January 12, 2014

The Ends of History and Life: Hegel in Alexandre Kojve and Terry Pinkard

My task here is to think about two strands of Hegel interpretation, those of Alexandre Kojve and of Terry Pinkard, whose interpretive projects agree with respect to fundamental elements of Hegels philosophy, but whose elaborated interpretations diverge remarkably. Kojve and Pinkard are of interest in part because they represent traditions of interpretation (respectively, that of the Continental and Analytic schools of philosophy) that now seem to lack the necessary shared vocabulary to meaningfully disagree. My intuition is that in each case, different worries gave rise to different, specialized vocabularies; roughly, we can think of these worries as those born of the ethical and historical exigencies of 20th century Europe for Kojve, and of the limitations of contemporary Anglophone philosophy that have made the rehabilitation of certain German idealist theses appealing for Pinkard[footnoteRef:1]. If, as Hegel reminds us, philosophy is its own time comprehended in thoughts, then it should be of little surprise that these interpreters in different historical periods seem to find, in each case a different Hegel (Elements 21). A minor victory here would be to describe and explain the reason for this interpretive divergence; a major victory, to suggest possibilities for a rapprochement. The speculative position I hope to describe will respond to worries voiced by both philosophers (worries that I take to be entirely legitimate worries to attribute to Hegel, anachronisms aside), marrying the perspicuity of Pinkards Hegel with the bold ethical and political vision of Kojves. [1: It is easier to see Kojves worries than Pinkards. My description here makes it sound as though Pinkard is without ethical and historical considerations, and this is plainly untrue. Pinkard however emerges out of a tradition of Anglo philosophy from which he has inherited both vocabulary and worriesand it is the non-overlappingness of the vocabularies, not the worries, which concerns us here. ]

We will begin by looking at Pinkards explicit concerns about Kojves reading of Hegel. Pinkards main worry is that Kojve relies on a pre-Hegelian notion of History that imputes to Hegel a providential teleology, itself imported from a long line of theological conceptions of God and Nature. I mean to demonstrate that this reading is entirely at odds with that of Kojve, whose Marxist-existentialism defines itself in terms of an atheism that is explicitly opposed to the providential model.[footnoteRef:2] By recognizing that Pinkards concern is unjustified, we can use Pinkards notion of a disenchanted Aristotelian naturalism[footnoteRef:3] to make sense of some of Kojves more obscure interpretations of Nature and History in Hegel. [2: One might still imagine that Kojves Man is still providential, and that Kojve merely replaced God with Man. This is not the case. As the title of Stephanos Geroulanos An Atheism that is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (2010) suggests, the reconstruction of an atheism that was not this kind of replacement of a metaphysically transcendent God by an immanent Man was a central philosophical goal of Kojve, his predecessors, and his successors. Indeed, if we are to understand what motivates a certain stream of anti-Hegelianism in French thought, we must attend the specific Hegel being opposed: that is, Kojves Hegel is already polemically situated against the theological Hegel, while, it is worth noting, even Kojves Hegel is too closed for thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. ] [3: I am attributing the phrase to Pinkard, but the notion will be familiar to readers of Charles Taylors Hegel (1975). ]

Both Hegels atheism and his disenchanted, Aristotelian naturalism are important points of contact between Kojve and Pinkard inasmuch as it distinguishes them from (what they might call) bad idealist readings. On some accounts, the story of Spirit is of the collective human mind (or Mind, or Noos) realizing its universe-creating powers. Alternatively, humanity can be taken to recognize its freedom in its conformity to a divine plan or Logos, conceived as the rational structure of the cosmos as well as an emanation of the divine mind.[footnoteRef:4] If we saw the direction of fit being thus, we could see humanity coming to terms with a pre-existing order of Platonic Ideas, or a kind of divine plan, thus emphasizing the Christian theological dimension of Hegels thought.[footnoteRef:5] [4: In one sense, this is in fact what Taylor suggests when he suggests that the world was posited by Geist or cosmic soul (1975, 87).] [5: The differences of opinion with respect to Hegels metaphysics fuel a lively contemporary debate. Because its not always clear that these disagreements, however, are disagreeing about the same thing, its helpful to approach the debate through the explicit points of disagreement, all of which can be found in the following references. With respect to Hegels metaphysics both Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Frederic Beiser argue that there are claims made in the Logic [See Substance, Subject and Infinity in Hegel: New Directions, 2006)] and in Hegels Naturphilosophie [See Hegel and Naturphilosophie (2003)] that we cannot make sense of if we take Hegel to be primarily concerned with some kind of category theory (in distinction to a recognizable metaphysics). See Pinkards Hegels Dialectic (1988), for such a categorical approach and his critique of Michael Rosens metaphysical reading (as given in Rosen,1985), in particular, for a reply to metaphysicalist approaches to Hegel. Note also, that Pinkard understands his recent work as moving away form the position he elaborates in HDthis move is not towards a more metaphysical view, but rather towards an even more practical view (HD 114 n.47). It does seem, at times, that Hegel takes himself to have provided an account of the unique and exhaustive conceptual structure of both mind and world. This semantics is tied to a metaphysical history, in which an organic, self-developing totality comes to know itself as having generated this final set of concepts (to be clear, the possibility of this account is presented by Pinkard himself in Hegels Dialectic, and it is rehabilitated it seems to me, in Robert Brandoms A Spirit of Trust (2013). Hegel claims to have apprehended the unique and eternal meta-logical concepts that by definition can explain all logical concepts (and, given the place of the Logic within the system, also explains the empirical concepts that depend on these meta-logical concepts) and are, relatedly, a priori and necessarythus securing the foundations of Absolute Knowledge. Indeed, it is only by maintaining the uniqueness and exhaustiveness of this schema that Hegel can maintain that his system has the kind of necessity required for it to count as knowledge. As Pinkard notes: it was because Hegel took himself to be engaged in something like the Kantian science of reason that he was mistakenly led to see his dialectic as providing not only explanations of the possibility of categories but also derivations of the necessity of that set of categories (Hegels Dialectic, 6). Brandom makes a similar point in Sketches of a Program for a Critical Reading of Hegel (36). Indeed, as James Kreines notes, the metaphysical-nonmetaphysical debate is misleading inasmuch as the non-metaphysical account does not also suggest how Hegel the category-theorist (explains how its categories relate to, well, the world [(See Kreines, Hegels Metaphysics: Changing the Debate, which offers a remarkably clear account of this metaphysical vs. non-metaphysical debate as well as Pinkards remarks at the beginning of Hegel and Marxism). That is, even if Hegel the category theorist takes himself to have supplied an answer to certain metaphysical questions that does not answer metaphysically-realist questions with metaphysically-realist answers he must he accountable to some of our pre-theoretical, realist worries. It is beyond the scope of this paper to get into why Hegel frames the project of Logic in this way. For our purposes, we should note that Kojve and Pinkard are both concerned that Hegel at times does seem to make some spooky metaphysical claims that really do seem best interpreted along bad idealist lines. This is why the real challenge for both Kojve and Pinkard, is to recuperate a good idealist Hegel against a bad idealist Hegel. Pinkard and Kojve dismiss different elements of the bad idealist Hegel. Pinkard rejects the claim to uniqueness and exhaustiveness (Pinkard HD 7); Kojve, to exhaustiveness alone (this is Kojves notion of a dualistic ontology that will be discussed). ]

