Introduction to the Reading of Alexandre Kojeve Patrick Riley Political Theory, Vol. 9, No. 1.

45 Pages·2007·0.95 MB·English

Introduction tothe Readingof AlexandreKojeve
PatrickRiley
PoliticalTheory,Vol.9,No.1.(Feb.,1981),pp.5-48.
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INTRODUCTION TO THE READING
OF ALEXANDRE KOJEVE
PA TRICK RILEY

Unrversrty of Wiscons~n-M adison

One of the most v~siblep henomena on the front~ero f postwar
polit~calp hilosophy has been a resuscitated "left Hegelianism," and
among contemporary left Hegelians none has been so influentla1 as
Alexandre Kojke, whose brilliant Introductron to the Reading of Hegel
(1947)l is viewed as a modern classic even by those who see it as a one-
sided interpretation of Hegelian philosophy Why "left Hegelianism" in
general, and Kojeve's reading of Hegel In particular, should have sprung
up in France (beg~nningin the 1930s but fully flower~ngo nly after the
War), is a questlon not as easily answered as some appear to th~nkA. llan
Bloom cla~msin his English-language edit~ono f Introductron to the
Reading of Hegelthat "Kojeve is the most thoughtful, the most learned,
the most profound of those Marxists who, dissat~sfiedw ~thth e thinness
of Marx's account of the human and metaphysical grounds of his
teaching, turned to Hegel as the truly philosophic source of that
teachingV;2 but it 1s not at all clear how far Kojeve's reading of Hegel IS
really "Marxist," despite the fact that Kojeve makes the "dialect~co f
Master and Slave" In the Phenomenology the "key" to h~isn terpretation
of the whole of Hegel.3 If there IS (at least) a Marx~stc omponent In
Kojeve's reading, there is also an existent~alisto ne-wh~ch is at its
clearest in his insistence that the h~stoncaslt ruggle between Masters and
Slaves is a struggle freely entered into, w~thout" cause" or "biological
ne~essity";~and there IS also what one could call a Nietzschean
component in Kojke's hatred of all "transcendence," of all "escape"
into a "beyond" where there is (allegedly) no struggle, no Mastery and
Slavery Th~dsi staste for the "beyond," so remlnlscent of the Twilight of
the Idols.5 is the foundation of Kojeve's hostility to Plato (and the realm
of idea^),^ and of his lesser but substantial aversion to Kant (and the
realm of th~ngs-~n-themselves).('O ne can, Kojeve complains in the
POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 9 No. I, February 1981 5-48
O 1981 Sage Publicat~ons,I nc.
6 POLlTlCAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1981
"Plato" chapter of his Attempt as a Reasoned History of Pagan
Philosophy, "deny the possibility of all satisfaction on the here-and-
now" Thus "the affirmation of religious satisfaction"-whether in
Plato or in Kant-"demands the affirmation of a 'beyond' where the
man can be satisfied who cannot be in the here-and-now."8 Put
otherwise, Kojeve continues, "religious satisfaction cannot be anything
else than an 'extinction' [nirvana] of the extendedduration of human
empirical existence."9 Since, for Kojkve, Hegelianism is a "radically
atheistic" philosophy which treats Christianity as only
"anthropologically" true-insofar as it stresses God-becoming-
manlo-Hegel avoids altogether the "religious attitude" which believes
in the "impossibility" of man's being "fully and definitively satisfied" in
this world, "in the world where he is born, lives and dies." Hegel, indeed,
for Kojeve, is the philosopher of "perfect" satisfaction in the "'worldly'
hzc et nunc.")li A complete "picture" of Kojeve, then, would stress not
just the Marxian elements of his thought, but the existentialist and
"Nietzschean" ones as well: these elements, in themselves perfectly
discrete, may well be able to coexist, and even support each other (if one
stresses, say, the "voluntary" undertaking of a "struggle" for Mastery
whose upshot is the enslavement of those who find solace in a
"beyond"); but these mutually supporting discrete "elements" add up to
something more and other than "Marxism" tout court.
With the posthumous publication of Kojeve's Kant (1973) and of the
last two volumes of his Attempt at a Reasoned History of Pagan
Philosophy (1972, 1973), one is finally in a position to sketch the
outlines of this complete picture. The central and decisive Kojevian
work remains the magistral Introductzon to the Reading of Hegel; but
this can and should be supplemented, not only by Kant and Pagan
Philosophy, but by several important articles which Kojkve wrote for
the journal Crztzque-above all "Hegel, Marx and Christianity"12
(1946) and "The Political Action of Philosophers"~3( 1950). It is only out
of this entire ensemble that an accurate portrait of Kojkve can be built
up, so that one can begn to assess his status as the most eminent
of contemporary "left Hegelians."
