Seminar from February 16, 1983

This chapter concerns the Milesian thinkers and above all Anaximander and the fragment attributed to him. Castoriadis reads the Milesians with emphasis on the conceptual linkage between two pairs of opposing significations, namely chaos/kosmos and hybris/dikē. He then argues that they initiated an attempt to investigate an origin or principle that is distinct from any mythical conception inasmuch as it is necessarily something unrepresentable. In Anaximander this principle receives its full expression through the notion of the apeiron, or the indefinite. Castoriadis then critically discusses Heidegger’ translation of the Anaximander fragment, giving special attention to the various core meanings of the verb einai, or being. As Castoriadis argues, Anaximander ultimately understands beings as offering justice and punishment to themselves for their own hybris. And existing as such, he argues, should be seen as adikia or hybris, i.e., as transgression. Castoriadis closes with an anecdote about the tyrant Polycrates of Samos. In question-and-answer, he responds with comments on the Greek terms chreōn and apeiron.