The Black Circle

by Jeff Love

  But what of Hegel? How is the concept time itself? How, indeed, can Hegel assert the equivalence of the concept and time, if the former depends on a degree of fixity inimical to the latter? Put most simply, how can there be complete, fixed knowledge—omniscience—in time?

  As we have seen, Kojève’s answer is straightforward. Omniscience is possible not “in” time but as the immanent articulation of the very shape of time itself that comes to its completion in the recognition of its own completion, of its own coming aware of itself as time, the central and final narrative. This recognition is not separate or different from the history it describes; rather, it is the final moment in that history, when the concept has come to itself completely by recognizing itself completely as itself as its own history. The equation of history and time describes the final equilibrium of the Hegelian system, according to Kojève. It is in this respect another way of describing the equilibrium that the slave seeks to establish by becoming equal to the master, and it assumes the fateful significance of the slave’s work in realizing this final equilibrium. The slave at the end of history is the slave having liberated himself fully from eternity into history itself, the slave having come to himself precisely as the work (or “product”) of history, which ends with this complete realization. The advent of the slave as time is the final liberation from the eternal as the deepest desire for self-preservation. History ends with the complete acceptance of the human being as historical, temporal, finite—and finished.43

  Kojève’s sage becomes free by giving up the Fedorovian “common task” as an expression of the essentially servile desire (and is there any other?) to avoid death. Yet, once again, this position is fraught with difficulty because the ambiguity incumbent at the end returns. Like the slave, the sage cannot but find himself in the tension of having come to accept human being as historical, temporal, and finite while remaining alive and writing the “Book” (as I will explain in the next chapter). If the end of history leaves nothing for the sage to do, then the sage who continues to live deceives himself and is never at the end, or simply repeats. Still, the sage cannot give an explanation of his choice or repetition; to do so would imply that one is not at an end, that there is something still unfinished. Circularity, Hegel’s “innovation,” cannot be compromised—to return to the beginning is to return to silence or “repetition” (both of which are virtually the same for Kojève).44

  Whatever the ambiguities, omniscience, then, is the result of reading the narrative of the Phenomenology itself. One joins oneself to the autobiography of the concept as the autobiography of all. But, as Kojève notes earlier in the lectures, the omniscience that results from taking the position advocated by the Book, a position of complete transparency vis-à-vis one’s own way of thinking, which emerges only by assuming the same patterns of thought as all those who read the Phenomenology, is fragile, the final result of a decision. Kojève writes of the difference between the sage and the religious person:

  The opposition is clear. And it is evident that there is nothing between these two extreme points. From the moment the Slave worker divided up the World between his Master and himself, annulling by his Work the autonomous reality of inhuman Nature; or, in other words, from the moment the Judeo-Christian man divided up the sphere of Parmenides between himself and his God (who, for us, is made in his own image, and who, for him is the image according to which he was made); from the moment of this total division, man has been unable to project his Knowledge onto a natural reality and call it true as did the pagan Philosopher, via the circular motion of the stars. He must relate his knowledge to himself or to God, being unable to relate it to the one and the other at the same time since only one absolute is possible.

  And the two extreme attitudes are realized: the one by Hegelian anthropo-logy, the other by the elaboration of Christian theo-logy. The two are evidently irreconcilable. And neither can be simply overcome. And if one can pass from the one to the other, it’s only by a sudden jump; for there is no transition possible since there is nothing between the two. To be in the one is to decide against the other; to reject the one, is to stand in the other. The decision is absolutely unique, and as simple as possible—the matter is one of deciding for oneself (that is, against God) or for God (that is, against oneself). And there is no “reason” or rationale for the decision other than the decision itself.45

  One decides to know oneself or not; the former is the essence of philosophy, the latter the essence of theology. The former is discursive, the latter ends up in silence, a sort of speechlessness or silent unio mystica or, indeed, in infinite conversation (or endless chatter) about an essentially unknowable “other.” The former is the most radical assertion of human sovereignty, the latter a wholesale rejection of that sovereignty in favor of the authority of mystery or the unknown.46 The former pursues freedom as full self-knowledge, the latter as the permanent absence of that self-knowledge. The former pursues an end, the latter the absence of an end. A blunter way of putting the basic import of these distinctions into their proper context returns us to the question of the relation between Christianity and Platonism. To the extent that one decides to think, one ends up following the philosophical path right up to its culmination in Hegel; to the extent that one decides not to think, one takes the other path, and one can do so because there is no argument that can best faith, whose final response to all rational contestation is “credo quia absurdum est” (I believe it because it is absurd).47

