Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence by Timothy Morton

Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence Reviews

• 
  Richard Derus

  Real Rating: 3.5* of five
  
  ***COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS GAVE ME A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.***
  
  I can honestly say that Author Morton was writing directly to my most dearly held concerns. The Anthropocene, the current post-Holocene epoch of geological time, is a given in the author's thinking; if you're not in sync with 21st-century thinking and deny that climate change is not only happening but is largely if not entirely of human genesis, this book will not do one single thing for you. That is, it will make you screechingly furious, but it won't change your mind.
  
  For the rest of us, the book's foundations in logic has lacunae. I'd expected to see the role of Big Science play a major part here; also Toxic Technology; instead Author Morton focuses on the philosophical and cultural roots of the Anthropocene. It's less about What Happened than it is about Why Things Are. We go down a bunch of rabbit holes to explore the nature of the Anthropocene's genesis, we spend a lot of time (in the footnotes) digging for truffles in the dirt of our Collective Unconscious, and in the end come to the surface of our minds with some useful new concepts. "Agrilogistics" and "ecognosis" are worthy neologisms for deep and tangled concepts. A simple explanation of them is that the reductive power of modern STEM-based environmental discussion ignores a huge reservoir of knowledge that comes from our shared, lived experience; this isn't in any way a comprehensive explanation so my suggestion is to read the 192 pages of the book slowly and carefully.
  
  It repaid me enormously to do so and it could do that for you as well.
• 
  6655321

  I feel like *liking* or *hating* this book is a matter of taste; i actually don't *hate* it so much as i wish Morton would settle the fuck down and sometimes cash out ideas more directly while spending less time explaining OOO and hyperobject theory as much as i *appreciated* that he is writing fairly accessibly about difficult topics. Mostly, I guess and this is the nihilist in me, this feels like a less fang-y and updated theoretical version of Against Leviathan Against His-Story and yet it also has a less *optimistic* space and I wish that Morton would dwell there more and just *give the fucking difficult and horrifying* time to breathe and envelop because the ending feels like an optimistic cop out. I still think people should read this and it is good to think with?
• 
  Uroš Đurković

  Čak kad izgubi uzde nad sopstvenim konceptima, Timoti Morton ima onu potrebnu i podsticajnu dozu provokativnosti, koja, preispitujući, inspiriše i osnažuje. Njegov naježeni tekst vrvi od ideja i još više od želje da retorika postaje dovoljno dobar poligon za dobro temperovani ontološki galimatijas, gde se, ako neko baš zapne, može naći teorijski ćup na kraju duge. Kao jedan od najpoznatijih predstavnika ekokritike, Morton uporno preispituje (odnosno, dekonstruiše) osnovne ekokritičke kategorije. Metodom petlje, odnosno, zamršenosti, pokazuje kako su smisao i besmisao sijamski blizanci i kako je priroda, zapravo, proizvod kulture. Zbog toga antropocen, kao geološka epoha u kojoj je uticaj čoveka toliki da se reflektuje na čitavu biosferu, nije ne-prirodan, već je njen košmarni, toksični oblik. Uzrok pojave antropocena Morton pronalazi u nečemu što naziva „agrilogistics”, odnosno, poljoprivredni impuls. Svaka ostala aktivnost čovekova proističe upravo iz tog podsticaja – obrade zemlje. Morton ide toliko daleko da u navedenom konceptu pronalazi uzrok patrijarhata, ali i kapitalizma, jer tek obrađivanjem zemlje, odnosno, shvatanjem da zemlja nije samo prostor (space), već i mesto (place), pokreću se i pitanja posedovanja. Kultivizacija predstavlja, stoga, nameru da se hijerarhija promeni – umesto da prostor ima nas, mi, pripitomljavajući ga, imamo prostor. Morton izdvaja tri agrilogistička aksioma, koji su utrli put silnim nevoljama: 1) logički zakon neprotivrečnosti je neizbežan; 2) postojanje znači stalno prisustvo; 3) količina postojanja važnija je od načina postojanja. Pokušaj da se navedeni aksiomi razobliče, nije sasvim uspešan, ali taj pravac razmišljanja je vrlo zanimljiv, pa i potreban. Takođe, pišući o, na primer, globalnom zagrevanju, Morton analizira koje su odlike nečega što se zove „wicked problem”. To, otprilike, ide ovako: 1) ako se rešimo globalnog zagrevanja, nikada nećemo moći da dokažemo da bi ono moglo da zaista uništi planetu; 2) WP su problemi neodređene beskonačnosti (ja bih dodao – poput pandemija); 3) rešenja za WP ne mogu biti određena kao ispravna ili pogrešna, već kao dobra ili loša; 4) mi smo u problemu dok ga rešavamo, problem se, zapravo, ne može iz sebe izdvojiti... I štošta ovde može još da se kaže, ali mislim da je ovo sasvim dobro za utisak. Verovatno je suvišno reći da i Morton, poput mnogih savremenih mislilaca, nije imun na autoreciklažu, s time što zna da se izvuče nekim šašavostima – jer, ko bi mogao još da spoji Lori Anderson i Huserla, Deridu i WALL-E-ja, Hegela i Bodlera sa „U potrazi za Nemom”, Šilera, Žižeka i Šopenhauera i veštačko meso. Razbarušen um jedan, Timoti.
  
