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This chapter addresses the second pole of the creative imagination—the radical imaginary—and critically engages with Castoriadis's theory of meaning as social imaginary significations. It situates him within French phenomenological perspectives in regards not only to meaning, but also to the problematic of the world horizon. Castoriadis emphasizes the world creating capacity of nuclear imaginary significations, such as “God” or “autonomy”, which have no world referent: they are purely generative and creative. The chapter argues that with his elucidation of the being of imaginary significations, Castoriadis makes an implicit hermeneutical turn that relativizes his claims of social-historical creation ex nihilo. The chapter includes an excursus on Johann P. Arnason's cultural hermeneutics and phenomenology of the world as an alternative to Castoriadis's ontological treatment of meaning and the human condition. It is argued that in the final chapter of The Imaginary Institution of Society, Castoriadis began to expand his notion of magma beyond human confines and into natural modes and regions of being, and, with the reappearance of à-être, paves the way to his shift to a trans-regional ontology of creative physis.

The conclusion revisits the idea of Castoriadis as problematic of being and creation. In arguing that Castoriadis's understanding of the circle of creation presumes a circle of interpretation, it draws attention to creation as contextual and opens onto inter-cultural questions of autonomy. It emphasizes that even though Castoriadis shifted from an elucidation of a regional ontology of nomos to a trans-regional ontology of creative physis, he did not dissolve the tension between the nomos and physis problematic, but took it in new directions. The phenomenological problematic of the world horizon was generally marginalized in his thought, but in extending his understanding of auto-ontological creation of form into nature, this book has argued that it reappeared at the level of the living being and expanded the phenomenal field as it has been conventionally understood in phenomenology.

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 shows how the movements leading to the Second World War in the 1930s as well as the war itself directly affected Butterfield's work as historian. Throughout the 1930s, while he continued his research on Fox and produced his lectures on general history, he felt the expansion of his world horizon. He began to shift his attention away from his narrow fixation on the notable Cambridge historians who had inspired him. He started to reflex on world affairs and read a wider range of historians. He felt most disturbed by the cacophony of voices in England and on the continent of Europe proclaiming their conflicting truths for the world. There were his students advocating Marxism from the early 1930s. There were the Nazis staging their rallies in Cambridge to trumpet Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany. Butterfield attended a Nazi rally on Parker's Piece in Cambridge in May 1933 to witness their appeal for himself.