Lyotard and the Problem of Justice

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, ¹ Richard Rorty characterizes the history of the western metaphysical tradition as an extended search for the foundations of knowledge and morality, underwritten by the conviction that all conceptions of truth or justice are commensurable, that is, ‘able to be brought under a set of rules which will tell us how rational agreement can be reached on what would settle the issue on every point where statements seem to conflict’. ² To forge a link between human rationality and the idea of a universal consensus and to insist, further, that through an appeal to reason, truth—and hence the elimination of disagreement—might be attained, is, as Rorty suggests, a familiar move within western philosophy, particularly since the Enlightenment. Within Kantian thought, this strategy assumes a specific form: the basis for consensus is located within a conception of the human person as rational and autonomous. Human society may appear to be marked only by conflict and cultural diversity; human history may seem to be little more than a succession of discontinuous shifts and transformations. But underneath the apparently irreducible heterogeneity of experience is a self that ‘we’—in all epochs and in all corners of the globe—share. As rational subjects ‘we’ are capable of reaching agreement on the fundamental verities of existence.