This Day in Philosophy — 10 August: the birth of Jean-François Lyotard

Jean-François Lyotard was born on 10 August 1924. His name is bound to a single definition that marked the last quarter of the twentieth century.

"Incredulity toward metanarratives"#

The report he prepared at the request of the government of Québec, published in 1979 as La condition postmoderne, had an unexpected effect. Its most quoted sentence:

"Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives."

A grand narrative (grand récit) is the overarching story that legitimates particular pieces of knowledge: the emancipation of humanity, the progress of reason, history marching toward an end. The Enlightenment and Marxism both rest on narratives of that kind. Lyotard's claim is not that they are false but that they have lost their credibility.

What replaces them? Lyotard's answer comes from Wittgenstein: a plurality of irreducible "language games". Science works by its own rules, justice by others, art by others again. None can serve as the measure of another.

Whose knowledge?#

The book's less discussed but perhaps more durable section concerns the status of knowledge. Writing in 1979, Lyotard predicted that knowledge would increasingly be reduced to what can be computerised, and that what would not take that form would be abandoned. Knowledge is no longer an end in itself but a commodity — and the real question becomes not "is this true?" but "who owns it?"

Where the arguments about artificial intelligence and data ownership now stand makes that section more current than it was on the day it was written.

The differend#

Lyotard's Le Différend (1983) is often considered his more important work. A différend is a conflict for which no shared rule exists that could settle the parties' disagreement. In such a case it is impossible to decide the dispute "justly": whichever language is chosen, one of the parties is wronged from the start.

The conclusion Lyotard draws is not pessimistic but admonitory: the task of philosophy is not to treat what cannot be said as though it had been said, but to bear witness to the fact that it could not be said.