The Black Circle

by Jeff Love

  I mention this central point now because it is properly preliminary to any discussion of the sage. It is all too easy to impute to Kojève’s discussion of the sage traditional notions of the wisdom figure as being alone, apart, above—in short, as having failed to extend his perfect self-consciousness to all. But, of course, this failure is fundamental. One of Kojève’s principal insights is to assert that there is no private wisdom that deserves the name of wisdom. He argues that such wisdom cannot really be wisdom because it cannot successfully distinguish itself from madness. The sage’s apartness, his isolation from the many, is indeed a kind of madness to the degree that the many simply cannot understand or grasp what the sage has to tell them.14 Kojève quite astutely infers that this notion of the sage requires the creation of a source of wisdom away and apart from the world that acts as a bastion of authority, which may justify the sage’s failure to convince others of his wisdom.

  This aspect of Kojève’s lectures—that they attempt to persuade—should not be underestimated.15 There is unquestionably a mirror effect at work here, for the comments that Kojève makes about the sage apply to his own declaration (albeit derived from Hegel) that he has achieved wisdom. Kojève’s autobiography of the sage is one that he assumes in propagating it, and his resulting philosophical pedagogy is an effort to persuade his listeners to accept this model of the sage, for it is only this acceptance that will give it the value of a full and final truth—a point that is worth underscoring again and again in the context of Kojève’s lectures. Kojève’s famous comment to the effect that his lectures were a form of philosophical propaganda can all too easily serve to dismiss the more comprehensive and interesting philosophical point he makes about the nature of the sage and the truth, that they are not, so to speak, purely theoretical creations but rather require action to become realized. As Kojève notes in his postwar epitome “Hegel, Marx and Christianity,” Hegel’s is the only philosophy that has not yet been refuted, because the nature of his philosophical project is precisely that it is a project to put into effect. The slogan here—an estranging one, to be sure—is that one must act or work to create the truth; the task of philosophy is the work of truth, to produce the truth.16

  Reading the Introduction is a work of philosophical pedagogy meant to bring about wisdom, not to discover it as if it were always already there. Wisdom is thus a discursive creation of the philosopher, an end that the philosopher sets for himself. In this respect, we may return to the discussion of Kojève’s approach to the task of commentary in a new light. If Kojève is arguably not as fanciful or arbitrary a commentator as some of his critics would have us believe, there can be little doubt that his purpose appears to be different from that typically associated with commentaries or scholarly literature in general. Kojève’s commentary has an openly political task: to bring about the conditions allowing for the establishment of a political reality that would permit the completion of the philosophical endeavor in the figure of the sage. Kojève is thus not revealing to us a correct reading of what is there in the text; rather, he is reading the text in such a way as to offer it as guidance for a project of completion to be undertaken by those who are willing to listen and follow, to undergo “conversion” to the truth.

  This intent is clear from the very outset of the lectures. Kojève makes an interesting point when he indicates that the sage is not the necessary end of history. Kojève first indicates that the notion of the sage is “only valid for the philosopher.” He supports this claim by noting that it is only the philosopher who “wishes at all costs to know where he is, to take account of what he is, who does not go further without first having taken account of what he is.”17 The upshot of this is that the philosopher is the one who acts, only after having taken account of where and what he is. In other words, the philosopher is the one who is self-conscious and, accordingly, the only one likely to accept the challenge of wisdom grasped as complete self-consciousness. The philosopher is thus the one who seeks to account fully for all actions in which he is involved, who seeks to be in this sense omniscient, satisfied, and morally perfect, as Kojève notes.

  If the philosopher is the only one likely to be interested in the ideal of the sage, then it is not clear what happens to others who are not concerned with becoming completely self-conscious. Kojève specifically addresses the distinction between the philosopher and the believer (le religieux). He does so because he finds that there is a structural similarity in the assumption of completeness or absoluteness that both philosopher and believer express in their adherence to perfection, either that of the perfect human being (the sage) or that of the perfect being (God). Kojève claims, however, that no one can convince the believer that it is necessary to become a philosopher. The believer is in fact not in the “space of reasons” because the believer does not base his adherence to the perfect being on argument but rather on revelation. The philosopher can no more argue about revelation than can anyone else, since the effect of revelation is to exclude the content of that revelation from the space of argument. One believes because one believes. To argue about belief is in effect to undermine the authority of belief—it is already to be outside of belief, a position that should not be possible other than as a mistake or sin. The same goes for other regions of human activity that accept a set of fixed foundations as the very condition of their possibility—one may refer to examples from mathematics. In these cases, one cannot argue “outside” of the axioms without calling into question the generality or applicability of those axioms.

