The Philosopher's Plant, by Michael Marder

Copyrighted Materiali

P R O LO G U E

H E R B A R I U M P H I LO S O P H I C U M

Few among the intellectual giants of the West professed a greater love for plants than Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Through his immersion in a meticulous study of botany, which surpassed the limited scope of an empirical science and became for him an instance of l’art divin, the philosopher hoped to get back to our natural origins, which were obstructed by the perversions of civilization. Alexandra Cook fittingly grouped Rousseau’s botanical reflections and practices under the heading of “the salutary science,” a therapy for curing the modern soul by purging it of destructive passions and putting it back in touch with the simplicity, calm, and truth of nature.1 In light of this sublime botany, philosophy itself changes beyond recognition: philo-sophia, the love of wisdom, is brought to life with the help of phyto-philia, the love of plants.2 The stunted growth of the human psyche receives a vital impetus from the flourishing of plants, which instigate thought, itself as prone to metamorphosis as the dandelions Rousseau described in one of the botanical letters to his cousin, Madame Delessert, in 1793.3 Already for Socrates, care for the soul was a preeminent philosophical concern. The goal of philosophy was to save the soul from its corruption and degradation by putting it in touch with its immortal provenance in the realm of Ideas. Much of the Western intellectual history that ensued accepted, without questioning, the Socratic recipe for salvation: thought had to discover a way back to its own immutable logical, metaphysical, and ontological foundations so as to dwell there in a lasting respite from the vicissitudes of everyday reality. The utopian, placeless place of salvation, exempt from the effects of time, is at the furthest remove from

Copyrighted Materiali

P R O LO G U E : H E R B A R I U M P H I LO S O P H I C U M xi v

the plant, for which constant change and the environment wherein it flourishes are paramount. That is probably why most philosophers were not phytophiles but instead viewed growth along with its unavoidable double, decay, as anathema to true philosophizing.

Despite its widespread conceptual allergy to vegetable life—indeed, its phytophobia—the philosophical tradition in the West could not skirt the issue of plants altogether. Philosophers allotted to them a generally inferior place in their systems; used their germination, growth, blossoming, fruition, reproduction, and decay as illustrations of abstract concepts; mentioned them in passing as the natural backdrops for their dialogues, letters, and other compositions; spun elaborate allegories out of them; and recommended appropriate medicinal, dietary, and aesthetic approaches to particular specimens.

Most of these engagements with the flora were fleeting and marginal, as though plants did not deserve the same careful reflection and theoretical attention due to other beings. But our rehashing of the philosophical record, sketchy at best in the case of plants, is not doomed to repeat the failures of the past. The Philosopher’s Plant turns the tables on the metaphysical tradition and illuminates the elaborate centerpieces and the hidden kernels of theoretical discourse from the perspective of what has been relegated to its vegetable margins. Briefly put, this book lifts the curtain on the significance of plants to the making (and growth) of thought.

On the journey that lies ahead we will visit fields and gardens, forests and groves, vineyards and backyards. Both seasoned philosophical fellow travelers and novice voyagers will discover something for themselves along the path, be it an unexpected angle on the intellectual history they are already steeped in or an introduction to some of its most important figures and concepts.

Traveling through the entangled roots and dense undergrowth of philosophy can take various forms. Readers may choose to move along, roughly following the chronology of Western philosophy from Plato to Luce Irigaray, or they may wish to wander across the parallel sections of each chapter. For those who prefer the second option, four additional byways and shortcuts open up. Readers interested in stories that mingle the episodes from the lives (and, in some cases, the deaths) of philosophers with the life of plants may browse the first section of each chapter. If you

Copyrighted Materiali

P R O LO G U E : H E R B A R I U M P H I LO S O P H I C U M x v

would like to glean theories of vegetable existence and how they bear upon the main ideas of each philosopher in question, you are advised to consult the second sections (and, at times, the third). The third section of each chapter explores the implications of human interaction with plants.

The concluding sections offer critical vistas for reassessing the place of plants as well as the legacies of the thinkers discussed in the book.

Whatever itinerary readers decide to pursue, they will encounter in The Philosopher’s Plant an interactive web of associations, one where ideas and their authors are linked to certain plant specimens. You will reminisce about Plato while resting in the shade of a plane tree; have a flashback to Avicenna as you cook celery soup; recall Hegel, eating grapes or drinking wine; and think of Irigaray in the blissful moments of contemplating a water lily. Philosophical dialogues, treatises, lectures, and meditations will grow, flourish, blossom in greater proximity to vegetable life. The philosophers and their thought will appear, quasi-magically, in the guise of the specimens that represent them—from magnificently tall trees to humble but all-pervasive grasses, from enchanting flowers to nourishing sweet fruits.

Resuscitated upon contact with plants, systems of metaphysics both ancient and modern will receive a second chance to do justice to the life they have devalued, instrumentalized, and rendered banal. In effect, the three final chapters in our intellectual herbarium will display an attitude to plant growth that is markedly dissimilar to the rest, the attitude consistent with their modification of (if not their rebellion against) the metaphysical tradition. Ultimately, in the shape of Irigaray’s water lily, thought and growth will, once again, melt into each other, opening this tradition to Eastern philosophies and inflecting it with feminist modes of intellection.

The Philosopher’s Plant is not, however, the philosopher’s stone—that mysterious alchemical substance that was supposed to turn base metals into gold. The stories you are about to read do not put plants to the task of a simple mediation between the so-called natural world and the gold standards of conceptuality. Each of the twelve specimens featured below promotes our appreciation of the ideas associated with the respective author as much as it thwarts understanding, for instance, by dissolving this faculty of the human mind in pure aesthetic pleasure, as Immanuel Kant would put it. The trees, flowers, vines, and cereals collected in this

Copyrighted Materiali

P R O LO G U E : H E R B A R I U M P H I LO S O P H I C U M x v i

book are cultivated at the edge of the traditions they illustrate, since the history of what ideally does not grow, namely metaphysics, is told here from the perspective of what grows, including the very plants that have surreptitiously germinated within this history.

Hence the second reason The Philosopher’s Plant is not the philosopher’s stone: it is not, nor does it claim to be, a monumental contribution to the history of thought à la Bertrand Russell’s widely read tome, precisely because it refuses to force thought, whether past or present, into rigid, inorganic, stonelike molds.4 Rather than cast a panoramic gaze over this history, I have selected, arranged, and displayed some of its most prominent representatives. And rather than emphasize the deep conceptual connections among them, I have pointed out certain family resemblances running across their genealogical tree. In short, I have compiled an “intellectual herbarium.”

The German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin dreamt of writing a book consisting of little else than quotations, collecting morsels of works that had influenced his thinking and interspersing them with his own reflections. His mammoth, albeit unfinished, Arcades Project is a partial realization of this dream. Indeed, citations are somewhat like the botanical specimens collated in a herbarium. To get a foretaste of this comparison, consider the etymology of “anthology,” a book containing assorted texts, poems, or epigrams by different authors, which originally meant “a collection of flowers” (from the Greek anthos, “flower” + logos, derived from legein, “to gather”). A book of citations, an anthology, an intellectual herbarium is distinct from the canonical endeavor that assembles the core of a discipline. Flowers are the least essential (and, on the evolutionary scale, the latest to have emerged) parts of plants, which have asexual means of reproduction at their disposal, and so are their textual analogues in an anthology.

Both the fragments of texts and those of the plant world are selected with great care and attention, cut off from the “natural” context of their growth, and displayed in a book, where they are juxtaposed with their casual neighbors. For J. Hillis Miller, such is the effect of translation: “Use of a translation uproots the work, denatures it, transforms it into a hortus siccus, or dried, specimen flower ready to be stored in the bottomless archives.”5 The denaturing and transformation evoked here are not exclusive to the work of translation. To return to Benjamin, a book of

Copyrighted Materiali

P R O LO G U E : H E R B A R I U M P H I LO S O P H I C U M x v ii

citations (and no book is ever free of citation) is a veritable hortus siccus, a desiccated garden, which makes thought grow. It allows the reader to make unexpected connections among different passages and to open a passage between these passages, to let them dialogue with one another, much like a botanist working with an herbarium studies and compares plant morphology, notably the shapes of leaves. Just listen to the conversation that is beginning to unfold among the epigraphs to this volume!

