Freeing Hegel from Kojève

History, for Hegel, is a progressive process, leading toward the realization of true freedom. Hegel attempted to unite a philosophy of mind, politics, and logic with a philosophy of history. Because of his unabashed embrace of a teleological history, many later interpreters of Hegel have viewed him as the philosopher of the “end of history” and interpreted his system as an argument for history compelling humanity towards a universal homogenous state. What exactly this state entailed was a source of great controversy among many Hegelians – was it to be the rigid authoritarianism of Prussia as posited by the Right Hegelians, the realization of global Communism as envisioned by the Left Hegelians, or the ultimate triumph of liberalism, as declared by Fukuyama?

It is prudent to ask, however, whether Hegel himself ever truly declared the end of history as a certain political reality, or whether Hegel’s system merely is being used to legitimize certain political ideologies through a vision of secular eschatology. Some Hegelians, notably Slavoj Žižek, have interpreted Hegel’s end of history idea as a relativistic concept. In their view, the end of history is merely a means to a societally and temporally relative historical understanding. Other Hegelians, notably Alexandre Kojève, Karl Marx, and Francis Fukuyama, have developed Hegel’s thought into a political teleology, positing the end of history as the achievement of a certain political reality.

However, each of these interpretations is incomplete. Hegel did indeed posit an objective end of history but disavowed the possibility of knowledge of the future. More specifically, a complete understanding of Hegel’s system of world history that maintains this emphasis requires an understanding of Hegelian history as not one, but two teleologies: the History of Awareness, and the History of Realization.

The Progression of History

Hegel’s narrative of history is the story of the progression of “Spirit’s consciousness of its freedom and of the actualization produced by such consciousness.” In Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel divides world history into three spatial-temporal realms: the Oriental world, the Classical world of the Greeks and Romans, and the Germanic world. History, and thus freedom, moves from east to west, achieving its culmination in Europe.

According to Hegel’s account of world history, freedom is the most limited in the Oriental world. Sovereignty in China is wholly vested in the figure of the Emperor. There is no higher sovereignty above him – not even God (this is what separates the Oriental world from later autocratic polities based on Abrahamic religion). The entirety of the Oriental world (which, for Hegel includes India, Persia, and Egypt) has no knowledge of spirit (geist) and no awareness of human freedom. Due to their ignorance of human freedom, “the Orientals…are not themselves free.” Oriental sovereignty is structured so that society is aware of only one person – the sovereign himself – as free. However, in a sense then, even the sovereign is not truly free – the structure of sovereignty here precludes the realization of true freedom – and the sovereign is a mere “despot, not a free human being.”

Although the Greco-Roman world symbolizes a marked advancement of freedom for Hegel, the Greeks had a crude and undeveloped conception of spirit. Although the Greeks did have a conception of freedom through individuality (which was more than could be said for the Oriental world), freedom was “immanent [and] submerged in materiality.” Hegel’s conception of freedom, however, is transcendent, and thus the Greeks are still at a primitive stage of Hegelian development. In the political realm, the presence of oracles, slavery, and the structure of Greek democracy, render only some people free.

Hegel contrasts Greek individualism with Roman universalism. However, the universality of Rome was directed solely at the attainment of power, not an understanding of universal human freedom. Therefore, although Hegel grants that “the consciousness of freedom first awoke among the Greeks,” this freedom was not universal, as only some people were understood to be free.

The Germanic world is the culmination of the “progression of spirit,” since it is the first to realize universal human freedom and understand human nature as the “freedom of spirit.” World history, for Hegel, begins in Asia and ends in Western and Central Europe. However, while Hegel is certainly Eurocentric, his history is not merely European chauvinism. Germany is placed at the culmination of the world-historical process because it is the birthplace of Lutheran Protestantism. Christianity, especially Lutheranism, occupies a privileged place in Hegel’s world history, not simply because of his own prejudices, but because Hegel believed Christianity was the only religion to reveal the truth of spirit through the doctrine of the Trinity. Protestantism removed the barrier of the church between man and God and thus was the culmination of the true religion.

However, even though his claims can be reconstructed as far more than mere Eurocentric Hegel’s world history remains infamously vague. Although he posits the realization of human freedom as the end of history, Hegel does not clearly define his conception of freedom in his lectures on the philosophy of world history, nor does he truly explain what propels history forwards.

Masters and Slaves in World History

For many interpreters of Hegel, the end of history was the achievement of a universal state that in some way represented the fulfillment of the world-historical process. The primary philosopher who developed this view was Alexandre Kojève.

Kojève read Hegel’s philosophy of history through the lens of the Master-Slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Kojève’s Hegel is a fundamentally Hobbesian philosopher, who views history as progressing from the warlike state of nature towards the security of a universal absolutist state. However, while Hobbes focuses on the human desire for peace, Kojève views the desire for recognition as the fundamental engine of history. What is innate to human nature is not the desire for security, nor the desire for power, but the desire for recognition.

For Kojève, the state of nature is the same as that of Hobbes: a war of all against all. For man to prove his self-consciousness, he must risk his life in a fight to the death. However, as with Hegel, the victor cannot kill the loser, as doing so would negate consciousness and the victor would not achieve the recognition he desires. Therefore, the victor must spare the loser’s life. This is the impetus for the historical process. A hierarchy then emerges between the victor (the Master) and the loser (the Slave). The Slave recognizes the Master, yet this recognition is ultimately insufficient and “without value” since the Master does not recognize the Slave. The paradox, as stated by Kojève in his lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit, is that the Master will “be satisfied only by recognition from whom he recognizes as worthy of recognizing him.” Although the fight in the state of nature was begun by the desire for recognition, the Master has not achieved this. He has achieved dominance over the Slave, but since he views the Slave as a thing and not a full human being worthy of recognition, he “will never be satisfied.”

Although the Master is at an “existential impasse,” the Slave is not. Through his own labor, the Slave can dominate nature itself. Slaves are the true historical actors, not the Masters, and the future and history lie with them. The Slave, through labor, can “transcend the given [and go] beyond himself.” Recall that  Hegel thinks world history is the progression of  “Spirit’s consciousness of its freedom and of the actualization produced by such consciousness.” Kojève develops this by claiming that “through work Consciousness comes into itself…it is by work, and only by work that man realizes himself objectively as man.”

The desire for recognition and the dialectical relationship between Master and Slave is then the engine of history. Kojève end of history is the synthesis of the Master-Slave dialectic through the establishment of a “universal and homogeneous” state. This is why Kojeve’s Hegel is Hobbesian; the goal of history is the establishment of the “Leviathan” state. The state is “universal” in that it achieves mutual recognition and thus fulfills the innate thymotic desire of humankind. In fact, the state itself is the vehicle to achieve this recognition that fulfills the historical process. Furthermore, the state is “homogenous” in that it is “free from internal contradictions.” At the end of history, the desires of humankind that set history in motion have been fulfilled; there is no longer a need for history. The achievement of freedom is freedom from contradiction.

Marx, although significantly more materialistic than Kojève, maintains the basic principles of Kojève’s philosophy of history – namely that the engine of history is the dialectical contradiction between Master and Slave, and that the end of history arrives with the establishment of a state that eliminates that contradiction. Although Marx preceded Kojève it is more helpful to view Marx’s Hegel as “Kojèvean” than vice versa. Marx’s philosophy of history divides history into socio-economic states, each of which leads to the next through their inherent contradictions (dialectical materialism). Communism is the one state, universal and homogeneous, which is free from contradiction. However, the interpreters of Hegel which subscribe to Kojève’s reading disagree on what form the universal and homogeneous state will take. Perhaps the most notable modern Kojève is Francis Fukuyama, who famously claimed that the end of history posited by Kojève was liberalism. Only in the liberal state could mutual recognition be achieved. 

However, Hegel did not claim that the end of history was mutual recognition through the establishment of a universal and homogenous state. Although Hegel did indeed posit an end of history, the end of history as a universal and homogenous state is a significant divergence from Hegel’s own thought. The problem with Kojève’s reading of Hegel (as well as Marx’s, Fukuyama’s, and others) is a misunderstanding of what freedom and contradiction are at the end of history.

Freedom through Contradiction or Freedom from Contradiction?

Hegel develops his thought on contradiction and consciousness in the Science of Logic. In the first book of the Science of Logic, Hegel presents a dialectic of Being. The thesis, Being, is “pure being – without any further determination.” The lack of “further determination” is critical for the nature of being, since if Being entailed any distinct further determination, then Being would not be pure. Therefore, Being is “pure indeterminateness and emptiness…[it] is in fact nothing.” However, the antithesis, Nothing, is also Being. The very conception of “nothing” is, in fact, something. Because the conception of anything entails meaning, Nothing is “altogether the same as what pure Being is.”

What Hegel reveals in this dialectic is that anything always entails and implicates its opposite negation in its own identity. Although Being and Nothing are conceived of as two separate and diametrically opposed ideas, they in fact implicate each other in themselves and are indistinguishable from each other. This element of contradiction is innate to everything, including and especially self-consciousness. Self-consciousness must posit an Other. I cannot be aware of myself without knowing what is not myself. However, the very identity of I implicates not-I in itself. I and the Other are the same. My own identity is composed of the positive (I) and the negative (not I, the Other). The two contradictory ideas are one and the same. Therefore, self-consciousness is the awareness of this innate contradiction of Being.

The awareness of contradiction is “Spirit’s consciousness of its freedom.” The entire purpose of spirit is to gain an awareness of Being. When the individual spirit has achieved self-consciousness, it is “at home not with another but with itself, with its essence, not with something contingent but rather in absolute freedom. This, accordingly, is the final end of world history.” In other words, the end of history, the realization of human freedom, is the awareness of contradiction inherent in self-consciousness.

Hegel is explicit about the link between the Science of Logic and human freedom in his commentary on freedom and spirit in his lectures on the philosophy of world history. Human spirit is human freedom for Hegel, but it is revealed through “pure thought itself, and thus the idea [of freedom] must be considered in terms of logic [emphasis added].” What Hegel means by “spirit” is self-consciousness, which, as stated in the Science of Logic and reiterated in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, necessarily entails contradiction of Being. Freedom must be achieved through the rational apprehension of self-consciousness, an awareness of contradiction that eliminates the authorities imposed upon oneself.

With the understanding that for Hegel, freedom was found in contradiction, his reverence for Christianity is not merely religious or cultural prejudice. Only in Christianity is the contradiction of Being applied to the highest universal: God. Monotheism is greater than polytheism, since while polytheism depicts particular attributes of God, monotheism represents the pure universal (“the One”). Likewise, Christianity is greater than Judaism, since while Judaism has grasped the oneness of God, God has not yet revealed himself in human form, and thus the Jewish religion is not immanent and world-historical.

Hegel posits a world-historical dialectic between the Oriental world, which represents spirit as infinite, and the Roman world, which represents spirit as finite. Christ, both fully human and fully God, is the synthesis of this dialectic. Hegel presents a novel defense of Chalcedonian Christianity: Christ must be two separate, opposing natures, in one person. But this is not the traditional apologetic of Chalcedonian Christianity in which the dual nature of Christ is necessary for humanity’s transcendent salvation. Rather, the dual nature of Christ is necessary for the self-conscious awareness of human freedom through contradiction. In Christ, human nature and divine nature, the infinite and the finite are united. Humans consider themselves finite beings but become aware of their “eternity within [themselves]” through Christ. The crucifixion is the pivotal moment, for the contradiction of Being in God is revealed: God, eternal, all-powerful, and immortal, suffers humiliation and mortal death on the cross.

Christianity is the religion of freedom not only metaphysically, but also in terms of socio-political reality. Christianity’s defense of human dignity prohibits slavery, as slavery would violate the natural right of all humans guaranteed by their being the imago Dei. Christianity also establishes a universal system of ethics, not dependent on cultural customs, as was the case in the Greek world. Christian ethics compels the establishment of certain political systems, notably precluding Oriental despotism, Greek democracy, or Roman aristocracy.

