Cornelius Castoriadis is one of the very few social and political philosophers – modern and ancient – for whom a concept of imagination is truly central. In his work, however, the role of imagination is so overarching that it becomes difficult to grasp its workings and consequences in detail, in particular in its relation to democracy as the political form in which autonomy is the core imaginary signification. This article will proceed by first suggesting some clarifications about Castoriadis’s employment of (...) the concept. This preparatory exploration will allow us in a second step to discuss why the idea of democracy is closely linked to tragedy, and why this linkage in turn is dependent on the centrality of imagination for human action. In a third conceptual step, finally, we suggest that any concept of imagination will need to take into account the plurality and diversity of the outcomes of the power of imagination. Thus, the question of the nature of the novelty that imagination creates needs to be addressed as well as the one of the agon in the face of different imagined innovations in a given democratic political setting. As a consequence of this shift in emphasis, to be elaborated further, one will be able to say more about one question of which Castoriadis was well aware, which he never addressed himself in detail, though: the decline and end of polities and political forms, the question of political mortality. (shrink)

In social and political theory, the imagination is often used in accounting both for creativity, innovation, and change and for sociopolitical stagnation and the inability to promote innovation and change. To what extent, however, can we attribute such seemingly contradictory outcomes to the same mental faculty? To address this question, this paper develops a comprehensive account of the political imagination, one that explains the various roles played by imagination in politics and thus accounts for the promises and limits of the (...) political imagination. This conceptualization of the political imagination allows us to account for the simultaneous presence of its seemingly contradictory roles—such as promoting stability and order on the one hand while generating creativity and critical innovation on the other. (shrink)

This article discusses the issue of social and cultural ‘autotranscendence’ - self-production, creativity - in the debates on self-organization. The point of departure is Cornelius Castoriadis’s idea of ‘self-creation’. First, a schisma between mechanical and ontological modeling is indicated and used to introduce the idea of a ‘creative organization’. This is further discussed in relation to Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s concept of social ‘autotranscendence’ by ‘complex methodological individualism’, with particular respect to the incomprehension of the social. Following Johann P. Arnason’s treatment of (...) the question of cultural articulation in Castoriadis, the article argues that the problem of autotranscendence presents a further problem of self-creation discernible in Castoriadis’s notions of phusis/nomos, living being/human, and constraint/magma. The article closes with a consideration of Duncan Watts, Alberto-László Barabási and Bernardo Huberman’s sketch of a network sociology. (shrink)

A collaborative article by the Editorial Collective of Social Imaginaries. Investigations into social imaginaries have burgeoned in recent years. From ‘the capitalist imaginary’ to the ‘democratic imaginary’, from the ‘ecological imaginary’ to ‘the global imaginary’ – and beyond – the social imaginaries field has expanded across disciplines and beyond the academy. The recent debates on social imaginaries and potential new imaginaries reveal a recognisable field and paradigm-in-the-making. We argue that Castoriadis, Ricoeur, and Taylor have articulated the most important theoretical frameworks (...) for understanding social imaginaries, although the field as a whole remains heterogeneous. We further argue that the notion of social imaginaries draws on the modern understanding of the imagination as authentically creative. We contend that an elaboration of social imaginaries involves a significant, qualitative shift in the understanding of societies as collectively and politically-instituted formations that are irreducible to inter-subjectivity or systemic logics. After marking out the contours of the field and recounting a philosophical history of the imagination, the essay turns to debates on social imaginaries in more concrete contexts, specifically political-economic imaginaries, the ecological imaginary, multiple modernities and their inter-civilisational encounters. The social imaginaries field imparts powerful messages for the human sciences and wider publics. In particular, social imaginaries hold significant implications for ontological, phenomenological and philosophical anthropological questions; for the cultural, social, and political horizons of contemporary worlds; and for ecological and economic phenomena. The essay concludes with the argument that social imaginaries as a paradigm-in-the-making offers valuable means by which movements towards social change can be elucidated as well providing an open horizon for the critiques of existing social practices. (shrink)

