Metamodernism: The Future of Theory by Jason Storm

[Philosophy Now]

John Best tries to move beyond postmodernism.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/157/Metamodernism_The_Future_of_Theory_by_Jason_Storm

[iambiguous]

Metamodernism: The Future of Theory by Jason Storm
John Best tries to move beyond postmodernism.

Faced with the dire plight of modern culture, what are we postmodern humans to do? Well, before attempting to chart a course forward, it might be a good idea to back up and show how postmodernism put us in the fix we’re in.

Of course:

1] go to Goggle
2] type in "postmodernism definition"
3] get this: https://www.google.com/search?q=postmod ... s-wiz-serp
4] click on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism
5] Get this: 'Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the "grand narratives" of modernism; rejection of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning; and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power. Claims to objectivity are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.'

Then, if you wish to discuss this further with me here, well, "we'll need a context".

Your own "grand narrative" pertaining to moral and political and spiritual convictions and my own "fractured and fragmented" perspective at the existential intersection of "identity, value judgments, conflicting goods and political economy".

Go ahead, you choose the context. That way we can move beyond the "future of theory" here and explore all of this pertinent to the lives that we actually live?

Postmodernism is a response to modernism. Modernism was a development of the ideals of the Enlightenment, which suggested that advances in human affairs were achievable through the use of reason, which established a secure foundation for authentic human knowledge.

Okay, but as I am fond of pointing out, in utilizing our capacity to be reasonable, mere mortals have chosen many, many, many different paths to Enlightenment, suggesting many, many, many different foundations for authentic human knowledge:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... ideologies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... philosophy

But we'll still need a context to go beyond "theory" here. In other words, moving beyond intellectual contraptions of this sort:

Modernists believed the possession of that knowledge would enable genuine social progress, and ultimately, the perfectibility of humanity. The clearest manifestations of this ideal were seen in the scientific and mathematical discoveries sprung from that well of tidy orderliness that was the Newtonian physical world. Modernism perhaps reached its high point in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

And what of modernism today? What of your own understanding of it? What of your very own moral and political equivalent of the Newtonian physical world?

Again, given a particular context.

[Iwannaplato]

My sense is that short essay does not make Metamodernism clear. But this quote interested me.

In attempting to grapple with the nature of such knowledge, Storm sets up a tri-partite schema: Knowledge produced on the mathematical model is the result of deductive reasoning to a proved conclusion from axiomatic principles. Knowledge produced on the scientific model is the result of inductive reasoning from a set of examples to a general principle. Both approaches have limitations; so Storm argues for a third basis of knowledge, that of ‘abductive reasoning’, or reasoning to the best explanation (as based on a set of pre-defined criteria). Thus, our interactions in the world do not lead to certainty – there may always be a better explanation waiting to be generated – but if we are willing to relinquish certainty, we can hang on to a form of ‘humble knowledge’ (p.211) which Storm labels ‘zetetic’ knowledge, after the Greek term zētētikos – ‘one who seeks by inquiring’. Storm does not intend the knowledge thus gained to be value-neutral, a position he regards as a ‘failed project’ of postmodernism (p.239). Rather, he intends to establish an ambitious (and Kantian) program, in which knowledge would become the basis of conduct. In such a context the goal of the human sciences is to “become a way of life directed toward human flourishing”

So we have this third mode, which is humble and tentative and openly not value neutral. Abduction. And where knowledge is directed towards human flourishing. All sounds nice and vague (and actually not unlike our dear Veritas' ideas, at least at this level of abstraction.

We can only, here, know hints of what the author is thinking, but....

I've also been mulling this the kind of skepticism hurled at beliefs. Beliefs are seen as assertions, and we should look at them and pick at them, from some kind of neutral standpoint (which the author claims postmodernism mistakenly aims for), and determine if the beliefs are true or not.

I'm starting to think that's a very poor framing of what beliefs are and are for.

If we jump to beliefs as tools or 'things' that make possible experiences, it's a different ball game. What happens when we believe X? What experiences are we now capable of having if we believe X?

This could be anything from belief in God, to belief that women are different from men, to the belief that beliefs hold reality together in some way, to beliefs about how to train a dog for certain behavioral outcomes.

