klooger-the guise of nothing-castoriadis on indeterminacy, and its misrecognition in heidegger and...

critical horizons, vol. 14, issue 1, 2013, 1-21

© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2013 doi 10.1179/15685160X13A.0000000001

The Guise of Nothing:Castoriadis on Indeterminacy, and its Misrecognition in Heidegger and SartreJeff KloogerSwinburne University of Technology, Faculty of Higher Education Lilydale, Victoria, [email protected]

Abstract: Castoriadis’s radical ontology of indeterminacy postulates a third term (or rather, an indeterminable continuum of terms) between the complete determinacy of the traditional conception of being and the absolute indeterminacy of the traditional conception of nothingness. Castoriadis himself made considerable efforts to demonstrate how onto-logical conceptions which equate being with determinacy fail to grasp the reality of being in all ontological regions and contexts. He did somewhat less in regard to the opposite pole of the ontological dichotomy, the iden-tification of indeterminacy with nothingness, though he certainly recog-nized this identification as equally suspect.

This article examines the use and interpretation of the concept of noth-ingness in two of the most important and exemplary employments of this concept in twentieth century philosophy. Nothingness is a key concept for both Heidegger and Sartre, however they may differ in regards to its meaning and significance. In both, the concept of nothingness disguises indeterminate modes of being which both perceive but which they refuse to accord the status of being, preferring instead the stark and absolute opposition between being, which continues to be understood in tradi-tional terms as determinacy, and nothingness, a catch-all category which absorbs and homogenizes anything falling short of the absolute determi-nacy predicated of true being.

Keywords: being; Castoriadis; Heidegger; indeterminacy; Nothing; Sartre.

1. Indeterminacy and Nothing

Castoriadis’s proposal that indeterminacy is the fundamental ontological condition of all beings is both bold and profound, and its implications are yet to be fully explored. His challenge to the traditional ontology of

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determinacy focuses on the construal of being, and the way in which “to be” is traditionally interpreted as “to be determined”. He spends some time and effort showing how the contrary is also true, that “to be undetermined” is taken to mean “not to be”. Here, the human phenomena of psyche and society are his particular foci, as forms of being that are ignored in their essential peculiarity. However, the absolute form of this denial of inde-terminacy is less of a focus for Castoriadis himself. By this I do not mean simply the construal of that which is indeterminate as “not being” in the sense of being impossible, untrue, or “imaginary” in the pejorative sense. I mean the construal of indeterminacy and the indeterminate as sheer non-being, the pure contrary of being, as nothing. Castoriadis’s ontological position entails the denial of the absolute determinacy of being, and the recognition that all beings are indeterminate, or that all determination of beings is relative and incomplete. A less obvious corollary is the impos-sibility of the complete absence of determination. Complete determina-tion and the complete absence of determination are mirror images of one another, equally challenged by the postulate of universal indeterminacy. If Castoriadis’s ontology challenges the idea of an absolutely determined being it equally challenges the idea of an absolutely undetermined Noth-ingness. Where we tend to see nothing, Castoriadis’s work challenges us to look again, and to ask whether what we imagine to be nothing is in fact something, only something that is too indeterminate to qualify as being according to traditional ontological assumptions.

This paper will focus on the use of the concept of nothing in Heidegger and Sartre. The choice of the two is partly justified by their place in the history of twentieth century philosophy.1 More particularly, each is con-cerned to elucidate an ontology that is to a significant degree defined by the opposition of Being and Nothing. This is more systematically so in the case of Sartre; but for Heidegger, too, nothing lurks as the shadow part-ner to Being, haunting Being as an unavoidable accompaniment. For Hei-degger, the other shadow of Being is concealment, whose opposite is truth (aletheia) as unconcealedness/disclosure. Nothing is that absence or lack that forces Being to appear for Dasein, who is “held out” into the nothing. In what follows I shall try to elucidate this connection between the nothing

1. Whilst Heidegger continues to have a profound influence on contemporary philosophy, Sartre seems more and more like a branch that has stopped bearing fruit. There may be good reasons for this, reasons related to the respective profundity of each philosopher’s insights or the subtlety of their arguments. On the other hand, fashions change, and what seems of permanent value can fall out of favour, while that which seemed uninteresting can acquire renewed currency when the cultural context becomes conducive to its concerns.

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and disclosure. It will soon become clear that the negativity of nothing has in Heidegger’s philosophy a positive function. For Sartre, of course, there is no question but that Nothingness is the counterpart of Being, and an absolutely essential one upon which is built the human mode of existence in all its positive facets: all subjectivity, all freedom, and all history.

My argument here will be that in both cases the philosophers in ques-tion have misconstrued Nothingness, that what they have in view is in fact not nothing but rather the ontologically indeterminate. What is in question is a type of being that cannot be assigned to the category of something as this is usually constructed within the traditional ontology of determinacy, and hence it is consigned to the category of nothing – for this ontology has no alternative to these two poles: one either has something (that is, something determinate) or one has nothing at all. As we shall see, Sartre recognizes this quite explicitly, and uses this logic to erect his defence of human free-dom as based upon the non-being of subjectivity. If we are not happy with this solution – and there are good reasons not to be – we can nevertheless understand the logic of the argument given the ontological principles it assumes as valid. Castoriadis is valuable here precisely because he questions this validity. Heidegger’s position is less clear-cut.2 He manages for the most part to avoid postulating nothingness as a pure negativity opposing Being. On the other hand, his conception of nothing rests upon a construal of beings that is essentially deterministic.

Something should be said here about the relationship of Castoriadis to these two thinkers. Heidegger’s importance to Castoriadis seems to be more as a disputant than as a progenitor or kindred spirit. Of course, those against whom one defines and refines one’s ideas can be influential, and not only in a negative way. I think it is clear that Castoriadis learned a great deal from Heidegger, and not only what not to think. As for Sartre, his star shone more brightly than anyone’s in the post-war France Castoriadis arrived in and made his home, and, though Castoriadis claimed not to have followed Sartre’s work closely3 it seems likely that he at least honed some of his ideas against the hard stone of Sartre’s views. Castoriadis reserves some of his most barbed comments for Sartre, which itself shows his importance, if chiefly as someone whose ideas needed to be opposed. Sartre was, of course, on the other side of the division of the French left to Castoriadis

2. This is something that could be said about Heidegger in almost every connection, and is a characteristic which is regarded as either a weakness or a strength, depending on where one stands on Heidegger’s worth as a philosopher.

3. C. Castoriadis, “From the Monad to Autonomy”, in World in Fragments, D. A. Curtis (trans. and ed.), 172–95 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997a), 173.

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and the Socialisme ou Barabie group on the issue of the treatment of the Soviet Union, and this no doubt left its mark. It is usually the case, of course, that those whose views one is most concerned to oppose are those whose ideas touch most closely upon one’s own concerns, and this, as I shall try to indicate, is the case with Castoriadis and Sartre.

2. Heidegger: The Nothing and Being

I will begin with Heidegger, concentrating primarily on his 1929 lecture “What is Metaphysics?”4 It is in this piece that Heidegger focuses most explicitly upon the question of nothing, its nature and significance. I do not propose to follow in minute detail the development of Heidegger’s exposition, but will instead focus on the elements of most importance for the issue at hand. The introduction of the concept of nothing as a meta-physical question, and as a pathway into the question of metaphysics in general, occurs by way of a typically Heideggerian piece of linguistic trick-ery – which is not to say that its product is fake. Science is central to our world today. What does science study? Science studies beings – beings and nothing besides, beings and nothing further, beings and beyond that nothing. Put in this way (which is, of course, the way Heidegger chooses to put it rather than the way science is bound to put it) science invokes nothing at every turn in order to reveal that which it wishes to gain knowledge of, though it invokes nothing precisely as that which it wishes to know noth-ing about, as that which it rejects completely as an object of knowledge. This is an incongruous state of affairs, observes Heidegger, and he proceeds to open an inquiry into what can, in fact, be known in regards to the noth-ing that science rejects.5

If we ask what nothing is, says Heidegger, we risk transforming noth-ing into its opposite, something, for the nothing, precisely, is not. “[T]he nothing is the negation of the totality of beings; it is nonbeing pure and

4. Heidegger’s discussion of the concept of Nothing elsewhere, in M. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, G. Fried and R. Polt (trans.) (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000), for example, is fundamentally consistent with his discussion of it in this lecture. If somewhere in Heidegger’s writings there should happen to be an interpretation of Nothing significantly different to the one presented in these texts, the analysis offered here obviously might not apply to it. This would not weaken the argument of this essay, however, which concerns a particular conceptual interpretation of ‘nothing’ rather than Heidegger’s oeuvre.

5. M. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings 95–112, D. F. Krell (trans. and ed.) (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1977), 97–98.


simple.”6 But is negation not an act of the intellect, asks Heidegger? Is the being of nothing, then, dependent upon this capacity of the intellect for negation? Is it an intellectual artefact? Or is negation, on the contrary, based upon some prior experience of nothing? It is the latter, Heidegger declares – for reasons he does not yet offer – and he sets out to explore what this primordial experience of nothing might be. How does the nothing give itself and where do we encounter it; for if we are to know or say anything about it, we must encounter it, it must be given in some way. (Unless we make it ourselves, which is the option Heidegger initially rejects.)

Now, if nothing is the negation of the totality of beings, then in order to find some experience of nothing, we must find an experience in which the totality of beings is itself given and thereby made available for negation. In a certain sense, nothing presupposes everything. Based upon his previous analysis in Being and Time, Heidegger can assert that although one may never be able to comprehend the totality of beings, whenever one is in the midst of beings one is always somehow aware of the whole, if only in a shadowy way. An awareness of the unity of this whole is the basis of our ability to encounter beings at all.7 This whole does not generally intrude into conscious experience because we are usually focused upon particular beings bound up with our specific concerns. But in a state of mind like boredom, where attention to particulars fades, the awareness of the whole emerges. “It [the whole] irrupts when ‘one is bored’. Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals beings as a whole.”8 Love is another possible path to this sense of the whole, says Heidegger; love, which makes us feel our attunement to things as joy, revealing beings as a whole.9

However, these feelings, while they reveal the whole, do not place us before nothing; on the contrary, they keep us attentive to beings. They give us everything, but not its negation. This negation Heidegger finds in anxi-ety. Fear is something we experience in the face of this or that particular threat to our existence in this or that particular respect, but anxiety lacks such a focus. “The indeterminateness of that in the face of which and for which we become anxious is no mere lack of determination but rather the

6. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, 99. 7. In Being and Time, this position turns on the notion of a world. Beings only exist for Dasein

within a totality of referrals which constitutes a world, and only on the basis of inhabiting such a world can Dasein encounter beings. See M. Heidegger, Being and Time, J. Macquarie and E. Robinson (trans.) (Oxford and Cambridge, MA., Blackwell, 1962), 91-148.

8. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, 101. 9. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, 102.

