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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
We barely talk about them and seldom know their names. Philosophy has always overlooked them; even biology considers them as mere decoration on the tree of life. And yet plants give life to the Earth: they produce the atmosphere that surrounds us, they are the origin of the oxygen that animates us. Plants embody the most direct, elementary connection that life can establish with the world.
In this highly original book, Emanuele Coccia argues that, as the very creator of atmosphere, plants occupy the fundamental position from which we should analyze all elements of life. From this standpoint, we can no longer perceive the world as a simple collection of objects or as a universal space containing all things, but as the site of a veritable metaphysical mixture. Since our atmosphere is rendered possible through plants alone, life only perpetuates itself through the very circle of consumption undertaken by plants. In other words, life exists only insofar as it consumes other life, removing any moral or ethical considerations from the equation. In contrast to trends of thought that discuss nature and the cosmos in general terms, Coccia’s account brings the infinitely small together with the infinitely big, offering a radical redefinition of the place of humanity within the realm of life.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Contents
Cover
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Author’s Preface
I Prologue
1 On Plants, or the Origin of Our World
Notes
2 The Extension of the Domain of Life
Notes
3 On Plants, or the Life of the Spirit
Notes
4 Toward a Philosophy of Nature
Notes
II Leaf Theory: The Atmosphere of the World
5 Leaves
Notes
6 Tiktaalik roseae
Notes
7 In Open Air: Ontology of the Atmosphere
Notes
8 The Breath of the World
Notes
9 Everything Is in Everything
Notes
III Theory of the Root: The Life of the Stars
10 Roots
Notes
11 The Deepest Are the Stars
Notes
IV Theory of the Flower: The Reason of Forms
12 Flowers
Notes
13 Reason Is Sex
Notes
V Epilogue
14 On Speculative Autotrophy
Notes
15 Like an Atmosphere
Note
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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The Life of Plants
A Metaphysics of Mixture
Emanuele Coccia
Translated by Dylan J. Montanari
polity
First published in French as La vie des plantes. Une métaphysique du mélange© Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2017
This English edition © Polity Press, 2019
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3307-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Coccia, Emanuele, author.Title: The life of plants : a metaphysics of mixture / Emanuele Coccia.Other titles: Vie des plantes. EnglishDescription: Medford, MA : Polity, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2018019594 (print) | LCCN 2018035025 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509531554 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509531523 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509531530 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Plants (Philosophy) | Philosophy of nature. | Ontology.Classification: LCC B105.P535 (ebook) | LCC B105.P535 C6313 2018 (print) | DDC 113/.8--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019594
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Matteo Coccia (1976–2001)in memoriam
Acknowledgments
I had the idea for this book during a visit to the temple of Fushimi Inari in Kyoto in March 2009, with Davide Stimilli and Shinobu Iso. But I had to wait for a yearlong visit to Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies to bring it to fruition and to find the time necessary to draft it.
I would like to thank David Freedberg and Barbara Faedda, who warmly welcomed me and, with attention and friendship, made possible numerous human and scientific exchanges. Nothing would have been possible without conversations with and daily support from Fabian Ludueña Romandini. Caterina Zanfi played a major role in the genesis of this book: I thank her greatly. To Guido Giglioni I owe the discovery of the long naturalist tradition during the Renaissance and the early modern period. Nora Philippe read, reread, and commented on a preliminary version of the manuscript; her criticisms and suggestions have been crucial.
The conversations between Paris and New York, with Frédérique Aît-Touati, Emmanuel Alloa, Marcello Barison, Chiara Bottici, Cammy Brothers, Barbara Carnevali, Dorothée Charles, Emanuele Clarizio, Michela Coccia, Emanuele Dattilo, Chiara Franceschini, Daniela Gandorfer, Peter Goodrich, Donatien Grau, Camille Henrot, Noreen Khawaja, Alice Leroy, Henriette Michaud, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Christine Rebet, Olivier Souchard, Michele Spanò, Justin Steinberg, Peter Szendy, and Lucas Zwirner, have been essential. Lidia Breda supported and accompanied this project from the start, with a friendship and force that only she is capable of; I thank her ever so much. Finally, I thank Renaud Paquette, who erased the signs of stammering from my French and allowed the manuscript to come into its own.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my twin brother Matteo: it is with him by my side that I began to breathe.
