Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit
by Alexandre Kojève
In "Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit," Alexandre Kojève explores the interplay between human existence, action, and historical development through a Hegelian lens. Central to Kojève's analysis is the notion that humanity epitomizes a paradoxical "emptiness" that must negate Being to achieve self-realization. This negation is manifested through transformative actions,work and struggle,that define humanity’s essence as a process of Becoming within the broader context of History. Kojève argues that true knowledge arises not from passive contemplation of Being but through Desire, which compels individuals to engage with and shape their world. He critiques the bourgeois intellectual's detachment from active engagement, suggesting that this class represents a unique form of slavery to capital, devoid of genuine community or purpose. The book posits that religion and philosophy serve as ideological reflections of historical human actions, with absolute knowledge only attainable at history's culmination. Ultimately, Kojève presents history as a comedic narrative, underscoring its predetermined nature and the necessity for individuals to confront their mortality and the gravity of existence in order to realize their potential and achieve a meaningful life within the social fabric.
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Man must be an emptiness, a nothingness, which is not a pure nothingness (reines Nichts), but something that is to the extent that it annihilates Being, in order to realize itself at the expense of Being and to nihilate in being. Man is negating Action, which transforms given Being and, by transforming it, transforms itself. Man is what he is only to the extent that he becomes what he is; his true Being (Sein) is Becoming (Werden), Time, History; and he becomes, he is History only in and by Action that negates the given, the Action of Fighting and of Work — of the Work that finally produces the table on which Hegel writes his Phenomenology, and of the Fight that is finally that Battle at Jena whose sounds he hearts while writing the Phenomenology. And that is why, in answering the “What am I?” Hegel had to take account of both that table and those sounds.
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....
According to Hegel -- to use the Marxist terminology -- Religion is only an ideological superstructure that is born and exists solely in relation to a real substructure. This substructure, which supports both religion and philosophy, is nothing but the totality of human actions realized during the course of universal history, that history in and by which man has created a series of specifically human worlds, essentially different from the natural world. It is these social worlds that are reflected in the religious and philosophical ideologies, and therefore-- to come to the point at once -- absolute knowledge, which reveals the totality of Being, can be realized only at the end of history, in the last world created by man.
The bourgeois intellectual neither fights nor works.
Puede decirse que el hombre es una enfermedad mortal del animal.You can tell that man is a mortal disease of the animal
Man who does not manage to satisfy himself through Action in and for the World in which he lives flees from this World and takes refuge in his abstract intelligence...
