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Timothy Morton
Since roughly 1790, humans have been depositing a thin layer of carbon in Earths
crust. This layer can now be detected in deep lakes and in Arctic ice. The term
now given for this by geology is Anthropocene, a disturbing moment at which
human history intersects decisively with geological time (Crutzen & Stoermer,
2000, p. 1718).
Since 1945, when humans began to deposit a layer of radioactive materials in
Earths crust, the Anthropocene has accelerated logarithmically, and we now live
within a period called The Great Acceleration. Global warming and extinction are
interrelated effects of the crossroads we have now reached, a crossroads at which
geological and human time have intersected.
This intersection renders meaningless the very tools with which modernity
has striven to talk about the nonhuman: concepts such as nature, world and even
environment are now obsolete. Though they may be politically useful in some
circumstances, they are not heuristically useful in any meaningful sense, and may
indeed be part of the problem and not part of the solution.
Furthermore, we are now confronted with gigantic entitiesglobal warming,
evolution, biospherethat cannot be seen directly by three-dimensional beings of
limited intelligence. Rather, they can be inferred mathematically and logically, a
fact that emphasizes that reason itself is not strictly human-flavoured, and that we
inhabit a reality that is much larger, and more intractable, than we had supposed.
1790 was also roughly the moment at which Western philosophy decided that
it could not talk about the real, but only about (human) access to the real. I see
this moment and the fact of the Anthropocene as deeply related. What is required
is a philosophyand a corresponding ethics and politicsthat can think of the
nonhuman not simply as the adornment or correlate of the human. Modernity
damaged Earth, but it also damaged thinking. Unfortunately, one of the damaged
concepts is the very concept nature.
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for cause and effect (Hume, 1993). All we have to go on are statistical correlations.
Kant grounds this in what he calls pure reason and gives a deep explanation for it.
Causality in contemporary science is just Humeanit is about bundles of data that
correlate statistically. Causality, in other words, is in the realm of appearance, not some
mechanical realm churning away underneath things. But what are the conditions
of possibility for knowing that these rather than those data are accurate? There must
always already be something in the back of our heads, something like a gigantic
ocean right behind us, an ocean of reason we are unable to see or touch, yet an
ocean which gives us the possibility of counting, of understanding number and
numbers, and so on.
Our sense of reality shudders. Kant himself provides an example that is uncannily
meteorological. We frequently feel raindrops on our head: they are wet, spherical,
cold and so on. But there is no basis to regard this experience as the thing in
itselfwhatever we are sensing is merely a phenomenal display, an aspect of that
Unknown = X (Kant, 1965, p. 845). Our concept of rainthe very physical,
the very tangible experience of raindrops hitting our headdoes not fully access
the real. Prior to Kant, Hume had blown a hole in causality theories by reducing
causality to mere statistical probability, which as I stated is how modern science
operates. Kant provided the deep reason for this stochastic approach to causality
there is an Unknown = X in the world, there is a crack in the real, and this fissure
marks the difference between phenomenon and thing.
For Kant, two kinds of being inhabit reality on either side of the fissure: humans
(or rather, consciousness, but for the anthropocentric Kant these are very much the
same thing) on the hither side of the crack; and everything else on the yonder side.
Kant himself was disturbed by the fissure. In a sense, this is Kants way of policing
the fissure, restricting the movement of the genie he has released, the genie that
comes to be known in the century that followed as nothingness. Something is there,
yet inaccessible, something like a shadow that flickers across a thing, something we
can only glimpse out of the corner of our eye.
Hegels solution to the problem of nothingness that leaks out of the fissure is
to paper over the crack. I cannot know the thing in itself, he argues, but there I am,
realizing thatso I can know the thing in itself. For Hegel, nothingness is thus a
form of illusion belonging to a primitive state of consciousness that doesnt realize
this sublime Hegelian truth. This primitive state has a name for Hegelit is called
Buddhism. Hegel palms nothingness off on the supposedly inferior peoples of the
East with their supposedly inferior religion, hobbling them in the grand march of
history towards its inevitable outcome, which is becoming a Hegelian (Hegel, 1988,
pp. 265 n. 183, 185, 266 n. 188, 5045; Hegel, 1975, pp. 125, 127).
But what elsewhere I have called hyperobjects, massively distributed entities
such as global warming, biosphere, evolution, electromagnetismthe discoveries of
the nineteenth century and afterare precisely efficient in reopening the gap for
us. Hyperobjects are things that one can compute and think, but not see or touch
(Morton, 2013). It is as if in the case of hyperobjects, reason were capable of slapping
us upside the head with a dose of reality, or better, as if through reason we figured
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they are and how they appear, even to themselves. There is a humanworld gap.
