The Black Circle

by Jeff Love

    6.    Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, 1.

    7.    The force of action in Soloviev’s thought is crucial and seems to have had considerable influence on Kojève. One of the virtues of Oliver Smith’s recent study of Soloviev’s thought is to focus on the distinctive role action plays in it. See Smith, Vladimir Soloviev and the Spiritualization of Matter (Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2011), 32–36, 95. Smith quotes Judith Kornblatt’s important comment, “All Russian religious philosophy insists on the role of action, a task or задача whose accomplishment will mean the reunion of God and creation.” See Kornblatt, “Russian Religious Thought and the Jewish Kabbala,” in The Occult in Soviet and Russian Culture, ed. Beatrice G. Rosenthal (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 86. See also Thomas Nemeth, The Early Solov’ëv and His Quest for Metaphysics (Cham: Springer, 2014), 115–123; Randall A. Poole, “Vladimir Solov’ëv’s Philosophical Anthropology: Autonomy, Dignity, Perfectibility,” in A History of Russian Philosophy 1830–1930, ed. G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 131–149; and Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 143–171.

    8.    Michael S. Roth puts the issue succinctly: “The significance of Soloviev’s dual perspective is clear: by seeing the Absolute as incarnate in Time (Humanity), he places great importance on human history. The structure of history’s progress is determined by its End, which is the continual unification of all people in a universal reunification with God.” See Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 87.

    9.    Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, 17.

  10.    Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).

  11.    Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, 17–18.

  12.    These narratives are generally narratives of decay—the narrative unfolds as fall or decay from a pristine beginning. One may call this kind of narrative “Edenic” as well.

  13.    No dialogue deals with the problem of the relation of the realm of ideas with the embodied or material world more powerfully than the Parmenides.

  14.    Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, 30.

  15.    Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, 38.

  16.    Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, 40–41.

  17.    This notion is of course vital to Kojève’s philosophical enterprise, though Kojève transforms Soloviev’s thinking by turning negation into a positive attribute, as the characteristic of the truly sovereign human who no longer posits a God that is outside or ahead as a “first” absolute. The negative is the character of the truly finite God. As Kojève notes, “The negative being is essentially finite. One can only be human if one dies. But one must die as a human in order to be human. Death must be freely accepted.” Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 52.

  18.    Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, 44. Note the contrast with Kojève indicative of Kojève’s atheism.

  19.    Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, 45.

  20.    Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, 67–68.

  21.    Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, 529; Kojève,“The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel,” trans. Joseph Carpino, Interpretation 3, no. 2/3 (Winter 1973): 114.

  22.    The commitment to absolute intelligibility arises from the “all-or-nothing” tendency of German idealism, best expressed by Schelling, who insists that the isolated or unique particular is contradictory. Kojève affirms this assertion, a point that becomes particularly clear in the postwar writings, as we shall see. One understands the whole only if all the parts are understood, each part in relation to every other part. Without relation, the one to the other, no understanding is possible at all. See F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809), trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006); and Kojève, “Sofia, filo-sofia i fenomeno-logia,” ed. A. M. Rutkevich, in Istoriko-filosofskii ezhegodnik (Moscow: Nauka, 2007), 320; autograph manuscript in Fonds Kojève, Bibliothèque nationale de France (box no. 20).

  23.    See the discussion of Attempt at a Rational History of Pagan Philosophy in chapter 8. Kojève calls into question the significance of sense that is only partial insofar as it may change—to say “provisional” in this respect is to say “in error” or “untrue,” once the whole picture is available. And if that picture is not available, then no standard of truth or falsehood is available. What sense is left? And how do we distinguish it from nonsense, the dream of the madman, and so on? To absolve ourselves of concern for what is true (or what is “the case”) is a peculiar move that may be taken so far as to deny any limitations on our capacity to create realities. Kojève’s attitude is direct: one either ends up “mad,” acting “as if” the world were what one imagines it to be—surely a dangerous proposition from the practical point of view—or one transforms the world through collective action in conformity with a universally accepted ideal.

  24.    See Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). Kripke emphasizes the problem of the “internalized” norm or “subjective certainty” in Kojève’s terms. In the absence of any external or public standard, how can I know that what I say is what I think I am saying? If I check, I may remember incorrectly or not at all. No adjudicating agency is available, and I am literally lost in myself.

  25.    Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, 81.

  26.    There are several important recent texts dealing with this issue. See, for example, Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  27.    Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, 95. Augustine’s text reads, “dico autem haec tria: esse, nosse, velle. sum enim et scio et volo, sum sciens et volens, et scio esse me et velle, et volo esse et scire” (Confessiones, book 13, para. 11).

  28.    Is Soloviev’s approach any more outlandish than, say, Heidegger’s reduction of all history to the history of Being?

