Castoriadis and Ricoeur on the Hermeneutic Spiral and the Meaning of History
Creation, Interpretation, Critique
Suzi Adams
The central theme of the 1985 Ricoeur–Castoriadis radio discussion concerns the possibility – and meaning – of human creation in history. This appears in the dialogue as two overlapping debates. They are: first, the problematic of creation ex nihilo versus production and, second, the question of the interplay of continuity and discontinuity in historical creation. Despite their ostensible – and seemingly unbridgeable – differences, Castoriadis and Ricoeur share some common ground. This includes, for example, an understanding of history as the realm of meaning and social change, an approach to the social imaginary that combines the sociological question of social creativity with the philosophical problematic of the creative imagination, the recognition of the bifurcation of the social imaginary in its instituting-utopian and instituted-ideological aspects, and the connection between meaning and the imagination. Where Castoriadis focuses on the social imaginary creation of institutions and whole societies (see chapter 1, p. 3),1 with particular reference to ancient Greece, Ricoeur prefers instead to emphasise ‘production in the order of language’ (4). Here, again, however, there remains openings in their broader oeuvres towards the other’s perspective, for example, in Ricoeur’s understanding of language as ‘the institution of institutions’ (1988, 221) and Castoriadis’s recognition that imaginary significations in language is its ‘widest and most familiar domain’ (1987, 345).2 The present essay offers two meditations that engage with these key themes of the dialogue. The first seeks to build a bridge between Castoriadis’s understanding of creation ‘out of nothing’ and Ricoeur’s notion of production ‘from something to something’ through recourse to the metaphor of ‘chaos’ in relation to the imagination and the underdetermination of meaning.3 The second reflection begins with the question of continuity and discontinuity in history. It broadens the scope of reference, however, and, in so doing, reconstructs an implicit dialogue between Castoriadis and Ricoeur that enunciates a different vantage point from which to understand their radio encounter as a rethinking of the hermeneutic circle in relation to history. Before proceeding further, two things are important to note: First, Ricoeur’s understanding of history as ‘history as project’ that is oriented towards the future, and ‘history as recounted’ that is concerned with the past will frame the following discussion; and, second, the essay takes its cue from Castoriadis rather than Ricoeur in its focus on the creative activity of the social-historical via social imaginary significations in and as society, rather than on production in the order of language.
MUCH ADO ABOUT ‘NOTHING’: CREATION OR PRODUCTION?
As is well known, Castoriadis elucidates human creation as ex nihilo: out of nothing. Ricoeur, however, rejects the possibility of ‘absolute novelty’ (5). He contends rather that we are ‘never in a passage from nothing to something, but from something to something’ (6). Is it possible to retrieve the sense of ‘out of nothing’ in Castoriadis’s formulation while still doing justice to the ‘from something’ in Ricoeur’s? How is such a bridge to be built? Castoriadis had insisted on an understanding of history as creation ex nihilo since the mid-1960s (1987, 2), and remained on this course throughout his intellectual trajectory. For present purposes, the key point to note in relation to his conception of self-creation is that new creations – as newly created forms as eide – are neither reducible to, nor producible from their antecedents; thus the creation of new forms emerges ‘out of nothing’. For Castoriadis, this is epitomised by the ancient Greek invention of democracy. The Greeks brought a new form – democracy – into being. Thus, social-historical creation has ontological consequences. The Greek breakthrough to democracy – and the project of autonomy, more broadly, in its interplay of politics, philosophy, and history – constitutes a rupture, a discontinuity in being itself, in history, and in anthropos more broadly. Beginning with Homeric texts, the upsurge of autonomy as an imaginary signification within instituting society found a hold within institutions as a ‘long revolution’ from 800 to 500 BCE. The ‘new form’ emerges as the interaction of nuclear imaginary significations (those that are without a world referent and, as such, are absolutely generative; in this case, ‘autonomy’) and their articulation and incarnation in institutions, as part of the broader interplay of instituting and instituted society. In his 1989 reply to his critics, Castoriadis (1997a) began to enunciate a more qualified position: Although creation was to still to be considered ex nihilo, it was neither in nihilo nor cum nihilo. He did not, however, further elaborate on the implications for his theory of creation. Clearly, his qualification implicitly acknowledges a contextual – and therefore, interpretative – facet to creation, but the interpretative aspect of creation (and, conversely, the creative aspect of interpretation) was one of Castoriadis’s enduring blind spots, and he continued to reject the possibility of a hermeneutic dimension to creation out of hand.4 Nonetheless, the logic of Castoriadis’s own formulations reveals an interpretative aspect to creation (and, conversely, a creative aspect to interpretation). This is seen in, for example, the enigmatic connection between the imaginary element and the symbolic webs through which the imaginary is expressed, and in his postulate that modernity utilises a ‘recreation’ of the ancient Greek imaginary signification of autonomy in a way that is not a mere copy. Thus, Castoriadis’s elucidation of imaginary significations and social-historical creation relies on a hermeneutic framework.
But what does the inauguration of democracy as a new ontological form have to do with meaning? For Castoriadis, the ancient Greek invention of democracy incarnates the social imaginary signification of autonomy as the nuclear imaginary signification of its world formation. Imaginary significations themselves are constellations and patterns of meaning that create each society’s own world. On Castoriadis’s account, social imaginary significations, as constellations of meaning, are the basis of any social-historical creation of form. This points to Castoriadis’s distinction – prior to his ontological turn, at least – between the imaginary element of the social-historical and its articulation, not only in institutions, but through symbolic webs (e.g. he uses the example of the ‘pay cheque’ symbolising the imaginary signification of ‘rational mastery’, which is embodied in the institution of capitalism). There is some overlap here with Ricoeur’s take on Levi-Strauss’s critique of Mauss. Ricoeur refers to this discussion in several places, but does not systematically pursue it. At one point, he argues: ‘For how could illusions and fantasies have any historical efficacy if ideology did not have a mediated role incorporated in the most elementary social bond, as the latter’s symbolic constitution in the sense of Mauss and Lévi-Strauss? Hence we cannot speak of a pre-ideological or non-ideological activity’ (Ricoeur 1998, 230). Here we can see that he actually reworks and fuses their approaches: The symbolic institutes the social world, and it does so symbolically.5
Ricoeur rejects Castoriadis’s elucidation of creation ex nihilo. In the radio discussion, Ricoeur insists on the Kantian concept of ‘production’ and (the productive imagination) instead of ‘creation’.6 Where, for Castoriadis, ‘production’ remains within determinist ontologies and identitarian thinking of ‘the same’, for Ricoeur, ‘creation’ is reserved for the domain of the ‘foundational sacred’ (4); creation – the ‘first day of creation’ (5) – is not within history but stands at its threshold. As ‘the idea of absolute novelty is unthinkable’ (5), Ricoeur considers the notion of ‘production’ more appropriate. The production of new figures in history emerges in an open dialectic of innovation and sedimentation. In this way, Ricoeur’s hermeneutic account of creation is more modest than Castoriadis’s: while allowing for social creativity, the new form always bears traces of antecedent figurations.
Throughout the dialogue, Castoriadis reduces Ricoeur’s understanding of ‘production’ to Lévi-Strauss’s position as a ‘combination of pre-existing elements’, which occludes the possibility of creation. This is perhaps partly due to the fact that Ricoeur’s work on the imagination and the social imaginary were all but unpublished at the time of their radio encounter in 1985.7 Additionally, the second volume of Time and Narrative (Ricoeur 1985) had been published only a few months prior to the dialogue, and the third volume was not published until several months thereafter.8 It was thus highly likely that Castoriadis was unfamiliar with Ricoeur’s reflections on these themes. Nevertheless, Ricoeur rightly defends his understanding of production from Castoriadis’s reductionism, agreeing that historical creation/production cannot be a combination of ‘elements already there’ (4), and asserting an alternative approach. Should it, indeed, be possible to think ‘creation’, it could only be as an ‘event of thought that we will reconfigure exactly as we tell a different story with the same archives’ (13). Ricoeur takes the example of the French Revolution to demonstrate that there are no prior elements to a narrative:
In contrast, in what I call emplotment, a process is set in motion where the ‘elements’ are reshaped by the lesson learned from an event. An event is determined by its role in the story that one is telling. Something might be an event for one story, but not for the other. In one plot, the storming of the Bastille is not an event; in another plot, it is an origin. Consequently, there are no elements that are somehow fixed in advance. (5)
Ricoeur devotes a more detailed discussion of this thematic in the first volume of Time and Narrative (1984). There he characterises the French Revolution as the ‘appearance on the stage of history of a practical and ideological mode of social action that is nowhere inscribed in what preceded it’ (1984, 222; emphasis added). He arguably finds himself very close to Castoriadis’s sense of social-historical creation ex nihilo: There is a clear sense in which Ricoeur articulates the French Revolution as emerging out of nothing. But he frames its emergence nonetheless more strongly within historical continuity than does Castoriadis. Ricoeur goes onto say: ‘No conceptual reconstruction will ever be able to make the continuity with the ancien régime pass by way of the rise to power of an imaginary order experienced as a break and as an origin. This rise to power is itself on the order of an event’ (1984, 223).
But back to the task of bridge building. Is there a way to do justice to both Castoriadis’s understanding of ‘creation out of nothing’ and Ricoeur’s articulation of production as ‘from something to something’? The key, I argue, lies in understanding that meaning is underdetermined. Social imaginary significations, as constellations of meaning in Castoriadis’s sense, are neither determinate ‘things’ nor completely indeterminate ‘nothings’. As such, meaning, as the basis of historical novelty, is neither ‘fully something’ nor ‘absolutely nothing’. It is not brute ‘existence’ of a form that makes possible its reconfiguration/recreation, but its meaning for us. And the reason that we can ‘be-affected’ in different ways by the efficacy of history is because the underdetermination of meaning allows for – calls forth, even – a plurality of interpretations. Being condemned to meaning (to lean on Merleau-Ponty) is to accept its underdetermination as the precondition for the surplus of meaning that makes possible a plurality of interpretations and historical novelty.
It is worth recalling, as noted above, that Ricoeur and Castoriadis share common ground in their linking the productive/creative imagination to their respective theories of meaning, and their characterisation of history as the domain of meaning. Full consideration of Castoriadis’s and Ricoeur’s respective theories of meaning is beyond the scope of this essay.9 Through a hermeneutic detour, however, the underdetermination of meaning can be illuminated via reconstruction of the figure of ‘chaos’ in Ricoeur’s and Castoriadis’s thought. This is warranted, as, for Castoriadis, social imaginary creativity emerges from the chaos, and Ricoeur himself equates Castoriadis’s understanding of creativity with chaos as the ‘absolutely formless’. As Johann Michel notes in his preface (in this volume): ‘Notably it is the always prior existence of language, whose pre-existing rules prevent Ricoeur from subscribing to the idea that a new form could arise from some kind of formless chaos’ (p. xxxvi). Ricoeur twice rejects the possibility of creation ex nihilo from the formless in the dialogue. He says: ‘We are never in a situation that you would call creation, as if form could be derived from the absolutely formless’ (5). Slightly later, Ricoeur reiterates this: ‘One is never in a passage from nothing to something ... never from the formless to form’ (6).
Both Ricoeur and Castoriadis take up the figure of ‘chaos’ in their work. Ricoeur discussed it in The Symbolism of Evil as the myth of primordial chaos (1967, 175–91), but he was more interested in the myth for its articulation of the entry of evil into the world rather than in the figure of chaos for its own sake. To this end, he explores the Babylonian creation myth Enuma elish (Ricoeur 1967, 175ff). He highlights that chaos is anterior to order (177), and that ‘evil’ is ‘coextensive with the primordial’. But evil is ‘twice designated: as the chaos in front of order, and as the [theogonic] struggle by which chaos is overcome’ (179). In this way, the myth of chaos as the drama of creation posits the origin of evil as coextensive with the origin of things. Interestingly, for present purposes, Ricoeur locates a ‘surcharge of meaning’ in chaos that makes possible ‘the power to produce’ (177), but also notes that its ‘original disorder’ was menacing (179). But what if we were to transgress Ricoeur’s reading and shift our lens from the myth of chaotic disorder and see in it a root metaphor for being that brings it closer to Castoriadis’s approach?10 Surely the element (in the Merleau-Pontian sense) that has most often been understood down the ages as unruly and disorderly is the imagination. If this is so, then it is possible to read the imagination as being at the root of the world order and co-extensive with its creation.
