KOJEV, ALEXANDER(Kojéve, Alexander) (1902–1968). French philosopher of Russian origin (Kozhevnikov, Alexander Vladimirovich). Born on May 11, 1902 in Moscow. In 1920 he left Russia, studied in Berlin and Heidelberg (philosophy, oriental languages), in 1926 he defended his dissertation on the philosophy of unity of V. Solovyov under the guidance of K. Jaspers. From 1927 he lived in France, in 1938 he received French citizenship. From 1933 to 1939 Kojève taught a course on Phenomenologies of spirit Hegel at the Practical School of Higher Studies. During the occupation he took an active part in the Resistance. After the war, he worked at the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations, participated in the development of important economic and political treaties (EEC, GATT, etc.).
Strictly speaking, Kojève did not publish a single book during his lifetime. Introduction to Reading Hegel published in 1947, and only a relatively small part of the text consisted of lectures entirely written by Kojève, the majority of the book was a collection of notes from students and rough sketches of Kojève himself, collected by his student, the famous writer R. Queneau. Between written in 1943 An outline of the phenomenology of law and the course of the 30s. he wrote a large work in Russian, one of the versions of which was recently found in the archives of J. Bataille. Essay on the phenomenology of law was also unknown to readers for a long time - it was published (on the recommendation of R. Aron) in 1981. Another great work - Concept, time, discourse. Introduction to the knowledge system appeared only in 1990.
Kojève's philosophical teaching is most often qualified as one of the varieties of neo-Hegelianism. This characterization is justified because Kojève’s own doctrine is hidden behind the interpretation Phenomenologies of spirit, and Hegel’s dialectic is considered as the pinnacle and limit of the development of philosophical thought. At the same time, the Hegelian system is radically revised by Kojève under the undoubted influence of Marx and Heidegger, and some of Kojève’s initial intuitions go back to his passion for Hinayana Buddhism. In a 1931 manuscript entitled Atheism, he formulated all the main theses of atheistic existentialism. The key to the interpretation of Hegelian philosophy for him is the concept of time, interpreted in the spirit Being and time Heidegger. Kojève rejects not only Hegel’s philosophy of nature, but also his doctrine of the absolute spirit. Only finite human existence is dialectical; existence is endowed with the ability of self-negation and the negation of any predetermined essence. Phenomenology of spirit Kojève reduces it to anthropology, Hegel’s panlogism is replaced by ontological dualism. "Dialectical dualism", unlike Descartes' dualism, does not lead to deism, but to atheism. The “dialectics of nature” is rejected; only human existence is dialectical (that is, temporary); the appearance of a person is not determined by anything. In nature there is no such goal - to give birth to a rational being (that would be theism or pantheism). Nature is timeless (as in Hegel), human existence is time (“temporality”), and thereby becoming, negation, freedom. Kojeve's philosophy is radical atheism and historicism, since free existence does not correlate with any transcendental principle; man creates himself in history. But he creates himself, possessing a material body, being a “being of the species homo sapiens,” which represents a substrate and potency - in different societies its actualization leads to the emergence of completely different creatures. Almost the entire content of human life is the result of the humanization of animal nature. Struggle and labor are specifically human; word and thought (logos) develop in joint labor activity - any work of labor (artifact) is a realized concept. Everything else in a person (including emotions) is the result of the humanization of the animal nature. Let’s say, a person’s sexual life with all the accompanying feelings is the result of humanization through “taboo”: a couple of animals turns into a family, an emotional connection appears, called love, poetic creations about it, etc. The family itself becomes an institution of humanization, education, and transfer of skills, but this is the result of social life. The natural characteristics of man are not rejected at all, but they enter into human reality only as possibilities of denial and choice. In the course 1933–1939, Kojève uses the following metaphor: if you take a ring, it is determined not only by the properties of the metal from which it is made, but also by its shape, which implies an empty circle inside. This emptiness is human reality, which does not depend on given natural characteristics. Free and self-denying existence forms a kind of “hole” in the unchanging natural being - this idea will become the foundation of the entire ontology of J.P. Sartre. The difference between Kojeve's philosophy and existentialism lies in the understanding of history as a rational and natural process.
Human existence is a denial of one's own animal nature. In society, lust (Hegelian Begierde) becomes a “struggle for recognition”—the humanity of every finite being depends on the recognition of others. As a result of the struggle, one becomes a Master, the other - on pain of death - becomes a Slave. "The Dialectic of Master and Slave" from Phenomenologies of spirit acts as the foundation of Kojeve's philosophy of history. The master proves his humanity in a life-and-death battle. A person is created by the denial of the animal nature, the instinct of self-preservation: “only Risk truly actualizes the human in a person.” The struggle is primordial, and the first relationship between people is “the struggle of all against all.” Social relations are the result of an anthropogenic desire for recognition - Master and Slave appear as a result of struggle. The gentleman was humanized by the risk, the willingness to die in the fight; The slave was humanized by the horror of nothingness. The Slave knows about his finitude and mortality, and in this already he is not an animal, since he is endowed with the desire for immortality (the religion of the “transcendent” appears in the Slave). The Master has placed the Slave between himself and nature; he himself produces nothing. “Inhabiting the technical world prepared for him by the Slave, the Master lives in it not as an animal, but as a human being in the world of culture. The slave, through his Labor, transformed the natural world into the world of culture or into the human world, but only the Master takes advantage of this and lives like a human being in the world prepared for his humanity” ( Esquisse d'une phenomenologie du droit. Exposé preliminaire. Gallimard, P., 1981). The slave works, and the expediency of labor is beyond the biologically expedient; he denies his animal nature through labor, creates an artificial world of technology, shapes nature with it, and thereby shapes himself. Labor is a “curse” precisely because it is generated by the fear of death, it is the forced labor of a Slave. Without fear and coercion, a person does not turn to work. In the work and struggle of the Slave, not only the instinct of self-preservation is overcome - one’s own animality and the facticity of nature are overcome with the help of production, science, and technology. History in the proper sense of the word begins with the beginning of work.
The end point of history - the end of history or its goal (the French "fin de l"histoire" can also be translated as "the goal of history") - is the total transformation of nature in accordance with human needs and the transformation of man himself into a Sage, capable of solving all rationally posed problems . The destruction of the kingdom of the Master through revolution is a historical necessity and a prerequisite for such a transformation. The result of the revolution is the synthesis of Master and Slave in the Citizen, recognized by all other citizens of a universal and homogeneous state. The political and legal aspects of this process were described by Kojève in his work Essay on the phenomenology of law(1943, published posthumously in 1981).
History is conceived by Kojève as a totality: it has a beginning and an inevitable end. Political history ends with a universal and homogeneous state, in which there are no wars and revolutions, no struggle “for a place in the sun” between individuals, groups, and states. The result of the revolution was the kingdom of the Citizen, a bourgeois civil society, which, in turn, was torn apart by class and national contradictions. “The end of history” means reaching the point where the struggle of individuals and groups, nations and empires ceases. It comes with complete control over natural phenomena. But that being who no longer needs to fight, compete, or strive for the recognition of others ceases to be a person, since all his desires are almost automatically satisfied. Freedom is born from lack and desire, the negation of existing existence, while the “last man” has nothing left to deny. Some self-sufficient being will be fundamentally different from those who thirsted, suffered and died in the struggle. Complete submission to nature and satisfaction of all conceivable desires, cessation of struggle - all this no longer characterizes a person, but some other creature. Human existence is defined by lack, lust and struggle. Therefore, it is historical, and the end of history also means the “death of man.” Humanity has already entered the era of “post-history”. Hegel, according to Kojève, rightfully connected this transition with the French Revolution and Napoleon. Wars and revolutions of the 19th-20th centuries. lead only to the expansion of the kingdom of the Citizen. If in the 1930s–1940s Kojève saw the coming kingdom of the Sage in the “end of history,” then later his view can be characterized as pessimistic—the “animal kingdom” of satisfied and complacent consumers, the time of the “last man,” is approaching.
