Kojève, “En guise d’introduction”
The quote from Marx says, “Hegel grasps … labor as essence, as the self-preserving essence of humanity.”
Kojève’s “Introduction” is a commentary on Chapter IV, section A of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. While an amazingly brilliant work of syncretic philosophy, Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel is unreliable as a scholarly account of Hegel, and this “Introduction” to his Introduction is fatally flawed as such in several ways. Indeed, even taken on its own as a philosophical account or a political theory, I think it is fatally flawed in several ways. Nevertheless, the account Kojève sets out proved to have a profound influence on French thinkers and political thought beyond France, and I think it is well worth the effort to understand it, not the least because it provides “a way in” to the topics and teachings of so many important thinkers.
I do not claim that the following is a full and accurate account of Kojève – it too is “a sort of introduction.” (Did Kojève borrow the title from Robert Musil’s great novel?) For an accurate and cogent philosophical commentary on the same Hegelian text, one can do no better than consult John McDowell’s article “The Apperceptive I and the Empirical Self: Towards a Heterodox Reading of ‘Lordship and Bondage" in Hegel's Phenomenology.’” Yet that article is even more difficult. Then there is Hegel himself. Χαλεπά τά καλά.
Reading notes:
Pages cited as English/French and are approximate.
Desire
3/11 – Kojève starts with what he takes to be the Hegelian account of consciousness. Consciousness is taken not as awareness but as desire, and it is desire that partitions itself into subject and object. Taken as fundamentally desire, humanity is not primarily soul but body. One starts anthropologically, with the “natural” human being, and the task is to explain the origin of the spiritual human being (society politics, science and history).
Desire “negates” its object, that is, desire does not leave the object as it is but subjects it to some other standard – uses its object for or in terms of something else. Negation is either destruction or transformation. Negation changes the “what” of an object, its “form.” The subject of desire is the form-changing negating. From here it is but a half-step to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
4/12 – The object of desire shapes desire and so shapes the subject of desire. A creature who desires natural things is a “natural” creature. What makes human desires human is that they are reflexive; they desire desires. This may sound cryptic but it can be rephrased as: humans take up an attitude to their desires. It is not just that you desire the pizza; it is what you want and what you want. The question, “is that what you really want?” makes sense to a human.
This definition has had quite a career in French thought and in its American echo (from Sartre to Judith Butler). It is, however, Kojève’s appropriation of what he takes to be Hegel’s historical reference here, Hobbes. “So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death.” (Leviathan, Ch. 11.)
5/12 – In this reflective act, a person “surpasses” the immediate desire in the sense that they are now “free” to take it up, modify, or reject the desire. This means that humans surpass the present towards a (desired) future shaped by given (past) circumstances.
6/13 – Kojève then makes his fundamental assertion that humans are human to the extent that they desire not things or the natural body of an other human but that human’s desires, and he defines human history as the history of desired desires (what we desired ourselves to strive for, what we were trying to be). He is now ready to analyze the structure of human interaction, or the “struggle to death of master and slave.” This struggle will explain the origin and development of spiritual humanity.
Recognition
6/14 – Because a human can surpass his or her natural desires by taking up an attitude to those desires, s/he can surpass “life” itself as a value and biology as an explanation of his or her actions. This is most apparent when a person risks her biological desires (including self-preservation) for the sake of another desire, for example risking her life for the sake of honor. While an animal may risk its life to preserve its kin, only humans would risk their lives for desired desires (values).
7/14 – In an encounter with other human beings, humans assert their own desired desires as the proper objects for the other person’s desires. We want them to want what we want; we solicit their recognition. Indeed, it is in such an encounter seeking recognition that a human becomes human, that is, transcends simple biological needs/desires and sees herself as independent of her circumstances (including others’ expectations). But she only realizes her full independence from natural/animal existence, her full humanity, if she risks her natural/animal existence; if she sets aside the desire for life in favor of her values, her ideals. Or as Kojève is too fond of saying, if she is willing to “fight to the death” (lutte à mort).
8/15 – If two human beings encounter in this manner and fight to the death, then one or both dies and “game over.” If, however, both survive, one must “recognize” the other, that is, adopt her value(s) as his own. He is willing to forego his values for the sake of life. This is the beginning of human History. History (capital ‘H’) is the development of this outcome of the struggle for recognition or “the dialectic of master and servant,” and this History will come to an end when the asymmetry of master and servant, the asymmetry of recognition, is overcome in “the universal homogenous state.”
