The Metacrisis - Diagnosis

On metamodernism, progress, narratives, and the tensile nature of the metacrisis

This essay is part of the second phase of The Magical Flower of Winter, a project that now turns its focus from outlining a metamodern view of reality as a whole, towards the metacrisis. The thread that links these two phases is how the former can be considered an attempt at providing a world view that may better help us deal with the latter. The first phase can best be accessed through its introduction:

Introduction

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Mankind is carried forth by the momentum of its deeds, deeds shaping a channel into the future into which is poured every manner of belief. What mankind does not see, but which is seen by some of its representatives, is that to follow the path is to relinquish one’s own agency, and that the path leads to demise. The foreseeable road is carved out by the ignorance of both our parents and our own uninformed actions. To gather unto us the wisdom to break the channel of low effort apart is the task of every generation, yet a task so easily forgotten among the distractions of modernity. Life is not earned by ease, but by hardship, by breaking free from the molds we are birthed into. Tracing out the shape of the worlds unfolding one sees, not a clockwork mechanism, but a world shaped by our view of it. The clock was only ever a tinkerers tool, a poor likeness when stood up against the richness of reality. And so it is that the path of unfolding we will find we have taken is not one we can foresee and control in its particulars, but one that leads unseen from what we forge in our hearts.

As I hope to have made clear through the first phase of this project, the world we live in, our reality, is very much shaped by our view of it, our world view. To reiterate, by world view I mean the contextual lens through which you parse every aspect of your experience, a lens that is in turn shaped by your unique experience gained throughout your life immersed in the world. Your world view denotes your relationship with reality, a relationship that is enormously complex, formed by your distinctive history of upbringing, education, environment, psychology, culture and much more. In their commonality to many people, these components make up groupings or clusters of world views that we may categorize as e.g. characteristically “Western” or “Eastern”, and “Modern” or “Postmodern”. Thus they cluster into what is conceived as distinct cultural logics, paradigms/epistemes or developmental stages, depending on your entry point being, respectively, anthropological, philosophical or psychological. Their analysis is varied, but of relevance to the metacrisis stands an understanding of the world views of modernity and postmodernity as being the paradigmatic progenitors of our contemporary world of crises, and a search for what kind of world view is required to “overcome” them. I write “overcome” quite deliberately in quotation marks to remind ourselves of the nature of the metacrisis as a predicament we will have to learn to live through, and not a problem that we will solve and make go away. And how we live through the metacrisis is exactly captured by the nature of our relation to each other, the systems we manifest, and our environment. In other words, what our world will look like in the time to come is very much shaped by the world view we go into the future with.

Metamodernism

The stage of world view that overcomes modernism and postmodernism both is called metamodernism. The coinage of metamodernism as a separate pattern of thought converges in the 2000s and 2010s, via the work of many people, amongst other Alexandra Dumitrescu, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, “Hanzi Freinacht”, Lene Rachel Andersen, Brendan Graham Dempsey, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm and Jonathan Rowson. The following is a succinct statement by Dempsey (2023) as to what metamodernism is about:

I see metamodernism… as representing nothing less than a comprehensive worldview, since it constellates a particular world model and normative orientation according to relatively coherent principles. It is, that is, a worldview organized according to recursive transcendence through iterative self-reflection - a going meta after and on the postmodern, which naturally brings with it a given sensibility, philosophical project, and meaningful scientific metanarrative as necessary byproducts.

Metamodernism is as such a world view that subsumes modernism and postmodernism, and every other “episteme” antecedent to them, a position capable of “going meta”, i.e. stepping outside a given subject and its context to a higher vantage point. Postmodernism also did this relative to modernism in a critical way, but metamodernism recognizes that this epistemic transcendence through self-reflection doesn’t stop there. By what Dempsey denotes eternal recursion, a process of nested self-reflexive and self-transcending maneuvers, the metamodern realization positions itself as a world view capable of the attempt at integrating the disparate strands of culture, thought and so much more that modernism and postmodernism has flung far and wide.

While modernism was characterized by a world view revolving around an Absolute world in which was found grand and universal narratives of progress and the ingenuity of mankind, postmodernism leveled a critique against this hubristic attitude towards reality, presenting instead a plurality of perspectives yielding radical relativity. The modern world view was particularistic (that is, realist, reductionist and physicalist), and through being so it painted a picture of our place in reality as one of independence and universality: there is One Absolute physical reality out of which you are created by processes reducible to the elements of science, and these processes operate independently of mind or experience. In doing so, modernism externalizes meaning, purpose and value, seemingly severing the intrinsic connection these have to the subjective.