The chaos myth did not play an important part in the development of Ricoeur’s overall philosophical framework. It is otherwise for Castoriadis, for whom, especially from the early 1980s, the interplay of chaos and kosmos as a metaphor for being became clearly apparent. Before proceeding further, it is worth noting that there is a widespread but misleading understanding of Castoriadis as a theorist of indeterminacy, to which the articulation of the formlessness of chaos corresponds. Castoriadis himself contributes to this confusion; it points to an internal tension in his thought. For example, in a late essay from 1997, he continues to posit chaos as ‘indeterminate’ (Castoriadis 2007b, 80). This is no doubt in part due to his embrace of Anaximander’s apeiron, which has typically been understood as a kind of primordial chaos, as the indeterminate as indefinite in the sense that it is preformed and unlimited/undetermined (i.e. before eidos or peras) (Castoriadis 1987; 2004, 197). In that Ricoeur seemed to equate Castoriadis’s ‘nothing’ with the ‘formless’ (in the dialogue, at least), he, too, appeared to cast Castoriadis as a thinker of indeterminacy. At other junctures in his thought, however, Castoriadis reminds us that chaos could not be completely indeterminate: ‘If this were the case, [chaos] could not lend itself to any organization or it would lend itself to all; in both cases, all coherent discourse and all action would be impossible’ (1987, 341). With his emerging metaphor of being as the interplay of chaos/kosmos in the early 1980s, however, Castoriadis developed a clearer – and distinctive – ontological image. He now clearly articulates chaos in a twofold sense: first, as the bottomless depths underlying kosmos, but also, second, as a ‘formative potential’ (Castoriadis 2007c, 241). In general, Castoriadis strenuously critiques the concept of ‘potential’ (especially in its Aristotelian distinction from ‘act’), as for him, it remains within a framework of determinacy: A potential is something that is identifiable, even if incipient, as derivable from its antecedents. In the dialogue – and in his later work – he notes the creation of the ‘potentiality of potentiality’ (36), which, as the human capacity to create new potentials, becomes a hallmark of his later philosophical anthropology, and his way to recognise the creative merits in ‘potentiality’ but to (attempt to) sidestep its determinist overtones. In conjunction with his understanding of the ‘chaos without’, he articulates the psyche (the radical imagination) as the ‘chaos within’, with formative links to the creation of meaning out of nothing (see Castoriadis 1987, 341–2). But if chaos is neither fully indeterminate nor determined – thus, underdetermined – how are we to understand it? Here Castoriadis can help us. In the early 1960s, where he argued if reality is not totally rational, ‘it also implies that it is not simply chaos [formless], that it contains grooves, lines of force, veins, which mark out the possible, the feasible, indicate the probable and permit action to find points of anchorage in the given’ (1987, 79). The Sinnfähigkeit of the world offers hinges and pivots (to draw on Merleau-Ponty) for its cultural articulation via imaginary significations.
Finally, a brief note that signposts another hermeneutical spiral to be explored: Castoriadis remarks on a further meaning of chaos (especially in the Hesiodian sense) as ‘void’ or ‘empty chasm’. Here, affinities with Ricoeur’s notion of utopia as the critique of ideology and future-oriented vision of counterworlds ‘from nowhere’ finds unexpected synergies with Castoriadis’s understanding of creation ‘out of nothing’.
HISTORY, TRADITION, AND THE HERMENEUTIC SPIRAL
As we have seen, Ricoeur raises the question of the French Revolution as a way of refuting Castoriadis’s reductive understanding of production to a (re)combination of a fixed set of elements. As part of his counterargument, Ricoeur also introduces the problematic of continuity and discontinuity. He presents this by way of a critique of Foucault’s understanding of absolute historical discontinuity to argue that ‘when there is a break in one line, there is continuity in another’ (7). Ricoeur acknowledges that he gives a ‘certain primacy to the continuity of existence, to the perpetuation of a living-together as the ground for instituting operations’, as it is that which ‘allows us to situate the discontinuities of sense against the continuities of existence’ (7). But the question of continuity and discontinuity in history opens onto broader questions. To this end, we shall follow a short excerpt of the dialogue fairly closely, as it goes to the crux of their dispute.
Ricoeur argues in the dialogue that there are ‘discontinuities of sense [sens] against the continuities of existence. There is a relation of sense and existence: it is on the level of sense that there can be ruptures, events, and emergences’ (7). Castoriadis accepts Ricoeur’s distinction between existence and meaning – at least, in the sense that continuity and discontinuity are evident in human history. The social-historical is the region of meaning par excellence in Castoriadis’s ontology, and it is at this level that historical discontinuity appears.11 Castoriadis illustrates the difference between discontinuity and continuity by drawing on the example of the (then) Ayatollah Khomeini and the modern West as discontinuous, ‘[o]therwise’, he says, ‘we are all talking bipeds; we live in established societies anchored in a shared Jewish past, that of the religions of the Book’ (7). Note here that he is not merely talking about our biological continuity as ‘talking bipeds’ but also the shared history of monotheistic religion emanating from our ‘shared Jewish past’. Then he goes on to argue: ‘But the discontinuity, the cut, occurs on the level of sense [sens] – and is also accompanied with other cuts, the cutting of the hands and of other members for thieves and fornicators. This is something that we cannot accept and that we should condemn...’ (7). He then adds: ‘This discontinuity alone is what interests me’ (7).12 Thus, Castoriadis is particularly interested in a specific kind of historical discontinuity: the discontinuity of the Greco-European tradition of history – dating back to the Homeric poems – from the continuity of the monotheistic heritage and, more broadly, from other civilisational continuities. At the centre of Ricoeur’s reflections, however, lies the dual conviction that humanity indeed proceeds via ‘ruptures, discontinuities’, but ‘always within the order of configuration’ (8). And in specific response to Castoriadis’s foregrounding of ancient Greece, Ricoeur appends the following: ‘If we have a great continuity, it is indeed the one that you have stated in which, through the fire, the root, the Greek trunk, we recognize ourselves within a certain continuity’ (8). Castoriadis’s response is succinct, ‘But that is the case for us’ (8), whereupon Ricoeur asserts, ‘Yes, it is the case for us, and also for those who we call the other’ (8).
To attain a fuller understanding of the above exchange, and the wider debates in which they are situated, it is helpful to go beyond the dialogue itself to key themes and issues that Castoriadis and Ricoeur were thinking about at the time. In broadening the space of reference, a submerged interchange becomes visible, which offers an alternative perspective on the central issues at stake in the dialogue proper. This ‘unspoken’ dialogue, as it were, centres on their different approaches to history and the human condition, more broadly. The frame of reference with which to understand continuity and discontinuity opens onto the human condition more broadly, on the one hand, and the question of our relation to the historical past becomes a question in its own right, on the other. These aspects become visible when key works contemporaneous to the dialogue, and to whose arguments Castoriadis and Ricoeur implicitly refer at crucial junctures, are taken into account. In Ricoeur’s case, excerpts from two volumes of Time and Narrative are the most relevant. The first is the final chapter of Volume 3, entitled ‘Towards a Hermeneutical Historical Consciousness’ (1988), and the second is his discussion of mimesis in the first volume (Ricoeur 1984). For Castoriadis, the second seminar of Ce qui fait la Grèce: D’Homère à Héraclite (2004) – which he presented in 1982 at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) – is the most pertinent, with supplementation from ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’ (1997b), which he wrote in 1983 and summarises the themes of the lectures, and ‘Heritage and Revolution’ (2007a), which he first presented at a Hannah Arendt conference a few months after the radio dialogue with Ricoeur. With the exception of Time and Narrative (Volume 1; Ricoeur 1984), none of the other texts mentioned above were published at the time of the radio dialogue, and thus the other could not be aware of – let alone engage with – them.