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essential impossibility of determining it. In a familiar phrase this indeter-minateness comes to the fore.”10 Here again indeterminateness comes to the fore. Just as boredom is like a muffling fog that sets us adrift in an abyss, so anxiety dissolves the determinacy of the apparently solid world, but in this case it goes further: not only does it steal away this determinateness, it leaves us convinced of its impossibility. Readers familiar with Castoriadis’s comments on ontological indeterminacy may well remark on the similari-ties of language here. I do not think this is accidental. Castoriadis and Heidegger are, I believe, talking essentially about the same thing, though in different ways, and with different conclusions, as we shall see.

In anxiety, says Heidegger, we can get no hold on things. He is somewhat ambivalent about what our attitude to this incapacity may be. On the one hand, he claims that “[a]ll things and ourselves sink into indifference.”11 Indifference could signify a lack of care, which does not seem right, because Heidegger is clear that anxiety oppresses us, and what oppresses us in it is precisely this inability to get a hold on things.12 “We can get no hold on things. In the slipping away of beings only this ‘no hold on things’ comes over us and remains”.13

This is what reveals “the nothing”. In anxiety we hover, we hang above the whole of beings which slip away from us. We even slip away from our-selves, our sense of who we are, our thisness, our ipseity, dissolves, until our whole being is reduced to a “being there” devoid of content or specificity (we are not “you” or “I”, says Heidegger; we are “one”). We cannot speak. To speak, to articulate, would be to determine, and that is impossible. We cannot “shatter the vacant stillness,” says Heidegger.14 But really, what is there to say? According to Heidegger, that in the face of which we were anx-ious was really nothing. “Indeed: the nothing itself – as such – was there.”15

Pausing at this point, just as Heidegger is about to tell us, not “what” the nothing is – since the nothing is not a thing that is – but “how it is with the nothing”, I want to say a few words about Heidegger’s argument thus far. Since Castoriadis’s conception of indeterminacy is the implicit background

10. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, 103. 11. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, 103. 12. In view of this, it is tempting to interpret Heidegger’s reference to “indifference” as, also, an

undifferentiatedness, a melting away of differences. Some justification might be found in the original German term, Gleichgültigkeit. More or less literally, this means “alike-counting-ness”: so the quality or state of counting alike, or counting as alike. This is reinforced by the separate meaning of Gültigkeit, which is “validity”. Gleichgültigkeit, then, signals the impos-sibility of differentiating with regard to validity or significance.

13. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, 103. 14. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, 103. 15. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, 103.


to this reading of Heidegger’s text, a reader familiar with Castoriadis’s writ-ings may well, as I remarked earlier, note the similarities in the two on these points. What I wish to draw out now are the questions Castoriadis’s work poses with regard to Heidegger’s interpretation of the phenomenon he is describing. Even before we allow Heidegger to clarify what he means by “the nothing”, we will wish to say that, from a Castoriadian perspective, the indeterminacy Heidegger describes is not nothing. If we cannot get a hold on beings, this does not mean that what we have is nothing. On the contrary, what we face is a quality of “being” that all beings to one degree or another share, a quality that underlies all the more familiar, more deter-minate modes in which we – as Heidegger might put it – “proximally and for the most part” encounter them. It may well be that individual and spe-cific beings, insofar as their existence as particular beings depends on their determinations, may become threatened with nonexistence qua particular and determinate beings. But what that leaves is not nothing. What it leaves is a magma, a magma in which the peculiar mode of being that is the mag-matic is most directly experienced.

For those who are not familiar with Castoriadis’s ideas, a brief explanation of his concept of magma is in order at this point. “Magma” is the name Cas-toriadis gives to the mode of being which he sees as underlying all others, and which is characterized by an indeterminacy in which particular determina-tions come to be, but without congealing into inalterable forms, and without diminishing the potential for the emergence of new and different determina-tions. All the determinations within a magma are partial and incomplete, and exist in such a way that they do not detract from the indeterminacy of the magma as a whole. Magmas encompass degrees of determination, and the degree of determination they incorporate depends largely upon the stratum of total being concerned (the stratum of the natural world described by clas-sical physics incorporates a degree of determination greater than the strata of being represented by the human phenomena of the psyche and society). Though indeterminacy is the fundamental feature of magmas – contrasting with the traditional ontology that regards determinacy as a prerequisite for being, so that a lack of determinateness is equivalent to a lack of existence, and indeterminacy is simply nonexistence – the indeterminacy of a magma does not exclude determination; rather, it relativizes it. Only absolute deter-mination is impossible according to this ontological concept. On the other hand, as I remarked earlier, the absolute absence of determination is equally alien to the mode of being of the magma.16

16. For more on Castoriadis’s concept of magma, see C. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, K. Blamey (trans.) (Oxford: Polity Press, and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987),

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So, in the experience of anxiety Heidegger describes we find what we may interpret as an encounter with the magmatic basis of all our quotid-ian certainties with regard to the determinateness of beings. We cannot get hold of things; they slip from our grasp as their determinateness melts away. We are left facing – what? Not nothing, but something that no longer has the qualities we tend to regard as essential to a “something”, something that is indistinct, multiple without being comprised of denumerable ele-ments. Not nothing at all, but rather everything, only everything all mixed up, everything unravelling, dispersed, a soup of being: a magma. Heidegger knows that what is in question is everything. His initial search was for an experience which brings us face to face with the whole of beings. But he also wants to find nothing as the negation of that everything. He will want to go further, to make the experience of this nothing the basis for our capacity to encounter beings and Being. He will want to say that Being is impossible without nothing. What we must ask is whether this nothing Heidegger imagines he has discovered really is nothing, or if, rather, its consignment to the category of nothing hasn’t more to do with our expec-tations, requirements and desires with regard to being. And insofar as there really is a nothing, we will want to ask from whence this nothing arises if not the experience to which Heidegger attributes it.

How is it with the nothing, then? The nothing, says Heidegger, makes itself known as a slipping away of the whole. This slipping away is neither an annihilation nor a negation. It is what Heidegger calls nihilation. The essential action of this nihilation is to repel. The whole of beings is pushed away, retreating in the face of the nothing, and as they retreat beings are revealed in their strangeness precisely as other than the nothing, as some-thing.17 It is as though a vacuum – this is my analogy, not Heidegger’s – were expanding, pushing away all matter. Previously, one was immersed in this matter, and as such one had no regard for its peculiarity. All was matter, all was the same, and there was no way to specify the peculiar character of this stuff one was always with and within. But now a space opens in which there is no matter, in which nothing appears. Now for the first time one sees matter in its peculiarity because one sees it juxtaposed to that which is its opposite, nothing. Only thus does one begin to gain an inkling of what a “something” is, what it means to be something rather than nothing.

C. Castoriadis, “The Logic of Magmas and the Question of Autonomy”, in The Castoriadis Reader, 290–318, D. A. Curtis (trans. and ed.) (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1997b), and J. Klooger, Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy (Leiden: Brill, 2009).

17. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, 104–105.


This, essentially, is Heidegger’s argument. “The essence of the original nihilating nothing lies in this, the fact that it brings Da-sein for the first time before beings as such… Only on the ground of the original revela-tion of the nothing can human existence approach and penetrate beings … Da-sein means: being held out into the nothing.”18 On this last point, we can see why Heidegger will assert that this being held out into the nothing is the essence of transcendence. To be held out into the nothing is to be beyond beings. Recalling my earlier explication of Heidegger’s scenario, we should ask: where are we in this scenario of the repulsion of the whole of beings by the expanding nothing? In order to experience it at all, in order to witness this interaction, we need to be beyond the beings that are under-going exclusion. If we were merely with and within that whole of beings we would witness nothing, and only nothing. Only by being beyond the whole of beings can we perceive this whole and its juxtaposition with the nothing. Having made human transcendence dependent on the experience of the nothing, Heidegger will have to declare that: “[w]ithout this original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom.”19

Thus, the concept of the nothing fulfils an essential philosophical func-tion for Heidegger. But is it true? Is it true that what appears in the experi-ence of anxiety Heidegger describes is nothing? Or is it, rather, as I have already argued, indeterminacy? And if this is so, what are the implications for the remainder of Heidegger’s argument?

Heidegger claims that the nothing repels beings as a whole. But does it? Or is what it repels, rather, our hold on beings as determinate entities. Hei-degger’s own account of the slipping away of the whole suggests just this, for it equates the Being of the beings that slip away with determinacy. Hei-degger uses the term “finite”.20 “Being itself is essentially finite,” he says.21 Beings as a whole come to themselves in “their most proper possibility” in the face of the transcending nothing of Dasein, and this “most proper pos-sibility” means “in a finite way”.22 This equation of Being and determinacy becomes even clearer when Heidegger examines the ancient conception of nothing. He sets out from a proposition that will be familiar to readers of Castoriadis, since it is the proposition Castoriadis most notoriously denies:

18. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, 105. 19. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, 106. We see here the seed of Sartre’s association of noth-

ingness and freedom, though he interprets it differently. 20. This term has a broader significance for Heidegger, and is important particularly in opposi-

tion to the concept of the infinite. However, it also signifies “determinacy”, and particularly in this context.

21. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, 110. 22. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, 110.

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ex nihilo nihil fit; from nothing, nothing comes to be. Nothing, Heidegger argues, is for ancient metaphysics “nothing in the sense of nonbeing, that is, unformed matter, matter that cannot take form as an in-formed being that would offer an outward appearance or aspect (eidos).”23 Putting to one side the question of the origin of beings from nothing,24 what does this statement tell us about Heidegger’s own conception of Being? It is no surprise that he should equate eidos with appearance. The form that confers Being upon beings is for Heidegger essentially something that makes beings appear. But what of this “unformed matter”? This, we are told, is nothing. Matter may be, but of it is unformed, it is nothing, even if it is matter. We may object: if it is matter, it is not nothing. It is matter, whatever that may be. But if it lacks the form necessary for it to appear – and this is the crucial thing – then it counts as nothing.

Having suggested that Heidegger’s supposition of the nothing is, in truth, a reflection of his assumption of the determinacy of Being, let me explore an alternative reading, one in which Heidegger’s vision of the noth-ing is, in fact, a vision of indeterminacy, only one to which he gives the name “nothing”, for reasons we will canvas shortly. In disagreement with the history of metaphysics, ancient and Christian, which he condemns as having suppressed the question of nothing as much as it has suppressed the question of Being by rendering the two as sheer opposites, Heidegger declares that the nothing “does not remain the indeterminate opposite of beings but reveals itself as belonging to the Being of beings.”25 We saw ear-lier that beings appear in their Being only in contradistinction to the Noth-ing. We should also say that this appearance, and hence the Nothing upon which it depends, is not something Dasein merely encounters with beings. Rather, it is something Dasein evokes in its encounter with beings. Here again, we see the contrast Heidegger wants to build around the concepts of Being and Nothing is equivalent to the contrast between determinacy and indeterminacy – or, in Heidegger’s terms, finiteness and transcend-ence. For Dasein itself is nothing insofar as it transcends the finiteness of beings, and only in transcending this finiteness does Dasein bring beings into their own as finite. Dasein generates the nothing by transcending

23. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, 109. 24. In the text, Heidegger explores its further transformations in Christian theology. Heidegger,

“What is Metaphysics?”, 109–10. 25. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, 110. This undermines the opposition presupposed by

Leibnitz’s famous question, which Heidegger re-poses at the conclusion of this lecture: “Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?” (“What is Metaphysics?”, 112) Hei-degger here answers: There are beings and nothing, there are beings because there is nothing, and there is nothing (and Being) because and where Dasein is.


finitude. Castoriadis might say: Yes, humans determine beings (hence expe-rience and know them) only because they can transcend determinacy, only because they are indeterminate to a degree unparalleled in other creatures. For Castoriadis, humans have access to indeterminacy in a way other living beings do not because of their ability to go beyond functionally ascribed determinations. An important part of this human indeterminacy – and indeed of Castoriadis’s conception of ontological indeterminacy generally – is its creative character. Indeterminacy is not a fixed and permanent absence of determination – such a fixity would be a contradiction. Indeterminacy is a temporal undoing and remaking of determination, and one which occurs in a non-deterministic manner, in which there is creation and not merely production of forms. (Another way to put this would be to say that tempo-rality is the creation and destruction of determinations).

Ironically, one of the expressions of this undetermined creativity in the human realm is the drive to determination; and beyond even that, the drive for determinacy, for complete and perfect determination, a determination far in excess of that which nature constructs or permits. The insistence on the determinacy of being is an expression of this, as is its compliment in the nihilation (to borrow Heidegger’s term) of indeterminacy and its transfiguration into absolute nothingness. This approach suggests what Heidegger himself wishes to deny: that “nothing” is an artefact – or at least, nothing interpreted as an absolute absence of determination. Hei-degger argues that the origin of negation in an experience of the nothing places in doubt the primal status of logic. Henceforth, says Heidegger, the validity of logic must be seen as relative, bound as it is to this fundamental and originary experience.26 Castoriadis agrees that the validity of logic is limited, but because he regards it as a creation of the human imagination with an imperfect and differential hold over the reality of being in all its ontological forms and strata. From this perspective, negation, like the con-cept of absolute nothing, is an imaginary creation, a logical fiction. Neither depends on the other; they are co-creations of the human imagination. As such, neither requires a basis in any primal experience. However much such creations may lean on experience, they are never determined by it, and the human imagination does not require experience as a basis for any act of creation.27 This emphasis on creation is perhaps the starkest contrast between Heidegger and Castoriadis. Where Heidegger seeks the basis of

26. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, 106–107, 111. 27. See, for example, Castoriadis The Imaginary Institution of Society, and C. Castoriadis, “Logic,

Imagination, Reflection”, in World in Fragments 246–72, D. A. Curtis (trans. and ed.) (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997c).

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human experience and knowing in an opening to the truth of Being as appearance or disclosure, Castoriadis regards that opening as dependant on a creativity which goes beyond anything that is or can be given by beings or by the sheer encounter between beings and Dasein. On the other hand, Castoriadis and Heidegger would be in agreement that science goes astray if it imagines logic is either adequate or sufficient for the comprehension of the things of the world;28 and that releasing ourselves into the nothing (translation: reducing the grip of determinations and accepting the reality and ultimate unavoidability of indeterminacy) can liberate us from the grip of idols and arouse in us a wonder that can be the basis for the quest for truth.29

So, if what Heidegger means by the nothing is indeterminacy, he and Castoriadis are in agreement.30 But is this what Heidegger means? On the one hand, he insists, in disagreement with traditional approaches to the question, that the nothing belongs to the Being of beings, which suggests that what is at issue is not a pure contrary of Being. On the other hand, he calls it “nothing”, and evokes with that term all the connotations implied by the concept of nothing, even if he wants to question and undermine some of these. And, what is more significant, his conception of Being returns again and again to descriptions equating it with determinacy in a manner which would seem to disallow any continuum between determination and indeterminacy. There is the indeterminacy of the nothing and the determi-nacy of beings, but there is no room here for the indeterminacy of beings or the partial determination of the nothing – describing it as nothing from the outset virtually rules that out.

My conclusion is that Heidegger’s conception of nothing, while sugges-tive and fertile in many respects, is inferior to Castoriadis’s conception of indeterminacy for an understanding of ontology generally and the nature of the relationship between the human mode of being and things in the world. It is confused, not just in that it lacks clarity, but in its failure to ade-quately describe and specify what is most essential to the issues involved.

28. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, 106–107. 29. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, 111–12. 30. This interpretation of Heidegger’s conception of nothing can find some additional supports

in Being and Time. There we find nothing interpreted in terms of the relationship between Dasein and beings such that nothing refers to the importance of beings to ourselves, and the indefiniteness of the object of anxiety refers to one’s being-in-the-world, and not just things in the world conceived independently of Dasein. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 231, 393. Dasein’s lack of totality is a continuing theme in Being and Time – see Heidegger, Being and Time, 288–89 – and this lack of totality is consistent with some notion of indeterminacy along the lines of that proposed by Castoriadis.


3. Sartre: The Poverty of a Dichotomy

This discussion of Sartre will be briefer than the preceding discussion of Heidegger, partly because some of the groundwork has already been done in the preceding section, especially in relation to the concepts of being and nothingness which Sartre borrows, with some adaptations, from Heidegger, and in relation to the concept of indeterminacy postulated by Castoriadis. The approach here will necessarily be more synoptic, since in the case of Sartre we have to deal with the massive and sprawling Being and Nothing-ness as opposed to Heidegger’s pithy lecture. In a way, Sartre’s approach is much easier to deal with in this manner. Despite his complexities, which can be formidable, Sartre is a less ambiguous thinker. Whereas Heidegger worries away at a question in pursuit of an answer which, when it arrives, remains an enigma, Sartre advances by way of bold and decisive definitions, which he uses to construct increasingly complex dialectical formulae. The definitions, though, are unambiguous, especially the fundamental distinc-tion between being and nothingness, which is what concerns us most here.