Kojève’s interpretation of Hegelian philosophy occupies an important place in French philosophy of the twentieth century. Students of his course were R. Aron, J. Bataille, R. Queneau, P. Klossowski, J. Lacan, M. Merleau-Ponty and others. Existentialism, Hegelian-Marxism, structural psychoanalysis were created under the obvious influence of Kojève. But this influence was more extensive - in addition to the philosophy of J. Bataille, the novels of R. Queneau and the theme of the “death of man” in M. Foucault, one should also mention the debates about the “end of history” in the 1980–1990s, for example, the report of S. Fukuyama and all the works on “post-history” that have appeared in recent decades.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Kojève wrote a number of works on the history of philosophy, the purpose of which was to demonstrate the natural movement of European thought towards the philosophy of Hegel. Along with them, some of Kojève’s early manuscripts were published posthumously, of which his 1932 dissertation is of greatest interest. The idea of determinism in classical and modern physics.
Works translated into Russian: Specific(objective)Kandinsky painting, “Man”, 1997, No. 6; Tyranny and wisdom, “Questions of Philosophy”, 1998, No. 6; The idea of death in Hegel's philosophy, M., 1998; Source of law: anthropogenic desire for recognition as the source of the idea of Justice, “Questions of Philosophy”, 2002, No. 12.
Other writings: Introduction a la lecture de Hegel, Paris, 1947; Esquisse d'une phenomenologie du droit, Paris, 1981 (1943); Essai d'une histoire raisonnee de la philosophie paienne, t. I-III, Paris, 1968–1973 (1953–1955); Kant, Paris, 1973 (1953–1955); Le Concept, le Temps et le Discours. Essai d'une mise a jour du Systeme du Savoir hegelien, Paris, 1990 (1952).
Alexey Rutkevich
Alexander Kozhevnikov (hockey player)
Alexander Viktorovich Kozhevnikov. Born on September 21, 1958 in Penza. Soviet hockey player, two-time Olympic champion (1984 and 1988), Honored Master of Sports of the USSR (1982).
Father is a driver. Mother is a nurse.
From the age of 6 he played football, then simultaneously played basketball. From football he was taken to hockey.
A graduate of the Penza Regional Sports School of Ice Hockey, a student of the Honored Coach of Russia V.I. Yadrentsev.
At the age of 15 he began playing hockey professionally.
From 1975 to 1977 he played for Dizelist (Penza).
In 1977-1986 - player of the Spartak team (Moscow).
In 1986-1989, 1991, 1995-1997 he played for the Krylia Sovetov club (Moscow).
Didn't leave for the NHL due to injury. He said: “I’ve been drafted since 1985, like everyone else. I was drafted by the Calgary Flames. Johnson, a great coach, talked to me personally. But I already had seven surgeries at that time. If it weren’t for the knee Naturally, I would go."
In the 1989-90 season he played for the Swedish AIK (scored 14 points in 16 matches) and the British Durham Wasps (47 points in 11 matches).
He played 4 matches for Krylya Sovetov in the 1990-91 season, after which he retired. However, at the age of 37, in 1995, he was announced by Krylia Sovetov, who were experiencing difficulties with their roster, to participate in the MHL championship. In 23 matches in the 1995-96 season he scored 20 points (8+12), and in the 1996-97 season he scored 9 points (3+6) in 12 matches.
Finished playing in Slovenia.
Two-time Olympic champion (1984, 1988). World and European champion in 1982. He played 525 matches in the USSR championships and scored 243 goals, of which he scored 43 in the 1981-82 championship. Also, as a member of the USSR national team, Alexander Kozhevnikov became the world and European champion among youth teams in 1977.
In 1998 he created a hockey school in Los Angeles.
Awarded the Order of Honor (2011) and the Badge of Honor (1982).
Member of the Board of the Night Hockey League, curator of the Moscow conference, hockey expert and television commentator.
Alexander Kozhevnikov's height: 192 centimeters.
Personal life of Alexander Kozhevnikov:
He was married to Margarita Kozhevnikova, an English teacher. The couple had two children: a son, Andrei (born in 1980) and a daughter (born in 1984), who later became a famous actress and deputy of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation of the VI convocation.
In his second marriage, a daughter, Ekaterina (born in 2002), was born; she studies ballet.
In 2015, who is 35 years younger than him.
Yuliana worked a lot abroad as a model, collaborating with one of the best fashion agencies in the world. Yuliana Belyaeva participated in several major advertising campaigns, and even after marriage she continued to build a successful career in the fashion industry.
Achievements of Alexander Kozhevnikov:
Gold - 1984 Olympics (Sarajevo)
Gold - 1988 Olympics (Calgary)
Gold - World Championship 1982 (Finland)
Alexander Kozhev
Kojéve, Alexander (1902–1968). French philosopher of Russian origin (Kozhevnikov, Alexander Vladimirovich). Born on May 11, 1902 in Moscow. In 1920 he left Russia, studied in Berlin and Heidelberg (philosophy, oriental languages), and in 1926 defended his dissertation on the philosophy of unity of V. Solovyov under the guidance of K. Jaspers. From 1927 he lived in France, in 1938 he received French citizenship. From 1933 to 1939 Kojève taught a course on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit at the Practical School of Higher Studies. During the occupation he took an active part in the Resistance. Students of his course were R. Aron, J. Bataille, R. Queneau, P. Klossowski, J. Lacan, M. Merleau-Ponty and others. Existentialism, Hegelian-Marxism, structural psychoanalysis were created under the obvious influence of Kojève.
Other biographical materials:
Rutkevich A.M. French philosopher of Russian origin ( New philosophical encyclopedia. In four volumes. / Institute of Philosophy RAS. Scientific ed. advice: V.S. Stepin, A.A. Guseinov, G.Yu. Semigin. M., Mysl, 2010).
Napreenko I.V. Was one of the key figures in the government of Valery Giscard d'Estaing ( Russian philosophy. Encyclopedia. Ed. second, modified and expanded. Under the general editorship of M.A. Olive. Comp. P.P. Apryshko, A.P. Polyakov. – M., 2014).
Gritsanov A.A., Filippovich A.V. Neo-Hegelian ( The latest philosophical dictionary. Comp. Gritsanov A.A. Minsk, 1998).
Some of Kojève's initial intuitions go back to his interest in Hinayana Buddhism ( Modern Western philosophy. Encyclopedic Dictionary / Under. ed. O. Heffe, V.S. Malakhova, V.P. Filatov, with the participation of T.A. Dmitrieva. M., 2009).
Read further:
Philosophers, lovers of wisdom (biographical index).
Essays:
Concrete (objective) painting by Kandinsky. - “Man”, 1997, No. 6;
Tyranny and wisdom. - “VF”, 1998, No. 6;
The idea of death in Hegel's philosophy. M., 1998:
Introduction to reading Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, read from 1933 to 1939 at the Higher Practical School. St. Petersburg, 2003; 2013;
The concept of power. M., 2007;
Atheism and other works. M., 2007.
ntroduction a la lecture de Hegel. P., 1947;
Esquisse d'une phenomenologie du droit. R, 1981;
Essai d"une histoire raisonnee de la philosophie pai"enne, t. 1-3. P., 1968-73;
Le Concept, le Temps et le Discours. Essai d'une mise a jour du Systeme du Savoirhegelien. R, 1990.
Kant. P. Gallimard, 1973;
L "idee du determinisme dans la physique classique et dans la physique moderne. P., 1990;
Literature:
Kuznetsov V. N. Alexander Kozhev: anthropological-atheistic version of neo-Hegelianism // French neo-Hegelianism. M., 1982;
Vizgin V.P. Philosophy as speech (historical and philosophical concept of Alexandre Kozhev) // Questions of Philosophy. 1989. No. 12;
Pyatigorsky A. M. To the portrait of Kozhev // Uninterrupted conversation. St. Petersburg, 2004;
Reis E. G. Kozhevnikov, who are you? M., 2000;
Rutkevich A. M. Alexandre Kojeve, Russian philosopher // Man. 1997. No. 5;
Rutkevich A. M. Introduction to reading A. Kozheva // “Phenomenology of Spirit” by Hegel in the context of modern Hegelian studies. M., 2010;
Rossman V After philosophy: Kojève, “the end of history” and Russian thought // Untouchable reserve. 1999. No. 5;
Dominique Auffret. Alexandre Kojeve: La philosophie, i"etat, la fin de l"histoire. Grasset, 1990;
Shadia B. Drury. Alexandre Kojeve: The Roots of Postmodern Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, 1994;
James H. Nichols. Alexandre Kojeve: Wisdom at the End of History (20th Century Political Thinkers). Rowman & Littlefieid Publishers, 2007.
Alexander Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov took French citizenship in early 1938, in his French passport he was still referred to as “Kojevnikoff”, but first for the students of his seminar on Hegel in the 1930s (who did not cope well with the pronunciation of the combination of consonants in his surname), and then, for the whole world, the abbreviation “Kojeve” became the pseudonym of the philosopher. Biographical information about him is scanty, even the exact date of birth is unknown: in some documents it is May 2, in others May 11, 1902, but from his widow, N.V. Ivanova, I heard that Kozhev’s birthday was celebrated somewhere in the end of May (May 11 according to the old style or May 24 according to the new style can be considered at least somewhat reliable as a date). In any case, the mansion in which he was born and lived for the first years of his life was located in one of the Arbat alleys. On both his paternal and maternal lines, his ancestors were Moscow merchants, who by the end of the 19th century became European educated industrialists. The fact that this environment was not alien to spiritual and scientific interests can be judged by the fact that his uncle on his mother’s side, Wassily Kandinsky, before becoming an artist, taught at Moscow University, wrote on economics and legal history, and he was prompted to paint in 1896, among other things, by his acquaintance with the latest discoveries in physics (the discovery of radioactivity, which overturned previous ideas about matter). In correspondence with his nephew, there are references to the fact that in the pre-revolutionary years, issues of literature and art were constantly discussed in the family circle. Alexander's father, drafted during the Russo-Japanese War as an artillery officer, died near Mukden in 1905; In his diary and in letters to Kandinsky, he called “father” the colleague of the deceased Lemkuhl, who married his mother (from a family of Russified Germans, which was also very wealthy). He was orphaned again in the summer of 1917, when his stepfather was killed by bandits while trying to defend his estate with a gun in his hands. Young Kozhevnikov faced “revolutionary violence” in 1918: he was held for several days in the basements of the Cheka and was almost shot for “speculation.” According to Kojève himself, it was in these cellars that he came up with some ideas that would become fundamental to his philosophy.
The youthful diaries of 1917–1920 contain the first sketches of the “philosophy of non-existence,” which indicate an early awakening interest in metaphysics. The manuscript of the diary for the years 1917–1919 was lost; in 1920, while in Germany, he restored from memory those entries that he remembered well. Even if he changed them a little, we are still talking about the very first philosophical experiences - from 15 to 18 years. In addition to philosophical reflections, there are youthful poems and literary sketches. Let me give as an example a discussion about the “priceless” aphorism of Kozma Prutkov: “If you click a mare on the nose, she will wave her tail”: “I don’t know anything deeper than this saying. It can have a thousand meanings, can be applied to a thousand cases. I was told that it is meaningless in itself. But every thought is valuable only in its understanding. And what is other than meaningless can be interpreted in infinitely different ways. Can’t Prutkov’s aphorism include all the wisdom of humanity?” Already the first entry in the diary dated January 5, 1917 (regarding the naval battle at the Arginus Islands during the Peloponnesian War) indicates familiarity with Plato’s dialogues and some of Nietzsche’s works; in subsequent notes, along with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Merezhkovsky, quotes from the works of Taoists and Buddhists appear. The published excerpt from the diaries - a dialogue written in June 1920 in Warsaw between the animated portrait of Descartes and a statuette of Buddha - indicates that he was already familiar with Nagarjuna’s arguments and tried to translate some of the provisions of Buddhism into the language of European philosophy. Reflections on being and thinking in the spirit of philosophical idealism (“only what is meaningful is real”), experiments in the field of ethics (comparing the ethics of Christianity and Buddhism), aesthetics (“On the non-existent in art and on the art of the non-existent”), and finally, a large manuscript on the philosophy of religion (lost along with most of the diary) - this is the range of topics that interested the young philosopher. “Home-made” philosophizing, either in the manner of Fichte (thinking and being are mutually conditioned, “by thinking the external as the real opposite to oneself, man creates it as such,” etc.), then under the influence of Taoism and Buddhism, contains some theses that will be characteristic for Kojève's mature works.
The passion for Buddhism was so great that Alexander wanted to study oriental studies at the university. These plans were interrupted by the revolution. The gymnasium where he studied was closed, and in 1919 he went to Libau, where he took his final exams, but, returning through the civil war fronts to Moscow, he discovered that he would not be accepted into the university: the Bolshevik government prohibited studies for people from " exploiting classes." This was precisely the main reason for emigration: in January 1920, he and his friend G. Witt secretly crossed the Polish border. In Poland, both young men are arrested as “Bolshevik spies”, and Kozhev almost dies in prison from typhus. Witt, who had previously been released from prison, first helped his release, and then once again made his way to Moscow, took the hidden family jewelry of the Kozhevnikovs and Lehmkuhls and returned to Berlin. After dividing these treasures equally, it turned out that Kojève, unlike the overwhelming majority of emigrants, could afford a completely tolerable material existence. In Heidelberg, he studied philosophy and oriental languages - although he studied both Chinese and Tibetan languages, Kojève knew Sanskrit and ancient Indian philosophy perfectly. However, he wrote a dissertation on the philosophy of Solovyov under the guidance of K. Jaspers. It can be said that two important sources of Kojève's own philosophy lie outside Western European thought. He would later define his philosophy of history as “anthropotheism,” starting from Solovyov’s teaching about God-manhood. For Solovyov, the embodiment of the divine idea in the world is the goal of the entire world process, in time there is a movement towards unity, and “the liberation of human self-consciousness and the gradual spiritualization of man through the internal assimilation and development of the divine principle forms the actual historical process of humanity.” For Kojève, there is only human self-consciousness in its development - God-manhood is replaced by man-deity. In both the Atheism manuscript and the Introduction to Reading Hegel, this opposition remains the basis of his interpretation of human nature and philosophy of history. The collision of Hinayana Buddhism and the philosophy of unity posed questions to Kojève, the answer to which he would later give, based on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
After defending his dissertation in February 1926, Kojève moved to France and married Ts. Shutak (taken away from his younger brother A. Koyre, which did not interfere with his close friendship with the latter). Until the economic crisis of 1929, he lived large, receiving dividends from shares in which the money received from sold jewelry was invested. He acquired an excellent library and educated himself, studying mathematics and physics along with philosophy and history. Having lost all his funds as a result of the fall in stock prices in the early 1930s, leaving the apartment to his ex-wife after a divorce, he is looking for work. Feeling the need for a French diploma (German was not recognized in France at that time), Kozhev defended one of his dissertations on the philosophy of Solovyov (translating into French the one defended in Heidelberg), while another dissertation - “The Idea of Determinism in Classical and Modern Physics” - was devoted to the problems philosophy of science. It was recently published, and its text testifies to the high professionalism of the author and his excellent knowledge of the theoretical physics of that time. Its text was written in 1932, but he began developing this topic several years earlier - in a letter to Kandinsky in 1929, he wrote that he moved from studying Eastern philosophy to mathematics and physics, and his goal remained the creation of his own philosophical system. The manuscript "Atheism", written in August - October 1931, dates back to the same period, immediately preceding the interpretation of Hegel. It begins with the question of the possibility of an “atheistic religion” and presents a sketch of the phenomenology of theistic and atheistic consciousness. Despite some criticisms of Heidegger, the influence of “Being and Time” is clearly visible: the phenomenological description of the positions of “man in the world” and “man outside the world,” finitude and “life to death” goes back to Heidegger. It can be said that Kojève began to write a text that could well be developed into a system of “atheistic existentialism”, since what he said is strikingly reminiscent of the works of Sartre and Camus, written a decade later. True, we are talking about a sketch that was not intended for printing. In addition, there is one significant difference. Developing the dualistic doctrine of being and nothing (“non-existence”) and of freedom as negativity, Kojève contrasts the world of freedom and history with the immutability of nature, but adheres to a kind of “metaphysical realism” while we are talking about nature. The point is not only that “being in itself” does not cause him any Sartrean “nausea”. As an object of natural scientific knowledge, the natural world is neutral and equal to itself: it simply lies outside the boundaries of human meaning, it is outside history. From these ideas it was easy to move on to the interpretation of Hegel that he would develop a few years later, since for Hegel nature is beyond temporary changes. Kojève subsequently noted that without the help of Heidegger's Being and Time, he would never have been able to approach Hegel in the way he did. But Heidegger himself, in his opinion, did not go towards a true “system of knowledge”: he returned back to the Pre-Socratics, and then generally took up “poetry”. Even though he wrote “poems” no worse than Parmenides, Parmenides was followed by the development of philosophical thought, which cannot be canceled by any “destruction” of metaphysics. As for the fascination with Buddhism, it quickly gave way to the analysis of Greek thought. In a 1968 interview, Kojève said that he was interested in Buddhism as the only atheistic religion. But then he realized that he had chosen the wrong path: “I realized that something happened in Greece twenty-four centuries ago - there is the source and the key to everything.” It is not my task to analyze several volumes of Kojève’s historical and philosophical works: they were written in the early 1950s, when Kojève was ill with tuberculosis and returned to his desk for some time from his diplomatic service. Some of the works were published shortly before his death (albeit in a clearly unprocessed form), and even those closest to Kojève did not know about the existence of a manuscript on Kant’s philosophy, which continued these works. Strictly speaking, Kojève did not publish a single book during his lifetime. “An Introduction to Reading Hegel” was published in 1947, and only a relatively small part of the text consisted of lectures entirely written by Kojève, the majority of the book was a collection of student notes and rough sketches of Kojève himself, collected by his student, the famous writer R. Queneau. Between the “Essay on the Phenomenology of Law” written in 1943 and the course of the 1930s, he wrote a large work in Russian, one of the versions of which was recently found in the archives of J. Bataille. “Essay on the Phenomenology of Law” was also unknown to readers for a long time - it was published (on the recommendation of R. Aron) in 1981. Another large essay is “Concept, time, discourse. Introduction to the Knowledge System" appeared only in 1990. It is worth saying that Queneau had to convince Kojève for a long time of the need to publish a course of lectures “An Introduction to Reading Hegel” - worldly fame did not interest Kojève too much, although he considered the most important motive of human activity to be the “struggle for recognition”, which is discussed in his main work “Introduction” in reading Hegel."
At the turn of two centuries [Collection in honor of the 60th anniversary of A.V. Lavrov] Bagno Vsevolod Evgenievich
Three endings to the story. Hegel, Soloviev, Kozhev
Over the past few decades, we have heard again and again discussions about the end of history, the end of subjectivity, the end of art, the death of Man, and above all the death of the author, about the impossibility of creativity in modern culture. The origin of this discourse is in a course of lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit given by Alexandre Kojève at the Paris School of Higher Studies between 1933 and 1939. These lectures were regularly attended by such leading representatives of the French intellectual environment of the time as Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Andre Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Raymond Aron. Recordings of Kojève's lectures circulated in Parisian intellectual circles and were the subject of close attention, including by Sartre and Camus. This course of lectures - known under the unpretentious title of "Seminar" - acquired a semi-mythical status at that time and has retained it almost to the present day. (Lacan called the course of lectures he began giving after Kojève's death the Seminar.) Of course, apocalyptic speculation about the coming end of history is not new. But Kojève, contrary to the traditional point of view, argued that the end of history does not await us in the future. It has already happened, in the 19th century, as evidenced by the philosophy of Hegel. According to Kojève, we have been living for quite some time after the end of history, in a situation of posthistory - we would now say, in a situation of postmodernity - and we are just not fully aware of our situation yet.
This transfer of the end of history from the future to the past was new at the time Kojève tried to convince his listeners of it. Perhaps that is why he tried to illustrate and confirm his theoretical reasoning by the practice of his own writing. Kojève invariably insisted that he was not trying to say anything new - because it was no longer possible to say anything new. He pretended that he was simply repeating and reproducing the text of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” without adding anything to it. Kojève never published his philosophical works and, in fact, did not complete them - with the exception of a few minor articles. His course of lectures on Hegel, published after the Second World War (in 1947) under the title “Introduction to Reading Hegel,” is a motley construction of texts and notes written by Kojève himself, and recordings of his lectures made by various people from number of listeners. This collection of heterogeneous text fragments was prepared not by Kojève himself, but by the surrealist writer Raymond Queneau. After the war, Kojève completely abandoned philosophy - because philosophizing after the end of history, from his point of view, did not make any sense. He turned to a diplomatic and bureaucratic career. As France's representative on the European Commission, Kojève became one of the founders of the modern European Union. He developed a tariff agreement that remains one of the pillars of the European economic system today. Kojève died of a heart attack at one of the meetings of the European Commission in 1968. One could say that Kojève was a kind of Arthur Rimbaud of modern bureaucracy - a philosopher who consciously became a martyr to the post-historical bureaucratic world order.
Today, the discourse of posthistoricity, or postmodernity, surrounds us on all sides. However, not a single example has yet appeared - with the exception of the writings of Kojève - of theoretical writing that would proclaim its own absolute unoriginality. Many such examples can be found in literature and art - but not in the field of theory. Blanchot, Foucault or Derrida - who wrote a lot about the death of the author - never once said about their own writings that they were completely unoriginal, that they were just repetitions of some already existing and well-known theoretical discourse. In postmodern conditions, theoretical writing remains the last area that allows and even requires originality from the author. Therefore, Kojève’s case remains unique and exceptional today. He is the only philosopher who can be compared with Duchamp, Warhol or Pierre Menard, the hero of Borges' famous story. Kojève's claim to radical philosophical unoriginality, his claim that he simply transfers Hegel's philosophy from the context of 19th-century Germany to the context of 20th-century France without any transformations, reinterpretations or changes, remains highly original even for our time. That is why explanation requires, first of all, the exclusivity of Kojève’s claim to unoriginality - to a greater extent than even his philosophical ideas themselves.
