In the U.K. - correct me if I'm wrong - there is a legal definition of 'not being in possession of yourself' aka 'not being a person.' That's the fun thing: someone such as a lawyer needs to define, using some empirical signal, something supposedly transcendental like 'person,' something lawyers argue and argue about regarding, say, chimps in zoos.

Timothy Morton

We're all human beings, in the end, despite our differences.

Timothy Morton

Everything is a railway junction where past and future are sliding over one another, not touching.

Timothy Morton

Our ecological emergency demands proactive choices, not reactive sideswipes.

Timothy Morton

If you have suffered from trauma, one of the most healing things that can happen to you is being seen. Being seen doesn't have to mean that someone actually lays their eyes on you, although that certainly helps.

Timothy Morton

If you've read 'Dark Ecology,' you'll know there's a whole thing about cats in it, more than once.

Timothy Morton

Losing a fantasy is much harder than losing a reality.

Timothy Morton

The waste products in Earth's crust are also the human in this expanded, spectral sense. One's garbage doesn't go 'away' - it just goes somewhere else.

Timothy Morton

In the U.K. - correct me if I'm wrong - there is a legal definition of 'not being in possession of yourself' aka 'not being a person.' That's the fun thing: someone such as a lawyer needs to define, using some empirical signal, something supposedly transcendental like 'person,' something lawyers argue and argue about regarding, say, chimps in zoos.

Timothy Morton

Am I simply a vehicle for numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me?

Timothy Morton

Since appearance can't be peeled decisively from the reality of a thing, attunement is a living, dynamic relation with another being.

Timothy Morton

It's easier to be the art school band than to be the Beatles.

Timothy Morton

An artist attunes to what things are, which means sort of listening to the future, which is just how things are - I think time is a sort of liquid that pours out of hatpins, underground trains, salt crystals. So a work of art is also listening to itself, because what it is never quite coincides with how it appears, too.

Timothy Morton

You don't eat a painting of an apple; you don't find it morally good. Instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves.

Timothy Morton

When you look for the environment, you find things that are in it: a hammer, a smartphone, some rusty nails, a shed, a spider, some grass, a tree. So there is a big difference between environmentality and Nature. Nature is definitely something you can point to: it is 'over yonder' in the mountains, in my DNA, under the pavement.

Timothy Morton

One advantage of arguing that causality is aesthetic is that it allows us to consider what we call consciousness alongside what we call things.

Timothy Morton

Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept.

Timothy Morton

The ideal job letter starts with a brilliant light. Then we realize that this brilliant light is actually sunlight, shafts of it, pouring through trees onto a thick bed of pine needles. Soft dusty resin floats in the sun shafts, invitingly. The smell of pine and sap rises from the forest floor. A twig snaps underfoot.

Timothy Morton

We intellectuals are not stupid: we know the phenomenology of guilt is a bad photocopy of the phenomenology of thought, so it's much cheaper to press that button.

Timothy Morton

It's very important that we keep our imagination, which is our capacity to open the future, awake at a time at which the urge to collapse into the fetal position is high.

Timothy Morton

Since when did scientific evidence become a reason to shy away from ecological action just because it wasn't popular?

Timothy Morton