Reviewing Timothy Morton’s Being Ecological
As the title suggests, Timothy Morton’s Being Ecological is a book about ecology. However, in a sense, the book tries to do more than simply presenting a philosophical, anthropological, or biological perspective on ecology. It tries to give an expansive critique on the way in which a lot of ecological thought is structured, and why this way of thinking is faulty. Morton adds that it is this faulty way of thinking that got us into (climate) trouble in the first place. Within the book, Morton also aims to provide us with a conceptual toolkit that may remedy our faulty ways of thinking. Each chapter follows a relatively similar structure, wherein Morton notes a problem, explicates it, and critiques it. The final part tries to provide a new way of thinking that may remedy this problem. For clarity’s sake, I will also follow this structure in my analysis of the book.
Factoids, Objects and Neolithic Thinking
One of the main points Morton argues in Being Ecological is that our way of perceiving reality is fundamentally wrong. While this may seem a somewhat large claim, Morton does provide ample argumentation for this throughout the book. In the introduction, he writes about the way in which we present ecological information to ourselves. Information about climate change is often presented as a compilation of data that must convince us of something – namely, climate change. Morton states that small chunks of data are presented as holding a fact, which he calls “factoids” (Morton, 2018, 8). These factoids appear to factually tell us something about reality, and therefore hold some kind of truth. The reality is that factoids are only interpretations of small pieces of data and are therefore not facts, but only fact-like, as Morton states. A lot of ecological thought is concerned with the idea that if we can compile enough factoids, we will ‘get’ climate change and will be able to act upon it. Morton relates this scientific perspective to the way in which human beings think about reality at large. We perceive ourselves as a rational subject that is independent of the world and can perceive and ‘grasp’ things around it, be that via sight, sounds, or scientific analysis. Objects exist outside of the human psyche and are there to be analyzed, grabbed, utilized, etc.
This idea of the human psyche being independent of ‘things’ is a symptom of ways of thought that originated in the Neolithic period (Morton, 2018, 50). Morton states that historically, since the move from hunter-gatherer to agricultural society, humans have started to create conceptual separations between animal-human, culture-nature, master-subject. They claim that this idea of human beings being able to rationalize and divide the world has, in turn, led to industrial capitalism and the problems that have arisen from it.
OOO
Morton presents his answer to the problem of Neolithic thinking in the form of object-oriented ontology (OOO). Object-oriented ontology is a way of thinking about ‘things’. It proposes that all things exist in the same way, thus there is no way in which human existence is more important than the existence of any other thing. Additionally, it maintains that there are infinite ways of accessing things in the world, such as grabbing, throwing, talking to, drawing on, etc. Therefore, you can never exhaust the way in which things can be accessed. This means that things remain fundamentally independent and can never be fully grasped.
This also means that all things, animal, plant or stone, cannot be reduced to the way humans perceive them. In this way, OOO can help in combatting anthropocentric ways of thinking, including those that privilege the position of humans above animals and objects. In summary, Morton thus states that ‘being ecological’ is “acknowledging in a deep way the existence of beings that aren’t you, with whom you coexist” (Morton, 2018, 128). This means that we accept the fact that we cannot fully grasp the essence and existence of beings around us, but we also accept that these beings exist, nevertheless. Being ecological is therefore a way of opening up and letting the existence of other beings into our own lifeworld.
Assessment
In general, this work is great at tackling the issue of anthropocentrism and presents an original critique and a strong response in the form of OOO. The work goes beyond simply diagnosing the problem in the form of socio-political structures that cause climate change. However, one point of critique that may be raised against this work is the fact Morton writes quite erratically. Morton often begins a chapter by expanding on a certain idea or thought, but then suddenly switches to another subject, leaving the explanation of the idea unfinished. This is a reemerging pattern in the work, and it significantly harms the readability of Being Ecological. Regarding accessibility, I therefore argue that although this work is accessible for a wider public, base-level knowledge of philosophers like Kant and Heidegger is necessary. The reason for this is that, while Morton does explain the ideas these philosophers hold, they are often brought up quite spontaneously in the text. Nonetheless, despite these shortcomings, this is a strong public philosophical work that provides an original narrative about ecological thought, which also serves as a good introduction to Timothy Morton’s further body of work.
Bibliography
Morton, Timothy. 2018. A Pelican Introduction: Being Ecological. Pelican Books.