Lexicon Existence & Knowledge

Metamodernism

Definition

Metamodernism is a name for a culture after modernism and postmodernism. In 2010 Vermeulen and van den Akker described a discourse between modern enthusiasm and postmodern irony; in 2024 Maik Hosang and Gerald Hüther edited the German volume Die Metamoderne.

By Gwendolin Kirchhoff · Philosopher 11 min read

Metamodernism is a name for a culture after modernism and postmodernism. In 2010 T. Vermeulen and R. van den Akker called a discourse oscillating between modern enthusiasm and postmodern irony “metamodernism” (Vermeulen & van den Akker, 2010, abstract). In the German-speaking world, Maik Hosang, a professor at the Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences, and Gerald Hüther edited the 2024 volume Die Metamoderne. Neue Wege zur Entpolarisierung und Befriedung der Gesellschaft (“Metamodernity: new paths to depolarising and pacifying society”) (Hosang & Hüther, 2024). Gwendolin Kirchhoff has held three conversations with Maik Hosang about metamodernity on her channel. The programme is Hosang’s and his co-authors’; in these conversations Gwendolin Kirchhoff is the one asking the questions. This entry keeps the two apart: what Hosang holds, and what she puts to him.

#What do Vermeulen and van den Akker mean by metamodernism?

For Vermeulen and van den Akker, metamodernism is the name for a discourse whose contours they trace in recent developments in architecture, art and film. The abstract of their essay “Notes on metamodernism” opens with the sentence that the postmodern years of plenty, pastiche and parataxis are over. They name the discourse that follows like this: “We will call this discourse, oscillating between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, metamodernism.” (Vermeulen & van den Akker, 2010, abstract). The metamodern, they argue, is most clearly, though not exclusively, expressed in a neoromantic turn, for instance in the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron and the films of Michel Gondry (cf. ibid.). The announcement of Maik Hosang and Gerald Hüther’s volume by the Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences in May 2024 asks whether the Western world is currently stumbling from one crisis to the next, and speaks of a new epoch: whoever grasps the understanding of seemingly irreconcilable positions on a meta-level as a solution is “very close to a new epoch: metamodernity” (Hochschule Zittau/Görlitz, 2024, translated from the German).

#How does Maik Hosang describe metamodernity?

In his first conversation with Gwendolin Kirchhoff (2025), Maik Hosang describes metamodernity as “a form of modernity”: it takes up what is positive in modernity, “free science, free economy, free culture,” but dissolves modernity’s limits, the reduction to the material, to the ego and to physical, biological needs (Kirchhoff, G. / Hosang, M., 2025, 28:06–28:26). He says he discovered the term three or four years earlier in the English-speaking world; it connects, he says, with sociology, which largely divides history into premodern, modern and postmodern (cf. ibid., 27:23–28:06). The prefix meta, according to Hosang, comes from Plato and stands for the whole, for the cosmic (cf. ibid., 28:20–28:31). He made the book with friends such as Gerald Hüther, he says, in order to make metamodernity conceptually clear (cf. ibid., 29:12–29:22).

Hosang names as the core quality of metamodernity the connecting of our physical and vital dimensions with our cosmic dimension; as its second achievement he names the ability to see the other not as a threat but as a richness (cf. ibid., 29:53–30:42 and 31:36–31:53). When we see that “at bottom we are all part of the world soul,” he says, we see the differences “not as a fight” but “as a richness” (ibid., 31:11–31:24). What the world soul means in the philosophical tradition is the subject of its own entry. The second conversation (2025) is devoted to Hosang’s concept of meta-consciousness (Meta-Bewusstsein), a consciousness that goes beyond the single ego-consciousness; Hosang stresses that the term goes beyond the individual: “It does not abolish it” (Kirchhoff, G. / Hosang, M., 2025, “Meta-Bewusstsein”, 01:29–01:38; cf. 00:55–01:04).

#Is Hosang’s approach escapism?