This particular instance of a “grand narrative” that defines mankind and its place in the world eventually found resistance from the postmodern world view. Instead of only the One there is also the Many, instead of only reduction there is also emergence, instead of solely the physical there is also the mental. My intention is not to conflate the postmodern with dualism, but to showcase a few of the other perspectives that are on offer on a postmodern view. Postmodernism sees modernism from outside its frame, is critical to its presuppositions and the relationships and structures it has built, and posits new structures, now taking the form of systems and networks that both incorporate and overflow the mechanistic view of modernity.

Where postmodernism falters is in providing some semblance of meaning or value, as through its deconstruction of reality into a plurality it approaches a stance of “anything goes” or “everything is relative”, offering a radical relativity that completely dissolves meaning and value. The ethical nihilism of postmodernism is as such part of the nexus that has given rise to the meaning crisis (See the work of John Vervaeke), a central part of the metacrisis on the individual and intersubjective level. As I have argued previously (See Language and Meaning) there is a cure to this radical relativity, and the cure, in my view, is holism. As it turns out, metamodernism also offers a cure to the problematics of modernity and postmodernity. Metamodernism sees the patterns common to the nihilistic plurality of postmodernism, and finds new meaning in them. Thus, I will try to illustrate how the philosophy laid out in the first phase of The Magical Flower of Winter, can be seen as an attempt at a metamodern philosophy. The following summary statement by Rowson (2021) beautifully captures so much of the feeling of metamodernism:

Metamodernism, then, is not so much a word for a new historical epoch, but rather a new disposition towards the experience of history unfolding. It is not merely an idea but an invitation to an imaginary that seasons our taste for ideas. It is not only an epistemology that studies understanding but also an episteme that emphasises a certain kind of aesthetic understanding. And it is not a metanarrative as such, but an outlook that restores the dignity of the metanarrative impulse without being subject to it. And it's not merely one feeling, but a whole structure of feeling; and that structure of feeling matters because it is prior to the structures of thought and society and the domains of the political and epistemological. As indicated, the metamodern notion contains a cultural between, a political after and a mystic beyond. In light of this sweeping scope and elastic structure, the test of the value of metamodernism is no less than this: whether it helps us feel at home in a world that might not be falling apart.

Metamodernism is an idea and a topic I have become aware of only after the first phase of this project, and consequently it was not a deliberate attempt at being metamodern, but at providing a Philosophy For Our Future. I nevertheless find comfort in my own take on a philosophy for our future being convergent with a cultural development of which many others are part. Something is clearly latent in the patterns of thought when several people “independently” arrive at the same type of insights. This is not to say that there are not parts of this development I do not disagree with, as we shall see.

The Magical Flower of Winter as a Metamodern View of Reality

I will try to make plausible that the world view I have been outlining is metamodern by going through some characterizations of what metamodernism is, made by some of its contributors, and put them in comparison to parts of this essay series. It is only appropriate that in self-analyzing through the lens of metamodernism that we “go meta” on the work itself. My main references will be two rather recent works on the topic: Dempsey’s Metamodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics (2023) and Rowson’s preface in Rowson & Layman’s Dispatches from a Time Between World (2021). Both of these attempt to synthesize the various different contributions to the category “metamodernism” in publications from a diverse range of disciplines, and I can recommend both of them to the interested reader wanting to read more about the topic. As they both argue, there is good reason to talk of a convergence towards what metamodernism means in terms of its relationship to the preceding world views, its metatheoretic quality, and in its view of our relationship to reality.

Here is a summary of the approach taken by Storm (2021) of metamodernism as a philosophical paradigm, via the analysis of Dempsey (2023):

…"metamodernism aims to provide a new grand synthesis." Specifically, Storm accomplishes this by taking up the reflective negatives of postmodernism's 1) antirealism, 2) disciplinary autocritiques, 3) linguistic turn, 4) broad climate of skepticism, and 5) ethical nihilism. Working dialectically through them, "productively reduplicating" each on itself, he is able to climb to a still higher vantage by means of these negative moves where each can at last be seen for the incomplete, half-gestures they are. Completing the full turn from this new vantage, antirealism is sublated into a metarealist frame, where multiple notions of the "real" can be seen to exist in relation; autocritique culminates in a powerful new process ontology for cultural analysis; the linguistic turn casting the world as language is completed by casting language as part of the world; radical skepticism finishes by doubting itself, rendering provisional knowledge possible; and radical relativism's pluralist values find positive expression. With these transformations, Storm offers a robust philosophical response to the driving challenges of the postmodern paradigm.

