Karl Smith

Every theory of modernity must at least presuppose an implicit ontology of the social-historical. Castoriadis is one of the few who makes these presuppositions explicit. Castoriadis’s socio-cultural ontology reveals that the essentially indeterminate nature of the social-historical entails ontological plurality, in the face of which monological or unilinear theories of modernity collapse — leaving us with a fragmented field of tensions. Castoriadis’s exposition of the ontological plurality of the social-historical is one of his most important contributions to social theory — but when he turns his attention to modernity, he immediately polarizes the field. The aim here is to offer some correctives to Castoriadis’s polarized depiction, primarily by teasing out tensions in his work.

Despite his own observations that autonomy is never complete, never once-and-for-all — in short, that autonomy is always relatively more-or-less; or rather, human subjects, institutions and societies can only ever be more-or-less autonomous, and thus more-or-less heteronomous — Castoriadis nevertheless polarizes autonomy and heteronomy. From the polarized perspective, then, he maintains that religion is intrinsically heteronomous, and thus intrinsically antithetical to the project of autonomy. By exploring Taylor's more nuanced understanding of the varieties of religious experience, I argue in this article that there must be room for religious belief within an autonomous society, and that religiosity per se is not incompatible with the project of creating an autonomous society

In A Secular Age, Taylor introduces the idea of porous subjectivity by way of elucidating the mode of being typical of the enchanted pre-modern world, and juxtaposes it to the buffered self typical of the disenchanted modern world. The framing of the problem in this way, with the argument so clearly oriented as an attack on the latter position, risks a polarization that defaults to the former as the preferred option. These, though, are not our only choices. There is much to recommend Taylor’s notion of porous subjectivity as distinct from the buffered self of atomistic individualism. But Taylor associates the emergence of the disenchanted world with disengaged reason, and the existence of an enchanted world with a deeper mode of engagement in the world. If we instead focus upon modes of engagement with the world separate from the question of enchantment, we can perhaps further our understanding of human subjectivity and relations with others

Castoriadis portrays the psyche in its originary state as a ‘psychic monad’ - an infantile psyche that experiences itself as omnipotent, omnipresent, undifferentiated and sufficient unto itself. According to Castoriadis, this totality is fragmented in a ‘triadic phase’ through the experience of desire, which brings to the fore the encounter with the Other. In contrast, Marcel Gauchet rejects the concept of the psychic monad, arguing that the unformed psyche enters the world with a primordial openness to being formed and transformed. Psychic tension does not arise from the immersion of the closed monad in a hostile world, but from within the psyche itself, for the psyche must form itself and be formed by the world. Gauchet’s understanding of an inherent psychic tension provides an important corrective to Castoriadis’s theory of the monad that nevertheless remains consistent with Castoriadis’s anthropology

Alexander’s invitation to a sociology of evil begins from the premise that the social sciences have long neglected direct analyses of evil. They have focused instead on questions of the good and treated its other as an absence or residual category. His most direct foray into this field must be read against his strong program in cultural sociology and his more concrete analysis of the development of narratives of the Holocaust as a moral ‘trauma drama’. I argue that the analytic frame Alexander constructs in ‘Towards a Sociology of Evil’ is too narrow to achieve the ambitions declared in ‘The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology’. A multi-dimensional social theoretical approach to evil must recognize that while its significations are clearly culturally variable, they also refer to something beyond the limits of discourse