#francis fukuyama | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

weare-yanagie · 10 months

Text

Transhumanism🤖

Transition towards post-humanism

The close-knit relationship between technology and human evolution is not a newly identified discovery. For example, the discovery of fire made a significant change in the then-existing life cycle of man. Therefore, through this article in YanaGie, we hope to introduce you to the climax of the conflict between technology and human evolution.

(

Things to know before reading:

Content- The article describes modern biological and technological innovations related to this concept (For example, the article doesn’t deal with how a chip is attached to the human brain through the Neuralink project). More attention has been paid to its inception, publication, and the philosophical debates that have been arisen from it, for the purpose of scientifically analyzing it. The structure of the topics in the article is as follows:

1: emergence, 2: development of the concept during the 80s, 3: development of the concept during the 90s, 4: market interference, 5: philosophical and ethical views, 6: summary.

)

“For the last several decades, a strange liberation movement has grown within the developed world. Its crusaders aim much higher than civil rights campaigners, feminists, or gay-rights advocates. They want nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints. As “transhumanists” see it, humans must wrest their biological destiny from evolution’s blind ...”

- Francis Fukuyama (American political scientist)

1. Emergence

The concept of Transhumanism became popular through an article published in 1957 by Julian Huxley, a British biologist, and philosopher, under this name. He stated that at this time, human evolution can be “supplanted” by removing unnecessary factors and improving the necessary ones we have gained.

Here, Huxley mainly focused on improving human conditions to a higher level through also a social and cultural sense in a broader perception, but the concept was adopted by Transhumanist movements that emerged later only as a unification of scientific and technological advances that man had acquired at that time. For example, computer science, space exploration, and cell and tissue preservation through cryopreservation techniques.

2. Development of the concept during the 80s

Subsequently, in the 80s, Transhumanist organizations and schools of thought emerged, focusing on extending human life span, Cryonics (the belief that it is possible to revive deep frozen dead human bodies in the future), space colonization, etc. to advance scientific and technological approaches.

Furthermore, the 80s was a decade favorable for this subject. The Foresight Institute was established by American engineer K. Eric Drexler and researcher Christine L. Peterson with the aim of using molecular engineering and nanotechnology in a visionary manner and conceptual artist Natasha Vita-More brought the discussion of human enhancement through the integration of aesthetics and scientific-technological advancement, among other events. In addition, prominent figures within this movement included American philosopher James Hughes and Canadian roboticist Han Moravec.

3. Development of the concept during the 90s

In the 90th decade, the concept was discussed further. British philosopher Max More and American philosopher Tim W. Bell founded the organization Extropy in order to enhance human characteristics. In 1998, Swedish and Britain philosophers respectively, Nick Bostrom and David Pearce established the Transhumanist Association (WTA), to introduce Transhumanism as a research subject, and in 2008 WTA, was renamed as Humanity+ in hopes of broadening the ideology of Transhumanism.

4. Market interference

In fact, after 2000, Transhumanism received support and funding from Google co-founder Larry Page, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk among other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. In 2013, Larry Page established Calico Life Sciences LLC (Calico Labs) with the aim of using technological advancements to extend human life. In 2022, Bezos and his donors invests $3 billion in Altos Labs, which aims to use technology to prevent ageing and disease. Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of colonizing Mars and the moon, and Neuralink in 2016 with the goal of creating chips that can be connected to the human brain. In July 2022, Synchron announced that they had successfully implanted a chip in the brain of a patient with ALS(Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis).

Elon Musk has quite a significant idea about this, according to him to avoid redundancy in the face of AI humans should merge mentally and physically with machines. Even if his statement seems quite serious at face value, the fundamentals of connecting humans and machines have been present for centuries, it exists in even wearing glasses which we have been doing for a long time now.

5. Philosophical and ethical views

American political philosopher, Francis Fukuyama, has stated “Underlying this idea of the equality of rights is the belief that we all possess a human essence that dwarfs manifest differences in skin color, beauty, and even intelligence. This essence, and the view that individuals therefore have inherent value, is at the heart of political liberalism. But modifying that essence is the core of the transhumanist project. If we start transforming ourselves into something superior, what rights will these enhanced creatures claim, and what rights will they possess when compared to those left behind? If some move ahead, can anyone afford not to follow? These questions are troubling enough within rich, developed societies. Add in the implications for citizens of the world’s poorest countries — for whom biotechnology’s marvels likely will be out of reach — and the threat to the idea of equality becomes even more menacing.” , when talking about Transhumanism in 2009.

He also elaborates “Transhumanism’s advocates think they understand what constitutes a good human being, and they are happy to leave behind the limited, mortal, natural beings they see around them in favor of something better. But do they really comprehend the ultimate human goods? For all our obvious faults, we humans are miraculously complex products of a long evolutionary process — products whose whole is much more than the sum of our parts. Our good characteristics are intimately connected to our bad ones: If we weren’t violent and aggressive, we wouldn’t be able to defend ourselves; if we didn’t have feelings of exclusivity, we wouldn’t be loyal to those close to us; if we never felt jealousy, we would also never feel love. Even our mortality plays a critical function in allowing our species as a whole to survive and adapt (and transhumanists are just about the last group I’d like to see alive forever). Modifying any one of our key characteristics inevitably entails modifying a complex, interlinked package of traits, and we will never be able to anticipate the ultimate outcome.” In his text.

6. Summary

Transhumanism has gained more popularity from the later end of the 1950s, been active during the 80s and 90s, and gained more attention of philosophers and scientists and had their views gained by the 2000s. This is because the action of succeeding biological limitations using science and technology is not an easy feat with positive outcomes. But after the 2000s, this concept gained more attention of the market, and individuals with more wealth have increased investing their resources largely for this matter. According to Francis Fukuyama, Transhumanism challenges equality among humans. Moreover, the changes that occur in the individual based on their unique characteristics affect the whole of humanity (our concepts, social relationships and interactions, desires, social values, spirituality, etc.) Transhumanists hope to eradicate “undesirable” qualities within us, but they do not realize that our “good” qualities are intertwined with our “undesirable” ones and that they would lose the basic essence of what humanity ultimately wishes for.

Sources: Brittanica (“Transhumanism”), The Guardian (“No death and an enhanced life: Is the future transhuman?”), Foreign Policy (Francis Fukuyama on “Transhumanism”).

@weare-yanagie | # SCIENCE

F O L L O W F O R M O R E ✨️

#science #philosophy #news #tech #science and technology #elon musk #francis fukuyama #transhumanism #futurism #neuralink #spacex

3 notes · View notes

nicklloydnow · 1 year

Text

“But intellectual life is flourishing in the cafés, institutes and academies, as refugees forge community in exile. And at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, one of France’s most prestigious research universities, Alexandre Kojève has taken over Alexandre Koyré’s seminar on The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) by G W F Hegel. Between 1933 and 1939, Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, André Breton, Gaston Fessard, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Éric Weil, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Raymond Queneau, Emmanuel Levinas all come to hear his lectures. A collection of the most renowned thinkers of the day, who would come to lay the intellectual foundations for 20th-century philosophy, political thought, literature, criticism, psychology and history. It is said that Kojève’s lectures were so intricate, so deft, that Arendt accused him of plagiarising. Bataille fell asleep. Sartre couldn’t even remember being there.

(…)

The short answer is that Kojève made Hegel accessible by bringing to the surface one of the essential elements of his work: desire. Kojève did not deny he was providing a reading of Hegel that transformed the text. His interpretation has been described as ‘creative’, ‘outrageous’ and ‘violent’. The question Kojève placed at the centre of his lectures was: ‘What is the Hegelian person?’ And he answered this question through a discussion of human desire by centring a brief section in the Phenomenology titled ‘Independence and Dependence of Self-consciousness: Lordship and Bondage’, which is popularly rendered as ‘the master/slave dialectic’. And by centring this nine-page section of a 640-page work, Kojève offered readers a way to grasp an otherwise elusive text.

Poetic in its opacity, perplexing in its terminology, Hegel’s work offers an understanding of the evolution of human consciousness where the finite mind can become a vehicle for the Absolute. But what does that mean? Kojève took the lofty prose of Hegel down from the heavens and placed it in human hands, offering a translation: this is a book about human desire and self-consciousness. Or, as the philosopher Robert Pippin writes:

Kojève, who basically inflates this chapter to a free-standing, full-blown philosophical anthropology, made this point by claiming that for Hegel the distinctness of human desire is that it can take as its object something no other animal desire does: another’s desire.

What was Kojève’s reading of the master/slave dialectic?

In Kojève’s reading, human beings are defined by their desire for recognition, and it is a desire that can be satisfied only by another person who is one’s equal. On this reading, Kojève unfolds a multi-step process: two people meet, there is a death-match, a contest of the wills between them, and whoever is willing to risk their life triumphs over the other, they become the master, the other becomes a slave, but the master is unable to satisfy his desire, because they’re recognised only by a slave, someone who is not their equal. And through the slave’s work to satisfy the master’s needs, coupled with the recognition of the master, ultimately the slave gains power.

What is essential for Kojève is that one risk their life for something that is not essential. The one who shrinks before the other in fear of death becomes the slave. The one willing to die – to face the inevitability of their own non-existence – becomes the master. In other words, desire is an exertion of the will over an other’s desire. Or, as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would come to say: ‘Desire is the desire of the Other’s desire.’ It is not an attempt to possess the other person physically, but to force the other person in that moment of contest to make the other give, to bend their will, in order to achieve superiority. And in this moment, Kojève writes: ‘Man will risk his biological life to satisfy his nonbiological Desire.’ In order to gain recognition in this sense, one must be willing to risk everything – including their life. It is a struggle for mastery of the self.

Instead of Hegel’s roundabout of self-consciousness that exists in itself and for itself but always and only in relation to another, Kojève gives us: self-consciousness is the I that desires, and desire implies and presupposes a self-consciousness. Thinking about the relation between the finite mind and Absolute knowledge is opaque, but desire is human. People know what it feels like to desire, to want, to crave to be seen, to feel understood. Desire is the hunger one feels to fill the absence inside themselves. Or, as Kojève put it: ‘Desire is the presence of absence.’

(…)

Perhaps most importantly, what Kojève understood was the extent to which we humans desire to exercise some control over how other people see us differently from the ways in which we see ourselves. However tenuous or certain our sense of self-identity may seem, it is our very sense of self that we must risk when we appear in the world before others – our identity, desire, fear and shame. There is no guarantee that we will be seen in the way we want to be seen, and feeling misrecognised hurts when it happens, because it wounds our sense of self. But this risk is vital – it is part of what makes us human, it is part of our humanity. And whereas Kojève’s reading drives toward an ideal of social equality that affirms one’s preexisting sense of self when confronted by an other, for Hegel, one must take the other’s perception of the self – whatever it may be – back into their own self-consciousness. In other words, whereas for Hegel freedom rested upon the ability to preserve difference, for Kojève it rested upon the ability to preserve one’s own identity at the expense of difference.