Author’s Preface
From the age of fourteen to the age of nineteen, I was a student in an agricultural high school in a small isolated town in the farmland of central Italy. I was there to learn “a real job.” So, instead of devoting myself to the study of classical languages, literature, history, and mathematics, like all of my friends, I spent my adolescence immersed in books on botany, plant pathology, agricultural chemistry, market gardens, and entomology. Plants, with their needs and illnesses, were the privileged objects of all study that took place in this school. This daily and prolonged exposure to beings that were initially so far away from me left a permanent mark on my perspective on the world. This book is the attempt to revive the ideas produced by those five years spent contemplating their nature, their silence, and their apparent indifference to everything we call “culture.”
It is therefore manifest that there is but one substance, not only of all bodies, but also of all souls, and that substance is nothing other than God himself. The substance from which all bodies are made is called matter; the substance from which all souls are made is called reason or mind. Therefore it is manifest that God is the reason of all souls and the matter of all bodies.
David de Dinant
This is a blue planet, but it is a green world.
Karl J. Niklas
IPrologue
1On Plants, or the Origin of Our World
We barely speak of them and their name escapes us. Philosophy has always overlooked them, more out of contempt than out of neglect.1 They are the cosmic ornament, the inessential and multicolored accident that reigns in the margins of the cognitive field. The contemporary metropolis views them as superfluous trinkets of urban decoration. Outside the city walls, they are hosts—weeds—or objects of mass production. Plants are the always open wound of the metaphysical snobbery that defines our culture. The return of the repressed, of which we must rid ourselves in order to consider ourselves as “different”: rational humans, spiritual beings. They are the cosmic tumor of humanism, the waste that the absolute spirit can’t quite manage to eliminate. The life sciences have neglected them, too.* “Current biology, conceived of on the basis of our knowledge of animals, pays no attention to plants”—“the standard evolutionary literature is zoocentric.”2 And biology manuals approach plants “in bad faith,” “as decorations on the tree of life, rather than as the forms that have allowed the tree itself to survive and grow.”3
The problem is not just one of epistemological deficiency: “as animals, we identify much more immediately with other animals than with plants.”4 In this spirit, scientists, radical ecology, and civil society have fought for decades for the liberation of animals;5 and affirming the separation between human and animal (the anthropological machine of which philosophy speaks)6 has become commonplace in the intellectual world. By contrast, it seems that no one ever wanted to question the superiority of animal life over plant life and the rights of life and death of the former over those of the latter. A form of life without personality and without dignity, it does not seem to deserve any spontaneous empathy, or the exercise of a moralism that higher living beings are capable of eliciting.7 Our animal chauvinism8 refuses to go beyond “an animal language that does not lend itself to a relation to plant truth.”9 In a sense, antispecies animalism is just another form of anthropocentrism and a kind of internalized Darwinism: it extends human narcissism to the animal realm.
Plants are untouched by this prolonged negligence: they affect a sovereign indifference toward the human world, the culture of civilizations, the succession of domains and ages. Plants seem absent, as though lost in a long, deaf, chemical dream. They don’t have senses, but they are far from being shut in on themselves: no other being adheres to the world that surrounds it more than plants do. They don’t have the eyes or ears that may have allowed them to distinguish the forms of the world and to multiply its image through the iridescence of colors and sounds that we give it.10 They participate in the world in its totality in everything they meet. Plants do not run, they cannot fly; they are not capable of privileging a specific place in relation to the rest of space, they have to remain where they are. Space, for them, does not crumble into a heterogeneous chessboard of geographical difference; the world is condensed into the portion of ground and sky they occupy. Unlike most higher animals, they have no selective relation to what surrounds them: they are, and cannot be other than, constantly exposed to the world around them. Plant life is life as complete exposure, in absolute continuity and total communion with the environment. It is for the sake of adhering as much as possible to the world that they develop a body that privileges surface over volume: “In plants, the very high proportion of surface to volume is one of the most characteristic traits. It is through this vast surface, literally spread in the environment, that plants absorb from the space the diffuse resources that are necessary to their growth.”11 Their absence of movement is nothing but the reverse of their complete adhesion to what happens to them and their environment. 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. To interrogate plants means to understand what it means to be in the world. Plants embody the most direct and elementary connection that life can establish with the world. The opposite is equally true: the plant is the purest observer when it comes to contemplating the world in its totality. Under the sun or under the clouds, mixing with water and wind, their life is an endless cosmic contemplation, one that does not distinguish between objects and substances—or, to put differently, one that accepts all their nuances to the point of melting with the world, to the point of coinciding with its very substance. We will never be able to understand a plant unless we have understood what the world is.