Castoriadis
Let us begin with Castoriadis. What does he mean by his assertion that ‘that is the case for us’, exactly? Arguably, it signals an internal tension to Castoriadis’s articulation of creation in history. Creation in history is social-historical, that is, anthropological. When the radio discussion ventures into the problematic of continuity/discontinuity in the creation of historical novelty, however, Castoriadis focuses on the historical tradition inaugurated by the ancient Greeks, which links directly to his understanding of the project of autonomy (which is girded by his underlying anthropology of the social-historical, but not reducible to it). Castoriadis understood the historical emergence of the project of autonomy as the ‘twin birth’ of philosophy (la philosophie) and politics (la politique) in the strong and explicit sense. This contrasts to their weaker – or, rather, anthropological – forms of ‘the political’ (le politique), as a dimension of all societies, and what I have argued elsewhere is appropriately characterised as ‘the philosophical’ (le philosophique), as a broader range of philosophical traditions that appear in a plurality of civilisational contexts (Adams 2011). In this vein, the internal tension between an anthropology of social-historical creation and the particular Greco-Western historical creation of the project of autonomy is such that we could say that Castoriadis introduces a third distinction between ‘the historical’ (l’historique), as a dimension of the social-historical and the human condition, writ large, and ‘history’, (l’histoire) in the strong sense as founded by the Greeks, which highlights the ‘singularity’ of the Greco-Western history and is tied to the project of autonomy. As Johann Arnason points out:
[C]ivilizations vary greatly in regard to the potential for change and differentiation. To take a particularly pronounced example, the ancient Greek civilization of the polis was marked by a high level of transformative capacity and a great variety of resulting socio-political formations. These aspects are stressed in Castoriadis’s interpretation of Greek history (2017, 29)
Thus, the Greek creation of l’histoire represents a rupture with the continuity of the human condition.
The subterranean discussion that can be reconstructed also concerns the question of creation of the historical tradition of autonomy – history in the strong sense – and our relation to such a history. Is it purely interpretative (i.e. concerning understanding), or is there a creative transformation that is wrought in us through the engagement with it, and its connection to a more general philosophical-sociological anthropology? When viewed from this perspective, the debate – on continuity and discontinuity – for Castoriadis, at least, concerns the level of social-historical creation ex nihilo, in general, and the ancient Greek creation of history (together with politics and philosophy) in the strong sense as the project of autonomy, and its meaning for us.
To expand on the distinction between Greco-Western history, in the strong sense, and the historical dimension of civilisations, more generally, I now turn to the second seminar in Ce qui fait la Grèce, Volume 1 (Castoriadis 2004). Castoriadis opens the seminar by posing questions concerning our interconnections with history. He asks, what kinds of relationships – other than passive – can we have with the past (Castoriadis 2004, 47)? Castoriadis explains that his own central preoccupation with history is to restore the significations and institutions (in which imaginary significations are incarnated), by means of which each society constitutes itself and its particular world as that society in its singularity, for example, ancient Hebrew society or contemporary French society, but not any other society (2004, 49). He briefly addresses a range of perspectives on history, but of most relevance for our present discussion is his portrayal of hermeneutics. He takes Gadamer’s Truth and Method (2013 [1960]) as emblematic and focuses on the problematic of the hermeneutic circle (Castoriadis 2004, 51ff ). Castoriadis casts the hermeneutic circle quite rightly as involving a pre-understanding (he uses the Heideggerian term) of the interpretand. The pre-understanding makes the text ‘speak’ in a certain way (2004, 51). The text, however, ‘resists’ and can speak in ways other than that imposed by the initial preconception, such that the initial interpretation can be modified, and so forth. Thus proceeds the hermeneutic circle. Castoriadis accepts the veracity and importance of the hermeneutic circle, and, shifting more broadly to religious hermeneutics in monotheistic contexts, even finds hermeneutic discourse to be ‘rich and subtle’ (2004, 53). The limitations of the hermeneutic approach, however, lie elsewhere for him. Castoriadis charges hermeneutics with being only concerned with isolated texts internal to a particular tradition. It is not self-evident, for Castoriadis, that such an approach would be as relevant for the study of a society; he regards the proper object of hermeneutics to be works (les oeuvres), and, notably, ‘discursive works’ (2004, 52). Castoriadis’s approach to history (and to Greco-Western history, in particular) is irreducible to a ‘simple interpretation of works’ (2004, 52); rather, it is a ‘project of total understanding’ (2004, 52). The aim is not, however, only to understand its world (although that is part of it): It ‘is not simply an interpretation, that is to say of a simply theoretical work: when we tackle the birth of democracy and philosophy, what is important ... is our own activity and our own transformation. And it is in this sense that the work which we do is perhaps a political work’ (Castoriadis 2004, 52).13
Ancient Greece created an ‘absolutely new project’ (Castoriadis 2004, 53): to understand its own history in order to transform oneself (cf. Castoriadis 1997b, 268ff). And in this, Castoriadis sees the project of autonomy, and the discontinuity of history with world history, more broadly. It is a practical project of political transformation, not a theoretical exercise for the sake of understanding alone (with which he charges hermeneutics). Elsewhere, in a paper written a few months after the radio dialogue (thus, surely in part, in response to it), Castoriadis identifies the specific ‘heritage’ of the Greco-West as the democratic and revolutionary traditions, which is characterised by making, problematising, and changing our institutions (2007a, 106). Central to the ‘singularity’ of this tradition is thus the activity of critique, of unlimited interrogation, of logon didonai (1997b, 268; Castoriadis 2004). Thus, even though Castoriadis is elucidating a version of ‘history as recounted’, it remains ultimately subordinate to ‘history as project’, both in the sense of an orientation towards the future and as the transformative project of autonomy.
