Alexandre Kojève: Adventures between Philosophy and Wisdom

Abstract

This article examines Alexandre Kojève’s attempts to differentiate between philosophy and wisdom; he thought of the two, particularly later on in his career, but also earlier, as distinctly non-identical. I trace Kojève’s transition from philosophy to practice in the corridors of power, motivated by his quest for wisdom, by outlining in some detail his stance on globalisation and the role of the state in his post-war dialogue with Carl Schmitt.

Alexandre Kojève, Russian by birth but better known as the French philosopher who in the 1930s delivered a powerful reinterpretation of Hegel through a lens that blended Marxism, Existentialism and a lighter version of psychoanalysis (see Tihanov, 2004), was a thinker who, in his later work, sought to revive the classic Greek virtues of wisdom over mere philosophy. After 1945, this aspiration led him to embrace practical action as advisor and policy-maker in the inner circles of power in Paris and among those who were to nurture the idea of what was to become the European Union. Jacob Taubes, intensely interested in the work of Carl Schmitt, who became one of Kojève’s most important interlocutors in the 1950s, noted that there was something ‘adventurous’ (abenteuerlich) about Kojève’s thinking. ¹ In this article, I mean by ‘adventure’ the multiple journeys that Kojève made between philosophy and wisdom; he thought of the two, particularly later on in his career, as distinctly non-identical. I trace Kojève’s transition from philosophy to practice, which was motivated by his quest for wisdom by outlining in some detail his stance on globalisation and the role of the state in his post-war dialogue with Carl Schmitt.

Kojève’s major philosophical work displays an idiosyncratically Marxist interpretation of Hegel, richly amalgamated with existentialist ideas. ² The very birth of the master–slave couple is portrayed as the result of free choice, and, in this sense, as an existential act. Although Kojève (1969: 43) postulates that both the future master and the future slave are granted equal freedom to create themselves, as such, this seems to be true only of the future slave: he prefers subjugation to demise. The master to be, on the other hand, has to make an altogether different decision. He must decide whether to kill his rival the slave or to let him live. Since each of the two opponents seeks recognition by the other in the fight, the stronger one, if he kills the weaker, will survive the struggle alone, with no one left to recognise him as victor. Therefore, he must spare the life of his adversary and overcome him, in Kojève’s account, ‘dialectically’; that is, ‘he must leave him life and consciousness, and destroy only his autonomy’ (Kojève, 1969: 15). If we opt for a post-structuralist reading of Kojève’s proposition, we might say that his imagination finds at the start of human history the somewhat histrionic scene of a ‘struggle to the death’ with no bodies left behind.

What is of crucial importance here, I think, is the notion of philosophy as conditioned by a regime of violence, of naked power. That particular form of knowledge that is enabled through acceptance of violence is philosophy. Wisdom, on the other hand, begins – only as potentiality – when violence and naked power are no longer needed as facilitators of knowledge. This interpretation opens, in my view, the distinctive gap between philosophy and wisdom that so much of Kojève’s work seeks to fill.

In order to grasp Kojève’s point about wisdom being available only as potentiality, it is vital to introduce at this point Kojève’s distinction between practical, theoretical and philosophical discourses. ³ Practical discourses are not subject to differentiation along the lines of true or false; they are discourses driven by necessity or desire and measured by their real impact. Theoretical discourses, on the other hand, are not about real impact (theoretical discourses, Kojève quips, ‘are discourses that end peacefully’ [Kojève, 2002]); but they can be judged on the grounds of verity or falsity. Theoretical discourses can be about any aspect of reality except the theory itself; they are discourses that exclude themselves as objects of reflection. Now, philosophy is precisely a discourse that interrogates itself, its own possibility. Wisdom, on this reading, is philosophy in its entirety, not as a compendium of knowledge, but as time-flow, the entirety of philosophy’s dialogue with itself. Wisdom is philosophy that has arrived – discursively, rather than in silence (and this is a crucial moment) at self-awareness. Kojève seems to imply that it was only Hegel who brought philosophy to the state of self-awareness, and thus to wisdom, by constructing an identity between concept and time (philosophy’s journey through time). In a sense, one might venture the conclusion that the end of history replicates the end of philosophy, which, having arrived at a state of self-awareness with Hegel, was supplanted by wisdom. In reality, Kojève’s argument appears to have been more nuanced than that. What Hegel did was to show what wisdom was, not to reach it; his philosophical discourse continued to be a quest for wisdom, as this is what philosophy is by definition. But with Hegel we knew for the first time that what philosophy had been after even before was precisely wisdom. Hegel did not attain wisdom, for he could not prove the principles of his own philosophy; instead, he offered a rationale for philosophy as such. So, the philosophical discourse remained open, and wisdom continued to be an idea that one – thanks to Hegel – could recognise but could not attain.

