Kojeve Quotes

Human life is a comedy-one must play it seriously.

The man who works recognizes his own product in the world that has actually been transformed by his work. He recognizes himself in it, he sees his own human reality in it he discovers and reveals to others the objective reality of his humanity of the originally abstract and purely subjective idea he has of himself

Indeed, we all know that the man who attentively contemplates a thing, who wants to see it as it is without changing anything, is 'absorbed,' so to speak, by this contemplation -- i.e., by this thing. He forgets himself, he thinks only about the thing being contemplates; he thinks neither about his contemplation, nor -- and even less -- about himself, his "I," his Selbst. The more he is conscious of the thing, the less he is conscious of himself. He may perhaps talk about the thing, but he will never talk about himself; in his discourse, the word 'I' will not occur. For this word to appear, something other than purely passive contemplation, which only reveals Being, must also be present. And this other thing, according to Hegel, is Desire, Begierde....

Philosophy in the strict and classical sense is quest for the eternal order or for the eternal cause or causes of all things. It presupposes then that there is an eternal and unchangeable order within which History takes place and which is not in any way affected by History. It presupposes in other words that any "realm of freedom" is not more than a dependent province within the "the realm of necessity." It presupposes, in the words of Kojeve, that "Being is essentially immutable in itself and eternally identical with itself." This presupposition is not self-evident. Kojeve rejects it in favor of view that "Being creates itself in the course of History," or that the highest being is Society and History, or that eternity is nothing but the totality of historical, i.e. finite time.

The world government now being sought therefore has changed its nature…it is no longer thought of as the result or expression of real universal equality… Rather, it is presented as a means of establishing justice at the level of the entire globe, aimed especially against states that oppress their peoples. …Our contemporaries no longer seek a “socially homogenous universal state,” as Kojeve put it…, but rather a morally homogenous state. …world government clearly is possible, indeed has begun to be realized through international criminal justice …What more noble aim can there be than to battle and defeat Evil wherever it may be found on earth? Why therefore, should one oppose this beautiful generous idea, that of cosmopolitan justice? It should be opposed because it undermines politics and more generally, human diversity

Human life is a comedy-one must play it seriously--Alexandre Kojeve

There is a formal feature that remains the same in both versions of “the end”: the sense of an infinite dragging-on. Fukuyama’s world is one in which nothing great or new happens, life just goes on with local ameliorations (the world described decades ago by Kojeve as the world of snobbery); and the apocalypse, too, is always almost here, as we drag on in a kind of endless limbo, the end of time experienced as the impossibility of end(ing). We are used to such a situation in art (which has been dying for over a century) and philosophy (which has from Hegel onward been renouncing itself, overcoming itself). In both cases, death leads to extraordinary productivity and the proliferation of new forms, as if the truth of death is a weird immortality.

Can we advance the hypothesis that, beyond the critical stage, the heroic stage (which is still that of metaphysics), there is an ironic stage of technology, an ironic stage of history, an ironic stage of value, etc.? This would free us from the Heideggerian view of technology as the effectuation, and the last stage, of metaphysics; it would free us from all retrospective nostalgia for being, giving us, rather, a gigantic objective irony, a superior intuition of the illusoriness of all this process - which would not be far from the radical post-historical snobbery Alexandre Kojeve spoke of. At the heart of this artificial reality, this Virtual Reality, this irony is perhaps all we have left of the original illusion, which at least preserves us from any temptation one day to possess the truth.