Metamodern Secularism

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Discussion

Daniel Gorz:

"The Integral movement viewed “the next stage” as more spiritual than modernity, as trying to successfully marry science and spirituality, modernity and tradition. The take in this text, “higher secularism rising”, turns that notion on its head and tries to point out that every shift in code system (each “symbol stage”, every major update of the philosophical engine, or every underlying theory of science) must per definition be a secularization, because it no longer believes in what the former one believed. Rather, it now explains away the very basis of the former mystery. What appeared to be an essence or a thing dissolved into smaller and refined elements.

This resembles Wittgenstein’s idea of “the problem of philosophy”: what appears at one point as a meaningful conundrum, at the next stage is revealed as just a product of the particular language game one was playing.

In this sense, Postfaustian religion is secular as compared to Faustian religion, Modernity secular towards Postfaustian God, Postmodernity secular towards Modern Universality, and Metamodernism secular towards Postmodern Skepticism. So what you get in the metamodern reaction to postmodern skepticism is “skepticism turned on itself” (Jason Stone’s formulation). Skepticism is no longer the God; but only because it was not skeptical enough. It is hence a further secularization; it is only the continuation of a longer stretch. Usually, when people use the word “secularism”, they have in mind only the shift between Postfaustianism and Modernity. We’re using the term in a broader sense, in order to get at its deeper mechanism or meaning, how it is part of a larger view.

As such, metamodern secularism does not eschew religion or spirituality, because it is skeptical of the skepticism that did so. But neither does it return to specifically Postfaustian (or Faustian or Animist) belief structures.

In brief, you might say that the “higher secularism rising” is the dispelling of post-modern anti-essentialism, which hence ironically opens up the door for reinventions of the religious."

(Metamodern Forum, October 2021)