Kojève’s later interpretations of Hegel have a lot to tell us on this count. His dialogue with Carl Schmitt in the 1950s is a confirmation of the centrality of Hegel for Kojève’s thinking, even in his later work. On 14 December 1955, Schmitt asks Kojève about the true meaning of ‘enemy’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology: ‘can there at all be an enemy in Hegel, given that he, the enemy, is either a necessary transitional stage of the negation, or else void (nichtig) and without essence?’ (quoted in Tommissen, 1998: 113). This dramatically put and almost rhetorical question is given a predictably placid reply by Kojève on 4 January 1956:

‘Can there be an enemy at all in Hegel?’, you ask. As always: yes and no. Yes – insofar and so long as there is a struggle for recognition, i.e. history. World history is the history of enmity between men… No – insofar and as soon as history (= struggle for recognition) is ‘sublated’ in absolute knowledge. (quoted in Tommissen, 1998: 115)

‘Absolute knowledge’ thus stands for ‘wisdom’ that is beyond history and enmity, thus also beyond violence and naked power. It is essential here to recognise the significance of the state for Kojève. Both he and Schmitt begin as classic etatists, fascinated with Hobbes. Kojève’s belief that the end of violence and naked power is inescapable rests, however, on the recognition of the fact that the main instrument of politics – the state – is dead. After the Second World War, Kojève and Schmitt readily agreed on the demise of the state: ‘It is over with the “state”, that’s true; this mortal God is dead, and there is nothing one can change there’, a resigned Schmitt wrote to Kojève in 1955 (quoted in Tommissen, 1998: 108). But unlike Kojève, Schmitt did not conclude from this that history was drawing to a close. The state, for Kojève (as much as for Hobbes), is the main instrument of violence, the exhibitor of naked power. It is the state, therefore, as the instrument of violence and power, that serves as the guarantor for the possibility of philosophy. This is why Kojève was not embarrassed to praise Stalin and thought of himself as the philosopher of the age of Stalin, much as Hegel was seen by him as the philosopher of the age of Napoleon. It was the demise of the state that meant that philosophy was no longer possible; the age of wisdom could potentially arrive as violence and power, represented and exercised by the state, wither away. The end of history – pace Fukuyama – is not politically grounded in a future global victory of democracy; for Kojève it has deeper roots: the end of history is enabled by the end of philosophy and the potential onset of the age of wisdom; wisdom is the epistemological regime of a world without violence and naked power. Unlike Fukuyama, Kojève thinks of this age of wisdom in the mode of conditionality; even as it might be considered to be a logical outcome of the evolution of reason and self-consciousness, it may or may not materialise; its rather precarious chance of actualisation presupposes a capacity on the part of philosophers to transform themselves into practitioners of wisdom. Practising wisdom is Kojève’s oxymoronic view of a world whose future is proactively shaped by thinkers who have internalised the non-aggressive techniques of wisdom, which they seek to apply in the realm of high bureaucracy, trade negotiations, cultural exchanges and so on.