It seems to me that the key to this claim of unoriginality can be found in the dissertation on the work of Vladimir Solovyov, “Die religièse Philosophic Vladimir Solowieffs” (“The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov”), which Kojève defended (in German) at the University of Heidelberg under his real name Alexander Kozhevnikov. This dissertation, written under the direction of Karl Jaspers, was published in the 1930s in Germany in a very small edition and was later translated, with minor changes, into French (published in 1934 in Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuse). At the University of Heidelberg, I read the original version of the dissertation (with handwritten notes by Jaspers and/or one of his assistants). However, now I am not going to engage in a textual analysis of this dissertation, nor to find out whether Kojève adequately understood Solovyov’s philosophy. I would like to draw the reader's attention to some key formulations of this dissertation that make it possible to understand more clearly how Kojève's specific concept of the end of history arose. Namely, I will try to show that Kojève’s arguments about the end of history can be correctly understood only in the context of “historiosophical” and “sophiological” discussions between representatives of post-Soloviev Russian thought in the first quarter of the 20th century - discussions about the future of humanity, and especially about the future of Russia. Kojève does not enter into an open debate with Berdyaev, Bulgakov or Frank - he does not even mention these names - but he offers an interpretation of Solovyov's philosophy that is clearly directed against the eschatological hopes and sophiological insights characteristic of these authors. He contrasts them with what he himself calls a pessimistic reading of Solovyov. And it was in the context of this pessimistic reading that the main figures of his later discussions of posthistory were first formulated.
However, I would like to begin with a brief description of how Kojève's idea of the “end of history” has traditionally been perceived and interpreted. Its reception occurred mainly in the context of political philosophy - through the mediation of authors such as Raymond Aron, Leo Strauss or Francis Fukuyama, who used Kojève's concept of history primarily in the context of their polemics with Marxism. This is why Kojève’s reading of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” is then and now usually compared with the Marxist interpretation of Hegel. Indeed, there are many parallels between Marx's and Kojève's readings of Hegel. Kojève proclaims the “struggle for recognition” to be the engine of universal history. This formulation at first glance resembles the Marxist “class struggle.” Kojève relies on the same Hegelian passage “on the dialectic of the relationship between master and slave” from the Phenomenology of Spirit as Marx. Hegel describes the historical moment of the first manifestation of self-consciousness. This primal scene involves two people willing to risk their lives in a kind of “combat to the death” in order to be mutually recognized not just as material objects in the world, but as two identities following their individual desires. There are three options for ending this fight. (1) One wins. (2) One loses and dies. (3) One loses and remains to live. The winner becomes the owner. The defeated, if he decides to surrender and save his life, becomes a slave. The master uses the slave to satisfy his own desires. The slave gives up his desire and becomes only an instrument to satisfy the desire of his master. But Hegel does not believe in the long-term stability of the master's power. The master gives orders, but the slave interprets and carries them out. The slave works - and his work changes the world in which the owner lives, and in fact, the very desires of the owner. The master finds himself a prisoner in a world built for him by a slave. Labor becomes a means of further development of the spirit, the engine of universal history. Hegel understands his own philosophy as an intellectual reflection of slave labor that creates history. Marx adds that history must lead not only to such a philosophical reflection, but also to the final political victory of the working class.
In any case, for Hegel and Marx the struggle for recognition remains only a passing moment in the historical development of the Absolute Spirit. Both of them perceived universal history from the point of view of the slave, not the master. Both saw themselves as losers in the historical struggle - and thought about ways to compensate for their defeat through creative work. For Kojève, on the contrary, the struggle for recognition remains the only driving force of history from beginning to end. He does not believe in the possibility of changing the world through work. He believes only in war and revolution - in direct violence. That is why, for Kojève, the end of history reveals itself in the paradoxical nature of the revolutions of the New Age - from the Great French to the Russian Revolution: the rebel people enter into mortal combat against their master - and win. But, having won the battle, the people begin to work again. And this Kojève - which is very noticeable - cannot understand at all. He doesn't understand how a man who has won a life-and-death battle can simply go back to work after that. Kojève concludes that the winner is already satisfied - he no longer has unsatisfied desires that could motivate him to new battles. For humanity, the appearance of this figure of a “man with a gun” means the end of history. A citizen of a post-revolutionary state of modern times is a master and a slave rolled into one. The State itself becomes universal and homogeneous for Kojève. The emergence of this kind of State, fully satisfying the desires of its citizens, makes any desire for recognition - and, therefore, history in general, driven by this desire - impossible, since this desire is now completely satisfied. The story of Man ends. Man returns to his original, prehistoric animal state, to animal, unhistorical desires. The post-historical state is a return to the original animality - to socially guaranteed consumption as the only possible goal of human existence. Here, of course, one cannot help but notice the influence of Nietzsche - and Kojeve was even accused of crypto-fascism from time to time, although he himself maintained all his life that he was a Stalinist. But traditional criticism often fails to notice that for Kojève the universal and homogeneous State is only one of three figures that appear at the end of history. The other two figures are the Sage and the Book.
These two figures have generally been overlooked by interpreters of Kojève's work because they cannot be found in the philosophy of Marx or Hegel, but his discussion of the end of history cannot be understood without them. However, the first question that needs to be asked is: what is the meaning of desire in Kojève's understanding? I am going to show that this concept has its origin not in Hegel, but in Vladimir Solovyov - namely, his “The Meaning of Love” (1892–1894) as interpreted in Kojève’s dissertation. Let us turn first to the figure of the Sage, and then to the figure of the Book.
In the Introduction, as well as in rare interviews that Kojève gave after World War II, he repeatedly argued that at the end of history the figure of the Philosopher is replaced by the figure of the Sage. The philosopher is guided by desire, love (philia) for absolute knowledge, love for Sophia. However, at the end of the story, the Philosopher acquires absolute knowledge, unites with “wisdom”, with Sophia - and becomes the Sage or, in other words, the Man-God. For Kojève, absolute knowledge means a state of absolute self-awareness. According to Kojève, a philosopher turns into a sage when his actions become completely transparent and understandable to himself. Or, to put it another way: absolute knowledge means for the philosopher the complete overcoming of his own unconscious, or his own subconscious, to use Freudian language. The philosopher still submits to the power of desire. Namely: his desire for absolute knowledge - the desire for Sophia - inevitably manifests itself at the first stage as a special type of unconscious sexual desire. The sage overcomes this desire by uniting with Sophia - that is, gaining complete satisfaction and possession of absolute knowledge. It is obvious that such an understanding of the historical process as the history of a gradual increase in a person’s conscious power over his own unconscious has little relation to the Hegelian or Marxist idea of the historical process, but is closely related to the philosophy of love of Vladimir Solovyov. The very vocabulary that Kojève uses to describe the Sage points quite clearly to Solovyov’s philosophy and its further development in Russian thought at the turn of the century: Sophia, man-god, etc. But above all, it illuminates in a completely new way the central figure of Kojève’s philosophy - struggle for recognition. The sphere of this struggle, of course, is not economics or politics, but desire or love. And it is at this point that Kojève’s philosophical work reveals its deep consonance with the philosophy of Solovyov, as well as with the main direction of all Russian philosophy and literature of the late 19th - early 20th centuries. The starting point for Solovyov’s philosophical reflections - Kojève writes about this in detail in his dissertation - are the philosophical works of Schopenhauer and his student Eduard von Hartmann, whose main work is entitled “Philosophy of the Unconscious”. The pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer (translated into Russian by Afanasy Fet in 1888) had a strong and in many respects decisive influence on a number of leading Russian writers and philosophers of the time - Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Fedorov and Nikolai Strakhov. Schopenhauer asserts the impossibility of free will and the autonomy of the mind - ultimately, the impossibility of achieving any kind of self-awareness. According to Schopenhauer, reason is subject to desire, the “will to live” (Lebensdrang) - and above all, erotic desire. Schopenhauer is dissatisfied with this subordination - Nietzsche will later have a desire to glorify. However, both consider reason, subjectivity and self-consciousness to be secondary to desire, its sublimations. Thus, philosophical reason is made completely dependent on desire.
Already in Solovyov’s first essay (“The Crisis of Western Philosophy. Against the Positivists,” 1874), his attention was focused on the relationship between reason and desire. However, he formulates a philosophical program that is directly opposite to that of Schopenhauer. Soloviev developed this program in his study “The Meaning of Love” (1892–1894), and Kojève in his dissertation calls it Soloviev’s most important text, the key to his other works. In this work, Soloviev describes sexuality as a secondary, derivative version of philosophical, Platonic eros - as a necessary but transitory stage in the development of philosophical self-awareness. Here, it is not the mind that appears as a sublimation of sexuality, but sexuality is understood as a special form of the mind. The sexual act turns out to be primarily an epistemological act. Sexual desire is the original form of the desire for knowledge. According to Solovyov, reason in its essence is not at all cold, not “rational” and not mathematical - but hot, full of desire and impulse, reason is an aspiration, it is love for Sophia. Sexual love is only a projection of philosophical love onto specific, individual objects (for example, a woman) - but at the same time it is its highest manifestation, because through sexuality the philosopher discovers the body of another and his own body. For Solovyov, this discovery - and not at all the reproductive function - is the true meaning of sexual feeling. The meaning of sexual love is complete recognition another by me - And me to others. Soloviev writes about this in great detail and insistently: complete affirmation, justification (but also recognition) another can only be achieved in sexual love, in eros. The basis of the human personality is the unity of spirit and body. To love someone is to recognize this truly existing unity (to recognize that another not only spirit and not only matter). Consequently: Love is the means of absolute knowledge - for absolute knowledge is precisely the knowledge of this unity.
This discovery leads the philosopher to the following: absolute knowledge itself also has a body - and this body is humanity in its unity. This means that the individual philosopher can achieve unity with humanity as a whole only if humanity itself reaches the level of mutual recognition through mutual love - because only then the body of humanity will become transparent and accessible to the philosophical mind. The prototype of this mutual recognition, in turn, is the mutual recognition between Christ and the universal Church, understood as a Free Theocracy, that is, as a Church without any established hierarchy or, otherwise, as a single Church. Consequently, an individual philosopher can unite with absolute knowledge - become the beloved of Sophia - only if he enters her transparent material body - the body of a single, united Church. Or the body of a single, united humanity. Otherwise, knowledge is doomed to remain abstract and incomplete, only spiritual and without a body. For Solovyov, true and absolute knowledge is only knowledge in the biblical sense of the word: the act of real, material entry into another. Kojève devoted most of his dissertation to the analysis of Solovyov’s most erotic-ecclesiastic texts concerning sexual relations between the philosopher’s body and the body of humanity: “The History and Future of Theocracy. Study of the world-historical path to true life" (1885-1887) and "La Russie et l'?glise universelle" (1889). It is now clearly seen that the universal and homogeneous State, as Kojève describes it, is a secularized version of Solovyov’s universal free Theocracy - humanity as a female body, open to the entry of the philosophical Logos - has little relation to either Hegelian or Marxian theories States.
Kojève reads Hegel in the footsteps of Solovyov's metaphysics - and not along the path of Hegelian or Marxist dialectics, as his interpreters traditionally claim. Both Hegel and Marx conceived of nature as an external, objective reality that must be explored and conquered through science and technology. Kojève, following Solovyov, understands nature primarily as an object of desire. Speaking of “desire,” he gives the example of hunger, arguing that all desire is destructive: by using food, we destroy it. But at the level of self-awareness, this destructive force of desire can be balanced by mutual recognition, since in this case we do not desire the other’s body, but his desire. This definition - which is a variation of Solovyov's definition of love - lies at the center of Kojève's philosophical discourse. Beginning the Introduction, Kojève speaks of “d?sir anthropog?ne”, which is fundamentally different from “d?sir animal”. This “anthropogenic desire” creates Man as Man, constitutes “le fait humain”. Kojève writes: “For example, the relationship between a man and a woman is human only if one desires not the other’s body, but his desire: in other words, the other is desired, loved, or, better said, recognized in his human worth.” Recognition is undoubtedly described here as identical to love. At this human, “anthropogenic” level, desire directed towards natural objects is also “mediated” by desire another. Kojève writes: “We desire something only because others desire it, for example, a battle medal, an enemy’s banner, and, in fact, all the things that make up our civilization.” That is why a person is able to risk his life for something that seems completely unnecessary from the point of view of political, economic, animal desire. The desire for these things is dictated to us only by the desire to be recognized, loved, desired by others.
So, all these formulations have very little in common with the descriptions of the struggle for recognition in Hegel or Marx. In Kojève, the struggle for recognition is modeled on the struggle between the sexes - not between classes. The goal of this struggle is to find love another rather than destroy another. It is no coincidence that the core of the Seminar, which Kojève led, consisted of representatives of French surrealism: Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Andre Breton. And the text of the “Introduction” itself was compiled, as I already mentioned, by Raymond Queneau (1947), one of the leading surrealist writers of the time. All these authors were primarily interested in developing a general theory of culture and society based on the concept of sexual desire. The scope of this article does not allow us to dwell on this in detail, although it would not be difficult to show that the concept of Desire in Bataille and Lacan actually correlates much more closely with the interpretation of Solovyov and Kojève than with Freud. This is especially obvious in the case of Lacan. However, this will take us too far from the topic - however, I should note that the correlation between the eroticization of theology and philosophy in Solovyov and the surrealist eroticization of economics and politics - if we take Kojeve as a mediator between them - can be very productive for understanding both of these phenomena. (In this context, it is interesting to note that the very concept of desire, as it is now used in an international context - d? sir, desire - was introduced by Kojève as a translation of the German “Begierde”, which Hegel uses. Kojève, however, gave this word a more general , Solovyov's meaning. It is very characteristic that in the reverse translation into German it is no longer Begierde, but Begehren - a word that previously did not exist in philosophical German.)
Kojève himself developed his thoughts on love, of course, not in the context of the surrealist movement, but in the context of the traditional Russian utopian idea of a society based on love - as opposed to a society based on economic interest. A similar utopia can be found in the works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Solovyov, as well as their followers in the first decades of the 20th century. Kojève's attitude towards this utopia is ambivalent or, better said, ironic. He recognizes these aspirations as close to himself, but at the same time points out that the satisfaction of desire, the realization of love means their disappearance. Every desire can be satisfied - and therefore finished. Satisfaction puts an end to desire. The end of history is possible and inevitable, since there is no such desire that would be infinite. The universal and homogeneous State represents the ultimate truth for Kojève because it is the state of love that ultimately satisfies our desire for recognition. Kojève practices radical sexualization of reason, history, politics - and finds this sexualization in Solovyov. This is the total sexualization of knowledge, which, as I already said, so attracted the French surrealists. But the difference between Kojève and the surrealists - as well as between Kojève and Solovyov - is that Kojève thematizes primarily not desire itself, but the state of philosophical thinking after the satisfaction of desire. Kojève's philosophy is posthistorical insofar as it is postcoital. Kojève is not interested in the pre-coital increase of desire, but in the post-coital decline. One might add: post-revolutionary, post-philosophical decline. The perfect society of realized, recognized love, which arises after a revolutionary paroxysm, after the entry of the Logos into the body of humanity, is a society without love.