[Kojève now begins to quote portions of Hegel’s text. Kojève’s paragraphs begin within a bracket,’ [‘, and Hegel’s text does not. A very poor typographical decision! The French at least uses different typefaces. I skip the Hegel segments and give an incomplete paraphrase of Kojève (his two-stage development of desire is a bit more nuanced). If you want a course on Hegel, take my seminar at Boğaziçi Universite in a couple of years!]
11/18 – When various humans come to recognize various ideals, values, and make those values their own, their own desired desires, what happens is that the human world arises in addition to the natural world. A person now also lives in a world of shared values, institutions, status, and practices.
13/19 – A shared value has “validity” and that validity depends on being shared, on being recognized. (As facts make sentences true, so recognition makes values valid.) So a person seeking to validate herself depends on others to recognize her, her values.
The Struggle
15-20/21-26 – “It does no good to kill the adversary, one must overcome him dialectically and this means one must enslave him.” To overcome dialectically, to enslave, means “negation” not as elimination but as transformation. The one who yields, who is enslaved, is still there, still has, perhaps, values of his own, still has agency, but the terms of his actions, what makes him act and be the person he is, now lie “outside” him, with the master. He has begun his e-ducation (“leading out”). His actions are now explained by (“mediated by”) other considerations than his own desire. The slave is dependent; the master, independent and autonomous.
The slave is more natural since he does not desire his desires; he accepts them as an animal accepts its desires. He is also more natural because he now acts out the desires of the master, doing her bidding, dealing with the world in her terms like a beast of burden. He does her work for her so that she enjoys satisfactions without the discipline of achieving them herself.
In the next few pages, Kojève quotes extensively from the most famous part of the Hegel text, the turning of the tables against the master. In brief, the master is validated as true, as right, as entitled by the recognition of the slave. So instead of being independent, it turns out that she is dependent on the slave, both for her satisfactions and for her status and validity. However, her status and validity are recognized by someone who cannot fully and truly recognize her. On the one hand, he has asserted his own desire to live, so he maintains his ultimate independence (and she cannot eliminate that without losing her servant), and on the other hand he is a slave, an inferior, and therefore is not freely able to validate her. (“Do you respect me because you fear me, envy me, are trying to manipulate me, or do you really respect me without reservation?”) Kojève will call this the “existential impasse” of the master. The master cannot achieve full status without abdicating her domination and freeing the slave – thus losing her status as master.
Meanwhile, the slave finds a different outcome. In the process of working to satisfy the master’s desires he inadvertently achieves three things: knowledge, independence, and History. First, by actually getting his hands dirty with work, he learns how things really work (he learns his math, not just getting answers in the back of the book). Second, while the master depends on him to get things done, he, as able to work out desires in the world, becomes independent from the world (someone who knows math can do what he wants with it rather than depend on the tutor). Third, he has learned how to regulate himself, not by subjective needs and desires but by objective standards, the facts of the world and the values of his society. This too is education but an education that will now set about to modify both the world and society’s values: History. History is the education of humans into full mastery of their world and of themselves.
Liberation
21/27 – The difference between servant and master is the one works for the satisfaction of the other. In working for the master, the servant becomes master over himself; he is able to discipline himself to act in accord with an “external” value, an assigned desire. He legislates for himself; he becomes autonomous. This is the reflective desire mentioned above. The servant also achieves truth (knowledge) of the real social/political situation: he himself is the reality of the master/servant relation. The master is established and validated as master by him (recognition) and the master’s “mastery” is his (the servant’s) doing; it is in fact the servant’s mastery over himself that carries out the commands of the master.
This self-recognition on the part of the servant is achieved by the fear of death that led him to yield to the master in the initial confrontation. The fear of death is more than the fear of this or that specific threat of disadvantage or injury (mortal or otherwise); it is fear of the complete erasure of himself and so it reveals to the servant that he is neither this or that specific person or body but some one agent entity detached from all circumstances. This one agent is the fixed point in a world of fluid circumstances who beholds the vanity of the world. [Descartes’ cogito, and behind him St. Ignatius Loyola].
22/28 – To this extent liberated from the “determination” causal or otherwise of his circumstances, the servant now sees and addresses those circumstances not as fixed but fluid, not as settled but to be reshaped, worked upon. Hegel, in his text, cites the Bible: “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The experience of mortality is the beginning of seeing a world and self, of taking up a stance towards a world and a self. It brings into view the world and the self as such. It subjects desire to desire.
