ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Anthropomorphism

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Anthropomorphism

Like “crickets” and “nothing to see here, move along,” the charge of anthropomorphism is oft repeated in the blogosphere. This comment I wrote on a post of Levi's just now was so good (he said modestly), and I feel so passionately about this, that I thought I'd reproduce it here:

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of anthropormorphism. Indeed according to OOO that’s what we can’t help doing. Pencils pencilmorph everything in the same way.

Furthermore, as I argue in The Ecological Thought, the charge of anthropomorphism is

1) A blind alley at best and a potentially infinite game of one-upsmanship
2) At worst, a symptom of profound correlationism and thus guilty of what it accuses the other of doing!

2 comments:

Scu said...: Not only is the charge of anthropomorphism a common attack, but it often covers over what Frans de Waal calls anthropodenial, the tendency to believe that traits only occur with humans even when it is clearly not the case. See his Primates and Philosophers, pp. 59-67. Obviously his work is in context of primates, but still I think his criticism is right on.; December 22, 2010 at 3:21 PM
ai said...: Picking up where you left off for a wander around the conceptual neighborhood...

http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2010/12/29/on-anthropomorphism-making-humans-pencils-souls/; December 29, 2010 at 12:07 PM

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton has written All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.

“Outstanding.”
—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”
—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”
—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”
—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”
—Vince Carducci

ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Anthropomorphism

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