by Jeff Love
A central claim, which have I mentioned already, appears in Ivan’s poem: “Nothing has ever been more insufferable for man and human society than freedom.”2 We note that it is the grand inquisitor himself who makes this statement; the mysterious stranger says nothing. And why should he? The grand inquisitor seems well pleased with his withering judgment of human beings who are happy to give up their freedom provided that an excuse flattering to their vanity can be provided. In this respect, the grand inquisitor suggests that bread and the power of miracle, mystery, and authority may prove sufficient to provide the appropriate cover for man’s own weakness.
We may say that the basic proposition of this famed parable is this: man seeks to rid himself of his freedom; the end of history is to eliminate history. By this, the grand inquisitor seems to mean that man can suffer neither the anguish of uncertainty nor the great responsibility of having to decide without certainty. The certainty of servitude is preferable to the uncertainty of freedom. Man is thus a born slave who cannot tolerate uncertainty. He exercises his freedom so as to extirpate it once and for all, root and branch. One can imagine the punditry to which such a series of claims may lead, especially given the reality of the bureaucratic state in the Soviet Union. Stalinism adopts the attitude of the grand inquisitor by ensuring that all be freed of the pain of freedom.
Kojève may emerge as the philosopher of this proposition, the “conscience of Stalin,” as he was wont to put it. Kojève’s proclamation of the end of history may tempt one to believe that his thinking beckons us toward freedom from freedom, for Kojève’s sage is not free. Indeed, if we follow Kojève’s argument to its conclusion, the sage is the one for whom freedom is no longer possible—or relevant. The end of history signaled by the advent of the sage is transparently a moment at which freedom will no longer matter. The slave frees himself by overcoming his concern for servitude—but does the slave become less of a slave for doing so?
If we heed the crushing statement of the grand inquisitor—that man will gladly bow down to bread—then the answer must be in the negative. To bow down to bread is to choose animal life over freedom. This choice is the defining choice of the slave, and it directs his life even in his endeavor to overcome nature. The slave seeks to overcome nature by transforming nature through technology. The slave seeks to turn nature from a blind destructive force into an entirely regulated one that can no longer pose any threat to the slave’s animal life. In doing so, the slave transforms himself from worker into manager or bureaucrat and occupies himself chiefly with technical problems related to the smooth operation or perfection of the regulatory system he has developed to rule over nature. The slave devotes himself to the furtherance of animal life by ensuring the complete eradication of any possible threat to that animal life. Once all such threats have come under management, the slave becomes free of his fear of death.
This is a crucial moment, as we know. Kojève states that this moment signifies the advent of wisdom, since wisdom is the conscious acceptance of death.3 Yet the slave does not accept death in any conventional sense. The slave does not muster existential courage, does not resign himself peacefully, does not put his head in the way of the bullet, his neck in the noose. On the contrary, the slave ensures himself that this possibility finally becomes impossible. The slave accepts death only when “death is no more,” when death has lost its authority to command and dominate the slave.4
With or without terror, the slave ultimately becomes free of his fear of death by abolishing death. The slave thus never frees himself of his fear of death, he merely eliminates that fear by eliminating its object. But, by eliminating his fear of death, the slave has also eliminated any possibility of threat, any possibility of an event occurring that could be harmful to his life. All runs according to plan, and this plan involves no surprises (other than “happy” ones); nothing unpredictable, outside the slave’s control, can possibly occur. The slave frees himself of the fear of death by freeing himself of novelty, of chance, of the unexpected. The end of the slave’s struggle with the master—the apotheosis of the slave’s relation to the master—is the elimination of the concern with freedom.
The obvious objection is that freedom from the fear of death is the headiest freedom. We become master over nature. We become a god. But is a god really free? From Kojève’s perspective, a god cannot be free because a god has no need to act—a god is fully satisfied. For a god nothing matters, because nothing is at stake. Kojève understands freedom only negatively, in the servile manner, as the negation of something given in favor of something not yet given—freedom from the given. To put this in the crudest terms, the slave negates the given in favor of a given that satisfies. Once this satisfying given has been brought to completion, the slave need no longer negate. If the slave need no longer act, the slave no longer exercises freedom.
Thus, Kojève agrees with the grand inquisitor to the extent that he argues that the slave becomes free only by freeing himself of his freedom. Uncertainty and fear make the slave. To eliminate them is the liberating act. Conversely, the grand inquisitor claims that Christ enslaves by his silence, that Christ’s enigmatic quality ensures that those who may follow him cannot be sure that following Christ will vanquish their fear—again the greatest fear of all, the enslaving fear of death.
CHRIST’S CRUELTY
If we put this in other terms, we may say that Christ does not allow for finality whereas the grand inquisitor does. The grand inquisitor maintains that Christ is cruel because he compels human beings to live in suffering. To live without a certain end is a kind of suffering. The grand inquisitor emphasizes the connection of nonfinality with suffering. But he also emphasizes thereby the connection between nonfinality, understood as freedom, with suffering: to be free is to suffer. What is the main point of doing so?
