The Phenomenology of Being-Toward-Death in the Dialectic of Kojève

“Now because 18 months ago the first dawn, 3 months ago broad daylight but a very few days ago the full sun of the most highly remarkable spectacle has risen — nothing holds me back. I can give myself up to the sacred frenzy, I can have the insolence to make a full confession to mortal men that I have stolen the golden vessel of the Egyptians to make from them a tabernacle for my God far from the confines of the land of Egypt. If you forgive me I shall rejoice; if you are angry, I shall bear it; I am indeed casting the die and writing the book, either for my contemporaries or for posterity to read, it matters not which: let the book await its reader for a hundred years; God himself has waited six thousand years for his work to be seen.”[1] Thus wrote Johannes Kepler on his momentous discovery of the laws of planetary motion. The birth of modern rationalism is deeply intertwined with the mystical language of Renaissance natural magic. Kepler, a German Lutheran, realized in astronomy, what Hegel considered to be the subjective essence of Protestantism. The “golden vessels of the Egyptians” was no longer something external and far-off but a possession of Man. Hegel, maintained the crucial distinction between Kepler’s “phenomenological laws” which unlike Netwon, “are not meant to be universal natural laws but rather laws of particular phenomenon”.[2] Just as Kepler’s God had to wait “six thousand years for his work to be seen” so had Hegel’s God waited since the dawn of Time, for the comprehension that was finally realized in Jena in 1807. At Jena, with the twin victories for human freedom in the great Napoleonic victory and the Hegelian Phenomenology, the Mind of God was at last made manifest in the World. The Universe had at last come to understand itself as Free. Having waited millennia to be understood in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, would likewise have to wait over a hundred years to be fully understood by contemporaries. But as Kepler pointed out, waiting a century for recognition was nothing compared to God’s long wait. In the century after Hegel’s death, his philosophy was understood one-sidedly through the lenses of Absolute Idealism or Revolutionary Materialism. It was only with the emergence of Heideggerian Phenomenology in the 1930s, that Hegel’s achievement could at last be appreciated. The Russian émigré Alexandre Kojève was the first to acknowledge the significance of the Heideggerian analytic of Being-Toward-Death (Sein-Zum-Tode) for the philosophy of Hegel. In Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, he outlined the manner in which Hegel’s dialectic could only be fully utilized, if it was understood through the methodology of Heidegger’s Dasein. The view of Man as Negativity, as the living Death in the heart of Being, borrows heavily from Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. Man does not just live in the shadow of Time and Death, but is himself Time and Death. The Master-Slave Dialectic is thus premised on the Master as the authentic individual who faces Death. While Heidegger had interpreted Authenticity towards Death in purely individualist existential terms, Kojève integrates it into Hegel’s Philosophy of History. The Master is that Death which lives, while the Slave is primarily a Slave to that ultimate Master- life itself. In his voluntary pursuit of Death, the Master recognizes his fully human potential above mere animalistic biology. The Slave is initially opposed to the human essence of Negativity for he flees from Death. However through Labor, the Slave ultimately becomes a purely Dialectical being, constantly negating the given world and transforming it. The political implications of Being-Toward-Death are drawn out in Kojève’s Tyranny and Wisdom, where he lambasts the Intellectual who impotently condemns the violence of the Tyrant from the sidelines of history. The Intellectual is thus akin to Hegel’s Beautiful Soul, a Being who flees from the struggle and complexities of Life, to adapt a hopelessly critical attitude. It is a form of Nihilism for it worships the Nothingness in opposition to the world that actually exists. Through Heidegger’s concept of Being-Toward-Death, the Wise Man at the End of History can at last see existence through the eyes of God. Just as Heidegger’s concept of Time necessitates the Death of Man, so does it necessitate an End of History. As Kojève points out Time=History, and History is merely the collective action of mortal human individuals. If the human individual must ultimately terminate in Time, so must his work of human History. The End of History appeals to the pacifistic dreams of the Intellectual; however it can only be realized by the violence of the Tyrant. The origin of history is the Slave’s terror before death. The tyrannical use of Jacobin terror universalizes this fear of Death before the entire population, and thus imposes mortality upon both Master and Slave. Through the terrorizing of the Master, the Death of History is at last realized. In this thesis I will argue that Kojève existentially sublimates Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic, as the culminating force of History, through the method of utilizing Heidegger’s Being-Toward-Death, in order to demonstrate that the Master relinquishes Worldhood to the Slave, in that moment of ontological suicide in which he voluntarily embraces Death.

EO Wilson and Albert Camus on the Question of Philosophy

Was human history a mistake? Man surely must seem to be the most dimwitted of animals. For if scientific materialism is correct, man has wasted millennia self-deluding himself with religion, ideology, and highfalutin pie in the sky nonsense, only to fall back to earth. At last materialistic biology has discovered that the animals were right all along. That the purpose of man is to eat, drink and be merry. The pig, earthworm, ant, and chimpanzee have better understood the simplistic biological imperative to survive and reproduce better than man, the most foolish of beasts. EO Wilson in the first lines of his 1975 Magnus Opus- Sociobiology, declared open war on existential questions. “Camus said that the only serious philosophical question is suicide. That is wrong even in the strict sense intended. The biologist, who is concerned with questions of physiology and evolutionary history, realizes that self-knowledge is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain. These centers flood our consciousness with all the emotions — hate, love, guilt, fear, and others — that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil. What, we are then compelled to ask, made the hypothalamus and limbic system? They evolved by natural selection. That simple biological statement must be pursued to explain ethics and ethical philosophers, if not epistemology and epistemologists, at all depths.” [3] Wilson’s disdain at the very question of man’s nothingness recalls Carnap’s similar rebuke of Heidegger’s supposed nonsensicalness. For Carnap “the nothing nothings” is the height of linguistic sophistry and nonsense. Nothing but a “logical defect of language”.[4] For the materialistic worldview, life is taken as a given and man is not a problem. From this perspective Camus and Heidegger appear to be talking nonsense when they speak of man’s nothingness. For materialism, man clearly is Thing and cannot be no-thing. Man is entirely at home in the world he belongs in. Wilson goes onto refute the very notion of being-for-itself “Self-existence, or the suicide that terminates it, is not the central question of philosophy. They hypothalamus-limbic complex automatically denies such logical reduction by countering it with feelings of guilt and altruism. In this one way the philosopher’s own emotional centers are wiser than his solipsist consciousness, ‘knowing’ that in evolutionary time the individual organism counts for almost nothing. In a Darwinist sense, the organism does not live for itself. Its primary function is not even to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes, and it serves as their temporary carrier.”[5] For the biological perspective, man is a means to the gene’s ends. Man’s history is thus nothing more than a series of mistakes and delusions which have distracted man from his “objectively true” biological teleology. James Nichols in examining one of Kojève’s earliest works, On Atheism, considers Kojève’s negative atheism to be diametrically opposed to the self-satisfied atheism of the Epicurean. The Epicurean seeks to “root out” religious delusion so he may “experience those genuine pleasures which are compatible with truth”. For Kojève on the contrary “to err is human” and it is precisely man’s erroneous

“rejection of satisfaction in this world” that “points toward something other”.[6]Contrary to Carnap and Wilson, it is precisely man’s lunge toward non-sense, that gives man meaning as the only no-thing in existence. Larry Arnhart has argued that in the wake of the Neo-Darwinian revolution, Natural Right must entirely base itself on the facticity of man’s evolved animal nature. Morality, ethics, and politics are reduced to shaping the community which best serves man’s biological Teleos. The starting point of Arnhart’s political philosophy is a confrontation with what he considers to be Leo Strauss’ dualism between Natural Right and modern science. Having “refuted the ancient teleological conception of the universe, modern science had thereby refuted natural right”.[7] Can political biology designate ends for man, in a universe without design? Is biological atheism merely an Epicurean worship of pleasure and strength? Arnhart argues that Leo Strauss does not sufficiently address the Aristotelian-biological opposition to Platonic-dualism that he himself identifies in a letter to Kojève. Strauss maintains that “The difference between Plato and Aristotle is that Aristotle believes that biology, as a mediation between knowledge of the inanimate and the knowledge of man is available”. (OT 279) For modern scientific reductionism biology continues to mediate as a bridge between inanimate chemistry and man’s psyche. For EO Wilson it is the limbic system which determines man’s end on earth which is survival. Suicide, of the type Camus describes is thus an absurdity and flat-out wrong. Man is thing and cannot be no-thing. Camus however did understand that man’s purpose was life and in his examination of Kirilov’s philosophical suicide pondered the possibility of death as the rejection of any Teleos in the universe.

Like Leo Strauss, Kirilov as an engineer recognizes the incompatibility of Natural Right and modern science. He laments “The Laws of nature made Christ live in the midst of falsehood and die for a falsehood”. [8] The world for the thinking and feeling atheist appears as a grotesque monstrosity. The Atheist has killed God, and found himself trapped in a Hell of his own making. The slavery to God is replaced with the slavery to the laws of nature. The greatest conceivable tyranny- laws without a lawgiver. “Kojève reread Hegel through Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, or rather through the thought of a composite philosopher created in the imagination of Twentieth Century thinkers- Nietzsche/Kirilov”[9]. This Nietzsche-Kirilov composite of Kojeve’s obtains Master Morality through his freely chosen disdain for life. He rules over the herd because he has escaped the animal herd-like nature that binds him to the earth and organic existence. The destruction of his biological apparatus assumes the ultimate refutation of easy hedonistic-materialism. In absurdly embracing the abyss Kirilov asserts his freedom in a meaningless universe. He recreates the dead God. “The reasoning is classic in it’s’ clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is God. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become God.”[10] Kirilov has thus already answered EO Wilson’s objections. Wilson states that Camus is flatly wrong in all senses. Camus is in error, the question of suicide is an error. It is precisely error that Kirilov embraces with his death. It is the error that Kojève identifies with religion itself. To err is human. And Kirilov asserts his humanity in an inhumane universe, precisely in the moment he negates himself. He stands with Jesus and against the “laws of nature”. To be God is to have the power of miracle, which is just the power to violate nature’s laws. Suicide is freedom precisely because it is wrong.

Kirilov and the ‘Pure Freedom’ of Death

The starting point of Kojève’s Master-Slave dialectic is the suicide of the Master. The Master in embracing death dislodges his attachment to the world. Whatever his triumphs, the Master is already dead and has already exited the stage of history. The world already belongs to the Slave. The only Freedom is death, thus the Free Master is already dead. It is the absolute freedom of suicide “which obviously distinguishes man from animal”. (IRH 248) The animal is a thing and thus determined entirely by natural laws. Man is free and autonomous precisely to the extent that he is not a thing. It is man’s power to embrace the nothingness, to be the nothing that makes him genuinely human. Contra Carnap, Kojève reveals that there is nothing more philosophically meaningful than Heidegger’s “nothing which itself nothings”. Man is the no-thing that nothings. In death the purely negative nature of man is revealed. Man is not a part of nature; he is a problem and question to nature. Jacob Klein was able to draw Kojève’s attention to the manner in which Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed illustrates the Hegelian themes of “the faculty of death” and “pure freedom”. By freely dying “before it was written” Kirilov overcomes the omnipotent, external, transcendent, “and has limited infinity or God”. (IRH 248) This important footnote reveals the source of the Master’s power in the rejection of animalistic life. Suicide for Kojève is understood on a higher level than the vulgar physical extent of merely terminating biological functions. Rather suicide is inherently outside of the realm of biology. God is Lord, the ultimate Master. “According to Kojève, Hegel asserts one can only become a free Christian man by becoming a man without God…if man kill himself in emulation of Christ he can thereby render himself immune to death.”[11] The Universe itself is nothing but the corpse of God’s own suicide. Kirilov voluntarily assumes the accusation thrown at atheists by Christians, that they are really Satanists who wish to be God. For Kojeve’s Kirliov that is precisely the point of Atheism, to become like God. However this atheism is not an anti-theist Atheism, but a profound understanding of the hidden esoteric teaching of Christianity itself- mainly that God is Dead. In Kirilov’s universe, God alone is free, thus to be a free man and voluntarily embrace non-necessitated death, is to become a God-Man. Embracing death becomes the only means of forever escaping death and obtaining Christian immortality. “Suicide (voluntary death without any vital necessity) is the most obvious manifestation of negativity or freedom in Hegel…this Hegelian theme was taken up by Dostoyevsky in the Possessed and dramatized in the death of Kirliov.”[12] In his death Kirilov becomes like Jesus the God-Man, the Master. EO Wilson’s biological objection merely repeats Dostoyevsky’s theistic objection that man “necessarily shrinks from death”. (IRH 248) However Kojève answers that even a suicide committed out of the very impossibility of suicide is still a free non-animal act. On a deeper level Dostoyevsky’s theistic objection fails because Kirilov is in a sense more theistic than Dostoyevsky himself. He is more pious than the theist who despairs at a universe without God. Instead, faced with a universe without God, he corrects the absence by becoming God. His error is the error which corrects.

Man is the living dialectic precisely because he is the living dead. Man is the Death that Lives. At first glance Hegelian dialectic that is both “preservation and sublimation” would seem to imply a Christian notion of the afterlife. (IRH 246) Man’s body is negated only to rise again on a higher level. What could be more dialectical? To say that man dies and is simply eaten by worms would seemingly be a simple negation of annihilation. Man’s empirical existence is annihilated pure and simple. There appears to be no sublation or preservation in physical death. But human death is never merely physical it is “always conscious and sometimes willed or voluntary”. (IRH 246) Human death can never be disentangled from the act of thought. Dying for man is always tied to his awareness of his mortality. It is self-awareness of death that marks the origins of self-consciousness. One cannot know an immortal self. An infinite self would be outside of Time and thus temporally incomprehensible. Man takes ownership of his death, it is his original property. “Man alone is capable of wanting the infinity and immortality of what is finite and mortal, just as he alone can kill himself”. (IRH 245) Man does not truly want immortality, which would negate his individuality, he wants a contradiction. Man is immortal in a pantheistic sense, precisely to the extent that his consciousness is abolished and he is reintegrated into Nature. When man craves immortality it is precisely his mortal individuality that he clings to. The individual’s death belongs to himself along. In craving immortality, man wishing to make his temporality infinite. This is the absurdity of the religious craving for the infinite and immortal. Still more absurd is the fact that only mortality gives man the possibility of craving immortality. Kojève here gives concrete meaning to Heidegger’s seemingly absurd “Nothing Nothings”. Man himself is a “penetration of nothingness into Being”. Or a “Nihiliation of Nothingness”. (IRH 247) It is as the Nothing that itself Nothings that man alone in the cosmos has the possibility of Freedom. Man’s freedom is inseparable from his mortality or nothingness. Freedom is inherently action, and action is inherently temporal. Make man immortal and you take him out of time, you take away his action and his freedom. Every act is a negation, a little death. Kojève answers EO Wilson’s charge that man is enslaved to the limbic system, itself enslaved to the design of the gene. He writes “to kill oneself in order to escape from a given situation to which one is biologically adapted is to manifest one’s independence with respect to it – that is one’s autonomy of freedom”. (IRH 247) Neither God nor Gene has the power to determine man to a particular situation or circumstance. Man is flung into a particular life, without his choice, but he preserves his choice to reject his very throwness. The Master kills his animal circumstances and escapes biological adaption into human history. Through action, labor, history, man becomes how own God who may create his own heaven or hell as he wishes. Death is a question to the world. And questioning is the start of all philosophy. Man thinks as he lives. Every moment of his life is a choice to be. As a nihilating nothing, Man is a hole in Being. Man under this definition fulfills the same role that Evil does in Augustinian cosmology. While for Augustine, freedom merely creates the possibility of evil, for Kojève man is himself the Augustinian absence. Man, as nothing, is the absence of Being, the absence of God. In appearance all animals are atheistic-materialists, and man alone is thoughtless enough to imagine religion. But on further consideration, it is man alone who is inherently atheistic. For if God=Being, it is Man who inherently negates Being and creates void and absence.

To be immortal is to be God. Thus it is no solution to concede that man would be determined if he were God, but that he can be free during life and immortal in the afterlife. The Afterlife casts the shadow of immortality over man’s mortal life and corrupts it. A man “who is the beneficiary of an afterlife” would be unable to rise above his determined destiny. (IRH 249) Calvin’s man is an Individuality by the virtue of God’s choice or damnation, but he is neither an individual nor free. If Man is immortal, he is eternal and outside time. With unlimited time, all of man’s possibilities will be realized. Nietzsche used the “myth of eternal recurrence” to emphasize the sacred importance of human choice. Nietzsche assumed that since time was infinite, eventually the universe would repeat all possible manifestations of material organization. All possible states of Being would eventually be realized an infinite number of times. However rather than imputing choice with existential importance, eternity actually removes all significance from choice. Caesar casting the die and crossing the Rubicon, has its importance negated if there will in Time be an infinite number of Caesars who cross and do not cross the Rubicon. Nietzsche emphasized how there would be an infinite repetition of the choices made. However if time is infinite, there will also be an infinite repetition of the choices not made. Thus in infinity all choices become meaningless, since all choices will eventually be made. The division between possibility and reality is abolished. In Eternity all that is Possible is already Real. Just as economics exists only because there is a scarcity of goods, so freedom exists only because there is a scarcity of time. “Man can individual and free only to the extent that he implies in his being all the possibilities of Being but does not have time to realize and manifest them all”. (IRH 251) Man would not be free if his being did not possess all the possibilities of being. By limiting man’s possibilities, man ceases to be free because he no longer has choice. So man must be in possibility everything. But in actuality he is only something. Man could be God, if only he had an infinite amount of Time. Man creates himself as Man by the choices he makes with the limited amount of time he has. Death is the end of Time. For the Individual his own Death ends God and the Universe.

On the implications of evolution for Natural Right, Kojève is closer to Leo Strauss than Larry Arnhart. The version of Darwinism propounded by EO Wilson and Larry Arnhart sees man as essentially determined by his genetic code. The life drama of a Man is simply an unfolding of whatever was already implicit in the man’s DNA. Man in this understanding is immortal since, the individual is merely the epiphenomenon of the eternal gene. Man is the temporal appearance, but behind him is the Gene, the eternal essence. Kojève insists that this solely biological Man, “while ‘evolving’ in time, he would only develop an eternal determined ‘nature’, which would be given to him ahead of time or imposed on him”. (IRH 252) There cannot be morality of Right at all under such a schema. For a decision can only be moral or immoral if it is a free choice. If Darwinian “natural right” consists merely of the unfree unfolding of man’s genetic programming, no external morality can be applied to it. There is no possibility of biological man failing to fulfill his human destiny, since merely by reproducing he has already fulfilled his biological destiny. Only a Man who stands as a being-toward-death can possess freedom and history. Man’s responsibility, drama and tragedy come from being both less and more than brute biological animality. Man is that Negativity within Being, which must play itself out through the drama of history. History is the individual drama of man’s temporality played out on the collective scale. Man’s finiteness forces him to act, and through action he creates History. Following the classic Hegelian triad of Being-Nothing-Becoming, Kojève maintains that “without Negativity, that is without finiteness or temporality, that is without finiteness or temporality, Being would never be a conceived being. (IRH 254) Being that was entirely Being, would be devoid of all content. It is the absence of non-being that creates the space for Being to exist. A Being without Negativity can only be conceived as Nothing. To say that Being is something and not Nothing, is to imply that is “some” of a thing and neither “all” nor “none” of a thing. There needs to be a negativity, a hole, in the heart of Being itself, for Being to exist. Man is that negativity, that hole in Being’s Center that allows Being to be conceived. How would a Being that could not be conceived be different from Nothing? Negative theology which insists that God cannot be conceived, says only what God is not and never what God is. Negative theology, the only logically coherent theology, is ultimately an atheistic theology. An inconceivable Being is Not-Being in the same manner that an inconceivable God is Not-God. The historicized God of Kojève, with his omnipotence, omnipresence, and eternality subtracted from him is a more Real God than the empty God of the theist. Likewise Being must be historicized, temporalized, and humanized. Man creates the possibility of conceiving Being, and it is Man alone who can conceive Being. Man is the only measure of Being. Being exists for and through Man. Man is Negativity, thus he alone has the power to conceive Being as he conceives himself. Man alone can subtract “the Being is” from Being. For man himself is the subtraction of “the Man is” from Man. When we speak of Caesar, as a mortal man historically, it is precisely with the understanding that Caesar is not. When we say a unicorn is not, we point to its eternal nonexistence. However for Caesar his nonexistence is purely temporal. Man is the particular individual which once existed, but now does not. Thus we can conceive of Being minus the “being of Being”, in the same manner in which we conceive a dead man. Caesar is a Man minus the “being of the Man”. And yet the dead Caesar of history possesses more Being than the young Caesar of possibility and potentiality. The dead man is thus the more actualized man. The dead man fulfills man’s essence which is his mortality.

