The Black Circle

by Jeff Love

  The main point is clear: the left cannot accept the notion that utopia corresponds with the overcoming of individuality. But neither can the right accept this notion, though they are forced to do so if they hold up Kojève as having proven how contrary to humanity the final cherished goal of total emancipation is, for total emancipation in the Kojèvian sense is the emancipation from the individual self. All that is left behind at the end of history is the “animal” body and the spiritual Book.

  Kojève forces his critics into a defense of individuality over collectivity, and the thrust of the critical approaches from left and right do tend to focus on the free historical individual as the atomic unit of political action. The primary difference between them concerns the degree to which all individuals can share in freedom, but not the desirability of individual freedom itself. While one may assail the claim as exaggerated, it seems that Kojève’s central emphasis on overcoming individuality goes against the single most cherished modern value: individual freedom. The singular cliché of modern bourgeois life—the free, self-creating, or self-fashioning individual—seems to be put at issue in Kojève’s thought. One must die so that the whole may live, or, as the famed epigraph to The Brothers Karamazov has it, quoting John 12:24: “Verily, verily I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”27

  If anything, the two possible opposing views I have briefly examined show the central challenge of Kojève’s own emancipation narrative. One may view this narrative either as a merciless parody of the emancipation narratives associated with the free, self-fashioning individual—a narrative of emancipation suggesting that these other narratives are in some way incoherent—or Kojève may indeed be quite serious in creating an emancipation narrative with a concept of freedom and individuality that is completely inimical to that which animates other such narratives.

  Let me explain this final point briefly before returning to a closer reading of Kojève’s text. The two notions of freedom at issue here may be defined as pertaining to, respectively, individual and collective freedom. The usual way of describing the relation between the two emphasizes that they are in fact at odds with each other—individual freedom comes at the cost of the collective, and collective freedom comes at the cost of the individual. There is a tension here that may be more abstractly identified as a tension between the particular and the universal. Probably few other tensions in the Western tradition have garnered more attention; in the guise of the relation of the one and the many, this tension appears to be, as Theodor Adorno affirms, the constitutive tension of metaphysics.28

  While a thorough engagement with this tension would take us too far afield, I do want to attempt a characterization of it that permits us to grasp exactly what is at stake for Kojève in his apparent advocacy of a kind of freedom that seems to be beyond the tension or which represents a definitive dissolution of it—perhaps a final freedom. Kojève seems to impute an essentially corrupt notion of freedom to both the individualist and collectivist notions of freedom, which appears to animate the critics of his view. When I say “corrupt,” I mean to emphasize that individualist and collectivist variants of freedom have at their core a similar account of freedom as the freedom to do as one wishes—to dispose of plant, mineral, man, and God as one sees fit, without restriction of any kind. The ultimate form of this kind of freedom is that which we might associate with the creator, who may do as he or she desires, creating hitherto unprecedented combinations in concept and in reality. The essentially negative cast of this conception of freedom is expressed by its necessary precondition: that there are no durable limits that cannot be overcome by something akin to will or voluntas, which, as Hannah Arendt explains, is far more than the freedom to choose among given options but is also the freedom to create the given.29

  Now, this sort of freedom seems to be very similar to the freedom Kojève advocates as negation. The human being is human or free insofar as he or she negates the given, whatever that given might be at any time. This freedom to transcend what one is, at any time, denotes for Kojève a properly human possibility which is necessarily creative because it relates not directly to the given in the way of the animal but to the giving of the given, as it were—to the given as defined in accordance with a set of human desires. One may recall here Kojève’s dogmatic insistence that human desire is differentiated from animal desire because it is not a desire for the object “in itself” but for the object as given within another structure of desire. If I may put this less bureaucratically, objects take on significance for human beings as “nodes” of interest. I want X only because others are interested in it and, in the end, it is not the combat against nature that takes precedence but the combat against other human beings. And this desire is only free to the extent that I am willing to die to impose it on other human beings. Any other kind of desire, to the extent it is tied to self-preservation and to not risking self-preservation, is not a free, human desire but an animal desire that holds to the signal imperative to avoid death.

  For Kojève, a human being only becomes free when the desire that holds us to preserve ourselves at all costs has been overcome. The most purely human desire is the desire that expresses no fear of death, a desire whose freedom arises from its complete absence of fear of death. It is, in this sense, the most truly selfless desire, because it expresses no attachment to the very self of which it is also an expression, if perhaps only in the negative. The bedrock point is that animal desire, the model and precondition of desire itself, seems to be incapable of detachment from the animal self, the body, of which it is the foremost expression. Only the necessarily strange creature we refer to as human desire can overcome this limitation, and Kojève suggests that this desire is itself only overcome in the sage, who becomes most fully human in the combination of the sage and the Book.

  Be that as it may, the implicit critique is clear: freedom, when attached to individual or collective animality, is not freedom. Rather, it is the expression of the purely animal fear of death, as we saw in the ambivalence of Alexei Kirillov. Indeed, freedom is not defined as the overcoming of that fear of death but as its highest, if most covert, expression. The freedom that one associates with self-creation, novelty, and so on is not freedom at all but a profound servitude to the animal will to live at all costs, this being, for Kojève, the very definition of servitude.30

  Kojève thus locates the emancipatory projects of modernity within the fundamental failure to deal with a greater servitude to the fear of death. Both kinds of freedom, then—that of the individual and that of the collective—are, for Kojève, essentially the same. They are kinds of freedom pertaining to the slave, who not only is unable to overcome his servitude but also has made it into the very essence of his life, transforming the potentially human actor into the animal with a human face. Hence, it is surely unsurprising that Kojève would later identify both the United States and the Soviet Union as being of essentially the same underlying orientation, with an accent on the individual in the United States and on the collective in the Soviet Union. Rather than being merely a “fashionable” repetition of Heidegger’s notorious assertion that the United States and the Soviet Union were metaphysically the same and, as such, a threat to Germany,31 Kojève’s comparison is fully justified on the basis of his own thought, which, in this respect, may well be a good deal more precise than Heidegger’s. Yet the same principle applies to both: the attachment to detachment from material or natural need as the precondition for the possibility of emancipation, any other kind of emancipation being in fact a veiled form of servitude.

  Once again. Kojève’s reductiveness calls into question the validity of his distinctions. Even if we accept the persuasive force of the basic distinction between a notion of freedom that is tied to bodily fulfillment and one that is diametrically opposed to that notion of freedom, the sweeping quality of these distinctions, which aim to define “modernity” as exemplified by the divergent �
�twins,” the United States and the Soviet Union, is bound to unsettle, and this once again raises the question about the purpose of the lectures as philosophical pedagogy or “serious” philosophical work. Kojève’s demeanor, his irony and playful insouciance coupled with his penchant for the diverting phrase, do nothing to upset the image of a somewhat superficial gadfly who, in denouncing one notion of freedom, praises a notion that places demands on human beings so outrageous as to be ridiculous. What is one to say when faced with a doctrine that insists on the need for what appears to be mass self-immolation, the death of the (still animal) human, so that the Book may live? What sort of triumph is this, if indeed it is a triumph at all? The vaunted irony of Kojève takes on a monstrous quality here when the final end of history, the true point of final emancipation for the toiling, oppressed human being, seems to be indistinguishable from suicide. Is Kojève really a progressive thinker, a Marxist, or is he a jocular misanthropist, a sort of Mephistopheles? Or is he both?

  PROGRESSIVE OR MISANTHROPE?

  To respond to these questions, I want to return to the final set of lectures from 1938–1939, but I also want to examine another pertinent text, the final text in the French original of Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, which, appropriately enough, deals with the Hegelian concept of death. I thus bring the lectures that elaborate the concept of the sage and his wisdom together with a text dealing with death, which seems to be the proper element of the sage in the sense that the arrival of the sage signals the collective death of the human as slave, as retaining animality, in favor of the perfectly human. To begin, I cite two important passages from the ninth lecture of 1938–1939:

  Now, Time—it’s Man himself. To suppress Time is thus also to suppress Man. Indeed: “the true being of Man is in his Action,” meaning action that succeeds. This is to say that Man is the objective result of his Action. Now, the result of the action of the Sage, that is, of the total perfect Man who completes the process of becoming of human reality is Knowledge [la Science]. But the empirical-existence (Dasein) of Knowledge is not Man; it is the Book. This is not Man, not the Sage in flesh and bone, it is the Book that is the appearance (Erscheinung) of Knowledge in the World, this appearance being absolute Knowledge [Savoir].

  .…

  To be sure, this existence [of Knowledge] is “empirical,” and as such it has a duration: the Book endures as well; it deteriorates and is reprinted, etc. But the nth edition does not differ in any way from the first: one cannot modify anything; one cannot add anything. Even in changing, the Book thus remains identical to itself. The Time in which it endures is thus cosmic or natural, but not historical or human. To be sure, the Book, in order to be a Book and not bound and darkened paper, has to be read and understood by men. But the successive readers change nothing in the Book. And if, in order to read the Book, Man must live, that is, be born, grow and die, his life reduced in its essence to this reading (for, let us not forget, that with the advent of the universal and homogeneous State, with desire being thus fully satisfied, there is no further struggle nor work; History is ended, there is nothing left to do, and Man is only to the extent that one reads and understands the Book that reveals all that has been and could have been done)—he creates nothing new: the future of Paul who has not yet read the Book is not the past of Peter who has already read it. The Time of the Man-reader-of-the-Book is thus the cyclical (or biological) Time of Aristotle, but not linear, historical, Hegelian Time.32

  Kojève links together three central aspects of his thought: the sage, the Book, and the universal and homogeneous state. They all describe different facets of the end of history, and they all seem to dispense with time as we have understood it thus far as the characteristically human time of history, in which to be human is to be history, that is, desire, negation, and change. As Kojève notes, time may arise in cycles; this is characteristic, as the second quoted passage shows, of the Aristotelian or “biologic” notion of time, which applies to those who read the Book. But this time does not apply to those who make the Book—they live in Hegelian time that, though circular, only runs through the circle once.33 Kojève thus seems to argue that human history may run its course to completion only once. Thereafter, it can only be repeated, literally as a repetition of the Book that is the lasting result—the only lasting result—of that human history which, otherwise, cancels itself. Yet it is equally obvious that this repetition is nothing like the action that gave rise to the Book, since the Book permits only repetition. If history has indeed come to an end, after all, no action other than repetition is possible.

