Shore's shortest definition of modernity is the search for something to do God's old job. That job was large: God grounded knowledge, existence and ethics all at once, so no single substitute fits easily. This route follows the candidates the course tries in his place, and what becomes of each.
The question is a theme Shore returns to across the course. The route through it, its stages and the summaries are our reading.
Read down. Each claim is our paraphrase; the time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
Shore
Why the post is so hard to fill, and the two candidates named at the outset: Man and History.
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.
Descartes, Voltaire, Mendelssohn
Descartes still needs God to hand him back the world; deism has God create it and then step aside, and Mendelssohn makes humanity's own destiny the measure.
After securing his own existence, Descartes brings God back in; a non-deceiving God lets him recover the whole world he had doubted away.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hegel, Marx
For Hegel meaning comes from the whole, and History gains a capital H and a forward motion of its own; Marx recasts religion as a drug for the exploited.
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.
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.
With Hegel, History acquires a capital H: in the Hegelian sense it is a phenomenon of its own, with a dialectical forward motion.
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.
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.
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".
Nietzsche
Nietzsche charges Hegel with making History a god. "God is dead" reports an event, one we brought about, and for Nietzsche no replacement can cure the crisis that follows.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lenin, Freud, Prokhasko, Sartre, Arendt, Žižek, and Shore on the avant-garde, Levinas and Stalin
Some put something in God's place: the Party, History in the person of Stalin, and, on Shore's reading, Levinas's Other. Others draw consequences: Freud calls belief in God an infantile projection, Sartre says we must create our values, and Arendt sees totalitarianism taking "everything is permitted" literally.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Without God, there is no "intelligible heaven" in which values might be found; human beings must create them themselves.
Put simply Sartre: without God, there is no higher realm where values are waiting to be found. People have to create their values themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 on structuralism and Girard, Derrida
Shore calls structuralism the last big attempt to replace God, and reads Girard as turning back to the killing itself. With postmodernism the search is given up: for Derrida every successor is dead as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Shore reads structuralism as the final big school to try standing in for God; with postmodernism the attempt is simply given up.
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.
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.
Asked whether God can be replaced, the question this course began with, postmodernism will answer, in Shore's summary, no.
Heidegger, John Paul II
Heidegger says only a god can save us and waits, open to his arrival or absence; John Paul II, as Shore recounts it, calls modernity a brief moment in God's autobiography.
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.
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."
"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.
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.
Our summary of where the lectures leave the question.
The route does not end on a settled answer. Postmodernism answers that God cannot be replaced; the final stage gives two voices, Heidegger and John Paul II, for whom modernity may not have the last word.
Those with a reading page of their own.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger.