Castoriadis at the limits of autonomy? Ecological worldhood and the hermeneutic of modernity

From ontology to anthropology

The Imaginary Institution of Society (hereafter the IIS) was central to Castoriadis’s elucidation of the philosophical aspect of autonomy. Not only does it interrogate inherited philosophy’s tendency to reduce the heterogeneity of being to an homogeneity of ‘determinacy’, it also, as the other side of the coin, excavates the social-historical as a mode of being sui generis. The social-historical, which forms the ontological precondition of autonomy as democracy, is a radically self-creating, self-altering and self-instituting mode of being. At this point, three aspects of the IIS are especially significant to observe. First, in setting out to elucidate the social-historical, Castoriadis identifies humankind as the only mode of being that is self-creating (and self-instituting) (Castoriadis, 1987: 167ff). Second, although the social-historical was his main theme, the elucidation of the creative imagination as fundamental to the human condition keeps intruding on his primary narrative (Castoriadis, 1987: 2). Third, his turn towards an ontology of the social-historical was meant to elaborate the ontological preconditions of an autonomous society and to mount a critique of determinist modes of thought. Castoriadis argues that a reduction of being to determinacy is endemic to the Western philosophical tradition, which, as such, cannot fathom a mode of being, such as the social-historical, which is characterized by self-creation rather than determinacy. Society, as the self-instituted form of the social-historical, does not look to extra-social laws to determine its form, such as is implied by the philosophical tradition, rather it is radically self-determining and self-creating. ⁸ More particularly for present purposes, the IIS announces his elucidation of the ontological order of nomos, that is the region of human self-institution and creation, for which, unlike the order of physis, but like ‘nature’ in Kant’s third Critique, ‘no ontological place’ had been given. Human beings were not seen as able to create ontological form—at best they could imitate nature (Blumenberg, 2000) and follow the natural norms embedded in its order.

Let us briefly elucidate Castoriadis’s anthropological approach at the time of the IIS. In line with the epigraph above, Castoriadis’s original anthropology was cast along political-ontological lines and focused on ‘men in the city’ (Castoriadis, 1984a). This involved an emphasis on the human condition as a self-creating, imaginary political institution, on the one hand, and the radical imagination of the psyche as the basis of human forms of subjectivity, on the other. While Castoriadis’s elucidation of the ontological dimension of social life—as opposed to epistemology or hermeneutics—was the most prominent in his thought, it is also relevant to mention the IIS chapter that focused on philosophical anthropology in this context (1987: 273–336): the chapter on psychoanalysis and the psyche. The connection between philosophical anthropology and the psyche is found in the central importance Castoriadis gave to the creative imagination. The ‘creative imagination’ was a term Castoriadis used to distinguish his approach from pre-modern conceptions of the ‘reproductive imagination’, on the one hand, and to radicalize modern perspectives on the ‘productive imagination’, on the other. Moreover, the creative imagination is Castoriadis’s generic term for the imagination in its dual aspects: the singular radical imagination of the psyche and the radical imaginary of the social-historical (as the anonymous collective). In the same chapter on the psyche, Castoriadis elaborates an anthropology of subjectivity through elucidation of the radical imagination as magmatic psychic flux. Here, it is to be noted that Castoriadis critiqued the conventional distinction between ‘society and the ‘individual’. For him, the true division lies between ‘society’ and the ‘psyche’; the psyche is ‘socialized’, although never totally, by the social-historical to form the social individual—a process which Castoriadis (1987) terms ‘sublimation’. That is not the end of the story of Castoriadis’s anthropology, however. Indeed, arguably the most important aspects to Castoriadis’s anthropological approach are to be found in his treatment in the other pole of the creative imagination as the radical imaginary of the anonymous collective.

Castoriadis’s discussion of the radical imaginary occurs in the final chapter of the IIS (1987: 340–373). In particular, he is concerned with elucidating the mode of being of social imaginary significations. Most relevant for currents purposes is his elucidation of central imaginary significations that are created ex nihilo by the social-historical. In an extension of Durkheim’s anthropological turn in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1965), social imaginary significations can be seen as a radicalization of the concept of ‘collective representations’ through—and by—which society itself is formed (and forms itself). Castoriadis goes beyond Durkheim, however, in linking imaginary significations to the creative imagination from which he developed his perspective on meaning. ⁹ Castoriadis distinguishes between ‘second order’ imaginary significations and ‘central’ imaginary significations. ‘Second-order’ significations ‘lean on’ what Castoriadis calls the ‘first natural stratum’, which is, unlike anthropos, more or less characterized by determinacy; these significations are brought into the fold of the social-historical through the proto-institutions of legein and teukhein (1987: 359ff). Central imaginary significations—those core significations that provide each society with its nuclear form—do not ‘lean on’ or ‘interpret’ anything ‘pre-existing’ or ‘found’ in nature or history. They have no world referent, but are absolute imaginary creations, and, as such, are totally generative, purely creative. Castoriadis considers ‘God’ and ‘autonomy’ to be prime examples in this respect. Note, however, that ‘nature’ or ‘the natural environment’ cannot feature as central imaginary significations for Castoriadis as they ‘lean on’ the first natural stratum and are not, therefore, purely human creations. In other words, the imaginary significations of ‘nature’ and ‘the natural environment’ have a world referent. In this way, at the time of the IIS, anthropos was considered as radically ‘other’ to ‘natural’ modes of being, specifically, to modalities of nature. Only the social-historical was elucidated as radically self-creative, and Castoriadis regarded the creations of the social-historical as creations ex nihilo, that is to say, that neither ‘lean on’ nor ‘interpret’ nor ‘transform’ pre-existing social forms.

An understanding of Castoriadis’s anthropology can be further deepened through recourse to the nomos and physis problematic. Recall that Castoriadis’s critique of Marx saw a concomitant renewal of interest in the ancient Greeks, whilst the ontological shift in his thought saw him move away from phenomenological considerations that were characteristic of earlier stages of his thought, in particular, the phenomenological problematic of the world horizon. ¹⁰ In turning away from the phenomenological problematic of the world, Castoriadis increasingly elucidated the social-historical as radically world creating but, because he thereby marginalized the phenomenological insight that we are already in-the-world, the social-historical creation of the world seemed to occur more and more in a worldless vacuum (Adams, 2007, 2011a). In turning to the ancient Greeks, Castoriadis’s anthropology resurrected the physis and nomos debates. These debates took a variety of historical forms, but were particularly foregrounded by the Sophists with reference to the conventionality or naturalness of human language (Heinimann, 1965). Understood as ‘human convention’ or, more specifically as ‘human self-institution’, nomos was contrasted to physis as the order of nature (or as the order of ‘natural norms’). The issue for Castoriadis was that as nomos was a self-creating order, it was to be regarded as completely distinct from physis. Or to put it another way, the human realm is not governed by natural norms derived from an extra-social source; rather, the human realm is self-founding and self-altering each time as the imaginary political institution of society.

The consequences of this for Castoriadis were far reaching. Although the elaboration of ‘physis’ has held a prominent place in Western theoretical traditions, the elucidation of nomos has been far more intermittent, and, in Castoriadis’s view, has been wrongly characterized as having no ontological import (1984b). In the 1975 section of the IIS, he set out to rectify the situation. There, as his long journey through nomos, he pursued responses to four perennial aspects of the human condition: ontological, epistemological, anthropological and hermeneutical. But although in the IIS Castoriadis set out to elucidate the self-creating order of nomos for which only an intermittent ontological perspective had been articulated within Western philosophy (1984b: 326), nomos came to act as a bridge between the social-historical and autonomy, not only as ontology but also as anthropology. As Castoriadis wrote: ‘Nomos is our creative imaginary institution by means of which we make ourselves qua human beings. It is the term nomos that gives full meaning to the term and project of autonomy’ (1997a: 332). Autonomy becomes, for him, the highest achievement of anthropos and the mode by which it achieves full humanization. As we have seen, Castoriadis articulates the human condition as anthropo- (and socio-)centric and does not take our ‘kinship with stones and trees’ into account. This changed in his later thought, however, where, through his rethinking of the creativity of nature, the human condition was again situated ‘in the world’.

Our kinship with stones and trees

Although his earlier writings were less focused on nature, Castoriadis’s later thought (beginning in the late 1970s to early 1980s) began to rethink regions of nature as self-creative. This shift emerged from a reconsideration of objective knowledge and its scientistic underpinnings, as well as a review of the living being as it was debated in the new biology (especially the debates on autopoiesis and complexity, and, in particular, the work of Chilean biologist Francisco Varela), and, finally, from a further wave of immersion in ancient Greek —particularly Aristotelian but also pre-Socratic—sources. In particular, Castoriadis’s (1997a) re-engagement with Aristotle saw him rethink the other side of physis that Aristotle’s classic formulation entailed, namely, not only physis as natural norm, but also its inherent auto-creativity. What emerged within this period was a second ontological turn in his thought. Castoriadis’s elucidation of the social-historical (in the 1970s) —the region of nomos (or self-institution) —as the only mode of being that could be creative, now expanded to include a recognition of the ontological creativity of non-human, that is natural modes of being, as well (in the 1980s). These changes in Castoriadis’s thinking, while not pursued systematically, wrought an overall transformation in his ontology of creation nonetheless. Whereas earlier in the 1970s (at the time of writing the IIS), he had focused on the human condition as the sole mode of being to be characterized by self-creation, his later thought expanded his notion of magma and self-creativity to include natural modes of being as well, such that his ontology of creation was no longer limited to a regional ontology of human creation alone, but was better understood as a general ontology of creative emergence. ¹¹ This shift in Castoriadis’s ontology alters the lines of continuity between human and non-human modes of being and rethinks our ‘kinship with stones and trees’, which, in turn, led him to reassign human beings a ‘place in the world’; thus, it also holds important implications for his overall anthropology.

Of most interest in the present context, however, is Castoriadis’s elaboration of the poly-regional ontology of modes of being for-itself, which emerged as part of his rethinking of the creative aspect of nature in the 1980s. His articulation of the poly-regional ontology of the for-itself shows an extensive reconfiguration of the nomos and physis problematic, and an expansion of the phenomenal field that had previously been reserved for human modes of being. ¹² The poly-regional ontology consisted of six levels that spanned both natural and human modes of being. In particular, there are four real and two virtual levels or modes of being for-itself (Castoriadis, 1997b). They are: the living being, the psyche, the social-historical, the social-individual, and, in addition, the autonomous subject and autonomous society. Castoriadis takes the living being as the ‘archetypal instance’ of the for-itself. The crucial element of the mode of all beings for-themselves, for Castoriadis, is that each mode of being creates its own world (Castoriadis uses the term ‘Eigenwelt’). ¹³ Here, the phenomenological problematic of the world makes a return to his thought, although relocated at a different level of being (1997a). A ‘world’, as opposed to an ‘environment’ presupposes a horizon of meaning that, in Castoriadis’s case, forms a nexus with the creative imagination. The human condition as being-in-the-world is a well-thematized idea in phenomenological strands of philosophy and social theory, but the world’s appearance––and the concomitant phenomenal field––has been more or less strictly reserved for human modes of being: animal and vegetative modes of being have generally been thought to be ‘world poor’ (Heidegger) and to live in an ‘environment’ rather than a ‘world’ (Uexküll). Part of Castoriadis’s really significant contribution here is that he broadens the phenomenal field or, to be exact, the horizon in which phenomena can appear as phenomena to a self, from purely human modes of being, which was his focus in the 1970s, to include non-human living beings during the 1980s. Thus, the world horizon appears to all levels of the for-itself, human and non-human alike. The significance of the for-itself is that it brings into being what Castoriadis calls ‘the subjective instance’, that is a rupture with physical modes of being, where the for-itself puts the physical world into meaning. To be sure, as meaning in a full sense is instituted (at the social-historical level), we can only talk about a proto-meaning at the level of the living being (and, indeed, at the level of the psyche for that matter), but this notwithstanding, the rupture of the living being with non-living or physical nature is profound. ¹⁴ Thus, Castoriadis’s poly-regional ontology of the for-itself formed the basis of a more broadly contextualized anthropology that recognized not only our kinship with stones and trees, but also assigned anthropos a place in the natural world.

