Throughlines of Modern Thought

The claims, lecture by lecture

This is the plain-text edition of the map: 693 claims and 348 links from the 25 lectures. With scripts on, the same material is shown as a timeline, a network and a set of throughlines.

Reading pages, by question: What replaces God?, Is history going anywhere?, Alienation: where is the split, and who can heal it?, The problem of the bridge: how does the mind reach the world?, Is the self transparent to itself?, If history is inevitable, why act?, The seduction of wholeness, Recognition and the Other: can I become myself without you?, Is and ought: can what happens tell us what we should do?

By lecture: Lecture 1, Lecture 2, Lecture 3, Lecture 4, Lecture 5, Lecture 6, Lecture 7, Lecture 8, Lecture 9, Lecture 10, Lecture 11, Lecture 12, Lecture 13, Lecture 14, Lecture 15, Lecture 16, Lecture 17, Lecture 18, Lecture 19, Lecture 20, Lecture 21, Lecture 22, Lecture 23, Lecture 24, Lecture 25.

Side by side: Hegel and Marx, Heidegger and Husserl, Hegel and Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre.

By thinker: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl, Simone de Beauvoir, Friedrich Nietzsche, René Girard, Henri Bergson, Immanuel Kant, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Václav Havel.

Lecture 1: Introduction to the Course

• Shore's own view. Shore's shortest account of modernity: the project of finding God a replacement, which is very hard because God simultaneously grounded knowledge, being and ethics. (41:28) Put simply: Shore: modernity, in short, is the search for something to replace God. That is very hard, because God did three jobs at once: he grounded what we can know, what exists, and what is right.
• Shore's own view. The candidates Shore names for God's vacant place, Man and History (both capitalized), set up a lasting tension between subjectivity, a turn inward, and teleology, time's forward motion. (42:16) Put simply: Shore: two candidates for God's empty place are Man and History. They pull against each other: one turns inward, to the self; the other looks to time moving forward toward a goal.
• Shore's own view. For Shore, alienation is modernity's central problem: once God is gone and nothing else binds the world together, human beings find themselves homeless in it. (44:19)
• Shore's own view. In Shore's framing, modernity is a trauma and a crisis; every thinker on this syllabus feels it as painful and is, in one way or another, trying to work through it. (40:32)
• Shore's own view. Modernity, conventionally if arbitrarily dated from 1789, is a break in time, including a change in the prevailing conception of time: cyclical gives way to forward-moving, progressive time. (38:51) Put simply: Shore: modernity, by convention (somewhat arbitrarily) dated from 1789, is a break in time. Even the idea of time changes: time that goes round in cycles gives way to time that moves forward and progresses.
• Shore's own view. Intellectual history studies ideas in their context, never in the abstract: every text is the work of actual, imperfect people living at a particular time and place. (22:05)
• Shore's own view. Brzozowski's 1911 diary line, "What is not biography is nothing at all," is more or less Shore's starting point for intellectual history: without real lives, a kind of abstraction. (24:31) Put simply: Shore takes, more or less, as her starting point a 1911 diary line by Brzozowski: "What is not biography is nothing at all." Ideas cut off from real lives become a kind of abstraction.
• Shore's own view. Intellectual history belongs cleanly to no single discipline: it sits where history, philosophy and theory-heavy comparative literature meet, and by its nature keeps crossing those lines. (21:16)
• Shore's own view. Nearly every philosopher in this course is read as continental, or at least through a continental lens, since the interest is always in the historically inflected side of their ideas. (26:28) Put simply: Shore: almost every philosopher in this course is read as "continental", or at least in that style, which pays attention to history. The course always cares about the historical side of their ideas.
• Shore's own view. Analytic philosophers treat reading an argument through its author's life or times as a genealogical fallacy; for the historian no such fallacy exists, since real life is the whole subject. (27:38) Put simply: Analytic philosophers call it an error, a "genealogical fallacy," to read an argument through its author's life or times. Shore: for a historian there is no such error, because real life is the whole subject.
• Immanuel Kant. Among the transcendental conditions that make knowledge possible are time and space: without them, no input from the world could be processed at all. (22:54) Put simply: Kant: some conditions must already be in place before we can know anything ("transcendental conditions"). Time and space are among them: without them, nothing coming in from the world could be processed at all.
• Shore's own view. Metaphorically, time and place do for historical study what time and space do for knowledge in Kant: nothing can be studied without fixing when and where it happened. (23:13) Put simply: Shore's metaphor: Kant says we need time and space to make sense of anything the world gives us; likewise, a historian cannot study anything without fixing when and where it happened.
• Shore's own view. Approaching philosophy as a historian means asking not who was right but what each thinker was attempting: an empathetic leap into a mind with its own obsessions and complexes. (29:42) Put simply: Shore: reading philosophy as a historian, you ask not who was right but what each thinker was trying to do. That takes imagining your way into a mind with its own obsessions and hang-ups.
• Shore's own view. Intellectual history tracks questions more than answers: the big questions are never satisfactorily settled, they just keep shifting and acquiring new inflections. (30:24)
• Shore's own view. No idea is ever produced in isolation. Intellectual history is made of conversations already under way, which people join, leave and split into new circles: everything is dialogical. (31:35) Put simply: Shore: nobody thinks up an idea alone. Ideas come out of conversations already going on, which people join, leave, or break away from to form new circles. Everything is a dialogue ("dialogical").
• Shore's own view. Historians face an infinite regress: grasping Stalinism requires Lenin, Lenin requires Marx, Marx Hegel, Hegel Kant, without end, so every starting point is somewhat arbitrary. (34:57)
• Shore's own view. Authors never control how their texts are read; readers take ideas where they will. One could even argue that all of French existentialism rests on Sartre misreading Heidegger. (35:55)
• Shore's own view. Shore's rule for the course: history cannot be cleaned up; sadistic lunatics have often played major historical roles, and cutting out everyone who was not nice would leave no history to teach at all. (36:37)
• Shore's own view. Shore reaches European intellectual history by an atypical route, as a Slavicist working in Czech, Polish and Russian, not French, German or British history; it inflects her view of Europe. (2:39) Put simply: Shore came to European history from the East, through Czech, Polish and Russian rather than French, German or British history, as most colleagues did. She says this colors how she sees the rest of Europe.
• Shore's own view. Shore calls this course a "chocolate sampler," no thinker in depth. Introductory teaching must be reductionist: each lecture draws out what she thinks are three key starting points, nothing exhaustive. (14:06) Put simply: Shore calls the course a "chocolate sampler": a taste of many thinkers, none in depth. An introduction has to simplify, so each lecture picks out what she thinks are three key starting points, nothing exhaustive.
• Shore's own view. Readers form their own relationships with thinkers, and those relationships change: the one you feel closest to at nineteen may well bother you by twenty-two, which is perfectly normal. (15:35)
• Stanisław Brzozowski. "What is not biography is nothing at all": the 1911 diary dictum that whatever stands apart from an actual human life does not amount to anything. (24:19) Put simply: Brzozowski, in his diary in 1911: "What is not biography is nothing at all." Whatever stands apart from an actual human life does not amount to anything.
• Shore's own view. Intellectual history, Shore says, records error and failure far more than success: every thinker studied here fails in some way, and none of them has saved the world. (31:08)
• Shore's own view. A purely national idea, conceived from scratch by someone who read no one, is what Shore calls an "epistemological fantasy"; ideas keep crossing borders and absorbing chance influences. (33:34) Put simply: Shore: a purely national idea, dreamed up from scratch by someone who read no one, is a fantasy (her phrase: an "epistemological fantasy"). Ideas keep crossing borders and picking up chance influences.

Lecture 2: The Heritage of the Enlightenment

• René Descartes. Knowledge should be rebuilt from scratch: treat as false whatever admits the slightest doubt, and see what survives to serve as a foundation. (12:40) Put simply: Descartes: to rebuild knowledge from the ground up, treat as false anything you can doubt even slightly. Whatever survives can serve as a firm foundation.
• René Descartes. Even if a demon has planted every thought in my head, the thinking itself is happening, so I must exist: "cogito, ergo sum." (15:49) Put simply: Descartes: even if a demon had put every thought in my head, I would still be thinking, so I must exist. Hence "cogito, ergo sum": I think, therefore I am.
• René Descartes. After securing his own existence, Descartes brings God back in; a non-deceiving God lets him recover the whole world he had doubted away. (16:46)
• Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes's state of nature means permanent war: greed, self-interest and the appetite for power and wealth set everyone against everyone, in unending terror. (19:29) Put simply: Hobbes: imagine people before any government (his "state of nature"). Greed, self-interest and the hunger for power and wealth would set everyone against everyone, in endless war and terror.
• Thomas Hobbes. Escaping the natural state of war takes a one-time, irrevocable bargain: everyone hands their freedom to an absolute ruler, the Leviathan, who provides peace and security in return. (20:09) Put simply: Hobbes: the way out of that war is one bargain that can never be undone. Everyone hands their freedom to an all-powerful ruler, the "Leviathan", who in return keeps them safe and at peace. In the text: In Leviathan (1651), ch. 17, each person covenants with every other to authorize "one man, or ... one assembly of men" as sovereign; ch. 14 holds that the right to defend one's life cannot be given up.
• John Locke. For Locke, people in the natural state were free and equal, not at war; government arises gradually, after they have worked the land, acquired property and want it protected. (21:17) Put simply: Locke: before government, people were free and equal, not at war (his "state of nature"). Government grew gradually, once people had worked the land, owned property and wanted it protected.
• John Locke. Government is legitimate only by consent of the governed, never by divine right, and that consent is revocable: rulers who abuse their power can be replaced. (22:46) Put simply: Locke: a government has the right to rule only if the people agree to it, never because God chose the ruler ("divine right"). That agreement can be withdrawn: rulers who abuse their power can be replaced.
• Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet). Deism's God made the world, gave humans reason, and then withdrew: no puppeteer working the strings, but a creator who left people responsible for their own affairs. (25:15) Put simply: Voltaire's deism: God made the world and gave people reason, then stepped back. He is not a puppeteer pulling the strings; people are left responsible for their own affairs.
• Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet). Tolerance among Christians is the easy case; Voltaire goes further and calls the Turk, the Chinese and the Jew brothers, all "children of the same father." (28:02)
• Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet). Every dogma breeds disputes and disputes breed misery; religion exists for our happiness, which requires only that we be just and indulgent, not that we agree about metaphysics. (27:07) Put simply: Voltaire: every fixed doctrine starts quarrels, and quarrels bring misery. Religion is there to make us happy, and for that we need only be fair and forgiving, not agree on ultimate questions ("metaphysics").
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau's natural human was virtuous and compassionate; property and society made people vain, selfish and competitive, and there is no road back to that lost condition. (32:02) In the text: In Part One of the Discourse on Inequality (1755), Rousseau writes that men in the state of nature "could not be either good or bad, virtuous or vicious", and calls pity "the only natural virtue".
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Authority belongs to the general will, which is neither a majority vote nor a tally of individual wills but a collective thing in its own right. (32:45) Put simply: Rousseau: the right to rule belongs to the "general will". It is not a majority vote, nor a count of what each person wants, but the will of the community as a whole, a thing in its own right. Where to read it: Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book II, ch. 3, and Book IV, ch. 2.
• Immanuel Kant. Enlightenment is humanity's exit from immaturity, an immaturity that is self-imposed rather than forced on us from outside. (35:21) Put simply: Kant: enlightenment is humanity leaving its immaturity behind. And that immaturity is our own doing, not something forced on us from outside. Where to read it: Kant, "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" (1784), opening paragraph.
• Immanuel Kant. "Sapere aude," dare to know: Kant's motto for enlightenment asks for courage, the nerve to reason for oneself rather than let a priest or a book decide. (35:29) Where to read it: Kant, "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" (1784), opening paragraph.
• Immanuel Kant. The Copernican turn in Kant's epistemology reverses the direction of fit: not the mind conforming to things as they are, but knowable things conforming to the mind's capacities. (38:03) Put simply: Kant's "Copernican turn": it was assumed that the mind must fit itself to things as they are. Kant reverses this: what we can know of things has to fit what the mind is able to take in.
• Immanuel Kant. Kant's call to think for yourself is no license for rebellion: soldiers still obey and taxes still get paid, but across many other spheres, nobody else should do your thinking. (36:06) Where to read it: Kant, "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" (1784), on the public and private use of reason.
• Moses Mendelssohn. Humanity's destiny should be "the measure and goal of all of our strivings," the fixed point we watch so as not to go astray. (34:38) Put simply: Mendelssohn: what human beings are meant to become should be the yardstick and aim of everything we strive for, the fixed point we keep our eyes on so we do not lose our way.
• Max Weber. The Enlightenment disenchanted the world (Weber's Entzauberung): belief in miracles, mythical beings, and powers beyond human grasp was draining out of how people understood things. (9:50)
• Isaiah Berlin. Berlin's image for the Enlightenment picture of progress: the world is a vast jigsaw, each piece fitted brings the whole nearer, and makes the next piece easier. (8:42)
• Charles Taylor. Rousseau was so hard to live with that, as Shore recalls Charles Taylor putting it, calling him difficult to get on with would be the eighteenth century's great understatement. (29:46)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe's charge against Mendelssohn: he treats beauty as an entomologist treats a butterfly, pinning it down until its color pales and nothing living is left. (46:35) Put simply: Shore has Goethe say of Mendelssohn that he treats beauty the way an insect collector treats a butterfly: he pins it down, its color fades, and nothing living is left.
• Shore's own view. Shore finds Descartes's proof of God deeply unconvincing: bringing God back in to recover the world looks like cheating after such radical doubt. (16:54)
• Shore's own view. Philosophical movements have moods, and the Enlightenment's, as Shore reads it, is exultant: reason worshipped and trusted, disenchantment greeted with joy rather than regret. (6:21) Put simply: Shore: philosophical movements have moods. The Enlightenment's was elated: it worshiped and trusted reason, and greeted the fading of magic and miracles ("disenchantment") with joy rather than regret.
• Shore's own view. The Enlightenment's talk of universal civilization, Shore observes, often shrinks on inspection to one Parisian café standing in for Paris, France, Europe and the world: universalism with a hypocritical streak. (3:57) Put simply: Shore: when Enlightenment thinkers spoke of a civilization for all humanity, they often meant one Paris café, standing in for Paris, France, Europe and the world. Their claim to speak for everyone had a hypocritical streak.

Lecture 3: The Legacy of Romanticism

• Shore's own view. Shore suggests Enlightenment and Romanticism can also be understood as moods (Stimmung), not only philosophical currents: two forces in constant tension, yet intermingling, across the whole course. (0:18) Put simply: Shore: Enlightenment and Romanticism are not only schools of thought but also moods ("Stimmung" in German). Throughout the course the two pull against each other, yet keep mixing.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau straddles the divide: which Rousseau one reads decides whether he looks Enlightenment or Romantic. In the Social Contract he is a crucial Enlightenment thinker; the Confessions, in tone and self-description, have a Romantic flavor. (14:22)
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Two things distinguish humans from other creatures, on Rousseau's account: free agency, and an openness to becoming. We are underdetermined, self-creating beings rather than finished ones. (17:39) Put simply: Rousseau: two things set humans apart from other creatures. We act freely, and we are open to becoming something new. Nothing fully fixes what we will be; we make ourselves.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Amour propre, vanity about how we appear, is artificial, not natural: it grows from others' gaze in society, and it is the real source of our discontent. (20:03) Put simply: Rousseau: our vanity about how we look to others ("amour propre") is not natural. Society breeds it, because we live under one another's gaze, and it is the real reason we are dissatisfied.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Virtue needs authenticity, and society, which forces us into pretending we are someone else, rules authenticity out. Being virtuous therefore means withdrawing from society. (20:51) Put simply: Rousseau: you cannot be good without being true to yourself. Society makes us pretend to be someone else, so it makes that impossible. To be virtuous, you have to withdraw from society.
• Immanuel Kant. Free will cannot be proven, yet without it there is no ethics at all. Kant therefore simply posits it, and, almost in passing, posits God too. (31:04) Put simply: Kant: no one can prove we have free will, yet without it there could be no ethics at all. So he simply assumes it, and, almost in passing, assumes God exists too. In the text: In the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant calls consciousness of the moral law "a fact of reason" (Remark to §7), and treats God and immortality as postulates of pure practical reason (Dialectic, Book II, ch. II).
• Immanuel Kant. Humans possess dignity, which is "above all price," because they are free moral agents. Hence Kant's basic rule: treat every person as an end, never merely as a means. (31:51) Put simply: Kant: people have dignity, a worth beyond any price, because they are free moral beings. So never treat a person merely as a tool for your purposes; always treat them as valuable in themselves. Where to read it: Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Ak. 4:429 and 4:434–435.
• Immanuel Kant. Kant's test when unsure whether an act is moral: imagine everyone acting on your principle. Should disaster follow, the act fails. (32:07) In the text: In the Groundwork (1785; Gregor translation), Kant's test is whether I "could also will that my maxim should become a universal law"; a maxim fails when it cannot be universalized without contradiction.
• Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Fichte: "to be free is nothing, to become free is heaven." Freedom is not a state you have but a becoming you live, driven by desire. (37:08)
• Johann Gottlieb Fichte. For Fichte, sincerity and motive outweigh consequences. Whatever it costs, you must not betray your own ideals. (37:32)
• Johann Gottfried Herder. Just as each individual has an irreducible soul, so does each nation. What binds a nation, for Herder, is soil and above all language, not blood or race. (42:07) Put simply: Herder: each nation, like each person, has a soul all its own. What holds a nation together is its land and, above all, its language, not blood or race.
• Johann Gottfried Herder. Humans are social beings with a deep longing for home. Belonging to a unique, rooted community answers it and overcomes alienation. Herder hated cosmopolitanism. (42:35) Put simply: Herder: people are social and long deeply for a home. Belonging to a distinct, rooted community overcomes the feeling of homelessness ("alienation"). He hated cosmopolitanism, the ideal of being a citizen of the world.
• Adam Mickiewicz. Mickiewicz: the Polish nation "did not die." Its body lies buried, its soul in purgatory, but on the third day it will rise and free Europe's enslaved peoples. (43:22)
• Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron). Byron's Manfred casts humans as "half dust, half deity," creatures of mixed essence "unfit to sink or soar," at war with their own elements. (41:04) Put simply: Byron's "Manfred": humans are half dust, half god. With this mixed nature we can neither sink nor rise, and the parts we are made of are at war with each other.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Underground Man grants reason is fine but says it feeds only our reasoning faculty; desire is "a manifestation of the whole of life," and people sometimes love suffering passionately. (46:17) Put simply: Dostoevsky's Underground Man: reason is fine, but it satisfies only our thinking side. Desire expresses the whole of life, and people sometimes love suffering, passionately.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky. Suppose the Enlightenment program succeeds and every question gets its calculated answer. The Underground Man cannot guarantee such a perfectly reasonable life would not turn out "dreadfully boring." (47:06) Put simply: Dostoevsky's Underground Man: suppose reason wins and every question gets a calculated answer. He cannot promise that such a perfectly reasonable life would not turn out "dreadfully boring."
• Lev Shestov. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, on Shestov's reading, really defends reason rather than critiquing it. The genuine critique of pure reason, he holds, is by Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground. (30:18) Put simply: Shestov: Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" really defends reason rather than criticizing it. The true critique of reason, he holds, is Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground.
• Emil Cioran. Cioran, late in life, as Shore recalls an interview: French civilization and its courtesy amount to a boundary accepted for reason's sake, whereas the Balkans have no such criterion; there one is simply excessive. (9:16) Put simply: Cioran, in a late interview Shore recalls: French civilization and its politeness are a limit people accept for reason's sake. The Balkans have no such standard; there, one is simply excessive.
• Shore's own view. A distinction Shore calls key and expects to keep returning: the Enlightenment asks how things are, what it is to be; the Romantics care about becoming, what we can become. (17:55) Put simply: Shore calls this a key distinction she will keep returning to: the Enlightenment asks how things are; the Romantics ask what we can become. Being versus becoming.
• Immanuel Kant. For Kant, acting morally means acting from duty, not from whatever one feels like doing; acts are judged by their intentions, never by consequences nobody can control. (31:51)

Lecture 4: Hegel and the Historicist Chronotope

• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In Hegel, calling something necessary and calling it good amount to the same judgment. The French Revolution was both: it had to come, so it was right. (3:13) Other readings: Terry Pinkard (Does History Make Sense?, 2017) defends Hegel's philosophy of history against the common reading of it as a theory of inevitable progress, grounding it in an account of human subjectivity. Where to read it: Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic §6; Philosophy of Right, Preface.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel makes history part of philosophy's own substance, reversing a tradition since the Greeks that sought timeless, universal truth and treated the changing and contingent as noise to purge. (12:04) Put simply: Hegel: since the ancient Greeks, philosophers had looked for truths that never change, and treated whatever changes or happens by chance as noise to get rid of. Hegel reverses this and makes history part of philosophy itself.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel shares the Enlightenment's ambition to make philosophy scientific but thinks it went about it wrongly: too skeptical, too shallow, better at dismantling faith than at offering depth in return. (11:04)
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Like the Romantics, Hegel cares less about what is than about what is becoming: nothing holds still, and everything is always on its way to being something else. (14:38)
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Small changes of degree can pile up until, at some threshold, they amount to a change of kind. Hegel's model is water: warmed bit by bit, then suddenly boiling. (16:53)
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Spirit ripens quietly and gradually toward a new form; then, like a child being born, the new world arrives all at once, "in one flash." (19:23) Put simply: Hegel: "Spirit", the shared life of humanity, matures slowly and quietly toward a new form. Then, like a child being born, the new world arrives all at once, "in one flash."
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Shore's preferred way into the Phenomenology: a Bildungsroman of consciousness as such, maturing through stages until, midway, it merges with Geist. (21:10) Put simply: Shore's preferred way to read Hegel's Phenomenology: as a coming-of-age story whose hero is consciousness itself, anyone's. It grows up in stages until, halfway through, it merges with "Geist," our shared collective life.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Consciousness climbs from one stage to the next by trying, in some highly abstract sense, to overcome alienation; the whole Phenomenology is that struggle. (22:20) Put simply: Hegel's Phenomenology: the mind climbs from stage to stage by trying to overcome alienation, the feeling of not being at home in the world. The whole book is that struggle, in a very abstract sense.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Geist is "the I that is a We": for Hegel meaning is relational, so a single act, like hitting a ball, counts for something only within the whole. (26:43) Put simply: Hegel's "Geist" is "the I that is a We": the shared life we are each part of. Meaning is relational. In Jay Bernstein's baseball image, hitting a ball counts as a home run only within the whole game. Where to read it: Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit §177.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. As Shore tells it, the Phenomenology's world history is a short European list: Greece, a lesser Rome, then nothing significant until the French Revolution and its deeper interpretation by German philosophers. (27:29) In the text: In the Phenomenology (1807; Miller translation), the chapter on Spirit runs from the ethical order and legal status through culture, faith and the Enlightenment to "Absolute Freedom and Terror" and then morality, without naming any period.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Understanding is retrospective: Hegel's owl of Minerva "spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." What anything meant becomes clear only afterward, never in advance. (28:14) Put simply: Hegel: we understand things only by looking back. His image: the owl of Minerva "spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." What anything meant becomes clear afterward, never in advance. Where to read it: Hegel, Philosophy of Right, Preface, closing paragraphs.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel rejects Kant's intention-centered morality as inadequate: acts usually have consequences far beyond what anyone meant, so their meaning can be judged only in hindsight. (29:14) Put simply: Hegel rejects Kant's view that an act is judged by the intention behind it. Acts usually have effects far beyond what anyone meant, so what they mean can be judged only looking back.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Dialectics is Hegel's name for what contradictions do when they meet: a position turns out unstable, its negation displaces it, and such clashes drive history forward in jolts. (32:56) Put simply: Hegel's "dialectics": when opposing positions clash, one turns out to be unstable and its opposite pushes it aside. Clashes like these drive history forward, in sudden jolts rather than smoothly.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Aufheben, Hegel's untranslatable verb for how one stage gives way to the next, means canceling something while also keeping it and raising it onto a higher plane. (35:40) Put simply: Hegel's German verb "aufheben" has no English equivalent. It describes how one stage gives way to the next: the old is canceled, but also kept, and lifted to a higher level.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Freedom, for Hegel, means recognizing necessity: since whatever happens had to happen, there is no room for a subjectively good choice, only for grasping why things are so. (40:12) Put simply: Hegel: being free means understanding that things had to happen as they did. Since everything happens as it must, there is no room for choosing what seems good to you, only for grasping why things are so. In the text: In the Philosophy of Right (§124), Hegel calls the right of subjective freedom "the pivot and center of the difference between antiquity and modern times"; "freedom is the insight into necessity" is Engels's summary of Hegel in Anti-Dühring. Other readings: Robert Pippin (Hegel's Practical Philosophy, 2008) reads Hegel's freedom as a relation: agents take their purposes as their own and act within institutions of mutual recognition, so the individual's own endorsement matters.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Alienation, in Hegel, is failing to see your own particular life as part of Geist, of the whole; its cure is coming to feel at one with the universe's telos. (40:49) Put simply: Hegel: alienation means failing to see your own life as part of the whole, which he calls "Geist". The cure is to feel at one with the goal (the "telos") the universe is moving toward.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. History's end, for Hegel, is a mystical point where all oppositions (freedom and necessity, is and ought, subject and object) dissolve into synthesis; nobody has ever witnessed it. (41:30) Put simply: Hegel: history ends at a mystical point where all opposites (freedom and necessity, what is and what ought to be, the mind and the world) merge into one. Nobody has ever seen this happen.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. On one reading, a master is master only through a slave's acknowledgment, yet only subjects can recognize, and he has made the slave a thing; hence his permanent dissatisfaction. (43:04) Put simply: One reading of Hegel's master and slave: a master is a master only if a slave acknowledges him. But only a person can truly acknowledge anyone, and he has made the slave a thing. So he is never satisfied.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. On one reading, through real labor, by reshaping the world with his own work, the slave makes himself into a subject; the one reduced to a thing acquires subjectivity. (43:49) Put simply: One reading of Hegel's master and slave: by working on the world and reshaping it, the slave makes himself a person with a self of his own. The one treated as a thing becomes a subject.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Nobody in the Phenomenology gets to be simply identical with themselves: identity is always mediated, handed to you through another's gaze, so no self stands on its own. (45:29) Put simply: Hegel's Phenomenology: nobody can be who they are all by themselves. Your identity always reaches you through someone else, through how another person sees you, so no self stands on its own.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel's slogan "the true is the whole" means everything is interdependent and intelligible only together; since a totality shows itself only from its end, meaning arrives in retrospect. (46:56) Put simply: Hegel's slogan "the true is the whole": everything depends on everything else and makes sense only together. A whole can be seen only from its end, so meaning comes only looking back. Where to read it: Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface §20.
• Isaiah Berlin. Berlin thinks Hegel extremely dangerous: his system, as Shore recalls him saying, is a very dark wood from which few return to report, and once inside you are meant to stop wanting things otherwise. (40:29)
• Isaiah Berlin. On Berlin's account of Russia's intellectual history, the fatal foreign import was Hegel rather than Marx: perhaps fine for Germans, but a little Hegel left the Russians drunk. (48:01)
• Angela Davis. Davis argues that, looked at philosophically, the master's supposed freedom and independence are a myth: slavery itself supplied his livelihood and wealth, so he depended on the slave. (44:52) Put simply: Angela Davis, reading Hegel's master and slave: the master's freedom and independence are a myth. Slavery itself supplied his livelihood and wealth, so he depended on the slave all along.
• Angela Davis. For Davis the master is never secure: he stands perpetually on the brink of turning into the slave, who holds real and concrete power to flip the relation. (44:34) Put simply: Angela Davis, reading Hegel's master and slave: the master is always on the verge of becoming the slave, because the slave holds real, concrete power to turn the relationship around.
• Jay Bernstein. Bernstein reads Hegel's master-slave dialectic as showing identity is never self-contained but always mediated by another's recognition; these dependencies are one of the things we find unbearable. (45:15) Put simply: Bernstein's reading of Hegel's master and slave: no one's identity is self-contained; it always comes through being acknowledged by someone else. Depending on others like this is one of the things we find unbearable.
• Czesław Miłosz. Miłosz has a name for what made Hegel's vision of wholeness so peculiarly seductive: "the Hegelian bite." (47:23)
• Alexander Herzen. In his memoirs Herzen describes Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as something you live through rather than read: an experience, not a book. (7:22)
• Shore's own view. What seduces people in Hegel, Shore judges, is wholeness itself: the promise that unity can finally be achieved and everything be seen as interwoven. (47:55)
• Shore's own view. One useful way to sort the course's thinkers, in Shore's view: those who build big systems and those who take systems apart. Hegel belongs squarely with the builders. (23:03)
• Hannah Arendt. For Arendt, Hegel's philosophy was Western thought's last attempt to reunite being and thought, subject and object; whether it housed reality or imprisoned it, nobody could say. (47:34) Put simply: Arendt: Hegel's philosophy was the West's last attempt to bring thought and reality, the mind and the world, back together. Nobody could say whether his system gave reality a home or locked it up.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel sets out to solve the old bridge problem, how to get from mind to world: he will join subject and object, though with a dash of mysticism. (11:43) Put simply: Hegel sets out to solve an old puzzle: how a mind shut inside its own head can reach the world outside. His answer joins mind and world together, with a touch of mysticism.

