For all is like an ocean, all flows and converges; touch in one place and at the other end of the world it gives way.
—Elder Zosima in Brothers KaramazovThe philosophy of Alexandre Kojève looms large over the history of twentieth-century thought. His seminars on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, delivered from 1933 until 1939 at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) in Paris reinvigorated interest in the German thinker and effectively defined the parameters of philosophical debate for a generation of post-war intellectuals. The many attendees to Kojève's seminars (among others, Jacques Lacan, André Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Georges Bataille) were greatly affected by his eclectic reading of the Phenomenology and adopted his terminology directly into their own work. His anthropological interpretation of Hegel, in which a nascent subject battles with and is instantiated by its “other,” became foundational even for those who did not directly attend the seminars—in particular such philosophers as Simon de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, and (much later) Judith Butler, all of whom relied on Kojève in articulating their own philosophies of difference, desire, and identity.Footnote 1 By the time of his death in 1968, Kojève's reading of Hegel had so firmly established itself within continental philosophy that his critics were forced to begrudgingly acknowledge his influence in order to overcome it: Martin Heidegger, in a letter written to Hannah Arendt in 1967, reluctantly admitted that Kojève's “rare passion for thinking” had meant even the abandonment of his thought was “itself an idea.”Footnote 2
Although Alexandre Kojève is now well-enshrined in this history of continental philosophy, his relationship to the Russian tradition only began to attract attention at the end of the century.Footnote 3 In 2001, the philosopher's collected papers were donated to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) and revealed an extensive relationship with émigré communities in Germany and France, including a close friendship with Lev Karsavin, praise for his work from Fedor Stepun, frequent evenings spent at the house of Nikolai Berdiaev, and a personal invitation from Georges Florovsky to join the Russian Philosophical Society in Paris.Footnote 4 In his early years, just prior to the acclaim garnered by his seminars on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Kojève enjoyed a relatively active link to Russian philosophy and was still tethered to his home tradition through networks in diaspora.
Ongoing debates within this Russian émigré community offered an initial entry point for Kojève as a philosopher. Born in Moscow in 1902 as Aleksandr Kozhevnikov, Kojève had emigrated from Russia to Germany in 1920 in order to study philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. While studying under Karl Jaspers, he wrote his dissertation on Vladimir Solov΄ev, presenting an overview of the religious thinker and his significance to Russian thought. Entitled “Vladimir Solov΄ev's Philosophy of History,” the dissertation was submitted in 1926 and later adapted into two articles, one in German in 1930 and another in French in 1934–35—the publication of the latter ultimately accredited him to teach his influential seminars at the EPHE. These early writings illustrate in particular Kojève's keen interest in Solov΄ev's Sophia as an anthropological approach to the philosophy of history.
Given that, in general, Kojève published very little in his lifetime, it is only through posthumously released works that one can follow more accurately his evolution as a philosopher. The manuscript Atheism, written in Russian in 1930 but only published for the first time in French in 1998, is a complicated work in this regard.Footnote 5 Atheism illustrates the philosopher's early engagement with Russian thought, yet it also outlines a secularization of the theandric concepts germane to the national tradition, in particular the theory of bogochelovechestvo or godmanhood that, after the revolution, survived and even flourished within diasporic circles. Together with his university research, these early works suggest that Kojève's engagement with Russian philosophy was more thorough than previously considered. They also illustrate, moreover, the extent to which his maturation as a philosopher required parting ways with the theological concerns of his Russian peers: ultimately, his eventual break from the Russian tradition paralleled his own belief in a fundamental distinction between theist and atheist approaches to the practice of philosophy.
Since both Atheism and his work on Solov΄ev focus on philosophies of history, a growing issue among scholars has become the question of continuity and rupture between a younger Kojève and his later influential reading of history, its conclusion, and human realization in Hegel's Phenomenology. Furthermore, what might this mean for the relationship between Kojève's thought and the rich tradition of Russian religious philosophy that emerged in the wake of Solov΄ev and survived in émigré circles abroad? To pose the question more broadly, how might one read Kojève through and against Russian thought?
The Early Years
From an early age, Kojève had professed an interest in eastern philosophy: his youth in Moscow was spent within fin-de-siècle circles fascinated by occult exoticism, and the nascent philosopher had kept a journal on his train ride west that already included scattered reflections on Buddha and the importance of negation and “non-being” within non-western traditions.Footnote 6 Upon his arrival to Heidelberg, Kojève had initially set out to study Indology, Tibetan Buddhism, and the Sanskrit and Chinese languages, alongside more expected coursework in the western philosophical canon.Footnote 7 Ironically, however, this fascination with the east gradually shifted toward a study of Russia: he soon dropped eastern studies and chose instead to write his master's dissertation on the philosophy of Solov΄ev. Biographer Marco Filoni attributes this shift in part to Kojève's friendship with Nicolai von Bubnoff, a fellow émigré who taught Russian philosophy and literature at the university. Although not his dissertation director, von Bubnoff encouraged Kojève's interest in the Russian religious tradition and even guided his reading habits.Footnote 8 While Kojève was an avid reader within his native literature even before the university (other diary entries include passing reflections on Fedor Dostoevskii, Lev Tolstoi, and Dmitrii Merezhkovskii), the shift toward Solov΄ev reflects the general significance and popularity the religious philosopher enjoyed within émigré circles. After Lenin's expulsion of ideologically problematic intellectuals on the Philosophers’ Steamships in 1922, an entire generation of Russian religious philosophers working in the tradition of Solov΄ev had been established in western Europe, where they dominated émigré journals and debates.Footnote 9 Their publications and circles were the first to receive Kojève as he began his career as a philosopher.
