The Black Circle
Page 23
The simple (for Kojève, dialectical) narrative form, then, is the self-canceling narrative. The truly human end of the human being is to eradicate itself, suicide writ large. The truth of the human is error, but the human being is an error that may correct itself. Note that there is no necessity in this self-correction. If there were, the human being would not be human in the Kojèvian sense but rather a natural being whose essence is to eliminate itself, a most peculiar natural being that would reinforce Kojève’s claim that nature eliminates its errors as quickly as it can. Thus, for Kojève, to be truly human is to undertake one’s suicide voluntarily, since there is no necessity to it. One must freely choose to eradicate oneself. Not to do so, to retain the error, is what Kojève refers to in one spot as “crime.”
We seem to find ourselves in a welter of confusions. Kojève uses the language of emancipation to an end that seems utterly preposterous: the elimination of the human being. His highest form of individuality and freedom seems to explode both notions. The sage, having acceded to the status of a finite god, cannot be referred to as free or individual in any “ordinary” sense. Indeed, it seems that the freedom of the sage presupposes emancipation from the effort to achieve freedom through struggle and work that defines the slave. To be free in this sense is to be free of the desire for freedom—to be freed of any desire at all insofar as that desire exceeds the animal desire for self-preservation. The final freedom, then, is the freedom from self-consciousness, that “disease” about which the underground man complains so bitterly.37 The universal and homogeneous state must be a state akin to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s state of nature, in which sociality in fact collapses because self-consciousness has been eliminated. All that can possibly remain is unconscious activity.
And yet Kojève wavers, and in many different ways, as we have already seen. We find additional evidence of this wavering in the final lectures themselves, most famously in a note he added to the original second edition of the French text of the Introduction, which came out in 1962. While Kojève describes the post-historical state as one of bestialization, of the becoming animal that coincides with the loss of the human or its preservation in the form of the Book, he also seems to grant it some human qualities—he suggests that the Book will have readers. But he also suggests that language will disappear in the post-historical era. Presumably the Book would disappear along with it. Further, Kojève differentiates between human time and natural time. As we have seen, human time is circular, but it completes itself only once, whereas animal time resembles the biological time of Aristotle.38 This animal time seems to apply also to the Book, which can be reread infinitely without change; each reading of the Book is identical. But what animal can read, and what being deprived of self-consciousness can read? What kind of reading can be mere imitation?39
Difficulties accumulate, because the universal and homogeneous state is the precondition for the advent of the sage—it is the state where all are sages—but its exact nature outside of this role is not consistently fleshed out by Kojève in the Hegel lectures. On the one hand, Kojève describes a state populated by beings that seem barely distinguishable from animals, the human having died with the advent of this new state. On the other hand, Kojève seems to grant some level of humanity to these post-historical creatures, who may have a language like that of bees or engage in erotic play. What seems to count here is a ritualization of life that is the human equivalent to the instinct that we attribute to animals. The human disappears because the chance event that gave rise to the human has been reversed in a return to something akin to the natural state.
Now, as we know, Kojève has raised the issue of the possibility of achieving wisdom and the only state appropriate to it, the universal and homogeneous state. But he has to some degree suppressed another issue: whether the achievement of that state is desirable. Kojève no doubt seems to condemn the notion of error and “errancy” as being essentially antiphilosophical states, and this condemnation reveals, on yet another level, the problem of the Kojèvian project as a form of philosophical pedagogy. The doubts Kojève addresses with regard to philosophy—that self-consciousness must of necessity extend itself to include all things—render philosophy itself vulnerable on its own terms.
In other words, if it is not necessary to become philosophical—and Kojève cannot claim that it is—then how can a philosophical pedagogy have any persuasive power, especially if it forces one into the structure that Kojève describes? Not only is the acceptance of philosophy the acceptance of the role of a slave but also its final destination is one whose subtraction from the world is so extreme that it resembles death itself, for the sage is in this respect the posthumous man, a ghostly presence who merely describes what he has seen in the Book.
The argument that Kojève can bring against this view is that it cannot assert itself consistently. To argue against philosophy, as Aristotle noted, is to engage in philosophy. One can thus argue that there is no discourse that can wholly reject philosophical discourse, since that rejection involves an acceptance of the conventions of philosophical discourse as a condition of the rejection itself. The best way to reject philosophical discourse is through silence or action that need not explain itself. Otherwise, as soon as one seeks to provide an account of one’s resistance to philosophy, one finds oneself already implicated in what one seeks to overcome.
But implication does not mean that one cannot still reject philosophy, and Kojève’s thought offers counterarguments, both by indicating that there is no necessity involved in taking up philosophy—that is, in the project of coming to full consciousness of oneself—and by setting up another tension—that between negation and completion. This tension between negation and completion comes clear in the potential clash between the notion that to be human is to negate the given and the notion that this act of negation is necessarily finite insofar as it must end, at some point, in final satisfaction.
This necessity is the most obscure. It seems to be predicated on an assumption that negation can only be determinate and that it can only be determinate if it is finite, if at one point or another the negation is complete. Otherwise, the identity of negation itself has to come into question, for if negation is not essentially finite, it can have no identity at all. But if it can have no identity at all, how can we know that there is a nonfinite negation? Simply put, we cannot; infinite negation is not negation as we understand it. Hence, Kojève seems to conceive of negation as relating to a concrete given and developing from there in a series of concrete acts of negation. But if that is so, then another problem emerges, because we can describe abstractly this concrete case. Concrete negation is already an abstract theoretical entity—it transcends the concrete, finite context in every case, and must do so.
The—dare we say?—theory of negation presented by Kojève threatens to call into question not only his notion that negation must come to an end but also—and maybe more significantly—the identity between time and the concept that is supposed to be the linchpin of Hegel’s radical novelty. If the concept and time are indeed one, then the conceptual horizon governing all thought has to be temporal as well. The upshot is that what is comes to be as narrative, and most fully comes to be what it is at the end of that narrative, when no further changes are possible. To describe negation as Kojève does, to describe the concept as Kojève does, to speak about the nature of reality as Kojève does—all of these possibilities are inherently reflexive, immanent in the overall narrative Kojève unfolds in his commentary. They clarify the origins of how we think the way we do, and they cannot by definition describe or refer to any other kind of thinking, because to do so would be to take them out of the temporal fabric that made them what they are and to suggest that such abstraction is in fact possible. In other words, abstraction of this kind derives, from rules applicable to one narrative, general rules applicable to all possible narratives. This is a problematic inference, unless one argues that one cannot transcend the horizon of one’s own understanding—and it
would seem that Kojève does argue this way. If that is the case, whatever I find that is other to my thinking must be assimilated to my thinking as the condition of my being able to make sense of the other. This is simply a different way of describing exactly the process that the Hegelian subject goes through as it assimilates what was other to itself, as it internalizes what was hitherto exterior, thus absorbing anything defined as outside of its proper sphere.40
The Hegelian approach transforms contingency into necessity, by holding that the Hegelian approach can conceive of difference or the other only within its own terms. Thus, to the extent that it encounters anything other, it transforms that other into itself—it is a machine of internalization (Er-innerung).41 Still, even if this is so, we have no reason to assert that this process of assimilation must come to an end. If we can argue that the Hegelian notion of self-consciousness tends to absorb into its own terms anything it encounters, that is not to say that this process is necessarily finite.
NEGATION AND FINALITY
This tension between negation and finality dominates the final set of lectures in the Introduction, entitled “The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel.” Though these lectures come from the first year of Kojève’s seminar (1933–1934), they reflect the same basic attitude that one finds in the very last set of lectures. The degree to which Kojève’s thought seems to have coalesced early on, despite a certain degree of variation, is quite remarkable in itself. Kojève opens these lectures with a discussion of a variant of this tension—the relation of substance to subject that Kojève identifies as giving us the “essential and unabridged content of his [Hegel’s] philosophy.”42 Kojève characterizes Hegel’s thought as essentially a process whereby substance becomes subject, recognizing of course the importance of providing an account not of one or the other but of their interrelation, of how substance relates to the subject and vice versa.43
This might seem to be a peculiar beginning for a set of lectures that seek to explain the idea of death in Hegel. What does this dualism of substance and subject have to do with mortality, if anything?
Kojève maintains that the definition of totality as a relation between substance and subject implicates negativity. The basics here are familiar. The subject as human creates itself through action, through negation of the given. The relation between subject and substance, whereby substance becomes subject, is thus a description of the process of negation, whereby what was other to the subject becomes one with it, a determinate negation that preserves the identity of the other in negating or incorporating it. By including the subject in the totality, Kojève suggests that Hegel brings together two radically opposed traditions, the Greek and the Christian. First, the Greek:
Now, the Man which Hegel has in view is not the one the Greeks believed they had identified (apercevoir) and which they left to philosophical posterity. This supposed Man of the ancient tradition is in fact a purely natural being (= identical) which has neither liberty (= Negativity) nor history, nor, properly speaking, individuality. Just like an animal he does nothing more than “represent,” in and by his real and active existence, an eternal “idea” or “essence,” given once and for all and remaining identical to itself.
Then the Christian:
The Man which Hegel analyzes is, on the contrary, the Man who appears in the pre-philosophic Judeo-Christian tradition, the only truly anthropological one. This tradition has maintained itself in the course of “modern times” in the form of “faith” or “theology,” incompatible with ancient and traditional science and philosophy. And it is this tradition that has transmitted to Hegel the notion of the free historical individual (or of the “Person”) that Hegel was the first to analyze philosophically, by attempting to reconcile it with the fundamental notions of ancient philosophy and the philosophy of Nature. According to this Judeo-Christian tradition, Man differs essentially from Nature, and he differs from it not only by his thinking alone, but by his activity as well. Nature is a “sin” in Man and for Man: he can and must oppose it and deny [nier] it in itself.44
The tensions in Kojève’s own account of the advent of wisdom appear to reflect the tension between what Kojève identifies as two radically opposed traditions, one seeking to subordinate the human being to nature, the other seeking to subordinate nature to the human being. Surely the bleak and peculiar imagery Kojève associates with the post-historical human being, shorn of all resemblance to the human being whose actions brought forth the post-historical state, is a rather shocking reflection on the Christian paradise. In this connection it may be helpful to recall an earlier comment by Kojève, to the effect that the great mistake of Christian thought is to offer resurrection, an otherworldly reward. If we examine this statement a little more closely, we may well come to a better understanding of Kojève’s unusual interpretation of Christianity.
Why is the resurrection a mistake? Pace Fedorov, the most obvious reason is that the resurrection appeals not to what Kojève considers truly human in the human being—the capacity to suppress the animal imperative of self-preservation—but precisely to that imperative. The obedient Christian is the one who offers up obedience—servitude—because he or she wants to extend earthly life. The brutish, selfish urge to preserve one’s bodily self above all other things rules one’s life such that one never becomes human in Kojève’s sense. One remains essentially animal.
To be truly human, to be the “free, historical individual” that Kojève identifies as the essence of Judeo-Christian anthropology, requires one fundamental act of self-abnegation or, in Kojève’s parlance, negation—the overcoming of the fear of death that dominates the animal. The “free, historical individual” is only free because he accepts his mortality. The fundamentally free act that enables all other free actions is the acceptance of death, and this acceptance is impossible without the renunciation of any and all afterlives. Kojève takes this somewhat further: to renounce the afterlife is to renounce God. It is the first step in radical atheism, and the import of atheism from this point of view is that it evinces the courage to face death as it is, without any palliative myths of return.
Kojève puts the matter bluntly in this early lecture: “Thus, Hegelian absolute Knowledge or Wisdom and the conscience acceptance of death, understood as complete and definitive annihilation, are one and the same.” But he goes further again and declares an identity between Man and death: “But, if Man is Action, and if Action is Negativity ‘appearing’ as Death, Man is, in his human or spoken existence, but a death, more or less deferred and aware of itself.” Even more pointedly, he says, “That is to say, therefore, that human existence itself is nothing but this Action [of negation]; it is the death that lives a human life.” And finally, Kojève adds that this capacity to risk one’s life, to allow oneself to die consciously without any “valid” biological reason, makes man a “fatal disease of the animal.”45
These citations support the inference that to be human is, above all, to negate the vestiges of nature in us, the stubborn hold of self-preservation. Subjectivity and negation are thus connected intimately with death because they flourish at the cost of the animal. Given that the path to wisdom is marked by an ever-increasing self-awareness, it also is not surprising that, to the extent the subject internalizes the given reality through continued action, it comes to recognize that death is not some strange external entity but the subject itself; the very possibility of freedom, for Kojève, is connected with death. Only a mortal being can be free because only a mortal being can choose to overcome the most crushing necessity of its mortality, the fear of death that attaches to the imperative of self-preservation.
The narrative we have associated with the slave is in this respect a narrative of liberation from nature. The slave takes measures that are, in the end, much more radical than any the master might take. The slave suppresses nature. He is not merely content to live with nature, to come to terms with nature, or to risk his life. On the contrary, the slave transforms nature in order to eradica
te its capacity to threaten human being; ultimately, the slave comes to accept death by eradicating it and himself along with it. This is an inference one may draw from the text, though Kojève does not say this directly.
But is this eradication of nature not precisely evidence of the rule of self-preservation? Is the kind of technological mastery over nature that Kojève imputes to the work of the slave not the expression of a servile concern for self-preservation? Does the slave truly liberate himself? Is the universal and homogeneous state a state of masters or of slaves?
The obvious immediate answer is that it is a state of neither masters nor slaves. Kojève affirms this in various spots and in an important passage from his work on legal theory, from 1943, which we will discuss in chapter 8. But this answer does nothing to resolve the guiding question. Kojève is in fact surprisingly enigmatic when it comes to an understanding of the dialectical fusion of master and slave, which can appear either in the guise of the grotesque animal or corpse without spirit or in the somewhat more banal “citizen,” the fusion of warrior and slave, Caesar with the soul of Christ. If the universal and homogeneous state is a utopia in which human errancy is finally corrected, it does not seem to be an inviting utopia—Kojève’s own descriptions, with their ironic insouciance, hint unsubtly at the utter strangeness of this final state.
As I have suggested, Kojève may well be provoking his audience with the example of the universal and homogeneous state in order to reveal the problematic notion of the “free, historical individual,” which seems to be the basic political unit assumed by both right and left in the modern era that has followed upon the French Revolution. If we take up this discussion again, we can see quite clearly now that Kojève’s conception of freedom and individuality seems to have very little to do with the conceptions of both that are usually advanced in support of the “free, historical individual.” At the risk of some repetition, let me review the basic positions one more time.