Lecture 5: Marxism

• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. With Hegel, History acquires a capital H: in the Hegelian sense it is a phenomenon of its own, with a dialectical forward motion. (12:57) Put simply: Hegel: History, with a capital H, becomes a force of its own, not just a record of what happened. It moves forward through clashes between opposites.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. History cannot be run backward: the Bastille, once stormed, stays stormed, and whatever actually happens is in some sense what ought to have happened. (8:19) Put simply: Hegel: history cannot be undone. Once the Bastille was stormed in the French Revolution, it stayed stormed. And whatever actually happens is, in some sense, what ought to have happened. Other readings: Terry Pinkard (Does History Make Sense?, 2017) defends Hegel's philosophy of history against the common reading of it as a theory of inevitable progress, grounding it in an account of human subjectivity. Where to read it: Hegel, Philosophy of Right, Preface; Encyclopedia Logic §6.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel's image for history is a "slaughter bench": the suffering piled up along the way is the price paid for progress toward a somewhat mystical end-point. (9:02) Where to read it: Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Introduction.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. History's telos is a reconciliation in which the great oppositions, being and thought, freedom and necessity, fact and value, subject and object, dissolve into a single whole. (10:02) Put simply: Hegel: history is heading for a final reconciliation in which the great opposites (thought and being, freedom and necessity, facts and values, mind and world) merge into a single whole.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. For Hegel the subjective is nearly a term of abuse: freedom means recognizing necessity, identifying with history's objective movement until you stop wanting it otherwise. (12:06) Put simply: Hegel has little patience for the personal, the "subjective." Freedom means seeing that things must happen as they do, and siding with history's course until you no longer wish it were different. In the text: In the Philosophy of Right (§124), Hegel calls the right of subjective freedom "the pivot and center of the difference between antiquity and modern times"; "freedom is the insight into necessity" is Engels's summary of Hegel in Anti-Dühring. Other readings: Robert Pippin (Hegel's Practical Philosophy, 2008) reads Hegel's freedom as a relation: agents take their purposes as their own and act within institutions of mutual recognition, so the individual's own endorsement matters.
• Friedrich Engels. Hegel's dialectic, in Engels's image, is standing upside down; the task is to take it "off its head" and plant it on its feet. (34:47) Put simply: Engels: Hegel's way of explaining history through clashing opposites, his "dialectic," is standing on its head. It needs to be turned the right way up and set on its feet.
• Karl Marx. Marx inverts Hegel, turning dialectics into dialectical materialism: history's driver is not Geist but socioeconomic forces, so philosophy must leave the metaphysical and ideal for the material and concrete. (33:55) Put simply: Marx turns Hegel upside down. History is driven not by "Spirit" but by social and economic forces, so philosophy must turn from abstract ideas to material, concrete life. This is "dialectical materialism". In the text: In the 1873 Afterword to Capital, Marx writes "My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite" and speaks of "the materialistic basis of my method".
• Karl Marx. What decisively shapes modern social behavior, for Marx, is industrialization: modernization in a technical and empirical sense rather than modernity as a broad condition. (24:37) Put simply: Marx: what most shapes how people behave in modern society is industrialization, the concrete technical change of factories and machines, rather than "modernity" as a broad condition of life.
• Karl Marx. Industrial society swaps nobles and peasants for two classes: a bourgeoisie defined by owning factories rather than inherited title, and a proletariat of urban workers employed in them. (27:20) Put simply: Marx: industry replaces nobles and peasants with two classes. The "bourgeoisie" own the factories, rather than inheriting titles; the "proletariat" are the city workers employed in them.
• Karl Marx. Factory work estranges workers from labor itself: hired by the hour, tending machines, performing one fragment of a process whose finished product is never theirs. (29:36) Put simply: Marx: factory work cuts workers off from their own labor. Paid by the hour, they tend machines and do one small step of a process, and the finished product is never theirs.
• Karl Marx. In the Manifesto's picture, capitalism's profit motive converts what ought to be relations between persons into relations between things, and human beings themselves into commodities. (42:38) Put simply: The Communist Manifesto: chasing profit, capitalism turns what should be relations between people into relations between things, and turns people themselves into goods for sale ("commodities").
• Karl Marx. For Marx, your place in the socioeconomic structure, the base, determines your thinking; consciousness, culture and art, the superstructure, derive from it. (46:02) Put simply: Marx: your place in the economy (the "base") determines how you think. Your ideas, culture and art (the "superstructure") grow out of it. Where to read it: Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859); Engels, letter to Joseph Bloch, 21–September 22, 1890.
• Karl Marx. Class consciousness, in Marx's near-technical sense, is the moment workers grasp both that the bourgeoisie exploits them and that nothing short of worldwide violent revolt will end it. (43:12) Put simply: Marx: "class consciousness" is the moment workers realize that the factory-owning class exploits them and that only a worldwide, violent uprising of workers will end it. In the text: In his speech at Amsterdam (September 8, 1872), Marx says that in some countries, such as America and England, "the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means"; for most of the Continent, he says, force must be the lever. Where to read it: Marx, speech at Amsterdam, September 8, 1872; The Communist Manifesto, Part IV.
• Karl Marx. After the revolution the proletariat must rule dictatorially for a transitional period, because the bourgeoisie will never surrender its property voluntarily. (43:40) Put simply: Marx: after the revolution, the workers must rule as a dictatorship for a while, because the factory-owning class will never give up its property willingly. Where to read it: Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, Part IV; letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852.
• Karl Marx. All history so far is class struggle, and each order carries the seeds of its own destruction: feudalism yielded to capitalism, whose bourgeoisie produces "its own grave diggers." (38:25) Put simply: Marx: all history so far has been a struggle between classes, and every social order breeds its own downfall. Feudalism gave way to capitalism, and the capitalist class produces "its own grave diggers."
• Karl Marx. In Hegelian fashion, the Manifesto makes no distinction between forecast and prescription: the proletariat's triumph is predicted, predestined, and right, all at once. (36:39) Put simply: Marx, like Hegel: the Communist Manifesto does not separate what will happen from what should happen. The workers' victory is predicted, fated and right, all at once.
• Karl Marx. For Marx, religion is a drug for the masses, dangled before the exploited so that a promised reward in the next world reconciles them to suffering in this one. (45:14) In the text: In the 1844 Introduction, Marx writes that religious suffering is "the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering", and calls religion "the sigh of the oppressed creature" and "the opium of the people".
• Karl Marx. The bourgeoisie, like the workers, are also self-alienated under capitalism; the difference is that they are content, since they are making money. (45:56) Put simply: Marx: under capitalism the factory owners are alienated from themselves too, just like the workers. The difference is that they do not mind, because they are making money. Where to read it: Marx and Engels, The Holy Family (1845), ch. IV.
• Shore's own view. Shore poses a Calvinist-style puzzle for classical Marxism: if the proletariat is predestined to win anyway, why act at all? That is the problem Lenin will take up. (49:31) Put simply: Shore's puzzle for classic Marxism: if the workers are destined to win anyway, why act at all? It echoes Calvinism: if God has already decided who is saved, why go to church? Lenin will take this up.
• Isaiah Berlin. What proved truly fatal for the twentieth century, on Berlin's thesis, was not the arrival of Marxism in the Russian Empire but the arrival of Hegelianism. (0:56)
• Isaiah Berlin. On Berlin's reading, Hegel admits only one evil: resisting the world process, reason incarnate. Those who wring their hands over history's victims are thus not merely blind but immoral. (15:44) Put simply: Berlin's reading of Hegel: the only evil is resisting the march of history, which Hegel sees as reason made flesh. So people who lament history's victims are not just blind but immoral.
• Tony Judt. Nothing in the twentieth century makes sense until students take the imaginative leap and grasp why Marxism seduced so many people, in so many places, for so long. (1:53) Put simply: Historian Tony Judt's advice to Shore: nothing in the twentieth century makes sense until students imagine their way into why Marxism attracted so many people, in so many places, for so long.
• Shore's own view. Shore's question about Marx is not whether he was right, which she pointedly does not claim, but what gave his picture of the world such a grip on people. (4:27)
• Karl Marx. In Capital's afterword Marx credits Hegel with first setting out how dialectic works, though mystified: stood right side up, it reveals "the rational kernel within the mystical shell." (35:02) Put simply: Marx, in Capital: Hegel was the first to set out how the dialectic, thinking through clashing opposites, works, but in a mystified form. Turned right side up, it reveals "the rational kernel within the mystical shell."

Lecture 6: Nietzsche and the Death of God

• Friedrich Nietzsche. Announcing "God is dead" is not atheism. It reports an event: humanity has crossed from a world God organized into one without him, and we ourselves did the killing. (43:30) Put simply: Nietzsche: saying "God is dead" is not saying there is no God. It reports that something has happened: we have moved from a world God gave order to into one without him, and we killed him. Where to read it: Nietzsche, The Gay Science §125.
• Friedrich Nietzsche. What dies with God is arguably not any being, physical or metaphysical, nor one religion's creed. The word names a belief that reality has order, purpose and wholeness. (44:11) Put simply: Nietzsche's "God" arguably is not a being of any kind, nor one religion's beliefs. The word stands for the belief that reality has order and purpose and makes sense as a whole.
• Friedrich Nietzsche. Sooner or later everyone concludes that the harmonious world where contradictions resolve, Hegel's end of history, is never coming. Unity cannot be found: life is nothing but difference. (45:04) Put simply: Nietzsche: sooner or later we all realize that a harmonious world where every conflict is resolved, the end of history Hegel promised, is never coming. There is no unity to be found; life is all difference.
• Friedrich Nietzsche. Nihilism is simply another name for the death of God: the crisis in which our supreme values become worthless and the principles that once structured reality no longer do. (45:46) Put simply: Nietzsche: "nihilism" is another name for the death of God. It is the crisis that comes when our highest values lose their worth and the principles that once ordered reality stop doing so.
• Friedrich Nietzsche. No replacement God can end the nihilist crisis, and every such attempt fails, because wanting an ordering principle is where the crisis began: the disorder has no real cure. (46:11) Put simply: Nietzsche: the crisis cannot be solved by putting a new God in the old one's place. Every such attempt fails, because wanting something to order everything is where the crisis began. There is no real cure. Other readings: Bernard Reginster (The Affirmation of Life, 2006) reads Nietzsche's philosophy as aimed at overcoming nihilism, through a revaluation of values that affirms life, suffering included.
• Friedrich Nietzsche. An excess of history sickens us: awareness of the past, and of its great figures, makes us feel small. Only the strong, with abundant "plastic power," can bear much history. (26:26) Put simply: Nietzsche: too much history makes us sick. Knowing the past and its great figures makes us feel small. Only the strong can bear a lot of history; he calls the strength they need "plastic power".
• Friedrich Nietzsche. Hegel's philosophy, by crowning the belated present as the goal of all history, deifies history and sets it, as "the sole sovereign power," in place of art and religion. (29:53) Put simply: Nietzsche on Hegel: by treating our own late age as the goal all history was heading for, Hegel turns history into a god. It becomes "the sole sovereign power", taking the place of art and religion.
• Friedrich Nietzsche. The revered virtues may owe their worth to being "insidiously related, tied to, and involved with" their wicked opposites, perhaps even sharing one essence with them: good and wicked, true and false, come together. (31:36) Put simply: Nietzsche: perhaps the virtues we revere get their worth from being secretly tied to their wicked opposites, maybe even being the same thing at bottom. Good and wicked, true and false, belong together.
• Friedrich Nietzsche. Suffering is not wholly negative and should be embraced, not merely endured, because whoever says yes to one joy says yes to every woe: "all things are entangled, ensnared, enamored." (32:55) Put simply: Nietzsche: suffering is not all bad. We should embrace it, not just put up with it, because saying yes to one joy means saying yes to every sorrow too: "all things are entangled, ensnared, enamored."
• Friedrich Nietzsche. Existence, honestly confronted, is dreadful; the question is whether it can be made bearable at all. The answer: "only as an aesthetic phenomenon," through grandiose art, is the world justifiable. (7:52) Put simply: Nietzsche: looked at honestly, existence is dreadful, and the question is whether it can be made bearable at all. His answer: only as art, through great creation, can the world be justified.
• Friedrich Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy, dedicated to Wagner, presents his music-dramas as continuing Greek tragedy, a tradition prized because it made people into artists of living. (18:41) Put simply: Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, dedicated to Wagner, presents Wagner's operas as heirs to ancient Greek tragedy. He prizes that tradition because it made people into artists of their own lives.
• Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's charge: Christianity is a slave morality. The weak, resenting their masters, brand the strong as bad, declare their own weakness virtue, and accept oppression for a promised reward hereafter. (36:05) In the text: In the Genealogy of Morals (1887), First Essay §§10–11, the man of ressentiment conceives "the evil enemy", while "bad" is the word of aristocratic origin.
• Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche holds that the egalitarianism of Christianity, a religion he calls nihilistic, also infects democracy, which he regards as rule by the mediocre, working against the vitality and heroism life requires. (36:48)
• Friedrich Nietzsche. Nobody yet knows what good and evil are, "unless it be he who creates": the categories we live by must be questioned, not trusted. (33:47) Put simply: Nietzsche: no one yet knows what good and evil are, "unless it be he who creates." So we must question the moral categories we live by, not trust them.
• Friedrich Nietzsche. Zarathustra teaches that humanity must be surpassed: a rope stretched above an abyss between beast and Übermensch, it must serve as a bridge. No Übermensch, Zarathustra included, has yet appeared. (38:14) Put simply: Nietzsche's Zarathustra: humans must be surpassed. Humanity is a rope over an abyss between beast and "Übermensch" (a future "overhuman"), and must serve as a bridge. No Übermensch has yet appeared, Zarathustra included.
• Friedrich Nietzsche. What eternal recurrence means is disputed. On one Kantian reading, you should live every moment as though it would return forever, acting only as you would wish to see repeated. (40:45) Put simply: Nobody agrees what Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" means. One reading, echoing Kant: live every moment as if it would come back forever, doing only what you would wish to see repeated. Where to read it: Nietzsche, The Gay Science §341.
• Richard Wagner. Opera should break with its French and Italian models and become distinctively German: grandiose, heavy with pathos and philosophical weight, drawn from medieval legend, and recovering ancient Greek drama. (15:19) Put simply: Wagner: opera should stop copying French and Italian models and become truly German: grand, full of strong feeling and philosophical weight, drawn from medieval legend, and reviving ancient Greek drama.
• Sigmund Freud. Freud's verdict: no one who has ever lived, or is likely to, understood himself as deeply as Nietzsche. (49:02)
• Bertrand Russell. Russell's quip: Nietzsche's view of women, like any man's, projects his feeling toward them, and that feeling is plainly fear: "nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him." (23:53) Put simply: Russell mocks Nietzsche's line about bringing a whip to women: like any man's, Nietzsche's view of women reflects his feelings toward them, plainly fear. "Nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him."
• Shore's own view. One way to situate Nietzsche, Shore's through line here: he is Hegel's alter ego, an anti-Hegel perceiving every antagonism and contradiction Hegel does, yet flatly refusing reconciliation, directionality or telos. (5:44) Put simply: Shore's way of placing Nietzsche: he is Hegel's mirror image. He sees every conflict and contradiction Hegel sees, but flatly refuses Hegel's promise that they resolve, or that history has a direction or goal.
• Shore's own view. One way Shore sorts thinkers: system-builders and dismantlers. Hegel builds; Nietzsche, who offers no solution or telos, takes everything apart, vividly and creatively, and in that sense anticipates deconstruction. (9:13) Put simply: Shore sorts thinkers into system-builders and dismantlers. Hegel builds. Nietzsche offers no solution or goal and takes everything apart, vividly and creatively, and in that sense looks ahead to later "deconstruction".
• Shore's own view. Both labels fit Nietzsche, late German romantic and early existentialist; Shore finds it helpful to see him as arriving late to romanticism and early to existentialism. (3:32)
• Shore's own view. For Shore, Nietzsche's announcement of God's death could never be retracted, like the Bastille's fall for Hegel; everyone since must reckon with it and its potential implication: everything is permitted. (50:08) Put simply: Shore: once Nietzsche said God is dead, it could not be unsaid, just as for Hegel the storming of the Bastille could not be undone. Everyone since must face it, and its possible implication: everything is permitted.
• Shore's own view. Shore sees mourning in Nietzsche: he dismantles every system and shows morality impossible, offers nothing to make up the loss, yet still grieves for God and for morality. (48:40)
• Friedrich Nietzsche. In some sense Nietzsche does not care whether a God actually exists; what counts is whether we believe in one and arrange our lives around that belief. (46:36)
• Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche blames Hegelian philosophy's huge, persisting influence for making every crisis of German culture in his century more dangerous; believing oneself a latecomer is "paralyzing and depressing." (30:04) Put simply: Nietzsche: Hegel's huge, lasting influence made every crisis in German culture in his century more dangerous. Believing you have arrived late, at the tail end of history, is "paralyzing and depressing."
• Friedrich Nietzsche. Anti-Hegelian as he is, Nietzsche's thinking has something dialectical about it: one Genealogy of Morals aphorism has great things "bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming." (31:29) Put simply: Nietzsche attacks Hegel, yet his own thinking has a Hegelian streak of things turning against themselves. In one aphorism, great things "bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming." Where to read it: Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay §27.
• Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is a fierce critic of the Western tradition and accepts none of its core beliefs: truth, morality, God, democracy, or the idea that virtue makes a person happy. (33:52)
• Richard Wagner. Wagner built a cult of opera as well as of himself: the opera house, once somewhere to gossip and drink, became a temple entered in reverent silence. (17:39)

Lecture 7: Henri Bergson and the Revolt against Positivism

• Herbert Spencer. The only knowledge worth the name comes from the sciences; no other source yields anything solid. (10:48) Put simply: Spencer: only science gives real knowledge. No other way of knowing yields anything we can rely on.
• Herbert Spencer. Humanity is perfectible because humans are rational: we keep arranging things better, move toward equilibrium, and in the end evil and immorality die out. (11:06) Put simply: Spencer: because people are rational, humanity can keep improving. We keep organizing things better, society settles into balance, and in the end evil and immorality disappear.
• Georg Cantor. The continuum hypothesis (1878): the integers make up one infinity, the gapless points of a line another, and no set has a size strictly between the two. (16:24) Put simply: Cantor's "continuum hypothesis" (1878): the whole numbers make up one infinity, the gapless points on a line make up another, and no collection has a size falling between the two.
• Henri Bergson. Spencer and the positivists go wrong by projecting the way they picture space onto time, chopping it into countable units like minutes and instants; time is qualitative, not quantitative. (12:40) Put simply: Bergson: Spencer and the positivists, who trust only scientific observation, treat time like space, chopping it into countable units such as minutes and instants. That is their mistake. Time is a matter of quality, not quantity.
• Henri Bergson. Real time is durée, duration: time as we actually experience it, a flow with no gaps that runs one way only and resists being divided into countable points. (14:39) Put simply: Bergson: real time is "durée" (duration), time as we actually live it. It flows without gaps, runs only one way, and cannot be split into countable points.
• Henri Bergson. Multiplicity comes in two kinds. A number is made of discrete, countable units; the states of consciousness instead permeate one another, forming a qualitative multiplicity that cannot be counted. (19:26) Put simply: Bergson: there are two kinds of "many". A number is made of separate units you can count. Our states of mind instead blend into one another, a "qualitative multiplicity" that cannot be counted.
• Henri Bergson. In consciousness, one state succeeding another means the two melt into an organic whole without gaps or edges, and the past keeps coexisting virtually with the present. (20:32) Put simply: Bergson: in the mind, each state melts into the next, forming one whole with no gaps or edges (Shore's picture: cheese slices melting together in a grilled cheese). The past keeps living on in the present.
• Henri Bergson. Free will is inseparable from qualitative time: because we live time as an undivided flow, we can act spontaneously, in ways no one could have fixed beforehand. (23:13) Put simply: Bergson: free will cannot be separated from time lived as one unbroken flow. Because we live time that way, we can act spontaneously, in ways no one could have settled in advance.
• Henri Bergson. Einstein's relativity theory measures time through instants, and that is the mistake: time must be flow, since only flowing time can accommodate contingency and free will. (25:48) Put simply: Bergson against Einstein: relativity measures time as a series of instants, and that is the mistake. Time must be a flow, because only flowing time leaves room for an open future and free will. In the text: In the preface to Duration and Simultaneity (1922), Bergson presents the book as asking how far his idea of duration is compatible with Einstein's views on time.
• Henri Bergson. Finalism (teleology) holds that life moves toward an end planned from the start; Bergson rejects it: more determinism means less contingency and free will, which he wants room for. (27:08) Put simply: Bergson rejects "finalism", the idea that life heads toward a goal fixed from the start, as an apple seed already "aims" at its apple. The more is fixed in advance, the less room for chance and free will.
• Henri Bergson. Mechanism treats nature as a machine: isolate each part, understand it, reassemble. Applied to life, that reaches only the parts and yields a thin, derivative picture of the whole. (28:07) Put simply: Bergson rejects "mechanism", which treats nature like a machine such as a bicycle: understand each part, then reassemble. Applied to life, it grasps only the parts and gives a thin, second-hand picture of the whole.
• Henri Bergson. Evolution has no single course. Like an exploding shell rather than a cannonball, life moves by splitting apart, scattering along divergent lines, with many possibilities open at once. (30:33) Put simply: Bergson: evolution does not follow one path. Life is less like a cannonball flying to one spot than a shell bursting into fragments, scattering in many directions with many possibilities open at once.
• Henri Bergson. Living things carry an élan vital, a life force that works on inert matter: it is what makes us want to do things, to act, to create. (31:36) Put simply: Bergson: living things carry an "élan vital", a life force that acts on lifeless matter. It is what makes us want to do things, to act, to create.
• Henri Bergson. For Bergson life is choice, continual choice: a newborn child is already a whole, indivisible self, yet which of countless directions that self will take cannot be predicted, and should not be. (32:23)
• Henri Bergson. You cannot spatialize only the past. Lay elapsed time out like space and the future is spread out too, complete behind a screen; contingency vanishes and our acts arrive ready-made. (34:24) Put simply: Bergson: if you lay out past time like space, you must lay out the future that way too, as if already complete behind a screen. Then nothing is left open, and our actions arrive ready-made.
• Henri Bergson. Intellect is built for inert matter. It measures, categorizes and breaks things into separable pieces from outside; at ease only with the discontinuous and dead, it cannot grasp life. (39:12) Put simply: Bergson: the intellect is made for lifeless matter. It measures, sorts and breaks things into separate pieces from the outside. At ease only with what is cut up and dead, it cannot grasp life.
• Henri Bergson. Intuition, instinct in sophisticated form, is molded to life itself: it grasps reality from inside, whole and at one stroke, not in represented pieces, and it belongs to time. (40:57) Put simply: Bergson: intuition, a refined form of instinct, is shaped to fit life itself. It grasps reality from the inside, whole and all at once rather than piece by piece, and it belongs to time.
• Henri Bergson. Intuition completes intellect rather than rejecting it, and consciousness needs both. Rely on mechanistic intellect alone, though, and you get an impoverished world drained of creativity. (42:16) Put simply: Bergson: intuition completes the intellect rather than rejecting it, and the mind needs both. But rely on the machine-like intellect alone and you get a poorer world, drained of creativity.
• Henri Bergson. Art, whatever its medium, has a single aim: to sweep away the useful symbols and accepted generalities that screen reality from us, and confront us with reality directly. (44:14) Put simply: Bergson: all art, in any medium, has one aim: to clear away the practical labels and accepted generalities that hide reality from us, and bring us face to face with reality itself.
• Henri Bergson. What is funny is what lacks self-awareness: the aspect of someone that resembles a thing, rigid, mechanical, moving without life. Laughter is society's corrective, jolting that automatism loose. (43:35) Put simply: Bergson on comedy: we laugh at the side of a person that acts like a thing, rigid and mechanical, unaware of itself. Laughter is society's way of correcting this, jolting people out of autopilot.
• Hannah Arendt. Natality: every new being who enters the world injects radical contingency into it, able to head in many directions along courses no one can foresee. (49:55) Put simply: Arendt's "natality": every newborn brings real openness into the world. A new person can head in many directions, along paths no one can foresee.
• Shore's own view. Shore reads Bergson, Freud and Husserl, born within a decade of one another, as three rebels against positivism, each turning on that Enlightenment inheritance in his own way. (5:04) Put simply: Shore treats Bergson, Freud and Husserl, born within a decade of each other, as three rebels against "positivism", the Enlightenment idea that only scientific observation gives real knowledge. Each rebelled in his own way.
• Shore's own view. It seems to Shore that Bergson never quite proves the link between free will and time's continuity; he suggests it, and even his clearest passage posits more than it proves. (10:20)
• Shore's own view. Shore hears something Hegelian in Bergson: the same longing for wholeness, where fragmentation counts as alienation and whatever is seamless ranks above whatever still shows its seams. (21:50) Put simply: Shore hears an echo of Hegel in Bergson: the same longing for wholeness, where being in pieces counts as "alienation", not being at home in the world, and anything seamless ranks above what still shows its seams.
• Shore's own view. The thinkers of this era long to reach the real, life at its core, what we feel estranged from; for Shore each in some ways reworks the subject-object bridge problem. (44:38) Put simply: Shore: thinkers of this period long to reach reality itself, life at its core, which they feel cut off from. Each in some way reworks the old puzzle of how a mind can reach the world outside it.
• Shore's own view. No general agreement exists on what Nietzsche meant by eternal recurrence; Shore suggests reading it, potentially, as eternal continuity: a river with no clean break between past and present. (0:19) Put simply: Shore: no one agrees on what Nietzsche meant by "eternal recurrence". She suggests one possible reading: time as an endless flow, like a river, with no clean break between past and present.
• Herbert Spencer. In ethics Spencer was a utilitarian: one should act so as to bring most good to most people, deciding matters on practical grounds. (10:55)
• Herbert Spencer. Spencer's account of evolution: living things change biologically because they adapt directly to the pressures of their surroundings. (11:06)
• Shore's own view. Intellectual history, Shore observes, is full of Oedipal revolts, not necessarily against a biological father but against the tradition that formed the rebel, like Bergson's against Spencer's positivism. (11:42) Put simply: Shore: intellectual history is full of rebellions against a father figure, not necessarily a real father but the tradition that formed the rebel. Bergson turning on Spencer's positivism is one example.

Lecture 8: Leninism, the Rushing of History

• Karl Marx. For Marx history can only move forward, through stages, toward communism; what he leaves open is the timetable, how long each stage lasts. (2:50) In the text: In his letter to Vera Zasulich of March 8, 1881, Marx writes that the "historical inevitability" of capitalist development is "expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe".
• Karl Marx. Communism, for Marx, is what history's laws must produce, not a wish: hence his contempt for utopian socialists like Fourier and Saint-Simon, who merely hope for a kinder world. (14:11)
• Karl Marx. Consciousness derives from one's objective place in the socioeconomic structure (being precedes consciousness, as Shore renders Marx and Engels), so for Marx workers will naturally become class conscious. (15:16) Put simply: Marx: how you think follows from where you stand in the economy ("being precedes consciousness", as Shore renders it). So workers will come, on their own, to see how the whole system fits together, not just that they are exploited. Where to read it: Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Part I; The Communist Manifesto, Part I.
• Vladimir Il'ich Lenin. Leninism is a method for speeding history up, not steering it elsewhere: workers are slow to reach class consciousness unaided, so it must be carried to them from outside. (18:14) Put simply: Lenin: history's destination is fixed, but it can be sped up. Workers are slow to grasp their situation as a class on their own, so that understanding must be brought to them from outside. Other readings: Lars Lih (Lenin Rediscovered, 2006) reads What Is to Be Done? as an expression of the orthodoxy of Karl Kautsky's German Social Democracy, resting on confidence in workers' revolutionary inclinations.
• Vladimir Il'ich Lenin. Left to its own efforts, Lenin argues, the working class develops "only trade union consciousness": better pay, shorter hours, cleaner workplaces, never a grasp of the whole system. (17:01)
• Vladimir Il'ich Lenin. Those who actually grasp Marx and Hegel are bourgeois intellectuals, tainted by class origin; Lenin's fix is a vanguard of them, professional revolutionaries carrying class consciousness to the workers. (21:46) Put simply: Lenin's problem: the people who actually understand Marx and Hegel are middle-class intellectuals, tainted by their background. His fix: a "vanguard" of them, full-time revolutionaries who carry that understanding to the workers. Other readings: Lars Lih (Lenin Rediscovered, 2006) reads What Is to Be Done? as an expression of the orthodoxy of Karl Kautsky's German Social Democracy, resting on confidence in workers' revolutionary inclinations.
• Vladimir Il'ich Lenin. Under Lenin, Party membership means giving it your whole life: readiness to die, devotion bordering on worship, and the secrecy and conspiracy that the threat of prison or Siberia demands. (24:23)
• Vladimir Il'ich Lenin. Classical Marxism invites the Calvinist's question: if the outcome is fixed anyway, why act? Lenin's answer gives intellectuals a role: not to wait, but to hurry history along. (20:34) Put simply: Marxism raises a question Calvinists, who believe salvation is decided in advance, also face: if the outcome is fixed anyway, why act? Lenin's answer gives intellectuals a role: not to wait, but to hurry history along.
• Vladimir Il'ich Lenin. The Bolsheviks who seized power in October 1917 formed a tiny minority acting not for Russia's few actual workers but for a proletariat that rushed industrialization would later create. (46:01) Put simply: Lenin's Bolsheviks, who seized power in October 1917, were a tiny minority. They acted not for Russia's few actual workers but for the working class that rushed industrialization would later create.
• Vladimir Il'ich Lenin. Lenin thought the 1918 separate peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk hardly mattered: workers everywhere were about to rise, within days at most, and sweep away every bourgeois government. (46:51) In the text: In his January 1918 Theses on a separate peace, Lenin writes that the socialist revolution in Europe will come, but that basing policy on its arriving within six months would be "nothing but a blind gamble".
• Rosa Luxemburg. Lenin's ultra-centralism, Luxemburg writes, bears "the sterile spirit of the overseer": his concern is less a fruitful party than a controlled one, narrowing and binding the movement, not developing it. (31:11)
• Rosa Luxemburg. Against Lenin, Luxemburg holds that any elite eventually turns conservative; genuine revolutionary energy lives in the proletariat, which must be trusted to reach consciousness by itself. (30:00)
• Rosa Luxemburg. History's logic runs ahead of those living it: "the unconscious comes before the conscious." Against Lenin, Luxemburg argues that history's stages must be respected and that party leaders turn conservative. (31:31) Put simply: Luxemburg, against Lenin: history moves by its own logic before people grasp it ("the unconscious comes before the conscious"). So its stages must be allowed to run their course, and party leaders turn conservative. Where to read it: Luxemburg, "Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy" (1904), Part I.
• Rosa Luxemburg. Lenin's centralism smells of Jacobinism, the centralizing zeal that produced the Terror of 1793-94, and it drives a wedge between party leaders and the workers they represent. (30:14) Put simply: Luxemburg: Lenin's centralized party resembles the Jacobins, the centralizers behind the French Revolution's Terror of 1793-94. It drives a wedge between party leaders and the workers they represent.
• Georg Lukács. Marxism, for Lukács, stands or falls on totality: revolution comes only from a standpoint that sees the social whole, and trade-unionism plainly fails that test. (32:46) Put simply: Lukács: Marxism depends on seeing society as one connected whole, its "totality". Revolution comes only from that view, and trade unions, which fight for better pay and hours, plainly lack it.
• Georg Lukács. The Party understands the workers' true class consciousness, perhaps before they do; what proletarians empirically happen to think is another matter, and confusing the two is "opportunism." (33:18) Put simply: Lukács: the Party knows the workers' true understanding of their place as a class, perhaps before they do. What workers actually happen to think is another matter, and confusing the two is "opportunism."
• Georg Lukács. Much as he admires Luxemburg, Lukács thinks she underplays the Party, which embodies class consciousness, unites theory with practice, and supplies the iron discipline a revolution needs. (33:42)
• Leon Trotsky. Trotsky's verdict on the Mensheviks who would not follow the Bolsheviks: bankrupt, their part played out, they belong in "the dust bin of history." (47:49) Put simply: Trotsky, to the Mensheviks (Marxists who wanted to let history play out and would not follow the Bolsheviks): you are bankrupt, your role is played out, you belong in "the dust bin of history."
• Slavoj Žižek. Žižek admires Lenin for his nerve: stepping into a situation nobody understands and simply declaring that now is the time to act. (45:36)
• Shore's own view. Shore's judgment: as the French Revolution shadowed the nineteenth century, the Bolshevik Revolution shadows the twentieth, making it arguably the century's seminal event, whether or not a good one. (7:20)
• Shore's own view. Shore's judgment: the Soviet Union was history's most far-reaching social-engineering experiment, aimed at remaking human beings, and its catastrophe shows how an excess of faith in human perfectibility can end in torture chambers. (49:13)
• Shore's own view. A lesson in contingency: had anything stopped Lenin's sealed train reaching Petrograd in April 1917, Shore thinks, there is arguably no Bolshevik Revolution and a wholly different twentieth century. (49:47) Put simply: Shore: history can turn on chance. Had anything stopped Lenin's sealed train reaching Petrograd in April 1917, she thinks there would arguably have been no Bolshevik Revolution and a wholly different twentieth century.
• Alexander Rabinowitch (historian). Shore cites the historian Alexander Rabinowitch: Lenin's wager that workers worldwide were about to rise, a wager that failed, was the twentieth century's single biggest mistake. (47:17) In the text: In a 2007 Indiana University news release on The Bolsheviks in Power, Rabinowitch is quoted calling Lenin's expectation that October would spark revolution across Europe "one of the biggest misjudgments of the 20th century."

