Timothy Morton

"I hold that one billiard ball hides from another no less than the ball-in-itself hides from humans" (188) and "Real objects are incapable of direct contract, and indeed many have no effect on one another at all. Even the law of universal gravitation only applies among a narrow class of physical objects, and even then concerns a limited portion of their reality....objects confront each other only by proxy" ("Vicarious Causation" 200)

"Nothing is complete in itself" (33); "nothing is self-identical" (83); BUT, perhaps more harmonious with Harman, "'interconnection implies separateness and difference. There would be no mesh is there were no strange strangers. The mesh isn't a background against which the strange stranger appears" (47)

"Really thinking the mesh means letting go an idea that it has a center. there is no being in the 'middle'--what would 'middle' mean anyway?" (38)
"A dog might look cute until it bites into a partridge's neck" (38)
excellent readings of Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, where "we witness the Mariner ignoring the ethical entanglement with the other, then restarting it (or letting it restart) from an imaginably nightmarish ground. The disturbing, inert passivity of life forms is the zero level of this encounter" (47)
Morton sets himself against against the "earthbound" Heidegger, whose "environmentalism is a sad, fascist, stunted bonsai version, forced to grow in a tiny iron flowerpot by a cottage in the German Black Forest. We can do better" (27); although he doesn't do without Heidegger altogether, of course: "Heidegger poetically said that you never hear the wind in itself, only the storm whistling in the chimney, the wind in the trees. The same is true of the mesh itself. You never perceive it directly. But you can detect it in the snails, the sea thrift [sic?] and the smell of the garbage can. The mesh is known through the being of the strange stranger" (57)
Morton sets himself against uncritical conceptions of life, "There's something slightly sizeist about viewing life as squishy, palpable substances, as if all life forms shared our kinds of tisue. This prejudice breaks down at high resolutions. Viruses are large crystals. The common cold virus is a short string of code packages as a twenty-sides crystals; it tells DNA to make copies of itself. Is the rhinovirus 'alive'? If you say yes, you ought to consider a computer virus alive. RNA-based beings such as viruses requires hosts in order to replicate [so too, I say, do humans]" (67)
Humans are "fairly uniquely good at throwing and sweating: not much of a portfolio" (71)
Without citing Derrida's discussion, via Benthem, of 'not-being-able,' Morton says something similar: "We could categorize life forms according to weakness and vulnerability, rather than strength and mastery, and thus build platforms for finding solidarity in our shared incompetence" (71)
"Rugged, bleak, masculine Nature defines itself through extreme contrasts. It's outdoorsy, not 'shut in.' It's extraverted, not introverted. It's heterosexual, not homosexual. It's able-bodied--'disability' is nowhere to be seen, and physical 'wholeness' and 'coordination' are valued over the spontaneous body" (81) "Masculine Nature is unrealistic. In the mesh, sexuality is all over the map. Our cells reproduce asexually, like their single-celled ancestors or the blastocyst that attaches to the uterus wall at the beginning of pregnancy. Plants and animals are hermaphrodites before they are bisexual and bisexual before they are heterosexual. Most plants and half of animals are either sequentially or simultaneously hermaphorditic; many live with constant transgrender switching. A statistically significant proportion of white-tailed deer (10 percent plus) are intersex" (84) "The ecological thought is also friendly to disability. There are plentiful maladaptions and functionless phenomena at the organism level" (85)
"We need something like a 'no-self' description of states of mind--'anger has arisen here' says enough of what is meanginful about 'I am angry,' without fixing emotions in the amber of identity" (119) [but] "By not holding an objectlike picture of myself in mind, by being true to my inability to pin myself down, I'm being more honest. The ecological thought includes the subject, as our trip through dark ecology showed. The subject isn't an optional extra. Subjectivity is like a waterbed: push it down in one place, it pops up in another. Thinking that personhood is the enemy of ecology is a big mistake" (120)
Very good when jettisoning the "infinite" (despite invocation of the theist Levinas), where he speaks, for example, of "the shock of very large finitude" (118): thus, it's "harder to imagine four and a half billion years than abstract eternity. It might be harder to imagine evolution than to imagine abstract infinity. It's a little humiliating" (5); however, he still uses the word infinite "the [evolutionary/ecological] mesh consists of infinite connections and infinitesimal differences" (30)

Learning about global warming serves to make us feel something much worse than an existential threat to our lifeworld. It forces us to realise that there never was a lifeworld in the first place, that in a sense ‘lifeworld’ was an optical illusion that depended on our not seeing the extra dimension that NASA, Google Earth, and global warming mapping open up. The more information we acquire in the greedy pursuit of seeing everything, the more our sense of a deep, rich, coherent world will appear unavailable: it will seem to have faded into the past (nostalgia) or to belong only to others (primitivism).

Art’s ambiguous, vague qualities will help us think things that remain difficult to put into words. Reading poetry won’t save the planet. Sound science and progressive social policies will do that. But art can allow us to glimpse beings that exist beyond our normal categories.

There is global warming; there is an ecological emergency; I’m not a nihilist; the big picture view undermines right-wing ideology, which is why the right is so afraid of it. However, the melting world induces panic. This is a problem, philosophically and otherwise. Again, it’s a paradox. While we absolutely have complete responsibility for global warming and must act now to curb emissions, we are also faced with various fantasies about ‘acting now’, many of which are toxic to the kind of job humanists do. There is an ideological injunction to act ‘Now!’ while humanists are tasked with slowing down, using our minds to find out what this all means.

DNA has no flavor. Nor is DNA a ‘blueprint’ as the common prejudice believes - it’s a set of algorithmic instructions, like a recipe book. There is no picture of me in my DNA.

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Society isn’t like a bunch of molecules randomly jostling each other with Brownian motion. As Darwin argued, even butterflies value choice. It’s one of the abiding curiosities of capitalist ideology that it accords a gigantic value to choice in one sense, and none whatsoever in another.