Philosophy and Politics at the Precipice by Kelly Gary M.;

Author:Kelly, Gary M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Kojève’s Nuclear Culture of Two and the Strauss Critique of Homogeneity

If, as emphasized in Chapter 2, the Strauss–Kojève exchange is, for Strauss, about clearing the high road of the universal to preserve the constructive antagonism of the theologico-political problem, the Strauss analysis of Kojève’s homogeneity is about the low road, an attack on Kojèvian human time that is the intersection of idea and act leading to Kojève’s universal.

Both Strauss and Kojève have their motivations for not making the exchange a rendition of history in the traditional sequential sense, as both wish to emphasize that ancient teachings have relevance to modernity, Strauss because they have currency as eternal, Kojève because in modernity ancient tyrannical ideas are at last “actualized.” Thus, both treat events in a bit of a zigzag fashion. Strauss jumps from ancient tyrants to his contemporary in Portugal’s Salazar, and Kojève strenuously argues that modern tyrannies have implemented the advice of the ancient Simonides (OT, 138–39, 188). Thus, both camps deploy events strategically, not to derive a whole-cloth panoramic view of history leading to an end state, but rather to illustrate a point about the process, about Kojève’s in-time intersection of act and idea. Strauss and Kojève view philosophy as a quest, and a public one at that (compare OT, 167 with OT, 205). Attitudes, behaviors, and externalities do not suffice to get to the Strauss and Kojève difference over the philosopher.

Consequently, the egalitarianism in homogeneity that Strauss wishes to attack is not that which is most manifest in history and externalities. If anything, Strauss critiques Kojève for manifest political inequality and an order tending to “a planetary Oriental despotism.”64 Nor is the easy egalitarianism of leisure depicted in Kojève’s “Note to the Second Edition” the particular target of Strauss.65 Instead, Strauss says the homogeneity of act and idea is impossible, arguing for the durability of the classical standard over time, for its ability to embody a “stable standard,” while maintaining that Kojèvian desire for desire lacks sustenance for its reliance on the vicissitudes of “actual situations” (OT, 210–11). The Strauss concern for homogeneity is thus, at bottom, an assault on Kojève’s parity of act and idea, the heart of Kojèvian proof by circularity. This makes Strauss Kojève’s most pertinent and impertinent provocateur.

For Kojève, the act is the basis for the idea, as the Introduction’s reference to philosophy as a “secondary and derivative” spectator sport implies. To say that Strauss critiques Kojève’s reliance on history to inform philosophy is only to state, more fundamentally, that Strauss objects to ideas resting on the bedrock of acts.

Phrased differently, the difference between Kojève and Strauss is with respect to time phenomenology. Kojève’s philosopher is dissatisfied because of an awareness that all acts have not occurred, and all ideas not thought. His philosopher necessarily remains dissatisfied in time. In contrast, the philosopher of Strauss has knowledge of ignorance referenced against pursuit of the timeless. As a matter of conduct, both seek others, but the philosopher of Strauss out of attachment to the timeless,

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