Review
Being Ecological by Timothy Morton review – a playfully serious look at the environment
There are not too many ‘scary facts’ in this ambitious book, which draws on both Kantian philosophy and Star Wars to explain our relationship to the world
PD SmithSat 20 Jan 2018 19.59 AEDT
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From the outset, Timothy Morton is very clear about the kind of book he isn’t writing. This is not another “confusing information dump, slapping you upside the head to make you feel bad”. What he terms “ecological information delivery mode”, heavy in “factoids” and accompanied by a “guilt-inducing sermon”, is counterproductive. Deluging readers with scary facts about global warming, which is what most environmental writers do, is “inhibiting a more genuine way of handling ecological knowledge”. To understand the true gravity of the current situation we need “to start to live the data”.
At the heart of this immensely ambitious book is a radical critique of how we know and relate to the world around us. Morton argues that our scientific age is characterised by an epistemological gulf between objects and data: “things are mysterious, in a radical and irreducible way”. Critical of a scientistic approach to knowledge, he believes the world can be grasped only by moving to a viewpoint that is both experiential and reflexive. The observer needs to be part of the equation: “Being ecological includes a sense of my weird inclusion in what I’m experiencing.”
In order to “live ecological knowledge”, Morton thinks we need to break through the “massive firewall” our Neolithic ancestors built between humans and non-humans some 12,000 years ago, as they began creating agriculture and theistic religions. Today we need to abandon the arrogance of anthropocentrism. In a memorable analogy, drawing on both Kantian philosophy and Star Wars, Morton observes that the idea of “mind melding with a non-human being” resembles the Force, an invisible field that permeates and binds everything. Sensing this “force”, the underlying connectedness of all things, is an experience Morton describes as “attunement”.
To read Being Ecological is to be caught up in a brilliant display of intellectual pyrotechnics. The playful seriousness of Morton’s prose mixes references to Blade Runner and Tibetan Buddhism with lyrics from Talking Heads and concepts from German philosophers. He doesn’t offer a plan to make society more environmentally friendly; instead, in what is an inspiringly idealistic book, he calls for a paradigm shift in our relationship to the world.
Being Ecological is published by Pelican. To order a copy for £7.64 (RRP £8.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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Pelican Books #17
Being Ecological
Timothy Morton
3.57
626 ratings94 reviews
'To read Being Ecological is to be caught up in a brilliant display of intellectual pyrotechnics' P.D.Smith, Guardian
Why is everything we think we know about ecology wrong?
Is there really any difference between 'humans' and 'nature'?
Does this mean we even have a future?
Don't care about ecology? This book is for you. Timothy Morton, who has been called 'Our most popular guide to the new epoch' (Guardian), sets out to show us that whether we know it or not, we already have the capacity and the will to change the way we understand the place of humans in the world, and our very understanding of the term 'ecology'. A cross-disciplinarian who has collaborated with everyone from Björk to Hans Ulrich Obrist, Morton is also a member of the object-oriented philosophy movement, a group of forward-looking thinkers who are grappling with modern-day notions of subjectivity and objectivity, while also offering fascinating new understandings of Heidegger and Kant. Calling the volume a book containing 'no ecological facts', Morton confronts the 'information dump' fatigue of the digital age, and offers an invigorated approach to creating a liveable future.
GenresPhilosophyNonfictionEnvironmentEcologyScienceClimate ChangeNature
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230 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 2018
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Timothy Morton73 books280 followers
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Timothy Bloxam Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They are the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence; Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (with Marcus Boon and Eric Cazdyn); Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World; and other books.
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Neil MacDonald
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February 8, 2018
This is a playful (in a very odd way) book about a serious subject (ecological crisis). Morton is a philosopher not a scientist. He is at pains to tell you there are no truthy factoids in the book. Rather, it’s an appeal that we should think about life, the universe, and everything in a different way. His style is folksy (or as folksy as you can get with object oriented ontology), and, like a mythic sprite, he delights in turning our “common sense” understanding of stuff upside down. His basic argument is that the way we think about ecology is distorted by the intellectual legacy of the hierarchical societies that came into being with the invention of agriculture. This legacy separates subject from object, the human from the non-human, spirit from body. In short, it’s anthropocentric patriarchy. When we see the environment as something we can operate on, we destroy the connection of everything to everything else. He feels most at home, not with a scientific grasping of the universe but with an artistic one, or even one of “enchantment” – “the aesthetic experience,” he says, “is about solidarity with what is given.” He is telling us how to care. And he reassures us, we already do. The parts, he says, are greater than the whole.