In Language and Meaning I provided what could be called a “metarealist” understanding of the real as plural, contextual and mind-dependent:

All our talk and thought is suffused by and founded on the idea of independent entities, be it of objects, standards, concepts or ideas. But any framework that relies on this inaccessible other for its foundations invariably falls short of providing a coherent view. The resemblances we find between our experience and memory do not tell us of an independent world which we only glimpse the appearance of, but rather of the coherence of experience and our cognitive ability to recognise this coherence. Our understanding of the meaning of "real", as used in science, is different from what we in our experience deem to be real, which is highly contextual.

In The Plurality of Experience, I echo some further developments that may be compared to the metamodernist project as process, and what I have termed epistemisation can be viewed as the processual reconnection of language to reality:

What our theories endlessly converge towards is a dynamic, processual and shared life-world, a reality that it is meaningless to inquire about as independent of us, as it is primarily experiential. In theorizing about reality we are prone to mistake the map we trace for the territory, and hidden behind the success of modern science lies the inverted belief that our model of reality precedes experience. In this way, the very tool we use in our investigation stands in the way of the investigated. The perennial nature of our quest reveals itself in that the that-ness of experience escapes any effort of turning it into a what that our frameworks can deal with. What we can deal with is epistemisation, the co-creative and co-dependent process by which reality and experience is linked.

I offer the following take on values as something that can be recovered in the holistic view, in A View of Reality as a Whole:

The evidence in judgment of the epistemic is not evaluated on criteria of rationality or “truth”, but criteria that are subject to the purpose and value it serves to our lives. Anything less yields an incoherent epistemic, an incoherent world view, which in its imbalance leads to self-destruction. What purpose? What values? We don’t have to invent these answers anew, these have been known forever, though they are disconnected from our world view in our modern technological civilization of quantity. Importantly, purpose and values are not quantities. They are not extrinsic metrics, reducible, independent, this utilitarianism is a legacy of the particularist paradigm. We cannot optimize them, they are not end states for us to achieve. They are processes, journeys, that acquire their value in their making, not their completion (they are infinite, not finite, games). These processes need to be flexible and open in order to provide the space in which their value can spring forth, because just like the unspeakable evaporates when spoken, too much control destroys the very thing we exert control over. A view of reality that is centered on our experience, that aims to connect value and purpose to its conception of reality itself cannot avoid teleology. That it is frowned upon to speak in terms of purpose intrinsically, that the whole both in time and space is more than the parts, is also a particularist legacy we need to rid ourselves of. A view of reality as a whole cannot succeed without an eye on what makes life worth living: love, beauty, goodness, purpose. The belief in something sacred to which we can aspire is not something to be explained or explained away. To call this naive is to have misunderstood the purpose of the statement: I do not intend glorification of something unknown, but recognition of our limitedness, that we are the manifestations of something vast we cannot truly know, only be, as limited parts. And of course this is grating on our ears, we cannot connect to this by our “normal” mode of thought, due to no other reason than our culture’s dogmatic and particularist world view, which I argue there is a coherent and richer alternative to.

Rowson (2021), in discussing the metaphysical aspects of metamodernism, says:

A feature of the new metaphysics is that it will have to integrate the immanent and the transcendent.

In World Views I offered this take on the holistic world view and the transcendent:

The holistic stance provides precisely the starting point for a meta-structure and view of reality as a whole I have argued is needed to start to correct our self-terminating activities, because it provides an account of experience and reality based on coherence and co-dependence. The only meaningful way to talk about transcendence on this view is not as a statement about the ontic, but as a statement about one’s epistemic world view, only by breaking free from the bondage of particularism can one transcend to a larger view of reality as a whole…

Throughout the first phase of this project I have attempted to braid together work from both modernity and postmodernity within metaphysics, epistemology, ontology and the philosophies of science and language, and the “tagline” of this project has since the beginning been that this is an attempt at understanding reality and our relationship to it. I have further tried to show the active and participatory aspect of each of our experiences in shaping reality, something I fear modernity and postmodernity has left us blind to. These strands ring true to Rowson as well:

The point of metamodernism for me is that it takes root in the best kind of soil, the new mixed in with the old, and that it has the potential to give rise to new life. The emergent properties that are evoked by the concept for me are not merely about the maturation of the relationship between modernism and postmodernism. What is exciting for me is our relationship to that relationship, because that relationship is potentially fecund, world-creating and metaphysical in character. The meta in metamodern that is most worth caring about is not passive and descriptive but is generative of the kinds of creative energy we need for[…] a new renaissance. That renaissance will grow in metamodern soil, so the final turn in the argument is to clarify the nature of its main nutrients.

