Verdinglichung
Turning a relation, process or abstraction into a fixed, thing-like entity. In the lecture's account, Marx charges Hegel with reifying consciousness.
Class consciousness imagined as an object you could physically pick up and hand to the workers, like a gift.
The image Shore uses for it, in our paraphrase.
In lecture order, as Marci Shore presents each view. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Links from these claims to others in the course. Each shows the earlier claim, then the later one that answers it. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
MarxFactory work estranges workers from labor itself: hired by the hour, tending machines, performing one fragment of a process whose finished product is never theirs. L5 · 29:36
MarxIn 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. L5 · 42:38
Extends alienation from the individual worker's product to social relations generally, now turned into relations among things.
TzaraDada 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." L10 · 44:41
ClarkDada 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. L10 · 44:01
Clark frames Dada's aimless freedom as reification of contingency.
HusserlPhenomenology 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. L11 · 31:40
HusserlStrip 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. L11 · 34:29
The I to whom the world is given is refined into a universal, essence-level transcendental ego.
HusserlTreating 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. L11 · 13:42
LevinasScience'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. L11 · 14:33
A later student recalls the same critique of scientific objectivism that drew him to phenomenology.
HusserlStrip 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. L11 · 34:29
WitkiewiczHusserl'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. L11 · 24:10
Mocks the pure, bodyless, generic ego as a philosopher floating out of the real world.Our inference
HusserlStrip 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. L11 · 34:29
HeideggerHeidegger 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. L12 · 18:35
Dasein is the next move in overcoming the notion of subjectivity that the transcendental ego began to unsettle.
HusserlStrip 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. L11 · 34:29
ShoreHusserl, 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. L12 · 3:55
Shore judges the pure, transparent I an unstable attempt to keep both subjective depth and objective certainty.
KantHumans 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. L3 · 31:51
MarxIn 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. L5 · 42:38
Shore sees Kantian influence in the Manifesto's objection to people being turned into things: a person is an end, not a means.
SpencerThe only knowledge worth the name comes from the sciences; no other source yields anything solid. L7 · 10:48
HusserlTreating 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. L11 · 13:42
Scientific objectivism expels the subject and ends in absurdityOur inference
HusserlStrip 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. L11 · 34:29
ShoreIn structuralism the subject is radically decentered: meaning is not something people produce; language produces people, more than the reverse. L19 · 46:01
Language and structure produce the subject instead of the transcendental ego producing all meaning
HusserlStrip 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. L11 · 34:29
FoucaultDescartes'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. L21 · 8:47
The transcendental ego is one more version of the sovereign subject he refuses
Throughlines that pass through one of these claims.
Terms that appear in the same claims.