  In all these cases, where there is acceptance of grounding principles, there is something “unthought” that is the basis of all thought that proceeds from it. The philosopher is the one who cannot tolerate this unthought.18 But, as Kojève notes, this refusal to accept an unthought—though it is an affirmation of the ideal of the sage for whom nothing, not even nothing, is unthought—does not necessarily result in the affirmation of wisdom. Kojève identifies two possibilities: the Platonic and the Hegelian. The Platonic tradition denies the possibility of attaining final wisdom. That is, Plato denies that the philosopher can become wise by overcoming the unthought; Sophia is unattainable. The best the philosopher can do is recognize that wisdom is impossibly remote. The philosopher is thus the most aggressive form of gadfly, unable to become wise and equally unable to become content with that inability. The philosopher is in this respect a figure of discontent who is aware of his discontent.19 For Kojève, Hegel overturns Plato and makes the astonishingly daring claim that a human being can become wise, such that there is no fundamental unthought, no fundamental question to which there is and can be no response. A human being may return to the beginning, thereby completing the circle of knowing and, in so doing, becoming a sage.20

  This may sound like a preposterous response. Is Kojève not advocating omniscience for human beings? Who can answer perfectly all questions, no matter how arcane, that relate to his or her actions? But here the difference between the Platonic ideal and that of Kojève’s Hegel comes out most clearly. Omniscience as we commonly understand it assumes that one can have complete knowledge of what is, was, and will be—all in one swoop. The model is visual, as Heidegger notes in his course on Gottfried Leibniz from the summer of 1928; there is a visio Dei or intuitus that grasps all “at once.”21 Obviously this kind of knowing is not discursive because it dispenses with time. But if knowing is “in” time, how can it possibly be complete? The Humean argument, to name just one, comes to mind, according to which the necessity (or unquestioned and unquestionable stability) of one relation, X, throughout time cannot be absolutely guaranteed. Variation remains possible until one has passed through all possible iterations of this relation—in other words, until time has ended.

  The Platonic answer is obvious: one cannot know completely in time what is outside of time. One ends up with a model of more or less adequate imitation in time of a model that is outside of time, so much so that it is difficult even to grasp how the one can relate to the other,
the Platonic notion of “participation” (μέθεξις) not being fully satisfactory. The burden of argument lies on the one who seeks to assert the completeness of knowledge in time without having to end time (sending us back out of time) to do so. This burden is one Kojève takes on in the second major section of his lectures, comprising lectures 6 to 9.22

  Before I take up the main points Kojève develops in these lectures, I want to return to another aspect of Kojève’s figuration of the sage that will loom ever larger as the lectures proceed to their end: that Kojève develops a homology between the philosopher coming to wisdom and the assumption of the role of God by the philosopher understood as the exemplary citizen in the universal and homogeneous state. Consider this remarkable passage from the fourth lecture:

  It suffices to read a manual of Christian theology (I emphasize: Christian), where God is in fact a total and infinite Being, and to say after having read the manual: the being in question—that’s me. This is simple, of course. Yet, even today, this seems to us to be an absurdity, an “enormity” without equal. And we label as mad anyone who openly makes the affirmation. This means that it is extremely difficult to affirm (that is, seriously). And it is a fact that millennia of philosophical thought have passed before a Hegel came in order to dare to say it. It’s simply that it was not at first easy to come to the concept of a Christian God. And, then, having come to it, it was not easy to identify oneself with this concept, to apply it to oneself. Hegel tells us that this is possible only for the Citizen of the universal and homogeneous State. For it is only this Citizen, that is, Man having effectively realized the triune whole of existence through the circularity of movement which, starting from the Particular, returns to it after having raised itself to the Universal by way of the Specific. It is only this Citizen who may affirm the identity with God without being mad, who may affirm it by being a Sage, who may affirm it in revealing thus a reality, that is by proclaiming an absolute Truth.23

  Though laced with a certain irony, this passage brings together several of the main strands of Kojève’s argument as it leads into a more detailed account of the possibility of finite omniscience. The sage is not merely the end of philosophy; the sage must also bring to an end the theological position, and this is only possible if the sage assumes the identity of God.

  While this argument does sound unusual and certainly challenged Kojève’s admirers, it is hardly as outlandish as it might seem when it comes to Kojève’s daring—and very Russian—account of Christ as the preeminently Christian figuration of the “God, the Christian one, that suppresses itself as God by becoming Man.” In other words, Kojève exploits the figure of Christ for an argument holding that atheism, understood as the assumption of God’s identity by the human being, is a necessary outcome of Christianity: “In brief, the atheism of the Sage does not establish itself in accord with any Theology: it is born from Christian Theology, and can only be born from it. (More exactly, it is not a matter of atheism, but of anthropotheism; now, this Hegelian anthropo-theism presupposes Christian Theology, since it applies to Man the Christian idea of God.)”24

  This is of course not an argument that follows from either Soloviev or Fedorov. But it twists their willingness to explore the unity of God and man in Christ to an unexpected result that achieves, through the death of God, the birth of the human being as the sage. The human being as the sage finally comes into being as such, freed from its servitude—in the sage, the Godman, though hardly in the sense of Soloviev, much less that of Fedorov. Here Kojève—in a characteristic move—transforms the notion of deification explicit in Soloviev and implicit in Fedorov by reversing its sense. Man does not become God, thereby letting go of his limitations; on the contrary, man becomes God by assuming finitude as absolute.

