by Jeff Love
This circularity raises many more questions than it answers. Kojève offers us a series of narratives of emancipation that bring us, in our end, back to our beginning. Is this emancipation? Is this truly becoming free of slavery? Kojève was clearly aware of the problematic nature of the final end, the suicide, the end of history. None of these seem attractive as ends, simply because they mock our entrenchment in interest—above all, our interest in living longer at virtually any cost. Mockery cannot offer, however, a particularly rich philosophical pedagogy, and one wonders whether Kojève’s studiously unfinalized approach to finality does not itself offer another way. If one becomes finally aware of the impossibility of finality—awareness being itself a sign of the absence of finality—one may come to terms with a terminal lack of an ending that is itself an ending because it is completely determinate. In short, one repeats. Every action repeats self-interest, which, once aware of itself as such, as the only final directive in our lives, may be played out in the wretched Beckettian sense of “I can’t go, I’ll go on,” an admission of courage and cowardice at the same time and a powerful echo of the terminal situation of the underground man with which we began.76
And yet this “solution” can be only unsatisfactory, a return to the terminal dissatisfaction of Christianity—of the religious philosopher, in Kojève’s terms. Kojève then seems to go no further than Kant, admitting the impossibility of his own self-refuting project. Kojève’s revolution proves itself to be vulnerable to the very counterrevolutionary propaganda that it sought to overcome, and he certainly seems to betray the revolutionary forces he sought to encourage (if one is to trust his own characterization of his work from the 1930s). Hence, it is hardly surprising that questions have arisen about his possible loyalty to Marxism, or to Stalin himself.77 Moreover, Kojève calls his own status into question with this nagging inconsistency. If he is only the prophet of the sage, and not the sage, how is it that he can possibly bring us to understand what the sage understands? And if he does understand, if he is the sage or a sage, why does he take the stance of the prophet, of an actor not simply describing the end of history but attempting assiduously to bring it about? After all, the sage is content, need not act any further—indeed, can have no further interest in action.
Most damning of all is precisely the achievement of Kojève’s extreme vision—a final utopia entailing the complete termination of the human being and a darkly ironical “return to nature” that frees the latter of the human aberration, even if it is indeed an artifact or product of that aberration. As a variant of Marxism, this result is of course invidious, since the “end state” is manifestly an affront to the emancipatory hopes invested in Marx’s thought. Kojève’s genuine radicality overturns the utopian hopes one may associate with Vladimir Soloviev, Marx, and perhaps even Hegel himself. The turn to deification as the absolutization of finitude is almost certainly a parody of these thinkers, and indeed of Heidegger as well, for the turn to absolute finitude terminates any hope for the transcendence of death by overcoming the selfish attachment to life that has created the various narratives Kojève undermines. If there is irony or laughter in this conclusion, it is that of either the Buddhist sage or the Swiftian misanthrope. After all, the fruition of humanity is to end humanity as an inherently unstable combination of human and animal. Kojève’s emancipation narrative thus emerges as a sober brand of philosophical “black humor” directed against the fecund and deviously selfish human imagination that tries at every turn to justify an ignoble desire to live at any cost.78
9
WHY FINALITY?
The raging desire to come to a final conclusion is one of the most deadly and sterile obsessions that belong to humanity. Every religion and philosophy has made claim to its own God, to have touched the infinite, to have discovered the recipe for happiness. What pride and what emptiness! To the contrary, I see that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works don’t come to final conclusions.
—Gustave Flaubert
Whether he succeeded or not, whether ironic or merely seriously playful, Kojève’s thought is preoccupied with bringing an end to thought. If this is indeed a philosophy of emancipation, it is no doubt a most curious one—the final emancipation appears to be indistinguishable from what we may perceive as suicide, the death or extirpation of the self. We may point to the obvious affiliations with Buddhism, with crucial currents in Christian thought, with crucial currents in the burgeoning Russian intellectual tradition of the nineteenth century, which shows itself to be a complex synthesis driven by concerns about the proper ends of human life. We may suggest that this suicide is the ultimate imitatio Christi, a triumphant declaration of the “inner truth and greatness” of Christianity in the guise of a thoroughgoing atheism. Or we may comfort ourselves with the notion that this suicide is merely a metaphor describing how one may subordinate oneself to the creation of a greater community where no one is everyone.
Whatever approach we take, whatever guise we choose to identify as the real Kojève, we still find ourselves faced with a singular challenge: to be truly human is to be free, and to be free is to eradicate one’s attachment to life. We are thus truly human, truly free, only in becoming freed of our servitude to self-preservation. The truly human life is very much a “mediated suicide,” in Kojève’s provocative phrase, these mediations being points of resistance to a final truth, our proclivity for error that must, in the end, be overcome.
If ever a philosophy were untimely, it would have to be that of Kojève. For error or, in Heideggerian parlance, “errancy,” is in its own inconsistent way the dominant surface dogma of our time. But Kojève’s is not simply a conservative voice railing against the apparent nihilism of our time in any of its various forms, from the supposed nihilism of the collective straw man known as “postmodernism” to that of the modern consumer society that turns everything into a product for consumption. Few conservative voices recommend a turn to collective deification by immolation of the self. This sort of thinking is rather too exotic or extreme to play well in what remains of the conservative tradition, though it would likely do well among those traditionalists on the left influenced by Alain Badiou, whose grand vision of a new kind of communal subjectivity bears more than a little resemblance to Kojève’s thought. Indeed, Badiou’s “aleatory rationalism” attempts to attain evacuation of the individual self in favor of a collective subject in a way quite similar to what one finds in Kojève.1
But even Badiou is careful to avoid what is most objectionable in Kojève’s thought: the obsessive focus on finality, an end of ends. The apocalyptic aspect of Kojève’s thought is repellent to our modern or “late modern” or “postmodern” sensibility. Perhaps it is also important precisely for this reason, since the immanence of apocalypse, long a feature of Western thought, is perhaps more convincing now than ever before. Given the rapid advance of technologies that may achieve the self-immolation Kojève describes, we may be closer to an end of history than we imagine.2
This is a standard argument insofar as it relies on the long-held cliché that we most stubbornly flee something unwanted or terrifying when it faces us most directly. It is a way of talking about the first stage of the recognition that we are dying—denial—and may nonetheless hold some truth. But it seems to me that the untimeliness of Kojève’s thought has more to do with the profound rejection of finality that emerged in the twentieth century in conjunction with an equally profound commitment to freedom as what cannot be defined, made final, reified, or turned into inventory (Bestand), as an object for use in processes that transcend that object. From the perspective of those many thinkers who associate freedom with the evasion of an end, Kojève’s thought is nothing more than an evocation of tyranny, the death of the human, an apocalyptic invitation to realize the very finality, reification, or objectification that these thinkers seek to combat in a final universal tyranny. Kojève really is a Stalinist, one far more radical than Stalin himself.3
How can it be, then, that Ko
jève’s thought may also claim to be emancipatory? What is at work here that we may say that Kojève’s thought is at once emancipatory and tyrannical? Do we not find ourselves enmeshed in contradictions or coruscating irony? Is Kojève’s account of emancipation in reality a parody of emancipatory movements? Does it reveal something deeply problematic about the way freedom has been understood as the final and ultimate goal of human striving? These questions and arguments hinge on an understanding of freedom. The untimeliness of Kojève’s thought consists, in the final account, in its exploration of freedom, and ultimately in its apparent insistence that we may free ourselves only by freeing ourselves from ourselves, a suggestion that sounds closer to the grand inquisitor in Ivan Karamazov’s famous poem than it perhaps should.
