Developing a Meta Perspective

I was out walking in the Oakland Hills this morning, specifically in and around the Chabot Space and Science Center. The actual center was closed, but since it is located in a regional park, there is a lot to do if walking around in the woods is your thing.

And that is the question, isn't it. Does anyone like to walk in the woods? I suppose you could make an argument that certain cultures - Nordic and Amazonian - to name just two off of the top of my head, although certainly not limited to these, for even in Sicily one can drive into the Nebrodi Mountains or in and around the slopes of Mount Etna and be as much in the woods as if you were in the Black Forest or the Chocó Rainforest, or nearly so.

Somehow some cultures have developed a more inclusive relation with the woods than others. This development can include but is different from what I am going to call a meta perspective on plants. For example, if plant neurobiologists such as Stefano Mancuso can say that plants can see, how are human beings to interpret that statement? In what sense does the word 'see' denote the thing that plants do in their engagement with light as well as the thing that humans do in their engagement with light? Plants do not have eyes, so maybe the capacity to produce images is not existent, but they are apparently sensitive to changing conditions, and therefore able to discern light from shadow, and even to tell when someone or something walks by them, momentarily blocking their light. Is this a kind of seeing?

If not, what is it when a I stand out in the sun with my eyes closed? I can sense when a cloud passes over the sun and thereby blocks the light. I sense a cooling on my skin and perhaps a darkening through some kind of residual sight capacity that remains even through my closed eyelids. Focusing on the skin sensation, and omitting the specialized capacity of eyes, especially their capacity to facilitate the production of images, is this what a plant senses when a cloud momentarily blocks the sunlight? In other words, when Aristotle stated that all senses are just variations on touch, is human skin like the membrane of a leaf or stem in the way it engages light? And by focusing on this similarity, can humans gains some sense of how plants are? Does this eyeless engagement with light facilitate the development of a meta perspective on the world, or at least a part of it? And must we not also consider that photosynthesis is a form of engagement with light that is so beyond human experience that we must not be fooled into thinking that the development of a meta perspective is somehow more inclusive of plant ontology than human ontology because plant experience is simpler?

It seems that I need to know more about how a plant experiences photosynthesis, if I can even use the word 'experience' in this way as a function of plants, before I could go further in developing a meta perspective on engagements with light across plant and human ontologies, so as to do a better job of including the ways of means of plant life into the project.

The Comforting Presence of Plants

What accounts for the comforting presence of plants? What makes them different from other material objects, including human beings and other animals? We can talk about 'energy' that is specific to various ontological forms: dogs, cats, fish, humans et cetera, which all charge a space with feelings that are quantitatively and qualitatively different, in accordance with their varying characteristics, which change also of course according to features that are present in all of them: for example, size, age and health, as well as innumerable individual differences that cannot or have not yet been categorized.

Just as there is variability on the production side, there is also variability on the reception side. Are some people more susceptible to the charms of plants? Probably, but I suspect it has much more to do withe personal and cultural influences than it does to any kind of innate difference, but this is something that needs to be studied, if it has not been already. Are human beings genetically coded to like trees or is such affection a cultural construct? I am sure there are many anthropological engagements with the question, but to what extent are these conducted within Anglo-Eurpean geographical contexts that are tree-laden, even in urban settings? Peter Wohlleben's observation that trees planted in an urban setting, like soldiers lining streets and boulevards (my description), suffer in this deployment, supports my long-held suspicion that these trees are being abused, separated as they are from their natural familial clusterings as found in forests. We may derive some pleasure from their presence, but if we were really tuned into their wellbeing, we would be distressed by their condition, just as we would be distressed by the appearance of a kitten or puppy who had been left alone on the sidewalk or in some alley, separated from its mother.

On that note, I have run out of books to review on the topic of the social nature of plants, so I will turn my attention to journal articles as well as my own investigations, in future posts.

Why think about plants as persons?

Why should we think of plants as persons? Can't we just be nice to them?

We should think of plants as persons because, from my perspective, it is the most accurate way to think of them, with person serving as an ontological category that can contain all kinds of things, whether they are animal, vegetable or mineral, to use a trinity from a guessing game I used to play as a child.