What is critical for our purposes then is that Pinkard and Kojve are both interested in a certain theory of the social that can be separated from the overblown claims of the Logic. While Pinkard will focus on the social space of reasons, Kojve focuses on how non reason-giving practices (in particular, desire, violence, and labor) create the historical conditions for the sociality of reason Pinkard attributes to Hegel. That is, inasmuch as the Phenomenology gives us a theory of knowledge grounded in social practices of reason-giving, the interference of reason by power presents a stumbling block that reason-giving alone (understood as the verbal exchange of ideas) cannot overcome. I take Hegel, Kojve, and, indeed, Pinkard to all recognize this fact. As Kojve notes in a lecture from the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (IRH), without Fighting and without Work, [the overcoming of the Master-Slave dialectic] conceived by the Intellectual remains purely verbal (68).[footnoteRef:6] Kojves Marxian suspicion of the purely verbal means for him that the philosophy of linguistic practice outlined by Pinkard, can only offer an ideal account of how communication should work: there is a danger in thinking that this is how it actually does work. It is beyond a doubt, to me at least, that Hegel wanted to offer both the normative account of how a social space of reasons should operate as well as how the historical conditions of its actuality could have come about. While Pinkards perspicuity, therefore, offers a critical way forward in the interpretation of Hegel, Kojves analysis of the real conditions of its practicability offer a far richer (and indeed, more troubling) account of how Pinkards social space can and has been realized. [6: These enormously influential lectures were given by Kojve from 1933-39 at the cole des Haute tudes, Section des Sciences Religieuses. The English volume, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (IRH) comprises about half of the French volume Introduction la lecture de Hegel (ILH). Translations from the ILH and from Kojves correspondence with Trn Duc Thao are my own. Kojve does offer a more abstract account of the philosophical exercise of attaining universality in a later work, Essai dune histoire raisonn de la philosophie paenne (1968).]

Here we can make a relatively small critical intervention. I want to maintain that Pinkards view of Hegel seems enormously promising. I also want to maintain that some of Kojves ideas have been dismissed prematurely by Pinkard[footnoteRef:7]. My hope is that by offering a charitable reading of Kojve that is not beholden to the idiom of Kojves French successors, we can sketch out a program for a reconstruction of Pinkards Hegel enriched by Kojves Hegel. It is my hope that any reader with a sense of Hegels general project may follow the course of this work. [7: Kojves thought is alive in Anglophone political philosophy, largely due to his reception by Francis Fukuyama, whose The End of History and the Last Man (1992) took on the end of history thesis directly. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris Empire (2000) draws on Kojves own theory of empire, or forms of inter- and, in some sense, post-national affiliation that he took to supercede the nation. Kojve outlines this idea in his Outline of a Doctrine of French Policy (2004). ]

Pinkard writes:Kojve used History in the same way in which early moderns used Nature. Kojve takes History to be that background of human action and passion that ensures through its own mechanism that the various actions humans take will automatically balance out so as to produce the best result. This corresponds to the idea of Nature in early modern thought as a beneficent, self-correcting background. This idea of Nature grows out of the way in which God was used in medieval ethical thought. God made the universe for a purpose, and every part has a purpose. We are conscious of our part, even if we cannot fathom exactly how we are contributing overall to divine purpose. God has given mankind a set of determinate, absolute duties; moreover, God in his supreme wisdom has given us these duties in the knowledge that if each person performs the duties of his station, the result will be good . . . Kojve used History in much the same way. History was a self-correcting enterprise that ensured that the right outcome would be ordained even if we limited humans could not see how it was working out. The mechanism by which history worked was the struggle for recognition, but Kojve took this to be the result of natural desire within humans to gain recognition from others. Kojve quite consciously used this idea of History to avoid being a complete relativist. Both Kojve and Fukuyama therefore transform Hegels project into a version of pre-Hegelian attempts at locating some fixed, transcendent standard to use for evaluating different historical phenomena. (Hegels Phenomenology[footnoteRef:8] 437)[footnoteRef:9] [8: For the sake of clarity, I will use the following abbreviations for Pinkards works: Hegels Phenomenology, HP; Hegels Naturalism, HN; Hegel and Marx, HM. ] [9: In HP, Pinkard seems to attribute this reading of Kojve to Michael Roth in his Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth Century France(1988). It is unclear to me how Pinkard understands this to be Roths view. I take the view presented here to be in accord with Roths view. For some excellent secondary literature on French Hegelianism, see Butler (1987), Geroulanos (2010), Jarczyk and Labarrire, (1996) and Kelly (1992).]

There are two general arguments I will develop with respect to this characterization. First, Pinkard is incorrect in attributing the providential model to Kojve. Second, the reasons why Pinkard should not attribute this model to Kojve are the same reasons why Pinkard does not attribute this model to Hegel. That is, with respect to Nature and History, Pinkards Hegel sounds an awful lot like Kojve.[footnoteRef:10] Pinkards disenchanted Aristotelian naturalism forms the background metaphysic of Kojves Hegel, and Pinkards path-dependent nonpurposive purposiveness describes what Kojve actually takes the course of history to be. It is only under these conditions that Kojves conception of an ultimately voluntarist, existentialist Man can be understood pace Pinkard. It is only with these ideas at hand that we can think about Kojves notorious end of history thesis.[footnoteRef:11] [10: There is a confusing point to be made here, however. Pinkards Hegel sounds like Kojve, but Pinkards Hegel does not sounds like Kojves Hegel. Or, Kojve emends Hegel, such that the Kojvevian emended Hegel is the one compatible with Pinkards Hegel. That is, except in those instances (which I will note) in which Kojves un-emended Hegel is the same as Pinkards unemended Hegelthis is the bad idealist Hegel who both authors reject.] [11: . My sense is that Pinkard addressed this issue backwards: that is, by beginning with the seemingly absurd claim about the end of history, he reconstructed what he thought Kojve had to have taken to be the case. This is very much how some readers of Hegel begin with Absolute Knowledge and reconstruct (what they take to be) its conditions. But the key, in both cases, is to understand how the final claims make sense as the result of an arduous development that excludes alternative interpretations. ]

If this gives us some sense of the similarities between the Pinkard and Kojve, it is not to deny the quite real differences. I will focus on two of them. First, as Pinkard notes, Kojve posits some drive for recognition to be fundamental to the human (HP, 436-7)[footnoteRef:12]. Kojves philosophical anthropology of desire is what ultimately drives the engine of history. Any Lebensform that cannot support this kind of recognition finds itself at odds with humanity itself. Pinkard posits a different fundamental drive; his is one to self-comprehension. Now, any interpreter of Hegel understands that recognition and self-comprehension are inseparablethis is perhaps the central thesis of the Phenomenology.[footnoteRef:13] But the emphasis on one as opposed to the other leads these authors in remarkably different directions. [12: I do not understand what Pinkard means when he writes that, The mechanism by which history worked was the struggle for recognition (437). The problem for me is that Pinkard really does seem to want to impute the kind of blind causality described by mechanism, but the struggle for recognition does not seem to be describable in these terms, not by Kojves lights, nor Pinkards, nor, for that matter, Hegels.] [13: The source of the confusion may be the transition in the Phenomenology between Consciousness and Self-Consciousness. That is, we know that the Conciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Reason do not constitute developmental stagestheir order is somewhat arbitrary. It is unclear then if there is in fact a grounding relation among these parts, or why exactly the Lord-Bondsman (or Master/Slave) section has the place it has in the Phenomenology. ]

In some sense, the primary difference between Pinkard and Kojve stems from Kojves emphasis of Marxist elements in Hegels thought; Pinkard, for his part, is less convinced of the need for this kind of Marxist rehabilitation. While this might help us get some purchase on Kojves interpretation, my concern is that this characterization actually draws Pinkard and Kojve apart in ways that are misleading. That is, inasmuch as Marx sought to avoid the belief that ideas determine the reality of practice and not the other way around (in Pinkards words), the emphasis on Hegels practical philosophy, and the denial of some of his bad idealist claims, are actually shared aims of Pinkard and Kojve (Hegel and Marx 24.2). They both think that any rehabilitation of Hegel will have to account for Marxs accusation that Hegel believed the norms of the concept [in the sense of Hegels Begriff] pressed for their own realization (HM 24.2). And yet, it is not wrong to see the emphasis on Marxs inverted Hegel to be more central to Kojves project. That is, whereas Pinkard does take the problem with successive forms of life to be, for Hegel, problematic inasmuch as they are ultimately not intelligible (HM24.1.2.3) and, relatedly, sees the ends of life to be primarily epistemic, that is, as the acquisition of a kind of self-knowledge (HM24.1.3, HN 105), Kojve is far more concerned with the material conditions that make life unlivable. For Kojve the negativity of desire, labor, and violence are more central themes in the interpretation of Hegel. To be clear, Pinkards notion of self-knowledge also involves a kind of practical wisdom that is not purely theoretical. And Kojve, for his part, also maintains that the the dividends paid out at the end of Phenomenology do satisfy recognizably epistemological demands. This is, therefore, a matter of emphasis.Kojve does think there is a transcendent standard to use for evaluating different historical phenomena. But Pinkard is wrong in thinking that this means that Kojve subscribes to a providential model. For Kojve, it is only a certain kind of satisfaction, that deriving from a universal, political citizenship produced by humans through labor, violence, and self-reflection, without the guarantees of any special causal force or plan, that ends history. There is no no background of human action and passion that ensures through its own mechanism that the various actions humans take will automatically balance out so as to produce the best result. It is through a certain kind of historically-specific, epistemic, ethical, and politically internal development that a transhistorical, transcultural standard (a standpoint from which alternative views can be adjudicated, accorded the status of a partial or internal view, and, relatedly, explained) was achieved. And Kojve will supply Hegels transcendental historical argument (in Kojves words, an a posteriori deduction) for those conceptual and historical conditions which must have been satisfied to explain the fact of this achievement (IRH 153). Pinkards willingness to deny the fact of this achievement may be entirely justified, but even he does not deny that such a view can be reasonably attributed to Hegel. And he is unjustified in thinking that Kojve thought this fact required the postulation of some mysterious mechanism to explain it. As a first step then, let us look at why the providential model cannot be what Kojve takes away from Hegel. In fact, the best way to understand this is to understand what Kojve took Hegels error to be. Kojves disagreement with Hegel is made most explicit in an extended footnote to, The Dialectic of the Real and the Phenomenological Method in Hegel, in the last section of his lectures collected in the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Much of it is written in Kojves idiomatic Heideggerian- and Marxist-inflected idiom. He writes: Hegels reasoning is certainly correct: if the real Totality implies Man[footnoteRef:14], and if Man is dialectical, the Totality is dialectical. But as he goes from there, Hegel commits, in my opinion, a grave error. From the fact that the real Totality is dialectical he concludes that its two fundamental constituent-elements, which are Nature and Man (=History), are dialectical. In doing this, he just follows the tradition of ontological monism which goes back to the Greeks: everything that is, is in one and the same manner. (IRH 212-3) [14: The French here is not gender neutral. I reproduce Man for reasons of consistency. This gendering is important for both Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigarary (both of whom are indebted to Kojve)I preserve it here.]

Kojve understands the real Totality to include two constituent-elements: Nature and Man. It is crucial if we are to understand Kojve that we construe the relationship between these constituent elements as he does (as we shall see, much of the disagreement surrounding Kojve may derive from a misreading of this opposition). For Kojve, to be dialectical means that something contains negativity, or a negative aspect (IRG169). This negativity refers to different things in different domains (and I take this to be something Kojve certainly got right about Hegel). Kojve is interested in Hegels idea that Man is das Negative seiner selbst (IRH 160). Practically, Mans activities of reflection are negative, and therefore dialectical, within the domain of epistemology; his activities of labor and violence, are negative, and therefore reflective, in non-discursive domains. Man thus both alters the world and gives a conceptual account of the world. Further, Man gives an account of world that contains within it those beings for whom the question of the world emerges (IRH 170-173). The project of knowledge must give an account of how such a entity exists (an ontological issue) for whom the world is thusly structured (an epistemological issue), that is, how it is ontologically possible to explain the existence of a epistemologist who can reflect on and change the ontological conditions of her own reflection. What the epistemologist is supposed to learn is that the dialectical reflection on the conditions of her own existence themselves disclose the dialectical structure of the ontology. For this point, Kojve invoked Spinozas ordo et connexio idearum est ac ordo et connexio rerum (IRH 172). The dialectical order of investigation mirrors or discloses what Kojve refers to in his title as the real dialectic. The account of this process is simply what history is, history thus refers to a succession of events, an account of those events, and, critically, the events that gave rise to the account-giver. When Kojve writes that Hegels reasoning is certainly correct: if the real Totality implies Man, and if Man is dialectical, the Totality is dialectical, it may look like Kojve asserts a fairly basic fallacy of composition: just because a part has a property (that its dialectical), it does not necessarily follow that the whole also has this property. In fact, however, he is not suggesting that this is the case at allhis whole point here is that Hegel made such an error, and then used the idea of the Totalitys dialectical nature to ground the claim that Nature itself was dialecticalsomething Kojve is at pains to deny. That is, the rerum of the connexio rerum ultimately refers to world we interact with, and while it enjoys mind-independent existence, it is not, ultimately, all there is.Kojve designates the world of objects, Nature. He writes, Sein or Space is Nature, the nonconscious natural World (IRH 158). This is a metaphysically naturalist statement concerning the mind-independent existence of objects. Indeed, Kojve takes Hegel to be such a naturalist.[footnoteRef:15] We must note, however, that his metaphysical naturalism does not mean his picture of a World from which Man has been subtracted would be recognizable or thinkable to us. This is because basic phenomena, including time and action are produced by and constitutive of subjects. This is more than a trivial claim that knowability entails a subject who knows, or that it takes time to know things. These are larger, ontological claims about what time and action are.[footnoteRef:16] [15: One point I would like to stress here is that this kind of naturalism is clearly in line with Marxs call for the materialists standing Hegel on his head. The fact that naturalism has become the default position of much academic philosophy in some sense vindicates Marx. But as Kojve and Pinkard demonstrate, it is entirely possible to interpret Hegel pace Marx as already being some kind of naturalist. ] [16: In her Subjects of Desire (1987), Judith Butler is too quick, is perhaps too charitable to Kojve (and perhaps, Heidegger) in her recuperating Kojves claims about time by suggesting they refer to lived time as opposed to extrinsic time (72).]

