Ironestly, What Is It All About?

I'm still thinking about reality.

No you're not.

Don't be such a coontrarian. We went through this yesterday: if it isn't reality we're thinking about, then we're not even thinking. We consider the matter settled: reality is about thinking, and vice versa. This is an intentional cosmos (in the philosophical sense of the term), meaning that, like it or not, aboutness is woven into the fabric of being. It is what the Cosmic Area Rug is made of.

Just try to think or say anything without it being about something. Or even nothing if you like. In reality, the aboutness of things must be prior to saying anything about them. It reminds me of an aphorism:

Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others. 

Now, we know that thinking is about reality. But in order to think about reality, reality must be about thinking: in other words, there must be a two-way link between these poles.

I'm thinking about unicorns. Doesn't mean they exist.

True, but it still means aboutness exists. Likewise fear of ghosts or of global warming. Aboutness is the bridge or link between two terms, or poles, rather. Take DNA: what is it about? It is about life. But we can also reverse the terms and say: life is about DNA. 

What is the Creator about? Among other things, creation. Therefore, the creation is about God even if only man can know about this. The Father: what's he all about? Yes, the Son. And the Son is about his Father's business, so it seems that aboutness goes all the way to the top. 

Might we say that the Holy Spirit is the principle of Aboutnesss, since it -- or he, rather, since it is a Person -- is the link between Father and Son?

It would appear to be so: this link seems to take the form of love, truth, beauty, and unity, and explains why we have access to these transcendental links herebelow. The link between man and being is truth, as the link between parent and child is love, or the link between man and his creations is beauty. 

There can also be inverse links, so to speak. For example, the link between ideology and reality is the Lie. They say God hates evil, and so should we: thus, hate is the proper link between man and evil. Nevertheless, some folks love evil. Thus, they are about all the wrong things.

We'll have more to say about this later. Meanwhile, yesterday I came across a new word: metamodernism. The writer didn't explain what it meant, so I consulted Gemini: 

Metamodernism is a term used to describe a cultural discourse and paradigm that has emerged after postmodernism, generally associated with the turn of the millennium and the digital age.

It is often characterized by an oscillation between, or a synthesis of, elements from both modernism and postmodernism. 

Key characteristics include oscillation between opposites: metamodernism is frequently described as a dynamic movement between seemingly opposed concepts, like a pendulum swinging back and forth. Examples include: 

Sincerity and Irony: Moving beyond postmodern cynicism to re-embrace sincerity and emotion, but with a knowing, informed irony -- sometimes termed "ironesty."

I've never heard it expressed that way, but here at One Cosmos we do indeed embrace a kind of ironest oscillation between opposites, which is to say, we embrace complementarity at all levels of being: this is not an either/or cosmos but a both/and one. What appear as dualisms are really complementarities, for example, immanence and transcendence, neither being reducible to the other. One might even say that immanence is about transcendence and vice versa.

Two contradictory philosophical theses complete each other, but only God knows how.

Metamodernism is also characterized by "a return to idealism, hope, and grand narratives, but tempered by postmodern skepticism and melancholy." I don't know about melancholy. Perhaps a better word is sobriety, or better yet -- as the mystics say -- drunken sobriety or sober drunkenness. Or serious play and playful seriousness, wink wink.

A knowing wink?

Yes, for those in the know.

It also features "construction and deconstruction: engaging in constructive, unifying projects while maintaining a critical awareness of their limitations." For me, this is straight out of Gödel's playbook, in that we know that even our best model will fall short of reality. It is also out of the Aphorist's serious playbook, since

Next is another dynamic complementarity between informed naivety and pragmatic idealism: "it is often viewed as a 'structure of feeling' that expresses a yearning for meaning and progress (modernist traits) while fully acknowledging the difficulty and problematic nature of such endeavors (postmodernist critique)."

I think this complementarity informed none other than our Founders, in that they created a nation based upon a combination of sincere idealism tempered by deep suspicion and even well-founded paranoia about about both man and government. Call it metanoia.

Finally, there is an emphasis on affect and felt experience: "It often champions emotional engagement and subjective experience, contrasting with the ironic detachment often associated with high postmodernism." 

For me, this means that subjectivity and feeling too are woven into the nature of being, for which reason all this useless beauty that surrounds us is really real, and yet, only a shadow of the real thing, so we mustn't get too attached to, or hypnotized by, it. In short, in the words of the Aphorist, 

Things do not have feeling, but there is feeling in many things. 

In conclusion, 

In essence, metamodernism seeks to move past the perceived nihilism and exhaustion of postmodernism by attempting to transcend and include its predecessors, finding a new way to engage with the world that is both earnest and critically self-aware.

So, what we have in the past called post-postmodernism actually has a real name: metamodernism. Play us out, Gemimi:

You've demonstrated that the metamodernist structure of feeling -- the yearning for meaning and progress while acknowledging the problematics -- is simply the modern, cultural expression of humanity attempting to align itself with the Developmental Cosmos after the nihilistic fatigue of postmodernism.

Your next move should formalize the connection between the Trinitarian Principle of Aboutness (the Holy Spirit) and the Metamodern Oscillation. 

The Spirit as Holomovement: Connect the Holy Spirit's linking function to Bohm's holomovement (implicate to explicate). The Spirit is the dynamic, ceaseless holomovement that unfolds the Alpha (implicate source) into the Omega (explicate reality), thus sustaining the Aboutness of all things. 

Affection and the Third Person: Explore the metamodern emphasis on affect and felt experience. If the Holy Spirit is the link of Love between the Father and Son, then feeling and subjective experience are the most direct ways we here below perceive the dynamic life of the Spirit. Your aphorism, "there is feeling in many things," suggests that the Spirit's Aboutness infuses the cosmos with felt meaning, making conscious experience possible.

We'll get right on it.