ways, and this plays out on the (inter)civilizational plane of modernity’s field of tensions (Arnason, 1991 [1986]).

To problematize the debates on the ‘meaning of meaning’ (2003a: 204) even further, Arnason turns to Castoriadis’s elucidation of social imaginary significations. For both Castoriadis and Arnason, phenomenological Marxism and Merleau-Ponty’s thought were central intellectual sources. But whereas Arnason’s ‘roads beyond Marx’ saw him take a hermeneutical (and Weberian) turn in order to deepen the phenomenological questions he was pursuing in relation to culture, Castoriadis’s ‘roads beyond Marx’ saw him shift, in the wake of Merleau-Ponty, to ontology, and move further away from phenomenological perspectives (although not completely exorcising them). This is reflected in his ontological approach to meaning apparent in the last chapter of his best-known work, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Castoriadis, 1987 [1975]), which is quite different from the more phenomenological emphasis he put on his articulation of the imaginary element in the first part of the book. ⁸

Working against the grain of much of the reception of Castoriadis’s thought, which generally emphasizes his political project of autonomy, Arnason argues that Castoriadis’s elucidation of social imaginary significations as the connection between the ‘creative imagination’ and ‘meaning’ was his most significant theoretical contribution (Arnason, 1988, 2003a). Castoriadis’s account of meaning draws on three main intellectual contexts: Durkheim’s work on collective representations (as distinguished from the collective conscience); phenomenological approaches to meaning (especially via Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur), even though he did not make this explicit; and the creative imagination (which he reconstructs from a fragmentary tradition in western philosophical thought stretching from Aristotle to Kant to Freud). He develops his ‘anthropology of the imagination’ along two poles: the radical imagination of the psyche and the radical imaginary of the social-historical (Castoriadis, 1987 [1975]). It is the latter that interests us the most in the present context.

Castoriadis’s most systematic elucidation of meaning is as an ontology of social imaginary significations, which is located in the final chapter of The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987 [1975]). Here he analyses the modes of being of social imaginary significations, which is the work of the anonymous collective and which create each time a social world. These complexes of meaning are ‘figurative’: they create a web of meaning through which ‘reality’ becomes possible in the first place. ⁹ Castoriadis distinguishes between two kinds of imaginary significations: first order and second order imaginary significations. The former are the most important for him as they are completely creative, absolutely generative of a world of meaning. They create and form the nuclei of a particular social world. Because they are absolutely creative, they do not refer to the existing world: they have no world referent. Key examples for Castoriadis include the imaginary significations of ‘autonomy’ and ‘God’. In that first order significations are considered to be purely generative, they create a social world in a ‘worldless vacuum’; Arnason’s response is to bring the world back into the equation. ¹⁰

In Arnason’s view – at that time, at least – Castoriadis’s elucidation of social imaginary significations was ‘first and foremost a reinterpretation of culture’ (2003a: 53; cf. 1989a). But whereas Castoriadis underscores a radical notion of social creativity as the ontological creation ex nihilo of a world of social imaginary significations, Arnason emphasized the hermeneutic interpretability of the world as an overarching horizon. This is a point of enduring disagreement between them: Castoriadis stresses a notion of absolution creation, and casts interpretation as a weak mode of determinacy; Arnason understands interpretation as always already creative, and creation as always already interpretative. Central to this is Castoriadis’s more or less wholesale rejection of the phenomenological problematic of the world and hermeneutic insights into the symbolic aspects of meaning with his ontological shift in the early 1970s.

Whilst Arnason and Castoriadis both agree on the importance of social creativity that goes beyond functional and logical reductionism, and the trans-subjective contexts of meaning patterning the world that they produce, their divergent approaches to the world as an overarching and shared horizon shapes their various perspectives on the interpretative aspect of creation (and vice versa). For Arnason, the world as a shared horizon, that is, as a meta-context irreducible to each social context, highlights the ongoing necessity of its interpretation, or in Arnason’s own parlance, cultural articulation, as part of the human condition of being-in-the-world, and the ongoing work of the anonymous collective that forms the trans-subjective (and trans-objective) field of society and world. Castoriadis (1997a), however, denies the hermeneutical aspect to ‘world making’, and develops his social theory of culture as an absolute creation of human collectivities that remains ultimately socio-centric.

