Hanzi Freinacht and the Apocalypse of Modern Enlightenment

Intellectuals like to have a map of where they are in history, as part of their bid to fulfill the old imperative of knowing themselves. How can we know ourselves if we don’t know where we are in the big picture?

Thus, intellectuals often divide history into stages and talk about abstractions such as “medievalism” and “modernity.” Supposedly, modernity ended in the late twentieth century, so that now we’re living in the wreckage of the modern period’s deflated metanarratives.

Ours is the era of “postmodern” doubt, cynicism, apathy, relativism, anxiety, and alienation. If modernists killed God with Reason, and Reason proved an inadequate idol, we’re left naked in the wasteland, like King Lear who cried out in a storm,

Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!
You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks…
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world.
Crack nature’s molds, all germs spill at once
That makes ingrateful man…
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness…
Then let fall
Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man.

But postmodernists grew weary of such existential self-flagellation. After all, it’s hard to keep consuming merchandise, as part of the developed world’s decadent class, when you’re in a morbid mood. It’s hard to suspend your disbelief and submit to the advertiser’s flattery when postmodern irony leads you to acknowledge your smallness and the effrontery of all ideological boasts.

Consequently, some postmodernists prefer to think of themselves as “metamodern,” as having transcended this supposed dichotomy between modern naïve optimism and postmodern pessimism.

In an introductory article on his version of metamodernism, for instance, Hanzi Freinacht — a pseudonym used by a pair of theorists, to which I’ll adhere for convenience— agrees with an earlier pair of metamodernists who said in a 2010 essay “Notes on Metamodernism” that the trick is to oscillate between the apparent poles.

Specifically, that earlier pair said, “metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.”

Freinacht says the oscillation is possible because of hindsight. Modern optimism is reborn since cynics can retrieve

the modern qualities lacking in postmodernity: enthusiasm, hope, unity, totality, purity. While we all know that these things taken by themselves create all the evil hotchpotches of modern times — Stalinism, fascism, the New Age, market-oriented neoliberalism, state socialism — now has come the time when we are sufficiently saturated with postmodern irony and critique to let them in again, through the back door.

He adds, “Now we can hurry up to hope and progress, just to hurry back to criticism and deconstruction of the same. Oscillating. We can create little utopias, small syntheses and try to build a more globally sensitive and ecologically concerned culture. We can allow ourselves that spark, because we today have more means to criticize it, to know it’s never all that, never a final answer.”

Freinacht thinks the metamodern stance is “cool,” and that “This coolness stems from the ability to be both ironic and sincere at the same time.” Think, he says, of “Metamodern music, softly alluding to the vastness and mystery of reality, the transhuman and superhuman potentials of man — but putting it in a silly pop song and getting drunk to it.”

Freinacht adds to this gloss on oscillation a Hegelian dialectical view of history. Like the modernists, he thinks history is divided into progressive stages, with metamodernism being superior to postmodernism. In his words,

While you can see metamodernism as a time period, a series of trends that simply came after postmodernism, I would still suggest a little stage theory can come in handy. I would suggest that metamodernism can indeed be viewed as a higher stage than postmodernism. But don’t worry, I’ll oscillate right back.

As a postmodernist who doesn’t succumb to naïve optimism about purported rational absolutes, Freinacht thinks he’s nevertheless entitled to some such progressive model because his model “includes postmodernism, but transcends it, allowing me more freedom of thought and action.”

The postmodernist just uses modern tools (such as the concept of secular progress) with the benefit of historical hindsight, knowing they’re mere tools that have some practical advantages but that they don’t support absolute answers. This pragmatic, ironic standpoint is supposed to be the oscillation, the metamodern mediation between modern and postmodern convictions.

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Now, if metamodernism is just the attempt to reconcile the early and late-modern periods of Western thought, I’m a metamodernist too. But alas, early modernists would also have been “metamodern” since they were already “postmodern.”

Remember that early modern thinkers, from René Descartes to Immanuel Kant, were seeking new foundations for European cultures after the collapse of Christendom. No one had a better sense of social fragility than those thinkers who contrasted the modern with the medieval.

As deists, they understood that our species is on its own to flourish or perish, and they appreciated that the modern world of science, capitalism, democracy, and personal liberty could fail just as decisively as the medieval one had failed in the shadow cast by the Black Death in the fourteenth century. By thinking of the bubonic plague in mainly theological rather than empirical terms, Western European elites in the Church had proved hopelessly inept, and 30% to 50% of Europeans died as a result.

True, these thinkers were relatively optimistic about reason, and they pushed philosophical arguments as far as they could, but that’s because they wanted to explore the territory of ideas, like scientists. They, too, presented their models, ontologies, anthropologies, and epistemologies. But some degree of relativism was always built into those theories precisely because they were offered as modern rather than medieval, or as skeptical and liberal rather than dogmatic and Scholastic.

Indeed, the so-called oscillation between humanistic self-assertion and sobering humility was found in ancient Greek thought, such as in the pairing of Plato’s lofty metaphysics with his elitist assumption that the unphilosophical masses should be fed “noble lies,” as in edifying myths. Greek and Shakespearean tragedies deem our progressive conceits to be hubristic, so they juxtapose our paltry autonomy with a cosmic perspective, according to which we’re fated to be caught up in inhuman processes.

