Positivism

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.

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.

The only knowledge worth the name comes from the sciences; no other source yields anything solid.

Put simply Spencer: only science gives real knowledge. No other way of knowing yields anything we can rely on.

In ethics Spencer was a utilitarian: one should act so as to bring most good to most people, deciding matters on practical grounds.

Humanity is perfectible because humans are rational: we keep arranging things better, move toward equilibrium, and in the end evil and immorality die out.

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.

Spencer's account of evolution: living things change biologically because they adapt directly to the pressures of their surroundings.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.