Kojeve's Existentialism

Here's Kojeve
>In other words, the very being of this I will be becoming, and the universal form of this being will not be space, but time. Therefore, its continuation in existence will signify for this I: "not to be what it is (as static and given being, as natural being, as 'innate character') and to be (that is, to become) what it is not." Thus, this I will be its own product: it will be (in the future) what it has become by negation (in the present) of what it was (in the past), this negation being accomplished with a view to what it will become. In its very being this I is intentional becoming, deliberate evolution, conscious and voluntary progress; it is the act of transcending the given that is given to it and that it itself is.

Spirit is the "I" that _knows_ _this_ _about_ _itself_. I am a "transcendence of the given" conscious of myself as such. But I was already a transcendence of the given before I became aware of this, and it was this transcendence of the given that made my self-knowledge possible in the first place. The past is not fixed. I am not only my past in the mode of no longer being it, but also my past is the past in the mode of no longer being it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

for "Stirner"

The "spirit of seriousness" possesses the objective man, the responsible man, the mature man. This "possession" is just its "non-optionality" in the absence of a conscious alternative. Until one somehow learns to think otherwise, virtue just is serious and objective. Or rather such is the case for the "scientist of virtue." To be clear, "I" who speak here also play at this role, but in a late ironic stage of the role, in a self-subverting stage. So the serious man to maintain his serious pose (which is to say to avoid understanding his seriousness as a pose) must interpret the ironist as a sick man or an evil man. The ironist, of course, is not offended --beyond as it were the "violence" of words. In this sense the ironist is the true materialist. If he shrugs at materialist ideologies, he knows better than most the gap between words and "reality." He fears actual  not verbal violence as an interruption of his c...
Read more

Death is God

>We might say that philosophy is God learning to own himself, overcoming the illusion-truth that he is outside himself. This is illusion-truth because he's only "really" God once he owns himself. But since he potentially owns himself, this alienation to be (potentially) overcome is an "illusion." The reader who intimately "gets" me knows that this is an obscenely arrogant statement. I am God. He is God. But there is also great humility in this statement, in that we allow one another to be God. We are grateful that are other kings out there among all the mere bishops with their tedious false humility. Death is God. You (we) have faith in death, in mortality. We have a dark faith in the nullity of all that accuses and imposes. "They" come to us with systems, millions of systems. They do not, however, offer to do our dying for us. They _cannot_ do our dying for us. To face this void (to believe in the void of death) is to perceive the fra...
Read more