The Black Circle

by Jeff Love

  THE MAD DREAM OF PERFECTION

  Madness plays a significant role in Kojève’s thought.1 In his dispute with Leo Strauss over the political commitments of the philosopher, Kojève’s most striking argument against the sheltered, contemplative philosophical life is that it cannot successfully differentiate itself from madness. Kojève maintains that the philosopher’s isolated judgment that his knowledge is superior—that he or she knows something more—is invalidated by the fact that there is madness, “which, insofar as it is a correct deduction from subjectively evident premises, can be ‘systematic’ or ‘logical.’ ” The philosopher who claims to know is simply not that distant from “the madman who believes that he is made of glass, or who identifies with God the father or with Napoleon.”2 There is biting irony in these comparisons, since they call into question the authority of several leading figures in the Western tradition as well as a key element in the philosophical tradition, the divine madness or θεία μάνια that compels the genuinely philosophical mind to look beyond appearances, to resist the rule of the given by attempting to understand it—that is, by attempting to know something more.

  While Kojève’s argument clearly alludes to Plato (and Christ), he also alludes to one of the dominating figures in Russian literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose brooding creation, the theoretical murderer Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, very much identified with Napoleon Bonaparte.3 But there is another character in Dostoevsky’s work who may hold even more significance for Kojève in this respect: Alexei Nilych Kirillov, the theoretician of suicide in Dostoevsky’s third large novel, Demons. By tracing the link between these references to Plato and Dostoevsky, in the next several chapters, I aim to reveal how Dostoevsky’s development of the notion of madness creates a framework articulating essential issues at stake in the subsequent Russian debates about the proper ends of human life—and the end of history—as a prolegomenon to consideration of Kojève’s reading of G. W. F. Hegel.

  To anticipate, I argue that Dostoevsky revives and clarifies the association of the striving for perfection, either as a striving to found the perfect city or to overcome all limitations of finite existence, with madness, albeit madness touched by the divine. Dostoevsky portrays this madness in a decidedly negative light, offering in its stead a portrait of radical finitude. Dostoevsky thus sets off an ambiguous hero of nonfinality against the hero of finality, perfection.4 Two of the main lines of thought emerging in his wake, that of Vladimir Soloviev and of Nikolai Fedorov, develop this Dostoevskian problematic, if in radically opposed ways, as we shall see. For his part, Kojève reprises substantial elements of the Dostoevskian position in his interpretation of Hegel by interpreting the ascent to absolute knowledge as a philosophical, even atheist, variant of deification, of becoming wise or a god on earth—a terminal, finite one.5 Here the ambiguity of Kojève’s approach is particularly evident. One may read Kojève as both repeating and overturning the Dostoevskian critique, as positing the sheer madness of striving to assume the role of an embodied god as the wise man—the σοφός—or its supreme sanity as the proper end of distinctively human life.

  In this respect, Kojève’s Hegel dares to conclude the extraordinary and complicated history of both philosophy and deification in one stroke, fulfilling the promises and warnings made in Plato’s two fundamental works about love, the Phaedrus and the Symposium. It is surely no accident that these works lay the foundations for central narrative patterns of Western action and thought by eroticizing both, a move whose extraordinary strangeness Kojève recovers in his commentary on Hegel and in the later works that I will discuss in chapter 8, with a fundamental difference: if deification ends up in silence for Plato, in Kojève it is the result of a comprehensive Hegelian discourse narrating the ascent to wisdom as our gradual assumption of divine identity.

  PLATO

  The problem of madness appears frequently and in many guises in the Platonic dialogues. The philosopher appears to the uninitiated, after all, as having lost his bearings. Nothing could make this point more starkly than the descent of the enlightened prisoner back into the cave after having glimpsed the “things higher up” (τὰ ἄνω ὄψεσθαι).6 The other prisoners seek to kill the one who has seen the higher realm. They fear and loathe him, giving birth to the cliché, flattering to the followers of Socrates and to many others claiming similar privilege, that the prophet of the truth is immediately decried by the many who are incapable and, therefore, unwilling to understand the truth brought to them. It is but a short step to the conclusion that the bearer of truth is a madman, for in the eyes of those who cannot conceive of any reality other than the one before them, such a figure may only be mad.

