Kandinsky's Nephew and Gallic Creations

So another French philosopher has been duped by a hoax. The merde last hit the fan as one reviewer put it, when Sokal and Bricmont first wrote a spoof philosophical piece which was lauded in all the appropriate journals, and followed it up by a book, Intellectual Impostures, which exposed the POFTS (pointlessly obscure French thinkers), Lacan, Kristeva, Baudrillard et al., as trying to make their thoughts more impressive by larding them with science that they clearly did not understand themselves. This time the joke is of Gallic origin and the philosopher with egg on his face is the médiatique intello, Bernard-Henri Lévy, as much known for his silk shirts open to the navel and his starlet wife as his thought. In his most recent book he has been naive or slapdash enough, to quote the philosopher, Botul and his creed of Botulism, which are pure inventions. Lévy is not a POFT. He made his name by coming out against the engagé philosophers who in various convoluted Marxist forms were supporting Stalinist barbarism, but having read an article or two by him and reviews of his books, I feel that, on this side of the Channel, he would be considered more of a journalist than a philosopher.

Last weekend I came across what, for me, was a new name from the French philosophical world. Writing in The Spectator, Francis Fukuyama, he of The End of History notoriety, claimed that his thesis was, that ‘the true embodiment of the post-historical world would be the European Union’ and that he derived his ideas mainly from the ‘great French philosopher Alexander Kojève.’ Not wishing to be completely ignorant of any great philosopher, I did some research – not actually reading his work, God forbid – but finding out who on earth he was. All the following comes from a note by Jeffrey Mehlman in The Columbia History of Twentieth Century French Thought.

Kojève, originally Kojevinkov, came from a wealthy Russian family who fled the Revolution. He was the nephew of the painter Wassily Kandinsky. Losing his fortune in the financial collapse of the dairy firm, La Vache Qui Rit, he had to earn his living interpreting the philosophy of Hegel. From his study of the German philosopher he evolved his own philosophy. Here are some of his conclusions. Napoleon is the secular Christ who brings history to an end by his victory at the Battle of Jena. Subsequently, there is some historical tidying up. Nazism was the ‘Democratization of Imperial Germany.’ The Chinese revolution was ‘the introduction of the Napoleonic Code in China.’ Beau Brummel and the marquis de Sade also play a part in the ending of history, Brummel because he concluded that man in uniform could no longer be taken seriously and de Sade because he understood that violence could only thrive in the boudoir. The surrealist touch to the story is that Kojève earned his living post-war as an important European bureaucrat and was the principal French architect of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). He died in harness in 1968.

One ends up having some sympathy for poor Lévy. Separating out the actual from the spoof in French twentieth century thought, is by no means straightforward. Raymond Aron who with Camus, is one of the few French intellectuals from the era respected in Anglo-Saxon circles, but who was criticised at home for lack of creativity, apparently described Kojève ‘as smarter than Sartre.’ I have read somewhere, of the view of a French intellectual that difficult things should be written about in a difficult way. Perhaps that is where the creativity comes in and where Kojève was very smart. Now that the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) are on the verge of bringing down the Euro, in some cases by creative accounting, leading to who knows what other chaos, I’m very glad that the Continental input to British thought came, thanks to Adolf Hitler, via Austria in the persons of Hayek, Popper and Gombrich, all exemplary figures in writing about difficult things in a very clear way.