Lecture 9: Freudian Psychoanalysis

• Sigmund Freud. Mental life is treated more as a thing in itself: once an imagined event can make someone ill, the psyche is no mere by-product of biology or chemistry. (15:19) Put simply: Freud: if something merely imagined can make a person ill, the mind must be treated more as real in its own right, not as a mere by-product of biology or chemistry.
• Sigmund Freud. In his first theory of hysteria, the illness traces back to repressed trauma from childhood, usually sexual; the buried memory resurfaces disguised as a neurotic symptom. (16:52) Put simply: Freud's first theory of "hysteria": the illness comes from a childhood trauma, usually sexual, pushed out of awareness. The buried memory comes back in disguise, as a nervous symptom.
• Sigmund Freud. What matters in the mind happens below awareness: Freud holds that "mental processes are essentially unconscious," with conscious ones only scattered fragments of the whole. (22:57)
• Sigmund Freud. For Freud, sexual life begins in infancy, though sexual here means far more than genital intercourse: desire in an expansive sense. (26:09)
• Sigmund Freud. For Freud, neurosis and psychosis lie on one continuum of repression, differing in degree; Shore draws the consequence that everyone is mentally ill, since nobody lacks repressed trauma. (19:15) Put simply: Freud: milder disorders ("neurosis") and severe ones ("psychosis") differ only in degree, both coming from repression. Shore draws the conclusion that everyone is mentally ill, since nobody lacks repressed trauma. In the text: In "Neurosis and Psychosis" (1924; Riviere translation), Freud writes that "Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id", and psychosis of a like disturbance between the ego and the outer world.
• Sigmund Freud. Nearly every child goes through an Oedipal phase: love shifts from breast to mother, the father becomes a rival, and a flickering wish for his death is quickly buried. (28:42) Put simply: Freud: nearly every child goes through an "Oedipal" phase. The child's love moves from the breast to the mother, the father becomes a rival, and a fleeting wish for his death is quickly pushed out of mind.
• Sigmund Freud. Freud's self is a structure whose parts only make sense together: two vertical layers, unconscious beneath conscious, cut across by three horizontal parts, id, ego and superego. (30:55) Put simply: Freud pictures the self as parts that only make sense together: an unconscious layer beneath a conscious one, crossed by three parts, the "id" (desire), the "ego" (the I) and the "superego" (conscience).
• Sigmund Freud. The id is desire itself, unconscious, divided into two hardwired drives Freud posits like geometric axioms rather than proves: Eros, toward love and pleasure; Thanatos, toward aggression and death. (32:50) Put simply: Freud: the "id" is desire itself, and unconscious. It has two inborn drives that he assumes rather than proves: Eros, toward love and pleasure, and Thanatos, toward aggression and death. In the text: In The Ego and the Id (1923; Riviere translation), ch. IV, Freud writes of "two classes of instincts, one of which, Eros or the sexual instincts," and calls the other the death instinct.
• Sigmund Freud. The superego is conscience rather than consciousness: an inner voice that constantly tells you you are bad, a source of guilt and also society internalized. (33:57) Put simply: Freud: the "superego" is conscience, not awareness. It is the inner voice always telling you that you are bad, a source of guilt, and society's rules taken inside you.
• Sigmund Freud. The ego's job is to negotiate, every moment, between an id that wants and a superego that forbids; since they barely admit compromise, misery is built into the self. (34:37) Put simply: Freud: the "ego" must negotiate every moment between the id, which wants, and the superego, which forbids. Since the two barely allow compromise, misery is built into the self.
• Sigmund Freud. Psychic energy behaves like matter: it can be shifted or sublimated but never discarded, so repressed desires return in another guise and blocked aggression turns on the self. (36:21) Put simply: Freud: mental energy behaves like matter. It can be moved or redirected but never thrown away, so pushed-down desires come back in another form, and blocked aggression turns against oneself.
• Sigmund Freud. The cure is nothing but talk: the analysand speaks uncensored, the analyst coaxes fragments of the unconscious out through the cracks, and symptoms become manageable rather than magically fixed. (22:51) Put simply: Freud's cure is only talk: the patient speaks freely, without self-censoring, and the analyst draws bits of the unconscious out through the cracks. Symptoms become manageable, not magically cured.
• Sigmund Freud. For Freud, belief in God is infantile: once the growing child sees his father is neither immortal nor all-powerful, he transfers his longing for an omnipotent protector onto a deity. (40:14)
• Sigmund Freud. Civilization is bought with repression of both drives: to live together people must curb sex and aggression alike, which is why society and individual fulfillment pull against each other. (42:17) Put simply: Freud: civilization is paid for by holding back both our basic drives. To live together, people must curb sex and aggression alike, which is why society and personal fulfillment pull against each other.
• Sigmund Freud. Human aggression is a standing threat to any society, so living together means constantly suppressing it; the hostility we cannot aim at others gets turned back on ourselves. (43:03) Put simply: Freud: human aggression is a constant threat to any society, so living together means always holding it down. The hostility we cannot aim at others gets turned back on ourselves.
• Sigmund Freud. Society trades happiness, not just Hobbes's liberty, for security: the pleasure principle, what the id craves, cannot be squared with the reality principle people need in order to coexist. (44:32) Put simply: Freud: Hobbes said society trades freedom for security; Freud says it trades happiness. What our desires crave (the "pleasure principle") cannot be squared with what living together requires (the "reality principle").
• Sigmund Freud. Against the Marxists, who expect aggressive instincts to fade once conditions change, Freud insists aggression is hardwired and older than private property, so no social rearrangement removes it. (47:30) Where to read it: Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, ch. V.
• Sigmund Freud. We can never fully know ourselves: what is most basic in us sits in the unconscious, so the self stays opaque to itself and permanently at odds with itself. (48:02) Put simply: Freud: we can never fully know ourselves. What is most basic in us lies in the unconscious, so the self stays hidden from itself and always at odds with itself.
• Paul Robinson. Picture the unconscious as a dark psychic closet: whatever the conscious mind cannot bear gets shoved in, the pile grows for a lifetime, and nothing is ever thrown out. (30:08) Put simply: Paul Robinson pictures Freud's unconscious as a dark closet: whatever the conscious mind cannot bear gets shoved in, the pile grows for a lifetime, and nothing is ever thrown out.
• Yurko Prokhasko. Psychoanalysis theorizes life once God is dead: having thrown him out, we hunt for windows to climb back in, torn between craving authority and wanting to undermine it. (49:00) Put simply: Yurko Prokhasko, a psychoanalyst and friend of Shore's: psychoanalysis is a theory of life after we reject God. Having thrown him out, we look for windows to crawl back in, torn between craving authority and wanting to undermine it.
• Hannah Arendt. Shore recalls Arendt remarking that had Freud not spent his days among German-speaking Habsburg Jews in Vienna reading Goethe and Shakespeare, the Oedipus complex might never have reached the rest of us. (35:54)
• Maximilien Robespierre. Revolutionaries build the new order with "hands still withered by the cross of despotism": formed by the old regime, its makers can never be pure. (3:37) Put simply: Robespierre: revolutionaries build the new order with "hands still withered by the cross of despotism". Shaped by the old regime, the people building the new one can never be pure.
• Yevgeny Zamyatin. A line in Zamyatin's dystopia We runs "We comes from God, I comes from the devil": the I is to be overcome and swallowed by the collective. (8:25)
• Shore's own view. Shore reads the Bolshevik project as Enlightenment perfectibility taken literally: engineer new human beings whose consciousness merges so completely with History that no separate subjectivity remains. (6:11) Put simply: Shore: the Bolsheviks took literally the Enlightenment belief that people can be perfected. They tried to engineer new humans whose minds merged so fully with History's march that no separate self remained.
• Shore's own view. Where the Soviet take on Hegel's I and we privileges the we, Freud flips the order: he begins with the single I, split into conscious and unconscious, reaching society afterward. (9:15) Put simply: Shore's contrast: the Soviet reading of Hegel puts the group ("we") before the individual ("I"). Freud reverses this. He starts from the single self, split into conscious and unconscious, and reaches society afterward.
• Shore's own view. Freud is in many ways Marx's opposite pole yet asks a very similar question: both are theorists of modernity, trying to explain why modern life leaves people so miserable. (12:15) Put simply: Shore: Freud is in many ways Marx's opposite, yet he asks much the same question. Both try to explain why modern life leaves people so miserable.
• Shore's own view. On Shore's analogy, sexuality does for Freud what property does for Marx, and guilt does what power will do for Foucault: pervasive, dispersed, latent in every relationship. (47:18) Put simply: Shore's comparison: sexuality is to Freud what property is to Marx. And guilt is to Freud what power will be to Foucault: present everywhere, spread out, hidden in every relationship.
• Sigmund Freud. For Freud we are formed very young: childhood, reaching back to birth itself, is the formative time, and it is necessarily traumatic. (26:09)
• Sigmund Freud. Civilization, Freud writes, is largely "constantly created anew": every individual entering society must in turn give up instinctual satisfaction for the community's sake. (45:07) Put simply: Freud: civilization is rebuilt in every generation, because each new person joining society must give up some satisfaction of their drives for the good of the community.
• Sigmund Freud. Joining the Enlightenment debate, Freud grants that the state of nature is genuinely free and liberating, but that freedom comes with a great deal of violence and aggression. (42:58) Put simply: Freud: life before organized society (the "state of nature") really is free and liberating, but that freedom comes with a great deal of violence and aggression.
• Shore's own view. What stays metaphysical in Hegel, the "I that is a We," the Soviets tried to realize as literally as they could: any subjectivity diverging from the collective must be purged. (7:27) Put simply: Shore: Hegel's "I that is a We," the self merged with the community, stays abstract in his philosophy. The Soviets tried to make it literally real: any inner life differing from the collective had to be purged.
• Shore's own view. Shore's closing contrast: unlike Marxism, psychoanalysis offers no exit; it may ease some symptoms, but no reordering of society can promise a happy ending. (49:54)

Lecture 10: Modernism and the Avant-Garde

• Shore's own view. On Shore's admittedly simplified schema, modernism answers modernity's uncertainty in two waves: a Freudian plunge into the self, then an avant-garde that vaults past it, almost a Hegelian Aufheben. (3:21) Put simply: Shore, simplifying on purpose: modern art answered the age's uncertainty in two waves. First a Freud-like dive into the inner self, then an avant-garde leap past the self, almost a Hegelian "Aufheben": overcoming something while carrying it forward.
• Charles Baudelaire. Art has no duty to depict only goodness and beauty; the obscene, the ugly, the erotic and the wicked belong in it too: owning one's perspective means admitting its darkness. (4:57) Put simply: Baudelaire: art need not show only the good and beautiful; the ugly, obscene, erotic and wicked belong in it too. Shore ties this to owning your own way of seeing, which means admitting its dark side.
• Pericles Lewis. First-wave modernism, on Lewis's account, is a crisis of representation: art stops assuming it must mirror the world objectively and asks whether to render it as felt from within. (5:48) Put simply: Pericles Lewis, a Yale colleague of Shore's, calls early modernism a "crisis of representation": art stops assuming it must mirror the world objectively and asks whether to show it as it feels from inside.
• Shore's own view. First-wave modernism, Shore would say, carries forward Romantic motifs like Sehnsucht and the irrational naked soul, yet without Romanticism's wholesale celebration of passion. (9:20) Put simply: Shore's view: early modernist art kept some Romantic themes, like longing for something that can never be reached and a naked soul full of irrational passions. But it stopped celebrating passion the way the Romantics did.
• Franz Kafka. Kafka felt estranged from each of his several identities, German-speaking, Czechoslovak, Jewish, and from himself: his diary admits "hardly anything in common with myself." (11:52)
• Franz Kafka. Gregor Samsa's waking as a "monstrous vermin" in The Metamorphosis forces the question of whether any stable self exists, or identity is only a mask with nothing underneath to grip. (13:37)
• Franz Kafka. Through a Gregor who can no longer earn his living, The Metamorphosis enters something of a dialogue with Marxism, asking whether a person's identity and worth depend on being productive. (14:48) Put simply: In Kafka's story The Metamorphosis, Gregor turns into a bug and can no longer go to work and earn a living. Shore sees a dialogue with Marx: does a person's identity and worth depend on being productive?
• Franz Kafka. Where Marx's worker is alienated structurally, by how labor is organized, Kafka's alienation is less structural than psychological: the anguished, powerless outsider who ends up utterly alone. (15:14) Put simply: Marx and Kafka both describe alienation, feeling cut off. For Marx it comes from how work is organized. For Kafka it is more a matter of inner feeling: the anguished, powerless outsider who ends up completely alone.
• Shore's own view. The small circle of Prague expressionists around Brod, Werfel and Kafka, German-speaking Jews in a Habsburg city, were above all prophets of marginality and alienation, Kafka most poignantly of all. (11:20) Put simply: Shore: the few German-speaking Jewish writers around Brod, Werfel and Kafka in Prague, then a city of the Habsburg Empire, wrote above all about living on the margins and not belonging. Kafka did so most movingly.
• Shore's own view. Around 1914 the inward plunge into radical subjectivity reverses into a flight out of subjectivity, bound not for where art began but somewhere else entirely. (17:18) Put simply: Shore: around 1914, art's dive into the inner self turned around into an escape from the self. That escape did not lead back to where art had started, but somewhere completely new.
• Ferdinand de Saussure. Language is form rather than substance: a combination of sounds means something only inside a particular linguistic system, so meaning is a matter of relations, not of things. (18:55) Put simply: Saussure: language is a pattern, not a stuff. A combination of sounds means something only inside a particular language, so meaning comes from how words relate to one another, not from the things they name.
• Ferdinand de Saussure. Nothing natural or God-given ties a signifier to its signified: the word dog refers to dogs only by differing from cat and hog, and by sheer convention. (20:22) Put simply: Saussure: nothing in nature or from God ties a word (the "signifier") to what it means (the "signified"). "Dog" means dog only because it differs from "cat" and "hog", and because speakers have settled on it.
• Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti's 1913 manifesto calls for words set free: strip away syntax, punctuation, grammar and spelling rules, play with typeface, so images and analogies pour out unhampered by constraint. (23:15)
• Guillaume Apollinaire. Arranging words on the page into pictures and shapes, through experiments with layout and typeface, dissolves the line separating the verbal from the visual arts. (24:39) Put simply: Apollinaire: by arranging words on the page into pictures and shapes, and playing with layout and typeface, poetry wipes out the line between writing and visual art.
• Velimir Khlebnikov. The word as such, slovo kak takovoe, goes beyond loosening grammar: cut the word from its referent altogether and it becomes a thing, a toy, free to be played with. (25:18) Put simply: Khlebnikov's "word as such" goes further than breaking grammar rules. Cut a word off from the thing it names, and the word becomes a thing in its own right, a toy free to be played with.
• Aleksei Kruchenykh. Divorce the word from what it stands for and form is all that remains; at the very least, the old ranking of content above form gets turned upside down. (26:14) Put simply: Kruchenykh: once a word is cut off from what it stands for, only its form is left. At the very least, the old belief that content matters more than form is turned upside down.
• Viktor Shklovsky. Literary language is special in announcing itself as language: it pulls attention toward the signifier, laying bare its devices, rather than acting as an invisible camera trained on the signified. (27:25) Put simply: Shklovsky: the language of literature is special because it draws attention to itself as language and shows how it works. It points you to the words themselves, rather than acting as an invisible camera on the thing described.
• Viktor Shklovsky. Habit leaves us sleepwalking, recognizing things without seeing them; ostranenie, art's estranging device, shocks perception awake, "to make a stone feel stony." (29:27) Put simply: Shklovsky: habit makes us sleepwalk, recognizing things without really seeing them. Art wakes us up by making the familiar strange, his "ostranenie" or estrangement, "to make a stone feel stony."
• Viktor Shklovsky. Art has never owed allegiance to any nation: it "was always free of life," its color never matching the flag flying over the city's fortress. (39:49) Put simply: Shklovsky: art has never belonged to any nation. In his words it "was always free of life," and its colors never matched the flag flying over the city's fortress.
• Vladimir Mayakovsky. The Russian futurists' 1912 manifesto would throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and others off the "steamship of modernity"; Shore glosses this as sweeping the past away to usher in the future. (33:21)
• Vladimir Mayakovsky. Shore reads Mayakovsky's 1930 suicide note, "the love boat crashed against the everyday," as the moment the avant-garde's leap proved existentially unbearable. (48:47) Put simply: Shore's reading: Mayakovsky's 1930 suicide note, "the love boat crashed against the everyday," marks the moment the avant-garde's leap into a world where anything was possible became impossible to live with.
• Tristan Tzara. Dada is rebellion without a program, freedom pursued for its own sake and pointed at nothing beyond itself; as Tzara put it, "the most acceptable system is in principle none." (44:41)
• Katerina Clark. Dada is best understood, Shore thinks, in Clark's phrase, as contingency reified: the feeling that nothing is fixed and anything might happen next, turned into a thing in itself. (44:01) Put simply: Shore thinks Katerina Clark put it best: Dada takes the feeling that nothing is fixed and anything could happen next, and turns that feeling into a thing of its own, "contingency reified."
• André Breton. Surrealism swings somewhat back toward Freud: psychic automatism, a free association of the mind released from every aesthetic or moral consideration. (45:00) Put simply: Surrealism swings partly back toward Freud. Its method is "psychic automatism": letting the mind run by free association, with no concern for beauty or morals.
• Shore's own view. The avant-garde recasts the representation question: art is no mirror of life but a hammer for building it, a shift from representing to creating that eventually leaves no ground underfoot. (37:05) Put simply: Shore: the avant-garde changed the question of what art is for. Art is not a mirror held up to life but a hammer for building it. Moving from showing to creating eventually left nothing solid underfoot.
• Shore's own view. On Shore's reading, the avant-garde took Nietzsche literally: if God's loss was to be compensated at all, his death had to be embraced without reservation, and whatever was toppling given a push. (34:56) Put simply: Shore's reading: the avant-garde took Nietzsche's "God is dead" literally. If anything could make up for losing God, his death had to be embraced completely, and whatever was already falling should be pushed.
• Shore's own view. The avant-garde's early war on the bourgeoisie was far more Rousseau's quarrel than Marx's: the target was shallow, showy conformism, and any real sense of exploitation came only slowly. (33:33) Put simply: Shore: the early avant-garde's attacks on the middle class were closer to Rousseau than to Marx. They mocked its shallow, showy conformity. A real sense that it exploited workers came only slowly.
• Shore's own view. Avant-garde internationalism was not merely circumstantial: once Versailles replaced the multilingual empires with passport-checking nation-states, crossing borders became a deliberate, aggressive act rather than the innocent cosmopolitanism of before. (38:00) Put simply: Shore: the avant-garde's internationalism was deliberate. After Versailles broke the old many-language empires into nation-states with passports, crossing borders became a pointed, aggressive act, unlike the earlier, innocent sense of being at home anywhere.
• Shore's own view. The avant-garde's trajectory ended in politics: Marinetti and the Italian futurists went right, to Mussolini's fascists; most others, the Russians above all, went left, to the Bolshevik revolution. (45:30) Put simply: Shore: in the end the avant-garde turned to politics. Marinetti and the Italian futurists went right, joining Mussolini's fascists. Most others, the Russians above all, went left, joining the Bolshevik revolution.
• Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Italian futurism, more than its Russian cousin, was bound up with machines, science, speed, physical vitality and aggression; Marinetti went so far as to find war beautiful. (34:40)
• Roman Jakobson. Looking back years later in On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets, Jakobson judged Mayakovsky a man wholly unsuited to life. (49:45)
• Ferdinand de Saussure. Every state a language passes through has, in Saussure's phrase, an "ever fortuitous nature": languages arise through arbitrary contingencies, not by anyone's design, Esperanto being a partial exception. (19:40) Put simply: Saussure: chance shapes a language at every stage. Nobody designed languages; they arose through countless accidents. Esperanto, an invented language, is a partial exception.

Lecture 11: Phenomenology

• Shore's own view. Despite his dull bourgeois domesticity, Husserl is the avant-garde's alter ego: he attacks the same problem, groundlessness, from the opposite flank, sharing their maximalism and the earlier modernists' radical subjectivity. (5:48) Put simply: Shore: despite his dull, respectable home life, Husserl is the avant-garde's opposite twin. He fought their fear that nothing is solid underfoot from the other side, sharing their all-or-nothing ambition and the early modernists' focus on the inner self.
• Shore's own view. Husserl's revolt is the trickiest to grasp, largely because he stays so near what he rejects (positivism, psychologism, even Kant): in some sense, Freud's narcissism of minor differences. (13:08) Put simply: Shore: Husserl's revolt is hardest to grasp because he stays so close to what he rejects, even Kant. In a sense it is Freud's "narcissism of minor differences": the smaller the gap, the more people obsess over it.
• Shore's own view. Freud and Husserl are two sides of one coin: assimilated Habsburg Jews born three years apart, both Brentano's students and anti-positivist theorists of radical subjectivity, yet with opposite selves. (16:00) Put simply: Shore: Freud and Husserl are two sides of one coin. Both were assimilated Habsburg Jews born three years apart, both studied with Brentano, both rebelled against fact-only science by putting the inner self first. Yet their selves are opposites.
• Shore's own view. The charge that Enlightenment rationality leaves people emotionally and existentially starved recurs throughout modern thought; positivism's leap into pure objectivity simply provoked it again, this time answered with radical subjectivity. (15:12) Put simply: Shore: the complaint that Enlightenment reason leaves people cold and starved of meaning keeps returning. Positivism's leap to pure objectivity, trusting only observed facts, revived it, and this time the answer was to put inner experience first.
• Edmund Husserl. Modern philosophy's basic trouble is that it has no ground to stand on. The remedy is Descartes' experiment: discard everything you think you know and ask what survives as certain. (9:55) Put simply: Husserl: modern philosophy's basic problem is that it has nothing solid to build on. The fix is Descartes' experiment: throw out everything you think you know and ask what you can still be certain of.
• Edmund Husserl. Kant's willingness to set aside the thing-in-itself as unreachable amounts to fatalism, a kind of surrender; the real thing can be reached, with absolute truth and full clarity. (28:39) Put simply: Husserl: Kant set aside things as they really are, apart from our minds, as out of reach. That is fatalism, a kind of surrender. The real thing can be reached, with absolute truth and full clarity.
• Edmund Husserl. Treating consciousness the way natural science treats its objects almost inevitably turns it into a material thing, and that reification, as the 1910 manifesto argues, leads straight into absurdity. (13:42) Put simply: Husserl, in his 1910 manifesto: studying the mind the way science studies objects almost always turns it into a material thing. Treating consciousness as a thing, he says, leads straight to absurdity.
• Edmund Husserl. Psychologism, the view that logic, truth and evidence are only empirical facts about how minds happen to operate, is unsatisfactory too; it must be rejected along with positivism. (17:10) Put simply: Husserl also rejects "psychologism", the idea that logic and truth are only facts about how our minds happen to work. It must go, along with positivism, the view that only observed facts count.
• Edmund Husserl. Phenomenology sets out to escape solipsism, the picture of a mind sealed inside itself with only its own contents for certainty; consciousness can reach its objects and claim objective truth. (18:38) Put simply: Husserl's phenomenology tries to escape "solipsism," the picture of a mind shut inside itself, sure of nothing but its own thoughts. He holds that consciousness can reach real objects and claim objective truth.
• Edmund Husserl. Phenomenology has two starting points: the world, the single all-encompassing horizon where objects appear, and the I, a worldly thing unlike any other because the world is given to it. (31:40) Put simply: Husserl starts from two things. The world: one single, all-embracing backdrop against which every object appears. And the I: a thing in the world, but unlike any other, because it is the one to whom the world appears.
• Edmund Husserl. Strip away the contingent particulars distinguishing empirical egos and a transcendental ego remains: the deepest, most essential I, yet universal and identical in everyone, as H2O underlies all water. (34:29) Put simply: Husserl: strip away everything that makes each actual person different, and a "transcendental ego" is left: the deepest core of the self, yet the same in everyone. To use the lecture's analogy, it is like H2O in all water. In the text: In the Fifth Cartesian Meditation (§56), Husserl describes other egos as "monads, existing for themselves precisely as I exist for myself", a plurality he calls transcendental intersubjectivity.
• Edmund Husserl. Intentionality is the structure of consciousness: always reaching for its object, like a magnet on a string. Neither subject nor object comes first; their relation does, bridged by intentionality. (40:21) Put simply: Husserl: consciousness is always reaching out toward some object, like a magnet on a string in Shore's image. He calls this "intentionality." Neither mind nor thing comes first; the link between them does, and that link is the bridge.
• Edmund Husserl. Where Kant left the thing-in-itself beyond reach, Husserl substitutes "the things themselves": the real things are simply objects as they show up to us, given in experience. (41:58) Put simply: Kant said we can never reach things as they are in themselves. Husserl replies with "the things themselves": the real things just are objects as they show up in our experience.
• Edmund Husserl. The phenomenological reduction jolts us from the natural attitude, where the world's existence is taken for granted, into reflection on consciousness; the reality question is bracketed, suspended rather than doubted. (30:57) Put simply: Husserl: normally we just assume the world exists, his "natural attitude". The "phenomenological reduction" jolts us out of that into examining our own experience. We set aside, or "bracket", whether things are real, without doubting it.
• Edmund Husserl. Where Freud locates the essential self in what is most hidden, the transcendental ego is pure light: nothing in it stays concealed, and knowing is a matter of clear seeing. (45:42) Put simply: Freud thinks the most important part of the self is what is most hidden. Husserl's pure self is the opposite: nothing in it stays hidden, and knowing means seeing clearly.
• Edmund Husserl. Bracketing reached into Husserl's own life: weeks after the First World War killed his younger son, he wrote to a friend that the war was now bracketed. (48:53) Put simply: Husserl's habit of "bracketing," setting a question aside, reached into his own life. Weeks after his younger son was killed in the First World War, he wrote to a friend that the war was now bracketed.
• Edmund Husserl. Europe slid into barbarism because people stopped believing in reason and in the possibility of absolute truth; convince them that such truth is reachable and the world could be saved. (49:50) Put simply: Husserl: Europe fell into barbarism because people lost faith in reason and in the possibility of absolute truth. Convince them such truth can be reached, and the world could be saved.
• Emmanuel Levinas. Science's pursuit of pure objectivity, which expels everything subjective for the object's glory, struck the young Levinas as "a leap into nothingness"; phenomenology's appeal was that it reversed this attitude. (14:33) Put simply: Levinas, as a young man: science's drive for pure objectivity, which throws out everything personal for the sake of the object, felt like "a leap into nothingness." Phenomenology appealed because it reversed that attitude.
• Boris Groys. The fatal step toward Stalinist art, Groys argues, was not imposed communist ideology but the avant-garde's own move from representing the world to transforming it, which licensed unprecedented social engineering. (1:36) Put simply: Groys: the fatal step toward Stalinist art was not communist ideas forced on artists. It was the avant-garde's own shift from showing the world to remaking it, which opened the way to reshaping society on an unprecedented scale.
• Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy). Husserl's trouble, Witkacy wrote to Ingarden, is that he lacks a body: in Shore's retelling, just eyes, glasses and a beard floating in space, never present in the real world as a person. (24:10)
• Edmund Husserl. Phenomenology, both in Husserl's conception and largely in its later development, is more method than theory: an account of how we ought to go about understanding the world. (30:57) Put simply: Husserl's phenomenology, and mostly what grew from it, is less a set of claims than a method: an account of how we ought to go about understanding the world.

Lecture 12: Heideggerean Existentialism

• Martin Heidegger. Modern philosophy since Descartes asks how we know before asking what being is. That order is backward: the Greeks understood that the question of being comes first. (14:55) Put simply: Heidegger: since Descartes, philosophy has asked "how do we know?" before "what does it mean to be?" That order is backward. The ancient Greeks understood that the question of being comes first.
• Martin Heidegger. Descartes starts from thinking and Husserl from thinking about an object; Heidegger starts from existing. That I am comes before anything I think: being precedes knowing. (20:46)
• Martin Heidegger. German separates Sein, the uncountable verbal noun for existing, from ein Seiendes, a countable entity. English uses being for both, so the book's opening distinction is often lost. (16:32) Put simply: Heidegger's German has two words where English has one: "Sein," the bare fact of existing, and "ein Seiendes," a being, a thing you can count. English says "being" for both, so his opening distinction often gets lost.
• Martin Heidegger. Among entities, only Dasein can ask what Being means, because its own existence matters to it. In Heidegger's words, it is "ontically distinctive in that it is ontological." (18:24) Put simply: Heidegger: of all the things that exist, only we, his "Dasein", can ask what it means to be, because our own existence matters to us. Being able to ask about being is what sets us apart. Where to read it: Heidegger, Being and Time §4 (H. 12).
• Martin Heidegger. Heidegger drops the words subject, consciousness and human being in favor of Dasein, literally being-there. Whatever remains of the subject is an entity that is somewhere. (18:35) Put simply: Heidegger stops saying "subject", "consciousness" or "human being". He says "Dasein", literally "being there". What is left of the self is something that is always somewhere.
• Martin Heidegger. Asking what Being is presupposes some rough prior sense of it; without that, the question could not even be framed. The questioner is already inside: the hermeneutic circle. (19:52) Put simply: Heidegger: to ask what being is, we must already have a rough sense of what "to be" means, or we could not even ask. The asker is already inside the question. This is the "hermeneutic circle".
• Martin Heidegger. Dasein is no detached observer. It is always already being-in-the-world: doing things, caring about things, alongside other beings, with no outside position to withdraw to. (24:14) Put simply: Heidegger: we are never detached observers. We are always already "in the world": doing things, caring about things, living among others, with nowhere outside to step back to.
• Martin Heidegger. The subject-object split assumes an Archimedean vantage outside the world. There is none: Dasein is inside, so the bridge problem is not solved but dissolved, since no gap exists. (25:27) Put simply: Heidegger: the old puzzle of how a mind reaches the world assumes we could stand outside the world and look at it. We cannot. We are already inside, so there is no gap to bridge and the puzzle disappears.
• Martin Heidegger. Our first and usual relation to things is using them, not looking at them: the hammer is ready-to-hand. Only when it breaks does it turn into present-at-hand, something to contemplate. (27:26) Put simply: Heidegger: we mostly deal with things by using them, not by looking at them. A working hammer is simply "ready-to-hand". Only when it breaks do we stare at it as an object, "present-at-hand".
• Martin Heidegger. Dasein's condition is thrownness (Geworfenheit): it lands, with a kind of violence, in a time and place it never chose, with no before and no outside from which to consent. (31:33) Put simply: Heidegger: we are "thrown" into existence. Each of us lands, with a kind of violence, in a time and place we never chose, with no earlier moment or outside spot from which we could have agreed to it.
• Martin Heidegger. Inauthenticity is conformity: handing the burden of deciding to convention and doing what one does. The agent there is das Man, the impersonal one, which is everyone and no one. (32:39) Put simply: Heidegger: living inauthentically means conforming, letting convention make your decisions and doing "what one does". The one in charge is "das Man", the faceless "they" that is everyone and no one. Other readings: Hubert Dreyfus (Being-in-the-World, 1991) reads das Man as the shared background of norms and practices that makes things intelligible at all, a positive structure of Dasein that also pulls toward conformity. Where to read it: Heidegger, Being and Time §27 (H. 126–130).
• Martin Heidegger. The they-self (das-Man-Selbst) has fallen into the world: lost in gossip, trivial curiosity and vague indecision, its being taken over by others, it "must first find itself." (35:03) Put simply: Heidegger: the self that just follows "the they" has "fallen" into the world. Lost in gossip, trivial curiosity and vague indecision, it lets others take over its life. It "must first find itself."
• Martin Heidegger. Surrendering to the they estranges Dasein from its authentic self, yet Heidegger argues the estrangement is comforting: going along with the crowd is easier than being oneself. (37:19) Put simply: Heidegger: giving in to the crowd cuts us off from our real selves. But that loss is comforting, because going along with everyone is easier than being yourself.
• Martin Heidegger. Authenticity means facing, eyes open, that one is finite and always moving toward one's own death (Sein-zum-Tode). Inauthenticity is at bottom a way of fleeing that awareness. (38:17) Put simply: Heidegger: living authentically means facing, eyes open, that you are finite and always moving toward your own death, his "being-toward-death". Living inauthentically is at bottom a way of running from that knowledge.
• Martin Heidegger. Fear always takes an object: snakes, spiders, planes. Angst takes none; what it faces is precisely nothing, the nothingness every existence is inevitably headed toward. (41:22) Put simply: Heidegger: fear is always of something, like snakes or planes. "Angst", a deep dread, has no object. What it faces is nothing at all: the nothingness every life is heading toward. Where to read it: Heidegger, Being and Time §40 (H. 186–189).
• Martin Heidegger. Angst brings Unheimlichkeit, uncanniness, literally not being at home. The world cannot be a secure home for an existence that, squarely faced, is ungrounded by its own finitude. (42:50) Put simply: Heidegger: dread brings "Unheimlichkeit", usually translated "uncanniness" but literally "not being at home". Our lives will end and so have no firm footing; faced honestly, that means the world can never be a secure home.
• Martin Heidegger. Death singles each of us out, because everyone dies alone. It is the one moment that is truly mine (Jemeinigkeit), belonging to no one else. (44:30) In the text: In Being and Time (1927; Macquarrie and Robinson translation), mineness belongs to all of Dasein's being: §9 says "The Being of any such entity is in each case mine"; §47 says death "is in every case mine".
• Martin Heidegger. Confronting one's own death alone, shaken by Angst, can produce resoluteness: taking hold of oneself and owning one's choices. That is authenticity's slightly empowering side, which Heidegger wants felt. (44:18) Put simply: Heidegger: facing your own death alone, shaken by dread, can make you "resolute": you take hold of your life and own your choices. That is authenticity's slightly empowering side, and he wants readers to feel it.
• Martin Heidegger. Husserl's transcendental ego is wholly transparent to itself; Dasein never is. Forever up to something, evading something, tempted toward inauthenticity, it stays partly hidden from itself, closer to Freud. (46:01) Put simply: Husserl's pure self can see all of itself clearly. Heidegger's human being never can. Always busy with something, dodging something, tempted to follow the crowd, it stays partly hidden from itself. In this Heidegger is closer to Freud.
• Shore's own view. Husserl, in Shore's judgment, wants to dance at both weddings at once, as the Polish proverb forbids: subjectivity's full depth and objectivity's firm certainty, surrendering neither. (3:55) Put simply: Shore's judgment: Husserl tries to "dance at two weddings at once," as a Polish proverb says you cannot. He wants all the depth of the inner self and all the firm certainty of objective knowledge, giving up neither.
• Shore's own view. Heidegger insists Being and Time passes no moral judgment; Shore thinks that disavowal disingenuous, since any reader can see he finds living authentically far more impressive than living inauthentically. (33:28)
• Shore's own view. Shore leaves open whether Dasein radically thickens the subject, darker than Descartes', Kant's or Husserl's, or ends it: if subject and object are no longer apart, is there a subject? (48:08) Put simply: Shore leaves it open. Does Heidegger's "Dasein" make the self far richer and darker than in Descartes, Kant or Husserl? Or does it end the self? If mind and world are no longer apart, is there still a subject?
• Shore's own view. Heidegger, Shore observes, offers readers little incentive to choose authenticity: the clarity it brings is plainly miserable, close to unbearable. (43:57)

