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.
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.
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