Man is the only animal that knows he is going to die. That is to say, man is the only animal that knows. The lesson of the Tree of Knowledge is that to know is to surely die. The death of the plant or animal is experienced by an external observer from the outside. If Man were a purely biological being he could experience what Kojève calls the “natural” death of the animal. Kojève does not reject the fact that Man’s animal existence is a truth for him to the extent that he is indeed an animal. He conceded in an interview that “In man there is one percent that is human and the rest is, let us say animal.”[13] From a sociobiological perspective, once an animal has reproduced it has realized “everything of which it were capable” and any prolonged life has no meaning. (IRH 257) Man’s death alone is “in and for itself”, alone “is Death in the proper sense of the word”. (IRH 255) The animal does not die; Man an external agent ascribes death to the animal. Man is being-for-itself solely because he experiences death-for-itself. The animal’s death does not belong to itself but to the external human observer. Man experiences Death from the inside. Man lives Death. Man is that unhappy creature who is dead while alive and alive while dead. When it comes to rationally-calculated risk of death, man is actually less rational than the animal brutes. For only for man is the probability of death always a certainty. Risk takes on a new meaning when the odds are certain. What is risked by Man is not the outcome of death, but the time of death. Man negates the real existing world through two means- technology and afterlife. Through activity man negates the real natural world and creates a technical world “which is just as real just real in a different way”. (IRH 256) When man negates his death through imagining the afterlife, his resurrection is purely conceptual. Man cannot live by spirit alone. Religion is imaginary, but imagination itself is a uniquely human project. Imagination reveals man’s fundamental dissatisfaction with the Being that is. Just as Man himself is negated by Death, Man wishes there were a way he could negate Being. Theology is thus Man’s imagining of the immortal afterlife he cannot actually have. Man finds his imaginary Concepts more satisfying than the facticity of Death, and this declares the Concept to be more Real than Death. This delusion finds its Reality in History, which imposes Man’s Idea on the Real.

While Ancient Philosophy often saw its task as overcoming the fear of death, for Kojève as for Heidegger it is precisely Angst before death that creates humanity. To live a life entirely free of dread of death, would be to live an animal life. For Heidegger the life fearless of death is the inauthentic life. While Kojève accepts Death as a necessary condition of Man, he rejects Epicurean mere indifference toward Death. Epicurus’ argument that Death is not an evil to be feared is based on Time. Since there was an eternity before birth, there is no reason to fear the eternity after Death. The before and after life, are two infinities equal to each other. If we do not fear the infinity before birth, we need not fear the infinity after death. Kojève is dismissive of this vulgar materialism and considers it “valid only for an animal or for a non-dialectical being in general”. (IRH 255) To embraced Epicurean apathy is to cease to be dialectical and hence to cease to be human. Epicurean materialism is true for the animal, which lacks any concept of Time. The animal does not look to its future absence. It experiences Death only in the single instance it suffers it. Death for the animal is a part of Being, for it is that experiential instance of dying. Dying is a verb for the animal, but Death is a state of non-being for Man. The animal knows death only as it dies, while Man conceives Death through the entirety of his life. Only timeless creatures would qualify as Epicurean. In Kojève’s terminology, God and dog are equally immortal and eternal. Only Man is temporal. Man is Time itself. To follow Epicurus’ advice and neglect the future, is to be something more or less than human. Man’s “future absence is present in his life, and the Epicurean argument cannot blot out this presence of the absence in his existence”. (IRH 255) Dialectic is Real and not linguistic. So when Kojève refutes Epicurus he reduces him to an “argument”. And argument can never “blot out” real, existing, presence. Merely denying the Reality of Death, does not make it any less Real. Epicurus adheres to an atomistic understanding of time as a set of fixed monads. We occupy the present point in time, and will in the future occupy a future point. Both the past before our birth, and the future after our Death are external to the present reality we currently experience. We need not fear that which is not present. But Kojève insists that our future absence in Death is experienced in present life. To live as Man is to already experience the future of Man’s absence. Man is Negativity, and so is in his essence an absence within Being. Man is Death, a hole in Being. To follow Epicurus, and deny that absence from Being, is to deny the existence of Man. Epicurean Materialism seeks to comfort Man by denying Death. But by denying Death, Epicureanism in fact denies the very existence of Man. Epicurus implies that we need only take care of our “real existence”. But Kojève exposes the truth, that even while Man lives he is already beyond his “real existence”. Man already is that, which Epicurus says we need not concern ourselves with.

Man’s mortality imposes an inherently dialectical structure on his reality. Hegel’s philosophy is a theology precisely to the extent it fulfills theology’s concern with Death and Afterlife. Man’s Dialectical nature comes from his ability to “freely prepare his death, or go beyond his given existence”. (IRH 256) Agreeing with Calvin, Kojève sees Immortal Man as inherently unfree. An immortal man would be the equivalent to Parmenidian substance. Possibility is inherently indefinite, which can be expressed in the logical term “that every non-A is indefinite”. (IRH 256) Man as the dialectical Negativity is none other than the continuous possibility of non-A. Dialectically the significance of every Choice A, lies not in the choice itself, but in the infinite possibilities of non-As abandoned. Choice A is finite specifically because of the indefiniteness of Choices non-A. As Hegel chillingly puts it “Man is this night, this empty Nothingness, which contains everything in its undivided-simplicity” (HMC 156) Man is a darkness that haunts existence. There is nothing at all in all the universe more terrifying than Man. Man has nothing to fear but Man himself. It is Man who imposes on himself fears far outstripping any horrors Nature could visit upon him.

History begins when Man assigns to his children the tasks he could not complete in his lifetime. At first glance, placing Man’s destiny in his offspring would seem to return to biological reductionism of “selfish genes”. The animal too fulfills its task in reproduction. Kojève insists that historical memory is essentially distinguished “from the simple evolution observed in nature”. (IRH 257) In biology, the parent is the slave to the child. Every act of the parent’s life is for the survival-benefit of the child, which is the parent’s only material legacy. In many species of animals, the parent perishes having completed its reproductive duty. In human history however, the child is the slave to the parent. The destiny of the parent is not tied to the necessity of reproduction, rather the destiny of the child is determined by the memory of the ancestors. The ancestor desires specifically human ends and goals. Having failed to fulfill all non-As in his lifetime, the ancestor assigns these missions to his offspring. Man through education, is no longer determined merely by the alien environment, but by Man himself. Man creates his own external reality. The “transcendence of death in history is the truth of the subjective certainty of an afterlife”. (IRH 257) Man is nothing but his actions, and his actions are preserved in history alone. The historical preservation of action is different from the merely subjective legacy of collective memory. Caesar is immortal, not because schoolboys still read of him in history books, but because our political world is heir to the Roman Empire.

It is in his discussion of Death, that Kojève most thoroughly modifies his understanding of Hegel through the insights of Heidegger. Hegel’s dialectical method can be understood only in the concrete Death of the human individual. Hegel is not a dialectical thinker, in the sense of applying a logical method. Rather he is methodologically a phenomenologist in the same manner as Husserl and Heidegger. Hegelian dialectic is phenomenological and not logical. What is expressed, is not abstract reason, but the concrete lived lives of human individuals. The heart of Hegel’s Logic- sublimation- that which preserves and overcomes, is none other than human Death. Hegel’s rejection of simplistic formal logic, is in fact a theological rejection of simplistic representations of the traditional Christian afterlife. Just as Aristotelian logic fails to understand that the truth of “A” is in the negation of “non-A”. So Aristotelian theology identifies immortality and afterlife purely with Being and not with Non-Being. The afterlife is placed in an artificial and one-sided opposition to the after-death. But by definition even the traditional Christian afterlife must also be an after-death. If Death is removed then so is the afterlife. If “A” is the lived life that the human individual actually lived, then immortality would annihilate “A” entirely by overwhelming it with an infinity of “non-As”. Human life “A” would in this sense have never been lived at all. Thus the Christian poses to the atheist, the horror of total annihilation and void upon Death as a case for Theism. But in fact it turns out that it is precisely the Theistic afterlife that would totally and completely annihilate the individual. The individual is defined precisely by all the non-As he choose not to be. If in infinite time, the individual is to fulfill all possibilities than he loses the “Life A” he choose. The removal of Death and finitude, would mean the removal of dialectic, which is the only motion in the universe. Paradoxically, a universe without Death, would be an entirely dead lifeless universe. It is precisely the possibility of human death that preserves motion in Being.

Kojève ties in the possibility of human individuality and freedom to Heidegger’s concept of Dasein. Heidegger is a notoriously difficult philosopher, with seemingly little to say about politics, ethics and freedom. However Kojève was able to draw out the political implications of Dasein in the grand Hegelian historical narrative. For Kojève Dasein means “empirical-existence as a dialectical entity”. (IRH 241) Dasein allows Kojève to cut through the Gordian knot of subjective as opposed to objective dialectics. For Dasein, dialectics is experiences both objectively and subjectively. There is no need for a “dialectics of nature” since Man himself is that dialectic within nature. Nature is dialectical only to the extent that it is conceived and transformed through Man. Man’s concrete particularized existence is always being negated and sublimated. Man is a problem to be overcome. Man is that spirit which negates. “Man is and exists only to the extent he overcomes himself dialectically.” (IRH 241) Man himself is that dialectical negation which constantly asserts “non-A”. To say that a Man is, is always to say that he is not. Man’s existence is proof of his nonexistence. Dasein must exist in a particular time, space and circumstance. Dasein is thus inherently historical. Kojève recovers Dasein’s historicist-Hegelian character which is missed in Heidegger. There can never be a dialectic of the infinite. Man as a dialectical Dasein, is thus a finitude amidst an empty ocean of infinity. Death must then be understood as a phenomenological representation of an ontological reality. “The radical finiteness of being and of reality ‘appears’ on the human ‘phenomenal’ level as that thing which is called death.” (IRH 242) Kojève, following Hegel, uses the term “appearance” in a manner entirely contrary to the Platonic tradition. For Kojève “appear” is to come into being. Appearance is hence more Real than essence. Essence that has not appeared is mere potentiality and possibility. Kojève connects Dasein to the manner in which dialectical Man comes to appear (erscheint) in his existence. Phenomenology concerns itself with the appearances of Totality. Appearance, even false appearance is a shining forth of the light of inner Reality. Man’s appearance is thus literally a “shining” a light amidst a dark emptiness. Being would be totally infinite, which is to say nonexistent, were it not for the existence of human finitude. A thing cannot exist without limit. Man is that limit placed on Being.

Kojève’s breakthrough in understanding the fundamentally different levels of human and animal existence on the ontic level owes much to the influence of Heidegger’s situating of Dasein. Kojève follows Heidegger in identifying the separation “between humans who are ‘being in the world’, for whom being is an issue, and nature/animals who ‘belong to the world’.[14] That is to say that an animal’s life is a possession of the world, it is owned by the world. Human life alone is free to and from the world. While Death is something to be feared, dreaded, avoided, it is also that thing which breaks man’s chains to the world. Death opens up the possibility of differentiating the imagined world that can be from the actual world that is. Death opens up the possibility of Desires. All Desire is ultimately, that lone singular desire for Death. Animals may desire sex, food, warmth, all things which are, which exist. Humans alone desire that which is not. Humans alone desire no-thing, which opens up the possibility of desiring nothing, and thus being satisfied. Humans are the least satisfied animal, but perhaps they could be the most satisfied. Sadly, the complete satisfaction of human Desire, would entail the end of Man as Man. This is the tragedy of the human condition. “For Kojève humans exist in the animal realm but find themselves above nature, a realm they will eventually control”.[15] Humans suffer from a bifurcated personality. They are flung in the Heideggerian sense into a state if animality. Man must find a way to endure and survive in a physicalistic world. And yet within Man, is that hope, possibility, and destiny of rising above brute natural circumstance. Man unlike the animal, is not at home in the world. But Man, alone possesses the ingenuity to transform the world into his home. When Man’s task is complete, the world will be fully his, his own creation. Man will be immortal like God, in the sense that he is the Creator of the world.

Kojève closes his 1935 Ninth Lecture on the Dialectic of the Real and the Phenomenological Method in Hegel, with a meditation on the atheistic anthropology of both Hegel and Heidegger. It is here where he most explicitly addresses the Hegel-Heidegger synthesis which has been implicit in all discussions on Death and finitude. He insists that Hegel’s Phenomenology “would probably never have been understood if Heidegger had not published his book.” (IRH 259) The atheistic radical finitude of Hegel was incomprehensible without the addendum of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. Kojève boldly asserts that Heidegger “adds nothing new” to Hegel’s phenomenological anthropology. Anthropology follows the dictum that the proper study of man is man. Phenomenology in turn examines the appearance of man’s existence as phenomena. Anthropology would be empty without an understanding of how it actually manifests itself in the Real. Death is the link which makes anthropology genuinely phenomenological. Death is an expression of the ontological finitude of Being, expressed phenomenological. As Ethan Kleinberg argues “this sort of phenomenological ontology is usually associated with Heidegger and not with Hegel” Kojève however insisted that “both Hegel’s work and the concept of the dialectic were primarily ontological and could best be understood through the work of Heidegger”.[16] While Kleinberg is certainly correct to maintain that Kojève’s ontological reading is more Heidegger than Hegel, Hegel’s later Logic and Encyclopedia clearly express an ontological view of the dialectic. Thus the gap between Heidegger and Hegel is not as great as Kleinberg seems to imply. The first category examined in Hegel’s System is Being itself. Hegel’s Being however is an abstract logical category. Kojève recognizes that Hegel’s ontology can be much enriched by Heidegger’s investigations into Being. The Being of Kojève and Heidegger always maintains the concrete focus on human experience and finitude. Heidegger’s Ontology is thus more true to the Phenomenology of Spirit, than Hegel’s own Logic. Kleinberg is correct to point out that the Phenomenology of Spirit, is not primarily an ontological work. Or at least it has not been understood ontologically before Kojève. However the continuous Negativity of the dialectic must ultimately be understood as negations of Being. Without Heidegger’s focus on Being-toward-death, dialectical finitude could never be properly understood. Hegel’s dialectic must be understood anthropologically, which is to say in an entirely human-centered manner. Otherwise it would fall prey to the criticisms of artificially imposing dialectic on the raw material of the universe. Dialectic implies action which implies goal-directed Teleos. In an atheistic universe, man alone acts with Teleos toward a final end. Anthropology, Phenomenology, Ontology properly understood all concern themselves with the same study of Man as a dialectical being. The Man who actually exists is a Human Being, this however reviews only a small fraction of who a man really is. The Man with a destiny, is not a human being but a Human Becoming. Thus the Hegelian logical triad is played out on the human level. Human Being (Animality) - Human Nothing (Death) - Human Becoming (Labor). As Nichols puts it “human being comes into being through negativity, that is through a negation or rejection of that natural order, including what it itself was by nature.”[17] It is significance that he locates human nature in the past tense. Human nature, is not what Man is but what he once was. Kojève acknowledges this focus on human negativity does not derive from Hegel alone but owes much to Heidegger’s being-toward-death. Kojève acknowledges this debt in Le Concept, Le Temps et Le Discours, he states that his own reading in Hegel and classical philosophy “would not have sufficed if I had not read Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit”. He goes on however to criticize Heidegger for taking “a bad turn philosophically perhaps precisely because of an unfortunate desire to surpass Hegel”.[18] While Heidegger’s direct writings on Hegel are rather sparse relative to his vast opus, Kojève sees him in constant dialogue and competition with Hegel. Heidegger’s return to ancient Greek philosophy is motivated Kojève insinuates, by professional jealousy with Hegel. This fleeing to Greek origins exposes a deeper problem with Husserlian phenomenology as a whole. It is ironic that for all Heidegger’s talk of “grounding” and “historicity”, the fatal flaw of Phenomenology is precisely its lack of historical grounding. Heidegger’s interest in the history of philosophy was surpassed only by Hegel. Heidegger himself neatly outlined this difference in historical approach: “For Hegel the force of each thinker lies in what each has thought, in that their thought can be incorporated into absolute thinking as one of its stages…We, however do not seek that force in what has already been thought: we seek it in what has not been thought and from which what has been thought receives its essential space.”[19] As Heidegger put it, Hegel wanted to elevate past philosophies, while he himself wished to take a step back from them. Hegel sought to preserve what was True in history, while Heidegger was searching for the wrong turning. Hegel in turn rejects any idea of ‘throwness’ of thought, for Hegel a thought is its historical context. Heidegger if flung into Ancient Greece could debate with Plato and Aristotle as contemporaries, while Hegel without the history of philosophy ceases to be Hegel. Heidegger wrote with an encyclopedic knowledge of the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant and Hegel. However he lacked the historicist understanding of Hegel to see how each historically determined system transmuted into a higher level. Phenomenology lacks the historical tradition of German Idealism, which was born out of the converging of the two rivers of British Empiricism and Continental Rationalism in Immanuel Kant. Thus Hegel could genuinely understand his system to be the End of Philosophy. Phenomenology emerged far more a priori, out of whole cloth, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter. The only historical stream in Husserl, was the influence of Brentano, who was himself stranded in the Austrian philosophical backwater of Aristotelian scholasticism. Husserl was a mathematician in educational background, and thus constructed his method rationalistically from geometric first principles rather than from the philosophic tradition. The Phenomenological debate with the Greeks and Medieval lacked the progressivist evolutionist context of German Idealism. Phenomenology was thus more liable to fall victim to the personal idiosyncrasies of a Husserl or Heidegger. When they look at Aristotle or Descartes it is only to see if they have anything interesting to say on a particular philosophic problem. Husserl’s only major work on a historical philosopher is entitled “Cartesian Meditations”. And it is precisely a meditation on Descartes, in the same geometric manner that Descartes’ original Meditations was a meditation of First Philosophy. Heidegger’s dialectic with the Ancients, was dialectical only in the Socratic sense of dialogue. Heidegger’s study of the Ancients, was not however dialectical in the Hegelian-Historicist sense. This defect was corrected by Kojève, who did not make the same philosophical “bad turn” as Heidegger. Instead Kojève succeeded in grounding the ethereal ahistorical insights of Phenomenology into the concrete historicity of Hegel. “Hegel and Heidegger exhibit opposite attitudes to philosophy itself. Hegel is positively disposed toward the history of philosophy, which demonstrates ever greater progress in the study of the conditions of knowledge, and which finally reaches its traditional aim in his own theory. Heidegger holds that since the pre-Socratics philosophy has been engaged in a long, difficult, and finally meaningless metaphysical exercise.”[20] Thus while Hegel and Heidegger are the two most knowledgeable of the history of philosophy they draw opposite conclusions. For Hegel it is the story of progress, for Heidegger the story of degeneration. Their historical methods follow from this conclusion. Hegel merges all past historical philosophies into the categories of his Logic, while Heidegger commits the destructing of all past philosophies. Heidegger does not see the merging of each historical philosophical system into the next higher stage. The very concept of higher stage is alien to him. Thus unlike Hegel, who is very much historically situated in the context of post-Kantianism, Heidegger is in as much if not more dialogue with Aristotle and Suarez than he is with his contemporaries. Kojeve’s project is to combine Heidegger’s ontological uncovering of Being, with a more Hegelian historical sense.

