The History of Animals: A Philosophy by Oxana Timofeeva

Author:Oxana Timofeeva
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

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Unemployed animality

How has it come about that negativity is now associated exclusively with man in his creative activity? Why was subjectivity in its unrest attributed to humans alone, and why was dialectics, especially in the French thought of the twentieth century, associated with the metaphysical circle of man, being and language, from which animals and other non-human beings were excluded? One important step was the anthropologizing of negativity, a step taken by Alexander Kojève in his influential but debatable interpretation of Hegel, whom he read particularly through the lens of Heidegger’s thought.

As is well known, Alexander Kojève, a nephew of Vasily Kandinsky, fled from revolutionary Russia and, after teaching philosophy in Paris for many years, later became a counsellor for economic and trade diplomacy and one of the creators of the European Union. From 1933 to 1939, he lectured on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In the course of this seminar, Kojève read certain chapters of the German text, translated them into French and commented on them. Kojève’s interpretation enjoyed the full confidence of his audience. He had a great talent as a narrator. In his interpretation, Phenomenology of Spirit is like a huge philosophical novel, with vividly drawn characters and memorable dramatic episodes.

One might summarize the crucial parts of Kojève’s reading as follows: the beginning of time coincides with the appearance of man. Before this moment, there is no time. There is only natural being, or space, which is eternal and immutable. There are animals that inhabit this space. History begins when, at a certain point, one of these animals turns into a man. ‘The real presence of Time in the World, therefore, is called Man. Time is Man, and Man is Time’, says Kojève (Kojève 1969: 138). The appearance of man as an active, suffering, fighting and working nothingness will introduce history and time in by means of the process of the negation of natural being for the benefit of man’s supernatural ideal goals:

Man must be an emptiness, a nothingness, which is not a pure nothingness, but something that is to the extent that it annihilates Being, in order to realize itself at the expense of Being and to nihilate in being. Man is negating Action, which transforms given Being and, by transforming it, transforms itself. (38)

Kojevian negativity has, therefore, a human face. He turns Hegelian ontology into anthropology. The condition of the appearance of man is his biological reality as a being capable of desire. Even if Kojève acknowledges that all living beings have the ability to desire, he thinks that man is the only one for whom this capacity is absolutely fundamental. Desire pushes man to act, and this action negates the object of desire, transforming and assimilating it, and thus creates some subjective reality. The desire of man as opposed to the desire of the animal is not a desire for this or that object.

To be sure, the animal, too, has desires, and it acts in terms of these desires, by negating the real: it eats and drinks, just like man.

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