Metamodernism and the Recovery of Felt Experience:
Greg Dember and Process Philosophy

​Part I: Greg Dember and the Recovery of Felt Experience

Something new is happening, at least in the West and perhaps around the world. Many people are living within a “metamodern” cultural atmosphere with its own distinctive emotional logic. It is not the only atmosphere people inhabit. Modern and postmodern sensibilities remain very much alive. By “modern” sensibilities, I mean those that emphasize science, rationality, individual freedom, and confidence in progress, as shaped by the Western Enlightenment and its revolt against premodern traditionalism. By “postmodern” sensibilities, I mean those that call modernity’s confidence into question, emphasizing the social construction of knowledge, the plurality of perspectives, the role of language and power in shaping experience, and suspicion toward universal truths and grand narratives. In light of these, metamodernism has a recognizable character, and increasing numbers of people are living and thinking within it—or, perhaps better, trying to live into it and breathe more of its air.

There are many ways to characterize this atmosphere, but one is personal and experiential. The metamodern mood is marked by a desire to take ownership of our felt experience, to inhabit it sincerely, and to express it through who we are in the world: personally, socially, artistically, and spiritually. This desire is particularly intense among those shaped by a postmodern atmosphere emphasizing ironic detachment and a flight from personal feeling. To the extent that they—we—are affected by the postmodern ethos, it can seem almost “embarrassing to express any earnest sense of an uncomplicated truth, or to openly identify with sentimentality,” as Greg Dember puts it. In the metamodern atmosphere, by contrast, personal interiority and individual experience can be defended and reclaimed. Earnestness, hope, emotional vulnerability, and enthusiasm for novelty become possible again—albeit without abandoning irony, critical self-awareness, or intellectual humility. It becomes possible to be sincere again.

Of course, this is only part of the story. Much more is involved in metamodernism, and the term is used in different ways by different thinkers. Some see it as an opportunity to recover a sense of the interconnectedness of all things and to bring diverse domains of thought and inquiry into constructive relationship: science and spirituality, economics and ecology, biology and psychology, reason and imagination. It can also involve seeking a common purpose without denying difference, uncertainty, or complexity. And it can involve an enjoyment of oscillating between apparent opposites—tradition and modernity, for example—without feeling compelled to choose one and reject the other. But the recovery of felt experience—sincerity after irony, without the loss of irony—is one important place to begin. At least, this is what we learn from Greg Dember and Linda Ceriello, editors of the website What Is Metamodern?.

My aim in this essay, with Dember’s book as my primary guide, is to suggest that Whitehead’s philosophy—with its emphasis on individual felt experience, its understanding of experience as situated within relational contexts, and its openness to novelty—can be a companion to the metamodern mood. I want to talk about a metamodern Whitehead and a metamodern process philosophy.

The Truth in the Moment
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One common approach is to understand metamodernism as an episteme: a way of understanding and inhabiting the world. It is not simply a worldview; more deeply, it is an emotional logic and an aesthetic sensibility. One influential interpretation has been developed by Dember and Ceriello on What Is Metamodern? and by Dember in his book Say Hello to Metamodernism!: Understanding Today’s Culture of Ironesty, Felt Experience, and Empathic Reflexivity. On the importance of felt experience—or interiority—Dember writes:
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Next—the new part, what I’m claiming in this book alongside many other theorists—is that sometime around the beginning of the twenty-first century, postmodern irony started “getting old” and people began appreciating aesthetic work that managed to find somewhere solid to stand, while still accounting for the relativism that preoccupied postmodernism. This place to stand in the new episteme is felt experience. What you think may be subject to cultural biases, to faulty premises, to the very limitations inherent in thinking itself. Ethical judgements about right and wrong may not be universally applicable. The very notion of a coherent, chronologically continuous self may be illusionary. But when individual experience ceases to claim to be anything beyond individual experience, what still remains is individual experience. Thoughts can be deceptive, but feelings cannot deceive, nor can they be explained away, if feelings simply are what they are. Felt experience claims to be nothing more than it is, and therefore cannot be made to be less than it is. It’s not always right, in a factual way, or even in a practical way, but from a metamodern point of view, it’s what connects someone to their self—to their truth in the moment. The premise of this book is that a preoccupation with felt experience (or interiority) is at the core of metamodernism. [1]

For Dember, then, metamodernism does not entail a naïve return to modernist certainty, but it also avoids the deadening effect of postmodern irony, It seeks a form of sincerity that has passed through postmodern criticism and learned from it. Felt experience becomes a provisional ground: not an infallible guide to facts or morality, but an undeniable dimension of life from which renewed sincerity, connection, and creative expression can emerge. And, so Dember adds, a healthy irony. He coins the term "ironesty" to name this coalescence. 