We should, therefore, establish three principles of Kojves analysis before turning to Man (=History). The identity claimed here will be important if we are to face Pinkards accusation that Kojves History is providential. (1) Kojve rejects a conception of invariant, parametric time. He is taking on some of the idealist commitments of Kant, who understood the objects of cognition to be necessarily temporal, and who located the source of this temporality in the constitutive faculties of the mind. It is a Kantian insight that time (as we understand it) is subjectively constituted. This is why Kojve praises Kant for realizing that the world in which Man thinks is necessarily a temporal world (IRH 127). (2) Kojve follows Hegel in extending this claim, such that the concept of time is a product of Spirits reflective and intersubjective constitution of reality and that any speculation about a kind of extra-spiritual Time is inchoate.[footnoteRef:17] (3) Kojve follows Heidegger in believing that Man (really, Dasein) is the being for whom temporality exists as such. Time is only ever time as such which is to say that time requires a phenomenological analysis (how does Time appear) which itself gives us a sense of the being for whom time appears as such, Man. [17: Obviously the question of whether Hegel is making the claim that extra-Spiritual Time is practically and epistemically unavailable or not real is the crux of the matter. He does believe Hegel makes the larger not real claim in a more inflated, metaphysical sense.]

Nature for Kojve does not appear to be the kind of thing that can play a role in establishing Pinkards self-correcting background. For Kojve, Nature is not itself teleological. There is no aim or standard with respect to which Nature can be in errancy, and therefore no sense in which it can be corrected or a fortiori self-correcting. We must then look to History. Recall that Pinkards claim was that Kojves History functioned like a medieval Nature in which humanity marched, Mr. Magoo-style, through a perilous reality unaware of how external fortune protected and guided it. In fact, however, this is not Kojves point. For Kojve, human progress need not have aimed at the self-consciousness finally achieved in Hegels Phenomenology, as indeed, Hegels Reason in history is not initially self-conscious. What Kojve actually argues is that incremental changes caused by purposive human activity itself generates a path-dependent progress without the initial agents intending to arrive at the end of history. It is true that Kojve assumes that a Desire for recognition drives this development, but I think the best way to understand that claim is roughly this: the Desire for recognition specifies a Desire that implicitly guides action before it becomes explicit that this is what it had been all along. Desire merely specifies a potentiality which a reflective thinker at the end of history, who has achieved satisfaction (Kojve thinks that this person was Hegel[footnoteRef:18]) must attribute in order to explain his own satisfaction. [18: For a comprehensive discussion of the Wise Man see IRH 75-100.]

What then is the idea of history that Kojve has in mind? We will address this question at length, but in short, history just is an explanation of real events displaying a kind of unity, of how, given certain metaphysical conditions (atheistic naturalism) Man arrived at satisfaction, in both epistemology and practical life. This unity is that of a conscious and willed tradition where memory allows man to persist through his autonegations (IRH 232-4). In terms of epistemology, Man must overcome certain forms of skepticism which would preclude his having knowledge of the external world. What the Wise Man knows is the Concept, or Begriff which Kojve parses as the coherent whole of conceptual truth that lays claim to the truth (IRH 101). Kojve writes:There is no deduction of Realism in Fichtes sense of the world. There is only a deduction in the Hegelian sense of the wordthat is, an a posteriori deduction or a conceptual understanding of what is. Therefore, by starting with Spiritthat is, a synthesis of the real and the idealHegel foregoes deducing the one from the other . . . He positsthat is, he presupposesboth of them. (IRH 153)

Kojve argues that the revelation of Totality is Mans recognition that Knowledge does actually correspond to the Real in that what is is itself Spirit, or revealed (that is, known) Being. Kojve claims that Hegel is making a transcendental argument from the fact of that state of fitedness (construed as isomorphism or identity) between the world and how we take the world to be, to its necessary conditionsboth conceptual and historical. This is not a thought experiment because knowledge is factive. What is required is a kind of proof of this fact. And history provides the proof, that is, a self-reflective account of the logical development (conditioned by historical developmenta point emphasized by Kojve), in which we become aware that this relation of knowledge genuinely obtains. And this knowledge is absolute in the sense that satisfies every possible claim to adequacy to what is. Critically, given Pinkards concern, for Kojve, the proof of history leaves open two optionseither there is an external source guiding the development of Spirit, or it is Man alone who accomplishes this feat. The first option describes the standpoint of religion; the second, philosophy. Religion and philosophy share a content, but they are irreconcilable, without transition and they cannot be sublated (ILH 293). Either one attributes agency in history to God or to Man:To be in one is to decide against the other. The decision is absolutely unique and extreme: it concerns deciding for oneself (which it to say, against God) or for God (which is to say, against oneself). And there is no reason to decide on one as opposed to the other. (293 ILH)

We will return to this point in the conclusion.Kojve takes this knowledge of objects to have been historically conditioned by the primary way that Man interacted with the worldthrough labor.[footnoteRef:19] This is one reason why the Master/Slave dialectic is the lens through which Kojve reads the entire Phenomenology. Kojve understands the second, historical sequence (following the first, epistemological sequence of consciousness) of the Phenomenology to be a historical deduction of the satisfaction of desire arrived at in Absolute Knowledge. As he puts it, the historical dialectic is the dialectic of Master and Slave (IRH 9). And it is the fundamental desire for recognition that drives the Master/Slave dialectic: Human Desire, or better still, anthropogenetic Desire, produces a free and historical individual, conscious of his individuality, his freedom, his history, and finally, his historicity (IRH 6). Through Desire humanity emerges and begins the historical and self-reflective quest towards recognition and satisfaction. [19: This represents another point of contact between Kojve and Pinkard. That is, inasmuch as Pragmatism (a philosophical tradition from which Pinkard draws) emphasizes the priority of human activities in the explanation of concepts and meanings, Heidegger suggests a similar view about the priority of Vorhandensein over Zuhandensein. While Kojve is following Heidegger in affirming this priority, and connecting it to Marxs notion of the essence of man being found in Labor (the epitaph of the Introduction is Marxs Hegel . . . erfasst die Arbeit als das Wesen, als das sich bewhrnede Wesen des Menschen), he is making a claim that has a resonance with Pragmatist considerations. ]

This Desire lies in distinction to animal need. While animals negate Being in that they change it, but they cannot conceive of how this negativity allows them to conceptually and actually make a world for themselves. They do not plan; they have no future; and there is therefore, no Time.[footnoteRef:20] From this animal emerges a special animal, an animal who plans to alter the given world in order to produce a new one. From this stage, recounted in Kojves reading of the Master/Slave dialectic, Man qua Man emerges along with Work and Action. These phenomena all entail a changing of given reality (Being) and this changing is Negativity and Time.[footnoteRef:21] [20: This claim, again rests on Heideggers conceptions of the ecstasies of time in Being and Time. That is, the temporality of Dasein is characterized (in part) but its relation to a future in which it can enact its projects. Kojve thinks of this as the priority of the Future in the temporality of Man. ] [21: Kojve is probably less clear or explicit than he should be about what kind of is claims he is making, that is whether the predicative expression establishes an identity, asserts a property or membership, or as I suspect, is not strico senso a preciative claim, but a Hegelian speculative proposition. It is beyond the scope of this paper to understand what he thinks Hegel is doing when Hegel writes in the Phenomenology, for example what has the form of a predicate in the proposition is the substance itself (60). It might, however, help to explain Kojves long strings of identities, such as: Man=Time=Work=Action=Negativity=Nothingess.]

For Kojve, the Master Slave dialectic is the process through which humanity emerges. It is the complex relation of Desire that distinguishes humanity from mere animals: while animals are driven by need, they cannot abstract from this need to recognize value, which itself requires intersubjective recognition. It turns out that in the strict sense, Desire can only ever exist in a complex relation with other desires[footnoteRef:22]: [22: The extended discussion of Desire in the first section of Kojves Introduction is quite clearly the origin of Lacans Desire is always the Desire of the Other. See Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: the Absolute Master (1991) for a full account of Lacans debt to Kojve. ]

Desire is only human if the one desires, not the body, but the Desire of the other; if he wants to possess or to assimilate the Desire taken as Desirethat is to say, if he wants to be desired or loved, or, rather, recognized in his human value, in his reality as a human individual. Likewise, Desire directed toward a natural object is human only to the extent that it is mediated by the Desire of another directed toward the same object: it is human to desire what others desire, because they desire it. (IRH6)Ultimately, it is only a universal recognition of ones desire by others that can satisfy this desire. This is the position of mediation that the particular individual finds as a citizen of the universal state (IRH 58-70). And it is only this state whose satisfaction arrests the dialectic of the Master and Slave.What is crucial for us to recognize about Kojves Master/Slave dialectic is the importance of work and fighting in his account. Kojve writes: Man . . essentially transforms the World by the negating action of his Fights and Work, Action which arises from non-natural human Desire directed toward another Desire (IRH 138). He explains:For if the history of man is the history of his work, and if this work is historical, social, human, only on the condition that it is carried out against the workers instinct or immediate interest, the work must be carried out in the service of another, and must be a forced work, stimulated by fear of death. It is this work, and only this work, that freesi.e., humanizesman (the Slave). On the one hand, this work creates a real objective World, which is a non-natural World, a cultural, historical, human World. And it is only in this World that man lives essentially a different life from that of animals (and primitive man) in the bosom of Nature. On the other hand, this work liberates the Slave from the terror that tied him to given Nature and to his own innate animal Nature. (IRH 26)Again, for Kojve, neither Nature nor History provides any guarantees or any kind of special causal force leading Man inexorably to satisfaction. That which is external to the world created by Man furnishes material, but provides nothing else. It is through human labor alone that satisfaction is arrived at. Kojves deep Marxist and existentialist commitments are demonstrated in his assertion that it is only through the labor of the Slave (which is meant to evoke the proletariat) that Man makes himself. As Kojve notes: The end of history is not a limit imposed on Man from without: history is, one might say, unlimited. Because man can negate whatever he likes, and he does cease to negate until he no longer wishes to do so. He does not achieve this, his becoming until he is perfectly satisfied . . . because this is what he is, or more exactly because this is what he does, --until he creates himself (by the negation of what does not satisfy him, outside him and inside himself ( ILH 347) One gets a sense here of the kind of heroic humanism that Kojve seems to have in mind. This heroism would be lost if there were in fact the kind of self-correcting background necessitating Mans development from without.It is ultimately Man who brings about the end of history, and it is only relative to his own standards that historys end can have arrived. The end of history marks that point when the I, as the mediating point maring the individuals placement within a social, linguistic system, becomes free. It is Man as the temporalizing being that ends history. And this history itself only makes sense as having a unity bestowed upon it through the memory retrospective reconstruction of the free individual (IRH 200 n.11. 233). Kojve writes:Thus, this I will be its own product: it will be (in the future) what it has become by negation (in the present) of what it was (in the past), this negation will be accomplished with a view to what it will become. In its very being this I is intentional becoming, deliberate evolution, conscious and voluntary progress; it is the act of transcending the given that is given to it and that it itself is. This I is a (human) individual, free (with respect to the given real) and historical (in relation to itself) [emphasis added]. And it is this I, and only this I, that reveals itself to itself and to the other as Self-Consciousness (IRH 5).

Kojve sees this process as one of arduous contest. He writes:The complete, absolutely free man, definitively and completely satisfied by what he is, the man who is perfected and completed in and by this satisfaction, will be the slave who has overcome his Slavery. If idle Mastery is an impasse, laborious Slavery, in contrast, is the source of all human, social, historical progress. History is the history of the working Slave. (IRH20)

What is distinctive about Kojves understanding of Hegels position (and Kojve does genuinely seem to agree with Hegel on this matter) is that we have finally arrived at the exhaustive and unique Concept that provides the transhistorical standard of knowledge (IRH 193). Bracketing for the moment what this entails, we can say that Pinkard and Kojve share a metaphysic (disenchanted Aristotelian naturalism), as well as (in broad outlines) a sense of what Hegel took himself to have apprehended. They differ on whether they agree with the claims of exhaustiveness and uniqueness of the Logic (Kojve does, Pinkard does not). But they also agree pace Pinkard, on what the process is between these two endsthat is, from a disenchanted nature setting the metaphysical conditions (the beginning), to the knowledge that is realized (to some extent) at the end of Hegels story. It is a distinctive feature of Pinkards Hegel to deflate what having this knowledge consists in, and, relatedly to develop a notion of an open-ended Hegel advocating a kind of amphibious or ironic attitude towards what we hold to be true.[footnoteRef:23] He suggests that Hegel warns us of a mistaken drive for a certain kind of wholeness (HN 9). In fact, Pinkard is quite explicit about the dangers of seeing anything like closure in Hegels system. [23: Pinkard develops this point in the conclusion of HN, subtitled Hegel as a post-Hegelian. Interestingly, Gwendoline Jarczyk and Pierre-Jean Labarriere, contemporary French interpreters frame their De Kojeve A Hegel: Cent Cinquante Ans De Pensee Hegelienne En France as a polemic recuperation of Hegel against post-structuralist concerns that Hegel is the philosopher of totality and closure. The open-ended Hegel, it turns out, is alive in France as well. ]

First, however, it could be helpful to get a general sense of Pinkards Hegel. Some indication of the metaphysical view Pinkard would like to attribute to Hegel is suggested by the title of Pinkards Hegels Naturalism. This is not to say that naturalism refers in every case to the same metaphysical view. In this case, Hegels naturalism opposes certain metaphysical views relating to special properties of substance and special kinds or sources of causality. Pinkard is interested in showing that for all of Hegels invocations of a substance that is subject he is not making an argument for vitalistic monism (to use Frederic Beisers term[footnoteRef:24]). Rather, it is Hegels goal to explain the normative dimension of experience, that is, the complex cognitive attitude that can treat appearances as appearances, while holding reality as setting the standards for what is in fact the case. We are capable of reflecting on our own taking the world to be a certain way, and we are normatively committed to getting it right. It is ultimately we who set the standards for what will count as the world being as such. And this we is constituted through the historical development of self-reflective practices. [24: See Beiser, 141. I take Beiser to be claiming that this vitalistic monism is precisely what lies at the center of Hegels system. ]

With respect to this last point, it is clear how Hegels metaphysical naturalism is tied to his social epistemology. That is, our coming to be self-reflective thinkers of the sort that we are entails our having eliminated some candidates for what provides the intelligibility of the world. In saying that the social plays an essential role here, Pinkard wants to emphasize that Hegel precludes the possibility of Platonic idealism, or Neo-Platonic Christianity as viable candidates to secure the foundations of knowledge (110). Further, Hegel is also attacking certain empiricist claims about the foundations of knowledge. On some readings of Hegel, Hegel is not only a Platonic idealist, but a subjective idealist, for whom the grounds of belief are all mental, in such a way that a world of mind-independent objects cannot play a role in cognition. In opposition to this view, the empiricist model of knowledge as founded on direct and unimpeachable intuition of reality would be ruled out if Hegel were this kind of idealist. On Pinkards reconstruction, Hegel avoids both Berkeleyan idealism and the dogma of empiricism. It is rather that the role that mind-independent objects plays in our thinking and reasoning about the world is always in some sense freely-grantedthat is, we are dependent, under recognizably realist metaphysical assumptions, on a world out there for supplying what it is were supposed to be getting right when we talk about the world. It is not as though this world comes to us in the uninterpreted manner (this would be that mythical Given) such that it provides the criteria for determining whether weve gotten it right or not. [footnoteRef:25] Rather, it is the collective epistemological work of Spirit to figure out how we can get things right.[footnoteRef:26] As Pinkard puts it: [25: The nature of this kind of epistemic internalism is a vexed issue for Davidson, Sellars, McDowell, and Brandom. See McDowells Sellars and the Space of Reason and Brandom s study guide to Sellars Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind for a sampling. How it is exactly that the world can play a truth-making role given an internalist epistemology is unclear. When I say the grounds of belief, this would make it seem fairly obvious that as grounds I am really talking about something epistemically-internal, or something that must have grounded something epistemically-internalthus generating a regress that would seem to support a form of internalism. I am really only interested in ruling out the bad idealism of the Berkeleyan and (on some accounts) Hegelian view here. This would be a form of metaphysical internalism which no one seems to want.] [26: Pinkard develops this argument quite clearly in Chapter 2 of Hegels Naturalism, Self-Consciousness in the Natural World.]

This view does not deny the independent existence of the objects of natural world, nor does it deny their independent causal properties. It says that something comes to count as an authoritative reason for acting or believing because the subject himself comes to count it as an authoritative reason (HP 49)

This however is the conclusion of the processit is not until we have encountered some objects that can set their own standard for correctness (that it, other people who can recognize objects) that we can resolve the initial issues concerning our knowledge of objects of the simpler sort.[footnoteRef:27] This is why we require the full set of conceptual tools provided by the phenomenological proof of the Phenomenology in order to know what we are saying when we assert the realist claim that there is a world out there. [27: Pinkard explains this transition at HP 52.]

For his part, Pinkard makes two central claims here. One is metaphysical and one epistemological. Not coincidentally, the point is somewhat Kantian. Pinkards naturalist Hegel never denies the realist assumption that there is a world of mind-independent objects. In fact, Pinkard stresses that Hegel goes even farther than Kant is assuming that spatio-temporality is a feature of objects, not forms through which we apprehend the world (HN 85 n78). Further, Pinkard notes that Hegel rejects subjective idealism as an entirely unconvincing position (HN 30). With this metaphysical point in hand, Pinkard then focuses on how Hegel thinks that knowledge can still be possible, given that the world has its independence and there does not appear to be any criterion of adequacy that seems to offer itself up to our minds. For Pinkards Hegel, the trick will involve figuring out that this last problem is not quite as much of a problem as we might take it to be (this is the Wittgensteinian and Pragmatist line that Pinkard finds in Hegels thought). We will always be left with questions about whether were getting it right about the world or not, but we are mistaken in thinking that this should lead us to skepticism (even of the Kantian varietythat is, denying the possibility of knowledge of things in themselves, while still thinking that the natural sciences are on sound footing with regard to appearances). We will always be revising our beliefs in light of the world, and it is only we who can meaningfully determine what the limits of our knowledge can be. In part, this means that it is not Nature or God who has endowed the objects of contemplation with their suitedness to the interests of our cognition or practical activity. Pinkard means this to rule out truthmakers like Platonist Ideas, or a theologically-informed conceptions of Gods Law or Mind (HN 110). Nature is not a book in which the will of a creator can be found. And, further, there is no divine plan according to which the world unfolds. This is the meaning of what Pinkard calls disenchanted Aristotelian naturalism. As he puts it:This nature, from which we have distinguished ourselves, is not anything that stands, as it were, in a friendly relationship with us or that is an expression of the grand providential plan of the universe. Indeed, such a disenchanted nature as a whole threatens no longer to be understood as responding to human aspirations at all, and if so, nature and religion part ways. (HN 21)Crucially, it is not only nature that is disenchanted, but we ourselves as well. Pinkard notes, We are self-conscious, self-interpreting animals, natural creatures whose nonnaturalness is not a metaphysical difference (as that, say, between spiritual and physical stuff) or the exercise of a special form of causality (HN 18). That is, we are not as far from animals as we might imagine[footnoteRef:28]. Further, Pinkards Hegel rejects Kants metaphysical arguments for a metaphysically unconstrained free will. He focuses instead on a kind of reciprocal causation, whereby we create the institutions, habits, and practices that give us the characters that then create those institutions, habits, and practices. The direction of fit runs from both the individual to the social and from the social to the individual.[footnoteRef:29] [28: In fact, a distinctive feature of the philosophical line of which Pinkard is a part, including Davidson, Sellars, McDowell and Brandom is that non-linguistic concept use, when concepts are conceived as rules for action, can be attributed to animals. In Hegels Naturalism Pinkard draws out how for Hegel too, it makes to think of animals as being concept-usersthis allows him to interpret the odd sounding claim Hegel makes that animals are idealists (HN 38 n. 28). ] [29: See Lewis, 2005.]

But if this explains how we may arrive at certain endsthat is, how our intererdetermined societies and selves inform our purposive activity, given that God and Nature do not supply us with endsit still leaves open the question of what these ends are or ought to be. What then supplies us with the final ends of life (to borrow a phrase from Pinkard)? Pinkard writes, As self-interpreting animals, our final end is that of self-knowledge (105). The conditions of this kind of inquiry however are not entirely abstact and conceptual, but, because of Hegels model of reciprocal causation, involve the material institutions and practices that allow for this kind of inquiry.[footnoteRef:30] [30: One might wonder how and why we move from a metaphysical discussion to one of sociality, habits, and institutions. There is obviously a much larger story to be told here. To offer only a skeletal account informed by both Pinkard and Brandom, the normative activity of getting it right about the world only makes sense if we think of this as a social activity, and think of our reasons as being reasons to the extent that they stand in an inferentially-structured social space. That is, the claims we make as individuals can only be thought of us as reasons inasmuch as we imagine a community of reason-givers who can recognize our authority as claim-makers, adjudicate our claims, and grant or reject the claims we make. The ground rules of this activity are the truth-preserving laws of logicthough, obviously, logical possibility defines too large a set of possible assertions to help us affirm he assertions we really care aboutthe true ones, and, in particular, the alethic ones. We engage therefore in the working out of material propositions, taking into account one anothers utterances in light of our beliefs, what we take to be true about the world, and the inferential constraints of reason.]

