Edgar Morin proposed that Castoriadis' work will be remembered for its remarkable continuity and coherence as well as for its extraordinary breadth which was "
encyclopaedic" in the original Greek sense, for it offered a
paideia, or education, that brought full circle the cycle of otherwise compartmentalized knowledge in the arts and sciences. Castoriadis wrote essays on mathematics, physics, biology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, society, economics, politics, philosophy, and art. One of Castoriadis' many important contributions to social theory was the idea that social change involves radical discontinuities that cannot be understood in terms of any determinate causes or presented as a sequence of events. Change emerges through
the social imaginary without strict determinations, but to be socially recognized, it must be instituted as a
revolution. Any knowledge of society and
social change can exist only by referring to (or by positing)
social imaginary significations. (According to Castoriadis, the sociological and philosophical category of
the radical imaginary can be manifested only through the individual radical imagination and the social imaginary.) However, the social imaginary cannot be reduced or attributed to subjective imagination, since the individual is informed through an internalization of social significations. He used traditional terms as much as possible, though consistently redefining them. Further, some of his terminology changed throughout the later part of his career, with the terms gaining greater consistency but breaking from their traditional meaning (thus creating neologisms). When reading Castoriadis, it is helpful to understand what he means by the terms he uses, since he does not redefine the terms in every piece where he employs them.
Autonomy and heteronomy The concept of
autonomy was central to his early writings, and he continued to elaborate on its meaning, applications, and limits until his death, gaining him the title of "philosopher of autonomy." The word itself is
Greek, where
auto- means "for/by itself" and
nomos means "law." It refers to the condition of "self-institution" by which one creates their own laws, whether as an individual or as a whole society. And while every society creates its own institutions, only the members of
autonomous societies are fully aware of the fact and consider themselves to be the ultimate source of justice. In contrast, members of "
heteronomous societies" (
hetero-, "other") delegate this process to an authority outside of society, often attributing the source of their traditions to divine origins or, in modern times, to "historical necessity." Castoriadis then identified the need of societies not only to create but to legitimize their laws, to explain, in other words, why their laws are just. Most traditional societies did that through religion, claiming their laws were given by God or a mythical ancestor and therefore must be true. An exception to this rule is to be found in
Ancient Greece, where the constellation of
city-states (
poleis) that spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean, although not all democratic, showed strong signs of autonomy, and during its peak,
classical Athens became fully aware of the fact as seen in
Pericles' Funeral Oration, where
Pericles praises the Athenian way of life—valuing freedom over mere peace and quiet. Castoriadis considered Ancient Greece, a topic that increasingly drew his attention, not as a
blueprint to be copied but an experiment that could
inspire a truly autonomous community—one that could legitimize its laws without assigning their source to a higher authority. The Greeks differed from other societies because they not only started as autonomous but maintained this ideal by challenging their laws on a constant basis while obeying them to the same degree (even to the extent of enforcing capital punishment), proving that autonomous societies can indeed exist. Regarding modern societies, Castoriadis notes that while religions have lost part of their
normative function, their nature is still heteronomous, only that this time it has rational pretenses.
Capitalism legitimizes itself through "
reason", claiming that it makes "rational sense", but Castoriadis observed that all such efforts are ultimately
tautological, in that they can only legitimize a system through the rules defined by the system itself. So just like the
Old Testament claimed that "There is only one God, God", capitalism defines logic as the maximization of utility and minimization of costs, and
then legitimizes itself based on its effectiveness to meet these criteria. Surprisingly, this definition of logic is also shared by
Communism, which, despite the fact that it stands in seeming opposition, is the product of the same imaginary, and uses the same concepts and categories to describe the world, principally in material terms and through the process of human labor.
The project of autonomy Castoriadis views the political organization of the Ancient Greek cities (
poleis) not as a model to imitate, but rather as a source of inspiration towards an autonomous society. He also rejects the term "
city-state" used to describe Ancient Greek cities; for him, the administration of Greek
poleis was not that of a State in the modern sense of the term, since Greek
poleis were self-administered. The same goes for colonization since the neighboring
Phoenicians, who had a similar expansion in the Mediterranean, were monarchical till their end. During this time of colonization, however, around the time of Homer's epic poems, the Greeks, instead of transferring their mother city's social system to the newly established colony, for the first time in known history, legislated anew from the ground up. What also made the Greeks special was the fact that, following the above, they kept this system as a perpetual autonomy, which led to
direct democracy. This phenomenon of autonomy is again present in the
emergence of the states of
northern Italy during the
Renaissance, as a product of small independent merchants. He sees a tension in the
modern West between, on the one hand, the
project of autonomy and the potential for creativity and, on the other hand, the spirit-crushing force of capitalism. These are respectively characterized as the
creative imaginary and the
capitalist imaginary: He argues that, in the last two centuries, ideas about autonomy again come to the fore: "This extraordinary profusion reaches a sort of pinnacle during the two centuries stretching between 1750 and 1950. This is a very specific period because of the very great density of cultural creation, but also because of its very strong subversiveness."