Unwittingly, those practitioners who dried leaves and entire small plants between the pages of thick books have always been complicit in an act of repetition, which redoubled the preservation of tidbits drawn from other texts in these same books.

Though not as inflexible as a row of monuments to philosophers and their works, hortus siccus is still a far cry from a living garden. Metaphysics robs the living of their immediate life, promising, in return, their resurrection in the ideal world of its chimeras—the Ideas, substance, Spirit . . . At the tail end of the metaphysical tradition, Hegel expresses what he sees as the upside of this tendency in his melancholic reflection on the dry flowers he kept as a memento of a dead friend: “[The] flowers are of course dry and life has vanished from them. But what on earth is a living thing if the spirit of man does not breathe life into it?”6 It is after they are desiccated that the flowers can truly live, live in truth, animated by “the spirit of man,” who, godlike, breathes a new and higher vitality into them. Thought finds itself in the same predicament, attaining its true life within the history it enters when its living impulse has all but waned. Refracted through the prism of this thought, in extremis, the entire earth comes to resemble a “living herbarium,” as the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova notes in one of her poems. On the other hand, postmetaphysical philosophy, which overflows the confines of the final section in our intellectual herbarium, restores to plants and to thinking itself the life and being that are rightfully theirs. It could well be that both may carry on living after metaphysics only in an alliance they would forge between them. The name I have provisionally given to this alliance is “plant-thinking.”

Just as a botanical herbarium cannot be compiled without the preserved plants themselves, so an intellectual herbarium is incomplete without the images of plants. The drawings by Mathilde Roussel included in The Philosopher’s Plant are incalculably more than mere adornments to a

Copyrighted Materiali

P R O LO G U E : H E R B A R I U M P H I LO S O P H I C U M x v iii

scholarly text. They are the offshoots of thinking that draws its nourishment and produces its sap from the aesthetic medium where it thrives; the fruits of an ongoing and often tacit dialogue between the artist and the philosopher; and, in some sense, the main protagonists of this book.

For while the images encapsulate the central ideas of the corresponding chapters, the text that follows may be read as an extended commentary on the images.

The complete title of Rousseau’s Reveries, which frequently makes mention of his botanical observations, specifies the subject of these musings and daydreams as a “solitary walker.” Feeling ostracized by humankind, Rousseau sought refuge in the world of plants, which he visited on his local botanical expeditions. Besides these peculiarities of his biography, the thinker’s solitary stance is hardly surprising. By now it is something of a cliché to imagine a philosopher (in particular, a modern one) meditating in unperturbed solitude. The illustrious precedent of René Descartes, seated in his evening gown alone next to a fireplace, has served as the model for subsequent generations of thinkers. In turn, the readers of The Philosopher’s Plant will not walk alone. On this decidedly nonsolitary stroll, which nonetheless promises to be full of reveries, you will be accompanied by a plethora of characters, past and present, who have shaped Western thought. You will witness a multifaceted conversation between philosophy and art. But, above all, you will come face to face with plants.

Rousseau might have been mistaken after all: he was not alone during his walks full of “happy reverie” amid “greenery, flowers, and birds.”7 Is it the case that we are—still or already—immersed in solitude when we are with animals or plants? What does being with these nonhuman beings mean? Doesn’t “being in nature,” as we say in everyday language, ineluctably create a broad transhuman community: being with nature? If so, then what is our place, and that of our thought, within such a community, and where are we situated with respect to the place of plants?

The intellectual herbarium you are about to view is, at once, a cartographic record of these places and a set of indications for their scrupulous remapping.