He later gives an overview of four dimensions he believes to be integral towards an understanding of the metamodern perception of context:

Interiority is about reasserting the depth of consciousness against modernism’s reductionism and postmodernism’s flirtation with superficiality. Intimacy highlights forms of relational beauty and is contrasted with modernist universalism and postmodern distancing. The reopening of time through historicity is contrasted with modernist grand narratives but also with postmodernism’s perpetual present. And ecology affirms the need to reorient ourselves to the relational and process nature of material reality, while being contrasted with the environmental blindness of modernism and the miasma of hyperreality in postmodernism.

While I cannot offer a definite statement from my previous essays that is in perfect alignment with this fourfold structure, I can reiterate that the symbolism I intend by The Magical Flower of Winter:

...is the flower growing out of itself, symbolizing the self-upholding nature of reality, the corresponding holistic philosophy I will outline, as well as the reciprocal relationship between us and reality that this philosophy represents. We cannot at this advanced stage of civilization allow ourselves to do anything, neither politics nor philosophy, without an eye on the whole that we are part of. Though tedious, this tedium is as nothing if we take action now, against having our hand forced later. The magical flower of winter is, ultimately, a symbol and a declaration of philosophical and ecological resistance for this age of adversity, a seed for a philosophy for the future.

Dempsey, in describing his take on metamodernism, uses the concept of eternal recursion (see above) to indicate the ongoing and self-reflexive process that “going meta” is. He states:

The advance is towards a continually receding horizon. There is no final Absolute, rendering all gains relative; and yet, in their relativity to one another, their gains are absolute… Progress is real, but it lies in the going.

This constitutes what he calls infinitesimal progress, a notion that I in an above quote stated as “[value and purpose] are processes, journeys, that acquire their value in their making, not their completion”, and the following from Experience and Immersion:

In lieu of any transcendental absolute, what science and philosophy approximates towards is the mutual holistic background to our experience, our shared life-world, which by being holistic is continually in a process of coherent change.

Similarly, I put forth the following in A View of Reality as a Whole:

I hope to have contributed to showing that reality is our experience. Certainly, part of that experience is structured in such a way that it can be discoursed about and manipulated, but only part. The whole that is our experience finds no complete counterpart in the word. The world is no thing, but not «nothing», not a void nor a negative. It is unnamable in that the act of naming it makes it otherwise. In the end, when we have seemingly managed to outline the way of things, when we recognize the holistic character of it all, when reality has been glimpsed, the magical flower known, then still the reality of it will remain ineffable. We cannot capture it, the truth of it as a whole is something we can only be, and we can only be it when we try not to, because in trying we unavoidably frame it, and thus it slips from our hands. Epistemically we have reduced only its outline, it is the outline that has become part of our web, what the outline stands against eludes capture. And further, as is the case with everything, both the trace and what has been traced is ever-changing, always new because reality is always new, no piece of it fixed. The web is always changing, but this as well is just an image. Philosophy and science does not end.

This return of experience as primary to reality can be matched with the words of Dember (2018), summarizing metamodernism:

I propose that the essence of metamodernism is a (conscious or unconscious) motivation to protect the solidity of felt experience against the scientific reductionism of the modernist perspective and the ironic detachment of the postmodern sensibility.

While these comparisons may only scratch the surface, I believe they at least make plausible that the attempt I have made at outlining a philosophy of reality as a whole coheres with the converging concept of metamodernism. We will see some further connections later in this essay, as well as divergences in terms of particular metamodern metanarratives, but I will first give a brief overview of the modernist progress narrative.

The Progress Narrative

A part of the reconstructive job that metamodernism does is to provide coherent metanarratives as a remedy to the postmodern critique of the grand narratives of modernity. A prime example of these grand narratives is the progress narrative, by which the achievements of modernity, capitalism, industrialization and globalization constitute “progress”, a path that overall should and must be kept to, even in mitigating the metacrisis. The progress narrative sees the way people in industrialized countries lead their lives as an aim for all peoples. But all is not well in this modern narrative, as Rowson (2021) explicates:

…modernism entails an irresolute process of secularisation and also the growth of civic and commercial institutions powered by bureaucratic and instrumental rationality and an exploitative relationship to nature. Modernism is therefore about presumed material and scientific progress, but it is often accused of wearing blinkers about its collateral damage. For instance, colonialism, slavery and fossil fuels drove much of modernism's so-called progress.

