Contents

Introduction: I Impact and Significance of Kojčve, Displacement One: Marx, History and Desire. Displacement Two: Heidegger, Death and Recognition Displacement. Three: Hegelon History and Method Conclusion: DialecticalMethod

Introduction:

The Impact of Kojčve

"Now, we have seen that the presence of Time (in which the future takes primacy) in the real World is called Desire (which is directed towards another Desire), and that this desire is specifically human desire, since the Action that realises it is Man's very being. The real presence of Time in the World is therefore called Man. Time is Man, and Man is Time. .

Therefore the natural reality implies Time only if it implies a human reality. Now, Man essentially creates and destroys in terms of the idea that he forms of the Future. And the idea of the Future appears in the real present in the form of a desire directed towards another Desire - that is, in the form of a Desire for social Recognition. Now, Action that arises from this Desire engenders History.

Hence, there is Time only where there is History. . On the last page of the Phenomenology, Hegel says, time is history whereas nature is space. . But in his other writings Hegel is less radical. In them, he admits the existence of a cosmic time. But in so doing, Hegel identifies cosmic time and historical time. This, I believe, was his basic error."(pp 133, 147)

Hegel's "basic error," according to Alexandre Kojčve, was his conflation of natural and historical time, and Kojčve sets out to rectify this mistake. In doing so, he produces one of the most influential interpretations of Hegel since Marx - not least because of his insistence on the need for a 'return to Hegel'. "Kojčve," argues Allan Bloom in the introduction to Kojčve's Introductionto the Reading of Hegel, "is the mostthoughtful, the most learned, the most profound of those Marxists who . turned to Hegel as the truly philosophic source of [Marx's] teaching." It is not an exaggeration to say that Kojčve's lectures at the Sorbonne (1934-1939) influenced an entire generation of French thought, including Sartre and Lacan.

Kojčve reads Hegel, 'after Heidegger' and finds Hegel's ontology of nature indefensible, suggesting that Heidegger's meditation on Being may be a substitute for it. The key text in Kojčve's Introduction is the appendix,"The Idea of death in the philosophy of Hegel". Here Kojčve expresses his judgement that "the 'dialectical' or anthropological philosophy of Hegel is in the final analysis a philosophy of death"and that "the wise man can speak of science as his science only to the extent that he can speak of death as his death".The potential complementarity of Hegel and Heidegger's work on this point lies at the basis of the extraordinary centrality o fthe master-slave dialectic to French thought since WWII. In the words of a contemporary reviewer, "Kojčve was the first to have attempted the intellectual and moral threesome of Hegel, Marx and Heidegger which has since that time been such a great success".[1]

Kojčve wants to work three displacements on Hegel's Phenomenology.

Kojčve's insistence on the centrality of the master-slave dialectic is intended to rectify Hegel's "basic error" - the conflation of natural (or cosmic) time with historical time. By placing the master-slave dialectic at the centre of Hegel, Kojčve hopes to work a displacement of Hegel's 'theological' time by Marx's emphasis on class struggle as the basis for inter-subjective history.

Kojčve works a displacement of Hegel's conception of death as "absolute lordship" by an existential conception of the anticipation of death as the basis for the human being's sense of historical time, producing a displacement of Hegel's analysis of the fear of death by Heidegger.

Kojčve produces a displacement of Hegel by Hegel himself, in Kojčve's insistence on the letter of Hegel's thesis of the end of history. Kojčve argues that the only logical way out of the theological underpinnings of all philosophies of history is Hegel's notion that "the Concept is Time" and that therefore a history of philosophy is only possible at the end of (historical) time. For Kojčve, the thesis of the end of history is the only way to have absolute knowledge (the final and immutable truth) and a thorough-going historicism, at the same time. This leads to Kojčve's last - and most interesting - assertion, that "Hegel's method is not at all dialectical . Hegel was the first to abandon Dialectic as the philosophical method".

