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 in 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 the phrase actually mean?

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

To say that our era begins where the era of grand narratives ends is to say that 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 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 dissolve 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 self-interest. Rather, each person now determines their own course; yet the multiplicity of these individual directions no longer converges towards a single endpoint that might represent humanity's collective purpose.

The two narratives to which Lyotard alludes are probably those proposed by Hegel and Marx, which give human history both 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, what unfolds in history is no longer a melody of events but a rhapsody—and indeed several rhapsodies playing simultaneously: a cacophony.
The world as cacophony: this is one way of defining our times, as Lyotard's formulation seems to suggest.

What are we to make of this diagnosis?

1. The Postmodern Condition, Introduction