A Note from Kojève about the Devil

‘If, however, one is afraid of the enemy, then he becomes “diabolical” and thus “powerful”: he is the “master” and one is his “slave.”’

Although Kojève was not mentioned by name, my previous post was remotely inspired by his claim in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel that Christianity in its theistic form did not succeed at overcoming the slavish fear of death. This is evident in the belief in an afterlife, in heaven, in the resurrection, which merely prolongs animal life and thus provides Christians with a cop-out, an escape route: they no longer have to face and overcome the fear of death, because they believe they will live forever anyway. In my post, I argued that the true Christian understanding of Heaven is actually something like death, a total death to the self, and I relied on a few mystics to make this case. The afterlife is not anything like the continuation of this life, nor the continuation in a new-and-improved form of my present familiar self. Compared to such an understanding, Heaven is more like annihilation.

Consequently, I also argued that Hell, by contrast, is precisely where people go who are afraid to lose their life for God. In Kojèvian terms, Hell is for those who have not overcome the fear of death and who remain attached to mere animal life — mere self-preservation. In Kojève’s philosophy, such people are slaves who remain slaves: they fail to overcome their enslavement to their masters. Of course, this is how Kojève described Christianity’s belief in the afterlife: by expecting to continue on in their condition as living animals, in fear for their life, dependent for their life upon a divine master, Christians remained stuck in the condition of slaves. But I want to argue, to the contrary, that this is a better description of Hell than of Heaven: those who continue on, after death, in a condition of attachment to their animal life and mere self-preservation are those who are in Hell… If God is the master to whom they submit in their afterlife, then God’s mastery over them is not a mastery that saves them in Heaven, but one that damns them in Hell. What is more, it is a mastery that can only reveal itself in a diabolical form. One might go so far as to say that Satan is the cursed minister of God’s eternal mastery over slaves who remain eternally slaves (by contrast to the blessed, to whom God is not master but friend, the unity of mutual and universal recognition). If the damned are “vessels of God’s wrath” (Romans 9:22), then the devil is the very first vessel (first among all the damned) by means of which God pours his wrath into them.

I was delighted to find this interpretation of Hell confirmed for me in a passage from Kojève himself, which he pennted in a letter written to his friend, the ex-Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt. For context, Schmitt had written to Kojève asking him how the notion of an “enemy” should be understood in the Kojèvian-Hegelian system. Recall that Schmitt popularized the notion that politics is rooted in the friend-enemy distinction, a notion which unsurprisingly attracted Kojève greatly, since he identified the cause of history in the conflict between masters and slaves. Kojève sent back a detailed and precise response to Schmitt’s query, in which he identifies the “enemy” in its most characteristic form as none other than the devil. I’ll cite it at length, with the crucial paragraph in bold:

Now, the enemy question: The “enemy in his characteristic form” is certainly the devil, more precisely the Christian devil, who also appears in the “animal functions.” For Hegel (“for us” or “in itself”) these functions are “invalid” because man negates them, and is only man and not just an animal as this negation alone. For, while the “unhappy consciousness” (i.e. religious man, more precisely Christ) appears as slave before death and the risk of life in the struggle for recognition (his human reality and honor) and avoids the struggle, “for itself” what is animal is not “invalid” but powerful, i.e. “diabolical.” One can thus say the following: The real enemy is the enemy to the death: he can kill and be killed, is thus body and thus, if one likes, “form.” If one is prepared to kill him (i.e. if one is prepared to risk one's own life), then the enemy is “invalid” [nichtig] and can (at least as enemy) be destroyed. If, however, one is afraid of the enemy, then he becomes “diabolical” and thus “powerful”: he is the “master” and one is his “slave” (at least insofar as one does not flee from him into “another world”).

Leaving aside some of the details, the essential the point can be communicated simply in the following way: the enemy who is not conquered becomes the final master — ultimately, for the damned, this is none other than the devil; and the slave who does not conquer his master is the slave who ends up eternally enslaved — again, to the devil — and therefore damned. Kojève also implies here that damnable fate is essentially indistinguishable from being enslaved to one’s own animality: the diabolical itself is revealed in animality, in an animality that conquers oneself and which one fails to conquer. To be enslaved to the devil is to be enslaved to what is most animal in oneself, which can be summed up as the desire for self-preservation, and the refusal to lose one’s life (above all, for God). Hell is for those who remain attached to life, and who therefore remain slaves in Kojève’s sense, enslaved to Satan, who is the diabolical face of God.

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Addendum: All this talk about God as the unconquered master over the damned, revealed to them only in the diabolical form of Satan, might make people who are familiar with Kojève wonder whether this doesn’t entail that, for the blessed, God must be the master overcome, i.e. conquered, by the revolutionary struggle of slaves? Is salvation in heaven equivalent to the victory of slaves over their master, i.e. the victory of the blessed over God? There are no easy answers to these questions, as deliciously paradoxical as it might be to imply that salvation is victory over God (what could that mean, theologically?).

From another perspective, it is also possible to say that the blessed relate to God not as to a master overcome, but as to a leader among slaves — and there are many places where Kojève implies that there must be such a leader-slave, even a slave who plays the role of a dictator (a kind of Platonic philosopher king), because other slaves will be stubborn or uninterested in their own emancipation. It would have to be “forced” on them (by violence or by divine grace). Either of these interpretations is attractive.

Moreover, perhaps both are true: God is both master and slave: and as such, he conquers and negates himself — and the blessed, as slaves, merely participate in God’s own self-overcoming. This gives a new metaphysical meaning to Christ’s death upon the cross: it was merely the human manifestation of a great act that occurs eternally within the Godhead, namely the death — the self-negation — of God. But this is all something I will have to explore in more depth later.