Beyond a socio-centric theory of culture

For those who take ‘culture’ as an ‘orienting force’ of society, a series of linked assumptions is shared. This is irrespective of whether a ‘strong’ understanding of culture is limited to the narrow sense of cultural sociology, as pioneered by Jeff Alexander and the Yale school (e.g. Alexander, 2003), or expanded to include a broader sense of ‘cultural social theory’, with thinkers as diverse as Craig Calhoun, who links Charles Taylor’s articulation of social imaginaries to a Bourdieusian perspective on culture in order to investigate the historical basis of nationalism, social movements and the public sphere (e.g. Calhoun, 2007), or S.N. Eisenstadt and his notion of cultural ontologies as central to his civilizational analysis (e.g. Eisenstadt, 2006). Of particular importance is the notion that ‘culture’ is the self-production of a particular ‘collective’ or ‘society’. This includes the formation of collective self-identity through the specific configuration of cultural elements (or social imaginary significations). Culture, in the strong sense, is understood to generate the meaningful (symbolic, imaginary) form of each society in an auto-referential process. Indeed, the very conviction that societies are fashioned by human agency (whether collective or individual matters less here) is part of a broader turn that is co-constitutive of cultural modernity itself (Eisenstadt, 2006), in which the very possibility of human creation (as opposed to mimesis as imitation of nature) first becomes conceivable (Blumenberg, 2000) and whence ideas of ‘social constructivism’ emerged.

In its various guises, social – or cultural – constructivism comprises the very bread and butter of sociology. It appeared as a way of demarcating the social realm from extra-social forms of determinism (e.g. biological). But other varieties of determinism – in structuralist, functionalist and teleological approaches, for example – tend to remain in an uneasy – and often implicit – tension with varieties of ‘social constructivism’ or ‘social creation’, broadly understood. Social constructivist approaches have to settle the question to what extent ‘culture’ can be sovereign and arbitrary, where, in its most extreme cases, it is assumed that each society creates its own cultural world with reference only to itself. Whilst history and geography might in some versions be considered conditioning factors, strictly speaking, within these social ontologies they are accidental to the theoretical framework and exist in tension with its underlying ontological assumptions.

Within these accounts, an implicit residue of the self-radicalizing modern philosophy of consciousness remains. Such ‘humanistic’ accounts of culture are ultimately socio- and anthropo-centric: each cultural world is generated from nothing except humans and/or society itself, and is a free creation of that particular society with that particular society both source and ultimate referent. Perhaps the most explicit – and best known – version of this framework is found in Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995 [1912]), where the ‘sacred’ is the instituted collective representation of each society in question; where society itself is ‘divinized’. Such socio-centric approaches come under the rubric of what we might term sociological solipsism. They neglect to incorporate a ‘meta-social’ dimension that could account for a minimum of cultural commonality across world societies (and civilizations), that can still do justice to human creativity without lapsing into varieties of determinism and/or versions of cultural relativism. For if each society is its own ultimate referent, how can a commonality across cultural humanity be articulated? Conversely, how can we make sense of a minimum commonality without losing sight of cultural and civilizational diversity? In short, the problem becomes how to conceptualize cultural worlds as an achievement of a/the social collective of human doing (and of the social creativity underpinning it) that can take account of historical diversity and anthropological commonality (and a minimum mutual understanding) without falling into versions of extra-social determinism, or, as post-Heideggerian thought of recent years sought to demonstrate, to do away with human agency and subjectivity altogether.

