The interest in publishing the 1985 dialogue between Ricoeur and Castoriadis on history and the social imaginary lies in the fact that this discussion lays the foundations of an unprecedented confrontation between two great contemporary philosophies of the imagination. It thus compensates for the paradoxical absence of written discussion between two thinkers who should have been drawn together by their common field of research.1
The two philosophers deal with a wide range of topics: Their dialogue emphasises both the meaning and the status of the concepts of ‘institution’, ‘production’, and ‘creation’ from a social and historical point of view – both thinkers draw their examples from political history, the history of sciences, and the history of arts – and on the alterity of cultures and the possibility of translation. Beyond this diversity of topics, a general reflection on the continuity and discontinuity at stake in the social-historical field, and on the emergence of novelty in the history of human cultures lies in the background. As shown by the wide range of topics we have just evoked, it is both possible and legitimate to deal with the stakes of this confrontation from different angles.
In this essay, we will focus on the analysis of the conception of productive imagination of both philosophers. We will first try to situate the precise general philosophical context of the dialogue, insisting on what we consider as the undeniable convergence of the thought of Castoriadis and Ricoeur: that is, a new reflection on productive imagination related to a common analysis of human action and of the imaginary constitution of social relationships. We will then focus on the terminological discussion running through the entire dialogue so as to assess its scope and meaning. From our point of view, these discussions on the notions of ‘institution’, ‘creation’, and ‘production’ must be relativised because they do not prevent the two philosophers from converging on a common critique of structuralism. In the third part, we will try to assess the gap existing between Castoriadis’s ontology of creation and the philosophy of imagination developed by Ricoeur in the renewed frame of a reflexive philosophy of the act.2 Beyond a mere disagreement over words, whose scope must be balanced, our thesis will consist in showing that these two intellectual projects are laid on different philosophical presuppositions concerning not only the method – that is, the ways of access to a philosophical reflection on productive imagination – but also the very status of this productive or creative imagination.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL CONTEXT OF THE DIALOGUE: A COMMON DEFENCE OF THE PRACTICAL POWER OF PRODUCTIVE IMAGINATION
Even if, as we will see throughout our commentary, the dialogue between Ricoeur and Castoriadis reveals some clear oppositions as to the status and scope given to productive imagination, it is clear that the two philosophers share a common aim when they deal with the notions of history and the social imaginary. It is clear to us that the deep meaning of this confrontation would be missed if we did not first point out the undeniable convergence of these two thinkers as illustrated by their shared attempt to think anew the power of productive imagination in opposition to the dominant philosophical tradition.
From this perspective, it is essential to stress the fact that, before diverging on their conceptions of imagination and the imaginary, Ricoeur and Castoriadis have both continuously fought for the general rehabilitation of imagination in its practical dimension, whether individual or social. In this respect, it does not seem helpful to specify the philosophical context of this shared struggle to promote the rediscovery and the rehabilitation of the productive or creative power of imagination.
The general philosophical context in which Ricoeur and Castoriadis develop their philosophies in the twentieth century consisted in hostility and persisting defiance towards the notion of imagination. In a radical way, which reminds us of the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics as the ‘forgetting of Being’, Castoriadis’s thought developed as a systematic critique of ‘inherited thought’.3 Even if Castoriadis will draw the inspiration for his critique from the new and fundamental elements brought by anthropology and psychoanalysis and not from a reflection on ‘fundamental ontology’, he nonetheless sets his thought in a radical opposition to the dominant philosophical tradition, which he considers as responsible for the occultation and the fundamental and persistent oblivion of the imagination and the imaginary.
For him, indeed, ‘inherited thought’ has always consisted in occulting the properly originary and creative dimension of imagination, failing to think it for itself and systematically reducing it to a second faculty or function. In other words, from Spinoza to Marx, and with a few remarkable exceptions – notably Kant and Fichte – imagination has been criticised and depreciated as a deluding and illusory power, the negative source of human passions radically opposed to reason. As Castoriadis points out in his article ‘The Discovery of Imagination’ (1997 [1986], 213–45), it is because the history of philosophy has been mainly deployed as an elaboration of Reason homologous to the position of ‘being as determinacy’, that it has reduced what does not belong to Reason – and first and foremost imagination – to the ‘infra-thinkable’ or to the ‘supra-thinkable’. Thus, it is against the occultation of imagination as a continued creative source of new determinations that Castoriadis’s philosophy is fighting, both from the point of view of the social-historical dimension of the instituting imaginary and from the psychic point of view of the radical imagination of the subject.
As for Ricoeur, even if he also wishes to rehabilitate the productive imagination and to fight against a discrediting of the imagination that dates back at least to Plato (and that can be found also in the French moralists, such as Pascal and Malebranche), he appears more cautious concerning the idea of a ‘forgetting’ or of a general occultation of the imagination extended to the whole of philosophy. This is the reason why, in his key article of 1976, entitled ‘Imagination in Discourse and in Action. Toward a General Theory of Imagination’ (1991 [1976], 168–87), he prefers to question more specifically the complex reasons for the discrediting of imagination in contemporary philosophy. For him, the abusive use of the term ‘image’ in the empiricist theory of knowledge is, without doubt, the very origin of this depreciation. Whether it is Husserlian phenomenology, Fregean logic, or contemporary semantics – that of the logicians as well as that of the linguists – the fight against ‘psychologism’ has essentially appeared as a fight against the notion of the image in its gnoseological pretentions. Thereafter, any investigation concerning the phenomenon of image and imagination seems bound to fail, as it will inevitably be suspected of ‘psychologism’. For Ricoeur, ‘the relative eclipse’ of the problem of imagination in contemporary philosophy can also be explained by the structural difficulties faced by any philosophical attempt to think the phenomenon of imagination in its unity in a coherent way. What seems actually understandable in the phenomenon of imagination – and which leads philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle (1939) to doubt the fact that imagination refers to a homogenous phenomenon – is that it refers to experiences that have little in common with each other and that can be moreover radically opposed. Indeed, what is there in common between the imagination thought as the nothingness of perception and imagination thought as quasi-perception, between the imaginative experience of the fascinated consciousness that can, at any time, turn into an illusory and delusory consciousness and the imaginative experience of the critical consciousness capable of taking a distance with reality using some form of power of absence? For Ricoeur, such is the challenge faced by any attempt to theorise and rehabilitate the phenomenon of the imagination.
From this perspective, Ricoeur’s philosophy – unlike Castoriadis’s thought – is not conceptualised to appear as a radical break with the whole philosophical tradition; on the contrary, it repeatedly evokes ‘unemployed potentials’ of this tradition and the possibility to renew the philosophy of imagination in the light of a reflexive philosophy of the act and towards a renewed ontology of act and power. Like Castoriadis, Ricoeur continues his dialogue with the human and social sciences – whether that is Freudian psychoanalysis, the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz, or the epistemology of history – but he is deeply convinced – as shown in the reflexive anthropology of Fallible Man (1986b), in The Rule of Metaphor (2003), and in Time and Narrative (1984–1988) – that it is possible to renew the thinking of imagination, starting from a creative reinterpretation of the unemployed potentials of the Kantian theory of schematism and productive imagination.4
Arguably, the common point between Ricoeur and Castoriadis within their shared diagnosis concerning the occultation–discreditation of imagination in the philosophical tradition, and the necessity to think imagination anew, is that they are both convinced that a renewal of the theory of imagination must necessarily proceed as a central function of imagination in human action and its foregrounding. For the two thinkers, it is the confinement of the theory of imagination within a theory of knowledge and reason that has led to this critical depreciation of the imagination in relation to these two powers of truth: sensation and concept. In that sense, the two philosophers lead us, each in his own way, towards a regathering of the practical and productive power of imagination.
From Freedom and Nature (1950) to the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986c) via From Text to Action (1986), Ricoeur sought a renewal of the theory of imagination through an innovative approach to the practical function of productive imagination. As will be confirmed in ‘Imagination in Discourse and in Action’ (1991), there is an essential link between praxis and the social imaginary, which requires a general theory of imagination to take as its starting point the constitutive and originary dimension of the social and cultural imaginary. To be more specific, it is only within a reflection on the originary dialectic between ideology and utopia and within a critical labour on the pathological forms of the social imaginary – that the contradictions which a simple phenomenology of individual imagination and action must leave as an aporia – are likely to be practically mediated. As for Castoriadis, his theory of the social imaginary significations and history obviously also starts from an attempt to rethink praxis in its irreducible creativity without reducing it to a – foreseeable and necessary – historical development. As he writes in The Imaginary Institution of Society (Castoriadis 1987 [1975], 146): ‘History is impossible and inconceivable outside of the productive or creative imagination, outside of what we have called the radical imaginary as this is manifested indissolubly in both historical doing and in the constitution, before any explicit rationality, of a universe of significations.’
