I recognise the danger in difinitionally ring-fencing a term like 'metamodernism' but I gotta get started somehow. So, in order to do that, ring-fencing is exactly what I'm gonna do. Ya see, getting to the bottom of an idea like metamodernism requires a lot of background and that's no easy thing. It's difficult ground and it takes a long time, a lot more time than what we have here in this short post. So, it's a situation of a classic virtuous circle. We have a complex idea and not much time. Yet we have to enter the perimeter of the idea (the circle) somewhere. But whithout knowing where to start, let alone where to best start, an arbitrary place is as good as any.

Ring-fencing? Virtuous circle? "What are these?", you might ask. Ring-fencing is really nothing more than saying what the idea os not. It's a process of elliminating or paring away of unrelated and unnecessary notions that might sometimes be associated with the term in question. The vertuous circle is just a way of saying that the key concepts within the term are interelated in such a way that each concept is required for the structure to remain standing. It's not a house of cards. It's like an engine where if one part malfunctions the whole engine is rendered inoperable.

The place I will start, therefore, is an article by Seth Abramson for the Huffington Post originally dated 2015 and revised in 2017. The article is entitled "Ten Basic Principles of Metamodernism".

In the following posts I will distill Abramson's points the best I can without much in the way of commentary. The points will serve as a framework for my future efforts in this series, trying to integrate my worldview, my conceptual apparatus, with the philosophical conclusions of the late twentieth century. These conclusions, briefly, are the following: that the concept of 'knowledge', with its requirement of certainly, has failed to live up to its potential; that the certainty requirement has all but stunted knowledge to be only that which can be proven within a logical structure; and that anything that cannot be proven by deduction from postulates is not knowledge. Therefore, we cannot 'know' our emotions, or our values, or our perspectives, or anything that is subjective in origin. The latter half of the last century brought convincing arguments that this structure was wrong. But in its place came an ironic, nihilistic veiw that claimed that there was no non-relative knowledge and that there was no such thing as meaning. This was the post-modern reaction. The straight-jacket of modernist rigour, together with a strong sense of post-modernism's fundamental degradation of purposeful human meaning, leads one to believe that there is no longer anywhere to turn. Perhaps these points also resonate with you.

This series of posts will incorporate a hermeneutical methodology and, by inference, an understanding of our already being in the midst of our own concern. That is to say, this series will progress over several pages linking a rational approach to a more mystical, even Zennish, perspective in order to present a justified rebuttal to religious sectarianism.

In the nihilistic wake of the modernist pursuit of epistemological truth, ultimate meaning has been 'proven' not to exist. Yet, the world yearns for it. The claim of metamodernity is that true knowledge cannot be definitionally contained. Truth can, however, be triangulated.