In his brilliant and influential Introduction to the Reading of Hegel
Kojeve make his treatment of the Phenomenology revolve around
Riley / READING ALEXANDRE KOJZVE 7
Hegel's great set-piece,l4 "Master and Servant" (which he renders
"Master and Slave"). And in this treatment Kojeve argues that for Hegel
human soclety and human "discourse" began when men were first
willing to nsk their "animal" and b~olopcale xistence in a 'Yight to the
death" for "pure prestige," for "recognit~on" by the "other."l5 The man
who became the Master was he who was "willing to go all the way*' in
this fight: the potentla1 Master "preferred, to his real, natural, b~olog~cal
life, something ideal, spiritual, non-biological-the fact of being
recognized in and through [another] consciousness, of bearing the name
'Master,' of being called 'Master' "16 The (potential) Slave on the other
hand, was the onewho saw and feared his own "nothingness" should he
die in the struggle, and who "recognized" the Master rather than die.]'
The Master, for his part, finds that he is not "satisfied" with mastery,
slnce he has rlsked his life for recognition by a mere Slave whom he uses
as a "thing"; the Master has the "pleasuren of not having to work, but
this pleasure is not a true satzsfactron. "To get oneself recogn~zedb y a
Slave is not to get oneself recognized by a man"; hence "the Master never
attains his end, the end for whlch he has nsked hls very life."'* (It IS for
this reason, according to Kojeve, that mastery is ultimately "tragic" and
"an existential impasse.")19 The Slave, who submits to and "works" in
the servlce of the Master, can ultimately find satisfaction in his work (by
whlch he transforms the natural world of "given being" and himself as
well): through work, which "negates" "given belng," the Slave
overcomes the world.20 "The man who works transforms pven belng
where there IS work there IS necessarily change, progress, historical
evolution."21 Though this progress and evolution involves alterations In
the "means of product~on,"t he essential change is in the Slave himself:
"thanks to h~ws ork, the Slave can change and become other than he is,
that is-in the end--cease to be a Slave."22 For work, according to
Kojeve reading Hegel, is Bildung or education "in a double sense of the
word: on the one hand it forms and transforms the world, humanizes
it, by making it more adapted to man; on the other hand, it trans-
forms, forms, educates man, humanizes h ~ min bnnpng him closer to
the idea which he makes for h~mself'( the "idea" of being "free"
and ''recognlzedW).23
Since the Slave's "overcoming"-of the natural world of "glven
being," of his fear of the Master and of death, of slavery ~tself-is not
histoncally complete until men choose thelr own work and become
cltlzens of a "universal and homogeneous" Hegelian state,24 history IS,
lnter alia, a history of "slave ideologies" by which Slaves conceal their
8 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1981
slavery from themselves. "The transformation of the Slave, which will
permit him to surmount his terror, his fear of the Master is long and
dolorous."25 At first, Kojeve reading Hegel asserts, the Slave "raises
himself' through his work to the "abstract Idea" of liberty-an abstract
Idea which he does not "realize" because "he does not yet dare to act in
view of thls realization, that IS to struggle against the Master and risk hls
life in a struggle for liberty "26 Before "realizing" liberty, the Slave
"imagnes a series of ideologies, by which he seeks to justify himself, to
justify his servitude, to reconcile the deal of liberty with the fact of
slavery "2' For Stoicism, the first of the "slave ideologies," Ep~ctetusIn
his chains and Marcus Aurelius on his throne are "equal" as "wise men";
hence for the Stoic "ideology" the chains do not "matter."28 In Chr~st~an
"ideology" equality is of a different sort: all men are equal "before God,"
whatever their earthly stations; but thls IS s~mplya nother escape to a
"beyond" (beyond the histor~calw orld of work and struggle) In which,
though there are no "masters," there is one "universal" Master (God) to
whom everyone is enslaved. Christianity, according to Kojeve reading
Hegel, "does not take account of social distinctions, but leaves them
intact. Equality is transposed into the beyond (men are brothers 'in
Jesus Chrlst'; that is, all slaves of an absolute Master)."29 A modern
bourgeois may, by contrast, appear to be "his own master," but
bourgeois ideology is simply a new slavery one is now enslaved to
property and to cap~tal".T he bourgeois does not work for another. But
ne~therd oes he work for h~mselft,a ken as a b~ologicale ntity He works