  Consequently, Kojève seems to be aware that his project of exposition is very much a project but that he is also speaking to those inclined to hear what he has to say—those who have already decided to think. Most important of all, Kojève clearly indicates that one chooses to think, that a necessarily irrational decision lies at the heart of the acceptance of rationality or discourse as such, and this emphasis on decision takes one of the major points of persuasion away from the rational tradition. Reason can no longer direct someone to itself based on its superior insight into the reality of things; on the contrary, one cannot say ultimately why it is better to be rational than nonrational, and this is a very profound problem for Kojève’s thought. Kojève relies on arguments whose coercive core is to insist that a decision against rationality and full self-knowledge is equivalent to madness or isolation, but he cannot otherwise give an account of why it is better to be rational. Madness or isolation or sheer willful action like that of the underground man needs no reasons and offers none.48

  Perhaps Kojève is only admitting the obvious, for if the authority of philosophy were necessary, it would be hard to understand why any philosophical pedagogy would be needed in the first place. Philosophy would already be universal, and no task of creating a proper audience for philosophy would ever arise. Contrary to the view that Kojève simply declares history at an end, it does not hurt to recall once again that, for Kojève, ending history is a project to be carried out as the proper completion of philosophy. This project has one end: to produce the sage, full self-consciousness. And, as we know, full self-consciousness can only emerge where struggle is complete; the universal and homogeneous state is the result of the final triumph of the slave.

  Kojève’s doubts about the realization of this project are far greater than his disciples or detractors are willing to admit.49 Kojève suggests that even Hegel, despite his formidable audacity, may not have achieved the complete self-consciousness necessary for the sage.

  This problem comes into sharper focus in the lectures that follow, on Kojève’s account of time. It is in fact remarkable that Kojève expresses these doubts after having set out a description of what I consider one of his most unusual ideas: the Book.

  What is the Book? The Book is what the sage creates, the final result of his activity. It contains the truth of the sage, the way to absolute knowledge. The Book is not human in the sense Kojève attaches to the human—that is, the Book is not time, not action, not desire; it has no future. The Book is both the grave marker and autobiography o
f the sage as the citizen who reflects all others at the end of time.

  6

  THE BOOK OF THE DEAD

  Human existence is a mediated suicide.

  The human collective (humanity) should die just as an individual person dies; universal history must have a definitive end.

  —Alexandre Kojève

  The Book is the wisdom of the sage, a philosophical bible.1 It is no living wisdom, but the “exteriorization” or “objectification” of the sage in a material artifact. There is a curious irony at work here, given the signal fact that the sage is the fulfillment of a circular process of interiorization (Er-innerung) whereby the other that was God becomes man in the figure of the sage.2 Being a sage is evidently not quite enough. The sage leaves behind evidence of his wisdom, and according to Kojève, this evidence is not merely secondary but a necessary element of the sage. There is no sage without the Book. What is more—and even more puzzling—is that the Book is the death of the sage. In this respect, the Book not only has the role of evidencing the sage’s wisdom; it also evidences the finite character of the sage’s wisdom, since the sage is not enough. He must leave something behind because he is unable in and of himself to preserve his wisdom. The sage is always and necessarily finite. He dies, and the Book of the sage is the living—indeed, eternal—monument to his death.

  The Action of the Sage, that is, of Knowledge, detaches itself from Man and passes into the Book. The “dialectical movement,” by ceasing to be the movement of the World or History, becomes the movement of the Word-concept or “Dialectic” in the current sense. And this detachment from Man, or this passage of “the movement” to the word-concept, takes place because, being exempt from contradictions, the World and Man cannot “move” themselves any more. Put differently, the World is dead; it has passed, with all that that implies, Man included. And, being dead, the World and Man-in-the-World can no longer serve as material support for the “dialectical” Concept that continues to “live” or to “move.” The material support of the perpetual “movement” of the Concept is from now on in the Book called “Logik”: it is this Book (“Bible”) that is the incarnation of the eternal Logos.

  The Sage does not then act as a Man. But he does not so act for the sole reason that Man no longer can act at the moment the sage becomes possible. And, inversely, wisdom becomes possible only when all possible human objectives have already been attained.3

  Coming at the very end of the tenth lecture, these two paragraphs provide an arresting summary of some of Kojève’s most unusual and challenging ideas about the sage and the Book he leaves behind. If, for example, Kojève labors to explain how omniscience may find expression in a finite individual, he seems to qualify this claim by asserting that, at the very moment omniscience finally becomes actual in an individual, time—which he equated with the concept—ends in historical fulfillment. The sage is what we might now call the first posthuman being, and while he is omniscient, he is no longer human in the special sense that Kojève applies to the human as the being that is desire, negation, time. Moreover, the action or praxis whereby the sage is realized comes to an end as well. It is preserved purely in discourse as the Book, which transforms the action of negation, the ostensibly dialectical movement whereby the world comes into being and is completed, into the Logos of the Book. Man and history come to an end in the sage and the Book: the apotheosis of the human is also the end of the human.4