Lecture 13: French Existentialism

• Shore's own view. Where Heidegger's Dasein could be read as either radicalizing or dissolving the subject, Sartre opts for the radically subjectivist reading: for him Dasein is, if anything, more of a subject. (25:16) Put simply: Shore: Heidegger's "Dasein" (human existence) can be read as making the self more central or as dissolving it. Sartre takes the first reading as far as it goes: for him Dasein is, if anything, more of a self.
• Jean-Paul Sartre. A cow or a plant merely is; a human being also exists, meaning it has to make itself through its own choices. Its essence lies in that existing. (26:39) Put simply: Sartre: a cow or a plant simply is. A human being also "exists": it has to make itself through its own choices, and what it is lies in that making.
• Jean-Paul Sartre. Without God, there is no "intelligible heaven" in which values might be found; human beings must create them themselves. (28:22) Put simply: Sartre: without God, there is no higher realm where values are waiting to be found. People have to create their values themselves.
• Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre shifts Heidegger's thrownness toward abandonment: we find ourselves dumped in a world without God, forlorn, with nothing either inside us or outside us to rely on. (29:13) Put simply: Heidegger said we are "thrown" into a world we did not choose. Sartre stresses being abandoned there: no God, nobody to turn to, nothing inside or outside us to rely on.
• Jean-Paul Sartre. Existence precedes essence: no human nature is given in advance. We arrive in the world first and only afterward make ourselves into something definite. (31:07) Put simply: Sartre's slogan "existence precedes essence": there is no human nature set in advance. We first find ourselves in the world, and only afterward make ourselves into someone in particular.
• Jean-Paul Sartre. Nothingness, for Sartre, is freedom rather than something to dread: what is not yet determined is precisely the open room in which we make ourselves. (33:22) Put simply: Sartre: where Heidegger's "nothingness" points to death, Sartre's means what is not yet settled about us. That is not meant to depress but to free: it is the open space in which we make ourselves.
• Shore's own view. Shore hears in Sartre's equation of nothingness with freedom less Heidegger's being-toward-death than the nihilism of the 1910s avant-garde: if anything is possible, nothing has a ground. (33:29) Put simply: Shore: when Sartre equates nothingness with freedom, she hears less Heidegger's focus on death than the mood of the 1910s avant-garde artists: if anything is possible, nothing stands on solid ground.
• Jean-Paul Sartre. The in-itself (en-soi) is everything already fixed about us: our past deeds, who we have so far been, inert and beyond revision, close to the facticity of our situation. (35:01) Put simply: Sartre's "in-itself" is the part of us already fixed: what we have done and who we have been so far. It is inert and cannot be revised, much like the given facts of our situation.
• Jean-Paul Sartre. The for-itself (pour-soi) is consciousness as an activity, not a thing: a fluid negating of what one has been, reaching past the given into the future to do something different. (35:49) Put simply: Sartre's "for-itself" is consciousness as an activity, not a thing: it keeps pushing away from what we have been and reaching into the future to do something different.
• Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartrean freedom, like Heidegger's, operates inside a situation already given: I may walk, run or jump, but not fly. Within those limits, though, possibilities never run out. (38:25)
• Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre's moral imperative is about choosing, not about what gets chosen: no code says which option is right, and declining to decide is itself a decision one answers for. (39:11)
• Jean-Paul Sartre. A person has no reality apart from action: we amount only to what we do, are nothing until we make ourselves, and remain subjects rather than objects. (39:25) Put simply: Sartre: a person has no reality apart from what they do. We are nothing until we make ourselves through action, and we remain agents who act, never mere things.
• Jean-Paul Sartre. Bad faith (mauvaise foi) is not the everyday English sense of hidden motives but self-deception: a lie in which the same person is both deceiver and deceived. (40:24) Put simply: Sartre's "bad faith" does not mean, as in everyday English, acting from hidden motives. It means self-deception: lying to yourself, so that you are both the liar and the one lied to.
• Jean-Paul Sartre. In its commonest form, bad faith shelters behind determinism: pleading fate, natural law or an unchangeable character denies one's freedom and recasts oneself as a mere object. (40:55) Put simply: Sartre: the commonest way of lying to ourselves is to plead that we had no choice, blaming fate, the laws of nature or "the way I am". That denies our freedom and treats us as mere things.
• Jean-Paul Sartre. A rarer, second form of bad faith overlooks facticity: fantasizing that wishing makes anything possible, one makes a decision that is no real decision at all. (41:49) Put simply: Sartre: a rarer way of lying to ourselves ignores the hard facts of our situation. Like a child demanding to fly to grandma's, we pretend wishing makes anything possible, so our "decision" is no real decision.
• Jean-Paul Sartre. Against Freud, consciousness cannot be cleanly cut into an opaque unconscious and a transparent conscious half; the whole of it is translucent, neither one nor the other. (43:50) Put simply: Sartre, against Freud: the mind cannot be neatly split into a hidden unconscious part and a fully visible conscious part. All of it is "translucent": neither hidden from itself nor fully clear to itself.
• Jean-Paul Sartre. What makes bad faith possible is the translucency of consciousness: because it is neither opaque nor transparent, a person can get away with lying to themselves. (44:17) Put simply: Sartre: because the mind is neither wholly hidden from itself nor wholly clear to itself, we can get away with lying to ourselves. In the text: In Being and Nothingness (1943; Barnes translation), Part One, ch. 2, Sartre presents "the total translucency of consciousness" as a difficulty for lying to oneself, since the liar and the one lied to are the same person.
• Jean-Paul Sartre. Anguish is the price of responsibility: whoever commits to anything settles not only who they will be but, in effect, legislates for all humanity. Absolute freedom means absolute responsibility. (44:48) Put simply: Sartre: whenever we commit to something, we choose not only who we will be but, in effect, set a rule for all humanity. Total freedom means total responsibility, and that weight is our anguish.
• Shore's own view. Sartre's anguish is a little different from Heidegger's angst: less connected with finitude and mortality, more with responsibility, the burden of choosing for all mankind. (44:48) Put simply: Shore: Heidegger's dread ("angst") is tied to mortality and the fact that we will die. Sartre's anguish is tied instead to responsibility: the burden of choosing for all mankind.
• Jean-Paul Sartre. Some situations admit no innocent choice: the wartime young man deciding whether to leave his sick mother for the Resistance has no clean option, yet must still decide. (46:36) Put simply: Sartre: sometimes every option does harm. His example is a young man in wartime choosing between staying with his sick mother and joining the Resistance. No choice is clean, yet he must still choose. In the text: In Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), Sartre's pupil must choose between staying with his mother, who lives only for him, and "going to England to join the Free French Forces."
• Shore's own view. Interwar polarization is the backdrop to Sartre's preoccupation with choice: with liberalism collapsed and movements claiming every corner of life, nothing moderate seemed left and nobody could sit it out. (11:52) Put simply: Shore: the years between the World Wars are the backdrop to Sartre's obsession with choice. Liberal democracy had collapsed, mass movements aimed to control every part of life, no middle ground seemed left, and nobody could stand aside.
• Shore's own view. The heart of French existentialism, in Shore's one-line summary, is decisionism: like Boynton's hippopotamus, the individual has to decide for herself whether she stays or goes. (3:10) Put simply: Shore's one-line summary of French existentialism: each person must decide for herself, which she calls "decisionism." Her picture is a children's book by Sandra Boynton, whose hippopotamus must choose whether to join the other animals or not.
• Jean-Paul Sartre. In his early Transcendence of the Ego (1937), Sartre rejects Husserl's phenomenological reduction on broadly Heideggerian grounds: always already in a world, we cannot bracket our belief in it. (19:10) Put simply: In an early work, Sartre rejects Husserl's method of setting aside our belief that the world is real. Following Heidegger, he says we cannot: we are always already caught up in the world. In the text: In The Transcendence of the Ego (1936–37; Williams and Kirkpatrick translation), Sartre applies Husserl's reduction to the ego itself: "the transcendent I must fall before the stroke of phenomenological reduction".
• Jean-Paul Sartre. Literature should be engagée: writers and philosophers belong in the thick of things, taking political positions, rather than hiding in a forest hut or behind university walls. (23:27) Put simply: Sartre: literature should be "engaged". Writers and philosophers should take political positions and get involved, not hide away in a hut in the forest or behind university walls.
• Witold Gombrowicz. Gombrowicz doubts Sartre's airy claim that someone who chooses pain as a good could feel torture as bliss, hearing in it a French bourgeoisie long spared real suffering. (45:31)
• Witold Gombrowicz. Gombrowicz presses the point: on Sartre's terms, someone who chooses frivolity over authenticity or falsehood over truth faces no hell and no penalty, except lacking a true existence. (46:05)
• Tony Judt. What Judt calls the Great Absence is Sartre's postwar refusal, or failure, to speak out about Stalinism's crimes, the East European show trials among them. (49:43)
• Shore's own view. Sartre brooded for years on the despair left by God's death, yet died in 1980 regarded as France's, perhaps Europe's, conscience: in Shore's phrase, the nearest thing postwar Europe had to a God. (50:29)
• Jean-Paul Sartre. Following Husserl, Sartre keeps the human subject at the center: all meaning has its source there. (27:56) Put simply: Sartre, following Husserl: the human being, the one who experiences and thinks, stays at the center, as the source of all meaning.

Lecture 14: The Frankfurt School

• Max Horkheimer. Hegel cannot be abandoned: without him, existence shows itself as nothingness and death, a "medley of arbitrariness," and that is too high a price to pay. (23:33) Put simply: Horkheimer: we cannot drop Hegel. Without him, life shows itself as nothingness and death, a meaningless "medley of arbitrariness", and that is too high a price to pay.
• Max Horkheimer. Dialectics survives without its destination: the contradictions inside things still push history forward, but nothing promises that history ends or resolves. (24:00) Put simply: Horkheimer keeps Hegel's "dialectics," the idea that tensions inside things drive history forward, but drops the promised destination: nothing guarantees that history ends or resolves.
• Max Horkheimer. Heidegger's notion of care applies to social inquiry: we are already inside the world and it matters to us, so no neutral, detached, scientific stance toward it exists. (24:27) Put simply: Horkheimer borrows Heidegger's idea of "care": we are already inside the world and it matters to us. So nobody can study society from a neutral, detached, scientific distance. In the text: In his 1931 inaugural lecture at the Institute for Social Research, Horkheimer describes Being and Time as a work that "radically rejects any aspiration to being a social philosophy."
• Max Horkheimer. Critical Theory, as Shore sketches the school, opposes theories promising reconciliation of subject and object, closed systems, and claims to absolute truth. (35:13) Put simply: Shore's sketch of Critical Theory, the Frankfurt School's approach: it rejects theories promising that mind and world will finally fit together, closed systems that explain everything, and claims to absolute truth.
• Max Horkheimer. Thinking is not enough; a theory has to be acted out. Praxis means doing something that a philosophy inspires and that realizes it in the world. (36:43) Put simply: Horkheimer: thinking is not enough; a theory has to be acted on. "Praxis" means doing something that a philosophy inspires and that carries it out in the world.
• Theodor Adorno. Enlightenment set out to free people from fear and make them sovereign; by its own dialectic it ends in catastrophe, an earth that "radiates disaster triumphant." (44:58) Put simply: Adorno: the Enlightenment set out to free people from fear and put them in charge. Yet through its own inner logic it ends in catastrophe: a fully enlightened earth "radiates disaster triumphant."
• Theodor Adorno. Enlightenment reason knows nature only as something to manipulate, and the price of the power it gains is alienation from the very nature it dominates. (45:41) Put simply: Adorno: Enlightenment reason sees nature only as something to control and use. The price of that power is that we become estranged from the very nature we dominate.
• Theodor Adorno. Once nature is an object, people become objects too: mastery over nature slides into mastery over other humans, then over oneself, producing the herd a fascist leader commands. (47:44) Put simply: Adorno: once nature is treated as a mere object, people are treated that way too. Mastering nature slides into mastering other people, then ourselves, producing the herd a fascist leader commands.
• Theodor Adorno. Keeping an "I" intact is a strain felt at every stage, and "the temptation to lose it has always been there" alongside the stubborn will to maintain it. (48:50) Put simply: Adorno: holding on to a self, an "I", has always been a strain. Alongside the stubborn will to keep it, there has always been the temptation to let it go.
• Theodor Adorno. Enlightenment's totalitarian streak is built in, not a detour: a project designed to emancipate individuals arrives at a manipulated collective whose unity is each individual's negation. (48:14) Put simply: Adorno: the Enlightenment's totalitarian streak is built in, not a wrong turn. A project meant to free individuals ends in a manipulated mass whose unity depends on canceling out each individual.
• Theodor Adorno. Adorno's famous verdict, "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," did not hold: the poetry of Paul Celan eventually made him recant. (50:34)
• Walter Benjamin. Watching fascism rise in Germany and Stalinism emerge in the Soviet Union, Benjamin sets the two against each other: fascism makes politics aesthetic; communism replies by making art political. (28:56) Put simply: Benjamin, watching fascism rise in Germany and Stalinism emerge in the Soviet Union, contrasts the two: fascism treats politics as a kind of art; communism replies by turning art into politics.
• Wilhelm Reich. For Reich, sexual liberation cannot be achieved inside a capitalist order; the two are incompatible. (32:00)
• Wilhelm Reich. Every neurosis has its root in sexual repression: Freud's claim pushed to the extreme, with libido treated as a literal physical energy, orgone, that can be stored in a box. (32:14) Put simply: Reich takes Freud to the extreme: every neurosis comes from sexual repression. He even treats sexual energy as a real physical substance, "orgone", that can be stored in a box.
• Herbert Marcuse. Marxism only makes sense when it keeps hold of its Hegelian roots. (33:07) Put simply: Marcuse: Marxism only makes sense if it stays tied to Hegel, the philosopher whose ideas it grew from.
• Herbert Marcuse. Where Freud saw repression as the unavoidable cost of living together, Marcuse sees an exit: the repression that matters is capitalism's, and its hold on the body might be undermined. (40:22) Put simply: Marcuse: Freud thought repression was the unavoidable price of living together. Marcuse sees a way out: the repression that matters comes from capitalism, and its grip on our bodies might be loosened.
• Herbert Marcuse. Eros and Thanatos compete for the same space, and the death drive can only occupy ground eros has vacated; so work rearranged to re-eroticize the body shrinks aggression. (40:37) Put simply: Marcuse: the erotic drive ("Eros") and the death drive ("Thanatos") compete for the same ground, and aggression only fills space eroticism has left. So reorganizing work to re-eroticize the body would reduce aggression.
• Herbert Marcuse. With Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in mind, Marcuse warns that unless capitalist sexual repression is reversed, annihilation will be our ultimate fate: the death drive will finish off the species. (41:21) Put simply: Marcuse, writing in 1955 with Auschwitz and Hiroshima in mind: unless capitalism's sexual repression is reversed, annihilation is our fate, because the death drive, our urge to destroy, will finish off the species.
• Paul Celan. Though a Jewish survivor who lost both parents to the Holocaust and had several languages to choose from, Celan writes his poetry in German, and does unprecedented things with it. (51:04)
• Max Weber. Enlightenment reason, understood as utilitarian calculation, has shut modern people inside an iron cage: the reading of Weber that Horkheimer and Adorno pick up. (44:11) Put simply: Horkheimer and Adorno take up a reading of Weber: Enlightenment reason, shrunk to calculating what is useful, has locked modern people inside an "iron cage".
• Shore's own view. History turns on small accidents, Shore holds: had Vienna's art academy admitted Hitler, Nazism might never have taken power, much as the Bolshevik Revolution hinged on Lenin reaching Petrograd. (16:39)
• Max Horkheimer. Critical Theory, in Shore's account of the Frankfurt School's common project, is normative: describing the world is not enough, it also says what the world ought to be. (37:25) Put simply: Shore's account of the Frankfurt School's shared project: Critical Theory does not only describe how the world is; it also says how the world ought to be.
• Wilhelm Reich. The Bolsheviks' failing, in Reich's view, is that they have paid too little attention to sexual questions. (31:55)

Lecture 15: Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism and the Nature of Evil

• Hannah Arendt. For Arendt the decisive break came in 1943, with the news of Auschwitz, not in 1933: having enemies is natural, but this was something politics could never make amends for. (14:17)
• Hannah Arendt. Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism starts from an intuition: Nazism and Stalinism, locked in a war to the death, were opposites yet in important respects deeply alike, and historically unprecedented. (16:44)
• Hannah Arendt. What the Dreyfus affair means for Arendt is neither the framed officer nor the birth of Zionism, but crowds in Paris streets demanding Jewish deaths: mob and masses entering history. (22:00) Put simply: Arendt: what matters about the Dreyfus affair is not the officer who was framed, nor the start of Zionism, but crowds in Paris shouting for Jewish deaths. That is when the "mob" and the "masses" enter history.
• Hannah Arendt. Arendt's mob is the bourgeoisie's shadow: gangsters who resent a society that shuts them out, want to force their way back into it, and share its values minus the hypocrisy. (24:33) Put simply: Arendt's "mob" is the dark twin of the middle class: gangsters who resent the respectable society that shuts them out, want to force their way back in, and share its values without the hypocrisy.
• Hannah Arendt. Arendt describes Nazism as the bourgeoisie allied with the mob, an alliance that managed to draw in the masses, recruiting from the politically indifferent rather than from any elite. (27:45) Put simply: Arendt: Nazism was an alliance of the middle class and the mob that managed to pull in the masses. It recruited from people who had never cared about politics, not from any elite. In the text: In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Part Three, ch. 10, section II, Arendt writes of "the temporary alliance between the mob and the elite."
• Hannah Arendt. By the masses Arendt means the hitherto unengaged majority: people too numerous, too indifferent, or both, for any party, union or other interest-based body ever to have organized them. (27:59)
• Hannah Arendt. Under capitalism, Arendt argues, accumulation throws off surplus money and surplus people, and that surplus must go somewhere: the result is a permanent drive toward imperial expansion. (31:00) Put simply: Arendt: under capitalism, piling up wealth leaves extra money and extra people with nowhere to go. That surplus has to go somewhere, so there is a constant push to expand into empires abroad.
• Hannah Arendt. Where Lenin saw in imperialism capitalism's final phase, Arendt sees the bourgeoisie's political rule just beginning. (31:22) Put simply: Arendt, against Lenin: he saw empire-building as capitalism's last stage. She sees it as the moment the middle class only begins to rule politically. Where to read it: Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, ch. 5, opening.
• Hannah Arendt. Human beings become superfluous, Arendt says, along two paths: losing the protection of a state, and being atomized into conformity. (34:46) Put simply: Arendt: people are made "superfluous", that is, expendable, in two ways: by losing the protection of any state, and by being cut off from one another and pressed into conformity.
• Hannah Arendt. For Arendt, interwar statelessness showed the rights of man to be a fiction: a right no government enforces does not exist in practice, so in effect only citizens have rights. (35:41)
• Hannah Arendt. In Arendt's analysis, victims are not the only ones made superfluous: the perpetrators, recruited from an atomized, lonely mass, trade isolation for collective organization and lose their selves. (37:42) Put simply: Arendt: the victims are not the only ones made "superfluous", unneeded. The perpetrators come from lonely, isolated people who trade their isolation for belonging to a movement, and lose their selves in it.
• Hannah Arendt. Arendt ties the emergence of radical evil to a system under which "all men have become equally superfluous." (38:14) Put simply: Arendt links the rise of "radical evil", a new evil beyond ordinary motives, to a system in which "all men have become equally superfluous": everyone has become expendable. Where to read it: Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, end of ch. 12.
• Hannah Arendt. For Arendt, ideology persuades by smoothing reality out: it swaps the actual world, arbitrary and contingent, for a fictitious one where a single narrative, however false, explains everything consistently. (40:00) Put simply: Arendt: ideology persuades by tidying up reality. It swaps the real world, full of chance and accident, for an invented one where a single story, even a false one, neatly explains everything.
• Hannah Arendt. Under totalitarianism the line between public and private disappears. Nowhere is left to keep out of politics or simply be let alone; under Stalinism even pillow talk concerned the regime. (40:20) Put simply: Arendt: under totalitarian rule there is no private life left, nowhere to stay out of politics or be left alone. Under Stalin the regime cared even about what lovers said in bed.
• Hannah Arendt. Totalitarianism, Arendt writes, found a way of "dominating and terrorizing human beings from within"; once everyone polices everyone else, no distance separates rulers from ruled. (41:18) Put simply: Arendt: totalitarianism found a way to "dominate and terrorize human beings from within". When everyone watches and reports on everyone else, no gap is left between rulers and ruled.
• Hannah Arendt. Totalitarian rule shapes its subjects to serve equally well as executioners or victims, so the line dividing persecutor from persecuted never holds still: under Stalin, any denouncer could be denounced. (41:03) Put simply: Arendt: totalitarian rule makes people equally fit to be executioners or victims, so the roles never stay fixed. Under Stalin, anyone who denounced a neighbor could be denounced in turn.
• Hannah Arendt. By making death anonymous, the camps emptied it of meaning as the end of a fulfilled life; the victim's death only sealed the fact that he "had never really existed." (42:18) Put simply: Arendt: in the camps, death was made anonymous, so it could no longer mark the end of a full life. The victim's death only confirmed that he "had never really existed."
• Hannah Arendt. Totalitarian cynicism takes Ivan Karamazov literally: if God is dead, "everything is permitted." That rests on a deeper conviction that "everything is possible," and the camps are laboratories verifying it. (43:03) Put simply: Arendt: totalitarian cynics take Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov literally: if God is dead, "everything is permitted." Behind it lies a deeper belief that "everything is possible," and the camps were laboratories for proving it.
• Hannah Arendt. Arendt ends Origins on absolute evil: once the impossible became possible, a crime appeared that no ordinary wicked motive, greed, resentment, cowardice, could explain, beyond both punishment and forgiveness. (43:49) Put simply: Arendt ends her book on totalitarianism with "absolute evil": once the impossible became possible, a crime appeared that no ordinary bad motive, like greed or cowardice, could explain. It could be neither punished nor forgiven.
• Hannah Arendt. Arendt, hearing Eichmann testify in German, was chilled by the gap between monstrous deed and mediocre man: an opportunistic bureaucrat who seemed less monster than clown. (45:02) Put simply: Arendt: listening in German to Adolf Eichmann, who organized the murder of Europe's Jews, she was chilled by the gap between the monstrous deed and the mediocre man: an opportunistic bureaucrat, more clown than monster. Other readings: Bettina Stangneth (Eichmann Before Jerusalem, 2014) reads Eichmann as a committed antisemitic ideologue who played the part of a minor functionary in court.
• Hannah Arendt. Eichmann spoke entirely in clichés, and for Arendt that was telling: his failure of speech was bound up with a failure to think, for himself or from anyone else's standpoint. (46:03)
• Hannah Arendt. Eichmann's crime, in Arendt's eyes, was failing to think. Far from excusing him, that makes him not a lesser criminal but the worst, because thinking is never optional. (46:36) In the text: In the Postscript to Eichmann in Jerusalem (1965 edition), Arendt writes that "sheer thoughtlessness" predisposed Eichmann "to become one of the greatest criminals of that period."
• Hannah Arendt. When Scholem charged her with not loving the Jewish people, Arendt answered that no collective, no people at all, had ever had her love: "I indeed love only my friends." (47:29)
• Hannah Arendt. Arendt refuses to explain the Holocaust by national character: nothing about Germans as such made them murderers, and nothing about Jews as such made them victims. (48:27)
• Hannah Arendt. Arendt holds that the capacity totalitarianism exploited in alienated modern masses belongs to everyone, always; nothing essential to any race or nation decides who has it. (49:24) Put simply: Arendt: the potential that totalitarianism exploited in uprooted, alienated modern masses is in all of us, always. Nothing about any race or nation decides who has it.
• Shore's own view. In Shore's reading, Origins shares, in some ways, the course's recurring starting point: alienation as modernity's central problem, breeding a vulnerability that is necessary though not sufficient for totalitarianism. (17:31) Put simply: Shore: in some ways Arendt's book starts where the course keeps starting, with alienation, the sense of not being at home in the modern world. That breeds a weakness totalitarianism needs, though it is not enough on its own.
• Shore's own view. Shore links the herd that Arendt, Adorno and Horkheimer all invoke to Heidegger's conformist das Man, and sees Arendt pulling that single herd apart into two categories, mob and masses. (8:57) Put simply: Shore: Arendt, Adorno and Horkheimer all speak of "the herd," which Shore links to Heidegger's conforming "they" ("das Man"). Arendt splits that one herd into two groups: the mob and the masses.
• Shore's own view. Arendt on anonymous death in the camps reads, to Shore, as something of a polemic with Heidegger, for whom one's own death was the single thing absolutely one's own. (42:30) Put simply: Shore: Arendt's point about anonymous death in the camps reads partly as an argument with Heidegger, for whom your own death was the one thing absolutely your own.
• Shore's own view. Shore judges that Arendt, between Origins and the Eichmann book, apparently reversed herself on Nazi evil: once radical, it is now banal. (44:19) Put simply: Shore: between her two books, Arendt apparently changed her mind about Nazi evil. First she called it "radical", beyond any ordinary motive; later, in her book on Eichmann, "banal", the work of a thoughtless, ordinary man.

Lecture 16: The Second Sex

• Alexandre Kojève. Following Heidegger, Kojève replaces talk of nature or the world with le donné, the given: we are always already caught up in it, so no uninvolved standpoint exists. (13:49) Put simply: Kojève, following Heidegger, speaks of "the given" instead of "nature" or "the world". We are always already caught up in it, so nobody can stand outside it as an uninvolved observer.
• Alexandre Kojève. For Kojève, being human means negating the given, in Hegel's sense of overcoming: its concrete features still mark us, but we are no longer its captives. (15:30) Put simply: Kojève: to be human is to "negate" what is given to us, in Hegel's sense of overcoming it. Its concrete features still mark us, but we are no longer trapped by them.
• Alexandre Kojève. Man, for Kojève, is not a being but a nothingness, and that gap is exactly what leaves room for freedom: for acting, having a history, being an individual. (16:22) Put simply: Kojève: a human being is not a fixed thing but a kind of "nothingness", and that gap is exactly what makes room for freedom: for acting, having a history, being an individual.
• Alexandre Kojève. Kojève, reading Hegel, holds that a person counts as genuinely human, to himself as much as to others, only through recognition by others, ultimately by all of them. (38:33) Put simply: Kojève, reading Hegel: you count as fully human, even in your own eyes, only when others acknowledge you, ultimately all of them. Hegel's word for this is "recognition."
• Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity builds existentialist ethics around resisting bad faith, mauvaise foi: the pull toward escaping one's own freedom and the load of being a subject. (19:36) Put simply: Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity builds an existentialist ethics around resisting "bad faith": the pull to escape our own freedom and the burden of being a self who must choose.
• Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir takes Marx seriously but refuses his determinism: she wants room for human agency inside a Marxist story about where history is heading. (20:03) Put simply: Beauvoir takes Marx seriously but rejects the idea that history is fixed in advance. She wants room for people to act freely within Marx's story of where history is going.
• Simone de Beauvoir. From Heidegger, Beauvoir takes the strong notion that human finitude must be accepted: we are mortal, moving toward death, and that is the context in which we make decisions. (20:23)
• Simone de Beauvoir. For Beauvoir, ethics presupposes failure: dilemmas sometimes offer no clean option, and often every available choice harms innocent people. The task is to face that squarely. (20:53)
• Simone de Beauvoir. For Beauvoir, creation starts from lack: a person is first of all a negativity, and only that absence opens room to make something positive, oneself included. (21:22) Put simply: Beauvoir: creating starts from lack. A person begins as an absence, a "negativity", and only that emptiness leaves room to make something positive, oneself included.
• Simone de Beauvoir. For Beauvoir, values come from nowhere but human existence: there is no higher authority handing them down, so making them is our job alone. (21:42)
• Simone de Beauvoir. Transcendence, a notion Beauvoir carries over from her religious childhood, becomes possible only by accepting freedom, finitude and responsibility in this life, not in any afterlife. (21:56) Put simply: Beauvoir keeps a word from her religious childhood, "transcendence": going beyond. But for her it is possible only by accepting freedom, mortality and responsibility in this life, not in any afterlife.
• Simone de Beauvoir. Nobody chooses from a blank slate: a person decides what to become "on the basis of what he has been," starting inside a world and a past already given. (22:44) Put simply: Beauvoir: nobody starts from a blank slate. A person decides what to become "on the basis of what he has been", inside a world and a past that are already given.
• Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir's slogan, "Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity": facticity is the thrown, already-there situation nobody can wish away, though anyone can push against it. (23:34) Put simply: Beauvoir's slogan: "Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity." "Facticity" is the situation we are already thrown into, which nobody can wish away, though anyone can push against it.
• Simone de Beauvoir. The Second Sex attacks patriarchy, not men: Beauvoir, who likes men, targets domination and oppressive conventions, habits, traditions and institutions, a distinction she insists on throughout. (30:31)
• Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir holds women partly responsible for their own subordination: too often they shrink in bad faith from freedom's burden, remaining the inessential and accepting the object role. (32:42) Put simply: Beauvoir: women are partly responsible for their own subordination. Too often, lying to themselves, they shy away from the burden of freedom, stay secondary to men and accept being treated as objects.
• Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir's diagnosis: man is treated as the default human, woman as the derivative; a man need never introduce himself as belonging to a sex, while she is "defined and differentiated with reference to man." (34:05)
• Simone de Beauvoir. Otherness, for Beauvoir, is built into thought, "as primordial as consciousness itself": no subject simply is who it is; each finds itself only against an Other. (35:13) Put simply: Beauvoir: the idea of an "Other" is as basic as consciousness itself. Nobody simply is who they are on their own; each of us finds ourselves only by setting ourselves against someone else.
• Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir finds Marxism too reductive on women: private property alone does not explain their oppression, and sex relations are not just a class struggle, even if economics and class matter. (40:32) Put simply: Beauvoir: Marxism reduces too much to economics when it comes to women. Private property alone does not explain their oppression, and relations between the sexes are not just class struggle, though economics and class matter.
• Simone de Beauvoir. Sexuality, for Beauvoir, cannot be absorbed into the social order: eroticism is "a revolt of the instant against time," and trying to channel or exploit it risks killing it. (41:15)
• Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir finds Freud as reductive as Marx: psychoanalysis swaps existential choice for hardwired drives and involuntary repression, a determinism she cannot accept, however seriously she takes sexuality. (42:11)
• Simone de Beauvoir. The prestige Freud grants the penis needs an existential explanation, Beauvoir argues: anxious about his freedom, the subject seeks himself in things, an alienation that lets him flee himself. (42:38) Put simply: Beauvoir: the special importance Freud gives the penis needs explaining from human existence itself. Anxious about his freedom, a person looks for himself in things, an "alienation" that lets him escape himself.
• Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir writes that woman must choose between affirming her transcendence and alienating herself as an object: she is no puppet of clashing drives, whatever Freud says. (43:16) Put simply: Beauvoir: a woman must choose between asserting her power to go beyond her situation ("transcendence") and turning herself into an object. Whatever Freud says, she is not a puppet of conflicting drives.
• Simone de Beauvoir. The root of oppression, for Beauvoir, is the urge to escape oneself: we flee our own subjectivity by alienating ourselves in an Other. (43:34) Put simply: Beauvoir: oppression comes, at root, from the urge to escape ourselves. We run from being a free self by losing ourselves in someone or something else, an "Other".
• Simone de Beauvoir. "All oppression creates a state of war": woman, shut in immanence, once tried to lock man in with her; now, Beauvoir says, she fights to get out, toward transcendence. (46:56) Put simply: Beauvoir: "All oppression creates a state of war." Woman, shut into a passive, confined life ("immanence"), once tried to keep man shut in with her. Now she fights to get out, toward freedom to act.
• Simone de Beauvoir. Men suffer under patriarchy too: a man consumed with appearing male and superior play-acts, fears the women he is hostile to, and "would be liberated with their liberation." (47:15) Put simply: Beauvoir: patriarchy harms men too. A man obsessed with seeming manly and superior is always acting a part, fears the women he is hostile to, and "would be liberated with their liberation."
• Simone de Beauvoir. Conflict between the sexes can be overcome, Beauvoir thinks, if people take hold of their subjectivity: free, autonomous subjects could then recognize one another reciprocally, and with desire. (48:11) Put simply: Beauvoir thinks conflict between the sexes can be overcome if people take charge of their own selves. Then free, independent people could acknowledge each other as equals, and with desire.
• Shore's own view. Kojève's Heidegger-steeped reading of Hegel, centered on master and slave, was, in Shore's view, a main conduit for Hegel into French existentialism, and into The Second Sex especially. (13:29) Put simply: Shore: Kojève read Hegel through Heidegger, centering on Hegel's story of master and slave. In her view, that reading was a main route by which Hegel reached French existentialism, and The Second Sex above all.
• Shore's own view. Shore suspects that without her American trips, Chicago above all, Beauvoir would not have had the three-case comparison of Jews, Black Americans and women in quite the same way. (25:23) Put simply: Shore suspects that without her trips to America, especially Chicago, Beauvoir might not have compared Jews, Black Americans and women as three cases of "the Other" in quite the same way.
• Shore's own view. The opening of The Second Sex, Shore suggests, echoes Being and Time's hermeneutic circle: to be able even to ask what a woman is, one must already half-understand the answer. (33:40) Put simply: Shore: The Second Sex opens with a move like Heidegger's "hermeneutic circle": to be able even to ask "what is a woman?," you must already half-understand the answer.
• Shore's own view. Shore detects Bergson behind Beauvoir's view of sexuality and the erotic as a domain of freedom, living spontaneity that cannot be handled like inert matter. (41:50)
• Shore's own view. Beauvoir's immanence and transcendence, as Shore reads them, work roughly like Sartre's in-itself and for-itself, with a somewhat different twist: immanence is bound up with facticity. (44:34) Put simply: Shore: Beauvoir's "immanence" (staying stuck, passive) and "transcendence" (going beyond) work roughly like Sartre's fixed "in-itself" and free "for-itself." The twist: immanence is tied to the given facts of one's situation.
• Shore's own view. The Second Sex, Shore observes, ends not in Hegelian reconciliation but in hope: reciprocal freedom is possible, never guaranteed, and only if people seize their own subjectivity. (48:03) Put simply: Shore: The Second Sex ends not with Hegel's final reconciliation but with hope. Freedom on both sides is possible, never guaranteed, and only if people take charge of their own selves.
• Shore's own view. The Camus character's monologue in Beauvoir's roman à clef captures, in Shore's view, the core of the postwar French debate over excusing Stalinism. (29:25) Put simply: Shore: in Beauvoir's novel about her own circle, a speech by the character based on Camus captures the heart of the postwar French argument over whether to excuse Stalin's regime.
• Simone de Beauvoir. Freedom, for Beauvoir, is no zero-sum game: when women seize theirs, men gain too, though no teleology guarantees it. (49:39) Put simply: Beauvoir: freedom is not a contest where one side's gain is the other's loss. When women take their freedom, men gain too, though nothing in history guarantees it.
• Simone de Beauvoir. Men dread the very liberation that women's freedom would bring them, on Beauvoir's account, because people shrink from seizing their own subjectivity. (47:57)