In bringing the lofty language of Hegel down from the heavens, Kojève offered readers a secular understanding of human action, which requires each and every individual to reckon with the inevitability of their own death, their own undoing. And in doing so he shifted the focus toward the individual as the locus of social change, where history unfolds toward an aristocratic society of equals, where all difference is destroyed. Influenced by Karl Marx’s account of class struggle as the engine of history, and Martin Heidegger’s understanding of being-toward-death, Kojève’s reading of the master/slave dialectic presents another form of contest between oppressor and oppressed, where mastery over another in order to master oneself becomes the means to equality, and ultimately justice within society. Kojève adopted the master/slave dialectic in order to develop what Michael Roth called ‘a schema for organising change over time’, to think about the movement of history. And the master/slave dialectic unfolds at the level of the individual and the level of society, where the self gains recognition as a desiring subject through the endless battle for recognition that is appearing in the world with others, and the level of society where all past historical movements will be judged within a framework of right, which is the end of history.

This has been in part the legacy of Kojève. Influenced by Kojève’s reading of the master/slave dialectic, Sartre argued in Being and Nothingness (1943) that man’s freedom is found in negation. In The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir turned to Kojève to think about women’s oppression in relation to man and the need for intersubjective recognition. Lacan’s ‘mirror-stage’ follows Kojève’s reading of Hegel to understand the role of desire as a lack in the formation of human subjectivity. Bataille turned to Kojève to argue that one could experience full self-sovereignty only in a moment of pure negation. For Foucault, it led to the belief that there is no desire free from power-relations – his central theme. And for Fukuyama, this historical contest of wills evolving along a linear temporal plane toward an equal and just society has become the much-mocked ‘end of history’ thesis – the idea that Western liberal democracy has evolved as the final form of human government in the postwar world. The postwar world Kojève himself helped to shape, before his untimely death in 1968. Ultimately, Fukuyama’s thesis captures the difference between Hegel and Kojève’s Hegel: for Kojève, the ideal of universal equality won through an endless battle for recognition was always an individualist notion that required domination when confronted by otherness. But for Hegel, human freedom could be won only through collectivity by embracing the opacity of otherness that we are constantly confronted with in ourselves, and in the world with others. It is an acceptance of that fact that self-mastery will always remain an illusion.”

#kojeve #kojève #alexandre kojève #philosophy #leo strauss #francis fukuyama #stalin #hegel #hegelian #sartre #bataille

4 notes · View notes

lovelanguageisolate · 2 years

Text

Fukuyama's End of History and the Last Man is kind of a wild book because it doesn't surprise in one sense that it's written by a State Department employee in the pol-sci/international relations wing of the American foreign policy aristocracy Unlike, I dunno, what mid-century French political writing I've mostly bounced off of, it's not fascinated by abstractions for their own sake and is immanently concerned with practical political questions of design and realpolitik. It has the aspirations to cool objective analysis of some high modernist policy thing.

But at the same time, it cannot hide its own nature as an almost mystical work.

Like claiming that liberal democracy is the terminus of human political evolution but using freaking Hegel to argue this and not particularly disowning the mystical shit. Almost like those really weird euro-Marxist writings that claim class relations in light of how the economy is factored bring consciousness itself into being, or that the spirit of the working class is literally guiding history like some kind of political godhead.

Except in (Fukuyama 93)'s case, the spirit of humanity's salvation seems to be freaking Clintonism and McDonalds energy spreading isothymia and freedom to all.

#francis fukuyama #end of history #politics

15 notes · View notes

jgmail · 2 years

Text

¿Conclusión o retorno? El “fin de la historia” treinta años después

Por Adriano Erriguel

El año 1989 concluyó con un gigantesco THE END. La caída del muro de Berlín marcó el fin de la guerra fría y la parusía incontestada de la democracia liberal. Anticipándose unos meses a la caída del muro, un oscuro consultor del Pentágono había publicado un artículo en el que afirmaba que la universalización del modelo democrático de occidente suponía el punto final en la evolución ideológica de la humanidad. O dicho en términos más amplios, el mundo asistía al “fin de la Historia”.

Francis Fukuyama se convirtió, a raíz de ese artículo, en el icono intelectual de la nueva era. Todo el que aspirase a figurar en el debate público tenía que posicionarse, a partir de entonces, en torno a esa idea que encapsulaba el Zeitgeist del occidente victorioso. La tesis –desarrollada en un libro publicado en 1992 – provocó un escándalo que dificultó su análisis en frío. ¿Qué quería decir exactamente Fukuyama?

Pero la gran pregunta nos la formulamos treinta años después. Tras tres décadas de sobresaltos políticos, crisis económicas, terrorismo, fundamentalismos religiosos, conflictos étnico-raciales, populismos, pandemias, invasiones y guerras: ¿nos encontramos realmente en el fin de la Historia? ¿No estamos más bien ante su retorno? ¿No asistimos a la aceleración de la misma?

Diagnóstico de un mal de siglo

El fin de la Historia es una idea esencialmente eurocéntrica. “Occidente” se configura en ella como el centro y el protagonista de la historia universal. Formulada tras el derrumbe del socialismo, la primera objeción que esta tesis provocó – la fuente del escándalo inicial – fue la acusación de vehicular una apología del neoliberalismo triunfante. Fukuyama se situó desde el principio en la diana de una crítica que se apresuró a condenarle – en muchos casos sin haberle leído – como el ideólogo de un imperialismo deseoso de “congelar” la Historia cuando más le convenía: en el momento de la generalización del capitalismo liberal como único modelo pensable. En cierto modo así era, pero el entusiasmo del autor americano era bastante más matizado.

Ciertamente, Fukuyama se felicitaba por la generalización de la democracia y de la “sociedad abierta” capitalista. Sin embargo, su libro de 1992 también puede leerse de otro modo, y no es nada inocente que desde su mismo título – El fin de la Historia y el Último Hombre– se sitúe en una perspectiva nietzscheana.[1]Su interpretación de la Historia traslucía una melancolía cierta ante la victoria final de ese sujeto neoliberal que, consagrado a los objetivos de seguridad, egoísmo y autosatisfacción, representa la victoria final de la parte menos humana y más animal del ser humano: ese “Último hombre” que Fukuyama identifica con la figura del burgués. Para Fukuyama, en ninguna parte como en los Estados Unidos de América está tan adelantado ese proceso de triunfo global de la mediocridad. En último extremo, este argumento le llevaba a concluir que “la política norteamericana es una conspiración contra la grandeza”.[2] Y es que las credenciales intelectuales de Fukuyama no son precisamente Popper, Hayek y Milton Friedman, sino la tradición centroeuropea de pesimismo cultural que, a través de Nietzsche y Heidegger, fue llevada a su conclusión por el pensador de origen ruso Alexandre Kojève.

Una segunda objeción – seguramente de más peso – consiste en preguntarse cómo es posible hablar de “fin de la Historia” ante la miríada de acontecimientos que se aceleran a un ritmo vertiginoso. Desde ese punto de vista, el fin de la Historia no habría sido más que un breve espejismo de unos pocos años: los del “momento unipolar” tras la victoria indiscutida de los Estados Unidos en la guerra fría.

Lo cual nos lleva a enlazar con una tercera objeción, la definitiva: en un mundo multipolar el supuesto “Fin de la Historia”, de existir, tendría un carácter geográficamente limitado, en cuanto el occidente “poshistórico” sigue rodeado de sociedades radicalmente “históricas”.

Aun aceptando el carácter pertinente de estas críticas, debemos afirmar que el fin de la Historia no es una idea desencarnada, confinada en el limbo de las abstracciones. Todo lo contrario, se trata de un modelo que nos permite situar en un contexto teórico preciso fenómenos concretos de la actualidad, tales como la satelización geopolítica de Europa, el impasse del proceso de construcción europea, el declive demográfico del continente, los procesos de sustitución poblacional y el nihilismo cultural posmoderno, entre otros muchos. Obtenemos de esta forma un diagnóstico de lo que podríamos calificar como nuestro “mal del siglo”, que no es tanto el ocaso de un mundo como la pérdida de su significado.

Música sin partitura

Ante todo, conviene aclarar que el Fin de la Historia no significa el fin de los acontecimientos. El problema de este concepto es que se ha extrapolado desde el campo filosófico al periodístico. Pero las interpretaciones periodísticas no ayudan aquí. Se trata de una argumentación filosófica y debe ser objeto de lectura en esos términos

Está claro que continuará habiendo crisis, conflictos y guerras. Lo que el fin de la Historia significa es que estos acontecimientos ya no tendrán un sentido superior, y no lo tendrán porque no serán más que desviaciones o accidentes respecto de “lo perfecto”, y no encontrarán más salidas que un retorno a lo perfecto: al estado del hombre acabado y que ya ha realizado todo lo esencial que tenía que realizar. Ese estado – dicho sea, en su auto-denominación triunfalista – es el “Orden Liberal”. Ése es el sistema en el que el hombre como ser histórico se consuma y acaba, porque ya no siente la necesidad de superarse a sí mismo ni de transformar los principios que lo gobiernan. El ciudadano del Orden Liberal es “el hombre satisfecho, narcisista, que no ha de darse a sí mismo más vueltas teóricas ni prácticas del tipo de aquellas vueltas y vuelcos esenciales en los que consistió su propia autoproducción. Ese hombre se instala en una inmediatez cuasi animal, en una especie de retorno a lo biológico”.[3]La Historia se ve sucedida por una especie de “presente eterno” —la post-historia— en el que la realidad ya no es cuestionada, en el que la acción del hombre ya no se inscribirá en la perspectiva de la auto-superación y la transformación, sino en la de la auto-preservación y el conformismo.

La temática del fin de la Historia – y la caracterización de los nuevos tiempos “poshistóricos”— está en el centro de la reflexión intelectual de nuestra época, si bien —signo de los tiempos— de forma desestructurada y dispersa, desvinculada de los esfuerzos de exposición sistemática propios de los siglos precedentes. Funciona a la manera de una intuición subyacente a todo análisis, casi como una constatación banal, como una “música sin partitura” que desde hace décadas se expresa en la obra de sociólogos, novelistas, filósofos, politólogos, historiadores, artistas, y que apunta en una dirección: estamos en una suerte de “presente eterno” ahistórico, en una especie de limbo o tierra de nadie marcado por el vacío.

El fin de la Historia tiene una filiación precisa: nace de la interpretación dialéctica de la Historia acuñada por Hegel; adquiere expresividad simbólica en una de las imágenes más conocidas de Nietzsche – el Último Hombre” descrito en el prólogo de Así habló Zaratustra; reaparece con diversos matices entre las corrientes positivistas y materialistas en la obra de pensadores como Cournot, Karl Marx o Max Weber. Pero, sobre todo, es desarrollada y formulada como paradigma por uno de los pensadores más enigmáticos del siglo XX: Alexandre Kojève.

Un aplicado burócrata

Nacido en el seno de una acaudalada familia rusa exiliada tras la Revolución de 1917, Alexander Kojève fue alumno de Karl Jaspers en Heidelberg, donde estudio chino y sánscrito y obtuvo un doctorado.[4]Fuertemente influenciado por Marx y Hegel, se estableció en París y se hizo cargo de un seminario sobre la Fenomenología del Espíritu de Hegel entre 1933-1939. Este seminario fue seguido por las futuras celebridades del pensamiento francés de posguerra (Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Raymond Aron entre otros) y adquirió con el paso del tiempo un aura mítica. Tras la guerra Kojève pasó a ocupar un alto cargo en el Ministerio de Economía francés, donde desempeñó un papel clave como uno de los arquitectos de la Comunidad Económica Europea. Kojève no se limitó a teorizar. En su faceta de aplicado burócrata, encarnaba ya el arquetipo del “fin de la Historia”.

Kojève fue mucho más que un intérprete de Hegel. No se limitó a una “relectura” del mismo, sino que desarrolló una reflexión original con la temática del “fin de la Historia” en el centro.

Al formular ese paradigma, Kojève se sitúa en la perspectiva hegeliana de interpretación de la Historia en términos dialécticos. Pero el suyo es un hegelianismo tamizado por la influencia de dos pensadores: Marx y Heidegger. De Marx, Kojève toma la idea de que es el hombre el que hace la Historia, y no el desenvolvimiento del Espíritu Universal que teorizaba Hegel. Pero de Hegel toma dos elementos clave: la idea de reconocimiento y la dialéctica del Amo y del Esclavo.

Para Kojève, es el deseo de reconocimiento lo que hace del hombre un ser con Historia. El afán de reconocimiento deriva de la realidad del hombre comoser auto-consciente. El hombre es una criatura auto-consciente porque, como sujeto, es capaz de percibirse a sí mismo como objeto. Su esencia es una dualidad íntima de sujeto y objeto, y eso es lo que le diferencia de los animales. Ahora bien, para el hombre no es suficiente con auto-percibirse: lo esencial es que los otros le perciban como tal sujeto. Eso es lo que le reafirma en su propia realidad, en su propia auto-percepción. El combustible íntimo del hombre es por tanto deseo de reconocimiento. Su afán de auto-creación, de auto-transformación, es alimentado por ese deseo que le empuja a hacer Historia.

Y aquí Kojève introduce otro concepto clave: la idea de negatividad. Para Kojève “el hombre es negatividad encarnada”; es “ese milagro que niega el ser que le ha sido dado y con ello transforma el mundo”.El afán de reconocimiento —sustrato de la historicidad del hombre— lleva al hombre a negar el mundo tal como es, y a negar incluso sus propios instintos naturales. Solo un ser libre es capaz de ello: el hombre. Esa negatividad, clave del ser del hombre, implica una reafirmación del Amo que llevamos dentro y la sumisión del Esclavo que llevamos dentro. ¿Cómo se satisface el deseo de reconocimiento? Venciendo el miedo a la muerte, arriesgando la vida para obtener ese reconocimiento. El Esclavo es el hombre que, aplastado por su instinto de auto-preservación, huye de la muerte. Al escoger la vida, el Esclavo se encadena por completo a la vida animal y se fusiona con el orden natural de las cosas.[5]

Es la lucha por el puro prestigio, por tanto, lo que pone la Historia en marcha. Negar para transformar, negar para crear, no ceder, confrontar la realidad, lucha entre opuestos. “El hombre no puede ser libre más que en la medida en que es histórico. Y al revés, sólo hay Historia allí donde hay libertad, es decir, progreso o creación, incluso negación “revolucionaria” de lo dado. Y como la libertad negadora implica y presupone la muerte, solamente un ser mortal puede ser verdaderamente histórico”.[6]

¿Cómo es ese Hombre libre que pone la Historia en movimiento?

Siguiendo a Hegel, Kojève señala que “el Hombre no es histórico más que en la medida en que participa activamente en la vida del Estado, y esta participación tiene su culmen en el riesgo voluntario para su vida que hay en una guerra puramente política. El Hombre “no es verdaderamente histórico o humano más que en la medida en que es, al menos en potencia, un guerrero”.[7]El caso paradigmático de la libertad humana no es el del viajero ante una encrucijada, sino “el del soldado dispuesto a actuar contra su instinto natural de auto-preservación, y ello por un principio, por una idea”.[8]

En un contexto posthistórico no tiene nada de extraño, por tanto, que la figura del soldado haya sido sustituida por la del mercenario, el gendarme o el trabajador humanitario. Así se explica también el eclipse de la idea de la muerte, hoy evacuada de su dimensión social y cuestionada por la fantasía del transhumanismo.[9]Jean Baudrillard lo describía en los siguientes términos: “ese individuo que hemos producido […] que protegemos en su impotencia, con toda la cobertura jurídica de los derechos del hombre […] es el individuo terminal, sin esperanza ni de descendencia ni de trascendencia. Es el hombre condenado a la esterilidad hereditaria y a la cuenta atrás. Es el individuo fin de ciclo y fin de especie, y no le queda sino tratar desesperadamente de sobrevivir […] es el Último Hombre, del que hablaba Nietzsche. Y precisamente porque es el último, no puede ser sacrificado”.[10]

Así se entiende también la parálisis militar de Europa, la dejación de su soberanía, su conversión en un satélite sumiso. En buen liberal consciente, el europeo actual nunca aceptará la expropiación de su bien más precioso: su vida. ¿Quién está dispuesto a morir por la bandera del arco iris? El hombre poshistórico podrá justificar la guerra, podrá incluso exaltarla, pero hará que otros mueran por él. Es la era de las guerras interpuestas (proxy wars).

El mundo Lennon

La Historia —señalan Kojève y su discípulo Fukuyama— termina cuando los hombres alcanzan un estado de satisfacción final en diferentes ámbitos. Ese es el momento en que la oposición entre el Amo y el Esclavo desaparece. El deseo de gloria –que el autor norteamericano denomina megalothymia– es derrotado, sublimado y canalizado hacia la vida económica. El capitalismo es el modelo económico del fin de la Historia: la uniformidad en los modos de producción y de vida y la prosperidad global que proporciona hacen innecesario el comunismo. Ya en 1948 Kojève predecía que el modelo económico norteamericano prevalecería sobre el soviético, y designaba al American way of Life como el propio de la era poshistórica.[11]En el plano psicológico, el deseo de reconocimiento del hombre encuentra su satisfacción en el marco garantista de la democracia liberal. En el ámbito político, el fin de la Historia se traduce en un Estado Universal y Homogéneo, en el que, como vaticinaba Engels, la política será sustituida por la administración de las cosas.

La desaparición de esa dimensión trágica de la Historia conlleva la desaparición del Hombre propiamente dicho, en tanto lo específico humano se identifica con “Acción que niega lo dado, oposición entre Sujeto y Objeto”. La desaparición del individuo libre e histórico significa “la cesación de la Acción, en el sentido fuerte del término”. Significa también la desaparición de la filosofía, porque si el hombre ya no encuentra razones para transformarse en un sentido interno, ya no tiene sentido que siga replanteándose los fundamentos de su conocimiento del mundo. La supresión de la filosofía en los planes de enseñanza cobra así todo su sentido. La filosofía —entendida como amor al saber, o búsqueda de la verdad— será sustituida por el saber en sí, por una mera acumulación de conocimientos, o lo que es peor: por una moralina funcional para la reproducción del sistema. La Religión, por su parte, se disolverá en un moralismo banal que dejará paso a la indiferencia o al ateísmo.

Sin embargo, “todo lo demás continuará indefinidamente: arte, amor, juego, etc.: en resumen, todo lo que hace al Hombre ‘feliz”. Es el guiño del “Último Hombre” que ha inventado la felicidad, descrito por Nietzsche en el Zaratustra. Es el hombre sin patria y sin religión que cantaba John Lennon. Escribía el politólogo norteamericano Allan Bloom que los hombres post-históricos “son como pastores ignorantes en medio de un sitio donde antaño florecieron grandes civilizaciones. Los pastores juegan con los fragmentos que aparecen en la superficie, pero sin percatarse de las magníficas estructuras de las que un día formaron parte”.[12]Ese hombre continuará habitando su entorno al igual que un animal en armonía con la naturaleza, y se limitará a responder con reflejos condicionados al aluvión de sonidos e imágenes que perciba. ¿Qué otra cosa es, sino, el control psicopolítico del enjambre digital?[13]

El sinsentido del llamado “arte contemporáneo” también revela, en este contexto, su auténtica dimensión. Para Kojève, el arte abstracto es el más adecuado a las condiciones de vida de la poshistoria. Y aquí establece una similitud inquietante: “Lo que en adelante pasará por cultura no estará basado en la autoconciencia —esto es, en el intento de plasmar ideas—sino en mera inmediatez, en impulso ciego e idiosincrasia. El “arte” no tendrá otra finalidad sino expresar lo inmediato, las impresiones idiosincrásicas de un artista particular. El “arte” será comparable a las redes de las arañas o a los nidos de los pájaros, la música a los sonidos de las cigarras o de las ranas. No habrá una verdadera cultura humana, sino solamente “arte por el arte”.[14]¿Encaja en esta descripción la cacofonía de las composiciones de música contemporánea? ¿O el arte donde todo equivale a todo y nada vale nada?

Parque temático

Paradoja suprema del “Fin de la Historia”: la Historia ha terminado, pero es más omnipresente que nunca. El pasado que no pasa se convierte en una obsesión. Y lo es, ante todo, como objeto de consumo o como objeto de condena.

Una contradicción que en realidad no lo es tanto. Ya Nietzsche alertaba – en su Segunda consideración intempestiva (1876) – de que la vida puede enfermar de un exceso de conciencia histórica, de que el exceso de historia nos convence de nuestra propia decrepitud y viene a compensar una falta de fuerza vital. Para el filósofo de Así habló Zaratustra,el historicismo estimula el placer de imitar, de cultivar lo inauténtico, supone el triunfo de la simulación y del espíritu del “como si.” El inmenso apetito de Historia es una prueba de la falta de combustible íntimo de una civilización, del olvido de su sentido de autosuperación y de lo sublime, de la pérdida de su “patria mítica”.[15]

En los tiempos posthistóricos la “industria cultural” encuentra en la Historia una gran cantera. En contraste con el declive de la educación humanística, las sociedades posmodernas presentan una curiosa patología, que bien podría describirse como avidez por el consumo de Historia o “historiofagia”. Esta bulimia se retroalimenta al ritmo de las efemérides conmemorativas, de la proliferación de museos, de parques temáticos, de la restauración y extensión del patrimonio histórico en pueblos y ciudades, de las reivindicaciones de identidades y tradiciones, reales o imaginarias. La presencia masiva de la temática histórica en los circuitos del consumo cultural, en la industria editorial, en el audiovisual y en las ofertas de ocio conoce un incremento inusitado. Pero que el pasado esté presente no quiere decir que esté vivo. El politólogo francés Pierre Manent formula esta idea de la forma más clara:

“Las generaciones modernas miran hacia atrás de buen grado, miran las vías romanas, las catedrales, los palacios, admiran de buen grado esas obras, pero ello les da ocasión de constatar que son extrañas a los motivos que las produjeron —la fe en Dios, el deseo de gloria—, que consideran esos motivos como fundados en ilusiones, en resumen que esas obras son probablemente admirables, pero finalmente absurdas, y las generaciones modernas […] en vez de experimentar el deseo de imitar las grandes empresas del pasado, el deseo de ‘crear’, están contentas y aliviadas […] de no tener que superarse a sí mismas. ‘Guiñan el ojo’ porque experimentan un sentimiento de superioridad sobre todas las generaciones precedentes”.[16]

En la poshistoria el pasado ya no es portador de significados que habiten en nosotros. El pasado no incita a la acción sino a la distracción. Será revisitado y explotado hasta la saciedad. Podrá ser hasta venerado, pero no nos interpelará para crear algo comparable. Quedará relegado a retrospectivas y revivals, a materia prima para el canibalismo intelectual posmodernista. Depurado en espectáculo, el pasado se ofrece en forma de divertimento y de evasión, a la manera de actividad recreativa para residencia de jubilados. De jubilados de la Historia.