In this context, it is rather telling that after 1945, as Kojève commenced his career in the corridors of power as advisor to the French government and one of the architects of the trade policies of what was to become, eventually, the European Union, ⁴ he moved away from his earlier propensity to identify the end of history with communism. Rather, he was inclined to think that the end of history could already be arriving as a combination of a regime of pragmatism beyond political divisions, on the one hand, and a certain exhaustion of the very possibility of generating and upholding meaningful antagonisms. Kojève, while analysing neo-colonialism, formulates what is in essence an early theory of globalisation – not in the strict sense of an experience driven by advances in information technology (simultaneity and a choice of multiple, often virtually available identities), but in the wider sense of an economic and political reality founded on the avoidance of conflict. ⁵ For Kojève, globalisation seems to be the natural consequence of the waning power of the two blocs to generate violent opposition; or as he put it, with his unfailing sense of irony, in a letter to Schmitt on 11 July 1955, ‘For me Molotov’s cowboy hat is a symbol of the future’ (quoted in Tommissen, 1998: 110). Globalisation follows triumphantly the exhaustion of history; it arrives with the final gasps of history’s engine. Globalisation, in other words, is the ultimate evidence and confirmation of the imminent arrival of the end of history. In this new condition, the world can no longer be divided into colonial slices, the strife and competition for territorial acquisition are allegedly left behind by a civilised West, which gracefully accepts the process of political de-colonisation as the inevitable consequence of the growing homogenisation of a world approaching the end of history and the potential return to wisdom.

Politically, the end of history is marked by the dwindling powers of the nation state, and thus of the state traditionally understood. Instead, it is Empire, or formations that resemble it, that can now function as the new forms of political organisation. Kojève is here not averse to the idea of a marriage between politics and religion (we should remember that his earliest work is on Vladimir Solovev’s religious philosophy, inspired also by Kojève’s then infatuation with Buddhist thought and, more widely, with what was customarily referred to at the time as ‘the wisdom of the Orient’): ⁶ in his 1945 ‘Outline of a doctrine of French policy’ he envisaged the construction of a ‘catholic Latin Empire’, in which France as a nation state is dissolved but its identity is ultimately preserved. While in the early days after the Second World War Kojève was still driven by the desire to see the sublation and salvation of the nation state through Empire, in the 1950s and later he increasingly welcomed the idea of players larger than the nation state; these players would employ power not in the classical Hobbesian sense but as embodiments of the benevolent, civilised, ‘giving’, as he put it, capitalism (see Kojève, 2001).

Does this transition from the nation state as the classic instrument of violence and power that enables the very existence of philosophy as partial, not disinterested, and conditional truth, to Empire and the homeostatic model of Cold Peace bring along a transition to wisdom? Kojève’s answer is tentative, at best; in fact, it is rather tinged with scepticism, and this is where the late Kojève differs so markedly from the Kojève of the 1930s and the early 1940s. The end of history and the suspension of violence induced by the state no longer appear to be sufficient conditions for wisdom. In the brave new world of integration and globalisation wisdom gets lost, as the imperative to search for the truth weakens. Here the figure of the animal makes an appearance once again, in that the new regime of suspended violence and the absence of naked power is open to producing regression to a self-sufficient but un-reflected existence rather than facilitating the transition to absolute knowledge (wisdom). This is time and again what one finds in Kojève’s literary reviews of French post-Second World War prose, heaping irony on the new contentedness of men and women who have entered the age of stagnation, not the Soviet, but the universal one. The only realistic embodiment of, and abode for, wisdom the late Kojève finds in the realm of ritual so consistently cultivated not in Europe, or America, or Russia, but in Japan: ritualistic action, at the same time as it unfolds, opens up a space for inaction, for seemingly repetitive actualisation of the past; it instantiates tradition without freezing it into identity; in other words, it enacts wisdom. Maybe this is why the post-war Kojève had such enormous fascination with Japan, wishing in the end to see not Britain but rather Japan as a member-country of a future European Commonwealth (see Pedrazuela, 2022: 237).

Kojève’s journey is thus an instructive one, especially for those of us who wish to understand the divergent trajectories of thinkers who hailed from Russia and Eastern Europe and did a considerable proportion of their work as – at times revisionist – sympathisers of Hegelian Marxism. Kojève’s telling evolution away from doing philosophy into practising wisdom is a transition from Hegelian Marxism to a pragmatist version of Stoicism; it welcomes wisdom as a form of praxis, while remaining painfully aware of its existence solely in the mode of potentiality.