Burrowing a way: Plato’s cave and the labyrinth of creation

Philosophy and politics share a common self-understanding according to which they both aim to liberate humanity from the suffering or stultification that arises from unfulfilled human needs and that is caused by the various dilemmas and disorders associated with the human condition. If neither philosophy nor politics have quite achieved this aim up to now, it is nevertheless what they overwhelmingly hope and strive for; Castoriadis, however, departs from this tradition. (I do not contend that this tradition is monolithic. There have been exceptions – there always are – but their exceptional status confirms the thesis that this view of philosophy and politics is widespread. If I proclaim Castoriadis as an exception to this view, I do not claim that he is the only one, only that he is an interesting and important exception.) For him, neither philosophy nor politics can be understood as an attempt to solve the problems of the human condition, and certainly not to escape such problems. To understand in what sense this is true for Castoriadis we will consider what he had to say about one of his favourite metaphorical figures, the labyrinth. Les carrefours du labyrinthe (Crossroads in the Labyrinth) is the title given to, at last count, six volumes of collected essays by Castoriadis in French, and in the preface to the first of these volumes (published in English translation as Crossroads in the Labyrinth) Castoriadis reflects on the philosophical significance of the figure of the labyrinth, which he contrasts with Plato’s metaphorical cave. (Plato, 1974: 316–25) (Eventually I want to explore how this metaphor of the labyrinth relates to Castoriadis’s political thinking, his conception of the political and of politics. But before turning to this question, we will need to take a long detour through the philosophical and sociological issues that form the necessary framework within which Castoriadis’s understanding of the political operates and makes sense. As Castoriadis implies in the following quote, no straight path exists; or, if such a path appears to be open, it is not the path we need to take.)

To think is not to get out of the cave; it is not to replace the uncertainty of shadows by the clear-cut outlines of things themselves, the flame’s flickering glow by the light of the true Sun. To think is to enter the Labyrinth, more exactly, it is to make be and appear a Labyrinth. When we might have stayed ‘lying among the flowers, facing the sky.’ ¹ It is to lose oneself amidst galleries which exist only because we never tire of digging them; to turn round and round at the end of a cul-de-sac whose entrance has been shut off behind us – until, inexplicably, this spinning round opens up in the surrounding walls cracks which offer passage. […] There can be no doubt that the myth was saying something important when it made the Labyrinth the work of Daedalus, a man. (Castoriadis, 1984a: ix–x)

Thinking will not get us out of the cave, says Castoriadis. It will not help us escape, it will not release us from the chains Plato envisages as binding us in the darkness. It will not solve the problem that Plato and so many after him have imagined to be the human problem, that of separation from the real and the true. The uncertainty of shadows cannot be supplanted by a clear and definite vision. No sun is waiting to reveal the truth. On the contrary. Not only does Castoriadis reject all hopes of escaping our imprisonment, and of solving the problem of our isolation forever; he asserts that our true situation is exactly the opposite of the one Plato imagines. Thinking is not getting out into the light, it is digging into the earth. It is not escaping the cave, but digging, not one cave, but a bewildering network in which a person can easily lose him/herself.

Three things are important here, and they are interrelated. The first is the recognition that thinking is not an escape from an artificial prison (the chains that bind the inhabitants of Plato’s cave are man-made, as are the torches that throw an unnatural light to deceive them); on the contrary, it is a work of artifice, of human creation. ² The second is that in order to think it is not enough simply to observe what is or, in Plato’s philosophy, to remember what one always knew by nature but which has been obscured and forgotten. One must rather make something that is not, something that did not exist until one made it. For Castoriadis, it is only through such creation that we can think profoundly. Finally, we can only begin to think deeply by losing ourselves. This we do by creating situations in which our comfortable and everyday understandings no longer operate effectively. We become lost, unable to orient ourselves; we no longer know where we are. This takes an effort, because we are only too willing to reside forever in the security of what we already know to be true. Only by artificially creating disorientation can we discover that what we thought was secure and certain may not be so. Then the challenge is to defer a speedy exit from this confusion, and to keep digging not out into the light, but onward into new chambers of our own creation.

