by Jeff Love
SELF-CERTAINTY
Kojève follows Hegel’s text much more closely in this part of his opening commentary, though he retains many of the same emphases as in his initial narrative of origins.58 He begins with a variant of the madness argument discussed above and then turns to a central emphasis of this portion of the commentary: the need to address the other as a way of securing one’s own certainty of oneself as an objective truth, not merely a subjective certainty.
The “first” man who meets another man for the first time already attributes an autonomous, absolute value to himself: one can say that he believes himself to be a man, that he has the “subjective certainty” of being a man. But his certainty is not yet knowledge. The value that he attributes to himself could be illusory; the idea that he has of himself could be false or mad. For that idea to be a truth, it must reveal an objective reality, that is, an entity that is valid and exists not only for itself, but also for realities other than itself. In the case in question, man, to be really, truly “man,” and to know that he is such, must, therefore, impose the idea that he has of himself on beings other than himself: he must be recognized by others (in the ideal, extreme case: by all others). Or again: he must transform the (natural and human) world in which he is not recognized into a world in which this recognition takes place. This transformation of the world that is hostile to a human project into a world in harmony with this project is called “action,” “activity.” This action—essentially human, because humanizing and anthropogenic—will begin with the act of imposing oneself on the “first” other man one will meet.59
Subjective certainty is epistemically suspect. I may suppose myself the king of Spain or a god or a pane of glass, but these are merely wind eggs of the imagination until another accepts my characterization of myself as such. My self-interpretation is merely a fancy until someone accepts it as true, as a reality. The upshot of this is obvious and troubling: objectivity has no ground outside this relation of one consciousness to another.60 Objectivity is not simply immanent in the world, is not something to which we all must jointly bow down. Rather, objectivity is the product of action, whereby I transform subjective certainty into objective truth by successfully imposing my self-interpretation on others as something they must accept themselves—indeed, this process of self-assertion constitutes my identity. I can only impose this, as we know, by showing my resolve to fight to the death for my subjective certainty, and provided I find others who prefer to accept enslavement rather than death. And the “first” enslavement is indeed the acceptance of the value imposed by another as being one’s own.
This acceptance as voluntary is the crucial beginning of the master-slave relation. But it is not its end. We must ask: What then is the end of this relation? Or, indeed, does this relation end? We may cite the cliché that all that begins must end, but it is hardly evident that this must be so.
Kojève insists, however, on an end. The slave is not content to remain a slave. Nor is the master content. The relation between master and slave is inherently unstable because it is not a relation that fully satisfies either. The reason for dissatisfaction lies in the fundamental inequality of the relation. The slave is not recognized as of equal worth, as being human, and the master is not recognized because the slave, not being human, is incapable of recognizing the master as equal. If the master seeks to secure his own sense of self by eliminating the other, he fails to the degree that the other is not fully capable of recognizing him except as a slave who is not human. The slave is not human precisely on account of his refusal to risk his life by fighting the master. As a result, the slave shows himself to be more concerned with self-preservation, or with the preservation of his animal existence, than with becoming truly human. In other words, the slave is unable or unwilling to recognize his identity as “pure negation” by engaging in the restless negation of the desire of the other and, thus, of his own animal desire (for self-preservation). As Kojève says, “Man is human only to the extent that he wants to impose himself on another man.”61
Yet it is one thing to say that the slave is not human and quite another to say that he seeks to be human, to be recognized. Why, after having surrendered to the master, does the slave not simply acquiesce in his servitude? How can the slave voluntarily accept a fate that he does not truly want?
There seems to be a conflict in the slave that does not have a correlate in the master, and one might argue that the disequilibrium in the relation between slave and master is reflected in the slave himself as a conflict between different kinds of desire with different objects. We have already identified two kinds of desire, animal and human, which are related to each other analogically, though their ends could not be more different—they are in fact essentially opposed. Animal desire may be boiled down to the desire to stay alive, the celebrated conatus that Spinoza defines as the essence of all living things.62
Human desire is not nearly so simple. Kojève first considers human desire as the desire to assimilate the desire of an other. This mildly pedantic way of expressing the essence of human desire allows us to bypass the simpler point: human desire is the desire to transform otherness into a reflection of itself, by substituting itself for all variant desires of any and all kinds. That is, human desire seeks to transform every otherness (both natural and human) into a reflection of itself, into a chorus in which all voices sing the same song or all plurality resolves itself in replication of the one. Human desire is at bottom the desire to be in a position vis-à-vis nature and other human beings that is equivalent to that of a god or God itself, since, as Kojève suggests, monotheism is the purification of polytheism.
