into 20th Century French philosophy, influencing many leading French
intellectuals who attended his seminar on The Phenomenology of Spirit
in Paris in the 30s. He focused on Hegel's philosophy of history and
is best known for his theory of 'the end of history' and for
initiating 'existential Marxism.' Kojève arrives at what is generally
considered a truly original interpretation by reading Hegel through
the twin lenses of Marx's materialism and Heidegger's temporalised
ontology.
For Hegel, human history is the history of 'thought' as it attempts to
understand itself and its relation to the world. He postulates that
history began with unity, but into which man, a questioning 'I',
emerges introducing dualism and splits. Man attempts to heal these
sequences of 'alienations' dialectically, and drives history forwards,
but in so doing causes new divisions which must then be overcome.
Hegel sees the possibility of 'historical reconciliation' lying in the
rational realization of underlying unity – the manifestation of an
absolute spirit or 'geist' – leading to humanity living according to a
unified, shared morality: the end of history.
Kojève takes these ideas of universal historical process and the
reconciliation towards unity, and synthesizes them with theories of
Marx and Heidegger. He takes Marx's productivist philosophy that
places the transformative activity of a desiring being centre-stage in
the historical process, housing it within the conditions of material
pursuit and ideological struggle. Drawing on Heidegger, he also
defines this being as free, 'negative' and radically temporal, thereby
recognizing and 'reclaiming' its mortality, ridding it of determinism
and metaphysical illusion, allowing it to produce its own reality
through experience alone.
This article examines the Hegelian context of Kojève's work, and
analyses how Marx and Heidegger contribute to his theory. It also
outlines Kojeve's vision of the culmination of history; how this fits
into 20th Century politics; and the profound influence he had on
French intellectuals including Sartre, Lacan and Breton, and on
America intellectuals including Leo Strauss, Alan Bloom and Francis
Fukuyama.
1. Chronology of Life and Works
French philosopher (1902-1968), born Aleksandr Vladimirovich
Kozhevnikov in Russia. Kojève studied in Heidelberg, Germany where,
under the supervision of Karl Jaspers, he completed a thesis (Die
religöse Philosophie Wladimir Solowjews, 1931) on Vladimir Solovyov, a
Russian religious philosopher deeply influenced by Hegel. He later
settled in Paris, where he taught at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes
Ētudes. Taking over from Alexandre Koyré, he taught a seminar on Hegel
from 1933 till 1939. Along with Jean Hyppolite, he was responsible for
the serious introduction of Hegel into French thought. His lectures
exerted a profound influence (both direct and indirect) over many
leading French philosophers and intellectuals – amongst them Sartre,
Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Bataille, Althusser, Queneau, Aron, and Breton.
Via his friend Leo Strauss, Kojève's thought also exerted influence in
America, most especially over Allan Bloom and, later, Francis
Fukuyama. His lectures on Hegel were published in 1947 under the title
Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, appearing in English as
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1969). After the Second World
War Kojève worked in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs, until
his death in 1968. Here he exercised a profound, mandarin influence
over French policy, including a role as one of the leading architects
of the EEC and GATT. He continued to write philosophy over these
years, including works on the pre-Socratics, Kant, the concept of
right, the temporal dimensions of philosophical wisdom, the
relationship between Christianity and both Western science and
communism, and the development of capitalism. Many of these works were
only published posthumously.
2. The Hegelian Context
Hegel's philosophy of history, most especially the historicist
philosophy of consciousness developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit,
provides the core of Kojève's own work. However, Kojève's Hegel
lectures are not so much an exegesis of Hegel's thought, as a
profoundly original reinterpretation. By reading Hegel's philosophy of
consciousness through the twin lenses of Marx's materialism and
Heidegger's temporalised ontology of human being (Dasein), Kojève can
rightly be said to have initiated 'existential Marxism'. Here I will
briefly sketch the most salient dimensions of Hegel's philosophy of
history, before proceeding to outline Kojève's own interpretation of
it.
Perhaps the core of Hegel's philosophy is the idea that human history
is the history of thought as it attempts to understand itself and its
relation to its world. History is the history of reason, as it
grapples with its own nature and its relation to that with which it is
confronted (other beings, nature, the eternal). The historical
movement of this reason is one of a sequence of alienations
(Entfremdungen) or splits, and the subsequent attempt to reconcile
these divisions through a restoration of unity. Thus, for example,
Hegel sees the world of the Athenian Greeks as one in which people
lived in a harmonious relation to their community and the world about,
the basis of this harmony being provided by a pre-reflective
commitment to shared customs, conventions and habits of thought and
action. With the beginnings of Socratic philosophy, however, division
and separation is introduced into thought – customary answers to
questions of truth, morality, and reality are brought under suspicion.
A questioning 'I' emerges, one that experiences itself as distinct and
apart from other beings, from customary rules, and from a natural
world that becomes an 'object' for it. This introduces into experience
a set of 'dualisms' – between subject and object, man and nature,
desire and duty, the human and the divine, the individual and the
collectivity. For Hegel, the historical movement of thought is a
'dialectical' process wherein these divisions are put through
processes of reconciliation, producing in turn new divisions, which
thought in turn attempts to reconcile. Historically, this task of
reconciliation has been embodied in many forms – in art, in religion,
and in philosophy. Enlightenment philosophy, the philosophy of Hegel's
own time, is the latest and most sophisticated attempt to reconcile
these divisions through reason alone, to freely find man's place
amongst others and the universe as a whole. This, for Hegel, is only
to be achieved through the overcoming (Aufhebung) of false divisions,
by grasping that underlying apparent schisms (such as that between
subject and object) there is a unity, with all elements being
manifestations of an Absolute Spirit (Geist). Thus Hegel sees the key
to historical reconciliation lying in the rational realisation of
underlying unity, a unity that can, in time, come to connect
individuals with each other and with the world in which they live.
Universal history is the product of reason, leading (potentially) to a
reconciled humanity, at one with itself, living according to a shared
morality that is the outcome of rational reflection.
3. The Influence of Marx
Hegel's philosophy of universal history furnishes that basic framework
of Kojève's philosophical stance. History is a processual movement in
which division is subjected to reconciliation, culminating in 'the end
of history', its completion in a universal society of mutual
recognition and affirmation.
However, Kojève reworks Hegel in number of crucial (and, amongst Hegel
scholars, controversial) ways. The first of these may be identified
with the influence of Marx, especially the writings of the so-called
'1848 manuscripts'. Kojève follows Marx's 'inverted Hegelianism' by
understanding the labor of historical development in broadly
'materialist' terms. The making of history is no longer simply a case
of reason at work in the world, but of man's activity as a being who
collectively produces his own being. This occurs through the labor of
appropriating and transforming his material world in order to satisfy
his own needs. Whereas Hegel's idealism gives priority to the forms of
consciousness that produce the world as experienced, Kojève follows
Marx in tying consciousness to the labor of material production and
the satisfaction of human desires thereby. While Hegel recuperates
human consciousness into a theological totality (Geist or 'Absolute
Spirit'), Kojève secularises human history, seeing it as solely the
product of man's self-production. Whereas Hegelian reconciliation is
ultimately the reconciliation of man with God (totality or the
Absolute), for Kojève the division of man from himself is transcended
in humanist terms. If Hegel sees the end of history as the final
moment of reconciliation with God or Spirit, Kojève (Like Feurbach and
Marx) sees it as the transcendence of an illusion, in which God (man's
alienated essence, Wesen) is reclaimed by man. Whereas the Hegelian
totality provides a prior set of ontological relations between man and
world waiting to be apprehended by a maturing consciousness, Kojève
sees human action as the transformative process that produces those
ontological relations. While Hegel arguably presents a 'panlogistic'
relation between man and nature, unifying the two in the Absolute,
Kojève sees a fundamental disjunction between the two domains,
providing the conditions for human self-production through man's
negating and transforming activities.
Perhaps the conceptual key to Kojève's understanding of universal
history is desire. Desire functions as the engine of history – it is
man's pursuit in realisation of his desires that drives the struggles
between men. Desire is the permanent and universal feature of human
existence, and when transformed into action it is the basis of all
historical agency. The desire for 'recognition' (Anerkennung), the
validation of human worth and the satisfaction of needs, propels the
struggles and processes that make for historical progression. History
moves through a series of determinate configurations, culminating in
the end of history, a state in which a common and universal humanity
is finally realised. This would entail 'the formation of a society…in
which the strictly particular, personal, individual value of each is
recognised as such'. Hence individual values and needs would converge
upon a common settlement in which a shared human nature (comprising
the desires and inclinations that define humanity as such) would find
its satisfaction.
How and why is this realisation of mutuality and equality to come
about? Kojève follows Hegel's famous presentation of the
'master-slave' dialectic in order to deduce the necessary overcoming
of inequality, division and subordination. The relation of 'master'
and 'slave' is one in which the satisfaction of a dominant group's or
class' needs (the 'masters') is met through the subordination of
others (the 'slaves' or 'bondsmen'). The 'slave' exists only to affirm
the superiority and humanity of the 'master', and to furnish the
'master's' needs by surrendering up his labor. However, this relation
is doomed to failure, for two fundamental reasons. Firstly, the
'master' desires the recognition and affirmation of his full humanity
and value, and uses the subordinated 'slave' for that end. This means
that the 'master', perversely, is dependent upon the 'slave', thus
inverting the relation of domination. Moreover, this forced relation
of recognition remains thoroughly incomplete, since the 'slave' is not
in a position to grant affirmation freely, but is compelled to do so
due to his subordination. Affirmation or recognition that is not
freely given counts for nothing. As Kojève puts it:
The relation between Master and Slave…is not recognition properly
so-called…The Master is not the only one to consider himself Master.
The Slave, also, considers him as such. Hence, he is recognized in his
human reality and dignity. But this recognition is one-sided, for he
does not recognize in turn the Slave's human reality and dignity.
Hence, he is recognized by someone whom he does not recognize. And
this is what is insufficient – what is tragic – in his situation…For
he can be satisfied only by recognition from one whom he recognizes as
worthy of recognizing him.
This establishes the constitutive need for mutual recognition and
formal equality, if recognition of value is to be established. It is
only when there is mutuality and recognition of all, that the
recognition of any one becomes fully possible.
Secondly, for Kojève (as for Marx) it is the laboring 'slave' who is
the key to historical progress. It is the 'slave' who works, and
consequently it is he and not the 'master' who exercises his
'negativity' in transforming the world in line with human wants and
desires. So, on the material level, the slave possesses the key to his
own liberation, namely his active mastery of nature. Moreover, the
'master' has no desire to transform the world, whereas the 'slave',
unsatisfied with his condition, imagines and attempts to realise a
world of freedom in which his value will finally be recognised and his
own desires satisfied. The slave's ideological struggle is to overcome
his own fear of death and take-up struggle against the 'master',
demanding the recognition of his value and freedom. The coincidence of
material and ideological conditions of liberation were already made
manifest, for Kojève, by the revolutions of the 18th, 19th and 20th
centuries; these struggles set the conditions for the completion of
history in the form of universal society.
4. The Influence of Heidegger
If Marx furnishes one central resource for Kojève's rereading of
Hegel, Heidegger provides the other. From Heidegger, Kojève takes the
insight that humankind is distinguished from nature through its
distinctive ontological self-relation. Man's being is conditioned by
its radically temporal character, its understanding of its being in
time, with finitude or death as its ultimate horizon. Kojève's
ontology is, pace Heidegger's analysis of Dasein in Being & Time,
first and foremost experiential and existential. By bringing together
Hegel with Heidegger, Kojève attempts to radically historicise
existentialism, while simultaneously giving Hegelian historicity a
radically existential twist, wherein man's existential freedom defines
his being. Freedom is understood as the ontological relation of
'negativity', the incompleteness of human being, its constitutive
'lack'. It is precisely because of this lack of a fully constituted
being that man experiences (or, more properly is nothing other than)
desire. The negativity of being, manifest as desire, makes possible
man's self-making, the process of 'becoming'. This position can be see
to draw inspiration from Heidegger's critique of the transcendental
preoccupations of Western thought, which he claims set reified,
metaphysically assured figurations of Being over and above the
processes of Becoming (wherein the 'Being of Beings', das Sein des
Seieinden, is variously revealed within the horizon of temporality).
The disavowal of such metaphysically anchored and ultimately timeless
configurations of human being frees man from determinism and 'throws'
him into his existential freedom. In Kojève's thinking, man's struggle
is to exercise this freedom in order to produce a world in which his
desires are satisfied, in the course of which he comes to accept his
own freedom, ridding himself of the illusions of religion and
superstition, 'heroically' claiming his own finitude or mortality.
We can see, then, how Kojève attempts to synthesise Hegel, Marx and
Heidegger. From Hegel he takes the notion of a universal historical
process within which reconciliation unfolds through an intersubjective
dialectic, resulting in unity. From Marx he takes a secularised,
de-theologised, and productivist philosophical anthropology, one that
places the transformative activity of a desiring being centre stage in
the historical process. From Heidegger, he takes the existentialist
interpretation of human being as free, negative, and radically
temporal. Pulling three together, he presents a vision of human
history in which man grasps his freedom to produce himself and his
world in pursuit of his desires, and in doing so drives history toward
its end (understood both as culmination or exhaustion, and its goal or
completion).
5. The End of History and the Last Man
Kojève's vision of the culmination of history has, in recent years,
exercised a renewed influence, not least in light of the collapse of
Soviet communism and its satellite states. If we examine the vision of
completion that Kojève held-out, we can see precisely why the
advocates (or apologists) of a post-Cold War global capitalist order
have drawn such inspiration from Kojève's thesis.
For Kojève, historical reconciliation will culminate in the equal
recognition of all individuals. This recognition will remove the
rationale for war and struggle, and so will usher-in peace. In this
way, history, politically speaking, culminates in a universal (global)
order which is without classes or distinctions – in Hegelian terms,
there are no longer any 'masters' and 'slaves', only free human beings
who mutually recognise and affirm each others' freedom. This political
moment takes the form of law, which confers universal recognition upon
all individuals, thereby satisfying the particular individual's desire
to be affirmed as an equal amongst others.
Simultaneously, the progression of man's productive capacities, his
ability to take nature and transform it in order to satisfy his own
needs and desires, will result in prosperity and freedom from such
want. For Kojève, the economic culmination of human productive
capacities finds its apotheosis not in communism, but in capitalism.
Like Marx, Kojève believed that capitalism had unleashed productive
forces, generating heretofore unimagined wealth. Moreover, like Marx
he believed that the expansion of capitalism was an homogenising
force, producing a globalising cultural standard that laid waste to
local attachments, traditions and boundaries, replacing them with
bourgeoisie values. Kojève departs from Marxism (and its variants such
as Leninism) by rejecting the notion that capitalism contained
inherent contradictions that would inevitably bring about its demise
and supercession by communism. Marx thought that the immiseration of
workers under 19th century capitalism would worsen as the pressure of
market competition would lead to ever-more brutal extraction of
surplus from workers' labor, in attempt to offset the falling rate of
profit. This would result in the pauperisation of the proletariat, and
capitalism's inability to avoid such crisis would necessitate the
overthrow of its relations by a proletariat raised up to class
consciousness under the conditions of its immiseration. Kojève, in
contrast, believed that 20th century capitalism had found a way out of
these contradictions, finding ways to yoke the market system to a
redistributive arrangement that managed to spread the wealth it
produced. Far from becoming increasingly impoverished, the working
class was coming to enjoy unprecedented prosperity. This is why
Kojève, as early as 1948, was proclaiming the United States as the
economic model for the 'post-historical' world, the most efficient and
successful in conquering nature in order to provide for human material
needs. Hence he asserted, long before the final collapse of the Soviet
empire, that the Cold War would end in the triumph of the capitalist
West, achieved through economic rather than military means.