For Sartre, Being and Nothingness stand in strict opposition to one another. Being is defined as plenitude. “It is full positivity,” says Sartre. “It is what it is.” “Transition, becoming, anything which permits us to say that being is not yet what it will be and that it is already what it is not – all that is forbidden on principle.” Being “knows no otherness.”31 On the other hand, Sartre contends that Nothingness lurks within this being like a worm. This worm is awoken by consciousness through the medium of expectation. When what we expect to find is not there, then we encounter nothingness. In this way, nothingness is made to be.32

So far, it might be possible to interpret Sartre’s account in a manner consistent with Castoriadis’s conception of ontological indeterminacy. We find, at least, a mixture of the two absolutes, which if pushed far enough, might relativize each other, so that we would end up not with a strict opposition between fullness and emptiness, but an idea of variably dense substance. But Sartre is not content to rest in such an enigma. He makes further distinctions, continuing to dissect.

Nothingness cannot arise within pure being, which admits no empti-ness and contains no space within which emptiness might form. To find an inlet for nothingness, Sartre distinguishes between two varieties of being: being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Being-in-itself lies on the side

31. J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, H. E. Barnes (trans.) (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 22.

32. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 27–36.

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of pure being: it is sheer plenitude, self-identity and atemporality. Being-in-itself cannot make nothingness, since nothingness is not, and being is only what is. Nothingness is made by being-for-itself, which makes noth-ingness by making itself as the opposite of being; therefore, as nothing. Being-for-itself is the nothing that nihilates, and thus makes nothing. It does so through a temporality structured as “having to be”, where this excludes being – that is, being determined, being only and entirely what it is and nothing other, being complete and finished, being at an end and at a standstill. “Having to be” therefore excludes the possibility of ever being or becoming without deficit or remainder that which one has to be. The existential condition of the being-for-itself is that it is what it is not and is not what it is.33

Is or is not: these are the only possibilities Sartre admits; and in this he is following the law laid down by an ontological tradition passed down to him even through Heidegger. Sartre plays with the contradiction, hoping to conjure a state that cannot be named except via contradiction. Language has its limits, it is true, but are these its limits, or limits that derive from a logic that is not simply the logic of language, but the language of an ontol-ogy that realizes the logic of language in a particular way? Nevertheless, there is value in this formulation of Sartre’s, particularly in his identifica-tion of the imperative nature of not just desire but self-creation per se. It is vital to understand, as Sartre and Castoriadis both do in their own manner, the spontaneous and undetermined character of this self-creation. It is also crucial to recognize the impossibility of a perfect coincidence between the aim of such a self-creation and its result. The problems associated with Sartre’s approach derive from the assumption that this not being – not being what one has to be, not being wholly this or that, and not being determined in what one becomes by what has been, including what one has been oneself – that all this means and must mean being nothing. For Sartre, being-for-itself is nothing because there is no alternative. Being qua being-in-itself is not a viable alternative because it excludes everything that is essential to being-for-itself: temporality, spontaneity, freedom. There is no room in Sartre’s ontology for a middle term between being and noth-ingness. His definition of being excludes the possibility that being-for-itself might be, that it might be a form of being, albeit one different from that form of being Sartre imagines we encounter in being-in-itself. Were he to entertain this possibility, it would, in the natural course of things and as it did for Castoriadis, cause him to revisit his conception of being-in-itself,

33. Sartre, Being and Nothingness.


so that being-in-itself could no longer be conceived as the sheer atemporal plenitude it was once imagined as being.34

Sartre’s understanding of the temporality of being is consistent with his dichotomy of being and nothingness. Being is only encountered as past, when it is extracted or abstracted from the flow of a temporality in which the movement of alteration excludes determinacy. Being-for-itself is under-stood as nothing but the movement of self-alteration that constitutes tem-porality. Its consciousness is pure consciousness, a reflection-reflecting with no being of its own, an image without substance that sits weightlessly upon the surface of being as pure appearance.35 The only being that being-for-itself has to do with, therefore, is a past being, a was which is like the min-eralized fossil left around an existential shape the for-itself never settled in but only passed through as virtual, imagined or projected.

The crucial consequence of this view of temporality and its relation-ship to being is the radical freedom of being-for-itself. Being-for-itself is undetermined because it escapes the grip of a being which, for Sartre, is equivalent to being determined. For Sartre, like Heidegger before him, this freedom is inevitable. Not being determined means having to make oneself in a self-creation that one cannot escape and for which one is solely respon-sible. The flip side of this responsibility is what Sartre calls facticity, what Heidegger explores as thrownness, and what Castoriadis calls contingency. We make ourselves what we become, but we find ourselves as and in a spe-cific context which is either not of our making, or, inasmuch as it is of our making, we could never forbear making; since even to choose not to exist is already to realize the inevitability of choosing, and implies a whole universe of involvements in connection with which any choice is made. Though we do not have power over our own Being from the ground up, as Heidegger puts it, we become the basis of our own Being insofar as we make choices, thereby nullifying alternative possibilities. In Heidegger’s terms, we become the basis of our own being by becoming the basis of a nullity, that nullity constituted by the choices we have elected not to realize.36 This is consist-ent with Sartre’s understanding of what he calls nihilation. The corollary of Sartre’s concern with freedom and choice, however, is an uncompromising, even inhuman, conception of personal responsibility.

