rejects the doctrine of the unity of reason. It refuses to conceive of humanity
as a unitary subject striving towards the goal of perfect coherence (in its
common stock of beliefs) or of perfect cohesion and stability (in its political
practice). ( Lovibond, 1986, p. 6)

The plurality of reasons -- irreducible, incommensurable and
related to specific genres, types of discourse and epistemes -- is pitted
against the Enlightenment claim to universality and the conception of
a unified human reason, which, as the sole standard of rationality,
allegedly underwrites all knowledge claims, irrespective of time and
place, and provides the ground for the unitary subject considered as the
agent of historically progressive change.

Lovibond's deceptively simple statement captures the modernist
dream of "educating reason," of a universal education based on uni-
versal methods equally applicable to all nations and cultures and of a
mass education operating on the principle of merit that would equip
individuals with the necessary skills, attitudes and attributes to become
useful citizens and good workers. Her statement also captures some-
thing of the liberal and Marxist progressive themes of Enlightenment
thought based on appeals to freedom and equality organized and
effected through the education of reason. The postmodern skepticism
toward the Enlightenment notion of subject-centered reason recognized
by Lovibond is represented explicitly by the poststructuralist critique of
reason and, perhaps, most easily recognized in terms of Lyotard's ( 1984)
typification of the postmodern attitude as an "incredulity towards meta-
narratives." The critique of reason centrally is a critique of education
based upon Enlightenment ideals. Lyotard The Postmodern Condition,
a book that crystallized a form of the French critique of reason following
a Kantian and Wittgensteinian line of thought, was first published in
France in 1979, and was subsequently published in English in 1984.
Lyotard The Postmodern Condition is, above all, a critique of Enlight-
enment metanarratives or grand récits. He argues that claims for their
alleged totality, universality and absolutist status in effect render these
notions ahistorical, as though their formation took place outside of
history and of social practice. Lyotard wants to question the dogmatic
basis of these Enlightenment metanarratives, their "terroristic" and
violent nature, which, in asserting certain "Truths" from the perspective
of one discourse, does so only by silencing or excluding statements from
another.

Lyotard, in a now often quoted passage, uses the term "modern": "to
designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a meta-
discourse... making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such
as the dialectics of the Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emanci-
pation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth"
( Lyotard 1984, p. xxiii).

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