This is why Kojève declared himself a Stalinist: Stalin brought to life the society of love by destroying love. In this sense, Stalinist Russia corresponds to the general pattern of post-revolutionary societies. The moment of complete satisfaction of philosophical desire, the moment of union with Sophia, with absolute knowledge, lasts only a moment. After this moment, desire - as a specifically human desire, as the desire to be desired - disappears once and for all. In posthistory, philosophy is no longer possible - because man loses his anthropogenic desire and again becomes an animal. Kojève cites the United States of America as the best example of a post-historical, purely animal, economic mode of existence. However, he sees another possibility of post-historical existence - the possibility, as he says, of pure snobbery, which, in his opinion, has come true in Japan. Snobbery is the struggle for recognition outside of desire as a pure play of signifiers. In post-historical conditions, the philosopher becomes a snob. To understand this means to reject the philosophical position, to reject philosophy - and to become a Sage. Kojève believed that Soloviev and many other authors lost sight of this dialectic of desire - the fulfillment of desire is its disappearance - because they postulated a theological, infinite guarantee of desire: God. Kojève, on the contrary, considered himself an atheist - and in this sense a true philosopher. Actually, already in Kojève’s dissertation one can find many critical assessments of Solovyov as a non-philosopher. Kojève accuses him again and again of not understanding this or that philosopher, of his own philosophical formulations being superficial and vague. Kojève emphasizes that Soloviev did not understand Hegel. Kojève's critical attitude towards Soloviev, the author to whom he dedicated his dissertation, is quite unusual in its harshness and decisiveness. Often this excessive critical pathos causes irritation, but quite soon the reader understands that Kojève resorts to accusatory language primarily in order to avoid the need to compare Solovyov's philosophical discourse with others. By asserting that Soloviev is in fact a non-philosopher, Kojève acquires the right to ignore in Soloviev's work anything that resembles epistemology, ethics or aesthetics, and that which is traditionally associated with “philosophy” as an academic discipline. He proceeds from the fact that Solovyov’s unique work is fundamental in the intuitive knowledge of the original unity of soul and body. Kojève further argues that towards the end of his life Soloviev experienced deep disappointment and abandoned his original belief that desire has a theological guarantee, that there is an original and infinite unity of Man with God, which can be rediscovered in love. Soloviev began to develop a different, pessimistic ontology (according to Kojève’s formulation) of the separation of man and God. However, he died without completing this work. It is obvious that Kojève saw his task in creating such a pessimistic ontology - and a corresponding new, pessimistic idea of posthistory.
At the center of this new pessimistic idea we no longer find the Sage, but the Book. The sage now resides inside Sophia's transparent body - all his desires are recognized, and he recognizes all her desires. But the most important thing is that the Sage knows about it. He gains complete power over his self-awareness. But this self-awareness, according to Kojève, is extremely unstable: as soon as it arises, it immediately disappears. Having lost desire, the Sage also loses his self-awareness and even the knowledge that his desires are satisfied. Post-historical man is completely satisfied, but he no longer knows it. He has forgotten the moment of satisfaction and cannot explain his lack of desire. In the Introduction, Kojève writes that Hegel introduced a new type of time in his Phenomenology: this time is not linear, but not cyclical either. Hegelian time is circular: human desire describes a full circle - it takes a person out of his natural, animal state and then returns him to it again. However, this circle cannot be repeated; it cannot be turned into a cyclic movement. At the end of history, a philosophical desire can no longer awaken in a person - and this impossibility is due precisely to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, because this book has already described the full circle of possibilities that can and should be realized by desire.
Consequently, now it is not a person, but a book that functions as a medium, a material carrier of philosophical desire, the Spirit. At the end of history, desire acquires a new material body. Desire replaces the human body with the body of a book for the purpose of its embodiment - the Spirit becomes a printed word, now it is non-human, separated from human history. Humanity’s relationship to truth becomes purely external: “Phenomenology of Spirit” itself plays the role of an external reminder of the end of history, preventing the Spirit from returning to the human body. Kojève proclaimed the end of man, the end of subjectivity and the end of the author long before Foucault or Derrida. And he did this much more consistently because, as I already said, he abandoned his own original philosophical discourse. After the Spirit has acquired a new body, the only opportunity for a person to come into contact with absolute knowledge is to copy, reproduce either individual early stages in the development of desire, or the entire circle of this development. And this is exactly what Kojève is doing. The post-historical role of man is not production, but reproduction, repetition.
Solovyov begins his philosophical discussions of love by separating sexual desire from the function of reproduction: for Solovyov, the meaning of love lies in recognition, and not in reproduction. However, after universal acceptance has been achieved, humanity has no choice but to return to reproduction as the only activity still possible. For Kojève, the main function of post-historical humanity is to reproduce the Book - to reprint and repeat the Phenomenology of Spirit. Man - humanity as a whole - becomes a machine of reproduction. Or, to use Marshall McLuhan's famous formulation, the book's sexual organ. This all, of course, sounds very postmodern. And we are indeed dealing here with a very precise description of a postmodern cultural situation, which is characterized by the reproduction and appropriation of existing cultural forms. However, there is an important difference between standard postmodernist discourse and Kojève's reasoning. Standard postmodernist discourse welcomes play with existing cultural forms as a manifestation of individual freedom, no longer subject to any laws of historical necessity. For Kojève, the end of history is also the end of freedom: freedom, like knowledge, spirit and creativity, becomes an artifact. This is why Kojève refuses to describe postmodern repetition in terms of his own, original, new and authorial philosophical discourse - as other postmodern theorists do. Instead, Kojève takes Hegelian dialectics as a ready-made thing, as a ready-made thing. He uses the Spirit itself as a ready-made product - to point out the gap between philosophical desire and the animal mode of existence that characterizes the post-historical situation. In doing so, Kojève explicitly places himself within this situation and reduces his own discourse to a gesture of repetition. He does not even pretend to have a special understanding or commentary on Hegel's philosophy - for this would mean that the Spirit, or meaning, of Hegel's philosophy is outside the text. Kojève, on the contrary, argues that the “Phenomenology of Spirit” has already absorbed the entire Spirit, all possible meanings. That's why he doesn't teach Hegel's philosophy - he just reads it out loud.
The concept of the Book, as Kojève uses it, is, in turn, a secularized version of Solovyov’s later idea of God as a “superconsciousness” that is external to human consciousness, separated from it by an original, ontological abyss. This concept of an impersonal “superconsciousness” was developed by Solovyov primarily in his Theoretical Philosophy (1897–1899). Kojève often refers to this text in his dissertation. However, he borrows the key idea of his philosophical discourse from another text by Solovyov, “The Concept of God” (1897). Kojève quotes: “What<…>we usually call our “I”, or our personality, is not closed in itself and a complete circle of life, possessing its own content<…>but only a carrier or support (hypostasis) of something else, higher.” The metaphysical belief in the ontological priority of the human person and in his original participation in truth is rejected here as an illusion: the human person, being (Dasein) as such is proclaimed external to truth. At the end of history, the human personality discovers that it can only be the material carrier and reproductive mechanism of truth - but not its owner. And of course, for Kojève, as an atheist, the external status of truth means its materiality - and not spirituality. “Superconsciousness” becomes a Book - the Bible or “Phenomenology of the Spirit” (according to Kojève, writing is generally “le suicide m?diatis?”).