Before we turn to this question, we should note the similarities between Sartre and Castoriadis in terms of their concerns if not their approaches.

34. For a detailed exploration of this development in Castoriadis’s thinking, see S. Adams, Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011).

35. See, for example, Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 200. 36. Heidegger, Being and Time, 312–48.

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Both strive to reject the idea of determinism in the human realm, both are interested in spontaneous self-creation. If Castoriadis ridicules Sartre’s approach to these issues this is because he regards the issues themselves as crucial, so it is a great disappointment for him to see them, in his view, mishandled, and to see so many others seduced by an approach which he regarded as misguided. What Castoriadis brings that Sartre lacks is a way out of the tyranny of dichotomy, in which the sole options are a determinis-tically conceived being and a nothingness totally devoid of determinations. Castoriadis’s conception of indeterminacy, which reaches its most poten-tially fecund expression in his concept of magma, bridges the opposition between being and nothingness, and imagines instead a continuum of dif-ferences. Being-for-itself need not be nothing if it is to escape the determi-nacy and determinism of the being-in-itself. It can instead be understood as indeterminate, as a mode of being which encompasses otherness and creativity, which is less and more than the solid fullness Sartre envisages as being. At the same time the very notion of pure and complete self-identity can be seen to be an illusion in relation to being-in-itself also. The being of non-human things, living and non-living, is not the atemporal, unchang-ing expanse of the self-same any more than the being of the human is the totally immaterial unfolding of unconstrained freedom. The reality lies in between, in a region whose essence is impurity, and which cannot be con-structed from a clash or conjunction of pure contraries, even if it gives birth to these contraries in the minds and through the acts of humans.

This suspicion with regard to notions of the absolute and the pure lies at the core of Castoriadis’s criticisms of Sartre, whether it is in relation to the understanding of the subject,37 or human freedom. In relation to the second, Castoriadis opposes Sartre’s conception of freedom as something entirely divorced from its context, as disembodied and unencumbered by the constraints and inducements of a concrete life – “the lightning stroke without density or attachment”.38 In a logic reminiscent of Hobbes, Sartre rejects any suggestion that the subject’s freedom can be diminished by com-pulsion, asserting that no matter what force is brought to bear on decisions,

37. In response to Sartre’s famous quote, “Hell is other people”, Castoriadis remarks: “The author of this statement was no doubt certain that he carried no trace at all of another within himself (otherwise, he might just as well have said that Hell was himself.) He has, moreover, recently confirmed this interpretation by stating that he had no super-ego. How could we object to this, as we have always thought he spoke of matters on Earth as if he were a being arriving here from another planet?” Castoriaids, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 384–85, n. 41.

38. C. Castoriadis, “The Ethicist’s New Clothes”, in World in Fragments, D. A. Curtis (trans. and ed.), 108–122, (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997d), 122.


no compulsion can reduce a subject’s responsibility for his/her choices.39 Such an absolutist stance is to some degree related to the absolutism of the dichotomy upon which Sartre builds his philosophy, an absolutism in which there is no possibility of compromise or dilution, no leavening of the purity of each term of the opposition by its immersion in an impure reali-ty.40 There are no degrees of being and nothingness for Sartre; everything we may encounter is one or the other, or some product of their dialectic.

The concept of indeterminacy reintroduces the question of degree, of differences and gradations of degree. This is because indeterminacy essen-tially incorporates determination as partial and imperfect, excluding only full and complete determinacy. The indeterminacy which inhabits any par-ticular determination is not a shortfall with regard to being, but only in relation to a conception of being that is revealed as a fiction and an illusion. Things are, and human beings are, even though they are indeterminate and indeterminable, and their being is not diminished by this indeterminacy. Recognizing the truth of this makes it possible to ask further questions about how they might be, in what sense and in what form. And answers to such questions go far beyond any stark opposition between dichoto-mous terms, or any sense that can be conjured by the interplay of their contradictory conjunction and rearrangement. From a Castoriadian per-spective, being-for-itself is not nothing any more than being-in-itself is a being which is fully determined. In both cases we are dealing with forms or modes of being, each of which encompass determination and indetermi-nacy in varying ways and to varying degrees.

4. The Vacuum and the Abyss

Where does an ontology of indeterminacy leave the concept of nothing? Insofar as nothing is conceived as an absolute, it leaves no room for it at all, because an ontology of indeterminacy eschews such absolutes. There is no nothing because there is nowhere a total absence of determination, and complete indeterminacy in the sense of the absence of all forms and forma-tion. There may be spaces, but these are not absolute vacancies, only fields of differences. The graduations within such fields are not always smooth or

39. Sartre. Being and Nothingness, 463, 574–75. 40. “Man cannot be sometimes a slave and sometimes free; he is wholly and forever free or he is

not free at all”, Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 463. As Castoriadis observes – C. Castoriadis, “Done and To Be Done”, inThe Castoriadis Reader D. A. Curtis (trans. and ed.), 361–417 (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press. 1997e), 403 – even motivation is impermissible according to the Sartrean vision of freedom.

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uniform. There are ruptures, abrupt and dramatic shifts and breaks. How-ever, between these there is never the vacuum of a total absence, any more that there is the plenitude of a total presence.

