Jean-François Lyotard (1924 to 1998) was a French philosopher, best known for defining the postmodern as “incredulity toward metanarratives”, a loss of faith in the grand stories that claim to explain and justify everything. In The Differend (1983) he named a particular kind of injustice: a conflict between two parties that cannot be fairly settled because there is no rule of judgement both sides share, so that one side’s wrong cannot even be put into words in the language the judgement uses. Therapeutic Shamanism meets him in its distrust of the single story Taker cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer tells about itself, and in its teaching that mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this and logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this are different kinds of truth that must not be judged by each other’s rules.
Who was Jean-François Lyotard? #
He was born near Paris in 1924, and trained in philosophy. In the 1950s he taught at a school in Constantine in Algeria, where he became caught up in Marxism and in the Algerian struggle for independence, and for about ten years he belonged to the radical left-wing group Socialisme ou Barbarie, breaking with it in 1964. Later posts took him to the Sorbonne, at Nanterre and at the experimental university founded at Vincennes after 1968, and died in Paris in 1998.1
His most famous book, The Postmodern Condition (1979), was a report on knowledge in the most developed societies. In it he described the postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives: the great stories, such as steady progress through reason or the coming liberation of humanity, that modern societies had used to give their knowledge and their institutions authority.1 In their place he saw many smaller language games, each with its own rules.
What is a differend? #
A dispute that cannot be settled fairly because the two sides do not share a rule for judging it. Lyotard set it against litigation, where both parties argue within a framework they both accept, such as the criminal law; one side may lose, but its case has been heard on its own terms. In a differend there is no such shared framework, and applying the rules of one side to the other wrongs it.2
He worked this out through what he called phrases. Anything said, and even a silence, is a phrase, and phrases belong to different regimens, such as describing, questioning, ordering or feeling, which cannot simply be translated into one another. Genres of discourse, such as science, law, economics or storytelling, supply rules for linking phrases together, but there is no higher rule for deciding between the genres themselves.2
From this comes his distinction between a damage and a wrong. A wrong is a damage that comes with the loss of the means to prove it: the victim has been deprived of life, of liberty, or of the ability to testify in the terms the tribunal will accept.2 His starting example was the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, who would accept as proof of the gas chambers only the testimony of someone who had died in them, a demand designed so that no witness could ever meet it. He also pointed to the colonised and the coloniser, and to the worker and the owner of capital.2
What did he think should be done about a differend? #
Not to pretend it away by forcing one side’s case into the other’s language, but to bear witness to it. Lyotard took even the silence of a wronged party as a kind of phrase, a sign of something that has not yet found words, and the silence that Auschwitz imposes on knowledge, in his account, calls for a feeling, if not an obligation.3 To get past such a dispute, new ways of phrasing, and new ways of living together, have to be invented, and no single discourse may claim to own reality.3
Critics have charged postmodern thinkers, Lyotard among them, with denying that there are facts at all, and so with opening the way to moral nihilism and a ‘post-fact’ world. From the side of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, whose ideal of agreement reached through open dialogue Lyotard had attacked, the philosopher Marianna Papastephanou argues that Lyotard engaged with only a few of Habermas’s ideas, and that dialogue between the two positions need not be reduced to a differend.4 In reply, the philosopher Peter Gratton holds that Lyotard never claimed that everything is a social construction or that every language game is as good as any other, and that his work bears witness against injustice, against the silencing of those whose wrong cannot be heard.5
How does Lyotard’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
First, in distrust of the one big story. Taker culture tells people that what it says is right, that this is how things are and always have been; it writes history, and it sets and controls the narrative.6 To justify itself it has to deny that there is any alternative, so it forgets, or calls savage, the hundreds of thousands of years in which people lived more peacefully, fairly and sustainably as hunter-gatherers.7 This is what Daniel Quinn called the Great ForgettingGreat Forgetting. Daniel Quinn’s term for the mass amnesia by which Taker culture erased the knowledge that humanity ever lived any other way, dismissing almost all of our story as ‘pre-history’. Read the full answer. Lyotard’s incredulity towards metanarratives and the teaching on the Great Forgetting both ask who is telling the story, and whom it leaves out. See What is the Fall?
Second, in the idea of genres that cannot judge each other. Mythos is metaphorical truth and logos is literal truth, and they are different kinds of truth, two ways of making sense of the world. Modern culture tends to mistake one for the other, thinking metaphorical truths are literally true, or thinking that literal truth leaves mythos with no purpose or value.8 Shamanic journeys are mythos, not logos, and an enormous amount of damage has come from taking mythos as literally true.9 Put in Lyotard’s vocabulary, which he did not apply to this himself, judging a journey by the rules of logos, or a fact by the rules of mythos, is like hearing a case in the wrong tribunal. The task is to know the difference and hold both side by side.8
Third, in those who cannot testify. The idea of ownership, and the idea that we can use and abuse other animals, plants and the Earth as we wish, are among the profoundly un-shamanic ways of thinking that people take on growing up in Taker society.10 Read through Lyotard’s idea, an application he did not make himself, the other-than-human Peoples are in the position of a party with no means to testify, so that harm done to rivers, forests and animals would be a wrong as well as a damage. Animism hears them in another idiom, through relationship and the shamanic journey. See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On grand stories. Lyotard’s incredulity reaches every metanarrative, including stories of a golden age. Therapeutic Shamanism tells a large story of its own, the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer and the long recovery from it, and holds it in two ways at once. As logos, it is a matter of fact, drawn from anthropology, that hunter-gatherers lived in a far better relationship with the Earth than we do now; as mythos, stories of a time when we lived more rightly exist to teach and remind us how to be, as such stories did for our hunter-gatherer ancestors.11 This is not romanticising, for hunter-gatherers were people with flaws like us. See Isn’t the Fall just “noble savage” romanticism?
