Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein is a notoriously difficult to penetrate philosopher wrote Philosophical Investigations. In that text (and others) he bases his philosophy of communications upon the idea of “language games.” It is primarily from this fundamental structure of Wittgenstein’s theoretical framework that Lyotard derives his foundational concept of the meta-narrative.
Karl Marx
Marx is, of course, the father of communism, author of Das Kapital. The opening words of the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto are among the most famous in the history of philosophy: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” This assertion represents the foundational theoretical construct upon which all communism is built. Thus, within the context of Lyotard, the assertion is also an example of a meta-narrative.
Talcott Parsons
Parsons is a sociologist from Lyotard draws his illustration of the two representational models of society. Parsons is a renowned proponent of the structuralist functional theory of society. This is a perspective which forwards the concept of society as a self-regulating system. That is to say, society operates somewhat along the lines of a living organism such as the human anatomical system in which the individual components operating in stability by themselves simultaneously promote a solidarity of functioning with the other operative individualized parts: one aspect of society would equivalent to the kidneys, another to the lungs, another to the muscular system and so on.
Immanuel Kant
Lyotard applies the Kantian thematic conceptualization of the sublime as the basic operating mode of the postmodern condition. Kantian sublimity is chosen in preference to another slightly less fitting term often applied externally: Nietzschean nihilism. The preference is for Kant’s expression that the aestheticism of the sublime is expressed through a combination of pleasure and pain which is further delineated as the pleasure being derived from the pain.
