Kant

by Alexandre Kojève, Hager Weslati (Translator)

Kant forms the centerpiece of Alexandre Kojeve’s intriguing discovery of objective reality and its repressed history in Western philosophy

During the early 1950s, Alexandre Kojève resumed his ambitious project to bring the analytic reason of Kantianism in line with Hegel’s logic and philosophy of history. Kant is one of the most extensive text fragments where Kojève turned his attention to the gaps left open in the system of critical philosophy.

Published in its raw, unedited form in 1973, in the aftermath of the anti-Hegelian drift of the student-led revolt of May 68, the book has remained largely unexplored, despite its protean influence on various “returns” to Kant, from Weil to Deleuze, and from Foucault to Tosel and beyond. Kant is a deep and provocative text, equal in breadth and depth of insight to the famous Introduction to the Reading of Hegel .

Kant’s philosophical system, Kojeve argues, is haunted by the Thing-in-itself , as the ultimate expression of ‘bourgeois hypocrisy’ and its internally divided reason between action and discourse.

Making a case for the post-historical moral imperative to turn away from infinite progress and the practical justification of the ideas of God and the immortality of the soul, Kant outlines the material conditions of possibility of revolutionary action within the twin horizon of accomplished and recollected history.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published November 8, 1973

About the author

Alexandre Kojève was a Russian-born French philosopher and statesman whose philosophical seminars had an immense influence on twentieth-century French philosophy, particularly via his integration of Hegelian concepts into continental philosophy. As a statesman in the French government, he was instrumental in the creation of the European Union. Kojève was a close friend of, and was in lifelong philosophical dialogue with, Leo Strauss.

Reviews

[Rhys · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Indeed, and no matter what Kant himself says in its regard, the Kantian System thus involves two irreducible gaps, camouflaged more than they are filled by two discursive developments in the mode of As-if: one, ‘theoretical’, by the (coherent only in appearance) discourse of hypocritical Scepticism (fundamentally religious and theistic), which says that one can live in a human way, that is, speak and act, AS IF the discursive Truth was accessible; the other, ‘practical’, by sceptical Hypocrisy (having the same religious theistic basis, which is, in fact, Christian or bourgeois), which says that one can speak and act AS IF the efficacious and free Action was possible. But had Kant consented to speak solely in the mode of Truth, he would have had to say that this Action is impossible and this Truth inaccessible, and by so doing he would have found it impossible to discursively account for the so-called Truth of this negative, or even sceptical, or ‘disillusioned’ proposition" (p.125).

[Marco Sán Sán]

Es de genio reducir toda la filosofía Kantiana a un problema entre la intuición y el entendimiento, y contrastarlo con el sistema Hegeliano para mostrar que le cierra categorial no es mas que un trascendentalismo disimulado, el cual impide al filósofo volverse sabio y dar cierre a la historia sino que deja una estructuración tan basta como finita por quien la escribe y no como Hegel enseña, que la estructura es infinita y tan basta como quien la aborda. Genio.