In recognizing greater ‘kinship with stones and trees’, and in the concomitant reconfiguration of the lines of continuity between anthropos and the living world that this entailed, however, new questions emerge regarding the lines of discontinuity between the human and living regions of being. Earlier, I argued that Castoriadis’s anthropology was best understood through the lens of the physis and nomos debates. But do the new lines of continuity with the natural world collapse the human into the natural? Has the problematic of nomos and physis been rendered void? The best way into a fuller examination of this problematic is through Castoriadis’s debate with Francisco Varela and the question of biological autonomy.

Francisco Varela was Castoriadis’s most important interlocutor during the development of his poly-regional ontology and rethinking of the living being in the 1980s. Amongst other things, they both shared an interest in elaborating a critique of scientistic ontologies of biology/nature. Indeed, we can date the formal emergence of Castoriadis’s rethinking of the creativity of nature to 1980––the year that he published a review of Francisco Varela’s ground-breaking work Biological Autonomy from 1979 in Le Debat (Castoriadis, 1980). In that book, and in his writings to follow, Varela was to articulate the organism as an auto-poietic system (or self) that, in contrast, to the conventional literature, was self-organizing and self-producing, with an increasing phenomenological sensibility. Common to both Varela’s and Castoriadis’s approaches to the living being are an ontology of self-organization/self-creation. The living being self-constitutes its own world or environment, and, most particularly, constitutes what, for it, counts as ‘information’; specifically, the living being does not simply find ‘information’ fully formed and waiting for it in nature, but constructs and organizes the relevant parts of the physical world into information, or, rather, into significance. As the title of Varela’s book suggests, Castoriadis and Varela also shared an interest in ‘autonomy’; indeed, it was this mutual interest that inspired their two-decade-long conversation. But their shared interest in autonomy and the self-organization of living beings led to quite different conclusions. For Varela, the biological autonomy of the living organism was reflected in its ongoing self-constitution as an autonomous process, whereas, for Castoriadis, the project of autonomy was not an ontological mode of being but expressly a political project, and, thus, for him it made no sense to speak of biological autonomy (see, for example, Castoriadis, 1997a, 1997b). Thus, whereas Varela’s notion of biological autonomy collapses ‘nomos’ into ‘physis’, Castoriadis wants to maintain a productive tension between the two orders. ¹⁵

Towards a hermeneutic of modernity

The shift in Castoriadis’s thought in the 1980s towards a rethinking of creative nature and the broader context in which he began to reconsider the links between anthropos, nature and the phenomenal field can be further situated within an overarching hermeneutic of modernity. In so doing, the limits of autonomy start to receive clearer contours. Castoriadis did not systematically elaborate a theory of modernity but its central importance to his overall thought has been highlighted by Johann P. Arnason (1988, 1989a), where, in a key essay, he argues that although Castoriadis might be best known for his ground breaking elucidation of the social-historical, his contribution to a hermeneutic of modernity is ‘the real centrepiece’ of his project (Arnason, 1989a: 323). A brief summary of Arnason’s own hermeneutic of modernity will help to make better sense of Castoriadis’s approach. ¹⁶

An elaboration of a hermeneutic of modernity was central to the middle period of Arnason’s intellectual trajectory, which coincided more generally with his shift from critical theory towards cultural hermeneutics. We can date the formal emergence of Arnason’s cultural hermeneutical turn with the essay ‘Rationalisation and Modernity: Towards a Culturalist Reading of Max Weber’ (1982), and it gained momentum throughout the 1980s to receive mature expression in Praxis und Interpretation: Sozialphilosophische Studien (1988). ¹⁷ Arnason’s cultural hermeneutic of modernity emerged from two overlapping currents: First, his theory of culture arose from a sustained engagement with the phenomenological problematic of the world horizon, especially Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of mise en forme du monde via Weber’s early theory of culture as the ‘relations between man and world’ (Arnason, 1982). This resulted in his notion of ‘cultural articulations of the world’ as a distinctively phenomenological-hermeneutic conception of culture. Second, he elaborated his cultural hermeneutic of modernity as a culturalist reading of Castoriadis’s concept of social imaginary significations (Arnason, 1989b), combined with his phenomenological-hermeneutical theory of culture, to address the shortcomings in Habermas’s theory of modernity. ¹⁸

