(intriguing music) - Welcome to the first day of the semester. Welcome to everyone. Yes. Feel free to... There are some seats up here. You're also welcome to sit on the floor if that's more comfortable. I'm kind of a floor-sitter myself, but in Eastern Europe there are all sorts of superstitions about reasons why people shouldn't sit on floors, which always stresses out my East European colleagues when I'm sitting on a floor for some kind of a lecture. Welcome to History 271, Humanities 339, European Intellectual History Since Nietzsche. This is a lecture course. I'm happy to see you all. This is my favorite part of the new semester when I actually get to come into the classroom. I'm going to start off. Today's not going to be a normal lecture. I'm going to go through some technical things and I'm going to tell you about the class so you can decide whether you really want to take it or not. And I'm going to introduce the Teaching Fellows, which I want to do first. And they're probably all sitting in different places, so I will ask them to stand up and wave to you. There are... Okay, I see some of you guys back there. Okay. So yes, so there's Daniel. Daniel, can you stand up and wave? This is Daniel. I'm just going to give you first name so it's not to confuse you. Yun-in in purple. Also standing up and waving. Sophia next to Yun-in. Let's see, Sebastian I see there. That's Sebastian. Susanna. Susanna. And Matthew. Okay, so those are your TFs. They're teaching different sections. You're welcome to meet all of them in addition to the person who is teaching your particular section. I'll just tell you a couple things about myself before we get started. I am a historian. I'm a Europeanist. I work mostly on the modern period. I work mostly in intellectual history. And I'll tell you a bit about what intellectual history is like in a field in a few minutes. And my research is in Eastern Europe, so I come to this field as a Slavicist, which is a somewhat atypical way to come to the field. Most of my colleagues in European intellectual history were trained in French, German, and British history, as they kind of came into the continent, and I was trained in the eastern part of Europe. Yeah, I work largely in Slavic languages, in Czech and Polish and Russian, and to some extent, Ukrainian and Slovak. That will inflect my perspective on the rest of the continent. I also mention that because, as many of you might know, it's a particular moment to be an East Europeanist because there is a grotesque and gruesome war going on in Europe now, and in particular in Ukraine, which has raised questions about everything we thought we understood about the 20th century and everything we thought we understood about the fall of communism and everything we thought we understood about the present moment. And that will also inflect various things that we talk about. Okay, a few technical things. This class is being recorded by this very friendly person named Guy. Guy will waive to you. So please don't feel self-conscious because he's only recording me, he's not recording you. So don't worry if your outfit's not matching or you feel like you're having a bad hair day, it will not show up on film. It's just me. The lectures will be posted as a YouTube channel, but not until the end of the semester when it's all edited and processed. So you do actually need to show up for class in person for the lectures. But if your parents say, want to listen in later on in a few months from now, it should be posted on YouTube. And one of the reasons I decided to do that has to do with the war in Ukraine to a certain extent, which forced me to appreciate some of the lessons we learned during the pandemic about the value of remote education, which I was never too much a fan of because I'm self-conscious about being filmed and I'm not really a visual person. And I like to be in the room with you guys and kind of feed off your energy. Even though I'm talking and you're not talking, I like that you're here. But I saw that during the pandemic it was much better than nothing. And now that I have students and former students in Ukraine who are in trenches and on the front or can't leave the country, I see that it matters what can be moved around on the internet, and continuing people's education and allowing people access to things in different parts of the world. Whatever gruesome things might be going on, I've come to a new appreciation for it. And so the lectures will be available to everyone anywhere who feels like listening to them. You may well feel like once you've sat through a whole semester of me talking, that's really more of my talking than you ever like need to listen to again. But there may be some other people or relatives who will be curious. Okay, more technical things, that section registration is online. You can only move around sections online. I don't actually have any influence in that. My office hours are also by appointment online. There's a link on your syllabus. They move around from week to week. I add slots as I see spaces becoming available in the next several days. So if there are no spots or no spots that you can make, just check back later. The default for my office hours is in my office in HQ, which is 263. But I often move them if I've squeezed them in between other meetings and other parts of campus, in which case I will email everybody who has signed up. But in general, office hours are in person now. Although if you want to schedule something remotely, you can also do that. Okay. Teaching Fellows will also have office hours and each of your Teaching Fellows will inform you about their office hours. They're all very friendly. You should feel free to talk to them as well. A couple of them, Susanna and Sophia have actually been Teaching Fellows for this class before, so they have an unusual amount of experience. And Daniel took this class years ago as an undergraduate, so there's a lot of expertise among the Teaching Fellows. Please do remember that sections are mandatory and section participation is part of your grade, so you do need to come to section. Attendance will be taken at section. Attendance will not be taken at lecture. I mean, I like to see you here because it makes me feel better about myself when people show up and want to listen to me. But you're not actually being held accountable in any kind of a technical way. There are no electronic devices in class, so I'll ask you all to shut off anything. I realize we're now like all online 24 hours a day, but I feel like I like there to be something special about us all coming together in real time. All of the people I'm going to talk to you about in this class are kind of like usual suspects. This is an introductory level course. We're not really going through people who are obscure. We're going through people like Marx and Freud and Hegel, who, if you Google them, you will get zillions and zillions of hints and countless amounts of secondary sources. So all information can be found somewhere on the internet, so I'd like to feel like there's something special about our coming together and my talking to you in person. That can't be done on the internet, but you will have the all other 23 hours of the day to look up these people on the internet. So I will post before every lecture a handout on Canvas, usually just a page, sometimes a page and a half, and I would recommend that if you print those out before the lecture and come to lecture, they will help you take notes. And if you don't print them out before the lecture, you should still print them out before the exams because they are your study guides. The handouts are generally names, dates, concepts, terms, and quotations, which I put there to kind of help to focus, especially when the reading is very dense. There are a lot of foreign names and there are a lot of foreign terms. I will teach you some fancy words in other languages that you can use to impress people at cocktail parties. I don't expect you to know how to spell them, but they will be on the handout. So please do go onto the... In the Files menu, there is a Handout folder, and I will post the handout before each lecture. And I will keep them posted, so you could go back to them at any time if you lose them. The readings are also posted, I think everything except for Kafka's "The Metamorphosis." That's a slim book that was ordered at the bookstore. I think all the other readings are posted either under Files or a couple of them that are new under Course Reserves. The nice people at Docuprint right here on Whitney, Whitney and Wall Street basically, will also have a course reader with all the readings printed in order that you can order from them. I think you can order it online and pick them up and then they will have nicely printed everything for you. And they should already have that. Okay, let's see. Other technical things. The lectures set up the readings. So the course is designed so that you have to sit there and be quiet for 50 minutes twice a week and listen to me monologue at you, and I will try to be as entertaining as possible. And then you do the reading and then you get to talk about the reading actively, discussing it in a much more democratic manner with your TFs. The reading is often very dense. If you do the reading before lecture and think, "This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, I'm like talking to a wall," do it again after the lecture. The readings are almost entirely of primary sources. That means that you're reading the authors and the thinkers that I'm lecturing to you about. I am your secondary source. I am the kind of interpreter commentator. I'm taking people who are writing a very dense language and talking to you about them in a very chatty way. My job is to try to make them as understandable to you as possible. So if you read them before the lecture and they make no sense, please read them again after the lecture. So the class is structured in such a way that there are two lectures every week and then sections meet after the second lecture. And then the reading for the section covers the material from both lectures. So if I give you a lecture about Marx and then about Freud, then you'll have the readings by Marx and Freud to talk about in section. So it's a very simple concept setup. Sections begin next week. The second lecture is on Friday because, as you know, Yale does this thing whereupon Friday is really a Monday, and Monday is Labor Day, so we will start with like real material on Friday, and I'll talk to you about the alignment. Okay, that is it for purely technical things. The substance of the course I will talk to you about for a couple minutes and then I'll talk to you about what modernity is. This is an introductory level survey course. There are no prerequisites. You don't need to have read any of these people before. You don't need to have done anything in particular in high school. That's very deliberate. I tried to design this course for everyone, for all majors, with no prior knowledge required. It's designed really as a gateway course into the humanities. So be it history or literature or philosophy, it's designed to give you a kind of general sense of at least the modern period that will give you a grounding to go into any one of these fields. It's designed as a very traditional lecture course. Not that I'm such a terribly traditional person, but in terms of form this is very traditional, which means that I talk twice a week and it's a kind of authoritarian principle. I get to talk, you guys don't get to talk. I don't take questions during lectures. Not because I don't care about your questions, but