As play, I enjoyed the book’s deeply intellectual anti-intellectualism. As a writer, I enjoyed his turning the world upside down, his archaeology of thought. It was a wonderfully pleasurable artistic experience reading the book, a wander through a hall of mirrors. But intellectually, practically, politically I’m less sure how useful the book is (Morton, of course, would say I’m asking the wrong, utilitarian, question). The mirrors seem to go along with a fair amount of smoke. There are too many logical elisions – to take one example the statement “when you play a game like cricket or baseball, the ball arrives at your bat within a few milliseconds. That’s faster than your brain.” The elision here is between brain and conscious brain. Of course it’s not faster than your brain or you couldn’t hit it. Or, again, his argument that not knowing why a painting moves you is like not knowing why you should care about the environment, as if there was only one way to not know things.
Reading the book isn’t really the point though. Letting it happen to you is. Its object is to “re-confuse” us, in the hope that will re-attune us to our environment. Perhaps, you have to be a philosopher for this to work.
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Uroš Đurković
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February 13, 2021
OOO je, osim što izgleda divno šašavo, skraćenica za „objektno orijentisanu ontologiju”.
A izgled, u neku ruku, i ne vara: OOO je filozofski pravac 21. veka, koji pokušava da preispita odnos između subjekta i objekta u smeru afirmacije postojanja objekta kao takvog. Dakle, od Kanta u metafizici dominira tzv. korelacionizam, iliti (putem uzročnosti) potvrda objekta u svesti subjekta, dok predstavnici OOO smatraju da objekat ne samo što postoji nezavisno od subjekta (što, realno, u filozofiji i nije neka novina), već čovekova svest nema privilegovano mesto u poimanju sveta te predstavlja samo jednu od ravnopravnih mogućnosti. Takođe, OOO smatra da misao ne samo što nije jedini način pristupa svetu, nego nije ni najbolji, jer najboljeg pristupa nema. (Uostalom, pitam se ja, u odnosu na šta se može ustanoviti ovo stepenovanje, a da nije izvan same misli?) A budući da je istorija ljudskog roda neraskidivo povezana sa istorijom misli, tako da je čovek jedini posednik misli, a time i centar značenja i moći, OOO pokušava da napravi silovit odmak od antropocentrizma.
A zašto je ovo uopšte važno? Misao o odnosu subjekta i objekta temeljno određuje i ekološka pitanja. Timoti Morton, kao jedan od istaknutijih predstavnika OOO-a, uzbudljivo pokazuje različita gledišta koja uspevaju da uzdrmaju niz naizgled očiglednih predstava o prirodi. Njegova fenomenologija znanja je vrcava, neočekivana, a bujajući (anti)intelektualizam inspirativan. I više od praktičnih rešenja, Morton se bavi ekologijom kao diskurzivnim konstruktom i njenim posledicama na mišljenje. Međutim, ovde je mnogo reči posvećeno i faktoidima (tzv. „lažnim činjenicama”), aroganciji nauke, estetici (lepota je u datosti koja donosi prepoznavanje nečega što nisam JA i što, na neki način, proizvodi vreme), ali npr. i naizgled sofističkoj argumentaciji da je celina manje od skupa delova – budući da celina predstavlja jedno, a delovi mnoštvo (opet, to je vezano sa teorijom o hiperobjektima, ali o tome drugom prilikom).
Bilo kako bilo, ovo je jedna zaista i eklektična studija (električno-eklektična), tobogan za misli koji nagrađuje tamo gde se najmanje očekuje. A zaključak se može naslutiti: priča o ekologiji često upućuje na ono što nema veze sa ekologijom, a stalni imperativ da budemo saobrazni ekološkoj misli, treba da bude drukčije shvaćen: mi već jesmo, hteli to ili ne, ekološka bića. Od prirode se ne može pobeći.
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Anna
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January 14, 2023
One of the reasons that I read a lot is my enjoyment of many different types of books and topics. After decades of reading, I'm also pretty good at judging whether a book will be my kind of thing. Thus I rarely give one or two star ratings. In the case of Being Ecological, it's especially surprising because I've already read and enjoyed another book by Timothy Morton on the same subject, The Ecological Thought, as well as a book about his preferred philosophy, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Yet somehow I found Being Ecological so incredibly irritating that I would have left it unfinished had it not been the first nonfiction book of 2023. Abandoning it would have been such a poor omen for the year ahead that I pushed on.
It was not so much Morton's ideas that I had a problem with, although I am doubtful about many of them, but the way he explained them. The best hypothesis I can come up with about what happened here is as follows: Morton is an academic and talks about lecturing indifferent students in philosophy at one point in Being Ecological. So presumably he teaches, or has taught, generation Z. I've done so as well, not very competently, and can understand the urge to try and make your material more appealing to the youth. Could that be what he's attempting with this writing style?
