From the postmodern to the metamodern: The Hegelian dialectical process and its contemporization

Abstract

This article posits that postmodernism and its focus on disenchantment, subjective experience(s), and the argument for the incoherency between modernist conceptions of truth, reason, universality, progress, logic, and knowledge are exhausted and have been transcended by a flexible successor. Named “metamodernism,” this new modality addresses the polemics left in the wake of postmodernism like alienation, hyperindividualism, and the breakdown of collectivity and unity. As such, metamodernism represents a more awakened sense of the modernist search for meaning and progress, albeit supplemented with self-conscious awareness of the goal’s seemingly unattainability. However, this renewed interest in reestablishing truth, certainty, assurances of identity, self-realization progress, and reinstatement of usable modes of I/We integrality is hardly new at all. Instead, this burgeoning “metamodern” development represents the rekindling of the “negative dialectic” as previously outlined by G. F. Hegel, but now with a heightened focus on its “positive” development, that is speculative philosophy and the pursuit of sublated individuality-in-unity. In this article, I will explore this argument in four sections. I will outline Hegel’s process of alienation to reunification as elaborated in “The Phenomenology of Spirit,” the “Science of Logic,” and the “Encyclopedia of Logic.” Next, I will explore how postmodernism buckled under its contradictions, introduce the philosophy of “metamodernism,” and argue for a Hegelian reading by focusing on three elements: Ironic Sincerity, Becoming, and Self-Renewal. While only looking at three aspects of a much broader fabric, metamodernism as a cultural shift is not estranged from postmodernism but is instead given life through it.

Keywords

• metamodernism
• postmodernism
• hegel
• dialectic
• negative dialectic
• negation of the negation
• metamodern