Thinking is not an escape, then, and certainly not an escape into the clear light of day. Rather, it is an act of human making, indeed, of creation. Only through such creation can we think. And this applies not just to philosophy but to all thinking, even the common and everyday thinking that in our moments of philosophical exertion we seek to put into question or liberate ourselves from. All human thought, all culture, all meaning, is creation. None of it, according to Castoriadis, is borrowed or derived from the merely real (Castoriadis, 1987: 340–73). Not only does this happen to be so, but contrary to those philosophers who imagine this to constitute a barrier to our encounter with the real and true, it is in fact the essential precondition for any such encounter. Significations, if they are to serve the function of representation, and as such grasp some aspect of the real, must first be created. No significations exist apart from those created by subjects, and a subject cannot grasp the real except through a signification of its own creation (Castoriadis,1997a: 137–71; 1987: 273–339). Far from liberating oneself from one’s own artifice in order to encounter the real, what is needed and all that is really possible is to continue to create and modify one’s own creations. The aim should not be to create a representation that is transparent, that disappears to reveal the real behind it. Insofar as we imagine we have created such a representation, we deceive ourselves. On the contrary, we must never lose sight of the being of the representation and its otherness vis-à-vis that which it represents. Only through recognizing this difference can we hope to reach beyond our current representations. But in doing so we can never forsake representation altogether; we can only create new representations, with their own difference vis-à-vis that which they represent.

Any being-for-itself exists and can only exist in a closure. Thus also society and the social individual. Democracy is the project of breaking this closure at the collective level. Philosophy, creating self-reflective subjectivity, is the project of breaking the closure at the level of thought. But of course, any breaking of the closure, unless it remains a gaping ‘?’ which does not break anything at all, posits something, reaches some results, and, thereby, risks erecting again a closure. (Castoriadis, 1991a: 21)

The labyrinth is interminable. If it ends, this is only because we cease to dig, cease to seek that encounter with the real that can only be had through our own creativity, our own artifice.

The interminability of thinking is a major theme for Castoriadis, and what he has to say about it will help clarify the points made so far. But before turning to this, we must address some general issues arising from the assumptions and tendencies of the philosophical tradition that tend to obscure the essentially creative character of human thought.

The concept of creation is central to Castoriadis’s thought, both to his philosophical anthropology and his ontology, and its operation within the first is inextricably linked to its operation within the second. For Castoriadis, humans are self-creating beings, both at the level of the individual psyche and the social-historical. Creation here means the emergence of genuinely new ontological forms, new beings and new types of being – a process that is not determined by what exists already nor by any fixed laws, but that occurs spontaneously and unpredictably. This creativity within the human domain is an exemplar of a general creativity of being, a creativity that is tied to and perpetuates a state of fundamental ontological indeterminacy. The structure of the universe is not fixed, nor is its development the inevitable unfolding of properties present from the outset. Genuinely new types of being emerge in the history of the cosmos, the living being constituting perhaps the most spectacular, at least until the emergence of the human – and these have their own laws and forms of lawfulness which, while they never contradict the laws of already existing domains, are not derivable from already existing laws but add to them something new and other. Humans emerge as the paragons of this cosmic creativity, more restlessly creative than beings in all other ontological domains. But this creativity is built upon the foundation of a general indeterminacy which leaves space for the emergence of otherness, since it means that the world is never entirely gripped by determining laws. Because of this, incalculable possibilities for new creations lie hidden in the imperfect determinations of the real (Castoriadis, 1987: 165–220, 340–73; 1997b: 342–73; 1984b: 145–226; 1997c: 361–417.)

Ironically, the hiddenness of these possibilities is not so much a characteristic of the real itself as an active achievement of humanity. For Castoriadis, the occulting of the self-creating character of the human domain, and particularly the social-historical, can be traced to a self-preserving reflex of the social-historical. It seeks to preserve itself as it is by denying and concealing the creative, and hence arbitrary, character of its institutional forms. By presenting them to itself as determined, as inevitable consequences or implications of our biological nature, or of cosmic nature in the form of the will of a deity or the laws of a divine order, it not only dissuades individuals from imagining they might alter them, it enlists them as agents for their preservation.