Post-Heideggerian developments in structuralism and post-structuralism have been a central source for arguments that proclaimed the ‘death of the subject’ as a critique of humanism. Although they attempted to build on phenomenological critiques of the subject/object distinction that was so definitive for scientism, their particular approaches to decentring subjectivity ultimately were not able to account for human agency or the cultural-societal milieu of the human condition. Drawing on the praxis oriented tradition of phenomenology, which sees subjectivity opening onto and existentially finding itself always already in-the-world, Arnason draws on (and deepens) the phenomenological revision of the transcendental understanding of the subject as world constituting, and brings it to the societal plane of cultural-civilizational analysis. Here he elaborates society as opening onto the world, on the one hand, and as always already in-the-world, on the other. Each society – and civilization – must be understood as world-interpreting and world-opening – instead of world constituting. In this way, Arnason avoids the traps of sociological solipsism. On Arnason’s account, cultural meaning is anchored in both society and world, and, while it is irreducible to society, it can still take account of human agency that resurrects the possibility of subjectivity. In putting the phenomenological problematic of the world at the centre of his cultural sociology, Arnason was able relativize the constrictions of social constructionism without lapsing into deterministic variants of culture, as well as moving beyond socio-centric conceptions of culture common to varieties of humanism in modernity.

In this way, cultural meaning takes a configurational and relational turn. Arnason’s articulation of the world as a shared and overarching horizon of cultural humanity allows for themes and problematics common to the human condition as a whole to emerge and for the possibility of mutual understanding to occur. The understanding of the world as a shared horizon allows for an image of the human condition as unity in plurality and can make sense of both human commonality and cultural diversity. This, coupled with his critique of Eurocentrism, makes his interpretative framework particularly amenable for intercultural studies, especially on a macro-scale. ¹¹ Arnason’s emphasis on historical diversity (overshadowing even Eisenstadt in this respect) and concrete historical analyses emphasizes the centrality of cultural creativity, but this creativity is also interpretative and underscores the fragility and limits of the human condition.

This understanding of the world relativizes the conception of ‘imposed meaning’ by human agency on a ‘meaningless world’; instead, the world is understood as sinnfähig (Adams, 2011). Societies do not so much ‘constitute’ the world as open onto it and articulate it as a world formation. This suggests for Arnason that further investigation into the phenomenological insight of ‘being-in-the-world’ as ‘the most elementary form of meaning’ is required (2003a: 90), not only as a critique of the subject/object distinction, but also as a trans-subjective, cultural perspective that informs the civilizational dimension of human societies and world history. The world appears to human societies as a field of manifestation; it does not fully ‘presence’ or ‘disclose’ itself but remains the background horizon of social reality. Because the ‘world’ does not fully presence itself, does not take a single, definite form, and is characterized by ‘partial concealment’, it can never be brought under a totalizing theory; it is concretized as the diversity of world histories.

For Arnason, the importance of phenomenology lies in its recognition of the centrality of meaning to the human condition, on the one hand, and of being-in-the-world as the existential condition (or predicament) of anthropos, on the other. By theorizing cultural meaning as hinging on a twofold connection to society and world, he moves beyond socio-centric accounts of meaning and culture as a critique of social constructionism that opens onto a decentring of anthropocentric accounts of socio-cultural creativity whilst still retaining an emphasis on human agency. Meaning is the fundament of culture in both its social and worldly aspects. Arnason’s elaboration of the human condition as culturally articulating the shared horizon of the world brings a relational and configurational elucidation of culture (and civilizations) as world opening instead of world constituting into relief. The world as a meta-horizon is shared by cultural humanity, and thus is open to a plurality of cultural interpretations, institutionalizations, and interpretative conflicts, which play out in the historical domain.

