Plants Being Metaphysics
by Adam Robbert
What does metaphysics have to do with plants? What can this group of heterogeneous beings, as different from one another as a stalk of wheat and an oak tree, tell us about Being ‘‘as such and as a whole,’’ let alone about resisting the core metaphysical values of presence and identity that the totality of Being entails? A pessimistic answer to these questions is that the bewildering diversity of vegetation is reduced, at bottom, to the conceptual unity ‘‘plant’’ in a signature gesture of metaphysical violence seeking to eliminate differences, for instance, between a raspberry bush and moss, a mayflower and a palm tree. The plant cannot offer any resistance to metaphysics because it is one of the impoverished products of the metaphysical obsession with primordial unity, an obsession not derailed but, to the contrary, supported by the scientific systems of classification that, from antiquity onwards, have been complicit in the drive toward identity across hierarchically organized differences of species, genus, family, and so forth. The ontic manifes- tation of this ontological consolidation of the plant is the ‘‘monocrop,’’ such as sugar cane, which increasingly displaces varied horticultures all over the world, but, especially, in the global South. Metaphysics and capitalist economy are in unmistakable collusion, militating, as they do, against the dispersed multiplicities of human and non-human lives; economic rationality, which currently treats plants as sources of bio-energy or biofuel, converts, concretely and on a global scale, the metaphysical principles of sameness and identity into the modes of production and reproduction of material existence in toto.
That is not to say, however, that there is nothing in vegetation that escapes this double objectifying grasp. In what follows, I will argue that, by denying to vegetal life the core values of autonomy, individualization, self-identity, originality, and essentiality, traditional philosophy not only marginalizes plants but, inadvertently, confers on them a crucial role in the current transvaluation of metaphysical value systems. From the position of absolute exteriority and heteronomy, vegetation accomplishes a living reversal of metaphysical values and points toward the collapse of hierarchical dualisms.
- Michael Marder, “Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics: Learning from Plants”
What a coincidence, Adam, I’m also reading this article today! My favorite bit, which is perfectly illustrated by the image you posted:
“Like a sentient and conscious subject who always finds herself in the midst of something that has already begun outside the sphere of her memory and control, the plant is an elaboration on and from the midsection devoid of a clear origin… The middle pertains to a non-totalizable synthetic unity”.
Yes! Very nice. I found his work because of his recent articles in the NY Times. I’m assuming that many more people are now appreciating Marder’s work.
This is a very stimulating excerpt. I’ll have to read the whole essay. I am thinking what I’ve read here in relation to what I just read Richard Doyle say in his new book Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere (2011) about the symbiogenic role of “ecodelic” chemicals in hominid evolution.
Marder writes: “by denying to vegetal life the core values of autonomy, individualization, self-identity, originality, and essentiality, traditional philosophy not only marginalizes plants but, inadvertently, confers on them a crucial role in the current transvaluation of metaphysical value systems. From the position of absolute exteriority and heteronomy, vegetation accomplishes a living reversal of metaphysical values and points toward the collapse of hierarchical dualisms. ”
So in other words, plants are not “external” to our human cultural consciousness, they are woven through it; they live inside of and through us and have direct psychological and political effects. The plant thinks in me.
What does this say about the relationship between the vegetable and the chemical, or between either and the mineral? Or between the mineral and the electromagnetic? Between electromagnetism and gravitation? Nature does seem to have distinct levels of organization. They are all “organized” as the one life of the universe: the whole scale of phenomenal beings, from persons to photons, participate in “the core values of autonomy, individualization, self-identity, originality, and essentiality” to varying degrees. What distinguishes each (by degree and not by “kind”) is a “style” of activity, rather than some radically new ontological power. Individuality does seem to increase in degree over time, even if no fundamentally new (and so “higher”) kinds ever emerge. There is only one power in the universe. Call it Life. Call it Spirit. But I’d not want to chose, say, vitalism or Absolute Idealism; I’d rather aim for something still indefinite, not reducible to one internally consistent set of abstract deductions or another.
[...] discussion on Twitter and elsewhere). I’ve pointed to Marder’s work before (here and here), and I’m hoping that with this text we’ll finally see a full-blown version of what [...]