Timothy Morton

In the beauty experience, there is some kind of mind-meld-like thing that takes place, where I can't tell whether it's me or the artwork that is causing the beauty experience: if I try to reduce it to the artwork or to me, I pretty much ruin it. This means, argues Kant, that the beauty experience is like the operating system on top of which all kinds of cool political apps are sitting, apps such as democracy. Nonviolently existing with a being that isn't you is a pretty good basis for that.

Art is a place where we get to see what it means to be human or whatever, which is why what I do is called humanities. But this isn't enough. One way this becomes obvious is when writing grant proposals that sound like pleading. Please, please don't hurt me, Mr Funding Source, I'm a sort of educated PR guy who is going to decorate this boring cupcake of scientism with these nice human-flavoured meaning-candies.

When you draw a set of things, the circle you draw around those things is always going to be bigger than the set, physically speaking. Otherwise it wouldn't be able to encompass them. But how a drawing looks isn't the same as what it logically means. If everything exists in the same way, that means that wholes exist in the same way as their parts, which means that there are always more parts than there is a whole - which means the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. It's childishly simple when you think of it this way. So how come it's so hard to accept?

For example, the idea of sustainability implies that the system we have now is worth sustaining. It implies furthermore that 'continuing for a longer time' is a hallmark of success, which in turn implies a model of existing having to do with persisting, going on, being constantly present. But we've established that things aren't like that. So in the end the style of efficiency is going to be stifling and uncreative, not allowing for malfunctions and accidents, which are ironically more likely the way things actually are. It's not the case that things are just functioning smoothly until they don't. Smooth functioning is always a myth.

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.