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From Hegel to Marx via Heidegger

Philosophy of the Social Sciences 1983 13: 247 DOI: 10.1177/004839318301300209 The online version of this article can be found at: http://pos.sagepub.com/content/13/2/247.citation

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247

From
H. S.

Hegel

to Marx via
College, York University

1 Heidegger

HARRIS,

Glendon

When I first embarked on the study of Hegels Phenomenology more than thirty years ago, there was little help to be expected from any of the secondary literature in English, save for the two brilliantly insightful chapters in Royces Lectures on Modem Idealism. The English followers of Hegel had beaten his Logic to death (the mumm~ed corpse can still be seen in Staces Philosophy of

Hegel), but they never devoted much attention to the roots of that encyclopaedic tree which they pleached on their own walls to suit their own social convictions, and to meet their personal need for an intellectually defensible replacement for the Thirty Nine Articles. It was to French books that the new generation had to turn for help in the rediscovery of a living Hegel after the dodecade of Hitler and Hiroshima. Our lecturers directed us to Hyppolite and to Jean Wahl-or at last mine did. But Hyppolite was as hard to understand as Hegel himself-perhaps
harder!-and Wahl tantalized us with views about texts still almost inaccessible in the original German. The discovery of Koj~ves Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, which I made for myself, was therefore an important breakthrough. For here was a commentary which, like Royce, attempted to tell us what Hegels s first big book was about; and unlike Royce, it did so in the finest detail, for it was based mainly on the notes taken in a seminar which ploughed steadily through the text over a period of six and a half years. (Everyone who sets out either to study or to expound the Phenomenology must look back on that seven-year flight of the Owl in the dusk with envy). That Kojeve was a biassed interpreter was obvious enough. He was a Marxist, and his key to the book had been identified by Marx himself. Human history as they saw it was about the forms of struggle, and the forms of work; it is a &dquo;discussion&dquo; that is carried out not with verbal arguments, but with clubs and swords or cannon on the one hand, and with sickles and hammers or machines on the other (p. 185). So the crucial moment in the Phenomenology had to be the emergence of labour as a social institution (serfdom) from the experience of struggle. That this key would not unlock all the doors in Hegels book was equally obvious. Indeed Kojeve admitted it himself. For although the title of his seminar (The religious philosophy of Hegel) implicitly claims that his key can do anything that Jean Wahls alternative emphasis on the Unhappy Consciousness could do, and do it better, Kojeve openly declares that he cannot fathom Hegels philosophy of nature-which is obviously at issue in chapter V of the Phenomenology (on Reasan). The philosophy of nature, he says, is an error on Hegels part... the real (metaphysical) and &dquo;phenomenal&dquo; Dialectic of Nature exists only in Hegels (&dquo;Schellingian&dquo;) imagination (p. 217). But it was agreed on all sides in those days that the philosophy of nature was an error. So what mattered was Koj6ves Feuerbachian reading of the Phenomenology as a radical anthropology. The way that he focussed attention
1 A.

Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (assembled by Raymond Queneau, edited by Alan Bloom, and translated by James H. Nichols, Jr.). Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980. Pp. xiv + 287. $7.95 paper. Page references in the text are to this edition.

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on the achievement recognition, as constitutive of distinctively human existence, still seems to me to be right, even though, as I shall argue later, his emphasis on opposition, and on exclusive options (particularly that of theism or atheism) springs from the unmediated dualist character of his basic ontology, and from the employment of an intuitionist logic in which the distinctively Hegelian middle term is always absent. This not only makes Koj6ve an essentially polemical writer who invites a polemical response; it also makes the appropriately crushing response easy to find. The fact that Hegel was not Feuerbach, and that the absolute Spirit evidently cannot be simply reduced to the historic interactions of atomically finite mortals, becomes more important to the orthodox interpreter than the equally evident fact (which Koj6ve triumphantly establishes) that the Phenomenology anticipates everything that Feuerbach was later to maintain against the hosts of the orthodox. This combat blindness is a pity. It is an even greater pity that, when Koj6ves work was finally abridged to half its length for publication in an English version, it was the half that contained this permanently important achievement that was eliminated. But it is scarcely surprising. For the positive achievement is mainly contained in notes which offer a detailed analysis and interpretation of Hegels text, paragraph by paragraph, and often sentence by sentence. These notes do not make easy reading, and no honest translation could make them outwardly attractive to the reader.

