REVIEW: Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, by Michael Marder, with foreword by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013

Here is one of the more striking passages from Michael Marder's Plant Thinking, a brilliant work that offers profound insights into the nature of plants:

It is neither necessary nor helpful to insist, as certain contemporary commentators do, on a need to attribute to vegetal beings those features, like autonomy or even person-hood, philosophers have traditionally considered as respect-worthy. To do so would be to render more refined the violence human thought has never ceased unleashing against these beings, for instance by forcing plants into the mold of appropriative subjectivity.

Marder's statement poses a direct challenge to Matthew Hall's thesis, not to mention a contestation to the theme of this blog. It is a fair point, one that Marder elucidates in his introduction, in which he decries the 'nominalist classifications and conceptual mediations' of contemporary philosophy. He argues instead for encountering a plant on its own terms, as neither an element in a broader organized scheme nor as an instantiation of an abstracted principle, let alone as a 'natural resource'. Rather than instrumentalizing a sunflower by chopping it down for its seeds and oil, by slotting it into our classificatory schema of species, genus, tribe and so on, or holding it up as a fine example of vitalism, we should arrange for a desencontro, a word that Marder deems untranslatable from the Portuguese.

Here is where I pose my own challenge to Marder. Why does he have to be so rigid in his use of language? Is it his philosopher's training? His years of being steeped in the thick tradition of Western philosophy that privileges adherence over invention? Why not just translate desencontro as disencounter? True, disencounter is not a word that you are likely to find in a standard English dictionary, but so what? Language is a living and changing medium. The coining of new words is, or should be, a part of the intellectual's craft. Created and placed in context, a reader will have no problem understanding what it means and everyone will be richer for it.

The same is true of the term 'person-hood' (as Marder renders it). Why does the application of the term to plants have to distort the plant? Why cannot the encounter - or disencounter - distort the word so that it now maps as easily onto plant ontology as onto human ontology? After all, Marder invents 'ontophytology' to mean 'plant ontology', a term which I love, so why can he not also wrap his mind around a term such as 'plant personhood'? Or why not take a step back by identifying a new term that avoids the perhaps indelible associations that 'person' has with 'human'. And, by the way, why use the word 'sunflower' unproblematically, since it enumerates an abstracting and limiting classification as readily as the term 'personhood' does? Is not the real problem one of epistemology versus ontology, a difficulty that is as irresolvable and intractable as any can be?

There is a power that lies in rejecting a concept, which is that it allows you the opportunity to promote your own perspective. I see it as a form of intellectual violence, however, something to which Marder should object.

Again, I understand Marder's desire to have contemporary philosophy's engagement with plants transform philosophy more than it does the plant; in fact, I wildly applaud it. But if this is Marder's true goal, why limit one's conceptual toolkit to that which is given by Western philosophy? He does mention Jain philosophy, but only briefly, and unless I missed it, he ignores Indigenous and Pagan philosophies completely. Aristotle, Theophrastus, Aquinas, Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger and Bergson do indeed offer a great deal to our metaphysical understanding of plants, but they of course do not represent the entirety of human thought on the subject. Having finished the book, in fact having read it twice, I feel at times that Marder could have given himself more freely to understanding plants, perhaps by engaging them more naively, or at least by engaging them through other systems of thought, especially modern science, more rigorously.

But, I criticize to praise. I am not trained in philosophy, so I have undoubtedly missed some of Marder's finer points, and may have veered toward casuistry by relying too heavily on logic and rationality, that is general principles, rather than specific knowledge, in making my argument. Perhaps it is the expository mode that encourages such bad habits, which limits and distorts any encounter. Perhaps it would have been better to approach Marder's book and the topic of plant ontology, as Marder himself suggests, aesthetically. How would that be? What would such a review or such an encounter look like? Why talk about doing it rather than actually doing it? No doubt it would be more difficult than tapping out lines of examination and exposition. Someone must be doing it and it is to them that I shall turn my attention in future posts.

In any case, Michael Marder has produced a seminal study on plant ontology. His discussion of the radical exteriority of plants will shine new and permanent light on the world. Anyone interested in the topic must read Plant Thinking, and reread it several times, throughout their vegetal engagements. Each reading will reveal something so transformative, that you will find yourself lowering the book, raising your eyes, and staring off into the middle distance, to revel in the sensation of - disencountering? - something truly new.

How is POPPI international?

I do not know if anyone has studied to what extent the formation of an acronym shapes the actual scope of the project that bears it. I admit that this was the case with POPPI, but it was not an unfortunate circumstance of its birth.

The initial 'p' was obvious and irrevocable since I am writing about plants, which is the simplest and most common choice for the thing it names. So no problem there. The same is true of the 'o' for ontology. There is no better term for the nature of being and/or the study of the nature of being. So we are now two for two. Likewise with the second 'p'. I played around with persona and other terms before settling on, actually returning to, personhood as the second characteristic of plants that I would address in this undertaking. The following 'p' for project is so general that it found an instant and immediate place in the title. In fact, it was the second word I settled on, after plant. I can safely say therefore that I made absolutely no compromises in selecting the first three letters of my project's titular acronym.

As for the terminating 'i' for international . . . why not? Like 'project' it is fairly innocuous, and since what I aimed to talk about was in fact a universal or global phenomenon, international seemed an apt descriptor and parameter for the project, while at the same time being more modest than either of those two alternatives. Not only would 'universal' or 'global' make for a lofty claim, either term would have rendered the acronym unpronounceable or nonsensical: Did you read the latest post on POPPG? What did you think of the latest review on POPPU?

But with POPPI, we are in luck. Not only is it pronounceable but it also alludes to a thing that is very much within the theme of the blog. And I like that it merely alludes to the proper name of the flower - poppy - rather than matching it exactly. Acronyms should be more connotative than denotative, suggestive and a bit out of step rather than exact and direct. This off-kilter quality renders a title that is particular to a project. If I had succeeded in naming the project 'POPPY', I am afraid that I would have disappointed a few readers who were hoping to find a blog that was devoted to that most charming of flowers.

I had actually considered naming the project POPPY and spelling 'international' with a 'y' instead of an 'i'. It might have been cute, but ultimately irritating and confusing, so I opted out, as much as I generally embrace the subversion of convention, which after all would have been nicely consonant with the latest research on plants which I highlight here.

So how is POPPI international? Certainly it is in the location and focus of the research it tracks, and certainly in the distribution of plants themselves. There is something cloying and untrue about the way that the terms 'global' and 'universal' are used, so I am happy to avoid them. The term 'international' connotes an appealing liveliness and changeability, suggestive of seemingly limitless permutations over space and through time, that the comparatively static 'global' and 'universal' lack, at least on the surface of their meanings. So thanks to a little bit of luck but thanks mostly to the flexibility of the English language, which is so rich in adjectives, I was able to find an acronym that is simultaneously accurate in description and evocative in spirit.

REVIEW: Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany, by Matthew Hall, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011

When it comes to plants, Aristotle got a lot of things wrong. So did Pliny and Thomas Aquinas. In fact, most of Western intellectual thought really has not accurately understood plants nor has it treated them fairly. This, at least, is Matthew Hall's contention in Plants as Persons, and I agree with him. Let's take a look at some of his arguments.

Things start badly with the Greeks as they devise ontological dualisms and hierarchies: humans and nature are separate; humans are better than animals and animals are better than plants, who are better than stones. Things did not improve with the Romans nor the Christians; not only were animals under the dominion of man, but so of course were plants, if they were given any special consideration at all. This basic understanding of plants as lesser entities, not even properly 'beings' in the sense that is attributed to animals, has endured over the centuries and remains as our basic matrix today.