This is a narrative that Vanessa Andreotti in Hospicing Modernity (2021), a book I cannot recommend enough, critiques for being held as the only measuring stick of what “forward” means. Modern culture and education is built around this narrative for self-serving purposes. In her book, she argues that the manifestations of violence effected for centuries by modernity and coloniality can be deeply traced to the ontological and metaphysical separation of ourselves from our (co-dependent) circumstances, a thesis I explicated in Philosophy for our Future. The house of modernity is built on separability, a move that allows externalizing and making invisible the costs of its upkeep at a global scale. In Development in Progress (2024), the Consilience Project levels the following critique against the progress narrative:

With a narrow view of reality, we blind ourselves to the critical questions: progress for whom? And at what cost? Throughout history, it has been clear that the upsides of progress have rarely been distributed equally. Perhaps the single clearest example of inequality of progress exists between the human and nonhuman worlds. The progress narrative is wholly anthropocentric, and nonhuman life on Earth has been almost exclusively harmed by progress.

The work of the Consilience Project goes much further, and identifies several mechanisms by which this narrative is defended in our contemporary world. To mention a few:

• The story that “technology lifts humanity up”, that “if we just know more we can solve all our problems” feels good. This is further cemented into our cultural understanding by the stories told by eloquent proponents of the narrative like Hans Rosling, Stephen Pinker and Carl Sagan: “These scientists, writers, and academics have helped to establish a worldview that is steeped in optimism… In the postmodern, Western world, our idea of progress has come to provide a secular variation on the code of ethics and teleology that we used to get from our gods.” The Consilience Project furthers this critique by noting the cherry-picking at work in “canonical examples of progress” like "the global increase in life expectancy, reduction in extreme poverty, increase in literacy and access to basic education, and decline in violent conflict.” On a broader view, these may not be the exemplary victories of progress we think they are.

• “[M]any perceived zero-sum trade-offs are in fact negative-sum, because they are the first move in an ongoing arms race…” These game-theoretic traps act as pumps for extractive growth, as noted in The Metacrisis. Furthermore, “those benefiting from our current form of progress offer a defense by noting that there are trade-offs everywhere and using this argument as an excuse to avoid acknowledging or internalizing negative effects.”

• Casting critique of progress and technology as being luddite: “To question the progress narrative is not to yearn for a return to the past, or to wring our hands in fear at the new and unfamiliar.” “Polar reactions”, jumping to the conclusion that being critical to X means that one is anti-X, betrays a narrow world view. It is perfectly possible to be critical to technology, without being against technology, because technology is not value-neutral, and its value is context-dependent. The same holds for any subject of critique.

I will return to the context-dependence and thus value non-neutrality of technology in the next essay as part of a larger breakdown of the topic, but it should be clear that embedded in the heart of the metacrisis lies a relationship between humanity and its reality at odds with the progress narrative that large parts of society are in service of defending. This progress narrative, and the house that modernity has built, will crumble, says Andreotti (2021), and necessarily so for our species and culture to mature:

Before anything different can happen, before people can sense, hear, relate, and imagine differently, there must be a clearing, a decluttering, an initiation into the unknowable; and a letting go of the desires for certainty, authority, hierarchy, and of insatiable consumption as a mode of relating to everything. We will need a genuine severance that will shatter all projections, anticipations, hopes, and expectations in order to find something we lost about ourselves, about time/space, about the depth of the shit we are in, about the medicines/poisons we carry. This is about pain, about death, about finding a compass, an antidote to separability. This is about being ready to go—to befriend death—before we are ready to return home and to live as grown-ups.

What we can now offer modernity is hospicing, for any other approach fails to forge in us the surrender and accountability required to learn from our wrongs and do better:

If we dont’ heal the (broken modernity) limb properly, the infection will compromise the whole metabolism… Hospicing involves intellectual accountability and existential surrender. Assisting with midwifery involves existential accountability and intellectual surrender.

A metamodern understanding of progress becomes necessary once we realize that the progress narrative at work in many peoples minds and in great swaths of our socioeconomic, technological and geopolitical institutions and processes is still modern, and as such not up to the task of healing a world mired in crises that have come about as a consequence of the way of modernity in the first place.

