Lyotard's opposition to universals and grand narratives, like that of human progress towards civilization, pits him against Plato and Platonism. Nevertheless, similarities surface in their approaches to safeguarding a diversity of language games. Lyotard criticizes the consensus model dominant in scientific discourse, which he sees as rooted in Platonism. Instead, he proposes a new kind of thinking which may prepare us to grasp what thought is not ready to think. But how may justice and injustice remain meaningful terms without appeal to agreed-upon criteria of judgment? Does Lyotard's critique of humanism offer a viable alternative to capitalism's commodification of knowledge? Or does this critique itself comprise a new hegemonic narrative? I argue that Lyotard's focus on the uncommodifiable and unrepresentable echoes Socrates' quest in the Platonic dialogues and that the aporetic and unattainable in Socratic elenctic and Platonic dialectic may help us discover the postmodern in the modern.
