Timothy W. Burns and Bryan-Paul Frost, eds.: Philosophy, History, and Tyranny: Reexamining the Debate between Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève. Albany: State University Press of New York, 2016.
Looking at his colleagues on the faculty of the University of Chicago and elsewhere in academia in the aftermath of the Second World War, refugee scholar Leo Strauss raised an embarrassing question: How was it that political scientists had failed to recognize tyranny when they saw it arise during the years between the world wars? Most immediately, he observed, Max Weber’s insistence that social scientists separate ‘facts’ from ‘values’ prevented these impressively-trained academics from identifying what anyone should want to know first of all about any ruler, namely, does this ruler take it as his right and even his duty to kill and imprison law-abiding citizens? To study political regimes as if they are bacteria in a petri dish isn’t really science; it is a professional deformation. Genuine understanding of political life would need to come from somewhere other than social science as conceived by Strauss’s contemporaries. Famously, he looked far behind them, to the political philosophers of Greek antiquity, as better guides to understanding politics than even the most celebrated ‘hard-nosed realists’ among ‘the moderns’: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx.
Today, as the living memory of Nazism dies with the generation that saw it, and after the collapse of Nazism’s great rival in tyranny, the Soviet Union, the need to identify tyranny, and to distinguish it from other forms of one-man rule—constitutional mo0narchy, absolute monarchy, military dictatorship and the like—remains with us. The contributors to this volume address a debate that took place between Strauss and the Paris-based émigré philosopher Alexandre Kojève, and admirer not merely of tyranny but of Stalinism, whose lectures on Hegel in the years before the war had influenced a generation of French intellectuals. Although some of them (most notably Raymond Aron) rejected the arguments for the necessity of statism and tyranny in advancing ‘History,’ others (Maurice Merleau-Ponty perhaps most vehemently) adopted and even radicalized what they heard from the Master.
What is tyranny? When we hear tyrants, and even ordinary politicians in democracies invoke ‘historical progress’ or ‘change’ as their slogans, what are they really talking about?
To understand tyranny in the modern world, Strauss engaged in a sly but serious provocation: He commended study of a long-forgotten short dialogue written by Xenophon—then as now hardly a staple of university syllabi, even in ‘Classics’ departments, let alone in social-science classrooms. Xenophon’s Hiero, subtitled On Tyranny, recounts an imaginary dialogue between the eponymous Syracusan tyrant and the poet Simonides of Cleos, a rival of Pindar whose practice of demanding money for his poems and whose reputation for wisdom made him into a sort of proto-Sophistic wise man in the eyes of later generations. In 1948 Strauss published a translation of the dialogue along with his own detailed and subtle interpretation; more than a straightforward exegesis, Strauss’s essay raised the issue of the relation between ancient or ‘classical’ and modern tyranny. He sent the book to his friend Kojève, who agreed to review it, and also agreed to have the dialogue, Strauss’s commentary, his review, and Strauss’s rejoinder published in a new edition, which appeared in 1954.
Xenophon’s Simonides opens the dialogue by asking Hiero how the tyrannical life and private life differ in terms of pleasures and pains—Hiero having followed both of these ways of life, whereas Simonides has never lived as a tyrant. Frequently (and perhaps rhetorically) swearing by Zeus, Hiero maintains that his physical pleasures are now weaker than they were when he was a private man because they are satiated by easy and repeated gratification. As for the gentler pleasures, the tyrant’s life is a lonely one; in loving he never knows if his love is truly returned, and he can trust no one, not even his family. A tyrant must fear the decent and brave, the wise (presumably including Simonides), and the just. At the central point of the dialogue, Hiero avers that even killing one’s suspected enemies cannot relieve the tyrant’s condition. “When, because of their fear, they do away with such men, who is left for them to use except the unjust, the incontinent, and the slavish?” Far from being capable of helping his friends and mastering his enemies, the tyrant finds that his friends fear him and his enemies are too numerous to master. But if he killed them all, he would have no one left to rule.
No stranger to rhetoric himself, Simnonides comes to the rescue of this poor tyrant in distress. Hiero, he intones, I know how you can rule and still be loved. First (and in this the ‘classical’ thinker anticipates Machiavelli) reward farmers, importers, and inventors a person who benefit the polis. Command your mercenaries to guard not only your own person but all your subjects. Finally, spend your money for the public good. “If you prove superior to your friends in beneficence, your enemies will be utterly unable to resist you” and, “while being happy, you will not be envied for being happy.” On that cheery note the dialogue ends; the tyrant rewards the poet with silence. Historians do tell us that Hiero did not have him killed.
In Strauss’s reading, the Hiero provides modern thinkers with a window into the thought of the classical philosophers on the now-misunderstood but crucial problem of tyranny, and on political life generally. Behind the fact-value distinction of Max Weber lies not simply an approach to social science but a philosophical doctrine, the doctrine or family of doctrines Strauss calls “historicism.” For all his talk about ‘ideals,’ Weber assumed that ideals are culturally determined; cultures arise, grow, then wither; that is to say, they are fundamentally ‘historical’—beings transformed in the course of time. While academic historians understand the term ‘historicism’ to mean simply to ‘contextualize’ the actions, thoughts, and persons of the past, showing how contemporary events relate to one another, Strauss offers a philosophic definition. Historicism in this sense means that “the foundations of human thought are laid by specific experiences which are not, as matter of principal, coeval with human thought as such”; every human thought is ‘relative to’ the historical time-frame in which it is conceived, and it has no necessary validity beyond that time-frame.
The moral and political result of historicist thinking proved catastrophic in the generation immediately following Weber’s for while the ancient Greeks in fact identified and described tyranny, in the eyes of Strauss’s contemporaries that definition had little or no relevance to our own time and place. Similarly, while those Greeks in fact made certain value judgements about tyranny as so defined, their values were not our values. We can have little or nothing to learn from Plato, Aristotle, or Xenophon, even if our antiquarians may enjoy learning about them.