because I would never actually get through the material otherwise. It's kind of intricately set up so that I need to get through the points I need to make about these authors so that your TFs have a fair chance to allow you to discuss the material in the section. But I am very happy to talk to you about any questions you have during office hours or in some other kind of context. Sometimes I have open office hours before exams so people can just come and listen to other people's questions as well. So it's not that I don't care about your questions, but it's just designed in such a way where I'm going to use all 50 minutes, I'm going to talk, you know? And then when you get to section, it's much more democratic. The readings are... Because this is a kind of chocolate sampler class, we're not going into depth on any given thinker. The readings are little pieces of text. They may seem random, they're not randomly chosen. They're in fact very carefully chosen. I guess you may have your doubts about this once you've read this, but they're actually very carefully chosen, but it's not very much of most things. And the number of pages, you can't actually gauge how long it will take you to do the reading by the number of pages, because the readings that are very dense I've given you very few pages, and the readings that are easier to read I've given you longer excerpts. So even if it seems like, "Oh, we only have 25 pages of reading to do this week, I'll allot myself 25 minutes," that won't work. Like a page or two of Hegel is a lot of Hegel. Yeah. I mean, you have to read it slowly. You might have to read it aloud. You probably have to read it more than one time. You may have to have another cup of coffee and read it again. You may have to like... So give yourself some time. I mean, I've deliberately tried to really only give you short fragments of the readings that's most difficult to allow you to kind of focus on the passages, but they're little pieces of things. So you're not going to be an expert on anybody when this course is over, but I hope you will have a sense of kind of how things fit together and also what your own interests are. Because as we go through, you'll find that you're much more drawn to some of these thinkers than of others. We all have our favorites. We all have the ones we like and the ones we don't like, and the ones we're irritated with, and the ones we feel very close to when we're 19, and then by the time we're 22, there's something that bothers us about them. That's all normal, that's great. You're developing your own relationships with them. So you just get a little taste of each of these. And I'm hoping that you will then find what interests you, and this will give you a basis then to go on and read further into the people who interest you the most. But in general, the number of pages is inversely proportional to the degree of difficulty of the reading. And also keep in mind that this is a European history class, which means almost everything that we're reading, we're reading in English translation and that creates another level of difficulty. For those of you who read in other languages, you are welcome to seek out the originals of any languages that you happen to know. But especially when we're talking about philosophy and the terminology is very specific, translation will also add another level of difficulty. Okay, let's see what else. What I try to do in this class, it's basically the usual suspects. I try not to be too overly creative about it because, again, I have my favorite pet thinkers. Like I have the ones I really, really like to talk about who might not be the most mainstream. But in order to give you a background in the field as a whole, I try to kind of hit this right down the center. It's an arc of a history of ideas. I will try to tease out what I think the key points are that necessarily involves my being very reductionist. There's no other way to teach an introductory level course. People spend their whole lives studying Hegel, studying Heidegger, studying Foucault. And you're going to get a 50-minute lecture for me, and I'm going to pull out what I think the three key points are that you should know to start with. That is not exhaustive. You could take any one of these texts and easily spend a whole semester with it, if not a year. So I'm necessarily going to be reductionist, I'm going to try to talk to you in a language that's fairly colloquial and chatty, because my job is to make things accessible to you. That involves reducing some sophistication. But again, these guys and these women, they're out there for you. You can go back, you could read in further by yourselves, or in further courses. I try to give you the fundamentals so that you can go on here in different fields. The way the course works is... So the reason why it's called European Intellectual History Since Nietzsche, where if you're looking at the syllabus, you already think this is not like in a particularly appropriate title because we don't get to Nietzsche until like several lectures in. There's a history behind that, and the history is that my very illustrious colleague, Frank Turner, who was the chair of the Search Committee, I think, who hired me almost 20 years ago now, he taught a course that went to Nietzsche. And so when I came here in 2006, he said, "I want you to teach European intellectual history, and I want you to teach a course that starts from Nietzsche." And so I designed the course starting from Nietzsche. And Frank very sadly then kind of died prematurely and suddenly of a stroke a few years later. And perhaps for sentimental reasons, or because the course was already kind of codified, I've never changed the title. And so somewhat in memory of Frank Turner, who was a wonderful intellectual historian, it's European Intellectual History