ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Schopenhauer

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Schopenhauer

You know the more I get into the details of finishing Buddhaphobia the more respect I have for Schopenhauer. I'd written him off for what I saw as his misunderstandings about Buddhism. But it's a very coherent view he has there and it's not completely dissimilar. Also, to swim against the racist, Christian white European (I'm not kidding—one word: Gobineau) orthodoxy of his day, to the point of having a Buddha statue in your front lobby to greet people who visited your office—that takes guts.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: This happens more in some fields than others, doesn't it. We don't despise Newtown because it turns out his theories were wrong; we recognise them as an important step forward, albeit superseded by relativity, etc. Yet Schopenhauer's readings of Buddhism and the Upanishads are no less necessary a step towards cultural understanding. I'm reminded of a recent article in the LRB about Goethe and Edward Said: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n24/marina-warner/in-the-time-of-not-yet; January 6, 2011 at 11:57 PM
Gustav said...: What is your take on Nietzsche's attack on Schopenhauer and Buddhism? Was it Buddhaphobia?; January 7, 2011 at 9:34 AM

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

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Schopenhauer

2 comments:

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