Assuming that the classical description and judgment of tyranny no longer had anything to teach us; assuming that the very notion of a ‘value-laden’ political science couldn’t be scientific at all because ‘values’ lie outside the boundaries of the knowable, and endure as mere sentimental reflections of the factual conditions of a given time and place; inclined to suppose that tyranny itself need no longer concern them, because humanity had moved on, progressing beyond such a thing, twentieth-century historicists failed adequately to assess such men as Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. More these new tyrants formed ambitions well beyond those of someone like Hiero or even Alexander the Great; armed with historicist doctrines, the new tyrants sought a “perpetual and universal tyranny” over not only human actions but human thoughts. Historicism itself advances this “collectivization of thought” because it enables tyrants to claim that their rule will enact the most ‘progressive,’ the most ‘advanced’ ideas of this historical time-frame.
To put this in terms of the history of political philosophy, Plato’s Socrates maintains that a philosopher can ascend from the convention opinions of his polis and begin to understand the nature (including the human nature) obscured by those opinions. The way to do this is through dialectic or the clash of opinions sorted out by reasoning—that is, thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction. As Socrates repeatedly shows, conventional opinions rationally examined will turn up many incoherencies; although dialectical conversations may embarrass and even infuriate non-philosophers who cherish their opinions, they enable the philosopher to progress toward a clearer and more accurate understanding of the natural order or cosmos. By contrast, historicists locate dialectic not in conversations among individuals engaged in rational discussion but in the collisions of masses of people—social classes, nations, even civilizations—struggling for dominance over time. This reconceived dialectic lends itself precisely to the “collectivization” of thought seen in modern tyrannies.
Strauss argues that in order to learn from the classics we will need to re-learn how to learn from them. Strauss subjects Xenophon’s Hiero to intense and detailed scrutiny with a view not to understanding it as an expression of its ‘time,’ relativizing it in relation to a putative ‘march of History,’ but rather to understanding it on its own terms. He intends to teach his readers how to read a philosophic dialogue as its author intended it to be read. In addition to improving our strictly ‘historical’ understanding of the classics (how, he asks, can we claim to understand the past unless we see what the people who lived then were trying to do?), in addition to helping us to identify tyranny when we see it, whenever it arises, study of philosophizing as presented in the form of a dialogue requires us to think not only theoretically but practically. By this Strauss means that to understand the dialectical subtleties of even the simplest philosophic dialogue we will need not only to understand the arguments of the participants but also the conversational situation in which they meet, the significance not only of their words but their actions, and indeed their silences—exactly what we all do when we engage in our own conversations. The dialogue form as a literary genre (not unlike a novel by, as Strauss suggests, Jane Austen) makes us think prudentially. Philosophic treatises typically don’t invite us to do that, but we should, especially when thinking about politics.
In considering the concluding speech of the Hiero in light of this careful way of reading, Strauss comes too doubt that it is right to hold out hope for the benefactor-tyrant Simonides extols. Such a tyrant will scarcely be immune from envy. Hiero’s problem isn’t that he hasn’t found the right techniques of tyrannical rule but that he wants his subjects to love him. Simonides’ wisdom, as seen in his own way of life, consists in wanting not love but honor, and that from a few understanding friends and not from everybody. While the tyrant makes himself dependent upon ‘the many,’ Simonides enjoys relative self-sufficiency. His pains are few because his needs are so modest; The tyrant needs a city; the wise man “may live as a stranger” in Syracuse or any polis. Simonides moved freely from his native Cleos to Athens to Syracuse, while Hiero stayed tied to one place. Even “the best city”—whether ruled by a beneficent tyrant or a virtuous citizenry—remains “morally and intellectually on a lower plane than the best individual.” And respecting the pleasures enjoyed by individuals, the “highest pleasure” is experienced by him who tracks his own “progress in wisdom and virtue,” even as he acknowledges that “no man can be simply wise.” Although no individual can be simply wise, no polis can be wise at all, and the tyrant in his self-imposed neediness cannot make it so.
Kojève rises to the challenge with a brilliant critique of Strauss’s argument, a critique now made available to us in a translation of the original, unedited version as an appendix to the Burns-Frost collection. He agrees that the problems of tyranny identified by Xenophon “are still ours,” but he rejects the classical ciritique of tyranny and the natural-right theory underlying it. Simonides errs in practical terms because he fails to tell Hiero any specific steps he should take to implement the reforms he urges. Further, and contra Strauss, although the reforms may have been impractical at the time, they are commonplaces of modern statism. Strauss “cannot admit that what was ‘true’ for Xenophon could be ‘false’ for us.” In these initial comments Kojève already hints at his deeper objections to Strauss and the classics: They fail to combine or ‘synthesize’ theory and practice in the manner attempted by Hegel and Marx.
Simonides also errs in defining honor as the province of “real men,” whom Kojève supposes to be aristocrats. We moderns now know that labor can be a source of pride and joy; therefore, everyone from a tyrants to a street sweeper can gain satisfaction from a job well done. Hegel has taught us that we can synthesize honor and labor, Master and Slave, thought and action. Hiero’s dilemma has been fully explained by Hegel as “the tragedy of the Master” in the pre-modern world, but the dialectic of History removed this tragedy long ago. As Hegel also teaches us, Xenophon gets the tragedy wrong in the first place; the tyrant doesn’t really want love, he (and his subjects) want recognition. They will get that, but only at the end of History in the universal and homogeneous state—universal because it extends throughout the world, homogeneous because it it all find equal recognition for their work. This state is “the goal and outcome of the collective labor of all and of each”; in this Kojève hints at the Marxian cast of his Hegelianism.
As for Strauss, Kojève maintains that he misunderstands the condition of philosophy. Insofar as History has ended we can and must abandon philo-sophy—literally the love of wisdom—because wisdom itself has been attained. The philosopher-king gives way to the Wise Man-King, recognized by all and therefore obeyed without coercion. In fact, at the end of History, only “administrative questions” remain, so the Wise Man may be able to retire completely as the (non-Hegelian but Marxist_ “classless society” takes shape. “The tyrant who here initiates the real political movement toward homogeneity followed the teaching of the intellectual who deliberately transformed the ideal of the philosopher so that it might cease to be a ‘utopian ideal'”—an ideal which Hegel prematurely claimed to have been brought about by the Napoleonic Empire For “intellectual” read “Marx”; for “the tyrant” read “Stalin.” So long as History hasn’t instantiated the universal and homogeneous State, the philosopher must exercise his human freedom by actively negating the ‘given’ social and political order, supporting the “Tyrant-Philosopher” who aims to bring it to fruition.
Kojève also departs in an important way from Hegel ‘ontologically.’ Hegel posits the existence of the “Absolute Spirit.” The Absolute Spirit differs sharply from the Biblical Holy Spirit in two ways: it isn’t holy, separate from ‘Creation’; and it isn’t a Person but a form of energy which converts itself into matter but remains immanent in matter as well as in all human thought and action. Kojève excludes matter or nature from the historical dialectic, which for him consists only in man’s progressive attempts to master brute nature. That is to say, Kojève retains the modern and particularly the Kantian esteem for human freedom, which in strictly Hegelian (and of course in materialist-Marxian)thought cannot exist. Aided by intellectuals, the Philosopher-Tyrant’s task is to hasten human progress; this supports the historicist ontology which asserts that Being is not eternal (the “theistic conception of Truth,” whether Biblical or classical) but rather that Being is Becoming (the stance of “radical Hegelian atheism”). Being will continue to ‘become’ or change until it reaches its end, its culmination, as this exclusively human reality “creates itself over time.”
Because human reality creates itself over time, Kojève argues, Strauss is entirely wrong to endorse the classical philosophers’ attempt to ascend from the Cave of political conventions to the sunlight of Nature by don’t of the logical efforts of the individual philosopher. No mere individual, not even the philosopher, can perceive the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth until the collective human advancement that is History has reached its final, grand synthesis, wherein all contradictions disappear into the universality and homogeneity of the World State. This is philosophically necessary because, absent that State, the philosopher cannot know with certainty that he is not mad, or that he and his circle of philosophic friends are not prejudiced.
How will philosophers (and the rest of us) knw that History really progresses dialectically, and how will we know that it has reached its culmination? In other words, how do we know that this grand Kantian-Hegelian-Marxist narrative is not simply the grandest of grand illusions, a spectacular, all-encompassing instance of the madness of crowds? The criterion of truth, Kojève explains, remains the one discovered by Machiavelli and systematized by Bacon: experimental manipulation. We know if a bridge is well-constructed if it doesn’t collapse; we confirm our anthropological theories by building state that doesn’t collapse, putting ideas into practice, synthesizing what earlier philosophers separated into ‘rationalism’ and ’empiricism.’ Machiavelli’s notion of “effectual truth,” which he held out against the classics’ contemplation of nature, will allow the Wise Man at the end of History to contemplate the completed Whole, but in the meantime philosophers should not and cannot afford such a luxury. Until History ends, philosophers must not behold but negate, experiment, build and rebuild. The dialectic of History is properly not a verbal argument; it is “played out on the historical plane of active social life where one argues by acts of Work (against Nature) and of Struggle (against men).”
Given this unity of theory and practice, “There is therefore [contra Strauss and the classics] in principle no difference whatsoever between the statesman and the philosopher; both seek recognition and both act with a view to deserving it.” The “consistent atheist” “replaces
God… by Society (the State) and History.” Instead of glimpsing the holy Creator-god’s Last Judgment in the Book of Revelation, we now say ‘Let History judge,’ and we will need a new ‘Bible’ or comprehensive account of the whole, which will be possible to write only after History has ended. Kojève was still working on it at the time of his death.
Reading Kojève’s essay, one is tempted to think, ‘They don’t write book reviews like that, anymore.’ But they didn’t then, either, and Strauss was delighted; “Kojève belongs to the very few who know how to think and who love to think.” Citing not only Xenophon but also Empedocles and Plato in his rejoinder, Strauss begins by observing that “the possibility of a science that issues in the conquest of nature and the possibility of the popularization of philosophy or science” were both known to the classics. He proceeds to answer Kojève’s critique point by point.
On the complaint that Simonides doesn’t tell Hiero exactly how to enact the reforms he proposes, Strauss replies that “the criticism may be said to be based on an insufficient appreciation of the value of utopias”—outlines of “the best social order.” Xenophon regards such an outline as a standard, but rarely if ever an achievable one. Truly to reform a tyranny would be to get rid of it altogether, to shift eh power wielded by the tyrant’s mercenaries to the citizens, who would no longer be tyrannized. Xenophon more modestly suggests one specific step Hiero might take, to abandon his participation in the Olympian and Pythian games—this, on the grounds that a tyrant should not lower himself to compete against private men—and to redirect his energies toward competing against his fellow rulers in foreign cities in making his citizens happier than theirs. Strauss pointedly observes that Stalin hasn’t done this, as evidenced by his secret police and labor camps.
On the criticism that Xenophon fails to synthesize honor and work, as Hegel does, Strauss remarks that the classics regarded neither honor nor work as the highest good; after all, a criminal might take pride in a job well done. If the ‘ancient’/aristocratic love of honor and the ‘Protestant’/bourgeois esteem for work, synthesized, produce modern tyranny, then we have “effect[ed] the miracle of producing an amazingly lax morality out of two moralities both of which made very strict demands on self-restraint”: “Neither Biblical nor classical morality encourages all statesmen to try to extend their authority over all men in order to achieve universal recognition.” Hegel as understood by Kojève gives us not a higher morality but Hobbes’s Leviathan on steroids, and modern leviathans were big enough, already. Under conditions of modern statism, we are usually better off with “liberal or constitutional democracy.” A universal empire ruled by a tyrant who is unlikely to be either philosophic or wise will exacerbate, not cure, the ills of modernity.
Regarding Kojève’s argument that only History can judge if a philosopher is mad or prejudiced, Strauss replies that “the mass party,” the engine of political life in the modern state, is even worse than “snobbish silence or whispering” within a coterie of philosophic friends because it inclines to crush dissenting voices, including philosophic whispers. In Strauss’s estimation, Kojève asks too much of both individual philosophers and History when he demands “subjective certainty” of human thought. “Philosophy in the original meaning of the term is nothing but knowledge of one’s ignorance.” This is the closest we can get, humanly speaking, to certain knowledge, inasmuch as “one cannot know what one does not know without knowing that one does not know.” Beyond that, philosophy entails only “genuine awareness” of “the fundamental and comprehensive problems,” about which the philosopher will form reasonable and revisable views, “neither dogmatic nor skeptic” but “zetetic”—from the Greek zētēo, meaning “seeking” or “inquiring.” In this view, both dogmatism and skepticism wall themselves away from the continued quest for wisdom; “zetetic” philosophy continues to love wisdom, to pursue it without fainting.
On Kojève’s Hegelian insistence that tyrants seek not love but honor, and philosophers do, too, Strauss rejoins, “the classics identified satisfaction with happiness.” Because “no one can find solid happiness in what he knows to be paltry and ephemeral,” genuine human satisfaction can only occur when a man “looks up in search for the eternal order.” The political man, however, attaches himself to perishable human being; he needs them to need him, and to feel that they do. Like a mother who loves her child, he love them because they are ‘his own’ subjects, not in a genuine spirit of self-sacrifice, as Kojève (actually following Hiero’s rhetorical self-portrait) claims. Insofar as the philosopher does attach himself to his fellow human beings—talking with them in the marketplace, for example—he acknowledges first of all that he is human, more self-sufficient than anyone else to be sure, but no god. He therefore will interest himself in the laws and customs of the marketplace, he frequents, which in turn requires him to consider the regime of the polis in which that marketplace is located. For this reason, he may advise the ruler or rulers, with the care exemplified by Xenophon’s Simonides. Finally, “of all perishable things known to us, those which reflect [the eternal order] most, or which are most akin to that order, are the souls of men”; accordingly, the philosopher will delight at the ‘sight’ of a well-ordered sou. He will want to gather such souls around him, and to help “the young whos souls are by nature fitted for it” to “acquire good order of their souls” by the practice of philosophizing. This also directs his attention to the regime, which may or may not leave philosophers to pursue this task in peace. In doing so he seeks not ‘recognition’ but progress in the direction of wisdom; ‘recognition’ by the subjects of a universal and homogeneous state, even if achievable, would only mean you have succeeded in impressing large number of folks who don’t really understand what you’re talking about. That is a formula for distraction, not intellectual certitude.
Strauss further argues that the universal and homogeneous state will not even succeed in its own terms, because in it men (indeed “real men”) will arise to negate the tyranny, whether it be that of the wise man or the administrative drones he leaves in his wake. And if the universal and homogeneous state actually did succeed, eradicating not only all existing real men but preventing their existence in tall future times, we would not have fully human men but the Last Man mocked by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra—who, insofar as he thinks of the eternal order merely asks idly, not really wanting to know, “What is a star?” And then turns to People magazine for the answer—or rather to the National Enquirer, wherein the motto, “Inquiring minds want to know,” takes on a decidedly non-skeptical cast.
Thus, Strauss concludes, Kojève is right to think “the coming of the universal and homogeneous state will be the end of philosophy on earth.” It will also entail an inhuman universal tyranny. he is only wrong in calling this good.
Each of the nine scholars contributing essays to Philosophy, History, and Tyranny calls attention to a different and illuminating dimension of the Strauss-Kojève debate. Timothy W. Burns begins with an excellent account of what might be described as the not-easily-seen philosophic background of the debate, beginning with the thought of Martin Heidegger, philosopher and Nazi, whose writings both men had studied with great care before the world war. Among the intellectual forebears of modern tyranny present in their debate, Marx stands out more clearly, but Kojève had also supplemented Hegelianism with Heidegger’s ‘existential’ preoccupation with death; that is, not only Hegel but Heidegger addressed the Hobbesian fear of death. Strauss saw Kojève was defending Hegelian rationalism from the long line of anti-rationalist thinkers—Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, culminating with Heidegger. He did this by showing how the fear of death could be incorporated within Hegelianism in the figure of the Slave who overcomes the fear of death in his struggle with the Master. To argue that was to redeem Hegelianism from the charge that Hegel had failed to ascend from philosophy to wisdom, that the Absolute Spirit hadn’t put an end to History because Nietzsche, or Heidegger, had refuted him. Burns learnedly situates the principal figures of ‘historical’ thought in this internecine debate—both the true historicists, who posit an end of History, and the historical relativists who posit ‘folk minds’ which clash or cooperate with one another in an endless struggle. Burns can then clarify Strauss’s achievement in rejecting this massive and pervasive habit of ‘historical thinking’ and turning instead to the classics and to nature—not incidentally defending the original understanding of the philosophic way of life, which all of the historical thinkers challenged, whether from the standpoint of Hegelian absolutism or cultural relativism.
Having situated the Strauss-Kojève debate in the history of philosophy, Burns saves his most philosophic insight for the conclusion. Although Strauss comes across as the man of greater moral sobriety, Kojève, for all his modern/Machiavellian esteem for a certain form of tyranny nonetheless remains much more in the grip of moralism. By contending that reason itself cannot transcend ‘the city’ but rather evolves with it into the all-comprehending condition of universality and homogeneity, Kojève does not fully achieve the understanding of the classical philosophers, who ascended from the cave to noetic glimpses of nature. The justice of the philosopher is not the same as the justice of the polis because the latter form of justice is attenuated by the need for self-defense in war the justice of the wise tyrant in the universal and homogeneous state will be similarly attenuated by the need either to maintain his rule against manly challenges or to debase the entire population into ‘Last Men’ unworthy of his attention. This is why Socrates held misology, the hatred of reasoned argument, to be a vice even worse than sins against the morality of the polis. In the philosopher, whose way of life is least compromised by the compromised morality of the polis and its laws, because he organizes his life around reasoning, and thereby approaches justice (initially by asking what it is) more nearly than the statesman, let alone the modern tyrant.
