Alexandre Koyré and the Beginning of the End of History

by Alexander Aerts The idea of the “end of history” is commonly regarded as a statement on the foreclosure of any political alternatives for the future. Francis Fukuyama (in)famously stated in 1989, after the dissolution of real existing communism of the Soviet Union, that the end of history was upon us. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, liberal democracy and capitalism seemed to have triumphed over all other alternatives, making way for a world without contesting ideologies nor conflictual politics. In recent decades, this narrative has been challenged by proliferating wars, genocide and large-scale political contestation, which have led some to proclaim “the end of the end of history” in the twenty-first century. Russo-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève was the first to equate the idea of the end of history with the end of political contestation. He saw Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as driving history forward through bloody revolutions and wars. Political struggle thus played a paradoxical role in Kojève’s system, rendering history meaningful while promising to redeem the historical dialectic by eventually bringing politics as such to an end and making possible the realization of truthful knowledge. However, the idea of the end of history itself was not Kojève’s own. For that, he expressed his indebtedness to another Russo-French philosopher, his mentor and friend Alexandre Koyré. Regularly overlooked in popular literature on the end of history, Koyré first developed the idea in a course on Hegel delivered from 1932 to 1933. Reflecting on his attendance of this course, Kojève wrote in his introduction to The Concept, Time, and Discourse, “Koyré … spoke of Hegelian Time, and this was, as they say, a revelation for me” (1990, 31). Koyré emphasized that time—more specifically, human time or history—was the key to understanding Hegel’s work. Yet Koyré, believing the end of history to have already arrived and made Hegel’s knowledge possible, did not ask which forces could eventually resolve the historical contradictions that sent the dialectic of human time careening forwards. Koyré’s reading of Hegel through a temporal and historical lens made it possible for Kojève to transform the “end of history” into a political idea, namely the future end of political conflict. By returning to the intellectual sources of this debate between Koyré and Kojéve, we can recover its original, more foundational stakes: the question of what makes history meaningful. Though philosophers and historians working on French intellectual life during the interwar years have emphasized Kojève’s indebtedness to Koyré’s reading of Hegel, they have not yet elaborated on the way in which Koyré’s historical interpretation of Hegel developed into Kojève’s increasingly political conception of the “end of history.” Overall, investigation into Koyré’s early writings on Hegel have been limited, with both historians and philosophers foregrounding his better-known work on the history and philosophy of science. One of the few to take up the transformation of the idea of the end of history from Koyré to Kojève has been philosopher Bruce Baugh (2003, 26), who claims that, in the hands of Koyré, Hegel’s philosophy became essentially anthropological. Baugh rightly notes that Kojève critiqued Koyré for incorporating nature into the historical dialectic. For Kojève, nature had no history; history belonged exclusively to the sphere of human self-transcendence. On this basis, Baugh argues that Kojève had developed Hegel’s philosophy into a profoundly historical system. Yet Baugh’s interpretation overlooks the extent to which Koyré had already emphasized the centrality of human temporality, and thus of history. Significantly, however, Koyré did not specify the forces that drive the historical dialectic forwards; the real novelty of Kojève’s philosophy was his identification of political struggle as history’s constitutive principle, making it the centerpiece of Hegel’s philosophical system and self-understanding as a whole. *** This philosophical intervention by Koyré and later Kojève was part of a larger Hegel revival in interwar France initiated by the French philosopher Jean Wahl with The Unhappy Conscious in the Philosophy of Hegel (1929). This revival sought to bring Hegel back to earth, relating his philosophical system to human existence. In a report presented at a 1930 Hegel congress in The Hague, Koyré interpreted Wahl’s book as “an effort to recapture, behind and beneath the abstract formulas of the system, the life and blood that nourish it, and of which they are but pale and distant expressions” ([1930] 1971, 222). Wahl wanted, according to Koyré, to replace the older Hegel of the Science of Logic (1812–1816) with the more romantic Hegel of the Early Theological Writings (1907). Wahl read Hegel through the prism of the “unhappy consciousness.” Human existence, on this reading, was characterized by separation, contradiction, and ultimately unhappiness. According to Wahl, these contradictions drove philosophical thinking and produced the unhappy consciousness. In Wahl’s tragic reading of history, the contradictory nature of human existence did not admit of a resolution. Koyré was far less romantic. In a 1930 review of Wahl’s book, Koyré praised Wahl for injecting life into Hegel’s otherwise lifeless philosophical system, but his tone became increasingly critical as the review progressed. He posed the rhetorical question of whether “the romantic Hegel offers us something more than Hölderin or Novalis?” (142). Answering his own question in the negative, he concluded that the real Hegel “is the Logic, the eternal cyclical movement of thinking, the self-movement of the concept.” He criticized Wahl’s primarily tragic reading of human existence and history, suggesting instead the possibility of overcoming their contradiction. Whereas Wahl’s emphasis on contradiction sought to highlight the existential dimension of Hegel’s system of knowledge, Koyré questioned the imperative to “humanize Hegel at all costs” (142). For Koyré, it was precisely Hegel’s cold inhumanity that set him above all other philosophers. Because Hegel sublated—that is, in Hegelian terms, synthesized to achieve a higher truth—the dialectic, his philosophy raised the possibility of bringing the historical contradiction in thought to rest. The idée force of Koyré’s philosophy came not only from his reading of Hegel’s system of knowledge as a reflection on human time or history, but also his notion that the end of history was the (a)historical condition for true knowledge of history itself. For Koyré, the Hegelian“ spirit” was essentially historical and could only be developed in time, as he argued in his article “Hegel at Jena,” which he wrote in preparation for his 1932–33 course and then published in 1934. During Hegel’s residency in Jena (1801–1807), the subject of Koyré’s article, Hegel had worked on the so-called “Jena system,” comprising both a “logic” and a metaphysical section. This was an early attempt by Hegel to organize, with a systematic coherence that he would later call “Science,” the