First Lines of Timothy Morton's "Humankind"

 "A specter is haunting the specter of communism: the specter of the nonhuman." 

- Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People

I can't claim to understand everything that Morton argues in the first 10% of Humankind, as much of it relies on a command of philosophical lineage that’s beyond me (although my handy copy of The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained helps immensely). Having said that, I'm intrigued by their main premise, which is (put simply as I understand it) that when Kant posited that there were two worlds – the world of experience sensed by our bodies and the world as it is in itself – this involved two errors: 1) the impossibility of knowing “the world as it is in itself” and 2) the anthropocentric bias of “...sensed by our bodies” when the world can be perceived by non-human bodies as well. Mitchell claims that this “severing” divorced humans from anything that wasn't human; in his words “The alienation is a crack in social, psychic, and philosophical ties to the biosphere, a hyber-object teaming with trillions of component beings.” (loc 332). 

This is exciting because they're implying that we can expand the potentiality of existence by opening ourselves up to solidarity with the biosphere. While they haven't detailed how to do this yet, barriers include our Hegalian conditioning to our anthropocentric bias and that moving past it would involve moving past fashionable cynicism; “progress would look like a regression to the childishly passionate" (loc 327).

Fascinating. I feel that this approach could be a natural extension of our learning more about "thinking" amongst "non-sentient" organisms like trees. I'm really looking forward to reading more!