Ontology and Personhood

Before I launch into another review, I thought it might be a good idea to discuss at length some of the key organizing concepts of this blog, namely ontology and personhood.

The first is quite simple, at least in the way I use it here. What I mean by ontology is ‘the nature of being’. In philosophical circles, specifically metaphysics, ontology is discussed in its most abstract sense – what does it mean to say that something ‘is’ or that something ‘exists’? I rarely wade into such heady waters, although splashing around in them at least a bit will be necessary. My concern with ontology in this blog is much more practical – what is the nature of a plant’s being, with ‘being’ meaning both an entity and a condition, both a phenomenon and a process. What is the nature of the plant as an organism (the first meaning) and what is the nature of its basic experience (the second meaning). In engaging these practical questions, I will have to engage theoretical ideas about ontology from time to time, but mostly my focus will be on understanding and developing the idea of ontology as it is specific to and observable in plants.

The second idea is ‘personhood’, or more basically that of ‘person’. The first point of potential confusion that requires clarification is that the concept of 'person' is distinct from that of 'human'. In no way does this blog suggest that plants are human beings. This frees the way for considering the concept of person in nonhuman and even inanimate form. This idea is not as strange as you might imagine. In the fields of philosophy, ethics and law, the idea of a person existing in forms other than that of a single human being is commonplace. In the realm of law, an American jurist referred to nonhuman personhood, actually even inanimate personhood, as a ‘legal fiction’, the particular recipient of personhood status in this case being a ship. Since then, legal personhood has been granted to corporations, and the most current and vivid case being tried in courts involves the personhood of chimpanzees and orangutans being used as experimental subjects in scientific laboratories. These cases are not without precedent. A court in India granted personhood to a holy text, the Guru Granth Sahib, and in New Zealand, another court determined that a river bore this status. And of course, in medieval Europe, the regular appearance of nonhumans in courts of law to stand trial for crimes of which they were accused was commonplace and is well documented.

Outside of law, the concept of nonhuman and inanimate personhood is longstanding. Traditional cultures throughout the world and throughout history have considered and continue to consider entities as diverse as mountains, plants and stones to be persons as much as humans are if, however, also radically different in terms of their ontologies. This traditional animist way of thinking has recently experienced a new wave of support in the form of ‘new animism’, a field of anthropology that examines personhood as it exists with reference to more-than-human worlds or other-than-human entities, such as robots and cyborgs, as well as forms of technologically enhanced humans, as well as a renewed appreciation for more natural forms of nonhuman personhood, particularly as they are relevant to discussions of climate change and other environmental conditions.

This is just a cursory treatment of the idea of personhood, particularly as it relates to nonhuman and inanimate entities. I have not touched on the vital role that the concept plays in discussions of abortion and assisted death, for example. Neither have I broached the topic of collective personhood, other than a brief mention of corporations. So whether the idea of nonhuman and inanimate personhood is a convenient fabrication, or takes the form of a more closely held cultural belief, there are more than enough prior manifestations of the idea to suggest that speaking of plants as persons is not as extreme as it might seem at first blush, in fact far from it.

Furthermore, the relation of ontology to personhood provides a rich and important opportunity to consider topics such as rights and obligations, since what a plant does and what can be done to it, as conditioned by its ontological features, plays into what kind of person it is, and therefore what kind of personhood it bears. Society might extend the right to vote to certain human persons, for example, but never to monkeys and certainly not plants, at least currently. By the same token, some environmental conditions are less critical to human welfare, at least when compared to the vital role they play in the lives of plants, therefore different rights and obligations obtain in each set of circumstances.

The two remaining terms bear clarification also, specifically ‘plant’ and ‘project’. I will address those in future posts, as they are essential to understanding the nature of this blog and are not as straightforward as you might think.