Introduction to the Reading of Hegel

Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

Cover of the first edition
Author	Alexandre Kojève
Original title	Introduction à la Lecture de Hegel
Translator	James H. Nichols, Jr
Country	France
Language	French
Subject	Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Published	1947 (Gallimard, in French) 1969 (Basic Books, in English)
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages	287 (English edition)
ISBN	0-8014-9203-3 (English edition)
LC Class	80-66908

Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (French: Introduction à la Lecture de Hegel) is a 1947 book about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel by Alexandre Kojève, in which he combines the labor philosophy of Karl Marx with the Being-Toward-Death of Martin Heidegger. Kojève develops many themes that would be fundamental to existentialism and French theory such as the end of history and the Master-Slave Dialectic.

Summary

Kojève argues that Hegel's System needs to be seen as circular and returning to itself.^[1]

Kojève takes Heidegger's concept of Angst in the face of death and applies it to the fear the Slave fears in his initial conflict with the Master. It is the slave's unwillingness to accept death, in contrast with the Master, that leads to their unequal relationship.^[2]

Influenced by Heidegger's insights into the manner in which Dasein stands before death, Kojève sees man as a fundamentally negative creature, who negates existence through labor.^[3]

Reception

Philosopher Herbert Marcuse, in a 1960 appendix to his Reason and Revolution (first published 1941), writes that the "only major recent development in the interpretation of Hegel's philosophy" is the "postwar revival of Hegel studies in France". Marcuse credits the "new French interpretation" with showing clearly "the inner connection between the idealistic and materialistic dialectic", and lists Kojève's book as one of the key works.^[4]

Some have argued that the book is more an elaboration of Kojève's own philosophy rather than a mere commentary on Hegel. For example F. Roger Devlin claims it is like calling Aquinas's Summa Theologica a mere introduction to Aristotle.^[5]

Simone de Beauvoir's reading of the book would emphasize the Master-Slave relation between men and women she saw in The Second Sex (1949).^[6]

In Jon Stewart's anthology The Hegel Myths and Legends (1996), Introduction to the Reading of Hegel is listed as a work that has propagated "myths" about Hegel.^[7] The dismissive view of French Hegel is expressed in Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations by Robert B. Pippin. He writes that Kojève is a "truncated and unsatisfactory jumblings of Hegelian ideas which get a better hearing in the original. It is commonplace among those who admire Kojève to grumble about the "Hegel scholars" who just don't get it when they criticize Kojève's eccentric reading don't see that Kojève was also a child of his time."

References