The end of history would also usher-in other distinctive forms.
Philosophically, it would end in absolute knowledge displacing
ideology. Artistically, the reconciled consciousness would express
itself through abstract art – while pictorial and representational art
captured cultural specifics, these specifics would have been effaced,
leaving abstract aesthetic forms as the embodiment of universal and
homogeneous consciousness.
However, Kojève's disposition to the culmination of universal history
is radically ambivalent. On the one hand, he follows Marx by seeing in
idyllic terms the post-historical world, one of universal freedom,
emancipation from war and want, leaving space for "art, love, play,
and so forth; in short, everything that makes Man happy". However,
Kojève is simultaneously beset by pessimism. In his philosophical
anthropology, man is defined by his negating activity, by his struggle
to overcome himself and nature through struggle and contestation. This
is the ontological definition of man, his raison d'etre. Yet the end
of history marks the end of this struggle, thereby exhausting man of
the activity which has defined his essence. The end of history
ushers-in the 'death of man'; paradoxically, man is robbed of the
definitional core of his existence precisely at the moment of his
triumph. Post-historical man will no longer be 'man' as we understand
him, but will be 'reanimalized', such that the end of history marks
the 'definitive annihilation of Man properly so-called'.
6. Kojève's Influence
The influence of Kojève's thought has been profound, both within
France and beyond. It is possible to trace many connections within
French philosophy that owe varying degrees of debt to Kojève, given
that his distinctive reinterpretation of Hegel was key for the French
reception of Hegel's thought. However, there are also a number of
important philosophers for whom Kojève's Hegelianism provided direct
insights that were taken-up and in-turn used to found distinctive
philosophical positions.
Firstly, we must note the importance of Kojève's Hegelianism for
Sartre's philosophical development. It is a matter of on-going
contention whether or not Sartre personally attended the Hegel
seminars of the 1930s. However, it can reasonably be claimed that
Kojève's existential and Marxian reading of the Phenomenology was
equally important as Heidegger's Being & Time for the position
presented in Sartre's Being & Nothingness. Central to Sartre's account
is a thoroughly Kojèveian philosophical anthropology, one which finds
man's essence in his freedom as pure negative activity, existentially
separating the human for-itself (pour-soi) from the natural world of
reified Being (en-soi). Sartre's account of the 'master-slave'
dialectic follows Kojève's in its existential reworking, albeit
without the optimism that finds a possibility of reconciliation in
this intersubjective struggle (for Sartre, the dialectic is doomed to
repeat a struggle for domination in which each party attempts to claim
its own freedom via the mortification of the other's Being). Moreover,
Sartre's subsequent attempts to reconcile historical materialism with
existentialism owe more than a passing debt to Kojève's original
formulation of an 'existential Marxist' position.
Another eminent thinker for whom Kojève proved decisive was Jacques
Lacan. Lacan's account of psycho-social formation was developed
through a synthesis of Freud and structuralism, read through Kojève's
ontologised version of the 'master-slave' dialectic. For Lacan,
following Kojève, human subjectivity is defined first and foremost by
desire. It is the experience of lack, the twin of the experience of
desire, that provides the ontological condition of subject formation;
it is only through the lack-desire dyad that a being comes into the
awareness of its own separation from the world in which it is, at
first, thoroughly immersed. Moreover, Lacan's account of the childhood
development of self-consciousness, captured through his analysis of
the 'mirror-stage', replays the intersubjective mediation of
consciousness that Kojève presented to his French students (Lacan
amongst them) in the Hegel lectures.
