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A review by eithe
Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World by Timothy Morton
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
0.5
Oh boy, where to start. This is not a book so much as it is a rambling, self-indulgent poem; it will be difficult to distil something useful from it.
Having doggedly refused to leave this book unfinished, I'm not sure I've come out the other side knowing anything new, entirely due to the failure of the author to actually communicate effectively.
Morton's biggest failure to communicate this particular work is in assuming too much esoteric background in various fields, primarily philosophy, but also art, history, and music - this is not a self-contained work. To understand all their references you'd have to be them. So the book as a whole and by itself is not of much use to anyone else.
But that's not the only failure. Even if you were to have a grasp of the right concepts, Morton's thoughts are unfocussed, meandering between disparate modes. They apparently expect us to trust that their wild meanderings are going somewhere useful. They rarely set a clear direction or a route, and rarely reflect systematically on the journey thus far, which makes it incredibly difficult to assemble the ideas into something consistent or useful.
This is a pretentious work. There is unnecessary use of French, Latin, and Greek. Morton uses strange syntactic constructions without explanation and overuses quotation marks as if we're supposed to keep track of all the non-standard ways they're using words, or which non-idiomatic subtle component of the definition they're relying upon. In fact, they do this so much that they frequently delve into etymology to justify non-standard word choice.
When Morton finds the fleeting realisation that they're trying to communicate complex ideas to an audience, they awkwardly use pop references and stretch metaphors past usefulness.
Perhaps there's something interesting in here but I would have a hard time explaining exactly what. They say that someone hasn't really understood something unless they can explain it in simple terms. Well, that litmus test speaks loudly when it comes to Morton's attempt to explain hyperobjects.
Having doggedly refused to leave this book unfinished, I'm not sure I've come out the other side knowing anything new, entirely due to the failure of the author to actually communicate effectively.
Morton's biggest failure to communicate this particular work is in assuming too much esoteric background in various fields, primarily philosophy, but also art, history, and music - this is not a self-contained work. To understand all their references you'd have to be them. So the book as a whole and by itself is not of much use to anyone else.
But that's not the only failure. Even if you were to have a grasp of the right concepts, Morton's thoughts are unfocussed, meandering between disparate modes. They apparently expect us to trust that their wild meanderings are going somewhere useful. They rarely set a clear direction or a route, and rarely reflect systematically on the journey thus far, which makes it incredibly difficult to assemble the ideas into something consistent or useful.
This is a pretentious work. There is unnecessary use of French, Latin, and Greek. Morton uses strange syntactic constructions without explanation and overuses quotation marks as if we're supposed to keep track of all the non-standard ways they're using words, or which non-idiomatic subtle component of the definition they're relying upon. In fact, they do this so much that they frequently delve into etymology to justify non-standard word choice.
When Morton finds the fleeting realisation that they're trying to communicate complex ideas to an audience, they awkwardly use pop references and stretch metaphors past usefulness.
Perhaps there's something interesting in here but I would have a hard time explaining exactly what. They say that someone hasn't really understood something unless they can explain it in simple terms. Well, that litmus test speaks loudly when it comes to Morton's attempt to explain hyperobjects.