Now that we have sketched the outlines of the general philosophical context of this confrontation between Ricoeur and Castoriadis, it seems useful, in ending this introductory part, to define the more particular context of this 1985 dialogue. Indeed, it is important to keep in mind the works published by these two philosophers at that date, because they are essential to determine not only the meaning but also the limits of their discussion on the question of the imagination.
First to Castoriadis. In 1975 – that is, ten years earlier – he published his masterpiece, entitled The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987 [1975]). As indicated in its title, this work can be wholly read as a progressive disclosure of the power of institution and creation of the social imaginary. Considering the fact that the 1985 dialogue between Ricoeur and Castoriadis opens precisely on this topic, we can consider that the major stakes of the Castoriadian thesis on ‘instituting imaginary’ led the tone and the orientation of the dialogue. Even if Ricoeur is led to develop some of his ideas on imagination in order to specify some of his oppositions to Castoriadis, his theory of imagination is not central in this discussion.
How can we explain this kind of asymmetry concerning the explicit or implicit references made by the two philosophers to their respective thesis on productive imagination? In my view, the explanation for this asymmetry is quite simple, but it has a decisive impact on the arguments and developments of the dialogue. In 1985, we doubt that Castoriadis could have considered the work already published by Ricoeur as actually focused on the phenomenon of imagination. The question of imagination is obviously repeatedly evoked in all of Ricoeur’s published works, but, after all, none of his books are explicitly or directly devoted to an elucidation of the productive imagination. It is only in 1995 – that is, ten years later – that, in his ‘Intellectual Autobiography’ (1995), Ricoeur will explicitly acknowledge having devoted a large part of his work – from The Symbolism of Evil to Time and Narrative passing through The Rule of Metaphor – to the elaboration of a philosophy of imagination.
Today, it is a fact that a great number of Ricoeur scholars – from Richard Kearney (2004) to George Taylor (2006), from Olivier Abel (1996) to Alain Thomasset (1996) and Michael Foessel (Foessel and Lamouche 2007) – now agree to consider that an essential part of the Ricoeurian work has been devoted to the patient and progressive elaboration of a general theory of imagination. In this perspective, our latest book – Paul Ricoeur, L’imagination vive (Amalric 2013) – is entirely devoted to a detailed genesis of the Ricoeurian philosophy of imagination, insisting on the fact that it already originates in the Philosophy of the Will. However, in 1985, it is unlikely that Castoriadis considered Ricoeur’s work as essentially devoted to the question of the imagination, and, as a consequence, it is as unlikely that he considered it as a competing theory concerning the productive imagination.
As Johann Michel usefully reminds us in his preface (in this volume), in 1985, Ricoeur had already published the first two volumes of Time and Narrative and was about to publish the third and last volume of this trilogy, Narrated Time. What is essential to us is the fact that, in 1975, Ricoeur had also given two absolutely fundamental lectures on imagination at the University of Chicago. The first series of lectures on social imaginary, today known as Ideology and Utopia, was edited by George Taylor and published in English in 1986, but was only translated and published in French in 1997. The second series of lectures is not yet published, but it dealt with philosophical aspects of the imagination, especially in its psychic, phenomenological, and individual dimension.5 In such a context, nothing indicates that Castoriadis, in 1985 – that is, at the time of the dialogue – knew anything about the content of these lectures; and this could explain why most of the questions he asked Ricoeur appeared less as a confrontation of a particular thesis – on social imaginary, ideology, or utopia – than as demands for precisions so as to better identify possible points of agreement on the question of imagination.6
In the following discussion, which we will develop in the following two parts, we will therefore try to keep in mind this asymmetry in the reception each philosopher has of the other’s work and thought. In a word, as it is obvious that Ricoeur has closely read The Imaginary Institution of Society7 and that his interventions aim essentially at clarifying some questions or removing perplexities concerning the central thesis of the work, it is on the contrary very likely that Castoriadis has had only partial access to the essential thesis of Ricoeur on social imaginary and on the dialectic between ideology and utopia. This is the reason why he never bluntly deals with the decisive concepts on which Ricoeur’s theory of imagination lies.
CREATION, PRODUCTION, AND INSTITUTION: A CONVERGING CRITIQUE OF STRUCTURALISM BEYOND THE TERMINOLOGICAL DISPUTE
The starting point for our commentary on the dialogue between Ricoeur and Castoriadis will be the discussion of the terms ‘creation’, ‘institution’, and ‘production’, which seem to create opposition between the two philosophers throughout their exchange on the status of imaginary and history. In this second part, our aim will be to show that this terminological dispute can be relativised and that it does not stand as an obstacle to a common converging critique of structuralism by the two thinkers.
From the beginning of the dialogue, a fundamental dispute seems to appear between Ricoeur and Castoriadis with, what would be, on one side, a Castoriadian defence of the notion of ‘creation’ conceived as an ‘institution’ and a radical surge of the new, and, on the other side, a Ricoeurian defence of imagination as production of meaning in the sense of the Fichtean Produzieren. While Castoriadis insists on the creation of new forms – in art, politics, and the sciences – as that which absolutely cannot be reduced to the existing order and determinations, Ricoeur conceives the imagination as a production of new configurations – whether narrative, metaphorical, political, or institutional – which can never be assimilated to the surge of absolute novelty because such configurations always lie on a ‘prefiguration’, a ‘pre-structuration’, or a ‘pre-institution’ which regulates and energises any imaginative production.
For Ricoeur, this reluctance to use the term ‘creation’ when applied to the works of the imagination can probably be explained by the fact that, in his philosophical writings, the term ‘creation’ has been mostly used for the idea of a ‘foundational sacred’ or, more broadly, for the idea of the ‘primordial’ or the ‘fundamental’ as that which exceeds, overwhelms, or precedes any strictly reflexive or speculative approach of the question of anthropos and human freedom. In the ‘General Introduction’ to Freedom and Nature (1966 [1950]), he evokes indeed the idea of creation as a ‘gift of being’ and as a ‘source of the will’ and immediately specifies that the approach of such a notion exceeds the resources of phenomenological description and of reflexive philosophy. For him, the notion of creation could only be developed in a ‘Poetics of the Will’, which, as a ‘pneumatology of the will’, would reinsert the ‘practical cogito’ in being while trying to articulate a poetic inspiration of the will. Beyond the irreducible dualism of freedom and nature which stands as a boundary to a phenomenology of the will, Ricoeur’s project of a ‘Poetics of the Will’ aimed at the poetic unity of freedom and nature as a ‘unity of creation’.
Even though Ricoeur did not write this third volume of the Philosophy of the Will, which was to complete the phenomenological approach of Freedom and Nature (1966 [1950]) and the hermeneutical approach of The Symbolism of Evil (1969) – which was then conceived as a ‘mythics of the will’ – he never gave up the idea that a discourse on the ‘originary unity of man’ or on creation as originary inspiring source of the human will can only be mythical or metaphorical. The conclusion of a phenomenology of the will is that ‘willing is not creating’ because a regeneration of the will as recreation of our freedom, beyond the slavery of passions, would only have been thinkable within the frame of a poetics of the will.
Even if Ricoeur’s philosophy has progressively abandoned the initial project of a ‘religious philosophy’ of originary creation and has later developed a strictly anthropological perspective – opting for the agnostic suspension of a‘philosophy without absolute’ – it has always remained faithful to the idea – coming from the Kantian critique of metaphysics – according to which a discourse on originary creation, in its cosmological and/or theological dimensions, is out of reach of any philosophical reflection with speculative pretentions.
He shows the same conviction in 1998, in What Makes Us Think? when he evokes the possibility of thinking a unity between the discourse on the lived body in its phenomenological and subjective dimension and the discourse on the body-object known by sciences. As he writes:
From this ontological identity arises a third discourse that goes beyond both phenomenological philosophy and science. To my mind this would be either the poetic account of creation in the biblical sense or the speculative discourse that was raised to its height by Spinoza, overcoming the division between the attributes of thought and extension in order to assert the unity of substance. (Changeux and Ricoeur 2002, 28)
But he later adds: ‘I do not hesitate to say that as a philosopher I profess considerable skepticism with regard to the possibility of constituting an overarching discourse of this sort, above and beyond the profound unity of what appears to me sometimes as a neuronal system, sometimes as mental experience’ (Changeux and Ricoeur 2002, 29).