There is a toasterworld gap.There is a crack between octopuses and toasters.There
is a crack between octopuses and octopuses: octopus thing and octopus phenomena
are fissured from within. There is a crack between this octopus and this coral reef;
a crack between this coral reef itself and this coral reef itself. Like some astonishingly beautiful piece of Japanese raku, reality is just riddled with trillions of cracks.
OOO is thus the first western view to embrace the nothingness with no hesitation
whatsoever. And thus OOO performs the task of overcoming nihilismwhich as
Nietzsche and Heidegger argued cannot be overcome by pushing or resisting but
by going in and transforming from underneath.
Nothingness rules out the metaphysics of presence. Kant made sure that the
factoids of presence were reduced to flimsy perilous islands floating on top of the
giant ocean of reason. Things like cause and effect, things like primal substance,
are no longer safe havens. If you cant have presence, then you cant have a void
at the beginning of timeyou cant shunt the void back there. To do so is not
particularly scientific: it is just to conform to the Papal edict of 1277 that pronounced
that since God was all powerful, he could have created an infinite void, and that
therefore, he had (Casey, 1997, p. 10616). But you also are incapable of restricting the nothingness to the humanworld gap, since there is nothing in particular
that makes humans special, and you know that because you are a post-Kantian
who grew up in a world of science. You cant really palm nothingness off on the
Buddhists eitherpeople who live Over There in a primitive state of not knowing
the beautiful circularity of Hegel.
Since nothing at all can coincide with its appearance, then, in the words of my
title this is not my beautiful biosphere.1 Anxiety arises as the spontaneous result of
noticing that we are not at home in our home: the uncanny. The gigantic entities
that human reason, assisted by prosthetic computing devices, has detected, will
simply not fit into the human box, because they are not part of human phenomenal
experienceand because human phenomenal experience is just that: its simply
what we touch and see and know.
Dark Ecology
The Anthropocene collapses the difference between the human realm and so-called
nature. Boundary collapse has resulted in what I prefer to call the end of the world,
which is to say the collapse of a meaningful and stable background against which
human events can become significant, as on a stage set. In turn, the loss of distance
has resulted in a powerful sense of the uncanny and the strange.
The collapse of the humannonhuman boundary is due, as we have been
exploring, to the radical intersection of human history and geological time. As if
to prove Jungs law of synchronicity, the intersection coincided with the restriction
of philosophy to the humanworld correlate. And yet the deep reasons for this
restriction, the realization that there is a crack in the real, that there is a profound
finitude to human being, means that there are things in heaven and earth that hadnt
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onand the same logic applies until I have only one blade of grass left. I conclude,
wrongly, that there is no meadow. These paradoxes plague sets of lifeforms at any
scale, and therefore it is strictly impossible to think ecological reality via a metaphysics of presence, namely, a belief that to be a thing, you have to be constantly
present.
It is paradoxically much better to think that there is a meadow and there is
not a meadow at the same time. We seem to have violated the supposed Law
of Noncontradiction, asserted but not proved in Section Gamma of Aristotles
Metaphysics. There is a meadow, but we cant point to it directly, because its not
constantly present. And yet here is the meadow, with the butterflies, the cowslips,
the voles. Just as a vole is a set of things that are not voles, so the meadow is a set of
things such as voles that are not meadows.
Thus a spectral strangeness that haunts being applies not only to lifeformsa
vole is a not-volebut also to meadows, ecosystems, biomes and the biosphere.
The haunting, withdrawn yet vivid spectrality of things also means that there can
be sets of things that are not strictly members of that set, and this violates Russells
prohibition on the set paradox that arises precisely through thinking Cantors
transfinite sets. Transfinite sets are as we just saw sets of numbers that contain sets
of numbers that are not strictly members of that set. There is an irreducible gap
between the set of real numbers and the set of rational numbersCantor himself,
like Gdel, drove himself crazy trying to find a smooth continuum between the two.
This drive to find a continuum is a hangover from the Law of Noncontradiction,
which has never been formally proved, but which has been accepted as a precondition for philosophy since Aristotle.
This means that contemporary thinking cannot cleave to a logic that assumes
that things are rigid and brittle, whether those things are static entities or
flowing processesfor processes can also be rigid, namely ontically given in the
Heideggerian lingo. Brittleness has to do with assuming that things do not contradict
themselves. The deep reason for self-contradiction is that reality is ambiguous and
contradictory.
