Kojeve’s theory of the End of History, and his idiosyncratic interpretation of Hegel, fit somewhat well with a Christian view of history. This is strange primarily because Kojeve is an atheist and one who, quite ruthlessly, purges out theological concepts that mystify theoretical accounts. Kojeve can be said to write like an instruction manual (which makes sense, given his career as a bureaucrat for the Fourth/Fifth Republic). Nevertheless, I would make the seemingly special-pleading claim that Christianity (qua its canonical scripture) does not really qualify for Kojeve’s ban. Of course, to argue such is to explicitly deny his claim that Christianity is a ‘myth’, but we’ll see if my claims stand up.
To summarize Kojeve’s position: Hegel is not a dialectician, but the opposite (Kojeve goes as far as to call him a ‘positivist’ and ‘empiricist’ in the final chapter to his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel). Philosophy, at its roots, is dialectic, made famous by Plato’s Socrates. In the classic Socratic dialogue, an interlocutor makes a claim about something (law, piety, gods, art, knowledge, etc.) and Socrates questions him. This is thesis-antithesis (with Socrates as consummate antithesis). But the indirect form of Plato’s speech is not simply to turn Socrates into a mouthpiece for Plato, but to leave the reader in a position of judgement. The reader is confronted with an esoteric crisis, where only Plato’s students (and true lovers of wisdom) can properly give an account (and the uninitiated are locked out). Nevertheless, it is the outsider participant who then produces a synthetic statement, coming to knowledge of the thing in question.
Such is the nature of philosophy until Hegel. For this dialectical process works on all levels, whether between interlocutors or societies. It may be waged with intelligible words or systematically through war and trade. Either way, one proposition is met with another, producing a crisis that forces a kind of resolution. But prior to this dialectical event, alternative forms of reasoning are possible. The first is ‘myth’ which is, essentially, a thesis with an aura. The ‘myth’ is a monologue, not a dialogue (thus not dialectic), a statement accounting for the world. The ‘myth’ is not simply an empirical account, for any statement includes an account of itself, which exceeds the empirical or rational faculty. To account for this state of affairs, the mythic monologue claims divine origin (and the author is simply a recorder of some being from a celestial realm).
In this definition, such includes even conversations with the divine (hence the biblical religion). While superficially dialectic, because it denies a human dialogue partner (and instead a non-verifiable, abnormal, ‘other’), it is still ‘mythic’. Yet such can exceed myth through this continued dialogue. Kojeve sees Augustine as a Platonic dialectician who relapsed. But the result is the pseudo-dialectic of ‘meditation’. Augustine speaks with God, but it is really a mediated conversation in/through his soul. In Descartes, the Augustinian dialectic drops God out and simply turns the soul (or self) into the dialogue partner. It’s at this point, where Cartesian philosophy and its rationalist component resembles a secular religion, a mystification of man’s relationship to himself. And it makes sense (though Kojeve doesn’t make this claim in the chapter I’m summarizing) that natural-rationalism (which sets up Lockean empiricism) gave rise to Deism. Within the context of the Enlightenment, a nature-religion of Reason would offer the social glue to pull together the polity as the lowest-common denominator civil religion. Of course, like the ‘myth’ of classic religion, it struggled under the antithetical blow of the Socratic questioner. Thus, it again makes sense that it would breed a kind of vicious inquisitorial stance. One may see Robespierre’s “cult of reason” manifest this ethos: a trial and auto da fe of atheism giving rise to the goddess Reason, as the burning of heresy clears the way for the truth of the church.
While some may mistake Hegel’s idealism as a form of ‘meditation’ (and thus a form of crypto-theology), Kojeve rejects this reading. Instead, Hegel is doing nothing more than giving an account of philosophy. He is a historian of philosophy, someone witnessing dialectics on the world stage. Hence Kojeve quotes Hegel favorably when the latter says: “World history judges the world”. Hegel is the analyst of these debates, not a participant. Hence his absolute idealism is not an account to produce one more myth. If it were, it would flunk Hegel’s synthetic test. In other words, if Hegel were simply producing another ‘myth’, his account could be given an antithetical counterpoise, reigning the dialectical process all over again. Instead, Hegel’s absolute vision is from the end of events. When Hegel remarks that Athena’s owl only takes off at dusk, he is commenting that his task only takes place when the end has come. The end Hegel sees is commensurate with his judgement, at Jena, that in Napoleon he saw the world-spirit on horseback. What Hegel is saying is that in Napoleon (as a figure and symbolic synthesis of the Revolution) he saw the product of history’s end. Thus, Hegel’s account is simply to state the end of the process (at least, thus far). One cannot see further than the end without simply producing another ‘myth’ (which, again, would only participate in the dialectical process of philosophy). That is precisely not what Hegel is doing. Instead, the task of absolute idealism is, ironically, empirical.
It’s this reading of Hegel that inspires Kojeve’s “end of history” thesis. The battle between the US and the USSR is given a dialectical read: the thesis of capitalism met with the antithesis of communism. In Kojeve’s estimation, he believed the US would win through modification (the Keynesian liberal synthesis). But Kojeve goes further in his Outline of a Phenomenology of Right to explain how his own account, like Hegel, is an empirical verification of socio-historical dialectic. Law, as a phenomenon, takes place between three actors: A, B, and C. A acts, B resists A, and C (an impartial and disinterested ‘other’) is called upon to resolve the dispute. This definition (which Kojeve labors over to defend from various attacks) is what grounds the synthetic nature of republican citizenship. Kojeve sees a dialectical struggle between three phenomena: equality, equivalence, and equity. Equality is an aristocratic ethic, the idea that each gets the same share as the others. Equivalency, however, rejoins antithetically about a state of affairs where equality is deficient. Kojeve uses the example of food: equality says each person gets the same plate of food. Equivalency asks: what if someone is larger and needs more, or someone is hungrier? The result is the need to adjust results so that each gets the proportionate amount. But such thus denies the equality of the participants (one gets more than another ‘equivalent’ to his/her need). The synthetic resolution is equity: reinstate equality in a way where the disparate needs are done away with.
As I stated, equality is an aristocratic ethic, whereas Kojeve pegs equivalency as a liberal-bourgeois ethic. However, these social forms reflect a more basic social arrangement: the relationship between master and slave. In an aristocratic society, the master’s equality is based upon his fundamental unlikeness to the slave (who has no part in the division). Equivalency is to undo this equality through an abolition of the master-status. It is the slave ethic, manifest in the liberal theological idea that we’re all equally slaves viz. a statement like the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. In other words, God (or one could replace with a secularized theological concept like “Nature” or “the Market”) is the only master and all men are equal in their inequality as the slave. The instability in this concept is the struggle of disparity from the superficial claim that all are slaveless masters. Inequality rears its head as equivalency becomes the ethos. The synthetic solution is the ethic of the republican-citizen: equity is to engage in the social and political task to remove the disparities that would result in the slave need to reject the aristocratic fair share. I might modify how Kojeve analyzed these relations and the way these terms fit together (such as the “aristocratic” US South being a fount of liberalism viz. its greatest theorist, John C. Calhoun).
The relation of this theory to the End of History is that the crisis of the Revolution was the revolt of the slaves qua bourgeois third estate. The Terror was the radical instability of the bourgeois, having won the battle against the aristocrats-slaves, tore itself apart as slaveless masters. Napoleon’s victory was a revelation of the synthesis. Napoleon was neither another Robespierre with tact (in other words, he was not a bourgeois despotic anti-despot), nor was he a return to the old order (misreading his imperial crowning as a return to ancien regime monarchy). Rather, Napoleon represented the triumph of the citizen-ethic of the republic, where he initiated programs to establish and enforce the rule of law. One may quibble with the historical facts about Napoleon’s reign and rule, but perhaps the Hegelian assessment (viz. Kojeve) offers the best account of why its so hard to peg Napoleon as either rightist or leftist (in a way, he transcends them because he’s instantiating a different order of things). And I’m sure it’s in Napoleon and his Continental system that Kojeve, as a lifelong economic bureaucratc, saw deGaulle and the nascent EEC (which Kojeve helped design). It was a synthetic project to build the “Latin Empire”, a suprastate entity that was the only means to defend and sustain the citizen-republic (beyond city-states and nation-states). The Latinate Continental system was the alternative (not as an idea, but as an actual polity system) to American or Soviet domination.
