Devlin really said Kojeve was a "blank slate" lockean liberal & he...
R.Сам 🦋🐏@Logo_Daedalus
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Mar 22, 2025
~4 min read
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Devlin really said Kojeve was a "blank slate" lockean liberal & he argues against him on the Hobbesian front-- madness.
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The question of "human nature" in Kojeve is not one that "denies man his animal nature"-- in fact-- Kojeve notes that the post-historical world is defined by its *return* to animal nature after the "exhaustion" of the historical.
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This is effectively what Devlin is on about in "Sexual Utopia" anyway-- but his reading is one-sided-- & it describes this "return to nature" as a "return to matriarchy"-- yet, even his thinking, of "man as sophisticated monkey" -- is a symptom of post-historical thinking.
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By placing Hobbes as the "first modern"-- & not Machiavelli-- or Descartes (etc)-- or Aretino-- (or anyone else)-- is just adopting Strauss's hermeneutic. & this is idiotic considering "Art > Nature" is not "invented" then, but is implicit in *every* religious tradition.
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Strauss is a post-modernist-- he is the most influential "post-modern rightist"-- as for him, the entirety of modernity is an "exoteric covering for esoteric goals only explicable by reference to animal nature."
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When someone in this Straussian tradition says "Human Nature"-- they have no definition of the Human-- at all-- which distinguishes it from "Animal Nature"-- because, in this view, they are one & the same thing-- or even "Material Nature"-- an abstract "Nature of Things"
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In a sense-- in the 21st century-- "too much has already happened"-- thinkers in this line suggest that "we cannot base our understanding on History, because too much History has been written already-- we must instead base our understanding on *Natural Science* which is eternal"
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We can see this everywhere-- when so many debates are about "what pre-historic civilization was like"-- or "what is uniquely human considered through the lens of evolutionary psychology (etc)"-- History, as an autonomous sphere of Free Will, is already rejected prior.
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You could call this "Gorilla Mindset"
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Devlin's version of Kojeve's biography, even, is wrong in most ways-- he suggests first off that Kojeve "wasn't allowed to go to university due to his class origin"-- but the truth was that he was actually *sentenced to death* & had this commuted to exile
youtu.be/z4ORpFluFU4
youtu.be/z4ORpFluFU4
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This is important because Kojeve considered this "confrontation with death" to be the origin of his obsession with Philosophy-- much like Boethius or Dostoevsky in that sense.
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He describes Kojeve as a "the ultimate modernist"-- but calls him a "left-wing" thinker-- even though Kojeve describes himself as a "right-wing marxist."
"I got to be very interested in their [Strauss Kojeve] correspondence..."
"I got to be very interested in their [Strauss Kojeve] correspondence..."
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When he talks about Kojeve he talks about "his book"-- in this sense that Kojeve wrote "one book" which is the introduction to hegel-- but this simply wrong lmao-- if you haven't read "Outline of the Phenomenology of Right"-- you're not getting Kojeve fully.
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"The ancients believed that human beings *always had the same nature*" says Devlin, "I'm not a radical historicist..."
One need only have "some idea" of the context in which an author is writing-- which basically gives away that his praxis of abstracting from "one book" is fine
One need only have "some idea" of the context in which an author is writing-- which basically gives away that his praxis of abstracting from "one book" is fine
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"For me, Kojeve is the great opponent" says Devlin.
"I can't really solve the problem" says Devlin.
"He was so much more intelligent than the other leftists of the time..." says Devlin.
"I can't really solve the problem" says Devlin.
"He was so much more intelligent than the other leftists of the time..." says Devlin.
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"He lays bear the truly essential differences of the Left and the Right" says Devlin-- but Kojeve isn't a "Leftist" nor is he a "Rightist"-- he's one of the only philosophers who explains how this ostensible "essential difference" is fake.
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It's funny-- Devlin can be laughed off in this statement alone-- "the Left" & "the Right" are purely Historical terms-- & to suggest there is an "essential difference" between them, is to be Historically confused-- just BTFO by yourself-- this is a self-own.
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Every post-modern rightist is a "weak historicist" in this same exact sense-- shunning actual deep engagement with an overwhelming historical corpus in favor of discerning "the essential" within it-- as if they can use a "few books" to grasp "the eternal & essential human nature"
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This "eternal & essential human nature" for Strauss can only be found reading Plato-- for others-- it can only be found in sociological/evolutionary psychology/etc conceptions of the earliest forms of human civilization-- of which there is no real "historical record"
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Thus, even here, Devlin's discussion devolves into saying "y'know Aristophanes had a play about Feminism in Ancient Athens..." -- as if this is not a totally anachronistic ahistorical hermeneutic-- because "the essential problems are always essentially the same" for him.
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Kojeve's entire point is the opposite of this-- the "essential problems" are historically constructed-- & they do not "remain the same" through time.
