(Polity, 2018)
I.
As torpedohiles will be aware, I'm a big fan of plants and trees. And interested also in the latest philosophical speculation concerning our CO2-loving friends. Thus, I'm delighted to have the opportunity to discuss - having finally read - a recent book by Emanuele Coccia, published in English as The Life of Plants (2019) [a].
One of Coccia's main points is certainly not new, but remains something that needs to be repeated as loudly and as often as possible: human exceptionalism is scientifically untenable - it's a theological prejudice. Thus, any system of rank that places mankind above all other animals is one that needs scrapping.
Further, we should also abandon the idea that animals are a superior form of life than plants - or even radically distinct.
For example, I don't know if plants have consciousness as conventionally understood. But, as a Deleuzean, I can happily subscribe to the idea that there are forces working through them that constitute microbrains, enabling plants not only to process information and make decisions, but contemplate the world by contracting the elements from which they originate [b].
Anyway, let's now look at Coccia's book in more detail ...
II.
Plants - like a lot of other things - have mostly been overlooked in philosophy, "more out of contempt than out of neglect" [3].
So it's an encouraging development that there has lately been a bloom of interest in them by philosophers such as Coccia and Michael Marder, who reject the metaphysical snobbery that would keep plants "in the margins of the cognitive field" [3] and forever outside the gate.
In other words, the return of the photosynthesising repressed is to be welcomed. I particularly like the fact that this represents a challenge to the chauvinism of the animal rights brigade and is one in the eye of holier-than-thou vegans, who never stop to question their own positing of animal life over plant life.
For what is animalism if not merely "another form of anthropocentrism and a kind of internalized Darwinism [which] extends human narcissim to the animal realm" [4] ...?
Not that plants care - they just keep on doing their thing with sovereign indifference, living a form of life that is "in absolute continuity and total communion with the environment" [5]. To imagine that they are poor in world is laughable:
"They participate in the world in its totality in everything they meet. [...] One cannot separate the plant - neither physically nor metaphysically - from the world that accommodates it. It is the most intense, radical, and paradigmatic form of being in the world." [5]
Ultimately, we need plants to live; but they don't need us: "They require nothing [...] but reality in its most basic components: rocks, water, air, light" [8], which they transform into life and into the world we inhabit. We call this god-like ability autotrophy - the capacity plants have "to transform the solar energy dispersed into the universe into a living body" [8].
This is why it makes much more sense to worship a tree, than a deity made in our own image; we owe plants everything (something that the man next door, forever spraying weedkiller on his drive, should think about, as well as those who are wilfully destroying the world's rainforests).
As Coccia writes, botany might be advised to "rediscover a Hesiodic register and describe all forms of life capable of photosynthesis as inhuman and material divinities [...] that do not need violence to found new worlds" [10]
III.
For Max Bygraves, hands were crucial.
But plants, as Coccia reminds us, don't have hands, they have leaves. But then plants don't need to brush away a tear or want to stop a bus, and the absence of hands "is not a sign of lack, but rather the consequence of a restless immersion in the very matter they ceaselessly model" [12] [c].
To think like this is, essentially, to revive the ancient Greek tradition of philosophy as a discourse not on ideas, but on nature [peri physeos]; i.e., philosophy staged as a confrontation with the objects of the natural world (something that plants do every moment of the day).
People often like to say that nature is a cultural construct; but, actually, culture is a natural construct and, as readers of Nietzsche will recall, he always stressed that the former must be understood in terms of φύσις.
For Nietzsche, culture possessed a spiritual quality, lacked by civilisation, which develops organically from within the conditions of existence and he affirms nature as a world of difference and constant becoming. As for man, the flower of culture: Der Mensch ist eine Mischung aus Pflanze und Geist ... [d]
Unfortunately, for centuries now - and certainly since the time of German Idealism - philosophy (with a few rare exceptions) stopped contemplating nature and left it up to other disciplines to speak of "the world of things and of nonhuman living beings" [18] [e].
