By ARI MARCELO SOLON*
Considerations on Alexandre Kojève's book
1.
This manuscript, written between November 1940 and 1941, was finally translated in a surprisingly clear and beautiful way by Rambert Nicolas. This is, in fact, the first volume, and the second volume will be published within a year.
Like everything in Alexandre Kojève's life, there are mysteries surrounding him. In the translator's view, it is a manuscript deposited with his friend Georges Bataille, in the French National Library, and only recently rediscovered. In the even more mysterious Anglo-Saxon view, it is a letter written by Alexandre Kojève to Joseph Stalin, deposited in the Soviet embassy in Paris, with his friend Léon Poliakov, a future historian of anti-Semitism, but destroyed in the embassy fire by the Nazis.
Despite the suspense, this is such a clear translation that it allows us to revisit the main theses of Alexandre Kojève's philosophy listed below.
Alexandre Kojève's (2025) only mistake throughout the manuscript now published was to point out the disaster, all along, of Trotskyism.
We think, on the contrary, that the betrayed revolution is valid.
Unlike the book written by the humorist Queneau, in this manuscript Alexandre Kojève points out that Hegel's mistake was the recognition that the end of history occurred with Napoleon. In fact, Hegel's phenomenology was not completed. It was Marx who completed it and recognized it for the first time.
2.
The social recognition of Alexandre Kojève's phenomenology took place in the country of the Soviets. It appeared in 1917, in Russia, but the chronological gap, between 1906 and 1917, is not a phenomenological gap, since Hegel captured the new of this period, democratic liberalism.
Napoleon's historical activity is not the end of history, but Hegel correctly showed the end that this effectiveness pursued.
Alexandre Kojève rightly states that the socialist revolution of 1917 achieved the social recognition of which Hegel spoke. Thus, from the Hegelian-Marxist point of view, the history of humanity is over. It has exhausted all its historical possibilities.
Hegel's discovery consists in preserving the Judeo-Christian-dialectical conception of man, suppressing the theological concept. In another sense, Hegelianism is nothing other than atheistic Judeo-Christianity.
Man becomes the free creator of himself and his world, that is, like something magical, man can change his appearance to his liking.
In this regard, the Hegelian man does not depend on nature. In this sense, he is different from the Greek man, at the same time that he does not depend on divinity, and therefore he is no longer the Judeo-Christian man. This is the thought that Hegel passed on to Marx.
Hegel's phenomenology does not differ from Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, only Husserl was not familiar with Hegel and Marx. The phenomenological method that Edmund Husserl discovered, a purely descriptive method, is in no way different from what Hegel applied in his philosophy, specifically regarding his phenomenology.
The works of Edmund Husserl (2012a; 2012b; 2019) and his most important disciple, Martin Heidegger (2015), are, from a strictly philosophical point of view, the most important that bourgeois thought has produced since Hegel.
Hegel's phenomenology is closer to Plato than to Kant. Plato studied not abstract knowledge and opinions, but flesh-and-blood men. Contemporary indeterministic physics is compatible with Hegel's phenomenology, unlike classical Galilean physics.
On the other hand, Hegel's philosophy of nature can be dismissed, since it attempted to introduce dialectics into the non-human world. Thus, Werner Heisenberg's physics is not philosophy, since it includes the subject as an abstract man. Unlike the concrete way in which Hegel does it.
Hegel's phenomenology is materialist, not in the vulgar sense, because it is on the side of the real, still having an ideal existence. For example, the State. In this he was followed by Karl Marx (2023) and Vladimir Lenin (1977).
This is what Hegel states in the preface to the work The phenomenology of the spirit: work so that philosophy approaches the end of placing its name, love of knowledge, as effective knowledge.
*Ari Marcelo Solon He is a professor at the Faculty of Law at USP. Author of, among others, books, Paths of philosophy and science of law: German connection in the future of justice (Prisma). [https://amzn.to/3Plq3jT]
Reference
Alexandre Kojève. Sophia: Philosophie et phénoménologie. Translation: Rambert Nicolas. Paris, Gallimard, 2025. v. 1, 544 pages.
REFERENCES
HEGEL, G.F.W. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Petropolis, Voices, 2014.
HEIDEGGER, M. Being and Time. Petropolis, Voices, 2015.
HUSSERL, E. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy. São Paulo: Ideas and Letters, 2012.
HUSSERL, E. Logical Investigations – Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge: Investigations for Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge. Rio de Janeiro: Forensics, 2012.
HUSSERL, E. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Sao Paulo: Edipro, 2019.
LENIN, VI The State and the Revolution. In: LENIN, VI Selected Works. 5th ed. Volume II. p. 1977-219.
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