Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Posthumanities)

There's plenty of positive reviews so I'll just mention a big takeaway for me.Hyperobjects are both real and constitutive of our sense of self. For example, oil is a hyperobject with its own directionality or purpose - it "wants" to move from a highly ordered state to a disordered state (i.e. burn). Oil touches us directly and our sense of self is partially constituted by oil.The thought, "I should fly to Fiji for the weekend" is, in a sense, an oil thought. Peak oil is peak ego. Because peak oil is an ego limit, humans are likely not going to act on the climate science -- that would require a letting go of this current sense of self which is, again, partly (largely?) constituted by oil.

I am a little over halfway through the book, and I am enjoying it. I am in the applied social sciences, and my research examines how social systems and ecological systems influence each other, so I welcome anything that helps me to think creatively on that matter. I also am not a philosopher, so I don't know if I am really the best to judge the quality of ideas in this book.One thing I am not so sure about though. Our brains weed out the large majority of the sensory information that hits us. Which means we continually only have partial pictures or models in our head of pretty much everything. So, doesn't that make everything a hyperobject? Isn't that kind of the basis of phenomenology in general?Anyway, it is an interesting read so far, and I am enjoying trying to apply the concepts Merton is using, although I don't know if I will stick with this framework.

Huh. Well, that was interesting. When I was in college, we sometimes sat up late at night (possibly with help from various substances) and talked about the nature of the world. This felt pretty much exactly like that, complete with the relationships to pop culture ideas and literary references. It’s a prolonged stream of consciousness proposal of a different way to look at the information we’ve gained about the world in the last 80 years or so. On the plus side, I think he conveyed his concept of hyperobjects pretty well, and I found a lot of the ideas interesting. Less usefully, he didn’t quite understand some of the concepts he brought in from physics, though on a surface level they helped make his points. I’m feeling mixed about the whole thing, but it was definitely an interesting read.

The "OOO" (Object Oriented Ontology) organizes some old and new perspectives in a very unique system of philosohy and social science. Lots of 'quantum physics' too. The bottom line message would be a 'spoiler' and if you read and think, I mean actually think, you will be satisifed that you did. Not happy, cause it is not a 'happy' message. Disclaimer: School teachers should stay away. You only screw this deep a matter up.

The concept of hyperobjects is an important one. It may even justify the length of this book. I have read many business and academic books steeped in the jargon of their specialty. Many are so dense that it is clear they were written either for a specific audience, or to assuage the author’s ego. This is one of those. I may never finish it as the concept was presented clearly enough in the first chapter or two. The rest of the book feels more like filler than elucidation - as happens with so many books of this ilk.

Occasionally, a new book comes along with a concept so startling that you never see the world in the same way again. Hyperobjects is such a book. Concepts, ideas, and entities that Morton terms "hyperobjects" challenge and then defeat traditional thinking about how the worlds works. This way of thinking is critical to fully understanding the consequences of climate change, the technology revolution, chemicalization of the environment, and the coming paradigm shift resulting from the confluence of these changes. Transformational thinking, such as Morton presents in Hyperobjects, is not the first step - that occurred in the 1970s with the whole earth concept and later presented as the Gaia hypothesis - it's the first leap into comprehending the world we live in now and that near future generations will inhabit.

There is a dynamic and creative movement in philosophy today, generally identifying itself as speculative realism, which has grown out of the most radical thinking of the 20th century in phenomenology, process philosophy, and French postmodernism and which is fluorishing in England and America in the English language. Timothy Morton's version is strikingly original while remaining well-grounded in the work of Bergson, Heidegger, and Deleuze, with the added value of his passionate and inspired awareness of the ecological crises facing humanity. This is really philosophy worth reading.

The idea of a hyperobject is, I think, a vital one. Morton makes a compelling case for this, and I have no doubt that there is good philosophical work to be done with this concept. The trouble, I think, is that he proceeds to overdo it. His writing is dense, and that is to be expected with such strange and technically complex ontology. At times, however, I realised that it was vastly more Byzantine than it needed to be. Philosophy of all strains should aim at clarity, not performance. Morton, disappointingly, cannot help but perform.

The writing and wording of the presented arguments is such heavy going that it defeated me. It's quite obvious that the author is making an excellently researched and insightful point, but the language and manner in which that point is put across is impossible to make headway with and completely fails to engage the reader . The real skill in writing this kind of material is in a clear explanation of the subject matter - something this book fails to deliver on - especially when introducing new or radical ways of thinking.For example, take a similarly complicated subject - quantum theory and parallel universes as covered in the book 'Parallel Worlds' by Michio Kaku. An extremely complex subject (a subject that is also touched on more than a little in Hyperobjects), vast quantities of information and historical and philosophical input but the author goes out of his way to make the subject understandable and applicable to the reader. Hyperobjects does the opposite and at times feels as though the author is being deliberately obscure. The use of increasingly complicated language just felt annoying instead of impressive, and although I have a keen interest in philosophy and the issues being described I was largely disappointed.

You're in a hyperobject & you never knew it till now.Tim Morton is quite simply brilliant.

This books says great things and unifies many fields of knowledge, particular quantum physics. Much was not comprehensible to me on the first read, but that which I did understand was fascinating. Recommended to get your brain going (again).

You can read it several times and still grasping something new, like swimming in a ball pool. Hard to read, wonderful to read. For those who wanna undestand what does it means to be "ecological" and inside a biosphere.

The concept of hyperobject, if connected to systems theory could be more interesting than in its ontological submission into OOO. Kant, as usual with these philosophers, is made into a caricature. Morton at least, better than Harman has some genuine doubts about meta-discourses, feeling that human language is embedded on the phenomena as it tries to sort into essences. In the end you feel, after too much fluff, that OOO metaphysics has become an hindrance to what could be an interesting concept.