In advancing the political project of autonomy, Castoriadis raises
the fundamental question: what ought we to think? Following an
interpretation of his elucidation of the connections between time,
history, and the groundlessness of the world and society, this study
argues for a broadening of Castoriadis’s question, something which
enables attention, not just to the subject matter of thinking, but
also its form and the thinker’s situatedness. While Castoriadis’s
insights may be usefully deployed both to expose the limits of
inherited thought, which privileges the power of receiving meaning
and value over creation and creativity, and to explore the
interaction between politics and philosophy, his own approach may
well represent the other equally problematic side of the Platonic
tradition he criticizes. Consequently, Castoriadis’s notions of
radical democratic subjectivity and autonomous thinking, both of
which respond to the ‘ought’ question, may inadvertently conform
to a mode of being that can do no more than protest the dominant
formalism characterising the modern Western world. At the core of
this limitation lies a decisive issue for philosophy: whether the
enactment of thinking is informed by the historical irruption and
retreat of the visionary collective.