Timothy Morton
2013-10-01
Having set global warming in irreversible motion, we are facing the possibility of ecological catastrophe. But the environmental emergency is also a crisis for our philosophical habits of thought, confronting us with a problem that seems to defy not only our control but also our understanding. Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”—entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. In this book, Morton explains what hyperobjects are and their impact on how we think, how we coexist with one another and with nonhumans, and how we experience our politics, ethics, and art.
Moving fluidly between philosophy, science, literature, visual and conceptual art, and popular culture, the book argues that hyperobjects show that the end of the world has already occurred in the sense that concepts such as world, nature, and even environment are no longer a meaningful horizon against which human events take place. Instead of inhabiting a world, we find ourselves inside a number of hyperobjects, such as climate, nuclear weapons, evolution, or relativity. Such objects put unbearable strains on our normal ways of reasoning.
Insisting that we have to reinvent how we think to even begin to comprehend the world we now live in, Hyperobjects takes the first steps, outlining a genuinely postmodern ecological approach to thought and action.
Timothy Morton's 'Hyperobjects' introduces a novel framework for grappling with the ecological epoch we inhabit, proposing that phenomena like global warming and nuclear radiation challenge our traditional understandings of space, time, and causality. The book weaves together strands of speculative realism, environmental philosophy, and post-Kantian thought, inviting readers to reconceptualize the ontological status of such phenomena. Morton's analysis is both rigorous and accessible, making a compelling case for a philosophical reorientation towards the 'hyperobject'—an entity that is massively distributed in time and space, yet fundamentally inaccessible to human comprehension. This work, though not traditionally within the purview of hard science fiction, resonates deeply with the themes of scale, complexity, and the limits of human cognition that characterize my preferred reading material.
