This comes from a thread I posted on twitter recently regarding plants before hosting an Interintellect salon on the topic. I’ve got a series of 5 or 6 articles outlined on this topic that I’ll hopefully finish and start posting before the end of the year. They’ll flesh out these ideas a bit more and discuss the latest research on the topic.
Do you think plants can be intelligent, learn new things, or make deliberate choices? If you answered no, you suffer from Plant Blindness. Research suggests that they can do all of those things and more!
All of the following examples support the idea that plants can make choices. They have a variety of information inputs, take stock of that information, and then make a choice based on it.
- Plants can recognize whether nearby plants are kin or unrelated and adjust how they grow based on that information. They will put more emphasis on leaf growth when near non-kin to get the most sunlight.
- Plants can discriminate between prolonged signals and transient background noise. They know what to pay attention to. Discernment is a key feature in intelligence.
- Plants defend themselves in different ways after sensing what type of predator is nearby and can tell when damage is predatorial or mechanical in nature.
- Plants can communicate with one another and with other organisms through contact, through chemicals, sound, and through a variety of other modalities.
- Plants are capable of learning and retaining memories. This is part of what makes them so highly adaptable to different situations.
- When Mimosa pudica plants were dropped from a height, they learned that this was harmless and didn’t demand a folding response. A garden pea learned that more airflow meant that there was more light available and grew towards the airflow.
- Plant leaves can anticipate the direction of a sunrise, even after being away from it. This shows a combination of memory and anticipation. It is similar to the phenomenological description of time as the retention of a past “now-moment” and the projection of a “future-moment”
- Plants use light to see what is around them–they can discriminate colors.
And this is only a portion of what a couple decades of scientific research as shown. This doesn’t include the immense range of personal experiences individual people have had with plants.
Plant Blindness is:
- failing to see or take notice of the plants in your life
- thinking that plants are the background for animal life
- overlooking the importance of plants to human life
- misunderstanding the time scales of plant and animal activity
Some suggest that humans put little value in plant life because we are burdened by our prevailing anthropocentrism and zoocentrism. Plants are seen as an absolute other to us. But where does this come from!?
Greek Ostracization of Plants
First we must begin with Plato who associates plants with the lowest level of his tri-part soul. He removed reason from them because reason belonged only to those with superior faculties: humans.
Plato also painted plants as passive creatures that were created to be food for animals and inactive beings incapable of flourishing meaning they have no purpose of their own. Next to Aristotle.
Aristotle created a hierarchy of the natural world and, go figure, placed plants at the bottom of it. Plants, unfortunately, are key to his theory of the Soul–but not in a good way.
There are 5 faculties of souls on three levels. The lowest is the nutritive level which allows one to feed and reproduce. All living beings contain this faculty. The second level is sensitive. Third level of the soul is intellectual.
Plants, according to him, can’t perceive their environment through touch, have no awareness or mentality, and so are relegated to a passive and mechanical life. Nothing problematic about this, right? WRONG. Aristotle clearly showed a zoocentric bias. Here’s why:
Aristotle: “It is also clear why it is that plants do not perceive, though they have a psychic part and are in some way affected by the touch objects. After all they become hot and cold. The reason is that they do not have a means as can receive the forms of sense objects”
He noted that plants are affected! They have a mentality! In his system, plants logically deserve recognition as sensitive and perceptive beings. Why aren’t they given this then? Because HE couldn’t see how they perceived. Anthropocentric bias.
He also had a zoocentric bias. He was a shitty botanist. He defines and evaluates plants using *zoological* criteria. Plant physiology is nothing but a series of lacks. “Lacks a mouth and an ass” could 100% be written by him.
Christian and Early Modern Ostracization of Plants
Greeks first ostracized plants, but they are not the only ones to blame. Thomas Aquinas is also to blame. He wrote:
“Hence it is that just as in the generation of a man there is first a living thing, then an animal, and lastly a man…. so too things, like the plants, which merely have life, are all alike for animals, and all animals are for man. Wherefore it is not unlawful if man uses plants for the good of animals, and animals for the good of man.”
It gets worse:
“Dumb animals and plants are devoid of the life of reason whereby to set themselves in motion; they are moved, as it were by another, by a kind of natural impulse, a sign of which is that they are naturally enslaved and accommodated to the uses of others.”
Also Aquinas:
“Because I don’t pay attention to the world around me I see that plants don’t move and I can break a branch with no consequences so that means I can do whatever I fucking want to them. It’s my God-given right to fuck shit up.”
Francis Bacon (a father of modern science) wrote that the similarities of living creatures are that
“spirits continued and branched, and also inflamed but first in living creatures the spirits have a cell or a seat, which plants have not…. And secondly, the spirits of living creatures hold more of flame, than the spirits of plants do and these two are the radical differences.”
Both reasons stem from a zoocentric perspective. Oh wait. It gets better. More differences:
- Plants can’t move (wrong)
- Living creatures have local motion but plants don’t (wrong)
- Living creatures nourish from their mouth, plants from below
- Plants have their seeds up high and living creatures down low (really. dick placement is that important?)
- Living creatures have more exact figures than plants
- Living creatures have more diversity of organs within bodies
- Living creatures can sense and plants cannot
- Living creatures have voluntary motion but plants don’t
- “Plants are inferior lol”
Basically Bacon, Descartes, Locke, John Ray (father of modern botany), Linnaeus, etc. all said nothing different than Aristotle. They just parroted him.