  Nije slučajno da je uroboros (zmija koja samu sebe jede), ključni simbol ove knjige – prisutan na kraju svakog poglavlja. Mračna ekologija je, svezajedno, bauk nakićen svetlećim lampicama, pušten u sobu punu ljudi, pa kako se ko, u razularenosti, snađe.
  
• 
  Buck Wilde

  Gibberish. The book is a stack of loose connections that never get paid off. Morton invents more complex phrasings for concepts that already exist (spare me the "hyperobjects", everything an English professor is going to grapple with exists in discernible units of time) then relay-races back and forth between them in an effort to make an argument, such as it is, look less like a collection of Burning Man doodle book scratchings.
  
  It's an emperor's new clothes situation, and has little to do with either ecology or darkness. Skip it.
• 
  Dean Zochert

  A challenging book to read and assimilate. New terms, new ideas (that are really old ideas being brought to light), and a style of writing that is truly aesthetic. Morton explores the philosophy of the current ecological paradigm and how we got to where we are. He also investigates where we need to go from here. He explains how current environmentalism is missing the mark, totally, because it's based on the thinking of the old paradigm. We need a new way of speaking about the web of life and its interconnectedness. Morton starts that conversation with new terms such as "agrilogistics" and "ecognosis" and "arche-lithic." This is not a book to be understood as much as it is a book to experience, ponder, and settle into.
  
  I will say that I had the advantage of reading this book in a group setting over just a few days. We were able to discuss and flesh out concepts that otherwise would have gone unnoticed for me. The group was facilitated by a woman who is well educated, has college level teaching experience, and has a passion for language. Yes, I had an unfair advantage.
• 
  Laura Walin

  This is the second book that I read from Timothy Morton and I continue to have the feeling that he is just kidding me. Although this one is an easier read than 'Ecology without Nature', it seems to me that Morton makes his argument too difficult to follow, just for art's (fun's, f**k's, whatever) sake. Contrary to EwN though, I think I understood the main arguments: Invention of agriculture was when things between humans and nature started to go wrong, starting from the fact that we made the distinction between nature and us. We shoul re-learn to let go of that, and see everything in this planet just intertwined whole. After closing the book I have the uneasy feeling that he could have made this point in 25 pages in a much more coherent way. But maybe it is just the natural scientist in me talking.
• 
  Daniel Petersen

  Recently finished a brief academic review of this for The Kelvingrove Review. Will link to it when it comes out. This is a very difficult work because Morton is trying to break out of dominant modes of logic (especially the 'Law of Noncontradiction', so you can imagine!). Yet it's also a scintillating read, full of vertiginous ideas and images, swallowing up the human in hyperobject upon hyperobject. 'Hyperobject' is Morton's term for something so gigantic in time and space that you can't see it all at once. The main hyperobjects he evokes and explores in this book are the human species, the age of agriculture, the Anthropocene, and global warming.
  
