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Realist Magic
Draft copy of Timothy Morton's new book, Realist Magic, to come out later this year from OHP.
Draft Copy
First published January 1, 2012
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About the author
Timothy Morton
82 books384 followersTimothy Bloxam Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They are the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence; Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (with Marcus Boon and Eric Cazdyn); Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World; and other books.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 10, 2014
Like eating ice cream. Delicious.
October 2, 2020
Somewhere between manifesto and spelunking, the only thing Realist Magic isn't is uninteresting. There are times when it's unclear whether this is an attempt to explore a new metaphysics or a new aesthetics, when you realize yet again (and there a lot of 'yet agains' - Morton repeats himself a lot) that the book seems to want to kill them into a smelted mix of the two. He does this in the most hook or crook fashion imaginable. Layering metaphor on metaphor, some helpful (the creation/destruction of objects as the reversal of the ancient Greek breakdown of rhetoric), others confusing ("on the surface of the black hole into which I have fallen, you see a rapidly fading photograph of my horrified face"), while drawing on everything from contemporary physics to Romantic literature to German & Buddhist philosophy. Eclectic doesn't begin to describe it.
But that's why it feels like a manifesto and spelunking. This feels like a foray into an exciting idea who's existence is being justified rather than elaborated. That might be because Object-Oriented Ontology is fairly new, but there's also a part of me that feels that this book is heavily overselling it. "OOO is the first and only truly post-Derridean view," Morton says. Martin Heidegger could become a Nazi because he was trapped in the "correlationist circle" (that the post-Kantian tradition has trapped its thinking in anthropocentrism), Morton says. I don't need to believe OOO is wrong to see these as extravagant claims. OOO is passed off as a real solution to roadblocks in thinking, and maybe it is, but this book has you walking away thinking - this was provocative, strange, and worth thinking about, but how does it do anything it claims to do?
TL;DR: within the 200+ pages of Realist Magic are what feels like 20-30 pages of arguments about how objects are fundamentally defined by self-contradiction since there is a "Rift between essence and appearance." Birth (an explosion of many self-contradicting objects from a singular object; a glass shatters, becoming shards), living (these shards continue to be self-contradicting), and death (self-contradiction ends when an opera singers voice matches the glass-shaped pitch that displaces it into shards) are defined by this fact. So is the universe, in which humans are one of many objects, and to which our notions of self are applicable. It's all somehow helpfully explained and unclear, enthusiastic and belabored, original and indebted. It's self-contradicting, I guess. Which, while clever, doesn't help.
But that's why it feels like a manifesto and spelunking. This feels like a foray into an exciting idea who's existence is being justified rather than elaborated. That might be because Object-Oriented Ontology is fairly new, but there's also a part of me that feels that this book is heavily overselling it. "OOO is the first and only truly post-Derridean view," Morton says. Martin Heidegger could become a Nazi because he was trapped in the "correlationist circle" (that the post-Kantian tradition has trapped its thinking in anthropocentrism), Morton says. I don't need to believe OOO is wrong to see these as extravagant claims. OOO is passed off as a real solution to roadblocks in thinking, and maybe it is, but this book has you walking away thinking - this was provocative, strange, and worth thinking about, but how does it do anything it claims to do?
TL;DR: within the 200+ pages of Realist Magic are what feels like 20-30 pages of arguments about how objects are fundamentally defined by self-contradiction since there is a "Rift between essence and appearance." Birth (an explosion of many self-contradicting objects from a singular object; a glass shatters, becoming shards), living (these shards continue to be self-contradicting), and death (self-contradiction ends when an opera singers voice matches the glass-shaped pitch that displaces it into shards) are defined by this fact. So is the universe, in which humans are one of many objects, and to which our notions of self are applicable. It's all somehow helpfully explained and unclear, enthusiastic and belabored, original and indebted. It's self-contradicting, I guess. Which, while clever, doesn't help.
September 25, 2021
a difficult book as almost any ontological work is. However I also found this book easier to read than Morton's other works, along with this Morton takes the time to go through ideas clearly, repeatedly and in a functional order. As such I think it makes a good groundwork for understanding Morton's particular OOO in hyperobjects and humankind.
Morton's work is certainly strange though for the most part it is convincing. It has certainly pushed me to read more work within speculative realism and object-orientated ontology.
Morton's work is certainly strange though for the most part it is convincing. It has certainly pushed me to read more work within speculative realism and object-orientated ontology.