I don't think there's any way to get to a neutral viewpoint where we then say 'prove to me X is true and from my neutral viewpoint i will evaluate your justification'. So I think the view of truth most people have includes this ideal neutral viewpoint falsehood. Of course many people will admit that they are fallible, but still judge others as starting from less neutral, less value-free starting points.

One difference is that one can try on beliefs and instead of looking at the beliefs epistemologically, we look at what happens if we take on this belief.

I don't think one can simply choose to belief X. But I think one can wag the dog to some degree. Try it on. Go and get an astrology reading. Or you've read a book on feminism and try to look at the world through the view that women are X, or are more Y than men, or are not Z as much as we have been told.

Ideas as scaffolding for new experiences.

Let's take dreams. You could assume what some consider the neutral postion that really they are mainly just side effects of the brain processing the days events, and generally meaningless phenomena.

Or you could try on the beliefs of one of the many psychologists (or indigenous groups) and treat them as having not only meaning but that certain ways of processing dream content are useful. You try this out. Wag the dog. You find others or one person to process the dreams with - processing might be as non-melodramatic as talking about the dreams from a Freudian or Jungian perspective. Or as dramatic as actively identifying and expressing, vocally with words and sounds, from things in dreams from a Gestalt Therapy perspective in what feels like the various dream persona and even things way of expressing.

This could include beliefs like when I dreamt about person X they literally were in the dream, a part of me I have trouble identifying with, but in the dream state there was some attempt at integration. Some part of me I suppress arose in me in a way I am less likely to notice in my waking state.

The belief allows then a difference experience of this experience and built on that a chance to commit to activities that would be hard to commit to without the belief.

Leading to new experiences.

[iambiguous]

Metamodernism: The Future of Theory by Jason Storm
John Best tries to move beyond postmodernism.

But modernism failed. The massive irrationality of the twentieth century included the horrors of the World Wars, with the unimaginable cruelty of the Holocaust, alongside all the other racially or ideologically-based attempts at mass extermination, as well as the continued suppression of some cultures through colonialism.

On the other hand, for those like the Nazis and other moral, political and religious dogmatists, success and failure does not revolve around rationality and virtue. They stay committed to their very own One True Path to Enlightenment. Instead, success and failure revolve around victory or defeat.

The Nazis were vanquished all those years ago. But that doesn't stop fascists today -- and now with a growing number of members from year to year in America and Europe -- from championing the 4th Reich. Or another rendition of fascism.

Indeed, we've got a few of them here, I suspect.

All these phenomena, and others, pointed to the imperfectability of humanity. Meanwhile, the discovery of the quantum world, with the consequent demotion of classical physics, seemed to undermine the modernistic hope that science would provide durable answers about reality.

Of course, I focus less on the imperfectability of humankind and more on those among us who insist that, on the contrary, perfection is within reach. Merely become "one of us". On the other hand, some here don't want you at all if you don't have the right skin color or are of the wrong ethnicity or sexual persuasion or have the wrong perspective on gender and God and government.

In pushing back against these forces of irrationalism, from the early twentieth century onwards, philosophy attempted to define its traditional problems (reality, existence, etc.) in linguistic terms, with the hope that increasing the understanding of and precision of language would permit conceptual surety.

Right, and look where that has got us. Rationalism revolving almost entirely around logic-chopping -- "using the technical tools of logic in an unhelpful and pedantic manner by focusing on trivial details instead of directly addressing the main issue in dispute" -- and "analytic" texts that can go on for page after page, chapter after chapter, book after book and scarcely bring the world of actual human interactions into the assessment at all. What Will Durant called "the epistemologists".

And we have lots and lots and lots of them here too

But whatever traction this ‘linguistic turn’ achieved, the cost was high. Instead of finding a way out of the paradoxes and conundrums that arose from modernism, each new philosophical turn seemed diminishing, with the scope of human reasoning and knowledge becoming less and less sure.

Now, I have my own rendition of that. Only I am careful to make what I believe to be an important distinction between the either/or world and the is/ought world.

