Introduction To the Reading of Alexandre Kojève

• Author: Patrick Riley
• DOI: 10.1177/009059178100900102
• Date: 01 February 1981
• Published date: 01 February 1981
• Subject Matter: Articles

INTRODUCTION TO THE READING
OF ALEXANDRE KOJÈVE
PATRICK RILEY
University of Wisconsin—Madison
I
One of the most visible phenomena on the frontier of postwar
political philosophy has been a resuscitated &dquo;left Hegelianism,&dquo; and
among contemporary left Hegelians none has been so influential as
Alexandre Kojeve, whose brilliant Introduction to the Reading of Hegel
(1947)~ is viewed as a modern classic even by those who see it as a one-
sided interpretation of Hegelian philosophy. Why &dquo;left Hegelianism&dquo; in
general, and Koj6ve’s reading of Hegel in particular, should have sprung
up in France (beginning in the 1930s but fully flowering only after the
War), is a question not as easily answered as some appear to think. Allan
Bloom claims in his English-language edition of Introduction to the
Reading of Hegel that &dquo;Koj~ve is the most thoughtful, the most learned,
the most profound of those Marxists who, dissatisfied with the thinness
of Marx’s account of the human and metaphysical grounds of his
teaching, turned to Hegel as the truly philosophic source of that
teaching&dquo;;2 but it is not at all clear how far Kojeve’s reading of Hegel is
really &dquo;Marxist,&dquo; despite the fact that Kojeve makes the &dquo;dialectic of
Master and Slave&dquo; in the Phenomenology the &dquo;key&dquo; to his interpretation
of the whole of Hegel.3 If there is (at least) a Marxist component in
Koj6ve’s reading, there is also an existentialist one-which is at its
clearest in his insistence that the historical struggle between Masters and
Slaves is a struggle freely entered into, without &dquo;cause&dquo; or &dquo;biological
necessity&dquo;;4 and there is also what one could call a Nietzschean
component in Kojeve’s hatred of all &dquo;transcendence,&dquo; of all &dquo;escape&dquo;
into a &dquo;beyond&dquo; where there is (allegedly) no struggle, no Mastery and
Slavery. This distaste for the &dquo;beyond,&dquo; so reminiscent of the Twilight of
the Idols,5 is the foundation of Koj6vi?s hostility to Plato (and the realm
of Ideas),6 and of his lesser but substantial aversion to Kant (and the
realm of things-in-themselves).7 (One can, Kojeve complains in the
POLITICAL THEORY, Vol 9 No I, February 1981 5-48
@ 1981 Sage Publications, Inc
5

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&dquo;Plato&dquo; chapter of his Attempt as a Reasoned History of Pagan
Philosophy, &dquo;deny the possibility of all satisfaction on the here-and-
now.&dquo; Thus &dquo;the affirmation of religious satisfaction&dquo;-whether in
Plato or in Kant&dquo;demands the affirmation of a ’beyond’ where the
man can be satisfied who cannot be in the here-and-now.&dquo;8 Put
otherwise, Kojeve continues, &dquo;religious satisfaction cannot be anything
else than an ’extinction’ [nirvana] of the extended-duration of human
empirical existence.&dquo;9 Since, for Kojeve, Hegelianism is a &dquo;radically
atheistic&dquo; philosophy which treats Christianity as only
&dquo;anthropologically&dquo; true-insofar as it stresses God-becoming-
man’°-Hegel avoids altogether the &dquo;religious attitude&dquo; which believes
in the &dquo;impossibility&dquo; of man’s being &dquo;fully and definitively satisfied&dquo; in
this world, &dquo;in the world where he is bom, lives and dies.&dquo; Hegel, indeed,
for Kojeve, is the philosopher of &dquo;perfect&dquo; satisfaction in the &dquo;’worldly’
hic et nunc. &dquo;)11 A
complete &dquo;picture&dquo; of Koj6ve, then, would stress not
just the Marxian elements of his thought, but the existentialist and
&dquo;Nietzschean&dquo; 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 &dquo;voluntary&dquo; undertaking of a &dquo;struggle&dquo; for Mastery
whose upshot is the enslavement of those who find solace in a
&dquo;beyond&dquo;); but these mutually supporting discrete &dquo;elements&dquo; add up to
something more and other than &dquo;Marxism&dquo; tout court.
With the posthumous publication of Koj6ve’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 Introduction 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 Kojève wrote for
the journal Critique-above all &dquo;Hegel, Marx and Christianity&dquo;12
(1946) and &dquo;The Political Action of Philosophers&dquo;~3 (1950). It is only out
of this entire ensemble that an accurate portrait of Kojeve can be built
up, so that one can begin to assess his status as the most eminent
of contemporary &dquo;left Hegelians.&dquo;
II
In his brilliant and influential Introduction to the Reading of Hegel
Kojeve make his treatment of the Phenomenology revolve around

