Cornelius Castoriadis - Philosophy, Politics Autonomy

-and adds to them plenty of new ones. Its wonderful "instrument," mathematics, displays more and more its terrifying efficiency -- for no apparent reason (the Kantian reasons are of no avail for a quasiRiemannian four- or perhaps ten-dimensional manifold). The dazzlingly rapid progression of mathematics, while unveiling the gap in its own foundations (undecidability theorems -- Gรถdel, Turing, Church) and based on paradoxical assumptions (axiom of choice) has led to a situation (Gรถdel and Paul Cohen on the continuum hypothesis) where an indefinite number of "non-Euclidian" ("non-Cantorian") set theories appear possible. Mathematics appears more and more as a free creation of human imagination working under certain constraints (consistency, economy). But it also appears as (1) strangely related to the physical world (any physical theory is mathematized, though sometimes in a very weird way, e.g., quantum theory, and purely mathematical considerations play a tremendous heuristic role in today's physics), and (2) bumping against no man-made constraints, necessities, and intrinsic kinships. We seem to be creating a multilayered "ideal" world which, in the most strange and uninspectable way, encounters both a multilayered physical world and an "ideal" world in itself.

Everybody knows, or ought to know, the chaotic theoretical situation in fundamental physics -- a situation that is all the more puzzling as it does not in the least interfere with the experimental, observational, and practical accuracy and efficiency of physics, nor with its predictive capacity. The two main theories -- general relativity and quanta -- are, both, continuously corroborated by observation and experiment, while each of them contains as yet unsolved deep problems and while they contradict each other. The classical edifice of categories -- by no means causality alone -- is a broken machine that still turns out wonderful products. And I could go on for pages.

It would be silly to speak of all this as just "epistemological" or even "metaphysical" (in the Heideggerian sense) problems. They go directly at the heart of the ontological question. What is the being of this being (humans), that can freely create forms, which then turn out to have something to do with, and encounter, something externally given? What is the being of these forms? And what is the being of the externally given? But then: What ought we to think of being as such, if being belongs also to a being capable of a free creation which both meets and fails to meet whatever there is? It would be ridiculous to think that these questions are eliminated by the "ontological difference" -- or by the supremacy of the question about "the meaning of Being." The question of the "meaning of Being" in the resolutely un- and anti- Aristotelian turn Heidegger wants to imprint on it is meaningless, except as an anthropomorphic/anthropological and/or theological question. Who told you that there is a meaning of Being? And the "ontological difference" is just a terminological nicety, without substantive import. Being is inseparable from the modes of being, themselves in turn inseparable from beings. To put it in the fashionable jargon: presence as such is obviously different from that which is present -- but presence itself is each time different, is in a different mode in relation to that which presents itself. The presence of a lover is not the presence of a crocodile (not necessarily, at any rate). The phenomenality of the phenomena is not itself a phenomenal datum, to be sure. But the phenomenality of, for example, thought, is not the phenomenality of a star. To talk just about phenomenality (or presence, or presence/ absence, etc.) becomes of necessity empty talk (logikon kai kenon, Aristotle would say), meaning simply: something is given -- es gibt -- something has to be given. Far from absorbing philosophy, in the sense of integrating the philosophical questions within its methods and its procedures, contemporary science both returns to these and puts them in a new light.

Something is given -- something has to be given -- but to whom, and how? Is mathematics "given" to us -- or are we creating mathematics? In what place are infinite-dimensional Hilbertian spaces "given"?

And who is thinking of Being? Is it the Dasein -- this bastard and composite construct (bastard and composite as the philosophical "subject" almost always is), ignorant of its constituent elements, an artificial juxtaposition of psychical, social-historical, and reflective components peppered with a powder strongly smelling both of the social-historical situation of the time and of its creator's idiosyncrasies and value choices?

If we are doing philosophy (or even, "thinking the meaning of Being"), we have to ask: Who is that "we," and what is he or she? Who and what am I, when I stop being simply a Dasein and start reflecting on the question: Who and what am I qua Dasein? Now the latest era has witnessed the flourishing of an eclectic, incongruous, and unthoughtful hodgepodge, proclaiming "the death of the subject" (and of man, of meaning, of history, etc.), under the sign of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, but -- strangely -- with Heidegger as the philosophical guarantor. Yet one could not note, in all this, the slightest awareness of the true questions raised, on the philosophical level, by psychoanalysis or by whatever is of value in Marx or Nietzsche. I leave aside the obvious objection of the clever high-school adolescent: if everything you say is determined by your unconscious (or your social position), or is just an interpretation, then so too is this very conception of yours (this was already well known in Athens around 450 B.C.). But the substantive problem is: given that it is true that at the core of the "subject" (whatever that may mean) an unconscious psyche most of the time motivates its acts (therefore, also, its pronouncements); given that it is true that nobody can ever jump over his times or extract himself from the society to which he belongs; given that it is true that any statement contains an irredeemable element of interpretation