What is new in all this is that the old poles of attraction represented by nation-states, parties, professions, institutions, and historical traditio… - Jean-François Lyotard

There’s a necessity for physical experience and a recourse to exemplary cases of bodily ascesis to understand and make understood a type of emptying of the mind, an emptying that is required if the mind is to think. This obviously has nothing to do with tabula rasa, with what Descartes (vainly) wanted to be a starting from scratch on the part of knowing thought.

Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter the postmodern age.

Here is the question: is a legitimization of the social bond, a just society, feasible in terms of a paradox analogous to that of scientific activity? What would such a paradox be?