A Quest Into Man In Desire

Alexandre Kojève is a Russia-born Fren ch philosopher in th e twentieth century,long enjoying a reputation in the field of philosophy,but he has never pursued academic positions,except tooking over Koyré’ s chair in EPHE(école pratique des hautes études)for over six years famous lectures on the Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,with great influence on a generation of prominent French intellectuals.He provided an anthropological version of Hegelian philosophy.“Man”,as a keyword,is a combination of Hegelian historical principle,Heidegger’s existence and Marx’s human reality.These not only fulfilled the very in tentions of the French philosophy after the Second World War,which had focused on the specific ex istence of hum an to seek a concrete philosophy,but also ended the period of Hegelian thought about 100 years not accepted by French,whereby constitu ting a trend of the French Hegelian ism.In addition,he spent his later life in senoir departm ent of Fr ench government.In fact,he led his colleagues formulating many policies,such as the Economic Cooperation Organization、tariffs and trade ag reements between France and Europe,etc.At the sam e time,he proposed a lot of im portant political thoughts,such as le gal society,the new L atin Empire,universal homogeneous state,etc.In western world,especially in France,Kojève’s thought is very popular,but regrettably,in China only a few scholars have realized the value of Kojève’s thought in the sense of reading H egelian thoughts,wh ile they ignored Kojève’ s thought itself,especially the importance concept of “Man” in its philosophical system.Or they just emphasied one side of Kojève’ s thoughts,rarely com bing both his philosophical anthropology and phenomenology of right.Therefore,this essay com bines Kojève’s two di mensions of philosophical anthropology and phenom enology of right as well as analyses the historical and theoretical background of cont emporary French philosophy,theoretical inclination in the early stage of Kojève and his respond of the problem of conscious inherence.On this basis,this ess ay,“Man” as a starting point,criticizies Cartesian cogito and then describes the reason of concept of “Non-Existence” as th e undoubted prem ise of Kojève’s whole thought system.With the comparison of Hegel,the theory of “Desire” in Kojève includes the lack of content and it desires another desire.Thus,Kojève’ s non-existential “Man in Desire” is a concrete,individual,free a nd negative man under dualism,and is a flesh and bl ood individual in the society of history in the sense of master and slave dialectic,as well as is a m an in labor and struggle,and is a man facing with the realization of mutu al recognition,the satisfy of personal desire,the end of history,the emergence of legal society a nd universal homogeneous state.Not only this theory criticises inside rationalism or e ssentialism,which m eets the time of the “irrational” trend of French philosophy,i.e.the theory of concrete individual turns French philosophy from sprite to existence,and then turning from existence to the structure without man under the promoting of desire theory.But also the concept of man is the com bination of Hegel,Heidegge r and Marx’ s thought,which led Marxist philosophy enter France,as a result France em erges Marxism of ex istentialism mainly representated by Sartre and Ma rxism of structuralism mainly represented by Althusser,in this sense,the concept of m an is the keyword in French philosophy with the transition from “three H” era to the generation known as “three masters of suspicion”.