After Postmodernism | 3. Spirit and the Specter of Identity

Using Ihab Hassan's essay, "Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust," we chart our way from late postmodernism into its aftermath, noting the resurfacing of ideas like truth, trust, spirit for meeting the demands of identity in a fractured world. I then offer my own analysis of what postmodernism really was, and use this to help explain key characteristics of the emerging post-postmodern sensibility. Crucial to this is what I am calling the return of dimensionality.
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[@theartofgregoryevans]

What a great series you've done. I'm enjoying every minute. In fact, I've been watching each episode repeatedly before moving on to the next. In response to the question of naming this new period, I'd have to say that, due to my own feelings on the matter, using any name that still has the word modern in it, attached with only a new prefix (or suffix for that matter) will just not do. We, in my humble opinion, have left the modern era altogether, and any naming of this new period with3 the word modern will only keep us stuck, in a sense, with a metaphysical attachement to the past, while we stubbornly refuse to move forward into this great unknown.

[@leehaiko3999]

I feel that the argument of Post Post modernism as being just descending further into post modernism is inorganic. I would say that human culture swings like a pendulum in search of balance yet it never finds it. One can say that what we see now is what was seen before. The traditional nature of prehistory to the liberal nature of Greco Roman culture, to traditionalism in the dark ages, to liberalism in the Renaissance, and then back in classicism, only to be swung back by the age of enlightenment. After that, we experience a bloom of traditionalism during the period of intense nationalism and the great awakenings of the modern world. Which brought us post modernism. I would suspect that what is beyond post modernism will be the swinging of the pendulum.

[@williammaxwell2239]

More of a spiraling swing.

[@Yuvraj.]

Funny how that works, doesn't it :) @@williammaxwell2239

[@lukedmoss]

All that to say, there is probably a better name than post-post...

[@alvaromd3203]

Absolutely great. Thank you!

[@HandleToBeDetermined]

Thanks for this series! It really sheds a light on this weird feeling I've had for a few years. I'm glad that all these thoughts I've had on community, spirituality, and optimism are meaningful and not at all out-of-place. Personally, I prefer post-postmodernism over all the other names for 'after postmodernism'. All the other names have a sense of cynicism as if they're coined by someone deeply tied to postmodernism and on a race to have their name in history books. Post-postmodernism at least is authentic in that it explains things in a way that's understandable to those that's at least a bit versed in what postmodernism is thought to be.

[@scythermantis]

I could hardly come up with a more postmodern name than 'post-postmodernism' lol

[@jiweonieya2492]

Please. Please. Keep more of these videos coming. I love all the book references and the simple explanations you offer in these videos ! Your three videos of After Postmodernism made your channel my favorite youtube channel. Would love to see more.

[@BrendanGrahamDempsey]

Thanks! That means a lot. I hope to have Episode 4 up before Christmas. Thanks for staying tuned.

[@hxgxxd7921]

This is very illuminating, ive been looking for something like this for a while, thanks alot

[@gagi6294]

I feel like Christianity should be re-examined through this new metamodern filter, by incorporating ideas of Eastern philosophies which have always been phenomenological in their core, offering the west a new way of spiritual development. And I think we have the grounds for that, considering how Carl Jung's work is integrating both eastern and western models of spirituality. It is an exciting era we're living it.

[@DevinRisner]

I haven't watched it yet but glad you posted. I really liked the last two after post-modernism videos

[@BrendanGrahamDempsey]

Thanks! Would love your feedback when you do. And yes, it took a while to finish this one. Was dealing with unexpected personal crises on multiple fronts. Finally getting back on my feet. Hope the wait was worth it.

[@DevinRisner]