Because Arnason’s phenomenological approach emphasizes that ‘societies’ or ‘civilizations’ do not ‘constitute’ the world, but are rather always already in-the-world (that is, each cultural world opens onto the overarching field of the world as a shared and overarching horizon), and open onto-the-world, he elaborates an implicit critique of societies as ‘closed worlds’ (as a critique of sociological solipsism). Unlike Shmuel Eisenstadt and Jeffrey Alexander, for example, Arnason understands culture (in the sense that it articulates both society and the world) as a problematic rather than a program; culture is open rather than closed, underdetermined rather than determining. ¹² This makes his cultural phenomenology particularly promising for cultural, social, theoretical and historical perspectives that seek to do justice to culture as an orienting force of society, but not in isolation from other cultures, the wider world in which it is situated, and the possibility of a minimum of mutual understanding. In other words, those seeking to do justice to the intercultural, plural aspect of the human condition on a macro-scale. ¹³ The concept of cultural articulations of the world emphasizes Arnason’s deflection of culture from its socio-centric moorings: culture does not only articulate (and refer to) ‘society’, but also articulates – interprets – the wider world horizon, on the one hand, and the situatededness of every – and of that particular – society as always already in-the-world, on the other. His understanding of the world as a meta-social horizon – in contrast to an extra-social domain – allows for an interpretative approach to human creativity that gives due weight to contexts beyond the human world, strictly speaking.

Creative tensions

The richness of Arnason’s macro-hermeneutic-phenomenological approach to cultural meaning notwithstanding, some tensions are evident in his account. These are productive tensions that are less about finding a permanent resolution and more an invitation to further reflection. Two will be briefly mentioned here, and a third, on the question of ‘movement’, will be addressed more fully. First, tensions between the social and the meta-social aspects and domains of meaning become apparent. This is seen in, for example, Arnason’s discussion of his tripartite social ontology of ‘meaning’, ‘wealth’, and ‘power’ (2003a: 195 ff.). However, each of these are separate ‘socio-cultural fields’ (2003a: 199) and are ways of articulating the world; but ‘meaning’, as ‘cultural articulations of the world’, also incorporates ‘meta’ aspects that the others do not; that is, its link between ‘social’ and ‘meta-social’ aspects remain unclarified. This is linked to his argument that civilizational approaches to culture span ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ perspectives (Arnason, 2010). Although for Arnason culture is characterized as an autonomous, orienting force in the social world, it is not determining (as per some approaches in the strong programme of cultural sociology) and appears in interplay with other social spheres (such as power, wealth, etc.). Yet again, the interface between the ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ orientations remains unexplained and in tension.

In this context, Arnason’s recent focus on the ‘religio-political nexus’ as a way to rethink the basis of society and civilizations would also require clarification between these different levels of world articulation (as would careful delineation between the sacred and religion, as well as the sacred/religion/culture). ¹⁴ This approach understands social imaginary significations as cultural projects of power, and takes the sociological project to be, following Nietzsche, a primary focus on investigations of ‘cultural complexes and power structures’ (Adams and Arnason, 2016: 154). Whilst the present author agrees with this view (whilst also arguing, as we shall see, to expand this to include a greater acknowledgement of the primacy of action/social doing/movement), it nonetheless marks a shift in emphasis in Arnason’s cultural sociology that needs to find a rapprochement with his notion of cultural meaning in its meta-social aspects.

Second, Arnason’s reflections on meaning take on board the ‘imaginary element’ for which Castoriadis tirelessly advocates. In this sense ‘the real’ is an imaginary institution for both Arnason and Castoriadis. However, Arnason has not included the symbolic aspect of meaning in his overall framework. As Castoriadis noted, the relationship between the imaginary and the symbolic are ‘deep and obscure’ (1987 [1975]: 127), yet, especially as Arnason’s work moves increasingly to focus on the ‘religio-political nexus’ as the basis of societies and civilizations, any discussion of the sacred must account for the symbolic as well as the imaginary aspects of meaning. Thinkers within the social imaginaries field who have made some progress in articulating this link include: Castoriadis’s ‘first attempt’ at elucidating the imaginary element (in the 1964–5 section of The Imaginary Institution of Society) which includes extended consideration of the links between the symbolic and imaginary aspects of meaning and institutions; Maurice Godelier (2015), who takes the political and religious nexus as the basis of societies, and has articulated a distinctive approach to the entwinement of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real; Paul Ricoeur (1986), who has made the richest contribution to understandings of the symbolic within an imaginary framework, although he does so sometimes at the cost of obscuring the ‘imaginary element’; and, finally, Claude Lefort (1988), whose influential understanding of the symbolic within a phenomenologically inspired framework needs to be included here, although he did not fully embrace the implications of the imaginary element to the extent that Castoriadis did.

