• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 932 0

us to doubt. The existence of or demand for a metanarrative is the demand to subsume all truths under one standard, under one set of rules, and Lyotard finds such a project problematic. Just as the narrator of On Beyond Zebra! refuses to be constrained by Conrad’s twenty-six letters and makes up his own to go beyond Zebra to Yuzz, Snee, and Floob, so does Lyotard want to expand language beyond its borders to allow for the expression of things currently inexpressible. “The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself . . .”2 Assuming there were animals like the Yuzz-a-ma-Tuzz, Glikker, and Wumbus, then the letters Yuzz, Glikk, and Wum would be all that allowed us to express their existence and natures. Without these letters they would be unpresentable; we wouldn’t be able to say anything about them, not even that they exist. To restrict our language to twenty-six letters would be to close ourselves off to the reality of Yuzz-a-ma-Tuzzes and their cohorts. If we stopped at twenty-six letters we’d never be able to discuss them, to think about them, to know them. Our world would be smaller and more limited due to our language’s inability to capture or express the nature of these things. Our language would fail to express the fecundity of our world. Now we know there are no such things as Glikkers, Wumbuses (or is it Wumbi?), and so forth. But there are experiences people have, there are things they feel, value, or conceive, that they may want to give voice to but can’t because our current language lacks the phrases or idioms by which they could express these things. The claim that one narrative, one story could encapsulate and communicate the totality of human experiences greatly underestimates the depth and breadth of the human condition. But to really begin understanding the importance of the function of metanarratives and the need to go beyond them, let’s look at the tradition to which Lyotard is responding: modernity. And let’s focus on one of its most prominent thinkers: Kant.

Z Is as Far as the Alphabet Goes!

If modernity is marked by the existence of “any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse . . . making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative,”3 then Kant is an exemplar of modernity; a systematizer who sought nothing less than to categorize all areas of human knowledge, evaluation, and judgment in order to provide a coherent, orderly, and exhaustive view of the world.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is most famous as the author of his three critiques of the various faculties of reason: Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgment. Each of these critiques dissects a particular faculty of reason in order to discover its limits and thereby the bounds of human knowledge and experience. As Kant succinctly puts it, “All the interests of my reason . . . combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?”4

Kant’s goal is laudable. He wants to clearly set the limits of human understanding so we don’t persist in error and make unjustified claims so that we can better grasp and thereby navigate the world around us. Each of these areas is fundamental to our lives. Knowledge, ethics, religion, and art are essential to the human experience. One can’t do without any of these areas of study, so Kant wishes to clearly delineate their limits so that we conduct our inquiries well, within the natural and inescapable limits of the human mind.

Kant’s first critique, the Critique of Pure Reason, is about knowledge—what can we know. This critique aims to explain the very conditions under which we can know anything. Kant seeks what he terms the transcendental preconditions for knowledge. That is, what conditions are necessary in order for us to know anything, or in a more simplistic even if anachronistic fashion, how is our brain wired and how does its wiring determine what we can know. According to Kant, the human mind is built in such a way, hardwired so to speak, as