  You might be tempted to give up half way through but you'd be missing out on the payoff of following his discussion through to its climax and fullness. Not that it ties things up neatly. But the full impact only comes from the cumulative conceptualisation achieved by the end. And, of course, it's a book that needs to be re-read a number of times.
  
  It's worth noting that references to monsters, ancient and modern, Sphinx to Godzilla, abound in this book. It could almost be titled Monstrous Ecology. Those involved in Monster Studies will find much of interest. My favourite line in this regard is: ‘There’s a monster in the dark mirror, and you are a cone in one of its eyes’ (p. 42). In context, it packs quite a punch.
  
  His breakdown of three kinds of dark ecology was helpful and fascinating. It's a descending order where the lower/deeper you go, the more real things get: 1) dark-depressing, 2) dark-uncanny, and 3) dark-sweet. (I'm reminded of the owl licking the tootsie pop.) I think I've been mostly focusing on Morton's engagement with the dark-uncanny in my interaction with his previous works. I'm excited to engage more with his dark-sweet ecology - which involves laughter in the sadness, comedy, and 'The Joy' at the bottom of everything, beneath the horror. (He does a controversial but very interesting take down of ecophilosophers' love affair with Lovecraft.) Though he's stoutly against monotheism throughout the book, his deepest layer of dark ecology, in which Joy pervades, has a lot in common with Trinitarian theology. He does note that his view is not one of atheism, but of an undecidable tension between a pointless universe and a meaningful one (or something along those lines).
  
  Indeed, the whole book is about the open-endedness of being, the 'gap' in all things, as Morton calls it (a term Graham Harman favours as well) and learning to live with and within that gap. The gap is a breakage and spillage between what a thing *is* and its many appearances (drawing on Heideggerian thought), which, if honoured, and even magnified in a way, preserves mystery and 'magic' in all things. So Morton argues.
  
  It's the most tenaciously philosophical work I've read by Morton, largely leaving to one side his usual field of ecocriticism (the study of environment in literature). He engages literature a little bit, and he features his usual peppering of films, contemporary art, pop music, etc., but he focuses mostly on ironing out and mapping out a new conceptual space for ecological thinking. It builds on, and to some degree recapitulates, what he's written before. Yet it blazes genuinely new territory. I really look forward to seeing it discussed in a variety of communities and disciplines. He's strongest when unpacking positive ideas and weakest when dismissing (often quite sweepingly and not a little snarkily) the ideologies he opposes, from agriculture to Aristotelianism. The snarkiness makes for a punchy read, but also obviously begs for rebuttals. He describes the metaphysics he opposes as 'Easy Think' ontology and pits against it his 'Difficult Think' ontology. I'm hugely sympathetic, but I also am somewhat familiar with some of what he opposes and 'easy' is not at all how I'd describe it (that hylemorphism, for example, is some cop out theory of being is laughable).
  
  It's an exciting book that I hope is widely read and discussed. I know it will inform my own ongoing doctoral research and will make a strong contribution to my theory of 'ecomonstrous' poetics in literature.
• 
  Leanne

  Disclaimer: I do not claim to understand this book or any of Morton’s ideas. That said, along with Donna Haraway, I consider Timothy Morton to be the most exciting thinker around right now. Despite this being shorter than his other books, Dark Ecology is arguable the most challenging. I mean, he does a damn good job of channeling his inner Heidegger —from the lyrical —romantic or baroque?- style of writing to the endless string of new terms he coins —also a la Martin Heidegger.
  
  arche-lithic, the mesh, subscendence, weird weirdness, phasing loops, strange loops, ecognosis, etc.
  Are you still reading?
  
  Along with the dizzyingly playful new terminology, literary details pop off the pages. His writing is beautiful—even if you have a hard time ever figuring out what in the hell the man is trying to argue.
  
  His book Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People is probably my favorite so far --and many of the ideas in that work are presented here as well-- but I think the other one is just much more rigorous in terms of laying out the idea and presenting an argument. So if you are only going to read one, I would recommend that one… even over hyperobjects.
  
