The Transformation of Cassirer’s Legacy: Cornelius Castoriadis on the Symbolic and Art

In this paper, I will discuss essential aspects of Castoriadis’ philosophy that can be related to Cassirer’s conceptions of symbol and imagination. The aim is not to reconstruct the antecedents of Castoriadis’ philosophy nor to propose a comparison between the two authors; rather, my intention is to show how Castoriadis’ reflection is in tune with some of Cassirer’s themes and how he develops them autonomously even to reach different conclusions. This analysis will serve to enrich the investigation on imagination in a different way from conventional frameworks. For this reason, I will choose the symbolic and art as the areas of research. Firstly, I will contextualize the figure of Castoriadis in relation to Cassirer and Neo-Kantianism in order to identify the common elements and to clarify some misunderstandings. Then, my analysis will underline Cassirer’s and Castoriadis’ great emphasis on the function of the symbolic in the human world and specify how the latter enriches this reflection through his original conception of the social imaginary as a collective and creative capacity for new forms. Based on these considerations, I will turn to the artistic field to observe how Castoriadis intertwines aesthetics and ontology in his conception of art as a “window into chaos”.