Aug 6, 2024 05:06 AM
https://aeon.co/essays/what-plant-philos...telligence
EXCERPTS: By the end of the 20th century, our understanding of plant behaviour had expanded well beyond growth and differentiation, and it continues to expand. Plant behaviour is, as the botanist Anthony Trewavas puts it, ‘what plants do’. It turns out that they do a lot.
[...] These responses are easily understood as behaviours ‘directed towards an end’ – the end of self-preservation and flourishing. They most likely have an adaptive advantage for the plant. [...] In one experiment, for example, Impatiens plants were grown in shared pots to study how they responded to competition for light above ground and for root space below ground. The researchers found that plants grown in pots with kin plants grew more elongated stems with more branches, whereas those grown with non-kin grew more leaves, blocking other plants’ access to light. The plants thus seemed to cooperate with kin, whereas they tried to outcompete non-kin plants.
The new plant philosophy has emerged partly in response to this work in the plant sciences, and especially to the new paradigm, because the series of concepts that mark out the new paradigm as new – agency, intention, consciousness, and so on – are already the topic of considerable and long-standing philosophical debate. As soon as attention is focused on plants, broader issues emerge. For it is not just that philosophy is interested in plants; we discover that plant life, or the specificity of plant being, challenges some of the cherished assumptions that have dominated the Western tradition for centuries, if not millennia. Plant philosophy is about more than plants. It is also about how the peculiarities of plant life challenge us to think about our own being in new ways.
To some, the very idea of ‘plant philosophy’ may seem absurd, like some sort of newfangled fad, and certainly you won’t find an entry for it in any recent dictionary of philosophy. But, in fact, there is a relationship between plants and philosophy that is nearly as old as the history of Western philosophy itself... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: By the end of the 20th century, our understanding of plant behaviour had expanded well beyond growth and differentiation, and it continues to expand. Plant behaviour is, as the botanist Anthony Trewavas puts it, ‘what plants do’. It turns out that they do a lot.
[...] These responses are easily understood as behaviours ‘directed towards an end’ – the end of self-preservation and flourishing. They most likely have an adaptive advantage for the plant. [...] In one experiment, for example, Impatiens plants were grown in shared pots to study how they responded to competition for light above ground and for root space below ground. The researchers found that plants grown in pots with kin plants grew more elongated stems with more branches, whereas those grown with non-kin grew more leaves, blocking other plants’ access to light. The plants thus seemed to cooperate with kin, whereas they tried to outcompete non-kin plants.
The new plant philosophy has emerged partly in response to this work in the plant sciences, and especially to the new paradigm, because the series of concepts that mark out the new paradigm as new – agency, intention, consciousness, and so on – are already the topic of considerable and long-standing philosophical debate. As soon as attention is focused on plants, broader issues emerge. For it is not just that philosophy is interested in plants; we discover that plant life, or the specificity of plant being, challenges some of the cherished assumptions that have dominated the Western tradition for centuries, if not millennia. Plant philosophy is about more than plants. It is also about how the peculiarities of plant life challenge us to think about our own being in new ways.
To some, the very idea of ‘plant philosophy’ may seem absurd, like some sort of newfangled fad, and certainly you won’t find an entry for it in any recent dictionary of philosophy. But, in fact, there is a relationship between plants and philosophy that is nearly as old as the history of Western philosophy itself... (MORE - details)