Dasein as Determinate Being, l'Existence-empirique, and Being There

The foundational role of Dasein in Heidegger’s ontology has lead it to have an untranslated meaning in English, that it lacked in previous German philosophers who made use of the everyday word such as Kant, Hegel and Feuerbach. In order to trace the ontological unity of Hegel and Heidegger it is necessary to first grasp the unique role Dasein plays in both their systems. Both Hegel and Heidegger found in Dasein, the skeleton key to open the dry arid scholastic notion of Being, to existential lived experience. The decision to render Dasein as “determinate being” by Anglophone Hegel translators has been called “a disastrous decision, which has had nothing but misleading consequences”. [21] Thus it would be incorrect to artificially separate Hegel’s use of Dasein as “determinate being” from Heidegger’s Being There. As Hegel introduces Dasein “Determinate Being issues from Becoming: it is the simple oneness of Being and Nothing.” (SL 120) Thus Hegel’s famous triad Being-Nothing-Becoming is in fact still empty and incomplete at the stage of Becoming. Becoming does not refer to any specific something. Thus Becoming suffers from the same vacuity that doomed Being and Nothing. Becoming as the true solution to Being and Nothing becomes clear only with Determinate Being which always refers to a specific something. Dasein for Hegel is the unity of Being-Life and Nothing-Death in Becoming-Time. Dasein is inherently lived in temporality. As Hegel writes “it is not mere Sein but Dasein, the etymology of which implies being at a certain place.” (SL 122) Dasein is the unity of life and death in Man. Man is that being, which is not-being for he is a Becoming that lives in Time. Dasein is being that is inherently negated. Man in his construction is constantly self-destructing. “Negation immediately opposed to Reality” is later revealed to be hidden in Reality and revealed by Dasein. (SL 126) Being must become Something if it is to have any reality at all. Through the Something, the finitude of all beings is revealed. If a thing is to exist concretely it must renounce its abstract claim to universality and infinitude. In Hegel’s linking of Dasein with Something, we can find parallels with Husserl’s discussion of intentionality. For Hegel, Being qua Being is meaningless Nothing, Being only obtains meaning when it is defined by particulars in a Something. In order to understand any category of Hegel’s it is necessary to grasp where it falls into his overall system. Determinate-Being occupies the Triad of Being-Determinate Being-Being for Self. Within the Category of Dasein the triad is A. Determinate Being as Such B.Finitude C. Infinity. (SL 22) Dasein as such is defined by Quality and Something. A quality is always a negation. Quality is what immediately and existentially confronts Dasein. Quality is ultimately a limited category within Dasein however. Like Heidegger and Sartre, Hegel believes that Dasein is more than a sum total of its qualities. For a Man to be solely determined by his qualities as Man would be a pathology. Dasein could be understood as defined, limited Being. A Man who knows that someday he is going to die. It is this very Limit, that gives human life meaningfulness. Dasein is the unity of “to be” and “not to be”. Heidegger on the contrary rejects such an optimistic synthesis. For Heidegger, Dasein would be better understood as that moment in Time, driven by Angst, Hamlet asks “To be or Not to be, that is the question.” To Heidegger’s question of “why is there something rather than nothing?” Hegel answers that there is Something precisely because there is Nothing. “Something is the first Negation of the Negation as simple existent self-relation.” (SL 127) Something is the negativity within the negative. Something is its own relation. To be a This is to not be a That. Thus contained in Hegel’s Dasein is the tragic fragility of the human condition. Human life is pure negation. To be There is to not be here. The thereness of Dasein is already a negation. To define a word is essentially to say what the word is not. Every choice destroys all other possibilities. Man is a crime against infinity, he is pure limit. As Kojève points out, the meaning of death for man is that it forces freedom and choice on him. If man had unlimited infinite time, he would eventually fulfill all possibilities and cease to be a Dasein. Man would lapse into indeterminate being. He would be a reference that referred to everything and nothing. Hegel refers to the fulfillment of all possibilities as the “Real in all Reals, or Sein in all Dasein, which is to express the concept of God, is nothing else than abstract Sein and identical with Nothing.” (SL 125) From this passage one can easily see how Kojève came to the conclusion that Hegel’s philosophy is implicitly atheistic. While the epithet “Real in all Reals” would at first seem to celebrate the Absolute Power of God, it in fact exposes his emptiness. The very Glory of God is what for Hegel and Kojève lowers him before man. God is the ontological fulfillment of all possibles, thus he is an empty nothing. Contrary to Kant who uses Dasein as a proof for God, for Hegel God is forever Sein and can never be a Dasein. God is never There for he is everywhere. But to never be There is to be nowhere. God is immortal and thus infinite in temporality. Man as a finite being is always temporal. Thus the particular Realness of Man is far more real than the universal Realness of God. Man’s greatest asset is that he is not God, meaning he is not immortal, he dies. We see that “for Hegel finitude is the being-toward-death that a thing bears within itself and that a finite thing will come to an end even if externally-induced changes are not great enough by themselves to destroy it.”[22] Finitude thus curses Dasein with the inevitability of its own self-destructing. Even without any outside impulse, Dasein is sentenced to meet its own demise. In Dasein’s category of finitude, it experiences the same being-toward-death as Heidegger discusses in Sein und Zeit. Death already lies implicitly within the heart of Dasein from the moment of its birth. Death for Dasein is not something that comes from without rather already “implicit in the structure of being negated by another is the quality of negating oneself and thereby being finite.”[23] Thus the Master enslaves the Slave, due to the Slave’s fear of death. The Slave’s fear of being negated by death, leads to his negation by enslavement. This is finite Dasein being negated by an Other, however as Hegel reveals, to be negated by an Other, is to reveal one’s own self-negating quality as a human being. The Master’s negation of the Slave, exposes the Slave’s self-negating humanness. Dasein is man continuous aware of his own nothingness- “in determinate being, being is so intimately united with nonbeing that the two are completely coextensive.”[24] Similar to Heidegger’s use of Dasein, Hegel likewise employs it to mean human existence grappling with its own finitude. Dasein is haunted by a death-drive toward its own nonbeing. Dasein is constantly held out towards the possibility of its own non-existence. Present in Man, from the very moment of his birth, is the reality of his own death. Death is always present at hand to Dasein.

There is no Chinese Wall between Dasein as used by Hegel and by Heidegger. It is this unity in Dasein, that made it possible for Kojève to synthesize their ontologies. When Hegel’s philosophy is made concrete it refers to the same existential questions as Heidegger’s. The use of Dasein as Determinate Being is not altogether absent in Heidegger. He begins his discussion “by attributing existence as a determination of being only to Dasein.” (BT 39) Dasein’s attributes are not found in outward appearance. Existence as determination in Dasein is thus opposed to objective presence in existentia. Objective presence means the objects of science studied by the positivistic scientist. Existence that is lived by real human beings on the contrary must be determinate. Dasein is possibility forced to choose. As with Hegel, Dasein is inherently finitude and limit. Dasein is the answer to the question What is a Human Being? It provides the meaning of what it entails to live an authentically human life. While Heidegger does not refer to Dasein as Becoming he does state that “The Being of Dasein finds its meaning in temporality”. (BT 17) Time is the realm of change and Becoming. Dasein is its past which has passed away and become Nothing. And yet the past, while ceasing to be, is never the pure emptiness of that which never was. Dasein is hence always looking behind itself to its past, while attempting to live in time. Dasein is thus inherently fallen, tied into the past. Dasein is a Being that is There. It must live in a world that is given to it. Existence in this world precedes understanding of it. Thus even if the world seems strange and alien, it is still there, and Being-There is an inherent part of it. “Dasein understands itself and being in general in terms of the ‘world’”. (BT 19) A world is a given space-there in which Dasein must define itself. Dasein is not identical with “being in general” and yet it understands both in world terms. So both abstract being in general and concrete Dasein in particular must come to grips with the world that exists. Dasein does not have the option to shrink back from world. To make a choice to retreat from the world, is to itself give an understanding of world. To make a choice is to be a part of the world. Every choice is pain, and with pain comes understanding. For Dasein being is not a given but a problem. Dasein need not simply accept its existence. Everydayness however is totally indifferent to being as a question. “We call this everyday indifference of Dasein averageness”. (BT 41) Thus the default ontological position towards Dasein is neglect. Can Dasein be ignored? Can man ignore his own existence? A Man lives his life without even knowing he exists. Man accepts his existence without even being aware that it is a Dasein to be accepted. Man is a Being-There, without even knowing he is a Being who is There. Man does not know where There is. Dasein is not an object, yet it must come to accept a world of objects. Man has his purely animal, biological, physiological functions, and yet Dasein is not an object. This separation between Dasein and Man the Machine, would seem to lend towards Cartesian dualism. And yet Heidegger strongly opposes the Cartesian escape hatch. Such is an ontological fleeing from the question of Being. Man must be understood as a whole. He is not divided from world, but a part of it.