Since Nietzsche. But I actually kind of start with two overview lectures on Enlightenment and Romanticism, and then we kind of go through Hegel before we kind of get to Nietzsche. So that's the story behind that. I'm not trying to trick you, it takes us a little while to actually get to Nietzsche, but I wanted to say that in memory of Professor Turner. The first two lectures are the only, after today, are the only lectures that are really big, broad overviews. At a certain sense they're like the least exciting because they're big and broad. But in order for us to kind of get into the modern period, I need to set up Enlightenment and Romanticism. And so I will do that on Friday and then next Wednesday, and then we will get into Hegel, and eventually we will then get to Nietzsche and the death of God. And as you might have guessed, the death of God is a big thing. A lot of this course is exploring the death of God and what modernity means and how it's related to the death of God. So we'll go through Marxism and Leninism and psychoanalysis, expressionism, structuralism, phenomenology, existentialism, anti-politics, deconstruction, Nietzsche, Lenin, Kafka, Freud, Husserl, Simon de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Heidegger, Adorno, Sartre, Girard, Derrida, Foucault, the usual suspects. Let me talk to you a little bit now just for a few minutes. I always say that I'm not going to keep everyone the full 50 minutes on the first day and then I usually do. Let me talk to you about a few minutes about what is intellectual history, and then I'll talk to you for a few minutes about what is modernity. So intellectual history is an interdisciplinary field. So a lot of people say, "Well, is it history? Is it philosophy? Is it history of philosophy? Is it comparative literature with a lot of theory thrown in?" It's on the borders of all those things. It's inherently interdisciplinary, so it's inherently going to cross those boundaries. The way it's most of the readings that we will be doing are readings that are more typical of texts you will get in literature and philosophy departments than in texts you would normally study in history departments. What is distinctive is that we study them from a different perspective, and it's a very explicitly historical perspective, which is it's a history of ideas, but it's not a history of ideas in the abstract, it's a history of ideas in context. So what you will see in these lectures, which is typical of the field as a whole, is a constant meandering back and forth and swimming around between the abstract, the ethereal, the metaphysical, and the concrete and the empirical. And that is the nature of intellectual history. Because the approach that historians have to the same text that philosophers work on is that texts were always produced by real people, in a real time, in a real place. We'll get to Kant, we'll start to get to Kant actually on Friday. Kant has various ideas about what he calls the transcendental conditions for the possibility of knowledge, two of which are time and space. And he says we need time and space in order to be able to process any kind of input we get from the world at all. And now in a metaphorical way, those are also the necessary conditions of possibility for the study of history, time and place. Everything happens in a time and a place. So there'll be times when we're like in this language that theme's extremely vague and abstract and ethereal, but we're always going to come back to a real time and a real place and real lives. So they're always real people. They're always real people and those people are never perfect. Perfection exists only in the realm of the theoretical. It doesn't exist in the realm of the real. We are always dealing with highly imperfect people, often quite morally dubious people. That's what we do in history. That is the condition of the world. So these ideas are always going to be put in context. They're always going to be put in the context of real people's lives. Those lives are always going to be highly imperfect. There's a quote that I really like but by a very obscure Polish Marxist philosopher named Stanislaw Brzozowski who managed to die at the age of 33 before he had a chance to get his hands dirty. And in 1911, in one of his last diary entries, he wrote, "What is not biography is nothing at all." And that is more or less the point of departure, for me, for intellectual history. What is not biography is nothing at all. We're always in the lives of real people. Anything that doesn't involve the lives of real people is a kind of abstraction for real life. And I'm going to keep trying to bring you back to real life. Now, let me make a further... Before I go into the distinction more so between philosophers and intellectual historians, let me go into a further distinction between continental and analytical philosophy. So there is a big split in philosophy as a field more or less at the beginning of the 20th century. Anglo-Saxon or American and British philosophy went largely in the direction of analytical philosophy, which is the dominant kind of philosophy taught in our department here, for instance, whereas in France and Germany and Eastern Europe, there was still a lot more continental philosophy. There are still big debates about what the distinction is, but I'm going to give you my very short version now. So analytical philosophy is a lot closer to math and logic. It's a lot more technical. Continental philosophy has much more of a kind of historical consciousness. It's closer to literature. It embodies and deals with things that don't work logically or that continue to inhabit contradictions in a way that analytical philosophy decides it really can't tolerate contradictions. And my colleague Tamar Gendler can speak about this very well too. She thinks that