The Black Circle

by Jeff Love

  Kojève then sets out two further arguments before taking up the evolution of the concept in earnest. The first of these arguments is largely negative and seeks to question the validity of three important kinds of discourse—sociology, historicism, and psychology—all of which are “antiphilosophical” in suggesting that philosophy, as the overriding discourse of sense, is impossible. Kojève seeks to show that these discourses are flawed to such an extent that they cannot make sense of themselves as discourses.45

  Kojève’s main target is sociology, which he accuses of permitting a vicious relativism because of the ostensibly neutral position it takes toward different truths, in the way we commonly say that there are “different truths for different people.” Kojève notes that history aids sociology in asserting this point: different peoples may have different histories that are all quite acceptable on their own; there is neither a singular truth nor a singular history to which we must adhere.

  Kojève questions the sense of this proposition and the sense one may make of the assertion that the truth can be several, even contradictory or essentially partial, for if the truth is essentially several and partial, is there really any truth at all? And if there is no truth, then what enduring sense can sense have? For Kojève, it comes down to a replacement of philosophy with ideology.46 The universalist claim that Kojève associates with philosophy has to dissipate, as does the authority of universalism—or, for Kojève, any authority at all. To make the point more sharply, the notion that one may retain an opinion without need for further reflection because all is “opinion” or “self-interest” or “the way I think” must itself become antiphilosophical precisely because it denies the reflective, synthetic role of philosophy as an organizing discourse about discourse, the task of which is to integrate various discourses into a final harmonious whole. Without this possibility of integration—as long as one totally ungrounded and ungroundable or dogmatic phrase is uttered—philosophy becomes impossible.47

  Sociology as such assumes the impossibility of philosophy. The sociologist knows only different practices and ways and does not claim to be able to know anything more. Kojève seems to view the sociologist merely as one who assumes the impossibility of philosophy; he remains silent as to whether that impossibility is desirable or not. For Kojève, as I have noted, the more salient point, at least initially, is not the desirability of philosophy but its possibility. Kojève’s concern, however, cannot simply be reduced to a defense of philosophy as a significant discourse. On the contrary, at issue for Kojève is the possibility of sense itself. This is Kojève’s “plea” that the sociologist is a kind of sophist selling whatever wares he can without regard to their quality. Like the sophists, the sociologist has no criterion of truth. Discourses may come and go, and the more “learned” one is, the less concerned one is with engaging in the foolhardy insistence on the superiority or correctness of one discourse as opposed to another. One faces multiplicity—history tells us so, our experience of sheer variety tells us so. Why should we insist on limiting that variety? Dare we? Can we?

  Kojève is clear: without philosophy, all we have are false or pseudo discourses. If we cannot defend or assert them on any basis, they literally are just positions we might take—we know not what and cannot know why. It is not merely that political authority might dissolve but also that any orientation of any kind might dissolve into non- or pseudo sense. The consequence Kojève draws from this is the obvious one: the condition of retaining a partial view is that one not think about it vis-à-vis other views. One merely holds on to the view, which is a kind of given whose meaning and authority are never subject to question.

  Sociology is thus a refusal to think in any way other than the accustomed one. Sociology may in fact offer multiple kinds of thinking, might allow one to become more “well rounded”—traveling does one good, according to the old adage; “Tout comprendre et tout pardonner” (To understand all is to forgive all); and so on. One does better not to think, and one ends up in dogmatism the moment a question arises.

  Kojève next approaches psychology, and his main target in this section of the text seems to be Sigmund Freud.48 The specific bone of contention is the notion of the unconscious. Kojève’s objections should be fairly clear by now. Since Kojève argues that it is the singular duty of philosophy to assert the ultimate accessibility of wisdom, to claim that one can become fully self-conscious, the notion of an ultimately inscrutable unconscious is completely vexing. Modern psychology not only creates an unconscious but also turns that unconscious into a virtually inexhaustible resistance to the transparent self-knowledge that Kojève sees as the ultimate form of wisdom, of adherence to the philosophic maxim “Know thyself” (γνῶθι σεατόν). What is more, psychology creates a virtually infinite market for itself by demanding that analysis clarify the unconscious—clarifying what, by its very nature, must always resist clarification. Psychology does not talk about an unconscious that can be eradicated or completely recovered but rather about an unconscious that becomes less threatening, understood in its resistance to understanding, a sort of perverse lux ex tenebris.

  Kojève proceeds from acquiescence to the impossibility of knowledge about history and society to acquiescence to an equal impossibility embedded in the individual. In both cases, the underlying concern is with an acquiescence to authority—either that of the given or that of mystery, the unknowable—that has a great deal in common with a vitiating fatalism or pessimism about the capacity of human beings to do anything but act in error. Human beings simply collapse in a muddle that both promises and defies description, that promises openness and freedom at the cost of our being able to know where and what we are. Here we rely on what we do not know.

  Nietzsche, for one, seems quite amenable to this idea. Nietzsche praises the Greeks for their “learned ignorance”—their superficiality that comes from profundity, from suffering, from recognizing that there are “dangerous” truths that it would be better for us not to know.49 Nietzsche may not turn ignorance into a virtue with ease, but he does call into question, with great severity and ingenuity, the insistence on clarity and openness that seems so crucial to Kojève.

  Still, it is all too easy to be deceived. Kojève’s position is not necessarily a moral one or about what one ought to do in a moral sense. Kojève’s position is about sense, period. How can we possibly make sense of ourselves if we are convinced that we cannot even know these selves, if we remain in some mysterious, chthonic way estranged from ourselves? Our claim to rationality—to the extent that rationality remains restricted—is purely spurious for Kojève. To insist that there are things we simply cannot know or can know only in part is, for Kojève, if not nonsense, then what he calls pseudo sense. If we cannot know that what we know is indeed what we know, without the agency of a God or an ideology of some kind, then we are simply condemned to endless chatter that is, in Kojève’s memorable phrase, equal to silence.50

  If speech is equal to silence, we have effectively suppressed what makes us distinct from other animals. The thought that may permit us to move beyond the sort of animal desire Kojève describes in the Hegel lectures proves to be nothing more than the dupe of that desire. We end up in the world of instrumental reason, of reason as tool of the desire not to be liberated from, but to serve, animal desire.

  SELF-REFERENCE AND SELF-INCLUSION

  The polemic is familiar. Kojève proceeds with two arguments in support of philosophy, one new, one an extension of older arguments. It should be obvious by now that, for Kojève, philosophy demands sense, demands achievement of complete knowledge as a condition of distinguishing itself from these other self-defeating and deluding discourses. Philosophy must become complete. If it cannot do so, then the human being is nothing but a comic and tragic creation, condemned to endless muddle and struggle, suffering without purpose.

  Kojève’s new argument, if it is indeed so new, takes aim once again at the problem of complete self-consciousness as a reductio ad absurdum. Let us
take the classic example of a person looking at the wall.51 Who is looking at the wall? We may say that X is looking at the wall. But we soon recognize that X cannot be simply silently looking at the wall. If X were simply silently looking at the wall, he could not communicate that action. X can only communicate that action by discourse, and X can only employ discourse if he recognizes himself as looking at the wall.

  The basic point is that communication requires awareness, and awareness involves a doubling of X, whom we might call the subject, with the wall as object. X is in effect aware of himself as looking at the wall. But we have not yet answered the initial question: Who is looking at the wall?

  Let us call nonverbal X, X1 and verbal X, X2. X2 describes X1 looking at the wall. How does X2 know this? Or, again, who is X2? We know who X2 is because X3 describes X2, who describes X1. For Kojève, everything comes down to this X3. If the explanation does not end with X3 but has to have recourse to an X4 to explain X3, then there is no way to call a halt to the progression, which becomes infinite or endlessly indefinite—in going on without end, it goes nowhere.52

  The argument that posits a progression ensures that no matter how far along we get, there will always be another X, unknowable in itself, that gives us the preceding X. This puzzle of self-consciousness is a major problem for the post-Kantian tradition—is the self essentially unknowable or not convincingly knowable or not? For Kojève, as we might expect, self-consciousness comes to complete self-transparency only when the concept is fully unfolded in history; the concept is nothing other than this history itself, as we have seen. Hence, Kojève attempts to get around the difficulty of an indefinite chain of (non)-identification by arguing that history must come to an end. Not only does this coming to an end create the basic contour of identity, but also the identity itself must appear, because in no other way is coherence possible.

  This latter argument is difficult. Why must identity appear? For Kojève, coherence is a project. Thus, if we speak Kojèvian, we argue that identity must appear in the end because it is the final result of the continued process of negation that must in the end come to an end at the cost of being considered negation, a process—indeed, anything at all. The vaunted negation Kojève describes must be determinate and can only be so if the process of negation is finite. Kojève essentially denies that any process that is not finite can deserve the name. To make this claim, it is noteworthy that Kojève simply dismisses mathematical examples out of hand. He argues that mathematics is not discourse, not conceptual, but rather a form of silence, and thus one can only infer that Kojève denies the availability of the linguistic analogy to mathematics.53

  Discourse, to be discourse, must therefore have a sense, and a clearly definable sense. If this sense is not clearly definable, the discourse is either nonsense or pseudo sense; that is, it is a discourse that is not immediately absurd, like “It flatly lookout cheese,” which is nonsense, but something more like “Birds fly upside down,” a phrase that does make sense though it may be shown to be only partially or incidentally true. Kojève goes against the tradition of “trans-sense” (заум) discourse in Russian poetry and, it seems, would be very circumspect about so-called poetic license. He essentially denies the validity of discourses that seem to be untranslatable or not interpretable. He is refreshingly honest in this respect, claiming that a discourse whose meaning cannot be placed within a definite framework is inadequate.

  The key point Kojève makes in this section of the text is to defend the possibility of closing interpretation of an action off at the level of X3. His claim is based, as should not surprise, on the dialectic logic he develops at length in the first volume of the Attempt and which may already be somewhat familiar from the previous chapters of this book. To reiterate: Kojève argues that discourse must have sense to be discourse. Further, the sense cannot be indefinite or infinite and still be considered sense. Hence, any discourse must at some point or another come to an end; it must be capable of finite development. Indeed, the end of this finite development of discourse is, for Kojève, the end of history, the complete discourse, which can no longer change but can only be repeated. In our example, then, Kojève admits the relation between X1 and X2 but claims that this relation must be finite if it is to be properly discursive. And if it is finite, it can be run through completely by X3, who can do little more than ensure that a complete account is available such that the only possibility of continued description has to be realized as repetition.

  Why is there no need for a further party? Why no need for X4 or Xn or Xn+1? This will become more obvious when we come to a discussion of the logic Kojève develops to bolster this account. However, there should be no surprise about this logic, since it is the same dialectic logic one sees everywhere in Kojève’s work. This logic involves only three positions, with X3 being something like the synthesizing agency who describes the progress of the dialectic movement immanently, as it were, since to describe the logic is to understand it completely. Let me move on to this logic.

  DIALECTIC

  The account Kojève presents in the Attempt sets out dialectic logic in a different way, which in itself is an interesting move for one who claims, as Kojève does, merely to be repeating the thought of the master to fit it to the needs of a different time. Kojève uses the clichéd division of the Hegelian dialectic into thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, with a new element that Kojève calls the “parathesis.”54 The thesis performs its accustomed role as the positive statement, as does the antithesis, the negation of this positive statement. This positive statement is of the utmost importance and is preceded by what Kojève refers to as a “hypo-thesis,” “being the intention to speak in order to say whatever might nevertheless have a sense.”55 This leads to a sort of “first” discourse—or, indeed, any discourse—that acts as a starting point, the positive statement that is the thesis generating its antithesis and preparing the way for a final synthesis, achieved after (perhaps many) parathetic interventions.

  While the possibility of having a starting point in any discourse seeking to make sense is certainly an innovation, the fundamental difference in Kojève’s treatment lies in his interposing a parathesis whose logical functioning is prior to the synthesis; the parathesis is an expression and elaboration of the introduction of time into logic via the dialectic. The parathesis plays a dynamic temporal role, for it too may be divided up into the triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; thus, one has a parathetic thesis, a parathetic antithesis, and finally, a parathetic synthesis. The parathetic differs from all the other thetic positions by its partiality. The parathesis draws on the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis only partially—a parathetic thesis is thus a partial assertion of the thesis. The same holds for the antithesis and for the synthesis, which can only be a synthesis including differential proportions of the thesis and antithesis.56

  The essence of the parathesis is to permit blends of the antagonistic elements in the thesis and antithesis. These blends represent attempts to attain a synthesis of thesis and antithesis in order to avoid an immediate contradiction leading to a synthesis that simply cancels itself out. In this respect, Kojève offers his famous example: I walk into a restaurant and tell the waiter that I want a beer and don’t want a beer. Evidently the waiter turns away without knowing what to do because, strictly speaking, there is nothing to do, no guidance for thought or action, until the two contradictory positions have been worked out.57 To avoid this state of affairs, Kojève invents the parathesis as a way to finesse the obvious contradiction. So I want a beer, but I want a beer in ten minutes. Kojève’s example deliberately introduces the element of time, to suggest that the contradiction presented by the thesis and antithesis if both are asserted at the same time may be averted by differentiating them in time, by introducing time into the logic of the concept as a parathesis.

  The basic idea is that the parathesis cancels itself out by going through all the possible combinations of declaring thesis and antithesis, until one is finally ready to
arrive at a final synthesis. This final synthesis is nothing other than the result of the interplay of the parathetic. The possible combinations—the contradiction between thesis and antithesis that at one point led only to mutual canceling of each other or to a full contradiction—may now unfold as the temporal movement from the thesis through to the synthesis. Kojève insists that it is only by reference to time that one can come to a solution to the problem of immediate contradiction that emerges with the assertion of thesis and antithesis without regard to time.

  The parathesis is therefore Kojève’s way of describing the various combinations of thesis and antithesis that lead in the end to a synthesis, which is the fulfillment of the concept and history as concept. Perhaps the most unusual aspect of this part of the Attempt is that it returns so dogmatically to the schema developed in the Hegel lectures from 1938–1939. The original thesis is that the concept is eternity. The original antithesis is that the concept is non-eternity. The paratheses are of course three: that the concept is eternal, relating to the eternal outside of time; that the concept is eternal, relating to the eternal inside time; and, finally, that the concept is eternal, relating to time itself. The final result of this structure, the totalizing synthesis, is the expected equation of the concept and time—Hegel’s basic achievement, according to Kojève.

  Again, as we might expect, Kojève matches up this dialectical structure with the same philosophers he names in the 1938–1939 lecture—excluding Baruch Spinoza, whose prominent role in those lectures has been eliminated. The rest of the Attempt is an enormously detailed history of the various philosophers, with the expected end in Hegel, an end that returns Kojève to his beginning with the Hegel lectures of the 1930s.