Moreover, Western modernism includes Romanticism and Existentialism, such as Hegel’s ironic historicizing of philosophical standpoints — and that’s all the basis for cynicism a postmodernist could want. Just as the positivists themselves deflated their empiricist pretentions, modernists in general followed their rational train of thought to critiques of rationalism, liberalism, and industrial progress. In 1781, for instance, Immanuel Kant published Critique of Pure Reason.

So paradoxically, the modern Enlightenment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy was already fully “postmodern,” meaning that that period was self-critical.

Modern art, too, was implicitly “postmodern” in the same respect since, in freely exploring various artistic media and subject matters, rather than adhering to religious dogmas and conservative traditions, these artists presented their art as mere human products, not as apologies for divine revelations. These were individualist paintings, poems, or musical compositions, in which case such artists implicitly saw themselves, too, as standing alone like Lear, howling into the void.

How is this possible? Is the dichotomy between the modern and postmodern bogus, leaving no room for the metamodern? Not exactly.

We should think of these things not so much as distinct historical periods but as secular moods or stances. Some thinkers are bolder or more naïve than others, just as some are uplifting while others are melancholy. A thinker or artist can be both at different times.

Granted, we can generalize about periods, contrasting early modern self-confidence with late-modern anxiety. Technological changes certainly make for different environments to which we must adapt. Television and the internet foster a degree of mass cynicism that would have been hard to sustain in the medieval period, before the invention even of the printing press.

Yet contrary to a Hegelian metamodernist like Freinacht, the problem isn’t really dialectical in a historical sense, and as I’ve argued elsewhere, the oscillation in question amounts to little more than a neoliberal apology for the consumer’s state of bewilderment, due to the overabundance of goods to consume. Oscillation between options must be mindless, whereas we’re supposed to be thinking with the Age of Enlightenment under our belt.

No, the problem of reconciling the modern with the postmodern is about sustaining a secular humanist outlook or society despite the debilitating effects of scientific and philosophical knowledge.

Again, the early-modern thinkers and artists already had that knowledge, compared to medieval priests and peasants. The modernists emphasized their rational and creative constructs, but the explicit self-doubt emerged at least with Romanticism and Existentialism, two centuries before The Simpsons and South Park in the late twentieth century.

But think of the literal meaning of “postmodern”: that which comes after modernity. In so far as the modern period is about falling back on our secular, human abilities to prosper despite our recognition that the theistic cultures that sustained the ancient world were naïve, what would have to come after modernity is nothing short of apocalyptic self-destruction, followed by a postapocalyptic dark age of lamentations.

Those are the stakes of modernity. We’ll find a way to carry on, despite the sobering effects of all knowledge, including the knowledge possessed by ancient elites in Greece, India, and China, and even by the shamanic outsiders in hunter-gatherer societies. Either that or we won’t, and we’ll likely destroy ourselves because of the disparity between our technological empowerment and our lack of personal or cultural resolve.

What comes after modernity is hardly just a period of cynical self-doubts. On the contrary, modernity includes those doubts, and modernity may usher in the truly post-modern by destroying itself with them. For instance, our modern self-doubts, anxieties, and alienation could lead to wild populist backlashes and tribal polarization that provoke a third world war, and what would follow such a war would be the true postmodern condition, the fallout from the failure of secular humanism.

The stakes are straightforward, contrary to the pretentious overcomplications of leading so-called postmodern thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard.

We live either with delusions or knowledge. The ancient world was relatively naïve in taking its religious brands at face value. The ancients trusted in their gods and thus the royal elites who represented them. The medieval period in Europe was an interim in which Christians wrestled with the contradiction between Jesus’s counterculture and the political imperatives of Christendom. Those self-doubts fueled the search for an alternative to Christian dogmatism; hence, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and so on.

This post-medieval period prided itself on its relatively objective (scientific) search for knowledge, as opposed to its deference to the dictates of authority figures. Reason was opposed to faith, and unleashed reason made many troubling discoveries, such as the inhuman extent of nature, plus the godlessness of that whole domain. World-historic modernity, then, rather than so-called postmodernity, is about living with that real knowledge that replaces the Orwellian submission to delusions.

The question for modernists has always been whether unvarnished knowledge of our status as clever mammals in nature can sustain a noble way of life. In other words, can we live as bona fide people that have transcended an animal’s state of relative ignorance, or is personhood a curse, a terrestrial trick played on our species, dooming us to self-extinction?

So-called “postmodernists” just emphasize modernity’s downside, the self-doubts that follow from real knowledge, rather than the progress that knowledge generates.

Wherefore, then, “metamodernism”? Again, in so far as metamodernists ponder this instability of modernism, which is to say the instability of personhood and the secular humanist outlook that science and philosophy virtually entail, metamodern reflection would be a worthy endeavour. My philosophy would be metamodern in that broad sense since I mean to combine naturalism, humanism, pantheism, cosmicism, pragmatism, and transhumanism to outline a worthy worldview, one that withstands hyper-modern self-doubt.

But if the metamodern is bound by this silly placeholder concept of dazed oscillation, I’m no metamodernist because I philosophize rather than propagandize.