Notes
*
Translator’s note: Unless otherwise specified, all the translations of quotations (French or otherwise) have been made by the book’s translator, Dylan J. Montanari, from Coccia’s French original. Material in square brackets has also been added by the translator.
1
. The only great exception in modernity is the masterpiece by Gustav Theodor Fechner,
Nanna oder über das Seelenleben der Pflanzen
(Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1848). Against this great silence, the voice of a small number of researchers and intellectuals has begun to rise, so much so that one hears talk of a “plant turn.” See Elaine P. Miller,
The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2002); Matthew Hall,
Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2011); Eduardo Kohn,
How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology of the Human
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Michael Marder,
Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Michael Marder,
The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); and Jeffrey Nealon,
Plant Theory: Biopower and
Vegetable Life
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). With a few exceptions (more or less), this literature insists on finding the truth about plants in purely
philosophical
or anthropological research, without having any truck with contemporary botanical thought—which, on the contrary, has produced remarkable masterpieces in the philosophy of nature. Here are only those that have influenced me most: Agnes Arber,
The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950); David Beerling,
The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth’s History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Daniel Chamovitz,
What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses
(New York: Scientific American / Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012); Edred John Henry Corner,
The Life of Plants
(Cleveland: World, 1964); Karl J. Niklas,
Plant Evolution: An Introduction to the History of Life
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Sergio Stefano Tonzig,
Letture di biologia vegetale
(Milan: Mondadori, 1975); François Hallé,
Éloge de la plante: Pour la nouvelle biologie
(Paris: Seuil, 1999); Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola,
Verde brillante: Sensibilità e intelligenza nel mondo vegetale
(Florence: Giunti, 2013). Attention to plants is also central in contemporary American anthropology, starting with Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s masterpiece
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), which is indeed centered around a mushroom, and with the works of Natasha Myers, who is also preparing a book on the subject. See especially Natasha Myers and Carla Hustak, “Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters,”
Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
, 23.3 (2012): 74–117.
2
. François Hallé,
Éloge de la plante: Pour une nouvelle biologie
(Paris: Seuil, 1999), p. 321. Along with Niklas, Hallé is a botanist who has made the great effort to transform the contemplation of the life of plants into a properly metaphysical object of study.
3
. Niklas,
Plant Evolution
, p. viii.
4
. W. Marshall Darley, “The Essence of Plantness,”
American Biology Teacher
, 52.6 (1990): 354–7, here p. 356.
5
. Among the most famous examples, see Peter Singer,
Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals
(New York: HarperCollins, 1975) [reissued several times], and Jonathan Safran Foer,
Eating Animals
(New York: Little, Brown, 2009). But the debate is very old: see the two great works of antiquity, one by Plutarch,
On the Intelligence of Animals
[
De sollertia animalium
], the other by Porphyry,
On Abstinence from Killing Animals
[
De abstinentia
]. On the history of the debate, see Renan Larue,
Le Végétarisme et ses ennemis: Vingtcinq siècles de débates
(Paris: PUF, 2015). The debate over animals, which is strongly marked by an extremely superficial moralism, seems to forget that heterotrophy presupposes the killing of other living beings as a natural and necessary dimension of life.
6
. Giorgio Agamben,
The Open: Man and Animal
, trans. by Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press: 2003) [originally published as
L’aperto:
L’uomo e l’animale
(Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002)].
7
. The debate over the rights of plants exists in a very minor form—at least since the famous chapter 27 in Samuel Butler,
Erewhon, or, Over the Range
(London: Trubner & co., 1872) until the classic article by Christopher D. Stone, “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,”
Southern California Law Review
, 45 (1972): 450–501. On these questions, see the useful summary of philosophical debates in Marder,
Plant Thinking
, as well as the position expounded in Hall,
Plants as Persons
.
8
. Darley, “Essence of Plantness,” p. 356. See also J. L. Arbor, “Animal Chauvinism, Plant-Regarding Ethics and the Torture of Trees,”
Australian Journal of Philosophy
, 64.3 (1986): 335–69.
9
. Hallé,
Éloge de la plante
, p. 325.
10
. On the question of the
senses
of plants, see Chamovitz,
What a Plant Knows
and Richard Karban,
Plant Sensing and Communication
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). The limitation of these works resides nonetheless in the stubborn attempt to “rediscover” organs “analogous” to those that make perception possible in animals without trying at all to imagine—starting from plants and their morphology—another possible form of the existence of perception, another way of thinking the relation between sensation and body.
