ABSTRACT

This chapter highlights incommensurability of the mainstream Western philosophical traditions with the global realities of the twenty-first century. It focuses on Immanuel Kant's approach to modernity and Jean-François Lyotard's concept of postmodernity. The chapter addresses complex relationship between Lyotard and Hegel: Hegel is the great "antipode" of Lyotard, who wished to disengage from Hegel in methodological and conceptual respects in the face of the horrors of Auschwitz. Kant without Georg W. F. Hegel remains in the best case idealistic, in the worst case creates a binary system of being rational in all particular circumstances and mythological concerning the whole; Hegel without Kant tends to be totalitarian. Conflict occurs, according to Lyotard, when two different manners of discourse used for the same issue, for example, in the case of the mixing of normative and descriptive discourses. The delusion or transcendental illusion insists on the claim to establish the good or the right on the truth or the ought on the being.