This social-historical tendency is realized at the level of systematic thought in the orthodox philosophical tradition of ontological determinacy, the insistence that ‘to be’ means ‘to be determined’, and thus that all real or true beings are completely determinate. Obviously, creation can be nothing but anathema from such a perspective. Everything that truly is must be and must be as it is. Nothing truly new can come into being, and all apparent novelty is merely a different re-presentation of the fixed and eternal (Castoriadis, 1987: 165–220). When it comes to thought, this means distinct and definite, and as the English empiricist philosophers never tire of telling us, our impressions and ideas reflect reality only insofar as they are distinct and definite; otherwise, they are mere phantasms of the imagination (Locke, 1975: Book Two; Hume, 1969: Book One, Part I). If the imagination creates, it creates nothing real. And it does not even truly create; it merely rearranges impressions derived from its senses. If we return to Plato’s cave, we see that the illusion is the constantly changing and indefinite, mere appearance created by human artifice, while the real and true is the clear and definite daylight world.

Castoriadis’s critique of traditional theory and theorizing or of a certain tradition of it and the self-understanding of it as an endeavour, that Castoriadis regards as predominant, is tied to his critique of ontological determinacy. Theory within this tradition is understood as a complete grasp of the real. It aims to explain the real without error or remainder. Ideally, if it is completely successful, which it never is in practice, but which it constantly aims to become, it leaves no questions behind. It solves the problem of our ignorance, of the elusiveness of reality, and our divorce from it. It liberates us from doubt and gives us the truth.

Not so, says Castoriadis:

Theory exists neither as a ‘view’ of that which is, nor as a systematic and exhaustive constitution or construction of that which may be thought, whether arrived at in a single definitive moment or through a process of gradual elaboration. No breach opens suddenly in the walls surrounding us, so that we can at last see the light of the sun which has always been there. And no more is there a harmonious edifice whose overall plan we shall progressively discover as we work on its construction. (Castoriadis, 1984a: xviii)

If theory is not this, what is it? We already have the answer: theory is the construction of a labyrinth. It finds a way to encounter the real via its own creative improvisations. Theorizing is the creation of knowledge, and knowledge is not a ‘view’ of what is, but a representation of the real. As we have already seen, a representation of the real is not the real itself; in fact it can only serve its function as representation by differing from that which it represents. A representation is what must be created by the knowing subject in order to know. And this creation is a genuine creation in Castoriadis’s terms: that is, it is not determined by the real. The theorist no doubt endeavours to make his/her representations responsive to his/her experience of the real - a complex matter, since that experience is inevitably ‘filtered’ through the subject’s already existing knowledge, and all the assumptions involved in that knowledge, assumptions that shape the perceptions and questions that are brought to any encounter. The subject strives to make any new representation capture the real as completely and accurately as possible, and the scientist specifically endeavours to capture as wide a domain of the real as possible. But none of this means that the subject takes the representation from the real, or that the real can ever give it in the sense that it can determine for the subject what its representation must or should be. This creation is a spontaneous, undetermined act of the subject. As Castoriadis explains, in animals this creative activity is tied to the exigencies of biological functionality, and so attains a uniformity within species, but in humans this link to biological function is broken, and creativity takes flight untethered. (Castoriadis, 1997a: 273–339). Or rather, to return to our original metaphor, creativity is freed to invent new ways of delving and building rather than following the established functionally effective paths. (The negative side to this story is that functionally effective paths may be lost. Castoriadis has described the human psyche as radically afunctional (1997a: 273–339), and afunctionality can easily become dysfunctionality. In the human context, where function can never be strictly defined according to universally valid ends, there is always a moral dimension to the term ‘dysfunctional’. But we can say that human creativity has the potential for self-destructive inventiveness, leaving aside the moral question of whether such destruction serves any higher goal.)