Lecture 17: Husserl's Children, Searching for the Other

• Martin Heidegger. Nobody is thrown into an empty world. For Heidegger, other people belong to Dasein's situation from the outset, so existing in the world already means existing alongside others. (11:56) Put simply: Heidegger: you never start out alone. From the moment you exist, other people are already part of your world.
• Edmund Husserl. Husserl's first route to other minds is epistemological: I grasp another ego by analogy with mine, and the result is a community of monads, each still self-contained. (5:32) Put simply: Husserl's first answer to "how do I know other minds?": by analogy with my own. Each mind still stays sealed in itself, a separate unit (a "monad") among others.
• Edmund Husserl. Take a die on a table: from any single spot I see only some faces. Others standing elsewhere complete the picture, which is why knowledge, for Husserl, is intersubjective. (6:47)
• Edmund Husserl. Could separate groups of monads, out of contact with one another, each constitute its own world? Husserl rejects the idea as "a pure absurdity": monads jointly constitute one world. (8:37) Put simply: Could groups of minds that never meet each live in a world of their own? Husserl says no: however many minds there are, together they make one world.
• Edmund Husserl. I have no direct line into anyone else's primordial experience. So for Husserl, another person counts as an existing other only insofar as my consciousness constitutes them as such. (9:52) Put simply: Husserl: I can never live through another person's experience from the inside. So, for me, someone else is another person only because my own consciousness makes sense of them as one.
• Edmund Husserl. Husserl's reduction brackets whatever may or may not exist, other egos included; only my transcendental ego stays unbracketed. What remains is the sphere of ownness: what is mine. (10:18) Put simply: Husserl's reduction asks me to put aside every question about what exists, other people included. Only my own "I" stays. What remains is my "sphere of ownness": whatever is given to me as mine.
• Edith Stein. Stein's objection to the transcendental ego is that it has no body. A subject, she insists, cannot be conceived as bodiless pure consciousness; philosophy has to reckon with embodiment. (22:15) Put simply: Edith Stein's objection to Husserl: you cannot picture a person as a pure, bodiless consciousness. Any account of the self has to reckon with our bodies.
• Edith Stein. Only one body, mine, is lived from inside; other bodies reach me as exteriors. Empathy, by analogy and pairing, lets me take those exteriors as living bodies someone else inhabits. (25:33) Put simply: Stein: I feel only my own body from the inside; everyone else's I see from the outside. Empathy is what lets me see those bodies as people living in them, as I live in mine. In the text: In On the Problem of Empathy (1917), Stein rejects inference by analogy as an account of empathy; "pairing" is Husserl's term, from Cartesian Meditations §51.
• Edith Stein. Empathy does more than reveal others, Stein argues: it hands me my own self, teaching me that other subjects take me as their object, in body and psyche alike. (26:48) Put simply: Stein: empathy doesn't only show me other people. It shows me myself too, because through it I learn that I am someone others look at, body and mind.
• Edith Stein. Someone watching me might catch me fishing for approval while I believe myself simply generous. Stein's point: imagining their view of me can correct my self-picture, so empathy enlarges self-knowledge. (28:40)
• Edith Stein. For Stein, empathy underwrites realism: how the world appears depends on each consciousness, but the world that appears is the same for everyone and so independent of any mind. (29:32) Put simply: Stein: we each see the world from our own angle, yet it is one world. Empathy confirms that others see it too, so it is real and not just in my head.
• Edith Stein. Writing to Ingarden in 1917, Stein casts a people as a living, person-like whole, "a life beyond our own, although it includes ours," to which members may willingly submit. (24:29)
• Jean-Paul Sartre. Being looked at makes me someone's object, and that very fact brings home that the looker is a subject. In Sartre's words, "I cannot be an object for an object." (32:07) Put simply: Sartre: when someone looks at me, I become an object for them. Only a subject can make me an object, so that is how I discover the looker is a person, not a thing.
• Jean-Paul Sartre. Once I register another subject, Sartre says, the whole universe shifts: the world loses its center in me even as I go on trying to center it there. (33:42) Put simply: Sartre: once I notice that someone else is a subject too, I stop being the center of the world, though I keep trying to put myself back there.
• Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre holds that genuine self-knowledge depends on being recognized by another subject; absent that acknowledgment, I cannot really know who I am. (34:17)
• Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre quickly spotted what was at stake, morally and existentially, in a thin conception of other people as mere objects of awareness; the other needed to be more than that. (31:17)
• Emmanuel Levinas. Where Husserl started from subject and object and Heidegger from Dasein in its world, Levinas grounds ontology, epistemology and ethics alike in the face-to-face relation between self and other. (39:42) Put simply: Levinas starts philosophy somewhere new: not with a mind facing objects (Husserl) or a person in their world (Heidegger), but with one person meeting another face to face. Everything else grows from there.
• Emmanuel Levinas. What stops me from absorbing another person into my totality is not some weakness in me, Levinas argues, but the other's infinity: they are radically other and cannot be possessed. (41:09) Put simply: Levinas: I can never fully take in or own another person, and that is not a failing on my part. They are simply, endlessly other than me.
• Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas, metaphysical desire does not aim at anything I could ever have: "desire is desire for the absolutely other," and the absolutely other is unpossessable by its very nature. (41:52) Put simply: Levinas: the deepest kind of desire is not for anything I could get. It is a desire for someone wholly other, who by nature can never be possessed.
• Emmanuel Levinas. In Levinas's Philosophy and Awakening, the other tears me loose from the central place where I posit myself; I must then see myself from their side and answer for myself. (43:37) Put simply: Levinas: meeting another person knocks me out of the center of my own world. I have to see myself as they see me, and answer for myself.
• Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas floats, as no more than a possibility, the thought that transcendence toward another human and transcendence toward God may not be so easily told apart; the distinction should not be rushed. (45:01)
• Shore's own view. Shore frames intersubjectivity as a change of question: a long epistemological tradition worried about the gap between subject and object; now the issue is how one subject meets another. (0:25) Put simply: Shore: for centuries philosophers asked how a mind can know the things around it. Here the question changes to how one person can truly meet another.
• Shore's own view. What Husserl's students share, in Shore's reading, is a discontent: his phenomenology seems to view other subjects as just variations of objects, and that came to feel impoverished. (3:36)
• Shore's own view. On Shore's gloss, Heidegger's picture puts intersubjectivity, in some sense, ahead of subjectivity: there is never a Dasein that is not already among other people. (12:39) Put simply: Shore's reading of Heidegger: in a sense, relating to others comes before having a self, since you are always already in a world shared with other people.
• Shore's own view. Shore thinks people reasonably ask whether Heidegger leaves room for authentic life among others: his authenticity demands the profound loneliness of facing one's own death. (14:04)
• Shore's own view. Shore insists you cannot make sense of Stein's sudden preoccupation with the body apart from her time in a wartime hospital among gruesomely wounded German soldiers. (22:32)
• Shore's own view. Shore's plug for Stein: much of what later made Sartre famous appears in her dissertation years earlier. She is not saying he stole it, and grants he writes more elegantly. (31:04)
• Shore's own view. Shore reads Levinas's Other as God secularized: beyond reach, beyond possession, always beckoning, and without that beckoning we could neither come into our own nor feel responsible. (44:36) Put simply: Shore: Levinas's "Other" is like God in secular form: out of reach, never possessed, always calling. Without that call we could not become ourselves or feel responsible.
• Shore's own view. Shore lines up four versions of one shaking moment: Heidegger's being-toward-death, Shklovsky's estrangement, Husserl's reduction, Levinas's face-to-face. For Levinas the jolt comes from the other, not from death. (44:12) Put simply: Shore lines up four shaking moments that reveal something fundamental: facing death (Heidegger), seeing the familiar as strange (Shklovsky), setting assumptions aside (Husserl), meeting someone face to face (Levinas). For Levinas, it comes from another person, not death.
• Shore's own view. Levinas's Other calls to me where Sartre's looks at me, Shore observes: the call is a summons to responsibility, a demand that the I account for itself. (45:31) Put simply: Shore: Sartre's other person looks at me; Levinas's other person calls on me, asking me to take responsibility and account for myself.
• Shore's own view. Shore traces an arc: Husserl poses the problem as epistemology, Heidegger as ontology, and Levinas folds both into a project that is, at bottom, ethical. (45:50) Put simply: Shore's arc for the lecture: Husserl asks how we know other minds, Heidegger what it is to exist among others, and Levinas folds both into a question that is, at bottom, ethical: what we owe each other.

Lecture 18: Revisionist Marxism and Existentialism

• Jean-Paul Sartre. By 1960, Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason opens by declaring Marxism "the unsurpassable philosophy of our time"; existentialism's job is to supply what Marx left unsaid. (12:19)
• Jean-Paul Sartre. Already in Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), Sartre is warm toward Marxism and the Russian Revolution, yet cannot bring himself to join the Party: a sympathizer, not a member. (11:23)
• Shore's own view. For Shore, revisionist Marxism turns on a dialogue between opposite journeys meeting in the sixties: Sartre moving from radical freedom toward Marxist determinism, East European philosophers from Stalinism toward existentialism. (12:45) Put simply: Shore: 1960s "revisionist Marxism" grew from two journeys in opposite directions meeting. Sartre moved from radical freedom toward Marxist determinism, the belief that history follows fixed laws; East European philosophers moved from Stalinism toward existentialism.
• Georg Lukács. Phenomenology cheats, Lukács holds. Philosophy must begin from the object, as Marx does, or from the subject, as idealism does; starting with the relation between them is no third way. (13:58) Put simply: Lukács: phenomenology cheats. Philosophy must start either from the world of objects, as Marx does, or from the mind, as idealists do. Starting from the link between mind and world is no honest third option.
• Leszek Kołakowski. Human beings are, in Kołakowski's phrase, the "sole creators of values," and this holds whether one affirms or denies a deterministic account of the world. (27:20) Put simply: Kołakowski: people alone create values. That stays true whether or not you believe history is fixed in advance.
• Leszek Kołakowski. No one escapes responsibility by pleading that their own actions were merely one fragment of history's larger course; Kołakowski refuses that excuse. (28:00)
• Leszek Kołakowski. "We are communist," Kołakowski writes, not from having recognized communism as historically necessary but from having sided with the oppressed, the poor, the persecuted. (28:22)
• Mihailo Marković. Humans are essentially beings of praxis: free, creative activity that remakes the world and realizes one's faculties. Alienation is the gap between that potential and what one actually is. (32:15) Put simply: Marković: what makes us human is "praxis", free and creative activity through which we change the world and develop our abilities. "Alienation" is the gap between what a person could be and what they actually are.
• Gajo Petrović. Only socialist revolution counts as revolution "in its deepest and fullest sense," Petrović argues: not swapping one exploitation for a more progressive one, but abolishing all exploitation and self-alienation. (34:52) Put simply: Petrović: a real revolution does not swap one kind of exploitation for a better one. It ends all exploitation and all the ways people are estranged from themselves. Only socialist revolution is revolution in that fullest sense.
• Shore's own view. Shore sees the Praxis Group's real preoccupation as overcoming alienation through praxis, a word they nearly fetishize: action that is partly self-chosen, theoretically informed and existentially fulfilling, not mere thinking. (30:38) Put simply: Shore: the Yugoslav Praxis Group's real concern was overcoming alienation, the gap between what people are and what they could be, through "praxis," a word they almost worshiped: action partly self-chosen, guided by theory, and fulfilling, not mere thinking.
• Shore's own view. Shore describes revisionism as peeling an onion: shed Stalin as distortion, Lenin as its suspected root, the deterministic late Marx for the younger, assuming Marx himself must hold the answers. (22:57) Put simply: Shore likens revisionism to peeling an onion: set aside Stalin as a distortion, then Lenin as its suspected root, then the late Marx's iron laws for the young Marx, still assuming Marx holds the answers.
• Shore's own view. The revisionists' every question, Shore argues, varies one theme: how much room did history's iron laws really leave for agency? The answer fixes their guilt for cheering the purges. (25:44) Put simply: Shore: every question the revisionists asked came down to one. How much freedom to choose did history's "iron laws" really leave people? The answer decided how guilty they were for cheering the purges.
• Karel Kosík. People are thrown into a history already moving on its own, yet they also act within it: individual and history shape each other in an interactive model. (41:09) Put simply: Kosík: we are born into a history already moving under its own steam, yet we also act within it. People and history shape each other.
• Karel Kosík. If iron laws drive history inexorably toward a goal, how can that be squared with human striving, or with human activity meaning anything? Kosík holds this antinomy still unresolved. (42:00) Put simply: Kosík: if fixed laws drive history unstoppably toward a goal, how can human effort matter or mean anything? He thinks no one has yet resolved this contradiction.
• Karel Kosík. Kosík's 1967 parable: a jailed reformer, advised to agree if the council called him one-eyed, replied that denying reason betrays conscience: his lens on the show trials. (42:50) Put simply: Kosík's 1967 story: an imprisoned religious reformer was told to agree if a church council said he had one eye. He answered that denying what reason shows betrays conscience. Kosík used this to think about the show trials.
• Ludvík Vaculík. At the 1967 Writers' Congress, addressing Party leaders as persons, not officials, Vaculík admits, in Shore's rendering, that if asked whether that beautiful Marxist dream can be realized, he honestly does not know. (45:54)
• Milan Kundera. In Kundera's telling, the Czechoslovak communists took power in February 1948 without bloodshed, cheered on by about half the population: "the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better half." (36:52)
• Slavoj Žižek. Žižek finds the whole Stalinist-fascist difference in one small gesture: the fascist leader accepts applause as his own; the Stalinist claps along, since it is really for History, his master. (20:25) Put simply: Žižek sums up how Stalinist and fascist leaders differ in one gesture. The fascist takes the crowd's applause as his own. The Stalinist claps too, since the applause is really for History, his master.
• Shore's own view. What made Khrushchev's 1956 speech so shattering for believers, in Shore's reading, was that Stalin had stood for History itself, infallible; now he was revealed as a fallible man. (20:02) Put simply: Shore: Khrushchev, Stalin's successor, told the Party in 1956 that Stalin had made errors. For believers who saw Stalin as the embodiment of History and its iron laws, that was shattering: he was a fallible man after all.
• Shore's own view. With only Stalinist language to criticize Stalinism, Shore argues, Czechoslovakia's writers began by setting word against word, borrowing from Heidegger and Sartre: conscience beside class consciousness, persons beside the people. (39:16) Put simply: Shore: Czechoslovak writers had only Stalinist language to criticize Stalinism. So they began setting words against each other, borrowing from Heidegger and Sartre: "conscience" beside "class consciousness", individual persons beside "the people".
• Shore's own view. For Shore, Vaculík's admission at the 1967 writers' congress was the most radical statement made there: to voice doubt about history's iron laws at all. (46:41)
• Shore's own view. One concrete idea to come out of Yugoslavia's Praxis Group was that workers should manage their factories themselves. (30:57)
• Karel Kosík. When reason and conscience lose their unity, Kosík warns, what follows is nihilism: a slide into nothingness. (45:28) Put simply: Kosík warns that when reason and conscience stop going together, the result is "nihilism": a slide into nothingness.

Lecture 19: Structuralism and Anthropology

• Ferdinand de Saussure. Studying how a language changes over time and studying how it works as a system at one moment are separate disciplines; neither is inferior, but a linguist picks one. (21:45) Put simply: Saussure: studying how a language changes over time and studying how it works as a whole at one moment are two separate fields. Neither is worse, but a linguist does one or the other.
• Ferdinand de Saussure. A language's present state can be fully described without knowing its past, much as a chess position is legible to a passerby who never saw the earlier moves. (25:50) Put simply: Saussure's comparison: a passerby can read a chess position without having seen the earlier moves. Likewise, a language as it stands now can be fully described without knowing its history.
• Ferdinand de Saussure. Nobody is present at a language's birth: every speaker arrives into one already in place, so its origins are never witnessed. (27:24) Put simply: Saussure: no one is around when a language is born. We are all born into a language that already exists, so nobody sees how it began.
• Ferdinand de Saussure. Proper study of language brackets the signified, the real cat the word points to, and examines how signs work as a system at one moment. (25:13) Put simply: Saussure: to study language properly, set aside the real things words point to, such as the actual cat. Look instead at how words work together as a system at a given moment. In the text: In the Course in General Linguistics (1916; Baskin translation, p. 66), Saussure writes: "The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image."
• Sigmund Freud. The prohibition on incest belongs to the earliest, most primordial taboos, laid down as culture first separated itself from nature. (43:38) Put simply: Freud: the ban on incest is one of the very first taboos, laid down as human culture first broke away from nature.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss. Culture, taken broadly to include language, art, customs, tools and belief, operates largely unconsciously, a Freudian premise; anthropology's task is to expose the deep laws beneath it. (40:15) Put simply: Lévi-Strauss: culture, meaning language, art, customs, tools and beliefs, works mostly without our being aware of it, an idea taken from Freud. The anthropologist's job is to uncover the hidden rules beneath it.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss. Anthropological research, like linguistic research, is "dealing strictly with symbolism": its material is signifiers. (41:42) Put simply: Lévi-Strauss: anthropology, like the study of language, deals strictly with symbolism. Its material is signifiers, the words and symbols themselves rather than the things they name.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss. Kinship can be read as a language: its relations form a system on Saussure's model, where each term has value only by differing from the others. (42:15) Put simply: Lévi-Strauss: family relationships work like a language. As with Saussure's words, each relation means something only through how it differs from the other relations in the system.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss. What makes kinship a system is not blood or descent but a representation held in people's minds: arbitrary, not grown spontaneously from any real situation. (42:36) Put simply: Lévi-Strauss: a kinship system is not made of blood ties or descent. It exists in people's minds, as a set of ideas fixed by convention, not something that grows naturally out of real life.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss. To grasp the avunculate, the bond between maternal uncle and nephew, one must treat it as a single relation inside a kinship system taken as a whole. (43:33) Put simply: Lévi-Strauss: to understand the special bond between a boy and his mother's brother, you must see it as one relation within the society's whole family system.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss. Classical structuralism, as it comes through Lévi-Strauss's anthropology, charts many cultural relations as binary oppositions: cooked against raw, low against high, cold against hot. (43:52) Put simply: Classical structuralism, in Lévi-Strauss's hands, maps much of culture as pairs of opposites: raw and cooked, high and low, hot and cold.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss. Across human cultures, including oral and indigenous ones without large written literatures, myths rework a limited stock of themes and share constant structures that operate like a language. (44:41) Put simply: Lévi-Strauss: across human cultures, including those that pass stories on by word of mouth, myths rework a limited set of themes. They share constant patterns that work like a language.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss. Myth has a grammar: its smallest units combine by rules analogous to those of language, and that grammar is built into the human mind itself. (45:18) Put simply: Lévi-Strauss: myths have a grammar. Their smallest parts combine by rules, as sounds combine into words, and that grammar is built into the human mind.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss. Myths are instruments by which a culture sorts and orders its reality. (45:24) Put simply: Lévi-Strauss: myths are tools a culture uses to sort and organize its world.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss. A myth works as an imaginary resolution of a contradiction that is real in social life. (45:24) Put simply: Lévi-Strauss: a myth settles, in imagination, a conflict that is real in a society's life. In the text: The phrase "imaginary resolution of a real contradiction" is Fredric Jameson's (The Political Unconscious, 1981, ch. 1), developed from Lévi-Strauss's reading of Caduveo face painting in Tristes Tropiques.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss. The crisis that opens many myths is one of too little difference, not too much: boundaries blur, distinctions collapse. (46:15) Put simply: Lévi-Strauss: many myths open with a crisis of too little difference, not too much. The lines that keep things distinct blur and break down. In the text: In "The Structural Study of Myth" (1955), Lévi-Strauss writes that "mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution"; "a crisis of distinctions" is Girard's phrase in Violence and the Sacred.
• Clifford Geertz. Lévi-Strauss is captivated by man in the abstract while caring little for actual, particular men. (50:45) Put simply: Geertz's criticism: Lévi-Strauss is fascinated by humanity in general but cares little for actual, individual people.
• Hannah Arendt. In her postwar lecture on existential philosophy, Arendt blames Kant: by severing being from thought and putting the thing-in-itself beyond reach, he opened the subject-world gap that alienates us. (7:57) Put simply: Arendt blames Kant for our alienation. He split thinking from being and said we can never reach things as they really are, which opened a gap between us and the world.
• Ludwik Zamenhof. Rising national and ethnic strife calls for a purely international second language that nobody owns more than anyone else: ideally consistent, exception-free and easy to learn. (28:33) Put simply: Zamenhof, who invented Esperanto, argued that with national and ethnic conflict rising, the world needs a second language no nation owns, ideally regular and easy to learn.
• Shore's own view. Structural anthropology hangs on a chance encounter: had Koyré not introduced Jakobson to Lévi-Strauss among wartime émigrés in New York, Shore judges, that intellectual history would never have happened. (2:22)
• Shore's own view. Shore places structuralism with the other answers to God's death: one more attempt to fill religion's empty place and quiet the alienation and groundlessness it left behind. (7:27) Put simply: Shore: structuralism is another answer to the loss of God, one more attempt to fill religion's empty place and ease the feeling of homelessness and having no firm ground that it left.
• Shore's own view. Structuralism responds to problems that preoccupied earlier thinkers, teleology and subjectivity, by diminishing both: in some ways it brackets history and the subject. (8:58) Put simply: Shore: earlier thinkers worried about where history is heading and about the individual self. Structuralism handles both by making them matter less; in a way it sets history and the self aside.
• Shore's own view. Calling structuralism anti-humanist is description, not condemnation: it advocates no cruelty, it simply denies that the individual subject centers the system or generates its meaning. (10:48) Put simply: Shore: calling structuralism "anti-humanist" describes it; it is not an accusation. It favors no cruelty. It only denies that the individual person is the center of the system or the source of its meaning.
• Shore's own view. In structuralism the subject is radically decentered: meaning is not something people produce; language produces people, more than the reverse. (46:01) Put simply: Shore: in structuralism the individual is pushed from the center. People do not make meaning; language makes people, more than the other way round.
• Shore's own view. As Shore reports the structuralists, language need not voice or mirror a meaning already present: it produces that meaning, and signs structure the way we think. (31:48) Put simply: Shore's account of the structuralists: language does not just express or mirror meanings that already exist. It creates meaning, and words shape how we think.
• Shore's own view. Structuralism is ahistorical, and amoralizing too, in that it tends to steer clear of value judgments. (47:40) Put simply: Shore: structuralism sets history aside, and it tends to avoid judging things as good or bad.
• Shore's own view. Bracketing subject and object alike and studying only how signifiers interact is structuralism's own route past the bridge problem of how subject reaches world. (47:26) Put simply: Shore: philosophy long asked how the mind can reach the world outside it. Structuralism sidesteps the question by setting aside both mind and world and studying only how signs relate to one another.
• Shore's own view. Structuralists meet modernists on the point of arbitrariness: because the linguistic sign is arbitrary, meaning turns out contingent, neither natural, universal nor intrinsic. (48:07) Put simply: Shore: structuralists agree with modernist artists on one point. Since the link between a word and its meaning is a matter of convention, meaning is never natural, universal or built into things.
• Shore's own view. Structuralists meet Hegelians on totality: a sign means something only within a whole that holds everything in place, so faint echoes of Hegel persist even on the synchronic plane. (21:24) Put simply: Shore hears a faint echo of Hegel in structuralism: a sign means something only inside a whole system that holds everything in place, even when the system is studied at a single moment.
• Shore's own view. Because it rethinks every part of human life with language as its model, structuralism leads into what is later called the linguistic turn in history, literature and anthropology. (49:37) Put simply: Shore: by taking language as the model for all of human life, structuralism opens the way to the "linguistic turn", which studies history, literature and anthropology as made of language.

Lecture 20: Violence and the Sacred - René Girard

• René Girard. Nobody wants anything purely from within. Desire is mimetic: we come to want a thing by imitating someone else who already wants it. (20:55) Put simply: Girard: we don't want things purely on our own. We want them because someone else does, and we copy that wanting ("mimetic" desire). Shore's example: a toddler wants whichever toy the other child holds.
• René Girard. Desire runs on a triangle of subject, mediator and object, and its energy flows from the subject's relation to the mediator; the object itself barely matters. (22:22) Put simply: Girard pictures desire as a triangle: me, the person I copy (the "mediator"), and the thing we both want. What drives it is my relation to the person I copy; the thing itself hardly matters.
• René Girard. Because imitated wanting converges on the same things, especially scarce ones, mimetic desire turns into rivalry, and rivalry left unchecked turns into violence. (25:30) Put simply: Girard: since copied desires aim at the same things, especially things in short supply, imitation turns people into rivals, and rivalry left unchecked turns into violence.
• René Girard. Girard calls it the scandal: the mediator whose desire one copies also blocks access to the object, so the same person is admired and hated at once. (29:51) Put simply: Girard's "scandal": the person whose wanting I copy also stands between me and what I want. So I admire and hate the same person at once.
• René Girard. External mediation, where real social distance separates subject from mediator, restrains rivalry; internal mediation, where that distance has collapsed, lets it escalate toward violence. The two form a continuum. (30:44) Put simply: Girard: when a wide social gap separates me from the person I copy ("external mediation"), rivalry stays in check. When the gap closes ("internal mediation"), it can escalate into violence. The two lie on one scale.
• René Girard. The sacrificial crisis is "a crisis of distinctions": cultural order is nothing but a system of differences that fixes who each person is relative to everyone else. (34:18) Put simply: Girard: when rivalry spreads until it threatens a society (the "sacrificial crisis"), what breaks down is distinctions. A culture's order is nothing but a system of differences that fixes who each person is relative to others.
• René Girard. The violence of a sacrificial crisis is resolved only when the rivals turn away from each other and together expel a scapegoat, a surrogate victim. (34:53) Put simply: Girard: the violence ends only when the rivals stop fighting each other and turn together against one victim, a "scapegoat", and drive that person out.
• René Girard. Killing or expelling the surrogate victim unifies everyone against that one figure; the act works as a purge, and through it order returns. (35:36) Put simply: Girard: killing or driving out the scapegoat unites everyone against that one person. It works like a cleansing, and through it order comes back.
• René Girard. The persecutors feel wholly passive, as if the scapegoat controlled them even as they attack; every cause gets attributed to the victim, none to themselves. (38:01) Put simply: Girard: the attackers feel they are only reacting, as if the victim controlled them even while they attack. They blame the victim for everything and themselves for nothing.
• René Girard. The mob's fundamental misattribution: it shifts its own violence onto the victim, who is then taken to have been its cause. (40:09) Put simply: Girard: when a crowd turns on a scapegoat, it blames the victim for the violence the crowd itself is doing.
• René Girard. Double transference: the one victim is held responsible both for the disorder before the killing and for the peace after it, the pharmakos, poison and remedy in one. (41:17) Put simply: Girard: the crowd blames the same victim both for the chaos before the killing and for the peace after it. He calls this "double transference". The victim becomes the "pharmakos", at once poison and cure.
• René Girard. The victim, though chosen largely arbitrarily, acquires mystical potency through double transference; it merges into what Girard calls the Sacred, taking a godlike role. (41:54) Put simply: Girard: though picked almost at random, the victim gains a mysterious power, because the crowd credits it with both the chaos and the peace. It merges into what Girard calls "the Sacred" and takes on a godlike role.
• René Girard. For Girard, the founding moment of civilization is a collective murder: the group experiences "a supremely evil and then beneficent being," and that experience cannot help gripping it. (39:03) Put simply: Girard: civilization begins with a group murder. The group meets a being that seems first utterly evil, then, once dead, a source of good, and that experience cannot fail to grip it.
• René Girard. Prohibitions work negatively to prevent renewed mimetic conflict: they tend to fence off goods that cannot be shared peacefully and keep categories apart, sacred from profane, class from class. (45:17) Put simply: Girard: prohibitions, the "must nots", exist to stop rivalry flaring up again. They tend to wall off things that cannot be shared peacefully and keep categories apart: sacred from everyday, one class from another.
• René Girard. Ritual is prohibition's positive twin, what must be done: it typically recalls or re-enacts the founding sacrifice in a controlled form, reaffirming that sacrifice and the order built on it. (45:54) Put simply: Girard: ritual is the "must do" that pairs with prohibition's "must not." It usually recalls or re-enacts the founding sacrifice in a controlled form, reaffirming that sacrifice and the order built on it.
• René Girard. Myth, in Girard's strict sense, is the scapegoat's murder recounted by the murderers, told so as to sanctify it: the violence was necessary to expel worse violence. (47:29) Put simply: Girard uses "myth" in a narrow sense: the killing of a scapegoat as told by the killers, told to make it holy, as if the violence was needed to drive out worse violence.
• René Girard. Beneath every myth lies a real victim and a real sacrifice; the story is never self-contained, and one can always dig back through it to the killing. (46:55) Put simply: Girard: behind every myth lies a real victim who was really killed. A myth never stands on its own; you can always dig back through the story to the killing.
• René Girard. A myth yields truth when inverted: read it from the victim's side, because for Girard the reality a myth refers to is always located with its victim. (49:27) Put simply: Girard: to find the truth in a myth, turn it around and read it from the victim's side, because what really happened always lies with the victim.
• René Girard. For Girard, Christianity breaks the mythic tradition: it tells the murder of Jesus from the murdered man's standpoint rather than the crucifiers', so one identifies with the victim, not the crowd. (50:13)
• René Girard. Sacrifice is what culture is built on, yet there is a way beyond it: identifying with the victim is the route past sacrifice and toward truth. (51:28) Put simply: Girard: culture is built on sacrifice, yet there is a way beyond it. Taking the victim's side is the route past sacrifice and toward the truth.
• René Girard. Lévi-Strauss, Girard objects, stops at signs that point only to other signs; analysis has to push through the structure to the anterior human reality underneath. (16:59) Put simply: Girard's objection to Lévi-Strauss: he stops at signs that only point to other signs. We must dig beneath the structure to the human reality that came before it.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss. Cultural phenomena, on Girard's summary of Lévi-Strauss, work like languages: signs mean nothing in isolation, only through other signs, so symbolic forms are read from within, never referred beyond themselves. (18:29) Put simply: Girard's summary of Lévi-Strauss: culture works like a language. Signs mean nothing alone, only through other signs, so cultural symbols must be read from inside the system, never traced to something beyond it.
• Terry Eagleton. Structuralism decenters the individual: on Eagleton's gloss, myths do the thinking, running through people rather than arising from any one consciousness or aiming at any particular end. (14:31) Put simply: Eagleton's account of structuralism: the individual is no longer the center. Myths do the thinking, passing through people rather than coming from any one mind or aiming at any goal.
• Robert Hamerton-Kelly. Double transference, for Hamerton-Kelly, is the mob misreading its causes: rivalry made the disorder, convergence against the victim made the peace; the victim was catalyst or passive object, never cause. (42:33) Put simply: Hamerton-Kelly: the crowd misreads its causes. Its own rivalry caused the chaos, and its uniting against the victim caused the peace. The victim was at most a trigger or a passive target, never the cause.
• Shore's own view. Shore sorts thinkers into those who dismantle systems and those who build them, and places Girard firmly among the builders, with Hegel and Marx. (16:17)
• Shore's own view. Girard seduces the way Marx does, Shore thinks: by totality. Inside the system everything seems explained, as though glasses had been put on and the world's hidden secrets appeared. (6:11) Put simply: Shore thinks Girard is seductive the way Marx is: his system seems to explain everything. Inside it, it feels like putting on glasses that reveal the world's hidden secrets.
• Shore's own view. Girard stands to Lévi-Strauss a bit as Heidegger to Husserl, in Shore's analogy: Lévi-Strauss has more scientific neutrality; Girard, in a darker key, finds structuralism too cut off from life. (7:51) Put simply: Shore's comparison: Girard is to Lévi-Strauss somewhat as Heidegger was to Husserl. Lévi-Strauss is the more scientifically neutral; Girard, in a darker mood, finds structuralism too cut off from real life.
• Shore's own view. Where Freud has violence repressed into the unconscious, Girard has it transferred outward onto a surrogate victim: projected onto someone else rather than locked in the psyche. (40:32) Put simply: Shore's contrast: Freud says we push violence down into the unconscious mind. Girard says we push it out onto a substitute victim, blaming someone else instead of locking it inside ourselves.
• Shore's own view. Girard, on Shore's reading, turns the death of God around: what matters is not God's absence but the killing, that we killed him, and the recognition that we did. (50:48) Put simply: Shore's reading: Girard turns the "death of God" around. What counts is not that God is gone but that we killed him, and that we recognize we did.

