Timothy Morton: Hell
Book review

A few times in one’s life, even in one as filled with books as mine has been, one encounters a book that has a special magic to it. That seems to be made from different stuff, different words than those we normally use — or perhaps the same words but arranged in a skewed fifth dimension that one can only perceive from the corner of one’s eyes. A book that points far beyond what the words within it signify, that speaks to a part of the brain that is usually silent, that demands to be listened to using some mystical faculty we all have but that has atrophied in almost everyone. A sixth sense that defines the true artist, the true religious ascetic, the true madman.

From all the books I’ve read in my life, what Tim Morton’s Hell most reminded me of are some of the wilder parts in a Henry Miller novel. If you’ve ever read Henry Miller, you will know the feeling: like a door that you didn’t even know was there has suddenly been pushed open, and a hurricane is now blowing through it into what you thought was the safe place between your ears. This is the closest I can get to describing what it is to read Hell.

The author

I find it, therefore, quite impossible to give a conventional review of it here. Of course, we can begin with the author, and what Wikipedia knows about them: They are a professor of philosophy, began their career with research on the Shelleys and Romanticism, diet studies, and “object oriented philosophy”. According to another Wikipedia article:

In metaphysics, object-oriented ontology (OOO) is a 21st-century Heidegger-influenced school of thought that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects. This is in contrast to post-Kantian philosophy’s tendency to refuse “speak[ing] of the world without humans or humans without the world”. Object-oriented ontology maintains that objects exist independently (as Kantian noumena) of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects. For object-oriented ontologists, all relations, including those between nonhumans, distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal ontological footing with one another.

I understand about half of what this paragraph is saying. I hope that there are some among you, dear readers, who understand the other half too. I am not being sarcastic or funny. I really understand only half of it (approximately up to the words “ontologically exhausted,” excluding those), but that’s okay. I became a philosopher because I was interested in applied ethics, in sociology, in the philosophy of technology: in thinking about practical, tangible things. I never tried to understand metaphysics, in the same way as I never tried to understand quantum physics, football, or music theory. In all these areas, human beings are doing marvellous things, and I admire theoretical physicists from a distance with as much awe as I admire music composers, football prodigies, or any other kind of genius. It’s just not my trade, and I honestly don’t understand it, but one cannot understand everything.

To come back to Tim Morton’s biography, in 2009 and 2010, they engaged with ecological theory, publishing two books on the topic: Ecology Without Nature (2009) and The Ecological Thought (2010). One thing that seems to stand out on their Wikipedia page is the basic premise of the interconnectedness of all things: not only in the sense of a mutual support but more radically in erasing the boundaries between things. In The Ecological Thought, Morton writes:

The ecological thought does, indeed, consist in the ramifications of the “truly wonderful fact” of the mesh. All life forms are the mesh, and so are all the dead ones, as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and nonliving beings. We know even more now about how life forms have shaped Earth (think of oil, of oxygen — the first climate change cataclysm). We drive around using crushed dinosaur parts. Iron is mostly a by-product of bacterial metabolism. So is oxygen. Mountains can be made of shells and fossilized bacteria. Death and the mesh go together in another sense, too, because natural selection implies extinction.

We will have to keep this basic premise in mind, because it is important to Morton’s new book as well.

The book

But what if I can’t forget so well? What if it doesn’t work? What if I want to shout at this devilish God, because I remember the last time this happened? All the bloodshed: a tree yells silently to stop the violence. A tree puts me to shame: a tree is like a hand permanently raised to say “Stop,” to be about to slap me, or a middle finger raised to “flip the bird” and tell me to go fuck myself: the kind of tree seen by Judas as he is about to end his life. Enlightenment atheism repeats the image of this “silent eloquence” again and again, often to judge Christianity for what it perceives as its offensive loudness. Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” is just such a yell, a “You have sinned!” directed from the superego CCTV camera of Voyager 2 back to all humans on Earth, a “You have sinned!” pretending to be the voice of reality, the harmony of the universe that condemns the humans like the vengeful God that atheism says it doesn’t believe in: Nobodaddy as atheism.

This, in the book, is about half a page out of 306 just like it. And the book, once started, never stops, never slows down, barrelling on and on, jumping from one thought to the next, from one idea to ten others, from God to trees to violence, to enlightenment, Christianity, Carl Sagan, Voyager 2 and the poems of William Blake. And all that within 15 lines of text. This is what I meant by the hurricane image above.

Hell is utterly impossible to put down just because of the sheer force of its language — one cannot stop because one has to know what the next sentence, the next image, the next paragraph will bring. If you don’t believe that this intensity of language can be sustained, here we are, at another random page of the book:

Alien, the sci-fi version of ultimate narcissism, is also the ultimate image of superego, a mouth just outside and to one side of us, like that famous shot of Alien’s face a few inches away from the flinching Ripley. If one requires an incarnation of will, surely a black hole singularity, not to mention the Big Bang one, is that. A thinking human, if anything, is the most pathetic possible embodiment of this will. But even this will not quite do. This “passive aggressive” flipped version of Schopenhauer means that mercy is secretly a form of revenge, an idea that is indeed popular in many fundamentalist circles, where Jesus will come back to execute the Jews who have returned to Israel but won’t convert. The universe is better than that. Mercy reverses time a little, but that doesn’t mean one lives forever. In the end, entropy has mercy on mercy and one dies, a fact that is evident in the damaged, wounded body of the resurrected Christ, pierced with bloody holes.

This is not a book to read like one reads other books — at least not for me. It is a book to be sipped slowly. When I was small, my father used to make his own liqueur out of every fruit he could find. He chopped everything into what I’m pretty sure was a fish bowl, added sugar and vodka, and put the whole thing in the sun for two months, at the end of which the liquid had turned a bloody dark red, thick and heavy and aromatic. Morton’s prose reminds me of that. I read one paragraph and then I have to stop, take a breath, and read the same paragraph again. The text is like an oracle, like the words in a prayer, more than it is the language of philosophy, or at least the philosophy I am familiar with.

But what is it about?

This also makes it impossible to write a review about it. In a review, we’d try to answer a number of questions, like: For whom is this book? What does it say? What are its arguments? How is it structured? What are its conclusions?

You try this with Hell. Just for the fun of it, here we go:

For whom is this book?

For mystics, I would be tempted to say. Or for everyone, because when I read it, as it is also with Henry Miller, I feel somewhere inside me that I need to read that. It is not a book one understands, as one does not understand Paul Celan or the Bible. But the book speaks to one in the way a mystic’s visions do, or Bach’s music. There is something that it communicates, but, at least for me, that something is not contained in the literal sense of the words. It is something that happens in the spaces between them, or in the images that the words conjure in one’s mind.

What does it say?

I don’t know. Honestly. In the preface, titled “What the Hell,” Morton explains, I guess, what the book will be about:

It’s really quite obvious, isn’t it? The past sucked. Just look around you. So we had better make a future world. Jesus is all about the future being better than the past. Here comes the neighbor, they’re bleeding to death. What am I gonna do? They don’t ever fit in my conceptual frame no matter how hard you try to figure them out on Facebook. That’s what mercy and forgiveness mean. Trust me, I have only just learned that, after fifty years of unforgiving revenge.

Well, now you know. You’re welcome.

What are its arguments?

Let me quote the author:

Beauty removes all trace of teleological arrows. The sexual display of the male Great Argus pheasant encloses the female in a deeply phantasmagorical space. The ocelli on his tail give the illusion of being three dimensional: they are trompes l’oeil, optical illusions, art. The phantasmagorical space is not flat; instead it has a dimensionality, but this is weird and hallucinatory. There is an “above” and a “below” (the light tops and dark bottoms of the ocelli). But there is no “here and there” The ocelli are balls foreshortened in such a way that for the female surrounded by his portable concave theater there is no distance (figure 12).

Forgive me for not including figure 12. You’ll have to buy the book to see it.

How is it structured?

The book has three parts, titled “Holy,” “Holy,” and “Holy.” Seriously, here is the table of contents:

Christ’s Earthly Form Divine: An Introduction

PART ONE: HOLY
1 Welcome to Hell
2 Hell on Earth
3 Hell, Where All Your Dreams Come True

PART TWO: HOLY
4 Nobodaddy’s Home
5 Parabolas of Hell
6 Abortions

PART THREE: HOLY
7 Hot as Hell
8 Experiences
9 Worlds Without Ends

What are its conclusions?

As far as I can tell, this paragraph comes close to a summary of the main idea:

Life dies in the end, the world has mercy on mercy: wouldn’t it be horrible if its mercy was revenge in disguise, like those who want to live forever, frozen at the expense of everything else? Human beings exemplify what “alive” means, and Christ exemplifies what “human” means — a stupid mistake in the smooth functioning of revenge cycles. So Christianity is the most ecological stance of all. The biosphere is the body of Christ. Can I get a witness? Like it or not, America is the battleground of this war against war against war. Like it or not, Jesus is someone we need to figure out, right now. We’re soon going to find out whether or not he was for real.

The last words of the book are:

Amen is not an abracadabra, not a way to “make it so.” So be it is almost how a comedy pirate would talk — or they might instead say So it be. The “without end” feel is what structures worlds as the evaporating, tantalizing beings that are therefore also gorgeous and sexual physical beings. And this is just how things are: “So be it” actually means So it be, intoned with the languid receptivity of Yes. I am open to what is the case, because openness is what is the case:

Every day she stood, hoping for a new light
She closed her eyes and she heard a small voice say
You don’t stop, no, you belong to me
She cried, Maybe it’s too late
She don’t stop, she don’t stop, she don’t stop
She don’t stop, she don’t stop, she don’t stop… (Laura Mvula, “She”)

Worlds without ends. Amen.

By the way, the book’s blurb on the Amazon sales page does it a disservice. Seemingly written by someone who was forced to extract the book’s “message” or be fired from their job, it tries to flatten, steamroll, exorcise all the magic out of the text, and ends up with sentences like: “Timothy Morton argues that there is an unexpected yet profound relationship between religion and ecology … together they provide the resources environmentalism desperately needs in this time of climate emergency … Morton finds solutions in a radical revaluation of Christianity, furnishing ecological politics with a language of mercy and forgiveness …” and more such dross.

Sorry, whoever wrote this, but it would have been a lot better to just quote a random paragraph from the book itself. If someone buys this for “the resources environmentalism needs,” they will make as much sense as someone who buys a Dali painting because they want to apply the colour scheme to their bathroom remodelling.

Conclusion

Well, here comes my own conclusion. I found it really difficult to write this review. It felt like reviewing the Bible, or the visions of Hildegard of Bingen. What can one say? “Here God appears a little bit too vengeful, and the characterisation of Noah is inconsistent across chapters. And, you know, how did he fit the lions together with the zebras in his boat?” There are books that are unreviewable, or I am unable to do them justice — and this is certainly one of them. I hope that I could give you an idea with those few quotes I showed you. The rest of the book is exactly like that: violently brilliant, overpowering, magical, mystical, intimate, ineffable, and, yes, holy.

Holy like hell.

Thank you, Columbia University Press, for providing me with a free copy of the book. The author Timothy Morton is, with 7 USD per month, a paying supporter of Daily Philosophy, but neither they nor their publisher had any influence on this review or saw it before publication.

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