I merely insist that in discussing this difference, it revolves around a particular set of social, political and/or economic circumstances.

And that includes any postmodernists among us.

[Immanuel Can]

Metamodernism is kind of a mess.

It accepts all the critiques of Modernism that Postmodernism launched. But then, it recognizes that Postmodernism really goes nowhere; cynicism about all metanarratives (presumably with the exception of Postmodernism itself, which IS a metanarrative in its own right) does not provide any basis for life going forward. It offers no instructions to follow, plans to work on, direction to pursue or hope: it's pure negativity, pure cynicism, an uncreative attempt to avoid getting "taken in" by everybody else's enthusiasms. But how do we go forward from pure negativity? It devolves all to easily into quietism and fatalism, or all the way to nihilism.

So Metamodernism tries to rescue this situation by returning to positive values like play, beauty, fun, positivity, and so on...but unfortunately for Metamodernism, does so entirely without warrant. It just sort of says, "Well, buck up and be happy anyway." And while being positive is much more useful than being purely negative, one needs some reason, some justification, some basis for hope...Metamodernism provides none, really.

The key "treatises," if they can be called that, from Metamodernism are three books written in ironic tone, not by a single author or even a real author, but by a couple of self-congratulating "wise lads" who think they're really onto something. But the whole thing comes off like a first-year undergrad arriving home for the long holidays and lecturing his parents with his eyes shut. It takes itself way, way too seriously, and proposes to achieve much more than it ever does. It cavalierly predicts the human future, with a messianic eye to technology and to human potential, while shunting aside the very serious critiques of both that come from Postmodernism and from our real-world experience with Modernism.They're so obnoxiously self-confident without warrant as to be really unbearable. What one is left with is an unhelpful and semi-informed package of enthusiasms...not much more.

Metamodernism is not the future, it seems; it's the past rehashed, the Postmodern self-congratulatory narrative once again, but this time with a cheerful insuicance that ultimately fails to take either the Modern condition or the Postmodern dilemma with any real seriousness at all. If there's a way out of the Postmodern situation, it's highly unlikely to be the way proposed by Metamodernism

[iambiguous]

Metamodernism: The Future of Theory by Jason Storm
John Best tries to move beyond postmodernism.

When the very concept of reality is undermined, the search for knowledge becomes quixotic, and any putative truths emerging from such a search are immediately suspect. The result has been paralysis. And so, we arrive at the postmodern person’s plight: Whom and what to believe? And why?

All I can do again here is to come back to that critical distinction between the concept of reality and the reality that we actually interact in socially, politically and economically day after day after day.

A postmodern mathematician? A postmodern physicist? A postmodern chemist? A postmodern meteorologist? A postmodern logician?

‘Metamodernism’ is an emerging movement in both the arts and the humanities. It is a continuation of some of the ideals of modernity, in particular with regard to notions of progress – if not perfectibility, at least the improvement of the human condition on a global scale, though, it is simultaneously, also a departure from what now looks like modernity’s somewhat naïve view of cultural indebtedness.

There can be no doubt that in regard to science, the progress has been by great leaps and bounds. Try even to imagine those who lived around the time of Aristotle being around today, gaping and gasping at the extraordinary advances in their own particular fields. On the other hand, imagine the ethicists of those times being around today. How could they not but be stunned, stupefied at how little progress was made in regard to conflicting moral and political value judgments. The horrors embedded throughout the 20th century alone would leave them completely deflated.

There is a frankly visionary undercurrent at work in metamodernism. Its longing gaze at a better future explicitly rejects postmodernism’s ironic playful passivity. In a kind of intellectual ju-jitsu, as Storm notes, “Postmodern doubt can be made to doubt itself”.

Or, perhaps, one or another Alan Sokal attempting to expose just how ludicrous the abstruse and inscrutable postmodern texts can often be.

Or try this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism_Generator

Or, for the "serious philosophers" here, this: https://andrewmbailey.com/Humor/Chart.pdf

[iambiguous]

Metamodernism: The Future of Theory by Jason Storm
John Best tries to move beyond postmodernism.

