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Jan Krikke is a former Japan correspondent for various media and former managing editor of Asia 2000 in Hong Kong. He pioneered the study of axonometry, the Chinese equivalent of European linear perspective overlooked by Jean Gebser. He is the author of several books, including Leibniz, Einstein, and China, and the editor of The Spiritual Imperative, a macrohistory based on the Indian Varna system by feminist futurist Larry Taub.

Can Metamodernism Go Global?

The Limits and Promise of Metamodernism

Jan Krikke / AI

Metamodernism today is Europe's emotional response to its own historical fatigue. Metamodernism tomorrow could become humanity's emotional framework for planetary consciousness—if it embraces non-Western cosmologies and unites science, harmony, and spirituality.

In the past two decades, the word metamodernism has entered the cultural lexicon to describe a shift beyond postmodern irony toward a renewed sincerity, hope, and search for meaning. The Dutch theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker coined the term in their 2010 essay Notes on Metamodernism, defining it as a “structure of feeling” that oscillates between modern enthusiasm and postmodern skepticism. It captured a mood recognizable across art, literature, and politics—from the revival of utopian design to the moral anxiety of a generation raised on irony but starved for faith in progress.

Yet despite its appeal, metamodernism remains a distinctly Eurocentric phenomenon. It is a new label for an old problem: Europe's struggle to transcend its own intellectual cycles of idealism and disillusionment. While its creators claim a transnational reach, metamodernism's roots, vocabulary, and emotional tone are products of the European historical experience. To become cosmopolitan—to serve as a framework for a genuinely planetary culture—it must move beyond Europe's self-referential gaze and enter dialogue with the philosophical traditions that shaped the rest of the world.

A European Inheritance

Metamodernism arose from the ruins of two great European worldviews: modernism and postmodernism. Modernism, from the Enlightenment onward, exalted reason, progress, and human mastery over nature. Postmodernism reacted by deconstructing those ideals, exposing their colonial, patriarchal, and instrumental underpinnings.

By the early 2000s, both narratives had lost their persuasive power. The modernist faith in progress had been undermined by ecological crisis and technological anxiety, while postmodern relativism had dissolved meaning into irony and fragmentation.

Metamodernism presents itself as the synthesis: an “oscillation” between sincerity and irony, hope and doubt, belief and disbelief. But this oscillation presupposes a distinctly Western genealogy. It responds to European exhaustion—Weber's “disenchantment,” Nietzsche's “death of God,” and the crisis of faith in the Enlightenment project.

Cultures that never experienced this linear progression from faith to doubt, from cosmos to chaos, cannot locate themselves in the same emotional rhythm. In short, metamodernism is Europe talking to itself, albeit in a new emotional key.

Metamodern discourse remains saturated with the language of Western metaphysics: dialectics, progress, irony, reflexivity. It still assumes the Hegelian model of history as self-overcoming—modernity negated by postmodernity, then transcended by a higher synthesis. The prefix meta- is not innocent; it carries a teleological confidence that Europe has always reserved for its own intellectual revolutions.

Its canonical references—Kant's critique, Nietzsche's tragedy, Derrida's différance—signal that it is the latest chapter in a European conversation about reason, not an encounter with non-Western ways of knowing. Metamodernism therefore reproduces what it claims to transcend: the idea that Europe is the privileged site where world-historical meaning unfolds, while other civilizations are sources of aesthetic “inspiration” rather than philosophical partners.

The Emotional Geography of Europe

Metamodernism also reflects a specifically European emotional geography. Its defining tone—oscillation between melancholy and hope—arises from the continent's historical experiences: world wars, decolonization, welfare-state decline, and the collapse of grand narratives. The “metamodern mood” mirrors Europe's moral self-image as a repentant modernity, struggling to reconcile its scientific power with the guilt of its past.

This mood differs from the affective registers of other civilizations. Chinese culture, for example, never divided knowledge into secular and sacred domains; the Dao remained immanent in nature and society. Indian thought, shaped by Vedanta and Buddhism, did not share Europe's obsession with historical progress; it saw time as cyclical and reality as a continuum of consciousness.

