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.

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. 

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 …

Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)