|
A
peer-reviewed electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics and ISSN
1541-0099 29(1)
– June 2019 |
Book review: Being
Ecological by Timothy
Morton
Steven
Umbrello
Institute
for Ethics and Emerging Technologies; Università degli Studi di Torino
Journal
of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 29 Issue 1 – June 2019 - pgs 19-20
From its opening page, Being Ecological (MIT Press, 2018; all
page references to this edition) seems to situate itself as an ecological text
of an unusual kind, stating that it does not aim to guilt its readers into
ecological angst with weighty
factoids and the information-dump approach, or “ecological information delivery
mode” (p. 7), so often adopted by other authors. Timothy Morton, notorious for
his ability to invert commonly held beliefs and understandings within the
humanities, presents Being Ecological
as his attempt to arrive at a more authentic and productive understanding of
what he has called elsewhere the ecological thought and how to live with it
(Morton 2012), rather than trying to guilt-trip us into ecology.
Rather than employing
the information-dump approach, Morton opts to investigate the way we understand
ecology and our interconnected relationships with nonhuman beings. His goal is
to arrive at a lived and embodied ecology, rather than the information- and
fact-based one that dominates the existing ecological literature. To arrive at
this, most of the book is dedicated to a staunch critique of anthropocentrism.
This reveals the illusory nature of human-exclusive correlationism,
that is, the world is not simply the correlation beween
the human mind and external objects. This
demonstrates, even to the most ecologically apathetic or ignorant reader, that
the human interconnectedness with nonhumans and the biosphere is intrinsically
deep, uncanny, and necessarily inseparable.
A feature of Morton’s earlier
corpus is his concept that humanity remains trapped within the confines of a Neolithic
agricultural logistics program that has artificially severed the human from the
nonhuman. This separation that he elsewhere calls “The Severing” (Morton 2017,
89) is ultimately the product of the Neolithic program and does not
authentically map on to the more complex reality of our world: an enmeshment
and interconnectedness of all things. The idea of nature is, itself, a human fabrication
that resulted from this mental separation and is no more than an
anthropocentric way of construing existence.
Morton argues that we
need an historical understanding of this anthropocentric style of thought in
order to penetrate the “massive firewall” (Being
Ecological, p. 128) raised during the Neolithic, and to reconnect with a
more accurate understanding of what actually exists in our world, and how. For
Morton, such an ontological inquiry is a critical step in living with
ecological knowledge and provides a more intuitive and successful way of
addressing the current ecological crisis than more common approaches in the
established literature.
The strength of Morton’s
account lies in its explosiveness, the ease with which it can dismantle the
anthropocentric conceptions that Morton sees as the cause of our ecological
crisis. However, just as quickly, the book leans toward theoretical
obscurantism. More often than not, the author plays fast and loose with his
theoretical constructs and deconstructions, offering to fill the vacuum left
behind with only an ambiguous praxis. What are the applied ethics of this
living ecology? How are we supposed to take these concepts, actually employ
them in our daily lives, and avert the crisis that they are evidently intended
to address? Morton seems to want to answer these questions, but he mostly
dodges them throughout the text; accordingly, there is, to say the least,
something left wanting in Being
Ecological. What, exactly, are we supposed to do with these ideas?
To be fair, Morton never
claims to provide practical guidelines for how his theories are to be applied.
He merely offers them up – perhaps they are a matter of the author’s self-actualization.
His other, denser texts on these subjects play a similar tune in their emphasis
on pure theory rather than practice. Nonetheless, a way to actually live ecology would be useful in showing
its actual power to avert catastrophe.
At its heart, this book
is a masterful dance that draws on art, religion, death, temporality, and
beauty. This is not a surprise from Morton, given his repertoire of
philosophical contributions that deal with all these topics while playfully, as
a staple of his writing, approaching metaphor and allusion. Where Being Ecological differs is its
accessibility: his other works may prove to be too obscure for readers not
steeped in literature, theology, continental philosophy, and art criticism.
Here, by contrast, Morton tills new ground by making his unique ecophilosophy approachable by any audience. Being Ecological serves, therefore, as a
tempering text for those brave enough to pick up one of its author’s more
narrow works. All in all, this book is a work of unprecedented catharsis that
provides the era of information overload with a novel approach to addressing
the sixth mass extinction.
References
Morton, Timothy. 2012. The ecological thought. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
———. 2017.
Humankind: Solidarity with nonhuman people.
London: Verso.