As we have just seen, Ricoeur has always refrained from developing a speculative discourse of a cosmological type, thus showing a very Kantian cautiousness as to the possibility of a discourse on the One and the originary. On the other hand, Castoriadis had a different approach, as, in the last phase of his intellectual work, he clearly developed a cosmological reflection8 inspired by Greek myths and the ontology of chaos expressed in them. For him indeed, Greek myths9 – notably through the works of Homer, Hesiod, and the great Greek tragedians – reveal a significance of the world that cannot be reduced to any form of rationality: They convey a ‘magma of significations’ which keeps referring to an origin of sense which is ‘devoid of meaning’ and thus invites us to think an ontology of creation as ‘ontology of chaos’ – that is, more precisely, as an ontology of the interplay of chaos and cosmos.10 In the same way as on the political plane, Castoriadis turns to the experience of ancient Greek democracy to read in it the radical surge of the project of autonomy, so, too, on the cosmological plane, he turns to Greece – that is, to the mythic and symbolic emergence of Greece – to try to read in it the surge of an ontology of chaos and creation which stands as the core of his philosophy of radical imagination.
In my view, we should not discuss this terminological dispute on the concepts of creation-institution and production too hastily. In fact, in one of his first texts in which he actually deals with the question on cultural imaginary in its ‘nuclear’ and originary dimension, Ricoeur goes so far as to use the term ‘creative nucleus’ of cultures to qualify this ‘ethico-mythical nucleus’ of a culture, from which it interprets and originary evaluates life (Ricoeur 1965a, 280). In his article from 1961, entitled ‘Universal Civilisation and National Cultures’ (Ricoeur 1965b, 271–84), Ricoeur points out that the values which determine a vision of the world proper to a specific culture correspond to a ‘creative phenomenon’, which first expresses itself in a superficial way at the level of ‘practical habits’ and then in a deeper way in ‘traditional institutions’. But he later adds: ‘The institutions are always abstract signs which need to be deciphered. It seems to me that if one wishes to attain the cultural nucleus, one has to cut through to that layer of images and symbols which make up the basic ideals of a nation’ (Ricoeur 1965a, 280).
Ricoeur’s connection of habits and institutions to an originary and creative cultural nucleus presents a strong analogy with the interplay of the instituted imaginary to the instituting imaginary, which constitutes the central philosophical gesture of Castoriadis’s approach to the social imaginary. The idea of an ‘ethico-mythical nucleus’ of human cultures is indeed very close to the ‘social imaginary significations’ in the Castoriadian sense. Beyond this strong convergence, we can consider that, in this key article, Ricoeur sketches a regression to a concept of the originary which obviously announces the ‘genetic phenomenology’ that he will develop later in Ideology and Utopia (1986c).
In fact, in the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, Ricoeur’s reflexive endeavour consists in starting from the most superficial significations of ideology and utopia (i.e. their ‘pathological’ significations) – ideology as distortion of reality and utopia as escape from reality – to finally reach their most originary and constitutive significations – ideology in its integrative function, constitutive of the identity of a group, and utopia as imagination of a nowhere, which keeps the field of the possible open – passing through their central significations of, on the one hand, the legitimation of power and authority, and, on the other hand, of the radical critique of power. When, in the conclusion of the book, Ricoeur uses the term ‘constitutive imagination’ (1986c, 311) to qualify the more radical meaning of these ‘imaginative practices’ that are ideology and utopia, it clearly appears that he gives to the social imaginary a status close to that of the Castoriadian ‘instituting imaginary’.
Indeed, Ricoeur, like Merleau-Ponty, had earlier criticised Husserlian idealism in his book A l’école de la phénoménologie (1986a) and had always denounced the reduction of the problem of the constitution of meaning to that of the auto-constitution of the transcendental absolute ego. Thus, when Ricoeur speaks of ‘constitutive’ or ‘constituting’ imaginary, it is never in an egological sense. On the contrary, it is to emphasise the originary character of the social imaginary being thus very close to the Merleau-Pontian and Castoriadian signification of the concept of ‘institution’. As early as the Phenomenology of Perception (2003a), the central philosophical intention of Merleau-Ponty consisted indeed in criticising the idea of a constituting transcendental subjectivity resulting from the Husserlian époché. Unlike the Husserlian reduction, the phenomenological reduction, as conceived by Merleau-Ponty, attempts to return to the unreflected ground of reflection. In Merleau-Ponty, the term ‘institution’ appears precisely when the philosopher develops the consequences of his criticism of the philosophy of consciousness and of reflection. Unlike the idea of ‘constitution’, the idea of ‘institution’ – as developed in Merleau-Ponty’s seminars on institution (2003b) – corresponds to a philosophical attempt to think the emergence of a sense susceptible to reconciliation with the passivity of the subject that is also to be shared by other subjects.
Considering what has just been analysed, it therefore seems important to relativise the terminological conflict between the two philosophers because we can see that Castoriadis also sometimes uses the term ‘constituting’ (1997, 173),11 as he also uses the term ‘productive’ (1987, 146)12 imagination without limiting himself to the use of the term ‘creative imagination’.
In that respect, it seems to us that the discussion of the term ‘production’ must also be interpreted with caution. When, at the beginning of the dialogue, Castoriadis insists on the fact that, for him, the concept of production is too closely linked to Marx (see chapter 1, p. 3),13 he obviously refers to the whole reflexive work he develops in his critique of Marx, especially in the first chapter of The Imaginary Institution of Society, entitled ‘Marxism: A Provisional Assessment’. In this critique of Marx, which appears as a radical critique of the causalistic and deterministic theories of society and of history, Castoriadis never questions the Marxian idea that human existence cannot be thought independently of the material conditions of the production of social life. However, what he denounces is the reduction of social relationships and historical becoming to the mere development of productive forces.
Here again, this critique of Marx, far from opposing Castoriadis to Ricoeur, in actual fact, brings them together, since, as early as 1953, in an important article entitled ‘Work and the Word’ (Ricoeur 1965c, 197–219), Ricoeur also develops a critique of the Marxian concept of production with similar arguments to the Castoriadian critique.14 In this article, Ricoeur outlines a ‘mutual overlapping of signifying and acting’, a primitive and always renewed dialectic between word and praxis which prevents any reduction of praxis to production and jointly asserts the overwhelming productivity of the word and of the creative power of symbolic imagination in relation to the simple material production.15 In 1973, in his conference entitled ‘Le lieu de la dialectique’,16 Ricoeur will reassert his critique of the Marxian concept of production in terms similar to Castoriadis’s.17 Ricoeur tells us (1975, 104):
The restriction I reproach Marxism with proceeds from a reduction of the concept of praxis to that of production and even to a reduction of the concept of labour to that of work, as Hannah Arendt has convincingly shown in her book The Human Condition.... It is not paradoxical to say that this reduction of praxis to productive work is responsible for the permanent temptation among marxists to fall back on what they themselves call an ‘economicist deviation’.18
In the five lectures in Ideology and Utopia devoted to a detailed commentary of Marx, Ricoeur argues that, in Marx’s thought, this reduction of praxis to production has never had the status of an initial presupposition, but has progressively imposed itself through a certain evolution of the Marxian use of the concept of ‘production’ (Ricoeur 1986c, 21–102). As Ricoeur clearly explains, it is in fact the progressive reduction of the semantic scope of the German concept of Produktion which explains, in Marx’s thought, the progressive loss of the creative and imaginary root of praxis. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, indeed, Marx’s use of the concept of Produktion is close to Fichte’s Produzieren, evoked by Ricoeur at the beginning of the radio dialogue with Castoriadis (chapter 1, p. 3), because it has, at that point, the same extension as the concept of objectivation, and because it means the creative activity in general, the activity as realisation as well as the economic activity in particular. However, in The German Ideology, the passage from an ontology of praxis to an ontology of production leads Marx to evolve in his use of the term Produktion (Marx, 1970). But, beyond The German Ideology, it is Engels’s and Lenin’s influences combined that will, for Ricoeur, lead Marxist thought to drastically reduce the concept of Produktion to the economic concept of production.
The preceding terminological analysis thus demonstrates that the disagreement between Ricoeur and Castoriadis on the choice of the most appropriate terms to define productive imagination is not sufficient to establish an irreducible opposition between their respective thesis on the imagination and the imaginary. From our point of view, this terminological discussion even enables us to reveal an essential agreement between the two thinkers on the originary and constituting status of the social imaginary, which is clearly expressed in this shared critique of structuralism that they both develop throughout the dialogue.