Nothing makes this clearer than ecological awareness, which is simply human
cognition coming up to speed with the fact of the Anthropocene. This coming up
to speed is like tracing the contours of a Mbius strip. There we were, achieving
escape velocity from the past, being modernI would assert to the contrary that
we have in fact been modern, contra Latourwhen all of a sudden, we find out
that we are shrink wrapped in the real. And, irony of ironies, this discovery is within
reason and logic themselves. It was phenomenology, for example, that set logic back
on a rigorous footing in Husserls preface to Logical Investigationswresting it away
from the psychologism that had reduced logic to a function of (human) brains
(Husserl, 2006, p. I: 1161). Yet this very move discovers discrete entities, which
Husserl calls intentional objects, swimming around like fish in the ocean of reason:
hoping, hating, asserting, wishing. These intentional objects have autonomy: they
are real in the sense that they are not simply reflections of our mind. They have a
front and a back, as it weremy mental image of a mailbox (Husserls example) has
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try to play it, it emits sympathetic vibrations that blow the record player to bits
(Hofstadter, 1999, p. 76). Existence means being inconsistent, which means having
what in Greek tragedy is called a hamartia, a tragic flaw.
This flaw is a wound, but it is a productive wound. Oedipus hamartia is that he
is so smart and so competent as the intellectual detective that he finds out that he is
the criminal he has been looking for. Its a tight loop, a Mbius strip. Dark ecology
means that we realize the truth of Oedipus, the primal myth of the agricultural
agethe age we still live in, the age that is responsible for much global warming,
the age that necessitated the industry that accounts for the rest of global warming.
Necessitated it not only socially but also ontologically, because Mesopotamian
agricultural logistics reifies Earth into domination-ready slabs of unformatted space
waiting to be filled and ploughed: a reification that paves the way for patriarchy
with its male seeds containing the essence of the human. An ecological age must
necessarily be a post-agricultural age, which means that an ecological age must push
against thousands of years of human history. Oedipus, king of the city-state that is
the culmination of generations of agricultural development, discovers that he is the
culprit responsible for the miasma (the physically and morally polluting plague) that
plagues not only people, but also the environment itself.
The Mbius twist is this: the very reasoning that asserts that human access to
reality is all philosophy can talk about is the passageway to an uncanny awareness
that humans are the culprit; furthermore, following Darwin, humans are replicants,
haphazard kludges of nonhumans, made of nonhumans and thus self-contradictory.
Humans are collections of nonhuman tools as if we were witnessing Darwin shaking
hands with Heidegger.We are human and not-human at the very same time. Under
its own steam (pun intended) reason exits the anthropocentric sphere and begins to
speak of strange, nonhuman entities.
Thus the dominant mode of ecological awareness is anxiety, the feeling that
things have lost their seemingly original significance, the feeling that something
creepy is happening, close to home.Through anxiety reason itself begins to glimpse
what indigenousthat is, pre-agriculturalcultures have known all along: that
humans coexist with a host of nonhumans. For reason reveals itself to be at least
a little bit nonhuman itself. In turn, reason discovers global warming, that miasma
for which humans are responsible. Through reason we find ourselves not floating
blissfully in outer space, but caught like Jonah in the whale of a gigantic object, the
biosphere. Such an object is not reducible to its members, nor its members to it;
it is a set whose members are not strictly coterminous with itself. Since this entity
cannot be known directly, it is known by intuition, by a kind of synthetic judgment
a priori, as Kant calls it. It is dark, insofar as its essence is unspeakable. It is dark,
insofar as illumination leads to a greater sense of entrapment. It is dark, because it
compels us to recognize the melancholic wounds that make us upthe shocks and
traumas and cataclysms that have made oxygen for our lungs to breathe, lungs out of
swim bladders, and crushing, humiliating reason out of human domination of Earth.
Within logic, we discover things that contradict themselves.Via accurate instruments, we discover beings that far outstrip human temporality: the time of global
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Notes
1 The title alludes to Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime, Remain in Light (Sire, 1980).
2 Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime.
Works Cited
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Hofstadter, D., 1999. Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books.
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Husserl, E., 2006. Prolegomena to All Logic. In: D. Moran, ed. Logical Investigations. London:
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Kant, I., 1965. Critique of Pure Reason. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martins.
Morton, T., 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Schopenhauer, A., 1969. The World as Will and Representation. New York: Dover Publications.
Tillich, P., 1951. Systematic Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Author Queries
AQ1: Sentence OK as edited?
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