I primarily post this in order to share, but I do think the limits of persuasive speech and anything else in the article would make for a good discussion. — t0m

Sorry, I read the text you posted twice. One and a half times. I can't figure out what it's trying to say. Is it that persuasive speech doesn't work, so let's go out and overthrow society? I don't think so, but I can't tell. You are good at explaining things. Can you lay this out a bit clearer using your own words?

Yes.

Kojeve thought the philosopher should become a tyrant. He was fascinated by Stalin and Mao. I don't think that way myself, but I do think the "limits of persuasion" are highly significant.

Aside from his politics, Kojeve is one of my favorites. His lectures on Hegel are profound. I don't agree with every point, but his vision of Hegel is pure intellectual delight.

Returning to the limits of persuasion, I tend to view the plurality of worldviews or philosophies as personal adaptions to specific environments. Philosophies are as unique as snowflakes or fingerprints. In my view, all philosophies are "ultimately" groundless. I mean that unquestioned and perhaps unconscious assumptions lie at their base. This does not mean that I regard them all as equal.

Instead I suggest that personality "is" a hierarchical vision, albeit often implicitly. Those who understand superiority or virtue in terms of knowledge or self-knowledge may seek to make this hierarchy explicit to themselves. Others just live it. Of course I am especially interested in this kind of self-consciousness, and one of the things I love about Kojeve was his vision of philosophy as a sort of religion of self-consciousness.

*Note that the "limits of persuasion" are related to the fact that we live in a world where the "grownups" do not agree. So it takes some grit to stand confidently in the cognitive dissonance of this pluralism. A philosopher does more than that. He projects his own personality as a truth or law. That's fascinating. To be really interesting is to be original, and in this sense philosophers are non-fiction "poets." Therefore they are arguably driven by Bloom's anxiety of influence. I think this connects to existentialism's authenticity. It may even be the "truth" of that authenticity --the guts to create oneself. But all this is just my "nonfiction" "poetry."

Incidentally by way of footnote, Kojeve was considered an influential intellectual and had a strong following in the salons of Paris, however it eventually came out that he was actually a high-ranking KGB operative, a fact which was only revealed long after his death (although this claim, made by Le Monde, is disputed.)

I find it believable that he was a spy. In that case, he was a highly positioned spy within the French government. He's a fascinating character, a neo-Hegelian spook trying to install the philosopher-king. He was willing to get his hands dirty. I'm not a revolutionary type myself, but I respect that he (apparently) put his money where his mouth was.

Returning to the limits of persuasion, I tend to view the plurality of worldviews or philosophies as personal adaptions to specific environments. Philosophies are as unique as snowflakes or fingerprints. In my view, all philosophies are "ultimately" groundless. I mean that unquestioned and perhaps unconscious assumptions lie at their base. This does not mean that I regard them all as equal. — t0m

I'll accept personal adaptions to environments, if by which you mean that the persons mind has as much a part as the environment. My philosophies are very much personal - a reflection of who I am and how I think. I don't think they are really unique - we're all talking about the same world. They are not groundless - some are more useful than others, at least in some circumstances.

I was right - you did make things much clearer, for me at least, than the original post. You write really well. I need to think about it before I respond.

Just to be clear, what I mean by groundless is not the equal "reasonableness" of beliefs. What I have in mind is that authenticity is a risky venture. Heidegger (who has great moments in my view) talked about the "they" that "one" is for the most part. We all emerge from the "they." What "one" does is, for instance, to reason in a certain way. Or "one" understands and worships God in a certain way. Our initial grounds are inherited from the "they," from our culture. So to emerge as an individual is to be "groundless" with respect to this "they" and this inherited culture. If we aren't groundless in this sense, then we aren't significantly individual. We are just going through the permutations.

There's nothing wrong with that. One might ask: "what's so great about being individual?" My answer would be that certain social roles prioritize exactly this. An unoriginal poet is a failure. That's why I read existentialism's authenticity as the anxiety of influence. Because Heidegger and Sartre were philosophers, they were deeply familiar with such anxiety, with the threat of the shame of being unoriginal and therefore failures in terms of their fundamental pose. They projected this rare problem outward as a universal problem. Most people are (seems to me) happy to be virtuous in the traditional way. They don't understand virtue in terms of the modification of virtue itself. Great philosophers tend to reinvent philosophy itself. If they change our understanding of rationality, then they change what philosophers understand to be virtue.

Thanks for the kind words, my friend. I look forward to your thoughts.

Thanks for the kind words, my friend. I look forward to your thoughts. — t0m

You got two compliments within half an hour of each other. That's a whole year's worth - You don't get any more for a while.

