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Vegetal anti-metaphysics: Learning from plants

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Metafísica? Que metafísica têm aquelas árvores?

Fernando Pessoa, “Há Metafísica Bastante…”

“Metaphysics? What metaphysics do those trees have?”

Fernando Pessoa, “There is Enough Metaphysics…”

Abstract

By denying to vegetal life the core values of autonomy, individualization, self-identity, originality, and essentiality, traditional philosophy not only marginalizes plants but, inadvertently, confers on them a crucial role in the current transvaluation of metaphysical value systems. From the position of absolute exteriority and heteronomy, vegetation accomplishes a living reversal of metaphysical values and points toward the collapse of hierarchical dualisms.

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Notes

  1. Plato (1929, 90a).

  2. As Graham Parkes concludes in Composing the Soul, “…in view of Nietzsche’s fondness for the vegetal metaphors, Plato’s image of the inverted plant must be anathema: the tree of life turned upside down!” (1994, p. 179).

  3. Descartes (1991, p. xxiv). Cf., also, Ariew (1992).

  4. Nietzsche (2009, p. 138).

  5. Qtd. in Heidegger (1966, p. 47).

  6. Heidegger (1966, pp. 47–48).

  7. la Mettrie (1994, p. 78).

  8. Novalis (1992, p. 133).

  9. Oken (1847, p. 269). Hegel objects to Oken’s as much as to Schelling’s analogies in his Philosophy of Nature.

  10. Ponge (1992, p. 106).

  11. Nancy (2008, p. 13).

  12. Ponge (1992, p. 109).

  13. Ponge (1992, p. 109).

  14. Schelling (2004, p. 47).

  15. Bergson (2005, p. 102).

  16. Canguilhem (2008, pp. 113–114).

  17. Hegel (2004, pp. 323–324).

  18. Derrida (1986, p. 17).

  19. La Mettrie (1994, p. 85).

  20. Aristotle [attributed] (1963, pp. 817a, 18–26). The plant, for the author of De Plantis, is literally rooted outside of itself: “But all herbs whether they grow above the earth or in it, depend on one of these five conditions; seed, moisture from water, a suitable soil, air and planting. These five one might say are the roots of plants [rizai phutōn]” (1963, pp. 827a, 2–7).

  21. Miller (2002, p. 17).

  22. Hegel (2004, p. 307).

  23. Hegel (2004, p. 306).

  24. “Unceasingly, unwillingly, we have been carried along by the movement which brings the sun to turn in metaphor; or have been attracted by what turned the philosophical metaphor to the sun. Is this flower of rhetoric (like) a sunflower? That is—but this is not exactly a synonym—analogous to the heliotrope?” Derrida (1985, p. 250).

  25. Bergson (2005, p. 93).

  26. Hegel (2004, p. 309).

  27. Hegel (2004, p. 308).

  28. Ponge (1994, pp. 68–9).

  29. Ponge (1994, pp. 70–1).

  30. Husserl (1983, p. 212).

  31. Aristotle (1933, 1006a, 12–5).

  32. Derrida (1985, p. 249).

  33. Derrida (2009, p. 147ff).

  34. Agamben (1999, p. 231).

  35. Pessoa (1969, p. 206).

  36. Pessoa (1969, p. 207).

  37. Plato (1914, p. 230d).

  38. Aristotle [attributed] (1963, pp. 318b, 10–15).

  39. Aristotle [attributed] (1963, pp. 319a, 23–25).

  40. Goethe (2009, p. 65).

  41. “Yet it [the body] is a skin, variously folded, refolded, unfolded, multiplied, invaginated…” [Nancy (2008, p. 15)].

  42. Ovid (1984, I, 9).

  43. Goethe (2009, p. 67).

  44. Aquinas (1952, Q.LXIX, A2).

  45. Goethe (2009, p. 6), emphasis added.

  46. Goethe (2009, p. 56).

  47. Goethe (1962, p. 310).

  48. Hegel (2004, pp. 303–304).

  49. Qtd. in Canguilhem (2008, p. 41).

  50. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 157).

  51. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 12).

  52. Goethe (2009, p. 6).

  53. Hegel (2004, p. 344).

  54. Hegel (2004, p. 343).

  55. Hegel (2004, p. 348).

  56. Bergson (2005, p. 49).

  57. Janeczko and Skoczowski (2005, p. 75).

  58. Derrida (1978, p. 72).

  59. Hegel (2004, p. 323).

  60. Derrida (1983, p. 304).

  61. Cf. Nancy (2000).

  62. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 19).

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  1. Ikerbasque Research Professor, The University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain

    Michael Marder

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Marder, M. Vegetal anti-metaphysics: Learning from plants. Cont Philos Rev 44, 469–489 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-011-9201-x

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