Note the different takes on mortality. The master overcomes her biological self, surpasses her circumstances by risking her life in the “struggle to death.” Her detachment from her circumstances makes for her ability to command: to insist on her own agenda rather than the natural “conditioning” or determinations of her body and the world. The servant’s fear of death likewise detaches him from his circumstances but not as simple detachment to pursue his own ends. He still has to address the world – he is “chained to its conditions” – but he doesn’t have to take it seriously. He can manipulate and change the world (within bounds of an external command). Hegel will liken these two ways of addressing the world to stoicism (the master always doing the noble thing no matter what the circumstances) and to skepticism (the servant always resisting circumstances by insisting they could be otherwise). [PdG §§]
Note also the different takes on desire. The master commands the satisfactions of her desires and now has servants who enhance her power to satisfy her desires, yet there is not much reason for her to change her “agenda.” Indeed, at best she becomes a “consumer” and her desire is as endless and futile as shopping. She makes nothing of herself. The servant, by contrast, has to defer his desire – twice. First, he has to defer his own “agenda” in favor of the master’s (sublimation of desire) and second he has to set about achieving the master’s desire (since he has no servants to command) by “getting the job done” (deferral of satisfaction). “Getting it done” entails organizing means to an end, engaging in a project. Means, ends, and organization “rationalize” his actions and his understanding (education), and this rationality deployed in the world is “technology.” History (capitalized) is not only the education of the servant but the development of rationality and technology. It is the education of desire; it is the discipline of work; it is the advance of Reason.
Solidarity and Revolution
25/30 – While the master’s desire spins around in consumption, the servant’s desire reshapes the world. The actions of the servant are “in the world” and so his desire is externalized, becomes objective both in the sense that it is “there” and in the sense that it is shareable (factual and validated). The servant/worker and others see what he has achieved and can make use of it. They understand the rationality of what he has made. This “humanizes” the world, both in the sense that the world is increasingly made by humans (just look around!) and also in the sense that it is increasingly rationalized and so increasingly intelligible to humans. The servant’s work transforms the world from an alien threat and makes of it a “home.” His work also transforms it from a world of things available for desire to a place for human action: collaboration, creativity, and freedom. To see this, contrast the world of the peasant with that of the contemporary sophisticated urbanite.
The servant’s self is transformed as well. A consumer is no more than just another consumer, but a servant, trained and educated, is an accomplished tinker, tailor, soldier or spy. A worker’s works testify to what he is and who he is – his abilities and character, his individuality, even his circumstances and world – in a way that a shopper’s “stuff” does not. Your writing tells me more about you than your clothes. Masters only leave a trail of waste – and what their servants have achieved. An accomplished worker is somebody; he has substance, is somebody objective. His work has brought out his essence (see Marx quote above). So work not only humanizes the world, it humanizes the worker and makes him real, makes him into somebody.
28/32 – Towards the end of the Introduction Kojève adds some curious comments, important for us and developed elsewhere. He notes that when desire and world come apart, when one does not rationally carry out the achievement of desire, then that person is counted as criminal or insane. By this account, those also who imagine or strive for a world not yet realized would be counted as criminals or insane by those who find the world already “in order.” This alludes to a justification for revolutionary criminal actions. The actions are criminal only in the eyes of an untransformed world; a full humanization of the world would not only eliminate criminality and insanity driven by disoriented or ineffectual desire, but also vindicate the criminality and insanity that brought it about. The ends justify the means.
Those who are more pragmatic and seek to reform the world, accept the world more or less as it is. This doesn’t change the (imperfectly) humanized world but just adjusts its comfort level. Real change is revolutionary, not reforming or improving but rejecting and reframing the way things are. That requires a more radical detachment from the way things are. To see the fundamental framework and to render it fluid so as to change it requires fundamental discomfort, profound fear, absolute terror. Revolutionary terror shakes the very foundations of the way things are; “all that is solid melts into air.” The abolition of the framework takes with it the masters of the framework. They are no longer validated. Only the workers can survive a framework change and constitute a new humanity.
Kojève’s Introduction (the book) goes on to develop the tale of History and how it works towards an “end” where there is no longer an external opposition between master and servant, the “universal homogenous state” where each can fully recognize the other. That is a longer tale.
There is much more here and one can draw out connections to Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Heidegger as well as Sartre, Foucault, and Lacan. (Never mind if these names are unfamiliar, your college professors will invoke (some of) them as demi-gods.)