In this paper I respond to Samantha Vice’s prescriptions for living morally as a white person in South Africa today. I allow that her ‘How do I live in this strange place?’ (2010) is convincing when read – probably against intent – as a descriptive account. It fails, though, in its attempt to provide an attractive set of moral prescriptions. I set out an argument against both shame and silence, focussing primarily on shame as I contend that the need to (...) withdraw or keep silent follows from feeling ashamed. I argue that shame is experienced as a diminution of the self, whereas guilt is experienced as a burdening of the self by wrongful behaviour; the diminution of the self in shame experiences is intrinsically harmful, and instead of enabling the self to be moral, actually inhibits the moral instincts of a person by cutting the self off from other selves. In a group context this type of severance has unhealthy moral features, as well as negative consequences for inter-group relations. (shrink)

This article engages the considerations of imagination in Kierkegaard and Ricoeur to argue for a moral dimension of the imagination and its objects. Imaginary objects are taken to be mental representations in images and narratives of people or courses of action that are not real in the sense that they are not actual, or have not yet happened. Three claims are made in the article. First, by drawing on the category of possibility, a conceptual distinction is established between imagination and (...) fantasy, (1) I claim that imagination has a moral dimension because it is engaged in considering real-life possibilities. Second, (2) drawing on Kierkegaard and Ricoeur, it is argued that mental representations of selfhood in imagination have a moral dimension because they essentially allow people to understand the development of agency in human selfhood by means of representations of would-be selves and narrative figurations of the self. Third, (3) mental representations of human selves have a moral dimension because they form important points of reference for moral orientations in the field of human praxis (moral pointers). (shrink)

How do abstract doctrinal ideas become visible and meaningful in the lives of religious practitioners? This article approaches this question by examining the diary of the Tibetan pilgrim Khatag Zamyak (kha stag 'dzam yag) (1896–1961) to explore how he engages with the idea of karma. Scholars of Buddhism often define karma as a law of cause and effect that is fundamental to Buddhist ethics, but this third‐person approach to understanding karma can lead scholars to overlook what it feels like to (...) live in a world structured by karma. This article explores how Khatag Zamyak confronts the fact that he does not know his own karma and how he undertakes specific practices to be able to see and tell stories about his own karma. It further argues that Khatag Zamyak's process of engaging with karma is integral to his formation as an ethical subject. (shrink)

پژوهش حاضر، به بررسی دیدگاه‌های ریکور و ملاصدرا در مبحث خیال و نقش مؤثر تخیل به‌ویژه در حوزة معرفت می‎پردازد. گرچه مبادی دو فیلسوف در این باره متفاوت است، در حوزه‎های خاصی شباهت‌های قابل توجهی در اندیشه‌های این دو ظاهر می‌شود. ریکور که یکی از فیلسوفان معاصر حوزة هرمنوتیک است از مباحثی نظیر نشانه‎شناسی، زبان‎شناسی، ساختارگرایی، و معرفت‎شناسی رایج در فلسفة تحلیلی، برای غنی‎ساختن هرمنوتیک استفادة بسیار کرده است. بدین‎سبب، مسئلة زبان در اندیشة وی نقشی محوری دارد. تفاوت مبنایی اندیشة (...) ریکور با ملاصدرا در مبحث تخیل، به این جهت است که در اندیشة ریکور، «زبان»، مبنای تبیین تخیل است. وی نقش تخیل در شناخت را از طریق زبان توضیح می‎دهد. اما ملاصدرا عمل تخیل در ایجاد معرفت را عمل قوه‎ای از قوای نفس می‌داند و مستقیماً به زبان نمی‎پردازد. اما به رغم این تفاوت مبنایی، هر دو فیلسوف تخیل را واسطه‎ای میان جهان اعیان و دنیای درون ذهن، می‎دانند و هر دو، این امکان را با مفهوم اجتماع دو امر متباین توضیح می‎دهند. (shrink)

Although most scholars trace the Liar Paradox to Plato’s contemporary, Eubulides, the paper argues that Plato builds something very like the Liar Paradox into the very structure of his dialogues with significant consequences for understanding his views. After a preliminary exposition of the liar paradox it is argued that Plato builds this paradox into the formulation of many of his central doctrines, including the “Divided Line” and the “Allegory of the Cave” and the “Ladder of Love”. Thus, Plato may have (...) been the first to formulate the view that Graham Priest calls dialetheism, roughly, the view that some contradictions are, in an illuminating way, inescapable and true. The paper argues that Plato builds this Liar paradox into the formulation of his signature views because he holds that the attempt by finite human beings to theorize about transcendent realities results in the simultaneous necessity, and impossibility, of transgressing the limits of language—leading to the paradoxes. Finally, it is argued that the existence of these paradoxes in these Platonic doctrines is the direct result of an intrinsic hermeneutical circle in Plato’s aforementioned signature views. (shrink)

Religious identity has, in recent times, become an important point of inquiry because of the growing awareness of religious diversity. On the one hand, this reality of diversity has served as an impetus to return to the roots of one’s religion. On the other hand, others have called for a more pluralist stance, out of the need to open up to other traditions. In light of this polarity, I argue that one can commit to one’s religion while opening up to (...) the religious other in a way that does not threaten one’s own tradition. This is done through a hermeneutic analysis of the religious identity, taking off from Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological hermeneutics – how this identity is formed and informed by the different significations of meaning within the tradition, and how the believer interacts with this tradition to construct his or her own narrative identity, through his or her imagination, mapping out the constellations of possible human action that root themselves in the necessity in encountering and working with the religious other, for this necessity is constitutive of one’s commitment to the tradition, embodied in the biblical narratives that call for this encounter. In sum, it is possible to be committed to one’s faith conviction while being hospitable to the religious other because it is constitutive of religion itself to encounter its other, and it is in this encounter that faith is truly understood as conviction. (shrink)

In cognitive psychology, a false memory refers to a fabricated or distorted recollection of an event that did not actually happen. Both ‘memory-distortion’ and ‘false memory creation’ refer to the processes of recollection in which the recollected events are not actually happened. This paper has three aims: to examine Ricoeur’s analysis of memory and imagination; to explain and reinforce the constructive role of memory; to show in what manner the first two aims lead to the conclusion that the phenomena of (...) ‘distorted or false memory creation’ are reproductive because the nature of recollection is constructive in the sense of representation of past. In this regard, Ricoeur’s trajectory not only displaces the essential structure of memory and imagination behind the curtain of their distinction and connection, but also contributes to the debates in cognitive psychology. (shrink)

This study seeks to account for and contest Ricoeur's relative absence from the literary-theoretical canon in Britain. Whilst Ricoeur secured a highly influential position within American language philosophy in his lifetime, the literary consequences of his philosophy have been largely overlooked by literary-theoretical discourse itself. This is in spite of Ricoeur's role within the revolution of French thought from whence the New Critical dominion was finally overturned in this country. I contend that the heightened socio-political exigencies of the theoretical revolution, (...) whilst they facilitated a desirable renewal of thought, also fostered unhelpful polarities between the subject and the text, between an idealist metaphysics and a sceptical Theory and a submerged prejudice against philosophies which, like hermeneutics, maintained a positive dialogue with the Kantian tradition. Forged in the interchange of German romanticism and German historicism, modem hermeneutics developed as a response to the excesses of both, seeking to place limits on the claims of a self-authored genius and linguistic determinism alike. As a contemporary of phenomenology and structuralism, Ricoeur provides a similar negotiation of his immediate context, putting paid to the heightened polemic of the literary textualists and the literary relativists alike. Central to this achievement is Ricoeur's concept of "semantic innovation" it stands at the heart of his theory of metaphor and forms the basis for his semantic re-appropriation of the productive imagination. Through a combination of historical and philosophical analysis, this thesis seeks to demonstrate Ricoeur's highly rigorous achievements as an astute theoretician and as one wholeheartedly committed to the liberating powers of the literary imagination. (shrink)

Published in 1780, Nicolas Le Camus de Mezieres' The Genius of Architecture; or, The Analogy of Tkat Art with Our Sensations is firmly ensconced in the traditions of western architectural theories, dating back to Vitruvius' The Ten Books on Architecture. Continuing the traditional relationship to the theatre as well as to the harmonic proportions of the orders although recast in terms of the century in which he wrote, Le Camus uses the paradigm of the theatre as the space of reception (...) for his architecture. (shrink)