¿No es ésta una visión demasiado pesimista? ¿Acaso el interés por la Historia no revela un afán de arraigo? ¿Acaso el hombre posmoderno no trata de encontrar puntos de referencia comunitarios, elementos del pasado que le confirmen en su identidad? Es preciso desvelar el carácter ambiguo de esta “vuelta de la Historia”.

La recuperación de la Historia se inserta, preferentemente, en un patrón individualista de narcisismo y evasión: los consumidores “personalizan” su identidad siguiendo pautas de emotividad superficial. En las sociedades de tradición – escribe Gilles Lipovetsky – “la identidad religiosa y cultural era vivida como una evidencia, recibida e intangible, excluyendo las elecciones individuales. […] En la situación presente, la pertenencia identitaria es todo salvo instantánea […]: es un problema, una reivindicación, un objeto de apropiación de los individuos. La identidad cultural ha devenido abierta y reflexiva, un asunto individual susceptible de ser indefinidamente retomado”.[17]El discurso de las tradiciones – señala Alain de Benoist – marca también la clausura. “Lo que se convierte en objeto de discurso acredita por eso mismo que ya no es algo vivo. En nuestros días, todo se ha transformado en objeto de discurso. Ya no se vive, se observa vivir”.[18]

Los usos y abusos de la Historia presentan otra derivada: la de su explotación geopolítica. La proliferación de micronacionalismos, la fabricación de irredentismos, la creación de Estados ex nihilo en base a los intereses estratégicos de las grandes potencias. Kosovo y Montenegro son dos ejemplos flagrantes. Como lo es en España la construcción de “realidades nacionales” impulsadas por intereses crematísticos de elites locales. Las naciones históricas se ven sustituirlas por naciones de bricolaje, frágiles y fácilmente manipulables. En la era de los micro-nacionalismos la Historia se convierte en “historias” o “narrativas” (story-telling). La nación se convierte en oferta de supermercado.

Históricamente correcto

“Aquel que controla el pasado controla el futuro; aquel que controla el presente controla el pasado”, escribía George Orwell en 1984. El mundo post-histórico ejerce un control férreo del discurso sobre la Historia. El pasado es presentado como un espectáculo a consumir o como una culpa a expiar; como evasión o como acto de contrición.

La colonización del pasado se realiza, en nuestros días, aplicando un enfoque moral. El hundimiento de los grandes sistemas ideológicos – principalmente de izquierda – propició el retorno del discurso sobre la moral, más apropiado a una época marcada por el individualismo y el sentimentalismo superficial. Los valores morales — cuyo vector político-jurídico está en la ideología de los Derechos del Hombre— conforman una doctrina de mínimos que sirve en realidad para “dar una forma de respetabilidad a una acción política que se reduce, a partir de ahora, a la gestión anodina de los asuntos cotidianos”.[19]Por eso la recuperación de la Historia se efectúa a través del tamiz de la moral: las leyes de memoria histórica, los desagravios retrospectivos, la fiebre autoinculpatoria, los revisionismos masoquistas, la cancelación del pasado… todo para sustentar la reconfortante idea de que, en contraste con nuestros predecesores, nosotros somos mejores, nosotros somos buenos.

Como vasta operación de pedagogía social, la reescritura de la Historia desemboca en lo “históricamente correcto”. “El debate público – escribe el historiador Alain Besancon – hace referencia constante a la Historia. Los hombres de la prensa y la televisión, los polemistas, los severos guardianes de la decencia intelectual, y, por debajo, los policías del pensamiento, encajan sus declaraciones en representaciones del pasado que son falsas. Que los verdaderos historiadores saben que son falsas”.[20]Un clamoroso ejercicio de anacronismo. La utilización de conceptos del presente para juzgar el pasado (que no para explicarlo) elude las necesarias contextualizaciones y relega la complejidad de la Historia en favor de una visión maniquea. Con un resultado: la alienación de las poblaciones respecto a su propia Historia.

“La Historia – escribe el periodista francés Jean Sevilia – constituye un terreno de exorcismo permanente: cuanto más las fuerzas oscuras del pasado son anatematizadas, más hay que justificarse de no mantener con ellas ninguna solidaridad. Personajes, sociedades y períodos enteros se ven así demonizados. Sin embargo, éstos no son más que un cebo artificial. El objetivo, por procuración, somos nosotros”.[21]Si nosotros somos, en gran medida, producto de nuestra Historia, nosotros estamos también “contaminados” de maldad. Nuestra Historia es mala, ergo debemos alejarnos de ella. Entra aquí en juego un imaginario de culpa y de expiación, sólidamente arraigado en Europa. La condena ritual del propio pasado conforta al europeo en su estado de beatitud poshistórica.

La visión moral del pasado tiene, una vez más, otra aplicación geopolítica: el recurso abusivo a la analogía histórica. La forma más socorrida consiste en amalgamar situaciones y contextos actuales con el museo de los horrores de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. De esta forma cualquier desafío al “Orden Liberal” – y a los Estados Unidos como su brazo ejecutor – será presentado, de forma rutinaria, como el zarpazo de una hidra sangrienta con las cabezas de Hitler y Stalin. Se proscribe así cualquier posibilidad deconsideraral enemigo, no como el Mal absoluto, sino como un adversario con quien se podría (eventualmente) negociar. Cualquier atisbo en este sentido será presentado como una nueva “capitulación de Munich (1938)”, lugar común de intelectuales orgánicos, periodistas midcult y analistas de todo a cien. La indignación moral mata cualquier aproximación política; no en vano “la moral es un valor en alza en el momento en que la política es un valor en baja”.[22]

El vacío como proyecto

Si en los años 1990 Fukuyama fue el heraldo del Fin de la Historia, la Unión Europea ha sido, desde los inicios, su proyecto piloto. Un galimatías burocrático-institucional que cobró vida propia, y en el que la visión del estadista dio paso a la competencia del contable y a la probidad del tendero.

Para empezar, la Unión Europea carece de una idea clara sobre el elemento de partida de toda construcción política: la idea de frontera. Comprometida en un proceso de ampliación que parece no conocer límites, esta Europa se define no por lo que la distingue del resto de la humanidad, sino por lo que la une a la misma: los valores universales de democracia y derechos humanos. Su origen está en el cansancio histórico de los europeos tras el trauma de 1914-1945, en el deseo europeo de hacer tabla rasa. En ese sentido, se sostiene sobre una quiebra en la línea de continuidad de las naciones europeas con sus Historias nacionales.

“¿Cuáles son los valores europeos? –se pregunta Pierre Manent–. El valor que los resume todos es la ‘apertura al Otro’, un universalismo ‘sin fronteras’. La particularidad europea reside entonces en una apertura particularmente generosa a la generalidad, o a la universalidad humana. […] Está claro entonces que no mencionamos a Europa sino para anularla. ¡Nosotros solo conocemos la humanidad! Nosotros ya no tenemos una existencia propia, ya no queremos ninguna forma — que sería necesariamente particular— de tener un ser propio”.[23]Búsqueda de la pureza, aspiración a la inocencia poshistórica.

El método funcionalista– diseñado por Jean Monnet y Robert Schumann – apuntaba a tejer gradualmente una red de vínculos económicos e institucionales de carácter irreversible entre los pueblos europeos, de forma que esa red diera paso —en un estadio posterior— a una unidad política. Un enfoque que probó su eficacia, excepto en su designio final: la unidad política. En algún momento del proceso el método fagocitó al objetivo último. La Unión Europea se resignó a ser, en el ámbito geopolítico, un apéndice estratégico de los Estados Unidos. El problema es que una unidad política no se sostiene, en último término, sobre un entramado institucional sin alma. Se sostiene sobre una visión, sobre una voluntad, y eso es precisamente de lo que la Unión Europea carece.

El filósofo alemán Peter Sloterdijk señalaba el nacimiento de una “virtud europea”: la de carecer de una idea general acerca del mundo como totalidad. Y escribía: “Bruselas ha sido desde el principio la capital del vacío par excellence”.[24]Para el filósofo Ulrich Beck Europa es “el triunfo de la vacuidad sustancial”. Para el politólogo Marcel Gauchet, Europa es un “objeto político no identificado”.[25]Para Pascal Bruckner Europa es “la apoteosis de la desencarnación. Como su pasado está maldito, debe abjurar de él a todo precio, y no ser más que un impulso hacia los otros, una idea pura capaz de trascender las fronteras”.[26]Este vacío interior, en última instancia, acaba pervirtiendo los términos de la famosa apertura al Otro. Abrirse al Otro supone dialogar con él. Pero como señala el pensador católico Marcello Pera, “el diálogo no sirve para nada, si de antemano uno de los dialogantes ha declarado que una tesis es igual a otra”. Abrirse al otro supone, llegado el caso, integrarlo. Pero “para integrar a alguien hay que tener primero bien claro dentro de qué se le quiere integrar. Porque integrar es distinto a agregar.[27]La Europa bruselense es una agregación de poblaciones de diferente procedencia, un conglomerado sin más nexo de unión que la obsesión por el consumo, pero sin voluntad ni principios rectores. Una situación potencialmente explosiva.

Como parque temático posthistórico, Europa es una construcción para tiempos de bonanza. Su función es la de liderar a la humanidad rezagada hacia un universo ecuménico, sincrético y pacificado, la de persuadir con su soft power para que los escépticos se muestren previsibles y razonables, multiculturales y eco-compatibles, mientras las elites europeas levitan en la pompa ingrávida de sus “valores” inclusivos, tolerantes, resilientes y sostenibles. Una verbosidad auto-complaciente que suena cada vez más hueca. El mundo le ha tomado la medida a esta Europa.

¿Cómo son posibles estas cosas?

Treinta años después del anuncio del fin de la Historia, debemos constatar que el mundo poshistórico se asemeja, cada vez más, a un pequeño apéndice geográfico en la gran masa euroasiática. Un protectorado cada vez más insignificante, dentro de un mundo que más se parece al descrito por Clausewitz que al descrito por Kant en su Ensayo sobre la paz perpetua. El fin de la Historia fue, para Europa, el adiós feliz a la Realpolitik. Como escribía atinadamente Philippe Muray “cabe preguntarse, en efecto, para qué podría todavía servir una conducción ‘realista’ de las relaciones internacionales en una época que ha perdido lo real, y que no cesa de felicitarse por ello”.[28]

Por mucho que se empeñen los burócratas eurolándicos, el mundo no es como ellos lo pintan. Un ejemplo: cuando en una comunicación de 2001 la Comisión Europea asociaba el racismo y la xenofobia a “la creencia en la raza, en el color, en la descendencia, en la religión y la fe, en el origen nacional o étnico, como factores que determinan la aversión a los individuos”, estaba intentando poner fuera de la ley a los factores que se alzan en el camino hacia el “Estado Universal Homogéneo” del fin de la Historia. Es decir, intentaba proscribir la adhesión espontánea de los seres humanos a las especificidades históricamente determinadas de las naciones, de las comunidades étnicas y de las creencias.[29]Un designio ideológico-dogmático que se da de bruces con la realidad. Por eso sólo puede ser impuesto por la fuerza.

