II/ The axiological panorama of our time

a/ How can we characterise our era axiologically?

a) The end of grand narratives (Lyotard)

What are the defining axiological features of our times? How can we describe the axiological profile of our era? Lyotard encapsulated this profile with a succinct expression: the 'end of grand narratives': Simplifying to the extreme, I define post-modern as incredulity toward metanarratives ¹. Our time, referred to as 'post-modernism', is thus marked by this shift. But what does this phrase actually imply?

A narrative is a discourse with coherence and meaning. A series of disconnected words does not form a narrative; rather, it resembles a kind of incoherent babble. In musical terms, a story cannot be merely a 'rhapsody', a sequence of disconnected sounds, but must resemble a melody with cohesion. The storyteller does not arrange words randomly, as one might strike random keys on a piano. A story must convey meaning and direction, typically with a clear beginning, middle, and end. A story often has a goal—for example, 'to live happily ever after'—with all the events working, at least ostensibly, towards achieving this end, serving as means to a purpose.

To say that our era begins as the era of grand narratives ends means we no longer lend credence to any overarching theory that would imbue our time with intrinsic meaning and direction.

This does not imply that no meaning can be found in the world, but rather that such meaning, whatever it may be, does not arise from history itself. Time does not inherently carry this meaning forward, unfolding it fully for us. Instead, it is we who give the world its meaning, stamping it onto reality through our work and efforts, only for it to vanish as soon as our labour or intentions are redirected or exhausted.

Nor does this suggest that our era is defined by aimless wandering or that humanity has lost all sense of direction. It does not mean that individuals act randomly, each deed tinged with profound irrationality (in fact, the post-modern individual may be among the most driven by rational calculations of personal interest). Rather, each person now determines their own path, yet the multiplicity of these individual directions no longer converges towards a single endpoint, which might otherwise represent humanity’s collective purpose.

The two narratives to which Lyotard alludes are probably those proposed by Hegel and Marx, which give human history a meaning (events do not follow one another randomly but are driven by the Spirit of the world or the dialectic of relations of production) and a final destination (absolute Knowledge or the advent of a state in which classes, and hence their conflicts, are abolished).

With the 'end of grand narratives', as Lyotard put it, we can imagine that what is happening in history is no longer a melody of events, but a rhapsody of events, and even several rhapsodies, since everyone is playing at the same time: a cacophony.
The world as cacophony: this is a definition of our times as it seems to be encapsulated in Lyotard's proposal.

What are we to make of this diagnosis?

1. The Postmodern Condition