The focus of Dember’s book is on how this renewed emphasis on felt experience finds expression and narrative space in film, music, television, literary fiction, philosophy, and religion. He identifies and explores eleven aesthetic strategies through which felt experience is expressed and affirmed and offers detailed analyses of the way these strategies are found in the arts. The eleven strategies are:
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• Empathic reflexivity/life-as-movie: Self-awareness that draws attention to the creator’s, character’s, or audience’s lived experience rather than undermining it.
• The double frame: A fantastic or artificial outer world surrounds an inner core of believable emotional truth.
• Oscillation: Movement between modernist and postmodernist qualities—such as sincerity and irony, hope and doubt—without settling permanently on either side.
• The quirky: Eccentric characters reveal recognizable vulnerability and emotional truth through their very strangeness.
• The tiny: A metamodern minimalism that uses smallness, simplicity, and intimacy to bring audiences closer to felt experience.
• The epic: A metamodern maximalism that embraces extravagance, exuberance, spectacle, and grand storytelling.
• Constructive pastiche: Disparate genres, styles, and cultural materials are combined to create new meanings and emotional possibilities.
• Ironesty: Irony and earnestness are braided together, allowing sincerity to be expressed with ironic self-awareness.
• Normcore: Deliberate ordinariness places human connection and relationality above the display of a distinctive identity.
• Overprojection: Human feelings and personalities are projected onto animals, machines, or inanimate objects.
• Meta-cute: Childlike innocence, simplicity, tenderness, and playfulness are embraced by and for adults.

These strategies frequently overlap within a single work. What unites them is their capacity to recover sincerity, vulnerability, emotional presence, and interiority without abandoning the irony, reflexivity, and awareness of context inherited from postmodernism.

*

Dember also considers the expression of metamodern sensibilities in philosophy and religion. His treatment of philosophy focuses on David Chalmers and the “hard problem of consciousness”; Philip Goff and panpsychism; the object-oriented ontology of Graham Harman and others; and Timothy Morton’s theory of hyperobjects. Despite their differences, these approaches challenge reductive and narrowly anthropocentric accounts of reality. Chalmers and Goff make conceptual room for consciousness or interiority as an irreducible feature of existence, while Harman and Morton emphasize realities that exceed ordinary human perception and cannot be reduced to their relations with human beings.

Dember’s discussion of religion turns to the Emerging Church movement, which he understands as an expression of metamodern Christianity, and to people who identify as spiritual but not religious. In exploring the latter, he is especially influenced by his colleague Linda Ceriello, a scholar of comparative religion specializing in mystical traditions, contemporary spirituality, religion and popular culture, and metamodern theory. Ceriello interprets spiritual-but-not-religious forms of mysticism as expressions of an emerging metamodern sensibility.

These religious and spiritual developments seek forms of meaning that remain open to uncertainty and plurality while moving beyond postmodern detachment toward participation, sincerity, and lived experience.

Part II: Whitehead and Felt Experience

There are three areas in which, in my view, Whitehead’s philosophy can serve as a companion to Dember’s understanding of metamodernism: his emphasis on felt experience, his affirmation of novelty and contrast, and his account of the aesthetic foundations of existence.

First, Whitehead understands felt experience as lying at the heart not only of human life but also of other forms of life and, in a more elemental sense, of the cosmos itself. Human consciousness is a highly developed form of a more basic activity present throughout nature: the feeling of a world and the creative integration of that world into a momentary unity. We are not detached minds looking out upon an otherwise lifeless universe. We are participants in a universe composed of interrelated moments of experience. From this perspective, sincerity about felt experience is not a retreat from reality into a merely private or subjective realm. It is an acknowledgment of something fundamental to reality itself. To take our feelings seriously—while recognizing that they are partial, fallible, and shaped by relationships—is to live in greater accord with the experiential character of the world.

