The Path to Atheism via God

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Notes

1. Husserl, cited in Janicaud, Phenomenology Wide Open, 23. Cf. Husserl, Ideas, 116–17.

2. Kojève, Letter to Leo Strauss (1946), in Strauss, On Tyranny, 234.

3. Nichols, Alexandre Kojève, vii.

4. The plan being: Ch.I. The philosophy of the nonexisting (ontology) [this manuscript - Atheism]; II. Philosophy of the existing (science, active attitudes, aesthetics and ethics, religion, and mysticism); III. Philosophy of Philosophy; IV. [unnamed]. V. Philosophy of Atheism (Kojève, Atheism, 123, 158 n.141 and 193 n. 219).

5. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” 82–96. Cf. Carnap, “Elimination of Metaphysics,” 60–81. Kojève acknowledged the seeming absurdity of speaking about “the nothing” but says its “presence” in language is “revealed” (Atheism, 129 n. 3).

6. On the “fundamental” question of metaphysics, see Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” 96; and Introduction to Metaphysics, 1–54.

7. This difference is intriguing, given that Kojève adopts and translates much of Heidegger’s terminology of the existential analytic of Dasein, such as the “modes of being [Seinsart]”: e.g., “being-in-the-world” and “being-toward-death.” Kojève adds the “world in its broadest sense” qua homogeneity is also inclusive of all the “Hilbertian dimensions” (i.e., David Hilbert’s theory of space) (Atheism, 16).

8. See Kant, Lectures on Philosophical Theology, 39–40.

9. Kojève had dealt with these issues in his dissertation on Vladimir Solovyov, see The Religious Metaphysics of Vladimir Solovyov.

10. Heidegger, Being and Time, sec. 53. Kojève uses the phrase “the tonus of horror” instead of Heidegger’s term “angst.” Kojève, who would later say Heidegger had taken a “bad turn” in his writings after Being and Time, notes in this book that Heidegger’s connection of “being-toward-death” to notions of “authenticity” or “meaning of Being” bears traces of “the religious attitude” (Atheism, 151 n. 123). Notably, Kojève later critiqued Alfred Delp’s theological critique of Heidegger’s “tragic humanism.” See his “Note sur Hegel et Heidegger.”

11. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 1–2. Dostoevsky’s character of Kirilov from The Possessed obviously impacted on both Camus and Kojève. See Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 226-27, 248 n.33. Cf. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 101–9.

12. Kojève cites Rudolf Otto’s book on the “numinous [das Heilige],” The Idea of the Holy, as an example of a psychological account of religious experience. Interestingly, Husserl wrote to Otto and recognised the book as the first example of a “phenomenology of religion.” See his “Letter to Rudolf Otto (1919),” in Heidegger: The Man and Thinker, 23–26. Kojève is less sure than Husserl, but he does refer to Max Scheler and Hedwig Conrad-Martius on the possibility of a phenomenology of religion (Atheism, 186 n. 191).

13. Fifty-odd years later, after the date of Kojève entertaining this challenge from a mathematic ontology, the famed philosophe du jour Alain Badiou would propose a “post-Christian” or arguably atheist interpretation Cantor’s set theory of infinity of the “pure multiple” that would not “save God” and thus be reducible to the theological notion of the infinite. Badiou, Being and Event, 42–43, 143. Kojève entertains a similar argument in “Note sur Hegel et Heidegger,” 45–46 n. 1.

14. Hegel uses the term “die Sache selbst” in Phenomenology of Spirit. Miller translates it as both “the real issue” and “the matter at hand.” Kojeve also cites the term in the Introduction á la Lecture de Hegel, 93, 96, 109, 295. Heidegger and Husserl, of course, also used the same term to mean “the things themselves.”

15. Kojève, Introduction á la Lecture de Hegel, 293. He also repeats this same “choice” in his review of Delp, “Note sur Hegel et Heidegger,” 43, 45.

16. This interpretation is not limited to Atheism but coincides with Love’s broader thesis on Kojève in his own book The Black Circle, which appears to overlook Kojève’s reservations about suicide as a free choice.

17. Kojeve does make this comment about Georges Gurvitch, a sociologist who wrote on phenomenology and religion. Kojève’s philosophical writings after the Hegel Course were all proclaimed by him to be “introductions” (of a “pedagogical” nature) to the “Système du Savoir.”

18. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, sec. 6.5–7, 150–51.

19. Kojève discusses “silence” in the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 83–84, 91, 234; cf. Kojève, Essai, vol. 1, 63, 154, 168; Strauss, On Tyranny, 256. See also Weslati, “The Inexistent in the Ontology of Alexandre Kojève.”