Philosopher views

HUMAN VALUING DOES NOT FOLLOW OBJECTIVE/LINEAR PROGRESSION

1. HUMAN THOUGHT DOES NOT WORK IN A BINARY, DIGITAL MODE

Jean-François Lyotard. professor emeritus at the University of Paris, THE INHUMAN, 1991. p. 15. But as Dreyfus argues, human thought doesn’t think in a binary mode. It doesn’t work with units of information (bits), but with intuitive, hypothetical configurations. It accepts imprecise, ambiguous data that don’t seem to be selected according to preestablished codes or readability. It doesn’t neglect side effects or marginal aspects of a situation. It isn’t just focused, but lateral too. Human thought can distinguish the important from the unimportant without doing exhaustive inventories of data and without testing the importance of data with respect to the goal pursued by a series of trials and errors.
2. DEFINITION OF POST-MODERN SUPPORTS DIVERSE HETEROGENEOUS VALUES

Jean-Francois Lyotard. professor emeritus at the University of Paris, THE POSTMODERN CONDITION within AFTER PHILOSOPHY, END OR TRANSFORMATION?, 1989. p. 74.

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution that in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements -- narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so

on.
3. POST-MODERNISM REINFORCES OUR ABILITY TO TOLERATE DIFFERENCES

Jean-François Lyotard. professor emeritus at the University of Paris, THE POSTMODERN CONDITION within AFTER PHILOSOPHY, END OR TRANSFORMATION?, 1989. p. 75.

Still, the postmodern condition is as much a stranger to disenchantment as it is to the blind positivity of delegitimation. Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside? The operativity criterion is technological; it has no relevance for judging what is true or just. Is legitimacy to be found in consensus obtained through discussion, as Jurgen Habermas thinks? Such consensus does violence to die heterogeneity of language games. An invention is always born of dissension.

Jean-François Lyotard. professor emeritus at the University of Paris, THE POSTMODERN CONDITION within AFTER PHILOSOPHY, END OR TRANSFORMATION?, 1989. p. 89. A recognition of the heteromorphous nature of language games is a first step in that direction. This obviously implies a renunciation of terror, which assumes that they are isomorphic and tries to make them so. The second step is the principle that any consensus on the rules defining a game and the “moves” playable within it must [sic] be local, in other words, agreed on by its present players and subject to eventual cancellation. The orientation then favors a multiplicity of finite meta-arguments, by which I mean argumentation that concerns metaprescriptives and is limited in space and time.

Jean-François Lyotard. Professor emeritus at the University of Paris, THE POSTMODERN EXPLAINED, 1992, p. 15.

Finally, it should be made clear that it is not up to us to provide reality, but to invent allusions to what is conceivable, but not presentable. And this task should not lead us to expect the slightest reconciliation between “language games.” Kant, in naming them the faculties, knew that they are separated by an abyss and that only a transcendental illusion (Hegel’s) can hope to totalize them into a real unity. But he also knew that the price of this illusion is terror. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us our fill of terror.
6. POSTMODERNISM REJECTS PLATONIC NOTIONS OF ABSOLUTE VALUES

Wilad Godzich. Professor of Literatures-University of Geneva, THE POSTMODERN EXPLAINED, 1992, p. 125.

As far as the ontological, or Platonic, theory of justice is concerned, Lyotard shows, in a deft admixture of Kant and Wittgenstein, that a prescriptive discourse cannot be derived from a descriptive one: from an is one cannot derive an ought. It is a logical falsehood to pretend that the true and the just are not dissociated.