Let us return to Castoriadis’s seminar on ancient Greece. After his brief comments on hermeneutics, he returns to the question of the hermeneutic circle. He agrees that there is, indeed, an element of (pre)understanding involved in the active relation that we have to ancient Greek history, but then the circle ‘refracts’ and ‘multiplies’, ‘becoming something more and other than a circle’ (2004, 52). Although he emphasises the particular case of ancient Greece, the refracting, multiplying hermeneutic circle has implications beyond Greco-Western history (I return to this). But Greece is a special case for Castoriadis, for it is ‘our’ history, and Greece created the possibility of comprehension in history as an ‘absolutely new project’ (2004, 53) of understanding history – history in the strong and explicit sense (l’histoire) in order to transform oneself (as politics in the strong sense of la politique). He forcefully differentiates the Greco-Western from the hermeneutic project (now expanded from Gadamer to include hermeneutic traditions within monotheistic religions; Ricoeur 2004, 53). Such traditions find radical limits in sacred texts that they cannot transgress. These limits are bound by the religious inability, on Castoriadis’s account, to ask what he casts as a mandatory question concerning the origin of meaning. Thus, for him, there is a ‘radical limit’ which distinguishes a work of interpretation from the project of understanding as simultaneously radical and practical. For hermeneutics, the phenomenon of meaning (of the text, of pre-understanding) is to be ‘disclosed’ (again, he uses the Heideggerian term), not created. But this cannot account for the production of sense; it cannot account for the moment of creation (2004, 53). Elsewhere, Castoriadis refers to this as the ‘circle of creation’, which he illustrates in the following way:
Did the Geek politai create the polis or the polis the politai? This is a meaningless question precisely because the polis could only have been created by the action of human beings who were simultaneously transforming themselves into politai. (2007a, 113)
Gadamer did not, indeed, examine the creative moment of hermeneutics, but Castoriadis considered only Gadamer in these seminars. What happens when Ricoeur is reintroduced into the mix?
Ricoeur
The question of the interplay of historical continuity and discontinuity is more significant for Ricoeur’s intellectual project than for Castoriadis. As noted above, Ricoeur argues in the dialogue for the discontinuity of meaning (sens) against the continuity of existence. While recognising the discontinuity of history, his approach ‘gives a certain primary to the continuity of existence, to the perpetuation of a living-together as the ground for instituting operations, and that allows us to situate the discontinuities of sense against the continuities of existence. There is a relation of sense and existence: it is on the level of sense that there can be ruptures, events, and emergences’ (7).
This ‘open dialectic’ appears at different levels in Ricoeur’s thought. It can be seen in, for example, his distinction between the human condition writ large and the human condition in modernity. In this vein, his philosophical anthropology is ‘aimed at identifying the most enduring features of [our] temporal condition ... those which are the least vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the modern age’ (Ricoeur 1983, 60), where institutional and cultural change certainly occurs but has been ‘over-evaluated’ in light of historicism (and other theoretical trends). This stands in contrast to Castoriadis’s emphasis on political change as ongoing, active, and explicit (e.g. Castoriadis 2007a, 105). In Time and Narrative (Volume 3), Ricoeur expands on this point:
[T]he very reception of the historical past by present consciousness ... seems to require the continuity of a common memory, and because, on the other hand, the documentary revolution brought about by the new history seems to make breaks, ruptures, crises, and the irruption of changes in thinking – in short, discontinuity – prevail. (1988, 217)
Where Castoriadis emphasises history in the strong sense as a future-oriented project of change, creativity, and political transformation, Ricoeur is more interested in highlighting the enduring features (of the political dimension) of the human condition, such as the family, politics, religion, violence, and sovereignty, although he allows, following Husserl, for their ‘imaginative variation’. For Ricoeur, the entanglement of continuity and discontinuity occurs as events within the order of history. In this way, the French Revolution, as we have seen, must be understood both in continuity with the Ancien régime and in discontinuity as the emergence of new modes of action and power. But continuity and discontinuity in a particular current of history play out at a different level than that noted above (i.e. between his philosophical anthropology and modern history).
Let us recall (and extend) Castoriadis’s questions concerning our relation to history, and then consider Ricoeur’s response. The questions are: What is our relation to history (as recounted)? Can it be something other than passive? What kind of insight does the hermeneutic circle provide in this regard? The following reflections are organised around three aspects: first, consideration of ‘traditionality’ as elucidated in Time and Narrative Volume 3 (Ricoeur 1988); second, incorporation of Ricoeur’s refiguring of the hermeneutic circle into the hermeneutic spiral of mimesis in the first volume of Time and Narrative (Ricoeur 1984); and, third, discussion of his notion of ‘retroaction’. In the final chapter of Time and Narrative, Ricoeur aims to rework and deepen Gadamer’s hermeneutic notion of Wirkungsgeschichte as historically effected consciousness (Ricoeur 1988, 217), as the interplay of effective history and our being-affected-by this effectiveness (1988, 224) in order to clarify his understanding of tradition. But ‘being-affected’ is neither purely receptive nor purely passive. Rather, Ricoeur argues, to the contrary (and in rejection of Foucault’s position), that only an understanding of history as living and open has the capacity of ‘joining together vigorous political action and the “memory” of snuffed out or repressed possibilities from the past’ (1988, 219). Ricoeur’s rearticulation of ‘tradition’ in this third volume is itself a refinement of his earlier intervention in the Gadamer–Habermas debate. In Time and Narrative, Ricoeur articulates a threefold understanding of ‘traditionality’ as a living, underdetermined current of history.
Ricoeur (1988, 211) draws on Koselleck’s argument on the ‘temporalization of history’ in modernity as his starting point. The concept of Geschichte brings together the twofold characteristics of history in modernity as a project to be made and as the past to be recounted(1988, 209, 212). Following Koselleck, Ricoeur reconfigures these as the ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’ as philosophical anthropological transcendentals (Ricoeur 1988, 208, 213–14; see also Koselleck 2004 [1985]). They meet in an ‘imperfect meditation’ of the present. Three topoi characterise the temporalisation of history in modernity: new times, the acceleration of history, and the mastery of history, which alter the interplay of the space of experience and the horizon of expectation (1988, 212–14). When all three topoi are taken together, Ricoeur argues that the temporality of modernity irrevocably alters our access to the historical past. They ‘contributed to the unfolding of a new horizon of expectation that by a kind of recoil effect transformed the space of experience within which the acquisitions of the past are deposited’ (Ricoeur 1988, 210). This transformation is surely, however, an implicit acknowledgement of the fundamental change – the profound rupture – that the modern human condition wrought on an understanding of anthropos that emphasises continuity.
