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Platonism and Postmodernism. Modes of Discourse in Plato and Lyotard

Lyotard’s opposition to universals, métarécits, and general terms, his rejection of grand narratives such as that of the steady progress of humankind toward civilisation, the knowability of everything by science, and the possibility of human emancipation pits him against Plato and the tradition of Platonism. However, there are striking similarities of approach between the Platonic dialogues and Lyotard’s language games. Lyotard places Plato squarely at the beginning of the “new language game of science” and the problem of its self- legitimation (The Postmodern Condition, 28). What Lyotard calls the “pragmatics of science” is “set in motion” in the dialogues and the “game of dialogue… encapsulates that pragmatics, ” with rules like: “argumentation with a view only to consensus (homologia), ” “unicity of the referent” as a basis for agreement, “parity between partners.” Against the notion of the inhuman Lyotard proposes a new kind of thinking that is meant to move us beyond humanism and beyond what we thought the human to be. This thinking consists in “Being prepared to receive what thought is not prepared to think” (Inhuman, 73). But if justice and injustice are to remain meaningful terms in postmodernist language games, is it really possible to “judge without criteria” (Just Gaming, 14)? And does Lyotard’s critique of humanism offer a viable solution to the dehumanizing commodification of knowledge in contemporary capitalism with its reduction of knowledge to information and of humans to instruments for the realization of economic motives? Lyotard calls for us to break free of hegemonic discourses and grand narratives (Differend, 80) In my paper, I argue that Lyotard’s call for the postmodern to look for what is irreducible to commodification, unrepresentable within our presentation of objective reality, unspeakable in any phrase regimen (Postmodern Condition, 73–9) is at the heart of what Plato’s Socrates undertakes in “seeking while he talks” (Republic 451a), and that the aporetic and unattainable at the core of Socratic elenctic and Platonic dialectic are precisely what is needed in order to discover the postmodern in the modern. Disrupting pre-determined significations is the aim of Socratic elenchus as a “logic of selection based on homologia” (Wolfgang Kullmann) and the core of Plato’s hypothetical dialectic, which relies on a permanent conjoinment of narrative and discursive reasoning. Lyotard’s valorization of the figural, and the mutual implication of discourse and the figural are anticipated in the complementary roles of belief and impressions, intuitive and discursive thought in Plato’s Proportion of the Line.

Platonism, Postmodernism, Lyotard, Discourse, Language Games

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