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1. HOW THE FIRST FIGHT FOR RECOGNITION SET THE STAGE
Long long ago, before anyone could think of himself as himself, two creatures who looked like us squared off against each other. Something in their primitive but fertile brains told them each that the other should respect him. They had a primal thirst for Recognition by the other.
This thirst had nothing to do with getting food or having sex or finding shelter in the caves. Until this moment of battle, they lived like the other animals of the natural world. They and their kind lived in their moments, getting what they needed, killing what they had to for survival. When they died, seldom of long life, they died, and there was no thought of what it meant or what they meant. The natural world existed in their minds out of time, so to speak--it was there when they were born and it was there when they died. Nothing they or anyone did during their lives altered its givenness.
The First Fighters of all time (think of them as Abu and Bu) thus created something never seen before in the natural world. Each demanded that the other submit to him, and they went at each other with all their might. The bloody battle raged, and they beat on each other with their fists through the long afternoon, and they each staggered and rose and fell and rose again.
Well into the bloody battle, Bu seemed to gain an advantage over Abu. He paused to see if Abu would submit. But Abu said that he would die before he would ever submit to a beast like Bu. This momentarily threw Bu off guard. Abu rose up suddenly and resumed his attack, wrestling Bu to the ground and beating him further.
"I could go on fighting," Bu said in his head to himself, spitting out a tooth and the mud in which Abu ground his face. "He might wear out and I might win. Then I would be the victor. He would have to Recognize me as his Master."
Just then, Abu struck Bu behind his ear with a mighty blow and Bu bit the mud again, whimpering now and still trying to think while Abu pummeled him some more.
"But I don't think so--I think he will probably kill me. Then I will not smell the perfume of the forest again. I will be nothing. I want to be something. I want to be someone, under any conditions."
Bu then raised both his bloody hands behind his head to show Abu that he was surrendering. Abu pointed at the ground; Bu rolled over face down and groveled. Abu placed his big foot on the back of Bu's neck and spoke:
"I will let you live if you will be my Slave and you will recognize me as your Master. I will let you live if you do the Work I would have to do if I had no Slave. Do you submit? Do you recognize me as your Master? Will you do my Work?"
Even at this extreme moment, Bu had to think about it one more time before he could speak the fateful words. Just think, he said in his head to himself. This monster has shown me that he is willing to die rather than quit the fight. If I quit, the good news is that I will not die at the hands of this monster. The bad news is that I will have to serve the beast as long as I live. I will have to get his food as well as my own. I will have to build his house as well as mine. I will have to do what he commands when he commands it even when I would like to be doing something else. Oh, what a choice. What a burden I must bear if I agree to this. But I cannot choose to die. I am not willing to fight him unto the death. Life is better than the darkness that does not end.
"I choose to live," he told Abu.
"Recognize me as your Master," Abu said.
"I do," Bu said.
"Agree to do my Work as I command you to do it," Abu said. And Bu agreed.
So the First Fight ended, and the world of nature saw its first Master and its first Slave. And they were only the first. Many followed, until, when humans were born, they did not actually fight. They accepted the decision handed to them by the circumstances. The Masters and Slaves performed their roles with a kind of efficiency that humans never exhibited when they were living in the natural world before the First Fight.
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2. HOW THE SLAVES MADE HUMAN HISTORY
And Slaves worked and acted while Masters watched and received the fruits of the sweaty and thoughtful labor of their Slaves. You might think that Masters had the best part of the bargain. Not according to Hegel's story. The First Fight and those that came after, and the virtual Fights that sorted Slaves from Masters henceforth, created something altogether new in the world. It created Human History. The beginning of Human History was the beginning of Humanity's conscious development of itself in Culture.
Human History depended upon the conscious Work and Action of the Slaves. Their Work and Action on behalf of the Masters changed the natural world that had existed before the First Fight; in that world there had been no conscious human History and therefore no consciousness of change in nature. Now through History the natural world changed. Also through History, that is, through Work and Action, human beings changed themselves. They created Culture. Culture also was Spirit, the ultimate human creation. The ultimate human creation, Spirit, contained Humans themselves as true Human Beings. It also contained the natural world, indeed, everything.
