Alexander Kojève’s post-historical wisdom

Alexandre Kojève became famous primarily for his discourse on the end of history and the posthistorical condition – the discourse that he developed in his seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit at the École des Hautes Études in Paris between 1933 and 1939. This seminar was regularly attended by leading figures of French intellectual life at that time, such as Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, André Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Raymond Aron. The transcripts of Kojève’s lectures circulated in Parisian intellectual circles and were widely read there, by Sartre and Camus among others.1 The end of history as it is understood by Kojève is, of course, not the end of historical processes and events. Rather, Kojève believed that history is not merely a chain of events but has a telos, and that this telos can be achieved, and actually is already achieved. According to the Platonic–Hegelian tradition in which Kojève situated his discourse, this telos is wisdom. Kojève understands wisdom as perfect self-transparency, self-knowledge. The Wise Man knows the reasons for all his actions; he can explain them, translate them into rational language. The emergence of the Wise Man, of the Sage, is the telos of history. At the moment at which the Sage emerges history ends. Here one can ask: but why is history needed for the Sage to emerge? Indeed, one can assume that it is possible to become a Sage at any moment of history – it is enough to decide to practise introspection, self-reflection, self-analysis, instead of being exclusively interested in the outside world. From the very earliest of times until now we have heard often enough the requirement to initiate metanoia – to turn our attention from dealing with the everyday world towards introspection. However, Kojève, following Hegel, does not believe that such a shift is possible under ordinary circumstances, that it can be effectuated by a simple decision to switch one’s attention from the contemplation of the world to self-contemplation. Such a voluntary decision would be possible only if ‘the subject’ were ontologically different from the world and opposed to the world, as Plato or Descartes believed it to be. But Kojève develops his discourse in the postmetaphysical, post-religious age. He wants to be radically atheistic; and that means for him that under ‘normal conditions’ man is a part of the world and human consciousness is completely captured by the world. ‘The subject’ does not have the ontological status and resources of energy that are needed to turn it from being immersed in the world to contemplation of itself – to effectuate phenomenological epoché in the Husserlian sense. Self-consciousness can emerge only when man finds himself opposed to the world. And one is opposed to the world only if one’s own life is put at risk – and is endangered by the world. There must be a specific force that opposes the ‘human animal’ to the world and turns it against the world by turning the world against it. It is, precisely, this force that produces the transition from nature to history. History opposes man to nature. So one needs history to constitute the ‘self ’ and at the same time to turn human beings’ attention to the self. Only a historical human is able to have self-consciousness and that means to be human in the full sense of this word. Indeed, Kojève begins his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel with the following statement: ‘Man is Self-Consciousness’. And then he writes that ‘it is in this that he is essentially different from animals, which do not go beyond the level of simple Sentiment of self ’. 2 However, this animalistic sentiment of self is crucial for the development of human selfconsciousness because it is precisely this sentiment that initially opposes man to the world and constitutes it as an object of contemplation and knowledge: