I.
Sometimes, despite having the best of intentions, it can take five or six years to get around to reading a book and Michael Marder's
Plant Thinking (2013) is a case in point. Not only have I been wanting to read it for ages, but, as a floraphile with a philosophical interest in all forms of nonhuman life, including our CO2-loving friends, I really should have read it by now.
Still, better late than never ...
II.
Firstly, I should say as sympathetic as I am to Marder's project, I'm not entirely convinced that re-thinking our relation to plants and raising various ethico-ontological concerns to do with vegetal life significantly helps in the task of deconstructing metaphysics, or overthrowing the "capitalist agro-scientific complex" [184]. That's over-egging the philosophical pudding and marks the enlisting of plants to the revolutionary cause of hermeneutic communism (it's no surprise to discover the foreword to Marder's book is written by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala).
And I'm certainly not of the view that his book will - to paraphrase ecofeminist Vandana Shiva - help plants threatened by human activity whilst enabling us to better understand the sanctity and continuity of life and our own place within the Earth Family. That's just quasi-religious vomit.
Anyway, here are my thoughts first on the Introduction to Plant-Thinking, followed by responses to the Epilogue (I shall deal with the body of the text - divided into five chapters across two main parts - in parts two and three of this post) ...
III. To Encounter the Plants ...
It's true, I suppose, that - in comparison to other living beings - plants have been given the shit end of the stick by philosophers (though, due to their penchant for manure, one might have assumed they'd not find this particularly objectionable). Even animals, which have themselves suffered marginalisation throughout the history of Western thought, suddenly seem very rich in world compared to plants; the latter are the poorest of the poor, populating the "zone of absolute obscurity" [2].
Vegetal life was simply not regarded as question-worthy by the vast majority of theorists and critical thinkers and this has allowed for their ethical neglect, argues Marder, who wishes to give plants their due and let them be in their own right. And he aims to do this by staging an encounter with plants in all their leafy otherness.
This might seem problematic (even impossible), but Marder insists human beings have "a wide array of possible approaches to the world of vegetation at their disposal" [3] and that, alien as they are, they are also curiously familiar to us in our daily lives, even if "the uses to which we put vegetal beings do not exhaust what (or who) they are but, on the contrary, obfuscate enormous regions of their being" [4].
For example, there's the aesthetic approach - think Van Gogh and his sunflowers - which seems "to be more propitious to a nonviolent approach to plants than either their practical instrumentalization or their nominalist-conceptual integration into systems of thought" [4].
I agree with that: artists and poets have a crucial role to play in the encounter with plants* and if philosophers are to think plants, they'll need to learn from the above and perhaps adopt a quasi-aesthetic approach of their own (easy enough for European philosophers, but problematic for those who belong to an Anglo-American (analytic) tradition and don't quite know what it might mean to "save singularities from the clasp of generalizing abstraction and [...] put thought in the service of finite life" [5]).
I'm not sure Marder particularly cares about the latter, however, whom he regards as disrespectful toward vegetation. It's weak thinking postmodernists, feminists, and non-Western philosophers with their rich venerable traditions who are "much more attuned to the floral world" [6] (apparently). So I suppose we'd all better get reading Irigaray and learning Sanskrit if we want to interact with plants in a manner that doesn't negate their otherness and at least entertains the hypothesis "that vegetal life is coextensive with a distinct subjectivity with which we might engage" [8].
Developing this latter point, Marder writes:
"This is not to say that human beings and plants are but examples of the underlying universal agency of Life itself; nor is it to plead for an excessive anthropomorphism, modeling the subjectivity of vegetal being on our own personhood. Rather, the point is that plants are capable, in their own fashion, of accessing, influencing, and being influenced by a world that does not overlap the human Lebenswelt but that corresponds to the vegetal modees of dwelling on and in the earth." [8]
In other words, rather than talk (like Heidegger) about having or not having world, it's better to say we have our world and they, plants, have theirs.
Thus, whenever a man or woman meets a sunflower, "two or more worlds (and temporalities) intersect" and to accept this is "already to let plants maintain their otherness, respecting the uniqueness of their existence" [8]. We can't and probably shouldn't try to enter their world (even though they certainly intrude into ours); rather, the challenge is "to allow plants to flourish on the edge or at the limit of phenomenality" [9].
