IN SEARCH OF THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE SOCIAL IN THE LATE MODERN AND POSTMODERN ERA: RADICALIZATION OF REFLECTIVENESS BY E. GIDDENS AND ABSOLUTIZATION OF THE IMAGINARY BY K. CASTORIADIS

Abstract

Completion of modern generates a question, that, actually, is reality and whether it is possible in general according to her theoretical description. In a background it there is various postmodern reinterpretations of social – from a statement about disappearance of social to his rescue through radical rethinking. Anthony Giddens belongs to the philosophers that try to "prolong" the lives of modern through his radical rethinking in the epoch of globalization. And a philosopher does it through the radicalization of one of the basic foundations of modernity – through radicalization of reflection, that is investigated in the article. The dynamism of social life destabilizes an everyday life that already is not provided in a complete measure by the mechanisms of tradition but needs, in the opinion of philosophers, an all greater reflection.
Giddens's postmodernism is the globalists of risks, uncertainty, the end of the direct power of traditions, and radical reflection that outpoured into the reflexive proactivity of the self and needs an articulated and conceptually defined imagined in Castoriadis.
Cornelius Castoriadis reacts somewhat differently to the realities of a rapidly changing world. Dissociating himself from the functionalist mainstream of social theory, from the tradition of "interpretive sociology", trying to conceptualize the dynamic environment as it is, which constantly generates various forms of social life, the philosopher problematizes and absolutizes the concept of the imaginary, which keeps the rational in itself in a primordial and infinite indistinctness.
The social concept of Cornelius Castoriadis involves the criticism of "naive realism" in the perception of social life, the separation from the "functional-economic" view as an exemplary embodiment of "real-rational" thinking and the identification of the symbolic component of social "things" and the understanding of institutions as functional and symbolic networks.
So, if the dynamism of postmodern social life prompts Giddens to radicalize reflection, then the loss of stability and intelligibility leads Castoriadis to thematize the imaginary, virtual dimension of social life, to develop a metaphorical ontology of the "magma" of social imaginary meanings.