Kojève also profoundly influenced the likes of Georges Bataille and
Raymond Queneau, both through the lectures they attended, and through
the friendships he maintained with them for many years after. Queneau
is often associated with Andre Breton and the surrealists (with whom
he broke in 1929), but his novels present a vision of the world that
is profoundly indebted to Kojève. Many of his most famous books depict
life at the end of history; there is no more historical movement,
progress or transformation to come, and his characters live in a kind
of 'eternal present' attending to the activities of everyday
enjoyment. History recurs as something that can only be enjoyed as a
tourist attraction, or as a reverie of the past, viewed from the
vantage point of its demise. Bataille (anthropologist, philosopher and
pornographer, a doyen of recent postmodern aestheticism and
anti-rationalism) was perhaps the most powerful articulator of
Kojève's pessimism in the face of the 'death of man'. The victory of
reason was, for Bataille, a curse; its inevitable triumph in the
unstoppable march of modernity brought with it homogeneity, order, and
disenchantment. The triumph of reason as history meant the twilight
and death of man, as the excessive and destructive power of negativity
was displaced by harmonious, reciprocal equilibrium. Bataille's
response, a liberatory struggle against these forces through the
evocation of perverse desires, madness, and anguish, takes Kojève's
prognosis at its word, and stages a heroic resistance against the tide
of historical forces.
The influence of Kojève outside France has probably been most
pronounced in the United States. His ideas achieved a new salience and
exposure with the publication of Francis Fukayama's The End of History
and the Last Man (1992), in the wake of the Cold War. Fukayama was a
student of Allan Bloom's, who in turn was a 'disciple' of the
'esoteric' émigré political philosopher Leo Strauss. It was Strauss
who introduced a generation of his students to Kojève's thought, and
in Bloom's case, arranged for him to study with Kojève in Paris in the
1960s. The book, an international bestseller, presents nothing less
than a triumphal vindication of Kojève's supposedly prescient thesis
that history has found its end in the global triumph of capitalism and
liberal democracy. With the final demise of Soviet Marxism, and the
global hegemony of capitalism, we have finally reached the end of
history. There are no more battles to be fought, no more experiments
in social engineering to be attempted; the world has arrived at a
homogenised state in which the combination of capitalism and liberal
democracy will reign supreme, and all other cultural and ideological
systems will be consigned irretrievably to the past. Fukayama follows
Kojève in tying the triumph of capitalism to the satisfaction of
material human needs. Moreover, he sees it as the primary mechanism
for the provision of recognition and value. Consumerism and the
commodity form, for Fukayama, present the means by which recognition
is mediated. Humans desire to be valued by others, and the means of
appropriating that valuation is the appropriation of the things that
others themselves value; hence lifestyle and fashion become the
mechanisms of mutual esteem in a post-historical world governed by the
logic of capitalist individualism.
7. References and Further Reading
Butler, Judith: Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth
Century France. New York, Columbia University Press, 1999
Descombes, Vincent: Modern French Philosophy. Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1980 Drury, Shadia B: Alexandre Kojève: The Roots of
Postmodern Politics. Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1994 Fukuyama, Francis:
The End of History and the Last Man. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1992
Hegel, G.W.F: Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977
Heidegger, Martin: Being and Time. Oxford, Blackwell, 1962
Kojève, Alexander: Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. New York,
Basic Books, 1969
Kojève, Alexander: Kant. Paris, Gallimard, 1973
Kojève, Alexander: Le Concept, le Temps et le Discours. Paris, Gallimard, 1991
Kojève, Alexander: Outline of a Phenomenology of Right. London, Rowman
& Littlefield, 2000
Lacan, Jacques: Ecrits: A Selection. London, Tavistock, 1977
Poster, Mark: Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to
Althusser. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1975
Roth, Michael S: Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in
Twentieth Century France. Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press,
1988
Sartre, Jean-Paul: Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological
Ontology. London, Routledge , 1989
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