Timothy Morton

Timothy Morten makes an inspired, impassioned case that we all tend to think about ecology the wrong way. We pay too much attention to "factoids," formulations prepared via collective thinking to sound "truthily" in the know. So far so good. But when he tries to tackle how we should think about ecology, he lapses into literal incoherence. He runs riot with relativity and categorical inclusiveness. He wants to honor the infinity of perspectives and contexts any object may have; but beyond that, leaves little or no purchase on what he's actually arguing for. Can he be saying that the only way to think (and talk) about ecology is not to make sense at all?… (más)

I think one may need to look at this book through the lens of someone really trying, if only experimentally, to reduce if not totally excise anthropocentric bias from philosophy. Morton is claiming reason's right to imagine objects that don't need us to exist. This runs counter to twentieth century relativism and its preference to analyze things from various exclusively human perspectives. You can almost sense in Morton an active aversion to what he finds to be human chauvinism. Why do we imagine that only we humans have the power to create credible slices of space-time reference by virtue of individual points of view? After all, doesn't everything in a universe affect everything else? What makes us so special?

Anthropocentrism has long since been the exclusive norm in consciousness studies. Thomas Nagel's celebrated essay, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat," is routinely quoted for its notion that we shouldn't attribute consciousness to anything unless we can know "what it's like" to be that thing. But this stricture runs the risk of ruling out imagination and the possibility of other sympathetic connections that could be metaphysically real.

I believe Morton is entertaining the idea that there are many ways of knowing. Anthropocentrism may be a rather poor way to get to know many of the objects, small and large and very large, that we routinely encounter in the business of living. (Morton focuses on the very large, the things that we don't see because they exceed our customary, if not blinkered, visual range).

What Morton doesn't do much of is look at how different types of people who are not philosophers -- such as artists and shamans, to name two -- look at or interact with objects in and out of nature. I'm reminded of Don Juan, the Yaqui shaman of Carlos Castaneda's books, who explained that seeing life in supposedly inanimate objects makes sense because doing so makes his life not only more interesting, but ultimately more true. Don Juan's kind of reasoning may fall outside the dominant modern Western philosophy, but perhaps not outside of philosophy itself as more creatively and expansively conceived.… (más)

I'm no philosopher, at least not in any professional sense or by virtue of being well-read in the subject. I like philosophy. I have read some - mostly classical and some of the more well-known later ones. Basically, the stuff you're likely to encounter in decent high school and college education (at least in the 80s and 90s when my formal education took place) and or a bit beyond that. I've read some since then, nothing in particular, just what fell into my TBR pile from friends and whatnot.

This book was my first exposure to object oriented ontology (OOO). It's an introduction of sorts, but only to one type of object, not to OOO itself. For that reason alone I'm reluctant to recommend it to someone who has encountered OOO before. (And also for that reason, I plan to reread it soon.)

Still, even with my light exposure to philosophy and complete lack of exposure to OOO I enjoyed the book and found it very thought provoking. I'm not sure I understand all of it, let alone buy it.

Given my superficial understanding, I'm not going to attempt more than the briefest of explanations.

What is OOO? A metaphysical theory that treats all things in the universe as objects without preference to their particular characteristics: size, intelligence, age, longevity, whatever. Thus is rejects human-centric interpretations based on any sort of human superiority or notions that reality is a product of the mind and senses. Objects are not necessary indivisible in the strict sense or even physical - forces and processes are objects too. Objects are objects are objects and exist on equal footing with each other.

What are hyperobjects? Object that are vast - compared to humans at least - in space and time. Examples are things like the Earth, evolution, galaxies, and even global warming. We can never fully experience such objects. Instead we see small parts of them or experience them indirectly through their effects on us and other objects - the evolution of selectively bread foxes in Russia, extreme weather events, the Earth setting from the moon, the disk of galaxy in the night sky.

The author invented (discovered?) hyperobjects in an earlier work, but this is the first work which details them and how they affect us and other objects. Although focused on hyperobjects, many of the concepts and ideas seem like they should apply equally to regular objects (or whatever non-hyper objects are to be called).

This was definitely a different way of looking at reality for me and, I would guess, most people. It's worthwhile to read to experience that point of view, even should it be replaced by a better theory.

So, if you have a little philosophy under your belt, especially some metaphysics, I do recommend this. Even if you don't and just want to bend your brain a bit, you might want to give it a try.
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