by Jeff Love
Kojève does not tie the two narratives together explicitly, though it is clear that the philosopher is a slave. Since the interrelation of these two primary narratives is a central facet of Kojève’s thought in the Introduction, I want to give a brief account of how the philosopher fits into the master-and-slave narrative, as a preliminary step on the way to a fuller understanding of the significance of Kojève’s concern with the sage.
PHILOSOPHY AND SERVITUDE
As we have seen, Kojève conceives of the master as being at an impasse. A master can do literally nothing of fundamental importance, as we understand it, because the essence of the master is to remain the same, that is, not to change. The master has shown us, through his willingness to die, that he has no attachment to change. The willingness to die in order to impose his desire on the slave is the starkest expression of his unwillingness to change.
The moment when the slave refuses to fight, the pivotal moment that defines the slave as such, is also the moment when the slave opens himself to change. The slave cannot remain the same and live. The two propositions find themselves in contradiction, and it is precisely this contradiction that the slave seeks to overcome. For the slave is never “himself” until he is capable of assuming an identity that is no longer an identity defined by what amounts to a lack of identity. As long as the slave must change to adapt to the desire of the master, the slave is, strictly speaking, only identifiable as a nullity.
This may seem to be too strong a term. What can “nullity” mean? It means that the master does not recognize the slave. The master only recognizes the slave to the extent that the slave adapts to the desires of the master and substitutes those desires for his own. In this sense, the slave is nothing more than a cipher or a tool whose identity is defined by the master in relation to the tasks the slave is asked to perform by the master. The slave may remain as such, a tool without identity, but as we know, the slave is not content or satisfied to remain in that position. The slave’s refusal to die leads to a life of combating nonidentity.
Kojève insists that the relation of master and slave itself changes in proportion to the master’s increasing dependence on the slave. This insistence warrants closer examination for the assumptions it reveals. These assumptions boil down to one basic proposition, not stated openly, but inferable from the structure of recognition itself: that inequality cannot maintain itself indefinitely. The corollary is to assert that harmony or equilibrium must rule in the end. This certainly does seem to be the basic import of the recognition thesis, that the initial disequilibrium—in which neither party to the fight that does not take place receives the recognition it seeks—must lead to the establishment of an equilibrium—mutual recognition.
Another way to express this is through a simple formula, now practically a commonplace: lack breeds desire, which seeks to overcome that lack. If we regard disequilibrium as a kind of lack, then it follows that disequilibrium invites its own refutation. But is there any reason that we must accept this “logic”? Is this, indeed, a logic? Can we not conceive of a permanent instability, a permanent inequality? Can we not agree with the underground man that, in some cases, our desire does not obey the “logic” of equilibrium, the imperative of equilibrium to overcome the lack?
We must be very precise here. What lack is at issue? What is the slave’s lack? Is it merely identity? What dominates the slave, what creates his identity as such, is the initial fear that created him: the fear of death. The lack that initiates the slave’s life is a profound lack, the lack of permanence expressed by death. The slave is indeed the being that recognizes impermanence, and in this sense the slave’s transitory, temporal being is the expression par excellence of finitude, of the being that cannot maintain its own being, that cannot transform it from the transitory to the permanent.
If we map the patterns onto each other, we see that the fundamental lack of identity is defined by an equally fundamental lack, the lack of being. Here we may be tempted to apply a sweeping statement to the slave: that desire is essentially oriented to maintaining one’s own being. Baruch Spinoza’s simple proposition triumphs—self-preservation is the primary rule. But is this really so? One could just as easily come to the point that self-preservation is precisely what the slave seeks to overcome, that a more complicated or subtle kind of desire is at work in the slave.
This more complicated desire is to be freed from the desire for self-preservation in order to be recognized by the master. Freedom and recognition go hand in hand; the one is not possible without the other. The slave’s work for the master becomes in this respect a task of overcoming the fear that created the slave relationship in the first place; it is an immense task of reversal and transformation. The parable of the slave is not one of mere contentment with servitude, with self-preservation on the condition of denial of recognition or identity. On the contrary, the parable of the slave is eminently human in the sense that it describes a desire to be recognized, which reverses the slave’s initial “mistake”—his refusal to fight, based on the fear of death—by transforming the world of the master into a world that belongs to the slave, not only with regard to the master of this initial fight for recognition but also with regard to the other masters that stand within that struggle, as moves in the game created by that struggle: God and death.
If death is the “absolute master,” in Hegel’s words, Kojève situates mastery within the social struggle that opens up history. This struggle can only come to an end with the overcoming of the social master and the fear that initiated the slave’s position of social inferiority or nonrecognition. It is important to keep in mind here, then, that the slave’s project is not one of personal salvation in some “beyond” but of salvation through recognition in this world, as it is created by the slave. Indeed, the world created by the slave, the state freed of all constraints on recognition, the essentially egalitarian state or, as Kojève calls it, the “universal and homogeneous state,” is first and foremost a vehicle of salvation through mutual recognition.