In the beauty experience, there is some kind of mind-meld-like thing that takes place, where I can't tell whether it's me or the artwork that is causing the beauty experience: if I try to reduce it to the artwork or to me, I pretty much ruin it. This means, argues Kant, that the beauty experience is like the operating system on top of which all kinds of cool political apps are sitting, apps such as democracy. Nonviolently existing with a being that isn't you is a pretty good basis for that.
The first sentence is fine, but I cannot believe that the second is an accurate account of Kant. I also have no idea what 'cool political apps' even means. Whether such a style actually appeals to those under the age of 22 is a mystery, but I find this sort of thing pretty unbearable:
Art is a place where we get to see what it means to be human or whatever, which is why what I do is called humanities. But this isn't enough. One way this becomes obvious is when writing grant proposals that sound like pleading. Please, please don't hurt me, Mr Funding Source, I'm a sort of educated PR guy who is going to decorate this boring cupcake of scientism with these nice human-flavoured meaning-candies.
Such metaphors explain nothing. His constant use of 'retweet' is likewise tiresome and seems unlikely to age well. The Ecological Thought was not written in such a manner, indeed my review comments on how clearly the ideas in it are articulated! Being Ecological starts out reasonably well, with some thoughtful stuff about truth and falsity not being a simple dichotomy, then unravels around ninety pages in. I did not follow this logic:
When you draw a set of things, the circle you draw around those things is always going to be bigger than the set, physically speaking. Otherwise it wouldn't be able to encompass them. But how a drawing looks isn't the same as what it logically means. If everything exists in the same way, that means that wholes exist in the same way as their parts, which means that there are always more parts than there is a whole - which means the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. It's childishly simple when you think of it this way. So how come it's so hard to accept?
Maybe because that explanation isn't very coherent? Surely the childishly simple implication is that a whole is equal to the sum of its parts, not less? This section is titled 'Not Your Grandaddy's Holism' which is cringeworthy. On pages 186 and 187, by which point I was really annoyed, Morton summarises his argument as 'it's fine not to give a shit and to leave your ways of thinking unchanged because you're already an ecological being'. I paraphrase, as it's articulated in a much more tiresomely whimsical way. The point is that Morton critiques the ways we talk about ecology in a straw-man fashion without providing anything useful to replace them with. This is all the more frustrating because he periodically makes a promising point like:
For example, the idea of sustainability implies that the system we have now is worth sustaining. It implies furthermore that 'continuing for a longer time' is a hallmark of success, which in turn implies a model of existing having to do with persisting, going on, being constantly present. But we've established that things aren't like that. So in the end the style of efficiency is going to be stifling and uncreative, not allowing for malfunctions and accidents, which are ironically more likely the way things actually are. It's not the case that things are just functioning smoothly until they don't. Smooth functioning is always a myth.
That is all very well, but I've read it before elsewhere actually used effectively in an argument. I'm really disappointed with Being Ecological. It provided me with no useful new ways of thinking about the environment, the style was deeply irritating, and I know Morton can do much better. I strongly recommend reading something else about ecological philosophy instead, such as The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, or indeed Morton's The Ecological Thought.
environment nonfiction philosophy
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René Bloemink
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September 5, 2018
When I stumbled upon some lectures by Timothy Morton, I was intrigued by his prospect of a different kind of thinking about being human at the brink of grand planetary changes by global warming. In 'Being Ecological', Morton tries to disrupt our usual way of thinking about it: the difference between nature and culture is non-sensical; everything is connected in intricate ways; objects are fuzzy and aren't fixed; we can't have any oversight on planetary issues because we're deeply involved in it; everything is ecology, even thinking about ecology, so we're already ecological if we like it or not.
In the first half of the book I was not sure if it was all common sense to me or that I didn't understand it at all. Morton's way of writing seems to be directed at achieving exactly this. Creating confusion, because everything radiates confusion. Morton writes like he talks: babbling, referencing, using unorthodox ideas and underexplained aphorisms. As a reader I really had to engage in a dialogue with the book - which is always a good thing in my opinion - but in second half of the book I found myself barely listening to the book without the desire of talking back.
I guess my takeaway from Being Ecological is that things are more complex and more connected to other things than what seems on the surface. Seeming, appearing, is laden with conceptual baggage and we can learn to see through our usual way of looking at things. We can take up a phenomenological stance towards things where we do not think we can obtain any kind of practical or intellectual mastery over it, but instead letting the things appear to us, like looking at a piece of art. In that aesthetic dialogue the object can appear anew, just like a psychedelic experience could provide. By the way, sometimes I feel that Object Oriented Ontology is a kind of psychedelic experience in the clothes of academic 21th century philosophy.
In the end, I was hoping that Morton would provide something that would really help in gaining a new constructive perspective on being human in 2018. Instead, he left me with the feeling of wanting 'something more'.