Thus Kojeve, being a Hegelian of sorts, saw his task as this radical empiricist, a historian of philosophy, giving an account of things as they are. It’s from the historical task that Hegel, unlike the primitive philosopher, can hear the trees speak and sit in silence as he gazes the activity of the city. He doesn’t need to talk or debate anymore, but simply witness. It’s on the other side of a transhistorical process that Hegel bears witness to the absolute. Of course, Kojeve’s reading may be incorrect. But if it’s not, Hegel cannot be swatted away as a buffoonish quasi-totalitarian who lost himself in his own head. For the dialectic to end, for the absolute to be recognized as such, is to see man’s task transfigured. Kojeve sees this as man qua human returning to a kind of animal existence. I’m not exactly sure what this means. It seems to simply mean that man’s return to silence, a destination of historical dialectic, is to cease the human task. It means that the need of philosophy, the self-consciousness produced through the process of confrontation between thesis-antithesis, ceases. While something might seize up in the breast, and maybe part of the reason why someone like Scruton (according to a quote on Wikipedia) called Kojeve a “life-hating Russian at heart”, perhaps this panic is due to a liberal ethic of debate for debate’s sake. Kojeve doesn’t mean we’ll become dumb beasts, but that the distinctly human task of self-conscious dialectic becomes unnecessary. Instead, the posthistorical man can frolic in the goods of citizen civilization (perhaps what he means by men becoming “snobs”) with one another. I’m not really sure.
As a Christian, I find a number of these points worthy of reflection. Hegel must be taken seriously as a philosopher of history. I have mistaken Hegel as distinct post-Christian, and perhaps there’s some truth to that, but not in the way others have stated. Hegel is not trying to bring about a new myth (a new thesis touching the edge beyond his own empirical ability of recount the ages), and so any attempt to use him as a “system” would be a radical act of misunderstanding. Hegel is simply bearing witness to the “end’ (meaning its point), which is precisely what the Apostles do with Christ. They’re not trying to build a new system of thought. Christ is the Omega (Rev. 1:11; Rev. 22:13). He is the God’s last-speech act in these Last Days (Heb. 1:1-2). He is the Second (and final) Adam (1 Cor. 15:45-47). The difference here is, perhaps, that Christ is not simply the “end” but the “origin”, being both Alpha and Omega. Such an interpretation would be at odds at a strictly dialectical process, though Hegel sees history as the Absolute’s self-recognition. Thus, Eden appears at the End as the New Jerusalem. Christ reigns as the Crucified Lord. We may make a theological statement about God’s unchanging, but nevertheless God’s covenantal presence with us is fundamentally distinct at the end from the beginning. History, at the End, did matter. And thus, the Apostles possess a quasi-empirical quality about them. They are not exegeting in a radically allegorical fashion, but in a way where Israel’s history makes sense in the visage of Christ Jesus. The Pharisees couldn’t make sense of the sacred books because they didn’t know the One (the hermeneutical key) to whom they gestured (Jn. 5:39).
Thus in the Hegelian-Kojevean account of the End of History, Christians should be theoretically in agreement. There should be no manic anxiety of the classical liberal, who can’t imagine the conversation coming to an end. Such doesn’t end creativity but enables it upon the historically derived foundation. Liberalism as an ethos and ethic can’t stand (or understand) such a concept and it turns to slander. Perhaps that is why Hegel is constantly reviled and his project condemned as a failure (even as the mania of the bourgeois ethic of equivalency seems only to reproduce its own constant set of crises). Kojeve saw the USA and the USSR both undergoing the dynamics of this synthesis, with the former as right-Hegelian and the latter as left-Hegelian. But I digress. The point here is that the Christian sees a point of life beyond the struggle, where what we understand as “man” won’t be the same. The eschatological fulfillment, where the blessed will be one in faith and at peace in one Spirit, partaking of the divine nature and seeing an end to sin and death.
And yet the struggle is still ongoing. A Christian may take issue with the necessity of a synthetic process (though it’s a concept not unknown viz. reference to the Fall as felix culpa), but there remains a dialectical conflict. God speaks, Satan questions, man responds, God presses the question etc. The End is revealed in Christ, the final word, the Yes and Amen to all promises (2 Cor. 1:20). But the final word presupposes a series of words, and thus history. However, throughout Christian theology, one may appreciate from Kojeve’s Hegelian schema that the Apostolic faith returned to the ‘mythic’ (or at the very least, viz. Augustine, to a self-referential ‘meditation’). Historically, a devolutions corrupts the Christian liturgy from its apocalyptic sacramental rites to thaumaturgic pageantry. Christ ceased to the apocalyptic king to a mythicized Roman imperator. This isn’t to repeat a “Fall of the Church” narrative or repeating the Hellenizing thesis. But corruption and reifying mythification did happen, though perhaps not the same in all places and as intense. But there’s no denying that Christ seated at the Right Hand of Majesty became confused for some sort of mirrored heavenly capital. The emperor or pope (depending on the theoretical underpinnings, East or West) became the earthly vicar for Christ’s kingdom. Thus, like a Roman emperor (whether actually in Constantinople or as a ghost enthroned on its grave, per Hobbes about the papacy, in Rome) Christ had need of an imperial bureaucracy. Biblical doctrines of saints and angels morphed into a kind of heavenly patronage system. Contra not a few, this shift isn’t a return to paganism (or a paganizing) but Romanizing Christian doctrine. It was the assertion of a new philosophic thesis, wrapped in divinity as ‘myth’, that returned to govern the Empire.
A Christian can put the pieces together through using Kojeve’s Hegelian schema. The purpose of Christian theology, contrary to any other kind of theology, is to bear witness to the end. It’s not a monologue disguised as dialogue, or an internalized dialectic, per Kojeve. In fact, given how Hegel’s philosophy-as-history synthetic judgement became confused for a kind of myth of its own, you would think Kojeve could be somewhat self-aware about such a process happening to Christianity (perhaps he did make such a statement somewhere). Of course, the major difference between Kojeve and Christianity involves a recognition of a supra-mundane agent who acts through self-insertion. Thus, God exists beyond, yet our dealings with the Logos are strictly historical. In this way Christianity is different from Hegel, as the Absolute is not the whole itself, but someone else. It’s in this way that, I think, one may claim a Berkleian metaphysics in service to Christianity against an atheistic materialism. It’s a parallel system but that depends recognizes an ‘other’ that supports the whole, not the whole itself as self-supporting. The Logos and matter accomplish the same goal in each system, but the former makes sense of the historic reality of Christ and the Apostolic witness. Of course, I don’t hope to convince those who don’t already believe. But the argument (rather strong, I think) for Christianity depends upon empirical historical judgement (i.e. the four facts of the resurrection: Christ’s death, the burial, the empty tomb, and the appearances to the Apostles and others). Of course, it is a presuppositional question whether such is possible.
Whether or not one accepts all elements of Kojeve’s reading of Hegel, or his synthetic account of law in civilization, a Christian can benefit from this account. It certainly not only moves beyond certain liberal hang-ups and hyper-theological accounts (which make Christianity a debate partner with other forms of theology), but it helps to appreciate the finality of Christ. If Christ is not the End, as many functionally believe, then the apocalypse of Christianity is rejected and transformed into a cult in service to another project.
No comments:
Post a Comment