From the beginning of the dialogue, both Ricoeur and Castoriadis criticise an explanation of imaginative productions that draws from empiricism and associationism, and that would reduce the novelty of a metaphor, of a narrative, or of a social imaginary signification to a simple ‘combination of pre-established elements’ (chapter 1, p. 4). For them, it is this same logic of a reduction of productive imagination to reproductive imagination – a logic prevailing in the philosophical tradition – that can be found in the central thesis of the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, when it pretends to explain the social starting from a formal symbolic entirely reducible to a pure combinatory logic. In fact, when Lévi-Strauss (2008) aims at explaining the diversity of cultural forms, from one single combinatory logic corresponding to the symbolic structure of human mind, he merely develops a ‘logicist’ version of the empiricist reduction of productive imagination to reproductive imagination.
In his 1967 article, entitled ‘The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology’ (Ricoeur 2004, 232–62),19 Ricoeur is grateful to Lévi-Strauss for having perceived the dimension of radical discontinuity that represents the institution of language and symbolism. In his famous ‘Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss’, Lévi-Strauss indeed wrote: ‘Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the ascent of animal life, language can only have arisen all at once ... So there is a fundamental opposition, in the history of the human mind, between symbolism, which is characteristically discontinuous, and knowledge, characterised by continuity’ (Lévi-Strauss 1987, 59–60).
As shown in this quotation, Lévi-Strauss has perceived the discontinuity implied by the birth of any symbolism, and by denying the possibility to establish a sociological theory of symbolism as Mauss does, he jointly asserts the central thesis of a ‘symbolic origin’ of society. However, for Ricoeur, structural anthropology fails to think the real origin of the social as, by reducing the genesis of language and of the symbolic to a gap, a difference or a simple combination of elements; it may indeed think the conditions of ‘semiological order’, but it completely misses the problem of the conditions of possibility of the ‘semantic order’. For him, what he calls Lévi-Strauss’s ‘transcendentalism without subject’ (Ricoeur 1974, 53) definitely accounts for the negative and non-subjective condition of language – that is, the game of differences operating in the system of the language – but it fails to tackle the positive and subjective dimension of language – that is, the capacity of human discourse to make sense and, by doing so, to refer to the world.
Even if their arguments differ, the Castoriadian critique of structuralism is obviously very similar to the main points of the Ricoeurian critique. Castoriadis indeed never intends to deny the functional and logical dimension of symbolism and of the social imaginary, but above all rejects the Lévi-Straussian reduction of the social imaginary to a mere combinatory logic, as it misses the ‘instituting’ aspect. By attempting to reduce the social imaginary to its logical and ‘ensidic’ dimension, Lévi-Strauss is in fact led to a reduction of the instituting to the instituted, which is unable to think the creative aspect and the radical novelty of ‘social imaginary significations’. Now, what specifically defines those significations, insofar as they differ from the formal symbolism to which the structuralist theory refers, is that they cannot have any meaning independently from historical becoming and from the concrete lived experience of the subjects in which they are incarnated (Castoriadis 2015).20 As Nicolas Poirier writes (2011, 258–9):
To assert, as Lévi-Strauss does, that the series of structures correspond to a series of throws of a dice, is to point out an essential dimension of the social-historical which is precisely the concern of ensemblistic-identitarian logic, and which is ruled by a rationality of probabilistic type.... [But] to reduce the succession of the different societies to a random draw comes round ... to obliterate the question of the very meaning of this succession which is, ‘par excellence’ the problem of historicity.
For Ricoeur and Castoriadis, we may thus affirm that, in the same way as time cannot be reduced to the logical, history cannot be reduced to structures, for it is, on the contrary, in its essence, production, or continued creation of structures. And in our view, this is exactly the same argument that Ricoeur attempts to develop when (on p. 5 of the dialogue in chapter 1) he opposes a ‘productive view’ to a ‘static view’ of cultural and social inventions. For him, historicity is the proper characteristic of the productivity of productive imagination, and the latter can only be conceived as an ever-open and ever-moving process which has a ‘happening’ dimension irreducible to a logical combinatory. Symbolic productions actually present a logical dimension, but their dynamism also implies an imaginative dialectic through which the meaning continuously historicises itself through structures.
PRODUCTIVE IMAGINATION: BETWEEN ORIGIN AND MEDIATION, CREATION AND RETROACTION
How can we understand the dispute between Ricoeur and Castoriadis then, despite the strong and undeniable convergences in their conceptions of the productive imagination and the social imaginary that we attempted to show in our two previous parts? In our view, the heart of the debate has to be sought in the dispute that opposes the two philosophers regarding the idea, defended by Ricoeur, that the discontinuities produced by the productive imagination in history should mainly be interpreted as ‘discontinuities of sense’ standing out in the background of the ‘continuity of existence’.
If Castoriadis seems to admit – not without a touch of irony (chapter 1, p. 7) – to the Ricoeurian idea, according to which discontinuity would merely be referring to sense, it is because in Castoriadis’s view, this ‘discontinuity of sense’ has an immediate ontological scope: it equates to the position of an imaginary signification of reality that conditions our very access to reality. However, it seems to us that it is precisely under this apparent agreement that the profound difference between the two philosophers’ approaches to the theorisation of productive imagination truly lies. When Castoriadis states that, in his view, ‘ontologically, society as history, is sense’ (7), he states in an eloquent way that the very heart of his philosophical reflection on instituting imagination is ontological. In this perspective, thinking the social-historical imaginary means, above all, elucidating a ‘mode of being’ or a specific and irreducible layer of being. Yet, the conquest of this mode of being specific to the radical imagination is, for Castoriadis, inseparable from the critique of ‘inherited ontology’, whose essential characteristic, as ‘ontology of determinacy’, is to lead to a complete occultation of the radical novelty of creation, by confining the philosophical reflection within the borders of the ensemblistic-identitarian logic.
Castoriadis can then very well grant Ricoeur that creation does not happen cum nihilo nor in nihilo – in so far as that there is always some pre-structured and ‘pre-regulated’ element resulting from the sedimentation of the instituted and applying a form of constraint on creation (pp. 5–6) – yet he maintains throughout his works the idea of creation as ex nihilo by defining the imaginary as primary and unmotivated position of new forms and new significations. As he summarises in his 1991 interview, entitled ‘From the Monad to Autonomy’,
Let us consider the constitutive dimension of society and of history, the instituting dimension. We see therein something that, for lack of a better term, must be called a source, a capacity of human collectives to give rise in an unmotivated – though conditioned – way to forms, figures, new schemata that, more than merely serving to organise things, are creative of worlds ... All that is neither necessary nor contingent. It is the way of being that human beings in society create, and each time they create it ex nihilo as to what truly matters, that is to say, as to its form or eidos. But, of course, never in nihilo or cum nihilo, for something that was already there is utilised. (Castoriadis 1997, 174)
Thus, beyond this concession made to the ‘already there’, the profound meaning of the Castoriadian ontology of creation is therefore to affirm that imaginary is a-causal and unmotivated and that it is the emergence through creation of a surplus of being and of an irreducible alterity. In that sense, the imaginary is the Being itself as Chaos, Abyss, and Groundlessness: It is the Being as time of creation and of radical alteration. As Castoriadis himself notes, it is difficult to speak of the instituting social imaginary without defining it as a ‘source’ or a ‘radical origin’21 of new determinations. In this respect, the essentially negative critical method he displays throughout The Imaginary Institution of Society aims at progressively isolating that which, in our understanding of history, exceeds the principle of sufficient reason and ensemblistic-identitarian explanations. If the Castoriadian critical method appears indeed as a patient and obstinate analysis of the insufficiencies of Marx’s theory of history and of ‘inherited thought’, it has an essentially ontological objective, that is, to unveil a ‘surplus of being’, which is the one of the imaginary sources of our societies.
As Arnaud Tomès (2008, 181–95) rightly stresses, the path that leads to a renewed ontology of creation is narrow, as there is, in the affirmation and definition of the social imaginary as origin, an apparent ‘positivity’ risking at any time to make us fall back into a substantialist and causal approach of the phenomenon of imagination. Temptation is strong, indeed, to forget the meaning of the immense critical effort developed by Castoriadis’s philosophy and to reduce the specific mode of being of the social-historical imaginary to the three types which the ‘inherited thought’ has continuously pointed at: the thing, the person, or the idea. This being done, it is the specificity in the mode of being of society and history as constituting poles of the anonymous collective creative capacity that is at risk once more of being lost and occulted.
We believe that it is this risk or ‘temptation’ that draws Ricoeur’s attention and orients it towards a very different interpretation of the productive imagination. Greatly influenced, as we saw, by the Kantian critique of metaphysics, Ricoeur has always considered the philosophical project of elaborating a renewed ontology as highly problematic. In this regard, constant references by Ricoeur to ontology must not mislead us: As shown in the tenth study of Oneself as Another (1992), ontology never plays the role of a primary philosophy for Ricoeur, but instead remains the ‘horizon’ or the ‘promised land’ of his philosophical reflection. In that sense, ontology is always characterised by its exploratory and unachieved status: It is the very thing that a philosophy of human action aspires to in its phenomenological, reflexive, and hermeneutical developments, although it always remains secondary and subordinate to the reflexive conquests of the reflection on action. As he stresses in the Conflict of Interpretations (1974 [1969]), a ’separate ontology’ is beyond our grasp: It is only within the movement of the interpretation of symbols, texts, and actions that we perceive some dimension of the interpreted being.
For these reasons, we do not find any ‘ontology of the imaginary’ in Ricoeur’s work, nor at any point is the philosopher drawn to place the social imaginary in a position of radical origin by identifying the instituting imaginary with the being itself of historical becoming. If he does not challenge the term of ‘source’ to define the social imaginary since, as we saw, he, like Castoriadis, defends the idea of an originary imaginary and symbolic constitution of the social bond, the fact remains that most of his theorisation of productive imagination falls within the renewed framework of a philosophy of the act22 that consists in thinking the activity of the imagination first and foremost as an activity of synthesis and mediation.
From the Philosophy of the Will to Time and Narrative (1984–1988), Ricoeur continually insisted on the inscrutable and structurally aporetic nature of the question of origin – whether it be the origin of evil or the origin of time – and for the same reasons, he never placed the imagination in a position of origin. Therefore, he keeps supporting the thesis according to which our relationship to the origin can only be of a poetico-practical nature. As our relationship to the origin is never immediate and can only express itself through the indirect discourse of symbols and myths, it can be first described as poetic in the sense that it shows an irreducibly metaphorical dimension. But this reference to the poetic is not sufficient to define our relationship to the originary. For Ricoeur, the profound meaning of this relationship is to be a practical relationship rather than a theoretical and speculative relationship. Thus, it is only in action and in the dialectic inherent in the human praxis that what could be described as a productive ‘contact point’ with the origin keeps forming itself.
What are then the consequences of this poetico-practical thinking of productive imagination that never places the imagination in a position of radical origin but always provides it with the status of a productive mediation?
In our judgement, there is first a methodological and critical consequence of this positioning regarding the phenomenon of imagination. All the developments of Ricoeur’s philosophy of imagination take as a starting point the effective experience that we have of the productivity and creativity of imagination, and maintain the methodological decision never to move away from the field of experience and from its reflective reappropriation. In that context, it is not surprising that the main objection made by Ricoeur to Castoriadis throughout the dialogue should precisely be to deny the fact that we could have an ‘experience’ of creation or of absolute novelty. As highlighted by Ricoeur, ‘we do not know the non-instituted’ (chapter 1, p. 13), and in that sense, the idea of an absolute discontinuity can only result from a form of ‘subreption’ in our reflection on productive imagination. Indeed, we have no choice but to note that our experience of imagination is first and foremost one of an imaginary and symbolic medium ‘always already’ there and one of an origin always beyond our grasp.
At the same time, we are merely describing half of this experience here, for the sole fact of being able to refer reflexively to this ‘imaginary medium’ which is always already there implies that we are capable of a ‘critical distanciation’ that creates the complementary and inseparable pole of our ‘experience’ of productive imagination. For Ricoeur, there is therefore a tensional nature in our relationship to productive imagination which – in its indissolubly active and receptive dimension – precisely leads to making any immediate or direct experience of the imagination’s productivity impossible. It should be stressed that, in this regard, we do not know what is a pure productive imagination, no more than we know what is a pure reproductive imagination. Our experience is one of the mixed, of the ‘in-between’, and of the ‘impure’, which is why Ricoeur constantly insists on the fact that the productivity of the imagination to which we have access is always one of a ‘regulated imagination’ and never of a purely anomic and anarchic imagination.
This is the reason why, from Fallible Man (1986b [1960]) – so to speak from the first sketch of his philosophical anthropology – to The Rule of Metaphor (1977 [1975]) and Time and Narrative (1984–1988 [1983–1985]), Ricoeur favours a Kant-inspired approach to the productive imagination that emphasises its power of mediation and synthesis. At the opposite end of the dominant philosophical tradition, the emergence of the entirely new problematic of synthesis in the Kantian philosophy entails, according to Ricoeur, a true revolution when dealing with the question of imagination. For the first time in the history of philosophy, the problem of imagination as production or as ‘doing’ indeed prevails on the problem of image conceived as reproduction of the perceived thing. In so doing, both the epistemological primacy of perception over imagination and the phenomenological primacy of representation over act are contested. All through his work, there is thus no doubt that Ricoeur constantly considers the elaboration of his philosophy of imagination as a renewal and a creative extension of the Kantian theory of schematism and productive imagination. In this perspective, he will take also his inspiration from the Bachelardian conception of the imagination (2014),23 the main contribution of which is to reveal the constitutive relationship between productive imagination and language by conceiving imagination as ‘emergent signification’ and not as ‘vanishing perception’.
From The Rule of Metaphor (2003) to Time and Narrative (1984–1988), therefore, it is a productivity of imagination conceived as synthesis and mediation that the Ricoeurian philosophy endeavours to think, focussing essentially on the inventive power of imagination operating in discourse. As underlined by the preface of Time and Narrative (1984–1988), neither metaphor nor narrative is likely to produce a semantic innovation unless they both apply a ‘synthesis of the heterogeneous’. In the case of the metaphor, the synthetic activity of the imagination lies in producing a new resemblance by crossing the gap between terms that at first seem ‘distant’. As Ricoeur stresses: ‘The productive imagination at work in the metaphorical process is thus our competence for producing new logical species by predicative assimilation, in spite of the resistance of our current categorisations of language’ (Ricoeur 1984, X).24 In the case of the narrative, this synthetic work of imagination consists in the invention of a plot: By means of the plot, heterogeneous elements such as agents, goals, causes, chance, or circumstances are brought together within the temporal unity of a whole and complete action. In other words, the plot of a narrative invents a human action configuration which ‘refigures’ our practical experience while resting upon its previous symbolic prefiguration.
In our view, this theorisation of the ‘regulated imagination’, in his attempt to think together the work of invention and mediation of imagination, reflects Ricoeur’s resistance to the interpretation of Kant that Heidegger offers in the Kantbuch (1997). Since Fallible Man (1986b), Ricoeur indeed critically positions himself regarding the Heideggerian interpretation of productive imagination as source or radical origin, that is to say, as common root of understanding and sensibility. In his view, ‘transcendental imagination’ can legitimately be thought as origin of transcendence, as the very possibility of our openness to the world, but it is not sufficient to account for the objectivity and the constitution of an intelligible order. In that sense, it seems illusory to see in the schematism of transcendental imagination an absolutely originary temporality, as it does not offer us much more than a vague and formless transcendence, a simple field of apparition, and fails to explain the problems of validity and of intellectual determination. For Ricoeur, the real function of productive imagination is therefore not only to make possible our openness to the world, but most fundamentally, to produce a mediation of appearance and expressibility, that is to say, a synthesis of finitude and rationality. In his dialogue with Ricoeur, Castoriadis in turn seems to distance himself from the Kantbuch (1997) as he reproaches the Heideggerian interpretation for not overcoming the Kantian conception of imagination as ‘imagination of a subject’, and for thus missing the specificity of the instituting social imaginary as created by the anonymous collective (3). Nonetheless, we may question whether his theory of social imaginary placed as radical origin of our relationship to the world – that is, as the very root of being and temporality – is not faced with the same difficulties as the ones encountered by the Heideggerian reduction of rationality to originary temporality. In other words, we may wonder whether the radical ontological orientation that, in Crossroads in the Labyrinth, Castoriadis gave to his philosophy of the imaginary first presented in The Imaginary Institution of Society – that is, an ontology insisting on Being as ‘Chaos’ and on an originary ‘creative-destructive’ time – leads to a satisfactory definition of rationality and of critical reason.25
Therefore, if we want to grasp the specificity of Ricoeur’s theory of imagination, we must absolutely resituate it in the framework of a reflexive philosophy of the act as inspired by Jean Nabert. In this perspective, to assert that productive imagination is, above all, mediation means that, in terms of individual existence as well as in social terms of the ‘living together’,26 it always mediates our actions by making correlatively possible a passage from act to sign and a reflexive movement from signs to act or to the originary affirmation that constitutes us. The imagination constantly mediates a passage from act to sign, from force to meaning, or from act to representation, but the essence of this mediation is to remain unseen in this intentional process of emerging synthesis. This is the reason why Ricoeur chooses the ‘long path’ of critical hermeneutics of symbols, texts, actions, and cultural objectivities in order to reappropriate in a reflexive and indirect way the productive power of our act to exist, rather than the ‘short path’ of ontology.