It is thus no accident that three of Arnason’s most important deliberations towards a hermeneutic of modernity during this period occurred as a critical engagement with Habermas’ notion of modernity as the ‘unfinished project of Enlightenment’. Arnason’s interventions were aimed, in part at least, at providing an alternative to what he considered the teleological, overly unified and ultimately reductive aspects of this approach (Arnason, 1986, 1988, 1989c). Two points of particular importance for the present context stand out. First, Arnason develops a notion of modernity as a ‘field of tensions’, which is partially structured by an ongoing plurality of a ‘conflict of interpretations’ as a critique of the implicit Habermasian teleology toward a rationally achieved consensus of communicative action (Arnason, 1986). Second, his cultural hermeneutics critiques modernity as reducible to the Enlightenment; instead, Arnason elaborates both Romanticism and the Enlightenment as constitutive of modernity’s field of tensions. Here, Romanticism and the Enlightenment are not understood so much as intellectual movements but as broad, cultural currents that offer competing visions and varieties of worldhood. Romanticism, often acting as a critique of Enlightenment excess, looked to ‘restore or recreate the contexts of meaning destroyed by the expansion of rational mastery’ (Arnason, 1989a: 336). Three levels––or cultural layers––are discernible in Arnason’s hermeneutic of modernity. First, as already discussed, its field of tensions is partially structured by the competing cultural currents and rival interpretations of Romanticism and the Enlightenment. Second, modernity can only make sense of itself in interpretative relation to a series of ‘othernesses’ that must be understood as constitutive not just significant (Arnason, 1996). These include, for example, both intercultural others (i.e. the sustained interest in ‘other’ cultures) and intra-cultural others (classical Greece, for example). ¹⁹ Finally, for Arnason, modernity is a world interpreting configuration. ²⁰ This contrasts with Castoriadis’s view of social imaginary significations as world creating.

These preliminary remarks to Arnason’s hermeneutic of modernity serve as a context for elucidating Castoriadis’s own theory of modernity. As Castoriadis neither set forth his theory of modernity in systematic fashion, nor explicitly recognized its hermeneutic element, Arnason’s essay entitled ‘The Imaginary Constitution of Modernity’ (1989a) provides a helpful way into the debates in question. In ‘The Imaginary Constitution of Modernity’, Arnason focuses on what he calls Castoriadis’s hermeneutic of modernity, as the dual institution of the central imaginary significations of ‘autonomy’ and the ‘infinite pursuit of pseudo-rational mastery’ (although Arnason generally refers to the latter more simply as ‘capitalism’). For Arnason, a hermeneutic of modernity, in general, and Castoriadis’s version, in particular, displays the ‘distinctively modern conflict between two different cultural orientations’ (Arnason, 1989a: 323), which, in the context of the essay, appear between ‘rational mastery’ and ‘autonomy’, not between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. As mentioned above, Arnason, in contrast to Castoriadis, stresses the interpretative aspect of social imaginary significations; that is, he highlights the interpretative dimension of creation (and the creative dimension of interpretation) that Castoriadis ignores. He does not really, however, address the other aspects of a hermeneutic of modernity; that is, how Castoriadis approaches the constitutive ‘othernesses’ of modernity (in this article at least) or how Castoriadis’s theory of modernity––at the level of its core significations of ‘autonomy’ and ‘rational mastery’––is situated within Romantic and Enlightenment currents. The overall significance of Castoriadis’s hermeneutic of modernity for Arnason is that he, unlike, for example, Habermas, sees modernity as a ‘dual institution’ of rational mastery (the imaginary signification that underlies capitalism and science) and ‘autonomy’ (underlying forms of democracy), instead of a unitary, albeit unfinished, project of the Enlightenment. Arnason also reconstructs the interpretative dimension inherent in social imaginary significations that is implicit in Castoriadis’s approach (although Castoriadis repudiates the hermeneutic element). ²¹ Arnason tends to incorporate Castoriadis’s hermeneutic of modernity into his own frame of reference and thus reconfigures Castoriadis’s understanding of the ‘dual institution’ of modernity as a ‘field of tensions’, although this is not a term that Castoriadis uses. Arnason does note, however, that Castoriadis’s version is structured around ‘two dominant poles with their respective clusters of derivative principles and perspectives’ (1989a: 323). Castoriadis himself tended instead to polarize the two significations of ‘autonomy’ and ‘rational mastery’ and did not, as Arnason pointed out, recognize the shared heritage of autonomy and rational mastery in Enlightenment thought. Overall, Arnason’s engagement with Castoriadis’s hermeneutic of modernity occurs on two levels. First, he focuses on the field of tensions structured by the social imaginary significations of rational mastery and autonomy as the ‘dual institution’. ²² Second, as we have seen, Arnason also focuses on modernity’s field of tensions as structured by Enlightenment and Romanticism and their respective versions of worldhood, although he does not systematically incorporate Castoriadis’s approach to modernity at this second level. To some extent, these differing layers of a hermeneutic of modernity overlap, but they do not totally converge.