What remains murky here is the relation of this universal recognition to death. Kojève admits that the slave transforms the world through technology, and it seems clear that the slave’s work must eliminate anything that may serve to impede full recognition—like the slave’s initial fear of death—but Kojève is not so clear about whether transformation of the world entails the most radical possibility in the overcoming of death or not. We will return to this theme explicitly when we come to discuss the final lectures recorded in the Introduction, which address the issue of death directly. Suffice it to say for the moment that Kojève’s attitude toward death is strangely ambiguous in this respect. This is a matter of no small importance, because there is a substantial difference, to put it mildly, between a Fedorovian account of emancipation that insists on the literal emancipation from death as a necessary condition of emancipation and one that does not go that far. In the first case, emancipation affirms the importance of the individual—the fear of death evinces an overwhelming attachment to individuality—whereas in the second case this is not clearly so, for collective identity seems to prevail.
To put this important point with all possible simplicity: to argue that literal emancipation from death is the precondition of any political emancipation is to insist on the primacy of the individual, of the body. The only other mode of emancipation from death is figurative, and the central model here is Christ, whose death is indeed a parable for the death of the self that gives birth to a community based on the primacy of communal, not personal, identity. We might infer from this distinction Kojève’s inclination to view the overcoming of the fear of death as a basic commitment to community, to the creation of a collective identity, since the notion of personal identity that one may connect with literal emancipation from death seems to be largely incoherent, as we shall see.4
While Kojève recommends overcoming the fear of death through work and community, in the introduction to the Hegel lectures, he also describes what
appears to be another, quite different approach in the lectures from the fateful years 1936–1937: the overcoming of the fear of death through terror.5 Kojève is blunt:
One more time: it is by Terror that Slavery ceases, even the relation of Master and Slave and thus Christianity. From henceforth Man will seek Befriedigung [Satisfaction] on this earth and within a State (where there will no longer be absolute freedom—except for the leader who is Napoleon; however, one could say that even this freedom is limited by reality; nonetheless the head of the post-revolutionary State is fully “satisfied” by his action, since this reality that limits him is his own creation.6
The embrace of terror as demonstrating the slave’s willingness to die, and thus to accept death as a revolutionary soldier, does not initially appear to fit well with the notion of overcoming death through work. Are these indeed alternative presentations of the end of servitude and therewith the end of history or do they have a complementary relation to each other, the peace ushered in by the universal and homogeneous state being the necessary condition for the final overcoming of nature, a structure very reminiscent of Nikolai Fedorov’s thought? In most cases, Kojève simply combines the two by suggesting that it is struggle and work that go together in the creation of final emancipation.
These differing versions or stages of emancipation reflect the dual nature of the slave, who is both animal and human, both a product of the assertion of self-preservation—the refusal to fight to the death—and of the human capacity to negate that refusal. As a product of self-preservation, the slave should not seek to change. But the fact that the slave does change is clear evidence of his essential “humanity,” in Kojève’s terms. To change, even if at the behest of the master, is to take the risk of creating (a human) identity and, through the work of transformation of the world, to take the risks necessary to tame and master nature by transforming it into an artifact.
Yet, while the transformation of the world may bring substantial risks, the result of this transformation is not to face death voluntarily in a violent uprising (the terror) but to obliterate it; the slave’s “revenge” against death is the technological world. So, despite the humanizing appearance, it is just as likely that the conquest of nature through work may resemble a kind of bestialization. The other possibility, that the slave obliterates the master in the terror accompanying the universalist revolution, comes far closer to avoiding this sort of bestialization.
At play in both these examples is self-preservation. Emancipation, according to Kojève, can only result from overcoming self-preservation. Yet the mere fact that the slave continues to live calls his emancipation into question—full emancipation leaves one with the impasse of the master, an unlivable life. Thus, we may infer that the slave does not achieve full emancipation, that full emancipation is not compatible with continued existence, since every moment of continued existence implies at least a very basic adherence to self-preservation, whether individual or collective. At the very minimum, then, we nourish ourselves and protect ourselves from basic dangers—our fear of death is maintained.
The emancipated slave, which Kojève refers to as the “citizen” (citoyen), both warrior and worker, god and beast, is thus a curious hybrid, and it is not clear that Kojève resolves the tensions inherent in this hybrid even in the universal and homogeneous state where conflict has been eradicated though the imperative to self-preservation has not been, at least to the extent that the citizens of the universal and homogeneous state continue to live. There seems to be no way to reconcile complete emancipation (or “absolution”) from servitude with the servitude to the body that is the necessary result of respecting the imperative to self-preservation (if only in the form of continued living). Even if we argue that the slave’s emancipation is effected through the humanizing process of revolution and work, whereby the world is transformed into an artifact, the slave becoming thus a fusion of worker and warrior, the problem of continued existence does not simply cease unless that continued existence takes on a radically different form, showing no servitude to physical need whatsoever. And this possibility may indeed be what Kojève has in mind, though he never definitively clarifies the issue. He looks at the post-historical being as a beast or a god or neither.7 For that matter, as a fusion of worker and warrior, the citizen should be beyond both.