  Plato makes this notion of madness central to the Phaedrus, where he famously refers to the striving to attain a vision of the “things higher up” as a blessed or divine madness, that is, a madness coming from the gods themselves.7 What this provenance suggests for Plato, as opposed to the Greek tradition, may be gleaned from the narrative about the nature of the soul that Socrates provides in the dialogue. It is well to recall here that the dialogue takes place outside the city walls, near a stream infused with narrative, particularly the narrative of the snatching away of Oreithyia by Boreas, the north wind. As other commentators have noted, situating the dialogue outside the city in a place of rapacious mythic abandon is highly significant, for it emphasizes the tension in the dialogue between emancipation and restraint, which is arguably one of its most important thematic structures. The tension may be best described as one between license, the apparent freedom to let one’s desires express themselves as they will, and the restraint that comes from reining in those desires so as not to harm others, so as to live tolerably well within the city according to its laws.

  This tension emerges directly in the discussion of eros itself as a way of referring to the impulsion to throw off restraint, not only in the pursuit of given objects, like the girl Oreithyia, but also, more fundamentally, in pursuit of emancipation from restraint of any kind other than the restraint imposed by the pursuit of emancipation itself. This latter pursuit seems to be associated with the divine—as if one were stung by the god—because it seeks to partake in the radical freedom the gods enjoy, perhaps the most radical freedom imaginable: the freedom from death.

  Socrates’s expression is telling. After listening to Phaedrus’s reading of a speech attributed to Lysias and making a speech of his own, the notoriously uncreative, maieutic gadfly creates in his second speech a remarkable counternarrative. Socrates begins this narrative by asserting that the divine is soul and that “all soul is without death” (ψυχὴ πᾶσα ἀθάνατος).8 The Greek suggests a unified, atemporal “thing,” which, as such, cannot really be a thing at all. More curious still is that this unique, invisible, unimaginable thing is what the erotic seeker or lover pursues, namely, communion with the deathless or, in the more common Latinate paraphrase, immortality itself. Yet if the object defines the quest—and surely it must, for the quest depends entirely on the object, without which it would not take place at all—then this quest is of a most unusual kind. What is it, after all, to pursue immortality as communion with something that cannot be a thing, whose identity is perhaps best described as a resistance to identity?

  The most obvious response is that such a quest is simply mad. It carries within itself a contradiction or problem that belies the appeal of immortality as the proper end of human activity. If Plato notes elsewhere that the governing eros of human activity is oriented toward immortality, he is rather more reticent to clarify what the consequence of this activity might be. And there is good reason for such reticence, since the quest for immortality seems indistinguishable from the most complete eradication of oneself as a being in time and space, having a particular language, gender, age, and color. Put more bluntly, the quest for immortality is in this sense the most radical expression of the eradication of the seeker or the lover—what we may now call the self. The quest for immortality is a ques
t for self-immolation: suicide.

  Divine madness is madness precisely because it beckons the seeker or lover to suicide. The philosopher as the most genuine avatar of the seeker is the most avid suicide of all. As such, why would the philosopher ever return to the cave, to the city? What drives the philosopher away from the highest, most noble goal?

  Socrates is clear on this: the body. The primary reason that the philosopher is unable to retain his relation to the soul as the inviolate, invisible immortal is because of the interference of the body. The image of the soul losing its wings, an image worthy of Aristophanes’s version of the erotic being in the Symposium, is central to Socrates’s narrative in the Phaedrus. Not only does this image anchor the narrative but also it is a figuration of that narrative itself. Let me explain this latter point first.

  Socrates emphasizes that the narrative is little more than a figuration. “So, then, concerning the immortality of the soul this is enough; but concerning its appearance [ἰδέα], one must speak as follows. To tell what it really is would be matter for an immense and divine description, while what it is like belongs to a human and lesser one.”9 This reduction to human terms is in itself as grotesque and inhuman as the image of the soul provided by the description itself—it is evident that no merely human description may do justice to the soul. Narrative or myth, that is, can be little more than an approximation, and, even as such, this approximation is problematic because it borders on the edge of the ridiculous to translate into an image that which by definition has and can have no image.

  This proviso about the mythic narrative suggests that it is little more than a fiction making a promise it cannot possibly keep. If one were less charitable, one could argue that the proviso tells us that the mythic narrative is merely a lie, a cousin to the necessary or noble lie (γενναῖον ψεῦδος) that features so prominently in the Republic.10 Insofar as it is a lie, it is a necessarily grotesque distortion of what it purports to describe. This is worth keeping in mind.

  The narrative itself is quite simple:

  We will liken the soul to the composite nature of a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the horses and charioteers of the gods are all good and of good descent, but those of the other races are mixed; and first the charioteer of the human soul drives a pair, and secondly one of the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character. Therefore in our case the driving is necessarily difficult and troublesome. Now we must try to tell why a living being is called mortal or immortal. Soul, considered collectively, has the care of all that which is soulless, and it traverses the whole heaven, appearing sometimes in one form and sometimes in another; now when it is perfect and fully winged, it mounts upwards and governs the whole world; but the soul which has lost its wings is borne along until it gets hold of something solid, when it settles down, taking upon itself an earthly body, which seems to be self-moving, because of the power of the soul within it; and the whole compounded of soul and body, is called a living being, and is further designated as mortal.11

  This living or mortal body is beset by conflict because it brings together heterogeneous elements. Whereas the divine intelligence beholds what is unchanging and thus perfect because it is free of the interference of the body, the mortal intelligence cannot free itself of this interference. Therefore, the mortal intelligence is not capable of sustaining perfection; the most it can do is glimpse the perfection that it cannot durably possess. Socrates continues:

  Of the other souls, that which best follows after God and is most like him, raises the head of the charioteer up into the outer region and is carried round in the revolution, troubled by the horses and hardly beholding the realities; and another sometimes rises and sometimes sinks, and, because its horses are unruly, it sees some things and fails to see others. The other souls follow after, all yearning for the upper region but unable to reach it, and are carried around beneath, trampling upon and colliding with one another, each striving to pass its neighbor.12

  This mythic narrative, which may have once seemed so dangerous as to merit the execution of its author, is now the stuff of cliché. The narrative of the errant soul—errant because embodied or “fallen”—striving to return to its origin in a perfect heavenly realm may be found hidden in almost countless forms, from the remnants of Christian narrative to the progress narratives that still hold sway in the secular imagination as narratives of self-improvement or, perhaps most ironically, of sensual satisfaction.

  The majority of these narratives express little more than a desire to be freed of limitations associated with our emplacement in the physical world. They are in this sense dreams of another world. Their relation to the world of quotidian experience is effectively a nonrelation for those who spot the contradiction inherent in identifying a world of pure form in terms of a world of impure forms, a contradiction that otherwise might be expressed as one between a world outside and a world inside of time. That a world outside of time might even exist is a logical problem that narrative works to conceal or disguise. And this may be said for Plato too. The Platonic narrative that purports to describe the perfect realm must be false, since perfection—pure unity—cannot be described without transforming it into what it is not.

  Madness is thus a decidedly uncritical affair. To be stung by the gods is to be intoxicated with lies, stories, possibilities that may never be realized. But, as Socrates says, “Madness that comes from a god is superior to sanity, which is of human origin” (τόσῳ κάλλιον μαρτυροῦσιν οἱ παλαιοὶ μανίαν σωφροσύνης τὴν ἐκ θεοῦ τῆς παρ᾿ ἀνθρώπων γιγνομένης).13 Better to be mad than reasonable; better inspired than prudent; better filled with fictions than fixated (dully) on what is already “real.”