The Eternal Spirit thus was not in heaven or in some afterlife outside Time. It was here and now. But it was not a given of nature. It was our creation, the creation of Human Beings, working and acting. Spirit was History; it was Time; it was Human Beings themselves, with their Concept, developing themselves toward an End, an end of History. In the end, Human Beings through History arrived at Totality, complete self-consciousness, the fulfillment of the entire process of History.
Totality first achieved itself in the self-consciousness of the Wise Person. The Science of the Wise Person informed the State, which transformed and became the embodiment of the fulfillment of History, the final solution. The knowing Citizen of the State was the final individualized Totality.
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3. HOW THE DIALECTIC PRODUCED CONSCIOUS HISTORY IN HUMANS
The end-all and be-all of this wondrous process of History was conscious human dialectical Overcoming. Humans had to overcome their lack of full understanding to achieve full realization. They achieved Overcoming through the process of what Hegel named the Dialectic.
All this--and there was more--did not give the Masters the best of the bargain. All this took place among the Slaves! It was to the Slaves that Hegel looked for the working out of our human destiny. The Masters received their homage but they did not participate in the making of History. They therefore were not fully human as Hegel thought of human. The Slaves did the Work and took the Actions. And History could only operate toward its dialectical end through Work and Actions--the obligation and the privilege of the Slaves. The Masters depended upon the Slaves for their Work, and the Slaves took upon themselves the labor of the human condition in History. It was they, the Slaves, who were capable of Overcoming.
Now you can see (our visitor Kojeve told us) how the Desire for Recognition led to the condition that you find yourselves in. It was the Desire not for necessities for sustaining life. It was the Desire for something wholly unnecessary in Nature and wholly an attribute of conscious Human Beings. It was thus the Desire for a Desire. And the seeking and capturing of the satisfaction of Desire for a Desire became the fundamental process of dialectical History. That History was the very History that Humans came to express in their self-conscious understanding. And the business of Working and Acting in the interest of that Desire was the fundamental business of being a full Person, the conscious and self-conscious I, the subject itself.
And the key to this business, this process of creating History, was the Concept, the linguistic construct that allowed you to be self-conscious. The fundamental concept "to be" was at the very heart of it all. (And at this point, our visitor Kojeve summarized the whole thing as follows.)
No concept in the World as long as there is no empirically existing Time in this World. Now, we have seen that the empirical existence of Time in the World is Human Desire (i.e., Desire that is directed toward a Desire as Desire). Therefore: no conceptual understanding without Desire. Now, Desire is realized by negating Action: and human Desire is realized by the Action of the Fight to the death for pure prestige. And this Fight is realized by the victory of the Master over the Slave, and by the latter's work in the Master's service. This Work of the Slave is what realizes the Master's Desire by satisfying it. Therefore, and Hegel says so expressly..., no Concept without Work; it is from the Slave's Work that Denken and Verstand, Understanding and Thought--that is, conceptual understanding of the World--are born.
And now we understand why. It is Work, and only Work, that transforms the World in an essential manner, by creating truly new realities. (p. 144)
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4. HOW NEGATIVITY CREATES THE 2ND STEP IN THE 3-STEP DIALECTIC
Now you have to see the importance of negating Action in the story. Negativity is fundamental to the Dialectic that produces History. The Concept depends upon the operation of Negativity to make it viable. The Idea in turn is the fundamental reality of History (e.g., of Time, of Humanity).