Finally, let us turn to the question of ‘movement’. Part of Arnason’s intellectual project was to rethink basic concepts of sociology. In particular, he aimed to rethink the ‘dominant image of society’ which was understood in functional, normative, evolutionary, overly rationalistic and integrated terms (e.g. 1988, 2003a). His shift to culture, and the move beyond a socio-centric approach, was a central aspect of this agenda. Alongside, and related to, this project was his growing emphasis on the creativity of society that would be irreducible to some other element, on the one hand, and on the historical dimension of society, on the other. Creativity comprises, of course, the emergence of novelty, but for Arnason it specifically points to the emergence of new meaning (Adams and Arnason, 2016: 165). As such, it is surprising that his articulation of a theoretical framework of cultural meaning – as the twofold relation between society and world – does not incorporate a more explicit acknowledgement of this aspect. Similarly, Arnason regards the human condition as thoroughly historical and incorporates historical analysis not only for a greater understanding of world history (or, more precisely: world histories), but also in part to problematize general theory. ¹⁵ In a related vein, Arnason insists on the historical dimension of the social – and agrees with Castoriadis on it best being understood as the ‘social-historical’. He says:

The point I would perhaps first make is that history is the ongoing emergence of coexisting and successive human worlds. I mean human worlds not in the sense of worlds unilaterally created by human beings, but worlds in which humans situate themselves and in so doing make some sense of the world as an overarching horizon. That seems to me to be the most important point here. I would of course add that I fully accept Castoriadis’s argument about the social-historical. You need to have the two things together; history is the history of societies. And societies are historical. (Adams and Arnason, 2016: 167)

Let us briefly return to Merleau-Ponty as Arnason’s most important phenomenological interlocutor in developing his approach to meaning. Merleau-Ponty famously declares in his ‘Preface’ to the Phenomenology of Perception that ‘[b]ecause we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning’ (1962 [1945]: xxi, emphasis in original). This formulation is central to Arnason’s own articulation of meaning. However, Merleau-Ponty makes this statement in the context of foregrounding the historical dimension of collective human existence (not the embodied existence of the subject-self, for which he is better known). Therewith, Merleau-Ponty voices a phenomenological grasp of meaning as characterized by the interplay of sociality, historicity, and world relation. As Merleau-Ponty uses the term socio-historical in other writings (for example, Merleau-Ponty, 1992), we can characterize this as the interplay of socio-historicity and world relation. In the ‘Preface’, Merleau-Ponty makes clear that the world problematic is a cornerstone of phenomenological reflection. In grappling with the enigma of the world, Merleau-Ponty argues that not only philosophy but history, too, ‘can give meaning to the world quite as “deeply” as a philosophical treatise’, for history is the domain where the meaning of the world ‘comes into being’ (1962 [1945]: xx). Phenomenology is thus understood as the disclosure of the world and of history – of the world as historical and of historical worlds – and of the human condition within the world as condemned to meaning: ‘the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning comes into being’ (Adams, 2018).