The future-oriented temporalisation of history, with its accent on human action as history-to-be-made – the theme of mastering history, as taken up by Foucault, for example, and by extension, Castoriadis – tends to neglect that we are also affected by history: ‘[I]t is precisely this tie between historical action and a received past, which we did not make, that preserves the dialectical relation between our horizon of expectation and our space of experience’ (Ricoeur 1988, 213). An important part of what Ricoeur is trying to do is to rearticulate the past similarly as we understand the future, that is, as more open and contingent – as an underdetermined realm of meaning (as discussed above) – instead of ‘unequivocally closed’ (1988, 216).
Ricoeur makes clear that he wants to avoid reducing human receptivity to the efficacy of history to the notion of tradition that was proposed in the Gadamer–Habermas debate. Instead, he articulates a tripartite notion of tradition: traditionality, traditions, tradition. This speaks to the pre-understandings that we bring to the hermeneutic circle. Traditionality comprises a core feature of the temporality of history, alongside the space of experience and horizon of expectation; it comprises a dialectic internal to experience between ‘the efficacity of the past that we undergo and the reception of the past that we bring about’ (Ricoeur 1988, 220), as a process of mediation between remoteness and distanciation. The formal condition of traditionality opens onto Ricoeur’s central problematic: the tension between the horizon of the past and that of the present. For Ricoeur, it signifies that temporal distance from the past is not a ‘dead interval’; instead, it generates meaning. He tells us that, ‘before being an inert deposit, tradition is an operation that can only make sense dialectically through the exchange between the interpreted past and the interpreting present’ (1988, 221).
Traditionality opens onto the second aspect: traditions, in the plural. This middle characteristic resonates with Ricoeur’s critique of Castoriadis’s stance towards creation/production, and continuity and discontinuity. It means that we can never be ‘absolute innovators’ but rather are always first ‘heirs’ to particular historical traditions (Ricoeur 1988, 221). Here, however, his linguistification of the imagination comes to the fore, for traditionality has its roots in the ‘language-like structure of communication’ (Ricoeur 1988, 221). At this point, Ricoeur links his analysis of traditions to mimesis1 in its ‘reference to the primordial aspect of action as being symbolically mediated’ (1988, 221), where action through the structuring activity of emplotment is understood as a text. Ricoeur can be seen to provide a response to Castoriadis’s charge that hermeneutics is primarily the study of texts, not societies and their imaginary significations. Ricoeur notes that historiography in great part depends on texts that provide the past with a ‘documentary status. It is in this way that the understanding of texts inherited from the past can be set up, with all the necessary reservations, as a kind of exemplary experience as regards every relation to the past’ (1988, 222).
With the consideration of the third variety of traditionality – tradition, in the singular – Ricoeur reconsiders the problematic that invited his intervention in the Gadamer–Habermas debate (1988, 222ff ). Foregrounded here are the question of meaning and its connection to truth – that draws on modes of belief – which confer reasonableness on the threefold plaidoyer for prejudice, authority, and tradition. Gadamer introduces his notion of consciousness in its encounter with effective history. The prejudged for Gadamer becomes a structure of the pre-understanding ‘outside of which the “thing itself” cannot make itself heard’ (Ricoeur 1988, 223). Authority is at play as the claim to truth augments simple ‘meaning’. In the reception of a particular tradition, it is a matter of the ‘recognition of superiority’ rather than of ‘blind obedience’; this brings it close to Hegel’s Sittlichkeit. Gadamer’s analysis of ‘method’ is a reminder that we are immersed in a traditional truth claim before we can subject that to critical inspection. Thus, Gadamer’s notion of ‘historical research’ holds an implicit moment of critique. The second moment of critique – distanciation – allows for the critique of ideologies (understood as rival traditions) (Ricoeur 1988, 224).
Thus, Ricoeur’s reconfiguration of tradition articulates a living connection that presupposes the underdetermined, open dimension of history as recounted to be met in the present to make the future as history as project. It allows for the interplay of reflexive critique and the productive aspect of interpretation as undergirding our pre-understanding as we traverse the hermeneutic circle. It also links up to his discussion of the spiral of mimesis in the first volume of Time and Narrative. Importantly, for present purposes, although for Ricoeur, the hermeneutic circle is focussed on texts, it is also meant to hold good for practical life as well, as the domain of the social imaginary. The social imaginary, especially as the ideological imaginary, continues to haunt Ricoeur’s thought on narrative and history, although it is no longer a central focus. But the symbolic mediation of action that is central to mimesis is anchored in social imaginary contexts. Ricoeur’s account of traditionality and being-affected by history deepens the hermeneutic spiral he articulated via mimesis. In brief, mimesis1 refers to the prefiguration of the field of action, which Ricoeur enunciates in formal terms via three features, structural, temporal, and symbolic (1984, 54ff ), which are then brought from the virtual to the actual realm of discourse/action as and via narrative. Of interest here is that the circle of mimesis is prefigured in symbolically mediated contexts of action, where symbols ‘understood as interpretants, provide the rules of meaning as a function of which this or that behaviour can be interpreted’ (Ricoeur 1984, 58). The symbolic webs are themselves anchored in historical traditions, and together they provide the context of our pre-understanding. Mimesis2 refers to the configuration of the field of action via emplotment (as per the example of the French Revolution, above) as the work of the productive imagination; the mediation of events into a meaningful narrative order and temporal signification; this activity, too, stands in living traditions of pre-understandings and historically effected consciousness, and bears similarity to the interplay of chaos and kosmos (as a beautiful order and ordering) that was important for Castoriadis’s thought. Mimesis3 provides the ‘reader’ with the opportunity to integrate the imaginative worlds of mimesis2 into their own lived experience – this is the transformative aspect, but is more muted, as George Taylor (2015) rightly observes, than the arguments in, for example, the function of fiction in shaping reality or in myths as opening new worlds.