There are different views about whether and how we should take guidance from the sciences in our attempts to philosophically elucidate the world, but I think it is interesting to note that contemporary physics seems closer to this view of nothingness than that of an existential absolutism. Plenitude in the physical realm was once considered absolutely necessary, so much so that unobserved substances such as the ether had to be hypothesized to ensure it. This view was overturned by the discovery of vacuums, and the conse-quent development of conceptions of non-mechanical action at a distance and of the field. Now, however, the vacuum can no longer be understood to be absolute nothingness. Quantum mechanics entails a view of physical systems in which a zero energy state can be approached but never reached. A vacuum is only the “ground state”, meaning the state from which no further energy can be removed. This does not and cannot eliminate fluctuations at the quantum level. Observe a vacuum closely enough and you will dis-cover a seething ocean of activity – what is called “quantum effervescence” – waves of energy potentials rising and falling and cancelling each other out, the emergence out of nothing (but is it, then, nothing?) of virtual particles whose existence is so brief that, at small scales and in most contexts (black holes aside, that is), the energy they borrow in order to exist is repaid before their existence can be felt at the macro level. It is a very busy nothing, then, quite differentiated and full of determinations, but indeterminate, too, in a way we might not expect if we failed to observe closely enough.41

Finally, we need to turn our critical gaze upon Castoriadis himself, and ask whether he is not himself guilty at times of using of the concept of noth-ing in an impermissible manner. Is Castoriadis, too, sometimes guilty of confusing indeterminacy for nothing? There is his famous advocacy of the concept of creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing. Does this not imply the positing of a nothing from which creation arises? I think not. I have dis-cussed this in some detail elsewhere.42 Castoriadis’s formulation is in some ways forced upon him by all those philosophers (including, as we have seen, Heidegger) who insist on the impossibility of anything coming from noth-ing, and who thereby intend to deny the possibility of creation. In defending creation as a reality, Castoriadis is naturally led to affirm what those before him have denied: that something does indeed come from nothing. But a

41. See F. Close, A Very Short Introduction to Nothing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 42. J. Klooger, “From Nothing: Castoriadis and the Concept of Creation”, Critical Horizons 12

no. 1 (2011): 29–47.


closer examination of the meaning of his conception of creation reveals that what is at issue is not a region or state of non-being from which creation or the created emerges, but a re-examination of the meaning of emergence, one which renews the mystery of the idea of something coming from something else, at the same time putting into question many of the traditional under-standings of this relation of origination. It is not that the creation arises from nothing, then, but that the idea of creation, properly understood, negates the idea of coming from in most of the usual senses of this term.

What, then, of Castoriadis’s uses of the terms abyss and void? Do they not suggest a concept of absolute nothing? Castoriadis himself responds to this suggestion. After declaring that creation originates in “the Groundless, the Chaos, the Abyss”, he states: “Here, the term “nothingness” seems to me mere literary posturing, and a possible source of useless sophisms.”43 The Abyss or Groundless Castoriadis speaks of possesses the qualities it does not because it is nothing but because it lacks solidity, because we cannot stand upon it, because it will not support us or allow itself to serve as a permanent and unchanging foundation. The ontological abyss is no more “nothing” than actual abysses (which are full of an immensity of par-ticles in gaseous or liquid form). If it – and they – seem like nothing this is because their lack of solidity threatens to overwhelm us. We feel ourselves falling into them, even as they attract us (since it is hard to resist the temp-tation to fall endlessly). The Abyss is not an opening onto nothing; it is an opening onto the indeterminate, the Chaos, as Castoriadis names it. Far from an absence of being, this Chaos may even be a super-abundance of it, an embarrassment of creation that cannot be domesticated by the rule of signification but imposes itself as that which exceeds all our efforts to determine and circumscribe meaning, especially the meaning of being.44 If Castoriadis sometimes uses the term “void” in relation to this ultimate ontological stratum, this is in recognition of the Greek origins of this con-ception. He notes that, for the Greeks, kosmos, “order”, arises out of chaos, which for them initially meant “nothingness”.45 But as he also says, this sense of the void (chainō) was combined with the sense of “a jumble defy-ing all definition.”46 It is this latter meaning that Castoriadis intends to

43. Castoriadis, “Done and To Be Done”, 404. 44. C. Castoriadis, “Institution of Society and Religion” in World in Fragments, D. A. Curtis

(trans. and ed.), 311–330 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997f ). 45. C. Castoriadis, “The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy”, in The Castoriadis Reader,

D. A. Curtis (trans. and ed.), 267–89, (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press, 1997g), 273.

46. C. Castoriadis, “The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary”, in World in Fragments D. A. Curtis (trans. and ed.), 84–107 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press 1997h), 98.

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endorse, and it is this meaning which he sees as gradually predominating in the developing Greek philosophical conception of the emergence of the world and its order.47

There is, then, no nothing proper in Castoriadis’s thought. Nor should there be. Indeterminacy leaves no room for nothing and has no need of it. The magma surrounds and engulfs us, sometimes seemingly solid and determinate, sometimes yielding and ungraspable. This magma is not merely outside us, it is us and we are it. It is a field of differences without gaps. It does not encase us in the way Sartre imagined being might encase us, like insects in amber. The freedom we have and may have arises through being itself. We are in and of being, and we do not require nothing, neither in order to escape determination by being nor to provide the contrast that permits us to encounter it. If we are blind or unfree, this is from causes quite other than our embeddedness in an obscuring and constraining Being.

Jeff Klooger teaches sociology in the Faculty of Higher Education Lilydale, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. He completed his PhD at La Trobe University in 2001. He is the author of Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy (2009, Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill). In recent years he has had articles published in Critical Horizons, Thesis Eleven and the European Journal of Social Theory.

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