Education
University of Heidelberg.
University of Heidelberg.
1930-1939, taught at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris.
Kojève was bom Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov into a wealthy and prominent Russian family. He was arrested after the Russian Revolution and, despite leaving prison a convinced communist, departed Russia in 1920. After completing a dissertation under Jaspers at Heidelberg, on the Russian religious philosopher Solov’ev, he moved to Paris and eventually took over Koyre’s course on Hegel’s philosophy of religion at the École Pratique, teaching it from 1933 until 1939.
Kojève's seiminars on Hegel during the 1930s proved a landmark in twentiethcentury French philosophy: among the parcipants were Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille. André Breton, Jacques Lacan. Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Eric Weil.
Kojève spent his postwar years attempting to actualize his philosophy of history as a government adviser in the finance ministry. He continued writing philosophical works, though most remained unpublished in his lifetime.
Kojeve initially shared with Solov’ev a desire to unite Western and Eastern philosophy, but came to reject Solov’ev’s total-unity and any other transhistorical measure of human action. Reworking Hegel in the light of Marx’s class conflict and Heidegger’s encounter with death, Kojeve substituted for Hegelian monism a dualism of nature and human history, and identified Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as the dynamic of the latter.
The dialectic manifested itself in bloody battle, leading first to the reign of the masters. It ended in the triumph of the slaves, through the establishment of the idea of equality during the French Revolution, and the emergence of the modern universal and homogeneous state, in which the fundamental human desire for recognition is satisfied. For Kojeve in his militant mode, in contrast with his later ironic stance towards the bestiality or snobbery of the post-historical condition of universal satisfaction, the ‘end of history’ is nigh, though philosophers must continue to press for its actualization.
For Kojeve, the end of history necessarily coincides with the end of philosophy.
The publication of Le Concept, le temps et le discours, along with his Essai d’une histoire raisonnee de le philosophic paienne, makes fully available his unfinished account of the progress of philosophy towards its culmination in Hegelian wisdom.