Metamodernism’s Construction

Metarealism is concerned with establishing the conditions and limitations of reality. In academia, when previously agreed-upon categories begin to crack under the pressure of cross-disciplinary interrogation, professors begin grasping for concepts of the ‘real’ like passengers grabbing life-vests on a sinking ship.

You know what's coming:

1] The Gap
2] Rummy's Rule

The Gap because there is just no getting around it: that grand canyon between what even the most intelligent among us think reality is and all that would need to be known about the existence of existence itself in order to actually know what it is.

Rummy in regard to to this part: "But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know" about reality itself."

The ship isn't sinking so much as far vaster than any of us can even begin to grapple with.

Postmodernism appears to have inherited a concept of ‘the real’ from modernism; that the real is that which is mind-independent. The typical postmodern response is to consider what was formerly ‘real’ as simply a ‘social construction’, that is, a product of the human mind, subject to the buffeting gales of culture and history. But Storm thinks this opposition between ‘the real’ and ‘products of the mind’ is misleading. By contrast, the metamodern response is to establish various ‘modes’ of the real, perhaps including contents of minds. Then the real becomes a possibility for those scholars who want to establish a contrast case. That is, the ‘real’ can be established as a contrasting case to that which is not real.

Let's bring this intellectual contraption down to Earth...

Trump and all those others indicted down in Georgia. Now, from a modern, postmodern or metamodern frame of mind, are there objective facts that everyone can agree on? Does the state of Georgis exist? Was there a presidential election in November of 2020? Does Donald Trump actually exist? Do all of the other men and women discussed in the news media in regard to the indictments exist? Are they real or are they just a product of particular minds?

Now moving on to the indictments...

Is there a 98-page indictment detailing all of the alleged criminal behaviors committed by Trump and others? Are there in fact newspaper articles discussing the case? Or is all of this just a product of minds as well?

Now on to the part that revolves more around our reactions to all of this. Reactions based largely on our uniquely personal political prejudices. Were the indictments justified? Let's run that by the talking heads at MSNBC and Fox. See if we can pin down the objective truth here too.

Let's face it, for many of the MAGA fanatics even if they believed Trump was guilty of everything that he is charge with, his behaviors would still be defended. Why? Because nothing that he does can be deemed wrong or immoral. Why Because nothing is more important in America right now than for the MAGA forces to drive the ungodly liberal Communists out and to take over the governemnt...federal, state and local.

[iambiguous]

Metamodernism: The Future of Theory by Jason Storm
John Best tries to move beyond postmodernism.

In the book’s second part Storm explains what he calls ‘Process Social Ontology’. Social ontology is concerned with the reality of social groups, especially in their apparent ability to act with agency in the creation of concepts which are sometimes external to them, such as the concept ‘money’, and sometimes internally self-referential, such as ‘gender’.

Social ontology?

Or, instead, are social interactions about as far removed from ontology as they are from teleology? In other words, money and gender given what particular historical and cultural context? Is there a way [philosophically or otherwise...modern, postmodern, metamodern or otherwise] to encompass how all rational men and women are obligated to think about them, feel about them? Embrace them in their social interactions with others?

And then, given a particular set of circumstances in which modern, postmodern and metamodern proponents might come into conflict, what on Earth does this...

One of social ontology’s goals is determining which, if any, of these concepts are really ‘natural kinds’ – types of things obviously definable in terms of static and unchangeable properties. However, such a search may lead to thinking of natural kinds as possessing an essence. Thinking in terms of essences enables one to generalize from one member of a natural kind to all of its members. This is in fact one of the tenets of substance ontology.

...mean? Whose goals in regard to what situation? And what is able to be described as essentially true about it? As opposed to conflicting personal opinions.

On the other hand this...

Storm accepts the reality of social groups and their group agency, but rejects essentialism. Instead he turns his attention to process ontology – the idea that all that exists is dynamic and continuously changing.

...seems entirely reasonable to me. Only in order to make it clearer we would need to take it out into the world of actual human interactions. Why in regard to any particular moral conflict are or are not essential, objective, universal value judgments beyond the reach of modernists, postmodernists and metamodernists.

And, given a No God world, it is my own rooted existentially in dasein personal opinion that they are.