Metamodern Metanarratives and the Tensile Nature of the Metacrisis

Now, what is a metanarrative? One way to illustrate what they are is by way of Vermeulen and van den Akker’s (2010) metanarrative of progress:

…humankind, a people, are not really going toward a natural but unknown goal, but they pretend they do so that they progress morally as well as politically. Metamodernism moves for the sake of moving, attempts in spite of its inevitable failure; it seeks forever for a truth that it never expects to find. If you will forgive us for the banality of the metaphor for a moment, the metamodern thus willfully adopts a kind of donkey-and-carrot double-bind. Like a donkey it chases a carrot that it never manages to eat because the carrot is always just beyond its reach. But precisely because it never manages to eat the carrot, it never ends its chase, setting foot in moral realms the modern donkey (having eaten its carrot elsewhere) will never encounter, entering political domains the postmodern donkey (having abandoned the chase) will never come across… For indeed, that is the "destiny" of the metamodern wo/man: to pursue a horizon that is forever receding.

This is reconstructive, as opposed to the deconstruction of narratives effected by postmodernism. This metamodern process is what Dempsey (2023) calls infinitesimal or zenonian progress: “Progress is real, but it lies in the going”. He also writes

[M]etamodernism… re-envisions the basic notion of progress, embracing both the aspirational journey of the modernists and the infinite plurality of the postmodernists. Metamodern progress… is a playful dance towards an infinitely receding goal, the endless end, the telos of infinity…

This resonates well with what I have termed the primacy of the tension, as laid out in The Plurality of Experience:

What does political polarism, the countermovement to modernity and the critique of scientism have in common? They all exemplify the primacy of the tension over the terminals we abstract from the tension. The tension is processual, a whole, always changing. It recedes from our attempts at grasping it, because it itself cannot be grasped. On the other hand, we are capable of grasping the abstract objects of which we conceive the tension to be between. Objects can far more easily be measured and quantified. In a particularist world running on metrics, the choice between quantity and quality is made for us. These objects may be variously named, but all end up in polar opposition to each other: matter and mind, subject and object, realism and idealism, nature and nurture, progressivism and conservatism, political left and right, capitalism and communism, the list goes on… we fail to see that the tension constitutes a spectrum, divisible only in the abstract, and by polarizing ourselves, humanity fragments. We are blinded to the primacy of the tension; that it is out of the ceaselessly changing tension that creation occurs, and not from achieving the dominance of any pole. Balance and temperance are the principles of creation. This is not a statement about dissolving our disagreements, but a call for seeing the purpose of polarity: If we can cultivate a deep understanding for why we disagree, how disagreement is necessary for creation, I believe we may start to heal fragmentation, for it is partly out of making disagreements into ultimatums, blind to the creative purpose of tension, that we split the world.

As such, both our culture and our crises must be viewed as tensile. This means that there cannot be singular philosophies, positions, world views or solutions that will lead us through our predicament, but an ecology, system, or a plurality of them, in line with their tensile nature. This also speaks to the “either/or” mentality of narrow world views, wherein such sentiments as “we have to do this and not that” lie central to any approach of bettering our world. For instance, degrowth and green growth will both be goals aimed at by different groups of people, because these different people occupy different world views and contexts in which their approach makes the most sense. Of course, we will also have positions of business-as-usual, denial and all manner of other stances both more conservative and radical, all part of the tensile continuum. The work lies in pushing the center of this continuum in the right direction, the direction where we come out the other side of this in some state of harmony.

On this view, the notion of the metacrisis as a predicament and not a problem gains further ground. Problems can be solved, while predicaments are more resistant, which can be explained by the tensile nature of these problematiques within an overall holistic view of reality. This view seems to be shared by Sevaldson (2022) in his approach to Systems-Oriented Design (SOD):

Seemingly simple problems are only simple because they are seen in isolation. We ignore the systems beyond and behind them, and we ignore the life cycles they are part of. Wicked problems are escaping problem descriptions; they are messy, and there is no way to understand them fully before trying to solve them… One could question if they are problems in the normal sense of the word at all. They escape the problem definition because they are about envisioning new states that were not imagined before. It involves recognising that the ground or starting point of a process is constantly changing. While we plan, the reality we plan for changes rapidly. In addition, what seems to be the problem at first glance might not be the real issue. It might just be a symptom of deeper systemic processes. Solving the symptom could make things worse. In addition, when investigating and involving, our perspectives change. Involvement implies one becoming part of the system that is at stake. This means that the system has changed through our involvement and will change again when the involvement ends. Checkland uses this difference between an old static way of defining problems and a new dynamic way of coping with issues to distinguish between hard and soft Systems Thinking[.] Denis Loveridge goes further to suggest that these be called situations rather than problems[.] While the notion of a problem implies that it can be solved with a singular response, a situation moves away from solutioning to imply a state of change, one that can change again in the future. Using the term situation resists the reductionism that lies in the notion of the problem. This challenges the role of the designer as a “problem solver.”

