OOO- object oriented ontology. The strange strangeness of being human. The hyperobjectivity of global warming: viscous, in it, blind to it, unknowable, and inescapable. The world has already ended.

I think one may need to look at this book through the lens of someone really trying, if only experimentally, to reduce if not totally excise anthropocentric bias from philosophy. Morton is claiming reason's right to imagine objects that don't need us to exist. This runs counter to twentieth century relativism and its preference to analyze things from various exclusively human perspectives. You can almost sense in Morton an active aversion to what he finds to be human chauvinism. Why do we imagine that only we humans have the power to create credible slices of space-time reference by virtue of individual points of view? After all, doesn't everything in a universe affect everything else? What makes us so special?

Anthropocentrism has long since been the exclusive norm in consciousness studies. Thomas Nagel's celebrated essay, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat," is routinely quoted for its notion that we shouldn't attribute consciousness to anything unless we can know "what it's like" to be that thing. But this stricture runs the risk of ruling out imagination and the possibility of other sympathetic connections that could be metaphysically real.

I believe Morton is entertaining the idea that there are many ways of knowing. Anthropocentrism may be a rather poor way to get to know many of the objects, small and large and very large, that we routinely encounter in the business of living. (Morton focuses on the very large, the things that we don't see because they exceed our customary, if not blinkered, visual range).

What Morton doesn't do much of is look at how different types of people who are not philosophers -- such as artists and shamans, to name two -- look at or interact with objects in and out of nature. I'm reminded of Don Juan, the Yaqui shaman of Carlos Castaneda's books, who explained that seeing life in supposedly inanimate objects makes sense because doing so makes his life not only more interesting, but ultimately more true. Don Juan's kind of reasoning may fall outside the dominant modern Western philosophy, but perhaps not outside of philosophy itself as more creatively and expansively conceived. ( )

I'm no philosopher, at least not in any professional sense or by virtue of being well-read in the subject. I like philosophy. I have read some - mostly classical and some of the more well-known later ones. Basically, the stuff you're likely to encounter in decent high school and college education (at least in the 80s and 90s when my formal education took place) and or a bit beyond that. I've read some since then, nothing in particular, just what fell into my TBR pile from friends and whatnot.

This book was my first exposure to object oriented ontology (OOO). It's an introduction of sorts, but only to one type of object, not to OOO itself. For that reason alone I'm reluctant to recommend it to someone who has encountered OOO before. (And also for that reason, I plan to reread it soon.)

Still, even with my light exposure to philosophy and complete lack of exposure to OOO I enjoyed the book and found it very thought provoking. I'm not sure I understand all of it, let alone buy it.

Given my superficial understanding, I'm not going to attempt more than the briefest of explanations.

What is OOO? A metaphysical theory that treats all things in the universe as objects without preference to their particular characteristics: size, intelligence, age, longevity, whatever. Thus is rejects human-centric interpretations based on any sort of human superiority or notions that reality is a product of the mind and senses. Objects are not necessary indivisible in the strict sense or even physical - forces and processes are objects too. Objects are objects are objects and exist on equal footing with each other.

What are hyperobjects? Object that are vast - compared to humans at least - in space and time. Examples are things like the Earth, evolution, galaxies, and even global warming. We can never fully experience such objects. Instead we see small parts of them or experience them indirectly through their effects on us and other objects - the evolution of selectively bread foxes in Russia, extreme weather events, the Earth setting from the moon, the disk of galaxy in the night sky.

The author invented (discovered?) hyperobjects in an earlier work, but this is the first work which details them and how they affect us and other objects. Although focused on hyperobjects, many of the concepts and ideas seem like they should apply equally to regular objects (or whatever non-hyper objects are to be called).

This was definitely a different way of looking at reality for me and, I would guess, most people. It's worthwhile to read to experience that point of view, even should it be replaced by a better theory.