April 9, 2026
I wish I could say that I understood Timothy Morton’s Realist Magic better—or at all. Only near the end does he gesture toward how his theory of object-oriented ontology might connect to climate change and, by extension, the Anthropocene. That connection, potentially the book’s most urgent and consequential insight, arrives too late and is never developed with the depth it deserves.
Throughout the book, I kept returning to the question one of my graduate professors taught us always to ask: So what? So what if all causality is aesthetic? So what if the Rift suggests that something can be both object and non-object at once? So what if there is, in fact, no space between objects? These provocations may be philosophically intriguing, but I wanted Morton to show more clearly how they alter one’s understanding of lived experience, one’s view of the world, and the material crises that world now faces.
Quotes...
Yet physics argues that the appearance of stability is a function of randomness. Random patterns are the ones that seem regular. Clumping is a feature of true randomness. 25
The qualities of an object are not the object. Objects then are both themselves and not themselves. In defiance of the Law of Noncontradiction--a law that has never been properly proved--objects present us with the following paradox: objects are both objects and non-objects. All objects are open secrets, like the Liar: This sentence is false. 27
The first paragraph Describes well the phenomenon cataloged by ooo: things withdraw, which means that they limit what 1 can think about them. Things also contain other things that are not strictly them--just as the zebra is not reducible to its atoms, from an ooo point of view, and yet a zebra is composed of just these particular atoms. 28
An object is a non-object not because it is “really something else, avoid or some featureless lump or moment in my reflective process—but because an object isn't something else. 30
An object is therefore both itself and not-itself, at the very same time. … If This were not the case, nothing could happen. The uncanniness of objects, even to themselves, is what makes them float, breathe, oscillate, threaten, seduce, rotate, cry, orgasm. 36
Why study or make art? Because when you do so, you are exploring causality. A bonus feature of Realist Magic, then, will be to place the arts and their study at the central point in the affairs of the world. 41
There are objects: cinnamon, microwaves, interstellar particles and scarecrows. There's nothing underneath objects. Or, better, there is not even nothing underneath them. There is no such thing as space independent of objects (happily contemporary physics agrees). What is called Universe is a large object that contains objects such as black holes and racing pigeons period 42
This Is a book about realism without matter. Matter, and current physics, is simply a state of information. Precisely: information is necessarily information-for (for some addressee). Matter requires at least one other entity in order to be itself. Matter is “materials-for”. 42
There is no space or environment as such, only objects. Moreover, in the succession of these objects, there is also no top object: No entity that Lords it over the rest, whose reality is superior to or more powerful than theirs, one auto theological object to rule them all. 43
This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that ooo holds to be a mere appearance of that object, and appearance-for some object. 44
But the Infinity, the uncountability, it's more radical than Leibniz, since there's nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a Society of corals. Each object is a “little world made cunningly” (John Donne). 45
If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object. That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature. There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” the connects things together. All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. 48
It only requires that the block exist. There is a block, whose essence is withdrawn. Withdrawn means beyond any kind of access, any kind of perception or map or plot or test or exploration. You could explore a thousand nuclear bombs and you would not reveal the secret essence of the cinder block. 54
To Say that existence is coexistence is not to say things merely reduce to their relations. Rather, it is to argue that because of withdrawal, an object never exhausts itself in its appearances--this means that there is always something left over, as it were, and excess that might be experienced as a distortion, gap, or void…. This is because of the Rift: The being of things is hollowed out from within. It is this Rift That fuels their births. 113
Speculative metaphysician al-Kiindi used a bit of Aristotle and some clear reasoning to argue that the Universe couldn't be infinite or eternal. Using Aristotle against Aristotle, he reasoned that since a physical thing can't be infinitely large, and since time is an aspect of the physical Universe, the Universe can't be eternal. (Aristotle himself thought that since the motion of the heavens was perfect, the Universe had to be eternal.) If the Universe were eternal, it would have taken Infinity days to get to this one period this means that today couldn't arrive. So the universe isn't eternal. 117-8
Fruit flies have more genes than humans. Genetic mutation is random with respect to present need. 120
Interobjectivtiy is the uterus in which novelty grows. Inter objectivity positively guarantees that something new can happen, because each sample, spider web vibration, each footprint of objects and other objects, is itself a whole new object and a whole new set of relations to the entities around it. 122
Godel showed how logical systems must self contradict at some point in order to be true… 189-190
Watch a slow motion video of the opera singers effect on the glass. Watch how the glass and the video shutters just before it ceases to exist. It was so beautiful I almost died.” Theodor Adorno argues that this is what the aesthetic is supposed to do: start a subject quake… a little death. 193
The (superficial, given) appearance of an object just is it's warping by another object, which is another way of saying that the “past life” of an object is its form. … The Eagle of an object is simply the record of the traumas that happen to it--this goes for the objects called human, for whom the ego is a virtual, sensual object. Thus the there are no blank screens in reality whatsoever. While the aesthetic motive beginning is horror-bliss, and the mode of continuing his comedy, the mode of ending his tragedy. This is because, like the protagonist of a Greek tragedy, objects all possess an intrinsic flaw or wound, which, after the Greeks, I hear call harmartia. 198
There is an ontological Rift between essence and appearance. This has nothing to do with the spurious gap between substance and accidents. What is called substance and what is called accidents are both on the side of what this book calls appearance. The Rift Is irreducibly part of a thing calling a thing is both itself and not-itself. I call this double truth of a thing its fragility. 199
Tracing the whodunit story of destruction via another object comma we soon returned to prime movers and first causes. 199
[An object’s] hamartia, its inner fragility, causes it to cease to exist. 200
All an object needs to cease existing is to coincide with itself. Once it does that, it evaporates. Reduced to sheer simplicity, the object dies, leaving behind only memories, cinders, sensual impressions. The Rift between essence and appearance collapses. The object evaporates into its appearance-for another object(s). 201
The Rift happens both within and between objects. Or rather: it becomes impossible to specify whether the Rift is inside or outside an object. The Rift cannot be located ontically, that is, we can’t point to it anywhere on or inside the object. Yet there it is. This Rift accounts for what I call fragility. 202
What if beauty is when an object tunes to our vulnerability? 208
Appearance, as appearance-for, is kind of death. We are living in a universe of death, in which interactions between the isotypes of objects, their uncanny, ghostly pull, color, taste and emotional state. Things appear because some kind of death happens. A photon “measures” an electron by changing it. I make the poem real for me by misreading it. Every step on the sidewalk wears it away. Time crumbles from the collapsing of carbon-14 as the atoms become something else. 208
We think of essence as buried away “behind” or “before” an object. But it should by now be fairly clear that the essence of things is in front of objects. However paradoxical this ma sound, the essence of a thing is the future, while the appearance of a thing is the past. 210
Contrary To the commonly held belief that appearance is “now,” the formal and material cause of a thing just is it's pastness. That must mean that the future is the essence of a thing. Let's pause to repeat that again: appearance is the past, essence is the future. 213
Excess is sensual and belongs to the realm of appearance. If anything, excess belongs in an objects pastness. Nor is future reality avoid, a gap. Perhaps the term openness expresses it best. Withdrawal is openness period now we can discern more clearly the chorismos between essence and appearance. It is a Rift Between openness and pretense. Time is not a series of now-points “in which” objects exist, but instead time flows out of objects in two different ways. The unknown, unknowable essence of The thing is the future; How something appears is the past period this is in accord with physics, since the speed of light guarantees that any sensual impression of a thing is an impression of its past. What I'm arguing here is that there is an ontological reason for this, namely that time pours out of objects. The fixity of things, their history, definition and so on, is the past period the openness of things is the future. The present is an “objective” fiction of something immediately “present at hand”… Presence is difference-from-itself, the thing hollowed out from the inside by past and future. 215
… art is strikingly like what Socrates says about art in the Ion: art is an attunement to a demonic force, akin to the way a magnet resonates with an electromagnetic field. 216
The coming to be of an object is the opening of a fresh Rift between essence and appearance. This Rift is unique, just as the object is unique. The Rift is not a void or a chasm: it is “What constitutes pretense.” It is the collapse of the Rift, not a change into invisibility, that spells the end of a thing. 225
It's just that the positive appearance and disappearance of things happen in the central realm, not in some quality-free zone “beneath” it. And this is not because there are no real substances, but because indeed there are. 225
Throughout the book, I kept returning to the question one of my graduate professors taught us always to ask: So what? So what if all causality is aesthetic? So what if the Rift suggests that something can be both object and non-object at once? So what if there is, in fact, no space between objects? These provocations may be philosophically intriguing, but I wanted Morton to show more clearly how they alter one’s understanding of lived experience, one’s view of the world, and the material crises that world now faces.
Quotes...