Although I disagree with Kojčve, I think all these displacements are necessary. SoI want to argue that either Kojčve makes a botch of the job (the first two displacements), or that he illustrates precisely why Hegel's dialectical method has to be itself historicised- rather than 'returned to'.

Displacement One: Marx (The Master-SlaveDialectic)

In his brilliant and influential Introduction, Kojčve makes his treatment of the Phenomenology revolve around Hegel's great set-piece, Lordship and Bondage, which Kojčve renders as "master and slave". It is no accident that Kojčve begins with a quotation from Marx:

"Hegel. grasps labour as the essence of man,"

and then places his own heavily glossed version of the master-slave dialectic at the start of his Introduction so that this chapter governs the work as a whole. This is consonant with Kojčve's statement that the master-slave dialectic is the key to Hegel and that it"determined the whole of Marx's thought".Kojčve's assertion is that: "in having discovered the notion of recognition, Hegel found himself in possession of the key idea of his whole philosophy. Also, it is through the analysis of this fundamental notion that one understands the role of the different aspects and elements of the Hegelian dialectic."

Kojčve argues that for Hegel, human society and human 'discourse' began when men were first willing to risk their 'animal' and biological existence in a 'fight to the death for pure prestige,' for 'recognition' by'the other'. The man who became master was willing to 'go all the way'. Yet although the master has the pleasure, they do not yet have the satisfaction of recognition by an equal: mastery is ultimately 'tragic' and' an existential impasse'.

It is the slave, who through work "negates given being" who overcomes the world: "the man who works transforms given being . where there is work there is necessarily change, progress, historical evolution". For work, according to Kojčve's interpretation of Hegel, is education or development in a double sense: it transforms the world and also educates the slave.

So long as there is slavery - whether to master, god or capital - man will never truly be 'satisfied' or truly free, since true satisfaction and freedom come from being recognised as an equal by an equal, which is possible only in the universal, Hegelian state. As Kojčve puts it, "the final struggle, which transforms the slave in to the citizen, suppresses mastery in a non-dialectical fashion: the master is simply killed, and he dies as a master. If idle mastery is an impasse, the future, by contrast, belongs to the laborious slave: Laborious slavery is the source of all human social historical progress. History is the history of the working slave."

The whole of "ideology" according to Kojčve's interpretation of Hegel, "is a sort of ideal 'superstructure' which has a sense and a possibility of being only o nthe basis of a real 'infrastructure', formed by the totality of political and social struggles and of labours undertaken by man". This "aspect" of "the Hegelian dialectic" he concludes, "is materialist"and it actually "determined all of Marx's thought". But if Kojčve stresses concepts that have Marxist resonances (work, struggle, ideology, and history as the history of the labouring slave), there is an important sense in which his employment of them is strictly non-Marxist.

In Marx, "men can be distinguished from animals . as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence." For Kojčve, by contrast, humanity is distinguished from animal life by the struggle for recognition:"man is only human . insofar as he is 'recognised'". Moreover, this recognition is methodologically analytically prior to production, for it is the "struggle to the death for pure prestige" which the master and the slave enter freely, while work is imposed on the slave as a consequence of the slave's defeat. "Nothing,"Kojčve urges "pre-disposes the future conqueror to victory, as nothing pre-disposes the future vanquished to his defeat. It is by an absolute act of liberty that the adversaries create each other, in and through the struggle for prestige, freely entered into".For Kojčve, it is recognition which lifts humanity from the animal world; for Marx, it is production.

Similarly, for Marx the socialist revolution means the end of the history of class struggle- which for Marx is the end of pre-history. Kojčve, by contrast, emphasises revolutionit self as the end of history.

"Marx,"Kojčve maintains, "takes up . this Hegelian theme" in Capital Vol. III Chapter 48

"History properly speaking, where men ('classes') struggle between themselves forrecognition and struggle against Nature throughwork,"

is for Marx "called the realm of necessity; beyond is situated the realm of freedom where men, recognisingeachother mutually without reserve, no longer struggle and work as little as possible (nature being definitively subjugated)".

