Castoriadis’ attention for the radical and unmotivated creations of the imaginary has always been perceived as a paradigmatic example of anti-naturalism. In recent years, however, some scholars have challenged this assumption and highlighted the crucial role of physis in his later writings. In this essay, I focus on this debate – is Castoriadis a naturalist or an anti-naturalist thinker? – to show how both options risk being one-sided. Against anti-naturalist readings, nature is always a central theme for Castoriadis, from The Imaginary Institution of Society to his ecological writings. In spite of this attention for nature, however, his later treatment of physis does not seem to solve the anti-naturalist tensions of his thought. In what follows, I will at first reconstruct the sense in which the social imaginary “leans on” nature, according to Castoriadis (§1); I will then reflect on some of the essays in which Castoriadis clarifies his conception of living and non-living nature, highlighting a possible tension between two levels (§2); lastly, I will focus on the structural link between capitalism and climate crisis. My claim is that Castoriadis’ attention for nature as a political issue exasperates, rather than solving, the tension between physis and nomos (§3).
