Kojève & the End of History

Political Theory 101

The episode explores the political philosophy of Alexandre KojÃ¨ve, specifically his influential reading of Hegel's master-slave dialectic.

Key takeaways

KojÃ¨ve's reading of Hegel was not strictly historical but a philosophical intervention influenced by Marx and Heidegger.
The master-slave dialectic in KojÃ¨ve's view requires a risk of death to prove one's status as a subject rather than an object.
The 'end of history' represents a state where the struggle for recognition ceases, potentially leading to a regression into consumerism and nature.
KojÃ¨ve's work played a significant role in shaping post-war economic institutions like the WTO and the European Union.
The hosts argue that modern politics of recognition in the US can be traced back to these KojÃ¨vean frameworks.

Main topics

Alexandre KojÃ¨ve's Hegel reading
The Master-Slave Dialectic
The End of History

Notable quotes

The only way to prove that you are a subject is to risk death.

Conclusion

The episode offers a profound look at how 20th-century philosophical i

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:08) Hi, I'm Benjamin Studebaker. And I'm Danny Jacobs. And this is Political Theory 101. So today on Political Theory 101, we're going to be talking about Alexandra Kozhev. Kozhev was born in Tsarist Russia in 1902 to a wealthy family. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Kozhev fled the country. He studied in Germany, at Berlin and Heidelberg, under Karl Jaspers. Then in the 1930s, Kozhev came to France, where he found himself giving lectures on Hegel. Kozhev's reading of Hegel is widely criticized by historians of political thought. His Hegel is clearly influenced by subsequent developments in the history of thought. Clearly, it bears influence from Marx and it bears influence from Heidegger. So it's not particularly faithful to the original context in which Hegel wrote. That said, Kozhev's reading was profoundly influential in France, and to some degree in the United States as well. Bataille and Lacan regularly attended Kozhev's series on Hegel. Leo Strauss became a close friend of his, and prominent Straussians like Alan Bloom studied under Kozhev. After World War II, Kozhev took up a post in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs. where he played a significant role in helping to craft the European Economic Community, which became the European Union, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which became the WTO, the World Trade Organization. So Kozhev's had a very strong influence, not just on political theory, but also on post-war institutions that, in time, developed into core pillars of the neoliberal economic order under which we still live. In 1968, Kozhev had a heart attack and died, leaving us with no reaction to the events of 1968 or to the crisis of the 1970s. So these events, which shaped a lot of subsequent thought, played no role in generating the ideas we'll be discussing today. Speaker 2 (2:38) Kozhev took a particularly Speaker 1 (2:39) strong interest in the Lord-Bondsman dialectic, which he translated as the master-slave dialectic. This comes to us from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, first published in 1807. It concerns the manner in which two self-conscious individuals encounter one another. For a master to be recognized as a master, it is necessary that slaves be capable of giving this recognition. But if a slave can give recognition, then a slave has, at minimum, the capacity to recognize. If the master recognizes that the slave is capable of giving recognition, what entitles the master to keep the slave as a slave? Remember, for Aristotle, slavery is grounded on the idea that slaves are, by nature, unequal to their masters. For Aristotle, a slave is a tool, an object, rather than a subject. So a slave that is capable of recognizing a master seems to have subjectivity. And a slave that is a subject does not neatly fit the image of a slave as a tool, as a pure object. And yet the master needs to be recognized as a master. So the institution of slavery seems to fundamentally contradict itself. The master needs to both affirm that the slave is not a subject and to demand subjectivity from this non-subject. There is a sense in which something like this occurs whenever two subjects encounter one another, because there is a tendency for subjects to want to treat one another as objects, and yet there is also a tendency to want our subjectivity to be recognized by others. It is not just a narrow point about servitude or slavery. Kozhev, however, alights upon a particular passage in which Hegel describes this encounter as a life-and-death struggle. This passage moves Kozhev to put the idea of death at the center of his account. For Kozhev, the only way to prove that you are a subject is to risk death. The capacity to purposely bring about one's own death proves that one is not an object bouncing around in some deterministic scheme, but that one has agency. For Kozhev, this is the feature that makes man what he is. Man can choose to fight to the death. rather than live in accordance with nature. This recasts the master-slave dialectic. The master is a master because he shows that he is willing to die to have his way, to become nothing, to be what he chooses to be. This willingness is what makes the master human. The slave is not willing to die and instead submits. By choosing life over death, the slave fails to be human. Slaves then do the work given to them by the masters. In doing this work, they participate in the master's humanity. Indeed, in time, the slaves create an entire world in the service of their masters. Kozhev draws a sharp distinction between artifice and nature. He thinks we show that we