ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Nietzsche and Hypocrisy

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Nietzsche and Hypocrisy

In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche laments the decline in hypocrisy. Quite right! I think this is one thing that the emerging ecological era will force back upon us, though perhaps not for reasons Nietzsche would like. We are entering a phase in which every decision we make regarding our coexistents is inevitably wrong in some sense. (You've probably heard some of my talks about this.) Future virtue in this sense will consist in being as consciously hypocritical as possible, rather than cynical. Maybe this is one place where my ecological philosophy has a quilting point with Nietzsche.

1 comment:

Schizostroller said...: It's impossible to go through life without being hypocritical at some point, if there is such a thing as 'a hypocrite', would it not be the one who tries to deny, repress or even heal any tendency to do so?

I'm not sure about going as far as doing so intentionally, i'm happy saying, 'yeh, I am sometimes, I try not to, but only within reason. I can't do anymore I ain't omniescent, or perfect. But you know sometimes I'm not hypocritical too. If I know i'm about to be its best to be honest with myself about why, as far as I can, avoid it if I can, go with it if I can't'; February 5, 2012 at 1:00 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

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Nietzsche and Hypocrisy

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