Lecture 21: Power and Archaeology - Michel Foucault

• Michel Foucault. Descartes's cogito, Husserl's transcendental ego, Heidegger's Dasein, Sartre's radical freedom: each keeps an indubitable self at the center, and Foucault's early work revolts against that sovereign subject. (8:47) Put simply: Foucault's early work rebels against the "sovereign subject": the self that philosophers from Descartes to Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre kept at the center as the one thing beyond doubt.
• Michel Foucault. Marx's decentering of the subject through class struggle was answered, late in the nineteenth century, by seeking a total history that reduces all of society's differences to one form. (10:31) Put simply: Foucault: Marx pushed the individual from the center by explaining society through class struggle. Late in the 1800s, defenders of the self answered by seeking a "total history" that reduces all of society's differences to one pattern.
• Michel Foucault. Against the decentering worked by Nietzsche's genealogy, Foucault says, the sovereign-subject tradition set a search for an original foundation, making reason mankind's telos and demanding perpetual return to it. (11:01) Put simply: Foucault: against the decentering of the self by Nietzsche's "genealogy," the defenders of the sovereign subject sought an original foundation: reason as humanity's goal, to which thought must always return.
• Michel Foucault. Agency belongs neither to a sovereign self nor to history's momentum; Foucault relocates it largely in language, in discourse, which becomes a key word. (11:48) Put simply: Foucault: what makes things happen is neither a ruling self nor the forward push of history. It lies largely in language, in "discourse": the organized ways a society talks about things.
• Michel Foucault. No statement is neutral or free-standing; each sits within a series, leans on other statements while setting itself apart from them, and means what it means through that network. (20:02) Put simply: Foucault: no statement stands alone or neutral. Each belongs to a series, leans on other statements while marking itself off from them, and gets its meaning from that web.
• Michel Foucault. Foucault's post-structuralist turn: a structure of statements is never sealed, references keep running past its edges, so even a book lacks clear-cut frontiers. (21:04) Put simply: Foucault moves past structuralism here: a web of statements is never closed. References always run past its edges, so even a book has no clear boundary.
• Michel Foucault. Foucault rejects one approach above all, the phenomenological, which gives the observing subject absolute priority and ends in a transcendental consciousness; scientific discourse should be analyzed as discursive practice. (22:32) Put simply: Foucault rejects above all the phenomenological approach, which gives the observing mind absolute priority and ends in a "transcendental consciousness". The history of scientific discourse should instead be analyzed as "discursive practice": how people speak and write.
• Michel Foucault. The standard story calls the asylum humane progress, treating the mad as patients rather than criminals; Foucault reads it instead as a means of control, a great confinement. (26:20) In the text: In Madness and Civilization (1961; Howard translation), ch. 2, Foucault dates the Great Confinement from the Paris decree of 1656 founding the Hôpital Général, which he says "is not a medical establishment". Other readings: Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain (Madness and Democracy, 1999) read the asylum as a democratic project.
• Michel Foucault. Enlightenment reason was possible only once madness had been defined: there is no reason without an unreason to set it against, which makes the asylum the Enlightenment's dark side. (27:08) Put simply: Foucault: the Enlightenment's idea of reason needed an idea of madness to define itself against. Without unreason there is no reason. That makes the asylum the Enlightenment's dark side.
• Michel Foucault. The prison was sold as a rational, humane successor to torture; its real function, Foucault argues, is surveillance and isolation, like the school, hospital, factory and asylum. (28:43)
• Michel Foucault. Bentham's panopticon fascinates Foucault: because the prisoner can never tell whether the guard in the central booth is watching, the uncertainty itself becomes an instrument of discipline. (29:47)
• Michel Foucault. The repressive hypothesis is a myth: the question is not why we are so repressed about sex but why we keep insisting, obsessively, that we are. (31:11) Put simply: Foucault calls it a myth that modern society silenced sex. The real question is not why we are so repressed, but why we keep insisting, obsessively, that we are.
• Michel Foucault. Sexuality is not a stubborn drive or a libido; Foucault treats it as "an especially dense transfer point for relations of power." (35:03) Put simply: Foucault: sexuality is not a built-in urge or sex drive. It is a place where relations of power run especially thick. Where to read it: Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Part Four, ch. 3 ("Domain").
• Michel Foucault. Where Adorno and Horkheimer draw a dialectical spiral from Enlightenment to totalitarianism, Foucault draws a straight line: the drive to know and classify everything leads directly to control and surveillance. (35:46) Put simply: Foucault draws a straight line from the Enlightenment to control and surveillance: the urge to know and sort everything leads there directly. Adorno and Horkheimer instead trace a winding, back-and-forth path toward totalitarianism.
• Michel Foucault. Knowledge is never innocent of power; the slash in power/knowledge marks their inseparability, which rules out disinterested inquiry and any neutral Archimedean point to stand on. (37:31) Put simply: Foucault: knowing is never free of power. His term "power/knowledge" marks that the two cannot be separated, so there is no neutral inquiry and no outside spot from which to look.
• Michel Foucault. Power has no single source. It is omnipresent "not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere": radically dispersed, built into every relationship. (38:23) Put simply: Foucault: power has no single source. It is everywhere "not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere": spread out through every relationship. Where to read it: Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Part Four, ch. 2 ("Method").
• Michel Foucault. Resistance never stands outside power. Always already present, power constitutes the very thing used to resist it; the two are locked in a shifting relational dynamic. (40:26) Put simply: Foucault: resistance is never outside power. Power is always already there and shapes even the means people use to resist it. The two keep shifting in relation to each other. Where to read it: Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Part Four, ch. 2 ("Method").
• Michel Foucault. Power does not only crush; it also creates. Calling it productive as well as repressive is a description, not praise or blame. (40:57) Put simply: Foucault: power does not only hold people down; it also creates things. Saying so describes power; it is neither praise nor blame.
• Michel Foucault. Discourse must be treated as discontinuous: the historian excavates layers of talk and marks the moments where the way something is spoken about shifts. (43:13) Put simply: Foucault: a history of how people talk must look for breaks. The historian digs through layers of talk and marks the moments when the way something is spoken about changes.
• Michel Foucault. Nietzsche's genealogy is the inspiration for Foucault's archaeology: a history that looks for discontinuity. (43:34) Put simply: Foucault's method, which he calls "archaeology," is a history that looks for breaks. Its inspiration is Nietzsche's "genealogy."
• Michel Foucault. The historian is an archaeologist digging in words and sources rather than earth; archaeology seeks no secret of origins, only "the systematic description of a discourse object." (43:40) Put simply: Foucault: the historian is an archaeologist who digs in words and documents instead of soil. The aim is not the secret of origins, only a systematic description of how something was talked about.
• Michel Foucault. When the discourse shifts, the archaeologist does not ask why. Causality is not the point; the task is to describe the break. (44:38) Put simply: Foucault: when the way people talk shifts, the historian does not ask why. Causes are not the point; the job is to describe the break.
• Michel Foucault. After God's death comes the subject's, and Foucault admits how much that hurts; he sympathizes with people who find it unbearable. (49:05) Put simply: Foucault admits how painful it is that, after God's "death," the self loses its central place too. He sympathizes with those who find that unbearable.
• Michel Foucault. To those who still ask after man's essence, or who start from man to reach truth, Foucault's answer is "a philosophical laugh." (49:36)
• Stephen Kotkin. Stalinist power did not merely crush, it also created: Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain brought Foucault's productive power into Stalinism studies and inaugurated a new line of work. (40:57)
• Stephen Kotkin. Magnetic Mountain reverses the usual order: rather than a subject producing discourse, Stalinist discourse produced the Stalinist subject. (47:12) Put simply: Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain reverses the usual order: rather than people producing Stalinist discourse, Stalinist discourse produced the Stalinist person.
• Shore's own view. Shore reads structuralism as the final big school to try standing in for God; with postmodernism the attempt is simply given up. (7:06)
• Shore's own view. Postmodernity, Shore says, is often defined through its fervent anti-Hegelianism: against Hegel's "the true is the whole," it denies any whole, order, stable meaning, subject or direction. (7:36) Put simply: Shore: postmodernity is often defined by its fierce rejection of Hegel. Hegel said "the true is the whole"; postmodern thought denies there is any whole, order, stable meaning, self or direction.
• Shore's own view. Foucault, in Shore's placement, sits on the threshold: no longer quite a structuralist, but not as radically post-structuralist as Derrida. (11:30)
• Shore's own view. Shore sees parallels between reason's dependence on madness, Beauvoir's self-definition through an other and Wolff's Eastern Europe, invented as the West's Enlightenment contrast. (27:45) Put simply: Shore sees parallels between reason defined against madness (Foucault), the self defined against an "other" (Beauvoir), and Eastern Europe, which the historian Wolff says the Enlightenment West invented as its contrast.
• Shore's own view. Shore reads Foucault's dispersed power as an attempt to invert and overcome the subject-object paradigm: no subject sits at the source of power, bearing down on an object. (38:04) Put simply: Shore: Foucault's spread-out power tries to overturn the old picture of a subject acting on an object. No one person sits at the source of power, pressing down on something below.
• Shore's own view. Shore's example of a Foucauldian discontinuity: the moment Czech and Slovak Marxist believers begin setting Stalinist words against others, class consciousness against individual conscience, the people against persons. (44:54) Put simply: Shore's example of a Foucauldian break: the moment Czech and Slovak communist believers began setting Stalinist words against others, such as personal conscience against class consciousness, and individual persons against "the people."
• Shore's own view. Shore's verdict: far more than Derrida, Foucault stays productive rather than merely deconstructive, giving historians a method that has yielded much good history. (48:01) Put simply: Shore's verdict: Foucault, far more than Derrida, builds rather than just takes apart. He gave historians a method that has produced a lot of good history.
• Shore's own view. When Foucault announces the subject's death, Shore hears mourning rather than gloating, something close to Rousseau's nostalgia for the state of nature. (49:17) Put simply: Shore: when Foucault declares the self dead, he sounds mournful, not gleeful, a little like Rousseau longing for humanity's lost natural state.

Lecture 22: French Post-Structuralism: Derrida and Deconstruction

• Jacques Derrida. From the ancient Greeks through Saussure, Western metaphysics has favored speech over writing: a speaking self seems immediately there, offering a window onto inner consciousness that writing lacks. (21:18) Put simply: Derrida: since the ancient Greeks, Western thinkers have ranked speech above writing. A speaker seems to be right there, giving a direct view into their mind, while writing seems one step removed.
• Jacques Derrida. Speech cannot guarantee presence, because the one speaking is not necessarily present even to himself; so presence versus absence, like speech versus writing, is a binary to be dismantled. (22:10) Put simply: Derrida: speaking does not prove that someone is truly "present", because the speaker is not fully present even to himself. So presence versus absence, like speech versus writing, is a contrast to be taken apart.
• Jacques Derrida. Any given sign draws its meaning from the signifiers it is not, which are absent; so language turns on absence more than on presence. (22:36) Put simply: Derrida: a word gets its meaning from all the words it is not ("cat" is not "bat" or "hat"), and those are absent. So language depends more on what is missing than on what is there.
• Jacques Derrida. Deconstruction is not confined to books: gestures, choreography, even a room of diners count as text, because Derrida has widened the notion of text to take in all of life. (23:32) Put simply: Derrida: deconstruction is not only for books. Gestures, dance, even a restaurant full of diners can be read as a "text", because he stretches the word "text" to cover all of life.
• Jacques Derrida. A sign can only be a stable unity if something anchors it: an arche or transcendental signified that fixes the signifier-signified gap as absolute and irreducible. (27:53) Put simply: Derrida: a word could keep one fixed meaning only if something outside language anchored it, a first origin or ultimate meaning (a "transcendental signified") that ties word and meaning together for good.
• Jacques Derrida. Not only is God dead; so is every would-be successor. History, Man, the Self, any transcendental signified: none exists to ground meaning or hold a system together. (28:52) Put simply: Derrida: God is dead, and so is everything people tried to put in God's place, such as History, Man or the Self. Nothing exists that could ground meaning or hold a system of thought together.
• Jacques Derrida. Play is Derrida's word for signifiers bouncing off one another; with no transcendental signified to cap it, that play has no limit and signification extends infinitely. (31:18) Put simply: Derrida: words keep bouncing off one another, which he calls "play". With no ultimate meaning to stop it, this play has no limit, so meaning spreads without end.
• Jacques Derrida. Structuralism's central pairs, nature and culture, empirical and rational, sensible and intelligible, are in some measure ideological constructs: never as tidy as they look, and always open to being undone. (33:03) Put simply: Derrida: the paired opposites structuralism relied on, such as nature versus culture, are partly ideological constructions. They are never as tidy as they look and can always be undone.
• Jacques Derrida. Différance packs both meanings of the French différer, differing and deferring, together: meaning is other than its neighbors and still to come, so synchronic and diachronic are handled together. (35:55) Put simply: Derrida's word "différance" joins "differ" and "defer." Meaning comes from differing from other words, and it is never finished, always still to come. So he studies language at one moment and over time together.
• Jacques Derrida. The trace is what a signifier carries of meanings it seems not to have: a leftover, neither quite there nor quite gone, on which its own sense may nonetheless rest. (37:20) Put simply: Derrida's "trace": every word carries faint leftovers of other meanings it does not seem to have. They are neither fully there nor fully gone, yet the word's own meaning may depend on them.
• Jacques Derrida. An aporia, or double bind, is the point where language turns on itself: caught between two meanings that cannot both hold, one reaches an impasse where no meaning seems possible. (38:10) Put simply: Derrida's "aporia" or "double bind": the point where language contradicts itself. Caught between two meanings that cannot both hold, you reach a dead end where no meaning seems possible.
• Jacques Derrida. To deconstruct is to take apart, not merely to smash. The target is stability itself: any meaning that claims to be settled, decisive and self-anchoring, structuralism's binaries among them. (19:14) Put simply: Derrida: to deconstruct means to take apart, not just to smash. What he takes apart is any meaning that claims to be settled and to hold itself in place, including structuralism's neat paired opposites.
• Jacques Derrida. To Derrida, anything linear, one-directional or Hegelian feels totalitarian, and goes with an illusion: that a transcendental signified, a unifying first principle, exists. (16:37) Put simply: To Derrida, anything linear or one-directional, anything Hegelian, feels totalitarian. It goes with an illusion: that a single unifying first principle, a stand-in for God, exists.
• Jacques Derrida. There are two ways to think the absent center: mourn it, in the sad, guilty, nostalgic Rousseauist manner, or affirm with Nietzsche the joyous play of a world without origin. (50:15) Put simply: Derrida: with no fixed center, we can respond in two ways. Mourn it, sadly, guiltily and nostalgically, in Rousseau's manner. Or celebrate, with Nietzsche, the joyful free play of a world with no origin.
• Jacques Derrida. Deconstruction is politics in the good sense, an antidote to the absolutist truth claims behind Nazism and Stalinism: "the at least necessary condition for identifying and combating the totalitarian risk." (48:20) Put simply: Derrida: deconstruction is political in a good way. By taking apart claims to absolute truth, like those behind Nazism and Stalinism, it is at least a precondition for spotting and fighting totalitarianism.
• Jacques Derrida. Derrida grants that de Man's 1941 article is antisemitic, verging on a call for exclusion and even deportation, and that no analysis will heal the wound it gave him. (46:43) Put simply: Derrida, writing about his late friend Paul de Man's wartime article of 1941, admits it is antisemitic and close to urging exclusion and even deportation. No analysis, he says, will heal the wound.
• Jacques Derrida. Yet "on the other hand," Derrida argues, the whole of de Man's antisemitic article is "organized as an indictment of vulgar antisemitism": its meaning undoes itself. (45:09) Put simply: Derrida then argues the other side: read closely, his friend Paul de Man's antisemitic article is built as an attack on crude antisemitism. Its meaning, he claims, undoes itself.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss. As Derrida reads him, Lévi-Strauss holds that writing reached the societies he studied as a corruption: hierarchy, control and even violence came with it, and an innocence was lost. (20:25)
• Paul de Man. De Man's antisemitic 1941 article held that Western literature's resisting Jewish influence proved its vitality, and that removing Jews to an isolated colony would cost it only a few mediocre writers. (45:49)
• Jean-François Lyotard. The postmodern, in Lyotard's famous 1979 formula, is "incredulity toward meta-narratives": a refusal to believe any single grand story could gather everything up and make it cohere. (17:41)
• Terry Eagleton. Eagleton's hostile illustration of deconstruction: man becomes himself only by endlessly shutting woman out as his opposite, so his identity hangs on, and is endangered by, what he excludes. (33:38) Put simply: Eagleton, a hostile critic of deconstruction, illustrates how it unravels opposites: man defines himself by constantly shutting woman out as his opposite, so his identity depends on, and is endangered by, what he excludes.
• Shore's own view. Asked whether God can be replaced, the question this course began with, postmodernism will answer, in Shore's summary, no. (2:43)
• Shore's own view. Nobody really escapes Hegel. Even Foucault and Derrida, who reject any sure direction in history, keep some form of dialectic, because ideas once loose are recombined and inverted, never erased. (2:57) Put simply: Shore: no one really escapes Hegel's idea that history moves through clashing opposites. Even Foucault and Derrida, who deny history has a sure direction, keep some version of it, because ideas once released get remixed and reversed, never erased.
• Shore's own view. For Shore, Marxism symbolically died as a passionately held worldview when Warsaw Pact tanks ended Prague's socialism with a human face in 1968; that post-structuralism took off just then is, she says, no coincidence. (9:20) Put simply: Shore: Marxism symbolically died as a passionate belief in 1968, when Soviet-bloc tanks crushed Prague's experiment in a humane socialism. That post-structuralism took off just then is, she says, no coincidence.
• Shore's own view. Derrida, a dismantler in Nietzsche's line, gives us no system and not even Foucault's usable method, only an invitation to read and think differently, treating life as a text. (10:29)
• Shore's own view. Derrida's opening question on writing echoes Heidegger twice: needing a preliminary idea of writing before asking where it begins is the hermeneutic circle, and "always already" is Heidegger's phrase. (23:11) Put simply: Shore hears Heidegger twice in Derrida. To ask where writing begins, you must already have some idea of what writing is: Heidegger's "hermeneutic circle." And "always already" is Heidegger's phrase.
• Shore's own view. Shore's own illustration of aporia is the Stalinist terror: everyone had to watch ceaselessly for enemies lurking anywhere, even as history's iron laws supposedly guaranteed the communist future. (38:30) Put simply: Shore's own example of a self-contradiction ("aporia") is Stalin's terror. People had to watch constantly for hidden enemies everywhere, yet history's laws supposedly guaranteed communism's victory anyway.
• Shore's own view. Shore sometimes finds it hard not to suspect something psychologically self-serving in de Man's embrace of aporia: for someone wanting to disown his past, denying any persisting self is appealing. (49:02) Put simply: Shore admits she sometimes cannot help suspecting that de Man's embrace of a philosophy where meaning undoes itself was self-serving. For someone wanting to cut himself off from his past, believing in no lasting self is appealing.
• Shore's own view. Derrida's essay on de Man's war has been called deconstruction's bankruptcy and one of the finest texts on intellectual friendship ever written; Shore feels both are, in some sense, true. (43:43) Put simply: Shore: Derrida's essay on his late friend Paul de Man's Nazi-era journalism has been called both the bankruptcy of deconstruction and one of the finest texts on friendship. Shore thinks both are partly true.
• Shore's own view. Followed line by line, Derrida's brilliant unpicking of de Man's article convinces: meaning does seem to dissolve. Step away for five minutes and the verdict reverses: it does not work. (47:34) Put simply: Shore: read slowly, line by line, Derrida's brilliant analysis of de Man's article seems to show its meaning unraveling. Walk away for five minutes and you think: no, it doesn't work.
• Shore's own view. Shore finds deconstruction thrilling and provoking, but it ultimately leaves us hanging as the avant-garde was: the leap opens every possibility and offers no handhold. (51:02) Put simply: Shore finds deconstruction thrilling and provocative, but in the end it leaves us dangling, as the avant-garde artists were: once you jump, anything is possible, but there is nothing to hold on to.

Lecture 23: Antipolitics and the Philosophy of Dissent

• Shore's own view. Shore offers a simplified schema: once Marxism and the grand narratives die, Eastern and Western Europe answer that death in two distinct ways, which sometimes overlap or interact. (11:51) Put simply: Shore's simplified picture: once Marxism and the other all-explaining stories died, Eastern and Western Europe responded in two different ways, which sometimes overlapped or influenced each other.
• Shore's own view. In some ways Marxism's collapse hit the parents' generation harder than the students: anyone over forty who had built a life on it found quitting the party negated that life. (10:51) Put simply: Shore: in some ways Marxism's collapse hit the students' parents harder than the students. Anyone over forty who had built a life on it felt that quitting the party canceled that whole life.
• Shore's own view. Vague, unenforceable, and signed by regimes that never meant to honor it, Helsinki's human-rights language still filled the vacuum Marxism's collapse left among Eastern intellectuals; its universality mattered. (23:01) Put simply: Shore: the human-rights promises the Soviet-bloc regimes signed at Helsinki were vague, unenforceable and never meant sincerely. Still, after Marxism collapsed, they gave Eastern intellectuals a new language, and it mattered that it applied to everyone.
• Shore's own view. Across Eastern Europe, most pointedly in Czechoslovakia after 1968, Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, whose one secret is unbelief, became the metaphor for a party that no longer believed in communism. (15:13) Put simply: Shore: across Eastern Europe, especially in Czechoslovakia after 1968, people likened the ruling party to Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, a churchman whose one secret is that he does not believe. The party no longer believed in communism.
• Shore's own view. Living in truth carries a strong Heideggerian motif: Havel takes over the authentic/inauthentic distinction but turns it into an explicitly moral one. (43:07) Put simply: Shore hears Heidegger in Havel's "living in truth," refusing the regime's pretenses. Havel takes Heidegger's contrast between living authentically and inauthentically and makes it openly moral.
• Shore's own view. The greengrocer lies twice. Feigning belief in communism is the shallow lie; the deeper one, Sartrean bad faith, is telling himself he is powerless when greengrocers keep the game going. (43:38) Put simply: Shore: Havel's greengrocer, displaying a communist slogan, lies twice. Faking belief in communism is the shallow lie. The deeper one is Sartre's "bad faith," self-deception: telling himself he is powerless, when people like him keep the system running.
• Shore's own view. On Shore's reading, Havel's roots are not in Western liberalism but in a Heideggerianism that reached him through Patočka. (47:51) Put simply: Shore: Havel's roots lie not in Western liberalism but in a kind of Heideggerian thinking, which reached him through the philosopher Jan Patočka.
• Leszek Kołakowski. Kołakowski argued in a 1966 Warsaw University lecture that Poland's regime worked by negative selection: the worst people, those without conscience or responsibility, were the ones promoted to power. (7:57)
• Leszek Kołakowski. On Shore's account, Kołakowski concedes the subject-object gap cannot be bridged and Husserl's quest fails, yet insists we keep seeking truth: abandon it and ethics goes too. (48:36) Put simply: Shore's account of Kołakowski: no one can bridge the gap between mind and outside world, so Husserl's search for certain truth fails. Yet we must keep seeking truth, because giving it up means giving up ethics too.
• Jan Patočka. In 1948 notes, Patočka holds that Marx, following Hegel, rightly centers alienation but misreads it: no reorganized conditions can heal it, because humans are permanently other than themselves. (34:48) Put simply: Patočka, in 1948 notes: Marx, following Hegel, was right that alienation, our estrangement, is the central problem. But no change in social conditions can cure it, because humans are always other than themselves.
• Jan Patočka. The search for truth has value in itself even when truth cannot easily be grasped, and so the search must go on. (48:24) Put simply: Patočka: searching for truth is worth doing for its own sake, even when the truth is hard to grasp. So the search must go on.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky. In Dostoevsky's parable the Grand Inquisitor tells Jesus that humans find freedom the hardest burden of all, and will lay it down in exchange for guaranteed bread. (16:50)
• Fyodor Dostoevsky. The parable's punchline, as Alyosha guesses and Ivan confirms: the Grand Inquisitor, who burns heretics for believing too little, has one secret, his own lack of faith in God. (17:34) Put simply: The twist in Dostoevsky's parable: the Grand Inquisitor burns heretics for not believing enough, yet his one secret is that he himself does not believe in God.
• Terry Eagleton. Eagleton's jab: deconstruction's dogma, that we are locked inside our discourse, lets you wreck everyone else's beliefs while holding none; an invulnerable position, and emptiness is its price. (4:52) Put simply: Eagleton mocks deconstruction: claiming we are trapped inside our own language lets you demolish everyone else's beliefs without holding any yourself. No one can attack that position, but the price is that it is empty.
• Václav Havel. For the Charter 77 circle, political opposition meant sharing in politics and dirtying one's hands; the only clean space lay outside politics, in a moral force grounded in human rights. (31:18) Put simply: Havel's Charter 77 circle: joining a political opposition meant entering politics and dirtying your hands. The only clean ground lay outside politics, in a moral force based on human rights.
• Václav Havel. Imagine every greengrocer taking his sign down one day: Havel calls that the start of a revolution, which shows the greengrocer was never really powerless. (41:58) Put simply: Havel: imagine every greengrocer one day taking down the communist slogan in his shop window. That would start a revolution, which shows the greengrocer was never really powerless. In the text: In "The Power of the Powerless" (1978), section VII, Havel imagines a single greengrocer: "one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans", and he is punished for it.
• Václav Havel. The line dividing victims from oppressors runs through every individual: each person, in a fashion of their own, is at once the system's victim and its supporter. (42:15) Put simply: Havel: the line between victims and oppressors runs through each person. Everyone, in their own way, both suffers under the system and helps hold it up.
• Václav Havel. If living a lie is what holds the system up, then living in truth is, unsurprisingly, the fundamental threat to it. (42:59) Put simply: Havel: if the system rests on everyone living a lie, then "living in truth", refusing to pretend, is naturally the greatest threat to it.
• Václav Havel. In Audience, Vaněk will not, on principle, ghost-write the brewmaster's weekly police reports on himself; the brewmaster, who sheltered him, protests that Vaněk keeps clean while he gets smeared. (45:04) Put simply: In Havel's play Audience, the dissident Vaněk refuses on principle to write the brewmaster's weekly police reports about himself. The brewmaster, who took him in, protests that Vaněk stays clean while he gets dirtied.
• Václav Havel. On Shore's reconstruction, Havel insists truth is real, not a language game; one reason is that lies are plainly real, and their reality in some sense proves truth's. (48:01) Put simply: Shore's reading of Havel: truth is real, not just a game played with words. One reason: lies are plainly real, and that in some sense proves truth is real too.
• Václav Havel. Shore reads Kołakowski and Patočka as holding that robust subjectivity grounds truth instead of relativizing it, linked through responsibility; subjectivity becomes a key word for Havel. (48:59) Put simply: Shore reads Kołakowski and Patočka as saying that a robust personal standpoint ("subjectivity") grounds truth rather than making it merely relative. Responsibility connects truth and subjectivity, and the word becomes key for Havel.
• Václav Havel. Addressing the US Congress in 1990, Havel inverted Marx: "consciousness precedes being," meaning that individual responsibility comes first and transcends any socioeconomic conditions. (50:05) Put simply: Havel to the US Congress in 1990, reversing Marx: "consciousness precedes being." Individual responsibility comes first, he meant, and stands above any economic or social conditions.
• Václav Benda. The parallel polis, an idea Benda voiced most famously, is a second society built by self-organization: institutions of one's own in which people speak and live in truth. (44:31)
• Václav Havel. Havel's greengrocer is not powerless, which makes him answerable and so guilty: it is people like him whose compliance keeps the game going. (42:07) Put simply: Havel: the greengrocer, an ordinary shopkeeper who displays a communist slogan he does not believe, is not powerless. That makes him responsible, and so guilty, because people like him keep the system going. In the text: In "The Power of the Powerless" (1978), section VI, Havel writes that "Position in the power hierarchy determines the degree of responsibility and guilt", and that rulers and ruled are both unfree.