What can be the specific contribution of this philosophy of imaginative mediation which is itself based on a philosophy of expression conceived as an expression of the act in the sign? Arguably, it consists, above all, in closer attention paid to phenomena directly linked to our lived experience of imaginative productivity – phenomena which tend to be concealed in the Castoriadian theory of imagination. If we had to schematically summarise the common characteristic of these phenomena, we could say that they all refer to originary experiences of receptivity or belonging. This implies that human action must always be conceived within the reflexive and hermeneutic frame of a dialectic of affection and self-affection.
From Freedom and Nature (1966 [1950]) to The Course of Recognition (2005 [2004], Ricoeur has kept defending a certain conception of human freedom as ‘receptive initiative’ or as ‘dependence without heteronomy’. In his phenomenology of the will, these expressions first referred to the relationship of a finite freedom to the motiveswhich orientate and energise it without compelling it; however, it does not appear exaggerated to say that in the following part of his work, they appear to characterise very precisely our relationship to productive imagination in its poetical and practical dimension.
As a matter of fact, what qualifies this relationship is that it is constitutively structured as a tensional and dialectical relationship between activity and receptivity, innovation and sedimentation, rupture and continuity, invention and discovery, distanciation and belonging, negation and mediation. In that sense, productive imagination is what continually mediates activity and receptivity in the human experience, both individual and social. Let us give but two examples. In a living metaphor, the invention of an impertinent attribution and the discovery of a relationship of similarity between two predicates, which at first seem distant, always coincide. In the invention of a narrative, the synthesis of the heterogeneous which operates the plot is only possible because it operates at the same time as ‘a creative mimesis’ of human action. From that point of view, it is very striking to note that it is precisely when he characterises the mimetic activity at stake in the narrative that Ricoeur uses the adjective ‘creative’. In other words, it is when imagination has a mimetic intention – which implies an irreducible dimension of receptivity – that it reveals its very creative nature. Such is the meaning, in the dialogue, of the notion of ‘debt’ which Ricoeur evokes when he speaks of artistic creation and, more particularly, of the painting of Monet. Any work of creation is preceded by a lived experience of the world which energises and provokes it, and this is why it is at the same time a creation that ‘confronts an unpayable debt’ (chapter 1, p. 10).
In this perspective, we can consider that the theory of the ‘triple mimesis’ developed in the first volume of Time and Narrative represents the most thorough explanation of this tensional dialectic of activity and receptivity which characterises the work of productive imagination. It means that there could not be any imaginative configuration and poetico-practical refiguration of our experience without a prefiguration of this experience in a symbolic imaginary.27 Even if Ricoeur, in the same way as Castoriadis, contests the speculative reduction of imagination to memory operated by Hegelian philosophy, he insists at the same time on the fact that there is no imagination without reminiscence, pointing out the role and the importance of a cultural memory which keeps sustaining and energising the inventions of productive imagination. As shown in the Ricoeurian theory of ideology – in an essential dialogue with the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz (1973) – the same process occurs concerning the function of imagination in praxis. There is no initiative of the subject and no inventive praxis without a symbolic mediation of praxis made possible by ideology in its integrative function.
We can therefore draw two essential conclusions from this analysis of the fundamental element of receptivity which is stressed by the Ricoeurian conception of productive imagination. The first is that, for a philosophy of a ‘regulated imagination’, the idea of an ‘unmotivated creation’ in the Castoriadian sense must remain a mere theoretical hypothesis. The only productivity of imagination that we experience practically is that of a ‘motivated production’ – that is, a production oriented and energised by a certain experience of receptivity and belonging. Contrary to Castoriadis, who tends to stress the ‘closure’ and the ‘inertia’ of the instituted imaginary as a progressive concealment of the instituting imaginary, Ricoeur therefore gives a more positive function to the instituted imaginary, as he considers it as an inspiring source of our praxis which orientates it without ever compelling it.28 However, if we can qualify our relationship to the instituted imaginary (in its symbolic, mythical, and poetic forms) as a positive mediation of our freedom – as an affection which cannot inevitably be reduced to an alienation – it is only under the condition that this mediation be submitted to a radical critique. For Ricoeur, the utopian pole of imagination is not only what makes this necessary critique of ideologies possible, but it is also what schematises the ways of a practical transformation of society. This is the reason why – and this will be our second conclusion – while refusing the idea of an ‘authority of tradition’, Ricoeur nevertheless defends a certain ‘tradition of authority’ whose deep meaning, for us, is that of a ‘critical tradition’ of the authority of the symbolic productions of the productive imagination operating in society and history.
What are then the properly ontological consequences of this tensional interpretation of the regulated productivity of imagination developed by Ricoeur? What understanding of the relationship between continuity and discontinuity in human history results from that interpretation?
In our view, the deep meaning of the ontology of act and power, especially sketched by Ricoeur in the tenth study of Oneself as Another (1992 [1990]) and re-elaborated in his key article of 1994, entitled ‘From Metaphysics to Moral Philosophy’ (Ricoeur 1996, 443–58), is precisely to enable a theory of a dynamic and tensional link between the continuous and discontinuous, capable of giving a full account of the work of productive imagination in history. But, in the same way as the ontology of creation of Castoriadis had to avoid the pitfalls of falling back into ‘substantialism’ and ‘causalist thinking’, the ontology of act and power sketched by Ricoeur must, for its part, also avoid the pitfalls related to a certain dominant interpretation of the concepts of act and power in the philosophical tradition. In sum, it must both avoid the assertion of a primacy of power over act which would reduce the act or the event in its emergence to the simple achievement of a previous logical determination, and – in an Aristotelian lineage – the assertion of a primacy of act as determinacy over power, which would lead to a reduction of the productive power of imagination to the infra-determinable – or what comes down to the same thing, to a constitutive lack of being.
Ricoeur strives to demonstrate that it is possible to conceive a dialectic of act and power in which the act – in its power of rupture and discontinuity – is indeed what reveals power as a continuity of existence operating through history, but in which power, far from being reduced to a pre-determination, is, on the contrary, conceived as a productive power of determinations. In other words, Ricoeur’s philosophy aims at thinking a concomitance of the power and of the act (1966 [1950])29 from a joint reading of the phenomenon of imagination as power and act and as power and event. That is the reason why, in the dialogue, the whole argumentation of Ricoeur concerning the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity constitutive of productive imagination leads to the idea of an innovation conceived as a retroaction.
In this perspective, even if Ricoeur accepts Castoriadis’s idea that imagination is not a passage from the potential to the actual but a continuous creation of potentialities, he specifies, however, that this productivity of imagination can only be understood if it is thought as an epigenesis, through the idea of ‘a sort of retroaction of our new creations on the old moments’ (chapter 1, p. 11). It is as if the very nature of every creation was to reveal retroactively a ‘point of contact’ with the originary: By opening a future, by inventing something unprecedented, we release in fact some unemployed and repressed potentialities of our past. In that sense, every creation, every imaginative production is indissolubly invention and discovery, act and power, for in the discontinuity of the act, it reveals retroactively the continuity of existence of the inexhaustible productive power of imagination.
Whether it is on the individual plan of the lived duration or on the collective plan of the perpetuation of living together or on the historical plan of intercultural encounters and praxis, we must understand that there exists a productivity of the instituted imaginary which continually mediates the different modes of our continuity of existence from which the creative discontinuities of the works of culture and of the founding events of our societies stand out. This is the reason why, throughout the dialogue, Ricoeur rejects both the idea of absolute novelty and that of absolute alterity, on the level of the social imaginaries proper to each culture. In this respect, what is paradigmatically exemplified in the practice of translation is that it is impossible to think of an absolute discontinuity of cultural imaginaries, as there exists an irreducible practical continuity from which the creations of productive imagination stand out.
In the light of the analysis of the differences between these two interpretations of the phenomenon of productive imagination – as ontology of creation in Castoriadis and as a philosophy of act and sign developed in the prospect of an ontology of act and power in Ricoeur – it is obviously two different understandings of autonomy that are adumbrated. With Castoriadis, no doubt, the insistence on the notions of novelty, discontinuity, and radical creation is directly linked to an understanding of the project of autonomy as a revolutionary project and to the intention to give an ontological foundation to this project. With Ricoeur, it is not the question of denying the legitimacy of a project of autonomy conceived as a revolutionary project, but rather of contesting the reduction of the project of autonomy to a revolutionary project. For him, indeed, praxis should rather be conceived as an activity dialectally situated between a revolutionary pole and a reformatory pole.30 In this respect, asserting the existence of an originary and irreducible dialectic of ideology and utopia31 is refusing the possibility of a pure autonomy as well as that of a pure auto-institution, and seeking the ways of a human freedom conceived as ‘dependence without heteronomy’. It is the ‘always already’ operating productivity of the instituted imaginary that comes to orient and energise our project of autonomy while, at the same time, defining its limits.
NOTES
1.We can here draw the reader’s attention towards the excellent biography by François Dosse (2014), in which is evoked in detail (in chapter 13, entitled ‘Changer la culture et la politique’ – especially pp. 264–8) the relationship between Ricoeur and Castoriadis and is sketched the confrontation between the two thinkers on the key question of imaginary.
2.It is possible to characterise Ricoeur’s philosophy merely as a philosophy of action or of human acting, but, in this essay, we will use the expression ‘philosophy of the act’, for, in our view, this expression defines what makes the singular originality of the Ricoeurian philosophy of action. The actus – Latin translation of the Greek energeia – refers indeed to a philosophical concept which is to be found throughout the history of philosophy, taking different forms as the Medieval actus purus, the Leibnizian actuositas, the Fichtean Tathandlung, or the Marxian Selbstbetätigung. In Ricoeur’s philosophy, the idea of a ‘philosophy of the act’ refers to the French reflexive philosophy and more precisely to the philosophy of Jean Nabert – that is, a philosophy of the expression of the act in the signs, which refers directly to the Fichtean conception of act and of ‘thetic judgement’. In that sense, when Ricoeur attempts to conceive human action and sketches an ontology of act and power, it is always within the specific framework of the French reflexive philosophy.
3.In this respect, the fact that Castoriadis sums up most of the philosophical tradition under the term ‘inherited thought’ reminds us of the singular of the expression ‘metaphysics’ used by Heidegger in his radical critique of onto-theology. In both cases, thinkers want to radically break with a philosophical tradition summed up in a singular and unique expression.
4.Incidentally, we can note that, through the different relationships that these philosophers have with the philosophical tradition, there already appears their respective position on the status of imaginative productions – conceived as a radical creative break in Castoriadis’ thought and as a creative appropriation of the unemployed potentials in Ricoeur’s.
5.Concerning these Lectures on Imagination to be published in 2018, the reader may refer to the two essential articles of George Taylor (2006; 2015).
6.Let us keep in mind that in 1985, From Text to Action. Essays in Hermeneutics II was not yet published and only three articles of Ricoeur specifically concerning the question of imagination and social imaginary had been already published in journals: ‘Science and Ideology’ (1974), ‘Imagination in Discourse and in Action. Toward a General Theory of Imagination’ (1976), and ‘Ideology and Utopia as Cultural Imagination’ (1976).
7.In his biography of Castoriadis, François Dosse quotes a correspondence between Castoriadis and Ricoeur, dating back to 1978, in which Ricoeur declares that he ‘reads with passion’ everything Castoriadis writes and where he even adds that he has made a lecture for third-year students in Nanterre University about The Imaginary Institution of Society (Dosse 2014, 265).
8.On this topic, the reader may refer to Suzi Adams’s essay (2008, 387–400), which is precisely devoted to the cosmological developments of the thought of the later Castoriadis, which lead to a renewed philosophy of life as ‘autopoiesis’, within the frame of an ontology of nature.
9.Even this question goes beyond the present essay; we can wonder if the relationship that Castoriadis has with the myths in his later works could not be paralleled with the relationship which Ricoeur has with the symbolic and mythic thought when he asserts that ‘the symbol gives rise to thought’. Indeed, for Ricoeur, myths are likely to make us think in ‘a free speculative register’ in which would be deployed the wisdom resources dissimulated under the narration of a narrative of the origins.
10.Depending on the texts, it seems that Castoriadis’s approach to ontology sometimes emphasises the primacy of ‘Chaos’, sometimes emphasises the interplay of ‘Chaos’ and ‘Cosmos’. For instance, he insists first and foremost on a characterisation of being as ‘Chaos’, ‘Abyss’, or ‘Groundlessness’ and on an analysis of temporality as ‘creative-destructive’ (Castoriadis 1984; 1993). In other texts, which generally refer more precisely to the Hesodian conception of ‘Chaos’ (Castoriadis 1983; 2004), Castoriadis, in his rethinking of ‘Physis’, emphasises the interplay of ‘Chaos’ and ‘Cosmos’. As Suzi Adams writes: ‘Castoriadis reinvigorates an ancient Greek schema of being as the entwining of chaos and cosmos that creates itself as heterogeneous strata and regions’ (Adams 2008, 89–390).
11.We can find an example of this in his interview entitled ‘From the Monad to Autonomy’ (Castoriadis 1997, 172–95): ‘What appeared to me as a fundamental lacuna, and more than a lacuna, in Marx’s conceptual framework was not only the dimension of the singular individual, it was the ‘imaginary creation of the social-historical sphere’, the imaginary as collective, anonymous, radical, instituting, and constituting imaginary’ (Castoriadis 1997, 173, italics mine).
12.Cf. the sentence we have already quoted (p. 81) and which, in The Imaginary Institution of Society, introduces the Castoriadian analysis of ‘The Role of Imaginary Significations’ (Castoriadis 1987, 146).
13.Hereafter the references to the radio dialogue proper appear as single page numbers.
14.For a more detailed analysis of the common points and differences between the Ricoeurian and the Castoriadian interpretations of Marx, the reader may refer to the enlightening synthesis proposed by Johann Michel in his preface. As for us, we will mainly focus on the common points between the two thinkers’ critiques of the Marxist concept of ‘production’.
15.For a detailed analysis of this question, please refer to chapter 6, part III of our book (Amalric 2013, 484–512).
16.A conference recently published online by the Fonds Ricoeur.
17.Incidentally, this critique reminds us of the critique of the Marxist reduction of the Fichtean concept of activity (as a fundamental activity of the human being producing himself ) to the concept of production (as mere instrumental activity) developed in 1968 by Habermas (1994).
18.Translation mine.
19.For a more detailed commentary of this article, the reader may refer to the excellent article by Suzi Adams (2015, 130–53).
20.This is a thesis that Castoriadis strongly asserts, as early as the end of the sixties.
21.Incidentally, this reminds us of the first phrase of ‘The Imaginary as Such’ where Castoriadis sums up his whole conception of the social imaginary: ‘We encounter the imaginary in history: as an ongoing origin, an ever-actual foundation; it is a central component, at work in both the maintenance of every society as a unit, an in the generation of historical change’ (Castoriadis 2015, 59).
22.For a more in-depth analysis of the renewed framework of this philosophy of the act, we refer to our essay (Amalric 2015; 2016a).
23.Cf. Bachelard (2014).
24.Cf. Ricoeur (1984, X).
25.It is obvious that this question partially overlaps the critique addressed to Castoriadis by Habermas (1990), but, in our view, it remains an open question which cannot be reduced to a mere interrogation concerning the relationship between sense and validity. Raising the essential and difficult question of the imaginary sources of reason, Castoriadis invites us, in fact, to question jointly the relationship between imagination and reason and the relationship between freedom and reason. On this topic, please refer to Castoriadis (1984, 1993, 1997, 1991) and Gely (2008).
26.Even if the question of the dynamic articulation between individual imagination and social imaginary is not directly dealt with in the dialogue and that it exceeds the limits of this essay, there is no doubt that it represents a decisive question in the Ricoeurian theory of imagination as well as in the Castoriadian theory. As early as Fallible Man and his analysis of the ‘theoretical synthesis’, of the ‘practical synthesis’, and of the ‘affective fragility’ of man, Ricoeur strongly asserts that all the being of man consists in ‘doing mediation’. But this mediation operated by individual imagination remains still abstract so long as it is not reinserted into the frame of the originary and ‘always-already’ operating mediation of social imaginary. As the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia will show, there exists indeed an integrative function of ideology, which precisely corresponds to this function of symbolical mediation of human action constitutive of the social bond and of the identity of a social group. In the same way, with Castoriadis, the elaboration of an ontology of creation and of imaginary being necessarily implies the dynamic relationship between the radical imagination of the psyche and the instituting force of the social-historical imaginary. Unlike the functional imagination already operating in the living being, the imagination of the human psyche is ‘non-functional’: It is pure representative spontaneity, ‘unlimited and uncontrollable representational flux’. However, in so far as, in its original form, the ‘psychical monad’ is radically asocial and antisocial, the decisive role of the instituting social imaginary is to institute the social individual by imposing to the psyche an organisation and common imaginary significations which are radically heterogeneous to it.