Against this background, the European oscillation between faith and skepticism looks less universal and more provincial—an emotional by-product of Christian dualism and Enlightenment individualism.

Calling metamodernism Eurocentric is not an accusation but an observation of its epistemic limits. By defining the future of culture as a reaction to Europe's own past, it excludes vast reservoirs of human thought that never fit the Western pattern of secularization and disenchantment. The result is a global discourse that pretends to be planetary while recycling European assumptions about what it means to “move beyond” modernity.

This Eurocentrism also narrows the moral imagination. Metamodern thinkers often speak of “re-enchantment” and “meaning-making,” but they treat spirituality as a psychological posture rather than a metaphysical reality. The sacred, for them, is an aesthetic mood—something to feel, not something that might be true. Such emotional pluralism may comfort disillusioned Westerners, yet it risks trivializing the enduring spiritual cosmologies that continue to organize meaning in much of the world.

Toward a Cosmopolitan Metamodernism

If metamodernism wishes to evolve beyond its European enclosure, it must become cosmopolitan—not by globalizing Western categories, but by entering genuine dialogue with other civilizations. That requires several transformations.

1. From Dialectic to Polarity

Metamodernism's central metaphor—oscillation—resembles the Chinese yin-yang dynamic but remains locked in a Hegelian frame: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. A cosmopolitan metamodernism would replace this linear dialectic with correlative thinking: a worldview where opposites coexist in mutual transformation. In Daoist and Neo-Confucian philosophy, contradiction is not a problem to be solved but a rhythm to be harmonized. This perspective could deepen metamodernism's oscillation into a more fluid, ecological understanding of change.

2. From Disenchantment to Immanence

Europe's dream of “re-enchantment” presumes that enchantment was lost. In most non-Western traditions, it never was. Chinese cosmology, Indian Vedanta, and Indigenous worldviews all conceive the sacred as immanent in the world. A cosmopolitan metamodernism would therefore move from nostalgic re-enchantment to immanent integration—seeing technology, ecology, and consciousness as expressions of one continuum rather than as opposing realms.

3. From Individualism to Relationality

Metamodernism inherits modernity's focus on the individual self seeking meaning in an absurd universe. In contrast, Eastern philosophies emphasize relation—the self as a node in a web of interbeing. Incorporating this relational ontology would shift metamodernism from existential therapy to planetary ethics, where human flourishing is inseparable from ecological and communal balance.

4. From Irony to Compassion

Where postmodernism cultivated irony as a defense against meaning, metamodernism oscillates between irony and sincerity. A more global outlook might replace that oscillation with compassion—a moral intelligence grounded in empathy rather than cleverness. This is not sentimentality but a principle of awareness present in Buddhist and Vedantic ethics. Compassion, not irony, may be the emotional foundation of a planetary consciousness.

Toward a Planetary Consciousness

The deeper promise of metamodernism lies in its implicit recognition that modernity and postmodernity are incomplete projects. Humanity's next step is not to refine Europe's internal conversation but to situate it within the planetary whole. The ecological crisis, artificial intelligence, and global migration have already made that integration unavoidable. What metamodernism can offer—if it opens its lens—is a language for the emotional transition toward global interdependence: a sensibility that feels both the tragedy of separation and the yearning for unity.

This requires humility. Europe must see itself not as the philosopher of humanity but as one participant in a larger civilizational dialogue. Its gift to the world is critical reflexivity—the capacity to question its own assumptions. Its task is to use that reflexivity to listen.

Metamodernism began as Europe's attempt to heal the fracture between reason and feeling, faith and doubt. To remain relevant, it must now help heal a larger fracture—the one between cultures and civilizations that have evolved separate yet complementary ways of knowing. Its oscillation can then widen into a planetary rhythm: the pulse of a species realizing that its many worldviews are reflections of a single, evolving consciousness.

In that transformation, metamodernism could become something more than Europe's latest self-portrait. It could become the first philosophy of the planetary age—an ethos that combines European analysis, Chinese harmony, and Indian transcendence into a living synthesis for the twenty-first century.