Lecture 24: The Heidegger Controversy

• Martin Heidegger. Writing to his wife during the war, Heidegger rejected Husserl's phenomenology as "too narrow and bloodless": no such method could be made absolute, because life outruns it. (7:00) Put simply: Heidegger, in a wartime letter to his wife: Husserl's philosophy of how things appear to consciousness ("phenomenology") is "too narrow and bloodless." No such method can be made absolute, because life is richer than any method.
• Martin Heidegger. By 1919 Heidegger privately believed his thinking had passed Husserl's, yet he told his wife he must keep playing the loyal phenomenologist, for a Freiburg chair and for money. (8:27) Put simply: In 1919 Heidegger told his wife he had already outgrown Husserl's philosophy but had to pretend to follow it, to win a professorship at Freiburg and to support them financially.
• Martin Heidegger. The Rectoral Address identifies the university's will to science with the Volk's will to its historic, spiritual mission: "science and German fate must come to power at the same time." (21:48) Put simply: Heidegger's inaugural speech as university rector ties the university's pursuit of knowledge to the German people's historic, spiritual mission: "science and German fate must come to power at the same time."
• Martin Heidegger. The Rectoral Address asks: if Nietzsche was right that "God is dead," and we take seriously "the abandonment of man today in the midst of being," what follows for science? (22:11) Put simply: Heidegger's rector's speech asks: if Nietzsche was right that "God is dead," and people today really are left abandoned in the world, what follows for science?
• Martin Heidegger. For the Rectoral Address, a Volk's spiritual world is a power, one drawn from guarding at the deepest level the forces rooted in its "soil and blood." (23:04) Put simply: Heidegger's rector's speech: a people's spiritual world is a power. It comes from guarding, at the deepest level, the forces rooted in that people's "soil and blood."
• Martin Heidegger. Addressing students as rector, Heidegger declared that the Führer alone was Germany's reality, present and to come, and its law. (24:56)
• Martin Heidegger. In 1935 lectures, Heidegger distinguished what passed for Nazi philosophy from the movement's "inner truth and grandeur," which he located in the encounter between planetary technology and modern humanity. (25:40) Put simply: Heidegger, in 1935 lectures: what was being peddled as Nazi philosophy had nothing to do with the movement's "inner truth and grandeur." That, he said, lay in modern humanity's encounter with worldwide technology. In the text: In Introduction to Metaphysics (lectures 1935, published 1953), Heidegger writes of "the inner truth and greatness of this movement". In the Spiegel interview he says the parenthesis that follows was in his manuscript; the Fried and Polt translation marks it as a later insertion.
• Martin Heidegger. Replying to Marcuse in 1948, Heidegger said he had expected in 1933 that National Socialism would spiritually renew all of life, reconcile social conflict and save Western existence from communism. (45:09)
• Martin Heidegger. Heidegger granted Marcuse's point that he never issued a public, plainly intelligible repudiation; doing so, he claimed, would have destroyed him and his family. (45:30) Put simply: Heidegger admitted to Marcuse that he never made a public, clear statement disowning his Nazi past, claiming that doing so would have been the end of him and his family.
• Martin Heidegger. In the 1966 Spiegel interview, released only after his death, Heidegger conceded that Nazism had perhaps been wrong, yet insisted the West's real crisis was still godlessness after Nietzsche. (47:51) Put simply: In a 1966 Der Spiegel interview, published only after his death in 1976, Heidegger allowed that Nazism was perhaps wrong. Still, he insisted, the West's real crisis was a world without God, after Nietzsche. In the text: In the Spiegel interview (1966, published 1976), asked about his 1933 statement that the Führer alone was Germany's reality and law, Heidegger replies: "The sentences you quote I would no longer write today."
• Martin Heidegger. "Only a god can save us," Heidegger told Der Spiegel; what remains for us is to ready ourselves, staying open to whether a god comes or stays away. (48:02)
• Edith Stein. Writing to Ingarden, Stein said Heidegger was using Husserl's complete trust to steer students away from phenomenology, and that everyone but "the good master" himself could see it. (9:01) Put simply: Stein, writing to a fellow student: Heidegger was exploiting Husserl's total trust to lead students away from Husserl's philosophy. Everyone could see it except Husserl himself.
• Karl Jaspers. Asked by the denazification committee, Jaspers called Heidegger's gifts perhaps unmatched in contemporary Germany, yet urged that he philosophize but not teach, not yet: students could not think for themselves. (34:50)
• Karl Jaspers. "We are guilty of being alive": we Germans who survived preferred living to protesting as our Jewish friends were taken, reasoning, logically but feebly, that dying would have helped nobody. (36:37) Put simply: Jaspers: "We are guilty of being alive." Germans who survived chose living over protesting when their Jewish friends were taken away, telling themselves, logically but weakly, that their deaths would have helped no one.
• Karl Jaspers. After Nazism, Jaspers held, a German has one route to truth and no other: purification arising from a deep consciousness of guilt. (37:20)
• Herbert Marcuse. In 1947 Marcuse told Heidegger he passed, for many, as a leading Nazi intellectual: he had bound himself to the regime in 1933 and never publicly recanted, even after 1945. (42:53)
• Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse, like many fellow admirers, cannot split the philosopher Heidegger from the man: Heidegger's own philosophy rules out that separation. (43:55)
• Herbert Marcuse. Political error is possible for a philosopher, who then owns up to it openly; being fooled by a regime that murdered millions of Jews simply for being Jews is not. (44:02) Put simply: Marcuse: a philosopher can get politics wrong, and then he admits it openly. But he cannot be fooled about a regime that murdered millions of Jews simply for being Jews.
• Hannah Arendt. Forgiveness, for Arendt in The Human Condition, is the sole remedy for irreversibility: a deed cannot be undone, even when its doer had no way of knowing what it was. (46:17) Put simply: Arendt: what is done cannot be undone, even when the person who did it could not have known what they were doing. Forgiveness is the only remedy for that. Where to read it: Arendt, The Human Condition §33.
• Jacques Derrida. In a 1997 essay, Derrida holds that forgiving, to have any meaning at all, must mean forgiving exactly what is unforgivable. (47:04)
• Jacques Derrida. Derrida's aporia of forgiveness: because forgiveness forgives only what cannot be forgiven, it must declare itself to be impossibility as such. (47:11) Put simply: Derrida: forgiveness only applies to what cannot be forgiven. So it is caught in a contradiction (an "aporia"): it must present itself as impossibility itself.
• Jacques Derrida. Derrida, in Gumbrecht's retelling, treated Heidegger's Nazism as settled; the real question was whether the ineffable something that drew him toward Nazism also made him the century's greatest philosopher. (50:40) Put simply: Derrida, as Gumbrecht tells it: that Heidegger was a Nazi is settled. The real question is whether the hard-to-name quality that drew him to Nazism also made him the century's greatest philosopher. Other readings: Peter Trawny, editor of Heidegger's Black Notebooks (published from 2014), reads them as showing antisemitism at work in Heidegger's account of the history of being (Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, 2015).
• Jan Patočka. Patočka asks whether Germans in 1933 could have known what is now obvious about Nazism, and whether, in some circumstances, there might have been no choice but trying it. (48:41)
• Paul Celan. Celan, Shore says, spoke of German after the war as both Muttersprache and Mördersprache: the mother tongue and the murderers' tongue. (2:53)
• Paul Celan. In Heidegger's Todtnauberg guestbook, Celan wrote of looking toward the well's star "in the hope of a word to come." (3:50) Put simply: The poet Celan, visiting Heidegger's hut at Todtnauberg in the Black Forest, wrote in its guestbook that he was looking toward the well's star "in the hope of a word to come."
• Hans Ulrich ("Sepp") Gumbrecht. For Gumbrecht, Derrida's question (did what drew Heidegger to Nazism also make his thought great?) justifies the university's existence: somewhere must exist where even that can be asked. (51:26)
• Shore's own view. Shore takes Heidegger's Nazism as known; the real controversy is what it means for reading Heidegger, and, she asks, for reading Arendt too. (49:20)
• Shore's own view. The word Celan hoped for from Heidegger at Todtnauberg, Shore judges, never arrived: not while Celan lived, and not in Heidegger's remaining years either. (49:14) Put simply: Shore: the word Celan hoped to hear from Heidegger at his hut never came, neither in Celan's lifetime nor in the years Heidegger had left.
• Shore's own view. Arendt forgave Heidegger, in Shore's reading, although he never asked; as to how, Shore points to her 1958 writing on forgiveness, in a book silently dedicated to him. (45:49) Put simply: Shore: Arendt forgave Heidegger, even though he never asked. To see how, Shore points to what Arendt wrote about forgiveness in 1958, in a book she privately dedicated to him.
• Shore's own view. Coming from a Czech who had lived under Nazi occupation, Patočka's willingness to ask what a German could have known in 1933 strikes Shore as extraordinarily generous. (49:00)
• Shore's own view. Why no university would habilitate Stein is uncertain, Shore says: perhaps her being a woman, perhaps her being Jewish, perhaps both at once, overdetermining the outcome. (30:56) Put simply: Shore: it is unclear why no university would let Stein qualify as a professor. Perhaps because she was a woman, perhaps because she was Jewish, perhaps both together.
• Shore's own view. What strikes Shore in the Rectoral Address passages she reads is an absence: nothing about Jews, antisemitism or extermination, but a great deal about will and the German Volk. (23:38) Put simply: Shore: what strikes her in the passages she reads from Heidegger's rector's speech is what is missing. Nothing about Jews, antisemitism or extermination, but a great deal about will and the German people.
• Shore's own view. Shore sees in the address's insistence on will one of Nazism's roots in Romanticism: the governing verb is not thinking but willing. (23:51) Put simply: Shore sees in the speech's stress on will one of Nazism's roots in Romanticism: the key verb is not "think" but "will."
• Shore's own view. In Heidegger's call for decision in everything and responsibility in every action, Shore hears existentialist motifs, decisionism and answerability, surfacing in his 1933 address as rector. (25:14) Put simply: Shore hears existentialist themes in Heidegger's 1933 rector's speech. His call for decision in everything and responsibility in every act echoes the existentialist stress on choosing and answering for one's choices.

Lecture 25: From Modernity to Post-Modernity

• Shore's own view. Shore reads postmodernism as a late answer to the century's mass killing: a vow of never again that reexamines the revolutionary tradition and concedes something in it went wrong. (31:15)
• Shore's own view. For Shore, making sense of the twentieth century requires history, and Heidegger supplies it: an account of historicity built on different lines from Hegel's. (29:22) Put simply: Shore: to make sense of the twentieth century we need a way of thinking about history, and Heidegger offers one: an account of how humans exist within history ("historicity"), built differently from Hegel's.
• Shore's own view. The twentieth century matters because its stakes are so high: death tolls so vast that, as Hegel describes, a change of scale becomes a change of kind. (29:45) Put simply: Shore: the twentieth century matters because so much was at stake. Its death tolls were so vast that, as Hegel puts it, a change in size becomes a change in kind.
• Shore's own view. For Shore, Heidegger's account of a being already on its way toward its own death strikes a visceral chord about the human condition that Descartes, Kant and Husserl never managed. (28:02) Put simply: Shore: Heidegger's picture of human life as always already heading toward its own death speaks to the human condition at a gut level, in a way Descartes, Kant and Husserl never did.
• Shore's own view. Heidegger raises guilt then handles it unimpressively, yet it is inseparable from the situation he describes: thrown into a world where one must choose how, and how authentically, to live. (28:16) Put simply: Shore: Heidegger raises guilt but handles it unimpressively. Yet guilt is bound up with his picture of us: thrown into a world we did not choose, where we must choose how, and how authentically, to live.
• Shore's own view. Marx wrote "all that is solid melts into air" somewhat before its time: false in 1848, it describes what postmodernism brings about. (34:12)
• Shore's own view. In Shore's telling the course moves from epistemology (truth as mind matching object), via ontology, to ethics (truth against lies, authenticity against inauthenticity); history occupies the middle. (40:28) Put simply: Shore's map of the course: from truth as the mind matching the world, through questions of what it means to exist, to truth as the opposite of lies and of living falsely. History sits in the middle.
• Václav Havel. Havel's truth, like the dissidents', exceeds factual accuracy: it is what rescues a person, grounding the self, liberating, giving life meaning, worth living and dying for. (5:12) Put simply: Havel's "truth," like that of other dissidents, means more than getting the facts right. It is what saves a person: it anchors the self, sets one free and gives life meaning, worth living and dying for.
• Arthur Koestler. Koestler, himself a former communist, wrote that each of them hides a skeleton in his conscience; heaped together these would make "galleries of bones more labyrinthine than the Paris catacombs." (21:35)
• Ivan Krastev. Krastev's reasoning: late in life Patočka's dissident circle mixed former Stalinists with victims of Stalinism, and he forgave those Czech friends; so, consistently, he would forgive Heidegger's Nazism too. (24:18) Put simply: Krastev's argument: late in life, Patočka's dissident circle included both former Stalinists and their victims, and he forgave those Czech friends. So it would be consistent for him to forgive Heidegger's Nazism too.
• Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman defines modernity as the project of swapping out inherited solids for new ones that are supposed to be sturdier and tougher. (34:19) Put simply: Bauman: modernity is the project of replacing the old "solids", inherited foundations, with new, harder and tougher ones.
• Zygmunt Bauman. Postmodernity, which Bauman names liquid modernity, abandons the search for sturdier solids altogether and welcomes what is fluid, slippery and short-lived instead. (34:34) Put simply: Bauman calls postmodernity "liquid modernity": people stop trying to replace old foundations with firmer ones and embrace what is fluid, slippery and short-lived instead.
• Karl Marx. Marx's phrase "all that is solid melts into air" names the dissolution of everything that once seemed fixed and permanent. (34:12)
• Jacques Derrida. Because language is unstable, meaning flickers; but for Derrida this produces too much meaning rather than too little, an excess rather than a deficit. (33:23)
• Jacques Derrida. In the 1990s Derrida returned to Hegel and Marx in Specters of Marx, an essay about his own, and perhaps everyone's, inability to be finished with them. (35:42)
• Jacques Derrida. Approached deconstructively, Marx and Hegel are plural: there is, and has to be, more than a single one of each; Marx especially leaves many unlike spirits whose legacy needs reclaiming. (36:05) Put simply: Derrida: read his way, there is not one Marx or one Hegel but several, and there must be. Marx especially leaves behind many different "spirits" whose legacy needs reclaiming.
• Jacques Derrida. Derrida labels the undertaking a hauntology: the many spirits of Marx, and with them Hegel's teleological conception of time, will go on haunting us indefinitely. (36:24) Put simply: Derrida calls this project "hauntology," from ghosts: Marx's many spirits, and Hegel's idea that time moves toward a goal, will go on haunting us indefinitely.
• Michel Foucault. As Foucault would put it about power, everywhere is not nowhere: that power pervades everything does not mean it has vanished. (34:00) Put simply: Foucault on power: the fact that power runs through everything does not mean it has disappeared. Being everywhere is not the same as being nowhere.
• Michel Foucault. Truly escaping Hegel means calculating what the escape costs and how close he stands; our anti-Hegelianism may itself be one of his tricks, with him waiting at the end. (36:56) Put simply: Foucault: to really escape Hegel, we must know what breaking free will cost and how close he still is. Our very rebellion against Hegel may be one of his tricks, with him waiting for us at the end.
• Hannah Arendt. Arendt contrasts the pre-modern lie, a rip in reality that an attentive eye could locate where it was stitched, with totalitarian ideology, which remakes reality wholesale and leaves no seam. (37:59) Put simply: Arendt: an old-fashioned lie was like a tear in reality, sewn back up, and a careful observer could find the seam. Totalitarian ideology rebuilds reality completely, so there is no seam to find.
• Hannah Arendt. Forgiveness alone among reactions is unpredictable: though a response, it keeps something of genuine action, starting afresh instead of being dictated by the deed that provoked it. (46:40) Put simply: Arendt: forgiveness is the one response no one can predict. Though it answers a wrong, it acts afresh, like a new beginning, rather than being dictated by the deed that provoked it.
• Hannah Arendt. Love, for Arendt, is unworldly in its very nature, and for that reason (not because it is rare) is not merely apolitical but anti-political, maybe the strongest such force. (46:23) Put simply: Arendt: love by its nature turns away from the shared world. For that reason, not because it is rare, love is not just outside politics but against it, perhaps the strongest such force. Where to read it: Arendt, The Human Condition §33.
• Jan Patočka. Patočka and Michalski shared a conviction: in the 1970s communist bloc Heidegger could counteract Hegel, showing meaning need not require wholeness, nor some kind of truth an inevitable destination. (42:24) Put simply: Patočka and Michalski shared the conviction that, in the 1970s communist bloc, Heidegger could counter Hegel by showing that meaning can exist without wholeness, and truth without history marching to a fixed end.
• Jan Patočka. To be in the world from the outset is to be responsible for it from the outset; that responsibility goes everywhere with Dasein, an ontological trait, not a contingent tie. (43:29) Put simply: Patočka: because we find ourselves in the world from the start, we are responsible for it from the start. That responsibility goes everywhere with us; it is part of what a human being is, not a chance tie.
• Krzysztof Michalski. Michalski found Heidegger like a portrait whose eyes track you wherever you stand: the thinker who, in some ways ironically, made each step feel weighty and life a responsibility. (42:54)
• Karol Wojtyła (Pope John Paul II). As Shore recounts it, John Paul II closed a conference on the Enlightenment's legacy by granting that reason was well and good but calling Enlightenment and modernity a brief moment in God's autobiography. (50:55)
• Karol Wojtyła (Pope John Paul II). When he canonized Edith Stein in 1998, John Paul II characterized her as a woman who had searched for truth with her entire being. (49:54)
• Jacques Derrida. To critics who say a surplus of meaning amounts to none, Derrida would reply, on Shore's telling, that the infinite is not nothing. (33:34)