The Dialectic begins with Identity (which is pure Being, Sein in Hegel's own word). It continues to the second step, which is Negativity (e.g., Nothingness, Nichts in Hegel's own word), the negation of the first step, Identity. The third step in the Dialectic is Totality. Totality (i.e., Becoming, Werden in Hegel's own word) is the unified and unifying result of the first two steps, by which Identity was first asserted and then negated. In the concrete real Being of Totality, there is no pure Identity or pure Negativity. Identity continues to be while it becomes its own declared opposite (through the second step of Negativity). The critically important aspect of this is that Identity and Negativity are self-referential. Hegel himself (according to Kojeve) has said:
The negating being negates its identity to itself and becomes its own opposite, but it continues to be the same being....it is the affirmation by negation." (p. 202)
And through this process of Thought--which is Work, which is Action--, the Slaves, acting for the Masters, produced what was uniquely Human on the earth in what once was pure Nature. And this, said Kojeve, according to Hegel, is our inheritance. This is what makes us behave as we do.
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5. HOW SLAVES BECAME THE BOURGEOISIE
Kojeve the visitor, telling all this added that it was not all of Hegel's tale. Hegel, Kojeve said, saw an evolution in the life of the Masters and the Slaves. The Slaves became fully human beings (doing so through Work and Action). They thus created the History that was the culture and the knowledge of conscious selves. They did so as service for the Masters (but made themselves fully human in the process, while the Masters remained undeveloped). They were aware of themselves in Time as finite creatures who could think about themselves (and who could think about their own deaths).
But the Slaves passed through phases as they developed. First they stoically accepted their fate as Slaves and the power the Masters had over them. Then they became nihilistic cynics toward their situation. Then they became bored with the Master-Slave relationship. That led to a fundamental change. It led finally to a new life of abstraction, with which we are familiar. In this life of abstraction, they transformed themselves and their Masters, who disappeared as real live entities. The Slaves invented the abstract notions of Private Property and of Capital. They transferred their service from Masters to these abstractions and thus became the Bourgeoisie. And Private Property and Capital became the abstracted Masters.
And Conscious Humans as the Bourgeoisie went on and created History through their Concepts, which came into being in Time, which was finite because Conscious Humans were finite. And the making of History was a Dialectic, by which Conscious Humans negated their Identity and dialectically created out of Identity and Negativity a Totality, which was the Real in Time, which was History, which would have an end.
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6. HOW DEATH CONFERRED FREEDOM ON THE SLAVE
Hegel's story, told by Kojeve, did not assure the folk that they would escape personal extinction. And the folk around the fire were sad but certain that this part of the Hegel story was accurate, according to their experience. They knew the bodies of their elders died and were sure beyond a doubt that their bodies too would cease to be. They knew that sickness and accident as well as old age terminated the lives of those around them. Each would have wanted to be immortal, to live without being limited by Time. But they received no such gifts of thought from Hegel according to Kojeve.
To the contrary, Hegel's story said that they would not be human at all if they were immortal. Their limited time on the earth in itself created the condition that made them human. With all the time there was or would be, a being would have no need to Desire Desire. Freedom comes to the human because of the limits of Time.
Hegel associated the freedom of the person to have a Concept with the notion of Time. Eternity was unimportant in the story Hegel gave us. Time was ultimately important. Kojeve said that all of Hegel's thinking came together when he invented the idea of the (human) Concept as Time. Here is what Kojeve told the folk in the evening around the fire about this:
Hegel is the first to identify the Concept and Time....'As for Time, it is the empirically existing Concept itself.' This sentence marks an extremely important date in the history of philosophy....philosophers [henceforth] who do not identify the Concept and Time cannot give an account of History--that is, of the existence of the man whom each of us believes himself to be--that is, the free and historical individual. (132)
The real secret of mortality was that it gave Humans (the Slaves) the opportunity of choice. They would not have this if they had eternal life. They could choose to give up life at any time. That was the ultimate condition that conferred Freedom no matter how bound they were otherwise.
With this Freedom, Humans created History. They created History by Working and Acting as an Individual. They thus created the only Totality or Synthesis there could be. This was evolution or progress. And it depended on Death as a human choice. That is, it depended on the finiteness of the human being.
The folk found it curious that Hegel’s story at this point corresponded with the Judeo-Christian story with which they were familiar. Kojeve explained that Judeo-Christianity looked like Hegel’s story because both depended on the union of three fundamental categories—Individuality, Freedom, and History.
Man appears as an Individual by "manifesting" himself as the free agent of History;
He reveals himself as Free by "appearing" as a historical individual;
He "manifests" himself historically provided that he "appears" in his individual freedom or his free individuality. (238)
To choose allegiance to his God, the Judeo-Christian showed his basic Freedom to choose his total Individuality and his total involvement in History.
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7. HOW THE WORLD WAS MADE DIALECTICALLY REAL
The visitor Kojeve told the folk that his storyteller Hegel sometimes seemed like an "Idealist" to people who heard of his story. But he said they misunderstood. Hegel was an absolute Realist, he said. Hegel separated the natural world from the human understanding, to be sure. However, Hegel saw Reality as the result of the Dialectic in which Human Beings had to participate to be fully human.
So, Hegel was not like Newton, who put nature on one end of the glass and the human eye on the opposite. Hegel did not think nature and Humans were separated in total Reality. He thought nature became involved in total Reality through the Dialectic, which involved conscious Humanity. Subject (Humans) engaged Object (nature) and the engaging Subject as well as the engaged Object became involved in human (total) Reality.
Newton, in contrast, abstracted the Object from Totality and forever removed it from the possibility of reflecting True Reality, no matter how thoroughly Humans (as Subjects) examined it. Hegel saw Reality as absolutely concrete, not abstract. The Object existed but participated in Reality by participating in the Dialectic effected inside the Subject.
And Kojeve spoke of the coming into being of total Reality in this manner:
The concrete Real (of which we speak) is both Real revealed by a discourse, and Discourse revealing a real. (178)
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8. HOW IT ALL HAS TO END
Kojeve said that Hegel insisted that History is finite. It therefore must end. Humanity, through whom History is effected, therefore must end. Humanity as a whole "must die just as the human individual dies; universal History must have a definite end." (148).
The folk saddened at the thought of an end, but Kojeve insisted this was an essential climax of the storyteller Hegel’s story. Knowing as they did the Christian notion of the end of days, they felt on familiar ground. Hegel’s seeming obsession with completion should have buoyed them, but this was a struggle for them.
The folk had to see, according to Kojeve, that Hegel saw the Dialectic from the standpoint of the Wise Person. He had worked his way through to the final insight. The Wise Person could see History only after it was a completed process.
Get this! Hegel wrote his story as Napoleon was winning at Jena. Hegel saw Napoleon’s triumph as the final action of History! It was the "rights of man" put into Action. With the Slave transformed into a Bourgeois and the Bourgeois into an enlightened Citizen, the universal and homogeneous State, made up of (self-conscious, enlightened) Citizens, thus, in Hegel's story, was the fulfillment of human History. Its founding by Napoleon concluded the (dialectical) historical evolution of Humanity and made possible the realization of Wisdom. (When France later failed in this role, Hegel, according to Kojeve, assigned the role to Prussia.)
Since the Wise Person-Hegel saw the truth, everything has simply been a working out of details, according to Kojeve. The details deal with the completion of the victory of democratic human rights. This was the definite end of History according to Hegel. It was not that Homo Sapiens would disappear when all the world embraced universal human rights. Humanity as Homo Sapiens would continue to exist, content with its lot. But because of the completion of the process of History, a Human would be something other than the Total Human Being we learned was arising from being a Slave.
But at this point Kojeve the visitor confused himself and the folk. He never clarified the story of the end according to Hegel. And in the darkness in the rear away from the burning fire, which was lowering, the folk heard a voice, saying, "I think I know what he meant." It was Karl, back from the British Museum, eager to tell his story to the folk, now that Kojeve had said all that he could say.
END OF SECTION 8. END OF I, ACCORDING TO HEGEL.
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