Kojève's description of the post-historical or, more precisely, post-revolutionary mode of existence has, of course, a clear political orientation. It is pointed against the nostalgic Slavophile utopias of the Russian emigration. In his dissertation, Kojève repeatedly and in different contexts sets out Solovyov’s historiosophical views, emphasizing that he was never a Slavophile in the sense of this concept, which is synonymous with Russian nationalism. For Kojève, this means that Soloviev never believed in any special Russian spirit, in a special value unique to Russian culture. On the contrary, Solovyov viewed Russian culture and the Russian imperial state as a passive material carrier, as a historical means and as a mechanism for the reproduction of the eternal truth of Byzantine Christianity, which, as Solovyov believed, represented the last revelation of absolute knowledge. At the same time, according to Solovyov, Russian culture could transfer and reproduce the absolute knowledge embodied in Byzantine Christianity precisely due to the fact that it remained completely external to this knowledge - enclosed within the limits, so to speak, of a purely animal, material way of life characteristic of social conditions Russian peasantry. It follows from this that Soloviev, being a Russian philosopher, already recognized himself as a philosopher in a situation after the end of the history of truth - which he understood as the history of Christianity. That is why he never claimed to reveal his own, original, new philosophical truth. He claimed that he was only repeating the Absolute Truth, as it had already been revealed by Byzantine Christianity, in philosophical terms understandable to the modern cultural environment of his time. And therefore Soloviev, as Kojève says, was not a philosopher: belonging to Russian culture, Solovyov could only repeat and reproduce, for Russian culture, as a culture of reproduction and appropriation, is initially post-historical, initially postmodern culture. It can be said that Kojève himself only repeats this gesture of Solovyov - the gesture of renouncing an individual, personal claim to originality - transferring it from a theological context to a philosophical one and replacing the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers with a “Phenomenology of the Spirit.” At the same time, Solovyov's affirmation of an initially external position in relation to truth and absolute knowledge is described by Kozhev as the end of love - love for the West. At some point in his life, Soloviev was captivated by the Free and Creative Spirit of the West. Kojève devoted many pages of his dissertation to describing all sorts of hopes and illusions that Soloviev had in relation to Western culture, as well as the extraordinary energy he invested in attempts to combine the passive, material body of Russian culture, understood as the silent and submissive aspect of Sophia, with the masculine, full of desire , the free Spirit of the West. Soloviev tried to bring about this union both in theory and in practice - in the project of reunification of the Eastern and Western Orthodox Churches - hoping that through this unification the Western Spirit would be able to penetrate the material body of Russian culture and give birth to some new culture that would become the true end of humankind. stories. However, Kojève argues in his dissertation that at the end of his life Soloviev was completely disillusioned with these projects and abandoned all his early political hopes.
Russian culture has made several attempts to get out of its semi-animal, material state through rapprochement with the West, trying to assimilate its inherent cult of the individual personality. However, the historical path of Western culture itself leads it back to an animal, purely material way of existence, for the satisfaction of philosophical desire leaves the West with nothing but material, animal consumption, which does not need any cultural recognition. Russia wants to become like the West. In reality, however, the West is beginning to resemble Russia. Trying to escape from the pre-modern animality of Russian life through emigration to the West, the Russian philosopher inevitably makes a full circle and comes to post-modern animality - following the logic of the development of Western culture itself. He cannot break out of this chain of repetition and become historical. His journey from prehistoric Russia to the posthistorical West ultimately turns out to be a repetition of the past.
Kojève devotes many pages of the “Introduction” to reasoning that Hegel’s philosophical discourse should be understood primarily as a kind of commentary on the historical mission of Napoleon. Napoleon was a man of action who ended European history by introducing a new universal and homogeneous order, but who failed to recognize the meaning of his own actions. It was Hegel who understood the historical role of Napoleon and acted as his self-awareness. In the same sense, Kojève perceived himself as the self-awareness of Stalin, who, in turn, repeated the historical act of Napoleon by establishing a universal and homogeneous order in Russia. And in the same sense, Kojève perceived himself as a repetition of Hegel. That is, he believed that his own repetition of absolute knowledge was the result of Stalin repeating the actions of Napoleon. And at the same time, both of these characters repeat Christ, the founder of the universal and homogeneous Church. Of course, most often both rulers were compared to the Antichrist. However, from Kojève’s “atheistic” point of view, the distinction between Christ and Antichrist, so important for Dostoevsky or Solovyov, loses its relevance. Therefore, Kojève himself may also be a repetition of Solovyov, who presented his philosophical discourse as the self-consciousness of Byzantine Christianity - regardless of the difference between theology and philosophy or between the Bible and the Phenomenology of Spirit. Each end of the story repeats the other ends of the story. From time to time this endless sequence of repetitions is interrupted by brief periods of philosophical desire, of vain aspiration - periods that disappear without a trace, without even leaving a memory at the moment when these desires are satisfied. The role of the Sage is to stop the temptation that comes from philosophical desire. It is intended to testify that the animal state is not something that must be overcome, transcended (in the form of Hegel’s “Geisterreich” or sophiological “deified humanity”), but that it is the ontological state of man as a bearer, and not a possessor of absolute knowledge.
V. Solovyov From the encyclopedic dictionary MAYKOV (Apollon Nikolaevich) - one of the main poets of the post-Pushkin period, son of Nikolai Apollonovich Maykov, born May 23, 1821; owes its initial development to V. A. Solonitsyn and I. A. Goncharov, who taught him
From the book Volume 2. “Problems of Dostoevsky’s creativity,” 1929. Articles about L. Tolstoy, 1929. Recordings of a course of lectures on the history of Russian literature, 1922–1927 author Bakhtin Mikhail MikhailovichV. Solovyov From the encyclopedic dictionary ZHEMCHUZHNIKOV (Alexey Mikhailovich) - lyric poet, satirist and humorist; born in 1821, completed a course at the School of Law, served in the Senate and participated in the Senate audits of the Oryol and Kaluga provinces and Taganrog
Vladimir Solovyov. The meaning of his poetry 1 Poems are always a confession. The poet creates first of all in order to clarify his thoughts and worries for himself. Thus, primitive man, when the creativity of language was still alive, created a word in order to comprehend a new subject. That's why true
From the book Whip [Sects, literature and revolution] author Etkind Alexander MarkovichSergei Solovyov I. Flowers and incense The first poems of S. Solovyov, which appeared in print in the early 90s, forced us to recognize in him one of the best hopes of our young poetry. The skill and thoughtfulness of the verse and the serious attitude towards the poet’s tasks are the features that distinguish
From the book Russian Symbolists: Studies and Research author Lavrov Alexander Vasilievich From the book Articles on Russian Literature [anthology] author Dobrolyubov Nikolay AlexandrovichEvgeny Trubetskoy V. S. Solovyov and L. M. Lopatin
From the book Notes of a Plumber about Cinema author Puchkov Dmitry YurievichArkady Solovyov POEMS OF RAVENS They say that a raven lives for three hundred years, they say that a raven kills carrion. Our wise people have noticed many things, we have no reason to doubt it... A pine forest flies over a pine forest that has become quiet by night and dozes off.
From the book Russian Paranoid Novel [Fyodor Sologub, Andrei Bely, Vladimir Nabokov] author Skonechnaya OlgaOn the history of the emergence of Sotskom at the Institute of Art History (Once again about Zhirmunsky[*] and the formalists) The archival information published below is taken mainly from documents from the collection of the Russian Institute of Art History (TsGALI St. Petersburg. F. 82). The focus was on materials
From the author's book From the author's book“CONTINUATION OF THE FAMILY” - SERGEY SOLOVIEV Of all the verbal characteristics of Sergei Mikhailovich Solovyov, the grandson of the great historian, bearing the same name, patronymic and surname, perhaps the most famous and expressive is formulated in verse - by Andrei Bely in the poem “The First
From the author's bookV. S. Solovyov (1853-1900) Born in Moscow in the family of the famous historian S. M. Solovyov. The great Russian religious philosopher, author of the fundamental works “The Justification of Good”, “The Russian Idea”, “Three Conversations” and others. The first theorist and practitioner (as a poet) of Russian symbolism,
From the author's bookSergey Solovyov on line 07/25/2008 Quote; - The first “Assa” turned 20 last year. What prevented the film's sequel from being released by that date? - Everything is the same - severe censorship of money. We say that we live in an uncensored society, but this is a lie. Ideological censorship
From the author's bookVladimir Solovyov The mad order of being, or physical space The motives of Solovyov's metaphysics and mythopoetics, cultivating the paranoid direction of symbolist texts, largely intersect with the ideas of Schopenhauer. Totally evil device
