The Black Circle

by Jeff Love

  This result may seem a meager reward for wading through the many discussions of the Introduction to the Attempt and to its numerous expositions of important philosophers. Yet the Attempt cannot be overlooked. It is a sophisticated development of the central idea of the lectures from 1938–1939, with two important differences that need to be emphasized: Kojève drops the language of negation so prominent in the Introduction, and he places strong emphasis on repetition. Gone as well are the striking, if horrific or apocalyptic, descriptions of post-historical humanity. In their stead is an insistence on repetition, the notion that, no matter what we might think, we are in a time of repetition from which we cannot easily escape, if we can escape it at all. Moreover—and most importantly—the purported logical innovation of the Attempt sheds light on a fundamental aspect of the principal narratives of the Hegel lectures, that of master and slave and the ascent of the sage to final wisdom. Both these narratives are distilled by the logic Kojève outlines in the Attempt into an underlying narrative of the temporalizing of the concept.

  The temporalizing of the concept is the complete articulation or explicitation of sense. In different terms, the concept is its own history, and the primary movement of that history is to turn away from two “eternities”: the initial silence from which the concept liberates us and the endless chatter that is equivalent to silence, which afflicts us if we find ourselves unable to accept the basic promise of philosophy—the ascent to wisdom or final truth. Within the terms of the master-slave narrative, the temporalizing of the concept is a description of the work the slave takes on and a response to the impasse of the master. Yet for this work to be truly emancipatory it must come to an end; otherwise, the incomplete character of the work imposes a slavery without end, the kind of slavery to dogma or mystery that Kojève identifies as a key aspect of the skeptical demeanor. This latter characterization of slavery puts the problem of incompletion in a new light, since incompletion is for Kojève an acquiescence to perpetual slavery. Of course, one may respond—and this response is practically a continuous refrain of the present study—that the alternative is hardly encouraging. For to end history in repetition demands the fortitude Nietzsche associates with the eternal return. It demands that we see our lives as wholly temporal and passing and welcome that aspect of life, without remorse or revenge, as true liberation. The earnest ambivalence of Kirillov returns to haunt Kojève’s project as a project.

  One well-disposed critic put the matter succinctly: the Attempt is a suffocating work. Time and again it tells us there is nothing left for us but repetition, that reason has no creative force whatsoever but is to be defined precisely as noncreative.58 Yet this is not the only caution. One begins to wonder whether creation was ever possible in the first place. This is a much more aggressive point that reveals one of the consequences of the a priori–a posteriori structure of Kojève’s logic, for if the a priori structure determines its shape as we see it at the very end of that development—so that we can fairly say that in my beginning is my end, and the reverse—how can there be any room for creativity? The development in history, if it is to prove to have a Logos, and precisely the self-reflective Logos that sees itself finally and fully reflected in its own history, could never have been otherwise. What might have seemed to be a free choice turns out to have been necessitated by the Logos that allows us to understand that act as such. Thus, the act could not have been free, could not have been creative in that sense, but only disclosive of a possibility that was “always already there” in the logic itself. No creativity, in terms we might normally associate with the modern artist, is available in Kojève, and, for that matter, an art unavailable to rational critique would be nothing more than non- or pseudo sense. Hence, the free modern individual of the Hegel lectures can be nothing other than an error corrected at the end of time.

  ENERGOLOGY

  In the remainder of the Attempt, Kojève offers an expansive context for the unfolding of this temporal (or spatiotemporal) logic in his division of philosophy into three principal parts: ontology, “energology,” and phenomenology.59 These parts ostensibly correspond, in Hegelian terms, to the logic, the philosophy of nature, and the phenomenology. To complete my brief account of the Attempt, I outline the fundamental components of this division as constituting yet another innovation that complicates the ostensibly faithful relation to Hegel’s thought that Kojève never tires of affirming.

  The most unusual term Kojève uses in this division is of course “energology.” He grants to energology an important systemic function as a mediating element between ontology and phenomenology in determining the truth of the discourse of philosophy on its way to wisdom, the final truth.

  Kojève first clarifies the relation among these three different elements of philosophy in his account of Democritus’s thought, contained in the opening volume of the Attempt. He relies on the simple metaphor of a house with three floors. On the ground floor, we encounter “empirical existence,” the “subjective,” or “phenomenal reality,” which phenomenology considers as its proper subject matter. On the main floor (bel étage), we encounter what Kojève refers to as the “objective reality” that corresponds to the subjective, phenomenal reality. On the second floor, we encounter “Being-given” (l’Être-donné) as such, the proper concern of ontology, according to Kojève.60

  If phenomenology and ontology are terms that have a ready history beyond Kojève’s description of them, energology does not. Kojève describes it in the following terms:

  Democritus projects an energo-metry [which, in any case, remains for him in the state of an “implicit” project since he only makes explicit an energo-graphy] that in fact demands as a philosophical “complement” an Energo-logy that no philosopher had hitherto made explicit as such and which will be made explicit only to the extent philosophers will try to take into account (discursively) the Physics founded by the atomists insofar as it is Energo-graphy and -metry.61

  Kojève distinguishes here between accounts of phenomena that are rooted essentially in measurement and a philosophical account of physics or “nature” that is discursive, rooted in the concept and its dialectical structure. What is he getting at?

  Kojève denies that there can be a direct philosophical account of nature or natural processes.62 He makes this point clear in the Hegel lectures, where he is radical enough to claim that there can be no philosophical knowledge of nature, for if philosophical knowledge is based in the concept, and the concept is the product that arises from the negation of nature, it follows that there can be no direct conceptual, and thus no philosophical, knowledge of nature. Kojève goes so far as to say that to make such a claim—that there can be a conceptual account of nature—was Hegel’s principal error, one that undercut his otherwise epoch-making equation of time and the concept.63 As we have noted previously, nature, as what is negated, has no positive identity in itself other than as the product of negation; nature is understood only as relative to the humanizing work of the concept. Hence, Hegel’s claim that there can be a conceptual understanding of nature as it is in itself is, for Kojève, tantamount to making the claim that Hegel, like God, has created nature. In short, Kojève completely rejects Hegel’s monism.64

  Kojève’s concern illustrates in the bluntest possible terms a fundamental postulate of his thinking: we know only what we make through the work preserved in the concept.65 If this is so, then any claim to conceptual access to nature puts us in the position of the creator of nature, a veritable God, rather than of the one who negates nature, the finite God that Kojève has us become at the end of history.

  Still, if this is so, then one might be tempted to ask why Kojève bothers with energology at all. To grasp what Kojève is after, it is important to consider why Kojève deems it necessary to interpose energology as a mediating element between ontology and phenomenology. For the purposes of his account of energology, Kojève defines ontology as the branch of philosophy that seeks to give an account of being as given (l’Être-donn�
�) and insists that ontology deals with what is common to all phenomena—that they are, as opposed to not being. Kojève defines phenomenology simply as dealing with empirical experience (existence-empirique) inhabited by different things or “monads.” If ontology concerns what is common to all things, their homogeneity, phenomenology concerns their difference, their heterogeneity, and for Kojève the question that arises is how the homogeneous can possibly relate to the heterogeneous. How does undifferentiated being appear as differentiated in beings?66 Energology deals with “irreductibly opposed” elements, whatever they are in differing conceptions of physical process.

  Energology, in this context, has to be something like a discursive account of the many attempts to clarify this relation and its completion: “By observing physicists, philosophers become discursively aware of the Objective-reality with which they are concerned and they see it at once directly ‘in the light’ of Being-given and in the reflected light of empirical-existence which are the phenomena.”67 The light imagery here may be slightly deceptive insofar as, for Kojève, philosophy represents a project of completing the discursive account of reality, but it is otherwise quite clear: a discursive account of energology articulates the changes in the mediating element, from Platonic idea onward.68 Energology is a mediation that finally consumes itself as such, along with the difference it mediates, this consummation being the completion of history.

  By “discursive account,” I want to emphasize another important aspect of Kojève’s energology. As I have noted, Kojève holds that there is no properly discursive account of nature itself. The only discursive account of nature is one that presupposes nature as negated—as unavailable in itself—and this is how Kojève describes the understanding of nature as “energography” and “energometry.” Both of these terms refer to scientific accounts of nature as physics. For Kojève, the science of nature, physics, is concerned with the measurement and management of nature, and he associates energometry with quantum physics and energography with classical mechanics.69 Natural phenomena are reduced to mathematical models that turn away from the phenomena in order to grasp what is common to all of them. Yet these attempts, understood discursively, are essential components in the creation of a durable (indeed seamless) relation between the one and the many that overcomes all possible contradictions.

  To put the matter differently, the relation of the three elements of philosophy bears a more than passing resemblance to the dialectical and parathetic logic Kojève unfolds in the Attempt, with ontology and phenomenology taking the role of thesis and antithesis and the various forms of energology offering a parathesis seeking to bind the other two into a durable synthesis. Thus, when Kojève proceeds to detailed accounts of Plato and Aristotle in the second volume of the Attempt, he divides each into three sections: ontology, energology, and phenomenology. He proceeds in the same manner in the final volume of the Attempt. Hence, it seems reasonable to suggest that the energological moment in these various accounts describes the mode whereby what is ostensibly indeterminate and eternal, being itself, is linked to what is inherently temporal and differential, the phenomena that inhabit what Kojève refers to as empirical existence. In other words, there is a homology between the framework Kojève outlines in the introduction to the Attempt, that of the temporalizing of the concept, which takes place through many different combinations, though the most important of these are only five. In this respect, it is intriguing that the third volume of the Attempt, aside from its astonishingly baroque account of Proclus (among others),70 directs so much attention to a school of thought that he tends typically to pass over in silence.

  With Kant, the supposedly final volume of the Attempt returns us to the list of six thinkers that Kojève considers most important (Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel). We do not know whether Kojève really planned to write an extensive account of Christian philosophy. All we have left of that project is his book on Kant, which dates from the same period as the Attempt. Still, Kojève insists in this book that Kant is the first genuinely Christian philosopher. To complete my sketch of the Attempt, I want to address briefly this most provocative statement about Kant, as a way of returning to what constitutes for Kojève’s Hegel’s decisive move. Kojève makes his case on the first page of his Kant book:

  On the one hand, Kantian “empiricism,” which is at once a complete reiteration of anti-Platonic Aristotelianism and an anticipation of authentic Hegelianism, in fact determines the radically atheistic character of Kant’s System. By the same token, his identification of the human in man with “pure Volition,” that is, with creative Freedom or, to use Hegelian language, negating Action (active Negativity), makes of the Kantian System the authentic philosophical expression of Judeo-Christian anthropology which culminates in Hegel.71

  This thought takes us all the way back to Kojève’s statement cited at the beginning of the present study: “The pagan way: become what you are (as idea = ideal). The Christian way: become what you are not (yet): the way of conversion.”72 The pagan belongs more properly to the “natural” world of the master, the Christian to the “artificial” world of the slave. The pagan world is marked by necessity and an impasse: one reaches a final point and repeats, a whole monistic system of repeating phenomena constituting the cosmos in which man is included. The Christian is radically dualistic and presupposes both combat with the master and the creation of work as an emancipatory activity recorded by, and finalized in, the full discourse of the concept—the full discourse of history itself as the account of the slave’s emancipation in the figure of the citizen of the universal and homogeneous state.

  For Kojève, Kant’s contribution is crucial because he introduces this radically new idea of volition.73 Where Kant does not go far enough for Kojève, however, is that he retains the notion of the “thing-in-itself” that ensures the impossibility of the complete transformation of the natural world into a human artifact. By retaining the thing-in-itself, then, Kant remains essentially unable to make the fundamental Hegelian move toward finality; for Kant, according to Kojève, history cannot come to an end. One is thus left with an unending struggle to end that is dangerously close to skepticism. Perhaps even worse, Kant’s prescriptions for action function on the basis of an “as if.” One acts “as if” that action could have a decisive impact on the natural world, whereas in truth it cannot because the thing-in-itself ensures the infinite distance between the activity and its goal.74

  Kant leaves one at an impasse and, in this sense, anticipates revolution from a position that precludes its possibility.

  TERMINAL TRANSITION

  Kojève’s postwar works refine and emphasize with exhaustive thoroughness the impossibility of novelty, of change that is not repetition, for all those living in the post-Hegelian age. The effect of this view, as one can glean from the Outline, is a society where nothing is open to chance, where all action is regulated and nothing outside the ordinary can happen other than as an error that must be corrected immediately. In this sense, Kojève makes good on his claim that the end of human life should be to correct the error that is human life when it has not turned toward the end. As creatures of this regulated society, we lose our individuality, as we must if we are going to submit to the machinery of legislation that eliminates all that our animal being has bequeathed to us in the way of individuality and the fearsome urge for self-preservation. Kojève manages to create a true (a)theocracy in which the individual finally submits to the universal command, having no other choice—a rather Stalinist (a)theocracy, if one may risk the expression.

  This is a society that aims to complete the suicide of the individual. This is a society that eliminates the error of individuality. This is the society that, in Kojève’s hands, Hegel bids us to create, a modern society that offers a total state of a kind never before imagined. If we truly emancipate ourselves in the way Kojève advises us to, we will bring forth this new universal and homogeneous state without question. If we fail to emancipate our
selves, choosing the virtual nonsense of animal survival of the one state, we will likely suffer in endless error.

  Yet the structure of the state itself expresses a fundamental misgiving about the possibility of the realization of the final state. As Kojève says in the first section of the Outline:

  To be sure, in the limit case of a perfectly homogeneous society where all conflict among its members is by definition excluded, one would have no need of Right. But one may ask oneself whether a homogeneous society will still be a society, whether it will maintain itself as a society. For in the societies we know the social link is conditioned by the diversity of its members, one giving to the other what the other does not have. (This point has been has been illuminated very well by Durkheim in his book on the Division of social work.) But no matter, for the real societies we know are never homogeneous.75

  More than a complement to this final state, which now seems to admit a terminal transition that never achieves its supposed end, the Attempt advances a powerful variant of the central emancipation narrative in Kojève’s work: the liberation from eternity. This narrative fits with the two other principal narratives, that of the freedom from nature (the master) and the ascent to wisdom; it is their temporal and discursive equivalent. Hence, the three principal narratives in Kojève’s philosophical thought converge as a flight from the eternal and unchanging, nature, space, the master, silence, and so forth. All of these are original figures that the work of history, the work of the concept, seeks to overcome by humanization or anthropogenic desire that insists on the temporal, the changing, and the discursive. Yet the final achievement of such overcoming cannot be other than a return to those initial figures, this being a mark of the circularity of the “system of knowledge” so dear to Kojève.