Modernity’s field of tensions: Enlightenment and Romanticism

As shown by Arnason, Castoriadis’s theory of modernity is organized around the central imaginary significations of ‘autonomy’ and the ‘infinite pursuit of pseudo-rational mastery’. But how is Castoriadis’s hermeneutic of modernity to be contextualized within Romantic and Enlightenment cultural currents? In this respect, the Romantic aspect seems peculiarly absent from the central social imaginary significations of modernity, as elucidated by Castoriadis. It reappears more clearly, however, at the ontological level (Castoriadis, 1987), and can be seen in Castoriadis’s elucidation of the social-historical, as well as in his emphasis on meaning and the creative imagination. From a slightly different angle, Arnason has argued that the conception of the social-historical presupposes a distinctive vision of modernity (Arnason, 1988, 1989a), and thus Castoriadis’s ontology does not stand outside a hermeneutic of modernity altogether, but can perhaps be best understood, following Eisenstadt, as a ‘cultural ontology’ that is anchored in the concrete historical manifestation of modernity itself. Indeed, at the ontological level Castoriadis’s image of being is clearly bifurcated along Enlightenment and Romantic lines. Here, his elucidation of the divide between the ensemblistic-identitarian strata of being (strata that are more or less rationally organized, and that can be known through the application of rationality and mathematical reason from which self-creation and meaning are absent), on the one hand, and the creative imagination linked to the phenomenon of meaning and self-creation that is characteristic of human modes of being, on the other, is consistent with Enlightenment and Romantic visions of the world respectively. Once we begin to consider Castoriadis’s changing approach to nature, however, his hermeneutic of modernity is brought into relief against a broadened horizon.

First to the ontological aspect: Castoriadis’s encounter with the Romantic conception of nature was sustained and transformative, albeit unsystematic. ²³ During the 1970s, his immersion in the Romantic imaginary had been more or less limited to a focus on the creative imagination and the recovery of the importance of meaning to the human condition in the face of the infinite expansion of rational mastery and the seeming flattening of meaning tout court in modernity (Adams, 2011a). In the 1980s, his re-evaluation of the Romantic imaginary of nature also included a renewed interest in the creativity of nature, and the place of humankind in the natural cosmos. Castoriadis’s rethinking of nature as creative physis in the 1980s can be contextualized within the intermittent tradition of natura naturans/ natura naturata as part of a broader, critical Naturphilosophie. Briefly, natura naturans refers to the productive, creative dimension of nature and natura naturata to its more or less stable and enduring creation. First emerging in the Middle Ages, the concept received renewed importance with Spinoza in early modernity and was especially important for the Early German Romantics (particularly Schelling). The Early Romantics were engaged in a Naturphilosophie that sought to re-contextualize human beings into the wider natural cosmos; it was not so much a rejection of science as an assertion of the possibility of a total science (Gusdorf, 1982, 1983, 1985). Castoriadis’s later philosophy of nature and rethinking of the ontological underpinnings of the scientific universe has obvious connections with such a programme, although, to be sure, he did not fall into religious excess as did some of the Early Romantics.