As Hall carefully notes, however, there were important exceptions, so not everyone in the Western canon failed to see the sophisticated nature of plants. He is particularly appreciative of the work of Theophrastus, for example, writing:

It is apparent in the work of Theophrastus that rather than exclusion, his orientation was toward inclusiveness and consideration. The result of this difference in intent is phenomenal. Instead of regarding plants as passive beings lacking sensation and intellect, Theophrastus related to plants as volitional, minded, intentional creatures that clearly demonstrate their own autonomy and purpose in life. For Theophrastus, plants demonstrated their own purpose and desire to flourish through their choice of habitats and the production of seed and fruit.

There are other glimmers of appreciation, which manifest in at least a symbolic sense. The Bible, for example, is full of instances in which apples, grass, crocuses, cedars and oaks act with volition and autonomy, or are at least expected to:

Wail, O cypress, for the cedar has fallen, for the glorious trees are ruined! Wail, oaks of Bashan, for the thick forest has been felled!

Hall is a good writer and he effortlessly places engaging illustrations of his points within his more  expository prose. In one passage, he relates Jesus' particularly harsh treatment of a fig tree. 

In a passage from Mark, Jesus is hungry during the Passover, and although early spring is obviously not the season for figs, Jesus approaches a fig tree seeking fruit. When he finds only leaves covering the tree, he curses the fig tree and issues the curse, "May no one ever eat fruit from you again." When his disciples pass by the following day, they find that the cursed tree has withered and died.

In defense of Jesus, and to pose a challenge to Hall, I must say that Jesus, in engaging the tree, at least regards it as a person, which is after all the state of relations that Hall is promoting. Admittedly, to regard plants as persons only when they exhibit an instrumental value is less than ideal, but it at least does not constitute a complete negation of vegetal subjectivity, and their relegation to serving as elements in a backdrop against which humans and other animals act as uniquely volitional agents.

Things get better when we move to either the Eastern traditions or to the Pagan or Animist worlds, wherever they are and whenever they were. The shift is more proportional than absolute, however, since not all non-Western constructions of human-environmental relations gave credit to the full capacities of vegetation, at least as modern science now understands it (a development which points to a Western triumph over its earlier failings, or at least a reconciliation of matters).

For example, in the Mahabharata we find the following passage:

A creeper winds round a tree and goes about all its sides. A blind thing cannot find its way. For this reason it is evident that trees have vision. Then again trees recover vigour and put forth flowers in consequence of odours, good and bad, of the sacred perfume of diverse kinds of dhupas. It is plain that trees have scent. They drink water by their roots. They catch diseases of diverse kinds. Those diseases again are cured by different operations. From this it is evident that trees have perceptions of taste.

As compared to the radical separation between human and plant ontologies found in Western works, Hindu texts emphasize the commonality of all beings, unproblematically including humans, animals and plants, essentially all living things, in a single category of entities that all share a proto-ontology. All things suffer, and all things suffer in the same way, this logic suggests, so all things deserve respect and compassion. The Jains have created a particularly sincere version of this belief and practice, eating only plants whose harvesting does not kill them. Root vegetables are not allowed in one's diet, for instance, because their harvest requires the death of an entire plant, a consequence that does not arise with the picking of an apple, or better yet, with the procurement of fruit that has fallen to the ground.

Plants show yet a different face in the Pagan and Animist traditions, even those in the European world. Nordic folktales, for instance, give us trees who are wily and self-defending. In the Finnish Kalevala, one reads an exchange between a group of woodsmen looking for timber to build a boat and the various trees they approach to get it. For example, we read this from a particularly astute aspen:

Full of leaks a boat from me
And a craft likely to sink!
I am hollow at the base.

In my opinion, however, Hall delivers his most convincing and heartfelt rendition of the belief in 'plants as persons' in his treatment of various Indigenous cultures of the Americas and of Oceania. In the interest of brevity, and also to leave what I consider to be the best part of the work to be discovered by any eventual readers of the book, I will not say much about them. Although most people know the general contours of these philosophies, which display a deep sense of kinship across human, nonhuman and even inanimate ontologies, encountering them anew always stirs a profound sentiment and a unique insight into what it means to be a spirited thing among other spirited things on the face of the earth.