  As we have noted, then, the picture Kojève creates of the end of history, of the human’s successful accession to wisdom, deeply challenges the assumptions that we typically associate with the success of that final state. But Kojève also seems to justify the assumptions of those who express hostility to that final state, who see in the final state the loss of nobility and greatness in humans. Even in regard to the latter, however, Kojève is not easily brought into the fold as a Right Hegelian or conservative figure because he also cannot be said to be one who advocates incompleteness or permanent struggle as an end in itself.34

  In this respect, Kojève makes a remarkable statement in the eleventh lecture, to the effect that the action of the human being corrects an error—the error of human being itself. This statement can in turn be connected with a similar statement in earlier lectures, to the effect that man is an error or that man is a defective or sick animal.35 From this perspective, human action is devoted to this correction, which involves the elimination of the animal actor as such by transforming the human being into the Book, by restoring, in this sense, the natural balance that the human being has disturbed by his defective actions, his errancy. The final human artifact, the Book, cannot by definition change anything more but refers to the restoration of balance and order—equilibrium again—as a return to cosmic or natural time undisturbed by human action.

  The key passage in the eleventh lecture is clear:

  The history of Man, that is, Time, will last as long as there remains a difference between (subjective) “Knowledge” and the (objective) “Truth” or the Reality-revealed-by-Knowledge. That is to say that History will last as long as there will be in the World a being that errs and, bit by bit, eliminates its errors on its own. Now, this being is Man, and only Man. For, in general, animals and Nature do not err. Or, granted, if you like, Nature errs too. But, if it errs, its error (a monster, for example, or a living being not adapted to its environment) is immediately eliminated: it dies or annihilates itself without being able to keep itself alive even temporarily. Only Man can keep error in the world by making it last in the form of an erroneous discourse. And History is the History of the erroneous Discourses of Man which bit by bit become truths. And this not only because they change to conform to a given Reality but because Man, by work and struggle, transforms Reality itself in order to make it conform to his Discourses that, initially, departed from Reality. And at the moment when the conformity of Reality and Discourse is perfectly realized, at the moment, thus, when Man can no longer err because he no longer transcends the given having no further desire—at this moment History stops. Then, subjective knowledge is at once objective; that is, it is true, definitively and completely. And this “absolute” Knowledge [Savoir] is Knowledge [La Science].36

  Kojève conceives of truth as narrative. So it is time to ask a basic question: What sort of narrative does Kojève’s interpretation of the end of history project? We have hitherto responded to this question by identifying Kojève’s narrative as essentially an emancipation narrative whereby the human being understood as slave liberates itself from two separate yokes: that of the master and that of nature. The liberation from both yokes seems to take place simultaneously; the one presupposes the other. This narrative of emancipation presupposes yet another whereby the human being assumes the role previously vouchsafed to God alone. The liberation of the slave from the master and from nature is thus als
o a liberation from God.

  But there is more. All of these forms of liberation in turn describe a more comprehensive movement from a relation to an external agency that defines the slave to the slave’s internalization of that relation whereby the slave assimilates the definition of others into his own self-definition. The slave no longer evaluates himself by reference to an external agency but by reference to himself as having created his own standard of evaluation through the struggle and work that allowed him to overcome his own servitude. That is, the reality the slave creates is itself his form of mastery—by creating in response to necessity, the slave overcomes necessity—or so we may be led to believe.

  And here is the difficulty we have examined from several perspectives already: the overcoming of necessity by the slave terminates his being as such. When Kojève remarks that the human being cannot survive without nature (other than as nothingness), he seems to mean that the overcoming of necessity in the guise of nature eliminates the human at the very moment of the highest expression of the distinctively human freedom from nature, from the animal. In this connection, Kojève deploys one of the governing images of his commentary as well as of his treatise on right, that of the ring. For Kojeve, the ring expresses the materiality of nature, which is the ring itself, and the negativity of the human, which is the empty space within the ring. The human struggle is a paradoxical one, since genuine freedom, as opposed to animal desire, emerges in the human overcoming of nature, the final success of which arises with the advent of the sage and the Book. The paradox inheres in the fact that the truly human expression of freedom eliminates the human as a natural being: it is self-cancellation or suicide.