Kojève thus began his dissertation work on Solov΄ev in 1924, gathering materials from émigré libraries in western Europe, but while the research would yield several articles, it nevertheless remains unclear if he ever formally finished at Heidelberg and received his diploma.Footnote 10 A version of his dissertation, “Vladimir Solov΄ev's Religious Philosophy,” was made available by the university in 1926, yet in a letter written in 1929 to his uncle, the painter Vasilii Kandinskii, Kojève claimed that he lacked the money to print his dissertation.Footnote 11 This lack of a published dissertation would prove a major problem for Kojève when he relocated to Paris in 1926, as he would need proof of his degree to find work at a university. In 1930, Kojève managed to publish a heavily edited version of his dissertation, entitled “Vladimir Solov΄ev's Philosophy of History” in Der russische Gedanke, and the editor of the journal, Boris Jakowenko, was particularly enthusiastic about the work.Footnote 12 In order to receive French accreditation, however, Kojève initially dropped his study of Solov΄ev and dramatically changed course, applying for a degree at the Sorbonne in theoretical physics. His proposed plan of study in physics was nevertheless firmly and quickly rejected, effectively ending his brief attempt as a philosopher of science and forcing him to return once more to Solov΄ev.
This time, he sought the help of friend and colleague Alexandre Koyré—born in Taganrog, Koyré had met Kojève within Berlin émigré circles while the latter was studying at Heidelberg. Their friendship at first seemed unlikely, as at the time Kojève was seducing Koyré's sister-in-law, Cécile Shoutak, away from Koyré's brother. Despite the initial scandal of the affair, Koyré came to respect and even admire the younger Kojève.Footnote 13 Koyré himself had already successfully made the transition from the Russian diaspora into French intellectual life. Having studied under Edmund Husserl at Göttingen, Koyré was a well-respected figure who played a major role in first introducing phenomenology to a French audience. He was therefore in an excellent position to advise Kojève on his own nascent career. With help from Koyré, who heavily edited the work, Kojève presented his writings on Solov΄ev to the EPHE and was conferred a diploma that would permit him to teach at the institution. As a conclusion to his formal engagement with the Russian religious philosopher, Kojève published this edited form of his dissertation research as the article “The Religious Metaphysics of Vladimir Solov΄ev,” appearing in two installments in 1934 and 1935 in the journal Revue d'histoire et de philosophie religieuses.Footnote 14 By then, he had already begun to lecture on Hegel at the EPHE, where in 1933 he replaced Koyré, who had departed for a visiting teaching position in Cairo. Thus, Kojève's final years of studying Russian philosophy and Solov΄ev were in fact what enabled him to first begin his famous reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit.
These early writings on Solov΄ev transformed across the various published versions of Kojève's graduate work. In his dissertation and German article, he offers a general overview of Solov΄ev's philosophy, whereas his final French work, in focusing more narrowly on the doctrine of Sophia and the Absolute, sheds light on what arguably most drew Kojève to the religious philosopher. In “The Religious Metaphysics of Vladimir Solov΄ev,” Kojève writes that theandry, the Christian understanding of Jesus Christ as both divine and human, is the guiding principle of Solov΄ev's metaphysical theology.Footnote 15 He focuses his reading of Solov΄ev on Critique of Abstract Principles (1880), in which Solov΄ev outlined two definitions of the Absolute: the Absolute is both “detached from anything, liberated, and secondly finite, completed, and all-encompassing.”Footnote 16 These definitions are, initially, contradictory: Solov΄ev describes the first Absolute as an eternal, total unity (vseedinstvo or, in Kojève's translation, “unitotality”) of all things that is nevertheless nothing in particular, whereas the second Absolute is defined as every particular thing in the multifaceted, physical world (materia prima).Footnote 17
The contradiction is resolved, however, in an evolving relationship between the two Absolutes. This second Absolute serves as the first's “other” and content: the total unity of the first Absolute, everything but nothing in particular, can only be defined by the aggregate of material content from the second, which is collectively all particular things. The second Absolute, coined by Solov΄ev as the “becoming Absolute” [absoliutnoe stanoviashcheesia] is gradually assembled, across history, into the unitotality of the first:
in order for the Absolute to be as such, it requires an Other, non-Absolute: the totality, in order to be everything, requires the many, the absolute spirit requires for its reality matter, and the supernatural being of God requires nature for its holy manifestation. True being in order to truly be being, that is total unity or absolute, should be the unity of itself and its other.Footnote 18
Solov΄ev identifies the second, “becoming” Absolute as the Christian theandric principle of an ideal humanity, as it gradually assembles and transforms into the divine. Humankind is the material content of the divine, and godmanhood is the process whereby humankind collectively and freely enters into union with God, with the unitotality of the first Absolute. In short: history is the process of humanity modeling itself after the divine.
