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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 20
th
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
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,

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.
2
anachronisms aside), marrying the perspicuity of Pinkards Hegel with the bold ethical
and political vision of Kojves.
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.
2
By recognizing that
Pinkards concern is unjustified, we can use Pinkards notion of a disenchanted
Aristotelian naturalism
3
to make sense of some of Kojves more obscure interpretations
of Nature and History in Hegel.
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.
4
If we saw the direction of fit being thus, we could see

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).
4
In one sense, this is in fact what Taylor suggests when he suggests that the world was posited by Geist or
3
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.
5

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

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).

4
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).
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.
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

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).
5
of Kojves ideas have been dismissed prematurely by Pinkard
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.
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
8
437)
9


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).
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
6
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.
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.
11

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)
12
. Kojves philosophical anthropology of desire is what ultimately drives the
engine of history. Any Lebensform that cannot support this kind of recognition finds

secondary literature on French Hegelianism, see Butler (1987), Geroulanos (2010), Jarczyk and Labarrire,
(1996) and Kelly (1992).
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.

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.
7
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.
13
But the emphasis on one as opposed to the other leads these authors in
remarkably different directions.
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

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.
8
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
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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
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)

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).

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.
10
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
11
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.
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.
16

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

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).
12
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.
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.
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

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.
13
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
18
) must attribute in order to explain his own
satisfaction.
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 ideal
Hegel 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

18
For a comprehensive discussion of the Wise Man see IRH 75-100.
14
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.
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

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.
15
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.
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.
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.
21

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

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.
16
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
22
:
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)

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.
17
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
18
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.
23


23
Pinkard develops this point in the conclusion of HN, subtitled Hegel as a post-Hegelian. Interestingly,
Gwendoline Jarczyk and Pierre-Jean Labarrire, contemporary French interpreters frame their De ojve
Hegel ent inquante ns De Pense Hglienne n rance 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.
19
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.
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
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.
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

24
See Beiser, 141. I take Beiser to be claiming that this vitalistic monism is precisely what lies at the
center of Hegels system.
20
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.
25

Rather, it is the collective epistemological work of Spirit to figure out how we can get
things right.
26
As Pinkard puts it:
This view does not deny the independent existence of the objects of
natural world, nor does it deny their independent causal properties. It says

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.
21
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.
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.
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

27
Pinkard explains this transition at HP 52.
22
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
28
. Further, Pinkards Hegel rejects Kants

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).
23
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.
29

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.
30

This kind of activity has a real history, and Hegel tries to gives us an abstract
account of how a certain European, 19
th
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

29
See Lewis, 2005.
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.

24
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
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.
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.

31
See Chapter 7 of Hegels Phenomenology for a brief account of the significance of these events.
25
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.
32

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.
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).
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

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).
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.
26
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.
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.
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.

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.

27
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
28
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
29
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.
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:
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

35
This line of inquiry is explored in Susan Buck-Morss Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009)
30
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
31
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.
32
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
33
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.
34
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