Ecology Now!

A Conversation with Timothy Morton

In discussion with Patricia Olynyk and Yining Pan.

Washington University in St. Louis, May 2024.

Ecology Now! was a series of public events presented by the Program in Public Scholarship in partnership with the Center for the Environment, the Center for the Humanities, the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, and Science in the Public Square (funded by Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures). With the objective to frame our relationship with the environment from new, unexpected perspectives, such as visual art, religion, public health, and cultural studies, the series gave voice to a range of scholars grappling with our rapidly changing environment.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Patricia Olynyk

First of all, thank you for last night's lecture, which generated some really interesting questions—particularly about your conception of the relationship between the past, the present, and the future. I am hoping you could start by talking a little bit about your new book. I have a copy in front of me, and, as I understand it, you saw the final book for the first time last night, which would have been a very exciting moment. It’s called Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology. Tell us a little about this book, how you came to write it and why now.

Timothy Morton

We've heard this idea of synthesizing science and religion before, but not in this way. This is more about the how of being sciency and the how of being religious in a good way—as opposed to the being scientistic (which is a kind of religion of science) and religiose, which is what Hegel calls “the beautiful soul”: this is a very popular way of being religious, where you identify evil as distinct from good, and you decide that it is a stigma that you can remove from the world, or you can remove yourself from the world, or you can remove the people from the world who have the stigma, or whatever it is—you can kind of get rid of something. And Hegel brilliantly observed that this attitude to evil is exactly what evil is. Evil is thinking that evil is a thing that you can get rid of all that is different from you. Truly religion is realizing that you are the evil.

Now this can lead to certain ideas about God: He must hate us. He must… this, that, all these reasons for the problem of evil—but by then, you've already blown it, you know? Because really, ultimately, we're talking about a relationship between people. You see, and this relationship is mysterious. You have to let it be mysterious—otherwise, it's just transactional reification.

In the process of writing this book, I finally figured out, Oh, I could just let people love me. You know, I could be okay with that. And it wouldn't be violating to let that be. And so the 55-year-old me was able to get to that point. The book has been an incredibly powerful—beyond existential, more than healing—very profound exercise in extricating myself from a lot of this stuff, as well as trying to make a case for there's a reason why to care about being alive.

There's a reason why to care about this earth. And it's a funny reason: It's because it doesn't have a reason—it’s because you're made out of love, it's made out of love. And the best reason in the world is there isn't one. This world is this world is a beautiful accident, on every level life is a beautiful accident made of random mutation, sexual selection, sexual display for no reasons, a totally trans category, symbiosis for no reason—accidental encounters between strangers. And this is why it occurs. You know, because we live in this world of wonderful, disturbing, uncanny, beautiful, tantalizing—on a good day they’re gorgeous, on not so good day, maybe they're disgusting, but then is disgusting different from gorgeous? It's like this edge, like yesterday's disgusting is maybe today's gorgeous—disgusting is just too much or too little pleasure. For now, right?

Any environmental awareness is disgusting because it contains more time and more lifeforms than you're used to. So there's a little bit of ugh, gross, bleh—a slimy feeling about knowing that you're an embodied being, a part of the beautifulness as a kind of disgustingness. And sometimes it levels out into this transparent feeling.

Yining Pan

Yesterday when you were talking with our graduate students, I was really fascinated by your understanding of ambiguity—how ambiguity is a “signal of accuracy.” I was thinking about how ambiguity can paralyze action: if you feel like there are two or more equally compelling options—how does one choose? What if this stops action?

Timothy Morton

Quantum theoretically, when a particle is in superposition, whatever might happen hasn't happened yet. The normal sense of what causality is, which is an action on something mechanically, has broken down. We don't actually live in a universe where there are causes followed by effects—that was destroyed by David Hume. But even more deeply in the physical structure of the universe, hesitation is how things really work. So ambiguity doesn't necessarily totally destroy action, it destroys the idea that acting is doing something to a thing in a mechanical way, in other words, by touching it.

We've lived in a world in which we think that act means here's a thing that's not doing anything, and here’s something that's going to do something to that other thing: PONG—an action. But in reality, at the bottom, everything is kind of quivering, even without being pushed. That's how things really happen, deep down—in ambiguity.

I don't know if I want to say there's a binary though between acting and not acting; but ethically and politically, hesitation is not a bad thing. Like the minimum of ethical behavior is hesitate. You know. We've all been in a situation where we're in some kind of fight. And you sort of think, Wait a minute, this is stupid, why am I doing this?—and you have a choice then to push ahead, or to stop. Stopping is also a kind of action. It's just not an action in a Neoplatonic patriarchal sense of something that's the opposite of passive.

But genuinely acting is not very different from being passive. If you were going to shoot an action around a particle accelerator, you would see that was made up of lots of little dots of appreciating. For example, I'm answering this question, right? In answering the question I'm attending to you, and thinking about what you need to hear next, I'm looking at you, I'm wondering where the sentence is going to go, I'm listening to my command of the English language, I'm attending to my understanding of my concepts of acting, and so on and so on.

If you've ever been in a band, you'll know what I'm talking about: To play a note in a band to act is to listen—you're listening to the instrument, you're listening to the other people, especially if you're improvising.

You know, any artwork at all involves a kind of attentiveness. In that moment, when I'm putting a splash of red on with a brush, am I doing a thing to a thing? Am I the actor doing something to something inert and passive? Or am I actually going along with what the brush seems to want me to do? You sometimes hear artists say, “Well, I was just following what the brush wanted.” And when somebody is a great writer, goes on TV, they go, “I don't know, I just put these words together…” And everybody thinks they're being falsely modest, but that actually was exactly what they did do.

Intending is actually always late. Neurologically speaking, when you when you intend to do something, you've already started doing it by a few 100 milliseconds. Intending is a state of mind induced by already you did it. (This is another amazing way in which the lineage of phenomenology, going through Martin Heidegger, has been hugely vindicated by science.)

So I don't know about ambiguity stops you. Because intending is also a state of mind rather than an actual little homunculus in your head willing to do something.

The difference between willing to do something and hesitating is not very clear to me. When you're really into something, you feel a kind of hesitancy. For instance, when I was writing this book, a lot of it, I was just typing and looking at the screen, going, Wow, that's really interesting. I wonder what I'm going to say next… It was one of those moments when you know, you're in the zone. And actually, what it means is, everything disappeared. I wasn’t really trying to have an idea. I was just writing a sentence. Then another.

Funnily enough, if you're good at what you do, it's kind of almost like you become this idiot who just does things without any reflectiveness. Reflectiveness is almost like a byproduct of a malfunction going on. Like when you're really jet lagged and you can't find the light switch, because they put them down here in this country rather than up there. Where is it? Our being is already doing stuff. So on a number of different levels, neurologically, but also, I think philosophically, hesitating and acting aren't that different. In the end, the subatomic particle of an action is a kind of hesitation. If it was like a pointillist painting, it would be made up of little dots of hesitation; if you looked at an action really carefully, you’d sort of see that about it.

Yining Pan

So the concept of ambiguity is about fundamentally rethinking how action and hesitation are related, and not opposed.

Timothy Morton

Right on. Yes.

You know, I learned about this sense of environment and time in 1988, in a club called “Love,” run by David Dorrell, who created “Pump Up the Volume.” To get permission for the frontispiece of the book, which is a picture of the Virgin Mary and a flyer for this club. I had to find David's contact information, and I got in touch with him. And I said, David, I'm asking permission to reproduce this because it is very meaningful for me. And I'm putting it in my book, and he said, “Are you Timothy Morton?” And I was like, Yeah, and he said, “I so love your stuff!” I thought, Oh, my God.

Everything I know about ecology was learned in David’s club and related venues from 1988 to now, and none of it was learned camping on a hillside in the rain, as it were.

Patricia Olynyk

Thank you so much for this incredible elucidation, Tim!