This convergence of human and divine worlds is exemplified in Jesus Christ, whose incarnation symbolizes the union of these two Absolutes. In his critique of Solov΄ev, however, Kojève highlights a major contradiction within this definition of godmanhood: namely, in his definition of Sophia, or the personified embodiment of divine wisdom. Solov΄ev had coined Sophia relatively late in the development of his philosophy of theandry, as an attempt to understand this union of collective humanity and Absolutes as a mystical form of love.Footnote 19 He defined Sophia as humankind's eternal unity with God, an erotic embrace of humanity with divinity, yet he simultaneously claimed that the material, human world was “fallen Sophia separated from God.”Footnote 20 Kojève objected: how can Sophia be both eternal and fallen? In other words, how is humanity both eternally linked to God and yet striving to reconnect with Him? Kojève argued that this contradiction reflects Solov΄ev's fundamental inability to understand historicism and temporality in his doctrine of godmanhood and the Absolute. If the first (divine) Absolute must by its nature be atemporal, the second (human or becoming) Absolute by its nature unites humanity to the divine across time: “the one contradicts the other.”Footnote 21
Furthermore, if Jesus Christ is the personification of Sophia, as the Christian convergence of the human and divine, why did his appearance on earth not inaugurate the unification between the two Absolutes, as Solov΄ev had outlined in his cosmogeny? According to Kojève, for Solov΄ev the revelation of Christ was an “absolutely perfected human yet nevertheless, as a real individual, separated from the rest of the human and material universe.”Footnote 22 Christ had not fully reconciled humanity to the divine because his appearance was an individual act, whereas humanity must universally and collectively follow in the steps taken individually by Christ as some kind of theandric blueprint.
Kojève nevertheless critiqued Solov΄ev for his inability to reconcile Christ as both a manifestation of these united forms of the Absolute and a historical figure demarcating an evolving relationship between humanity and the divine. Christ is a philosophical problem because what he represents is both universal and historical in nature. This contradiction, moreover, recalled Solov΄ev's problem of an Absolute that is simultaneously all particular things, and nothing in particular. For Kojève, the solution would be an atheistic approach to the theological problem, yet, curiously enough, he suggests that Solov΄ev himself began to realize this contradiction in his later career, even addressing it in his final publication, Three Conversations on War, Progress, and the End of History (1899).
There, Solov΄ev recounts the story of the anti-Christ, a figure who emerges in the twenty-first century and, while he performs good deeds and helps to bring peace, nevertheless is deceitful in his relationship to the Divine. The anti-Christ accentuates the difficulties in historicizing a Christian philosophy of godmanhood, as the anti-Christ sees himself as greater than Christ due to his final position at the end of history: “Christ came before me. I come second. But what, in order of time, appears later is, in its essence, the first. I come last, at the end of history, and for the very reason that I am the complete, final savior of the world. Christ is my precursor. His mission was to precede and prepare for my coming.”Footnote 23 If the significance of Christ is in his synthesis of the human and divine, the emergence of a great figure after Christ could subvert the historical underpinnings of godmanhood.
Although the anti-Christ offers universal peace, his rise is resisted by a small number of Christian sects, who identify self-aggrandizement in his efforts. Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant churches unite and insist that the anti-Christ submit to the authority of Christ, and that his arrival is not the end of history, for Christ has not yet returned. When he refuses, they overthrow the anti-Christ and usher in the second coming of Christ, which ends history. Kojève interpreted this last work by Solov΄ev as the most pessimistic and secular version of his theory of godmanhood, where history does not lead to the union of the two Absolutes previously outlined in his metaphysics. Instead, Solov΄ev openly scrutinizes the teleological implications of his own philosophy:
History for Solov΄ev is now no longer the gradual reconstitution of godmanhood and the return of fallen Sophia to God, but rather a perpetual battle of the principle of evil with that of good, a battle that, though it ends with the victory of the latter, at the same time has as a consequence the annihilation of a large part of the empirical world: the kingdom of God lies on the other side of history that itself is abandoned to the dominion of evil. It could be that Solov΄ev from this point of view is moving towards a specific essence of the Historical.Footnote 24
This specific essence of the historical could never be fully articulated by Solov΄ev, who died several months after the text's publication. Nevertheless, Kojève strongly suggests that Solov΄ev's next step would have been a more thorough secularization of this theory of Sophia, one that would help resolve its inherent contradictions, and he offers one possible interpretation of this secularization in his manuscript Atheism.
A New Atheism after Solov΄ev
The critique made by Kojève in his works on Solov΄ev foreshadows a distinction crucial to understanding his later seminars on Hegel. There, describing the historical transition made from a Christian (theological) worldview to a philosophical (atheist) one, Kojève will stress the significance of Hegel's inversion of Christian doctrine: “For the Christian, God becomes Man. Hegel interprets this as: Man becomes God at the end of his history evolution, or, more precisely, he is God by becoming him in the totality of this evolution—‘Anthropotheism.’”Footnote 25 In order to overcome Solov΄ev's problem of the Absolute, Kojève argues (through Hegel) that the historical process reveals to humanity that its vision of the Absolute, its other, was in fact itself all along: “the entire evolution of the Christian World is nothing other than a march toward an atheist awareness of the essential finitude of human existence. As such, it is only by ‘eliminating’ Christian theology that Man ceases to be a Slave and realizes the very idea of Liberty brought about—yet remaining abstract or idealist—by Christianity.”Footnote 26 Humanity's merging with the divine, in other words, is actually the historical realization of one's own finite wisdom.