11
. Darley, “Essence of Plantness,” p. 354. The question of the surface and of exposure to the world is central to Fechner,
Nanna
and to Hallé,
Éloge de la plante
. On the matter of the relation to the world, see Marder,
Plant Thinking
, which represents the most profound philosophical work on the nature of plant life.
2The Extension of the Domain of Life
They live at astral distances from the human world, like nearly all other living beings. This separation is not simply a cultural illusion; it is of a much deeper nature and its root can be found in metabolism.
The survival of the near totality of living beings presupposes the existence of other living beings: every form of life requires that there be life in the world already. Humans need the life produced by animals and plants. And higher animals would not survive without the life they exchange among themselves, thanks to the process of nourishment. To live is essentially to live the life of another: to live in and through the life that others have been able to construct or invent. There is a sort of parasitism, a universal cannibalism, that belongs to the domain of the living: it feeds off itself, without realizing that it needs other forms and modes of existence. As though life in its most complex and articulated forms is never anything but an immense cosmic tautology: it presupposes itself and produces nothing other than itself. This is why life seems impossible to explain other than starting from itself. As for plants, they represent the only breach in the self-referentiality of the living.
In this sense, higher life seems never to have had immediate relations with the inanimate world: the first environment of any living being is that of the individuals of its own species or of other species. Life seems to have to be its own environment, its own site. Plants alone break this topological rule of self-inclusion. They have no need for the mediation of other beings in order to survive. Nor do they desire it. They require nothing but the world, nothing but reality in its most basic components: rocks, water, air, light. They see the world before it gets inhabited by forms of higher life; they see the real in its most ancestral forms. Or rather they find life where no other organism reaches it. They transform everything they touch into life, they make out of matter, air, and sunlight what, for the rest of the living, will be a space of habitation, a world. Autotrophy—the name given to this Midas-like power of nutrition, the one that allows plants to transform into nourishment everything they touch and everything there is—is not just a radical form of alimentary autonomy; it is above all the capacity that plants have to transform the solar energy dispersed into the universe into a living body, [to transform] the deformed, disparate matter of the world into a coherent, well-ordered, and unified reality.
If it is from plants that we ought to enquire what the world is, this is because they are the ones who “play the world” [“font le monde”]. For the vast majority of organisms, the world is the product of plant life, the product of the colonization of the planet by plants, since time immemorial. Not only is it the case that “the animal organism is constructed entirely and simply from the organic substances produced by plants,”1 but “higher plants represent about 99% of the eukaryotic biomass of the planet.”2 All the objects and tools that surround us come from plants (nourishment, furniture, clothes, fuel, medicine). Most importantly, the entire higher animal life (which has an aerobic nature) feeds off the organic exchange of gases between these beings (oxygen). Our world is a world of plants before it is a world of animals.
It was Aristotelianism that, before any other philosophy, took into account the liminal position of plants, describing them as a universal principle of animation and ensoulment [psychisme]. For the Aristotelianism of antiquity and the Middle Ages, vegetative life, psuchē trophukē (literally “nursing/feeding/vegetative soul”), was not simply a distinct class of specific forms of life or a taxonomic unity separated from others, but rather a place shared by all living beings, regardless of the distinction between plants, animals, and humans. It was a principle through which “life belongs to all living things.”3
For plants, life starts by defining itself as circulation of living beings and, because of this, constitutes itself in dissemination of forms, in difference between species, realms, and modes of life. They are not always intermediaries, agents of the cosmic threshold between the living and the non-living, spirit and matter. Their arrival on firm ground and their proliferation have made it possible to produce the quantity of matter and organic mass of which higher life is composed and from which it nourishes itself. But also—and this in the first place—they have transformed for good the face of our planet: it is through photosynthesis that oxygen came to feature so heavily in our atmosphere;4 it is thanks to our plants and their life that higher animal organisms can produce the energy necessary for survival. It is through them and with their help that our planet produces its atmosphere and makes breath possible for the beings that cover its outer skin. The life of plants is a cosmogony in action, the constant genesis of our cosmos. Botany, in this sense, has to rediscover a Hesiodic register and describe all the forms of life capable of photosynthesis as inhuman and material divinities, domestic titans that do not need violence to found new worlds.