We might also admit that we ourselves retain vestiges of the inorganic and of ancient plant life; that we have a common evolutionary origin after all. Thus, Deleuze's notion of becoming-plant might be said to involve the activation of long dormant and long forgotten molecular memories. The challenge that plant-thinking sets us, therefore, is this:
"Are we ready to take the initial, timid steps in the anamnesis of the vegetal heritage proper to human beings, the very forgetting of which we have all but forgotten?" [13]
IV. The Ethical Offshoots of Plant-Thinking
It was certainly new to me to be told that in 2008 the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Nonhuman Biotechnology released a report titled 'The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants'.
As Marder explains, for perhaps the first time in human history, "a government-appointed body issued recommendations for the ethical treatment of plants" [180]. Vegetal life was said to deserve to be treated with the same consideration accorded all other living beings. Henceforth, fucking with plants and subjecting them to arbitrary harm was not okay; they had rights.
You'd think Marder would be delighted by this - and he does, in fact, describe the report as admirable and praise its revolutionary potential. But he also points out that it failed to "inquire into the being of plants, into their unique purchase on life" [180]. In other words, it lacked any ontological insight or philosophical depth and continued to privilege mankind as supreme moral arbiter. It was ultimately an attempt to absorb the vegetal world into the all too human world of law and order.
What was needed, rather, was "the cultivation of a certain intimacy with plants, which does not border on empathy or on the attribution of the same fundamental substratum to their life and to ours" [181]. We must go beyond being plant-like in our thinking alone; we must allow this thinking to bear upon our actions, says Marder, before outlining a series of offshoots that suggest how we might best form an ethical relationship with plants.
These offshoots tell us, for example, that ethics is "rooted in the ontology of vegetal life" [182] and that plants deserve respect in the Kantian sense of the word (which is "not to be confused with a quasi-religious veneration" [183] - please note Vandana Shiva). I don't know if either of these ideas is true, but it's certainly fun to have them on the table for consideration.
How one might show respect to a weed, for example, is an interesting question: don't immediately uproot or spray it with herbicide might seem to be an obvious place to start. But it's going to be difficult to convince my next-door neighbour - who prides himself on his decorative brick driveway upon which not even a fallen leaf shall come to rest - that the loss of even a single plant "is tantamount to the passing of an entire world" [183].
It might be even more difficult to persuade the local greengrocer that whilst plant-thinking "does not oppose the use of fruit, roots, and leaves for human nourishment" [184], plants should not be harnessed to a particular end that ontologically exhausts them.
In other words, Hegel was mistaken to assert that "vegetal beings attain their highest fulfilment in serving as sources of food for animals and humans" [184] and Marder objects to "the total and indiscriminate approach to plants as materials for human consumption within the deplorable framework of the commodified production of vegetal life" [184].
It's not a question, therefore, of not eating broccoli or Brussels sprouts with your Christmas dinner, it's a question of not disrespecting other facets of ontophytology and of eating with ethical concern - which, for Marder, is eating like a plant! He explains:
"Eating like a plant does not entail consuming only inorganic minerals but welcoming the other, forming a rhizome with it, and turning oneself into the passage for the other without violating or dominating it, without endeavouring to swallow up its very otherness in one's corporeal and pyschic interiority." [185]
That's something the even self-righteous vegans and vegetarians stuffing their faces with chickpeas and tofu might like to consider. For when it comes to the ethics of eating conceived from the perspective of plant-thinking, "what is required is a complete and concerted decommodification of vegetal life, a refusal to regulate the human relation to plants on the basis of commodity-economic logic" [185].
Ultimately, despite their being silent and non-conscious in the usual manner, plants are alive and therefore worthy of at least some degree of ethical consideration; indeed, I would extend this even to non-living objects - everything should be handled with care.
Notes
* As Marder asks in the epilogue to his text: "How, for instance, could one ethically regret the fading of flowers, if not, as Rilke does, in the language of poetry, which does not represent anything and which, itself, verges on [the] silence [of plants]?" [186-87]
See: Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, (Columbia University Press, 2013). All page references given in the text are to this work.
See also an interesting debate to do with plant ethics between Michael Marder and the legal scholar and animals rights author Gary Francione in the online magazine Berfrois (15 June, 2012): click here. Note that the image above of a thinking plant was taken from here.
Part two of this post - on vegetal anti-metaphysics - can be accessed by clicking here.
For part three, on vegetal existentiality, click here.