Murray S. Y. Bessette provides the philosophic background of Kojève’s reply to Strauss, well complementing Burns’s essay. In his lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, delivered between 1933 and 1939 and published after the war, Kojève enunciated the principal themes of all his subsequent work. Here is where we see why he so forcefully refutes Simonides’ charge that Hiero could be motivated by a desire to be loved. Love is natural; humans share it with animals. Its frustration does move man to action, to freely negate the given, and thus acts as a counterbalance to passive contemplation. But unlike recognition, love is for someone—human or divine. “While human, [it] is not humanizing” because it lacks the capacity to make us want to overcome our animal nature, to overcome the fear of those who dominate us by mastering the fear for the safety of our bodies, readying our spirits for rational thought and action. Contra Aristotle, there is no such person as a natural slave because slavery occurs accidentally, through the bad luck of having encountered someone stronger or smarter or tougher than you are. You will end your slavery only when you see a good opportunity to challenge his rule, when the slave can “reasonably risk [his life] with a belief in the possibility of victory.” This opportunity comes as the slave works, through his work, inasmuch as even servile labor requires him to master his desires in order to do his job. Underneath the ruling gaze of the mastery, the slave husbands the spiritual resources needed for the “final Fight” to overthrow him. Although I have said “him,” the struggle isn’t limited to male adults but encompasses women and even children; although initially incapable of winning a fight for recognition, the latter will achieve recognition not only through iducation but through the “socialist Society” which will take over parenting from individual parents. “The abolition of the final human Master inaugurates the birth of the Master state,” the entity which “replaces the biblical God as the guarantor of the truth of wisdom.” All being satisfied with their status of equal recognition within this state, none will aspire to rebel against what one might call the Last Master. Bessette thus makes it easier to see why Kojève so dislikes Aristotle’s definition of virtue as the metrion or ‘mean’ between two extremes. Without the starker conflict between good and evil, without the clash of moral and political opposites, no dialectic; without dialectic, no History and no end of History. Aristotelian balance between extr4emes only slows this dialectic, clogging History’s flow.
The conflict between good and evil recalls the world as understood in the Bible. Daniel E. Burns remarks that no commentator has properly appreciated the role of Biblical thought in Kojève’s thought, a role Kojève himself obscures by insisting upon his atheism. he begins with that bête noir of Biblical thought, Epicureanism, a form of ancient atheism which Kojève classifies as actually theistic because it believes Being to be eternal, not changing. All those who believe this need to posit some version of intuitive cognition, whether by natural reasoning or divine revelation, and no such thinker can distinguish himself from madmen and false prophets, who are equally certain of their putative insights. The Socratic circle of philosophic friends doesn’t overcome this problem because for every Socrates there might be one or more Jim Joneses or Charles Mansons—malicious crackpots who gather disciples around them. As for Socrates himself, his move to the marketplace was a step in the right direction, but only the all-encompassing ‘marketplace’ of the universal and homogeneous state can settle the problem of cognition once and for all. That is, the Biblical ‘end time,’ wherein God will reign over a new Heaven and a new Earth, far more closely represents the end of History than anything ‘theists’ believe. The End of History is the “Christian idea” secularized —made rational and real. The religious paraphernalia that went with that idea will then “be more than refuted; it would be outlived.” Kojève charges that Strauss and his classics simply cannot account for the Biblical vision, which will become true by dint of human thought and effort, without the assistance of a personal God.
Burns writes that Strauss “does agree that Hegel’s political philosophy is part of an effort to respond to a challenge that the Bible poses to the enterprise of philosophy as such,” an effort that began with Machiavelli in opposition to such philosophers as Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, who sought to integrate Biblical and classical-philosophic teachings. The modern-philosophic effort responds to the Biblical challenge, which holds the certainties of divine revelation over the head of classical zeteticism (“always searching, never finding,” in the Apostle Paul’s scornful estimation), by positing the sure knowledge of making. the human maker proves to himself and everyone else that he understands the efficient causes of production in the real world. If these productions satisfy him and others, why speculate further on human ends? Strauss responds to the modern project first by noting that the classics did in fact understand that technological innovation could be encouraged, but advised against it as dangerous to any regime and its laws, which require the respectful obedience that only stability can foster. “There are natural limits preventing the full success of the Machiavellian project.” which sacrifices the moderation underpinning self-knowledge, without which human beings have no wisdom at all. The limitlessness promised by the technological mastery of chance and of nature destroys, and was intended by Machiavelli to destroy, the sense of limits, of legal restraint, that non-philosophers find in piety and philosophers find in rational inquiry. In addition, Strauss simply does not share Kojève’s “revolt against the idea that the history of the world has no ‘meaning.'” Strauss finds meaning in nature, not history.
The next two essays, by Nasser Behnegar and Bryan-Paul Frost, take opposite sides in the debate, with Behnegar arguing on behalf of Strauss and Frost making the case for Kojève. On the matter of utopia, Behnegar notes Struass’s criticism of the modern utopias: In order to make ideals seem realizable, they lower the standards set by the classics. And in regard to Strauss’s reminder to Kojève that Simonides does in fact offer Hiero a practical step to take—to avoid competing in the chariot races in Pan-Hellenic competitions—he brings to light the important fact that such contests were religious festivals; “victory in them was tantamount to receiving Zeus’s or Apollo’s approval.” This suggests that Simonides was warning Hiero against delegitimizing his own authority if he happened to lose. Bot the critique of utopias and the warning against risking apparent divine disfavor point to Strauss’s deeper critique of Hegelianism: It “combines the rule of the philosophers with an egalitarian political order that emerges through the power of emancipated passions.” The modern philosophic quest for epistemological certainty in some respects reflects the need to appeal to ‘the people,’ who are not likely to rule themselves by the zetetic skepticism that philosophers practice. Philosophers and citizens both care about human things, but the kind of care which animates them differs in kind, not in degree; what is right for one is wrong for the other, and Hegelianism can never overcome that. Nor can the statesman-tyrant synthesize these two kinds of caring in his own soul; rulers care for citizens (or subjects) first of all because they are ‘their own,’ as a mother loves her child, but also as instruments of their own ambitions. As for the people themselves, they in turn would use rulers—for protection and for the promotion of their prosperity generally. In this polis of necessarily somewhat ‘low’ concerns, the philosopher will work the apertures, fish for young potential philosophers in the unstill waters of the marketplace, needing toleration rom his fellow-citizens but not any excessively ordered, Spartan-lie regime that would shut him down. “The coming of Kojève’s regime will be the end of philosophy on earth, not because the quest for wisdom will be replaced by wisdom but because the quest for wisdom will be successfully suppressed”; meanwhile, “the politicization of philosophy runs the danger of infecting the philosopher with the vice of the political man.”
Frost’s essay, literally the central essay of the book, provides a spirited defense of Kojève. Frost cites Hegel’s denial that we can know nature as certainly as we can know the human things which are verified by virtue of their social-historical success. This is why the social criterion of recognition and especially of mutual recognition looms so large for historicists; nature, like the God of the Bible, hides behind clouds of unknowing, but when we’re being treated with contempt we know it. Strauss cannot really know if nature is eternal and unchanging or a being of Heraclitean flux, but he can readily judge if a man like Kojève respects him. And not only Strauss: “Contrary to Strauss, Kojève does not think ‘the masses’ are utterly incompetent judges” even of the philosopher’s opinions, insofar as these opinions remain in the realm of social and political life. We all know when we’re being hosed. And if philosophy is the quest for wisdom and not wisdom itself, how does Strauss know that the masses are incompetent judges? How does he know that philosophy is the best way of life? Or (again given the criterion of certainty) how does he know anything? “Philosophy would be futile if it did not culminate in wisdom itself.” Inasmuch as Strauss himself admits that the classical philosopher cannot prove his claim that the well-ordered souls that please him are really more akin to the eternal order than chaotic souls are, where does that leave him?
As for the universal and homogeneous state, is it so very bad? Modern men do in fact accept a substantial state already, empowered to care for them, watching over them like a vigilant mother. Universalized, such a state would prevent the scourge of war, “offer[ing] the prospect of peace, prosperity, and security.” “Are these such terrible things to enjoy, and might they not be worth the purchase price, even on Strauss’s own terms?” Under modern conditions, what better alternative has Strauss to offer? Frost ends on a not e of what might be described as liberal Kojèvism: “As for whether one might argue that Kojève himself won the debate outright, would it be too brash to say that only Time (=History = Being = Truth) will tell?” Surely not too brash, this argument might well prove perhaps both too historicist for Strauss and too uncertain and indecisive for Kojève. For a reply to Frost, one might turn not so much to Strauss but to Tocqueville and his critique of “soft despotism.”
Neither Strauss nor Kojève supposed the debate to have been settled in their published exchange, as they continued to correspond for years. Mark Jo. Lutz ably summarizes their continued dialogue. Interpretation here proves especially helpful because the two men wrote not for general readers but as (so to speak) one philosopher to another; when they weren’t talking about the logistics of a projected but never-to-be meeting with conversation, a high degree of abstruseness prevailed, especially on Kojève’s side of the correspondence. Lutz remarks that Strauss describes “the desire to converse with other philosophers” as “natural,” “a spontaneous, recurring, and lasting feature of philosophic life,” and not at all indicative of a need for recognition.
Kojève objects to any Platonic dualism founded on a mathematized physics on the one hand and an understanding of the human soul on the other; for his part, Strauss complains that Kojève has set up his own dualism by failing to account (as Hegel himself tried to do) for nature, and simply setting it aside to concentrate his attention on History. Strauss continues to reject the several historicisms of Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger, while Kojève upholds a mixture of these. Moreover, “Kojève assumes the ideas are concepts”—realizable ideals—”and that Plato is interested only in concepts and not in the soul” On the contrary, Platonic ideals are not ‘realizable’ at all, the ‘ideal’ polis of the Republic is intended ironically, and Plato’s Socrates sees into the soul of every person he knows, including himself. To Strauss’s criticism that Hegel’s project won’t satisfy anyone but the Last Man, Kojève cheerfully agrees that “in the universal and homogeneous state the great majority of people, whom he characterizes as ‘animals’ or ‘automata,’ will become easily satisfied by simple gratifications such as sports, art, and eroticism” for them, there will be no need for spirituality and its negations at the end of History, and that will prevent any popularly-based revolutions. As for the elites, the philosophers will eventually “acquire wisdom and become ‘gods,'” while “the recognition-hungry tyrants” will administer the greater machine that rules all the lesser automata. In other words, to Strauss’s civic concerns Kojève answers with a shrug of the shoulders; the end of History will become the much-sought-after eternal order, and that will be that. He continues to regard nature as necessitarian, radically unfree, as well as unteleological , which makes ‘natural right’ an oxymoron; in this he resembles a historicist Hume in maintaining that no ‘Ought’ can be derived from the natural ‘Is.’
In response, Strauss denies that the citizen-morality of (for example) a Polemarchus in Plato’s Republic is truly just; it is a matter of convention. In view of the self-contradictory character of convention as revealed by dialectical conversations, one cannot derive an ‘Ought’ directly from such an all-too-human ‘Is.’ this notwithstanding, the philosopher must take citizen-morality seriously, understanding it “on its own terms” rather than rushing to reduce it to class interests or other history-bound circumstances. The universal existence of citizen-morality of one sort or another tells us things about human nature, and nature is the object of the philosopher’s inquiry. Looking at historical circumstances to explain citizen-morality will misdirect the philosopher’s mind from glimpsing reflections of nature in conventions. Serious thinking about citizen-morality will also lead the philosopher to think about the guarantors of that morality, the gods of the polis, and thereby lead him to the question of “what the gods are and thus into the question whether there is an eternal order or realm of necessity or whether there is a ruling intelligence that can alter the prevailing order at will.” “Historical thinking’ is the wrong way into these questions because it is a closed system, with the proverbial ‘turtles’ (in this case, historical events) ‘all the way down. ‘
This brings Strauss to a consideration of the ‘Idea’ in Plato. By nature, each living being has an identifiable character; as Strauss puts it, this character aims at “the end of the individual being belonging to the class” of which it is a member; “in this sense” the end or purpose pursued by the individual “transcends” the individual, as seen in ‘the animal’s desire for procreation or for the perpetuation of the class.” Human nature, the idea of the human aims at a “complex” end “because man is both simply a part of the whole (like the lion or the worm) and that unique part of the whole which is open to the whole.” The quest for justice, for the natural end, the naturally right way of life for man, goes beyond the perfection of individual humans. But as citizens we do not see the implications of that. In Lutz’s words, “Our concern for justice can appear to be our complete end, but it cannot perfect us, either because it is not necessarily accompanied by wisdom about the whole or because our concern with justice can stand in the way of the desire to know the truth about the whole.” The idea of man as situated within the natural order of which he can be a knowing (if not all-knowing) part requires us to wonder about the Good, the good of the whole natural order.