Kojčve, unsurprisingly, mentions recognition first and foremost - but what does Marx actually say?

In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations cease; thus, in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production.. Beyond [necessity] begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day is its basic prerequisite.

Far from 'recognition' being the 'key idea' of this summary, and prior to work, Marx flatly says that the "realm of freedom" begins only where "labour which is determined by necessity . ceases". Freedom, for Marx, begins not simply with the suppression of the master, but with going beyond work determined by material necessity.

But if work is determined by necessity, it is not something simply imposed by the master as an objectification of recognition. For Marx, production is primary; for Kojčve it is secondary. Hyppolite (a left Hegelian with Marxian tendencies): "the struggle for life and death . is the root of history for Hegel, while the exploitation of man by man is only a consequence of it, this consequence serving on the other hand as Marx's point of departure."

This can be demonstrated by reference to the epigram Kojčve cites as his introduction to his own Introduction. ("Hegel . grasps labour as the essence of man".) In Marx's text, however, the 'dot dot dot' is filled by a crucial qualification: "Hegel's standpoint is that of modern political economy. He grasps labour as the essence of man -man's essence in the act of proving itself: he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labour . The only labour which Hegel knows and recognises is abstractly mental labour . he is therefore able to present his philosophy as the philosophy". Hegel, then, not only draws on political economy- and does not simply "grasp labour as the essence of man" - but one-sidedly understands this by reducing labour to thought. This flatly contradicts Kojčve's assertion that the "recognition" arising from the "master-slave" dialectic is the "key idea" in Hegel, and that this (materialist) side "determines the whole of Marx's thought".

Displacement Two: Heidegger (Death and Recognition)

Having abandoned Hegel's ontology of nature, Kojčve is seeking for an existential basisfor the phenomenon of the temporalisationof history. Because "the Concept isTime" and "man is Time," thebasis for humanity's comprehension of thehistorical unfolding of the empirically existingconcepts, which describe the real, is tobe located in our existential experience. The key to this experience is the strugglefor recognition; and the key to recognitionis death as the possibility of the "absoluterefusal of recognition". But for Kojčve, Hegel's concept of 'death' is insufficientlydistinguished from natural death.

The main point of Hegel's dialectic of recognition- as opposed to Heidegger's existential analysiswhereby a Being individualised by its anticipationof death is considered, by virtue of itsthrowness, to be 'with- others' - is that"self consciousness exists for a self-consciousness".If this is true, then as a self-interpreting, self-conscious being, Being's individualitycannot be derived from its anticipation ofdeath independently of its relations to others. Rather, Being must first, or simultaneously, be constituted as a self-conscious beingthrough its relation with others, in a dialecticof recognition, in order that it may becomethe kind of being which is capable of anticipatingits death as the end towards which it isthrown, and hence of constituting itselfexistentially as a being-towards-death. Thisdisrupts the whole ontological problematicof being and time, for it challenges thefoundational status of Heidegger's descriptionof Dasein - a being for whom being is 'there'in the fundamentally inquisitive form ofthe question of the meaning of being - revealingit as a dogmatic presupposition of Heidegger'sinquiry; the result of a prior commitmentto 'the question of the meaning of being'which falls outside the scope of the inquiry'sown critical procedures.

On the Hegelian model, being can only be'there' in Heidegger's sense of presentingitself as the object of inquiry for a fundamentallyself-interpreting entity, if this entityhas previously been constituted as an entityof this kind, through a process of mutualrecognition. Furthermore, it is only throughthis process of mutual recognition constitutiveof Dasein's consciousness of itself as aself-interpreting being that Dasein can acquirea sense of death in the first place. Thepoint for Hegelians is not only that Beingis first and foremost a being-with-others, but that its being with others is constitutiveof a death which, while ultimately groundedontologically in our inscription within cosmologicaltime, nonetheless derives its existentialreality from the form of our relationshipto it. Heidegger's analysis may registerthat it is by the deaths of others that that'mineness' of death is confirmed, but itprovides no account of whence this thingcalled 'death' comes, or what its existentialanticipation has to tell us, ontologically, about the character of Being as a socialbeing. In Hegel's analysis on the other hand, the dual priority of recognition over theanticipation of death appears explicitlyin the depiction of the 'struggle for recognition'in which each must risk their life in orderto be recognised by the other as a self-consciousbeing - the process leading up to the notoriousmaster-slave dialectic.