There is a further issue with the act of reading belonging to a ‘self’ or ‘agent’ which seems to rule out more collective experiences of refiguration but which would be important to reconstruct for a deeper understanding of the social world. It is pertinent in this context that Ricoeur announced the importance from shifting from the hermeneutic circle to the hermeneutic spiral at the end of the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986), thus reminding us of its importance for sociality of life, which the literary emphasis in mimesis3 tends to obscure. As ideology and utopia are not reducible to the agent/self, the emphasis on the hermeneutic spiral in the practical, social realm of life allows for its development in a way that deepens its collective, social dimension. Ricoeur contends,
It is too simple response, though, to keep the dialectic [between ideology and utopia] running. My more ultimate answer is that we must let ourselves be drawn into the circle and then must try to make the circle a spiral. (Ricoeur 1986, 312)
Arguably, both Castoriadis and Ricoeur reject the image of the hermeneutic circle and have elucidated different versions of the hermeneutic spiral. Despite the differences, their respective account of the hermeneutic spiral anchor it in a theory of meaning and the practical social world of doing. As a spiral, the hermeneutic circle is no longer just about understanding; it also incorporates critical and productive/creative dimensions, although Castoriadis and Ricoeur articulate – and emphasise – the interplay of these dimensions differently. Where Castoriadis prioritises change, creation, explicit critique/interrogation, and the singularity of the Greek historical tradition of autonomy, ultimately remaining focused on history as project, Ricoeur deepens the hermeneutic elements of history as recounted not only to relativise the focus on the openness of the future, but also to impart an understanding of tradition in the dynamism and creativity while incorporating the element of critique. We saw that Castoriadis argued that the hermeneutic circle ‘refracted’ and became something other than a circle. The image of the hermeneutic spiral offers a fruitful way forward in reflecting on such refractions. It should be noted however that spirals are not predetermined to travel in an upward direction: A new interpretation is not necessarily a ‘higher’ interpretation, but its novelty is irreducible to the retracing of the previous ‘loop’. The spiral is not even unidirectional; rather, it can refract into multiple directions and mutate into multiple spirals. The idea of the spiral is to open new frontiers, not to be bound to hierarchical modes of thinking.
CONCLUSIONS AND BEGINNINGS: TRAVERSING THE HERMENEUTIC SPIRAL ANEW
This essay has considered Castoriadis and Ricoeur’s respective approaches to creation and historical discontinuity as these themes emerged in the dialogue. But it took hermeneutical detours of its own, in order to place these themes in a wider context. Through a consideration of the chaos metaphor, it argued that their respective accounts of history – and the possibility of creation in history – are girt by the underdetermination of meaning, which is fundamentally linked to the mode of being of the creative-productive imagination; this forms the precondition for both the hermeneutic spiral and historical novelty. The focus on the underdetermination of meaning allows Castoriadis to emphasise the ‘out of nothing’ and Ricoeur to focus on the ‘from something’. For both Castoriadis and Ricoeur, history – and our relation to history – is living and active. History is not an inert deposit. For Ricoeur, western history emerges from the intercivilisational encounter of Athens and Jerusalem; for Castoriadis, it appears as the strong version of the Greco-Western inauguration of l’histoire. But where Castoriadis wants to argue for the specificity of the Greco-Western trajectory, Ricoeur wants to expand such competencies (such as an active relation to history) to the human condition. Both thinkers demonstrate that we are affected by the efficacy of history; it is not a passive relationship. However, for Castoriadis, it is more explicitly political, more directly transformative, whereas for Ricoeur’s richly hermeneutic approach, the transformation is always mediated and indirect, and the extent of the transformation is more measured – or even muted. For Castoriadis, history (l’histoire) is primarily understood as history as project, even when he considers its ‘recounted’ aspects. But for Ricoeur, in Time and Narrative, at least, the opposite would appear to be the case. Where Castoriadis emphasises change, creation, and discontinuity, Ricoeur clearly prefers to emphasise overarching lines of continuity internal not only to history but also to the broader interplay of history with the human condition (this is, however, at least in part attributable to what he judges as the overestimation of change in modernity). Castoriadis wants to emphasise the singularity of the Greco-Western tradition of autonomy (as the strong and explicit instauration of history, politics, and philosophy) as a rupture of – and thus discontinuity with – the human condition; he also wishes to emphasise that this ‘potentiality of a potentiality’ becomes part of the anthropic inheritance more broadly: Potentialities as the ‘essence’ of the human condition are self-created; this emphasises the anthropic capacity for change. Ricoeur’s hermeneutical emphasis on continuity can obscure the significance of world historical ruptures/creation, while Castoriadis’s refusal to recognise the interpretative aspect of historical creation and social imaginary significations needlessly closes down, for example, investigations into intercultural versions of autonomy beyond the Greco-Western tradition and the underdetermination of history as recounted to interrogate present and future worlds, and, in so doing, the formation of critical counterworlds.
Thus, overall, their primary disagreement appears to be less about their differing approaches to creation and production, but more to their commitment to and emphasis on the human capacity for change and radical sociopolitical transformation. An alternative approach, such as Blumenberg’s recognition that some (philosophical and/or political) questions from a particular historical epoch continue to inform succeeding epochs, could allow for a greater emphasis on social change, but would also require recognition of the hermeneutical basis of the social imaginary. These differences notwithstanding, both Ricoeur and Castoriadis converged on innovative and distinctive approaches to the hermeneutic spiral, as a development of the hermeneutic circle that incorporates not only interpretation and critique, but also creation.
In traversing a single loop of the hermeneutic spiral, new spirals emerge. To deepen the argument presented in this essay, further aspects would need to be taken into account. For example, in what relation does the movement between the ‘strange’ and the ‘familiar’, which is the touchstone of hermeneutics and hermeneutic transformations, also rely on its historical discovery with the ancient Greeks, which was Castoriadis’s claim? If the ‘social’ as understood by Ricoeur is primarily intersubjective, or trans-subjective (as the unmotivated movement of the anonymous collective), when viewed through a Castoriadian lens, is there a need to elucidate an intermediate level of sociality to take better account of the collective reflexivity and ‘willing’ (the activity of willing something) that was inaugurated by the project of autonomy?