extension of the idea of reason in human experience. During these productive years, Hegel developed the foundation of his Phenomenology of Spirit, taking the first steps in developing his concept of Geist (spirit). In reading Hegel’s early work and by drawing on philosopher Victor Delbos’s temporal reading of Hegel, Koyré came to understand “Hegelian time” as essentially equivalent to Geist. His equation of the central Hegelian concept of spirit with time led Koyré to posit the development of Geist as occurring through human history. For Koyrè, historical time was a perpetual movement of seemingly never-ending negations. In “Hegel at Jena,” Koyré characterized time and spirit in terms of a quasi-existential restlessness. As twentieth-century Russian Hegelian thinkers such as Ivan Ilyin had maintained, “‘the now,’” wrote Koyré, “is essentially unstable, ungraspable, and perishable. This ‘now’ is never here. It transforms itself immediately into something else. It denies itself by itself and sublates itself by itself” (391). Restlessness, absence, and deferral became the foundational concepts for describing the Hegelian conception of time. Koyré described the writings of the young Hegel as “the atrocious suffering of tearing, isolation, opposition, [and] unresolved contradiction” (383). Koyré understood the preliminary structures of spiritual reality that Hegel drew up at Jena as the restless structures of the human spirit. In “Hegel at Jena,” Koyré observed that the German word for “present,” Gegenwart, already contains the notion of opposition, alterity, or contradiction. The “empty present” is thus inherently contradictory: it can become a higher truth only by realizing itself in the form of the future—that is, by sublating itself. Koyré argued that this temporal restlessness prevents philosophy from fully grasping historical, and thus human, reality in the present. He further wrote that “one cannot foresee the yet-to-come… The synthesis is unpredictable: one cannot construct it; one can only analyze it” (398). On this reading, philosophy will always come after the so-called historical fact and insufficiently grasp the now. The logical implication is that the philosophy of history can only become truthful when history ends. Koyré suggested that if the future, that which is not yet here, would disappear and human time would come to a close, then the Hegelian system of knowledge could realize itself. In Koyré’s view, this closure was not merely a possibility but an accomplished fact. In the last line of the article, Koyré cited Hegel’s well-known introduction to Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1815): “it is only with the falling of twilight that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings” (398). Koyré attributed to Hegel the conviction “that this essential condition was already realized, that history was indeed completed, and that it is precisely for this reason that he could and that he was able to accomplish it.” For Koyré, history had already ended, and Hegel’s philosophy served as an intellectual affirmation of this post-historical reality. In other words, Hegel could only have made his philosophical discoveries after history’s end. By making truthful knowledge conditional upon the arrival of post-history, Koyré was the first render the philosophy of history into the central feature of Hegel’s system of knowledge in the interwar years in France. *** Koyré first lectured on these ideas in an influential course that he delivered on Hegel from 1932 to 1933 at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) in Paris. In attendance were several intellectuals who would achieve prominence in the postwar era, including the philosopher Georges Bataille, the writer Raymond Queneau, and Kojève himself. Kojève’s notes from Koyré’s course at the EPHE include a simple equation that summarizes his temporal reading of Hegel: “Geist ist Zeit” (spirit is time). Kojève radicalized the insights that he had gleaned from Koyré’s seminars at the EPHE, claiming that the entirety of Hegel’s philosophy could be summarized by way of its identification of the (philosophical) concept with time. For Kojève, this meant that Hegel’s philosophy was dialectical because history itself developed through an intrinsically dialectical process. Kojève conceptualized philosophy as the revealed reality of the historical dialectic in a coherent and sensical discourse. He argued that the end of history would be recognized and conceptualized in a final system of thought propagated not by a philosopher, but a sage whose appearance in turn signaled the closure of philosophy—that is, negative thought. In response to the question of what renders history meaningful, Koyré merely gestured towards history’s existential contradiction. Kojève’s reading of the Phenomenology, as elaborated in his seminars and an article written for Mesures (1939), offered a more determinate and explicitly political answer. For Kojève, the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, a development that arose specifically from human social life, rendered history meaningful. In other words, the history of humanity was the history of bloody struggles for recognition between masters and slaves, and these revolutions and wars constituted the very substance of history’s meaning. The outcome of that political struggle left some to be recognized, the “masters,” and others to live in a temporary state of non-recognition, the “slaves.” Kojève concluded that the desire for recognition structured history. Whereas Koyré saw the end of history as already accomplished, at least intellectually speaking, Kojève’s philosophy of history turned the idea of the end of history into a political promise: the unrecognized “slaves” would eventually redeem this historical dialectic. For Kojève, the dissolution of political conflict was the paradoxical and necessary condition for the knowability of history. The absolute end of political action struck him as the sole condition for recognizing a lasting truth about that history. During the turbulent 1930s, Kojève had identified the philosophical idea of the end of history with the political project of actually existing socialism in the Soviet Union. In his idiosyncratic view, Stalin would eventually establish absolute recognition between masters and slaves and would therefore end all political conflict. He hoped that one day the idea of the end of history might become an (a)political reality. Returning to the genealogy of his idea via Koyré allows us to see that one can think through the end of history otherwise, using this hypothetical to interrogate what imparts meaning to human time. Alexander Aerts is a PhD student in the history department at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. He is currently working on a dissertation about Alexandre Kojève and the idea of the end of history in the twentieth century. His research interests include twentieth century French philosophy, literature critique and the history of European integration. His writing has appeared in Marx and Philosophy, Lava Revue, and Krisis. Edited by Zac Endter Featured image: Detail of Le Soir D’Jena. Édouard Detaille, circa late nineteenth century.