Kojève in his definition and translation of Dasein, reveals the unity of thought in Hegel and Heidegger. Kojève brings out the existential analytic of Dasein that can be found both in Hegel’s Logic and in Heidegger’s Being and Time. He provides a simple clarification “The World of phenomena is what Hegel calls Dasein, empirical Existence.” (IRH 103) By defining Dasein as Empirical-Existence, Kojève captures the spatiality to which Dasein refers. Dasein’s world is a world of phenomena and not dead objects. Hence Existence is revealed to Dasein phenomenological. Phenomena is the world which appears to Dasein. Empirical as used in Kojeve’s translation is not meant to have the positivistic meaning found in Anglo-American philosophy. The objectivist scientific connotation is absent in Kojeve’s use of empirical. Empirical is Kojeve’s translation of ‘Da’ thereness. The Empirical-Thereness is the immediate sense-certainty of phenomena. It is experience so immediate, that it cannot be doubted or challenged. This is an empiricism prior to the problems of epistemology. Empirical existence is opposed to any lifeless abstract metaphysical existence. Man is the Empirical Existence (Dasein) of his future death, which will never be present for him. (IRH 14) This relates to Heidegger’s assertion that Dasein is past. The future which is Death, always flees before the present of Dasein. Man’s death will never be a present empirical moment for him. Man is always following his Death, but always a moment behind. Forever catching up to his Death, but never grasping it. For Death to become present to Man, is for the very concept of ‘present’ to vanish. Kojeve’s understanding of Dasein thus unifies Hegel’s Being-Nothing-Becoming, with Heidegger’s Worldly Temporality. Both Nothing and Time come to be revealed by Kojève as Man’s own Death. Death in the abstraction can be present to Man. That is the Death of the They, the Other, but not of the unique, particular, individual. The only empirical death, is the death the lone individual experiences. The ending of existence for Man must be empirical and not abstract. Empirical existence means a lived human experience. The importance of the distantly human element of Dasein, can be seen in Kojeve’s early French translations of Dasein in the 1930s. The term “human reality” had “a further force in 1930s thought because in tune with Alexandre Kojève’s use of the term to translate Heidegger’sDasein in his early, unpublished work, his collaborator and student Henri Corbin used it, apparently with Heidegger’s approval, in his translation of early es­says that appeared in 1938.”[25] Kojeve’s earlier decision to use the term réalité humaine makes clear that in context empirical has nothing at all in common with the scientific-objectivist use of the term. Reality must be real for Man. There is a dialectical unity of opposites between Humanity and Reality. There can be no Humanity without Reality and no Reality without Humanity. Dasein cuts through the realist-idealist split between subject and object. In Alexandre Kojève’s “Note sur Hegel et Heidegger,” he writes “the human being (Dasein) is essentially a being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein); … the world (Welt) of man differs from nature (Natur; Vorhandensein) in an essential way, by the fact that it is modified—or, at least, as revealed and con­sidered to be modifiable.”[26] Empirical for Kojève is thus clearly not the empirical of the positivist scientist. The facts of chemistry, biology, physiology are empirical in an ontic sense, while human reality is empirical in an ontological sense. Influenced by Heisenberg, Kojève sees man as the observer who must always transform that which he observes. Man is thus a participant intrinsically in the world he attempts to study. There is no abstract Man outside of the lived human world. To be human is to be engaged with the multiplicities of existence in a world. While Heidegger, was wary of any scientistic attempt to ground ontology in philosophy of nature, Kojève saw parallels between Dasein and developments in modern physics. As he put it “the observed system is no less real than the observing system, and it is independent from the latter as regards its being; their interaction is itself also real.”[27] Heisenberg’s uncertainly principle, seemed to confirm the phenomenological thesis of the unity of subject and object. The highest ontological reality is assigned not to subject nor object, but to their interaction itself. This was a major breakthrough from the mechanistic-materialism of Classical Physics, in which it was possible to totally remove the observer from the system. Not only was it possible to remove the observer, it was actually seen as a virtue to preserve objective-neutrality. Kojeve’s statement that man is fundamentally different from Nature on an ontic level, could at first seem to imply a slip back into Cartesian dualism, to which Heidegger was at such pains to avoid. Man would seem to be a Ghost in a Machine. And yet this is clearly not what Kojève intends, for he explains that what separates Man from Nature is his modification. Man is a modified being, and in turn he is that being which modifies Nature through labor. Here we again see continuity with Hegel’s use of Dasein, Man as the modified being, is a Being always in a state of Being-Nothing-Becoming. Following Hegel, Kojève sees the resolution of the dialectical nature of Man in the category of Dasein. Man does not simply accept the being-in-the-world that is given unto him. Dasein is not a Cartesian ghost gliding outside of the world, rather Dasein is the observing system interacting with the observed system. Man is totally inseparable from being-in-the-world and yet on a deep fundamental level he is totally estranged from the world that exists. Dasein for Kojève exists entirely as a human-anthropological category. Heidegger himself in a letter to Hannah Arendt would criticize this as a one-sided interpretation. Thanking Arendt for a copy of Kojeve’s book on Hegel, Heidegger goes onto clarify “Kojève has a rare passion for thinking. French thought of the past few decades is an echo of these lectures. Even the abandonment of these talks is itself an idea. But Kojève only readsBeing and Time as an anthropology.”[28] It is telling that Heidegger’s critique of Kojeve’s understanding of his ontology, is the very same critique leveled at Kojeve’s reading of Hegel by Orthodox Hegelians. In interpreting both Heidegger and Hegel, the question for Kojève is always anthropological, how does it relate to the reality of human existence? Kojeve’s success as a philosopher is precisely that he transforms the abstract ontology of phenomenology into concrete historical examples. Kojève modifies Husserl’s slogan “back to the things themselves” into “back to human experience itself”. The question of Being, for Kojève is always “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Being is not an abstract category, but the decision to live a human life facing death. Being and Nonbeing are transformed into the very real human questions of choosing to live or die. Kojève thus completes the evolution of Dasein from Hegel to Heidegger. Dasein, once an abstract ontological category becomes the concrete lived experiences of real human beings.

Sein-Zum-Tode and Authentic Lived Experience

To be alive is to be there. The everyday English idiom “I will be there for you” expresses the way in which being-there relates to the Other. Such a Being-There is there in its forness. It is directed outwards. Being-There is inherently lived. Thus it is a misnomer to say “I will always be there for you”. Such a statement is a denial of Man’s temporality which will always be nothing. Heidegger adequately expresses this paradox when he states “When Dasein reaches it wholeness in death, it simultaneously loses the being of the there”. (BT 221) This is a seeming contradiction. How can Being-There lose the being of the there? How can Dasein lose Dasein? The paradox is further exasperated because Heidegger does not describe death as a lapsing of Dasein but as a reaching of its wholeness. This is a fine illustration of the Hegelian concept of ‘aufheben’. Just as Dasein becomes most Whole, it loses the very parts that make it Dasein. In death Being-there is finally whole as Being-There yet it ceases to be there. No-Longer-Being-There is a possibility that Dasein can never empirically experience. There seemingly is nothing more objective than Death, and yet nothing so removed from positivistic science. The death of Others can be understood spiritually, physiologically, biologically, psychologically, anthropologically, and dissected like a cadaver. But there is no -ology that can experience its own death. Death is that which is most one’s own. One’s most sacred possession, even more so than life itself. No experience that is lived is more one’s own than death. He who dies loses nothing. “Death does not reveal itself as a loss, but as a loss experienced by those remaining behind.” (BT 222) Those left behind are still in a world. It is the dead who have abandoned the world. He who ceases to be, cannot experience a loss. The death of the deceased cannot be experienced by anyone. Those who surround a dying person, are ‘present’ with him, but they no more than him, experience the dying. The Human Being becomes a Human Nothing. It is here that objectivity meets its death knell. Objectivity can only analyze Things, but in death Man reveals his true self as a No-Thing. To objectively study a man is to take his own most lived-experience away from him. Objectivity is the collectivization of private experience. However “no one can take the other’s dying away from him”. (223) Death is personal property that can never be stolen. Another can go and die in my place, but he merely takes away the moment of my death, not the future that I will die. Thus the temporality of Death can be taken onto a sacrifice, but not the facticity of death itself. Death is always coming. Sacrifice would merely delay another’s death. This was the moment Dasein was to cease, but a sacrifice removes the burden off Dasein and unto itself. This Other attempts to experience my death for me. He leaps unto my moment and makes it his own. With this talk of sacrificial death, it is easy to see Christian overtones of Christ as the absolute sacrifice. For the Christian, Death is Sin, and Christ takes up man’s sin in his own death. In both the Christian and Heideggerian senses, one’s life takes on new meaning after it has been sacrificed for. When another dies for Dasein, Dasein becomes a living-death. The sacrifice “proposes the dying of others as a substitute theme for the analysis of totality”. (BT 223) If substitution could be successful, than I could watch the death of another as my own death. In experiencing his death, he would be experiencing my own death. At first glance, this sacrficer is the ultimate slave. He takes on the ultimate burden for the sake of his Master. But it turns out that it is the sacrificing dying man who actually experiences, while the sacrificee is at heart a coward. The coward cannot accept the death that belongs to him, and thus invites the courageous Master to sacrifice for him. In this so-called sacrifice, he who lives becomes slave to the sacrifice. It is in this sense that Nietzsche is correct when he calls Christianity a slave morality. The flock is slave to the Sacrifice who experienced their death for them.

In Heidegger’s discussion of Sein-Zum-Tode, we can see the prefiguring of Kojeve’s discovery that Man is the Death that Lives. Heidegger breaks with the traditional view of Death as the End of Dasein. Rather than being its End, “Death is a way to be that Dasein takes over as soon as it is.” (BT 228) Dasein is inherently temporal, and Time is always awareness of finitude. Time implies death. Death is not present at the end but at the start of life. To be born is to begin to die. Death is irrevocably tied in with the human condition. When man experiences the world, death always occurs to him. Man is presented with a world and with an exit. Man is not the world, hence he is always aware of the existence of a world with himself absent. Existence in the world is a problem for man. Death is thus not man’s problem but a given. Death the most objective fact of the world is also what is most subjectively given. The necessity of death is present as a physiological fact and yet also an objective impossibility. One must be alive to be a neutral scientist coldly dissecting the phenomenon of death. Death does not disappear like bread or cease like rain. It does not halt, does not come to an end. Human life is not merely a project that can be comfortably finished and concluded. Death is a phenomenon of life that is experienced by being-in-the-world. Death constantly reminds Dasein, that the world is not its own. The radical separation of Dasein from Worldhood is present in Death. It is world that is alien to Dasein, not death. Death is rather immanent within Dasein. Death is unavoidably present toward Dasein. “Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. Thus death reveals itself as the ownmost nonrelational possibility not to be bypassed.” (BT 232) To say something is relational is to say that it has reference to the world. Only death is totally absent of world. Dasein learns that it is possible through death, that it is itself impossible. The possibility of being impossible is present at hand. Dasein never chooses the circumstances of it’s’ life, rather it is thrown. Dasein is flung into an existence in a world. Dasein thus experiences an Angst both towards death and life in a world that is alien to it. “Angst about death must not be confused with a fear of one’s demise” nor “the ‘weak’ mood of an individual”. (BT 232) The Angst of the Master who faces death is thus neither a fear nor a weakness. Angst arises from the Master’s strength. The Master is always ready to die, the Master is in a sense already dead. It is the Slave who lives, that truly fears and weakly trembles before death. The Master rather runs toward death, he does not fear animalistic perishing. The Slave rather makes a flight from his ownmost being toward death. The Slave is inauthentic to the extent that he ignores the realness of his own death, he puts off his death onto an Other. The Master is thus the sacrifice, who takes own the death, that rightly belongs to the slave. The slave flees from death and thus from freedom.