[iambiguous]

Metamodernism: The Future of Theory by Jason Storm
John Best tries to move beyond postmodernism.

Reconstructing Knowledge

What is the nature of the knowledge that a scientist might create?

Okay, but when scientists grapple with reconfiguring theory into practice, they are generally grappling with it within the parameters of the either/or world. So, through experimentation [re the scientific method], verification and falsification are often considerably more applicable when it comes to figuring out what is in fact true. In fact, true for all of us. That's why I suspect there are not a whole lot of postmodernists and metamodernists in the scientific community. Other than when science goes all the way out to the very end of the metaphysical branch in grappling with the Big Questions.

Knowledge, or specifically our confidence in our ability to create and use it, was perhaps the chief casualty when the linguistic turn arose in Anglophone philosophy. In Part III, ‘Hylosemiotics’ (really one chapter, but the longest in the book), Storm makes contact with the implications of the linguistic turn. Surprisingly, he does not repudiate it. Instead, he acknowledges the skepticism the linguistic turn raised about the gap between the world either as it is or as it might be, and human representation of the world.

Anglophone philosophy? Google it and you get this:

analytic philosophy n.
1. Any of various philosophical methodologies holding that clear and precise definition and argumentation are vital to productive philosophical inquiry.
2. A philosophical school of the 20th century predominant in the United States and Great Britain whose central concerns are the nature of logic, concepts, and language. Leading practitioners have included Bertrand Russell, George Edward Moore, Rudolf Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

So, in regard to postmodern and metamodern philosophy, how much of this is really applicable? From my frame of mind, the postmodern thinkers seem obsessed with the limitations of language. With deconstructing it. But for me, such limitations and deconstructions are applicable only in regard to moral and political value judgments. How is either school of thought pertinent to the laws of nature, to mathematics, to the physical world around us, to the rules of logic?

[Gary Childress]

Metamodernism: The Future of Theory by Jason Storm
John Best tries to move beyond postmodernism.

But modernism failed. The massive irrationality of the twentieth century included the horrors of the World Wars, with the unimaginable cruelty of the Holocaust, alongside all the other racially or ideologically-based attempts at mass extermination, as well as the continued suppression of some cultures through colonialism.

On the other hand, for those like the Nazis and other moral, political and religious dogmatists, success and failure does not revolve around rationality and virtue. They stay committed to their very own One True Path to Enlightenment. Instead, success and failure revolve around victory or defeat.

Not sure what "modernism" entails. Did the ideals of the Enlightenment "fail" or were they suppressed by some who didn't uphold the fundamental undercurrents that propelled them (or however one ought to describe first principles or foundations)?

[iambiguous]

Modernism vs. Postmodernism
at The Living Philosophy website

Well into the 21st century, the trenches of the so-called culture war are drawn by the tension of Modernism vs Postmodernism. These two worldviews — as radically different as the Medieval and the Modern — still have much of an overlap.

Over and again, however, from my own frame of mind, we have to recognize first and foremost that any "radical differences" that there are here, they revolve almost entirely around human interactions in the is/ought world. Where is the equivalent in the either/or world? Postmodern physics or chemistry or mathematics or logic?

Up next: The postmodern weather report..."partly not partly sunny today, and then partly not partly cloudy tonight." Or the postmodern analysis of the "big game" that day?

“Postmodernity definitely presents itself as Antimodernity. This statement describes an emotional current of our times which has penetrated all spheres of intellectual life. It has placed on the agenda theories of post-enlightenment, postmodernity, even of posthistory." Jurgen Habermas, Modernity vs. Postmodernity (1981).

Ever and always, this revolves not so much around what different people believe when distinguishing modern from postmodern thinking, but what, given a particular set of circumstances, they can demonstrate all rational men and women are obligated to believe as well.

And how is this not almost always in regard to our moral and political and spiritual value judgments? The part where, in regard to everything from sexuality and education policy to matters of life and death itself, we deconstruct their dogmas and they deconstruct ours.

And no doubt about it...

Either in terms of ends or means, moral nihilism can beget amoral sociopaths. Or the amoral "show me the money" billionaires who run the world.