  Moreover, the human being becomes the sage by assuming the identity not only of God but also of all preceding philosophies. This melding of the Christian and philosophic traditions might strike many critics as fanciful, if not basically unsound, from a number of points of view. After all, one of the firm modern dogmas in philosophy is that intermingling Christianity and philosophy does damage to both, for there is no equilibrium to be achieved between the two—as Kojève seems to affirm himself when he suggests that only philosophy is capable of full self-consciousness.25 Thus, it is perhaps somewhat surprising that Kojève emphasizes simultaneously the integration of Christianity into the history of the sage and of philosophy; the autobiography of wisdom is in this sense profoundly integrative. But on what basis? Is it possible to integrate these two disparate and mutually exclusive traditions? What is Kojève’s justification?

  Like Friedrich Nietzsche, Kojève seems to justify this integration—at least initially—by claiming that Christian thinking is merely a version of Platonism.26 Insofar as Christianity thinks, it thinks in a distinctively Platonic way. To put this more starkly, Kojève seems to argue that, to the extent Christianity seeks to take account of itself, to come to terms with itself, to become conscious of itself, it must rely on the conceptual armature of the Platonic tradition to do so. If we consider Kojève’s seemingly bold—and very modern—claim that philosophy is self-consciousness, then Christianity, like any other area of discourse, needs to turn to philosophy or “become philosophical” in order to give an account of itself. In this respect, Christian theology is a veiled or limited form of philosophy that cannot but return to philosophy in the end if it is to become fully aware of itself. Kojève exploits the Christ figure in this respect to authorize his suggestion that theology is in fact not the basis of human identity but merely a stage in human self-recognition, governed, as all the other stages in this narrative, by the struggle to overcome the master that marks the life of the slave. Moreover, in contrast to Plato, Kojève insists that Hegel’s triumph is to overcome theistic philosophy by the assimilation of God into man and, in this sense, Kojève regards Hegel as having grasped the truly revolutionary core of Christianity as well as having overcome theology in favor of anthropology.

  In this respect, while Kojève does not add that Christianity is “Platonism for the people” (Platonismus für das Volk), the notion that the figure of Christ acts as a figuration for the democratization of God certainly seems to follow the basic lines of Nietzsche’s thought. Here it is important to keep in mind that the revolutionary, absurd phrase “I am God” is also, in the context of Kojève’s notion of the sage, a statement having revolutionary democratic impact. The sage is the figure of the “citizen soldier,” the final product of the French Revolution and, as we shall see, the final product to be achieved by and in history. If Nietzsche’s claim about Christianity seems little more than a sneer at the rabble, Kojève transforms that sneer into a rallying cry for the most radical political project: the “deification” of the masses in the figure of the sage, a sort of universal and homogeneous subject populating the universal and homogeneous state. Kojève thus pursues the cherished aim of his Russian predecessors in a new and theologically radical Christian form insofar as the essence of Christianity, for Kojève, is that it brings about atheism by transforming man or the human being into the absolute.27

  Of course, this deification is somewhat unusual as well because it is the deity who becomes man and not the reverse; thus, one might argue that this is no deity at all, a point Kojève freely acknowledges when he refers to deification in this sense as anthropotheism—what results is a radicalization and reversal of Soloviev, who, as Kojève notes repeatedly in his various works on Soloviev, does not succeed in suppressing the primacy of God in the relation of Godmanhood. The Solovievian Godman, for Kojève, remains primarily a man under the yoke of God, a secondary figure akin to the Kantian moral actor who attempts to become a member of the kingdom of ends (Reich der Zwecke).28 In this sense, the Solovievian God never really becomes man; the hierarchy maintains itself.

  Kojève’s notion of deification is, if anything, almost a parody. The Platonic challenge with which we began in the first chapter is met by a thorough transfor
mation whereby the primacy of the vertical and hierarchical erotic relation—the distant progenitor of the notion of desire essential to recognition—is eradicated in favor of a horizontal and egalitarian erotic relation—the relation of mutual recognition that provides the foundation for the universal and homogeneous state. The assumption of equilibrium appears here again as the guiding assumption of the Kojèvian philosophic enterprise. The constitutive lack of equilibrium characteristic of the Platonic challenge, a lack of equilibrium that can only spawn endless conflict, is finally abolished.

  THE TEMPORALIZING OF THE CONCEPT AS A FIGURATION OF DIVINE HUMANITY

  Kojève realizes, however, that one may not merely abolish or “complete” a tradition by fiat. His philosophical pedagogy is just that—a pedagogy, albeit a revolutionary one. If the general lines of Kojève’s notion of deification in the figure of the philosophic sage are set out in the first five of the 1938–1939 lectures, the next three lectures offer, as I have noted, a crucial, original, and far more detailed philosophical account of how one might realize the ideal of the sage in a finite individual.

  Kojève confronts the basic issue of how perfection or completion, as embodied by the sage, can possibly emerge in time, which, as flow or motion—evanescence itself—would seem to be fundamentally opposed to completion. The stakes of Kojève’s account are extremely high, for he takes it upon himself to explain how the final figure of history, understood as essentially temporal, can appear in history. How might one reconcile rest and motion, being and nothing (das reine Sein und das reine Nichts) in a “final” totality?