¿Por la fuerza? “¿Cómo son posibles estas cosas – gimen las almas piadosas– en pleno siglo XXI?”

Aquí subyace un equívoco sobre el significado último del fin de la Historia, sobre lo que Fukuyama anunciaba hace más de treinta años. ¿En qué consistía en realidad?

En el fugaz “momento unipolar” de la posguerra fría. Y con él, el inicio de la Larga Guerra del Pentágono. El “Gran Tablero” de Brzezinski. El proyecto de “Nuevo Siglo Americano”. Los Estados Unidos como “superpotencia benigna” promotora de “principios y valores”.

¿Qué fue lo que vino después?

La guerra del Golfo. El “imperialismo humanitario”. El bombardeo de Serbia. La desmembración de Yugoslavia. El Homeland Security Act. El Patriot Act. La expansión de la OTAN. La carrera de armamentos. Las “revoluciones de colores”. La crisis financiera de 2008. El terrorismo islamista. Las “primaveras árabes”. La destrucción de Afganistán. La destrucción de Iraq. La destrucción de Libia. La destrucción de Siria. Los seis millones de muertos. El Califato Islámico. La crisis de refugiados. El resurgir de Rusia. El auge de China. Las sanciones. El populismo. El Bréxit. La elección de Trump. Las guerras culturales. La “cancel culture”. El coronavirus. El “gran reseteo”. Las “psyops”. La guerra del algoritmo. La guerra en Ucrania. La guerra híbrida. La militarización de todo. La amenaza atómica. La guerra total.

El camino hacia el fin de la Historia no es un suave discurrir por la avenida del Progreso. No es una progresión dialéctica por la senda de la concordia. Todo lo contrario. Se trata de un proyecto agresivo de coacción, de control y de hegemonía violenta, sostenido por la mayor acumulación de poder militar que el mundo ha conocido. La dialéctica del futuro no será la tradicional entre progresistas yconservadores, sino la establecida entre el presente poshistórico del Orden Liberal y las “potencias revisionistas” decididas a transgredir ese orden de cosas.[30]

¿Retorno de la Historia? En realidad, ésta nunca se había ido. Lo que ocurre es que mientras unos la hacían otros se habían apeado de ella. Ésa es la realidad que subyace tras los pulcros razonamientos y tras el rostro apacible de Fukuyama. Negación, transformación, confrontación, destrucción creadora, el Hegemón y los satélites, dialéctica del Amo y del Esclavo. ¿No era esa la esencia de la Historia?

[1]Francis Fukuyama,El fin de la Historia y el último hombre.Planeta 1992.

[2]Shadia B. Drury. Alexandre Kojève. The roots of postmodern politics. St Martin’s Press, 1994, p. 186.

[3]Manuel Jiménez Redondo, prólogo a Alexandre Kojève, Introducción a la Lectura de Hegel,Editorial Trotta 2016, pp. 9-11.

[4]Alexandre Kojève nació en Moscú en 1902 con el nombre Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov. Murió en Bruselas en 1968, mientras intervenía en una sesión de trabajo de la Comunidad Económica Europea.

[5]Shadia B. Drury, Alexandre Kojève, the Roots of Postmodern Politics. St Martin´s Press, New York. 1994, pp. 21, 69-70.

[6]AlexandreKojève “ La idea de la muerte en la filosofía de Hegel”, Apéndice II de Introducción a la lectura de Hegel, Editorial Trotta 2016, p. 617. Es significativo que en la Ilíada sólo los mortales alcanzan la alta seriedad de la tragedia, mientras los dioses inmortales parecen simplemente cómicos, especialmente cuando parecen “luchar” (F. Roger Devlin, Alexandre Kojève and the Outcome of Modern Thought. University Press of America 2004, p. 59.p. 67).

[7]Alexandre Kojève “ La idea de la muerte en la filosofía de Hegel”, Apéndice II de Introducción a la lectura de Hegel, Editorial Trotta 2016, p. 619.

[8]F. Roger Devlin, Alexandre Kojève and the Outcome of Modern Thought. University Press of America 2004, p. 59.

[9]El filósofo francés Rober Redeker ha escrito dos ensayos iluminadores a este respecto: Le Soldat Impossible, ed. Pierre Guillaume de Roux 2014, y L´Éclipse de la Mort.Desclée de Brouwer 2017.

[10]Jean Baudrillard. Écran total, Galilée, 1997, p. 80

La figura del Esclavo no tiene en Kojève una connotación peyorativa. El Esclavo es una figura dinámica, cambiante, que a través de su trabajo niega la realidad dada y transforma el mundo. El Amo, por el contrario, es un impasse, una figura estática. El Amo es el catalizador que pone la Historia en movimiento, pero es el Esclavo quien la hace avanzar. A nivel ideológico, el Esclavo debe conquistar el miedo a la muerte. El estoicismo, el escepticismo y el cristianismo son, para Kojève, ideologías de Esclavos. El Fin de la Historia sería la politización del cristianismo –entendido como “moral de Esclavos” – frente al principio masculino de “reconocimiento” y de prueba en el campo de batalla. Como forma política del fin de la Historia, el liberalismo es la secularización del cristianismo. Con su trabajo, el Esclavo domestica la naturaleza y erradica su capacidad de amenazar al ser humano, transforma el mundo en un Hogar.La muerte se desvanece, y con ella la figura del Amo. En ese sentido el “fin de la Historia” sería la victoria definitiva del Esclavo. Shadia B. Drury, Obra citada, pp. 29-39. Jeff Love, The Black Circle. A life of Alexander Kojève. Columbia University Press 2018., pp. 124-131, 188.

[11]Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire. Has History Come to an End?Verso 1992, p. 67.

[12]Allan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind, Simon and Schuster, p. 239

[13]Byung-Chul Han, Psicopolítica.Herder 2014.

[14]Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the reading of Hegel, citado en Gregory Bruce Smith: Nietzsche, Heidegger and the transition to postmodernity, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 53

[15]Friedrich Nietzsche Seconde considération intempestive. De l´utilité et de l´inconvénient des études historiques pour la vie. Flammarion, 2006. Estudio introductorio a cargo de Pierre-Yves Bourdil. También: Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche, biographie d´une pensée. Solin/Actes Sud, 2000.

[16]Pierre Manent, Cours Familier de Philosophie Politique.Gallimard 2006, p. 212

[17]Gilles Lipovetsky. Les Temps Hypermodernes, p. 92-93. Grasset, 2004.

[18]Alain de Benoist. Dernière année. Notes pour conclure le siècle. L´Age d´Homme, 2001. p. 77.

[19]Alain de Benoist “Minima Moralia”, en Critiques, Théoriques. L’Age d’Homme, p. 514.

[20]Cita de Alain Besancon (Peut-on encore débattre en France?Plon-Le Figaro) recogida por Jean Sévillia en Historiquement correct, Perrin, 2003.

[21]Jean Sévillia. Obra citada,p. 12

[22]André Comte-Sponville. “Beatitude et Desespoir”. Entrevista en la revista Krisis, nº 7, febrero de 1991.

[23]Pierre Manent. La Raison des Nations. Réflexions sur la Démocratie en Europe, Gallimard, 2006. p. 93.

[24]Peter Sloterdijk. Si Europa despierta, p. 58. Pre-textos, 2004.

[25]Marcel Gauchet, La Condition Politique.Gallimard 2005, p. 499.

[26]Pascal Bruckner, La Tyrannie de la pénitence. Essai sur le masochisme occidental. Grasset, 2006. P. 112.

[27]Marcello Pera, Sin raíces. Europa, relativismo, cristianismo, Islam. Marcello Pera-Joseph Ratzinger. Península, pp. 47 y 89

[28]Philippe Muray,Après l’Histoire, Gallimard, 2007, p. 382.

[29]F. Roger Devlin, Alexandre Kojève and the Outcome of Modern Thought.University Press of America, 2004, p. 154.

[30]En un nuevo libro – El Liberalismo y sus Descontentos– publicado a los treinta años de su Fin de la Historia, Fukuyama levanta acta de las potencias revisionistas que arruinan su tesis. Presentado como “una defensa del liberalismo clásico”, el libro ofrece lo que cabe esperar de un consultor del Departamento de Estado: una colección de piadosos consejos para salvar los muebles. Liberalism and Its Discontents. Profile Books, 2022.

#fin de la historia #filosofía #pensamiento #postmodernismo #Francis Fukuyama

3 notes · View notes

toscanoirriverente · 2 years

Text

Francis Fukuyama: “Il liberalismo estende i diritti. La vera minaccia è la Cina”

Non è solo il fuso orario del Pacifico che mette Francis Fukuyama nella posizione di guardare i movimenti sociali in corso da una prospettiva globale. Gioca un ruolo anche il lavoro che ha svolto nel suo ultimo libro, Il liberalismo e i suoi oppositori (Utet), dove ha analizzato le distanze tra democrazie e autocrazie, tra destra e sinistra, tra capitalismo e socialdemocrazia, sempre tenendo fermo, come unità di misura, quel «liberalismo umano» che ai suoi occhi consente agli individui di abitare una società più equa. E che oggi gli fa dire che «la cancel culture è illiberale», che «la Cina fa più paura della Russia», e che per l’Ucraina, «più che l’ingresso in Europa sono importanti le armi».

Professor Fukuyama, che possibilità ha il liberalismo di far emergere una società più equa, nell’era della globalizzazione e delle diseguaglianze? «Non penso che l’ideale ultimo sia quello dell’eguaglianza: ogni essere umano ha un senso morale dell’equità, che va protetto grazie ai diritti. Il fatto che tutti debbano avere il diritto di parlare, di credere, di partecipare politicamente non significa che per ciò stesso tutti siano uguali economicamente e socialmente. Uno dei maggiori problemi nelle società liberali è stata l’ineguaglianza percepita come tradimento di una promessa. Per questo credo che il liberalismo vada integrato, a vari livelli, con la democrazia sociale, così da equilibrare le ineguaglianze create dal capitalismo di mercato. Una formula abbastanza buona è quella di fare iniezioni di democrazia sociale in un tessuto liberale, al fine di ridurre le disuguaglianze».

Dopo anni di neoliberismo sfrenato, la pandemia ha rimesso al centro l’intervento dello Stato. Crede che abbia contribuito a bilanciare le nostre società in senso più liberale? «No, anzi credo sia proprio il contrario. Negli Stati Uniti, ma anche in altri paesi, più che portare le persone insieme, la pandemia ha stimolato nuovi estremismi. Lo dimostrano i movimenti anti vaccini e la sfiducia nelle autorità che è stata cavalcata da Donald Trump e altri politici conservatori. Anche in Europa sono fiorite le teorie del complotto, la pandemia ha messo le persone in una modalità molto negativa, il distanziamento è diventato quasi un habitus sociale. Penso che la pandemia abbia contribuito a distorcere la scena politica e sociale».