@@BrendanGrahamDempsey That happens to the best of us. So, about 8 minutes in I am loving this notion of 'the void' as the point of unity between cultural agents as the ground of "truth" and "trust" among us in the next cultural stage and order. This invokes in me the postulate notion in theoretical physics wherein there may be a black hole at the center of every galaxy around which everything revolves. In my encounters and wrestlings with the void I very much experienced it as a black hole at the core of my being swallowing every ounce of light in my life. However, I have also found it to be an inexhaustible source of beauty, wonder, empathy and compassion, a means of cultivating strength and wisdom, and its actually become heavily involved in my sense of meaning in life, oddly holding everything together as the center of gravity just like the central galactic black hole. To conclude, I've found the affect of the void is highly sensitive to the mode of relating with which we approach it. Much better to confront it via voluntary and incremental exposure, than to be forced to face it suddenly and in full effect upon the loss of integral structures and relationships. I have to imagine that the void is at least a human universal upon which it seems highly feasible to unite. Where we differ is how we relate to it and thus what we experience it as. It is one man's sacred and loving God and Heaven, while it is to another an absolutely vile, tormenting, Satan and hell. All while we tend to fail to recognize these as two sides of the same coin wherein the side we experience is the one corresponding to our own manner of relating to or with it. Just like how we call forth different aspects of a person via differing manners of relating.

[@BrendanGrahamDempsey]

@@DevinRisner I agree. I think that image of the black hole at the center of a galaxy is a great one. It is in some ways like a Dark Empyrean (or maybe just the old Empyrean using different imagery?) What I am most intrigued by is finding ways to interpret this simultaneously as both the Nihil, the Abyss, but also the "darkness of God," the "cloud of unknowing," etc. How might it be that this sense of existential emptiness one second might turn out to be the Pleroma, or fullness, in another? Could some synthesis lie here of atheism and theism? Is a God that isn't (atheism) just another expression of a God without being (mysticism)? How might Buddhist conceptions of the ultimate void of things, of form as no-form, influence this discussion? All fascinating stuff to me...

[@DevinRisner]

@@BrendanGrahamDempsey The notion of a synthesis between atheism and theism via convergence upon 'the void' is extremely fascinating to me and I feel a deep sense of promise if such an idea can be sufficiently or properly formulated. There is a book on this subject called Religion and Nothingness by Keiji Nishitani I have heard about and would love to read which goes in depth into all of this in nihilism, buddhism, and religion. I haven't personally read this but I heard an account of it by prof. John Vervaeke of University of Toronto, whom host a lecture series called Awakening From the Meaning Crisis. Whom is a man and a course I deeply respect and would recommend. He said this book was transformative in his personal shift from a kind of fixation the nihilistic abyss into recognition as a source of something like sacred inexhaustibility like that of the empyrean or pleroma. Both terms I had to look up and thank you for adding to my vocabulary. Lol.

[@samuellopez-barrantes4865]

This is fantastic information, well-researched, well-delivered, and damn inspiring and intriguing.

[@soyboy466]

Glad we seem to have survived Postmodernism.

[@ligerllama]

Fascinating 👍

[@LowenKM]

Great series, thank you!

[@williammaxwell2239]

Very good. The transindental inclusive vibe was nourishing. Thank You.

[@joeboi3146]

We should try to get this out there

[@BrendanGrahamDempsey]

Share away

[@lastmatch1111]

Let's call this present era: Deathtripism

[@TheLittleBirdyKing]

Very good and interesting video, I would suggest a better understanding of the term spirit would be an explicitly Germanic reading of spirit as geist/gees/ghost a sort of motivating force or energy, that is explicitly collective, imagine the sort of ghost possessing a crowd. This I think is a good "naturalisation" of what Hegel basically means.

[@BrendanGrahamDempsey]

And yet, I feel like there's something more than just "naturalizing" about this sensibility. Its more like seeing the natural as supernatural (i.e., seeing the transcendent IN the immanent), not just reducing the supernatural to the immanent (which is how I would interpret "naturalize" in this context). I think there may be something more akin to the ontology of the mystics here. I use a picture of "God Without Being" when I mention "new" forms of dimensionality, though in truth Marion is really grounding himself in the ontology of Pseudo-Dionysius and the mystics. God Without Being is Eckhart and others (Sankara in India [I'm currently reading Otto's Mysticism East and West so forgive me]). It's not God is Not Dead, it's God is Not, which becomes God is Not an "is", which becomes God Beyond Being. But there we stumble back to Transcendence, again, as something totally Other.