As mentioned above, Castoriadis’s ecological concerns persisted throughout his intellectual trajectory. A concern with the destruction of the natural world at the hands of unfettered capitalism and techno-science points to a resurgence of autonomy as an interrogation of the unlimited pursuit of rational mastery over the earth. It also indicates a romantic concern with human embeddedness in the natural cosmos, which, in turn, manifests not only as a critique of the over-reach of scientistic frameworks––which can be aligned with a resurgence with the project of autonomy––but as a restoration of contexts of meaning that had been lost, or at least marginalized, in the Enlightenment expansion of reason––in this case, the restoration of our ‘kinship with stones and trees’. In reconsidering the importance of Castoriadis’s enduring engagement with ecological concerns, it becomes possible to consider the imaginary signification of ecology as a specific cultural-historical extension of the Romantic imaginary of nature that emerges from a particular social-historical constellation and as opening onto not only, but especially, the Romantic cultural current of modernity.

Where does this leave autonomy? The limits of autonomy, in the context discussed here, are threefold: at the ontological level, the project of autonomy and the autonomist imaginary are not only creative but interpretative, which limits the scope of their reach. Seen from a different perspective, autonomy requires a certain distanciation from the world, in line with broader Enlightenment trends, whilst Romantic currents look to re-embed anthropos into the natural world in its overlap with a broader horizon of meaning. At the hermeneutical (or culturological) level, if modernity is structured by Enlightenment and Romantic cultural constellations, the central imaginary signification of autonomy is limited by the very fact that there are competing visions of worldhood beyond merely Enlightenment images, and thus autonomy (or rather autonomy and rational mastery as both deriving from Enlightenment cultural currents) cannot wholly comprise modernity’s field of tensions. An emphasis on the Romantic imaginary of nature, and, more specifically, openings onto ecological worldhood offer a corrective to the predominance of Enlightenment images of modernity in Castoriadis’s thought. Autonomy also reaches its limits in that, when it takes the phenomenon of the natural world and its global destruction into account, there is, as has already been argued, a recalibration in the lines of continuity and discontinuity between human and non-human modes of being emerges as the result of rethinking our ‘kinship with stones and trees’, as well as our ‘place within the world’. Recall, though, that neither ‘nature’ nor ‘the environment’ can feature as a central social imaginary signification for Castoriadis, as he conceives central imaginary significations as genuinely world creating and, thus, without any world referent. At most, ‘nature’ could figure as a second order signification and would then also involve the proto-institutions of legein and teukhein which the imaginary signification of autonomy (or God, for that matter) does not. Autonomy has to take account of something other than itself and is not purely ‘self’-instituting; in this case, it must also take account of our ‘kinship with stones and trees’. To raise ‘the ecological world’ as a central imaginary signification would mean to bring into relief not only the interpretative aspect of social imaginary significations per se, but also the complex interaction and interpretation of the human encounter with, and place within, the natural world. ²⁴

In needing to take account of our kinship with the natural world, the project of autonomy paradoxically bumps against the internal limits of its purely creative, purely anthropocentric foundations and finds that modes of humanization involve recognition of domains outside the human realm. In this way, ecological worldhood, as a necessary counterpoint to ecologically rich modes of humanization includes the recognition that we are not only already in the world, but also that we are always in the natural world. ²⁵ Ecological worldhood recalls Heidegger’s thought and the notion of ‘dwelling’ in the world that encompasses, but goes beyond, the project of autonomy. The Heideggerian notion of being in the world (Heidegger, 1972 [1927]) originally emerged as a critique of (Husserlian) absolute subjectivity––a critique which itself resonates with Castoriadis’s absolute notion of autonomy and radical human creation. The significance––and possibility ––of an ecological worldhood in Castoriadis’s thought emerges from the specific historical trajectory of modernity and its philosophical possibilities; it broadens the Heideggerian scope of Dasein’s Sorge, on the one hand, and autonomy, on the other. For despite the blockages to an ecological worldhood, there are, nonetheless, latent openings in Castoriadis’s later work––such as the rethinking of nature and his ongoing concern with an ecological autonomy––that seem to offer at least a partial rapprochement onto an ecological form of worldhood. Arnason himself has not directly written on the possibility of an ecological worldhood, but in a particularly programmatic paper (1989c), he clearly acknowledges that Romanticism and the Enlightenment offer different––and competing––possibilities of worldhood. An ecological worldhood, in that it is still strongly connected to the project of autonomy, would thus offer a bridge between purely Romantic and Enlightenment currents, deepen our engagement with a hermeneutic of modernity and open possibilities for elucidating a socio-political response (or at least some of its preconditions) to the global scale of ecological devastation.