It may well be that the future of the world, and thus the sense of the present and the significance of the past, will depend in the last analysis on contemporary interpretations of Hegel’s work – from Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947) by Alexandre Kojève
Alexandre Kojève was an immense influence on many French thinkers. What was so compelling about his lectures on Hegel?
Paris, France, 1933. The French newspaper Le Figaro reads: ‘It’s a wick to a barrel of powder’ beneath the headline ‘Hitler Is the New Master of Germany’. Terror sets in. The far-Right is growing. The economy is suffering. There is mass unemployment. There are workers’ strikes. Fascism begins appealing to the middle classes. In Berlin, Stormtroopers are patrolling the streets. The Gestapo is detaining people and murdering them in cellars. Refugees from Germany arrive by train daily looking for asylum. Between 1933 and 1938, more than 80,000 politicians, philosophers, communists and liberals flee from Germany to France. There is anti-German sentiment. There are anti-immigrant protests.
But intellectual life is flourishing in the cafés, institutes and academies, as refugees forge community in exile. And at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, one of France’s most prestigious research universities, Alexandre Kojève has taken over Alexandre Koyré’s seminar on The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) by G W F Hegel. Between 1933 and 1939, Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, André Breton, Gaston Fessard, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éric Weil, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Raymond Queneau, Emmanuel Levinas all come to hear his lectures. A collection of the most renowned thinkers of the day, who would come to lay the intellectual foundations for 20th-century philosophy, political thought, literature, criticism, psychology and history. It is said that Kojève’s lectures were so intricate, so deft, that Arendt accused him of plagiarising. Bataille fell asleep. Sartre couldn’t even remember being there.
How is it that Kojève, this obscure figure of history, came to influence an entire generation of thinkers at this pivotal moment? How is it that his ideas continue to fuel political and cultural debates today around identity, individualism, liberal democracy and the end of history?…
https://aeon.co/essays/the-philosophical-legacy-of-alexandre-kojeve
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After the truth-shower 