The tensile nature of the metacrisis and approaches to it means that we will have to learn to live with humanity presenting a non-unified front when it comes to how we deal with this predicament, because different approaches do not gain their validity by measurement in comparison to an absolute yard stick of what progress is, but by a complex system of relative and normative evaluations that in part can only be measured in their implementation, and not in advance. However, the infinitesimal progress of knowledge does not preclude a far broader perspective in terms of what we internalize to our approaches. Perhaps most importantly, we can be united in the horizon we aim for, even though we know it to be receding from us: an understanding of knowledge as provisional and uncertain, but at the same time one that allows us to incorporate the broader perspectives the metamodern view affords us that are crucial towards our dealing with the consequences of our form of society. This is what hopefully will enable us to act on uncertain knowledge, for on a metamodern view, all knowledge turns out to be uncertain. In the words of the Consilience Project, we need a development in our notion of what progress is:

For a change to equal progress, it must systematically identify and internalize its externalities as far as reasonably possible. Its underlying incentives must be bound to the well-being of all life, and it must uphold and protect the social contract of society that motivates people to work together at scale.

The Power of World Views

The plurality inherent to metamodern metanarratives comes about as a requirement in the face of epistemicide, a phrase by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Epistemicide denotes the tendency to word the world, to attempt to control and define a ontic reality by words, epistemics, that can only act to reduce it (See e.g. Wittgenstein and the Private Language Argument). These acts of reduction are never up to the task of capturing reality. As Andreotti (2021) puts it, this, in combination with the power dynamics of modernity, leads to

…cultures' epistemologies [being] cut from their ontological roots and grafted onto the modern/colonial ontology in the process of translation. This restrictive pattern of translation makes it impossible to communicate a relationship with language that is not about describing or constructing reality.

The way language shapes how we think about the world and our place in it has become transparent to us. We fail at understanding foreign cultures because we view their world through the lens of our own, which cannot but fail in translation. This, as I argued in A View of Reality as a Whole in the context of the structure of past and present, is a consequence of how our world views function:

…by the epistemic we shape our world view, and in turn we shape our experience. Living is an active enterprise, but not only are our actions active, so is our thinking about and epistemic structuring of our experience, for how we order the past impacts the present. This process is transparent to us because at any and all times we experience reality through our world view, which just as ourselves is cumulatively changed in the experience. There is no yardstick we can hold up between the past and now in order to compare our experience and world view, for we see the past experience and our previous world view through the lens of our current one. We can set out on a quest, but our starting point will have changed in the process of journeying. That the starting point remains what it was is a projection we do, but when we return to what was the starting point we will have changed.

Thus, we are bound to view other ontologies and epistemologies through the lens of our own. The metamodern move is now, given the awareness of this effect, to expand the boundaries of our own world view, to cultivate the ability to uproot the presuppositions in our analysis, to operate holistically in a shifting plurality, all in an effort to better internalize the externalities. This will have to be a continuous process, subject to infinitesimal progress against a receding horizon. In the face of this, we realize that we will never be able to do this perfectly, and in that knowledge lies everything we need to act on uncertain grounds and do better. What metamodernism may be able to provide us with time and much practice is the insight and wisdom that allows us to steward this power of our world views, and in turn the destructive powers we wield with our technology and form of society.

This power of world views also explains the normalization that occurs continuously in our lives. Our world view and our experience stand in a co-dependent relationship, one continuously shaping the other, and this acts to unceasingly normalize the local conditions of our experience. We may learn devastating facts about our world, but given time these facts lose their efficacy at surprise or shock, because we cannot return to a world view wherein these facts weren’t integrated and normalized. This normalization is of course coupled to a cognitive and psychological dissonance that greatly contributes to the individual and intersubjective dimensions of the metacrisis. We live in a world where massive consumption, both physical and digital, is normalized, and meanwhile over a third of all species on earth are threatened by extinction. We live in a world of enormous natural beauty and richness, and yet we are normalized to grey urbanity and pollution. We treasure creativity and the human spirit of ingenuity, and yet we are normalized to the destruction of these qualities in the name of commercialism and capitalism. We treasure independence and freedom, yet we are normalized to psychological and cultural manipulation through advertising and social media, all in service of growth. The more mature view on these issues afforded by the metamodern stance will hopefully be part of bringing them to an end.