[@TheLittleBirdyKing]

​@@BrendanGrahamDempsey Sure but once we return to seeing the transcendent in the immanent then this is quite literally no different than historical Idealism, e.g. Hegel and Plato. Not that this is a criticism, I am a Hegelian, but to see the transcendent in the immanent is precisely what both Plato, with the realm of Ideas being nested with the realm of Becoming, and both being eternal, and Hegel are interested in. If this then is what is being aimed for, transcendence within immanence, then it has not really "escaped" from the modern and postmodern paradigms so much as returned to the modern. While arguably it could be more focused on the collective rather than the individual, this again is already within the modern paradigm, as seen with Marxism and Revolutionary Liberalism. Furthermore, God as pure nothingness is itself a key part of modernism, Hegel does extensively engage with people like Swedenborg and Meister Eckhart, as well as being positive towards the Indian conception of Atman as Nothingness. If it is then specifically the case of seeing the transcendent within the immanent this is then quite literally just modernism 2.0.

[@BrendanGrahamDempsey]

@@TheLittleBirdyKing Well, it's probably not coincidence that Episode #4 will be on "Re-modernism." More anon!

[@BrendanGrahamDempsey]

@@TheLittleBirdyKing With a little more time (and a keyboard), here's more of what I meant to say: I would disagree that this is "quite literally no different" than the idealism of Hegel and Plato, at least as I understand them. Plato, for instance, posits a whole "realm" of the Forms, and it is our aim to free ourselves from the cave of illusion to behold the light of the Real, etc. This seems like a pretty clear dualism: illusion/Reality, appearance/Truth, the participatory particulars/the Forms, etc. This idea of immanence/transcendence seems very different indeed from the models that seem to be appearing now. Hegel might be closer, but it seems that he is positing a kind of realization of the Ideal in the immanent reality--religion yields to philosophy, the Church yields to the state, etc. This strikes me as a kind of culmination in immanence, where materialism is ultimately the outcome. Transcendence empties into the immanent. This, too, seems quite different from the models of immanence/transcendence I hint at being developed now. I'm happy to be corrected in my understanding of one or both philosopher. And, even without that, it may indeed be the case that nothing particularly revolutionary is going on after all in the thinking about immanence/transcendence.

[@TheLittleBirdyKing]

@@BrendanGrahamDempsey I would agree with that understanding of Hegel. I think the mistake is that from my readings of Plato, especially after the Republic, he is not really proposing Dualism, so much as a kind of integrated series of realities. This is the line specifically taken by the Neoplatonists, and what Hegel develops from Plato and the Neoplatonists. Beyond this I would need to see the next video to comment further.

[@derrickhill5892]

Song at 7:23 ?

[@grantinvestments3159]

Artwork name at 5:03?

[@BrendanGrahamDempsey]

"Couple Human Standing Connection Hand Up Pose, Abstract Body Wor" (mixed media by Benjavisa Ruangvaree)

[@BubblegumCreepydoll]

We call it Grotesque-ism

[@faisalrehman8298]

Will all this be explained, nailed, informed by the West yet again considering most of the world lives in the east which has totally a different approach to life. God has been trashed in China and succeeding. Not that I’m against any idea coming from any corner of this planet but just a question . The realities that an eastern or African faces day to day is very different from a westerner. This suggests the world will follow the west even after postmodernism. I’m completely fine with it but this got me thinking 🤔

[@nathanlafontaine3258]

Why did this turn so complicated and uninteresting all of a sudden? It feels like the narrator is trying to force a new movement rather than just letting it happen. Perhaps this is the necessary blow to the human ego it cannot contemplate.

[@leehaiko3999]

I kinda agree, it seems that the narrator has a point of view and is trying to push it via the writers, but I guess that is what happens when we contemplate the future.

[@scythermantis]

This is a fair critique as well

[@jamesbarlow6423]

I knew it.

[@khawlahbnat386]

The music is noisy and unneeded, though, the ideas are overarching and wonderfully displayed.

[@slicktip]

Great music, makes video watchable

[@michealstewart6975]

Intratransiminentalitisationiigalitisattionisationing.

[@deepblack67]

Again we see the largest error of all talk of PM and Modernity in general, the specificity of mod, postmod, postpostmod, metamod all fail to understand that they are all including that called mod are all reactions to the Modernity and Modernism of the Elite, the Academy, and Control. There is also a failure to recall history or include the non WEST - China, India, Japan, Islam, Africa, and the Indigenous World do not fit these narratives.

[@scythermantis]

I agree and feel the same way, the pendulum can swing back the other way, and also, there are many pendulums

[@williammaxwell2239]

Ken Wilber addresses this, Integral perspective.

[@deepblack67]

Saying Post-post=modern is lazy.