If you didn't realize that all the big philosophers had views on plants, this book will open your eyes: Aristotle, Pseudo-Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bergson, Freud, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida and many more. But you may wind up rubbing your eyes when you realize that this book is still all about those philosophies.
What Marder establishes is certainly interesting. Not only does every western thinker you've ever heard of say something about plants, but time and again these asides turn out to reveal the deeper problems and potentials of their thought. Plants, we learn through Marder's masterful manipulations, turn out to embody the profoundest ideals of the very thinkers who disparage them. Such inversion is what one expects from deconstruction, but it's still fun. And so we learn that plants - often on these philosophers' own careless accounts! - exhibit the indifference of Kantian ethics, but also the absolute openness to alterity of Levinas'. They daily live out the wish for eternal recurrence enjoined by Nietzsche's Zarathustra. As for Marder's pash, Heidegger:
the plant materially articulates and expresses the beings that surround it; it lets beings be and, from the middle place of growth, performs the kind of dis-closure of the world in all its interconnectedness that Heidegger attributes to human Dasein. (66)
How "plant thinking" is obscurely at work in the thinking of the philosophers is exemplified by the way Heidegger misses the wood for the trees. Marder continues
The tree is already a "clearing of being," [Lichtung] even if it grows in the thickest of forests, for in its openness to the earth and the sky, to the closed and to the open simultaneously, it brings these elements into their own and puts them in touch with each other, for the first time, as that which lies below and that which stretches above. (66-67)
Plants and trees, which these thinkers thought needed to be put aside in order for human beings to be open to reality, in fact live out that very reality in ways we can (thanks to postmetaphysical philosophy) dimly appreciate - and must urgently emulate.
And yet it's hard to see any real trees in Marder's philosophical forests. He wouldn't disagree: his project is ontological (or, as he puts it, "ontophytological"), carefully avoiding "objective" description to ensure that plants maintain the "alterity" which might permit us really to "encounter" them as subjectivities of their own. As Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala write in their Foreword, "his ontology is not of the plant but for the plant" (xv). Where does Marder's understanding of plants' distinctive existential "time," "freedom" and "wisdom" come from, then? He very occasionally references scientific work on plant sentience, memory and communication, but these evaporate in a discourse in which only philosophical ideas persist. And when they don't fit his larger point, they're dismissed as just "ontic"! A telling example:
The plant does not stand under the injunction, ostensibly relevant to all other types of subjectivity, to cordon itself off from its surroundings, to negate its connection to a place, so that it can fully become itself as a consequence of this oppositional stance. If vegetal being is to be at all, it must remain an integral part of the milieu wherein it grows. (69)
This is nonsense, of course, and he immediately - sort of - admits it.
Of course, this hyperbolic attribution of passivity to vegetation ought to be tempered by recent findings that shed light on the way plants defend themselves from predators (for instance, by bathing the larvae of insects deposited on their leaves in toxic chemicals) and actively adapt to changes in their environment. It would be more accurate to describe plants as neither passive nor active, seeing that these behavioral attitudes are merely human projections onto the world around us. (69)
But don't suppose this will stop him from working with hoary ideas about the passivity of plants. No, they need to be taken further than the metaphysical tradition was capable of imagining!
In the context of the post-metaphysical rethinking of ethics in the writings of Levinas and Derrida, such radical passivity in excess of the opposition between the active and the passive, such exposure to the other, typical of plants, which is affirmed well in advance of our conscious ability to utter a decisive “yes” or “no,” denotes the ethical mode of subjective being. Opening themselves up to the other, ethical subjects prompt the plant in them to flourish. While plant existence is ethical, post-metaphysical ethics is vegetal. (69)
Plant-Thinking is really about the "plant in us," not about plants. I don't object to the idea that human beings need to recognize that we belong in a milieu, that the meaning of our existence involves letting other beings be, and that the call of ethics (and religion) takes us beyond the world of human projects and rationalizations. But has this really anything to do with plants?
Plants are not about "unconditional generosity" (74) except when mismeasured in terms of human conditions. Plants know (in whatever sense you want to take that) that they must interact with their surroundings. Constituted by what they draw from sun and air and soil, they are indeed embedded in an environment, and so for good. But they do this precisely by absorbing what they need and not what they don't, and not just once but continually. They don't "cordon" themselves off but manage complicated flows at every level, from the cell to the forest and its floor. (That they do this always together with other beings is never even mentioned in Plant-Thinking.)
[Elsewhere, Marder does sort of get symbiosis: "Plants are wonderfully collaborative creatures. They collaborate with each other, with microbes and fungi belowground, with insects and other animals, with the elements, such as the wind that carries their pollen, or the solar blaze from which they draw energy." ("In conversation with Michael Marder," LA+ Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture (2022): 28-35, 29.) But it doesn't root deep in his thinking, which abstracts to the point of erasing these relationships: "plants are singular universals, that is, singular living beings who point toward and, to some extent, encapsulate the universality of life." (30).]
How could Marder, even in ontophytological mode, imagine that plants are purely receptive, passive, generous, paragons of an unconditional availability? To be fair, he's not alone in this. Unable to perceive plant time, we experience plants as somehow beyond time - they don't move but let us move around them. Focused on what we can see, we encounter something apparently coming from nothing, filling what had been empty space with their being, a miraculous transsubstantiation of the shapeless inorganic into the shapeful organic. (That the process repeats when seeds germinate, or when a cutting takes root on its own, only makes it more wonderful.) But the paradox of an embedded, embodied detachment is a weird hullicination, indeed the hallucination of a human being encountering a plant with whom she has no more than an aesthetic relationship.
I think this is ultimately my problem with Plant-Thinking. It seeks to combat the deadening instrumentalization of plants effected by capitalist agri-business - a worthy aim - by inviting us to "encounter" plants in all their obscure fecundity and open-ended availability entirely non-transactionally, in an ethical way which allows them to be what they are in all their alterity. But this is still in the terms, though very rarified, of what humans think we are - fundamentally unconnected from others but called somehow to forge relationships with them. The closest Marder comes to what this might look like in practice is in his proffered answer to those who think the upshot of his book is that we should stop eating plants.
[P]lant-thinking does not condemn the consumption of plants and their parts, unless in utilizing them we dim down and disrespect the other facets of ontophytology. ... instead of “What can I eat?” we should inquire, “How am I to eat ethically?” To put it succinctly, if you wish to eat ethically, eat like a plant! 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 endeavoring to swallow up its very otherness in one’s corporeal and psychic interiority. (185)
I'm not sure what that means - I'm put in mind somehow of slow cooking of seasonal and culturally valued plants - or why plants would care how we consume them. Except how this is part of a broader relationship of cultivation and care? Eating them is the only relationship with plants Marder even mentions; he left aside the distractions of agriculture at the very start of the book.
Plants are constituted by relationships, dependent on them - and so are we. From this book, you'd never guess. It's helpful for diagnosing the depth of distorted philosophical ideas about plants - including the mystique that might lead us to see(k) spiritual transcendence in trees. But it offers no way to accept our fundamental dependence on plants, to imagine ways of consciously coexisting with them, nurturing and being nurtured, branching and grafting, sharing a precious and precarious world that they established long before we arrived.
Look again at the quote I started with, at top. Suppose we replaced "Despite" with "Through," even "By the grace of"?