There’s also a whole massive Christian influence on crushing any sort of plant intelligence, soul, or agency. A couple of quotes on that and maybe I’ll do a thread in more depth on it another day if people are interested in it.
Richard Folkard, in his 1884 book Plant Lore, Legends, and Lyrics wrote:
“Seeing that the reverence and worship paid to trees by the ignorant and superstitious people was an institution impossible to uproot, the early Christian Church sought to turn it to account…and therefore consecrated old and venerated trees, built shrines beneath their shade, or placed on their trunks crucifixes and images of the Blessed Virgin.”
Similarly, in 1889 T. F. Thiselton-Dyer wrote The Folklore of Plants where he proposed that:
“The fact that plants, in common with man and the lower animals, possess the phenomena of life and death, naturally suggested in primitive times the notion of their having….a similar kind of existence. Indeed, under a variety of forms this animistic conception is found among the lower races, and in certain cases explains the strong prejudice to certain herbs as articles of food.”
Of course he had to be racist about it btw. Come on.
The Eastern Traditions Give Hope for Humanity’s Blindness
The Eastern traditions’ perspectives on plants is more comforting, so we’ll turn there next. First to Hinduism:
In Hinduism plants are often sacred and tied to a deity or divine being. Bamboo is sacred because it was used by Krishna for his flute. Basil is sacred by association with Krishna as well.
The neem tree is regarded as the home of Shitala and Lakshmi resides in the pipal tree. The sacred Lotus originated from the navel of Prajapti and Datura was formed from the heart of Mahesvara. Rice, caroway, and sugar all come from Vishnu.
In contrast with Christianity where there is a division, the Puranas regards plants as *consubstantial* (the same substance or essence) with the divine. Everything manifests from and originates in Brahman. Everything is connected.
In the Mahabharata it describes all the things that emerge from Brahman, even weeds: “You are the thin creepers, you are the thicker creeping plants, you are all kinds of grass and you are the deciduous herbs. “You are no different from the weeds you pull out of your garden!
In Hindu texts, we have the same ontology as plants. Plants, animals, and humans are all “jiva” (living beings who have a personal self that can undergo rebirth). All jiva are sentient, volitional, have a soul, and are aware. So plants have all of those capacities!
The Yogavasistha says that plants are sentient AND self-aware! “As a tree perceives in itself the growth of the leaves, fruits and flowers from its body; so I beheld all these arising in myself.”
Good thing for you too, since you can become a plant when you die and are reborn you can still be self aware! (Maybe even aware of all the plants you needlessly harmed in this life!)
On to Jainism, and this is really neat. They incorporate lifestyle changes to mitigate their destruction of plant life as much as possible! This is a logical outcropping of ahimsa. Plants seek to thrive in similar ways as humans.
Clearly the Jains are more observant than Aristotle or any Western philosophers or scientists: “Thoroughly knowing the earth, water, fire, and wind bodies, the lichens, seeds and sprouts, he comprehended that they are *IF NARROWLY INSPECTED* imbued with life.”
You have to be in a particular state of mind, pay particular attention to, and show care to be able to discern their life. Something very few people seem to be capable of doing and takes practice to learn.
Guess what, the Jains even knew about plant respiration even though we can’t directly watch it, they inferred it “these living beings with one sense also inhale and exhale, breathe in and breathe out.”
Plants also have a range of emotions, just as humans do. While we might have the same essential nature, we have different faculties in life than they do. The one downside is that Jains also view plants as lacking intelligence and autonomy in many cases.
But the fact that they are aware, that they recognize plants as aware and have a felt-sense, allows them to respect them and treat them as actual living things.
One Native American’s Story and Influence on Me
Perhaps one of my most perspectival shifts regarding plants came from attending a conference where a Native American from the Northeast US came and spoke of his traditions:
He spoke of how being human, or being two legged is to live with the Earth. To live against the Earth, to merely view her as an object is to be less-than-human, to be half human. In his tribe there were no such thing as races or people outside of the Earth.
We are a part of nature and we are to help Mother Earth. I thought it was interesting that he said our view of “pristine” nature, of nature untouched by man is incorrect. “Pristine” nature doesn’t exist without us. We are nature.
Actual humans don’t spoil nature, they take care of it. They relate to it. He then began relating the creation stories of his people, which began with plants! He told the story of their crops.
The crops they cultivated said “Hey! Over here! We will live with you!” These were plants such as beans, and squash, and corn. They said they would live and work with us. Other plants said “No, we just want to be seen from afar.
You can come to us if you need us, but we prefer to be on our own.” And still other plants wanted nothing to do with us because humans stink. And so his people respected that. (he continued and told the whole creation story and much more)
This wasn’t just him telling us a story either. It was a prayer. Relating the story of the earth was a prayer. This fits with Kenneth Morrison saying “Native American prayer acts are commonly invocations of kinship, at once earnest petitions and reminders of interdependence.”
I’ll pick up again on plants and animism, plants in paganism and mythology, and some of my experiences with plants when I get more time.
Some good sites for more information regarding the latest research:
https://www.monicagagliano.com/
https://www.michaelmarder.org/
https://www.plantbehavior.org/resources/