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Alexandre Kojève’s Hegelianism and the Formation of Europe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 October 2017
Extract
Kojève once wrote in a reply to Leo Strauss that the philosopher who contemplates action faces a conflict that constitutes the only authentic tragedy left in the Christian or bourgeois world:
[T]he tragedy of Hamlet and of Faust. It is a tragic conflict because it is a conflict with no way out, a problem with no possible resolution.
One is inclined to add that the acting philosopher has a notoriously comic side, too, a side that has been exploited throughout the history of literature, from Aristophanes’ ‘The Clouds’ to the modern trope of the moronic impotence of the inept professor. But just as the comic fiction of Aristophanes’ ‘Clouds’ ultimately turned out to have had an actual tragic effect on Socrates’ life and death, so the modern depiction of the helpless philosopher is but a reflex on the troubled relation of philosophy and action.
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- Copyright © Centre for European Legal Studies, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge 2006
References
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44 The intellectual precursors of national socialism, Friedrich Ratzel, Hans Grimm, and Carl Schmitt, must have been painfully aware of this incompatibility of winning wars and being a nation state. In order to make war winnable, so to speak, they thus reinterpreted world histo ry as not being about power but about space . History is demoted to nothing but a permanent fight for Lebensraum; it is nothing but political Geography.
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46 Ibid.
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50 None of the following is meant to prejudge or suggest that Europe should in any way fol low a development like that in the United States. It is only the expression of the world historic fact that the United States do have existence as an Idea, whereas Europe does not have existence as an Idea. Rather, the fact that one part of Europe wants to exist as an incarnation of the United States and the other part of Europe wants to exist in opposition to the United States constitutes one of the fundamental reasons for the fact that Europe does not have existence as an Idea.
51 Kojève, A, above n 33.
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