Just to be clear, what I mean by groundless is not the equal "reasonableness" of beliefs. What I have in mind is that authenticity is a risky venture. Heidegger (who has great moments in my view) talked about the "they" that "one" is for the most part. We all emerge from the "they." What "one" does is, for instance, to reason in a certain way. Or "one" understands and worships God in a certain way. Our initial grounds are inherited from the "they," from our culture. So to emerge as an individual is to be "groundless" with respect to this "they" and this inherited culture. If we aren't groundless in this sense, then we aren't significantly individual. We are just going through the permutations. — t0m

I don't think this contradicts what you say - As I said, I come from a family of engineers. My father, uncle, father's father, both my brothers are or were engineers. That's not a coincidence. We think like engineers. My three children are not engineers, but they think like one. We were born this way. I watched my children from the first minute. They were who they are before the (external) environment had a chance to affect them.

So it takes some grit to stand confidently in the cognitive dissonance of this pluralism. A philosopher does more than that. He projects his own personality as a truth or law. That's fascinating. To be really interesting is to be original, and in this sense philosophers are non-fiction "poets." — t0m

Again you send me off to my favorite writing:

"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost — and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages."

Self-reliance. Emerson. Love it, love it.

I love Emerson, too. "They set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought." I suppose that I've been seduced by thought for many years now.

Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

Every man is a new method.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but though his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

— Emerson

That last quote reminds me of Heidegger's authenticity. We are thrown into a heritage. We don't start from nothing. So we must go forward by going back. Instead of idle dreaming we have to toil at the actual given, play the cards we were actually dealt.

God will not have his will made manifest by cowards.

Indeed. I remember the struggle to embrace my "thrown-ness." We are always given these parents, this face, this situation (class, gender, race) --as terribly unique in their synthesis as a snowflake or a fingerprint. An unripe personality wastes time resenting and evading this actual "raw material." In that sense they flee from their "existence," their "jutting out" from the inherited theyness. They hide behind ready-made masks, even the ready-made mask of authenticity itself -- in-authentically understood as fixed in some dead man's language.

I have been writing & speaking what were once called novelties, for twenty five or thirty years, & have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. I delight in driving them from me. What could I do, if they came to me? — they would interrupt and encumber me. This is my boast that I have no school & no follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did not create independence.

You must read Plato. But you must hold him at arm's length and say, 'Plato, you have delighted and edified mankind for two thousand years. What have you to say to me?' — Emerson

I think this is one interpretation of "eating the bread of Christ." To know truly and deeply is to assimilate, to make the inheritance one's own. To "speak from the I" is not to speak from the "alienated" position of the non-eaten sage or prophet but rather from one's center, which was indeed formed from this heritage but ideally transcends while including it. One of the things this means for me is that attachment to any particular jargon is an inferior or unripe approach. So I'm delighted to see Emerson in Heidegger, for instance. As I see it, any jargon is dead until it is digested to the point that it can be paraphrased (becomes jargon-independent.)

You must read Plato. But you must hold him at arm's length and say, 'Plato, you have delighted and edified mankind for two thousand years. What have you to say to me?' — Emerson

I took this quote and PMed it to MysticMonist. He is undertaking an assault on the fortress of Plato and I thought he might find it helpful.

Kojeve — t0m

My problem with Kojeve, much like Hegel, is that they are both largely responsible for the collapse of order in Western civilization and the return of barbarism in one form or another. Both create a politics that authorizes the use of force - makes it legitimate and necessary in the progress of consciousness and self-consciousness. To them, the 20th century with all its wars and violence was absolutely necessary.

It's evident from the very basic conceptions - of desire, of freedom, etc.

For Kojève, the necessity of revolutionary violence follows from the ineffectiveness of persuasive speech. — Groys

For example this. What could be more incriminating? It is clear that they advocate the use of force, so long as force is used for truth - but in that very process, truth becomes untruth. Persuasive speech isn't ineffective due to a fault of its own or due to the times - it's ineffective because people are free - free to disagree.

Indeed, throughout its history philosophy tried to operate by persuasion. It measured its effectiveness by the influence that it exercised on listeners or readers. — Groys

Sure but the underlying point here should be that philosophy cannot be effective. Goodness and Truth cannot be effective except in their very expulsion and victimhood and failure.

The principle of the new post-historical, post-philosophical politics is the principle of inclusion. — Groys

The principle of inclusion fails for the very same reason that desire itself fails. Namely it turns back on itself and ends up being a very restrictive form of totalitarianism. Nothing excludes as much as or as well as inclusion.

Thanks for this thread, really interesting.
Thanks for T Clark for pointing it out to me.