This picture of the creative, undetermined construction of knowledge takes us away from the image of a purely receptive theorizing, but it does not in itself destroy the idea that theorizing might aim for and possibly one day achieve a perfect adequacy of knowledge to its object. However, this is not how Castoriadis views things. For him, theory is essentially interminable. All dreams of an end to our searching and creative struggles to approach the real are illusory. As a matter of historical fact, it can be observed that thus far the struggle has not led to any final theoretical structure grasping the real perfectly and completely. Rather, we witness the creation of ever new structures, along with their eventual destruction and replacement with others. This process of change is history. As Castoriadis observes, science has a history, and not just because it happens to be ‘caught up in’ a society that has a history. For Castoriadis, the reason science has a history is ontological, not merely sociological, and to explain why science changes is also to explain why creativity is possible in the first place. In both cases, the fundamental indeterminacy of being makes a definitive, univocal and comprehensive grasp of the real impossible, at the same time as it makes it possible to partially grasp the real through an unending plurality of new theories and concepts. A definitive grasp of the real is impossible because the real is not determinate but indeterminate. This means that to arrive at a perfectly definite/determinate conception is to have missed and distorted the essentially indeterminate character and dimension of the real. And this indeterminacy is not static but dynamic. The real is never completely determined, and its partial and incomplete determinations change in spontaneously creative ways. It is never entirely and simply this, and it is always more and other than the conceptual frame within which we have momentarily and imperfectly grasped it (Castoriadis, 1984a: ix–xxix; 1984b, 1997b).

None of this means that anything goes, or that nothing matters, that no theory is better than another, that theories can never be assessed for their value or validity as depictions of reality. Castoriadis passionately opposes such relativism. Some theories really do grasp aspects of the real, while others do not. Some grasp the real better than others; or they grasp more of the real than rival theories, they comprehend objects and relations within a wider domain than the theories they supersede (Castoriadis, 1984b, 1997b). It is not true that our theories as our creations do no more than embody our own presuppositions. Our theories do embody our prejudices, and prejudices can and often do obscure the reality which is supposed to be captured in the theory; but, as Gadamer (1975) has tried to explain, we cannot do without prejudices altogether. Prejudices are necessary to any encounter with the world; without them we would be blind or lost. Through them, we can encounter the world, and in a way that can go beyond those prejudices (which does not mean that it inevitably must) and which does so precisely to the extent that the encounter is able to put those very prejudices into question. Castoriadis agrees with this when he asserts that truth is the movement of breaking the closure of signification, of breaking the sealed structure of assumed meanings (Castoriadis, 1997d: 99–116). In a manner that is difficult to explain, the real plays a role in this breakage, but it can only play such a role because of the efforts of the subject who seeks an encounter with it, who comes to regard his/her significations/prejudices as inherently revisable and who constructs knowledge of the real in a manner that renders this knowledge open to re-evaluation and alteration.

So, our labyrinths can and do map the real, however imperfectly and incompletely. (Maps are another interesting metaphor here, since they are never perfect or complete. They always distort that which they map, and must distort in order to depict. But perhaps we should stick to one metaphor at a time.) Castoriadis’s main point is that, whatever the limitations of human thought may be, these limitations are unavoidable and inextricable from its strengths and potentialities. We can never escape from the struggle to grasp the real. It is interminable, and essentially creative. We can never arrive at our final destination: true and perfect knowledge. No sunlit meadows await us at the end of our journey. To lie down in the flowers is not to have arrived at our goal but merely to cease for a time our efforts.

