From Modernity to Post-Modernity

Shore’s own judgments and connections

Shore says she will use truth as the thread for looking back over the course: starting from the dissident sense of the word that Havel used, she asks how truth has played out as a motif from the Enlightenment onward.

Beneath the whole modern period sits the worry of God's absence and the groundlessness it brings; Hegel and Marx answer with History and a telos, while a parallel rise of the self (psychoanalytic, phenomenological, existentialist) sets up an unresolved tension between the two. Structuralism then sets history aside.

Every thinker in the course wrestles with the Enlightenment's legacy: whether there can be too much reason or the wrong kind, and whether it was good or bad. She closes by letting John Paul II frame the whole modern era as a brief moment within a larger story.

She wants students to remember that intellectual history is cosmopolitan and moves through encounters, many undocumented, between thinkers; new ideas come out of such meetings, which is why the field is unpredictable and exciting.

Modernity starts in rupture and keeps searching for wholeness and firm ground: the avant-garde's swing from nihilism to utopia, totalizing systems, engineered societies, existentialist self-creation by choice, until postmodernism accepts instability.

The course's philosophical arc runs from truth as correspondence between subject and object to truth set against lies and authenticity against inauthenticity, with history in the middle; even after rejecting grand narratives, Havel and Michnik insist there must be truth.

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.

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.

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.

Because language is unstable, meaning flickers; but for Derrida this produces too much meaning rather than too little, an excess rather than a deficit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Because language is unstable, meaning flickers; but for Derrida this produces too much meaning rather than too little, an excess rather than a deficit.

To critics who say a surplus of meaning amounts to none, Derrida would reply, on Shore's telling, that the infinite is not nothing.

As Foucault would put it about power, everywhere is not nowhere: that power pervades everything does not mean it has vanished.

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.

Marx wrote "all that is solid melts into air" somewhat before its time: false in 1848, it describes what postmodernism brings about.

Marx's phrase "all that is solid melts into air" names the dissolution of everything that once seemed fixed and permanent.

Bauman defines modernity as the project of swapping out inherited solids for new ones that are supposed to be sturdier and tougher.

Put simply Bauman: modernity is the project of replacing the old "solids", inherited foundations, with new, harder and tougher ones.

Postmodernity, which Bauman names liquid modernity, abandons the search for sturdier solids altogether and welcomes what is fluid, slippery and short-lived instead.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When he canonized Edith Stein in 1998, John Paul II characterized her as a woman who had searched for truth with her entire being.

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.

Michalski, with a West German colleague, smuggles Patocka's archive out of Czechoslovakia; it becomes the core of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

John Paul II hosts a colloquium of the Institute for Human Sciences on the Enlightenment's legacy and closes with his remark on God's autobiography.

Teaching in Krakow after the war, Ingarden tells the priest Karol Wojtyla about Edith Stein and gives a private lecture on her.

Marx and Engels meet at the Café de la Régence in Paris and begin their collaboration.

Beauvoir meets Sartre while both prepare for the agrégation in philosophy.

Patočka studies with Husserl and Heidegger at the same time.

Darkness at Noon Sonnenfinsternis

In New York, Koyré introduces fellow émigrés Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss; structuralism grows from their collaboration.

The Gestapo arrests Stein at Echt; she is murdered at Auschwitz days later.

The God That Failed

The Human Condition The Human Condition

Heidegger gives Der Spiegel an interview on condition it appear only after his death.

March 1968 Warsaw student revolt against censorship, crushed with violence; the regime's accompanying "anti-Zionist" campaign drives about 13,000 Polish Jews to emigrate; Michnik among those jailed.

The Discourse on Language L'ordre du discours

A friend of Kolakowski sends Michalski (b. 1948) to Patocka (b. 1907) to write a Heidegger dissertation; they work largely by correspondence.

Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History Kacířské eseje o filosofii dějin

Heidegger dies; Der Spiegel publishes the 1966 interview; Patocka's students smuggle a copy to Prague and record his reaction.

Patočka dies after exhausting police interrogations; funeral becomes a mobilizing event.

Havel, Michnik and Kuroń climb Sněžka on the Czechoslovak-Polish border to coordinate resistance.

Specters of Marx Spectres de Marx

John Paul II canonizes Edith Stein.