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The Problem of Social-Historical Being: Nonreductionism and Creation in Hartmann and Castoriadis
Abstract
Both Nicolai Hartmann and Cornelius Castoriadis were philosophers not easily classified in terms of the major schools of thought in 20th century philosophy. Both had wide-ranging interests, one of which was the problem of “spiritual being” or the “social-historical.” This problem, the ontological status of social-historical phenomena, is the focus of the paper. Using a comparative, historically sensitive, analytical, and interpretive approach, we find that their discussions of it converge in their shared critique of reductionism in social theory, their proposals regarding ontological stratification, and their attribution of a unique mode of being to the social-historical. They also diverge due to the subtly different Problemlagen of the two writers. Castoriadis frames the issue of the social-historical with reference to the reductivist-determinist explanatory axis, and emphasizes the creativity of the social imaginary and its role in social institution. Hartmann is not immediately concerned with the determinism question due to his careful disentanglement of genesis questions and stratification questions in ontology. The result for both is that because human existence is stratified, reductionism is fruitless and the social-historical has a unique mode of being, characterized by free cultural creativity and institutionalized transmission of cultural contents.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/kw.2025.40.47-76
Date of publication: 2025-12-31 22:57:35
Date of submission: 2024-11-01 16:03:22
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