  Thoughts I had while reading (not necessarily relevant to Morton’s book since I can’t be sure of anything). Where, Heidegger saw humankind (i.e. German people) as having progressed through a series of changing understandings of being, Morton is saying we had one big transition and that happened when we transitioned from Paleo to Neolithic…
  
  “How Mesopotamian of us.” (That is my favorite sentence in the book, by the way.)
  
  We became agriculturalists. This resulted in the technological understanding of being of Heidegger but Morton is saying it also resulting in what we call the anthropocene. He hates the word Nature because it functions to solidify the abyss Neolithics created between some humans and the rest of existence. We are already a multi-species crowd. That is, he rejects Cartesian dualism—even self/other human/animal.
  
  A lot is going on in the book. It is like Nietzsche has come back from the dead and is writing more fever dreams.
  
  The other thing I loved about this book is the concept of play. Play happens in the gap between a think and its correlation… this kind of open-endedness of being. Morton feels it is through play and imagination that will preserve mystery and magic. Why is this good? Well, we are trying in his book to step out of the production/consumption loop that he is arguing has been with us since Mesopotamian times.
  
  If you are at all interested, I wrote this some years ago about play, and I believe Morton is dead right about the function of play and we avoid it at our peril
  
  https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksd...
  
  Okay, I might need to re-read this one again and then try again at this review...
• 
  Xavier Roelens

  Toen ik aan het boek begon, had ik niet verwacht in zo'n taaltrip terecht te komen. Zigzaggend van prikkelende (of soms onnavolgbare) gedachte naar culturele verwijzing naar treffend (altijd weer treffend) beeld skiet Morton met de lezer als een willoze rugzak de berg af. Na het eerste hoofdstuk denk je nog: recht op de afgrond af. Maar hel wordt vagevuur wordt hemel. Aan het eind van het boek werd ik vrolijk door hoe hij aan ons consumentisme en narcisme een positieve draai gaf en verdedigde dat we enkel vanuit vrolijkheid iets aan ons klimaat kunnen doen. Of is het toch: met de glimlach naar de verdoemenis gaan?
• 
  Emma

  “Dark Ecology” is an environmental philosophy book by Rice professor and notorious object-oriented ontologist Timothy Morton. In this book, Morton attempts to convey a new framework through which to view the current climate collapse. This new method of thinking he called dark ecology, and defines as a method of ecological knowing in which one is conscious not only of their being a part of ecosystems rather than above them, but also that the very nature of ecology is in and of itself a strange and dark one. Further developing this infant thought through the remainder of the book, Morton draws upon Post-Kantianism, hyperobjects, and modern art to not only convey what a dark ecology is, but to awaken the reader themselves to the weirdness of such.
  
  This book, more than many things I’ve ever read, tends to walk a thin line between being a work of genius and being incomprehensible nonsense. In many ways it’s both, and for that reason it’s a book I’ll never be able to say with certainty that I actually “get.” Nonetheless, in my opinion it ultimately erred toward the side of genius, though it sure did bring a great deal of nonsense along with it.
  
  Morton writes like an anthropologist that’s trying to be a philosopher. Meaning, his work is infused with the very same critical theoretical jargon that in anthropology I find so nauseous, but without the ethnographic bit that makes anthropologists actually worth reading. Only making matters worse is that, along side this, Morton seemed to find it necessary to fill this book with all manner of pop culture references, muddling an already muddled collection of cited literatures.
  
  Much like the “joy beneath the sadness” that Morton in this book declares so incremental to dark ecology, however, there shines beneath this book’s slough of words a treasure trove of ideas and concepts. Take agrilogistics, for example: here, introduced in the first chapter, is a concept of agriculture coming from a larger system of interconnected logics that determine the way we rationalize not only food production, but literally everything about our world. And that’s just one of many of the genius frameworks which Morton brings to the table. Take for example his antithesis to agrilogistics, the arche-lithic.
  