Yet physics argues that the appearance of stability is a function of randomness. Random patterns are the ones that seem regular. Clumping is a feature of true randomness. 25
The qualities of an object are not the object. Objects then are both themselves and not themselves. In defiance of the Law of Noncontradiction--a law that has never been properly proved--objects present us with the following paradox: objects are both objects and non-objects. All objects are open secrets, like the Liar: This sentence is false. 27
The first paragraph Describes well the phenomenon cataloged by ooo: things withdraw, which means that they limit what 1 can think about them. Things also contain other things that are not strictly them--just as the zebra is not reducible to its atoms, from an ooo point of view, and yet a zebra is composed of just these particular atoms. 28
An object is a non-object not because it is “really something else, avoid or some featureless lump or moment in my reflective process—but because an object isn't something else. 30
An object is therefore both itself and not-itself, at the very same time. … If This were not the case, nothing could happen. The uncanniness of objects, even to themselves, is what makes them float, breathe, oscillate, threaten, seduce, rotate, cry, orgasm. 36
Why study or make art? Because when you do so, you are exploring causality. A bonus feature of Realist Magic, then, will be to place the arts and their study at the central point in the affairs of the world. 41
There are objects: cinnamon, microwaves, interstellar particles and scarecrows. There's nothing underneath objects. Or, better, there is not even nothing underneath them. There is no such thing as space independent of objects (happily contemporary physics agrees). What is called Universe is a large object that contains objects such as black holes and racing pigeons period 42
This Is a book about realism without matter. Matter, and current physics, is simply a state of information. Precisely: information is necessarily information-for (for some addressee). Matter requires at least one other entity in order to be itself. Matter is “materials-for”. 42
There is no space or environment as such, only objects. Moreover, in the succession of these objects, there is also no top object: No entity that Lords it over the rest, whose reality is superior to or more powerful than theirs, one auto theological object to rule them all. 43
This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that ooo holds to be a mere appearance of that object, and appearance-for some object. 44
But the Infinity, the uncountability, it's more radical than Leibniz, since there's nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a Society of corals. Each object is a “little world made cunningly” (John Donne). 45
If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object. That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature. There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” the connects things together. All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. 48
It only requires that the block exist. There is a block, whose essence is withdrawn. Withdrawn means beyond any kind of access, any kind of perception or map or plot or test or exploration. You could explore a thousand nuclear bombs and you would not reveal the secret essence of the cinder block. 54
To Say that existence is coexistence is not to say things merely reduce to their relations. Rather, it is to argue that because of withdrawal, an object never exhausts itself in its appearances--this means that there is always something left over, as it were, and excess that might be experienced as a distortion, gap, or void…. This is because of the Rift: The being of things is hollowed out from within. It is this Rift That fuels their births. 113
Speculative metaphysician al-Kiindi used a bit of Aristotle and some clear reasoning to argue that the Universe couldn't be infinite or eternal. Using Aristotle against Aristotle, he reasoned that since a physical thing can't be infinitely large, and since time is an aspect of the physical Universe, the Universe can't be eternal. (Aristotle himself thought that since the motion of the heavens was perfect, the Universe had to be eternal.) If the Universe were eternal, it would have taken Infinity days to get to this one period this means that today couldn't arrive. So the universe isn't eternal. 117-8
Fruit flies have more genes than humans. Genetic mutation is random with respect to present need. 120
Interobjectivtiy is the uterus in which novelty grows. Inter objectivity positively guarantees that something new can happen, because each sample, spider web vibration, each footprint of objects and other objects, is itself a whole new object and a whole new set of relations to the entities around it. 122
Godel showed how logical systems must self contradict at some point in order to be true… 189-190
Watch a slow motion video of the opera singers effect on the glass. Watch how the glass and the video shutters just before it ceases to exist. It was so beautiful I almost died.” Theodor Adorno argues that this is what the aesthetic is supposed to do: start a subject quake… a little death. 193
The (superficial, given) appearance of an object just is it's warping by another object, which is another way of saying that the “past life” of an object is its form. … The Eagle of an object is simply the record of the traumas that happen to it--this goes for the objects called human, for whom the ego is a virtual, sensual object. Thus the there are no blank screens in reality whatsoever. While the aesthetic motive beginning is horror-bliss, and the mode of continuing his comedy, the mode of ending his tragedy. This is because, like the protagonist of a Greek tragedy, objects all possess an intrinsic flaw or wound, which, after the Greeks, I hear call harmartia. 198
