Philosophy and Philm: Federico Fellini - Amarcord

Jean-François Lyotard (1924 - 1998)
"Paganism rejects any universal criteria for judgement, yet Lyotard claims that we must judge, that justice demands this of us. So how do we judge, without criteria? Lyotard invokes both Kant and Nietzsche in his answer. In Kantian terms, we judge through the constitutive imagination. For Kant, this ability to judge, and to invent criteria, is mysterious, and there is little we can say about it. In Nietzschean terms, Lyotard says that judgement is an expression of the will to power. It is perhaps misleading of Lyotard to say that paganism is judgement without criteria; for it is judgement only without universal criteria. What he is denying is the possibility of a discourse that will give us adequate criteria for judgement in each and every case."

(http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/Lyotard.htm#top)

Instead, what we must do (as pagans) is meet every circumstance that requires judgement anew, and create criteria specific to that case by an affirmative act of the imaginative will. Thus we will get a plurality of criteria, a plurality of judgements, a plurality of justices. In this sense, paganism can be thought of as a plurality of rules of judgement (gods), as opposed to belief in just one rule or set of rules (God). Somewhat paradoxically, perhaps (as Lyotard himself admits), the justice of this pluralism is assured by a prescriptive of universal value - the prescriptive that the rules of individual language games be respected; that they are not subsumed under a single criterion of judgement.