So, if you have a little philosophy under your belt, especially some metaphysics, I do recommend this. Even if you don't and just want to bend your brain a bit, you might want to give it a try.
( )

It’s the end of the world and we’re already experiencing it. However, since the end of the world is an object that far transcends our ability to grasp it, it is a hyperobject.

Every object is a hyperobject in a sense. And since hyperobjects are so difficult to make sense, this book try, in a hyperobjective way, to hyperobjectify our understanding of hyperobjects, making it a bit hard to grasp its message. However, that is not the author’s fault. This is the nature of hyperobjects and reading this book, with all its faults, still makes you aware of these hyperdimensions where we inhabit and rarely give a thought about it.

This is not an easy book; but it is not an easy subject. Notwithstanding that, the author does a great job in giving you a sense of what he’s aiming at.

Would I recommend this book? Yes, if you’re interested in philosophy; moreso if you want to learn about a cutting edge approach to ontology. If you’re not into this, don’t waste your time. The message is: we are already there, but it is too big and too complex for us to understand its workings and implications. ( )

The thesis of this book is right on, and a very relevant concept for our time: global warming is a hyperobject—massively distributed in time and space from the human perspective. In other words, individuals are having such a difficult time coping with global warming because it is so massive—we don't truly even understand it.

It's an overly heady and academic text. Apparently it's making the rounds amongst doctoral candidates in the Harvard literature department—I got the recommendation from a friend there—and you can see why. It often feels as though Morton's examples aren't actually chosen to illustrate his points, but instead just show how cultured he is. I didn't understand most of the references in the book, and this is rare. I don't think my understanding of the concept increased significantly after I first got the concept of hyperobjects near the beginning of the book.

Near the end of the book, Morton comments that pretty much everything is a hyperobject if you look at it in its fullness. I've been doing this for years. One example I like is to meditate on a bookcase. Each book was written by a different person in a different place. The wood for the paper and petroleum for the ink came from all over the country and the world. The technologies involved in printing the books involved numerous people. And then there's the time and thought and observation that went into the writing. Contemplating even just one bookcase in this way is stunning and humbling experience.

For the extensiveness of the fields upon which Morton draws from, he's missing one vital perspective: that of J. G. Bennett on individuality. Bennett was a brilliant philosopher and spiritual explorer. His magnum opus, "The Dramatic Universe," outlines his theory of everything. He describes a twelve-fold map of energies and intelligences. A little ways above humans is a sphere called individuality, comprising entities like species, or even the biosphere. From Bennett's perspective, an individual person has no chance of accessing true autonomy or "individuality" in his language. This is only accessible on the scale of an entire race. In other words, we may fail on our own to truly understand and deal with global warming. But on the scales of communities and civilization as a whole, we actually do have this ability, and we will really need it! Morton references higher-dimensionality many times throughout the text, but his argument would be greatly enhanced by Bennett's material.

The section on music and just intonation (harmonic tuning) really piqued my interest. I have spent time as an organ tuner, and am familiar with just intonation (as opposed to equal temperament), but have heard very little music in this tuning. I looked up Michael Harrison, and listened to his 75-minute solo piano album "Revelation." He had his piano specially tuned for the album into harmonic tuning. It just gets you wondering—how did baroque tuning sound in it's original state? It's not a subtle difference, but also would be phenomenally difficult for a musician to adapt to the change. ( )

I LOVE this book! It is a moderately challenging read, and I recommend multiple reads.

Hyperobjects discusses how we view the world, Object Oriented Ontology (O.O.O.), and how O.O.O. could be flawed through the creation of Hyperobjects, new entities which challenge our ways of thinking. To Morton, the "world" ended (not an illusion to Francis Fukuyama) because at certain points in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, our conceptions of the world are rendered null through the emergence of Hyperobjects. Morton discusses what Hyperobjects are, and how they impact our ways of thinking. ( )

Raw thoughts on things that are too big to think about ( )