for himself taken as a 'jundical person,' as a private proprietor he
works for Capital."30
And so long as there is slavery-whether to a Master, to God, or to
Capital-man will never be truly "satisfied" or truly free, slnce true
satisfaction and freedom come from belng "recognized" as an equal by
an equal, which IS possible only In the Hegelian state. "Man can only be
truly 'satisfied,' history can only end, in and through the formation of a
Society, of a State, In which the strictly particular, personal, individual
value of each is recognized as such . . by all."31 Such a state, selon
Kojeve, "is only possible after the 'suppress~on' of the opposition
between Master and Slave."3*
This "suppress~on," to be sure, is brought about mainly through the
Slave's work. "Only the Slave," Kojke urges, "'suppresses' hls 'nature'
and finally becomes a Citizen. The Master does not change: he would
rather die than cease to be Master. The final struggle, which transforms
the Slave into a Cit~zens,u ppresses Mastery in a nondialectical fash~on:
Riley / READING ALEXANDRE KOJEVE 9
the Master is simply killed, and he dies as a Master."33 But by this point,
the end of history, the Slave is ready for the reality of freedom, not its
mere "imagination" (as in Stoicism or Christianity). "The complete,
absolutely free man," Kojeve insists, "will be the Slave who has
'overcome' his slavery If Idle Mastery 1s an impasse, laborlous Slavery,
in contrast, is the source of all human, soc~al,h istorical progress.
History 1s the history of the work~ngS la~e."3In~ the6'raw, natural, given
world," he adds, "the Slave is the slave of the Master. In the technical
world transformed by h~sw ork, he rules-or, at least, will one day
rule-as absolute Master. And this Mastery that anses from work
will be an entirely different thing from the 'immediate' mastery of the
Master. The future and History hence belong not to the warlike Master
but to the working Slave."3s In another passage of his Introductzon,
Kojeve enlarges and refines this view uHistory will end when man no
longer acts in the strong sense of the term, that IS, no longer negates, no
longer transforms given being and social being through bloody struggle
and creat~vew ork. And man no longer does this when what IS Real
[le Re'el donne1 glves him full sat~sfactionb, y realizing fully h~Ds es~re
(which in man is a des~ref or universal recognition of his personality,
which is unique in the world)."36 Or, as Kojeve puts it in "Hegel, Marx
and Christianity," history will end "necessarily" when "man is perfectly
satisfied by the fact of being a recognized citizen of a universal and
homogeneous State, or, if one prefers, of a soclety w~thoutc lasses
encompassing the whole of humanity "3' If man is fully satisfied "by
what he IS," the only des~rele ft-on the part of aphilosopher-1s that of
"understanding what he is and revealing it through discourse." This
"understanding" and "revealing" are prov~dedb y Hegel, standing at the
end of time, who offers an "adequate description of the Real in its
totality."38 Hegel, in short, provides a satisfying account of a Reality
which has (finally) become satisfactory.
This is about as far as most accounts of Kojeve go. Thus Hannah
Arendt, in her frequently stimulating last work, Willing, claims that
Koj6ve was influenced above all by the closing lines of Alexandre
Koyrt's "Hegel a Iena," which had argued that "it is possible that Hegel
believed" that history was at an end, and that "this essent~alc ondition
(for a philosophy of history) was already an actuality . .and that this
had been the reason why he himself was able-had been able-to
complete it." And Arendt goes on to speak of Kojeve, "for whom the
Hegelian system is the truth and therefore the definite end of philosophy
as well as hist0ry."3~
10 POLITICAL THEORY I FEBRUARY 1981
Unfortunately "definiten is too definite a term at this point; for while
Arendt is certainly essentially right about Kojeve, she does not take into
account some peculiarly Kojevian additions to the Ende der Geschlchte
and to Hegel as "the last philosophern-additions which need to be
attended to.
One might pardonably imagne-havlng been told that the future
"belongs" to "the working slavew-that the "universal and
homogeneous staten would be produced precisely by these (former)
slaves when they (finally) "suppressn both the Master and their own
slavery. But this turns out to be not quite the case: if a "Master" is not
needed to usher in the "end of history," a hero at least is. And this hero is
Napoleon. Since this somewhat odd doctrine is peculiarly Kojevian, but
is not noticed by Arendt and many others, it requires some attention.
Hegelianism is true, for Kojeve, because it stands at the end of time
and "knowsn the whole of Reality; it is "no longer thesearch for wisdom,
but wisdom (= absolute knowledge) itself."40 Now truth is not "truly
true," for Kojke, unless "the reality which it reveals is entlrely attained
(all that was possible is effectively realized), thus 'perfect,' without
possibility of extension or change." This "total, definitive reality is the
Napoleonic Empire"; for Hegel in 1806-the year of the composition of
the Phenomenology-this Empire is a "universal and homogeneous
staten which "re-unites the whole of humanity and 'suppresses'
(aufiebt) in its womb all 'specific differences': Nations, classes, social
groups, fa mi lie^."^'
Since this state-for Kojeve-is "perfectn and "definitive," there will
be no further change, no further "negation" of the "given"; "this state
changes no more because all its citizens are 'satisfied' "In a "universal"
state, according to Kojeve, "I am recognized by all men, who are all my
peers." And thanks to the "homogeneity" of this state, "it is truly Iwho
am recognized, and not my family, my social class, my nation."42 True,
in the Napoleonic state it is Napoleon himself who is best ~atisfied;b~u3t
apparently everyone is sufficiently satisfied. Hegel's role in the process is
simply to "understand" and to "reveal" "this Sage, who (through
'knowledge') reveals Reality (incarnated in Napoleon), is the
incarnation of Absolute Mind: thus he is, if one likes, the incarnated
God of whom the Christians dreamed."44 And Kojeve ends with a bold
claim: "the true, real Christ = Napoleon-Jesus + Hegel-Logos; the
Incarnation thus takes place not in the middle but at the end of
history "45 This claim, however, in Kojeve's view, is no longer
"blasphemous" if one understands that Christianity, qua
Riley / READING ALEXANDRE KOJ~VE I I
"anthropology," is only symbolically true. "The life of Christ and his
death symbolize the real course of history: Chnst sacrifices his
particulanty (= Jesus) in order to realize the Universal (= Logos) and the
Universal (= God) recognizes this particularity (= Man) which is God
himself." Christ, Kojeve insists, "works-he is a carpenter; he sacrifices
his life-this is struggle and risk." But it is not a true struggle, since
Christ "remains a slaven who "dies on the crossn; thus He reveals "the
final atheism, the death of God." And he is "resurrected"-to the extent
that one can say this at all--only "as real Man, that is as Community, as
Church (= prototype of the Napoleonic Em~ire)."~6
It is Napoleon "revealed" by Hegel who is, according to Kojeve, the
"revealed Godn of Chapter VI of the Phenomeno1ogy;and the section of
that work called "Evil and Forgiveness" deals (again selon Kojtve) with
Napoleon's "crime" in establishing a "universal" state and Hegel's
"forgiving" him (by "understanding" the world-histoncal significance of
his action).47
Why K0jeve should have attached such weight to Napoleon is much
less clear in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel than in the article
"Hegel, Marx and Christianity." In the article Kojeve begins, familiarly
enough, with the view that history "ended" with the publication of the
Phenomenology; that Hegelianism is true "solely because history has
ended, because man no longer negates, no longer transforms the Real
revealed by the last philosophy, which, for that reason, is no longer
philosophy or recherche de la vPrztP, but truth itself or Wisdom
(absolute knowledge)";48 that there is a "man" who "realized or
incarnated" the end of history, "that is to say Napoleonn; that "Hegelian
thought" gives "an account of Napoleon"; that "the Chnst who exists
empincally, the God who actually reveals himself to man, the Word
truly become flesh-is the diad Napoleon-Hegel, is the man achieving
the historical evolution through a bloody struggle, doubled by a man
revealing the sense of this evolution through his discourse."49 It is a
crucial footnote to "Hegel, Marx and Christianity" which reveals why
Kojke sees philosophy, history, Napoleon and Hegel in this light. "In a
famous letter," Kojeve urges, "Hegel says that, havlng finished the
Phenomenology, he saw at dawn the 'soul of the world' on horseback
beneath his windows." This letter, Kojeve insists, is a revelation"^
Napoleon, "the conqueror at Jena, is called 'world-soul' . . he
incarnates not the history of the French people, but that of the whole of
humanity " But Napoleon, taken by himself, is not "mind," because he is
not "fully conscious of himself: by his action, he has in fact completed
12 POLITICAL THEORY / FEBRUARY 1981
history, but he does not know that he does it and that by doing it he
realizes Absolute Mind." It is Hegel who "knows" this, and says it in the
Phenomenology. Thus, "Absolute Mind or 'God' is neither Napoleon
nor Hegel, but Napoleon-understood-by-Hegel or Hegel-