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7
Hegel’s great set-piece,14 &dquo;Master and Servant&dquo; (which he renders
&dquo;Master and Slave&dquo;). And in this treatment Kojeve argues that for Hegel
human society and human &dquo;discourse&dquo; began when men were first
willing to risk their &dquo;animal&dquo; and biological existence in a &dquo;fight to the
death&dquo; for &dquo;pure prestige,&dquo; for &dquo;recognition&dquo; by the &dquo;other.&dquo;15 The man
who became the Master was he who was &dquo;willing to go all the way&dquo; in
this fight: the potential Master &dquo;preferred, to his real, natural, biological
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’.&dquo;16 The (potential) Slave on the other
hand, was the onewho saw and feared his own &dquo;nothingness&dquo; should he
die in the struggle, and who &dquo;recognized&dquo; the Master rather than die.17
The Master, for his part, finds that he is not &dquo;satisfied&dquo; with mastery,
since he has risked his life for recognition by a mere Slave whom he uses
as a &dquo;thing&dquo;; the Master has the &dquo;pleasure&dquo; of not having to work, but
this pleasure is not a true satisfaction. &dquo;To get oneself recognized by a
Slave is not to get oneself recognized by a man&dquo;; hence &dquo;the Master never
attains his end, the end for which he has risked his very life.&dquo;Ig (It is for
this reason, according to Kojeve, that mastery is ultimately &dquo;tragic&dquo; and
&dquo;an existential impasse.&dquo;)19 The Slave, who submits to and &dquo;works&dquo; in
the service of the Master, can ultimately find satisfaction in his work (by
which he transforms the natural world of &dquo;given being&dquo; and himself as
well): through work, which &dquo;negates&dquo; &dquo;given being,&dquo; the Slave
overcomes the world.20 &dquo;The man
who works transforms given being ...
where there is work there is necessarily change, progress, historical
evolution.&dquo;21 Though this progress and evolution involves alterations in
the &dquo;means of production,&dquo; the essential change is in the Slave himself:
&dquo;thanks to his work, the Slave can change and become other than he is,
that is-in the end-cease to be a Slave.&dquo;22 For work, according to
Kojeve reading Hegel, is Bildung or education &dquo;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 him in bringing him closer to
the idea which he makes for himself’ (the &dquo;idea&dquo; of being &dquo;free&dquo;
and &dquo;recognized&dquo;).23
Since the Slave’s &dquo;overcoming&dquo;-of the natural world of &dquo;given
being,&dquo; of his fear of the Master and of death, of slavery itself-is not
historically complete until men choose their own work and become
citizens of a &dquo;universal and homogeneous&dquo; Hegelian state,24 history is,
inter alia, a history of &dquo;slave ideologies&dquo; by which Slaves conceal their

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8
slavery from themselves. &dquo;The transformation of the Slave, which will
permit him to surmount his terror, his fear of the Master
is
...
long and
dolorous.&dquo;25 At first, Kojeve reading Hegel asserts, the Slave &dquo;raises
himself’ through his work to the &dquo;abstract idea&dquo; of liberty-an abstract
idea which he does not &dquo;realize&dquo; because &dquo;he does not yet dare to act in
view of this realization, that is to struggle against the Master and risk his
life in a struggle for liberty.&dquo;26 Before &dquo;realizing&dquo; liberty, the Slave
&dquo;imagines a series of ideologies, by which he seeks to justify himself, to
justify his servitude, to reconcile the ideal of liberty with the fact of
slavery.&dquo;27 For Stoicism, the first of the &dquo;slave ideologies,&dquo; Epictetus in
his chains and Marcus Aurelius on his throne are &dquo;equal&dquo; as &dquo;wise men&dquo;;
hence for the Stoic &dquo;ideology&dquo; the chains do not &dquo;matter.&dquo;28 In Christian
&dquo;ideology&dquo; equality is of a different sort: all men are equal &dquo;before God,&dquo;
whatever their earthly stations; but this is simply another escape to a
&dquo;beyond&dquo; (beyond the historical world of work and struggle) in which,
though there are no &dquo;masters,&dquo; there is one &dquo;universal&dquo; Master (God) to
whom everyone is enslaved. Christianity, according to Kojeve reading
Hegel, &dquo;does not take account of social distinctions, but leaves them
intact. Equality is transposed into the...