Today, the notion and status of the human have become more and more problematic. We speak about human history as the epoch of the Anthropocene—an epoch that has led to the current global ecological crisis. Thus humans today are seen as enemies of nature, a negative force in Earth’s history.

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At the same time, human history seems to have come to an end. With a mixed feeling of relief and dread, the future is imagined as post-human or trans-human. But if humans disappear, what will actually disappear? What distinguishes humans from any of the other things of this world—for example, from other animals?

The notions of the end of history and the end of humanity have their origin in a course of lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that Alexandre Kojève gave at the École des hautes études pratique in Paris between the years 1933 and 1939.

Throughout his whole intellectual development, one question stood at the centre of Kojève’s thinking: What does it mean to be human?

Kojève’s course on Hegel was attended by such leading figures of French intellectual life as Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, André Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Raymond Aron. Even people who did not attend “Le Séminaire,” a name suggesting Kojève’s course was the only one that mattered, took notice: the transcripts were widely read in Parisian intellectual circles that encompassed Sartre and Camus among others.

Le Séminaire acquired a legendary status. This course on Hegel was later published under the title Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (1947), as a pretty loose patchwork of texts and notes written by Kojève and of transcripts made by different members of his audience. This collection of heterogeneous text fragments was produced not by Kojève himself, but by the Surrealist writer Raymond Queneau.

If this seems like a peculiar way for a modern philosopher to find a readership, it reflects the unusual nature of the man himself. Kojèvewas born in 1902 in Moscow as Alexander Kozhevnikov. His family was rich, politically well connected and culturally aware.

In 1919, after having lived through the Russian Revolution as well as the beginnings of the Civil War and the Red Terror, Kojève left the Soviet Union for Germany. Kojève saw understanding the revolution that had been the setting of his youth as his primary intellectual goal. He studied philosophy in Germany and, in 1926, wrote his PhD thesis in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg under the direction of Karl Jaspers.

Soon after that, Kojève moved to Paris, where, after World War II, he started a diplomatic-bureaucratic career. As one of France’s representatives to the European Commission, Kojève became one of the creators of the contemporary European Union, and a tariff agreement he worked out remains to this day a pillar of the European economic system.

In his free time, Kojève continued his philosophical writing, but these posthumously published texts have only relatively recently begun to attract attention. Kojève died from a heart attack in 1968, during a meeting of the European Commission. One can say that Kojève was a kind of Arthur Rimbaud of modern bureaucracy—a philosophical writer who became a martyr of the post-historical bureaucratic order.

Now, nothingness is not a part of nature—it is the opposite of nature. And that means that humans are not fully “natural.”

Throughout his whole intellectual development, one question stood at the centre of Kojève’s thinking: What does it mean to be human? For Kojève, humans are animals who know that they will die—and thus are different from all other animals (who, we assume, do not know this). Kojève was a radical atheist. Death for him is not succeeded by the post-mortal journey of the soul towards paradise, purgatory or hell; instead, humans end in nothingness. And that means that they already carry this nothingness inside themselves, while waiting and preparing for their death.

Now, nothingness is not a part of nature—it is the opposite of nature. And that means that humans are not fully “natural.” Humans are at once inside nature—as human animals—and outside it as carriers of nothingness. It is this access to nothingness that makes humans unique.

In this insistence on nothingness as the core of human existence one can see the influence of Heidegger and his Sein zum Tode (beingtowards-death). However, the Kojèvian notion of nothingness has Buddhist origins and not Heideggerian ones. Already the earlier Kojève text Diary of a Philosopher—that Kojève brought to Germany from Russia, lost and then later restored—shows a strong influence of Buddhism and its concept of nothingness.

The Diary includes a fictional dialogue between Descartes and Buddha in which Buddha argues that if thinking can be self-reflective, it cannot be a part of being. When I think of myself as this particular human being, I am outside being—in non-being, in nothingness. Time and again in Kojève’s later writings, he speaks about nothingness in just this way, as a medium of human self-reflection. One can understand one’s own being only from the perspective of non-being—from the perspective of death.

The traditional definition of the human is a thinking (or speaking) animal, Aristotle’s zoon logon echon. But for Kojève, thinking is a secondary attribute of the human—the first attribute is being a carrier of nothingness in the world.

It is not enough to be human; one has to prove that one is human, that one carries nothingness inside oneself.

Accordingly, there is an important difference between Kojève’s and Heidegger’s understanding of being-towards-death. Unlike Heidegger, Kojève does not stop at proclaiming that their nothingness makes human beings unique.

Instead, Kojève requires from humans that they demonstrate themselves to be carriers of nothingness through explicit acts of self-negation—like the Buddhist monks who practice rigorous ascesis. It is not enough to be human; one has to prove that one is human, that one carries nothingness inside oneself. The acts of self-negation of which Kojève speaks are not peaceful but belligerent.

Here, the opposition between Buddha and Descartes—or thinking as nothingness and thinking as existence—becomes an opposition between two basic life attitudes. The “reasonable” human is supposed to avoid dangers and the risk of death, to keep their thinking “existent.” The carrier of nothingness embraces the risk of life—and goes towards the dangerous and perilous. Here, Buddhism takes a Nietzschean turn. Wars and revolutions are interpreted as radical forms of ascesis.

All humans have the same value—nothingness is equal to itself. That is why all humans are equal. However, this equality emerges only at the end of history. Throughout history humans have practiced self-negation in different ways and to different degrees, which is why they become recognized as human to different degrees.

Most importantly, what is valuable is not the result of an act of self-negation but this act itself. Nothingness is the only source of human value. When humans disappear, it is nothingness that will disappear.

In this sense, Kojèvian humanism is different from Sartrean—even though Sartre was deeply influenced by Kojève’s lectures on Hegel. In his Existentialism and Humanism Sartre understands humanism as the right and obligation of the individual to solve their ethical problems in full freedom—rather than out of respect for any divine or social values—and to solve them not merely for themselves but also for the whole of mankind.

Indeed, nature is the enemy of humans because it kills them.

In other words, Sartre understands humans as having original freedom of choice as their nature. In his “Letter on Humanism” that indirectly reacts to this text by Sartre, Heidegger writes that ethics has to do with ethos—with a way of life in a certain domestic environment that one cannot choose arbitrarily.

It can be argued that Kojève is closer to Heidegger than to Sartre insofar as he also does not believe that humans are free by nature. As these particular human animals, we are always inscribed into certain social, historical and natural conditions. However, humans have access to the forces of negation that allow them to break with their ethos and to transform their pre-given, natural, familiar, domestic environment.

Of course, one may ask: But even if humans are able to do that, why should they? Kojève’s answer is: Not only are they human, they have to demonstrate that they are human. If they do not, other humans will treat them as animals.

Thus, for Kojève, humans are indeed a negative force directed against nature—but he praises rather than condemns them for this work of negativity. According to Kojève, humans assert their value and are recognized only when they destroy nature. Indeed, nature is the enemy of humans because it kills them.

At first glance, this assessment seems to suggest that humans have a secure place in some supranatural, metaphysical order—a suggestion that Kojève radically rejects.

Humans are not supranatural or metaphysical, because the metaphysical and supranatural do not exist—they are merely products of religious imagination. Humans have their place in nothingness. And they demonstrate that by returning to nothingness time and again—in what Kojève calls the struggle for recognition.

Kojève believed that the struggle for recognition is central to the human condition, and that human history is the history of this struggle. When we speak about the struggle for recognition, we should ask ourselves this: Who or what is to be recognized?

A universalist tradition with its origins in the European Enlightenment tells us we should recognize each individual human as a representative of humanity. And that means, further, accepting that every individual has the same needs, desires, fears and hopes, and, accordingly, should have the same rights as all other individuals.

In other words, the classical Enlightenment believes in the universality of “human nature” beyond all the religious, cultural, ethnic and class differences. Seen from this perspective, an individual’s struggle for recognition is a struggle for humanity—against discrimination based on their specific corporeal and cultural characteristics, against exclusion from humanity and for inclusion in the name of the basic commonality of human nature.

This universalist model was questioned because its definition of human nature remained unclear. Which needs and desires could be called naturally human and which inhuman because they are not dictated by nature?

Rousseau and late Tolstoy, for example, imagined humans as basically peaceful creatures with a modest set of needs and desires that could be easily satisfied. All the desires that lead to violence and war they considered unnatural, planted in the human heart by a civilization that seduced people into believing they needed more than their nature required. Possessed by a love for fashion and prestige, civilized people could not be satisfied with cultivating their own garden.

In the choice between life and death, humans can choose death.

Instead, they competed for imaginary goals—for status, wealth and power that they actually did not need. Thus, the critical observation that different people want different things was met by a rejection of the distortions of human nature produced by civilization—and by a return to the basics. The struggle for recognition took a psychological, subjective turn. Individuals were supposed to struggle not only against the external pressures, injustices and exclusions that denied their humanity but also against internal distortions of their own bodies and souls produced by civilizational illnesses—with the goal of returning to their true, original human nature.

But is such a return possible? Is it really the case that when an individual turns away from all civilizational imperatives and seductions and returns to their own human nature, this nature will coincide with the nature of all other humans?

Previously, the Marquis de Sade manifested his skepticism: there are people who naturally have different desires than other humans—and who use pretty drastic methods to satisfy those desires.

During the nineteenth century, this skepticism was radicalized and systematized. Nietzsche insisted on original differences within human natures. Freud introduced the notion of the subconscious: one cannot fully control and shape one’s own desires.

Human nature understood as an innate set of needs and desires became elusive, the conscious return to this nature impossible. Gender and ethnic differences were taken more seriously as well as cultural determinants. Humanity came to be seen as a patchwork of heterogeneous identities rather than one common, universal identity. “I am who I am” was the slogan. Inner liberation was understood not as the revelation of universal human nature but as a protest against universality in the name of particularity, against a common identity in the name of difference.

Nothingness is open to everything—it presupposes a potentially unlimited number of possibilities for human existence.

Now, in both cases—as universal or particular—human nature is understood as pre-given. One has a nature—and then one enters a struggle for its recognition.

However, this is not how Kojève understands the struggle for recognition. For Kojève, as already stated, humans do not have any nature—or, rather, they have nothingness as their nature. Of course, humans like all animals have needs and desires, such as, for example, hunger and thirst, which they must satisfy.

But humans are also able to reject their instinct for self-preservation and put their life at risk. In other words, humans can act against the animal component of their nature and manifest their humanity by rejecting their animality. In the choice between life and death, humans can choose death.

For Kojève, humans have no identity—be it universal or particular. Identity is what the things of nature, including animals, have. Throughout their existence, such things of nature remain identical to themselves. In contrast, having nothingness inside themselves, humans are, so to say, non-identical.

Nothingness is open to everything—it presupposes a potentially unlimited number of possibilities for human existence. These possibilities differ, but nothingness, as their origin, remains the same. In other words, the identities of humans are different, but their non-identity is the same.

This universality of human non-identity—which is based on the self-identity of nothingness—is the source of Kojève’s conviction that human history will end with the establishment of a universal and homogeneous state in which everyone’s non-identity is recognized.

However, when human non-identity is recognized, the danger emerges that this non-identity will disappear—and humans will be treated as animals that have a naturally given set of needs and desires. Therefore, for humans to remain human means to continue practicing self-negation and self-overcoming, even under the conditions of post-history. But how does Kojève describe the genealogy of the human understood as self-negating?

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From Alexandre Kojève: An Intellectual Biography. Used with the permission of the publisher, Verso Books. Copyright © 2025 by Boris Groys