Coccia, following Iain Hamilton Grant, calls this forced expulsion from philosophy of all traces of the natural world physiocide and suggests that it has had terrible consequences for philosophy, turning it into an "imaginary struggle against the projections of its own spirit" [19] and the ghosts of its past:
"Forced to study not the world, but the more or less arbitrary images that humans have produced in the past, it has become a form of skepticism - and an often moralized and reformist one at that." [19]
Thus, Coccia's little book has a big goal: to rebuild philosophy as a form of cosmology via an exploration of vegetal life. In other words, he wishes to learn from the flowers, roots and - arguably the most important parts of the plant - the leaves ...
IV.
As this passage makes clear, for Coccia leaves are key:
"The origin of our world does not reside in an event that is infinitely distant from us in time and space [...] It is here and now. The origin of the world is seasonal, rhythmic, deciduous like everything that exists. Being neither substance nor foundation, it is no more in the ground than in the sky, but rather halfway beween the two. Our origin is not in us - in interiore homine - but outside, in open air. It is not something stable or ancestral, a star of immeasurable size, a god, a titan. It is not unique. The origin of our world is in leaves [...]" [28]
But, on the other hand, Coccia also loves roots - "the most enigmatic forms of the plant world" [77] - which are hidden and invisible to most animals as they move across the surface of the earth. Interestingly, roots are relatively a recent development in the evolution of plant life, which seems not to need them "in order to define itself, exist, or at least survive" [78].
Indeed, for millions of years, plants lived perfectly happily without roots and their origin is obscure:
"The first fossil evidence dates back to 390 million years ago. As in all forms of life destined to last for millions of years, their origin is due to fortuitous invention and bricolage more than to methodical, conscious elaboration: the first kind of roots were functional modification of the trunk or horizontal rhizomes deprived of leaves." [78]
That is fascinating, I think, and it gives one a new interest in roots; particularly in their extremely variable morphology and physiology.
I know Deleuze always hated roots - primarily because Plato and Aristotle thought of them as analogous to the human head (and hence reason) and this idea was to have "an extraordinary success in the philosophical and theological tradition from the Middle Ages and up to the modern period" [79] - but nous somme ne pas Deleuzean [f].
Thus, we are free to say that roots rock and are perhaps not as bad as we thought they were, although Coccia's suggestion that roots "make the soil and the subterranean world a space of spiritual communication", transforming the earth into "an enormous planetary brain" [81] is not something I would write and doesn't help matters.
Personally, I prefer it when Coccia reminds us that roots are ontologiclly nocturnal and "swarming under the surface of the soil, nauseating and naked like vermin", as Georges Bataille so memorably put it [g]. Flowers face heavenward; but roots have no superterrestrial dreams or hopes; they remain true to the earth:
"The root is not simply a base on which the superior body of the trunk is based, it is the simultaneous inversion of the push toward the upward direction and the sun that animates the plant: it incarnates 'the sense of the earth', a form of love for the soil that is intrinsic in any vegetal being." [85] [h]
V.
Finally, having discussed leaves and roots, we come to Coccia's theory of the flower, or, if you prefer, his erotics, which posits sex as "the supreme form of sensibility, that which allows us to conceive of the other at the very moment when the other modifies our way of being and obliges us [...] to become other" [100] - which is as boring a definition as you could wish for.
And the flower? A flower is a cosmic attractor - "an ephemeral, unstable body" - which allows the plant to "capture the world" [100]. And thanks to flowers, says Coccia, "plant life becomes the site of an explosion of colours and forms and of a conquest of the domain of appearances" [100].
Flowers are not only beyond good and evil, they are beyond any "expressive or identitarian logic: they do not have to express an individual truth, or define a nature, or communicate an essence" [100] - they just have to look pretty and smell nice.