Whether Hosang’s approach is escapism is a question Gwendolin Kirchhoff puts to Maik Hosang herself, before the conversation turns to metamodernity. To Hosang’s picture of the free human being who, with Schiller, is only fully human when he plays, Gwendolin Kirchhoff responds by asking how this kind of approach differs “from, let’s say, escapism” (Kirchhoff, G. / Hosang, M., 2025, 20:53–20:59; cf. 18:32–20:51). One could also put it to him, she says, that he does not want his duties and does not want to take on responsibility, and so imagines a world in which there is only play, and that this is surely completely unrealistic (cf. ibid., 20:59–21:15). Hosang answers with the difference between East and West: Western culture, he says, recognises that we are cosmic beings on the one hand, but also physical, vital beings on the other (cf. ibid., 21:18–23:03).

Later, again as a possible objection, she puts Heraclitus to him: strife is the father of all things, and the competition we see is also built into the world, she says (cf. ibid., 31:56–32:14). In Diels’s German translation the fragment reads: “War is the father of all things, the king of all things” (Heraclitus, fragment B 53, translated from the German). Hosang then calls strife “an important cultural technique” for seeing the differences in the first place and exchanging views about them; that, he says, is something other than fighting one another (ibid., 33:26–33:39).

#Does a new view of the other resolve a concrete conflict?

A new view on its own does not resolve the concrete conflict, Gwendolin Kirchhoff objects, and Maik Hosang agrees with her. She sums up what Hosang has said: metamodernity would then be, first of all, “a kind of mental superstructure or spiritual superstructure” on the basis of which one could see the other differently, and Hosang confirms: “Exactly.” (Kirchhoff, G. / Hosang, M., 2025, 34:38–34:49). Then she follows up: this mental superstructure “doesn’t solve my concrete problem” with the other person, for instance when she has an argument, in a shared flat (ibid., 34:53–35:06). Hosang answers: “Right,” that is why, he says, a culture is still needed “to put purely theoretical insight into practice” (ibid., 35:07–35:11). How Gwendolin Kirchhoff describes talking with people who think differently is set out in the entry Encounter.

Later she sums up Hosang’s answer about modernism and postmodernism, according to which postmodernism practises critique rather academically (cf. ibid., 40:54–41:05), and takes it further: this critique, she says, never really comes into contact with the general public, because people at some point lose interest when everything is criticised and dismantled. To this she adds: “They’re simply right to drop out” (ibid., 44:03–44:05; cf. 43:24–44:03). Holding on to possessions in modernity and holding on to critique in postmodernity she calls two dogged positions, and she asks what humour does to power (cf. ibid., 44:06–44:35).

#What role does humour play in metamodernism?

Maik Hosang calls the life-feeling of metamodernity Humoronie, a blend of humour and irony (cf. Kirchhoff, G. / Hosang, M., 2025, 36:30–36:44). So that access to the whole does not turn into a power structure again, he says, even the claim to be more conscious, more loving or better may be picked apart; to take the stress out of this takes “a certain positively ironic manner”: “We mustn’t take ourselves too seriously.” (ibid., 39:12–39:19; cf. 36:43–39:12). Before that, without access to a level the book calls transcendence, one cannot be humorous, he says, but is cramped (cf. ibid., 44:36–45:46). Gwendolin Kirchhoff puts this answer into an image of her own: the basis of humour and irony is “the transcendent anchoring,” that is, “a verticality of one’s own”; the human being is not only placed horizontally, where power and possessions are negotiated, but also vertically, she says (ibid., 45:48–46:05).

She adds two observations of her own. She speaks of a “tyranny of the offended” that wants to lay down what one may not joke about; precisely where there is a deep cramp, she says, humour is especially drawn (ibid., 47:36–47:52). And she links humour to spellbreaking, the dissolving of a spell: the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes, a tale Hosang had mentioned shortly before, “destroys the illusion” (ibid., 49:39–49:50; cf. 46:37–47:34). Simply saying certain truths out loud destroys the illusion, she says, and with it “the basis of power’s legitimacy,” for power can only hold as long as it is perceived as more or less legitimate; when the divine right of kings no longer held, the social contract came in, the idea of Hobbes (ibid., 49:51–50:06; cf. 50:06–50:56). How words create belief is described in the entry Language as Incantation. She also adds that memes, too, can be subject to particular power-based interests that use mockery to call the opponent into question (cf. ibid., 49:19–49:30).

#Can a connecting spirit be trusted?