27.For a detailed analysis of the relationship between ‘implicit symbolism’ and ‘explicit symbolism’ in Time and Narrative, and for a synthetic reflection on the relationships between symbol and fiction in Ricoeur’s work, the reader may refer to our essay (Amalric 2016b, 131–67).
28.We might say, in that sense, and to use Castoriadian terms, that the central methodological decision of Ricoeur’s philosophy of imagination is to situate his analysis of productive imagination in the tensional ‘in-between’ of instituting imaginary and instituted imaginary. On the contrary, Castoriadis’s ontology of creation seems, from our point of view, to oscillate between a theory of productive imagination situated in the tension of instituting society and instituted society, and a discourse on radical autonomy and auto-institution centred on the instituting.
29.We use here an expression used by Ricoeur in chapter 3, part I of Freedom and Nature. It is indeed in this chapter, developing a reflexive analysis of the ‘choice’, that Ricoeur defines his conception of freedom and sketches, for the first time, a precise analysis of the relationship between power and act. As he then writes: ‘This concomitance of the power and of the act is the radical manner of affirming freedom’ (Ricoeur 1966 [1950], 186).
30.Whatever the essentially ‘reformist’ political positions adopted by Ricoeur from the nineties may be, there is no doubt, in our opinion, that it is his article of 1968 entitled ‘Réforme et révolution dans l’Université’ which most accurately expresses the meaning of his philosophy of social imaginary and of the originary dialectic of ideology and utopia. As Ricoeur then writes: ‘We have entered a period in which it is necessary to be reformist while remaining revolutionary. In the times to come, the whole art of the legislator will be to set up light institutions, revocable, reparable, opened both to an internal process of revision and to an external process of contest’ (Ricoeur 1991, 381, translation mine).
31.As regards our personal interpretation of this originary dialectic of ideology and utopia as emerging from the founding event of a constituting social imaginary, the reader may refer to our essay (Amalric 2014, 9–22).
REFERENCES
Abel, Olivier. 1996. La Promesse et la règle. Paris: Michalon.
Adams, Suzi. 2008. ‘Towards a Post-Phenomenology of Life: Castoriadis’ Critical Naturphilosophie’. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 4:1–2: 387–400.
———. 2015. ‘On Ricoeur’s Shift from a Hermeneutics of Culture to a Cultural Hermeneutics’. Etudes Ricoeuriennes/Ricoeur Studies 6:2: 130–53.
Amalric, Jean-Luc. 2013. Paul Ricoeur, l’imagination vive. Une genèse de la philosophie ricoeurienne de l’imagination. Paris: Hermann.
———. 2014. ‘Evénement, idéologie et utopie’. Etudes Ricoeuriennes/Ricoeur Studies 5:2: 9–22.
———. 2015. ‘L’articulation de l’éthique et du politique dans l’horizon d’une philosophie de l’acte I’. Eco-ethica 4: 241–55.
———. 2016a. ‘L’articulation de l’éthique et du politique dans l’horizon d’une philosophie de l’acte II’. Eco-ethica 5: 233–50.
———. 2016b. ‘Símbolo, metáfora e narrativa: o estatuto do ficcional em Ricoeur’. In Pensar Ricoeur: Vida et narração. Edited by Dir. R. Wu and C. Reichert do Nascimento. Porto Alegre: Editora Clarinete.
Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Bachelard, Gaston. 2014. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Mark Z. Danielewski. New York: Penguin Books.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1983. ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 9:2: 79–115.
———. 1984. ‘The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain’. In Disorder and Order, Proceedings of the Stanford International Symposium. Stanford Literature Studies 1. Edited by Paisley Livingstone. Saratoga, CA: AnmaLibri.
———. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
———. 1991. Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy. Translated by David Ames Curtis. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 1993. ‘Institution of Society and Religion’. Thesis Eleven 35:1: 1–17.
———. 1997. World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis and the Imagination. Translated and edited by David Ames Curtis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
———. 2004. Ce qui fait la Grèce 1. D’Homère à Héraclite. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
———. 2015. ‘The Imaginary as Such’. Translated by Johann P. Arnason. Social Imaginaries 1:1: 59–69.
Changeux, Jean-Pierre, and Ricoeur Paul. 2002. What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Dosse, François. 2014. Castoriadis, une vie. Paris: Editions de la Découverte.
Foessel, Michaël, and Fabien Lamouche. 2007. Anthologie de Paul Ricoeur. Texts chosen and presented by Michaël Foessel and Fabien Lamouche. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Gely, Raphaël. 2008. ‘Imaginaire, affectivité et rationalité. Pour une relecture du débat entre Habermas et Castoriadis’. In Praxis et Institution. Cahiers Castoriadis n°4. Edited by Sophie Klimis, Philippe Caumières and Laurent Van Eyde, 139–82. Bruxelles: Publication des Facultés Universitaires Saint Louis.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Translated by Frederic Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.
———. 1994. Knowledge and Human Interests. Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1997. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Translated by Richard Taft. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Kearney, Richard. 2004. On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1987. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. Translated by Felicity Baker. London: Routledge and Keagan Paul.
———. 2008. Structural Anthropology, Vol. 1. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York and London: Penguin.
Marx, Karl. 1970. The German Ideology. Translated by Christopher J. Arthur. New York: International Publishers.
———. 2007. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Translated by Martin Milligan, Mineola, NY: Dover.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2003a. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge Classics.
———. 2003b. L’Institution, La Passivité: Notes de cours au Collège de France (1954–1955). Paris: Editions Belin.
Poirier, Nicolas. 2011. L’Ontologie politique de Castoriadis. Création et institution. Paris: Payot.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1965a. History and Truth. Translated by Charles A. Kelbley. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
———. 1965b. ‘Universal Civilization and National Cultures’. In History and Truth, 271–84. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
———. 1965c. ‘The Work and the Word’. In History and Truth, 197–219. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
———. 1966 [1950]. Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Translated by Erazim V. Kohák. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
———. 1969. The Symbolism of Evil. Translated by E. Buchanan. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
———. 1974. The Conflict of Interpretations. Essays in Hermeneutic. Translated by Don Idhe. Evaston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
———. 1975. ‘Le ‘lieu’ de la dialectique’, IIA309. In Dialectics (Entretiens de Varna, 1973). Edited by Chaïm Perelman, 92–108. Comité éditorial du Fonds Ricoeur. Text edited by Roberta Picardi. Conference proceedings published by Ricoeur Archives, Paris.
———. 1984–1988. Time and Narrative, 3 vols. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
———. 1986a. A l’école de la phénoménologie. Paris: Editions Vrin.
———. 1986b. Fallible Man. Translated by C. A. Kelbley. New York: Fordham University Press.
———. 1986c. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Edited by George Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 1991. From Text to Action. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
———. 1991. ‘Réforme et révolution dans l’Université’. In Lectures I. Autour du politique, 380–97. Paris: Seuil.
———. 1992. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
———. 1995. ‘Intellectual Biography’. In The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn and translated by Kathleen Blamey, 3–53. Chicago, IL: Open Court.
———. 1996. ‘From Metaphysics to Moral Philosophy’. In Philosophy Today 40:4: 443–58.
———. 2003. The Rule of Metaphor. The Creation of Meaning in Language. Translated by Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, SJ. London: Routledge.
———. 2004. The Conflict of Interpretations. Essays in Hermeneutics. Edited by Don Ihde and translated by Kathleen McLaughlin. London and New York: Continuum.
———. 2005. The Course of Recognition. Translated by David Pellauer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2018. Lectures on Imagination. Edited by George H. Taylor, Patrick Crosby, and Robert D. Sweeney (in press).
Ryle, Gilbert. 1939. The Concept of Mind. London and New York: Hutchinson’s University Library.
Taylor, George H. 2006. ‘Ricoeur’s philosophy of Imagination’. Journal of French Philosophy 16:1.2: 93–104.
———. 2015. ‘The Phenomenological Contributions of Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Imagination’. Social Imaginaries 1:2: 13–31.
Thomasset, Alain. 1996. Paul Ricoeur, une poétique de la morale. Louvain: Leuven University Press.
Tomès, Arnaud. 2008. ‘Création et causalité dans le social-historique’. In Cornélius Castoriadis. Réinventer l’autonomie. Edited by Blaise Bachofen, Sion Elbaz and Nicolas Poirier. Paris: Editions du Sandre, pp. 181–196.
———. 2015. Castoriadis. L’Imaginaire, le Rationnel, et le Réel. Paris: Editions Demopolis.