I've managed to persuade Yoko Ono to put some of her work in my Penguin book!
— Timothy Morton
'Nowness' is a dynamic relation between the past and the future.
Since a thing cannot be known directly or totally, one can only attune to it, with greater or lesser degrees of intimacy.
Beauty doesn't have to be in accord with prefabricated concepts of 'pretty.'
Unfortunately, of course, guilt is an artifact of agricultural-age religion and is designed specifically to prevent humans from thinking and operating on a collective level.
Unfortunately, there are some ecological phenomenological chemicals within consumerism.
The noises Russia makes on the world stage are deeply misogynist, homophobic and racist.
We like to think, in our anthropocentric way, that irony means that you transcended something, but actually, what it means is that you've realised that you're stuck in something, and you have this kind of uncanny awareness of that, and there's not much you can do about that feeling of stuckness.
I'm not unhappy with the idea of appealing to people's self-interest if that's what makes them understand something about the non-human world.
Invoking Nature always measures the distance we have yet to travel to achieve real progress on environmental issues.
One advantage of arguing that causality is aesthetic is that it allows us to consider what we call consciousness alongside what we call things.
Anyone who has trouble imagining causality as magical and uncanny need only consider the existence of children.
The Severing is a catastrophe: an event that does not take place 'at' a certain 'point' in linear time, but a wave that ripples out in many dimensions, and in whose wake we are caught.
I believe art is a way to attune to what reality is, which is a weird reality.
Inevitably, ecological awareness has this kind of '70s flavour to it.
Everything is a railway junction where past and future are sliding over one another, not touching.
The present is haunted by the X-present. I call this manifold of present and X-present 'nowness': a shifting, haunted region like evaporating mist; a region can't be tied to a specific timescale.
I love folding laundry.
You don't eat a painting of an apple; you don't find it morally good. Instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves.
We intellectuals are not stupid: we know the phenomenology of guilt is a bad photocopy of the phenomenology of thought, so it's much cheaper to press that button.
It's very important that we keep our imagination, which is our capacity to open the future, awake at a time at which the urge to collapse into the fetal position is high.
Our ecological emergency demands proactive choices, not reactive sideswipes.
Symbiosis can fail in various different ways: if there's too much stomach bacteria in my stomach, I might have some problems. If there's too little, I might have some problems. There's a sort of dynamic system there.
Aesthetic experiences are powerful, to be sure, and probably inescapable, but Nature will not remain effective for very long.
The trouble with ecological invocations of Nature is that they're like calling for a medieval tool, perhaps a portcullis or an arrow slit, to fix a modern problem.
When you make or study art, you are not exploring some kind of candy on the surface of a machine. You are making or studying causality.
Am I simply a vehicle for numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me?
An artist attunes to what things are, which means sort of listening to the future, which is just how things are - I think time is a sort of liquid that pours out of hatpins, underground trains, salt crystals. So a work of art is also listening to itself, because what it is never quite coincides with how it appears, too.
I can get quite well known, and then I can unleash this kind of anarchist-hippie thing that I've been holding like a very precious liquid, carefully, without spilling any, for years and years and years. And now I'm going to pour it everywhere.
You wouldn't believe how many philosophers are afraid of movement.
The belief that 'animals' are superior or inferior to humans because they live in an eternal now is untrue, because no being lives in a now.
Since appearance can't be peeled decisively from the reality of a thing, attunement is a living, dynamic relation with another being.
Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept.
When you watch one person on stage trying to surmount their fate only in that very action to embody it, it's called a tragedy. When you see a lot of people doing it on stage, it's called 'Fawlty Towers.'
Ecological thought rejects consumerism at its peril.
American voting districts are, across a lot of the country, deeply messed up by having been gerrymandered by right-wing politicians.
Since when did scientific evidence become a reason to shy away from ecological action just because it wasn't popular?
Trivially speaking, ecological awareness means realising that beings are interconnected in some way, but then we have to figure out what this interconnection actually means.
Nature was developed to resist the onslaughts of capitalism, but it's really not a very good defense - rather like resisting a steamroller with a Christmas tree ornament.
Humans can no longer ignore nonhumans: they end up haunting the words we use and interrupting everyday talk.
Losing a fantasy is much harder than losing a reality.
The waste products in Earth's crust are also the human in this expanded, spectral sense. One's garbage doesn't go 'away' - it just goes somewhere else.
It truly seems to me that there is some kind of shift happening towards ecological awareness - not just in terms of PR for the science.
I like to think of myself as the corniest, most awful thing you could possibly imagine.