While these ideas are already latent in his critique of Solov΄ev, they emerge fully in Atheism. Having finished the text in 1931, Kojève was conscious of its incompleteness, remarking in a footnote: “everything that I write here is merely a sketch of my philosophy, and therefore neither is definitive nor should it be published.”Footnote 27 The manuscript thus remained unknown until 1998, when a French translation was published by Gallimard.Footnote 28 When examined in light of his work on Solov΄ev, Atheism illustrates Kojève's incorporation of Solov΄ev's ideas on godmanhood just as he eschews their theological underpinnings.
At the heart of Atheism is the relationship between self and world, and the role that religion plays in offering, initially to both atheist and theist, the possibility of connection with another being. Subjectivity, Kojève argued, begins by realizing that things exist other than oneself: each person understands themselves in relationship to what is not themselves. Kojève depicts God therefore as the “ultimate Other,” a being so removed that it defies any possible relationship with humanity. Unlike other objects in the world, such as a chair or horse, God is distinguished by our inability to have any physical interaction with Him: “Objectively this means that God is something that differs radically from any other thing that one could say is this or that.”Footnote 29 Kojève consequently defines three categories of things: oneself (which has definable attributes), things which are not the self but definable (“the world”), and God, which is not oneself and not definable. God is a thing completely without attributes, in contrast to every other “qualified something.” One cannot, moreover, have multiple non-qualified things, as it would be impossible to distinguish them from one another.Footnote 30
In Kojève's first step toward defining atheism, the atheist denies the existence of this ultimate, undefinable Other:
for the atheist, God is not something. It is nothingness, and between myself and God there cannot be a relation, nor anything in common, since I know to a certain extent that I exist (I am a something), whereas God simply does not exist. It is clearly impossible to say what is this nothingness that God “is,” since it does not exist. Not only can one not say anything about it, but moreover one has nothing to say. The negation of God by the atheist must be understood radically and “simply”: in other words, for the atheist there is no God.Footnote 31
The atheist's problem, Kojève finds, is that in order to disavow God, the atheist must necessarily acknowledge the non-existence of God so as to deny it. He illustrates this problem with an analogy of an atheist stone: a stone does not know whether God exists, it is merely a stone without knowledge of God, whereas the atheist must “know” that God does not exist.Footnote 32 Both the atheist and the theist are thus originally presented with a “path toward God,” a potential relationship with the ultimate Other. The atheist, however, in actively denying the existence of God, paradoxically recognizes the existence of the thing that they seek to deny. Kojève defines this inevitable “path toward God” as religion, and the atheist's path to nowhere as the “atheist religion.”
The atheist thus does not believe in non-qualifiable things (God) but instead only knows things with defined attributes: “the atheist believes ‘neither in God nor the devil,’ he only knows qualifiable things, the me and the not-me, a person (oneself) in the world, and nothing else. Outside of this, there is only nothingness.”Footnote 33 From this disbelief, the atheist creates an immanent community with other, qualifiable things in the world:
These other things are other people. In seeing outside of myself other people, I cease to perceive the world as something completely foreign to me, as something other, radically different from this something that I myself am. I can fear an “empty” world, that is, it could seem to me “foreign,” but the fear passes (or becomes something else, dread without object transforms into concrete fear before an enemy, etc.) as soon as I recognize another person: I see immediately that my fear is in vain, that the world is not as strange to me as it seemed before It is rather in seeing something incontestably familiar outside of myself that I understand that this “outside of myself” cannot be completely foreign to me.Footnote 34
Kojève stresses collectivity in the homogeneity of things in the world: because they are all definable, it effectively establishes a rapport between self and other: “despite the diversity of forms in which he and I are given in seeing another person, I feel a sense of community with him . given in the interaction between the world and person.”Footnote 35
Atheism clearly develops Kojève's earlier speculation on Solov΄ev's anti-Christ, where the religious philosopher began to view humanity as unable to “reach” the divine and inaugurate the spiritual on earth. It also reorients Solov΄ev's contradiction of two Absolutes: the many qualifiable things of the world (the second Absolute) are irreconcilable with the unqualifiable thing known as God (the first Absolute). While Solov΄ev initially envisioned godmanhood and Sophia as a unification of God and humanity, at the end of his life he realized, so Kojève claims, that such a reconciliation was impossible. The anti-Christ unites the people of the world, but it is the result of refusing God rather than having any transcendental relationship with the divine. The “end of history” was merely the unification of the material world on Earth, as the path toward reunification with the divine was closed.
