Lyotard’s Hegel and the Dialectic of Modernity

Abstract

Hegel is a central figure in the development of Lyotard’s philosophical and political standpoints. From the outset of his career, Hegel’s idealism epitomised what Lyotard consistently takes to be the ‘other’ of his own fast-moving thought. Hegel’s otherness is seen to be his rationalist essentialism against which Lyotard’s anti-essentialist and contrary standpoint is defined. Hegel’s philosophy is presumed by Lyotard to consist in the reflective imperialism of establishing understanding and mastery of the world. Lyotard’s goal as a philosopher and social theorist is to explode the imperial pretensions of rationalism. Throughout his career Lyotard worked at highlighting aspects of reality that resist the closure of explanation and thereby fail to be comprehended in the Hegelian network of concepts. In so doing, however, he displays a close knowledge of Hegel in that he purports to show how Hegel’s dialectic betrays its aim of explaining how different aspects of the whole lead inexorably to a single route of explanation by imposing an external methodology upon reality.