The imaginary In the context of being a specific term in
psychoanalysis, "imaginary" originates in the writings of the French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan (as elaborated in his concept of "
the Imaginary") and is strongly associated with Castoriadis' work. Castoriadis believed that for a given society, as people penetrate the layers of its culture deeper and deeper, they arrive at
meanings that do not mean something other than themselves. They are, so to speak, "final meanings" that the society in question has imposed on the world, on itself. Because these meanings (manifestations of the "radical imaginary" in Castoriadian terminology) do not point to anything concrete, and because the logical categories needed to analyze them are derived from them, these meanings cannot be analysed rationally. They are arational (rather than
irrational), and must therefore be acknowledged rather than comprehended in the common use of the term. Castoriadis' view on concept-formation is in sharp contrast to that of
postmodernists like
Jacques Derrida, who explicitly denies the existence of concepts "in and of themselves". The radical imaginary is at the basis of cultures and accounts for their differences. In his seminal work
The Imaginary Institution of Society (especially in Part II: "The Social Imaginary and the Institution"), Castoriadis argues that societies are founded
not as products of historical necessity, but as the result of a new and radical idea of the world, an idea that appears to spring fully formed and is practically
irreducible. All cultural forms (laws and institutions,
aesthetics and
ritual) follow from this radical imaginary, and are not to be explained merely as products of material conditions. Castoriadis then is offering an "ontogenetic" or "
emergentist" model of history, one that is apparently unpopular amongst modern historians, but can serve as a valuable critique of
historical materialism. For example, Castoriadis believed that Ancient Greeks had an imaginary by which the world stems from
Chaos, while in contrast, the
Hebrews had an imaginary by which the world stems from the will of a rational entity, God or
Yahweh in the
Hebrew Bible. The former developed therefore a system of
direct democracy where the laws were ever-changing according to the people's will while the second was a theocratic system according to which man is in an eternal quest to understand and enforce the will of God. Traditional societies had elaborate imaginaries, expressed through various creation myths, by which they explained how the world came to be and how it is sustained. Capitalism did away with this mythic imaginary by replacing it with what it claims to be pure reason. That same imaginary is the foundation of its opposing ideology,
Communism. By that measure he observes (first in his main criticism of
Marxism, titled the
Imaginary Institution of Society, and subsequently in a speech he gave at the
Université catholique de Louvain on 27 February 1980) that these two systems are more closely related than was previously thought, since they share the same
Industrial Revolution type imaginary: that of a rational society where man's welfare is materially measurable and infinitely improvable through the expansion of industries and advancements in science. In this respect Marx failed to understand that technology is not, as he claimed, the main drive of social change, since there are historical examples where societies possessing near-identical technologies formed very different relations to them. An example given in the book is France and England during the Industrial Revolution, with the second being much more liberal than the first. This initial
schema of separation Castoriadis translates the Greek word "chaos" as
nothingness. According to him, the core of the Greek imaginary was a world that came from Chaos rather than the will of God as described in
Genesis. Castoriadis concludes that the Greek imaginary of a "world out of Chaos" was what allowed them to create institutions such as democracy, because—if the world is created out of nothing—man can model it as he sees fit, without trying to conform to some
divine law. He contrasted the Greek imaginary to the Biblical imaginary (found in Genesis) in which God shapes the chaos that already exists.
Social constructionism Castoriadis was a
social constructionist and a
meta-ethical moral relativist (but not a
cultural relativist) insofar as he held that the radical imaginary of each society was opaque to rational analysis. He believed that social norms and morals ultimately derive from a society's unique idea of the world, which emerges fully formed at a given moment in history and cannot be reduced further. From this, he concluded that any criteria by which one could evaluate these morals objectively are
also derived from the said imaginary, rendering this evaluation subjective. This does not mean that Castoriadis stopped believing in the value of social struggles for a better world; he simply thought that rationally proving their value is impossible. This, however, does not mean that Castoriadis believed there is no
truth, but that truth is linked to the imaginary which is ultimately arational. In his book
World in Fragments, which includes essays on science, he explicitly writes that "We have to understand that
there is truth—and that
it is to be made/to be done, that to attain [
atteindre] it people have to create it, which means, first and foremost, to
imagine it". == Lasting influence ==