At this point, readers of the collection will have ventured quite far from the initial concern with tyranny and what Strauss regarded as the incapacity of contemporary political scientists to understand it. In one of the finest essays in the volume, Waller R. Newell brings us back to earth, without forgetting the larger philosophic questions raised by our life on earth, in modern states.
Kojève insists on a politics, indeed a metaphysics of sharp dualities—of good and evil, Master and Slave, of historical dialectic. Newell observes that Strauss to some degree plays along with this, insisting that we must choose between philosophy and political liberty on the one hand and the rule of modern tyrants in a World State which would snuff out philosophy on earth. Strauss offers no “middle range,” instead making it sound as if “the independence of the philosophic life is the only certain defense against tyranny, particularly the modern version of tyranny.” It seems as if Strauss concurs with Kojève’s claim that wisdom can be divorced from moderation, that the wisdom of the classics is in some sense continuous with the wisdom of the moderns and their immoderate pursuit of the conquest of nature by means of science or knowledge. Newell demurs, arguing that, just as Strauss contends each Platonic dialogue leaves out some important feature seen in other dialogues, with only the full corpus of Platonic writings constituting the whole of his thought, so too Strauss’s commentary on the Hiero and his exchange with Kojève afford only a partial glimpse into his understanding of political philosophy.
For starters, Strauss sees that “Kojève-Hegel is not necessarily simply Hegel.” Kojève’s Hegel does not encompass Hegel’s own account of the “sacred restraints” the classical philosophers saw as animating and moderating the polis. Socrates in the Republic makes the radical claims that the philosopher’s study of “the Idea of the Good” generates practical as well as theoretical wisdom and that civic education, not only philosophy, “offers an account of a well-ordered soul that is at best indirectly connected to philosophizing and should function as an independent source of psychological immunity in the citizenry, or among the ‘gentlemen’ to the temptation to tyrannize.” But in his exchange with Kojève, Newell argues, Strauss downplays this latter account, centering on classical politics not classical civic education as the antidote to modern tyranny. Buy if there really is an eternal natural order, including a persistent human nature, can the universal, homogeneous state really threaten to end philosophy on earth?
In his other writings, Strauss points to Platonic psychology as evidence against the fearful Hobbesian struggle for self-preservation and honor, later seen in historicism as the struggle for recognition leading to self-preservation in a permanently self-preserving World State. Love, not fear, much less Heidegger’s existential anxiety, more truly animates the human soul. Strauss knew Xenophon’s Hiero, but he also knew Plato’s Symposium, with the Ladder of Love that stretches between animals and gods. For human beings ‘in themselves,’ abstracted from the whole, love of wisdom also mediates “between the charms of excessive homogeneity (typified by mathematics) and excessive heterogeneity (the realm of statecraft and education)”. Philosophy, “graced by nature’s grace,” as Strauss rather un-Biblically puts it, accounts for each of these realms of human thought while refusing to succumb to the “charms” of either. In contesting modern tyranny on the grounds as it were of a dialogue by Xenophon, who “presents a comparatively sharper divide between the philosophic life and the city” than Plato does, Strauss meets Kojève on grounds closer to Kojève’s own thought than he might otherwise do. He is taking a worthwhile risk, but it is a risk because things finally cannot be left on the grounds of such sharp dualism.
Newell also tries to rescue Hegel from Kojève’s Hegel, although in some of this he probably goes too far, and farther than Strauss would go. The real Hegel understands that “the God of Abraham unfolds historically in time, changing nature and human nature,” in this resembling the activity of the world itself as conceived by historicists—most prominently Hegel, who writes of “the self-actualization of God in History.” The problem here is that the God of Abraham doesn’t “unfold” over time, the way Hegel’s ‘God’ or Absolute Spirit does. The God of Abraham creates the universe ex nihilo, not by unfolding Himself dialectically; insofar as He changes nature and human nature, He punishes human beings in response to their disobedience and redeems them through an infusion of His (not nature’s) grace. God isn’t embodied in His creation, immanent; as Newell rightly observes, Hegel’s Christianity “may have been a kind of deism or pantheism.” But this means it isn’t Christian. So in saying that “For Strauss… Hegel’s philosophy is not, as Kojève asserts, atheistic,” Newell misses Strauss’s understanding of the distinctions between Jerusalem and Athens, the grace of grace of God and the grace of nature, and also Kojève’s special use of ‘atheism’ to mean the denial that Being is stable or fundamentally changeless. Strauss’s esteem for Hegel’s recovery of the classics, which Newell rightly highlights, was always tempered by his equal recognition that Hegel did not understand the classics s they understood themselves, and that this would not do.
This notwithstanding, Newell is surely right to say that “Kojève’s Hegel” differs from “Hegel’s Hegel” by making the Master-Slave dialectic central to the dialectic of History simply. Hegel is more political and less individualistic-moral because the locus of human history manifests itself in the political evolution of polis to empire to modern state to (eventually) world-state. To concentrate on the Master-Slave dialectic is to make Hegel more consonant with Marx than he really is; Kojève “combines the reductionist materialism of Marx”—particularly the class struggle of capitalists and workers, the modern masters and slaves—”with the historical and cultural breadth of Hegel,” adding Heideggerian-existential ‘nothingness’ as the negation that drives the historical process. For Kojève, unlike either Hegel or Heidegger, “the progress of history is purely anthropocentric.” Newell astutely observes Kojève’s resemblance to Fichte, “the ultimate proponent of man’s untrammeled will to conquer and reshape nature,” and it would be a dull reader who doesn’t delight in his line, “As Fichte was to Jacobinism, so might we say Kojève was to Stalinism.”