I'm currently slogging thru the Republic, so it's a fitting discussion.
I really love Plato's division of the state in to Rulers, Guardians, Craftsmen. Does Kojeve talk about this all in just a literal political sense? I think that's how most people read the Republic. Yet Plato himself says that it is allegory to finding justice/virtue in a large and easier to see form of a hypothetical state. I'm only on book 3 of 10, so I'll have to wait how he then relates this to the Individual. I suspect he says, or if he doesn't one can say, that this is a more true as allegory than as literal political theory. However this may just be my biased interest in personal virtue more than political theory.
Where I think Plato is going is that the Ruler is our rational soul, the guardian is our will or ego that fulfills or neglects our duty to follow the light of the Ruler, and the craftsmen or passions of the body which while useful at times should not be left in charge. In a way this is simmilar to Freud's Ego, Superego and Id.
Does Kojeve go in this direction at all or is he mostly concerned with political theory? Even on the surface I think it's a fun parralels that in our search for meaning and virtue it's become quite clear that persuasion or coaxing of our baser natures isn't working. We can't bribe or accommodate ourselves or others into being good. We need to take control and excerise tyranny over our own selves if we are to get anywhere.

Kojeve's famous lectures on Hegel are not at all only political. Kojeve is an "existentialized" Hegel. He takes the concepts of existential time ("thrown projection") and being-towards-death from Heidegger and blends them with what he finds most important in Hegel. The translation is beautiful, too. It's a special book. It's been in my top 5 philosophy texts for many years now.

Here's a sample of one of the more far our or difficult passages:

The concrete Real (of which we speak) is both the Real revealed by a discourse and Discourse revealing a real. And the Hegelian experience is related neither to the Real nor to Discourse taken separately, but to their indissoluble unity. And since it is itself a revealing Discourse, it is itself an aspect of the concrete Real which it describes. It therefore brings in nothing from outside, and the thought or the discourse which is born from it is not a reflection on the Real: the Real itself is what reflects itself or is reflected in the discourse or as thought. In particular, if the thought and the discourse of the Hegelian Scientist or the Wise Man are dialectical, it is only because they faithfully reflect the “dialectical movement” of the Real of which they are a part and which they experience adequately by giving themselves to it without any preconceived method. — Kojeve

I agree completely about our need to tyrannize over ourselves. For me the basic or the deepest theme of philosophy is always who we think we should be. All action and speech more or less explicitly reveals this constantly, even if we haven't clarified it to ourselves. Indeed, we might only clarify this ourselves because we already think we should be the type of people who can account for ourselves. To engage in philosophy is to have already partially answered this question. It is already to say that it is good to be able to give reasons.

This is how Kojeve sees the philosopher. He is on the path to being able to give a complete and satisfying account of who he is (which will include his world). The wise man (the ideal) is the possessor of this complete account. The wise man is the completed or transcended philosopher. Philosophy is dialectical. Wisdom just describes or is this completed-in-time dialect. Kojeve understands Hegel to have accomplished this. This is wild and arrogant, of course, and Kojeve is a "grand" philosopher. He was not a professor. He "jokingly" called himself a "god." As you might imagine, the feel of the book is like good Nietzsche. It's a storm or a sunrise.

I share your concerns about that side of Kojeve. I'm also a fan of Sartre and Heidegger without being a fan of their politics. I am (far more than most) a self-consciously apolitical thinker. I think about politics, but my goal is to understand rather than shape the world. Correction: I want to shape the world, but I find that "local" action on my own life is far more efficient. The world as a whole is not something I wear on my shoulder. If I were to project this goal of understanding as opposed to fixing the world as a whole as a universal human duty, then I would be lapsing right back into politics. I would be prescribing rather than understanding.

That said, politics is essentially violence. Its sublimated form involves using persuasive speech to motivate voters to steer the state as the instrument for this violence. So representative democracy is violent, too. Indeed, political discourse is on such a low level that I don't feel particularly sentimental about the word democracy. As Sam Johnson said in so many words, it's not necessarily better to be eaten by 50 rats as opposed to a single lion. As I see it, the world is a collision of wills. We might say that civilization is the manifestation of this collision in terms of rhetoric rather than violence. The civilized man asks questions first, and shoots later.

I share your concerns about that side of Kojeve. — t0m

This is a good essay on Hegel (and Kojeve).

I don't feel particularly sentimental about the word democracy — t0m

Well yeah, everyone around here knows I'm not the biggest fan of democracy either :P

We might say that civilization the manifestation of this collision in terms of sophistry or rhetoric with a minimum of violence. — t0m

You might like to look into René Girard about that.