This ides of course calls for a conception of the word 'person' that lies outside of its usual everyday meaning of 'human'. So cutting any kind of exclusive link between the idea of 'person' and that of 'human' is a great place to start.

What then, exactly, is a person? I would say that it is an entity that has an agenda, with the idea of agenda being very largely construed. Does a dog have an agenda? I think most people would agree that it undoubtedly does. Birds, fish and spiders? Of course. Plants? Yes. Fungi and bacteria? Clearly. Rocks? Rrrrrhhh! (That's the sound of brakes squealing).

Does a rock want to do something? Of course. It 'wants' to do things in accordance with an ontology that is bounded by the physical and chemical parameters of minerals just as plants and animals want to do things within the confines of their biological ontologies. I understand that some may quibble with my use of the word 'want' here, but since an aim of this blog is to emphasize similarity rather than difference across ontological forms, I use the word in an open way. After all, not all wants are intentional. I do not think my hunger into being, it merely appears through no conscious effort on my own, as a condition of the nature of my beings. Similarly, a rock that is exposed to the serial effects of rain and sun wants to break so as to conform to its ecological conditions. Similarly, a mason or carpenter would say that a particular stone or piece of wood 'wants' to break or separate along its grain. In this way, even inanimate things exert their will upon society, shaping our art and architecture and, in a more fundamental sense, transforming the ground we stand upon.

In this sense, dogs, birds, fish, plants and rocks are all entities with agendas, and are therefore persons. Now, we can also say that groups of dogs, birds, fish, plants and rocks behave in ways that are both similar to and different from those of their singular forms, but that, that idea of collective agency and collective persons, with collective agendas, note the interesting connection between the words 'agency' and 'agenda', shall be a topic for another post.

The Radical Exteriority of Plants

Have I written on this before?

One of the more essential aspects of plants, in my view, is their sheer presence in the world, and this presence is no more apparent than in their method of reproduction. Mammals have evolved special organs in which they nurture a fetus until it is strong enough to survive in an open environment. Some species have evolved long gestations to facilitate the long period of nurturance that complex neural systems, for example, require to develop. Other classes of animals, such as fish, amphibians and reptiles, have evolved other strategies, such as producing and fertilizing relatively huge numbers of eggs in order to increase the odds of species survival in their favor. Only mammals have uteruses, organs that I like to think of as specialized and super-protective environments to allow for an incubation period that occurs inside rather than outside a sexually-reproducing animal.

How strange and instructive it is, then, that plants have evolved in such a way that they are capable of carrying out the complex and delicate process of fertilization, let alone incubation, such that it is, more or less entirely outside of their organism. And not only does it occur outside of plant bodies, but it also requires, by design, the involvement of other beings, namely birds, bees, bats and even human beings, as well as other creatures.

In this sense, agency, at least the agency of sexual reproduction, cannot be ascribed to a single organism, but is necessarily a group project. I said earlier that plants are instructive in this way because such a clear example of agency existing as a feature of a collective rather than an individual, as a dynamic of an ecology rather than an organism, points to the collective nature of human agency. Where would we be, for example, without the help of the countless organisms that inhabit our bodies and make them work?

As I have written before in this blog, and as scientists and scholars such as Pollan, Chamovitz, Mancuso, Hall, Nealon and others have elaborated, plants stand to teach us a lot not only about themselves but about us and about life in general as well. The beauty of plants is that all aspects of their lives are always on display for us to observe, such is their prepossessing and - seemingly - unselfconscious generosity.

Talk about tough.

Horses with Four Legs

There is a logic that some people use that I find strange. It goes something like this: If everything is or has X, then X is unimportant. So for example if, as some scientists claim, everything is or has consciousness, then consciousness is unimportant; that is, you cannot use it to make any claim about an entity, such as what it is like or to which category it belongs.

I have a standard response to such complaints, so when a student recently protested that my claim that everything has agency was irrelevant because the ubiquity of the characteristic made it useless for any kind of taxonomic sorting, I replied: All horses have four legs. Does that mean the fact that a horse has four legs is unimportant to understanding its nature?

My point is that we should focus on our similarities as well as our differences. Such is the politics of our times, however, that it is difference that is celebrated over similarity. So while I see clear differences among human beings, nonhuman animals, plants and stones, I also see clear similarities. And if this blog is about anything it is about noting and celebrating those similarities.