Inauthentic existence is a fleeing from the facticity of man’s death. Death is covered up and concealed by polite society. Das Man lives his life willingly unaware of his own death. He goes on fleeing from death and in fact fleeing from life. Even in if he succeeds in all his endeavors, the final reward for all his victories will still be the very death he has been running from all his life. For Das Man, angst must be put aside if he is to live his life. He fears that death will make his life meaningless, and so he responds by preemptively living a meaningless life. Avoidance of death, entails a meaningless existence. To refuse to accept the throwness of death, is to meekly acquiesce to the throwness of life. Questions are not asked to Being. Why is Das Man born in this specific historical period, in these circumstances to this family? Why is Das Man here and now? He does not bother to ask. His inauthentic means of life is exposed in his cowardly refusal to take up Angst. It is not respectable to dwell on Man’s mortality. “Even ‘thinking about death’ is regarded publicly as cowardly fear, a sign of insecurity on the part of Dasein and a dark flight from the world.” (BT 235) The inauthentic They, sees any facing of death as a fleeing of the world. Meanwhile the They cowardly take a dark flight from death. Here we see the clear conflict between what will become for Kojève the ways of the Master and Slave. Neither can understand the other. The They with the morality of Slaves, “will not permit the courage to have Angst about death”. Angst for the They is an insecurity to be avoided. It is better to pretend that One will live forever. The refusal to take the flight from death is seen as the utmost cowardly fear. Being-toward-death appears to They as a fear of life. Angst cannot handle the trials and tribulations of life’s challenges and thus flees toward the void of death. In death, the cowardly perceive void, emptiness, blankness, Nirvana. The putting out of the flame. One is flung into life, and must accept the circumstances that are not chosen. To become estranged from the world, is to show cowardly fear towards the being that actually is. Das Man fears nothing more-so than making an authentic choice towards the world. Das Man at all costs must avoid deciding on life and death matters. However the inauthentic evading of death is revealed by Heidegger to be a fool’s game. “That Dasein dies factically means at the same time that it has already decided”. (BT 239) The decision to take no decision on Sein-Zum-Tode is itself the ultimate decision. The They have decided on its position towards the world. The They accept the world as it is without Angst. The world is taken as a given, a certainty. The They’s commonsense looks upon life as something to be lived. Death ought to be concealed. Das Man is a slave to life, when faced with death at the hands of the Master he flees. His commonsense cannot see anything more valuable than the experience of breathing. The cessation of experience horrifies him. Das Man constantly seeks new amusements and distractions to avoid the question of Being. The cessation of activity reminds Das Man too much of death.

When the lone, singular individual experiences death, or rather the coming to be of death, as far as he is concerned it is the ending of an entire worldhood. One’s understanding of the world comes entirely from one’s own lived experiences in such a world. If empirical-existence is removed for one, then as far as one is concerned the universe itself has ceased. Thus the ending of the world for Dasein is an apocalypse, the ending of all existence. If the universe ceases to exist in Time, then it is the same as if it were never to exist at all. Thus death confronts Dasein with the never-being of existence. It is as though the universe had never come into existence. After death, there was always Nothing and never Something. Death is the confrontation of the complete and total void, vacuity, emptiness, blankness, nothing. Such complete nonbeing cannot be conceived by living Dasein. The ending of the universe would be catastrophic enough for Dasein, but Dasein is faced with the prospect that the universe never even existed in the first place. Time that ends if revealed to be fundamentally unreal. Being-unto-death becomes a rushing forth toward death. Death nihilities all that has ever existed in the spirit of Mephistopheles. Being-There is transformed into a being that is no longer There, that never was There. There is no There and there never was Being. With the apprehension of death, Temporality becomes for Dasein merely the length of Time give unto it before the inevitable coming of Death. Death is both Time and the destroyer of Time. Time becomes something hostile and unreal to Dasein, when it is revealed to be a sentence of death. Time is a shadow of death that haunts the life of Dasein. Dasein is thrown into a being-in-the-world not of its own choosing, and then confronted with the sudden end of said being. “Throwness in which facticity can be seen belongs to Dasein.” (BT 167) Dasein is thrown into a factual world. The plunge is the means by which Dasein seeks to take a leap away from being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein). Dasein is thus struck by Angst, the feeling that it is not at home in the world. Dasein becomes estranged from the world that actually exists through the phenomenon of perishing. The moment of perishing exposes the Hegelian paradox of being and not-being in the same moment of Zeit. Perishing for Heidegger is the physical-biological act of death as experienced by an animal. Man’s partness with the world is revealed when he perishes and thus feels his physiological functions expire with the same finality as an animal. The act of perishing inflicts upon man the facticity that here is a merely physical animal. The world is supposed to be a materialistic system, that existed long before his birth, and will continue operating long after his death. Man is a mere chemical system operating within a larger life-system, and his perishing is of no consequence. Even the perishing of the entire human species, or all life on earth would make no difference to the physical universe as a cybernetic system. If the death of man is to have any existential meaning, then it must be more than a mere animalistic perishing. “For both Hegel and Heidegger, death is the fundamental horizon that constitutes the structure of life- and therefore of freedom.”[29] Kojève will draw on this insight when he contrasts the way in which the Master authentically faces death, and the manner in which the Slave inauthentically flees from animalistic-perishing with cowardice. The death of the Slave is thus a mere perishing, while the Master on the contrary voluntarily embraces perishing, to become more than an animal. The perishing of the biological side of man, is not Death, but a calling to a higher existential consciousness.

The idle talk of fallen every-dayness sees being-toward-death as cowardly and morbid. Death is envisioned as a fleeing from being-towards-the-world. The attunement of Angst however exposes the way in which it is inauthenticity that constitutes the real fleeing. “The absorption of Dasein in the They and the World taken Care of reveals something like a flight of Dasein from itself as authentic potentiality for being itself.” (BT 172) Dasein loses its independence and autonomy and is entirely absorbed into the inauthentic They-self. Das Man is intrinsically tied into the World. If Dasein is estranged from the world, Das Man is too at home in this world. The World is all taken care of for Das Man. They thus flee away from Dasein, and authentic human reality. Das Man makes a choice to be purely ontic and live only by the facticity of chemistry, biology, sociology. Falling for Das Man is a choice that is no choice. This falling prey of Das Man, out of cowardice towards Death, is the same fleeing that will motivate Kojeve’s Slave to submit to the authentic Master. Already in Heidegger we see the way in which Das Man takes on the attitude of slavery towards life. Fear makes Das Man a slave, fear not of the Master, but of the ultimate Lord- Death. Angst for Dasein on the contrary is not fear of death but “that which one has Angst is being-in-the-world as such”. (BT 174) The Slave fears death, while the Master has Angst towards life. The Slave is at home in this world, so it is only natural he should slave and labor in it. The Master is already dead to the world, and while this indifference initially gives him the indifference to dominate the world, it ultimately marks his own death in the Death of History. The Master thus becomes Death itself, the Death which the Slave fears. Angst does not understand one’s place in the world. One is confronted with a sense of dread, at one’s own potentiality. What will become of one? Throwness is determinate, in the Hegelian sense of Determinate-Being, it limits the possibilities that confront Dasein. “Hegel’s notion of negativity survives in Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein with its same sort of grounding negative dimension.”[30] The fact that Das Man, as a biological organism must someday perish is likewise a determinate ontic fact. However the Time of One’s own death, of which no man knows the day nor the hour, is entirely indeterminate. It is a Being that is not There. Nothing fills Dasein with more Angst than the possibility of no possibilities. Death is the end of all possible potentiality. Angst is thus experienced by Dasein as dread, anxiety, and fear. While fear is intentionally directed towards a particular object, anxiety does not know the which to which it is directed. The only thing Dread has to fear is Dread itself. And yet Angst’s fear of fear is revealed to be the most terrifying fear of all. This indeterminate fear of what could be anything or nothing, is more terrible than all the monsters and tortures of reality. Human lived-time, thus is the time-space in which the turmoils and cares of life are experienced by Dasein. Angst thus is a fear of life through death. Death reveals through Angst, all the fears Dasein already has toward life. Being a human being, is not something just given but a project of great magnitude. In Heidegger’s chilling words “what is threatening cannot approach from a given direction… it is already there- and yet no where. It is so near that is oppressive and stifles one’s breath and yet it is nowhere.” (BT 174) In this frightening passage, Heidegger reveals the truly horrific nature of the threat of Angst. One does not even know from which direction it will attack. The threat is already upon one, and yet breathless one discovers it is nowhere. As Heidegger is at pains to stress however, this nowhere does not mean nothing. Angst is already present and yet we do not know how to fight it off. Angst is so terrible that one cannot even breathe in its presence, and yet one can not even sense its presence. Through Angst the torments and tortures of life, becomes something far more terrible to Dasein than death itself. Angst hence forces Dasein to confront its innermost potentiality. Angst reveals a fundamental discomfort with the human condition. Angst does not accept being placed into its determinate facticity. It is a mode of attunement that discloses for the first time how the world is to be understood as a world. The world is ontologically separated from the human element, and yet Man is expected to live his life within a world. Angst is the punishment man must pay for living for so long in a thrown world, without questioning his own throwness. Angst broods over how “the ‘world’ can offer nothing more nor can the Mitda-sein (being-with Dasein) of others.” (BT 175) This distortedness that Dasein is directed towards is unsatisfied with the answers given to it by the world and the companionship of Others. The world can offer Dasein nothing that is existentially satisfying. This fleeing away from Others, forces Dasein to confront its ownmost inner individuality. A falling into one’s own world occurs in which one’s subjectivity becomes the entire universe. We must keep in mind that “this existential ‘solipsism’ however, is so far from transposing an isolated subject-thing into the harmless vacuum of a worldless occurrence that it brings Dasein in an extreme sense precisely before its world as world.” (BT 176) Dasein’s fleeing from being-in-the-world, grants it no liberation, for solipsism actually brings Dasein into greater confrontation with the world as it is. The isolated subject is forced to confront its potentiality in the world. The more Dasein becomes aware that it is not at home in the world, the more dragged down into the world it becomes. The very act of withdrawal reveals an existential commitment to the world. It is at that moment when Dasein has withdrawn from being-with, and is purely an isolated-subject that Dasein is left alone with the world, with no intermediaries. Being-with provides the occasion for idle-talk that tranquilizes Dasein from its existential concerns. When all distractions are removed however, the isolated-subject is left alone to comprehend the meaning of existentiality. “Angst on the other hand fetches Dasein back out of its entangled absorption in the world…Being-in enters the existential mode of not-being-at-home.” (176) Dasein is inclined towards lingering in a tranquilized familiarity absorbed into the They. Angst drags Dasein out of the easy world of the They back into the pivotal confrontation with being-toward-death. It would be too easy for Dasein to just sink into tranquility and accept the facticity of the world it was flung into. This is the world inhabited by Das Man. Not-being-at-home reveals to Dasein its fundamental estrangement from absorption into Das Man. An uncanny feeling torments and follows Dasein wherever it goes, whispering in its ear, that it does not belong. Angst is the constant reminder to Man, that his destiny is ontological and not ontic. Man is not meant to merely accept the giveness of his existence. Those materialistically inclined, who believe the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile, would denounce Angst as a mere physiological imbalance. Thought is merely the flow of chemicals through the brain. Ontological anxiety is therefore no more than the malady of psychological anxiety. The ‘cure’ to this illness is to be tranquilized back into the They. Heidegger does not deny, that while Anxiety is an ontological problem, in its facticity there are ontic causes which are indeed physiologically conditioned. However Heidegger reminds us that the “physiological triggering of Angst is possible only because Dasein is anxious in the very ground of its being.” (BT 177) So even if anxiety has ontic-physiological causes, the very facticity of anxiety, reveals the degree to which Man is already a disturbed animal in his very essence. Anxiety towards Being, is a physiological disease that brutes do not suffer from. The ability to suffer from a particular malady reveals the character of a being.