(Only Koj6ves appendix on the structure of the text survives here, thanks to Kenley and Christa Dove.) Already in his compilers note to the original publication, Raymond Queneau was instructing the lazy reader on how to skip all the hard labour that the six year seminar was organized for; and the English editor, Alan Bloom, has very largely followed the advice he gave. Queneau recommended the Introduction, the resume of the first four seminars which Kojeve gave at the inception of the fifth (1937/38), and the first two appendices. Bloom accepted all of these elements except Appendix 2 (The idea of death in the philosophy of Hegel) which contains the full text of Kojeves first two lectures for the first seminar (1933/34). This omission is easy to understand, since the acceptance of Queneaus own substitute for an introduction was mandatory. Queneaus compilation began with the translation and running commentary on the Lordship and Bondage chapter which Kojve himself published in Mesures in January 1939. This is rightly regarded as the foundation stone of his whole approach. But the omission of his opening position in 1933 was a bad mistake nonetheless; and the repetition of it in the Cornell reprint of 1980 is all the more lamentable because since the abridged translation was first published (1969) an English version of these lectures has appeared (by J. J. Carpino in Interpretation, The Hague, 1974). (Arrangements could surely have been made to incorporate this?) Instead of this original introduction Bloom included another lengthy independent cxeuosuW% Koj6ve (On Eternity, Time and the Concept) with the beginning and the end of the final seminar (on Absolute knowledge) into which Koj6ve injected it. Queneau was able to give us a stenographic record of this last seminar, so it is rather a pity that it could not have been translated as a whole. But only the final lecture of the seminar is really a bleeding hunk torn from its living context; and that we certainly had to have, for it contains an afterthought added by Koj6ve to the second edition which illuminates his conception of the end of history in the most startling way. (Just when this second edition was published I am not sure; but it was certainly not in 1947, as claimed in the publication data given at the front of our translation. It was the frrst edition that appeared in 1947; and Koj6ves addition refers to his visit to Japan in 1948).

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What we have in the English version therefore is not the introduction which the seminar provided for the actual reading of Hegel, but rather an introduction to Koj6ves own comprehension of his time on the model of what he saw as Hegels achievement in comprehending the world of the French Revolution and Napoleon. We must still regret what we do not have; for although there are now quite a string of books to aid the English student of the Phenomenology, none of them has yet fully absorbed, or done proper justice to, what Koj6ve saw and rendered truly in his commentary; and this abridgement is likely to make that situation worse, rather than better, by parading all the reasons why the orthodox can rightfully set Koj6ves work aside. But we must not mind that, but do justice, as well as we can to what we are offered. What is Koj6ves philosophy worth, in and of itself? The answer must I think be, something, but not much. Certainly not as much as Alan Bloom claims when he says that Kojve is the most thoughtful, the most learned, the most profound of those Marxists who, dissatisfied with the thinness of Marxs account of the human and metaphysical grounds of his teaching, turned to Hegel as the truly philosophic source of that teaching (p. viii). This claim, though not quite so obviously nonsensical as the opening hyperbole, Queneaus collection of Koj6ves thoughts about Hegel constitutes one of the few important philosophical books of the twentieth century (p. vii), must be firmly rejected. That Koj6ve was more thoughtful and learned than most people (including Marxists) is beyond dispute. Whether he was more so than any other Marxist of his generation, I cannot tell-though I doubt it, for Marx himself set an example of thoughtful studiousness that has inspired many. But the answer does not matter, since Koj6ves supposed profoundity comes from a source which, as I see it, corrupted his Marxism. I should perhaps state clearly at this point, that although I am not a Marxist, I am a democratic socialist. Thus I do share the essentially hopeful or progressive orientation of the Marxists towards the human future. This is what was corrupted by Koj6ves wisdom. (To rank him with Bloch or Lukacs as a Marxist is therefore almost blasphemous). According to Koj6ve the age of philosophy as search ended, and the age of Hegelian absolute knowledge or wisdom began, when Hegel comprehended Napoleon. That Hegel believed this in 1806, and that he still believed it in 1816, cannot be denied. The epigraphs that Queneau put on his edition-which are preserved in our abridgement-prove it. (I assume that Koj6ve himself suggested the epigraphs precisely for this reason). Hegels belief, when he wrote the Phenomenology was that man had come to perfect self-consciousness, that the history of mans struggle toward the comprehension of his nature and of his place in the world was over, in the sense that the formal context and method for the proper interpretation of all human beliefs and endeavours was established. The Kantian dialectic of Pure Reason was finally overcome. On this basis, Hegel could proceed, even in the dark times of the Restoration, to give an essentially forward-looking analysis of human society and the century that came to grief on the banks of the Marne and the Somme confirmed Hegels analysis of what Napoleons conquest meant-the inevitability of nationally representative constitutional government. But between 1915 and 1945 the world of Napoleon perished, and a new world of East and West (with Napoleonic Europe crushed, battered and divided in the middle) has now emerged. The destruction and alienation that Napoleons Europe brought upon itself, left Koj6ve a Marxist without hope. As a Marxist he believed in advance through conflict and work; as a phenomenologist he could see that social conflict and the evolution of worktechnology has brought the world to a blind impasse. The idea that history could end with a return to Nature, which was optimism for the young Marx in 1844 (or