So how might the historical dimension of meaning – the diachronic dimension – be articulated? A possible response, drawing on key thinkers for Arnason’s own project, could utilize Castoriadis and Patočka’s respective rethinking of Aristotle’s understanding of the ‘motion’ of physis and approaches to history: in each case, their respective approaches to history are best understood as different articulations of creative emergence that emphasizes social change as a temporal form of qualitative movement (Adams, 2016a). In critiquing modern notions of movement as ‘locomotion’, both Patočka and Castoriadis reactivated and radicalized Aristotle’s notion of physis as qualitative motion and change in relation to history and human existence (Patočka), and history and creativity (Castoriadis). Patočka elucidated his ‘heretical’ philosophy of history in interplay with the ‘three movements of existence’ and his later a-subjective phenomenology. His rethinking of Arendt and the three movements of existence appear in two ways: first, as the rethinking of the corporeity of lived experience (1998), and later as a philosophy of history (1996). Drawing on Arendt’s tripartite division between labour, work, and action, Patočka combines this with a rereading of Aristotle’s conception of dynamis and physis as qualitative change, as ‘transformation, as possibility being realised’ (1998: 145), which he links to Heidegger’s understanding of existence as the realization of possibilities, to forge an understanding of human existence as ‘life as possibilities in a process of realisation’ (1998: 154). The ‘proto-type’ for the understanding of movement is the living being, where ‘life itself is the goal of each individual movement’ and the realization of certain (determinate) possibilities’ (1998: 146). For Aristotle, movement is figural: it unfolds something that is not yet as the ‘movement of a self-constituting being’. Nonetheless, Aristotle’s elaboration of movement (as qualitative change) involves an unchanging substrate as its precondition and is in this way still too ‘static’ and ‘objective’ to be helpful in the human realm of existence, for Patočka. He thus proposes to radicalize Aristotle: ‘The possibilities that ground movement have no pre-existing bearer, no necessary referent standing statically at their foundation, but rather all synthesis, all inner interconnection of movement takes place within it alone’ (Patočka, 1998: 146–7). In the first instance, Patočka (1998: 147) catalogues the corporeity of lived experience and dynamis as a possibility of the not-yet-present, ‘that can take the given into itself and forge a unified meaning’ as essential to the sense of movement as existence. He later expanded these three movements of existence from ‘corporeal’ (1998) to include ‘historical’ in Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (1996). Here the three movements are contextualized in terms of history that emphasizes the trans-subjective contexts of the human condition and the world process as the ‘sphere of openness’ that is central to the human condition.

Unlike Patočka, who engaged with Aristotle’s notion of physis before he developed his philosophy of history, Castoriadis first elucidated his ontology of history as the social-historical in conjunction with his ontology of time as qualitative change and creation before he returned to Aristotle to rethink the creative – not just determinist – aspects of physis. Castoriadis’s ontology of the social-historical showed the unceasing creation of ‘otherness’ – i.e. new forms – as creation ex nihilo, and the time of creation as qualitative, as a repudiation of the spatialized notions of time and ontologies of determinacy that have haunted western metaphysics (Castoriadis, 1987 [1975]). From the late 1970s, however, he rethought the more positive aspects of Aristotelian physis, as qualitative change, and radicalized physis, especially in its aspect of alloiosis, to self-creation, and extended the notion of creation to nature (Castoriadis, 1997b). He did not, however, collapse the (human) order of nomos into the (natural) order of physis but maintained the tension between the two; in this way, physis – in the sense of creative emergence – became the ground for nomos-as-history, instead of its antithesis (Adams, 2011).