Second, Whitehead emphasizes openness to novelty and the creative holding together of contrasts. Every moment inherits a settled past, but it is never entirely determined by that past. New possibilities are available, and each occasion of experience participates, however modestly, in deciding how the many influences it receives will become one. Whitehead’s universe is therefore unfinished: the future remains genuinely open, and creativity belongs to the very structure of existence. At the same time, richness of experience arises through contrast. Permanence and change, individuality and relationship, order and novelty, reason and feeling need not always be treated as mutually exclusive alternatives. They can be brought together without being collapsed into sameness. This resonates with the metamodern enjoyment of oscillation between apparent opposites. Whitehead offers a metaphysical basis for such oscillation: contrasts can become sources of intensity and beauty when they are held together creatively.

Third, Whitehead understands experience as aesthetic at its foundation. By “aesthetic,” he does not mean that every experience concerns art or conventional beauty. He means that every moment involves feeling the many elements of the world and integrating them into some pattern of harmony, contrast, and intensity. Before experience is intellectual, moral, or linguistic, it is affective and aesthetic. We feel the world before we analyze it. Ideas matter partly because of the ways they shape feeling, disclose possibilities, and invite particular ways of responding. Whitehead calls such possibilities “lures for feeling.” This aesthetic understanding complements Dember’s approach, which finds the metamodern sensibility expressed most vividly in music, film, literature, religion, and popular culture. Artistic works do more than illustrate ideas: they help create new forms of subjectivity and new ways of feeling the world.

It is important to add, however, that enthusiasts for Whitehead have often been modernist or postmodernist in spirit rather than metamodern. Some have approached his philosophy in a characteristically modernist way, emphasizing rational coherence, systematic metaphysics, scientific adequacy, and the promise of intellectual or social progress. Others have interpreted him through postmodern concerns, emphasizing relationality, difference, indeterminacy, the critique of fixed substances, and suspicion toward inherited hierarchies and absolutes. Both approaches have yielded important insights. Still, neither necessarily foregrounds the recovery of felt experience, sincerity, emotional vulnerability, and aesthetic participation that Dember associates with the metamodern sensibility. Whitehead’s philosophy does not belong exclusively to any one cultural atmosphere. My more modest suggestion is that certain dimensions of his thought can be retrieved and inhabited in a metamodern spirit.

In any case, it is important to note that Whitehead’s philosophy now has a global life. It is being studied, interpreted, and creatively developed not only in Europe and North America but also in China, Africa, and other parts of the world, often in conversation with local intellectual, religious, artistic, and ecological traditions. This global reach matters because the metamodern spirit need not be understood as an exclusively Western development or as something the West offers to everyone else. Whitehead’s philosophy can become one participant in a many-sided global conversation, receiving as well as offering insight. Its emphasis on relationality, felt experience, creativity, and the possibility of holding differences together may help foster forms of metamodern sensibility that are culturally diverse rather than uniform.

Taken together, these themes suggest why Whitehead can be a philosophical companion to the metamodern mood—and perhaps one resource for nurturing it. He offers a vision of reality in which interiority is genuine, novelty is possible, contrasts can be creatively held together, and aesthetic feeling belongs to the very fabric of existence. Metamodern sincerity, from this perspective, is not naïveté after criticism. It is a willingness to participate feelingly and creatively in an unfinished world, with critical awareness intact.

Part Three: A Note on the Contemplative and Mystical

Dember draws upon the work of his colleague Linda Ceriello to describe a metamodern mystical sensibility. It includes:

• A focus on ground-level, everyday, “this-worldly” concerns as much as—or more than—attempts to transcend the world.
• A fluidity of identity narratives, such that people who are spiritual but not religious do not feel compelled to choose between spiritual and secular affiliations.
• An approach to the “problem” of the self that does not seek to solve it by dissolving or eliminating the self.
• A recognition of the extraordinary within the ordinary, rather than only in experiences of transcendence.
• A respect for extraordinary mystical states experienced by ordinary people alongside those cultivated by dedicated practitioners, such as monks and contemplatives.

Taken together, these features suggest a mysticism that is embodied, this-worldly, and open to spiritual depth without requiring either a fixed religious identity or an escape from ordinary life.

An interesting feature of process philosophy is that it can help us appreciate many kinds of "mysticism." See my Eight Forms of Mysticism.