This kind of activity has a real history, and Hegel tries to gives us an abstract account of how a certain European, 19th century community of reason-givers tried, through a long process of contest and reflection, to distribute social authority such that the project of collective and individual reflection came to be unlimited (HP 16). It was unlimited, or infinite, in that no external authority (paradigmatically that of both monarchy, as the French Revolution demonstrated, and the Church, as the Protestant Revolution demonstrated) limited social activity without being susceptible (in principle) to a critical examination of its authority[footnoteRef:31]. What Hegel calls negativity, a critical activity in the domain of inquiry, comes to stand in a relation with positivityand we can think of positivity as that which is posited that is, something which is established by fiat and which lacks a ground apart from arbitrary activity of its positing. It will be a distinctive feature of Spirit that it can engage freely (that is, as the negative) in its positing, without any longer being concerned about a fiat from elsewhere. Spirit overcomes both the excesses of negativity (for Hegel, these include skepticism, Kantianism, and the French Revolutionall of which privilege negativity in a way that yields contradictions) as well as the arbitrary and brute positivity of objects and institutions. The critical (and distinctively modern) innovation of Hegels time was the development of the individual as a source of authority in the domains of scientific and normative inquiry (HN136). Such an individual, however, is itself the creation of a society. The persistent community of self-reflexive individuals, their material habits and practices, are what Hegels Geist really is. [31: See Chapter 7 of Hegels Phenomenology for a brief account of the significance of these events.]

Yet we may note a tension here between Hegels social theory and the epistemological dividends its historical development are supposed to have yielded. Given Hegels notion of reciprocal causation between individuals and society and the reality of social change, its not exactly clear how or why the kind of self-reflexive activities of Geist came to be. It is also not clear (and this is crucial for Kojve and Pinkard) what kind of necessity the process of social awakening Hegel describes has. The idea of reciprocal causation might lead one to wonder how there could ever not be a fit between the individual and society. That is, if we emphasized the role society plays in conforming individuals to itself, it would not seem possible (or would seem highly unlikely) that a society would develop individuals with the capacity or will to challenge social norms.[footnoteRef:32] [32: This concern is voiced by Bertrand Russells quip that for Hegel, freedom means the right to obey the police and it means nothing else at all (qtd. HN 144).]

There seem to be a few ways of understanding how social change is possible, given a fairly strong emphasis on the social formation of individuals.[footnoteRef:33] First, there could be forces (supernatural, natural or, critically for a Marxist, productive) which throw a society into a kind of disequilibrium, such that the social norms and traditions on which the individual had relied prove to be inadequate relative to the internal standards of a culture. Second, there could be contingent (in the sense of accidental) developments that similarly create crises that a given form of life cannot manage (we might think of this as something like a random mutation). Third, we could deny the extent to which our selves are in fact historically formed, and affirm that we have strong enough first natures such that any form of life out of line with these first natures faces resistance. There are obviously weaker and stronger versions of this position. On this view, only a form of life that accommodated these first natures could in fact be, as Pinkard puts it, sustainable over the long run (HN 126). [33: Im using individuals in a fairly un-technical sense here. In fact, Hegels historicism means to demonstrate that the members of a social whole are themselves conceptually (and linguistically) differentiated by the relations of members to that whole. So concepts like citizen and individual have specific and differentiated meanings referring, in part, to the relations obtaining between singular members and society. See HN 64 for a discussion of the individual in the stricter sense. ]

Kojve and Pinkard both draw on all three of these forces as explaining historical changes, and they both reject pace Pinkard any kind special causal force guaranteeing progress. Again, I take both Kojve and Pinkard to be reconstructing from Hegel a species of historical transcendental argument. That is, they argue from the fact of certain features of modern life to those historical conditions which would have had to be necessary for this fact to have been actual. Those historical conditions are sometimes more recognizable as actual historical events and sometimes more recognizable as thought experiments. Hegels distinctive philosophy of history gives the most explicit account of just how concepts are in history, but we cannot engage that issue here. I take Pinkard to argue, however, that while Hegel took himself to have achieved a kind of semantic finality in certain domains (the project of the Logic) Hegel never in fact achieve this kind of finality.[footnoteRef:34] The denial of finality obviously deflates just which fact it is that were trying to recover the conditions of. Kojve does not part with this fact in quite the same way. [34: In part, I think this explains why Pinkard is more willing to see Hegel as engaging in thought experiments (HN 67) (even though Pinkard repeatedly chastens Hegel for confusing his thought experiments with recognizable history). In an odd way, it is Kojves Marxism that prevents him from being this kind of Hegelian. Kojve wants a concrete Hegel. He does not want the kind of speculative reconstructive project that is ultimately only a theory of knowledge. He wants a theory of history that genuinely explains history. ]

But if we bracket questions about the putative fact from which Pinkard and Kojve argue, we can see that there is still substantive agreement about how such a fact could be explained. The historical transcendental argument can be made without recourse to the kinds of teleology both Pinkard and Kojve are at pains to separate from Hegel. This is possible given some of the concepts Pinkard attributes to Hegel: nonpurposive purposiveness, retrospective rational reconstruction, path-dependent progress.The way this fits together it perhaps best understood by looking at the structure of scientific discoveries. It is only possible to advance a certain scientific thesis, having already been given certain scientific concepts and methods to work with. There is a very obvious and necessary way that discoveries always require this kind of background and that allow new discoveries to make sense. Revisions are always possible, but, to make a Wittgensteinian point, not all of them, and not all at once. From the standpoint of a new discovery, one could (at least potentially) reconstruct the historical line of discovery that furnished the concepts through which the discovery could be interpreted. This kind of inquisition is open-ended with respect to the future, but it is clearly conditioned by the inherited conceptual resources from which it emerges. Novelty requires tradition in this sense. This does not mean, however, that the past is aiming at the future. It does not mean that new discoveries fulfill the past in any sense other than that the contemporary thinker takes her own work to fulfill past commitments (through emending it, applying a concept to new developments, discarding parts of it, for example). The web of belief grows develops in time, but never according to some pre-determined plan. And, given the disenchantment Pinkard advocates, there is certainly so special causal force at work in the world drawing our knowledge forward. Pinkard dissociates the providential model, or enchanted teleology, from path dependent progress (HN 119). This progress is made rational by retrospective legitimization (HN119). Given this position, it is clear why Pinkard would deny anything like the idea of Nature in early modern thought as a beneficent, self-correcting background that he imputes to Kojve (HP 436). To be clear, there is actually a self-correcting dimension of the model of human inquiry Pinkard is interested in. In fact the idea of being self-explicating in the sense of self-correcting is precisely what Pinkard takes Hegels sense of the infinite to be (HN 74). It is the idea of this development being pre-ordained that Pinkard objects to. As I hope is now clear, Kojve too would object to anything like some pre-ordained plan for humanity.The question then remains: what is it that drives the engine of history? While scientific inquiry and the application of concepts to novel situations clearly display the structure of retrospective rational reconstruction, it is clear to Hegel, Kojve, and Pinkard, that this is not all that Hegel is concerned with. In fact, a case could be made that in the case of scientific inquiry as a specific domain of inquiry, social changes in the distribution of socially-recognized epistemic authority were probably conditions of the kind of best-practices science that now govern those fields. This is to say that a social theory of knowledge presupposes some theory of the social, and a rational reconstruction of history presupposes some account of an actual history. What then, were or are these redistributions of socially-recognize authority? Here Pinkard emphasizes that our nonpurposive purposiveness, the teleological activities that we engage in in Nature but which are not given by Nature, have ultimately served to allow us greater self-understanding. He is quite clear on this point: As self-interpreting animals, our final end is that of self-knowledge (HN 105). Pinkard notes that for Hegel, collective human activities do have a kind of inevitability, such that Reason necessarily works its way through history inevitably yielding the kind of society of self-interpreting, anti-foundational epistemologists. Pinkard notes that for Hegel, The natural dialectic propels it in the direction of increasing universality (HN 63). This would be precisely the kind of providential model Pinkard attrbutes to Kojve and rejects. I take Pinkard to think that, in fact, this process was far more contingent than the providential model would suggest.Pinkard is also clearly aware that whether providential or entirely happenstance, this process is not merely discursive. The importance of non-reason-giving practices in establishing the practical conditions of reason-giving is central in Hegels Lord Bondsman, or Master/Slave dialectic. Indeed, if Hegels project is in fact the kind of transcendental historical argument that I have been describing, then we would expect the fact of reason-giving to be the culmination of a long development. As Pinkard put is:The capacity to see each other as ends in themselves is the result of a historical struggle and if the failure of forms of life based on something elsesuch as mastery and servitudeto provide a way of life that could ultimately sustain normative allegiance. (HN 105)As with certain other episodes in the Phenomenology, its not entirely clear whether the Master/Slave dialectic is meant to be an abstract description of real events, or whether it is entirely a thought experiment.[footnoteRef:35] What is clear is that this struggle was violent, and could not have possessed the kind of receptivity to reason which was to be its result. As Pinkard notes: [35: This line of inquiry is explored in Susan Buck-Morss Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009)]