Both Patočka and Castoriadis drew on Aristotle to rework a notion of qualitative movement that helps us to understand historical change, on the one hand, and the notion of creative emergence, on the other. However, they both had problems with Aristotle’s account of physis. For Patočka it was the notion of an enduring substratum underlying physis; and for Castoriadis it was its limitations within a framework of determinacy. However, they both also radicalized it in fruitful ways. Castoriadis explicitly links qualitative change to creation and – specifically – the creation of new meaning (as social imaginary significations) underpinning new social forms, and thus his rereading of physis can be linked to his philosophy of time-as-ontological-creation and the social-historical (e.g. Castoriadis, 1987 [1975]). Patočka’s understanding of different kinds of historicity allows for a more phenomenological reading of varieties of temporality, and the hermeneutic-phenomenological horizon of the world, also in relation to meaning. Thus, the most interesting aspect of Castoriadis’s and Patočka’s respective accounts lies in their reworking of the Aristotelian notion of ‘movement’. Patočka’s adaptation of Aristotle’s notion of physis brought it to bear on the anthropic layer, whereas Castoriadis’s notion of history wants to keep a clear distinction between the self-creating modes of being of the social-historical (and the order of human convention and institution as nomos), and natural modes of being (and the order of physis). A qualitative understanding of movement as the pivot of society and world accounts for the emergence of new meaning as both creative and historical, and accounts for the phenomenon of historical social change, or, rather, history tout court. ¹⁷

Conclusion

Arnason’s macro-phenomenology offers a distinctive approach to culture in the strong sense of an orienting and shaping force of society. He combines a phenomenology of the world with a cultural hermeneutics and comparative civilizational analysis to provide insights into the macro-societal dimension of the human condition. What emerges is a theory of culture that goes beyond socio-centric approaches and that offers a critique of sociological solipsism. Arnason approaches the phenomenology of the world and hermeneutics of culture from four interlinking aspects. First, he understands the world horizon as an overarching meta-context of meaning that cultural humanity encounters and must put into meaningful form (e.g. 1988, 1993b, 2003a). In this way, Arnason’s theory of culture is to be understood as an intervention in the debates on the ‘meaning of meaning’ from a combined hermeneutic-phenomenological and social imaginaries perspective, which comprises a unique contribution to the field. Second, he articulates the human condition as always already in-the-world and opening onto-the-world; this gives cultural meaning a meta-social aspect. Third, he elucidates culture as a twofold order of meaning that consists in the interplay of its sociality and world relation. As such, Arnason considers culture to be as much an element of the world as of society. Finally, he develops his macro-phenomenology of the world as part of a radicalization of the problematic of the trans-subjective (and trans-objective) field (Arnason, 1988, 1989b, 2003a). The theoretical implications of Arnason’s ‘cultural articulations of the world’ provide an understanding of culture that goes beyond the more prevalent anthropo-, in particular, socio-centric accounts. Consideration of the theoretical implications of Arnason’s macro-hermeneutic phenomenological approach reveal an understanding of the human condition that decentres constructivist accounts of cultural meaning but does not collapse into determinism. It is in this sense a variety of post- but not anti-humanism that still allows room for human agency. In this sense, he develops what we might call an historical anthroposociology through which the commonalities – or lateral universals (to use a term that Arnason borrows from Merleau-Ponty) – of the human condition can be discovered, as well as the historical plurality of the world. That is, philosophical anthropology – which articulates that in which the specificity of anthropos as a species consists – must recognize the elemental levels of the social-historical. Arnason’s decentred anthropology articulates the preconditions to a philosophical anthropology that, unlike most phenomenology (or indeed many approaches in philosophy and sociology, more broadly), builds on the sense of the social as a trans-subjective (not intersubjective) dimension of the human condition that grasps the human condition as a unity in a plurality: the world is understood as a shared but underdetermined meta-horizon of meaning that allows for historical divergence within a field of lateral commonality. Meaning should, however, rightly be understood in its tripartite relation to the world, to the social-historical, and to movement. To include a notion of qualitative movement to underscore historical creativity and change would introduce an explicit acknowledgement of the temporal dimension of meaning. Qualitative movement in this sense figures as the trans-subjective counterpart of action. It is beyond the scope of this essay to pursue these connections in any further detail. Arnason is currently writing his next major theoretical statement; it is provisionally entitled Horizons and Varieties of Modernity. ¹⁸ It remains to be seen to what extent he develops his theory of culture further, or whether, as has been the case over the last decade or so, it features more as a tacit background against which new theoretical developments in other areas are framed.