  Don’t just take my word for it, though. Pick up the book yourself and give it a read, and understand why it may be one of the most important texts written on the anthropocene to date. Or maybe starting with Morton’s earlier works and moving chronologically would be better. I know that what I’ll be doing from here on out.
• 
  Pearse Anderson

  I got 1/3rd of the way through. I'm disappointed in myself. I just could not absorb or comprehend half of what he was saying, and that's partially my fault, but Morton also does not make it an easy job. I think he's best absorbed through OTHERS: when Vandermeer described his hyperobjects idea online, or when The Guardian did a profile on him, I understood it. Here: nope. Nope nope nope, and I hate that inaccessibility.
• 
  Becka

  Moments of lucidity interspersed with large swathes of nonsense. I will admit to skim-reading this rather than taking in every detail, but that is partly because Morton's style is too playful for its own good - he seems to be arguing some obvious things with an awful lot of waffle piled on top for the sake of it. Academic writing which deliberately obscures its own meaning feels more like a form of gatekeeping to me than ever at the moment, so I'm not inclined to be forgiving of it.
• 
  Jed Mayer

  At its best this work of ecocritical theory sends the mind racing almost as quickly and feverishly as that of its author, spinning off to fresh avenues of thought and approaches to thinking through our disastrous ecological moment. At its worst the reader (or at least this one) struggles through page after page, hoping for a moment of clarity that would make the journey worth it. But one has to accept Morton on his own terms, and this book did enlighten me on a number of issues and approaches and I think I am a little bit smarter and more aware for having read it.
• 
  Francis Vandecaveye

  Ik lees nochtans regelmatig 'moeilijke ' boeken maar deze gaat er los over. Ik geef u één zin:
  
  Het saterspel onderbouwde de agrilogistieke machinaties van de tragedie in haar ambigue archelitische grenstoestand tussen Neolithicum en Paleolithicum, waar 'monsters' en hybriden tussen mens en niet-mens (saters en centauren) rondwaren.
  
  Bijna iedere (ellenlange) zin is overgoten met een sausje van de moeilijkste woorden en de bizarste filosofische overpeinzingen. Ik heb me door de eerste 40 pagina's geworsteld maar finaal opgegeven.
• 
  Jenny Lane

  This was a very misleading book. What i believed i was buying was a book on theory. About ecology. But what it really came down to was Morton continuously repeating the same philosophical drivel over and over. I was expecting facts and figures. Maybe to even learn about something but all i learnt is that this book was inspired by some warped political incentive. Such a shame. My fault for buying a book based on what it promises, i guess?
• 
  Peter

  while the book is extremely enjoyable to read, I think the author likes to generate new ideas more than teasing out the obvious errors in his playful judgment
• 
  Carlo Wijers

  'Dit wonderlijk onorthodoxe boek', aldus de flap. Geen boek, zeg ik: een installatie. Nieuwe woorden in een oude context, oude woorden in een nieuwe context; de verknopingen van toneel, film en wetenschap; het schetsen van een (agri)culturele historie; onze plek op of in of met de wereld - ik weet verdomme niet genoeg, begrijp niet wat er staat, het is gissen naar wat die Morton wil. Ik lees door, bang om het ritme te verliezen. Hopend op een pot goud sleep ik mij hijgend naar het einde. Nietzsches Zarathustra schiet door mijn gedachten, het boek te willen begrijpen lijkt niet de bedoeling. Morton lijkt erop uit je te bedwelmen, in een bepaalde staat te krijgen.
  
  Een overdadige herziening van onze plek in deze alomvattende eindigheid. Een bruisende oproep om een andere manier van 'ons-verhouden-tot'. Verhoudingen tussen zijnden en niet-zijnden; verhoudingen 'tussen' een zijnde; ontologische cirkelbewegingen; vreemdheid; duistere ecologie; de wet van het al dan niet uitgesloten midden; ecognosis. En de ouroboros, de alchemistische slang die, in zijn eigen staart bijtende, een eeuwige cirkel vormt.
  