It is significant for Kojève that nothingness (nichto or le néant) and negation play the major role in adhering the material world together into a community. Kojève praises the freedom Solov΄ev, and by extension Christ, gave humanity to choose between God or nothingness: “[humanity] is free to reduce itself to nothingness in declaring itself against God.”Footnote 36 The centrality of nothingness to human experience resurfaces in Atheism, where the atheist chooses nothingness over God and accepts that community is formed in the shadow of this emptiness. Part of this interest in non-being may reflect Kojève's earlier, admittedly orientalist interest in Buddhist and South Asian traditions, yet it also clearly reflects the then popularity of Heidegger, whose unique terminology Kojève deploys and cites throughout.Footnote 37 Heidegger's influence is furthermore in an emphasis on death as the definitive form of non-being that shapes human experience: by denying the existence of God, the atheist's “path toward God” becomes instead a path toward one's own mortality as a reminder of human nothingness: “nothing is therefore given to the atheist outside of the world, but what does it mean that ‘nothing is given?’”Footnote 38 Death is the atheist's only access to being “outside of the world” and is, in Kojève's words, an active nothingness. The remarks are nearly verbatim those of Heidegger who a few years prior had similarly written on death as “the possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be-there.”Footnote 39
Kojève's development of a negative anthropology, in which humanity is a freely negating agent that embraces mortal finitude, found echo decades later in structuralist and post-structuralist proclamations of “the death of man” or the “death of the subject.” This next generation of thinkers, including many of Kojève's own students, relied on his anthropology to critique previous claims for an integral human subject at the center of philosophical inquiry.Footnote 40 Michel Foucault, for example, clearly refers to Kojève in The Order of Things (1966), where he traces the disintegration of a stable, discursive subject at the center of modern human sciences: “in our day it is not so much the absence or the death of God that is affirmed as the end of man.”Footnote 41 In critiquing humanist trends in Marxist philosophy, Louis Althusser likewise credited Kojève with discovering the fundamental negativity at the heart of subjectivity, even if he disagreed with Kojève's conclusions.Footnote 42 By the end of the Second World War, Kojève's treatment of being as an act of negation had been effectively subsumed into French philosophical discourse. Looking back, Jacques Derrida referred to the period as a time of an “apocalyptic tone in philosophy” and delineated its terminologies and canon: “end of History, end of Man, end of Philosophy, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, with their Kojevian codicil and the codicils of Kojève himself.”Footnote 43
Given Kojève's insistence that Atheism was an impressionistic attempt at a conceptual problem rather than a polished piece of writing, one should not exaggerate its importance within his philosophy. Nevertheless, as a transitional text, it allows us to identify both themes that shaped his initial development as a philosopher, as well as linkages between his work within the Russian diaspora and his later magnum opus: his seminars on the Phenomenology of Spirit, held at the EPHE from 1933 to 1939. Indeed, the homogeneous community created by the atheist in Atheism parallels the anthropological project developed by Kojève in his reading of the Phenomenology. Kojève even stresses in the seminars the need to interpret Hegel, his philosophy of Absolute Spirit, and the end of history as an atheist realization of a theological project: “for Hegel, the real object of religious thought is Man himself: every theology is necessarily an anthropology. Spirit, the suprasensible and transcendent entity with regard to Nature, is in reality nothing other than the negating (that is, creative) Action realized by Man in the given World.”Footnote 44 Reading Kojève's seminars through his early writings thus allows us to see one origin of his philosophy—namely, his engagement with, and ultimate renunciation of, the Russian tradition and Solov΄ev's godmanhood.
In the Phenomenology, Hegel traced the evolution of Absolute Spirit across time: history is the gradual realization of concrete knowledge, as it is embodied in philosophical reason and knowledge of the Absolute. In his seminars, Kojève infamously stressed the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology, the mediation of the dialectic of Lord and Bondsman. Two subjects, in order to be recognized as subjects, fight to the death so as to make one submit and agree to recognize the other. The Lord initially succeeds in forcing recognition (and labor) from the Bondsman, yet as such the Bondsman exerts a power over the Lord, by both controlling the Lord's recognition and shaping the world through their labor.Footnote 45 By being willing to risk death for recognition, the dialectic of Lord and Bondsman once more illustrated to Kojève the centrality of non-being and nothingness in human subjectivity.Footnote 46
In analyzing the evolving relationship of Lord and Bondsman as it shifts and manifests in various historical socio-economic forms, Kojève thus reworked the Phenomenology into an anthropological project, in which humanity realizes its full potential as the subject and object of history: “but the Human, in creating History, reveals itself to itself by and through this creation. The successive revelation of the Human to itself by itself constitutes the ideational [idéel] universal History.”Footnote 47 The trajectory of Absolute Spirit is not one of pure reason but humanity itself, which attains true wisdom when it comes to understand its own capacity to make and realize history—when, in short, all of humanity is both Lord and Bondsman. Kojève argued that Hegel, in writing the Phenomenology, explicitly viewed the atheist realization of Christian ideals as necessary to this trajectory, and that it had been realized in the Napoleonic era through the formation of the bureaucratic legal state of the period:
the perfect Man, that is, completely and definitively satisfied with what he is, being the realization of the Christian ideal of Individuality—the revelation of this Man by Absolute Knowledge has the same content as Christian Theology, minus the notion of transcendence: one need only say of Man everything that the Christian says of his God in order to pass from absolute or Christian Theology into Hegel's absolute philosophy or Science. And this transition is carried out thanks to Napoleon, as Hegel had illustrated.Footnote 48
The claim clearly parallels Solov΄ev's own description of the anti-Christ, the messiah of a final world order and embodiment of wisdom who ends bloody wars and revolutions.Footnote 49 For Kojève, in this end of history, humanity no longer pursues any new, historical actions, but instead witnesses the slow expansion of a bureaucratic and homogeneous state: “[the state] reunites all of humanity and ‘annuls’ (aufhebt) in its being all ‘specific differences’: nations, social classes, families. This State no longer changes, because all its Citizens are ‘satisfied.’”Footnote 50
Kojève's claim to an “end of history” was offensively Eurocentric in orientation: the philosopher viewed the independence of former colonies, and even the Soviet and Chinese revolutions, as mere “extensions in space of universal, revolutionary power brought about in France by Robespierre and Napoleon.”Footnote 51 Subsequent historical struggles are reduced to footnotes to the development of a strong, European state. It should be noted, however, that some of Kojève's interpreters were more generous than others in understanding this homogenous state and its flattening of differences: Butler, for instance, refers to Kojève's idea as “one that maintains a dialectical mediation of individuality and collectivity. In fact, collective life appears to gain its final measure and legitimation in proving capable of recognizing individual desires.”Footnote 52 Regardless, the claim soon took on a wide array of political interpretations in Kojève's wake, at home in both interpretations of class struggle in western Marxist traditions, and most infamously in Francis Fukuyama's work on the ascendency of neoliberal democracies in the post-Soviet period.Footnote 53
The idea of a collective, homogeneous world at the end of history, however, had already been developed by Kojève in his earlier writings, and it is now clear that these speculations were developed out of a critique of Solov΄ev's Sophia and the Russian eschatological tradition. Kojève in fact alludes directly to Sophia in the seminars, “Wisdom itself” that is embodied in the emergence of a Sage at the end of history, a figure who, rather than struggling in historic action, is now fully satisfied with knowledge of the world and “fully and perfectively self-aware.”Footnote 54 Whereas Solov΄ev's account of the anti-Christ, as one such Sage, was arguably pessimistic in tone, Kojève viewed this final figure positively: rather than struggle and create history, the Sage encapsulates humanity as a post-historical bureaucrat, effectively an administrator of the universal state.Footnote 55
While Kojève's adamant atheism might encourage us to look elsewhere for influences, it is nevertheless telling to compare Kojève's protracted investment in Sophiology with those of his Russian peers in diaspora. In 1935, during Kojève's seminars, Sergei Bulgakov is formally accused of heresy by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) for advocating the theory of Sophia in his teachings at the St. Sergius Institute in Paris.Footnote 56 Bulgakov wrote on Sophia as the doctrine of kenosis, or emptying, whereby God diminishes Himself in order to allow for the creation of humanity and its ability to connect with the divine through spiritual love. In order for humanity to become God, it was necessary that God first actively empty Himself and seek mortality and humanity in the death of Jesus Christ: “Sophia—antinomically—condescends itself in the kenosis of the Son of God who descends from heaven to earth, in the self-diminishing of Christ. In a way which is incomprehensible to man, divine nature diminished itself so far as to allow the death of human nature, uniting itself with it in an indivisible manner.”Footnote 57 Thus, much like in Kojève's Atheism, by embracing death and mortality, Bulgakov's Sophia unified and established a spiritual community on earth.Footnote 58 While no formal correspondence or direct influence connects Kojève to Bulgakov, we do know that Kojève frequented Russian émigré circles that included Bulgakov, and certainly the debates surrounding Sophiology within the Russian community in Paris must have tempered Kojève's work as he delivered his seminars several arrondissements over.
In fact, the popularity of Solov΄ev's theandry was so strong in Paris that even Berdiaev, in general loathe to ascribe himself to the insular world of émigré circles, described it in his memoirs as one of the Russian intelligentsia's greatest contributions to the interwar intellectual milieu:
With what Russian thoughts did I arrive in the west? I think that above all I brought an eschatological feeling for the fate of history I brought with me awareness of the crisis of historical Christianity. I brought awareness of the conflict of personality and world harmony, individual and general, unsolvable within the limits of history . I brought with me an idiosyncratic Russian anarchism based in religion, the rejection by religious thought of both the principal of authority and the supreme value of the state. I also consider the understanding of Christianity as the religion of godmanhood to be Russian. To this one could add the anthropology of godmanhood.Footnote 59
The 1920s and 30s witnessed an explosive interest in the use of theology within philosophy to address questions of humanity, history, political ideology, and nationhood—while not overtly religious in nature, political theorists and philosophers alike regularly cited theological doctrines in their work, all while “pushing under the rug religious problems and questions.”Footnote 60 This trend was in part the result of an interwar influx of east European intellectuals—including Kojève and his mentor Koyré—into French academic institutions, where by bringing with them new problematics and terminologies they uprooted base assumptions in the practice of philosophy.
Kojève claimed in his seminars that the Sage, having achieved satisfaction at the end of history, would ultimately become the bureaucrat, helping to administer the universal homogeneous state. Perhaps hoping to test his own theory, Kojève decided after the war to take his own shot at bureaucratic administration. In 1945, Robert Marjolin, who had attended the Hegel seminars and was then employed in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs, secured for Kojève a position as chargé de mission in his office. There Kojève would serve as an ad hoc adviser to diplomats and ministry figures until his death in 1968, notably earning the ears of both Charles de Gaulle and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.Footnote 61 Kojève's first assignment was to advocate for the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), which had been founded following the Marshall plan in 1948 to supervise the distribution of American financial aid in Europe.Footnote 62 The organization stipulated as a condition to economic aid the reduction of tariffs and other barriers to intra-European trade, easing the flow of transnational capital and later paving the way for a common customs union on the continent through the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) with the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Thus, preliminary legal groundwork for a supranational European state is often, provocatively, ascribed to Kojève's initial philosophical vision of a universal and homogeneous state.Footnote 63
A Stalinist Solov΄ev?: Mysteries of the Sophia Manuscript
Despite spending the last phase of his career in government, the exact nature of Kojève's political views remain controversial. Reflecting in his memoirs on a lifelong friendship with Kojève, Marjolin recalled numerous instances of Kojève's referring to himself as “Stalin's conscience,” yet the moniker was often interpreted as merely another way to épater les bourgeois, a frequent habit and pleasure for the philosopher.Footnote 64 In the interwar years, Kojève had expressed clear sympathy for the USSR, and had written two opinion pieces for the Parisian émigré newspaper Eurasia (Evraziia) in which he praised the Soviet Union for its creation of a “truly new culture and philosophy,” predicting that only communist revolution could save Europe from stagnation, whereas an American ideological victory would only amount to Europe's enslavement to capital.Footnote 65 Later, after the liberation of France and into the Cold War era, rumors emerged claiming Kojève was a Soviet spy, yet the accusers regularly arrived at conclusions through indirect means and insinuation.Footnote 66 In his more mature years, moreover, the philosopher seemed to have decidedly shifted toward an endorsement of both Charles de Gaulle and trans-Atlanticism, viewing the “American way of life” as the supreme political configuration at the end of history rather than Stalinism or the Soviet Union.Footnote 67
According to Nina Ivanoff, Kojève's longtime partner, in 1941 Kojève had visited the Soviet embassy in Paris and brought with him an unidentified manuscript. The manuscript was left at the embassy but, following a fire on June 22, 1941 that took most of the building's paperwork with it, it was presumed to be lost forever. The circumstances surrounding the manuscript's disappearance have fueled speculation as to its contents, as well as to why Kojève had brought it to the embassy in the first place. Thanks in part to the persistent claims surrounding Kojève and Soviet espionage, some have since claimed that the manuscript was a “letter to Stalin” written by Kojève in order to align his philosophical views, as expressed in the Hegel seminars, with Stalin's politics.Footnote 68
To complicate matters, in the early 2000s, more than a half century later, a draft of an unpublished, Russian-language manuscript written by Kojève was found in the archive of Georges Bataille, Kojève's friend and former student. During the German occupation, Bataille had worked at the BnF and once described having preserved two manuscripts: a copy of Walter Benjamin's “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and an unnamed manuscript by Kojève. Is this newly discovered text a version of the manuscript that Kojève had left at the Soviet embassy? The draft in question is entitled Sofia, Philo-Sophia, and Phenomenology—consisting of approximately a thousand pages, it was in the process of being transcribed by Ivanoff but has been unfortunately delayed after her death, as researchers have struggled to read the inscrutable cursive in which Kojève had written it.Footnote 69
Although the exact relationship between this manuscript and the one burnt at the Soviet embassy will most likely never be resolved definitively, Kojève lists dates at the beginning of the various subsections on the Sofia manuscript, confirming that it was written 1940 to 1941, or right before his visit to the Soviets. The manuscript attempts furthermore to illustrate a connection between political and philosophical wisdom and expresses enthusiasm for Stalinism in this regard. Its engagement with wisdom as “Sophia” suggests that Kojève's earlier work on Solov΄ev's philosophy may have exerted a longer influence on his work than previously understood, and that his previous secularization of Solov΄ev remained at the forefront of his philosophy even as he sought to position himself once more within a Russian tradition by praising Soviet politics, now far removed from the religious philosophers of his earlier years.
The first half of the manuscript appears to follow the general conclusion of Kojève's Hegel seminars several years earlier, where Kojève speculated on the appearance of a Sage at the end of history. The opening chapter, entitled “absolute knowledge or ‘wisdom’ (Sofia), and philosophy as the pursuit of absolute knowledge,” once more outlines wisdom as the condition of full knowability embodied in the SageFootnote 70. Kojève repeats a similar claim made in the seminars that “philosophy strives not only to live and ‘take advantage of life,’ like every other living thing strives to do, but intends to live ‘consciously.’” Philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge, began when “the ‘first’ person asked the first question about their life,” yet philosophy will end “either when living beings stop asking questions about their lives or when answers are found for all possible questions of this kind.”Footnote 71 A Sage, Kojève claims, will be a human capable of answering any question posed to them concerning life or living activity: such a figure was called by the Greeks a wiseman (Sofos), “and his ability to answer questions is wisdom (sofiia).”
Just as in his work on Solov΄ev, Atheism, and his Hegel seminars, Kojève likewise in the manuscript outlines the difference between wisdom as viewed by religious philosophers and wisdom as an atheist, anthropological ideal:
Describing philosophy as the ability to ask questions and give answers to them, we tacitly assumed, firstly, that the questions concern the life of man, and, secondly, that man himself poses them and answers them without any non-human help. Yet it actually seems that a part of those people one is accustomed, however falsely, to calling philosophers see things differently. The main questions for them concern not man (Anthropos) but rather that which they call “God” (Theos), and the answer is given in the final analysis not by man but by this very same “God.” In other words, it is a question here of an opposition of philosophy in the proper sense of the word, that is, “discourse on man” (anthropo-logy) to this pseudo-philosophy which is correctly called “discourse on God” (theology).Footnote 72
Philosophers are thus those who believe in the ability of humanity to answer its own questions without any external assistance, for example, from God. Kojève clarifies this distinction with a mathematical analogy: there is almost certainly no one able to name the 100,000th decimal in the mathematical consonant π, yet theoretically one can calculate this number, due in part to advances in mathematics and human reason: “the truth of mathematics in general relies on this principle it is precisely because humanity can respond in principle to any question, when always using the same means, that already supplied answers (and only those) can be true without having to presuppose the existence of any wisdom outside of humanity.” The realization of this possibility in humanity, Kojève argues, was discovered in Judeo-Christian thought in its conception of revelation: “from the point of view of Christianity, the truth (‘revealed’ by Jesus) cannot appear before its given time, since God can only be incarnated in humanity under certain determined historical conditions with this idea, we have the seeds of a historical conception of knowledge.”Footnote 73 He claims, again, that Hegel was the first philosopher to secularize this concept of historical revelation, through his philosophy of Absolute Spirit in the Phenomenology.
Kojève's manuscript soon shifts tone, however, toward an analysis of “consciousness” (soznatel΄nost΄) as the defining characteristic of wisdom and links this philosophical definition of consciousness with the pervasive spread of political references to a “conscious proletariat” and “conscious citizenry” in the Soviet Union.Footnote 74 Kojève acknowledges the development of this historical view of revealed wisdom since Hegel into Marxist-Leninist politics, where he claims that Stalinism cultivates a sense of self-awareness that encourages humanity to reasonable action: in other words, “the ideal of a ‘realization’ is linked directly to that of a communist society which is, from Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist point of view, the definitive ideal for all of humanity.”Footnote 75 If, for example, in a pre-communist society, the Russian proletariat was unable to explain why he purchases a bottle of vodka, the conscious Soviet proletariat has the awareness both to understand why he is purchasing the vodka but also the reason he requires the means to purchase it (“Why does he need money?”). Kojève makes clear that a conscious proletariat is not yet able to answer all questions, but nevertheless the proletariat understands its theoretical potential to do so, as this potential is incorporated into the proletariat's conscious relationship to communist society more broadly. Thus, the conscious proletariat makes motions towards becoming a sage by signaling an eventual possibility to answer all questions, the possibility of which is at the heart of human historical development: “the revolutionary socialist—just like the philosopher—seeks to enlarge as much as possible the circle of questions that humanity can address to itself about itself, and thus seeks to provide as many convincing answers as possible.”Footnote 76
Kojève's political interpretation of wisdom under Stalin, taken with his previously developed philosophical interpretation of wisdom, greatly suggests that he intended for the Russian-language manuscript to be published in the Soviet Union, lending further credence to any claim that this work was a version of the work destroyed at the Soviet embassy. It is nevertheless characteristic of Kojève's ideological eclecticism that the philosopher would later repeat similar claims for political wisdom, for example, in the context of postwar France, writing several reviews of nouveaux romans in which he heralded their depiction of de Gaullist society as another instance of realized human potential.Footnote 77 Consciousness and wisdom, it turns out, are rather abstract concepts that allow for often contradictory political applications.
Kojève's insistence on developing a secular theory of wisdom, however, remained a constant throughout his career. Its earliest roots were to be found in his dissertation work on Solov΄ev, and his belief in the manifestation of divine wisdom in the material world. Although his emigration and quick absorption by the French canon has until now obfuscated this connection to the Russian tradition, Kojève's long engagement with revelation, historical conclusion, and theanthropy nevertheless firmly place him within speculative Russian thought of the early twentieth century. The impetus to achieve a fully realized homogeneous state echoes eschatological claims for revolution among fin-de-siècle radicals, and the uniformity of the material world in Atheism shares its origin with early avant-garde strategies to create “a single total project of reorganizing the entire universe,” itself an initially theological idea.Footnote 78 Revolution is a unification of the material world, as the means for humanity to answer fully the questions it poses to itself.
Kojève's early works thus reveal continuity between Russian philosophy in diaspora and an exceptionally transformative period in western continental thought. It is admittedly difficult to trace the movement of an idea as it travels across national traditions. This difficulty is compounded by Kojève's own explicit deviations from Russian thought, in particular his atheist interpretation of a religious concept. His example, however, might encourage us to expand the ways in which we think of philosophical canons—particularly in light of transnational exchanges, often undertaken in diaspora, which might otherwise remain invisible due to rigid defining boundaries of what constitutes a national philosophy. In examining Kojève's early philosophy as a development of, or response to, Russian thought, one discovers a remarkable ideational thread linking the Russian diaspora, French interwar philosophers, and broad, all-encompassing philosophies of state and history before and after the Second World War. In an era of strong states, total war, and nascent Cold War supranationalism, the notion of a homogeneous state that could satisfy its citizenry appealed across political and national orientations, discussed by émigré Orthodox priests and French bureaucrats alike. Its vector of transmission was, perhaps unsurprisingly, an émigré who had himself crossed major (geographical and ideological) borders of Europe for France, bringing with him a religious tradition rich in speculations on collective governance and end times.
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