讲座摘要：莫爾頓在他的力作《沒有自然的生態學》一書中雖然看似大膽放言：「在一個『生態狀態』的人類社會中，許多人視為至寶至珍的『自然』這個觀念，必須消失」，但他並不是意圖菲薄自然的意義，而是藉此強調自然不應被固化為一種超越的本質。同樣的，拉圖爾也指出，那個大寫而單數型態的「自然」造成了自然的「去物質化」，以致生態評論只能在浪漫主義的框架中原地踏步、無力前進。莫爾頓進一步指出，在這個人類世的階段，我們迫切需要的是「生態神會」（ecognosis），也就是對物與物之間之空間，或萬物之間的物質關係的體悟。唯有找回與環境及萬物的共同基礎，人類才能「重塑我們的文化符碼，改變我們的基礎觀念架構」（Iovino），並進一步建構拉圖爾所言、符合政治生態學的「共同世界」（Latour）。  

When Timothy Morton says apocalyptically in his book Ecology without Nature, “the very idea of ‘nature ‘ which so many hold dear will have to wither away in an ‘ecological’ state of human Society,” he is not dismissing “nature” but stressing that nature ought not have been reified into a transcendent essence. In a similar vein, Latour argues that it is this capitalized and singularized Nature that has de-materialized natures and incapacitated ecocriticism. In the Anthropocene, argues Morton, what we need is ecognosis, an intimation of the space between things, which is the hidden material relationship between all things (human or non-human). Only after we have recovered the common foundation of the myriad things can we “remak[e] our cultural codes and chang[e] our basic conceptual structures” (Iovino) with a view toward establishing a Latourian “common world,” one that conforms to political ecology.