the critical distinction is, can you tolerate contradictions? Can you not tolerate contradictions? My colleague Peter Gordon feels like the critical distinction is, do you have a sense of history and philosophy that's continental? Have you completely bracketed history out? That's the analytical And I'll keep coming back to this distinction, but what you should know for these purposes is that almost all of the philosophy we deal with in this course is continental, or at least in its continental interpretation, because we're always dealing with the historically-inflected part of these kind of philosophical ideas. If you take courses with some of my colleagues like Shelly Kagan, who is a wonderful lecturer, who is an analytical philosopher, you'll read some of the same people that you're reading in this course in a very, very different way. When you listen to Professor Kagan lecture, it's like Heidegger, Aristotle, and Spinoza can all be on the stage at the same time. It doesn't matter who they were, where they were, when they lived. There's an argument they're making, and that argument is either consistent and it works or it doesn't work, and anything else is completely irrelevant. And it's more than irrelevant, it should be purged because it contaminates the philosophical argument. History is all contaminated. There's no decontamination of history. It's all this kind of messiness, you know? So no one gets to be kind of on stage at the same time. Everyone is always situated in a certain place. In analytical philosophy, you'll hear a phrase, genealogical fallacy. Genealogical fallacy is when you try to interpret the philosophy through biographical or historical details. There's no such thing in history as a genealogical fallacy because everything is about real life. I'll give you one more example. So my colleague Jason Stanley, who's a fantastic teacher and you should all take a class from him as well, so comes from an analytical tradition, is a philosopher of language. And when I first met him here years ago, we were talking about ways in which we try to help our students understand various kinds of philosophical ideas. And I told him about some of the analogies and metaphors I was using, and he said, "You tell stories about your children to illustrate philosophical points." And I said, "Well, yes, of course. I mean, how do you do it? What do you do to illustrate philosophical points?" And he said, "Well, in analytical philosophy, we have all sorts of examples. For instance, we ask the students to imagine that the brain is in a vat." And I said, "But the brain is never in a vat. I mean, how can that be relevant? Because you can never actually take your brain out of your head and put it in a vat." But that's the kind of thing analytical philosophers do to kind of purify. We never purify in history. History is just impure. It's messy, it's often ugly. That is it's natural state. No purification process is possible. The brain is never in a vat. There are no ideas existing outside of time and place and human lives. Now, the other thing that inflects the difference between philosophy then and history, in addition to that we're dealing more with continental and less with analytical philosophy, is that the perspective from which historians approach philosophy and the perspective from which I'll be teaching this class is that it's not about who was right. It's about trying to understand what people were trying to do. You're not going to find out, well, maybe you will, but you're not going to find out like, "Okay, well Aristotle was right and Heidegger was wrong," or, "Arendt was right and Heidegger was wrong, and now we know the answers and we can solve all the great mysteries of human existence, and we could just go home." If I knew the answers to solve the great mysteries of human existence, I would happily tell you and we could all go home, and then play softball or do something else. But the point about intellectual history is that the conversations go on and on and on because the answers are never satisfactorily found. It's the history more of questions than of answers. And one of the things I want you to see is how the questions shift. They generally never get answered in a satisfactory way, but the questions start being differently inflected. So I'm going to try to help you make a kind of imaginative leap into the minds of these thinkers we're studying and try to understand what they were trying to do. They all had their pet obsessions. They were all trying to figure out certain things. They all had their own complexes. They were all responding to the dramas and the tragedies and the angst of their own moment and their own lives. And I'm going to try to help you kind of empathetically imagine what they were trying to do. All of them in various ways fail. It's the history much more of error and of failure than it is of success. Now, no one has saved the world. I mean, the world would look a lot differently if somebody had saved it. Nobody has saved the world, but I'm going to try to help you see what they were trying to do and how they were trying to do it. Intellectual history is a history of conversations. In that sense, any place you start is a bit arbitrary. You're always coming into a conversation that's always ongoing. It keeps going, and more people join it and some people drop out, and then other people join it. Or the conversation splits up into different directions, and this circle goes over here and that circle goes over there, but it's constantly moving. There's no kind of pure moment where some idea was produced in isolation. Everything in various ways is dialogical. And I'll maybe tell you a small anecdote to illustrate this on ideas and cosmopolitanism. So years ago I was giving a talk in Lodz, in Poland. In must have been... I was wearing my son in