Angst is what calls Dasein from its slumber towards an Authentic facing of Death. It is ironic that what alienates Dasein from the physical inorganic world is precisely the possibility of inevitably becoming a part of the inorganic world. When the Man is broken down into his particular chemical elements he is nothing more than inorganic matter. However it is this very knowledge that grants to him the awareness that he is more than physical atoms. Heidegger of course does not intend this in any Platonic, Christian or Cartesian sense. Heidegger does not wish to speak of Being after Death, except an empty vacuum. Pure void after Death is ontologically far more meaningful to Dasein, than any concept of Heaven or Afterlife which would be a mere rising within ontic planes of existence. The Christian Afterlife is a quantitative change, while the Void of emptiness is a qualitative leap. Death discloses to Existence that its “extreme inmost possibility lies in giving itself up and thus shatters all one’s clinging to whatever existence has been reached.” (BT 244) It is this clinging to reached existence that sets the stage for inauthentic Das Man to become a slave to life. In order to be free, Dasein needs to voluntarily surrender to the inevitability of Nothingness. The physiological process of perishing transforms man from organic vitality into inorganic thingness. The physiological process of death is purely involuntary and physicalistic. However existentially, Dasein has the free choice of embracing the No-Thing and thus escape the reification that comes with Death. By embracing No-Thingness, Dasein refuses to become an object and thus preserves its inmost subjectivity. Unlike the Master’s Being-toward-death, the Slave “distorts Angst into cowardly fear, and in overcoming that fear only makes know its own cowardliness in the face of Angst.” (BT 245) The Slave like the Master experiences Being-Toward-Death and Angst, but faces it with a cowardly demeanor. The “overcoming” of Angst for the Slave, is the acceptance of his place as a Slave in the world. There is nothing more terrible for the They-Slave than to be separate from its at homeness in the World. The World feels to Das Man as a place that he belongs in and is meant to be. Life is an assignment that must be lived. Inability to submerge into Das Man is considered a failure to be human. The Slave’s inauthentic attitude towards Death, sentences him to defeat in the Fight for Recognition. His life is something too precious to be sacrificed, and he would purchase it with the chains of Slavery. It is different for the Authentic Dasein to whom Death reveals “its lostness in the They-self , and brings it face to face with the possibility to be itself, primarily unsupported by concern taking care of things, but to be itself in passionate anxious freedom-toward-death which is free of the illusions of the They, factical, and certain of itself.” (BT 245) Without the possibility of Death, Dasein would merely be stuck in the muck of the facticity it was flung into. Dasein is lost in the They-self and preoccupied by the day to day tasks that need to be taken care of. Angst releases Dasein from these everyday responsibilities and cares. The only true human freedom is freedom towards Death. Dasein thus obtains a Stoical indifference to its life or death. Embracing the freedom to die, Dasein can live its life with anxious passion. The everyday concerns of the They are reveal to be the factical illusions they really are. To live the life of Das Man, is to not be oneself and thus not to live at all. If there already is an unlimited supply of Theys, what need is there of Dasein to take up the They and add another drop to the ocean? The roles assigned to Das Man are played by a billion actors across the time-span of human history. In a Schopenhaerian sense, perhaps Das Man is right not to be concerned with death, since the death of the human individual means nothing to the eternal They. Dasein rises about this happy complacency and voluntarily embraces disquietude. The pains of authentic Dasein are infinitely more valuable than the joys of inauthentic Das Man. Freedom-towards-Death reveals the infinite possibilities facing the individual. One becomes free to live, only when one knows one is going to die. Dasein ought not take on an attitude of waiting for death, but an attitude of freedom. Man is the only Being in existence who does not merely perish but also experiences death. For Heidegger man is the only animal that dies. To renounce Death, is to renounces one’s humanity and to become a brute or God. Possibilities only become choices, when time before Death is limited. If Man were immortal all choices would eventually be fulfilled and thus cease to be choices. Man is only free because he dies. When Man pretends he will never die, he is inauthentic ally renouncing his own freedom and choosing to be an object. By pretending he will never die, Das Man kills himself as a living-being and turns himself into a dead object. The inauthentic life, is not a lived life. There are particular facticities or ontic qualities that are imposed on Dasein, when it is flung into existence. Being-toward-death however releases Dasein from these essential qualities and prevent them from permeating into its very existence. One is thus free to think over one’s death. However in this very act of brooding one might fool oneself into thinking one can know the time and place and understand the coming of death. Heidegger is aware of this possibility and warns “brooding over death does not completely take away from it its character of possibility. It is always brooded over as something coming, but we weaken it by calculating how to have it at our disposal.” (BT 241) A misunderstanding of Time thus corrupts brooding over death. For brooding sees Death as something always approaching but never here and now. This is an inauthentic way of understanding the future. When One calculates death, one thinks of it as a liability to be accounted for. One does not grasp death inwardly and hold it to the bosom. Das Man does not understand the difference between being free toward death, and having death at one’s own disposal. Death is not a tool one can have in one’s hand. Death is instead the destruction of an entire ontological plane of existence. Death is the ending of all worlds. To be free towards death, is to realize that one cannot plan one’s life around death, but instead through death. Dasein freely and passionately commits to life, in that single moment of Time before death. The intensity of authentic life comes precisely from the fact that it is limited by the bookend of death. A Man who would live forever would not even need to bother getting out of bed. No action would have any meaning for him, since he could always do it tomorrow. It is the forbidden knowledge, that tomorrow one will be dead, that frees Dasein to live with authentic commitment in the here and now. This attitude of living-death is the disposition taken up by the Master. Since the Master is in an ontological sense, already dead it is possible for him to risk his life on something that is of no biological importance to him. The Master voluntarily embraces the Death that it is in his power to avoid. However the seed of the Master’s dissatisfaction and ultimate downfall are to be found in the very source of his victory- the Master is already dead to the things of the world. On an ontological level, the Master has already embraced Death and negated his own existence. It is impossible for either Master or Slave to recognize this fact during the Fight, but this Truth is uncovered during the playing out of human history. Heidegger’s Sein-Zum-Tode thus provides the phenomenological source of both the early victory and ultimate defeat of the Master.

Living? Our servants will do it for us!: Villiers and the First Wave of French Hegelianism

While it is often asserted that Hegelianism was totally absent to France, until it was introduced in the 1930s, the famous trio of Wahl, Koyre, and Kojève was in fact the Second Wave of French Hegelianism. The most famous proponent of the 19thCentury First Wave of French Hegelianism was the playwright Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. In 1866 Villiers wrote in glowing terms of Hegel as “this miraculous genius, this unrivaled procreator, this reconstructor of the universe.”[31] In Villiers’ dramas he would prefigure many of the concerns of 20th Century French Hegelians particularly Kojève. “The interest for Hegelian philosophy for Villiers lay in the notion that Spirit alone is real and has ascendancy over the so-called real world of matter and the senses.”[32] The Absolute Idealism of Hegel, revealed to Villiers the way in which the Master is not slave to the sensual-material world but can rise to the level of the symbolic Ideal. Villiers’s drama Axel is set in the depth of Heidegger’s Black Forest. The father of the German noble Axel de Auersperg, was entrusted with the gold reserves that were to fund a Germanic War of Liberation in 1807. However with aristocratic disdain for the rising tide of mo