If we imagine those metaphorical meadows as the quietude and complacency of the everyday world or even a purer and simpler world than that of the everyday for most of us, we modern or postmodern creatures particularly, then the perhaps surprising news from Castoriadis is that even those meadows are not the ‘natural’ things we may sometimes imagine them to be. They are every bit as artificial as the more sophisticated products of theoretical knowledge. Though for the purposes of contrasting the effort of philosophical questioning with the mundane reality of the everyday, Castoriadis places the labyrinth on one side and not the other, in fact the everyday is as much a labyrinth as philosophy or science. The social-historical world, including ourselves as social-historical beings, are also creations, and the creation of this social-historical world is as undetermined and spontaneous as the creation of more self-conscious thought. Our everyday lives as social beings are not lives that are conferred upon us naturally and inevitably as human animals. They are artificial creations. All the significations that govern our lives and thoughts, and around and through which all our acts are organized and oriented, are social-historical creations. To some degree they relate to our biological and psychological needs; they take these into account though there is absolutely no guarantee that they will ensure their fulfilment, at least not in toto. But they are not determined by these needs, and they are never a mere response to them (Castoriadis, 1987: 165–220, 273–339). This social world is a labyrinth of our own creation; and we, as diggers in and of that labyrinth, are also part of it. We ourselves are labyrinths as well as being in and of the labyrinth.

If this is true, there is obviously no question of escaping the labyrinth, that artificial construction that supposedly separates us from the real, but which, as we have seen, is our only method of encountering reality. But the implications go still further. We may imagine that the problem is to encounter the real, and thereby to face and solve both the problem of our separation from reality and truth, as well as identifying and solving our real problems, which lie hidden beneath the merely apparent and ephemeral. But if our being is a social-historical creation, then the problems of our being are every bit as much a creation. There are not apparent and ephemeral problems, on the one hand, and real and eternal problems on the other. There are only the problems that we create and set for ourselves by creating ourselves as we happen to do in each social-historical context. These are not and can never be set once and for all; they change as we change. Castoriadis explains:

Man is not this need which contains its ‘proper object’ as its complement, a lock with its key (to be found or to be made). Man can exist only by defining himself in each case as an ensemble of needs and corresponding objects, but he always outstrips these definitions and, if he outstrips them (not only as a permanent possibility but in the effectivity of the historical movement), this is because they spring out of him, because he invents them (not arbitrarily, to be sure, for there is always nature, the minimum coherence required by rationality, and previous history), and hence because he makes them by making things and by making himself, and because no rational, natural or historical definition allows us to establish them once and for all. (Castoriadis, 1987: 135)

What philosophy since Plato has dreamt of is a solution to problems, or a satisfaction of needs, that will finally extricate us from problems and needs altogether and permanently. Castoriadis’s vision of a self-creating society reveals this dream as an illusion. The problems, the needs, arise out of our self-creation; that is, they arise out of exactly what makes us. And they do not arise once and for all as permanent characteristics of our being, but continually and differently. There are no fixed and eternal needs or problems, there are only the constantly changing social-historical and human situations that our own self-creation brings into being. In bringing these problems into being, moreover, it simultaneously brings into being orthodox solutions, orthodox methods for satisfying the needs it creates. Though in many societies these are compulsory, with alternatives being neither conceived nor allowed, the orthodox, socially endorsed methods for solving socially created problems are not and cannot be perfect. If, as Castoriadis declares, the human condition is not akin to a lock with its key, this is not only because that which opens and that which must be opened are changing continually, or because they change together. Locks and keys are determinate things, and the human condition, the human mode of being, is not determinate. The needs that are created each time as part of our social-historical self-creation are not perfectly defined and determinate. They are fuzzy at the edges, their shapes shift and can never be brought into perfectly sharp focus. No one key can open these locks, and an indefinite plurality of different ‘keys’ may suffice, though each perhaps imperfectly and incompletely. And the possibility exists that keys other than the socially endorsed orthodox varieties may do a better job, always, or only for some and in some contexts. So the fact that the solutions to our problems are given with the problems themselves, as part of the same movement of creation, does not mean we need not seek better solutions, or different ways of satisfying the needs our social world has created and conferred upon us. But it does mean we can never escape problems altogether. Each new solution also creates a new problem, a new situation with its own needs and lacks. We can never escape this labyrinth, we can only create new passages. But every passage will and must terminate in a wall, which we must find a way to bypass, break through or just live with and accommodate ourselves to.

