Dark Ecology and the Romantics

Prof Tim Morton at UCLA Davis teaches a course (available in iTunes) on Romanticism and the environment. The course covers Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley (Mary and Percy), Coleridge, Austen, DeQuincey and John Clare - the last two previously unknown to me.

His theme is the implicit attitude of the Romantics, and the extent to which it's still with us. They wrestled with self-consciousness and the way it produced a seeing of the world and its effects on them as if through a glass.  (Plate glass shopfronts, he notes, are a Romantic period invention.)  This attitude of independence from the world is something he believes is still with us.  We still use our gaze to find the world - find used as discovery, but also judgement and construction.  We are like Romantics when we value Coke (or Jolt) for its desirability, the way they valued landscape for how like a picture of a landscape it was. We look at the environment the same way, as an object with properties unlike us, and doing so creates the space to argue whether or not there is climate change, whether or not pollution is bad, whether the sixth mass extinction in the history of life that we are causing is a big deal or not.

His thesis is that the Romantics were wrestling with this and modern thinking could be amended to rhyme not with Romantic self-consciousness, but with Romantic irony - the ability to recognise the self-conscious position, and to negotiate the gap it creates from the reality that we are absolutely embedded in ecology.  He doesn't say it, but he might well say with Heidegger that 'We are our world, existingly.'  What goes wrong out there is the wrong in human hearts. We need to adopt what he calls 'Dark Ecology' in which there is no hope of restoring nature to being Nature, no hope of avoiding catastrophe and no hope of remaining unimplicated - there is only the recognition that this is Real, that it is us out there, going extinct.

Although his lecturing is uber-offhand, and he has some annoying verbal tics like ',right?', and he explains unfamiliar things too often by analogy to other things that are unfamiliar, this is an excellent course. In addition to deft handling of complex philosophical challenges, you will get a pretty good handle on the skills for analysing poetry and prose.  Highly recommend.