Destiny Symposium Response

Laurence Hemming

To what destiny do we stand open? Hegel’s Introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy World History of 1830–31 makes clear that history stands in a rational relation to the absolute: our destiny appears as freedom, but is decided – if even by reason, absolute reason, already, in advance.

Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (from lectures of the 1930s) was said by Judith Butler to illustrate “what in Hegel survives [...] and what is lost.” One is tempted to opine: not much survived – above all, the all was lost. Kojève argues for the precedence, in Hegel, and for us now, of the future. In an argument that reads like the bad Heidegger it is, Kojève (who’d dabbled more than a bit in Being and Time) says that time flows from the future back to the past, to be realized by “us” in the present. Heidegger said of the same (Hegel) text that Hegel’s “future” was no more than the same preoccupation with the past that haunts the discussion of all time (GA 21: 265). Heidegger argues, overturning Aristotle for the first time, that time is not only in the mind (is not merely intuition) – is neither subjective nor objective – and is the basis for finite presence, for an understanding of being that is finite, not absolute or infinite (the infinite sequence of “nows”). It is in the finitude of time that death arrives: no infinite, no eternity already there awaits.

We can see in Kojève’s understanding of the future, and in Heidegger’s futurity (rather than the future as such), the essential anguish of our times. Kojève, collapsing history into time and making the future our own, elucidates the demand to make the future that is our present destiny. Kojève does not re-open us to anything tragic – nor do we ever face the all. Instead we live the iron slavery of an optimism, not that we can, but that we must, or we are nothing. Ours to be a scale of values. Ours to clamber. And we esteem at nothing those who will make nothing of themselves. Hegel annihilates the tragic, because in his history the openness of destiny is gone: we know in advance (by rational means) that we are saved for a good (an absolute) end. The detaching of reason from the absolute and from system (the system of reason) does not restore a tragic destiny. It nails us to our failure, for shame, for never having attained to what we should and must have been (and never are).

Heidegger draws our attention to what it means to turn out: away from absolute reason, to be resolute for what is arriving. Only resolutely open to an empty end, and the finitude revealed, presently and in death (the truth of being), can we stand before a destiny proper. Only then can a destiny arrive, and human being be futural being. Does this require a god (to save us)? Or is speaking of the resolute awaiting of a god a way of speaking of how, of only how, the abyss can be faced and known – of how what comes to us as future could be owned?