The grand inquisitor frames the question thus: Why prefer the freedom of nonfinality to the freedom of finality? We find ourselves in a rather peculiar situation, with two different, if not opposed, concepts of freedom, one drawing its strength from the lack of an end, the other from the sure prospect of an end. Some have argued that the operative distinction is between “freedom to” or “freedom from,” between positive and negative freedom.5 Positive freedom is beset by the difficulty that it is exercised for an end that, by its very nature, terminates the freedom that allowed the end to be achieved, or the freedom to achieve any end at all. Negative freedom is necessarily enigmatic because it is defined negatively as being freedom from positive action, indeed, from an act that may determine such freedom, thereby diminishing it.
It should be no surprise that we return here to our starting point in Dostoevsky. The man of action is one who constantly limits his freedom, tying himself down to certain ways of exercising his freedom. The man of inaction, the underground man, pursues the negative ideal of freedom as far as he can. He attempts to thwart limitation in whatever form it may take in any given situation. The underground man is thus a hero of negation, as we have noted, and he mocks those who engage in the seemingly contradictory process of limiting their own freedom.
The underground man is in this respect a parody of nonfinality as a kind of liberation, because the underground man is trapped within his own “logic” of negation. He is reactive, as we see in the second part of the novel, and he can be only reactive, because any positive or creative action is necessarily a self-restriction of freedom. To avoid these two problematic alternatives, there is yet a third: to engage in positive action and to undo that action—to “weave and unweave Penelope’s web,” in the words of Hannah Arendt.6 Arendt associates this with a liberating notion of thinking. But is it liberating? For one may then simply wind oneself up in a repetitive pattern of building and destroying that is yet another restriction on freedom understood as being absolutely free from any pattern or condition.
Would it be possible to experience such freedom? Likely not, since to experience a sort of “pure” openness would seem to be impossible other than as mystic
experience or experience that cannot be addressed by cognition, for cognition has to produce a series of identities that collapse the openness into a specific configuration of things. Mystic experience interrupts or puts aside discussion of any kind in favor of silence; mystic experience is silence (as Kojève indicates). In this respect, the freedom of the mystic moves beyond the parameters of finality and nonfinality because it moves beyond any cognitive or social network—hence, its silence.
To the extent that we can speak of finality or nonfinality, we may do so only in the context of discourse, a context bound to language and determinate norms. This discourse either becomes fully transparent to itself—and when it does, it becomes fully clear to itself such that nothing new or different can ever be encountered—or it does not, in which case the possibility of a new and different configuration cannot simply be dismissed out of hand.
Returning to the grand inquisitor, it may be possible now to view the attraction of finality, of final authority, as eliminating any need for further thought—or as eliminating the potential for endless chatter, in the case where a final account is ruled out from the very beginning. If a final account is in fact ruled out, all accounts may be subject to change at any moment and without warning. We know what we know only “provisionally.” Our identity, the world to which we have become accustomed, is only a provisional home. While the provisional character of the account allows for the freedom of conversion, of the discovery of the apparently new, of transformation, it also, though by definition provisional, is of a stronger kind since a final account can never be achieved. This possibility means that no matter what we know, we cannot claim that it is definitive and, more likely, that whatever we know is like a fiction, allowing us some security in the world, some sense of being at home, when in reality there is no chance of finding a home or peace in the world, and never will be any.
To link nonfinality with homelessness brings out the problematic quality of freedom as the result of an inability to find comfort in the world, a sense of homelessness that can be as much delight as burden or terror. To the extent that we see the world withdraw before our eyes, we are stuck with mystery, miracle, and the authority of the unknowable, what is beyond us. What is beyond us remains outside our control; reality retains an aleatory aspect that can be the delight of the new or the terror of the awful and unexpected.
On the other hand, to be at home, to be at an end while still alive, can be nothing but repetition where nothing is at stake, nothing needs resolution. As we noted earlier, repetition in this sense is indistinguishable from ritual. No questions arise, other than of a technical nature, the worthiness of ends having been already assumed. One obeys the ritual, all things have order, space takes precedence over time.
A REVERSAL?
Living is servitude, in either sense, whether to ineffable chance or to repetition. One cannot live and accept death. The only way to accept death is to risk one’s life completely. The master is the only one who accepts death, and he remains silent in the crucial sense that his is not a world of change and development but one of stasis. He has said his last word, and there is nothing else for him to say. The slave is the creature of discourse, the one who talks in order to stave off death, like a sort of Scheherazade. And, like Scheherazade, the slave may be silent only at that point when the threat of death is no longer present. If we take the analogy further, the slave only creates while death is still a threat.
Yet, in Ivan’s poem, it is the ostensive master who talks and the slave (or prisoner) who is silent. The poem reverses the relation we have just described. And this is an intriguing reversal because it suggests that the one who considers himself master in this case, the grand inquisitor, is nothing of the sort. His need for discourse belies his authority. This point may be merely obvious, but its full significance is more elusive and has to do, it seems to me, with the difference between discourse and action, for the grand inquisitor talks while the mysterious stranger silently acts.
Kojève tells us that philosophy is about action. He roundly mocks those who leave philosophy at the level of theory or who stick to their philosophical cloisters rather than engaging in revolutionary action. These “cloistered minds” are the madmen with which we began in the first chapter of this book. They are the ones who live in discourse, and discourse only.7
The grand inquisitor does not belong among the madmen of this kind. The grand inquisitor is indeed a strange figure within the context of Kojève’s thinking—the putative sage who talks to the slave as if the slave were master, the sage who talks and cannot stop talking. But this is a deception. The real master is the one who is silent. The one who speaks is still the slave, the one who has not and cannot reach satisfaction.
THE SUICIDE MYTH
As long as there is discourse, there is servitude. Silence is the proper speech of the master. Kojève’s call to revolution undercuts itself as long as it remains a call. Kojève’s garrulousness is a sign of dissatisfaction—or worse, of impossibility. No matter how he might have tried, Kojève cannot rid his thought of this lingering, damning inconsistency. Like the grand inquisitor, he cannot be silent; he cannot be satisfied by the authority he has attained because it does not and cannot satisfy him. To put this in Kojève’s terms, one cannot accept death while still alive. The notion that there can be some sort of acceptance of death that accompanies life is a myth, a founding fiction that fails. This founding fiction undergirds the entire edifice of Kojève’s thought. If we return to our original terminology, the acceptance of suicide, of utter self-immolation, can only be a decoy of the slavish imagination, as it is for Alexei Kirillov, the model Kojève invokes, ambiguously, in this respect.
In a passage from Kojève’s unfinished manuscript Atheism, from 1931, two years before he gave the first Hegel lectures, he writes, “ ‘The human being in the world’ is thus given to herself in her consciousness of herself as finite and free, that is, as being able at any moment freely to kill herself. And that is why she lives at every moment only thanks to her free refusal to commit suicide, that is to say that she is free, not only at the moment of suicide, but at any given moment of her existence.”8
Here Kojève tries to address the problem I have identified: that the acceptance of suicide is merely a fiction, a thought experiment, or, worse, a Hirngespinst or pipe-dream that proves nothing at all or is glaringly disproved by the one who continues to live.9 For if the act of suicide is the only absolutely free act, then the refusal of that act cannot in itself be free—indeed, as I indicate, the refusal of that act must itself undermine any claim to the heady freedom of suicide. Kojève turns this objection around by suggesting that acceptance of death is possible insofar as this acceptance is the precondition of freedom, the reality of which is proved every moment by the decision not to commit suicide.
This argument seems to be little more than a sophisticated ruse. In the simplest terms, it claims that continued life is not prima facie evidence of animal attachment to life. Rather, continued life is the result of a free decision that sustains itself by continued reassertion. This free decision is the decision not to commit suicide. Hence, continued life results from what is supposed to be an absolutely free act. The problem here, as above, is precisely that the free act is absolute. The question arises, then, as to how an act can be absolutely free and yet at the same time fit into a continuum of preceding acts. The tension between the act itself and the context of its exercise is difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. If this act is not absolutely free, then it cannot have the significance it is supposed to have as an assertion of a sovereign freedom; to the extent that the act is not absolute or is incomplete, it cannot be free. The freedom of the act can only be assured by its completion. Any negation of that completion, such as the decision not to carry through the act, is equivalent to complete nonperformance. One thus cannot simply say that to decide not to commit suicide is sufficient evidence of the willingness to do so, because it is not. The only sufficient evidence is the comple
tion of the act itself (even taking into account “failed” attempts).
Kojève cannot simply brush aside Dostoevsky’s irony with regard to Kirillov. The theoretical suicide is no suicide at all.
FREEDOM FROM FREEDOM
With disarming simplicity, this point calls Kojève’s whole elaborate system of thought into question. For the individual suicide that is so important in the context of Kojève’s earlier writing becomes the collective suicide of the slave who negates in the desire for wisdom or final freedom (from freedom). One can argue that the slave’s overcoming of his own position through work and struggle is cumulative evidence of his freedom because the slave works to eliminate himself as such—the slave’s struggle toward wisdom is self-immolation writ large. But this simply cannot be so, because the slave’s struggle is a refusal of the risk of death. To struggle, to hang on, is indeed proof of a decision not to die, but this proof is not, for all that, a positive proof of the “free refusal to commit suicide.” How can it be? One cannot prove a free decision not to commit suicide when that decision is not taken.
The upshot is that the slave, the creature of discourse, will continue to talk as long as possible and will cease to talk only unwittingly. The slave, like the grand inquisitor, cannot shake off his essential origin. The conversion from slave to free creature is not possible other than through the willing and final completion of the act of self-immolation. Christ’s death had to be. If he had lived, he would have been an object of ridicule.
The irony is the governing irony of Kojève’s work: the freedom from freedom, the final finality, is an impossible goal as goal. It is only possible as an impossible goal. The talk continues as long as it continues because we cannot tell ourselves when the goal has been reached. We can only deceive ourselves about the goal having been reached to the degree that we can still talk about it—and how can we deceive ourselves without the capacity for speech? Martin Heidegger may well have the final say, for Heidegger’s implacable assertion of finality as an impossible possibility or a possibility whose realization is impossible remains, unrefuted.