After the Russian Revolution, the Russo-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968) fled to Germany to study philosophy. In the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin, the young Kojève lived through the philosophical heydays of neo-Kantianism. There he took courses with leading neo-Kantians such as Heinrich Rickert and even wrote a dissertation on Kant’s theory of antinomies. From Germany, Kojève found his way to Paris in the late twenties, where academia was dominated by the neo-Kantianism of Leon Brunschvig. Kojève would describe Kant as the hero of the ‘universal and homogenous empire of philosophy’. He, simply put, had to be reckoned with.
Kojève did so from his early writings until the end of his life by pitting his reading of Hegel against a highly idiosyncratic reading of Kant. The result of his post-war unfinished writings, entitled Kant, are now for the first time available for an English readership. Hager Weslati, a Kojève scholar, has meticulously translated the original French. In a much-needed introduction to Kant, Weslati explains how Kojève drafted up multiple versions of the manuscript but did not live to see his book, packed with clunky five-line long sentences, pages full of footnotes and many intellectual excurses, published by Gallimard in 1973.1
The recent translation is part of a renewed interest in Kojève’s oeuvre in the English speaking world. Only a small portion of his work has been translated. Yet, currently a wave of biographies, anthologies and monographs on and of Kojève has been or will be published in the near future, such as Marco Filoni’s The Life and Thought of Alexandre Kojève and Boris Groys’ Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography. Although Kojève did take up an important role in the debate regarding the so-called end of history throughout the nineties, it is not until very recently that he has become regarded as a central figure in 20th century continental thought. One reason for this absence is that the canonisation of 20th century French philosophy into French theory has often left Kojève out of the picture. He did not fit the historiography of this subfield. In his idiosyncratic style he at once combined positions of phenomenology, Marxism and post-structuralism which were sharply divided in the botched canon of French theory. The introduction of Kojève’s work to the English speaking world thus essentially questions the hegemonic historiography of so-called French Theory.
Although Kojève’s Kant was marketed by his publisher Gallimard as a fourth volume of a history of Western philosophy, the manuscript of Kant reveals that it is part of a much larger project entitled the Système du Savoir. The fourteen boxes found at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France which make up Kojève’s Système seem to be his magnum opus project. This Système is an attempt to, in his words, create a complete and encyclopedic exposition of the Hegelian system of knowledge, a megalomaniac endeavor to forge an account of all Western philosophy that had led up to Hegel. He begins his history with pre-Socratics such as Parmenides and Thales, chronicling up until Kant, as a contradictory figure that brought about a Copernican revolution in philosophy that led to Hegelianism, while remaining stuck in a religious worldview. The variety of philosophical positions and traditions in his Système stand in stark contrast to the many lectures Kojève gave at the École pratique des hautes études on Hegel (1933-39) which focused almost exclusively on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Many of his unpublished manuscripts show a much more systematic way of thinking and a broader philosophical scope than the published lectures on Hegel.
In Kant, Kojève argued that over and against the dominant science and theology of Kant’s time, he returned to a classical epistemological question: what can we know? Contrary to knowledge based on revelation and empiricism, Kant laid his focus on how people could understand the world in an a priori manner. These (in)famous a priori categories through which people could understand the world, opened the door to meaningfully talk about reality.
What Kant thought to be intelligible remained for Kojève essentially non-spatial and atemporal, and hence untruthful. Although the Kantian categories referred to reality, the world out there or in Kant’s words, the thing-in-itself, was never reachable. We might be able to talk about it as if it is true. However, we are never certain. For Kojève, this led to an aporia where knowledge was replaced by a faith in subjective certainty. He thought that “if one simply eliminates the notion of the Thing-in-itself2 without touching anything else, one can find” a Hegelian philosophy that is able to meaningfully talk about objective-reality in toto.
Weslati wisely notes that this Kojèvean analysis creates two readings of Kant that either oppose or accept Hegelian-Marxism. Kojève’s first reading sees Kant’s thing-in-itself in line with Plato’s cave where the philosopher is never able to know what is happening outside the cave: A highly theistic view that claims that truth cannot be attained in the here and now. Kant tries to mask this problem by pretending that we can talk about the things-in-themselves ‘as-if’ they were true. By introducing this as-if, Kojève argues that Kant takes on the position of a skeptic who enjoys endless chatter because he cannot settle whether an opinion is true or false in a definitive way. Kant thus camouflages his skepticism by hiding it under a religious mask.
However, Kant also paved the way for Hegel and ultimately Marx by claiming that this ‘as-if’ discourse is an indispensable notion for philosophy. Kojève argued that Hegel and Marx treated this Kantian notion as a revolutionary project of political struggle or in Kojèvean terms a ‘project of negating action’. This meant that all discourse could be historically validated. In other words, discourse could reflect reality through political struggle. History ‘decides’ whether one opinion prevails over others and is thus rendered truthful.
In a dialectical move, Kant is both seen as a bourgeois intellectual that engages in endless chatter and a revolutionary embracing political action, a bold reading that could be interpreted as a critique of interwar neo-Kantianism. In that critique, Kojève implicitly depicts neo-Kantians as bourgeois intellectuals who despise any political action and hence protect the powers that be. Historians like Stefanos Geroulanos have shown how Kojève’s philosophical project can be primarily understood as a political critique of the French Third Republic’s humanism which was embodied by neo-Kantian figures like Brunschvig.
Although this might be true, a disdain for intellectuals is found throughout Kojève’s oeuvre. This bears the question of whether this disdain was primarily a critique levelled at neo-Kantians. From the philosopher gardens to the Republic of Letters, intellectuals were, according to him, cloistered figures who critiqued the hands that fed them. They never really engaged with and even looked down upon those who sought to put their ideas into praxis. Figures like Socrates who went to the marketplace to discuss philosophy with ordinary people suited Kojève better than Plato teaching in his academy in front of converts. In truth, Kant embodied both the distant and engaged attitude of philosophers. Kojève chose the latter, because philosophers who truly shun prejudice need to actively participate in history. Philosophical ideas remain merely ideas if they are not made real through political and ultimately revolutionary action.
Maybe this renewed interest in Kojève comes with a turn towards a more historicized philosophical approach which ties up the validity of knowledge with political action, an approach that does not see the end of history as a mere hyperbolic statement, but as an sincere and open question about what makes the meaning of history. Kojève’s historicizing approach challenges so-called French theory as it at once proposes a highly modernist and post-modern answer to this question. History can only be meaningful if it has an end goal. When this is realized, one is faced with the impossibility of philosophy or meaningful political action. One has to reckon with ‘a postmodern condition’ of meaninglessness and feeling of being too late to the party. Kojève’s reflections on the conditions of politically meaningful action and philosophy speak to our current zeitgeist where history seems neither dead nor alive. Kant’s appearance is a point of orientation for fundamentally confusing times.
- Gallimard published most of Kojève’s work in their 1927 series entitled ‘Bibliothèque des Idées’. It was especially during and after WWII that important books obyAlbert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau Ponty were published at Gallimard. Post-War French philosophy found its home at this publishing house, as did Kojève, who published alongside his former students and admirers. ↩︎
- Introduced or maintained, as we have just seen, for purely and exclusively religious reasons. ↩︎