a baby carrier for this talk and he grabbed the microphone from my hand, so it must've been 2011. And there was a young student there, a young Polish leftist student at this talk in Poland. And afterwards he came over to me and he said, "I had this question that I really wanted to ask you, but I was too embarrassed to ask in front of the whole audience. Can I ask you now?" And I said, "Sure, go ahead." And he said, "Well, listening to you talk, what I worry about is that these ideas and these philosophical traditions and these currents that I'm interested in, maybe they do really all come from foreigners. Maybe the right-wing nationalist in Poland who I hate..." This is like a young leftist student. "Maybe they have a point. Maybe the things that are authentically really Polish are not what I like. Maybe those of us on the left really are attracted to things that are foreign." And how I answered him is that it was not the right way to pose the question. Because the idea that there's some set of ideas that are purely X or purely Y that have been created in the minds in a kind of tabular rasa, ex nihilo from somebody who has never read anybody who has never read anybody who has never read anybody, it's an epistemological fantasy. That's not actually the way ideas move in the world. Everything is much messier. Borders get crossed. They get crossed again and again and again. People have layers of subliminal influences on themselves. There are no thinkers kind of creating in that black box in which they've always lived, ex nihilo. Ideas are always moving around. They're always crossing borders. They're always picking up contingent and arbitrary and accidental things, depending on the weather, depending on who else stops by the cafe that day, depending on who misses a boat or a train or an airplane, depending on who has read what book at what moment. So we can't actually perform purification exercises on real life. Conversations go on. They're complicated. And they can't be disentangled in that way. Okay, what else do I want to tell you before I tell you a couple things about modernity? As you see, that also implies there's an infinite regression problem because there's no clean point from which to begin. Historians always have an infinite regression problem. Like really, in order to understand Stalinism, you have to understand Lenin. In order to understand Lenin, you have to understand Marx. In order to understand Marx, you have to understand Hegel. In order to understand Hegel, you have to understand Kant. And so it keeps going and going going. So any place you start has a bit of an arbitrary quality to it, which is why I start with these general overview lectures, which are imperfect, but the best I've come up with. The other thing I want you to think about is that many of these thinkers and these same ideas can be interpreted in radically different ways and used for completely antithetical purposes. That is the nature of ideas, that people pick them up and do things with them that their authors never intended. That's what history is. That's how it moves. The author of a text never gets a monopoly on the interpretation of a text. That text is out there and people take it in the directions they will. There's an argument to be made that the entire history of French existentialism is based on Sartre's misreading of Heidegger. Perhaps. But that doesn't mean you cross out French existentialism as if it never happened, because it went off in its own direction. People take things in their own direction. And that's why it's so interesting. The other thing I guess I should mention before I talk to you about modernity, which is probably obvious but I'm going to mention it anyway, is that sadistic lunatics often can and do play major historical roles. The fact that somebody was a lunatic doesn't mean that they did not play a historical role. So for instance, my philosopher colleagues have long been engaged in a big debate about, should we teach certain people because they were Stalinists or because they were Nazis or because they did... I can't take those people out of history because history is not just the history of people who were nice, you know? So if I took out the people who were not nice, I couldn't teach you history at all. History is full of horrible, disturbing things. It unfortunately continues to be full of horrible, disturbing things. It did not happen the way we would like it to. That said, I'm here to be nice. So I can't make the classroom a safe space in the sense of not mentioning anything disturbing. I mean, 20th century Europe was a bloodbath. There's no way around that. There's no way I can kind of take that out. But I and all of the TFs will try to make the classroom a safe space in which we will be very nice to you, and we will do everything possible to encourage you to be extremely nice to one another and to create an atmosphere in which we can think through things together. But the fact is that the condition of the past was quite horrific. Okay, let me just spend a couple minutes then talking to you about modernity. So this course deals with intellectual history in the modern period. European historians traditionally begin modernity in 1789, with the French Revolution. Why, that's arbitrary in a lot of of ways. You'll find out more on Friday about why it's the case. A lot of it has to do with things being very France-centered. Some of it has to do with our being snobs and think that everything important happens in Paris. But in the convention is to date modernity beginning with 1789. What is modernity? It's a break in time. It's a break in time that transitions us into a different historical period in European history. It's a break with tradition. It's a lot of it has to do with not only a break with time in terms of a new historical period, but in