I diritti sono il cuore del liberalismo, che è nato però in un’epoca in cui questi erano prerogativa di maschi bianchi. È il peccato originale del liberalismo? «Non penso sia un peccato del liberalismo, ma delle vedute ristrette di chi nel corso del tempo lo ha applicato. Il liberalismo possiede la cornice entro cui è possibile estendere il raggio dei diritti. Negli Stati Uniti ad esempio, quando fu ratificata la costituzione americana nel 1789, le persone che avevano titolo per definire i diritti civili erano persone che avevano delle proprietà. Poi quel vincolo è caduto, successivamente è caduto il vincolo razziale, dopo ancora quello di genere. L’espansione del circolo di chi era titolato ad avere dignità e rispetto è stato possibile proprio grazie alla cornice liberale. Non è il liberal framework il problema: il problema sono gli uomini».

Come mai società tradizionalmente liberali come quella britannica e americana sono oggi così in crisi? «A causa di due differenti distorsioni. La prima è venuta da destra, dal neoliberismo economico degli anni ’80 e ‘90, con Milton Friedman e la scuola di Chicago che hanno teorizzato un capitalismo sfrenato in cui i problemi sociali rappresentavano nemici da rimuovere, eliminare, abolire. L’altra è venuta da sinistra: l’insistenza sull’inclusione dei diversi gruppi ha portato al paradosso per cui non si può parlare di lavoratori perché bisogna parlare dei neri o delle donne. Il focus cioè è diventato la specifica identità delle diverse categorie. Ora, il liberalismo è un progetto naturalmente inclusivo, ma se l’identità del gruppo diventa più importante dell’identità individuale – e si viene giudicati per appartenenza a una certa razza, religione o genere – ecco che si ricade nell’illiberalità».

Cosa pensa della cancel culture? «È segno della crescente intolleranza. Un ruolo decisivo lo gioca la tecnologia: i social media danno infatti la possibilità di isolare le opinioni, abolire il contesto e abdicare a una conversazione civile. Basta un tweet per trasformare un commento in un’onda anomala».

Un altro pilastro del liberalismo è il merito. Cosa pensa delle tesi di Michael Sandel sulla tirannia della meritocrazia? «Ha ragione quando dice che nel volere il meglio per ciascuno dei nostri figli si finisce per produrre ingiustizie, d’altra parte la meritocrazia è la strada che permette la mobilità sociale, è il modo che la classe media ha avuto di insidiare l’aristocrazia. Nessuna società esiste senza meritocrazia. Guardiamo alla Cina: negli ultimi 25 anni ha investito nella meritocrazia sul piano economico, ma non ha fatto altrettanto sulla formazione dei funzionari di Stato, e il risultato di una grave incompetenza sulla cosa pubblica la vediamo oggi».

Che possibilità ha il liberalismo di conquistare società autocratiche come Russia e Cina? «Penso che il liberalismo diventi attrattivo proprio quando le società autocratiche diventano troppo autocratiche. Guardiamo all’Europa dell’Est, dove le persone hanno abbracciato i princìpi del liberalismo dopo aver sperimentato le dittature comuniste fino al 1991. Cina e Russia usano il nazionalismo per costruire consenso, ma a un certo punto il percorso è destinato a superare il limite e quando le persone capiscono che non c’è più libertà individuale, il liberalismo diventa attraente».

È d’accordo con la divisione del mondo in democrazie e autocrazie? «Nel XX secolo la distinzione era tra destra e sinistra con le democrazie nel mezzo. Oggi vediamo la Russia, che ai miei occhi è un paese fascista, sostenere il Venezuela, che ha la pretesa di essere un paese di sinistra. Cos’ hanno in comune? L’opposizione alle democrazie occidentali. Per cui sì, è giusto che le democrazie si alleino tra di loro. Non penso ad esempio che gli interessi di Russia e Cina siano molto convergenti, ma potrebbero allinearsi proprio nell’ideologia anti-occidentale. Basta vedere cosa sta succedendo in Cina con la politica zero-Covid. Una policy ridicola, una trappola che sta bloccando l’economia e sta rendendo difficili le relazioni fra persone ».

È più pericoloso il modello russo o quello cinese? «Quello cinese. La Russia non è un problema, il problema è Putin, uno che ha commesso errori enormi, mandando truppe in tutto il mondo, dal Venezuela alla Siria, fino a questa assurda invasione di un paese sovrano come l’Ucraina. I cinesi sono molto più consapevoli nell’uso del loro potere e soprattutto hanno un’economia più sofisticata, più tecnologia, più differenziazione, non solo gas e petrolio, e nel lungo termine possono porre più problemi alle democrazie occidentali di quanto non possa fare la Russia».

Che strumenti ha il liberalismo per ottenere e accrescere i consensi? «Le persone non capiscono il liberalismo in astratto, lo capiscono se è calato nella loro realtà. In alcuni casi il liberalismo è diventato troppo cosmopolita, le persone invece hanno bisogno di vedere una connessione con le caratteristiche nazionali. Una identità nazionale deve includere tutte le persone che vivono nella società ma deve anche creare una corrente emotiva. Credo insomma che vadano evitati gli eccessi cosmopoliti e vada compreso che le persone vivono in un determinato spazio, nazione, con una tradizione culturale che va salvaguardata».

Secondo lei l’Europa dovrebbe facilitare l’ingresso dell’Ucraina nell’Ue o anteporre il funzionamento della comunità alle regole previste per l’ingresso? «Non penso che la cosa più importante per l’Ucraina in questo momento sia l’ingresso nell’Ue. Ha più bisogno di assistenza militare».

Perché anche società tradizionalmente moderate tendono a produrre modelli di leadership estremi? «Perché questo è il tempo del populismo, dove la leadership politica si struttura a partire dalle paure delle persone, esagerandole, proponendo idee ridicole che non hanno senso economico, ma solo quello di conquistare le persone nel breve termine».

Quali autori liberali dovremmo rileggere oggi? «Il mio preferito è Abraham Lincoln, tutti i suoi scritti sono a favore di un liberalismo umano. Tornerei a questo grande classico».

#Francis Fukuyama #liberalismo

2 notes · View notes

grandhotelabyss · 2 years

Photo

—Geoff Shullenberger, “The Faith of Mass Shooters”

Insofar as we need a cultural explanation, and not an MK-Ult(u)ra(l) one, this is probably it, not that those two possibilities are strictly inconsistent. For my take on how we can have Fukuyama-without-violence, see here (essay) and here (podcast):

The only way liberal democracy can fall short of humanity’s final political synthesis is if it too harbors an inherent contradiction necessitating further conflict. Now Fukuyama brings another alarming Teuton onstage to consider this possibility—for didn’t Nietzsche say that liberal society produces the bathetic creature he labelled “the last man,” a cow-eyed consumer so lost in complacent satisfactions that he lacks any thymos at all? (Nietzsche’s contemporary heirs—ultra-right-wing online shitposters—have their own pungent labels for this archetype: the soyboy, for instance, or the bugman.) And doesn’t this last man at the end of history eventually become so disgusted with himself that he begins to long for an apocalypse of the sort that ended Europe’s long peace in 1914 when the citizens of the nations clamored for a cleansing war?

Fukuyama says yes to this dire possibility. As a solution he proposes that liberal society must allow illiberal pockets in private life—religion, sports, art, etc.—to drain humanity’s incorrigible thymos away from the political realm while still satisfying our urge to rise up and be recognized as not merely equal to but better than our neighbors in at least some arenas. To put it more coarsely than he does, we may need a little fascism in our poetry or our football games or our church services to keep fascism out of the government.

For my response to Bataille, whom Shullenberger cites elsewhere in the piece, see here—limited to my reading of his most famous novel, all I’ve read of him, but enough to get the point. I took the excess violence or violence-as-excess in the pornographic novel more as prescription than diagnosis, but perhaps in that essay, significantly written and posted on the 7th of November 2016, I was being too moralistic:

Mothers and sisters—that is, female blood relations—are presumably sickening for Bataille because, like eggs, they stand for generation and their menstrual blood for the processes that generate life. The eye, on the other hand, stands for visionary perception, but it too must be debased because the eye’s idealism has in the western tradition also upheld life by associating it with a higher ideal, God or the Platonic forms or, simply, the truth. Bataille and his heroes are inverted Platonists, no less in love with an ideal, but a dark and negative ideal, an upside-down sublime, a mountain standing on its head, a photo-negative of the good, an anti-truth of the rapture of torture.

[...]

All in all, Story of the Eye is a typical piece of “French extremity,” to cite the film genre, a narrative tradition almost unchanged since the days of Sade, whose books I have never succeeded in finishing, and which continues onscreen today. Mechanically reversing the traditional pieties of the west like flipping a series of switches, the devotees of extremity have created a pious tradition of their own, carried on to a stultifying extent in the institutions of culture, particularly the art world and some wings of academe.

#geoff shullenberger #francis fukuyama #georges bataille #political philosophy #philosophy

4 notes · View notes

waitinglistbooks · 5 months

Text

The Origins of Political Order, From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

For a few years now, I’ve been leaning on reading more about Sociology, Politics, History of Nations and, eventually, the name of Francis Fukuyama came up. Fukuyama is an American writer and political theorist. He studied at the Cornell University and Political Sciences at Harvard. He is currently a fellow at the Stanford University. Fukuyama has also worked for the U.S. Department of State, having specialized in Middle East affairs, and, later, to deal with European Political and Military affairs. In short, he has an enviable curriculum and a lot of experience in the field of politics.

When I was listening to a podcast I caught his name, and put him on my “books to read” waiting list, and was only expecting to actually get to it in a while. However, the Universe had other plans and in one of my many visits to bookshops, I found one of his books just asking me to take it. And so, I did. “The Origins of Political Order” was the book. It’s a fairly dated book (from 2012), and it’s the first volume of a set of 2 (the second one being “Political Order and Political Decay”). I couldn’t wait, and started reading it straight away – my other ongoing books were not happy…

It took me awhile to get through it because it’s such a dense book. Dense in the sense that every sentence is pertinent information. I usually underline passages, expressions, sentences in books, but on this one I just couldn’t. Everything is relevant and thought provoking.

In this first volume, Fukuyama goes through the origins of human relations and society since the primitive times up to the eve of the French Revolution. Not being his own view and systematization of history, he does it in a very neat way, starting with China, then going to India, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and finally Europe, to explain how institutions are built and how the different social groups interact and make or destroy social organizations. I learned a lot with this book, as my base education is medical science, so I never got to go so thoroughly into history, Rule of Law, Social Movements, the Parliament, etc. It was so interesting to have a view on how the rule of law came about, how the different societies organized themselves, and how government and society interact with each other and how they, in Fukuyama’s point of view, can create strong or weak absolutists states, or democracies. I was also enlightened with regards on how the geography influences the culture and the way the government can control, or not control its people, and consequently, build states. Very, very interesting, and even if only a point of view on the facts, still food for thought.

I found the writing of Fukuyama very easy to read. Yes, this is textbook level, and yes, I am not that person that gets tired when reading thick, dense texts, but I would still think that, for the interested mind, this a very good recommendation.

I cannot go into specifics as the context is important, and I wouldn’t be able to, even if I wanted to but, if you want to learn more on how states, and political institutions come about, and to have a wider point of view on how things came to be, this is the ideal book to start.