However, the end of history does not arrive with the Crucifixion of Christ, the Edict of Thessalonica, or the coronation of Charlemagne, but rather with Luther’s Reformation. The Reformation removed the mediating authority of the Church and its priesthood. Whereas Catholicism was still corrupted by authority and spectacle, Protestantism, with its focus on a direct individual relationship with the divine, is the religion of freedom.

History, conceived of as the progression of “Spirit’s consciousness of its freedom” reaches its end when humanity becomes self-consciously aware of the contradiction of Being and thus is aware of absolute internal freedom. For Hegel, that end is reached with Lutheran Germany, and Hegel’s own philosophy – now that Hegel and Luther have revealed human freedom, the rational human can become aware of their own freedom.

History 2.0

Hegel’s end of history is fundamentally different from the end of history as posited by Kojève, Marx, Fukuyama, and others. While the latter group viewed the end of history as the end of political struggle, Hegel viewed the end of history as the culmination of an internal process of self-discovery. The project of Hegel’s philosophy of world history is reading that internal process into the external world. This conflation of internal awareness with external social-political history is the root of the confusion. Hegel’s end of history did not mean or imply the end of political struggle. In fact, Hegel hinted that the future lay with the political development of the United States.

Hegel is not unconcerned with political development; on the contrary, he was incredibly invested in statism. The state is the vehicle for the realization of human freedom, the “actualization” of Spirit. For Hegel, Prussia was the most advanced state – no other state in world history had surpassed it. But it is unknown whether another state would surpass it. Hegel was not in the business of political idealism. While Prussia may be the greatest state thus far it is conceivable but unknowable that a future state would be greater still. Furthermore, while the Germanic world may be aware of freedom, Hegel does not claim that the entire world is. Freedom has not yet been completely universalized across the Earth. Just because all of humanity has the potential to become self-conscious of human freedom does not mean that they are yet.

Hegel’s world history then contains two separate but interconnected progressions of history. The first is the History of Awareness: the progression of “Spirit’s consciousness of its freedom.” The second is the History of Realization: the history of political development. When Hegel declares the end of history, he declares the end of the History of Awareness. Luther and Hegel are the at the end of history in this sense, since now human spirit is truly conscious of its freedom. But this end of history is not the end of the second history, that of the political realization of freedom.

Therefore, Kojève, Marx, Fukuyama, and all the Hegelians who posit a political end of history should not be read as mere interpreters of Hegel’s world history, but as continuators of it. The end of the History of Awareness can be viewed as opening the door for the conscious History of Realization. Once humanity is self-conscious of its own freedom, it is conscious of the question of how to realize that freedom through the state. What socio-political structure is the best to realize and universalize human freedom?

At the end of the History of Awareness, humanity becomes conscious of the History of Realization. Yet this post-historical history leads to a dilemma of human subjectivity. Of course, all of humanity desires a peaceful utopian polity. After all, Kojève’s universal and homogeneous state posited as the fulfillment of the History of Realization. However, different people, societies, and cultures each conceptualize vastly divergent visions of that state (a similar dilemma of subjectivity is famously presented in chapter 12 Book XIX of City of God). It is enticing to view the entire concept of the end of history (of realization) as inherently relative. Given human diversity, there is no single end of history, but in fact many histories – a view attractive to theorists who would analyze the world in civilization blocks, such as Spengler, Huntington, or Wallerstein.

It appears that Hegel and Kojève embrace this view. Kojève presents a theory of historical time in which “the movement is engendered in the Future and goes toward the Present by way of the Past: Future → Past → Present.” History is understood by first envisioning an idealized future, then constructing a historical teleology leading towards that end, and finally situating oneself in a historicist present along that teleology. Since Hegel himself stated that wisdom could only be ascertained after the fact, then no present can be understood ahistorically. The present must be understood only in relation to the past. We cannot make sense of history unless we are at the end of history. But of course, we always attempt to make sense of history. Therefore, the present must always be posited as an end of history if history is to be understood.

