Just Curious

Dear Mr. Kojevnikov!

I've just started reading Alexandre Kojeve's "Introduction to the Reading of Hegel," and I must say it's a very readable commentary and introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit. It's almost like traveling in a gold-mine (the same could be said of reading Kant), where one could find just about everything Marx (and eventually every modern-day leftie and neocon) would eventually build their theories and (dare I say) worldview on.

Master-slave dialectics; the end of history; the ultimate abolition of the master-slave "contradiction" and the synthesis of the master and the slave into the "last man"; the ultimate universal and homogenous state (see the religious overtone here? One utopia under God...); how the contradiction between master and slave is the propelling force that moves history foreward; how it is the slave whose trascendental activity in transforming nature has built "human worlds" after "human worlds," etc.: they're all here. Most importantly, as Kojeve pointed out, Hegel was among the first who recognized the truth that the nature of man cannot be understood without knowledge of history, for man is a microcosm of history and social relations. Is such a reading of Hegelianism accurate? Or is Kojeve reading Marx into Hegel? Either way, Hegel was the first who gave humanist meaning to history and his disciple Marx was the first who made history into a science.

Where were I? Hmm...Kojeve is a very intelligent man. Both he and Leo Strauss had this sneaky way of presenting their own ideas through writing commentaries on other people. So when one reads their debate, one doesn't always know if it were a debate between the two giants or one between the, uh, classicals (Strauss?) and the moderns (Kojeve?)...

posted by James Chang @ 9:21 AM