Hegel and Marx provide the ultimate philosophical examples of the aim of extracting humanity from its problems and needs. As Castoriadis points out, in both cases this involves the mirage of an escape from history. Most interesting for Castoriadis is the way this delusional belief in an emancipation from history is linked to a faith in determinacy. For Hegel and Marx, the problem of history is soluble precisely because it is determinate: it is fixed and essential. (For Hegel it is highly abstract, concerned with the essential nature of subjectivity, whereas for Marx it is material and social; but the commonality of their assumptions withstands these differences.) The problem of history is soluble because it is determinate. This may not mean we can say: precisely this is the problem, and precisely this is how to solve it. But it does mean that the solution is already woven into the fabric of reality. The solution exists already, just as much and arising from the same source as the problem. If we could only see reality in its entirety, the pattern that constitutes both the problem and its solution would be revealed to us. Since the solution already exists as a structural characteristic of reality, it is not simply an inevitable future; in a very real sense, it already is. All that remains is the philosophically trivial matter of its phenomenal working-out. (Castoriadis, 1984a: xxi)

Finally to politics, though the political implications of the foregoing may have become clear to the reader already. Obviously, for Castoriadis politics can never be about the solution of problems, certainly not fixed and eternal problems, and it can never be about the escape from political problems once and for all. Castoriadis acknowledges two senses of ‘the political’. One relates to power and the organization of power within a society. In all historical societies some groups and institutions have more power than others, usually only in certain respects and within limits, but absolute and unlimited power is not unknown and the limits can be very broad and are always indeterminate, of course. The institution of the state is the modern focus of power, though obviously not the only one, and some theorists focus their attention on the state and identify politics with this institution and its activities, or activities relating to it. The political problem then becomes: what to do about the state? What to do with it, what to make of it; and for some, of course, how to overcome it, how to limit it, even how to abolish it altogether (Castoriadis, 1991b: 143–74)?

All of these questions, however, presuppose a different conception of the political or politics. This is politics as the explicit effort to question and re-evaluate social institutions, to reform old institutions and create new ones. To be involved in politics in this sense is not just to be involved in struggles over or for power, but to be consciously engaged in the institution and reinstitution of one’s society (Castoriadis, 1991b: 156–74). This conception of politics is tied to the idea of autonomy, of giving oneself one’s own laws, an idea and a project that Castoriadis believed was a creation of ancient Greece. As the foregoing implies, this is more than just one political project among others, it is a project that redefines politics, transforming it into something it had never been before. It manifested itself in the place of its creation in the emergence of both philosophy and democracy.

It would not be entirely untrue to say that for Castoriadis the aim of politics is autonomy. It is certainly true that his own political activity centred on the goal of autonomy. He strove to understand what autonomy means, its implications, its potential, its social-historical and anthropological basis, its weaknesses and strengths, its traps and pitfalls, as well as the forces and structures that stand in its way or threaten to undermine it. At the same time he worked avidly to promote as well as analyse real struggles for autonomy, particularly workers’ movements. Insofar as he worked towards and advocated autonomy, it can hardly be denied that this was a political goal for him. However, describing it in this way risks misunderstanding, because there are important senses in which autonomy is not and can never be a political ‘end’. The first we have already canvassed: far from being an end-point for politics, the project of autonomy is what gives birth to politics in its critical and creative-transformative form. As soon as we become involved in the political struggle to bring about an autonomous society, we are already engaged in the project of autonomy. Autonomy is not just the goal of this process, it is also both its condition and method.

Castoriadis put it this way: autonomy is not an ‘end’ at all, it is a beginning. This is so, first, for the reasons already explained: autonomy is the condition for politics, not its end. Secondly, autonomy is not a definite or determinate end in itself. It is a state of being that permits the pursuit of an indeterminate multiplicity of ends, but does not specify what those ends must be. And that, after all, is the point: to avoid prescribing and dictating ends and to instead allow the subject to determine its ends for itself. The only ‘end’ aimed at, therefore, is a state of being of the subject, which cannot be ‘produced’ in a technical manner but must be fostered and grown through the activity of the subject him/herself. Castoriadis at one stage analyses this form of activity under the heading of praxis: ‘that doing in which the other or others are intended as autonomous beings considered as essential agents of the development of their own autonomy’ (Castoriadis, 1987: 75). For Castoriadis, medicine, pedagogy and psychoanalysis are also examples of praxis in this sense.

Many philosophers and political theorists, formed or influenced by the tradition we have analysed here, have attempted to defend or justify democracy as a political goal on the basis of its supposed benefits as a solution to human problems. They argue that democracy is the best regime for achieving this or that political or moral outcome, whether it be social equality, freedom, peace, or any of numerous other candidates. For Castoriadis, democracy means social autonomy, and autonomy, properly understood, is not the solution to any problem whatsoever. On the contrary, social autonomy guarantees nothing in terms of outcomes (a democratic/autonomous regime can in principle be guilty of the most horrendous crimes, and may easily destroy itself), and the project of social autonomy is pursued, or ought to be pursued, only because autonomy has come to be valued in itself (Castoriadis, 1991c: 81–123; 2007: 118–50). Autonomy means: we give ourselves our own laws. In other words, we become self-determining, to the extent that this is possible for us by conscious and deliberate acts of self-legislation. From Castoriadis’s perspective, of course, we humans are peculiarly qualified for such a self-determination, since we have significant freedom from the biological determination to which other animals are subject (which does not mean that we are unaffected by our biology – far from it – only that it does not determine our modes of being). As we have seen, humans do determine their own being in an ongoing and spontaneous social-historical creation, but they do so in a largely unconscious fashion; or, more precisely, they do so in an occulted manner, hiding from themselves their own responsibility for this determination behind myths of either divine creation and legislation, or natural determination. However, the potential for autonomy that is derived from the de facto self-determination of the human qua social-historical does not oblige anyone to adopt autonomy as a value and a project. It does not even guarantee that the concept of such a value and project must arise. The fact that it has arisen is for Castoriadis a purely contingent historical fact, undetermined by any natural propensities of the species, however consistent it may and must be with such propensities and potentialities (Castoriadis, 1997e: 310–16).

Understood in this way, autonomy is almost an entirely formal matter, and as such, is not tied to any specific social or moral ends. This is both its strength and its weakness. Autonomy allows one to do whatever it is that one wills to do (within the bounds of the possible, of course, but these bounds are usually wider than we imagine). But it gives no instruction as to what one should will. And it gives absolutely no guarantee of the success of one’s efforts to achieve the self-determined outcomes one aims for. If, as can be argued, social autonomy precludes certain things and requires others – for example, it precludes great disparities of wealth and power, and it requires the real opportunity for political participation by all – these are not achievements of autonomy, they are its prerequisites, its necessary characteristics. One does not wish for autonomy in order to achieve these characteristics. Rather, one establishes and maintains them in order to have and preserve one’s autonomy, which one then uses in order to achieve…whatever one wills (Castoriadis, 1991b).

Just as the sun of truth proves illusory, so no sunlit land awaits us as the necessary and prearranged terminus for our political travails. As political animals too, we inhabit a labyrinth of our own creation. We cannot escape it, and we do not need to do so in order to discover and create the good and the just. On the contrary, the labyrinth is the only place in which we can encounter the good and the just, these being none other than chambers and passages within it. They are always our own creations, not entirely arbitrary but undetermined by the real. The form of politics that arises with autonomy is not a way out of the labyrinth either; it is only a new way to inhabit and construct it. The problems we encounter within our labyrinths are a part of their construction. Beyond the requirements for biological survival, which are seldom exclusive and which never operate outside a social-historical construction, there are no ‘real’ problems on the other, sunlit side of our catacombs. Our human problem is how to dig and live in our particular labyrinth, or how to construct a new one. There is no way out; and insofar as there is an outside, it is not a place in which human needs can be met, or in which human lives can be lived.