Whether a connecting spirit can be trusted is a question Gwendolin Kirchhoff herself raises in the third conversation (2026), in what she calls “a potpourri of questions” (Kirchhoff, G. / Hosang, M., 2026, 12:20–12:22). At the start of this conversation, which discusses Hosang’s article for the NZZ, she names as the topic of her earlier interviews with him metamodernity as a new or underlying cultural epoch (cf. Kirchhoff, G. / Hosang, M., 2026, 00:00–00:15). For her, the question of what a spirit could achieve that might connect people beyond limits such as power and the guarding of one’s own advantage includes the fear programmes that start running when we find ourselves confronted with such a spirit (cf. ibid., 10:35–11:06). She voices the questions that then arise: “Can I trust it?” A trick by the elites could well be behind it, she says, and is a realistic danger. “Will it become a form of power again?” (ibid., 11:08–11:19). On the idea of seeing the common origin of all human beings realised politically, she asks whether it is a utopia “that is like a kind of inner anchor of the heart,” and whether great, even negative possibilities do not arise when one tries to immanentise the eschaton, that is, to realise the end time (ibid., 11:37–11:44; cf. 11:20–12:34).

When Hosang calls the qualitative leap of freedom and consciousness probably the real task, she says that at this point it is less about freedom and consciousness than about the self-image: whether I am a threatened creature, threatened by scarcity, by violence and by power struggles, or a cosmic anthropos (cf. ibid., 23:54–24:23). In honesty one has to say, she adds, that there are so many situations in which people on this planet actually find themselves that the line but you are a free, great being, while a beautiful idea, does not, for the time being, match their lived reality (cf. ibid., 24:23–24:41).

If you are looking for the prefix meta in the sense of perceiving one’s own perceiving, see the entry Second-Order Perception.

#Sources

Frequently Asked Questions

What is metamodernism?
Metamodernism is a name for a culture after modernism and postmodernism. In 2010 T. Vermeulen and R. van den Akker called a discourse oscillating between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony metamodernism. In the German-speaking world, Maik Hosang and Gerald Hüther edited the 2024 volume Die Metamoderne. Neue Wege zur Entpolarisierung und Befriedung der Gesellschaft (Metamodernity: new paths to depolarising and pacifying society).
What does Maik Hosang mean by metamodernism?
In his conversation with Gwendolin Kirchhoff (2025), Maik Hosang describes metamodernism as a form of modernity: it takes up what is positive in modernity, free science, free economy, free culture, but dissolves modernity's reduction to the material and to the ego. Whoever sees that at bottom we are all part of the world soul, he says, sees the differences between people not as a fight but as a richness.
What are Gwendolin Kirchhoff's objections to metamodernism?
Gwendolin Kirchhoff asks Maik Hosang how his approach of free play, which he describes with Fichte and Schiller, differs from escapism, and later puts to him, as a possible objection, Heraclitus' saying that strife is the father of all things. A mental superstructure that lets you see the other differently does not solve her concrete problem with the other person, say an argument in a shared flat, she says. In 2026 she names the questions such a connecting spirit raises, among them whether one can trust it and whether it will become a form of power again; she calls a trick by the elites a realistic danger.
What role does humour play in metamodernism?
Maik Hosang calls the life-feeling of metamodernism Humoronie, a blend of humour and irony: a positively ironic, humorous attitude in which even the claim to be more conscious, more loving or better may be picked apart, so that it does not turn into a power structure. Gwendolin Kirchhoff brings in the image of spellbreaking: the child in The Emperor's New Clothes destroys the illusion, and with it the basis on which power claims its legitimacy.
Is metamodernism an epoch?
The announcement of Hosang and Hüther's volume by the Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences (2024) speaks of a new epoch, metamodernity. Maik Hosang ties the term to sociology's division of history into premodern, modern and postmodern. In 2026 Gwendolin Kirchhoff names the topic of her interviews with Hosang: metamodernity as a new or underlying cultural epoch.
What does metamodernism have to do with meta-consciousness?
Meta-consciousness (Meta-Bewusstsein) is Maik Hosang's term for a consciousness that goes beyond the single ego-consciousness; the second conversation on metamodernism on Gwendolin Kirchhoff's channel (2025) is devoted to it. There Hosang stresses that the term goes beyond the individual but does not abolish it.
Gwendolin Kirchhoff
Gwendolin Kirchhoff “Consciousness is not something that is produced. It is that in which everything appears.”

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