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for William Morris half a century later) could only appear as the self loss of Nirvana to an intensely sophisticated self-consciousness of total war and of world industry; but the alternative of Japanization which occurred to Kqjeve after the war was, if anything, worse. If this is all that can be expected from the Hegelian comprehension of human history, we may as well abandon wisdom (whether as a pursuit or as an achievement) and devote ourselves to literature. We shall learn more about animalization and Japanization from Animal Farm and 1984 than Kojeve can ever tell us. But this is non what either Hegel or Marx expected. How, therefore, did Kojeve manage to reduce them to this? The answer is simple. He accepted the nominalist deformation of Hegels Logic that Marx had imposed in order to make Hegels philosophy an instrument of social progress. Kojves ontology is a dualist one. There is a real world which is all particulars (i.e., in proper Hegelian terminology, singulars); and an ideal world which is all universals. The human individual is a unity of these two opposites; and he exists in the full sense when he knows that he is this unity. For knowledge is the only mode in which universals can exist at all. Thus the realization of human individuality is the climax of existence. This sounds like the left Hegelians and like Marx, but it is not in harmony with what either of them meant. What Hegel meant by the particular (the specified universal which is realized in organic nature) has disappeared as irrelevant, and the very project of a philosophy of nature is denounced as a mistake; and what both Marx and Hegel meant by the realization of human individuality (the establishment of a rational form of society based formally on the Kantian principle of respect for humanity and materially on the Christian ideal of charity) is reduced to the momentary flicker of the singular rational consciousness facing its own death. Even human existence, the only real existence, is not the existence of a species (a genuine Hegelian particular or middle term) in Koj6ves theory. Kojves self-consciousness is not the concrete universal of Hegel and Marx but the Existenz of Heidegger. The dualism of Marx was not really a betrayal of Hegels idealism (or of the absoluteness of human self-knowledge/precisely because his materialism remained historical. Mar~c did not want to undo Kants Copernican revolution. He accepted the Hegelian view that primary reality is the continuum of experience in which man interprets nature as what properly belongs to him. What results from this is Science; and Science itself is a social enterprise, which takes different shapes according to the different relations that man establishes between himself and his experiential environment, and especially between himself and his fellows. Marx deprecated the adoption of an idealist (or comprehensive) logic because any such logic is practically appropriate for the defence of the human status quo. He adopted ontological materialism because the acceptance of Nature as what is imposes upon logic the instrumental status that reason must have in any project for changing the status quo. Kojeves careful reading of Hegel obliged him to restore to Hegels ideal of wisdom the status of Aristotelian happiness (activity of soul in accordance with the virtue that is best and most complete). Self-knowledge, as he saw, does not have a merely instrumental status. But because of Kojeves commitment to Marxist realism Heideggers doctrine of Existenz represented the only available access for him, to this completeness. By taking that way, he betrayed not only his Marxian, but also his Hegelian, heritage. For there is no doubt that Hegel would agree with Marx, if his only other option were Blooms pessimistic verdict that Kojves authoritative interpretation of Hegel forces us to a more somber and more radical historicism which rejects reason (p. xii). Nor is there
even

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any doubt that Marx would prefer Hegels idealism, if it be true, as Kojve himself maintains, that Heidegger is the first to undertake a complete atheistic philosophy (p. 259n, my italics) and also the first to have posed the problem of a dual ontology (p. 215n, my italics). For Marx wanted neither this kind of atheism, nor this kind of problematic dualism. For Bloom, Kojves book is one of the few important books of the century. It is plain that he holds this view because for him Koj6ves book is the decisive reductio ad absurdum of historicism. I can only say that rather than accept that view, I would prefer to say that Heidegger got what he deserved from Carnap, and Marx what he deserved from Popper. (But I do not have to accept such stark alternatives, precisely because Hegel has not yet had the treatment that he deserves from anybody. When we do understand Hegel, we shall be able to see the equal folly of all of these critical

judgements.)

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