However, just as the proclamation of the end of history in Hegel’s time and society was not mere chauvinism or bias, it is also not mere relativistic historicism. Spirit had truly become self-consciously aware of freedom in the Germanic world. Hegel did not proclaim the end of history to understand history, but rather because it actually was the end of the History of Awareness. Political struggle – the History of Realization – continues.

After Hegel, his students and later philosophers (the political teleologists) took his system in different directions, each envisioning a political structure as the end of history. What is the true end of the History of Realization? Is it Prussian statism, international communism, the European Union, American capitalist liberalism, Russian Christo-Fascism, or something else entirely?

This diversity of Hegelian political thought is not a bug, but rather a feature of the History of Realization after the end of the History of Awareness. Once spirit has become conscious of human freedom, so too does humanity become conscious of the History of Realization. Whereas the political development up to the Protestant German world of Hegel was unconscious, conscious political struggle appears after the end of the History of Awareness. Conscious political development and the crisis of subjectivity may make political struggle far more violent than history before the end of the History of Awareness, but this should be interpreted as a positive development; it is a natural consequence, even the truest evidence of Hegelian freedom.

Does A Universal History Exist?

It is apparent that there are two major interpretations of the end of history concept in Hegelian thought. The first, subscribed to by Marx, Fukuyama, Kojève, and many others – including some critics of Hegel such as Eric Voegelin – is that there is a knowable universal history that reaches its end through the establishment of a universal and homogeneous political system which eliminates contradiction.

The second view, embraced by Žižek, is that of a radically historicist relative end of history. Every present is the end of history for our epoch, which is relative both temporally and socio-culturally. There is no universal history. What Hegel meant when he proclaimed the end of history was that history up to his present had ended which enabled him to understand history, but history may end tomorrow in a completely different way, thus enabling a completely different understanding of history.

However, both interpretations miss the key to Hegel’s philosophy of history. Hegel’s universal world history was not one but two world-historical processes: the History of Awareness of freedom, and the History of Realization of freedom. With this distinction in mind, the relativistic view of the end of history is incomplete. Although we can only view the past through the lens of the present, the end of history proclaimed by Hegel was indeed a true end of history, not merely a tool for historical understanding. Hegel proclaimed the end to an objective universal History of Awareness, the end of which opens the door to subjectivity in the History of Realization. The mistake of Žižek and other radically historicist interpretations is to conflate the current relativism of the History of Realization with all of history. Hegel never denied an objective and universal History of Realization either, but to him, its end was unknowable since humanity had not yet reached it. 

The political teleologists also oversimplify Hegel’s system. They do not give credence to Hegel’s end of history as freedom through contradiction. Instead, they assume that the end of history must be freedom from contradiction. Although they posit a political culmination as the fulfillment of Hegel’s world history, if the end of the History of Awareness had not been reached, they could not conceptualize a universal state to realize freedom. Hegel is often unfortunately reduced to a precursor of these political teleologists, especially Marx.

The basic distinction between the historicists and the political teleologists is on the existence and knowability of a universal history. A purely historicist account posits that there is no universal history at all. The political teleologists not only proclaim the existence of a universal history but also the knowability of its end. This is a significant deviation from Hegel. Hegel. however, did believe in an objective universal history, but that the future was unknowable, that the end of the History of Realization remains a mystery.

The Predicament of Humanity

We are indeed part of the universal history described by Hegel. In one crucial sense, however, we are living in a post-historical age: we have become conscious of our freedom. Hegel’s universal world history is, in fact, two historical teleologies: the History of Awareness and the History of Realization. One of these histories, the History of Awareness, is knowable because we have reached its end. This is Hegel’s project in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. But the other, the History of Realization, is not over, and thus unknowable. Political struggle is not over, but it is impossible to posit any political system as a not-yet-realized end of history.

With no way of knowing what the end of the History of Realization will be, a self-conscious humanity is doomed to violent political contestation. The current era, after the end of the History of Awareness yet before the end of the History of Realization, is a particularly distressing situation. Humanity’s awareness of freedom makes the lack of freedom’s universal realization all the more painful. How will freedom be realized? What political system will emerge at the end of history? Perhaps this project will require a new way of thinking about politics: not as the elimination of contradiction, but the realization of it.

Print