I like to think of the trees leaning out to greet us. There isn't a cell in my brain that believes this to be true, but it means I remember to look for the pattern, which gives me a warm feeling each time I see it. Try it.
Tristan Gooley, How to Read a Tree (NY: The Experience, 2023), 108
Here's a question: Are trees generous?
I've been feeling that my response to Michael Marder's Plant-Thinking - where he argues for the "unconditional generosity" of plants - was a little ungenerous. I get no sustenance from claims like "in Heideggerese, trees are ontically vertical and ontologically horizontal" (Grafts, 136), but his effort to make us less dismissive of our vegetal - and other - kin is surely a worthy one. And if his move into "ontophytology" seems to me to lose the embodied relational reality of plants, he's right to challenge the unexamined ontology at work in views of plants as merely struggling for existence.
A nice example is his response to the Canadian philosopher Jean Grondin, who finds in plants a surd "aspiration de la vie à a vie":
The non-conscious and unwilled “aspiration of life to life” Grondin has in mind is a contemporary replica of Spinozan conatus and Nietzschean will to power. This ostensibly objective and all-inclusive meaning of life is a projection onto all living beings of a historically conditioned human desire for self-preservation, a desire born from the political and economic systems that make survival ever more precarious and uncertain. Given that capitalist patterns of production and consumption prompt human subjects above all to value their own self-preservation, the plants, too, seem to partake of this desire, not the least because their survival is becoming less and less assured in the era of genetic modification and because these political-economic patterns have proven to be tremendously detrimental for the environment. The meaning of life is, on this view, one and the same for all living creatures, and plants merely supply a convenient example of the overarching logic of self-preservation. (Plant-Thinking, 131)How very helpful to be reminded that the view of nature as the site of a war of all against all, each striving only for its own preservation, is an artifact of western capitalist modernity. I'm reminded of Frans de Waal's campaign to demonstrate that animals - including us! - are not selfish in the ways Neodarwinians claim, and of Lynn Margulis' argument that symbiosis is as important as competition in the history of life. And of indigenous wisdom like that in Robin Wall Kimmerer, Zoe Todd, Yuria Celidwen and Tyson Yunkaporta.
All of these, however, seem to me to be about relation - the signal omission in Marder's plant-thinking. From Margulis and Ed Yong and Merlin Sheldrake and Donna Haraway I get the sense that the world was already teeming with life before any of our familiars, animal or vegetable or human, got off the ground - and this emergence was possible only through ongoing collaboration with (some of) it.
The mistake is supposing a being - any earthly being - exists before and outside all this complexity, rather than being one of its manifestations, one of its projects. (And once you conceptually sever it like this, there's no way in thought back to full interbeing.) I scoffed at Marder's observation
Despite their undeniable embeddedness in the environment, plants embody the kind of detachment human beings dream of in their own transcendent aspirations to the other, Beauty, or divinity. (Plant-Thinking, 12)
Detachment?! For such obviously embedded creatures? But as I tried stumblingly to articulate, I think, at least with trees, he's on to something phenomenologically. Trees seem to us in some appealing way autonomous and self-sufficient. We know they need sustenance but still they seem to pull themselves out of a hat (out of thin air!), something from practically nothing. Where before was, presumably, just an empty space, now there is an ordered, fruitful world!
But this world, if self-contained, is not closed to us. Rather, trees seem welcoming, inviting - generous. As if they don't have to have anything to do with us, and yet do. Of course they couldn't turn away or run if they wanted to, but in some way they seem turned toward us. Come! Enjoy my shade, my coolness, my scents, my leaves, my fruit, my nuts, my peace. However strange the story, Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree names this experience of ungrudging availability.
So, are trees generous? Is saying so an anthropomorphism, or a self-serving projection? Yes, surely. Plants don't give but animals do take, non-negotiably. But avoiding anthropomorphism entirely has its own problems; as my colleague K told us when she visited my class last year, it is to deny the reality that we share an enormous amount of genetic material with the rest of the living world. And while it's certainly convenient to suppose that what we freely take is freely given, some things like fruit are there precisely for the eating - so long as we disperse the seeds! Beyond that, trees are aware of us but do not, I'm convinced, have anything to say to us, no desire to be connected to us in particular.
But what I want to say, to find a way to say, is that it still makes sense that we should experience them as generous, and respond with feelings of gratitude. In trees we can knowingly enter the space of interconnection which in fact surrounds and constitutes all of life, including our own, but is hard for us otherwise to grasp or experience.
Does this make any sense? It's my first stab at articulating what trees do for me.