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I would like to recommend The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram in which he embraces a animistic/shamanistic/phenomenological perspective on what is to be ecological. It's about how the environment is always present in our experience, in who we are. That book is much more vivid and pronounced and maybe even accomplishes what this book by Morton is trying to achieve.
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Joris
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August 24, 2020
As a physicist and statistician, data and models are a natural way for me to understand climate change and the accompanying mass extinction of species. But I have had it all wrong, according to this book. Timothy Morton explains that it is unimportant and even dangerous to consume information if we don’t know how to think first (which we cannot). Knowing fact(oid)s such as the 1000 years it can take to decompose plastic in the ocean, or that we lose 13% of sea ice every decade are supposedly treacherous and distracting.
I agree with most of his ideas, such as the importance of understanding that humans are part of the biosphere, not ‘outside’ of it. Anthropocentric and monotheistic ways of thinking also do not help, they are part of the problem. However, these ideas are not new (to me at least?), and reading this book there wasn’t a moment I felt the paradigm shift in my thinking that I was hoping for. But maybe I was expecting too much after the pompous first chapters.
Morton likes to say he is different and the readers are wrong, and all 'classical' environmentalists and eco-scientists with us. But I can't help but think that Morton too had to be swayed by facts (or factoids) before believing or understanding something as massive as climate change. Surely, facts are not everything, but they help with the puzzle. As Morton explains near the end, green energy is plentiful, and if all energy were renewable we could waste it without shame or guilt and party like there is no tomorrow (pun!). How can you come to that conclusion if not with facts on the consequences of different energy sources? This book is in fact full of facts, but they are all assumed, already in the mind of the readers thanks to other sources of information.
Morton employs a direct style, almost like a stream of consciousness, that is sometimes hard to follow. It is written with an air of superiority that made me angry at times like a nihilist teenager with a patronising teacher. I guess that was the whole point, but he didn’t do enough to redirect my anger to get me to a higher level of understanding. A missed opportunity, as I don’t get angry very easily. The name dropping of philosophers and pop culture references is just that, name dropping.
Overall an interesting book about how we should deconstruct the way we think before we can tackle climate change (or any other global threat), but it doesn’t deliver on its promises and left a bad taste in my mouth.
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Lillian
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November 12, 2018
Have you ever found a book so good you felt a premature grief for when it would be over?
This book was that for me.
I like a short book. I like a book that gets to the point. What the book sets out to do on the first page is what the book does. And the first page took me from "oh björk recommends it" to "I cannot leave without this buying this €11 book".
It took everything in my power to not highlight and scribble in every page. The accessible and casual language made me feel engaged and excited to read and have my mind blown each chapter.
Did I mention it was a short book? Not only short but POLITELY SIZED paper back with a sexy cover that could very easily be shoved into a generously sized pocket and POLITELY whipped out to read in public. Book function and aesthetic matters to me.
As a philosophy student reading this, it satisfied alot of unresolved feelings I have on problematic key philosophers. Morton was able to reference their ideas without ignoring their some of their yucky connotations or contexts.
This is my favourite book. I can't wait to read more of his works and will be enthusiastically enforcing my loved ones to flick through this.
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Sven Krook
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July 5, 2022
Het gezegde "veel geblaat, weinig wol" komt in me op. Hij gebruikt veel woorden en benoemt vaak wat hij niet wil schrijven of bereiken. Hij zegt echter weinig naar mijn mening. Het kan zijn dat de boodschap is achtergebleven in de vertaling of dat het aan mij ligt maar de boodschap komt volgens mij niet veel verder dan "we zijn al deel van alles om ons heel en dus ecologisch".
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Rik-Jan Veldhuijzen
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January 28, 2019
I gave up on this book after having read about two-thirds of it.
Although I might agree with the main thesis of the book - Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) - and think it is a really interesting philosophy, Morton was not the guy to sell it to me.
This book was one big word salad, and most of the time I had no idea where he was getting. Maybe this rhizomatic way of writing was done on purpose, to make us feel OOO. In that case, I might not like it after all. Admittedly, radically changing the way in which people approach the world is not an easy task, maybe a quit to easily on Morton.
Anyways, I still feel like I did not understand where he was after. I do not know whether my poor philosophical capabilities are the terrible writing style are the cause of that. In either case, I think, it is still hard to read. Do not recommend.
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Zachary
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February 4, 2019
Timothy Morton’s attitude toward environmentalism is both essential and rooted in reductionist assertions, which makes this book rather complicated. On the one hand, he creatively applies to environmental concerns his philosophical approach to how we interpret phenomena, how we understand wholes and parts, and how we differentiate existence from presence in an accessible and popular style; on the other hand, he romanticizes non-hierarchical, pre-Neolithic human existence and somehow attributes all injustice and oppression to civic monotheism which, for more than ten-thousand years, has evidently ensnared us in its tendrils and made it difficult to think in new, more innovative and more just ways. While it is hard to pin down Morton’s thesis (since this book, albeit slim, touches on so much), his main claim is that the most ubiquitous form of environmental discourse at present—wherein scientists, philosophers, politicians, and activists “dump” massive quantities of information on a relatively uninformed public in an effort to persuade us all to act quickly and definitively to avoid climate catastrophe—impedes the very outcomes we desire most. These immense data dumps both reinforce the myth that climate catastrophe is imminent, rather than presently upon us, and the myth that we still have time to remake our society or restructure our economic behaviors—colossal tasks that still perpetuate our human lust for domination and control. This type of data dump discourse, Morton writes, is “exactly the opposite of what we need in order to comprehend where we are and why—to start to live the data.” The question that everyone asks in this mode of discourse—“so what can we do?”—“wants to see ahead and anticipate and know what to do, in advance. That’s what we can’t do,” Morton insists. “That’s exactly why all this happened.”
In the first half of the book, Morton takes pains to defend this thesis. He sketches why any so-called objective notion of truth is suspicious and, with a nod toward Stephen Colbert, defends a notion of truthiness. This may strike some readers as peculiar—why, when so many climate deniers impede efforts to address climate justice, should we rely less on facts?—yet Morton’s point is philosophical, and spot on. We can never entirely know an object: when we see or touch or bite into an apple, we access apple data, never the apple itself. We have no idea what it is like for a worm to tunnel into the apple, for instance, nor do we know each and every scientific property of any apple we eat. And even if we did have this data, we would still never know the essence of the apple, the apple itself. For Morton, there are other, less obvious objects that exist and are not entirely present to us: these he calls “hyper-objects,” such as climate, evolution, and the biosphere. He meticulously explains—in rather quirky, non-philosophical prose—why hyper-objects exist in the same way as apples, even if such objects contain many parts. One could think that the biosphere, for instance, insofar as it contains all lifeforms (Morton’s preferred term), is a whole, and that this whole exceeds the sum of its parts. People, apples, trees, rocks, etc. are all parts of the biosphere, yet the biosphere outstrips them all in its very existence. This, Morton persuasively demonstrates, is profoundly mistaken: the biosphere is an object like any other object, a phenomenon like any other phenomenon, and it exists in the same way and on the same level as any one of its smaller parts. While hyper-objects are massive in scope and thus distributed across vast time and space, they elude our efforts to know them fully for the same reason the apple eludes our attempts to know it and therefore control it. We can never access the biosphere or the climate fully, we are in fact parts of the biosphere and the climate, and yet the biosphere and climate are each smaller than the sum total of their respective parts. Once we have a handle on this, Morton believes, we can start to think and act in a more environmentally-conscious manner.
Part and parcel of Morton’s effort to reorient how we think about our relationship with what we call Nature (a term Morton in fact wants to dismiss, since it implies a radical distance between us humans and the environment in which we live, as if we could neatly separate those interconnected “realms” of existence), is his attempt to show how radically interrelated all objects are. He is up-front about the fact that such “web of life” discourse is ubiquitous and cliché, yet he aptly observes how so few people can explain what they mean when they repeat such platitudes. Morton nonetheless defends this rather kitsch axiom with recourse to thinkers like Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. When we apprehend an object, he explains, there is never just the I, the subject, and the object, which passively awaits my contemplation. Each object is part of a manifold, a complex context or interpretive system wherein the object has various connotations and denotations and is used in a myriad of ways by countless different lifeforms. So while I, a human eater of apples, eat the apple, the worm, a tunneler of apples, tunnels into it, and the scientist, an observer of apples, observes its skin underneath a microscope. To push this further, whereas the apple is a source of nourishment and enjoyment for me, the forbidden fruit also exerts powerful symbolism in some people’s recollection of Genesis (nota bene: Genesis never states that the fruit is in fact an apple). Every object is a manifold, no object is just itself, and thus each object resists our anthropocentric efforts to manipulate it at will. We can never fully possess an object since an object always exists in a different way or for a different purpose in another context. With respect to environmental issues, the upshot of such manifold ubiquity is “explosive” interconnectedness that, in Morton’s view, levels out some “monotheistic” hierarchy of existence (a reductionist characterization, more on this later). To echo an earlier point, once we appreciate this “context explosion,” Morton believes, we can more successfully avoid the pitfalls of data-dump environmentalism mode and better appreciate the serious issues we face.
For all his deconstructive efforts, Morton’s project is ultimately constructive as well. He is, as noted, deeply suspicious of our “constant and very particular orientation to the future—what needs to be done. . . . You think future and you think radically different than the present.” Yet Morton wants to drive at a more fundamental, more existential, and less utilitarian reorientation toward the world that involves what he calls attunement, rather than plans for revolutions to remake society. When we are attuned to our environment, to creatures both biotic and abiotic, we relate to such creatures for “no particular reason.” This is a rather indistinct notion that Morton develops for most of the book; the essential point is, however, that each and every object and lifeform we encounter can speak to us, as it were, and that we should attend to this expression, relate to it, and let it determine us and our actions. In effect, Morton refutes the supremacy of Kant’s transcendental subject and re-enchants the nonhuman environment with the power to meet and confront us from a place of real, non-illusory alterity.
Morton does this with philosophical dexterity; for all his apparent mysticism, Morton is not a mystic, and the case he presents in this book is scrupulously philosophical. In attunement, we are “tuned” by what we encounter insofar as we can never, via our own efforts at perception, interpretation, etc., impose an exhaustive identity on an object, just as we can never determine its essence with any certainty. It exists outside of us and actively exerts power over us: art, for example, draws us in, captures our attention, reorients the way we approach other objects. “Art is telepathic—it’s spooky action at a distance,” Morton writes. He even wants to say that art and other objects temporalize us—that is, they literally provide us with time, albeit a more fundamental time than clock-time. “How it looks, how it feels . . . its mass, its shape—all that, which we could call appearance, is the past.” How the art will affect me, how it will prompt certain reflections and projections in me, how it shapes the way I look at it and other objects hereafter, when I see in some other object that which I see now, in this object—all this is the future. The present is “a sort of train-station” wherein past and future meet, “a kind of relative motion between . . . past and future. I call it nowness to differentiate it from a reified atomic ‘present’ that I actually don’t think truly exists,” Morton explains. To the correlationists—such as the post-structuralists, who maintain that what we say objects are are in fact cultural constructs, “discursive products of epistemic formations” or “concepts we project onto certain lumps of matter”—Morton responds that “there has to be a correlatee as well as a correlator: there is a violin sonata, not just a violinist.” To be sure, we do decide what is real to a certain extent, yet this does not also mean that the correlator, be it the Kantian subject, the Nietzschean will to power, or Dasein, is more real than the objects we encounter. We do not simply determine them; they too, speak to us and consequently determine themselves.
Morton seeks to rediscover and recover the non-violent, non-dominant attunement he believes pre-Neolithic peoples practiced in accordance with their environment, and herein lies one of the book’s major flaws. Not unlike some of the thinkers he admires, Morton paints with an unfathomably broad brush; it is not hyperbolic to say that he attributes most, if not all of our modern woes, and most certainly climate catastrophe, to Neolithic domestication and concomitant monotheism. When humans started to farm, they were subsequently forced to continue to farm in order to stay alive, and the institutional structures that materialized as part of this revolution in human history were hierarchical, oppressive, and rooted in systematic domination. Humans came to see the environment as mere mindless, plastic stuff upon which they could act unilaterally, heedless to how and whether matter could speak to them, summon them, and transform them, as it had in the pre-Neolithic era. Fortunately, the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, and subsequent twentieth century thinkers rediscovered how objects are both what they are and how they appear to us, and particularly that how they appear to us betrays some sense of what they actually are. This development, coupled with deconstructive efforts from the likes of Jacques Derrida and others, upended the traditional, static-substance metaphysics that arose when Neolithic humans started to farm; deconstruction has thus helped us rethink dichotomies between the human and non-human, the conscious and non-conscious, the sentient and non-sentient. As per this narrative, Morton contends, a new, leveled-out metaphysics has resurfaced, one which resembles the pre-Neolithic attunement practiced by earlier humans. Morton calls this metaphysics the spectral plain, and a less violent, more playful, perhaps even more indifferent posture toward the lifeforms that inhabit this spectral plain is the mode in which we should attend to climate catastrophe and the earth system more broadly.
There are numerous elements of this narrative that are both historically accurate and philosophically persuasive. The metaphysics toward which Morton alludes is the best defense of non-anthropocentric eco-centrism that I have thus far encountered. And his analysis of care is, albeit unintuitive and at first ostensibly unethical, much needed at a time when “what to do” dominates and actively undermines our conversations about the climate crisis. Yet Morton’s story weirdly romanticizes pre-Neolithic humans and pretends as if no other humans for more than ten-thousand years have also practiced what he calls attunement. Moreover, Morton unpersuasively maintains that Christianity particularly excludes such an attitude and its concomitant metaphysics, which is patently not the case. The monolithic narrative wherein Christian philosophers inherited from Plato a stark mind-body dualism and an otherworldly metaphysical orientation is reductionist and historically imprecise, and Morton simply seems to accept this narrative rather than provide evidence to justify his wholesale rejection of Christian or any other “monotheistic” philosophy. One need only read Thomas Aquinas and other medieval thinkers to see how important sense-perception is in their metaphysics, and one need only peruse Book XIV of City of God for an explicit patristic rejection of the mind-body dualism purportedly apparent in Platonism (which, for some philosophers, is not so obvious even in Plato).
To be sure, orthodox Christian metaphysics is hierarchical, yet hierarchy need not entail domination and, properly conceived, can more appropriately attend to relationality between different types of creatures and objects. Humans are, after all, profoundly different than prokaryotes, which is not to necessarily say we are better than them, or that our interests should always come first; nevertheless, it is to say that I have a metaphysically different sort of responsibility to other humans than I do to the bacteria that cover my skin and live inside my intestines, with whom I do, as Morton wants to stress, collaborate on a daily basis. Moreover, it is just not true that a Christian hierarchical view of the creation is at its core otherworldly. When Morton cherry-picks a quote from Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew—“Store up your treasure in heaven”—then explains that this “means you don’t need to worry so much about what happens down here, because it’s less real and less important,” he betrays a remarkably uncharitable and poor comprehension of creation metaphysics. As someone like Rowan Williams could inform Morton, an orthodox Christian view of the creation cultivates what Williams calls “a solidarity in creatureliness” that rejects the myth of self-creation and therefore dominance, which Morton likewise wants to unsettle. On a Christian view, the creation is not mindless, plastic stuff, even if, at the same time, it alone cannot provide the metaphysical fulfillment we all seek. Yet this latter accession need not—or rather should not, not ever—allay any Christian’s anxiety about what happens here, on earth, to the earth system. Just as God is utterly for the world—“God desires to be God for what is not God,” which is to be God, Williams explains—then we, in openness to the divine action, likewise strive to be for the world in the same way.
Consequently, monotheistic traditions—or at least the one with which I am most familiar—do not fit so neatly into the narrative Morton presents here; more importantly, they are not so hostile to his ultimate project as he seems to think. If we are to embody the non-calculative, non-dominant praxis that attunement reflects, we should attend to how other traditions and worldviews can inform, correct, or make more persuasive the case for such praxis. Grand, reductionist (and rather caustic) narratives of the history of “Neolithic” philosophy can only undermine this effort. Thus, while Morton adds so much to our impoverished environmental discourse, he needlessly excludes a whole host of helpful voices from such discourse. And this ultimately makes this book poorer than it otherwise could have been.
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Ben Thurley
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April 22, 2020
Morton's one big idea in this book (that we're already "ecological" just by "being") is wrapped in one philosophical framework (object oriented ontology - OOO) inflected with a slightly coy (at least in this work) Buddhist temperament and he'll be damned (or you will) if he's not going to drag you across a landscape of cool and coruscating philosophy/cultural studies to get that across. "You don't have to be ecological", he says in the book's final sentences (...spoilers...). "Because you are ecological."
His opening chapter, "Not Another Information Dump" is outstanding. He nails a mode of knowledge and communication – driven by anxiety and a sadly misinformed epistemology – that too often characterises environmental campaigning and discourse:
Ecological information delivery mode in the media seems most often to consist of what we could call an information dump.leading to what Morton refers to as a sort of "ecological PTSD."
Morton helpfully aims to take a step back and asks how is this discourse intended to be received? What kind of response is it aiming to generate? Are those responses desirable, or even possible? His OOO helps us see that the "factoids" this discourse generates cannot possibly help us to grasp a thing (any thing) in itself - let alone something as all-encompassing and all-consuming as "ecology" and its current crisis, "climate change". The truth of our ecological existence, he rightly says, is fundamentally ungraspable and never separable from our inherently contingent, subjective, partial realities.
I didn't find all the writing as accessible and there's much I disagree with. Maybe I'm just not cool enough, but I tuned out of a lot of his over-long chapter "Tuning"and though I thought his analysis of the ecological styles of immersion, authenticity, religion and efficiency was stimulating, by the time of the final chapter I was already tired of yet more references to The Simpsons and deconstructions of the concept of genre on iTunes. Oh, and a small side-note: Morton's contention that "free will is overrated" is based on a widely misinterpreted experiment.
Morton helpfully identifies and critiques the either-or/black-or-white thinking that generates notions of individual guilt in our current ecological crisis. He is, of course, right to point out that no one person caused the climate crisis and any individual's actions make only an infinitesimal contribution to our current disrupted and dangerous ecological state. Although, in an almost perfect encapsulation of his black andwhite (not black-or-white) thinking, he also – correctly – notes that "whatever evil is, it is an intrinsic aspect of oneself." It is, Morton declares, "the human species", not "sea turtles" or "the octopus species", that caused global warming.
It is in this dual performance of liberation from, and liturgy of, (a somewhat dispassionate sense of) personal guilt that I dramatically part ways with Morton. Certainly he attempts to defend himself from the charge of quietism or political indifference – though, to my mind, unsuccessfully. He identifies my urge to name a culprit or identify avenues for action to repair the world as part, if not the sum total, of the problem when it comes to thinking and acting ecologically. He is repeatedly scornful or dismissive of well-meaning but misguided attempts to ask "so what should we do?" at the end of every conference or discussion about ecology.
However, it is a matter of empirical analysis – which Morton largely eschews – to attempt to trace our current crisis to the actors and networks and processes that wield disproportionate power and influence in our fossil-fueled wealth-dream. It is not merely "the human species" – an abstraction Morton has already helpfully deconstructed – as opposed to "the octopus species" that has caused global warming. The vast majority of human beings who have ever lived and who currently live bear no responsibility whatsover for our current ecological crisis. There are corporations with names and CEOs and boards and marketing teams and scientists on retainer – along with politicians and governments which are beholden to them – that have caused the crisis. But you will not read about them in Being Ecological.
I guess, I'd like to affirm Morton's holistic disengagement from, and critique of, the urgency of knowing certain kinds of things in certain kinds of ways. It is helpful to think about the ways that our embodied existence is already an ecological one and admit that "we" (people like me) can unnecessarily create barriers to people recognising this for themselves. However, the question remains, if I can be ecological just by being, how am I to act ecologically in light of the actual ecology I exist within.
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From the United States
Pen Bay Person
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2018
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A must read for every rational, thoughtful person in the world!
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Joshua Chavanne
5.0 out of 5 stars We are all Ecological
Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2018
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Worthwhile and thought-provoking.
Kind of inarguable
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Laura
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 5, 2020
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My lecturer recommended this book to me and it was definitely a wonderful read! Morton explores very deep topics in an accessible way so if you’re worried that philosophy isn’t your thing or don’t want to waste your time reading complicated philosophical texts, you honestly have nothing to worry about!! Don’t get me wrong, this is still a deeply fascinating philosophical text but everything is written in a very inclusive way and all topics are explained very well. Morton manages to be funny while also teaching us about climate change etc, which I imagine isn’t an easy task at all! Also the music/pop culture references make it so much more fun/enthralling to read. Overall, I recommend it to anyone :)
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Duncan Spence
5.0 out of 5 stars A must for anybody who thinks about ecology
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 12, 2020
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Most philosophy in English is translated out of German, French, Italian, Latin, Arabic, Greek and so forth. Morton's is possibly the best philosophy written in English since Wm James or maybe even Adam Smith and David Hume. The analysis spans twelve and a half thousand years, extending the origins of the current crisis of western intellectualising to the first domestic enclosures of Mesopotamia, to the moment when human beings turned from hunting and gathering to building fences round fields and manipulating crop production. Everybody should read this book.
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Dominikus Heil
5.0 out of 5 stars This book is a ‚must read‘!!!!!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 20, 2021
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This book is a game changer in the ecological discourse. I do not understand why there is not more of a public discussion about this groundbreaking work. If you want to really understand the issue at stake with this central issue of our time, buy this book!
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José Macaya
1.0 out of 5 stars En ningún momento entendí dónde quería llegar o cuál era su mensaje
Reviewed in Spain on November 20, 2021
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Sin duda me equivoqué al comprar este libro. Pensé que contenía algún enfoque novedoso sobre el tema ecológico, pero no tiene nada que ver con eso. Es un libro de filosofía, pero lo encontré deslavazado y sin rumbo. En ningún momento entendí dónde quería llegar o cuál era su mensaje. Veo que otros lectores lo apreciaron más, pero imagino que es porque no buscaban lo que yo esperaba encontrar, y se sintieron cómodos con el estilo divagante del autor
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Emilio Portal
5.0 out of 5 stars melting your phenomenological reconfiguration
Reviewed in Canada on October 22, 2018
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this book goes deep into the constructs that brought us to this catastrophe: the 6th mass extinction. morton provides a new and radical ontology and phenomenology that deconstructs notions of self and other, knowledge, property, politics, art and ecology. poetic and sublime.
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Libra
1.0 out of 5 stars What is this?
Reviewed in Canada on June 21, 2019
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I get that Tim Morton is knowledgeable, and wants to add to the plethora of books out there about global warming and ecological devastation. However, it would help if the reader could make sense of what he is writing.
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Shedman
5.0 out of 5 stars Veer your brain in new directions
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 4, 2018
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Wonderfully challenging. Full of fascinating insights and concepts as slippery as fish. But a welcome change to so much ‘nature writing’ and very enjoyable.
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Margery Een
5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning, cosy and uncanny. Morton is a genius.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 24, 2018
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Stunning, cosy and uncanny. Morton is a genius. And it's short. Just go and read it. Then dissolve.
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