are human insofar as we negate nature. Choosing death is a negation of nature, but we also negate nature when we create artifices. So for Kozhev, when the slaves create artifices, they also show that they can reject nature. In this way, the workers create an unnatural form of life, a life that comes from the choosing of death. The artifices they create show the workers that they are able to be human. But wages are an inadequate form of recognition. To show that they are human, it is still necessary for the workers to risk death. Having shown that they can make a world, the workers then fight to the death in a final battle for recognition. For Kozhev, this is the revolution, and the revolution brings about the end of history, the end of the struggle for recognition. But here's the rub. Once everyone is recognized as human by default, without any need for each person to prove humanity through work and through the willingness to die, humans stop working and stop putting their lives at risk. In other words, humans stop being human and become creatures of nature again, living in a world they cease to understand as having been created by them. They regress into consumerism and desire satisfaction. In this way, they become like cows in the field. Since for Kozhev, the creation of art and philosophy is itself a way of making an artifice so as to acquire recognition, the end of history means the end of art and philosophy. For Kozhev, the revolution has already happened and the end of history has already arrived. It is already the case that most people have ceased to see the world as something they create through their labor. Art and philosophy are already in decline. But can the European bureaucracy create an alternative possibility, a society of universal art and philosophy in which everyone can be human? Like many from this period, Kozhev considered whether the bureaucracy itself could be the agent of revolution. Did the institutions Kozhev helped to create restart history, or did they consolidate its end? Now, from a Platonic point of view, Kozhev's theory is incorrigibly silver, in that for Kozhev there is nothing higher than recognition. For him, philosophies of the good can only be bids for recognition. and so they are always already reframed in his terms. This distinguishes Kozhev from libidinal theorists like Deleuze and Guattari, who understood everything in terms of desire, but it also distinguishes Kozhev from theorists who take a universal principle fully seriously. This includes not just Plato, but arguably Hegel himself. The emphasis on death and on a sharp contrast between artifice and nature comes out of Heidegger. It pulls sharply against theories that hold that what we create is an extension of nature or is a way of participating in a universal principle. For Khojav, nature becomes the bad thing that has to be escaped by man. This has a bit of a Gnostic ring to it. Suffice it to say that this view is not for everyone. It's certainly not my kind of theory. But it has an undeniable influence, particularly on French theory. and also on the politics of recognition in the United States. In recent years, many Americans have become obsessed with recognition, insisting that other people see them the way they wish to be seen. There's something not quite right about this, I think. It doesn't seem to me to be a good thing. But it does fit with this kind of view, which would center this impulse and frame it as the ultimate expression of our humanity. It is particularly noteworthy that these struggles for recognition seem to go on primarily in bureaucratic workplaces, institutions designed to compete in a world shaped by neoliberal structures like the European Union and the World Trade Organization. We are used to talking about the end of history in Francis Fukuyama's sense. For Fukuyama, who was a student of Bloom, who was a student of Kozhev, we are at the end of history insofar as the collapse of the Soviet Union heralded the end of ideological struggle. But insofar as neoliberalism can be connected with a renewed demand for recognition, it might be a return of history in Kojev's sense. To be honest with you, I'm not sure this sort of history is worth worrying about. If we're just a bunch of egotists trying to be seen, I'm not sure our struggles matter very much at all. But let's hear what Daniel thinks about all this. Speaker 2 (10:27) Yeah, I wanted to maybe... clarify some things about the recognition. I'm not necessarily saying this is what you mean, but just for the audience, which is there's recognition as in. Speaker 2 (10:40) I don't know how I would the image or representation that I would like to be seen, like if you want to be seen as musical or intelligent or, you know, clever by other people, by funny, like this, you know, kind of self-representation. And then there's the recognition in the Hegel sense that I do think Kojic is talking about this, which is recognizing each other as free beings. And that's part of. Whether or not Kojiv is right in his critique of Hegel, I'm, for today's podcast, going to take it on its own terms, because I'm very aware of all of the criticisms of Kojiv as being, as they say, too anthropological or too anthropogenetic, or it's like humanism, it's like a humanist reading of Hegel, that in his critique, he's basically trying to say, and he's actually even rehearsing an older critique that you can find in Porderbach. He's trying to say what made Hegel certain about his own account of giving an end of history or absolute knowledge. It's his kind of way of setting up his reading of Hegel. And he's saying, look, you know. When you read the phenomenology of spirit, I'm just going to mention this quickly and then we'll come back to Kojic. You're reading, there's kind of two