Finally, Ricoeur’s account of history recounted and history as project also draws on a notion of retroaction. In deepening the hermeneutical aspect of ‘history recounted’, the idea of retroaction points to the underdetermination of meaning. In the radio dialogue, Ricoeur raises the question of retroaction repeatedly, but Castoriadis does not pursue it, even though arguably, he recognises the hermeneutic status of retroaction in the reactivation of the project of autonomy in modernity. At one juncture in the dialogue, Ricoeur characterises retroaction as
[t]he successive forms in which the past, which you yourself characterized as the inexhaustible, has been revived and reinterpreted themselves contained potential and incompleteness. And through a sort of retroaction of our new creations on the old moments, we can deliver possibilities that had been prevented.... And this unemployed, repressed potential is something that each new creation somehow delivers retroactively. (11)
An earlier articulation of retroaction is found in The Symbolism of Evil (Ricoeur 1967, 21–2), where Ricoeur argues that the underdetermined, and openness of the meaning of history – recounted in conjunction with cultural memory and intercivilisational encounters – is central to our understanding of the present. In Time and Narrative (Volume 3), Ricoeur expands the discussion on retroaction, strengthened, perhaps, by Koselleck’s own usage of the term (1988, 209).14 In Time and Narrative, it is connected to the underdetermined realm of history and tradition, but not to cultural memory, as it was in The Symbolism of Evil. Ricoeur’s emphasis in Time and Narrative is to demonstrate that retroaction presumes the openness, the underdetermination of history that influences our gestalt of the present:
To do this we must struggle against the tendency to consider the past only from the angle of what is done, unchangeable, and past. We have to reopen the past, to revivify its unaccomplished, cut-off – even slaughtered – possibilities. In short, when confronted with the adage that the future is open and contingent in every respect but that the past is unequivocally closed and necessary, we have to make our expectations more determinate and our experience less so. For these are two faces of one and the same task, for only determinate expectations can have the retroactive effect on the past of revealing it as a living tradition. (Ricoeur 1988, 216)
As noted above, in the dialogue, the notion of ‘retroaction’ was important for Ricoeur as a way to open up contexts of meaning in history as recounted and bring it into play with the present through cultural memory. Although retroaction was not a central theme of Ricoeur’s thought, it opens onto interesting debates within tradition, memory, and civilisations. Most recently, Jan Assmann has developed the idea of cultural memory. For Assmann (2015), culture is twofold. It refers, first, to the accumulation and expansion of knowledge across historical generations that enable humanity to transcend its natural limitations. Its second sense is as a ‘meaning-producing institution’ that relates specifically to memory and recourse, which
lead to a specifically human form of temporal orientation that transcends the limits of one’s own span of life in both directions ... The cultural forms and institutions of social memory keep the dead present in the life of a group and maintain the contact between the living and the dead. It is this form of memory that provides meaning and orientation in a wider, even multi-millennial temporal dimension. (Assmann 2015, 327)
Distinctive to Assmann’s approach is his rethinking of tradition via cultural memory, which allows for greater emphasis on historical experience and its interpretation. The rethinking of tradition via cultural memory is hinted at in Ricoeur’s work, but not systematically pursued. Cultural memory is, moreover, instituted in various ways in forms of relative closure or openness. For Castoriadis, critique and critical reflection is ‘breaking open the closure’ – or, in Ricoeurian terms from an earlier phase in his thought, the ‘shattering’ effects of utopia (see Taylor 2017). A further delineation of cultural memory, which we might call ‘cultural recollection’, is required here, to make sense of the critical aspect of the retroaction of history as recounted. Ricoeur does not incorporate a critical aspect to recollection, but Dmitri Nikulin’s (2017) distinction between collective memory and collective recollection is helpful here.15 In sum, unlike collective memory, collective recollection is critical and participatory (and therefore potentially democratic). This critical aspect – in Castoriadis’s terms, in its twofold aspect of the logon didonai and unlimited interrogation – sharpens the notion of cultural memory/tradition in relation not only to retroaction but also to the project of history.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to thank Erin Carlisle for her sterling work in copy-editing this essay. I would also like to thank Johann Arnason for his comments on the chaos section, and George Taylor for his help in locating the ‘hermeneutic spiral’ in Ricoeur’s oeuvre.
NOTES
1.Unless otherwise specified, all page numbers refer to the radio dialogue (from chapter 1).
2.For a discussion of Ricoeur and Castoriadis on their respective approaches to institutions and the social imaginary, see Michel (2014) and Amalric (chapter 4). For a discussion of Castoriadis’s approach to institutions, see Arnason (2014b).
3.See Dosse (chapter 6) for a discussion of the importance of the imagination for Castoriadis and Ricoeur’s respective theories of history; Amalric (2013) for the most comprehensive account of the imagination in Ricoeur’s thought; and Arnason (2014a) for a succinct discussion of the creative imagination in Castoriadis’s work.
4.I have discussed this at length elsewhere. See, for example, Adams (2005; 2011).
5.I take this up elsewhere in the context of Ricoeur’s general theory of culture. See Adams (2015). See also Helenius (2015) for an alternative approach to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of culture.
6.But also see Taylor’s essay in this volume, which argues that, in his imagination lectures, Ricoeur is closer to an understanding of ‘creation’ not ‘production’. See Taylor (chapter 2).
7.See Jean-Luc Amalric’s essay in this volume for a more extensive discussion of this issue (chapter 4).
8.Time and Narrative, Volume 3, was first published in November 1988.
9.Any comparative discussion of Ricoeur’s and Castoriadis’s theories of meaning would need to include consideration of the following: the symbolic and the imaginary dimensions of meaning and their interplay; the role of movement, institutions, and action as contexts and bearers of meaning; the phenomenological question of the world and its significance for a theory of meaning; the historicity of meaning (history as project, history as recounted, and retroactive meaning); the question of the ‘meaning of meaning’, often taken up via Frege’s classic account of sense and reference; meaning as interpretative and meaning as generative; the connections between meaning and power; and meaning as figurative and tropic, to name but the key issues. Such a discussion should not obscure the differences between Ricoeur’s and Castoriadis’s approaches. These include, for example, Ricoeur’s linguistification of the imagination and Castoriadis’s focus on meaning in institutions, Ricoeur’s positing of a split reference and Castoriadis’s account of core social imaginary significations as not having any referent, and Ricoeur’s intersubjective understanding of the social, but Castoriadis’s trans-subjective elucidation of the social. Any such discussion would further need to reconstruct the shifts and changes – and internal tensions – in each thinker’s respective trajectories in relation to their theories of meaning – from Castoriadis’s shift away from the symbolic and doing (see, e.g., Adams 2011) in his articulation of social imaginary significations, and Ricoeur’s developing account, from the symbols to metaphor to narrative, but also his shift in thinking the productive–creative imagination from the time of the ‘Imagination Lectures’ and the ‘Ideology and Utopia’ lectures (both from 1975) to Time and Narrative (in the early-mid 1980s) and beyond. For an illuminating discussion of such issues in Ricoeur’s thought, see Taylor (2015).
10.See Ricoeur (1976) for a discussion of symbols and metaphors, especially the final section – ‘Intermediate degrees between symbol and metaphor’ – of chapter 3.
11.For Castoriadis, ontological discontinuity is also evident in the self-creation of new modes of being.
12.Both Castoriadis and Ricoeur reject discontinuity in the Foucaultian sense. See Ricoeur and Castoriadis (chapter 1, p. 6 ff).
13.All translations from Ce qui fait la Grèce are my own.
14.Ricoeur does not discuss it however in Memory, History, and Forgetting (2004).
15.Nikulin has written extensively on ‘recollection’, including on the difference between memory and recollection in the ancients. In the present context, his articulation of ‘collective recollection’ as a response to Halbwachs is of particular interest (Nikulin 2017).
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