  'De filosoof-profeet van het Antropoceen', volgens The Guardian. Weer Zarathustra. Maar toch meer de Pythia van het orakel van Delphi. Een boek in tongen. 203 pagina's aan stonede luciditeit.
• 
  La Central

  "Que una ecología sea oscura parece, de entrada, una contradicción. Una ecología que prescinde del verde, que no tiene a la naturaleza en el centro de la reflexión. ¿Una ecología sin naturaleza? No, no es una contradicción, esta es la propuesta del filósofo Timothy Morton. Una mirada crítica que analiza el impacto del hombre desde su aparición y más allá. Un esfuerzo por pensar todo lo que acontece (humano y no humano) a gran escala, a muchas escalas, a diferentes escalas, que se aumentan, contraponen, incluyen, comprimen, complementan. Estamos inmersos en un bucle, cuyo origen es casi imposible de rastrear. Y hace falta un cambio radical en nuestras mentes para poder salir de él. De lo contrario, cuanto más pretendamos solucionar el problema, con más contundencia lo perpetuaremos. Sirviéndose de la literatura, la filosofía, el feminismo, las referencias a la cultura popular, e inventando nuevos conceptos cuando es necesario, Morton abre un espacio de entendimiento, como ningún otro pensador ha sabido hacer. Este libro es una explosión a las estructuras del pensamiento convencional para el despertar de una comprensión capaz de romper el bucle de ese desastroso acontecer." Laura Sala
• 
  Andy

  Tim's reading of Sophocles at the start of The Second Thread shimmers brilliantly.
  The page where he continues to scale out the loops of massive shifts within which Anthropocene is one will melt your mind in a good way that liquefies its plastic rigidity.
  I would recommend Dark Ecology to those who've read some of his work already rather than as a starting point. If you're looking for the starting book: I say The Ecological Thought.
• 
  Brian Henderson

  Playful, dense, difficult, provocative -- what else might we expect from Morton? -- and a significant contribution to the necessary reorientation of feeling (not just thinking) that's required for a possible sustainable future: "A thing is saturated with nothingness....Entities are so incredibly themselves." And it's this "themselves-ness" that we need to sense, which might give us what the earth needs from us: respect.
• 
  Garrett Peace

  I understood about 40% of this, but it was engaging almost all the way through. Thought-provoking stuff.
• 
  Justin Goodman

  Intro
  I'm torn between hating this book and everything in its vicinity, and being unable to stop thinking about it, partly because of this hate, partly because it has interesting ideas buried within Morton's (what comes across as) rigorously anti-scholarly approach. I don't need stilted sentences with hard to parse grammar and frustratingly technical language. But, the advantage of having footnotes (for one example) is that it suggests you're part of a community of ideas and not, as Morton's style invites the reader to think, a Delphic oracle speaking tongues mid-seizure. This seems to get particularly silly when he positions himself against "traditional Marxism" and "some Marxists," talking about "the cultural Marxist unconsciously retweeting a substance-and-accidents model of things." I wish Morton was less annoying, all in all, and I'd genuinely recommend reading a
  review of this book rather than the book itself because of it. But. Into the book.
  
  My Understanding
  
  -There's a lot of hubbub around the use of the term "Anthropocene," apparently, and I'm not particularly knowledgeable or invested in this conversation, so I'm going to jump ahead.
  
  -Morton reiterates his concept of the hyperobject, or an "object" which is massively distributed across time and space such that we can't think of it how we would a typical object. Global warming being one. Humans as a "species," as Morton argues in this book, as another. In fact, thinking about our relationship to hyperobjects gives us "ecognosis," or ecological thinking, which allows us to see multiple spheres of overlapping time and space. To our gut bacteria, we are a hyperobject.
  
  -In acknowledging the ontological equality of things (e.g. bacteria-time = space-time = human-time all being valid times to exist through), we begin the struggle against "agrilogistics." This is the key term of this book, premised on the idea that 12,500 years ago, after changing from a hunter-gatherer society to a agricultural society, we created a division between us and nature. We no longer saw ourselves as part of nature, but as actors upon it. This "agriglogistics" is the primary antagonistic of life, for it forces humans into a hyperlocal, causal logic that goes not just against reality as it exists for other beings (24 hours for a mayfly = 76 years for a human) but against physics (here Morton invokes quantum entanglement).
  
  (-Why did keep up with this process? Something about Julian Jaynes concept of the Bicameral Mind where voices outside of us, what we call thoughts, invade us causing us. These cause psychological distress so that we claim ownership of these external voices, investing our psychic energy into further bifurcations that justify this initial one - there is an outside and an inside, civilization and nature, etc.)
  