things that are happening, meaning there's the stage of consciousness at the time in the book. And then there's you, the reader, which is different, who's looking on, as Hegel likes to say, this dialectical development of stages of consciousness. The reason I bring this up is because, of course. If all that humanity ever developed into was the sense certainty of the first chapter of the phenomenology of spirit, we could say it wouldn't be possible to write phenomenology of spirit. And so I'm saying this because that is the way in which Kojic tries to center on, as Ben was just saying in his great introductory remarks on the Lord and bondship passage or what he translates into master and slave dialectic, meaning he's saying in order to even. write what Hegel wrote, you had to develop self-consciousness. And for self-consciousness to develop, this is part of his account of Hegel, it doesn't quote-unquote naturally occur. So an animal has desires, it's hungry, it's thirsty, it goes and fulfills those desires, it negates even. And even as he says, there's a sentiment of self, but it's not self-consciousness. Because upon fulfilling those desires, it falls back into nature. Right. It's kind of like the the flux of life, actually, to quote the phenomenology of spirit, which would then be different from self-consciousness, which I reading the Koji of this time, I was kind of like, oh, I can exactly see how all sorts of Hegelians can read this as nails on a chalkboard. Like, oh, no, like he's doing this kind of maneuver, but I want to read it seriously anyways. that he's trying to say there has to be something non-natural about this desire. And as he puts it as a desire for desire in order to kind of pull one out of nature. Speaker 2 (13:55) Right. It's fine. You know, I'm taking Kojov on his word. It's fine if you go, I don't find the account satisfactory. And in a sense, it's introduction to reading Hegel, meaning you have to go and do it on your own. And then you kind of learn if you agree with Hegel. And I should also say it's totally fine if someone goes, well, I'm not a Hegelian. I have a Heideggerian side, a Marx side, a Hegel side. And I'm, you know. A thinker. OK, that's fine. And obviously it was very influential. But with the question of desire for desire, he is saying, OK, it had to get to the stage where one would be willing to. Speaker 2 (14:39) potentially die, right? Like this is the whole aspect about the fight over life and death. Risk dying in order to fulfill a desire that was not a natural desire. And this is where this question of recognition comes in. Now, this is not unique to Hegel, that our freedom is bound up with other people's freedom. I personally feel like I can read it out of Rousseau and Smith and Kant, all sorts of figures like this. But nonetheless, maybe people are most familiar with it from Hegel because Hegel specifically puts it as recognition and gives the development in a way that maybe you might find unsatisfactory with Rousseau, which it's more like a philosophic essay. But there is, I guess, two more things I wanted to say. So the question of recognition as one of as being free. as being self-conscious and needing, I want to say, another super sensual being to be able to affirm one's freedom. Because the way that Hegel would put it is that if I only had self-consciousness as an object for myself, then it actually dissolves itself as self-consciousness. Because self-consciousness is supposed to find itself out of consciousness, out of the object. So you need another self-consciousness to be able to find yourself as self-consciousness. Something you can't do with a stone or with a rock or eating a fruit or something like that. And then the Lordship. Speaker 2 (16:16) slave section or lordship bonded section is kind of the contradictory process in which recognition comes to be, becomes. Speaker 1 (16:25) So I say that because, Speaker 2 (16:27) Ben, I'm thinking about why these lectures appealed to people in the 30s, and they continue to appeal in the 20th century. And it rings of an existentialist moment. So I was thinking of Sartre as well, existentialism as humanism. where he treats his first principle as the I think, therefore I am. But he reads it in a very Kojic way. He doesn't read it in the Descartes way, meaning he's instantly talking about many self-consciousnesses and how they interact, which Kojic thinks is something assumed by Hegel. This is part of his critique of Hegel, whether or not that's right or wrong. I'm just saying what Kojic says. He thinks it's an irreducible part given by Hegel in the phenomenology. Speaker 2 (17:10) You know, existentialism has a kind of meaning for, I want to say, a lot of leftists actually in the aftermath of the failure of the German Revolution. So Marcuse, in an interview with Habermas and Talos, talks about getting interested in Heidegger in the context of the retreat of the German Revolution, that he felt like it spoke more to them about their condition than Hegel. And maybe that's a confused. I don't know. I'm just I'm the messenger here. Don't you know, I'm just the medium here of these people. And, you know, I feel like something that existentialism maybe spoke to was a sense of. Speaker 2 (17:53) I don't know, the finite character of somebody under capitalism, that there's a way that Hegel starts to seem unbelievable to people. Like, you know, when I read someone like Feuerbach, he's like, well, Hegel seems to do a trick. Like he kind of slipped something in through the back door. And likewise, I kind of get that with the Kojic as well. Meaning they feel there's some kind of detail that's missing. Kusserl is another person that comes to my mind. And in fact, Kojic mentions Husserl at the end. He thinks that Hegel really arrives