• t0m
    319
    I found a great article on Kojeve. Since Kojeve is not much discussed, I provide this for background:

    In other words, the very being of this I will be becoming, and the universal form of this being will not be space, but time. Therefore, its continuation in existence will signify for this I: "not to be what it is (as static and given being, as natural being, as 'innate character') and to be (that is, to become) what it is not." Thus, this I will be its own product: it will be (in the future) what it has become by negation (in the present) of what it was (in the past), this negation being accomplished with a view to what it will become. In its very being this I is intentional becoming, deliberate evolution, conscious and voluntary progress; it is the act of transcending the given that is given to it and that it itself is. — Kojeve



    That's "existential" Kojeve. But the famous lectures iare just as much about the telos of history. He expected a universal, homogeneous, egalitarian state of worker-soldier-philosophers. He (more than I realized) thought the end of philosophy along with the end of history.


    For Kojève, the necessity of revolutionary violence follows from the ineffectiveness of persuasive speech. Already in his analysis of Bayle’s Encyclopedia (to which he indirectly refers in this letter to Strauss), Kojève demonstrates that the philosopher cannot overcome the plurality of particular opinions by means of persuasive speech alone – by the speech that pretends to be ‘true’ speech. [17] Indeed, throughout its history philosophy tried to operate by persuasion. It measured its effectiveness by the influence that it exercised on listeners or readers. But there is no evidence that is evident enough to compel readers to abandon their own opinions and begin to accept ‘evident speech’ as ‘true speech’. The hope that motivated philosophy for centuries – the hope to produce such an intense light of evidence that it would be impossible for anybody to reject this evidence, to turn one’s back to this light, to remain unpersuaded – this hope demonstrated itself as futile and ruinous for philosophy. As a result philosophy degenerated into literature; philosophy began to reproduce the plurality of opinions instead of overcoming it.

    The end of history is the end of persuasive speech; or, rather, the end of belief in the ability of speech to persuade. But if the philosopher abandons his hope to persuade, would it mean that he would also abandon any hope of influencing the course of the world? Kojève’s answer is: ‘no’....

    ...
    If the philosophical project is the search for the common truth that would be able to unite humankind, this search is, indeed, abandoned in our time. Today, everyone insists on his or her own opinion and reacts to any attempt to change this opinion as propaganda, indoctrination and totalitarian oppression. The end of persuasive speech that Kojève diagnosed before World War II is in our time a reality that is obvious to everyone. But that does not mean that the unity of humankind as such became impossible. The principle of the new post-historical, post-philosophical politics is the principle of inclusion. Here Kojève was right. To be truly inclusive the form of the state – and all other state-like institutions – should be empty. That means that the realization of the universal state presupposes the process of the progressive emptying of its form. Here, again, art is a good illustration. A typical global art exhibition of our time is an exhibition that includes all the possible art forms and attitudes, cultural and ethnic identities, sexual orientations, and so on. It has nothing to do with the time of the historical avant-garde as artists tried to define the universal art forms that would correspond to their own time. Today, the form of an art exhibition tends to be an empty form that can contain any artistic method and attitude. Meanwhile, individual artworks are also produced as ‘open’ ones, which means not having any specific message and open to all possible interpretations.

    The same can be said about the political activism of our time. As a rule it is directed towards inclusion in the existing system of political representation of the people, who are currently excluded from this system; or towards better and more general access to information; or towards better access to economic opportunities, and so on. Thus, today’s political activists operate de facto in the name of the universal and all-inclusive state that is empty and not based on any commonly shared values or truths. In this respect, they continue the post-historical politics that Kojève started before World War II: the project of opposing the world as it is, not in the name of an Idea, but rather in the name of the state as universal, all-inclusive, empty form, or in the name of Romantic Bureaucracy. Kojève died from a heart attack during a meeting of the European Commission in 1968. It was, of course, a truly Romantic death. Kojève was the Arthur Rimbaud of modern bureaucracy: a philosophical writer who consciously became a martyr of the post-historical bureaucratic order.
    — Groys

    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.


    https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/dossiers/romantic-bureaucracy-2
  • T Clark
    13.8k
    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?
  • t0m
    319


    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."
  • Wayfarer
    22.3k
    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.)
  • t0m
    319

    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.
  • T Clark
    13.8k
    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.
  • T Clark
    13.8k


    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.
  • t0m
    319


    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.
  • t0m
    319


    Thanks for the kind words, my friend. I look forward to your thoughts.
  • T Clark
    13.8k
    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.
  • T Clark
    13.8k
    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.
  • T Clark
    13.8k
    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.
  • t0m
    319


    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.
  • T Clark
    13.8k


    God will not have his will made manifest by cowards.
  • t0m
    319


    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.)
  • T Clark
    13.8k
    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.
  • Agustino
    11.2k
    Kojevet0m
    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.
  • MysticMonist
    227

    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.
  • t0m
    319


    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.
  • t0m
    319


    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.
  • Agustino
    11.2k
    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 democracyt0m
    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.
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