Abstract
History begins in a struggle producing two figures, Master and Slave. It ends in a “universal and homogeneous state”, an Empire. Revolution with its inevitable terror is the central point in this history. Kojève himself had experienced the Russian revolution and Civil War; in 1920 he left Russia for Germany, where till the end of 1923 he had witnessed the same strife between the “left” and the “right”. This experience is the basis of his view of history, his interpretation of the path from Mastery and Slavery to the figure of the Citizen, to universal recognition. The French revolution with the Jacobins’ terror and Napoleon’s Empire represent for him the model by which to understand not only the revolutions of the twentieth century, but of the entire course of history.
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Notes
“…[T]he goal, absolute knowledge, that is, spirit knowing itself as spirit, has there collection of spirits as they are in themselves and as they achieve the organization of their realm,” these are the words Hegel chose to conclude The Phenomenology of Spirit.
Whatever “the left,” who counted Hegel among their predecessor and the liberals, who viewed his philosophy either as a “reaction,” or as a “fountainhead” of totalitarianism, had to say, he was a moderate liberal conservative. In his article “Political Absolutism” (1926), C. Schmitt pinpointed the particular social group whose interests Hegel’s Philosophy of Right represented: it was Prussia’s liberal officials who carried out reforms in the early nineteenth century. Cf. Ritter (1984).
The short period of Stalin’s final years is an exception. Stalin personally ordered that Hegel be viewed as a reactionary; it resulted in such measures as the confiscation of Volume 3 of The History of Philosophy where Hegel appeared as a direct predecessor of Marxism (à la Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks). However, ideological debates in the USSR had largely nothing to do with the history of philosophy. The only curious point is that Stalin and Zhdanov’s views of the “reactionary Romanticism” and of Hegel’s idealism were in full accordance with the liberal “unmasking” from Hayek to Popper.
Hegel. The Philosophy of Mind, paragraph 435.
Sometimes, Kojève speaks about differences between The Phenomenology of Spirit and Logic; sometimes, he asserts that their contents are essentially identical, “Logic gives us an atemporal ontology, while in The Phenomenology of Spirit, that ontology unfolds in time.” See Kojève (1971), 420–421.
He writes about it in the summary of the 1933–1934 lecture course Ibid., p. 57.
Kojève, ibid., p.65. One of the 1939 lectures is entirely devoted to the statement that “time is in itself the concept.” Temporality is entwined into being through our activity.
“Problem: wo sind die Barbaren des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts? Offenbar warden sie erst nach ungeheuren sоzialistischen Krisen sichtbar warden und sich konsolidieren,—es warden die Elemente sein, die der groessten Haerte gegen sich selber faehig sind und den laengsten Willen garantieren koennen…” (Nietzsche 1996, 592).
These thoughts are not quite as developed in the 1930s lectures as they are in Outline of a Phenomenology of Right (1943) in the section on the “anthropogenetic desire”.
One could trace certain links between Kojève’s ontology and V. Solovyov’s teaching of the “supra-being” as a dialectical unity of being and non-being, with the qualification that for Kojève, the human reality becomes the Absolute. See the section on organic logic in The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge.
See the insightful comparison of Hegel’s philosophy with Nietzsche’s teaching: Jünger (2001, 196–198).
The experience of the Russian revolution is apparently evident here: Kojève’s words pertain primarily to the Provisional Government of March–October 1917.
Traces of Heidegger’s philosophy are evident here, but even a Marxist reading of Hegel’s dialectic exhibited examples of such transitions from “nothing” to the “fullness of being.” See, for instance, Lukács’s comment on Marx’s tenet that when a proletarian, due to his life conditions, finds himself at the point of absolute poverty, the summit of inhumaneness, loss of a human image, it leads the worker to the extirpation of all social inhumaneness. [Lukács 2003, 121–122.].
Although in a 1945 paper (A. Kojève, “Esquisse d’une doctrine de la politique francaise” https://archive.org/stream/KOJÈVEPOLITIQUE1945/KOJÈVE=POLITIQUE=1945_djvu.txt) he writes about a long period of strife not between nations, but between empires, until all of them are subsumed by the single remaining one.
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Rutkevich, A.M. Alexander Kojève: from revolution to empire. Stud East Eur Thought 69, 329–344 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-017-9296-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-017-9296-7