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Castoriadis's rethinking of the living being emerges as a central aspect of his shift to a trans-regional ontology of creative physis, but also as the site of relocation for the nomos/physis problematic. Increasingly, Castoriadis began to characterize the living being as “self-creating” rather than “self-organizing” and redrew the demarcation between humans and non-humans more in terms of continuity (rather than discontinuity). However, he still maintained a line of discontinuity between human and non-human modes of being, as his rejection of Francisco Varela's notion of “biological autonomy” demonstrates. In rethinking the living being, Castoriadis developed what might be called a poly-regional ontology of the for-itself, which spans human and non-human regions. The living being inaugurates the level of the for-itself, by rupturing with non-living (that is, physical) regions of being, and creating what Castoriadis called the “subjective instance”; that is, putting the physical world into meaning. Common to each level of the for-itself, is the interrelation of imagination, world and meaning. In that the world manifests itself to the living being, Castoriadis extends—and radicalizes—conventional phenomenological approaches.

This chapter examines The Human Centipede, Nymphomaniac, and Videodrome; films that push the boundaries of human objectification. The chapter draws on the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Jean-Paul Sartre, highlighting an ontological distinction between being “in-itself” and being “for-itself.” It is argued that though the objectification of key characters in these films, on the one hand, promotes a sort of nihilistic reduction of humans to meaningless bodies in motion, on the other hand, this same reduction potentially provokes a sense of sympathy in viewers who are also embodied, and thus can see their own condition reflected in the experiences of the characters who suffer on screen. Depictions of others as meaningless matter remind audiences of their own corporeal nature (being in-itself), disgusting, titillating, and amusing them, but also potentially moving them to empathize with the consciousnesses presumed by analogy with themselves to exist within the bodies depicted on screen (being for-itself).

This chapter discusses the view of some moral responsibility advocates positing that people do not simply take moral responsibility for the character they happen to have; rather, they gain moral responsibility for themselves because they make themselves. Jean Paul Sartre insists that man’s existence precedes their essence and that humans are self-conscious self-creating “being-for-itself” with the free power and necessity to make themselves; we are different in kind from entities with their own given natures, the unfree “being-in-itself.” Naturalists, however, have been reluctant to embrace self-making as grounds for moral responsibility since it cannot possibly fit within a naturalistic system of thought.

This chapter illustrates the desperation that is almost tangible in the attempts to support moral responsibility. Evidence of this desperation becomes apparent in the wide variety of distinctly different and often conflicting proposals for supporting moral responsibility. The moral responsibility system is deeply embedded in common sense, the legal system, and deeply entrenched in man’s natural strike-back emotions. Existentialists refer to concepts such as “being-for-itself” to demonstrate the great choices one makes sans constraints and conditions. Contemporary libertarians offer similar arguments, but with a hint of apprehension. Robert Kane is one such libertarian, and he rejects mystery and relies on quantum indeterminism amplified by chaos. Compatibilists, on the other hand, are united in their rejection of miracles but divided on almost everything else.