What is intellectual history, and why has modern thought struggled so hard to replace God?
24 claims from this lecture, in the order Marci Shore makes them, with the 9 terms it leans on and its 1 links to other lectures.
In general modern man has no solutions.
Alexander Herzen, From the Other Shore. The epigraph Shore gives this lecture.
By number of claims in this lecture.
Shore’s own judgments and connections
The 6 claims the lecture spends most time on.
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.
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.
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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Read down to follow the lecture. The time opens that minute on YouTube.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Among the transcendental conditions that make knowledge possible are time and space: without them, no input from the world could be processed at all.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Intellectual history tracks questions more than answers: the big questions are never satisfactorily settled, they just keep shifting and acquiring new inflections.
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.
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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
9 of these 9 first come up in this lecture. Definitions are our paraphrase.
Where a claim here answers an earlier lecture, and where a later lecture answers a claim here. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
ShoreThe 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. L1 · 42:16
DerridaNot 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. L22 · 28:52
Nothing, whether History, Man or Self, can fill the place God left
Throughlines that pass through this lecture.
As they come up in the lecture.
From the Other Shore S togo berega
Brzozowski writes "What is not biography is nothing at all" in one of his last diary entries, dying at 32.