ABSTRACT
As the preceding chapter concerned time and universality, this chapter will concern time and homogeneity. The chapter will discuss Kojèvian proof by historical verification as outlined in the Introduction, whereby acts based on desire for desire, on one hand, and ideas, on the other, ratify each other in Kojèvian human time. The chapter will maintain that such a process might be a means to avoid the non-relation and timelessness of Kojèvian tyrants by bringing ideas associated with their acts into human time through discourse. It will argue that the core of Kojèvian homogeneity is the relation of the tyrant to a thinker who might accomplish this task. The chapter will review the fitness of three types of Kojèvian thinkers for this task: the philosopher, the wise man, and the intellectual mediator. It will argue that all fail under Kojèvian time phenomenology to resolve the time-tyrant problem. The chapter will conclude by returning to the Strauss–Kojève exchange. It will show that Strauss’s strident defense of his view of the philosopher and philosophy is more precisely understood as a concerted effort to undermine Kojèvian homogeneity, the parity of desirous of desire acts and ideas, of tyrants and thinkers, respectively.