The master and slave are allegorical forms, typifications of power relations inherentin the structure of recognition. What theymark is, on the one hand, the necessarilysocial character of all self- consciousness, and, on the other hand, the contradictionbetween dependence and independence thatself-consciousness beings must consequentlyexperience outside of an association 'inwhich the free development of each is thecondition for the free development of all';or, as Hegel puts it, 'an absolute substancewhich is the unity of the different independentself-consciousness which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence'.

The presentation of this struggle as a trialby death is somewhat obscure. In order toknow itself as a consciousness, consciousnessmust know itself as both subject and objectof knowledge at the same time. But withoutanother self-consciousness, this is impossible, since any relation of consciousness to itselfwhich is modelled on its relations to objectscan only oscillate between an assertion ofits independence from itself as the objectof knowledge, and a supersession of thisindependence which establishes the self-certaintyof the knowing subject only at the cost ofdemonstrating its dependence on the negatedobject: therefore "self-consciousnessachieves its satisfaction (the satisfactionof its desire to supersede itself as an object)only in another consciousness."

The duplication of self-consciousness, theirmutual recognition, and hence their mutualdependence (replacing dependence on an object)are thus all shown to be conditions of thepossibility of self- consciousness, and hence, conditions of the possibility of Dasein asa self-interpreting being for whom beingis in question.

The difficulty here lies in the conceptsof life and death as used by Hegel; specificallyin Hegel's use of death as the negation oflife. Life, here is not used in the commonsensemanner of physical existence. "Life'is the category which, at the beginning ofchapter four of the PhG matches the reflectivetransition from consciousness to self-consciousnesson the side of the object. Life is the "naturalsetting of consciousness" or what Hegeldescribes as "independence without negativity".When Hegel writes that the individual's "presentationof itself . as the pure abstraction of self-consciousnessconsists in showing . that it is not attachedto 'life'" what this means is the consciousnessmust show that it is detached from its naturalsetting. Yet physical death is "the natural negation of consciousness, negation without independence, which thus remains without the required significance of recognition".

Now Hegel distinguishes between abstractnegation - death in the physical sense -and dialectical negation, the negation that"preserves and cancels". This kind of negation is the kind performed by consciousness on its objects, and it is essentially epistemological in character. So in this context, it is clear that the 'negation' that occurs in the 'trialby death' is not the abstract negation ofphysical death, but the dialectical negationof the other's non-natural life - that isto say, the negation of their self-consciousnessand independence.

Rather, insofar as this kind of literal negation of physical life is at issue here, it is present only in the 'staking of life' asan unrealised possibility. Consciousnessrequires a demonstration that the other isdetached from the natural setting - thisis furnished by the others staking of lifein the free enactment of the possibilityof literal, physical death. The freely embracedpossibility of death symbolises the freedomof consciousness from the dictates of self-preservation. Pure being for itself manifests itself onlyas freedom for death. This is what one mightcall the existential core of the dialecticof recognition. It is in this sense thatKojčve for, humanity is "death livinga human life"" in achieving self-consciousness, the human being 'kills' the animal withinthemselves and supersedes their natural being. But this is already a shift to Hegel's second, metaphorical sense of death.

It is this second, metaphorical sense ofdeath alone which is at issue in consciousness'sseeking of the death of the other: what consciousnessseeks when it desires the death of the otheris its death as an independent consciousness. It is thus not the abstract negation of lifethat is at stake in the death which is sought, but a reduction to 'life', in Hegel's naturalisticsense. A social death: such is slavery, symbolicreduction of social to natural being. Slaveryis social death. Conversely, the life wonby the master is beyond mere 'life', henceKojčve's insistence that the struggle isone for "pure prestige".