A Critique of Some Metanarratives

I would like to offer a critique of some specific metamodern metanarratives that I see as breaking with the notion of infinitesimal progress. Dempsey (2023) discusses two particular instances of metanarrative: those of Gregg Henriques (2022) and Bobby Azarian (2022). In summarizing their views, he writes:

In sum, the metamodern metanarrative [of Henriques and Azarian] frames the acquisition of human knowledge as part of a cosmic saga of complexification-through-learning. Azarian calls it the Unifying Theory of Reality; Henriques, the Unified Theory of Knowledge…

Without going into too much detail, the metanarrative they are providing is one of reality as a “universal cosmic learning process”, a narrative that supports a view of the purpose of mankind as the cosmos learning or knowing itself. I find this to be incompatible with a notion of metanarrative progress as one of infinitesimal progress, of progress against a horizon that is ever receding. On first glance, a universal cosmic learning process may seem fully compatible with infinitesimal progress, as learning and complexification are surely perennial processes. But this is a narrow view of learning and complexification. Learning and knowledge can be both wise and unwise, as I will return to in the next essay. As Tainter (1988) and Ophuls (2012) both argue, overcomplexification lies at the heart of societal collapses. Thus, the challenge we face in the metacrisis is a societal decomplexification, a simplification, that will be forced upon us with the end of fossil fuel as a growth and complexity accelerant. The jury is still out on whether mankind will rise to this challenge with wisdom.

The issue with these metanarratives is in their framing of the purpose of mankind or the cosmos, a move I take to exemplify falling prey to the ontic projection fallacy, or Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness. While metamodernism may certainly recover value and meaning, in contextual and holistic ways, universal talk of purpose quickly becomes problematic. We cannot say what the purpose of mankind or the cosmos is, because these gain their purpose (to the extent that this can even be talked about) in contexts inaccessible to our knowledge. This is a kind of teleological speculation that projects purpose outside the human contexts this term gains its meaning in. While I am in support of acknowledging the teleological workings of the whole of reality, we are in no position to specify what these workings are, or for what purpose. None of this is to deny the self-organizing nature of reality, but to ascribe a purpose to this self-organization smells of finalism, some sort of teleological certainty, or some plan that is followed in the unfolding of reality. This move is further problematic in its return to a sort of grand narrative of mankind's part in the cosmos that may prove to stand at odds with what is required in dealing with the metacrisis. This is just a suspicion I have, but I find it hard to see the compatibility of mankind’s purpose as some great cosmic process of self-knowledge, when the fallibility and unguidedness of this process is amply demonstrated through the predicament we find ourselves in as part of the metacrisis.

I will let Bergson (1998) have a (provisionally) last word:

But, if the evolution of life is something other than a series of adaptations to accidental circumstances, so also it is not the realization of a plan. A plan is given in advance. It is represented, or at least representable, before its realization. The complete execution of it may be put off to a distant future, or even indefinitely; but the idea is none the less formulable at the present time, in terms actually given. If, on the contrary, evolution is a creation unceasingly renewed, it creates, as it goes on, not only the forms of life, but the ideas that will enable the intellect to understand it, the terms which will serve to express it. That is to say that its future overflows its present, and can not be sketched out therein in an idea.

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References

Andreotti, V. (2021). Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. North Atlantic Books.

Azarian, B. (2022). The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. BenBella Books.

Bergson, H. (1998). Creative Evolution. Dover Publications. [1907]

Dember, G. (2018). After Postmodernism: Eleven Metamodern Methods in the Arts. https://medium.com/what-is-metamodern/after-postmodernism-eleven-metamodern-methods-in-the-arts-767f7b646cae

Dempsey, B. G. (2023). Metamodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics. Arc Press.

Henriques, G. (2022). A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap. Palgrave Macmillan.

Ophuls, W. (2012). Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail. CreateSpace.

Rowson, J. & Pascal, L. (Ed.) (2021). Dispatches from a Time between Worlds: Crisis and Emergence in Metamodernity. Perspectiva Press.

Sevaldson, B. (2022). Designing Complexity: The Methodology and Practice of Systems Oriented Design. Common Ground Research Networks.

Storm, J. A. S. (2021). Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. Chigaco Press.

Tainter, J. A. (1988). The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press.

The Consilience Project (2024). Development in Progress. https://consilienceproject.org/development-in-progress/

Vermeulen, R. & van den Akker, R. (2010). Notes on Metamodernism. Journal of Aestetichs & Culture 2(1):5677.