There is an ontological Rift between essence and appearance. This has nothing to do with the spurious gap between substance and accidents. What is called substance and what is called accidents are both on the side of what this book calls appearance. The Rift Is irreducibly part of a thing calling a thing is both itself and not-itself. I call this double truth of a thing its fragility. 199
Tracing the whodunit story of destruction via another object comma we soon returned to prime movers and first causes. 199
[An object’s] hamartia, its inner fragility, causes it to cease to exist. 200
All an object needs to cease existing is to coincide with itself. Once it does that, it evaporates. Reduced to sheer simplicity, the object dies, leaving behind only memories, cinders, sensual impressions. The Rift between essence and appearance collapses. The object evaporates into its appearance-for another object(s). 201
The Rift happens both within and between objects. Or rather: it becomes impossible to specify whether the Rift is inside or outside an object. The Rift cannot be located ontically, that is, we can’t point to it anywhere on or inside the object. Yet there it is. This Rift accounts for what I call fragility. 202
What if beauty is when an object tunes to our vulnerability? 208
Appearance, as appearance-for, is kind of death. We are living in a universe of death, in which interactions between the isotypes of objects, their uncanny, ghostly pull, color, taste and emotional state. Things appear because some kind of death happens. A photon “measures” an electron by changing it. I make the poem real for me by misreading it. Every step on the sidewalk wears it away. Time crumbles from the collapsing of carbon-14 as the atoms become something else. 208
We think of essence as buried away “behind” or “before” an object. But it should by now be fairly clear that the essence of things is in front of objects. However paradoxical this ma sound, the essence of a thing is the future, while the appearance of a thing is the past. 210
Contrary To the commonly held belief that appearance is “now,” the formal and material cause of a thing just is it's pastness. That must mean that the future is the essence of a thing. Let's pause to repeat that again: appearance is the past, essence is the future. 213
Excess is sensual and belongs to the realm of appearance. If anything, excess belongs in an objects pastness. Nor is future reality avoid, a gap. Perhaps the term openness expresses it best. Withdrawal is openness period now we can discern more clearly the chorismos between essence and appearance. It is a Rift Between openness and pretense. Time is not a series of now-points “in which” objects exist, but instead time flows out of objects in two different ways. The unknown, unknowable essence of The thing is the future; How something appears is the past period this is in accord with physics, since the speed of light guarantees that any sensual impression of a thing is an impression of its past. What I'm arguing here is that there is an ontological reason for this, namely that time pours out of objects. The fixity of things, their history, definition and so on, is the past period the openness of things is the future. The present is an “objective” fiction of something immediately “present at hand”… Presence is difference-from-itself, the thing hollowed out from the inside by past and future. 215
… art is strikingly like what Socrates says about art in the Ion: art is an attunement to a demonic force, akin to the way a magnet resonates with an electromagnetic field. 216
The coming to be of an object is the opening of a fresh Rift between essence and appearance. This Rift is unique, just as the object is unique. The Rift is not a void or a chasm: it is “What constitutes pretense.” It is the collapse of the Rift, not a change into invisibility, that spells the end of a thing. 225
It's just that the positive appearance and disappearance of things happen in the central realm, not in some quality-free zone “beneath” it. And this is not because there are no real substances, but because indeed there are. 225
March 28, 2015
3.5 stars. funny and psychedelic. though at times morton's tone and style can get to be a bit much. reading this made me want to delve deeper into ooo- so i suppose he accomplished something. no sure how seriously i take it (or how much i actually understand) - but was an enjoyable ride.
April 10, 2020
Timothy Morton continues to be wildly great and his texts a wonderful combination of denseness and clarity all wrapped up into one humorous and entertaining and insightful entity.
December 18, 2015
Has speculative realism already become dogmatic, a Church of Graham, as it were? Or, is this the half-baked work of an epigone, who has understood SR dogmatically as OOO (object-oriented-ontology) and written an entire book to explicate a mediocre pun in the form of philosophy? At any rate, the overly casual and 'cool' presentation makes it difficult to tell the difference. Interesting ideas are insufficiently developed, and the innumerable quasi-scriptural citations of Harman's work continually remind the reader that these ideas are largely unoriginal.
There are many better works of Speculative Realist philosophy (such as Tristan Garcia's Form and Object)
There are many better works of Speculative Realist philosophy (such as Tristan Garcia's Form and Object)
November 7, 2013
i don't know what to think.
October 28, 2015
"To give meaning is to mistranslate."
February 4, 2016
whoa, this is bonkers! Very thoughtful and fwd thinking.
August 28, 2016
My 2nd favorite of Tim's--The Ecological Thought still at the top for me, but this one is wonderful too.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews