Abstract

In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton breaks with the folksy and somewhat frumpy environmental holism of the '70s and '80s, and confirms the growing conviction in continental philosophical circles of a necessary movement beyond phenomenological critiques of calculative science to hypermodern reinscriptions of technological thinking. In this essay, the author argues that Ecology without Nature does not, in fact, challenge the dominant twentieth-century discourse. For Morton, any experience of nature as organic whole, the universe of meaning, can only be the result of a substitution of a psycho-genetically structured totality for the material chaos of the universe. The authors makes a case for questioning Morton's rejection of "premodern" cosmology and argues for a reconsideration of alternative models of material interdependence. The author discusses one model central to the Renaissance philosophy of nature, hermetic holism, which offers us a strong theory of interdependence but does not implicate us in a posthuman meta-narrative.

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