To return to the main thread of our account: the slave’s “project” of transforming the world and his master is thus the essence of history as Kojève understands it; namely, as the social struggle to establish equality of recognition, whereby master and slave overcome that relation in the new—and final—relation of mutual recognition denoted by the term “citizen.” The various shapes of the slave’s evolving relation to the world are indeed the shapes of social consciousness, whose description and integration are, for Kojève, the primary ends of the Phenomenology.8 The Phenomenology announces the self-consciousness of the slave and, in so doing, leads to the overcoming of the slave’s dependence on a world that is external to him by showing that the external world is a creation of the slave—that it is in fact as much dependent on the slave as the slave is dependent on it. Here, once again, the assumption of equilibrium shows itself as essential to the Phenomenology understood as analysis and project—that is, as a project of dissemination of the final truth, harmonious plenitude.
As we have just seen, however, Kojève is hardly sanguine about the possibility of this final harmonious plenitude. The tension in the slave between self-preservation and self-abnegation or immolation admits of no easy resolution. If Kojève promotes the universal and homogeneous state precisely as the locus of this resolution, he also denies that that state is capable of the full freedom that he otherwise associates with suicide or coming to accept one’s essential emptiness or identity with death.9 We are left with a tension that comes to the surface, in the lectures on absolute knowing, in different terms: as visions of the post-historical state that seem to diverge from Kojève’s generally positive accounts of the universal and homogeneous state, the final “superstate” created by the man of action and described by the philosopher.
Given the foregoing, it may well be that the Fedorovian reading is most attractive and consistent, the universal and homogeneous state constituting the transitional postrevolutionary political structure on the way to the attainment of the complete negation of nature through work. Nonetheless, Kojève shows tremendous ambivalence about this final goal, an ambivalence that has to do with what is left after the end has been achieved. The citizen of the fully realized universal and homogeneous state, the warrior-worker, seems to be nothing more than an automaton, a living death, neither animal nor human but the product of the apparent disappearance of both at the end of history.
Where does the philosopher fit in this narrative? The first and perhaps most obvious inference is that philosophy is the expression of the consciousness of the slave. The grand movement of the Phenomenology is the record of the slave’s conscious discovery of himself as slave and of the transformation of that slave being into a being that is beyond both master and slave: the sage. The Phenomenology is thus a very special kind of book, both philosophical and beyond the limits of philosophy. In this sense, one can say that the Phenomenology brings an end to philosophy as a temporal discourse by seeing, from a view no longer temporally limited, beyond what philosophy has hitherto seen, because it is finished, complete and absolute, “absolved” of all unrealized possibility. And one of Kojève’s probing concerns is to ascertain just what such a view might be.
These are sweeping claims. All too often, Kojève has been accused of making sweeping claims without grounding them sufficiently in the text or a web of argument. For this reason, I want to address these claims by a careful examination of Kojève’s account of the sage, which emerges in his reading of the final and “most cryptic” chapter of the Phenomenology.10
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE SAGE
We may express Kojève’s fundamental point quite simply: the Phenomenology is the �
�autobiography” of the sage who is all and none; it is the book the sage creates as “proof” of his wisdom and as a fundamental constitutive document of the state created by and for the sage, the universal and homogeneous state.11 Hence, the account of the master-and-slave relation is the slave’s account of his own origins—the beginning of his journey to the overcoming of his slave being in the figure of the sage. The philosopher is the intermediary figure that describes the various stages of the slave’s self-overcoming as different ways of taking account of his situation, culminating in the complete self-awareness of the sage.12 Kojève uses the term “conscience de soi,” literally “awareness of oneself,” or self-consciousness. “Self-consciousness” is in fact preferable because it foregrounds the collective aspect of awareness, evidenced by the etymology of the term (the Latin cum, “with,” and scientia, “knowledge”), an aspect of the term not available in the German (Selbstbewußtsein). Hence, the translation of the German into French here has philosophical significance because it exposes the public aspect of consciousness, that consciousness is in fact the expression of an awareness that is not some essentially inchoate sense of self but rather is a cultural artifact “produced” by the slave in his struggle with the master.
This clarification may in turn serve to put in bold relief one of the most distinctive aspects of Kojève’s account of the sage: that the sage is not a lonely individual but a public (and political) figure to the very highest degree. Kojève stresses time and again that the sage cannot come into being without the establishment of the universal and homogeneous state. By doing so, Kojève eviscerates a long tradition according to which the sage walls himself off from the world in lonely self-contemplation or meditation. This wisdom figure is, for Kojève, only one station on the way to the full unfolding of wisdom, and it is inadequate precisely because it fails to take action to transform the world into a proper place for the sage to live openly with other human beings rather than hidden away from them in isolation or in the kind of cloistered community that is unable to defend itself from accusations of madness.13 For Kojève, the very universality of the sage requires a universal state in which all citizens are effectively sages—the sage, as such, is the final figure of human existence, the figure that establishes the very equilibrium that I have already mentioned as the decisive assumption of Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel.