by Jeff Love
Even Hegel cannot claim to be fully self-conscious, to be a sage, since, as Kojève remarks in the tenth lecture, he cannot explain why it is in him, and not in another, that wisdom first appears.14 This is surely an extraordinary admission on Kojève’s part. It leads immediately to an even more extraordinary surmise: that Kojève is taking it upon himself to complete Hegel’s work, not merely to repeat it (as he suggests in later writings), and that Kojève’s task of completion is part of an eminently practical project. Kojève thus finds himself in the uncomfortable, perhaps untenable, position of declaring himself the sage in the Book that will introduce us to his “Book”—presumably including the vast archipelago of unpublished and unfinished writings that began to appear only after Kojève’s death. In this respect, we find ourselves, as readers of Kojève, in an immense self-reflexive text in which what we read in the text describes that text itself.15
Moreover, Kojève’s criticism of Hegel is in fact possible only if Hegel was deficient, not yet the sage. Thus, we have to accept that Kojève, otherwise so ostentatiously deferential to Hegel, knows more than Hegel, that not Hegel but Kojève is the genuine sage. But, as I have noted, it is one thing to claim to know more and quite another thing to claim to know everything that can possibly be known. While Kojève seems to assume this latter role, the fact that his own commentary is a form of philosophical pedagogy, or an exhortation to complete history, and not the completion of history itself, suggests that this may not be the case. And if this is not the case, then the book we are reading is not the Book but merely another installment in the history of error that is philosophy as Kojève himself conceives it.
It is no secret that there are serious obstacles to the realization of Kojève’s radical philosophical project of completion. We have already discussed Kojève’s reservations about one key notion: that it is in the “nature” of self-consciousness to extend itself. Kojève counters this assertion by observing that not all people seek to extend their self-consciousness to such a degree. Not all people want to be philosophers, regardless of whether they can be philosophers. The extension of self-consciousness as characteristic—in fact, as definitive—of the philosophical “nature” does not, for Kojève, seem to be a necessary or “natural” aspect of human beings. In this respect, Kojève keeps his distance from the view, ultimately traceable to Aristotle, that “all humans by nature desire to know.”16 The ostensibly Hegelian version of this is that all humans (as social beings) desire to be fully conscious of themselves, to be omniscient, but Kojève expresses a skepticism about this, the origins of which, as we shall see, reach to the foundations of Hegel’s philosophy.
By not subscribing to the claim that the expansion of self-consciousness is necessary, Kojève thus affirms, as we have noted, that his work is a practical project whose chances of success are by no means assured. If, as Kojève suggests at one point, history came to an end in 1806, it is clear that not everyone has grasped that fact—history seems to move on as it did before. Indeed, the absurdity that one may find in this declaration, the sheer eccentricity it seems to express, is the most powerful sign that it not only has failed to come to pass but also has failed to capture the imagination of those who could have helped to make the declaration a reality.
The practical aspect of the end-of-history claim is itself estranging because it completely rejects the notion that the truth is somehow “there” for us to discover. Rather, Kojève makes the still radical point that the truth is something that we make, and the challenge he puts to his audience is to make the declaration that history is at an end true. While the association of the end of history with the work of the slave is quite obviously predicated upon the equation of work with truth, as we noted earlier, the simple statement that we make the truth leads to accusations of solipsism, subjectivity, or madness.
Kojève anticipated these objections, and that is why he insists that the way to the objective truth is paved with a philosophical pedagogy that convinces others to join in the project of bringing about the truth. The truth as project loses its solipsistic or subjective flavor, its association with madness, the moment it becomes accepted as the truth. Moreover, this truth comes to itself as a truth when it is accepted not only by many but by all. The truth becomes truth only when it becomes universal; we seem to trade individual for collective madness, though Kojève thoroughly denies the possibility of the latter.
This is perhaps still a shocking doctrine, especially in its universalist form. It estranges us not only from the venerable doctrine that truth is discovered, not made, but also from the view that there is no final truth. (Here the claim that Kojève is somehow postmodernist—in the clichéd sense—is flawed.) It estranges us from the doctrine, in other words, that we are limited by a power or absence of power that we can never overcome and which we refer to as nature or God or language and so on. For Kojève, the claim that we are beings that are necessarily subject to these “external” limitations is a doctrine that plays a role inside of the master-slave relation.17 The upshot is that it is not nature or God or some other external limitation that shapes us but our relation to other human beings. The human relation is the foundational relation by which we come to know anything, including ourselves. To declare, then, that nature or God limits us is to create a specific structure of authority within the human relationship, a structure of authority that reinforces social or political servitude by anchoring that servitude in an unchangeable external authority. One may fight the master, but one may not fight the absolute master—nature or God (in the guise of death). But this admonition, Kojève suggests, is merely another move in a social or political contest for domination that, in the end, provides powerful reinforcement for the hegemony of nature or God—and, in particular, of death—over human affairs. By reinforcing the authority of death, the master reinforces his own authority as the one who, in contrast to the slave, is not afraid of death.
Accordingly, the notion that truth is anchored in external limitation is yet another position in an overall politics of domination that reinforces the division between master and slave. Those who accept the authority of nature, death, and truth understood in this way condemn themselves to servitude.
Here is a fascinating point: Kojève’s reservations about the triumph of philosophy indicate that the slave does not have to triumph. When Kojève suggests that not all people will seek to become philosophers, to become fully conscious of themselves, he means that they will not want to confront the fact that their servitude may be merely a fiction, an illusion behind which lies a structure of political domination. And they will not want to come to full self-consciousness because they will also have to confront death. By confronting death they will in this sense lose their fear of it. But if they lose their fear of death, then they will no longer be slaves, if not in actu (for they may still find themselves in the position of the slave) but in potentia. The essence of the slave revolt that Friedrich Nietzsche fears and Kojève welcomes is the loss of the fear of death.
For Kojève, no other character in occidental history shows this loss more convincingly than Christ. In this respect, Kojève’s claim that Christ shows the way for overcoming the distance between man and God is the paradigmatic expression of the slave losing his fear. The greatest of all slave rebellions is that formulated by Christ as the rebellion against the fear of death, which shows the way to the conquest of nature, God, and death. As Kojève says, in his lecture on death in Hegel from the year 1933–1934:
It is by resigning himself to death, by revealing it through his discourse, that Man arrives finally at absolute Knowledge or Wisdom, in thus completing History. For it is by starting out from the idea of death that Hegel works out his Science of “absolute” philosophy, which alone is capable of philosophically rendering an account of the fact of the existence in the world of a finite being conscious of its finitude and disposing of it at times as it likes.
Thus, Hegel’s absolute Knowledge or Wisdom and the conscious acceptance of death are b
ut one and the same.18
The challenge of Kojève’s thought as set out here, as a philosophical pedagogy that seeks to liberate all from the fear of death by following a model of emancipation created within Christianity itself—a religion, we may recall, that, in offering the example of Christ, suppresses itself, according to Kojève, and thus brings about its own refutation to the degree that it enshrines not the acceptance of death but rather the fear thereof (in the image of God)—is to eliminate all avatars of the master constructed to impair our acceptance of death by reinforcing our fear of it.
Kojève’s thought, in this respect, seems to be an astonishing, apocalyptic account of kenosis. The more I incorporate God, the more universal I become, the more complete, the less I fear death, and the more I come to recognize my essential kinship with death. The journey captured in the Phenomenology is an emptying out (Entäußern) whereby my I becomes one with what was hitherto other than my I, where I become one with all, and all becomes one with my I. This is, I caution, not a moment of “oceanic feeling” that Sigmund Freud mentions in his Civilization and Its Discontents,19 nor is it a variant of “silent” communion or the unio mystica. On the contrary, this is an expression of the highest self-consciousness and thus a conscious recognition of myself in what is other to me, whose correlates are several: the universal recognition with which the master-and-slave relation comes to an end, as well as the fabled union of subject and object in Hegel that Kojève puts aside for yet another unity—that between time and space, understood as the final spatialization of time and the temporalizing of space. Unlike the oceanic feeling, the sage describes this process of emptying out—it is by definition a discursive process—and leaves behind this description in the Book.
There is a great deal to elaborate here. But I want to address first, even if only in a preliminary manner, two positions that express a critique of Kojève’s interpretation, one from the right, the other from the left. I will then situate Kojève’s response to that critique within an extended discussion of the kenotic aspect of the last lectures of 1938–1939.
NATURE AND THE GIVEN
The lines of engagement pertinent to the first position emerge as an attack on Kojève’s disregard for the concept of nature, understood as supplying a sort of “given.” From this perspective, the social relation is not essentially a rejection of nature, as it is for Kojève, but rather a specific response to nature whose most basic tenet is that nature cannot be overcome—thus, nature, however it is identified, provides the ultimate limit to the social. While this can sound quite egalitarian—we are all “children” of nature—it is not, since there is a caveat insofar as nature is employed as a means of justifying inegalitarian norms. The doctrine of nature as a fiction, a noble lie, as it is in Plato, provides an order for the many so that the few who have the requisite virtues may flourish without interference from the many. If anything, Kojève’s “arbitrary” focus on the master-slave relation merely reveals his astute appraisal of the alternatives. The preferred alternative of those who defend natural law is a “sober” recognition of the necessity of maintaining inequality; the unattractive side of this may be neatly expressed as advocacy for the continuance of servitude for all those unsuited to the “rigors” of freedom.
The other face of this argument is the compliment paid to Kojève by those of the natural law persuasion, who note that Kojève, by taking the logic of the Enlightenment to its furthest limit, shows his clear and sober vision of the “dehumanizing” truth of that logic. “Sobriety” is the word of choice for describing that “austere” attitude toward reality which does not flinch when confronted with the “dangerous” truth. Of course the most dangerous truth, the unlovely truth (schlechthin), is that we die.20 And as we may glean from the Republic, death is the greatest injustice, if not the origin of all that is ugly and dangerous in our social relations, which themselves can offer but a palliative.21
The most dangerous of these palliatives is the promise of paradise on earth, something very much like the universal and homogeneous state that is the necessary precondition of the arrival of the sage. As if its adherents were all quoting Friedrich Hölderlin’s warning in Hyperion, the conservative view might be reduced to a claim that to bring paradise to earth will create a hell, not heaven.22 So when Kojève talks with apparently mordant delight about the death of man and the end of history, he seems to fall into the hands of his critics, and not only those from the right. From the left, the argument is that Kojève hands the conservatives a prize when he describes the ostensibly utopian state as a posthuman state of erotic play in which discourse becomes the “ ‘language’ of the bees.”23 Or, worse:
The end of History is, properly speaking, the death of Man. After this death, there remain (1) living bodies with human form, but emptied of Spirit, that is, of Time or creative power; (2) a Spirit that empirically-exists but in the form of an inorganic reality, one that is not living, as a Book that, being not even animal life, has nothing to do with Time. The relation between the Sage and his Book is thus rigorously analogous to that between Man and his death. My death is indeed mine; it is not the death of another. But it is mine only in the future; for one may say: “I am going to die” but not “I am dead.” The same for the Book. It is my work, and not that of another; and it is there a question of myself and not of another thing. But I am not in the Book, nor am I this Book, except as I write or publish it, that is, as long as it is still a future (or a project). Once the Book has come out, it detaches itself from me. It ceases to be me, just as my body ceases to be me after my death. Death is just as impersonal and eternal, that is, inhuman, as is the impersonal, eternal, and inhuman Spirit fully realized in and by the Book.24
This remarkable passage paints a bleak portrait of the post-historical state, establishing an equivalence between the emptying out of the human being that becomes its fulfillment as a universal being and the emptying out of the human into the Book. In both cases, the kenotic act of universalization is equivalent to death. To become a citizen of the universal and homogeneous state seems to be akin to dying—wisdom is not merely the acceptance of death, it is death’s enactment. The sage arises ghostlike from the corpse of the once vibrant human being, as a momentary transition to the Book. If sobriety were ever required, it would seem to be required in this case, in the exceedingly sober reflection over the prospect of emancipation that seems to lead the slave in his struggle with the master. Having won this struggle, the slave slips into oblivion, leaving behind only the record of his victory, in the Book that the philosophical slave writes. What is more, the emancipated slave is little more than an animal, a creature of “bodies and pleasures” who has been deserted by the labor that emancipated him. His emancipation recalls the impasse of the master, who also seems to live on in some sort of vegetative limbo as he becomes more and more dependent on the slave for the necessities of his material existence—and indeed, becomes more like the slave.
From the perspective of the left, of those who hold to narratives of emancipation, this narrative of self-annihilation, of the “mediated suicide,” can hardly seem attractive. It must fail, not only as a rhetorical effort, if it ever were that, but also as a cold conceptual possibility. The victory of the slave at the end of history is not Pyrrhic—that would give it a far more enticing look. In fact, it is a victory that seems indistinguishable from defeat, since there is nothing left for the slave after the end of history but aimless and unconscious pleasures.
From the perspective of the right, Kojève’s post-historical scenario makes for pointed propaganda. No wonder the acolytes of natural law praise Kojève for his sobriety; for them, he envisions the “gray” death of utopianism without illusions, what one might view as the victory of the Nietzschean “last man.” There is thus a reason—we are to suppose—for the absence of detailed portraits of the final state in the greatest of the utopian social theorists, Karl Marx (whom Kojève claims to follow): the horrific nature of the final state ensures that it shall ne
ver attract many adherents. At the very least, Kojève, that peculiar master of philosophical propaganda grasped as philosophical pedagogy, either stumbles, which is highly unlucky, or decides to paint the cruelest possible view of what realization of utopian hopes must entail.
Is Kojève’s post-historical state, then, not a warning to those who would pursue the utopian striving for the final, best state, for the state that establishes at last the rule of the egalitarian principle in all facets of life? Is Kojève a leftist of the right or, as Stefanos Geroulanos argues, is he not a leftist or Marxist at all but an entirely different kind of thinker, a sort of pre-postmodern nihilist?25
How are we to take these somber final words of the 1938–1939 lectures? He begins by quoting a passage from Hegel:
“The entire sphere of finitude, by the fact that it is itself something, of the senses, collapses into the true-or-truthful Faith before the thought and Intuition (Anschauung) of the Eternal [thought and intuition], becoming here one and the same thing. All the gnats of Subjectivity are burned up in this devouring fire; and even the consciousness of this giving of oneself (Hingebens) and of this annihilation (Vernichtens) is annihilated (vernichtet).”
Then he goes on:
Hegel knows it and says it. But he also says in one of his letters that this knowledge cost him dearly. He speaks of a period of total depression that he lived through between the twenty-fifth and thirtieth years of his life: a “Hypochondria” that went “bis zur Erlähmung aller Kräfte,” “to the point of a paralysis of all his forces,” and which arose precisely from the fact that he could not accept the necessary abandonment of Individuality, that is in fact of humanity, that the idea of absolute Knowledge demands. But, finally, he overcame this “Hypochondria.” And, becoming a Sage through this last acceptance of death, he published, a few years later, the first Part of the “System of Knowledge,” entitled, “Science of the Phenomenology of the Spirit,” where he reconciles himself definitively with all that is and has been, by declaring that there will never again be anything new on earth.26