Additionally, Hall's accounting of modern scientific engagements with the question of plant subjectivity, such as in the work done by Stefano Mancuso and others, offers convincing support to his philosophical arguments, and is a fine summation of current knowledge.

By offering a global and historical survey of the various ways people have understood and treated plants, Plants as Persons adds tremendous depth to the topic of plant ontology and personhood, and as such it is essential reading for anyone who is interested in this fascinating question.

Plant and Project

Following up on my admittedly overly mechanistic promise to break down every element of the name of this blog, or nearly so (‘international’ shouldn’t be left unexamined, so I will get to it also), I take up the words ‘plant’ and ‘project’. The saving grace of such a task is that any assumptions can be tossed aside, leaving terms that had seemed simple enough susceptible to and amenable to reinterpretation.

So what is a plant? I want to address this question in two ways. First, I will consider the category from a physiological perspective and second, from a social point of view.

My survey of the literature so far suggests that a plant is a biological entity whose metabolism is based upon photosynthesis. This places the plant in the position of being the great translator between the fizzing energy of the sun and the meatier ontologies of animals, to surrender to a somewhat unsophisticated adjective. It is not bad, however, since one of the fundamental characteristics of residents of the kingdom Plantae is their composition in cellulose as opposed to the tissue of those resident in Animalia. Both are eukaryotes (organisms composed of cells with nuclei and membranes) and, as I will address in a future post, and as Mancuso and Viola discuss at length, at the cellular scale, distinguishing a plant from an animal can be quite difficult and, in fact, the comparison leads to some surprising insights in the both similar and contrasting natures of plants and animals.

A turn to an etymological investigation of the word ‘plant’ reveals it to be of the kind of noun that is derived from a verb: a plant (from Latin planta) is a thing that is planted (from Latin plantare). A consideration of these linguistic origins points to an essential typological characteristic of plants: they are sessile (rooted, fixed in place) as opposed to mobile (a distinguishing feature of animals).

So a plant is an organism that is rooted in soil, made of cellulose, and which derives its energy through the process of photosynthesis. There are important exceptions, modifications and addenda that need to be posed to this basic definition, but it at least stakes out some of the basic parameters of plants.

In a less straightforward way, I want to address the social understanding of plants. What is a plant from this perspective? I will address this question first by considering the idea of plant as individual organism as opposed to the idea of plant as collective. One way of considering the complexity of a system is to place it on a scale between the Baroque and Romantic epistemologies that emerged in the 17^th through 19^th centuries. Briefly summarized, the Baroque perspective looks downward, seeing worlds within worlds in a never-ending diminution in scale. In contrast, the Romantic view looks upward, seeing a grand assembly of agents acting in an enormous and unified ecology. The first perspective is well served by a microscope, the second by a telescope, at least in a suggestive rather than literal sense. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was a key exponent of Baroque thought, while Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was a major developer of the Romantic outlook. Both views posit the same model, one in which complexity increases with scale, the difference being the direction in which they trace it.

The significance that this discussion has for plants is that it is often more accurate and useful to see organisms – humans, cats, birds, fish, plants – less as individual beings and more as collective ecologies. The human body, for example, not only hosts a number of other organisms, on its skin and inside its organs, but is in fact dependent upon them. The human digestive system, for example, would not function without the myriad bacteria that populate it.

So how should we look at a human body – as a being or as a community? I aver the latter and do the same for plants, who evince an even stronger distributive nature, in the shape and function of their leaf and root systems (in the Baroque model), as well as in the shape and function of their intra- and inter-species communities (according to the Romantic idea) , aspects of plant physiology that I will address in future posts and again, something that Mancuso and Viola unveil expertly.

As for project, perhaps the most important feature of this word is its connotation of ‘process’. The Plant Ontology and Persona Project, as manifest in this blog, is very much a dialog, a discussion that is not necessarily tenuous, as it is based upon sound science and logic, but one that is very much in process. A person is whatever we – individually and collectively – decide it is, so I look forward to your insights on the topic, rendered in the form of comments to each post as it appears.