L'athéisme

by Alexandre Kojève

One of the twentieth century's most brilliant and unconventional thinkers, Alexandre Koj�ve was a Russian �migr� to France whose lectures on Hegel in the 1930s galvanized a generation of French intellectuals. Although Koj�ve wrote a great deal, he published very little in his lifetime, and so the ongoing rediscovery of his work continues to present new challenges to philosophy and political theory. Written in 1931 but left unfinished, Atheism is an erudite and open-ended exploration of profound questions of estrangement, death, suicide, and the infinite that demonstrates the range and the provocative power of Koj�ve's thought.



Ranging across Heidegger, Buddhism, Christianity, German idealism, Russian literature, and mathematics, Koj�ve advances a novel argument about freedom and authority. He investigates the possibility that there is not any vantage point or source of authority--including philosophy, science, or God--that is outside or beyond politics and the world as we experience it. The question becomes whether atheism--or theism--is even a meaningful position since both affirmation and denial of God's existence imply a knowledge that seems clearly outside our capacities. Masterfully translated by Jeff Love, this book offers a striking new perspective on Koj�ve's work and its implications for theism, atheism, politics, and freedom.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Nonfiction

294 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published November 25, 1998

About the author

Alexandre Kojève was a Russian-born French philosopher and statesman whose philosophical seminars had an immense influence on twentieth-century French philosophy, particularly via his integration of Hegelian concepts into continental philosophy. As a statesman in the French government, he was instrumental in the creation of the European Union. Kojève was a close friend of, and was in lifelong philosophical dialogue with, Leo Strauss.

Reviews

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is great to see that some of Kojève's other writings besides his lectures on Hegel are finally being translated. This essay is an important groundwork for understanding Kojève's own philosophy, and how it came to develop out of his in-depth engagement with Hegel.

This work is far from the trite Dawkinsian diatribes which but thinnly veil a perverted love of God. God is but a minor topic in this work, which focuses instead on the existential standing of the atheist and the theist (the latter juxtapositionally determined in counterposition to the elaboration of atheism).

The atheist is figured not as the person who doesn't believe in God's existence, but rather as the being who is given nothing as existing outside the world (as opposed to the theist, who is given God as existing outside the world). The (non-)relation between human being in the world and the nothingness of the outside (of the world) that Kojève elaborates here is deserving of further thoughtful exploration, especially as it is essentially entwined with death. I hope to analyse the comparison between these thoughts and those of the anonymous neutrality of the no-one that death imposes upon the worldly being divested of God in the works of Blanchot.

This text, then, is more a work of ontology rather than theology, and I would recommend it to those interested in Kojève, Heidegger, Existentialists, and theoreticians of death, horror, and religion from a philosophical perspective.

[Benji · Rating 3 out of 5]

'The atheist is given nothing outside the world; for her there is neither death nor (the immortality of) the soul nor the God given to this soul. But this nongivenness has the character of the 'givenness' of the absence of all this. The route to God is given to the atheist, and the theist, in the givenness of her finitude, but moving along it [that route], the atheist finds nothing, she gets nowhere, but only because for her there is nothing at all there: she does not find nothing, she finds nothing precisely there where the theist finds something. She is only the 'human being in the world', given to herself, but given to herself as knowing that outside the world there is nothing, as knowing that there is no God ,i.e., as an atheist. Only such a person is an atheist in the full sense of the word, i.e., a person, responding to the question about God in the negative, and not an animal that has not and could not ask itself this question.'

'In the givenness of her death to the human being in the tonus of terror she can become a theist, but she can also become an atheist: in the givenness she poses the question about God and responds to it either one way or another. Every theist, and those who while alive did not take their theism into account, is revealed to herself as such in the horror of death, and only those know that they are really atheists who reveal themselves as such in this horror. Hence, referring to the fact of the givenness of death, we have not only shown the paradoxical fact of the givenness of the 'other', but we have found that route to God, moving along which the theist and atheist radically diverge, and each finds herself as such in the her difference from the other.'

[Ira · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book about infinity more than atheism. Good for that.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are looking for a real free thinker philosopher and a really deep intellectual without making noise about it, this is your guy! He is not only the Hegel's best interpreter but a unique voice, a polymath a really interesting human being.

[jiik · Rating 2 out of 5]

Retroactively refuted by Nagarjuna.

[Marco Sán Sán]

.Me parece que es osado leer a Kojève en inglés, mi nivel de inglés me saca de la exposición, me distraigo, tendré que releerlo y comparar traducciones.

Osado como todo libro de Kojève, el esbozo de una fenomenología de la religión. Es para lamentar las introducciones que hace a sus ideas pero el "poco" esfuerzo que hace por concretarlas, pero es de agradecer el ya haber hecho una introducción.

Qué decir, nunca me había planteado el Ateísmo más que como un berrinche al abandono, rechazo o ignorancia de la divinidad. Kojève acota esto y lo deja vano para mostrar que el Ateísmo no es la negación de la divinidad sino su inexistencia, su irrealidad, no por ausencia sino por finitud en un UNO, ósea nada alrededor (Plotino) más que el ser del Ateo, la inexistencia de algo fuera más que ese Ser dentro de una finitud.

Encarnar así al Ateísmo para elaborar su existencia como una parte del todo sin negación solo en su positividad sobre lo demás sin percatarse de lo demás, por que si lo hiciera dejaría de ser... MARAVILLOSO.