Replacing God

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.

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.

Nietzsche blames Hegelian philosophy's huge, persisting influence for making every crisis of German culture in his century more dangerous; believing oneself a latecomer is "paralyzing and depressing."

Put simply Nietzsche: Hegel's huge, lasting influence made every crisis in German culture in his century more dangerous. Believing you have arrived late, at the tail end of history, is "paralyzing and depressing."

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.

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.

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.

Shore reads structuralism as the final big school to try standing in for God; with postmodernism the attempt is simply given up.

Asked whether God can be replaced, the question this course began with, postmodernism will answer, in Shore's summary, no.

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.

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.