  What are we to make of this madness, then? On the one hand, we might read this divine madness through one of its successors, the romantic notion of inspiration or genius, according to which an individual expresses, as if chosen by the muses, the universal current of our lives otherwise hidden in their particularity. The artist is in this sense the privileged vehicle of the divine, the one who divines in the smithy of his soul the “uncreated conscience” of the race.14 On the other hand, we might read this divine madness as the most powerful expression of the desire to free ourselves from all limitation, as I have suggested. But this freedom also has several facets: it can be a freedom expressed as a freedom to create whose most radical, far-reaching, and disturbing facet is the attempt to create ourselves wholly anew, a self-creation that transforms the human being, stuck in mortality, into a being no longer stuck in mortality but no longer recognizable, either.

  This dual quality of erotic ascent is even clearer in the celebrated “ladder of love” example from the Symposium, a work traditionally linked to the Phaedrus:

  “A lover who goes about this matter correctly must begin in his youth to devote himself to beautiful bodies. First, if the leader leads aright, he should love one body and beget beautiful ideas there; then he should realize that the beauty of any one body is brother to the beauty of any other and that if he is to pursue beauty of form he’d be very foolish not to think that the beauty of all bodies is one and the same. When he grasps this, he must become a lover of all beautiful bodies, and he must think that this wild gaping after just one body is a small thing and despise it.

  “After this he must think that the beauty of people’s souls is more valuable than the beauty of their bodies, so that if someone is decent in his soul, even though he is barely blooming in his body, our lover must be content to love and care for him and to seek to give birth to such ideas as will make young men better. The result is that our lover will be forced to gaze at the beauty of activities and laws and to see that all this is akin to itself, with the result that he will think that the beauty of bodies is a thing of no importance. After customs he must move to the various kinds of knowledge. The result is that he will see the beauty of knowledge and
be looking mainly not at beauty in a single example—as a servant would who favored the beauty of a little boy or a man or a single custom (being a slave, of course, he’s low and small-minded)—but the lover is turned to the great sea of beauty, and, gazing upon this, in unstinting love and wisdom, until, having grown and been strengthened there, he catches sight of such knowledge, and it is knowledge of such beauty.”

  What is this beauty?

  “First, it always is and neither comes to be or passes away, neither waxes nor wanes. Second, it is not beautiful in this way and ugly that way, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another, nor beautiful in relation to one thing and ugly in relation to another; nor is it beautiful here but ugly there, as it would be if it were beautiful for some people and ugly for others. Nor will the beautiful appear to him in the guise of a face or hands or anything else that belongs to the body. It will not appear to him as one idea or one kind of knowledge. It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself, it is always one in form; and all the other beautiful things share in that, in such a way that when those others come to be or pass away, this does not become the least bit smaller or greater nor suffer any change.”

  Then a summary:

  “One goes always upwards for the sake of this beauty, starting out from beautiful things and using them like rising stairs: from one body to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, then from beautiful bodies to beautiful customs, and from customs to learning beautiful things, and from these lessons he arrives in the end at this lesson, which is learning of this very Beauty, so that in the end he comes to know just what it is to be beautiful.”15

  Beauty is both plenitude and nothingness, positive and negative perfection. It does not take much effort to conclude, however, that positive and negative perfection are in fact one and the same, since full identity is no more capable of being grasped as a thing than full nonidentity. Both exceed what we may understand by a thing, that is, by any particular thing in the world. If we cannot understand perfection in terms of things or objects, then we are hard pressed to understand what perfection may mean, for understanding requires a syntax or “logic” of relations that the notion of perfection, predicated on pure self-consistency, must exclude as its very condition of possibility, to employ a Kantian turn of phrase. The striving for perfection, either as plenitude or nothingness, then, is madness insofar as it seeks in either case the completely unconditioned, the absolute, what has no relation to anything else—the very antithesis of sociality, of life.