In Hegel's own account, 'absolute negativity'or 'pure being for self' appears in the consciousnessof the slave only in the form of the fearof death. A fear of death which is producedby the recognition of the independence ofthe other. Yet this recognition thereby makesconsciousness aware of its own potentialnothingness for the other - a nothingnessit must project into the other (seeking thedeath of the other) if it is to establishitself as pure being for self. Pure selfconsciousness pure being for self thus revealsitself as a contradictory structure of misrecognitionand disavowal.

In summary: self consciousness and the consciousnessof death ore one and they both come fromthe other. They are the product of desireand they result in fear: fear of death asthe fear of the refusal of recognition. Inboth the pervasiveness and indeterminacy, this fear is equivalent to Heidegger's existentialconcept of anxiety, an anxiety in the faceof being in the world as such, which accordingto Heidegger, makes fear possible at all. However, where for Heidegger it is being'sown freedom which is at stake, its characteras pure possibility - to which anxiety returnsit from its absorption in the world; forHegel, it is the freedom of the other whichinspires fear.

Anticipation of death, in Heidegger's existentialsense, is to this extent a constitutive dimensionof self-consciousness (and therefore socialbeing). If temporality derives existentiallyfrom the anticipation of death
(Heidegger)and death comes from the other (Hegel), so, it follows, does historical time. Existentialtemporality comes from the other. It is recognitionwhich temporalises time. It is only selfconsciousness for which death has a meaning- for which death 'is' in Heidegger's sense- and self-consciousness is always sociallymediated. Hegel's definition of death thusrequires modification. Death is not just"the natural negation of consciousness, negation without independence", theliteral, physical death with which Hegelbegins. It is the natural or unnatural negationof a consciousness, negation without independence, which is both for itself and for others. For all its inherent mineness which cannotbe denied, what death 'is' existentially, is mediated by relations to others - in Hegel'sterms, the forms of objective spirit. Itsanalysis will form part of an ontology ofsocial being.

The decision to substitute Heidegger's analysisof being for Hegel's ontology of nature, combined with the 'existential' decisionto place the struggle for recognition beforelabour has an unwanted consequence in Kojčve'sreading of Hegel, let alone Marx. For Hegel, the struggle for recognition is profoundlysocial. Yet for Kojčve (as for Heidegger)because the anticipation of death is locatedin the ontological structures of individualexperience, death is profoundly a-socialor pre-social. Kojčve, despite his protestationat Hegel's "basic error", repeatsHegel's obscurity, supplementing it witha further problem: the existential deploymentof death not as a social concept but as anindividual reality prior to socialisation.

Displacement Three: Hegel on History andMethod

Hegel shows that the desire that is directedtowards another desire is necessarily thedesire for recognition, which engenders History, and moves it. Time lasts only as long ashistory lasts - that is as long as humanacts accomplished with a view to social recognitionare carried out. (135) "As for time, it is the empirically existing concept itself":this sentence marks an extremely importantdate in the history of philosophy . thosephilosophers who do not identify the conceptand time cannot give an account of history. the principle aim, then, of the reformintroduced by Hegel was the desire to givean account of the fact of history.
(132)

Yet the structure of the preceding two displacementsmakes this last consideration, on Hegel'sview of history and methodology, come outvery strangely indeed. Kojčve's "wiseman" is an existential Hegel, not ahistorical Hegel. That is why Kojčve insiststhat: "the wise man can speak of scienceas his science only to the extent that hecan speak of death as his death." (167)For Kojčve, "Consciousness necessarilyimplies consciousness of death . historycompletes itself by man's perfect understandingof death".

Kojčve links this to the dialectical characterof Hegel's philosophy in remarkably consistentfashion. "Dialectic" accordingto Kojčve involves action, negation, andtherefore perturbation of the object. Accordingto Kojčve, Science perturbs the object .there is no scientific truth in the strongand proper sense of the term (177).

"The Hegelian method, therefore, isnot at all dialectical: it is purely descriptiveand contemplative, or better, phenomenologicalin Husserl's sense of the term. (171) Ifthe thought and the discourse of the Hegelianscientist or the wise man are dialectical, it is only because they faithfully reflectthe "dialectical movement" of theReal of which they are a part and which theyexperience by giving themselves to it withoutany preconceived method. (179) Hegel's method, then is not at all dialectical . Hegel wasthe first to abandon Dialectic as the philosophicalmethod (179)."

"Accordingly, Hegel does not have to'demonstrate' what he says, nor to refutewhat others have said. The demonstrationand the refutation were effected before him, in the course of the History which precededhim, and they were effected not by verbalarguments, but in the final analysis by theproof of fighting and work. Hegel only hasto record the final result of that "dialectical"proof and to describe it correctly. And since, by definition, the content of this descriptionwill never be modified, completed or refuted, one can say that Hegel's description is thestatement of the absolute, or universallyand eternally (ie necessarily) valid truth. All this presupposes, of course, the completionof the real Dialectic of fighting and ofwork, that is the definitive stopping ofhistory. It is only "at the end of time"that a Wise man (who happened to be calledHegel) can give up dialectical method - thatis, all real or ideal negation, transformationor critique of the given - and limit himselfto describing the given (191)."

Conclusion: Dialectical Method This conclusionis unavoidable. Yet it flows from an incompleteconsideration of the arguments. Kojčve listsa number of possible relationships betweenthe concept and time, dismissing the non-historicalrelationships that had obtained in philosophyup until Hegel. This leaves only two possibilities:

The concept is time, and hence is relatedneither to time nor to eternity - this isHegel's position.(102)

There is still [another] possibility. Theconcept is temporal. But this is no longera philosophical possibility. For this typeof (sceptical) though makes all philosophyimpossible by denying the very idea of truth: being temporal the concept essentially changes: that is to say, there is no definitive knowledge, hence no true knowledge in the proper senseof the word. (102)

I would suggest that this latter is in factthe only way out of the end of history thesis. In the celebrated second preface to Capital, Marx insists that though in Hegel the

(idealist) dialectic is "standing onits head" and "must be turned rightside up again, if you would discover therational kernel within the mystical shell"nonetheless in its rational form, Hegeliandialectics "includes in its comprehensionan affirmative recognition of the existingstate of things, at the same time also, therecognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up." DemystifiedHegelian dialectic is "revolutionaryin its very essence critical and revolutionary,"because it "regards every historicallydeveloped social form as a fluid movementand therefore takes into account its transientnature not less than its momentary existence."

This suggests that the solution "theconcept is temporal" is the path takenby Marx. But if this is the case, then extractinga dialectical method from Hegel can onlyproceed at the level of an historical critiqueof Hegel aimed not at producing eternal formulasbut at inserting Hegel - and Marx - withinan ongoing history of philosophy . one withouta goal or an end.

Heidegger considers successful temporal self-fulfilmentto be possible in the absence of device transcendence. Heidegger describes the anticipation of one'sown future as a "Being- towards-death", but he means that this anticipation ofthe "possibility of the measurelessimpossibility of existence" , whichrepresents death, allows a kind of 'authentic'existence.

Rorty precis the basis of Being and Timeas follows: "Heidegger would like torecapture a sense of what time was like beforeit fell under the spell of eternity, whatwe were before we became obsessed by theneed for an overarching context which wouldsubsume and explain us (...). To put it inanother way: he would like to recapture asense of contingency, of the fragility andriskiness of any human project (...)."This productive intention, continues Rorty, was undermined by Heidegger's absolutionof authentic temporality and its fundamentalontological elucidation.

Note:

1 Alan Bloom, "Preface," to AlexandreKojčve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, pi.