FREEDOM AND ERROR: VOLUNTAS
Freedom is not an immaculate concept; it too has a history. To get a sense of what is at issue in Kojève’s untimeliness vis-à-vis the dominant notions of freedom as essentially a kind of inexhaustibility, we must take a brief look at how freedom emerges as a concept. The astonishing thing about freedom is that it seems to emerge first in conjunction with evil. A number of studies come to this conclusion, and it seems to agree with Kojève’s own understanding of the matter, which places emphasis on the dramatic difference between the pagan and the Christian view of human agency.4 As the opening epigraph of this book demonstrates, Kojève characterizes the Greek understanding of human action as a discovery of what one already is—one comes to discover the necessity hidden in the apparent disorder of appearances, one’s fate that lies “before” time as what expresses itself in time. According to Kojève, the Christian view is radically different because it sets out no specific fate; rather, the Christian view asserts the fundamental openness of experience and the responsibility that individuals have for their acts, based on this openness.5 If, for the Greeks, freedom is essentially a kind of vanity to be punished by the realization of the superior role of necessity in our lives, the Christian may be punished not for mere vanity but also for evil, defined as the will to persist in error, to perpetuate error as self-assertion at all costs.
This will to persist in error is what Augustine refers to as voluntas. Our abbreviated history of freedom is a history of this unusual, revolutionary notion. Augustine first introduces this notion of the will as voluntas in his dialogue On Free Choice of the Will (De libero arbitrio voluntatis).6 It is of course no accident that the dialogue’s primary topic is evil and, in particular, the question of God’s responsibility for or relation to evil. No more difficult question can arise for the Christian apologist. The underlying problem is to reconcile the three primary attributes of God—his omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence—with the reality of suffering. How is it possible that God allows suffering if God is truly good and truly powerful? The famous characterization of the problem by Lactantius (citing Epicurus) is worth repeating here:
God, he [Epicurus] says, either wants to get rid of evil and cannot; or he can but does not want to; or he neither wants to nor can; or he wants to and can. If he wants to and cannot, he is feeble, which is not fitting for God. If he can and does not want to, he is wicked, which is equally foreign to God. If he neither can nor wants to, he is wicked and feeble, and thus, not God. If he wants to and can, the only combination suitable to God, whence evil? Or: Why does he not get rid of it?7
Lactantius puts the problem starkly: God is either feeble or wicked, impotent or evil. At least these characterizations of God are a possible consequence of the problem of evil, if an answer to that problem is not forthcoming.
Augustine tackles the problem by directing the responsibility for evil to human beings. If God is incapable of erring, human beings are quite capable of erring, and they often do. One hears in this respect another echo of Augustine’s remarkable phrase from the Confessions: “si fallor, sum” (If I err, I am).8 This phrase is more radical because it identifies the human with error, and thus with evil, for evil is precisely error, the unwillingness to live in accordance with the way set for us by God. It is not merely to err as a result of mistaken apprehension; rather, it is the far more interesting and aggressive case where one errs willingly, where one deliberately contravenes God’s will. The deliberate contravention of God’s will is accomplished by a different will that becomes distinctively human to the extent that it struggles against God. The human will thus describes the capacity or power to contravene God’s will and to persist in contravention of God’s will. As Kojève puts it, the human being is the only being that may persist in error.9
Attributing to human beings the capacity to err is an astonishing move that grants to human beings a power that the Greeks did not see fit to give them.10 Indeed, the Greek tradition puts tremendous emphasis on the limitations that extend to human beings, limitations that simply cannot be overcome. Any attempt to overcome these limits is both heroic and tragic—the epic and tragic traditions in classical Greek literature attest to this emphasis, according to which the attempt to transgress both fails and warrants the most terrible punishments. The case of Oedipus is paradigmatic (and perhaps falsely so) because it is such a clear case of noble striving—in this case, for knowledge—that turns against the heroic figure, who, in the end, tears his eyes out so as not to see, not to know (both verbs are closely related in classical Greek). The lesson is unmistakable: there are borders that one cannot and dare not cross.
In Augustine’s hands, Greek restrictions on the capacity to overcome limitation are largely eliminated. Human beings can and do transgress, and the capacity that fundamentally enables this transgression is will. They also dare to transgress, though in this respect their punishment is supposed to be certain. Nonetheless, the key move is to attribute to human beings a capacity for disobedience that must be very considerable indeed, since it is the origin of evil in the world, the very evil that has such a violent and harrowing effect on other human beings and on natural creatures. It is the ultimate capacity for self-assertion at the cost of all others; it is what Augustine identifies with original sin.
Augustine places the responsibility for evil squarely on the shoulders of human beings. This transfer of responsibility from God to human beings has invited derision. Friedrich Nietzsche said that “the entire doctrine of the Will, the most fateful falsification in psychology hitherto, was essentially invented for the sake of punishment.” And Hans Blumenberg, in his magisterial study of the modern age, makes a similar point, emphasizing the manifest utility of the Augustinian notion of will as a defense of the deity.11
Though Blumenberg and Nietzsche focus on the creation of a will capable of transgressing and transforming limits as the precondition for the proper attribution to human beings of punishment for evil, they tend to stress the incredible increase in human possibility opened up by this new notion of will. Human beings no longer must choose between strictly denominated choices; they can transform those choices, creating new possibilities of exploration (indeed, Robert Brandom’s “sapience” is unthinkable outside this concept of will). The vast expansion of human responsibility is accompanied by an equally vast expansion of possibility, expressed in all cases as disobedience or negation, the ultimate disobedience or negation being the negation of God himself.
The negative relation to freedom as freedom to be responsible for disobedience offers another side: the freedom to overthrow the very framework in which that disobedience is possible. Augustine’s notion of voluntas incites deeply impious hopes for a revolution in which the order that imposes obedience is finally and fully overcome. As much as Augustine’s notion of freedom lays a great responsibility on human beings, it also permits them the most expansive freedom, provided they are daring or reckless enough to accept it.
The aftermath of Augustine’s notion of will suggests that such daring was not at hand. It is not until far later that the assertion of a capacity not merely to obey but also to master nature was declared. But even in the more radical philosophical projects of the early part of the modern age,
the expression and expansion of human will still refers to a fixed structure or system. The human will may expand to cover more areas, but it cannot, in the final account, overcome God himself.
The most important modern apology for God in the face of evil, Gottfried Leibniz’s Theodicy (1710), indicates that we cannot do better than realize our similarity with God as well as our distance from him. This distance expresses itself indelibly with the claim that evil is primarily deficiency, defect, or want of being. God, as the ultimate being, sees all at once without shadow or defect. But we, as creatures, as creations of God, and thus as contingent, are unable to see in exactly this way. Our freedom is located not in our willful disobedience but rather in our sheer inability to be obedient. We are constitutionally unable to see the final ends to which we owe obedience, as God does, but we may make efforts to see in a way that is analogous to God, through logic or mathematics, such that we may free ourselves from our defect—or, at least, this seems to be our task, the perfection of the creation through our proper self-direction toward God. The contrary is of course persistence in error, but unlike in Augustine, this persistence in error, for Leibniz, is not necessarily willful—it is much more likely that it is due to our (perhaps) corrigible tendency to defect and error.
Leibniz thus stresses the positive aspect of human freedom at the same moment that he reveals its negative aspect. The more difficult question in this latter respect is whether Leibniz ascribes to human beings the same kind of responsibility Augustine does. For there is a very significant difference between responsibility accruing to willful disobedience, when one turns against God’s will in full knowledge of the right way, and disobedience arising from misrecognition, misprision, misunderstanding. The distinction is hard to clarify. Ignorance in Leibniz seems to flow from the same essential refusal as in Augustine, the refusal to overcome one’s selfish or immediate interests in favor of the interests of the whole. Ignorance is a result of this refusal, since ignorance of the whole is the result of considering only the part or of interpreting the whole from the perspective of the part. There is, in other words, no fully innocent ignorance, but ignorance is the result of an underlying disregard, which we are free to either maintain or correct.