Ultimately, to have the position of a god vis-à-vis all others means that all others must be slaves; that is, they must not be ready to become God themselves. The desire that is truly human eliminates all impediments to its hegemony, but it cannot be fulfilled by slaves. And here is the remarkable logic that Kojève begins to develop. The master must himself in some sense desire that his slaves become completely like him so that he may receive full recognition as an autonomous consciousness of which he is worthy. The master can, of course, only receive this recognition from another master, a recognition that is tantamount to the fullest self-consciousness because it is one that is absolutely pure, since both masters recognize themselves in the other—what is I is other, and what is other is I. Otherness per se has not been simply abolished; rather, it has been brought to a point of full self-reflection. To employ the metaphor of reflection again, we can say that the relation of God to his manifestations, as sought by the master in relation to his slaves, cannot be one of perfect reflection. There remains an otherness that is necessarily recalcitrant, that emerges as imperfect reflection of the master in any given slave. But this relation can be transformed to the extent the slave overcomes his attachment to animal desire, the blemish that impedes perfect reflection. It is only by overcoming this blemish, the slave in himself, that the slave may properly recognize the master for what he is.
This process occupies the final third of Kojève’s commentary, for, as Kojève repeatedly insists, the slave is dynamic, changing, the genuine motive force that creates history.63 In contrast to the slave, the master is an impasse. The master’s willingness to risk death to impose his value on the slave leaves the master with nothing to do. He cannot be properly recognized by the slave, to be sure, and he cannot directly bring about that recognition. The master is left in splendid repose, or languor (this being a deft parody of the Nietzschean master, who is all natural ferocity, a “bird of prey” among lambs). Only his involuntary influence brings about the end of his condition as not fully recognized—his “tragedy,” in Kojève’s words—by imposing servitude on the slave such that the slave seeks to free himself from that servitude. One is in fact not at all sure what this master can be. This master is a necessarily enigmatic being because he has no further desire to negate, no content for his negation, and thus no positive content, either. In the Kojèvian account, the
master acts merely as a trigger or “catalyst” for the beginning of a history that would not otherwise begin at all. But if the master is responsible for beginning history, he plays no further positive part in it. The master’s presence is negative, an absence to be overcome—the absence of freedom for the slave.64
The notion of freedom here should be quite concrete. The slave wants to enjoy the same freedoms as the master. It is important in this connection to recall that desire, for Kojève, is always mediated. But the slave, by definition, is the one who substitutes the desire of an other for his desire. The servant recognizes the master’s desire by negating his own, but the reverse is not the case. This reversal is the primary characteristic of the slave, who seeks recognition from the master by negating the negation of his own desire. The process of the negation of the master’s desire is what Kojève calls history. The slave makes history, not the master, who is essentially inert.
The negation of the master’s desire, however, is also an assumption of it. In other words, the negation of the master’s desire ends up preserving it as well, in a transformed desire.65 Here we need only recall the endlessly repeated caution about the German term Aufheben that Hegel employs to describe properly dialectical negation as both negation and preservation of what is negated. This movement of negation and preservation merely expresses the commonsense notion that negation bears the identity, if only in the negative, of the thing it negates. Thus, if the slave negates the master’s desire to substitute his value for that of the slave, the negation can only follow as a reversal of that substitution—if the master sought to assimilate the slave’s desire, the slave now seeks to assimilate the master’s desire.
The slave assimilates the master’s desire initially through work, the negation of nature. The slave works to transform the environment in order to feed the master. By doing so, the slave transforms not only nature but also his relation to the master, since the master becomes dependent on the work of the slave. The slave learns to plan, to organize, to calculate, to negate apparent natural immediacy or the connection to nature that made the slave into a slave in the first place. One could argue that the slave’s work, as such, is a negation of his origin, that the history created by the slave erases his history as a slave.
Therefore, by freeing the Slave from Nature, work frees him from himself as well, from his Slave’s nature: it frees him from the Master. In the raw, natural, given World, the Slave is slave of the Master. In the technical world transformed by his work, he rules—or, at least, will one day rule—as absolute Master. And this Mastery that arises from work, from the progressive transformation of the given World and of man given in this World, will be an entirely different thing from the “immediate” Mastery of the Master. The future and History hence belong not to the warrior-Master, who either dies or preserves himself indefinitely in identity with himself, but to the working Slave. The Slave, in transforming the given World by his work, transcends the given and what is given by that given in himself; hence, he goes beyond himself, and also goes beyond the Master who is tied to the given which, as one who is not working, he leaves intact. If the anguish of death, incarnated for the Slave in the person of the warrior-Master, is the sine qua non of historical progress, it is solely the Slave’s work that realizes and brings that progress to completion.66
Moreover, the slave learns to delay his own satisfaction—time first comes into being in the delay of satisfaction imposed by work. As such, there is a potential end to time as well, an end that seems to result from the achievement of final satisfaction.
Kojève confronts the issue of final satisfaction, appropriately enough, at the end of his commentary. Remarkable here is the focus on death, specifically on the anguish or fear of death. In the final account it is precisely this fear of death that makes the slave a slave and from which the slave seeks to free himself through work, through overthrowing the master, who represents for the slave the attachment to a world that the slave, in contrast to the master, cannot accept. Work is the emblem of nonacceptance, of the slave’s desire to overcome his status by overcoming the world ruled by the master—by transcending it.
The Master can never detach himself from the World in which he lives, and if this World perishes, he perishes with it. Only the Slave can transcend the given World (which is subjugated by the Master) and not perish. Only the Slave can transform the World that forms him and fixes him in slavery and create a World that he has formed in which he will be free. And the Slave achieves this through the forced and anguishing work carried out in the service of the Master. To be sure, this work by itself does not free him. But in transforming the World by his work, the Slave transforms himself, too, and thus creates the new objective conditions that permit him to take up once more the liberating Fight for recognition that he refused in the beginning for fear of death. And thus in the long run, all the work of servitude realizes not the Master’s will, but the will—at first unconscious—of the Slave, who—finally—succeeds where the Master—necessarily—fails.67
This is a very intriguing paragraph, as we shall see. One might expect that the work of the slave would in fact bring the slave into a relation of mutual recognition, the reciprocal recognition that would seem to be the proper resolution to the conflict opened by the slave’s initial acquiescence to the master, as is suggested by Kojève in other parts of the Hegel lectures. But Kojève does not say this here, at the beginning. Rather, the work of the slave transforms the world so completely that the master disappears, and the master disappears because death seems to disappear as well. For what, other than the conquest of death itself, might free the slave from the fears that made him a slave?
Kojève makes it clear that the slave transforms the “given world” into an artifact, becoming in that process a being that frees itself from its attachment to nature. As we know, the master cannot free himself from this attachment because the master, by definition, has no interest in changing the world. Strictly speaking, the master is utterly inscrutable for us because the master, as a contrast to the slave—that is, as one who is tied to the world he does not fear—cannot know growth, change, transformation. The master is free in this respect, and thus also nontemporal.
How could we imagine the master other than in a negative way? For we, as creations of the work of the slave, are now hard pressed to understand what mastery can mean other than in terms of our own technical mastery, the various modes by which we transform the world into one that no longer terrifies and estranges us. We become, to bend Novalis’s famous phrase, “everywhere at home.” If the threat of a fight to the death generates the emotion and the object, the potent fear of death, it also generates the radical overcoming of that fear, the creation of a being for which there is no fear at all, thus resembling the master by having transformed his forbidding world into one that offers us a home.
5
TIME NO MORE
Time shall be no more.
—Revelation 10:6
The philosopher is the slave par excellence.1 The philosopher is the being whose essence is change. The philosopher seeks to overcome the limitations that he encounters, that prescribe the situation in which he finds himself. The philosopher seeks not to remain a lover of wisdom, as the word philo-sophia indicates, but to become a sophos (ὁ σοφός), a wise being, one who transcends limitations in complete, unblemished self-awareness, capable of answering with perfect coherence all basic questions relating to his actions.2 The philosopher represents a bridge, a transition, to a different kind of being for whom nothing is unfamiliar, strange, novel. The philosopher, having become wise, has achieved what Novalis refers to in his romantic idiom—he has learned to be at home everywhere—and for him there is no more time because the philosopher has become at home in time. Even death no longer enthralls the philosopher. The nagging caution from Antigone that so exercised Martin Heidegger falls silent.3
Here in a nutshell is a description of central propositions that Kojève develops in the most extensive series
of lectures reproduced in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. This series comprises twelve lectures from the fateful years 1938–1939, the last years of Kojève’s seminar, which did not continue during the occupation of France. The lectures take up roughly a third of the French text of the Introduction. They are its centerpiece, the fullest unfolding of its central doctrines, and the most distinctively original aspect of Kojève’s reading of G. W. F. Hegel, weaving together the Hegelian narrative of struggle with a complex recasting of Vladimir Soloviev’s idea of divine humanity, or Sophia. Unfortunately, less than half of this particular lecture series is included in the English translation, an omission that seriously impedes access to the complicated core of Kojève’s thought for those who do not have French. It is no exaggeration to argue that this Kojève remains, in important respects, largely unknown in English.
My purpose in this chapter is to give an account of Kojève’s overriding concern with the sage, the wise man, or sophos, the guiding figure of the second major narrative developed in Kojève’s commentary. Philosophy comes to its end in the figure of the sage, who gives definition and thus sense to philosophy as a way of being or, put more simply, as a way of life. Kojève’s concern with the identity of the sage, then, is also a concern with the identity of philosophy; the two go together, and neither can be defined without reference to the other. Hence, to grasp Kojève’s understanding of philosophy, one has also to grasp his understanding of the sage. Moreover, Kojève’s concern with defining the sage unfolds in another context, that of the relation between master and slave that we examined in chapter 4. Kojève in effect superimposes two narratives, the master-and-slave narrative that he extracts from chapter 4 of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and the narrative of the sage, which he extracts from chapter 8, the final chapter of the work.