“Samuel Huntington has suggested if the rallying cry of the English Parliament was “no taxation without representation”, today’s slogan ought to be “no representation without taxation”, since it is the latter that best incentivizes political participation.”

“The Origins of Political Order, From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution” written by Francis Fukuyama, Profile Books Ltd, UK, 2012 ISBN: 9781846682575

#books #literature #francis fukuyama #the origins of political order

0 notes

twyrrinren · 6 months

Text

imagine writing a book so controversial that anytime something tragic happens, there are cries "oh you are a big liar!"

#history #francis fukuyama #the end of history #unfortunately history is not ending

0 notes

thehauntologicalsociety · 8 months

Text

Francis Fukuyama — The End of History and the Last Man

Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama (born October 27, 1952) is an American political scientist, political economist, and author. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford. He is best-known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992).

By way of an Introduction:

The distant origins of the present volume lie in an article entitled “The End of History?” which I wrote for the journal The National Interest in the summer of 1989. In it, I argued that a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government had emerged throughout the world over the past few years, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently communism. More than that, however, I argued that liberal democracy may constitute the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government”, and as such constituted the “end of history”. That is, while earlier forms of government were characterised by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was arguably free from such fundamental internal contradictions. This was not to say that today’s stable democracies, like the United States, France, or Switzerland, were not without injustice or serious social problems. But these problems were ones of incomplete implementation of the twin principles of liberty and equality on which modern democracy is founded, rather than of flaws in the principles themselves. While some present-day countries might fail to achieve stable liberal democracy, and others might lapse back into other, more primitive forms of rule like theocracy or military dictatorship, the ideal of liberal democracy could not be improved on.

The original article excited an extraordinary amount of commentary and controversy, first in the United States, and then in a series of countries as different as England, France, Italy, the Soviet Union, Brazil, South Africa, Japan, and South Korea. Criticism took every conceivable form, some of it based on simple misunderstanding of my original intent, and others penetrating more perceptively to the core of my argument. Many people were confused in the first instance by my use of the word “history”. Understanding history in a conventional sense as the occurrence of events, people pointed to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Chinese communist crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as evidence that “history was continuing”, and that I was ipso facto proven wrong.

And yet what I suggested had come to an end was not the occurrence of events, even large and grave events, but History: that is, history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process, when taking into account the experience of all peoples in all times. This understanding of History was most closely associated with the great German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. It was made part of our daily intellectual atmosphere by Karl Marx, who borrowed this concept of History from Hegel, and is implicit in our use of words like “primitive” or “advanced,” “traditional” or “modern”, when referring to different types of human societies. For both of these thinkers, there was a coherent development of human societies from simple tribal ones based on slavery and subsistence agriculture, through various theocracies, monarchies, and feudal aristocracies, up through modern liberal democracy and technologically driven capitalism. This evolutionary process was neither random nor unintelligible, even if it did not proceed in a straight line, and even if it was possible to question whether man was happier or better off as a result of historical “progress”.

Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an “end of history”: for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.

The present book is not a restatement of my original article, nor is it an effort to continue the discussion with that article’s many critics and commentators. Least of all is it an account of the end of the Cold War, or any other pressing topic in contemporary politics. While this book is informed by recent world events, its subject returns to a very old question: Whether, at the end of the twentieth century, it makes sense for us once again to speak of a coherent and directional History of mankind that will eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy? The answer I arrive at is yes, for two separate reasons. One has to do with economics, and the other has to do with what is termed the “struggle for recognition”.

It is of course not sufficient to appeal to the authority of Hegel, Marx, or any of their contemporary followers to establish the validity of a directional History. In the century and a half since they wrote, their intellectual legacy has been relentlessly assaulted from all directions. The most profound thinkers of the twentieth century have directly attacked the idea that history is a coherent or intelligible process; indeed, they have denied the possibility that any aspect of human life is philosophically intelligible. We in the West have become thoroughly pessimistic with regard to the possibility of overall progress in democratic institutions. This profound pessimism is not accidental, but born of the truly terrible political events of the first half of the twentieth century – two destructive world wars, the rise of totalitarian ideologies, and the turning of science against man in the form of nuclear weapons and environmental damage. The life experiences of the victims of this past century’s political violence – from the survivors of Hitlerism and Stalinism to the victims of Pol Pot – would deny that there has been such a thing as historical progress. Indeed, we have become so accustomed by now to expect that the future will contain bad news with respect to the health and security of decent, liberal, democratic political practices that we have problems recognising good news when it comes.

And yet, good news has come. The most remarkable development of the last quarter of the twentieth century has been the revelation of enormous weaknesses at the core of the world’s seemingly strong dictatorships, whether they be of the military-authoritarian Right, or the communist-totalitarian Left. From Latin America to Eastern Europe, from the Soviet Union to the Middle East and Asia, strong governments have been failing over the last two decades. And while they have not given way in all cases to stable liberal democracies, liberal democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe. In addition, liberal principles in economics – the “free market” – have spread, and have succeeded in producing unprecedented levels of material prosperity, both in industrially developed countries and in countries that had been, at the close of World War II, part of the impoverished Third World. A liberal revolution in economic thinking has sometimes preceded, sometimes followed, the move toward political freedom around the globe.

All of these developments, so much at odds with the terrible history of the first half of the century when totalitarian governments of the Right and Left were on the march, suggest the need to look again at the question of whether there is some deeper connecting thread underlying them, or whether they are merely accidental instances of good luck. By raising once again the question of whether there is such a thing as a Universal History of mankind, I am resuming a discussion that was begun in the early nineteenth century, but more or less abandoned in our time because of the enormity of events that mankind has experienced since then. While drawing on the ideas of philosophers like Kant and Hegel who have addressed this question before, I hope that the arguments presented here will stand on their own.

This volume immodestly presents not one but two separate efforts to outline such a Universal History. After establishing in Part I why we need to raise once again the possibility of Universal History, I propose an initial answer in Part II by attempting to use modern natural science as a regulator or mechanism to explain the directionality and coherence of History. Modern natural science is a useful starting point because it is the only important social activity that by common consensus is both cumulative and directional, even if its ultimate impact on human happiness is ambiguous. The progressive conquest of nature made possible with the development of the scientific method in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has proceeded according to certain definite rules laid down not by man, but by nature and nature’s laws.

The unfolding of modern natural science has had a uniform effect on all societies that have experienced it, for two reasons. In the first place, technology confers decisive military advantages on those countries that possess it, and given the continuing possibility of war in the international system of states, no state that values its independence can ignore the need for defensive modernisation. Second, modern natural science establishes a uniform horizon of economic production possibilities. Technology makes possible the limitless accumulation of wealth, and thus the satisfaction of an ever-expanding set of human desires. This process guarantees an increasing homogenisation of all human societies, regardless of their historical origins or cultural inheritances. All countries undergoing economic modernisation must increasingly resemble one another: they must unify nationally on the basis of a centralised state, urbanise, replace traditional forms of social organisation like tribe, sect, and family with economically rational ones based on function and efficiency, and provide for the universal education of their citizens. Such societies have become increasingly linked with one another through global markets and the spread of a universal consumer culture. Moreover, the logic of modern natural science would seem to dictate a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism. The experiences of the Soviet Union, China, and other socialist countries indicate that while highly centralised economies are sufficient to reach the level of industrialisation represented by Europe in the 1950s, they are woefully inadequate in creating what have been termed complex “post-industrial” economies in which information and technological innovation play a much larger role.

But while the historical mechanism represented by modern natural science is sufficient to explain a great deal about the character of historical change and the growing uniformity of modern societies, it is not sufficient to account for the phenomenon of democracy. There is no question but that the world’s most developed countries are also its most successful democracies. But while modern natural science guides us to the gates of the Promised Land of liberal democracy, it does not deliver us to the Promised Land itself, for there is no economically necessary reason why advanced industrialisation should produce political liberty. Stable democracy has at times emerged in pre-industrial societies, as it did in the United States in 1776. On the other hand, there are many historical and contemporary examples of technologically advanced capitalism coexisting with political authoritarianism from Meiji Japan and Bismarckian Germany to present-day Singapore and Thailand. In many cases, authoritarian states are capable of producing rates of economic growth unachievable in democratic societies.

Our first effort to establish the basis for a directional history is thus only partly successful. What we have called the “logic of modern natural science” is in effect an economic interpretation of historical change, but one which (unlike its Marxist variant) leads to capitalism rather than socialism as its final result. The logic of modern science can explain a great deal about our world: why we residents of developed democracies are office workers rather than peasants eking out a living on the land, why we are members of labor unions or professional organisations rather than tribes or clans, why we obey the authority of a bureaucratic superior rather than a priest, why we are literate and speak a common national language.

But economic interpretations of history are incomplete and unsatisfying, because man is not simply an economic animal. In particular, such interpretations cannot really explain why we are democrats, that is, proponents of the principle of popular sovereignty and the guarantee of basic rights under a rule of law. It is for this reason that the book turns to a second, parallel account of the historical process in Part III, an account that seeks to recover the whole of man and not just his economic side. To do this, we return to Hegel and Hegel’s non-materialist account of History, based on the “struggle for recognition”.

According to Hegel, human beings like animals have natural needs and desires for objects outside themselves such as food, drink, shelter, and above all the preservation of their own bodies. Man differs fundamentally from the animals, however, because in addition he desires the desire of other men, that is, he wants to be “recognised.” In particular, he wants to be recognised as a human being, that is, as a being with a certain worth or dignity. This worth in the first instance is related to his willingness to risk his life in a struggle over pure prestige. For only man is able to overcome his most basic animal instincts – chief among them his instinct for self-preservation – for the sake of higher, abstract principles and goals. According to Hegel, the desire for recognition initially drives two primordial combatants to seek to make the other “recognise” their humanness by staking their lives in a mortal battle. When the natural fear of death leads one combatant to submit, the relationship of master and slave is born. The stakes in this bloody battle at the beginning of history are not food, shelter, or security, but pure prestige. And precisely because the goal of the battle is not determined by biology, Hegel sees in it the first glimmer of human freedom.

The desire for recognition may at first appear to be an unfamiliar concept, but it is as old as the tradition of Western political philosophy, and constitutes a thoroughly familiar part of the human personality. It was first described by Plato in the Republic, when he noted that there were three parts to the soul, a desiring part, a reasoning part, and a part that he called thymos, or “spiritedness.” Much of human behaviour can be explained as a combination of the first two parts, desire and reason: desire induces men to seek things outside themselves, while reason or calculation shows them the best way to get them. But in addition, human beings seek recognition of their own worth, or of the people, things, or principles that they invest with worth. The propensity to invest the self with a certain value, and to demand recognition for that value, is what in today’s popular language we would call “self-esteem.” The propensity to feel self-esteem arises out of the part of the soul called thymos. It is like an innate human sense of justice. People believe that they have a certain worth, and when other people treat them as though they are worth less than that, they experience the emotion of anger. Conversely, when people fail to live up to their own sense of worth, they feel shame, and when they are evaluated correctly in proportion to their worth, they feel pride. The desire for recognition, and the accompanying emotions of anger, shame, and pride, are parts of the human personality critical to political life. According to Hegel, they are what drives the whole historical process.