  29.    Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, 71.

  30.    Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, 81.

  31.    Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, 108, 113, 118.

  32.    Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, 121. Translation modified.

  33.    This is Kojève’s primary complaint: if there is a God, man cannot become God other than by bringing God down to man, that is, by making a move equivalent to atheism.

  34.    Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 88–99, 100.

  35.    Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt B. Hudson (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 23–27. See also Gordon E. Michalson Jr., Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral Regeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 37–40.

  36.    See George M. Young, Russian Cosmism: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  37.    The Russian texts may be found in volumes 1 and 2 of N. F. Fedorov, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. A. G. Gacheva and S. G. Semenova (Moscow: Traditsia, 1995–2000). An abridged translation of The Philosophy of the Common Task is N. F. Fedorov, What Was Man Created For?: The Philosophy of the Common Task, trans. Elisabeth Kutaissoff and Marilyn Minto (London: Honeyglen, 1990), 33–102. The “Supramoralism” essay may be found in the same volume, at 105–136. For an excellent treatment of Fedorov’s thought in English, see Irene Masing-Delic, Abolishing Death: A Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Literature (Stan
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 76–104. For a comprehensive treatment, see Michael Hagemeister, Nikolaj Fedorov: Studien zu Leben, Werk und Wirkung (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1989).

  38.    The title expresses the typically Fedorovian insistence on completeness. One finds in Fedorov’s works a repetitiveness essential to their construction, both as an indication of the simplicity of their underlying point and the obsessive need to make it again and again—to convince completely.

  39.    Fedorov, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:37–308.

  40.    Kojève, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth, 135–176 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 171–173. See also A. M. Rutkevich, “Alexander Kojève: From Revolution to Empire,” Studies in East European Thought 69, no. 4 (December 2017): 329–344.

  41.    Fedorov, What Was Man Created For?, 56.

  42.    As Fedorov notes, “Only when all men come to participate in knowledge will pure science, which perceives nature as a whole in which the sentient is sacrificed to the insensate, cease to be indifferent to this distorted attitude of the conscious being to the unconscious force.” And he adds, “Then applied science will be aimed at transforming instruments of destruction into means of regulating the blind death-bearing force.” Fedorov, What Was Man Created For?, 40; see also 76.

  43.    Fedorov, What Was Man Created For?, 40. This suppression is crucial to Fedorov’s project; there has been considerable debate concerning Fedorov’s radical theology—is it still a theology or is it the most extreme anthropology possible?

  44.    Fedorov, What Was Man Created For?, 89.

  45.    This seems a more Confucian than Christian move, unless one takes into account the differing notion of community that applies in the Eastern church.

  46.    “Singularity” is Ray Kurzweil’s term for the moment when human beings will have reached a new kind of being.

  47.    Fedorov, What Was Man Created For?, 77.

  48.    An interesting study that picks up Solovovien themes from a rather different perspective is Mark Johnston, Surviving Death (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

  49.    This seems to be Kojève’s view; it is also reflected in a remarkable text from Martin Heidegger from his recently published Black Notebooks: “In this way, the lower forces of the animal first come to prevail, through rationality animalitas first comes into play—with the goal to liberate the animality of the not yet finished animal, mankind.” See Martin Heidegger, Anmerkungen I-V (Schwarze Hefte 1942–1948), ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2015), 41.

  4. THE LAST REVOLUTION

    1.    This is characteristic of the reception from the Straussian side as well as from others like Judith Butler, who puts the matter succinctly: “Kojève’s lectures on Hegel are both commentaries and original works of philosophy.” See Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 63. See also F. Roger Devlin, Alexandre Kojève and the Outcome of Modern Thought (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004), xiv–xv; James H. Nichols Jr., Alexandre Kojève: Wisdom at the End of History (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 21–30; and Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 103–107. Others are less sanguine, perhaps with good reason. See Philip T. Grier, “The End of History and the Return of History,” in The Hegel Myths and Legends, ed. Jon Stewart (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 183–198; and Joseph Flay, Hegel’s Quest for Certainty (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 299. Flay bluntly says, “Kojève’s influence is unfortunate, for seldom has more violence been done by a commentator to the original.” Still others, like Michael Forster, think that Kojève’s interpretation is correct or, at the very least, plausible. Barry Cooper offers a balanced approach that accepts Kojève’s interpretation as “vulgarized” Hegel but praises its astuteness and power. See Cooper, The End of History: An Essay on Modern Hegelianism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 3. George L. Kline affirms the importance of Kojeve’s reading as well as its flaws. See Kline, “The Existentialist Rediscovery of Hegel and Marx,” in George L. Kline on Hegel (North Syracuse, NY: Gegensatz Press, 2015). Perhaps most balanced of all is a more recent reading of Kojève that gives Kojève his due for emphasizing the revolutionary potential in Hegelian thought as a thinking about history. See Eric Michael Dale, Hegel, the End of History, and the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 80–109. Still, Dale admits (echoing Flay) that Kojève is better Kojève than Hegel: “Indeed, Kojève’s Introduction à la lecture de Hegel is not a particularly useful introduction to reading Hegel, if what one wants is Hegel, rather than Kojève. For that matter, Kojève’s book is not a particularly good introduction to how to read Hegel via Marx, if what one wants is to understand Marx’s appropriation of Hegel, rather than Kojève’s. As a guide to Kojève’s thought, however, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel remains the ideal starting place” (83). This comment repeats similar comments made about Heidegger as well.

    2.    Kojève seems to admit as much himself. See Kojève, review of G. R. G. Mure’s A Study of Hegel’s Logic, Critique 3, no. 54 (1951): 1003–1007.

    3.    Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), xx. Translation modified.

    4.    See Butler, Subjects of Desire, 63, for the defense; and Flay, Hegel’s Quest for Certainty, 299, for the negative view.

    5.    Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 529 (hereafter abbreviated as ILH); Kojève, “The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel,” trans. Joseph Carpino, Interpretation 3, no. 2/3 (Winter 1973): 114 (hereafter IDH).

    6.    ILH, 66. All translations of Kojève’s text are mine unless otherwise indicated. See also note 10.

    7.    ILH, 93.

    8.    ILH, 117.

    9.    ILH, 135.

  10.    ILH, 167; Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols Jr., 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), 38 (hereafter abbreviated as IRH). Where I have been able to use it as a base, I have frequently modified Nichols’s fine translation for emphasis or clarity with regard to the context in which I quote Kojève. In addition, as I note in this chapter, the English translation omits roughly three hundred pages of the French original; thus, all translations from the French text not translated by Nichols are mine.

  11.    ILH, 463; IRH, 187.

  12.    ILH, 550; IDH,134.

  13.    I note, however, that Kojève attributes a capacity for condensation of the whole into a part to Hegel himself and his “ideogram texts.” See ILH, 415.

  14.    Kojève, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 255.

  15.    ILH, 97. In fairness to Kojève, however, it should be noted that the focus on action in his commentary tends to overshadow concerns with the “passive contemplation” described in the first three chapters of the Phenomenology. Indeed, as George L. Kline puts it, “It was Kojève, I think, who first adequately stressed the interrelations among what he called ‘contemplation,’ ‘desire,’ and ‘action’ in Hegel. His point was that (passive) contemplation at the initial stage of consciousness gives way at the stage of self-consciousness to desire, which, in turn, at the stages of self-consciousness and active reason, issues in action. Desire introduces negativity to the dialectical scene, and negativity leads to action.” See Kline, “The Dialectic of Action and Passion in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” in George L. Kline on Hegel (North Syracuse, NY: Gegensatz, 2
015). This view runs contrary to that of Robert Pippin, who decries Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel precisely on the basis of Kojève’s relative neglect of the first three chapters of the Phenomenology. See Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Death and Desire in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 11.

  16.    Prudence recommends an interpretation of Kojève’s approach to Hegel that both stands on its own and points to some of Kojève’s supposed deviations from or simplifications of the text. It is evident that Kojève’s reputation among Hegel scholars is worth an extended treatment of its own, but that is not the purpose of this study. While Stanley Rosen defends Kojève, claiming that his work is worth many more learned commentaries, the concern among Hegel scholars is surely justified. One may argue that, for scholars such as Terry Pinkard and Robert Pippin, who develop a view of the Phenomenology as creating a comprehensive practical philosophy, Kojève’s interpretation must seem problematic, if not perverse. Other Hegel scholars seem to view Kojève’s interpretation more ambiguously, though one would be hard pressed to find a champion of Kojève in the current Anglo-American discourse on Hegel. For a more positive view of Kojève’s interpretation as justified within its own terms, see, for example, Michael Forster, Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 248. For a view that follows Kojève in substantial respects, see Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic (New York: Routledge, 2005).

  17.    Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 131. Geroulanos’s treatment of Kojève is in general superb and, aside from Groys’s, is the most helpful in English. Its most problematic aspect may be that it assumes an underlying understanding of the human as the bourgeois free historical individual, which Kojève is out to eliminate as being more animal than human. Does Kojève’s project end up in an “antihumanism” or in a more profound humanism? Geroulanos does not go into this debate. Nonetheless, Kojève’s fundamental challenge turns on how one defines the human. Is it more human to respect the servitude to animal desire or to extirpate that desire? Kojève seems to conclude that the latter is more human, and, in so doing, he calls into question the definition of the human upon which Geroulanos relies.