But the flower isn't, for Coccia, just sex on a stem: it is also reason; "the paradigmatic form of rationality" [110], echoing Lorenz Oken, a leading figure within Naturphilosophie in Germany in the early 19th-century who wrote:
"If one wishes to compare the flower - beyond sexual relation - to an animal organ, one can only compare it with the most important nerve organ. The flower is the brain of plants [...] which remains on the plane of sex. One can say that what is sex in the plant is brain for the animal, or that the brain is the sex of the animal." [i]
What does that mean? It means, says Coccia, that "anthropology has much more to learn from the structure of a flower than from the linguistic self-awareness of human subjects if it is to understand the nature of what is called rationality" [117].
And on that note, I think I'd like to close the post ... [j]
Notes
[a] Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari, (Polity Press, 2019). All page references given in the post are to this edition of the text.
[b] Even Darwin speculated that plants might have tiny brains in their roots; see The Power of Movement in Plants (John Murray, 1880).
Michael Marder, meanwhile, is adamant that plants do, in fact, have consciousness - albeit in a radically different way to ourselves; see Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013). Readers may recall that I published a three-part discussion of this book on Torpedo the Ark in November 2019: click here for part one and then follow links at the end of the post for parts two and three.
Readers interested in this topic might also like to see F. Baluška, S. Mancuso, D. Volkmann, and P. W. Barlow, 'The "Root-Brain" Hypothesis of Charles and Francis Darwin', in Plant Signaling and Behaviour, 12 (Dec 2009), 1121-27. Click here to read online.
[c] This is not to downplay the importance of hands; see my post of 1 June 2019: click here.
[d] See Zarathustra's Prologue, 3, in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
[e] Of course, it was Socrates who first insisted that philosophy should disregard the physical universe and confine itself to a rational study of moral questions.
[f] In other words, Deleze has a metaphysical objection to roots, which, as Coccia notes, are often still thought of in ordinary speech as "what is most fundamental and originary, what is most obstinately solid and stable, what is necessary" [80] - i.e., the plant organ par excellence. And yet, as Coccia goes on to point out, roots are actually the most ambiguous part of the plant.
[g] Georges Bataille, 'The Language of Flowers', Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl,
with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr., (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 13.
An interesting post written by Michael Marder on Bataille and his vegetal philosophy, can be found on The Philosopher's Plant (his blog for the LA Review of Books): click here.
[h] Having said that, Coccia warns against blind fidelity to the earth if
that means forgetting the sun: "Geocentrism is the delusion of false
immanence: there is no autonomous Earth. The Earth is inseparable from
the Sun." [91]
That's true, of course, but I'm not sure I understand what he means when he goes on to argue that to "the lunar and nocturnal realism of
modern and postmodern philosophy, one should oppose a new form of
heliocentrism, or rather an extremization of astrology" [92] - with the latter understood as a universal science. Coccia seems to think there's a correlation between us and the stars; that because we are of an astral nature (and the earth a celestial body), that we can influence the stars (just as they influence us).
Predictably, this way of thinking very quickly leads to a theological conclusion: "Everything [...] that occurs is a divine fact. God is no longer elsewhere, he coincides with the reality of forms and accidents." [94]
Ultimately, it's important to realise that whilst Coccia loves plants, he's not an ecologist, he's a sky-worshipper. That is to say, for Coccia it's not the soil or the sea that is the ultimate source of our existence, it's the sky, and what plants teach us is not to remain true above all else to the earth, but to make life "a perpetual devotion to the sky" [94], whilst, of course, remaining rooted in the earth.
He concludes: "The cosmos is not the inhabitable in itself - it is not an oikos [a home], it is an ouranos [a sky]: ecology is no more than the refusal of uranology." [96]
[i] Lorenz Oken, Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie, 3rd edition, (Friedrich Schultheisse, 1843), p. 218. Quoted by Emanuele Coccia in The Life of Plants, p. 108. The quotation is trans. Dylan J. Montanari.
[j] Readers should note that The Life of Plants does have an epilogue, consisting of two short chapters; the first on speculative autotrophy and the second on philosophy as a kind of atmospheric condition, rather than a distinct discipline. To be honest, as interesting as his remarks are, I'm not sure why he felt the need to add them to this particular text (unless attempting to fend off criticism of his work from more traditional philosophers).