  -"Agrilogistics," therefore, creates a hard division between objects that doesn't exist. There is a no "human" insomuch as their are bacteria and cells that compose one. And since these bacteria and cells all equally exist, the the whole (e.g. a human) is less than the sum of its parts (e.g. those bacterias and cells). And yet there is humans, per se. "There is no obvious, constantly present positive content to the human." When we fail to see the hyperojbectified nature of things, because of agrilogistics, we create the conditions for racism: "racism exists when one fills in the gap between what one can see and what this human being is...the racist effectively erases the gap." Nazism is also explained in this direction, where the abjection caused by not discovering this loopy logic of "ecognosis" can cause people to "[try] to peel the abject embodiment off of oneself once and for all." The inverse, developing "ecognosis," is the titular dark ecology.
  
  -Morton devolves (a word choice that's harsh, but I've lost patience by this point) to saying "the more philosophy attunes to ecognosis, the more it makes contact with nonhuman beings, one of which is ecognosis itself. The world it discovers is nonsensical, yet perfectly logical, and that is funny"; "Ants and eagles cause philosophy to get off its high horse and smile—maybe even laugh. The name of this laughter is ecognosis." And the third thread is an extended metaphor about eating chocolate that seeks to breakdown this process of gaining ecognosis (of seeing dark ecology) before, "cleverly," ending with the beginning - the last chapter is your standard scholarly introduction titled "The Ending Before The Beginning."
  
  Thoughts
  I genuinely hate this totalizing philosophical gesture that attempts to explain everything from thoughts to quantum theory to nazis. It's a gesture that Morton's so insistent on this that, in his book on causality,
  Realist Magic, he attempts the exact same thing. I also find reading his books distressing because they don't read like arguments so much as gesticulations. I'm not knowledgeable enough in Lacanian psychology, Quantum theory, and the history of agriculture to agree or disagree with much of Dark Ecology and my initial instinct is to see the whole affair as gish galloping. I also find his targeting of Marxism strange. That's not to say Marx was right about everything, but in mentioning "the cultural Marxist unconsciously retweeting" he suggests he has a massive chip on his shoulder. Also, I immediately lose respect and distrust anyone who uses that phrase, given its origins in literal
  nazi propaganda.
  
  At the end of the day, I can't help but feel Morton had one good idea (hyperobjects), and has tried to explain everything through this idea. As for this book, I'm torn between hating this book and everything in its vicinity, and being unable to stop thinking about it, partly because of this hate, partly because...
• 
  Derek

  (The first third of) Fanged Noumena for anthropology/ecology. It gets similarly obsessed with the transcendental illusion Kant deduces. Thinking never knows things, it only thinks the thoughts of things, and so the things themselves operate behind our back. And sometimes these things are threatening! But this time The Noumena's fangs are not technology disguised as value, but Gaia.
  
  Now, this actually makes for a pretty good book at first. Global warming and biodiversity collapse is already a crisis and will continue to escalate. Ecological and anthropological thinking is also really quite sharp and penetrating, so when its used to create a kind of anti-philosophy like in this book, philosophers should really pay attention.
  
  3 stars because it really just drags on and gets boring at the end. Can't really quite put my finger on why. First half was great, but it pretty much said everything it needed to say.
• 
  Ruby S

  I reaaaaallly wanted to love this book and have an aha moment but Morton’s post structuralist way of writing is a level beyond my comprehension. I glimmered a few pieces of wisdom and intrigue and I like his emotional understanding of ecological awareness. Maybe in years to come I’ll try and tackle this again with more patience and time.
  
  🥀🖤🧃
• 
  Ana Peraica

  Only first chapter and the last a logical connection. The rest functions fuzzy. Nevertheless, Morton has really nice writing style so the reading is enjoyable.
• 
  Corvus Corax

  wild ride
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  Robotronik

  I’m an ecologist by profession and I found this incomprehensible. This is a book for those that enjoy and are accustomed to reading technical philosophical prose. A shame for the rest of us since the book’s premise seems interesting. I heard the author speak on a podcast and really appreciated his perspective and sought out the book to learn more. But I found the logic exhausting to follow and gave up quite quickly.