  Not surprisingly, more than a little controversy surrounding Kojève’s interpretation of G. W. F. Hegel arises from these unusual propositions.5 Not only do these propositions emerge at the end of an almost 200-page lecture on sixteen cryptic pages in The Phenomenology of Spirit but also the notion of the sage and the Book seems more obviously “read into” Hegel’s text as a peculiar, reflexive, speculative move than almost any other portion of Kojève’s commentary. No matter how carefully one scans the final sixteen pages of the Phenomenology, one is very hard pressed indeed to find mention of the Book, let alone the sage. Of course, it may seem obvious that the Phenomenology itself is the Book and Hegel the sage.6 However, it is equally obvious that in this context Kojève finally discards any claim to philological scruple; he becomes the prophet of the Book. This is a troubling role for several reasons, as we shall see, for, as prophet, Kojève appears to claim that he is not himself a sage, and if he is not, how can he claim to explain the sage? But one may also make the harsher judgment that this final interpretation, the conclusions of which are both so crucial to and characteristic of Kojève’s position, is simply willful, an imposition of a foreign doctrine onto Hegel’s text that rivals the most violent interventions of Martin Heidegger.7

  I say “foreign doctrine” intentionally, since one cannot avoid the suspicion that Kojève emphasizes a way of reading Hegel that has much more to do with the distinctively Russian concern with divine humanity, or with overcoming humanity, as we have examined these tendencies in several other chapters. There is nothing really new to this claim; other commentators have suspected it, at least as far as Kojève’s obvious relation to the thought of Soloviev is concerned.8 Perhaps less obvious has been the powerful Russian connection of the end of man and the world with a most peculiar—and particular—universalism, the celebrated connection of the end of time with the establishment of Moscow as the “Third Rome,” itself akin to the new community of the resurrected dead that Nikolai Fedorov seeks to create.9 While the claim is perhaps recklessly speculative, one wonders to what degree Kojève’s Stalinism affirms this sense of the apparently impossible: that the locus of the world revolution leading to the end of history and of man, as we understand both, is Moscow. And Moscow is the final point and culmination of the tradition begun in Rome, the translatio imperii taken to its most extreme point as empire over nature itself. In this respect, Kojève’s intervention in European thought takes on a distinctively different hue and allows yet another reading of the lectures—as an allegory for the overtaking of the erstwhile European master by the colonized slave, a bringing up to date of the declaration that Moscow will be the Third Rome, that the slave shall become equal to the master in an apocalyptic end of time.10

  Kojève thus succeeds where his predecessors, from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Fedorov, not to mention others, have largely failed. He not only has appropriated the very fulfillment of the European intellectual tradition, Hegel, to his own ends but also has done so in the ostensive capital of European culture, Paris.

  I mention these extraordinary points here to give a sense of what exactly may be at stake for Kojève in this final part of the 1938–1939 lectures. But this is only one aspect of the final part, and it seems to me of the utmost importance to examine Kojève’s notion of the sage and the Book in greater detail before returning to these points in earnest. If the notion of the sage, together with the complementary notions of the end of man and history, have occasioned more controversy (and acrimony) than perhaps any other dimension of Kojève’s thought, some of that controversy seems to arise from the largely polemic intentions of Kojève’s interlocutors. Some of the most vocal and influential of these seek to argue that he is antihumanist or postmodern or apocalyptic without bringing out the full implications of Kojève’s arguments.11 Hence, I propose a detailed account of the sage and the figures of finality associated with the appearance of the sage as a counterbalance to these polemics.

  THE SAGE

  An extensive discussion of the figure of the sage occupies the final third of Kojève’s lectures of 1938–1939. While we have examined in considerable detail the possibility of the sage as an omniscient figure, we have not yet examined the actuality of the sage; that is, we have not considered what the actual appearance of the sage as a living being might entail. Here we enter upon one of the most openly speculative areas in Kojève’s thought, since it is not even clear that the one who has declared himself a sage, Hegel, has correctly done so. Contrary to what some of Kojève’s critics seem to argue, the evidence supporting the assertion that history
has indeed come to an end is equivocal. At one point, Kojève associates the end of history with Joseph Stalin, at another with Napoleon.12 Regardless of the identification of the final point, Kojève’s declaration that history has come to an end serves as an exhortation to engage in a philosophical project of completion that is obviously not complete. If it were, there would be no need for Kojève’s exhortative commentary.

  The crucial point is this: the end of history describes an outstanding project, not a fait accompli dating back some two hundred years. Moreover, as befits a project, there is no necessity attaching to its success.

  In our time, as in the time of Marx, Hegelian philosophy is not a truth in the proper sense of the term: it is less the adequate discursive revelation of a reality than an idea or an ideal, that is to say, a “project” which is to be realized, and therefore proved true, through action. However, what is remarkable is that it is precisely because it is not yet true that this philosophy alone is capable of becoming true one day. For it alone says that truth is created in time out of error and that there are no “transcendent” criteria (whereas a theistic theory of necessity either has always been true, or is forever false). And that is why history will never refute Hegelianism but will limit itself to choosing between its two opposed interpretations.13