understanding-Napoleon."50 (If one stresses "the diad Napoleon-
Hegel," it is because this theme is characteristically and peculiarly
"Kojevian," and cannot be accounted for on a "Marxian" view after all,
in the 18th Brumaire Marx, while calling the reign of Napoleon 111 a
"farce," referred to the reign of the first Napoleon as a "tragedy.")51
In any event, and whatever one makes of Kojeve's Napoleonism, it
turns out that it is not simply the case that "the diad Napoleon-Hegel"
has "realizedn (in the double sense) a "satisfying" state: it may only have
launched a state of affairs which might (yet) become satisfactory For,
after having said in Introduction to the Reading of Hegelthat Napoleon
and Hegel between them bnng history to an end, Kojeve backtracks a
little: "The perfect State ?No doubt possible, but one is far from
Hegel himself, Kojeve urges, knew quite well that the state "was not yet
actually realized in all its perfection," and therefore "affirmed only the
existence in the world of the germ of this State and the existence of the
necessary and sufficient conditions of its flowering."53 Now no one,
Kojeve continues, can "deny with certainty the absence of such a germ
and of such conditions in our world"; thus the Hegelian "universal and
homogeneous state" is no "error" and remains possible "in principle."54
In an argument reminiscent of what Kant saysabout the "possibilityn of
"eternal peace,"55 Kojeve goes on to insist that "that which is neither an
error nor (yet) a truth, is an idea, or if one prefers an ideal." The idea or
ideal of an Hegelian state "will only be transformed into truth by
negative action," which, in destroying the World which does not
correspond to the idea, "will create through this very destruction the
world which conforms to the idea1."56 Thus the Hegelian state, though
extant as a "germ" since 1806, remains aprojet a rkaliser Or, as Kojeve
puts it in a note in Pagan Philosophy, "Hegelianism is alone in
translating itself into existence (at least insofar as history is not
definitively completed) through social and political action properly
speaking ('revolutionary' or 'Marxi~t')."5~
It seems, then, that there IS some uncertainty in Kojeve whether
history ended, and "satisfaction" began, in 1806; or whether only the
"germ" of a future "satisfaction" sprang up with "the diad Napolebn-
Hegel." Kojeve tnes to cast a little light on this obscurity at the end of
"Hegel, Marx and Chnstianityn by saying that, if history did not
Riley / READING ALEXANDRE KOJ~VE 13
(utterly) end with "Hegel-understanding-Napoleon," it is at least the
case that there has been nothing truly or wholly "new" srnce Hegel: "if
there has been from the beginning a 'left' and a 'right' Hegelianism, this
is also aN there has been since Hegelw( leaving out of account the vestigial
survival of liberalism, a pre-Hegelian thing).$*A nd "history," according
to Kojkve, has not yet awarded the. palm to either "left" or "right."59
In sum: however Kojeve may vacillate, he vacillates within a narrow
range of possibilities. Either history and philosophy ended in 1806, and
universal "recognition" and "satisfactionw set in (the strong version); or
at least the germ of all this began in 1806 (remaining aproject are'aliser),
and there has been nothing truly new srnce Napoleon-Hegel (the weak
version). The "end," then, or the "beginning-of-theend"-those are the
possibilities; the vacillation is perhaps not as serious as it might at first
appear to be.
III
The "Napoleonism" apart, there are several ways in which it is
reasonable to characterize Kojeve's reading of Hegel as (more or less)
"Marxist." Most noticeably, it is no accident that Kojeve begins his
interpretation of Hegel with a quotation from Marx's Economrc and
Philosophrc MSS of I844 ("Hegel grasps labor as the essence of
man-as man's essence in the act of proving itself")60a nd then places his
own heavily glossed verslon of the "Master and Servant" chapter of the
Phenomenology at the outset of Introductron to the Reading of Hegel,
so that this chapter colors and indeed "governs" the rest of the reading.
(Hegel, of course, does not begin with Master and Servant; and he gives
no Indication that this chapter is "privileged" above other parts of the
Phenomenology.)61 Now if "mastery" might mean something like
owning the "means of production," and "slavery" might take the form of
"alienated labor" on the part of a "proletanan," then Kojeve's insistence
on "Master and Servant" as central and governing could certainly be
viewed as a "Marxian" reading of Hegel. (One says "could," and not
"must," because it 1s noticeable that where one might expect Marx to
mention Hegel as the theorlst of Mastery and Slavery-above all In
Book 111, Chapter XXIII of Caprtal-he In fact quotes Aristotle's
discussion of the subject, at length, and in Greek, but fails to mention
Hegel at But as an example of Mastery-in this same passage-