Plant-Thinking
by Adam Robbert
I was happy to discover earlier today that Michael Marder’s new book Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life is finally available for purchase (and I was even happier to see that the book is getting a bit of 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 we’ve already seen in some of his papers and articles. It’s definitely worth adding to your list if you’re looking for new philosophical approaches to plants and ecology.
I’m curious to follow the thread of Marder’s vegetal thinking… I’ve downloaded a few of his papers on plants and metaphysics. I’ve been reading some Bachelard, whose poetic phenomenology suggests a metaphoric link between the force of imagination and the growth of an inverted tree whose branches are in the soil and whose roots reach into the sky. William Blake also links imagination to vegetation, as does Steiner in his occult phenomenology of etheric forces.