Kojeve was a Russian-born French philosopher who became one of the architects of what became the European Union. That right there is a weird life. It’s not the life in this book. Biographical details are largely side-notes in this monolithic thesis on Kojeve’s lectures about Hegel in the 1930s. As such, it borders on the interminable, and was not what I thought I was buying.
He does, however, explore many tangents starring off the main thesis, including a valuable sidetrack into Cosmism. I have a list of Kindle notes a mile long.
If you’re looking for the study of the life of a Russian polymath who lectured on Hegel in Paris before helping to architect the EU, look elsewhere. If a long wander through the more esoteric end of 20th Century continental philosophy and thorny questions about death sounds good, this is the book for you.
Kojève’s most striking argument against the sheltered, contemplative philosophical life is that it cannot successfully differentiate itself from madness. Kojève maintains that the philosopher’s isolated judgment that his knowledge is superior—that he or she knows something more—is invalidated by the fact that there is madness, “which, insofar as it is a correct deduction from subjectively evident premises, can be ‘systematic’ or ‘logical.’ ” The philosopher who claims to know is simply not that distant from “the madman who believes that he is made of glass.“
The philosopher appears to the uninitiated, after all, as having lost his bearings.
It is but a short step to the conclusion that the bearer of truth is a madman, for in the eyes of those who cannot conceive of any reality other than the one before them, such a figure may only be mad.
THE BLACK CIRCLE, Jeff Love (UK) (US+)
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