By Hegel’s account, the desire to be recognised as a human being with dignity drove man at the beginning of history into a bloody battle to the death for prestige. The outcome of this battle was a division of human society into a class of masters, who were willing to risk their lives, and a class of slaves, who gave in to their natural fear of death. But the relationship of lordship and bondage, which took a wide variety of forms in all of the unequal, aristocratic societies that have characterised the greater part of human history, failed ultimately to satisfy the desire for recognition of either the masters or the slaves. The slave, of course, was not acknowledged as a human being in any way whatsoever. But the recognition enjoyed by the master was deficient as well, because he was not recognised by other masters, but slaves whose humanity was as yet incomplete. Dissatisfaction with the flawed recognition available in aristocratic societies constituted a “contradiction” that engendered further stages of history.

Hegel believed that the “contradiction” inherent in the relationship of lordship and bondage was finally overcome as a result of the French and, one would have to add, American revolutions. These democratic revolutions abolished the distinction between master and slave by making the former slaves their own masters and by establishing the principles of popular sovereignty and the rule of law. The inherently unequal recognition of masters and slaves is replaced by universal and reciprocal recognition, where every citizen recognises the dignity and humanity of every other citizen, and where that dignity is recognised in turn by the state through the granting of rights.

This Hegelian understanding of the meaning of contemporary liberal democracy differs in a significant way from the Anglo-Saxon understanding that was the theoretical basis of liberalism in countries like Britain and the United States. In that tradition, the prideful quest for recognition was to be subordinated to enlightened self-interest – desire combined with reason – and particularly the desire for self-preservation of the body. While Hobbes, Locke, and the American Founding Fathers like Jefferson and Madison believed that rights to a large extent existed as a means of preserving a private sphere where men can enrich themselves and satisfy the desiring parts of their souls, Hegel saw rights as ends in themselves, because what truly satisfies human beings is not so much material prosperity as recognition of their status and dignity. With the American and French revolutions, Hegel asserted that history comes to an end because the longing that had driven the historical process – the struggle for recognition – has now been satisfied in a society characterised by universal and reciprocal recognition. No other arrangement of human social institutions is better able to satisfy this longing, and hence no further progressive historical change is possible.

The desire for recognition, then, can provide the missing link between liberal economics and liberal politics that was missing from the economic account of History in Part II. Desire and reason are together sufficient to explain the process of industrialisation, and a large part of economic life more generally. But they cannot explain the striving for liberal democracy, which ultimately arises out of thymos, the part of the soul that demands recognition. The social changes that accompany advanced industrialisation, in particular universal education, appear to liberate a certain demand for recognition that did not exist among poorer and less educated people. As standards of living increase, as populations become more cosmopolitan and better educated, and as society as a whole achieves a greater equality of condition, people begin to demand not simply more wealth but recognition of their status. If people were nothing more than desire and reason, they would be content to live in market-oriented authoritarian states like Franco’s Spain, or a South Korea or Brazil under military rule. But they also have a thymotic pride in their own self-worth, and this leads them to demand democratic governments that treat them like adults rather than children, recognising their autonomy as free individuals. Communism is being superseded by liberal democracy in our time because of the realisation that the former provides a gravely defective form of recognition.

An understanding of the importance of the desire for recognition as the motor of history allows us to reinterpret many phenomena that are otherwise seemingly familiar to us, such as culture, religion, work, nationalism, and war. Part IV is an attempt to do precisely this, and to project into the future some of the different ways that the desire for recognition will be manifest. A religious believer, for example, seeks recognition for his particular gods or sacred practices, while a nationalist demands recognition for his particular linguistic, cultural, or ethnic group. Both of these forms of recognition are less rational than the universal recognition of the liberal state, because they are based on arbitrary distinctions between sacred and profane, or between human social groups. For this reason, religion, nationalism, and a people’s complex of ethical habits and customs (more broadly “culture”) have traditionally been interpreted as obstacles to the establishment of successful democratic political institutions and free-market economies.

But the truth is considerably more complicated, for the success of liberal politics and liberal economics frequently rests on irrational forms of recognition that liberalism was supposed to overcome. For democracy to work, citizens need to develop an irrational pride in their own democratic institutions, and must also develop what Tocqueville called the “art of associating,” which rests on prideful attachment to small communities. These communities are frequently based on religion, ethnicity, or other forms of recognition that fall short of the universal recognition on which the liberal state is based. The same is true for liberal economics. Labor has traditionally been understood in the Western liberal economic tradition as an essentially unpleasant activity undertaken for the sake of the satisfaction of human desires and the relief of human pain. But in certain cultures with a strong work ethic, such as that of the Protestant entrepreneurs who created European capitalism, or of the elites who modernised Japan after the Meiji restoration, work was also undertaken for the sake of recognition. To this day, the work ethic in many Asian countries is sustained not so much by material incentives, as by the recognition provided for work by overlapping social groups, from the family to the nation, on which these societies are based. This suggests that liberal economics succeeds not simply on the basis of liberal principles, but requires irrational forms of thymos as well.

The struggle for recognition provides us with insight into the nature of international politics. The desire for recognition that led to the original bloody battle for prestige between two individual combatants leads logically to imperialism and world empire. The relationship of lordship and bondage on a domestic level is naturally replicated on the level of states, where nations as a whole seek recognition and enter into bloody battles for supremacy. Nationalism, a modern yet not-fully-rational form of recognition, has been the vehicle for the struggle for recognition over the past hundred years, and the source of this century’s most intense conflicts. This is the world of “power politics,” described by such foreign policy “realists” as Henry Kissinger.

But if war is fundamentally driven by the desire for recognition, it stands to reason that the liberal revolution which abolishes the relationship of lordship and bondage by making former slaves their own masters should have a similar effect on the relationship between states. Liberal democracy replaces the irrational desire to be recognised as greater than others with a rational desire to be recognised as equal. A world made up of liberal democracies, then, should have much less incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognise one another’s legitimacy. And indeed, there is substantial empirical evidence from the past couple of hundred years that liberal democracies do not behave imperialistically toward one another, even if they are perfectly capable of going to war with states that are not democracies and do not share their fundamental values. Nationalism is currently on the rise in regions like Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union where peoples have long been denied their national identities, and yet within the world’s oldest and most secure nationalities, nationalism is undergoing a process of change. The demand for national recognition in Western Europe has been domesticated and made compatible with universal recognition, much like religion three or four centuries before.

The fifth and final part of this book addresses the question of the “end of history,” and the creature who emerges at the end, the “last man.” In the course of the original debate over the National Interest article, many people assumed that the possibility of the end of history revolved around the question of whether there were viable alternatives to liberal democracy visible in the world today. There was a great deal of controversy over such questions as whether communism was truly dead, whether religion or ultranationalism might make a comeback, and the like. But the deeper and more profound question concerns the goodness of Liberal democracy itself, and not only whether it will succeed against its present-day rivals. Assuming that liberal democracy is, for the moment, safe from external enemies, could we assume that successful democratic societies could remain that way indefinitely? Or is liberal democracy prey to serious internal contradictions, contradictions so serious that they will eventually undermine it as a political system? There is no doubt that contemporary democracies face any number of serious problems, from drugs, homelessness and crime to environmental damage and the frivolity of consumerism. But these problems are not obviously insoluble on the basis of liberal principles, nor so serious that they would necessarily lead to the collapse of society as a whole, as communism collapsed in the 1980s.

Writing in the twentieth century, Hegel’s great interpreter, Alexandre Kojève, asserted intransigently that history had ended because what he called the “universal and homogeneous state” – what we can understand as liberal democracy – definitely solved the question of recognition by replacing the relationship of lordship and bondage with universal and equal recognition. What man had been seeking throughout the course of history – what had driven the prior “stages of history” – was recognition. In the modern world, he finally found it, and was “completely satisfied.” This claim was made seriously by Kojève, and it deserves to be taken seriously by us. For it is possible to understand the problem of politics over the millennia of human history as the effort to solve the problem of recognition. Recognition is the central problem of politics because it is the origin of tyranny, imperialism, and the desire to dominate. But while it has a dark side, it cannot simply be abolished from political life, because it is simultaneously the psychological ground for political virtues like courage, public-spiritedness, and justice. All political communities must make use of the desire for recognition, while at the same time protecting themselves from its destructive effects. If contemporary constitutional government has indeed found a formula whereby all are recognised in a way that nonetheless avoids the emergence of tyranny, then it would indeed have a special claim to stability and longevity among the regimes that have emerged on earth.

But is the recognition available to citizens of contemporary liberal democracies “completely satisfying?” The long-term future of liberal democracy, and the alternatives to it that may one day arise, depend above all on the answer to this question. In Part V we sketch two broad responses, from the Left and the Right, respectively. The Left would say that universal recognition in liberal democracy is necessarily incomplete because capitalism creates economic inequality and requires a division of labor that ipso facto implies unequal recognition. In this respect, a nation’s absolute level of prosperity provides no solution, because there will continue to be those who are relatively poor and therefore invisible as human beings to their fellow citizens. Liberal democracy, in other words, continues to recognise equal people unequally.

The second, and in my view more powerful, criticism of universal recognition comes from the Right that was profoundly concerned with the leveling effects of the French Revolution’s commitment to human equality. This Right found its most brilliant spokesman in the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose views were in some respects anticipated by that great observer of democratic societies, Alexis de Tocqueville. Nietzsche believed that modern democracy represented not the self-mastery of former slaves, but the unconditional victory of the slave and a kind of slavish morality. The typical citizen of a liberal democracy was a “last man” who, schooled by the founders of modern liberalism, gave up prideful belief in his or her own superior worth in favour of comfortable self-preservation. Liberal democracy produced “men without chests,” composed of desire and reason but lacking thymos, clever at finding new ways to satisfy a host of petty wants through the calculation of long-term self-interest. The last man had no desire to be recognised as greater than others, and without such desire no excellence or achievement was possible. Content with his happiness and unable to feel any sense of shame for being unable to rise above those wants, the last man ceased to be human.

Following Nietzsche’s line of thought, we are compelled to ask the following questions: Is not the man who is completely satisfied by nothing more than universal and equal recognition something less than a full human being, indeed, an object of contempt, a “last man” with neither striving nor aspiration? Is there not a side of the human personality that deliberately seeks out struggle, danger, risk, and daring, and will this side not remain unfulfilled by the “peace and prosperity” of contemporary liberal democracy? Does not the satisfaction of certain human beings depend on recognition that is inherently unequal? Indeed, does not the desire for unequal recognition constitute the basis of a livable life, not just for bygone aristocratic societies, but also in modern liberal democracies? Will not their future survival depend, to some extent, on the degree to which their citizens seek to be recognised not just as equal, but as superior to others? And might not the fear of becoming contemptible “last men” not lead men to assert themselves in new and unforeseen ways, even to the point of becoming once again bestial “first men” engaged in bloody prestige battles, this time with modern weapons?

This books seeks to address these questions. They arise naturally once we ask whether there is such a thing as progress, and whether we can construct a coherent and directional Universal History of mankind. Totalitarianisms of the Right and Left have kept us too busy to consider the latter question seriously for the better part of this century. But the fading of these totalitarianisms, as the century comes to an end, invites us to raise this old question one more time.

#The End of History #The End of History and the Last Man #Francis Fukuyama #1992

1 note · View note