Hegel’s encyclopedia produced the metanarrative whose narrator is neither people nor scientists

Evidence

It is here, in the mechanism of developing a Life that is simultaneously Subject, that we see a return of narrative knowledge. There is a universal “history” of spirit, spirit is “life,” and “life” is its own selfpresentation and formulation in the ordered knowledge of all of its forms contained in the empirical sciences. The encyclopedia of German idealism is the narration of the “(hi)story” of this life-subject. But what it produces is a metanarrative, for the story’s narrator must not be a people mired in the particular positivity of its traditional knowledge, nor even scientists taken as a whole, since they are sequestered in professional frameworks corresponding to their respective specialities. — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 273

Categorization

• DEFINE: Directly defines ‘metanarrative’ — the term at the core of Lyotard’s famous definition of the postmodern condition.
• XREF: This is the exact concept ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ that Jameson’s postmodernism theory answers — the primary reading purpose.