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Existentialism, Marxism and Hegelianism: A Reconsideration of Alexandre Kojeve
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16322 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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3 / 1989 |
4,623 Words |
| Author
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Steven B. Smith
Steven B. Smith is an associate professor of political science
at Yale University and has published widely on French Marxism. |
In the face of it the differences between existentialism and Marxism are too great to allow for synthesis. Two differences appear to be crucial. First, existentialism maintains that human actions are underdetermined; its proponents typically believe that we "make" ourselves through freely chosen actions or "projects" that cannot be reduced to any underlying causal mechanism or necessity. Marxism, by contrast, maintains that free will or individual self-determination is an illusion, an ideological "mystification." To be sure, men make history, but they do so not as they please and under circumstances dictated by economic necessity. In the final analysis, freedom amounts to a recognition of this necessity as our ineluctable fate or destiny.
Second, existentialism remains wedded to a type of methodological individualism whereby only individuals are taken to be "real". It is individuals who act and who alone must accept responsibility for their deeds. To fail to recognize responsibility amounts to an admission of "bad faith," which is itself a choice, although a particularly odious one. Marxism, on the other hand, is bound to a type of class analysis whereby we are what we are only by virtue of our relationship to a given social class. Classes are themselves defined in terms of their degree of control or noncontrol over the productive forces of society. Thus Marxism eliminates the individuals as the basic unit of analysis and substitutes a doctrine of collective action in its place.
Existential Marxism
These differences notwithstanding, it is undeniable that there has been a certain affinity of existentialism for Marxism. This affinity, most are agreed, has its origins in the philosophy of Hegel. Indeed, the fusion of Marxist and existentialist ideas that was to prove so potent a force, especially in France, was prepared by a Russian émigré, Alexandre Kojeve (Kozhevnikov), whose lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes between 1933 and 1939 were to captivate an entire generation. Not published until 1947 by his student Raymond Queneau, these lectures attempted to establish a direct philosophical link not only between Hegel and Marx but also between existentialism and Marxism, a link that was to form the spiritual core of the postwar Left or so-called New Left. Kojeve's reading of the Phenomenology before World War II provided direct access to Marxism for thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre.
There are a number of ways in which Kojeve's treatment of Hegel skillfully
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