How does kojève’s Hegel interpretation hold up. Is it faithful to the source material? In other words can I trust him to transfer the essential Hegel to me?
>>24958714No, and he doesn't intend to. He doesn't depart so completely that there's nothing recognizable, but he's doing his own thing while using Hegel as a means.
>>24958751Thanks. Do you prefer his approach over a more faithful one?
Like the other poster said, Kojeve doesn't give a shit whether it's really Hegel or not. He is about as faithful to Hegel as Schopenhauer is to Kant: both see something they like, something that is "so fundamentally right that it's the obvious important bit," and scrap the rest. Just like Schopenhauer guts basically everything other than appearance/reality dualism in the Critical Appendix, and replaces 99% of Kant's actual conceptual scaffolding with bits of British and classical epistemologies, Kojeve doesn't give a shit about Hegel's metaphysics (definitely) and doesn't give a shit about 95% of his philosophical interpretation of history. He secularizes Hegel's philosophical history completely, turning it into something more like Kant's "Ideas for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Purpose" than what Hegel actually intended. All he cares about is the social-level, intersubjective dialectic of mutual recognition. He is basically a Left Hegelian in this, and it's obvious that he's basically one Left Hegelian in particular: Marx. He essentially just steps back from vulgar Plekhanov-style historical materialism into the "social Hegelian" Marx that underlies so much of contemporary academic Marxism. It's interesting but in my opinion you can get the gist by reading very little of it. Again, it's just Kant's "Universal History" + Hegel's Cunning of Reason + Marxist philosophy of history but without the materialist fatalism. Instead it's liberal-constitutional fatalism. The argument is not metaphysical, it's simply that once "good enough" constitutions were created that allowed mass-democratic distribution and homogenization of political rights, there was effectively no going back, because this has been the engine and telos of constitutional theory since the beginning of human association. But it's only a telos in a functional sense, not in the literal metaphysical sense Hegel tried to save/sublimate from ancient metaphysics. It's the END of history in the sense that the function reaches a steady state, not the teleological end of history in the sense that a form has reached entelechy. In this sense it seems to me that it's almost a hybrid of early modern social contract theory (= reductionist, psychologistic, post-metaphysical/non-teleological theories of why humans formed political associations in the first place) and Enlightenment progress fetishism (Condorcet e.g.), but adjusting the latter so that it's not the triumphant utopian march of reason understanding the world and perfecting the social world, it's just the grim calculus of "fat retarded Mexicans aren't going to give up legal equality even if all they do with it is live consumerist lives." It's basically exactly what Nietzsche feared with the "last men" and "passive nihilism." Apparently Kojeve mildly preferred a haut bourgeois European form of his end of history, so even he was capable of typical European horror at "Americanism" (fat Mexicans watching TV).
>>24958850>Apparently Kojeve mildly preferred a haut bourgeois European form of his end of historyA Japanese form, actually
>>24958714No. Hegel's master dialectic (which is essential to Kojève) is only the start of society for Hegel, and not its actual motor. This is where Kojève departs from Hegel and uses recognition and the master/slave dialectic as an engine.Other than that, >>24958850 is very clear and right about Kojève. Great effort post
>>24958850Oh ok. I unfortunately have a hunch that kojève might be right with this analysis.