What is more, Newell is right again to conclude by observing that the real Hegel detested Jacobinism and surely would have detested Stalinism even more. His universal and homogeneous state was an attempt to combine bureaucracy with parliamentarianism, with a monarch who simply ‘signs off’ on legislation produced by the legislature. Tocqueville didn’t think this synthesis fully possible or desirable, and I think he was right, but it is quite far from it to the mass-murdering Man of Steel. “Kojève was an unconditional friend of Soviet communism, while Strauss was a conditional friend of liberal democracy.” “Strauss’s focus on the centrality of the regime therefore serves more than ever to remind us that in the modern world freedom can only be exercised in the modern nation-state with its individual liberties and representative political institutions, and that all political movements claiming to be able to create ‘global’ peace and justice are at best naïve and at worst open the door to aspiring universal tyrannies.”
While Hegel figures explicitly in the debate, Richard L. Velkley considers the unspoken presence of Martin Heidegger, the subject of Strauss’s allusion in the final paragraph of his “Restatement,” where he says, “We [i.e., he and Kojève] have seen that those who lacked the courage to face the issue of Tyranny, who therefore [here quoting Livy] ‘mad themselves obsequiously subservient while lording it over others,’ were forced to evade the issue of Being as well, precisely because they did nothing but talk about Being”—this last phrase glancing at Heidegger’s best-known book, Being and Time. Heidegger, Strauss implies, made his peace with the Nazis in part because he failed to engage in political philosophy, attempting to jump directly into ‘ontological’ contemplation without first attending to the opinions of citizens who have already arrived at answers about the gods and the cosmos. Some of those opinions may have dark consequences for philosophy along with every other aspect of human life; Heidegger didn’t consider that, but even (the Stalinist) Kojève is ready to do that.
Velkley recalls that Strauss had high respect for Heidegger in many ways, calling him “the only great thinker of our time,” the one whose profound etymologically-based interpretations of Greek philosophy had enabled Strauss and others to see “the roots of the [philosophic] tradition as they are,” and to wonder about “the most elementary premises whose validity is presupposed by philosophy.” Moreover, Heidegger’s original contribution to modern philosophy was impossible to overlook; in his thought, Strauss wrote, “modern thought reaches its culmination, its highest self-consciousness, in the most radical historicism, i.e., in explicitly condemning to oblivion the notion of eternity.” Kojève felt no less indebted. Heidegger corrected Hegel by refusing any attempt to bring nature into the realm of History, replacing Hegelian monism (the Absolute Spirit) with the dualism Kant had initiated. Heidegger also corrected Marxist materialism, vindicating human freedom—again, following Kant. As Velkley remarks, Kojève didn’t follow Heidegger into an affirmation of the nation-state, an affirmation which, coupled with radical historicism, inclined Heidegger to sympathy with the malevolent tyranny of the Right. Velkley offers a clear and helpful overview of Kojève’s desired synthesis (never effected to his own satisfaction) of these philosophers, which combined Hegelian dialectic, culminating in the ‘end of history,’ when explaining the human world, Platonic geometry for understanding the structure of the cosmos, Aristotelian teleology for understanding biology, and Kantianism to explain the dynamics, the movement of the cosmos. Overall, “Kojève nonetheless continued to insist that Hegel ended the evolution of philosophy by transforming philosophy into a System of Knowledge.”
The editors give the last word to James H. Nichols, the author of Alexandre Kojève: Philosophy at the End of History. He picks up the theme of his book here, outlining Kojève’s never-finished attempt to formulate a thoroughgoing update of Hegel’s system. “How could one show that history had ended?” In this, he goes deeper into Kojève’s thought than Kojève himself does in his critique of Strauss, relying on arguments taken from the lectures on Hegel and the correspondence. To demonstrate History’s conclusion, one needed to establish the “circularity” of philosophic thought. By this Hegel and Kojève mean that a thinker will begin with a question—for example, ‘What am I?’—and then follow “a logically necessary series of answers and questions” that wind back to the original question. When, in Kojève’s words, “it is clear that all possible questions-answers have been exhausted,” that “a total answer has been obtained,” that each answer fits logically into the whole of knowledge, then the end of history has occurred. And indeed, in Kojève’s argument, as Nichols puts it, “Hegel’s whole encyclopedic system of knowledge shows that all previous philosophical arguments find their necessary place in the definitive systematic wisdom that gives an adequate account of, and thus ends, the evolution of philosophy.” what was left for Kojève to do was to complete “the considerable philosophic work yet to be done to complete the [in-principle completed] system.”
Nichols holds out the tantalizing prospect that Kojève’s Hegelianism had a touch of “Socratic irony” to it; after all, unlike Hegel, he regards nature as “in a decisive sense mysterious to us,” better approached through mathematics than through discourse, and therefore not easily integrated into any logos or ‘Word,’ Hegelian or other. A famous recent attempt to complete or supplement Hegel by Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (the title of which shows an awareness both of Kojève’s argument and Strauss’s critique), goes even farther. To the best of my knowledge, Nichols is the only one of the seemingly innumerable commentators on that book who has notices the way Fukuyama subsumes Hegel’s grand narrative into “a Platonic conception of the nature of the human soul”; Fukuyama locates “the fight for recognition” in human nature, specifically, Socrates’ description of “thymos or spiritedness,” which he distinguishes from reason or logos and also from the bodily appetites. (As a side note, I can report that several years ago I asked Fukuyama about his ‘Platonism,’ and he affirmed it.)
As for Strauss, he answered Kojève’s defense of the Hegelian system in his actions as well as his arguments. Nichols recalls his own encounter with Strauss in a classroom, only a few years before Strauss died. After discussing his own work on Plato’s Euthydemus, a dialogue which addresses the question of the possibility of philosophy and how it might be distinguished from sophistry, Strauss told the class about Kojève’s contrasting approach. In his own thought and life, Strauss treated these questions as open, still alive—thus indicating that the circle of human thought has not yet closed.
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