at the position that Husserl is at. These are all figures that were influential for a lot of continental thinkers in the early to mid 20th century as somehow speaking more to them, this phenomenology, this existentialism, than I want to say classic German philosophy. And I think that undergirds what they're thinking of. But you look like you wanted to say something, Ben. Speaker 1 (18:50) Yeah, I think there is a general tendency in this period to get focused on what it's like to be a particular person. Speaker 1 (18:59) In part because there's a sense that social and political possibility have fallen away. And there's something of stoicism or gnosticism in this. And I think it's the same kind of context which generates stoicism and gnosticism, which generates this tendency, which is a feeling of impotence in terms of the universal and therefore looking for ways to find value in the particular. Speaker 1 (19:28) Right. Speaker 2 (19:28) Yeah. And that's my that's my understanding of the appeal of a kind of humanism, that it is particular, but it's it's a. So on the one hand, humanism has a universal aspect to it, but it's not supposed to be a universal aspect in the way that. Let me let me voice a common Hegelian critique of Koja. They would say it's too anthropological, meaning it's too subjective. He's reducing Hegel too much to what do human beings know, whereas the logic is supposed to be absolute. It's supposed to be beyond just finite knowing beings. And by the way, I'm not even as familiar with Plato as you are, but I could imagine a Platonic critique also saying something similar of don't reduce the forms to. the thoughts of people, but their forms of nature, the forms of the universe per se, of which people, the reason why our thoughts can be objectively valid is because of how, to quote Kojov, we're revealing being, we're revealing the true nature of things. And so I say this because that's like a standard. Speaker 2 (20:41) philosophical critique of Kochev. And yet, Ben, what you're saying right here and what I was agreeing with you is that the kind of humanistic aspect seems to be more real and say, OK, what are we dealing with? We're dealing with humans. And that's why Kochev kind of rehearses, in my view, a common critique post-Hegel of Hegel is that people would appeal to Hegel the person as opposed to the philosophy. They would say, well, when Hegel wrote this text, wasn't he a person in the world, in history, in time, everything like this. And doesn't he necessarily bear the content of all that? And when he sits down to write the book, I'm going to rehearse for a second. When he sits down to write the book, doesn't he know where he's going? Like he already has the book in mind. And so even if in the preface he says the true method is to kind of start from the simple, you know. abstract from all the potential subjective anticipations and give yourself to the material. Kojic brings this up and then come back to the self that Feuerbach nonetheless is like, and Kojic says the same thing. Oh, but Hegel, the person wrote this book. And obviously they had already worked everything out in detail. Does that make sense what I'm saying? Like people try to put the presentation against the person who wrote the text. Speaker 1 (22:02) Yeah. Yeah. People try to make it about the specific person. Yeah. And in doing that, it becomes not about the actual substance, because the substance is an attempt to talk about something that's not reducible to the particular person. But if the premise is that any attempt to go beyond the particular person is to move into something mystical. Speaker 1 (22:28) And that that's not a licit move. And that anyone who does something like that must be laundering some desire for status or recognition or some erotic pleasure that they get from this activity. Speaker 1 (22:43) then it becomes impossible to take that kind of theory seriously on its own terms. Speaker 2 (22:48) So I think you're alluding to there's a section where he talks about how does myth become dialogue or science. So there's a section in the lectures where when he's talking about dialectic and he says maybe a provocative point, maybe it's not provocative to people. He says, well, Hegel's method is not the dialectic, actually. Right. At least in Hegel's own. If you were to treat him seriously, that you're giving yourself over to the material, that means you're not approaching it dialectically. You're just giving yourself over to the material. And so he kind of gives a little bit of a history of how did we get dialectic? And he says, well, theory begins with myth, but he says it begins as a kind of monologue. And then when that myth encounters other myths, it's almost like a rehash of the kind of life and death battle of self-consciousness that the myths have to fight each other and annihilate each other. And yet he goes, but another. alternative path is that you convince somebody that your myth is the right myth. And he feels like this is how dialogue is born and this dialectic. And so I say that because when you were saying that somebody going beyond the particular would do this out of desire for recognition, it kind of reminded me of that section. I don't know if that's what you meant, but he seemed to say one is driven by that. Speaker 1 (24:15) Right. If the goal of speech is just to subjugate, is just to persuade the other person to treat you as a master, then nothing that's said can actually be taken to even potentially mean what it says. Speaker 2 (24:32) Can I ask two questions? This is now me asking questions to Ben Stedebaker. This will be an interview. So one thing is I wanted to know, this should be the second question, which is how this relates to his idea of the EU. But the first idea I would think is