by Jeff Love
We either negate so as to be free of negation—we become free by freeing ourselves of ourselves—or we negate so as to continue negating, the only difference being that subsequent negations are repetitions of the “first” negation and can only be repetitions of that first negation because it has already run through all possible forms of negation. If we are unable to do either, we find ourselves in a state of inveterate incompletion or indecision—in irony.
While Kojève entertains all three possibilities, the main thrust of the large corpus of writings that followed the Introduction is to elucidate the possibility and meaning of repetition in the post-historical state. In this respect, Kojève’s later writings may be divided into essentially two groups, one setting out the actual shape of the post-historical order and the other attempting to prove conclusively that this order is already upon us, thus extending the course of arguments advanced in the Introduction. The second group of writings predominates, and it is reasonable to suppose that they dominate because of the difficulties I have described. The first group is, however, of enduring interest because it provides a detailed sketch of what the post-historical order may look like if it is ever achieved.
Another way of defining the relation between these two kinds of writings raises intriguing questions. It is quite possible to define their relation in terms of their proper “jurisdiction,” since these writings are just as easily classifiable into writings applicable to thought and writings applicable to action. The writings that provide a sketch of the post-historical order seem to belong to the writings applicable to action, whereas those applicable to the process of thought and, above all, to providing a final account of thought seem to belong to the former group.
The division here between thinking and action is interesting, first and foremost, because it affirms a distinction that must itself be overcome in the end of history, where thought is action and action thought. Indeed, this equation of thought and action is a crucial precondition of finality, signaling the final consummation or overcoming of cognate tensions such as that between finality and negation. These various forms of tension as I have introduced them thus far—theory and practice, reason and will, sociality and individuality, and others—are all implicated in this comprehensive division between thought and action.
The overcoming of this division is a crucial element of the assertion that the concept is time. Hence the striking irony of Kojève’s pursuit of two lines of finality, one in thought and one in action, an irony that is the correlate to the difficulties we have just addressed with regard to the relation between finality and negation. If history has truly ended, these tensions must be overcome—there can be no thought that is not action and no action that is not thought. This overcoming has to be the most startling consequence of the achievement of Kojève’s philosophical project, and, to express my previous arguments with reference to the vocabulary of the relation between thought to action, there can be no further thought about action, no reading that is merely a reading. Everything becomes, strictly speaking, performative, or a performance that cannot be thought about or viewed as such, because nothing is thought about or viewed in the post-historical world.
But what sort of existence does this extraordinary unity describe? We seem to move within the circle of Eastern conceptions of mindless or intentionless action, wu wei.12 Or we move within the circle of the notion of discourse promoted by Boris Groys, a careful student of Kojève, who views communism as the realization of the unity of thought and action in discourse.13 In either case, we come to a point where thought can no longer be aware of itself, a lack of awareness that must also apply to language. The advent of the sage is the complete termination of the self-conscious actor, and the beings that are left seem to be no more than automatons that do not even know they are following patterns of thought or action. Another word for this kind of automation is “instinct,” and here another reading of Kojève becomes available, to the extent that one can argue that the aim of history is to correct the error that is human being by giving human beings instinct.
What exactly does “giving instinct” mean? The Nietzschean phrase we have already cited once—that man is the incomplete animal—may allow the surmise that it is precisely the want of instinct that distinguishes the human being from the animal and that this want of instinct is a sign of incompletion. There is nothing terribly surprising about a claim such as this, given the relative values established in our tradition with regard to perfection and imperfection. It almost goes without saying that imperfection is to be eliminated, and the conventional link between desire and absence or a lack—a link Kojève of course affirms—merely underscores this attitude toward imperfection. Hence, the human being understood as an incomplete animal is imperfect and even defective; we are, in Kojève’s memorable words, the “deadly sickness of the animal.”14 One would think, then, that the way to free the animal of this sickness would be to direct desire, and thus human action, toward eradicating it.
This is surely one of the tart ironies of Kojève’s assertion that the most genuine expression of our humanity is to risk our lives in an attempt to attain completion, for is it not the fundamental import of recognition that one be recognized as complete, self-sufficient, fully worthy, like a god, and that this recognition itself be complete in every way? “Man can only be satisfied by being recognized universally; that is … man can only be satisfied by being perfect.”15 This perfection entails complete self-sufficiency. The perfect man needs nothing, depends on nothing—the perfect man is in both these senses truly universal.
One could identify sickness with dissatisfaction, with imperfection, with fear of death, and all the other limitations that impede our being complete and finished, in and of ourselves. There is good reason that Kojève equates individuality with crime.16 The individual, as such, is a failure to overcome itself, a failure of perfection, for man achieves perfection only by transcending individuality, by self-annihilation as an individual. Individuality is a kind of defect for Kojève because individuality can arise only from a difference that cannot be resolved or understood in the accustomed language of the larger community in which that individual finds himself. To the extent that the individual is not fully clear to himself he cannot be fully clear to others, and therefore his proper worth cannot be universally recognized because that proper worth cannot be clarified to all.
The individual cannot thus free himself of his particularity, which is a particularity of imperfection or incompletion. The urge to finality overcomes these defects. Each individual recognizes the other and can recognize the other because this mutual and universal recognition is predicated on complete transparency, such that every individual is an exact replica, in all essential respects, of every other individual. The differences that one may attribute to the physical or animal being of the individual are thereby effaced. Moreover, every individual thinks according to the same principles and in the same way—error itself has been abolished. This similarity of thought is also a similarity of action, since thought and action are one in the truly universal and homogeneous state. We may thus finally argue that this uniformity of thought and action functions in a way that is an exact correlate to instinct, or even to a kind of computer program. In either case, the basic motive patterns of the individual are in every way the same; we may assume that every individual, when confronted in the same way with the same difficulty, is likely to react in the same way.
If this sounds something like what the underground man railed against in Notes from Underground, there is good reason for this similarity, because the underground man mocks and fumes at the enactment of a final system of rationality as represented by the Crystal Palace.17 This fallen prince of nonsense cannot free himself of his own attachment to error, a certain kind of freedom, which is pitted against the sort of freedom possible for those who delight in the Crystal Palace. He cannot go gently into that good night; he cannot become nobody or an animal body that repeats the same actions when confronted with the same
circumstances, the animal that is complete unto itself in its dealings with its surroundings. In the end, becoming nobody means becoming a creature of ritual, repetition—and bureaucracy.
Yet, as should now be clear, Kojève’s attitude toward the post-historical state seems to be very ambivalent, as ambivalent as his varying descriptions of the slave’s path to the post-historical state. On the one hand, he describes the post-historical state in terms of what appears to be a horrendous apocalypse, or the end of the human, with nothing attractive or salvific about it; better to remain in the confusion of history without a certain end than at the end of history. On the other hand, the achievement of a post-historical state seems to be the highest end of genuinely human striving, an end to be brought about and perfected at the cost of a comprehensive, final revolution, without which human life would not make any sense at all. Kojève offers, it seems, two radically opposed alternatives: a continuation of the nonsense of history that heads nowhere, achieves nothing, and speaks of itself in the plaintive tones of the underground man; or a history whose aim is to cancel itself out in a final end that frees human beings from the otherwise nonsensical muddle that history must be in absence of a definitive end.18
If we may put it so, the governing irony in Kojève’s work is related not only to the practical task of achieving this final state but also to the question of how we can know it has come to be realized at last if one of the results of the institution of the final state is to eliminate the very consciousness that could recognize it as such. In fact, irony also extends to the desirability of the final state. Do we truly wish to become free by eliminating our animal existence? Do we truly wish to become universal through the most radical plan of de-individualization imaginable, one akin to death—if not literal, then metaphoric?
SENTIENT, NOT SAPIENT
If the expansive treatises Kojève wrote after the Introduction tend to deal with the issue of achieving the final state, the comments strewn throughout the Introduction itself bring up concerns about its desirability. The most famous of these is the note Kojève added to the original second edition of the Introduction, which came out in 1962.19 This long note has occasioned a great deal of comment, to put it mildly, because it is proffered as a self-correction with regard to the date of the end of history and to the consequences of that end. As we have seen, the notes to the final lectures of 1939 are unusual insofar as their depiction of the final state, the universal and homogeneous state, does not fit well with the overall account of the advent of the sage and the Book. If the advent of the sage and the Book should be a welcome final event, the overcoming of history in the acquisition of final truth, the notes attached to these sections provide a very different account.
The added note of 1962 does nothing to dispel this impression. The note is appended to the twelfth lecture of the 1938–1939 series, and its playful tone belies its rather disturbing content. The note is connected not to the text but, in a typical Kojèvian gesture, to another note to the text, thus creating a comment on a comment on the original text. The first note discusses the consequences of the disappearance of man after the end of history. The disappearance of man is not a “cosmic catastrophe,” nor is it a biological catastrophe. Indeed, Kojève suggests that the disappearance of man might be a boon for nature since, after the end of history, man is in accord with nature or the given. Kojève can say this because the end of history is nothing else than the establishment of a final accord or truce with nature, signaling that man has no more demands to make of nature, is indeed satisfied with nature, having overcome the deficiencies of nature and himself.
Keep in mind that Kojève identifies man’s continued existence with error, if man does not seek to overcome that error by ending history. We also know that the elimination of error thus renders man in harmony with nature, even if that harmony has been achieved through the most thorough plan of domination over nature, that of the slave. Having come to this point of dominance, when there is literally nothing more to do, one finally succumbs to repetition. We might say that man, in having mastered nature or become “master of the world,”20 has given himself instinct, so that he need no longer think or wonder, and wisdom describes precisely this instinct, a λόγος that writes human life once and for all.
The note from 1962 takes these conclusions a good deal further. Kojève recognizes, in part, the problem of repetition that we have just mentioned—if the human has departed with the advent of wisdom, then only those beings with instinct remain, beings that are satisfied, who have no human desires. How can beings such as these be the ideal celebrants of ritual or be those who might read the Book? As we noted, Kojève questions what language may mean for being such as these; after all, what understanding can mere repetition allow? The only kind of language suitable to the post-historical being is something like the language of the bees, a language that is not self-conscious, that is merely a set of signals that produce accustomed responses.
The stress is on instinct again, on the fact that the λόγος that governs these post-historical beings acts like a computer command or a basic code furnishing all possible reactions to a given stimuli. To repeat an example presented by Robert Brandom in Making It Explicit, one must distinguish between sentience, which describes the capacity to respond to certain stimuli in delimited ways, and sapience, which describes a relation whereby the stimuli themselves may be transformed or reoriented, where the being in question does not merely respond but transforms. For Brandom, only the latter attitude applies to human beings, and it hints at the gulf that divides humans as potentially creative actors from other beings whose possibilities for response are strictly delimited.21
The post-historical being has to incline to mere sentience, a point Kojève canvases with considerable humor when he discusses the similarities between the Soviet Union and the United States. Kojève insists that history ends with the 1806 Battle of Jena, and he attempts to bolster this point by suggesting that nothing significant has occurred since Jena and that both the Soviet Union and the United States are realizing the bestialization of humanity in states created purely to foster the physical well-being of their respective citizens.
But this darkly humorous view of sentience is complicated by the peculiar account of snobbery that Kojève introduces toward the end of the note:
It was following a recent trip to Japan (1959) that I had a radical change of opinion on this point. There I was able to observe a Society that is one of a kind, because it alone has for almost three centuries experienced life at the “end of History”—that is, in the absence of all civil or external war (following the liquidation of feudalism by the commoner Hideyoshi and the artificial isolation of the country conceived and realized by the noble successor Ieyasu). Now, the existence of the Japanese nobles, who ceased to risk their lives (even in duel) and yet did not for that begin to work, was anything but animal.
“Post-historical” Japanese civilization undertook ways diametrically opposed to the “American way.” No doubt, there were no longer in Japan any Religion, Morals, or Politics in the “European” or “historical” sense of these words. But Snobbery in its pure form created disciplines negating the “natural” or “animal” given which in effectiveness far surpassed those that arose, in Japan or elsewhere, from “historical” Action—that is, from warlike and Revolutionary Struggles or from forced Work. To be sure, the peaks (equaled nowhere else) of specifically Japanese snobbery—the Noh Theater, the ceremony of tea, and the art of flower arrangement—were and still remain the exclusive prerogative of the nobles and the rich. But in spite of persistent economic and political inequalities, all Japanese without exception are currently in a position to live according to totally formalized values—that is, values completely empty of all “human” content in the “historical” sense. Thus, in the extreme, every Japanese is in principle capable of committing, from pure snobbery, a perfectly “gratuitous” suicide (the classical samurai sword can be replaced by an airplane or torpedo), which has not
hing to do with the risk of life in a Fight waged for the sake of “historical” values that have social or political content. This seems to allow one to believe that the interaction recently begun between Japan and the Western World will finally lead not to a rebarbarization of the Japanese but to a “Japanization” of the Westerners (including the Russians).
Now, given that no animal can be a snob, every “Japanized” post-historical period would be specifically human. Hence there would be no “definitive annihilation of Man properly so-called,” as long as there were animals of the species Homo sapiens that could serve as the “natural” support for what is human in men. But, as I said in the above Note, an “animal that is in harmony with Nature or given Being” is a living being that is in no way human. To remain human, Man must remain a “Subject opposed to the Object,” even if “Action negating the given and Error” disappears. This means that, while henceforth speaking in an adequate fashion of everything that is given to him, post-historical Man must continue to detach “forms” from their “contents,” doing so no longer in order actively to transform the latter, but so that he may oppose himself as a pure “form” to himself and to others taken as “content” of any sort.22
I have reproduced a large portion of the note because of its intrinsic interest to the issue of the post-historical epoch. The note first sets out the possibility of bestialization that might characterize the post-historical epoch and seems to follow from the various problems we have discussed above in regard to the period after the end of history. Against this train of thought, Kojève introduces here a basic notion of ritual: human beings may repeat actions that were once filled with the immediate force of struggle or desire without possessing anything close to the magnitude of that original force or desire. Put slightly differently, one can identify a marked difference between those who make history, who forge the essential pattern of history, that λόγος that ends up preserved in the Book, and those who merely repeat that λόγος. Among those who repeat, the original sense of the actions they imitate may be very remote indeed, but the actions remain as pure forms to retrace and imitate. What was once the creation of spontaneous human action, the negation of the given, now recurs as purely formal repetition.23