How the claims answer one another

• Shore (lecture 1) builds on Shore (lecture 1): Names alienation as the lived, felt consequence of the empty space left once God is gone.
• Shore (lecture 1) borrows from Brzozowski (lecture 1): Shore takes Brzozowski's diary line as, in her words, more or less her own point of departure for intellectual history.
• Shore draws a comparison with Kant (lecture 1): Shore likens time and place in historical study, metaphorically, to Kant's time and space as conditions of possible knowledge.
• Shore (lecture 1) builds on Shore (lecture 1): Extends the refusal to simply judge a thinker right or wrong to cover morally monstrous historical actors as well: understanding, not excision, is still the task.
• Shore (lecture 1) builds on Shore (lecture 1): Extends the claim that ideas cross borders impurely to the specific case of a text's reception: readers redirect a work beyond its author's intent.
• Shore (lecture 1) builds on Shore (lecture 1): Restates the absence of a pure origin as a problem specifically of historical periodization and syllabus sequencing.
• Locke (lecture 2) reacts against Hobbes (lecture 2): Replaces Hobbes's violent state of war with natural equality and freedom as humanity's starting condition.
• Locke (lecture 2) reacts against Hobbes (lecture 2): Makes the social contract conditional and revocable rather than an irreversible, unconditional surrender to a sovereign.
• Rousseau (lecture 2) turns over Locke (lecture 2): Turns Locke's account of property as protective and legitimate into the very source of corruption and inequality.
• Rousseau (lecture 2) builds on Hobbes (lecture 2): Shore places the general will between Hobbes and Locke: a sovereign whole, yet not exactly the Leviathan.
• Rousseau (lecture 2) builds on Locke (lecture 2): Keeps consent-based legitimacy but relocates sovereignty in an indivisible general will rather than majority agreement.
• Kant (lecture 2) builds on Descartes (lecture 2): Takes off from Descartes's inner/outer problem: a real world exists, but known only as minds process it.
• Shore (lecture 2) disputes Descartes (lecture 2): Judges Descartes's own reintroduction of God as a weak patch used to underwrite the external world's reliability.
• Shore (lecture 2) builds on Weber (lecture 2): Frames Weber's disenchantment thesis as the specific historical process underlying the Enlightenment's characteristic confident mood.
• Fichte (lecture 3) builds on Rousseau (lecture 3): Radicalizes Rousseau's becoming-over-being into an explicit axiom: freedom itself is a process, not a possession.
• Fichte (lecture 3) builds on Kant (lecture 3): Takes Kant's merely-posited free will and turns it into an active, never-finished existential project of becoming free.
• Fichte (lecture 3) builds on Kant (lecture 3): Radicalizes Kant's focus on motive over consequence into an absolute imperative never to betray one's ideals.
• Shestov (lecture 3) disputes Kant (lecture 2): Argues Kant's first Critique defends reason rather than truly interrogating its limits; only Dostoevsky supplies the real critique.
• Rousseau (lecture 3) builds on Rousseau (lecture 2): Explains how the corruption of the idealized natural state specifically produces amour propre.
• Rousseau (lecture 3) builds on Rousseau (lecture 3): Draws the ethical conclusion — retreat from society — from amour propre's social origin.
• Herder (lecture 3) builds on Herder (lecture 3): Extends the claim of national linguistic souls into an account of belonging as the remedy for alienation.
• Shore compares Mickiewicz (lecture 3) with Herder (lecture 3): Shore offers Mickiewicz as a Romantic national poet illustrating the national-soul idea she traces largely to Herder; she states no direct debt.
• Hegel (lecture 4) builds on Hegel (lecture 4): Quantity-into-quality is a special case of the general dialectical process of instability, negation, and leap.
• Hegel (lecture 4) builds on Hegel (lecture 4): Aufheben names the specific negate-and-preserve mechanism by which dialectical stages succeed one another.
• Hegel (lecture 4) builds on Hegel (lecture 4): The slave's self-transformation through labor is the flip side of the master's dependence and dissatisfaction.
• Shore (lecture 4) builds on Hegel (lecture 4): Shore's judgment that Hegel's seduction is the seduction of wholeness rests directly on Hegel's own slogan that the true is the whole.
• Berlin (lecture 4) disputes Hegel (lecture 4): Berlin argues that requiring people to stop wanting the world otherwise, once necessity is grasped, is what makes Hegel's determinism dangerous.
• Davis (lecture 4) rereads Hegel (lecture 4): Shore presents Davis's lectures as a clear reading of Hegel's master-slave dialectic in an American context: the master depends on the slave.
• Bernstein (lecture 4) builds on Hegel (lecture 4): Bernstein concludes from mediated identity that our dependence on others is unbearable, even murderous.
• Arendt (lecture 4) disputes Hegel (lecture 4): Arendt questions whether achieving Hegel's totality is a home for reality or a prison, casting doubt on the value of the whole.
• Miłosz (lecture 4) builds on Shore (lecture 4): Shore adopts Milosz's term "the Hegelian bite" for Hegel's peculiar seduction by wholeness.
• Herzen (lecture 4) builds on Hegel (lecture 4): Herzen's description of living through the book as an experience matches Shore's Bildungsroman framing of consciousness's maturation.
• Marx (lecture 5) turns over Hegel (lecture 5): Keeps Hegel's drive toward reconciling all dualisms but replaces Geist's spiritual resolution with a material, socioeconomic one.
• Marx (lecture 5) builds on Marx (lecture 5): Extends the materialist inversion from history's motor to consciousness itself: base produces superstructure.
• Marx (lecture 5) builds on Marx (lecture 5): Extends alienation from the individual worker's product to social relations generally, now turned into relations among things.
• Marx (lecture 5) builds on Hegel (lecture 5): Class struggle concretizes Hegel's violent, sacrificial dialectic: capitalism, like feudalism, breeds its own gravediggers.
• Marx (lecture 5) builds on Hegel (lecture 5): Inherits Hegel's collapse of subjective/objective into a philosophy of history where prediction and prescription coincide, now centered on the proletariat.
• Berlin (lecture 5) disputes Hegel (lecture 5): Reads the objective/subjective hierarchy as licensing amoral indifference to atrocity committed in the name of "progress."
• Shore (lecture 5) disputes Marx (lecture 5): Shore's Calvinism analogy: if the triumph is predestined, why act? A tension Lenin steps in to solve.
• Shore (lecture 5) builds on Judt (lecture 5): Shore adopts Judt's challenge — recover the seduction, not just the error — as her own explicit teaching method for this lecture.
• Nietzsche (lecture 6) disputes Hegel (lecture 4): Declares Hegel's reconciling telos gone: the harmonious whole is not coming and life does not come together.
• Nietzsche (lecture 6) disputes Hegel (lecture 4): Treats the world-process philosophy as making history a god, justifying the present as its necessary result and paralyzing culture.
• Nietzsche (lecture 6) builds on Nietzsche (lecture 6): The attack on Hegel is launched from the essay's broader argument that too much history sickens.
• Nietzsche (lecture 6) builds on Nietzsche (lecture 6): Once God is understood as a belief in a meaning-giving order, its collapse is the loss of highest values.
• Nietzsche (lecture 6) builds on Nietzsche (lecture 6): Spells out what the lost order contained: meaning, purpose, goal, and a totality that cannot be found.
• Nietzsche (lecture 6) builds on Nietzsche (lecture 6): Adds that the nihilist crisis has no cure by substitution because the ordering impulse itself is the root.
• Nietzsche (lecture 6) builds on Nietzsche (lecture 6): Carries the critique of Christian slave morality over to egalitarianism and democracy.
• Nietzsche (lecture 6) builds on Nietzsche (lecture 6): The Übermensch is the heroic counter-ideal that would overcome the mediocrity Nietzsche condemns in democracy.
• Shore compares Nietzsche (lecture 6) with Kant (lecture 3): Shore reports one interpretation of eternal recurrence as Kantian, going back to the categorical imperative; she does not say Nietzsche took it from Kant.
• Nietzsche (lecture 6) builds on Nietzsche (lecture 6): Wagner's music-drama is offered as the concrete art that could justify existence.
• Shore (lecture 6) builds on Nietzsche (lecture 6): Shore adds that the announcement, like Hegel's Bastille, is irreversible: everyone must now live after God's death.
• Shore (lecture 6) builds on Nietzsche (lecture 6): Shore's anti-Hegel frame is what she uses to read the death of God as the loss of Hegel's telos.
• Bergson (lecture 7) disputes Spencer (lecture 7): Spencerian quantifying science treats time like space and so misses lived duration.
• Bergson (lecture 7) disputes Spencer (lecture 7): Spencer's evolutionism cuts present reality into pieces and recomposes it, presupposing what it claims to explain.
• Bergson (lecture 7) borrows from Cantor (lecture 7): Shore conjectures that the continuous/discrete contrast comes from calculus and Cantor; time is like the continuum of the line.
• Bergson (lecture 7) builds on Kant (lecture 3): Where Kant merely postulates free will, Bergson tries to ground it in the nature of time.
• Bergson (lecture 7) builds on Bergson (lecture 7): The Einstein polemic is where the duration-freedom link is pressed against a physics of instants.
• Bergson (lecture 7) builds on Bergson (lecture 7): Spatializing time is the mirror image: it deletes contingency and with it creative agency.
• Bergson (lecture 7) builds on Bergson (lecture 7): The life force is what generates evolution's divergent, unplanned lines.
• Bergson (lecture 7) builds on Bergson (lecture 7): Intellect is the faculty whose analytic partition of matter yields mechanism; fine for machines, blind to life.
• Arendt (lecture 7) builds on Bergson (lecture 7): Shore links Bergson's radical contingency of living beings to Arendt's natality.
• Bergson (lecture 7) builds on Bergson (lecture 7): Rejecting a pre-set goal and affirming free will are two sides of the same open future.
• Lenin (lecture 8) builds on Marx (lecture 8): Lenin fills Marx's silence on the timetable of history's stages by proposing an active method — the vanguard — to shorten it.
• Lenin (lecture 8) builds on Marx (lecture 8): Lenin keeps Marx's claim that revolution is scientifically inevitable but adds that intellectuals must actively accelerate its arrival.
• Lenin (lecture 8) rereads Marx (lecture 8): Lenin reinterprets Marx's stages: the proletariat becomes a future class the revolution will create, not the small class that exists in 1917 Russia.
• Luxemburg (lecture 8) disputes Lenin (lecture 8): Luxemburg rejects Lenin's vanguard mechanism, insisting real revolutionary energy must come from the trusted proletariat itself, on its own timetable.
• Luxemburg (lecture 8) disputes Lenin (lecture 8): Luxemburg attacks the vanguard's ultra-centralism as Jacobin, severing party leadership from the workers it represents.
• Lukács (lecture 8) builds on Lenin (lecture 8): Lukács supplies the totality-based philosophical rationale for Lenin's charge that trade-unionism/economism "thinks small."
• Lukács (lecture 8) disputes Luxemburg (lecture 8): Though Lukács loves Luxemburg, he judges that she underrates the Party's necessary role as the living unity of theory and practice.
• Freud (lecture 9) builds on Freud (lecture 9): Hysteria is the first worked case of memory-caused illness, showing that thoughts can make one ill.
• Freud (lecture 9) builds on Freud (lecture 9): Generalizes the return of a repressed memory as a symptom into a law of the whole psyche.
• Freud (lecture 9) builds on Freud (lecture 9): The unconscious "gets started very early": childhood sexuality and its repression are where it forms.
• Freud (lecture 9) builds on Freud (lecture 9): Everyone is repressed in childhood, so neurosis differs by degree only.
• Freud (lecture 9) builds on Freud (lecture 9): The Oedipal stage is the near-universal childhood motif of formative repressed desire.
• Freud (lecture 9) builds on Freud (lecture 9): The structural model gives the primacy of the unconscious an architecture of layers and parts.
• Freud (lecture 9) builds on Freud (lecture 9): Fills in the id, the unconscious desire layer, as Eros and Thanatos.
• Freud (lecture 9) builds on Freud (lecture 9): Fills in the superego as conscience and internalized society.
• Freud (lecture 9) builds on Freud (lecture 9): The ego is squeezed between the id's drives and the superego's prohibitions.
• Freud (lecture 9) builds on Freud (lecture 9): Superego prohibition is the opposing force the ego negotiates against.
• Freud (lecture 9) builds on Freud (lecture 9): The talking cure works by coaxing the unconscious into revealing itself.
• Freud (lecture 9) builds on Freud (lecture 9): God-belief arises from the father-relation: the wish for an all-powerful father, transferred after disillusionment.
• Freud (lecture 9) builds on Freud (lecture 9): Society must repress both drives, Eros and Thanatos, to keep people living together.
• Freud (lecture 9) builds on Freud (lecture 9): Repressed aggression is the specific price of leaving the state of nature.
• Freud (lecture 9) builds on Freud (lecture 9): Restates renunciation as pleasure principle versus reality principle, with happiness traded for security.
• Freud (lecture 9) builds on Freud (lecture 9): Aggression is a hardwired drive, not a product of private property.
• Freud (lecture 9) builds on Freud (lecture 9): If the fundamental is unconscious, the self cannot be transparent to itself.
• Freud (lecture 9) turns over Shore (lecture 9): Shore: Freud inverts the Bolshevik I/we model, starting from the first-person singular rather than the collective.
• Freud (lecture 9) turns over Shore (lecture 9): Freud's never-transparent self makes the Bolshevik goal of transparent identification with History impossible.
• Robinson (lecture 9) builds on Freud (lecture 9): Robinson's closet is a picture of the unconscious as a repository that accumulates what consciousness rejects.
• Prokhasko (lecture 9) rereads Freud (lecture 9): Recasts Freud's dismissal of religion as an account of modern life after God, still hunting for windows back in.
• Arendt (lecture 9) disputes Freud (lecture 9): Argues the supposed universality of the Oedipus complex is a product of Freud's particular cultural milieu.
• Shore compares Luxemburg (lecture 8) with Freud (lecture 9): Shore says Luxemburg in 1904 was already hinting at the conscious/unconscious dualism Freud develops, though she identifies the unconscious with objective history.
• Kafka (lecture 10) builds on Kafka (lecture 10): Once work-based identity is questioned, the alienation Kafka depicts is psychological rather than structural.
• Lewis (lecture 10) rereads Baudelaire (lecture 10): Baudelaire's embrace of the ugly and subjective is re-read as the start of a crisis of representation.
• Saussure (lecture 10) builds on Saussure (lecture 10): Arbitrariness of the sign is the sharpest consequence of language being relational form.
• Shore compares Khlebnikov (lecture 10) with Saussure (lecture 10): Shore gives Saussure as background to the futurists' freed word and says the avant-gardists were not necessarily structuralists.
• Khlebnikov (lecture 10) builds on Marinetti (lecture 10): Goes beyond freeing grammar and punctuation to severing word from referent.
• Kruchenykh (lecture 10) builds on Khlebnikov (lecture 10): Follows from severing word and referent: form displaces content.
• Shklovsky (lecture 10) builds on Khlebnikov (lecture 10): Formalists bracket the referent and study self-announcing language.
• Shklovsky (lecture 10) builds on Shklovsky (lecture 10): Laying bare the device serves defamiliarization, waking us from automatized perception.
• Shore (lecture 10) builds on Shore (lecture 10): Shore sharpens the two-wave frame: first wave rethinks how art represents; avant-garde abandons representation for transformation.
• Shore draws a comparison with Saussure (lecture 10): Shore describes the avant-garde's move from representing to creating as completely severing signifier from signified, the terms she introduced through Saussure.
• Mayakovsky (lecture 10) builds on Shore (lecture 10): Cult of the new and pushing the falling follows from taking the death of God radically.
• Tzara (lecture 10) builds on Marinetti (lecture 10): Dada, following futurism's words set free, turns liberated form into systemless freedom aiming at nothing outside itself.
• Mayakovsky (lecture 10) builds on Shore (lecture 10): Mayakovsky's suicide is offered as the tragic endpoint of the leap.
• Shore (lecture 10) builds on Shklovsky (lecture 10): Art crossing borders is the internationalist reaction to the Versailles nation-state order.
• Mayakovsky (lecture 10) builds on Shore (lecture 10): The revolt against convention and bourgeois culture expressed in the Slap manifesto.
• Clark (lecture 10) rereads Tzara (lecture 10): Clark frames Dada's aimless freedom as reification of contingency.
• Marinetti (lecture 10) builds on Shore (lecture 10): Marinetti's celebration of speed, aggression and war prefigures his move to fascism.
• Shore (lecture 11) builds on Shore (lecture 10): Shore casts Husserl as the avant-garde's alter ego, answering the same modern problem of groundlessness.
• Husserl (lecture 11) disputes Kant (lecture 2): Brands Kant's decision to set the thing-in-itself aside as fatalism and giving up.
• Husserl (lecture 11) turns over Kant (lecture 2): Recasts the thing-in-itself as the thing as given in experience; Shore says the result is a hair's breadth from Kant.
• Husserl (lecture 11) rereads Descartes (lecture 2): Husserl reworks the Cartesian fresh start: he suspends the world's reality in brackets instead of doubting it.
• Husserl (lecture 11) builds on Husserl (lecture 11): Intentionality is the answer to how consciousness bursts out of the windowless box: subject and object are connected from the start.
• Husserl (lecture 11) builds on Husserl (lecture 11): The I to whom the world is given is refined into a universal, essence-level transcendental ego.
• Husserl (lecture 11) turns over Freud (lecture 9): Keeps a radical theory of subjectivity but flips the depth from hidden to transparent, all light.
• Husserl (lecture 11) builds on Husserl (lecture 11): Shore reports that Husserl applied his own bracketing to his life, writing weeks after his son's death that the war was now bracketed.
• Husserl (lecture 11) builds on Husserl (lecture 11): The search for a foundation acquires political stakes: without absolute clarity, Europe slides into irrationalism and barbarism.
• Levinas (lecture 11) builds on Husserl (lecture 11): A later student recalls the same critique of scientific objectivism that drew him to phenomenology.
• Witkiewicz (lecture 11) disputes Husserl (lecture 11): Mocks the pure, bodyless, generic ego as a philosopher floating out of the real world.
• Heidegger (lecture 12) turns over Husserl (lecture 11): Reverses the order: being precedes thinking, so the "I think an object" already presupposes an I existing in the world.
• Heidegger (lecture 12) reacts against Husserl (lecture 11): Husserl bridges subject and object by intentionality; Heidegger denies there is any gap to bridge.
• Heidegger (lecture 12) builds on Husserl (lecture 11): Dasein is the next move in overcoming the notion of subjectivity that the transcendental ego began to unsettle.
• Heidegger (lecture 12) builds on Husserl (lecture 11): Shore calls ready-to-hand breakdown another variation on Husserl's question: when do we really see?
• Heidegger (lecture 12) builds on Heidegger (lecture 12): Thrownness gives the always-already-in-the-world condition its violence and its facticity.
• Heidegger (lecture 12) builds on Heidegger (lecture 12): Once thrown, Dasein must decide how to be; the default mode is conformity.
• Heidegger (lecture 12) builds on Heidegger (lecture 12): Spells out what living as das Man looks like: falling, idle talk, ambiguity.
• Heidegger (lecture 12) builds on Heidegger (lecture 12): Adds that the they-self's self-loss is alienation, and a comforting one.
• Heidegger (lecture 12) builds on Heidegger (lecture 12): Thrownness and finitude combine: always already thrown, and always already proceeding toward death.
• Heidegger (lecture 12) builds on Heidegger (lecture 12): Anxiety is the mood in which being-toward-death is actually confronted.
• Heidegger (lecture 12) builds on Heidegger (lecture 12): Anxiety about nothing produces the feeling of not being at home.
• Heidegger (lecture 12) builds on Heidegger (lecture 12): Finitude individualizes: death is the one thing each Dasein must do alone.
• Heidegger (lecture 12) builds on Heidegger (lecture 12): Being individualized before death can shake Dasein into resolute responsibility for its choices.
• Shore (lecture 12) disputes Husserl (lecture 11): Shore judges the pure, transparent I an unstable attempt to keep both subjective depth and objective certainty.
• Shore (lecture 12) rereads Heidegger (lecture 12): Shore argues the claimed moral neutrality about conformity is disingenuous.
• Shore (lecture 12) rereads Heidegger (lecture 12): Draws out a consequence Heidegger's dissolution of the bridge invites: with no distance, is there still a subject?
• Sartre (lecture 13) builds on Sartre (lecture 13): Shore grounds Sartrean freedom in consciousness being for-itself, with its limits set by the in-itself.
• Sartre (lecture 13) builds on Sartre (lecture 13): Bad faith is the evasion of the responsibility that the imperative to choose imposes.
• Sartre (lecture 13) builds on Sartre (lecture 13): Total freedom to choose becomes total responsibility, which is experienced as anguish.
• Gombrowicz (lecture 13) disputes Sartre (lecture 13): Gombrowicz answers "no reality except in action" with the charge that Sartre's bourgeois vantage romanticizes pain.
• Gombrowicz (lecture 13) disputes Sartre (lecture 13): If only the act of choosing matters, choosing frivolity or falseness carries no penalty beyond an emptier existence.
• Horkheimer (lecture 14) builds on Horkheimer (lecture 14): Explains why they keep Hegel's dialectic while dropping telos: abandoning Hegel means facing sheer meaninglessness.
• Adorno (lecture 14) builds on Horkheimer (lecture 14): Applies the no-guaranteed-telos dialectic to Enlightenment itself: internal contradiction produces catastrophe, not progress.
• Adorno (lecture 14) builds on Adorno (lecture 14): Domination of nature as object dialectically ricochets into domination of other people, then of the self.
• Marcuse (lecture 14) builds on Reich (lecture 14): Shares Reich's claim that capitalism specifically, not civilization as such, causes sexual repression, but adds the Eros/Thanatos economy explaining the stakes.
• Arendt (lecture 15) builds on Arendt (lecture 15): Reverse direction (arendt-L15-12 -> arendt-L15-09): radical evil is named as where superfluousness becomes total.
• Arendt (lecture 15) builds on Arendt (lecture 15): Reverse direction (arendt-L15-20 -> arendt-L15-19): making the impossible possible yields unpunishable, unforgivable evil.
• Shore (lecture 15) rereads Arendt (lecture 15): Shore reads the Eichmann account as a possible revision of the earlier radical-evil framing.
• Beauvoir (lecture 16) borrows from Kojève (lecture 16): Shore says Beauvoir goes back to Kojève's reading of Hegelian recognition and takes it up in casting woman as the other.
• Beauvoir (lecture 16) builds on Kojève (lecture 16): Beauvoir follows the idea that human negativity, a lack, is the precondition for self-creation.
• Beauvoir (lecture 16) builds on Beauvoir (lecture 16): Root cause of oppression as flight from freedom yields the charge that women share responsibility by fleeing into the object role.
• Stein (lecture 17) builds on Husserl (lecture 17): Stein reaches another's living body by the same analogy and pairing that Husserl uses for other egos, but adds the body he leaves out.
• Sartre (lecture 17) builds on Stein (lecture 17): Shore says Sartre takes up Stein's idea that I am an object for other subjects; she does not claim direct borrowing.
• Sartre (lecture 17) disputes Husserl (lecture 17): Sartre sees moral and existential risk in Husserl's other, constituted in me as an object for my consciousness.
• Levinas (lecture 17) builds on Heidegger (lecture 17): Shore presents Levinas as re-grounding everything one step further, in the self-other relation, after Husserl's subject-object bridge and Heidegger's always-already-in-the-world.
• Kołakowski (lecture 18) disputes Marx (lecture 8): Replaces claimed historical necessity with a moral choice to side with the oppressed.
• Shore compares Marković (lecture 18) with Sartre (lecture 13): Shore hears echoes of Sartre's for-itself, the going beyond, in Marković's account of alienation as the gap between actual existence and potential essence.
• Petrović (lecture 18) builds on Marković (lecture 18): Builds the praxis-based account of alienation into a theory of authentic revolution.
• Kosík (lecture 18) turns over Lukács (lecture 18): Kosik's interactive, Heideggerian model occupies the subject-object middle ground Lukacs dismissed as cheating.
• Vaculík (lecture 18) builds on Kosík (lecture 18): A parallel act at the same 1967 congress: like Kosík, Vaculík refuses to split reason from conscience, at political cost.
• Shore (lecture 18) borrows from Žižek (lecture 18): Shore cites Žižek's applause detail to illustrate her point that Stalin embodied History, which is why his exposure as fallible was devastating.
• Sartre (lecture 18) builds on Sartre (lecture 18): Moves from sympathetic distance in 1946 to full philosophical embrace of Marxism by 1960.
• Geertz (lecture 19) disputes Lévi-Strauss (lecture 19): Geertz charges that Lévi-Strauss's universal structures of mind seek abstract Man, not actual people.
• Shore (lecture 19) rereads Saussure (lecture 19): Shore reads the structuralist bracketing of the signified through Husserlian bracketing, widening it to subject and object.
• Girard (lecture 20) borrows from Lévi-Strauss (lecture 19): Shore presents Girard as coming out of a dialogue with Lévi-Strauss and calls his view that differentiation holds culture in place a structuralist premise.
• Girard (lecture 20) disputes Lévi-Strauss (lecture 20): Charges that staying at the level of signifiers misses the real victim beneath every myth.
• Girard (lecture 20) disputes Lévi-Strauss (lecture 20): Rejects confining interpretation to relations among signs, demanding a return to substance beneath the structure.
• Hamerton-Kelly (lecture 20) builds on Girard (lecture 20): Glosses the double transference as a collective misidentification of the real cause of disorder and peace.
• Girard (lecture 20) builds on Girard (lecture 20): Says the crisis of distinctions is resolved only by converging on a scapegoat.
• Girard (lecture 20) builds on Girard (lecture 20): The double attribution to the victim is what lifts him into the Sacred.
• Girard (lecture 20) turns over Girard (lecture 20): Christianity reverses the mythic vantage point, telling the killing from the victim's side.
• Foucault (lecture 21) reacts against Saussure (lecture 19): Against structuralism's closed, chessboard-like system, Foucault holds the web of statements is never sealed.
• Kotkin (lecture 21) borrows from Foucault (lecture 21): Shore lists Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain among histories written with Foucault's archaeological method, showing Stalinist discourse creating the Stalinist subject.
• Kotkin (lecture 21) borrows from Foucault (lecture 21): Takes over Foucault's view that power creates as well as represses and applies it to Stalinism.
• Shore draws a comparison with Foucault (lecture 21): Shore offers the Czech and Slovak writers' shift in vocabulary as an example of what Foucault would call a moment of discontinuity.
• Shore (lecture 21) builds on Foucault (lecture 21): Shore reads the denial of a single point of power as an inversion of the subject-object paradigm.
• Shore (lecture 21) builds on Foucault (lecture 21): Shore generalizes reason's need for madness into a pattern of identity formed against an Other.
• Shore (lecture 21) rereads Foucault (lecture 21): Shore reads Foucault's acknowledgment of the subject's loss as mournful, nostalgic rather than triumphant.
• Derrida (lecture 22) disputes Lévi-Strauss (lecture 22): Derrida takes apart Levi-Strauss's speech/writing binary, denying that speech guarantees presence.
• Derrida (lecture 22) builds on Derrida (lecture 22): If a stable sign needs an absolute foundation, denying any such foundation removes the sign's guaranteed unity.
• Derrida (lecture 22) builds on Derrida (lecture 22): With no anchor for meaning, nothing limits play among signifiers.
• Derrida (lecture 22) builds on Derrida (lecture 22): Endlessly unstable meaning is what casts doubt on structuralism's fixed binaries.
• Eagleton (lecture 22) builds on Derrida (lecture 22): Eagleton offers man/woman as a worked example of a binary that deconstruction takes apart.
• Derrida (lecture 22) disputes de Man (lecture 22): Derrida calls the 1941 article's violence unpardonable and recognizes it as antisemitism.
• Derrida (lecture 22) rereads de Man (lecture 22): Derrida reads de Man's article against its apparent thrust, as an indictment of vulgar antisemitism.
• Shore draws a comparison with Derrida (lecture 22): Shore offers the Stalinist terror, with its call for vigilance alongside iron laws of history, as her own example of Derrida's aporia.
• Shore (lecture 23) borrows from Dostoevsky (lecture 23): Shore reports that Dostoevsky's unbelieving Grand Inquisitor was used across Eastern Europe as the metaphor for the post-1968 Czechoslovak party.
• Shore (lecture 23) rereads Havel (lecture 23): Shore reads the greengrocer's self-deception about his own powerlessness as Sartrean bad faith.
• Havel (lecture 23) builds on Havel (lecture 23): The brewmaster scene applies the victim-and-supporter logic to a single case.
• Havel (lecture 23) builds on Patočka (lecture 23): Shore says Havel learns from Patočka that seeking truth matters even when truth is elusive.
• Benda (lecture 23) builds on Havel (lecture 23): The parallel polis gives living in truth a collective, institutional form.
• Marcuse (lecture 24) disputes Heidegger (lecture 24): Marcuse cites Heidegger's own 1933 speeches as proof of identification with the regime; the Rectoral Address is the speech Shore has just read (Marcuse does not name it in Shore's excerpt).
• Heidegger (lecture 24) borrows from Jaspers (lecture 24): In the 1948 letter Shore reads out, Heidegger himself cites Jaspers's line that remaining alive is our guilt when explaining his lack of a public repudiation.
• Shore (lecture 24) rereads Arendt (lecture 24): Shore reads Arendt's account of forgiveness as the means by which she forgave Heidegger.
• Patočka (lecture 24) builds on Heidegger (lecture 24): Asked to answer the Spiegel interview, Patočka further mitigates 1933: could a German then have known?
• Gumbrecht (lecture 24) builds on Derrida (lecture 24): Gumbrecht retells Derrida's question about Heidegger and draws his own conclusion from it: the university must exist so that even that question can be posed.
• Stein (lecture 24) disputes Heidegger (lecture 24): Stein privately accuses Heidegger of exploiting Husserl's trust, the conduct that Heidegger's letter to his wife describes from the inside.
• Bauman (lecture 25) borrows from Marx (lecture 25): Bauman takes Marx's melting-solids image and redeploys it as his definition of modernity as replacement of solids.
• Shore (lecture 25) rereads Marx (lecture 25): Shore reads Marx's line as untimely for 1848 and as truly describing postmodernism.
• Marx (lecture 5) turns over Hegel (lecture 4): Keeps the dialectic but puts material forces where Geist stood
• Marx (lecture 5) builds on Hegel (lecture 4): Retains dialectical motion through antagonism as the engine of history
• Marx (lecture 5) turns over Hegel (lecture 4): Consciousness is no longer the protagonist of history but derivative of social being
• Shore compares Marx (lecture 5) with Hegel (lecture 4): Shore presents alienation as a shared preoccupation: failure to see oneself within Geist for Hegel, concrete estrangement from one's labor for Marx.
• Marx (lecture 5) builds on Hegel (lecture 4): Every order carries the seeds of its own supersession, now as class antagonism
• Marx (lecture 5) builds on Hegel (lecture 4): Inherits the collapse of what will happen into what should happen
• Marx (lecture 5) builds on Hegel (lecture 4): Marx's historicism makes a concrete, contingent process, industrialization, decisive for thought
• Lenin (lecture 8) builds on Shore (lecture 5): Supplies classical Marxism's missing answer to "why act?": the vanguard accelerates the inevitable
• Lenin (lecture 8) rereads Marx (lecture 5): Class consciousness no longer arises organically; it must be brought from without
• Lenin (lecture 8) rereads Marx (lecture 8): Left alone, workers reach only trade-union consciousness, so Marx's "natural" class consciousness needs outside help
• Luxemburg (lecture 8) builds on Marx (lecture 5): Holds to the orthodox view that the proletariat reaches consciousness on its own timetable
• Lukács (lecture 8) borrows from Hegel (lecture 4): Makes Hegel's "the true is the whole" the test of revolutionary class consciousness
• Lukács (lecture 8) rereads Marx (lecture 5): Distinguishes "ascribed" from empirical class consciousness; the Party knows it first
• Horkheimer (lecture 14) builds on Hegel (lecture 4): History still moves through contradiction
• Horkheimer (lecture 14) disputes Hegel (lecture 4): Drops the guaranteed telos and final reconciliation
• Horkheimer (lecture 14) disputes Hegel (lecture 4): Refuses any promised identity of subject and object; no closed systems
• Marcuse (lecture 14) builds on Lukács (lecture 8): Like Lukács, insists Marxism stay rooted in Hegel rather than shed its Hegelian categories
• Adorno (lecture 14) borrows from Hegel (lecture 4): Alienation reappears as reason's estrangement from the nature it dominates
• Kołakowski (lecture 18) reacts against Marx (lecture 8): Commitment is a moral choice for the oppressed, not a deduction from historical necessity
• Kołakowski (lecture 18) reacts against Hegel (lecture 5): Reinstates subjective value-creation against Hegelian contempt for "the subjective"
• Marković (lecture 18) rereads Marx (lecture 5): Rereads Marx's alienation existentially, via Sartre: the gap between actual existence and potential essence
• Petrović (lecture 18) builds on Marx (lecture 5): Real revolution must abolish self-alienation, not just swap ruling classes
• Kosík (lecture 18) builds on Shore (lecture 5): Names the same unresolved antinomy: iron laws of history vs moral responsibility
• Shore (lecture 18) disputes Marx (lecture 8): Admitting doubt about the "Marxist dream" breaks with scientific certainty
• Shore (lecture 18) rereads Marx (lecture 5): Czech writers pair class-consciousness with conscience, borrowing existentialist terms
• Hegel (lecture 4) builds on Kant (lecture 2): Takes up the problem of the bridge between subject and object that Descartes and Kant tried to solve
• Hegel (lecture 4) borrows from Fichte (lecture 3): Shore says Hegel takes the being-versus-becoming distinction central to Romanticism, which she recalls through Fichte's line on becoming free, and makes it central.
• Hegel (lecture 4) builds on Rousseau (lecture 3): Humans defined by becoming, not fixed nature, now generalized to all of reality
• Hegel (lecture 4) disputes Kant (lecture 3): Intentions are not enough; actions are judged by consequences that exceed them
• Marx (lecture 5) borrows from Kant (lecture 3): Shore sees Kantian influence in the Manifesto's objection to people being turned into things: a person is an end, not a means.
• Marx (lecture 5) borrows from Rousseau (lecture 2): Shore sees a kind of Rousseauian influence in the Manifesto's abolition of private property: property as a kind of sin.
• Adorno (lecture 14) disputes Kant (lecture 2): Enlightenment's promise of liberation and sovereignty turns into its opposite
• Adorno (lecture 14) builds on Weber (lecture 2): Disenchantment (Entzauberung) becomes the domination of nature as mere object
• Weber (lecture 14) builds on Weber (lecture 2): Disenchanted reason hardens into the "iron cage" of instrumental rationality
• Nietzsche (lecture 6) disputes Hegel (lecture 5): Hegel turned History into a god that rules over art and religion
• Shore compares Nietzsche (lecture 6) with Hegel (lecture 4): Shore finds something very dialectical in Nietzsche despite his anti-Hegelianism: the same coming together of good and wicked that Hegel is always doing.
• Bergson (lecture 7) disputes Hegel (lecture 4): A goal fixed in advance leaves no room for contingency or freedom
• Bergson (lecture 7) builds on Goethe (lecture 2): Analytic intellect, like the pinned butterfly, cannot grasp the living whole
• Shore compares Arendt (lecture 7) with Bergson (lecture 7): Shore sets Bergson's radical contingency entering the world with each living being beside what Arendt called natality.
• Marcuse (lecture 14) disputes Freud (lecture 9): Civilization's repression is not permanent: capitalism's specific repression can be overcome
• Marcuse (lecture 14) borrows from Freud (lecture 9): Shore calls Eros and Civilization a takeoff on Freud, using eros and Thanatos to find the way out that Freud denies.
• Reich (lecture 14) builds on Freud (lecture 9): Neurosis from sexual repression, pushed to a literal, physical libido
• Freud (lecture 9) disputes Marx (lecture 5): Aggression is innate, not a product of social position; Marxists neglect Thanatos
• Freud (lecture 9) builds on Marx (lecture 5): Religion as illusion that consoles, now traced to infantile wishes
• Freud (lecture 9) builds on Hobbes (lecture 2): A violent state of nature; happiness traded for security, as in Hobbes
• Freud (lecture 9) turns over Rousseau (lecture 2): Society still costs us our nature, but nature was violent, not virtuous
• Shore compares Breton (lecture 10) with Freud (lecture 9): Shore says surrealism becomes "a little more Freudian" with free association and psychic automatism.
• Tzara (lecture 10) builds on Nietzsche (lecture 6): After the death of God, no system at all: Dada as pure freedom
• Husserl (lecture 11) builds on Descartes (lecture 2): Husserl adopts Descartes's radical start from zero, but thinks Descartes didn't go far enough.
• Husserl (lecture 11) disputes Spencer (lecture 7): Scientific objectivism expels the subject and ends in absurdity
• Adorno (lecture 14) turns over Husserl (lecture 11): Barbarism comes not from losing faith in reason but from reason itself
• Heidegger (lecture 12) turns over Descartes (lecture 2): "I am, therefore I think": existing precedes knowing
• Heidegger (lecture 12) turns over Husserl (lecture 11): Dasein occupies the transcendental ego's privileged place but is never transparent to itself.
• Heidegger (lecture 12) builds on Rousseau (lecture 3): Inauthenticity as conformity to the social gaze, now das Man
• Horkheimer (lecture 14) borrows from Heidegger (lecture 12): Takes "care": we are always already in the world, with no neutral standpoint
• Kosík (lecture 18) borrows from Heidegger (lecture 12): Shore says Kosík rereads Marx and Hegel through Heidegger, yielding the idea that we are always already thrown into history yet act within it.
• Sartre (lecture 13) disputes Husserl (lecture 11): The reduction is impossible: we cannot suspend belief in a world we are always already in
• Sartre (lecture 13) builds on Heidegger (lecture 12): Takes Heidegger's always-already-in-the-world to its anti-Husserlian conclusion: no reduction is possible.
• Sartre (lecture 13) builds on Nietzsche (lecture 6): Takes the death of God with full seriousness: with no heaven of values, humans must make them
• Sartre (lecture 13) builds on Heidegger (lecture 12): Keeps thrownness but stresses abandonment: cast into the world with nothing to lean on
• Sartre (lecture 13) rereads Heidegger (lecture 12): Nothingness stops meaning death and comes to mean the open space of freedom
• Sartre (lecture 13) builds on Shore (lecture 10): Nothingness as radical freedom resembles the avant-garde's ungrounded sense that everything is possible.
• Sartre (lecture 13) borrows from Heidegger (lecture 12): Bad faith parallels flight into das Man, recast as a lie one tells oneself about one's freedom.
• Sartre (lecture 13) disputes Freud (lecture 9): Rejects the split into an opaque unconscious and a conscious part: consciousness is translucent
• Sartre (lecture 13) borrows from Kant (lecture 3): Choosing for oneself is choosing for everyone: a Kantian universalizing moment inside existentialism
• Arendt (lecture 15) builds on Adorno (lecture 14): Splits the Frankfurt "herd" into mob and masses
• Arendt (lecture 15) disputes Heidegger (lecture 12): Anonymous mass death strips away the "mineness" of death that Heidegger made the core of authenticity
• Kojève (lecture 16) borrows from Heidegger (lecture 12): Shore says Kojève, following Heidegger, holds that the world is never independent of Dasein; his "given" draws on Dasein always already being in the world.
• Kojève (lecture 16) builds on Hegel (lecture 4): Human being as negating the given echoes Aufhebung: overcome yet marked by what it overcomes
• Kojève (lecture 16) rereads Hegel (lecture 4): A Heidegger-tinged reading of master and slave: becoming human through others' recognition
• Sartre (lecture 13) builds on Kojève (lecture 16): Both treat man as a nothingness that opens the space of freedom; the influence is indirect, since Sartre did not attend Kojève's seminar.
• Beauvoir (lecture 16) borrows from Hegel (lecture 4): Takes the master-slave dialectic of recognition into relations between the sexes
• Beauvoir (lecture 16) builds on Hegel (lecture 4): Mutual recognition, each both subject and object, as the way out of the master-slave impasse
• Shore compares Beauvoir (lecture 16) with Heidegger (lecture 12): Shore glosses Beauvoir's temptation to remain the object as a kind of Heideggerian falling into the they-self.
• Beauvoir (lecture 16) builds on Heidegger (lecture 12): Choosing as finite beings toward death: being-toward-death as the frame of ethics
• Beauvoir (lecture 16) builds on Sartre (lecture 13): Freedom must prevail over facticity, the given situation
• Beauvoir (lecture 16) disputes Marx (lecture 5): Women's oppression cannot be derived from property or reduced to class
• Beauvoir (lecture 16) disputes Freud (lecture 9): Hardwired drives and repression are too deterministic; they crowd out existential choice
• Beauvoir (lecture 16) builds on Adorno (lecture 14): The temptation to flee oneself, lodged in the self, becomes the root of oppression
• Beauvoir (lecture 16) borrows from Bergson (lecture 7): Shore sees Bergson's influence in Beauvoir's view that live spontaneity cannot be disposed of like inert matter: eroticism is a realm of freedom.
• Beauvoir (lecture 16) builds on Sartre (lecture 13): Beauvoir grounds Sartre's human creation of values in man as negativity, the lack that permits self-creation.
• Stein (lecture 17) disputes Husserl (lecture 11): Pure, bodiless, transparent consciousness is inadequate; the lived body must enter philosophy
• Sartre (lecture 17) borrows from Hegel (lecture 4): Only a subject can objectify me; like Hegel's master, the gaze needs the other as subject.
• Sartre (lecture 17) builds on Hegel (lecture 4): No self-knowledge without recognition by another subject
• Levinas (lecture 17) builds on Sartre (lecture 17): The other still decenters me, but by addressing and summoning me rather than watching
• Shore compares Levinas (lecture 17) with Heidegger (lecture 12): Shore likens Levinas's face-to-face to Heidegger's being-toward-death as the moment of shakenness, which for Levinas comes from the other, not from death.
• Lévi-Strauss (lecture 19) borrows from Saussure (lecture 10): Kinship read as a language: units valued only by their differences within the system
• Lévi-Strauss (lecture 19) borrows from Freud (lecture 9): Takes Freud's premise that most mental life, and so culture, is unconscious
• Shore draws a comparison with Hegel (lecture 4): Shore hears vague echoes of Hegel's "the true is the whole" in Saussure's holistic system and says structuralists and Hegelians converge on totality.
• Shore draws a comparison with Husserl (lecture 11): Shore calls structuralism's bracketing of both subject and object analogous in impulse to phenomenology's bracketing of the world.
• Shore (lecture 19) builds on Khlebnikov (lecture 10): Structuralists meet the avant-garde on the arbitrariness of the sign
• Arendt (lecture 19) disputes Kant (lecture 2): Declaring the thing-in-itself unreachable cut thought off from being and alienated us from the world
• Shore (lecture 19) turns over Husserl (lecture 11): Language and structure produce the subject instead of the transcendental ego producing all meaning
• Shore compares Girard (lecture 20) with Hegel (lecture 4): Shore draws an analogy between loving and hating Girard's mediator and the bind of Hegel's master, who needs recognition from a slave made an object.
• Girard (lecture 20) builds on Heidegger (lecture 12): Mimetic desire echoes das Man: wanting what others want is conformity at the level of desire.
• Girard (lecture 20) builds on Freud (lecture 9): Civilization rests on violence: for Girard an actual founding murder, for Freud repressed aggression.
• Girard (lecture 20) turns over Freud (lecture 9): Violence is thrown outward onto a victim rather than turned inward and repressed
• Shore (lecture 20) rereads Nietzsche (lecture 6): The decisive fact becomes that humans killed God, and must own the killing
• Foucault (lecture 21) disputes Descartes (lecture 2): Rejects the cogito as the sovereign ground from which knowledge starts
• Foucault (lecture 21) disputes Husserl (lecture 11): The transcendental ego is one more version of the sovereign subject he refuses
• Foucault (lecture 21) borrows from Saussure (lecture 10): Shore says Foucault takes from structuralism the premise that meaning is relational, nudged up from language to discourse.
• Shore compares Foucault (lecture 21) with Lévi-Strauss (lecture 19): Shore calls Foucault's claim that reason required unreason a very structuralist argument in which the structuralist binaries come back.
• Shore (lecture 21) builds on Beauvoir (lecture 16): Reason needing madness is another identity formed against an Other
• Foucault (lecture 21) disputes Marcuse (lecture 14): The story of bourgeois sexual repression that liberation should undo is a myth
• Foucault (lecture 21) builds on Adorno (lecture 14): Keeps the line from Enlightenment to totalitarianism but drops the dialectical reversal
• Shore compares Foucault (lecture 21) with Heidegger (lecture 12): Shore hears echoes of Heidegger's observer problem in Foucault's claim that there is no neutral, innocent space outside power.
• Foucault (lecture 21) borrows from Arendt (lecture 15): Shore hears echoes of Arendt in Foucault's denial of a binary between rulers and ruled, and says he is drawing on Arendt in rethinking power.
• Foucault (lecture 21) builds on Nietzsche (lecture 6): After the death of God comes the death of the subject
• Derrida (lecture 22) disputes Lévi-Strauss (lecture 19): Structuralism's clean binaries do not hold; post-structuralism begins by unsettling them
• Shore compares Derrida (lecture 22) with Freud (lecture 9): Shore points to Freud in Derrida's claim that the speaking self is not present to itself: the self is hidden from the self.
• Derrida (lecture 22) builds on Saussure (lecture 10): If meaning comes from differences, it depends more on what is absent than present
• Derrida (lecture 22) builds on Lévi-Strauss (lecture 19): All culture as language becomes all of life as text
• Derrida (lecture 22) disputes Shore (lecture 1): Nothing, whether History, Man or Self, can fill the place God left
• Derrida (lecture 22) builds on Nietzsche (lecture 6): No new God or substitute order can cure the loss
• Derrida (lecture 22) disputes Hegel (lecture 4): Derrida calls Hegel's linear march toward a final synthesis totalitarian.
• Derrida (lecture 22) reacts against Saussure (lecture 19): Différance fuses the synchronic and diachronic axes that Saussure kept strictly apart
• Derrida (lecture 22) borrows from Nietzsche (lecture 6): In the passage Shore quotes, Derrida himself names the joyous alternative to mourning the lost center "Nietzschean affirmation".
• Shore draws a comparison with Heidegger (lecture 12): Shore hears echoes of Heidegger's hermeneutic circle in Derrida's point that one must already know what writing is to ask where it begins.
• Shore (lecture 22) builds on Kosík (lecture 18): The antinomy of iron laws versus responsibility reappears as the aporia of Stalinist vigilance
• Lyotard (lecture 22) reacts against Hegel (lecture 4): Incredulity toward any grand story claiming to hold the whole together
• Eagleton (lecture 22) builds on Beauvoir (lecture 16): Man defines himself by excluding woman, and depends on what he excludes
• Shore (lecture 23) borrows from Heidegger (lecture 12): Shore says Havel takes Heidegger's authenticity and inauthenticity and makes the distinction explicitly moral: living in truth against living a lie.
• Shore draws a comparison with Sartre (lecture 13): Shore reads the greengrocer's lie to himself about his own powerlessness as bad faith in Sartre's sense.
• Havel (lecture 23) turns over Marx (lecture 5): Consciousness comes before being: responsibility is not set by socioeconomic conditions
• Patočka (lecture 23) disputes Marx (lecture 5): Alienation is not a fixable deficiency but the human being's permanent otherness to himself
• Kołakowski (lecture 23) disputes Husserl (lecture 11): Absolute truth cannot be reached across the bridge, yet the search must go on for ethics' sake
• Eagleton (lecture 23) disputes Derrida (lecture 22): If everything is text, deconstruction can demolish every belief while holding none
• Havel (lecture 23) turns over Foucault (lecture 21): Restores a robust, responsible subject as the ground of truth
• Havel (lecture 23) builds on Arendt (lecture 15): Havel moves Arendt's blurred victim-executioner line inside each person, turning it into shared responsibility.
• Havel (lecture 23) builds on Kołakowski (lecture 18): Havel extends Kołakowski's universal responsibility to complicity: everyone sustaining the system shares its guilt.
• Heidegger (lecture 24) builds on Nietzsche (lecture 6): Treats the death of God as the real condition of man's abandonment amid Being
• Heidegger (lecture 24) builds on Nietzsche (lecture 6): The West's crisis remains that of a world without God after Nietzsche
• Heidegger (lecture 24) disputes Husserl (lecture 11): Phenomenology as method is too confined and lifeless for life's richness
• Shore draws a comparison with Heidegger (lecture 12): Shore hears existentialist motifs of decisionism and responsibility in Heidegger's words as rector; she does not explicitly tie them to Being and Time's resoluteness.
• Derrida (lecture 24) turns over Arendt (lecture 15): Where Arendt finds evil beyond forgiveness, Derrida makes the unforgivable forgiveness's only true object.
• Heidegger (lecture 24) rereads Herder (lecture 3): Heidegger redeploys Romantic rooted belonging as a Nazi Volk spirit of soil and blood.
• Derrida (lecture 25) rereads Marx (lecture 5): Derrida pluralizes Marx: many heterogeneous spirits to inherit, not one predestined historical outcome.
• Derrida (lecture 25) rereads Hegel (lecture 4): Hegel's teleological time survives as a haunting rather than a destination
• Patočka (lecture 25) reacts against Hegel (lecture 4): Uses Heidegger to show meaning without wholeness and truth without a preordained end
• Patočka (lecture 25) builds on Heidegger (lecture 12): Because Dasein is always already in the world, it is answerable for the world
• Arendt (lecture 25) builds on Arendt (lecture 7): Forgiveness, like birth, begins something new that is not conditioned by what came before
• Shore draws a comparison with Hegel (lecture 4): Shore likens the twentieth century's death tolls to what Hegel describes as changes in scale becoming changes in kind.
• Krastev (lecture 25) builds on Patočka (lecture 24): Patočka's generosity toward a German in 1933 fits his forgiveness of former Stalinists
• Nietzsche (lecture 6) builds on Wagner (lecture 6): Nietzsche's first book takes up Wagner's music-drama as heir to Greek tragedy
• Shore compares Kafka (lecture 10) with Freud (lecture 9): Shore calls Gregor's waking from unsettling dreams very Freudian and ties the story's unstable self to what Freud tells us about subjectivity.
• Shore draws a comparison with Freud (lecture 9): Shore characterizes first-wave modernism as a basically Freudian turn inward toward what is dark, hidden and not rational.
• Arendt (lecture 15) builds on Shore (lecture 6): After God's death, totalitarianism takes "everything is permitted" literally, as "everything is possible"
• Beauvoir (lecture 16) builds on Sartre (lecture 13): An ethics built around refusing bad faith, the temptation to flee one's freedom
• Shestov (lecture 3) rereads Dostoevsky (lecture 3): Shestov reads Notes from Underground as the genuine critique of pure reason.

The throughlines

• What replaces God? Shore, Descartes, Voltaire, Mendelssohn, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Lenin, Freud, Prokhasko, Sartre, Arendt, Žižek, Derrida, Heidegger, Wojtyła.
• Is history going anywhere? Shore, Berlin, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, Lenin, Horkheimer, Kosík, Vaculík, Foucault, Derrida, Patočka.
• Alienation: where is the split, and who can heal it? Shore, Rousseau, Herder, Hegel, Marx, Kafka, Heidegger, Adorno, Arendt, Beauvoir, Marković, Petrović, Patočka.
• The problem of the bridge: how does the mind reach the world? Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Shore, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Horkheimer, Lukács, Kołakowski.
• Is the self transparent to itself? Descartes, Freud, Kafka, Husserl, Heidegger, Shore, Sartre, Stein, Foucault, Derrida.
• If history is inevitable, why act? Shore, Lenin, Luxemburg, Lukács, Beauvoir, Kołakowski, Kosík, Havel, Patočka.
• The seduction of wholeness Berlin, Dostoevsky, Hegel, Shore, Arendt, Nietzsche, Lukács, Horkheimer, Adorno, Lyotard, Derrida, Bauman, Foucault.
• Recognition and the Other: can I become myself without you? Hegel, Husserl, Stein, Kojève, Sartre, Beauvoir, Levinas, Girard, Shore, Eagleton.
• Is and ought: can what happens tell us what we should do? Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Horkheimer, Beauvoir, Kołakowski, Shore, Havel, Marcuse.