Lachlan Ross

This paper studies the invention of causality as a case study, not as a metaphor or interpretation, but as an old and beautiful lie that has attained objective reality/being. Causality is real because it is real ‘for us’, because it contains the characteristics that we habitually tie to phenomenality – the traits that are the only possible attributes of reality. Causality was born out of prayer and is at least as vulnerable as was God before we killed him. We ought to learn from Nietzsche that all things, and even those that at some stage garner unquestionable belief, are capable of perishing. It has been posited that for Nietzsche, a will to absolute knowledge may destroy the seeker: it is a will to death. It has not yet been explored that the same may potentially imperil key elements of living being. Nietzsche's defence of life against knowledge has never really been heard: left irrationalism – that is, poststructuralism – frequently claims Nietzsche as a founder of its project, but is a generalised denial of the importance of being (we study ‘discourse’, which by virtue of being discourse is presupposed to be something other than reality), and right irrationalism, though many today say it is Nietzschean, mostly appears as a politics of generalised ressentiment, which by definition cannot be Nietzschean. Nietzsche, in short, is used today to deny or resent being, and thus is primarily misused. This paper will show that Nietzsche, properly heard, is a defender of both being and life, and that there are interconnected benefits to engaging with his unique ontology and politics. In recent discussions of the ‘discovery’ of Nietzsche's hatred of the left of politics, his equal and opposite hatred of the right has been somewhat muted, and ought to be heard as well. Nietzsche ultimately despised modernity, because it seemed to him that nobody knew how to be alive. As the fight between left and right becomes increasingly absurd in the 21st century (for Nietzsche, a fight between those who want Socratic undeath and those who want, like Socrates, just actual death), another look at Nietzsche's ontology and politics is timely.

The following article defines Castoriadis’ concepts of the radical imagination and the social imaginary as a platform for a discussion of some motifs important to Castoriadis: the nature of human subjectivity, the nature of ‘reality’, the role and scope of the human imagination, the importance of freedom, the question of whether or not we are free (i.e. how sick/diminished/vulnerable is the second epoch of autonomy that broke open in/as modernity), and the roles of science, politics and philosophy in human social life. The central work on the radical imagination and the social imaginary is of course more than an arbitrary jumping-off point: this paper argues that understanding these concepts is vital if one is to understand the core elements of Castoriadis’ writings and his broader emancipatory project.