Even with, as it were, the best reasons n the world, one can still find oneself confronted by an other who demands recognition and is willing to kill for it, not out of any kind of built-in desire for domination but simply out of the conviction that he is right and so he demands recognition of his rightness. (62 HN)

This is why, Only something like a slave revolt or a massive shift of institutional loyalty can end the reign of masters over servants (HN 67). I foreground these passages in Pinkard to highlight that he is acutely aware that the kind of normative reason-giving, entailing as it does a receptivity to reasons that ought not be arbitrarily circumscribed by social position, is a historical accomplishment. Pinkards point is that the broad conceptual outlines of the social space of reason are what is meant to have been established by Hegel, but neither Hegel nor Pinkard claim that such a this kind of reason-giving is entirely actual. Despite the contradictions a reasonable critic might observe, as Pinkard notes, people can live with those contradictions and whatever anguish they bring with them for centuries (HN 118).I focus on Pinkards treatment of the master/slave dialectic in part to demonstrate that there is in this interpretation an implicit theory of the relation of a social epistemology to violence; of the norms of political life to their retrospective legitimation; of the normative outlines of a theory of communication to the real conditions of its emergence. This is important for two reasons: first, one could get the impression from reading certain Pragmatist interpretations of Hegel that better reasons win out on the basis of their explanatory force alone. In fact, however, this was never Hegels point. Further, Kojves emphasis on the master/slave dialectic (and if readers are familiar with Kojve at all, they know this emphasis and his end of history thesis), has often been seen as too narrow to make sense of the wider Hegelian system. And there are good reasons to read more than just Kojve if one wants to know what Hegel said. But it is wrong, I think, to ignore the haunting question of how the conditions of a communicative Hegelian exchange of reasons could be possible. With this in mind, I hope to suggest how I think Kojve and Pinkard might be brought together.There are swaths of Hegels philosophy that must now be recognized as false. The contemporary natural scientist should not turn to Hegel for a working model of any of the sciences; historians and anthropologists continue to purge crude forms of Hegelianism from their thought. While his views on the matter are somewhat complex, Hegel is racist and sexist (inasmuch as all but the most caricatured racism and sexism is racist and sexist) and his would-be rehabilitators would be better served to be forthright about this than to interpret it away. The contemporary worries about Hegel as a totalitarian, racist, proto-Nazi are too heavy-handed to be informative; but there are grounds to be worried, deeply worried about Hegels views. Hegel, the new Aristotle is a bit like Aristotlehis philosophical anthropology at times suggests a better political vision than his actual political vision. How then to interpret Hegel if we wish to perform anything other than an academic exercise, reconstructing a putative account of the world that we know is not true of the world?On some accounts, the kind of holism Hegel advocates precludes the possibility of falsifying any parts of the system without also falsifying the whole. Interpreters of an open Hegel are less convinced that such a requirement holds. We might imagine that the system can in fact persist through changewhether this means responding to new events or working out some internal contradiction. Indeed, the processual model of truth the Pragmatist readers would like to impute to Hegel is meant to account for exactly this kind of possibility. This remains, it seems to me, the only way forward. What function Hegel plays in such interpretive projects will remain internal to the rules of justification and authorial authority. The charge that anything but a quotation, and perhaps nothing short of the system in its entirety, can be attributed to Hegel always relies on an interpretationthat is, a subject-relative judgment with respect to the objects principle of unity. That we have access to an uninterpreted Hegel-in-himself, is of course, something we can imagine Hegel to deny.On the question of interpretation itself, Pinkard notes:Although it is not a noncontroversial idea, there is one principle of interpretation that holds that when interpreting philosophical texts, one must interpret them so as to make them the best texts they can be, taking into account both fit with the actual words used and fit with an overall plausible and defensible philosophical program. To read a text in a philosophical way is to make certain choices about what is central to the program and its arguments and what it not. (HD 9)The question then is what we take an overall plausible and defensible philosophical program to consist in. In his later years, Kojves life shifted from that of the contemplative activities of academic philosophy to the political activity, helping to lay the groundwork of the European Economic Community, and ultimately, the European Union. He turned away from philosophy which he took Hegel to have completed, and turned towards wisdom, though, aside from the practical emphasis of wisdom its not entirely clear what the difference he saw between the two was (De Kojve 97-9). His observations in a late interview in 1968, shortly before his death, suggest what he took the project of living at the end of history to be. Indeed, his comments here about national cultures are bizarre and offensive. He thought, for example, that Japan is a country of 80 million snobs and that it is necessary to democratize snobbism ( De Kojve 99). These views are neither plausible, nor defensible.In part, however, I suspect Kojve means to be sensational here. In a letter to Tran Duc Thao, who had strongly resisted Kojves interpretation of Hegel in the pages of Les Temps Modernes (Temps 492-519), Kojve freely admitted his work was not a historical study but rather a work of propaganda designed to frapper les esprits (Kojve, Lettre 134). Kojves elliptical musings on wisdom, express the belief conviction that we must take ourselves to seeking guidance in the field of practical life. Inasmuch as Hegel settled certain theoretical issues for us, we may turn our attention to the labor of applicationsome kinds of speculation no longer require working through. Of course, Kojve himself thought that taking Hegel to have gotten it right, requires a kind of decision that ultimately cannot be grounded. In the final options of a theological or anthropological account of History there is no reason to decide on one as opposed to the other (293 ILH). Ultimately then, Kojve reminds us that any rehabilitation of Hegel cannot ignore the historical, political, and material conditions of the retrospective legitimizer. There is a genuine danger in ignoring these conditions, just as there is a danger in thinking that reasonableness consists in nothing but the communicative rules of the powerful. The task moving forward will be to determine how these conditions relate to these rules.It is for this reason that Pinkards shifting his attention to Hegels practical philosophy seems so promising. That is, the shift from what Pinkard characterizes as an examination of the possibilities of thought to the practical questions of how theoretical disputes can be tamed, opens the door to a more careful examination of the real history of those practices. There may be a kind of uneasiness here. For if we abandon the end of history and the closure of the Hegels system, which Kojve could not bring himself to do, we allow the threat of relativism to return. This is not to say that all claims will suddenly be true, nor that the truth preserving laws of inference will fail us. But it means that the practical activities which make use of such formal laws cannot depend on those laws to guarantee their legitimacy. We may find ourselves ultimately with a good deal of work to do.

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