terms of a change in the conception of time. And I'll keep going back to this idea of temporality. And one of the big shifts that's happens is that we move from a dominant notion of time as something that happens in a cyclical manner to a dominant notion of time that happens in a forward-going manner, in a progressive manner. How many of you have seen "Fiddler on the Roof"? Oh, a lot of you. Okay, if you haven't, you can all watch the movie on the internet this weekend. Okay, so the hero of "Fiddler on the Roof" is this guy Tevye, the dairyman, who lives in the Pale of Settlement in the part of the Tsar's Russian Empire where it was permissible for Jews to live. And as you might remember, the film begins with a trauma, or the story, the play, which is based on the novels, begins innocently enough. The first trauma is romantic love. So Tevye's oldest daughter, Tzeitel, doesn't want to marry the wealthy butcher that her parents have chosen for her, she wants to marry the poor tailor. Why does she want to marry the poor tailor? She wants to marry the poor tailor because she loves him. Romantic love is the first trauma of modernity that falls down upon Tevye's head. Then his second daughter, Hodel, wants to marry a revolutionary Marxist. Then his third daughter, Chava, wants to marry a non-Jew. Then come pogroms, expulsions, revolution, basically modernity is just one horrible trauma for poor Tevye, the dairyman. It kind of all spirals downhill for romantic love to revolutionary Marxism, assimilation, pogroms, homelessness. It's a trauma. And I start with that because modernity is generally a trauma. Modernity is a crisis, it's a trauma. All of the thinkers we're going to study in various ways experience it painfully and are trying to work their way through it. The very short version of modernity is it's an attempt to replace God. What happens in the Enlightenment is first we kind of move God like off to the sidelines, out of center stage, and then eventually Nietzsche's going to come and kill off God. The short version of the story is that modernity is an attempt to replace God with something else that's stable, that holds things together. And the shorter version of that story is that it's really, really tough to replace God, 'cause God performs these simultaneous epistemological, ontological, and ethical functions. So epistemological refers to knowledge, ontological refers to the nature of being, ethical, you know what ethical means. God fulfills all these purposes. So you get rid of God, you've got a big gap to fill. And what are you going to put in God's place? Are you going to put History with a capital H? Are you going to put Man with a capital M? There's a lot of tension that will keep playing out between subjectivity, a kind of turn to the self, and teleology, a turn to the forward motion of time. The forward motion of time moving towards a certain goal in a kind of progressive manner. The central problem of modernity has to do with the destabilization produced by that loss of God and that attempt to replace God. And I'll tell you another anecdote to give you a sense of that. So years ago, my son is now 13 and would be embarrassed if I continue telling these anecdotes, but he's not here at the moment, so... Now that this is being filmed. (laughs) And when he was one, my brother and sister-in-law bought him for Christmas a baby piano. And so I was at my parents in-law's house in rural Ohio on the floor trying to figure out how to play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on the baby piano. I am unfortunately musically illiterate, which is very ironic because I'm the sister of a musical prodigy who's an opera composer. But I have no musical talent whatsoever. I don't even read music. I was on the floor trying to just figure out "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on the baby piano, which was already a big mental challenge for me. Then my brother-in-Law, who is a professor of literature in Oklahoma, was reading a Kafka novel. I don't remember which one. He left it on the sofa and he went out for a walk. My father-in-Law, who's a retired veterinarian, comes in, sits down on the sofa and next to me and my son, and picks up the Kafka novel. And the first sentence of the introduction, he opens it up, it says, "In this novel, as in all of his work, Kafka deals with the central problem of modernity." So my father-in-law, turns to me and says, "What is the central problem of modernity?" And I look up, I said, "Oh, alienation." (students laugh) And he said, "How do you know it's alienation?" I said, "Obviously it's alienation. We all know it's alienation. The central problem of modernity is the problem of alienation." And then I was completely consumed with trying to figure out how to play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." And he kept reading and then we went on to talk about alienation. The central problem of modernity is the problem of alienation. What does it mean to be homeless in the world once we have gotten rid of God and there's nothing else holding things together? Once you get rid of God, you've got a lot of work to do to make up for God's absence. And the short version is that it generally doesn't go very well. Okay, I will try, despite the fact that things will get dark kind of quickly, I will try to make this as cheerful a course as possible. You should all feel free now to start wearing black turtlenecks and drinking lots of espresso and hanging out in cafes. I'm going to take you through the whole narrative arc from modernity to postmodernity to post-truth. Post-truth also has a history. We will end with the question of what post-truth means, what does it come from, and what does evil look like in a post-truth world. And I'll see you on Friday. (students chattering indistinctly) (gentle ambient music)