In and of itself, the world-plant is a useful theoretical fiction. In it, “the Soul of the All,” as Plotinus imagines it:

(that is, its lowest part) would be like the soul of a great growing plant, which directs the plant without effort or noise; our lower part would be as if there were maggots in a rotten part of the plant — for that is what the ensouled body is like in the All. The rest of our soul, which is of the same nature as the higher parts of the universal soul, would be like a gardener concerned about the maggots in the plant and anxiously caring for it (Plotinus, Ennead IV.3.4, 25-35).

The Soul of All may envelop everything that exists, but it is not undifferentiated in itself. Plotinus translates the Platonic division between “the highest” and the “lowest” into a separation between “the great growing plant,” which is the ensouled body of the entire world, and a gardener who cares for it and who represents the soul in its pure state, unmixed with the corrupting bodily dimension.

Now, if a living body corresponds to the rotten part of the plant, we can begin to understand the reasons behind Plotinus’ shame in the face of his own embodiment: seeing death as a moment of liberation, he craved a return to the blessed condition of the gardener, his soul cleansed of its material incarnation. While many Christian authors, including St. Augustine, took this as a reference to the congenital sinfulness of corporeality, or the inevitable fallenness of the soul trapped in a body, Friedrich Nietzsche will have brushed away the Plotinian metaphysical daydream as nihilistic.

The tremendous implication of Plotinus’ vegetal portrait of the world is that there is nothing outside the soul, which always and necessarily cares for itself. There is, on the contrary, something of the plant in the gardener and something of the gardener in the plant.

The Socratic dictum that “all soul cares for the soulless” no longer applies there where a pure, because “unmixed,” soul nurtures its impure counterpart trapped in the dark cavern of the body. Even such inanimate things as rocks are not formless, as they exhibit crude material forms that are the pale reflections of the soul’s own formative capacity.

And so it is with the gardener, who does not shape raw matter but cares for the pre-formed plant, the spontaneous, effortless, and noiseless growth of which should be, as much as possible, protected and redirected away from the deadly activity of the maggots, symbolizing the self-forgetting of the soul in the body. As far as Plotinus is concerned, then, all pure soul cares for the embodied soul, so as to reduce the dependence of the latter on corporeality and hence to defend the soul from evil, symbolized by its “fall” into matter.

From the image of the world as a plant we learn about the nature of the One. Plotinus likens the One to:

the life of a huge plant, which goes through the whole of it while its origin remains and is not dispersed over the whole, since it is, as it were, firmly settled in the root. So this origin gives to the plant its whole life in its multiplicity, but remains itself not multiple but the origin of multiple life” (Plotinus, Ennead III.8.10, 5-15.)

Life, to be sure, is multiplicity and dispersion; it is lived, always and everywhere, in the plural as lives. Yet, Plotinus implies, when we concentrate on living creatures, we are only seeing the upper segments of the world-plant with its intricate branching out at the tips. We literally miss the forest for the trees.

A more radical vision, on the other hand, aims at the radicle, the source, or the root of life that is always one and the same, unaffected by the dispersion of the living. As a vegetal elaboration on the Aristotelian “unmoved mover,” the ever-living root of the One, which is not split into the many, animates all finite lives without being in the least affected by their changeability or, indeed, finitude. It is an exceptional root that does not grow and that, remaining self-identical, upholds the origin’s unviolability.

The root of the world-plant becomes, in Plotinus’ philosophy, the yardstick for measuring the worth of multiplicities comprising this world. As a rule of thumb, the closer a branch is to the root, the firmer its grasp on being, which it vicariously imbibes from this principle of growth. As for the tips of the branches, the leaves, and even the fruit, many of these are so distant from the root that they neglect their provenance from the One.

That is how the possibility of contention and conflict arises where unity and peace should, in principle, prevail. The One starts to wage a war against itself the moment its most distal parts grow oblivious to their common emanation from the same root and, in an illusion of independence, assert themselves at the expense of other tree limbs, branches, and twigs. The closer these parts identify with matter, which is thoroughly divisible, the more they violate the absolute wholeness of the One.

Breaking out into finite lives ruled by the merciless cycles of growth and decay, the One is no longer (simply) one, even if its static root is appointed to serve as the guardian of unity. That is why Plotinus abandons the animal metaphor and resorts to the plant, where the One and the not-One meet without negating one another.

extraordinary tale of Manuel Córdova-Rios a mestizo from Iquitos, Peru, who was captured as a boy on a rubber trapping expedition and raised by them as a vegetalista. In the forward, Dr. Andrew Weil speculates that the, ‘ability to share consciousness through the medium of the visual imagination must be a capacity of the human nervous system … The visual cortex is implicated … What we see when our visual cortex is interpreting signals from somewhere other than the retina might have more to tell us about the nature of reality’. Archaeologists have called this sort of imagery entoptic phenomena. The Signs of All Times Times (Lewis-William, et al. 1988) is an academic paper of anthropology and archaeology which argues that palaeolithic art can be analysed using a neuropsychological model of the apprehension of entoptic (interior) imagery in three stages of plant induced altered consciousness with reference to form-constants in nature and the structure of the visual cortex. These form constants are also echoed in plant forms, and suggests something more about the nature of reality, an underlying thread perhaps connecting the mechanics of perception with the growth patterns in other life forms.  

PLANT THINKING / ANTHROPOLOGY, THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY

In roughly the last twenty years a broad school of thought has emerged called ‘the ontological turn’ or the ‘nonhuman turn’ in anthropology, ethnography, philosophy, and theory. In anthropology Philippe Descolar (Beyond Nature and Culture, 2005) considers the ways humans have lived and live, alongside plants and animals and recontextualises the western world view in the context of ‘multi-species ethnography’. How Forests Think (Eduardo Kohn, 2013) builds on 25 years studying with the Runa in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Kohn’s claim that forests think, is about forms of thought – forms of representation – beyond language.

There is a trend here towards dismantling old anthropocentric models of thought and classification towards something decentred, ecological, environmental – the rhizomatic as opposed to an arboreal model of knowledge (Deleuze & Guattari) and the companion-species and cyborgs of Donna Haraway. Jane Bennett in an essay on Object Oriented Ontology says “the nonhuman turn can be understood as a continuation of earlier attempts to depict a world populated not by active subjects and passive objects but by lively and essentially interactive materials, by bodies human and nonhuman.” (The Nonhuman Turn, Ed. Grusin 2015). She cites poet Walt Whitman as an example, and Spinoza. Especially so in this decade there has been a windfall of thought on this subject. Michael Marder is an important proponent. Following a raft of scientific papers on the subject, in ‘Plant-Signalling

and Behaviour’ (vol. 7:11, Nov 2012) Marder outlines the ‘phenomenological framework of plant intelligence’. His books and work develop the philosophical model of plant intelligence in opposition to old western metaphysics.

THE LANDSCAPE AS ACTOR / FICTION esp. SCI FI

Hybridity, symbiosis, loss of control, erasure of the boundaries of self, expansion of consciousness in the vast network of the natural world we are all already enmeshed within, all of these ideas are explored in these science-fiction stories and the more recently demarcated genre called the ‘New Weird’. ‘Plant consciousness’ is a theme that has occasionally been the subject of speculative fiction, especially, e.g., in the compendiums of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and his own stories, where plants or plant-like lifeforms often hybridise and transform humans, decentralising their bodies and dissolving boundaries we traditionally ascribe to individual life-forms. In The Southern Reach Trilogy (2014) a biologist inhales a spore of a lifeform she is observing and gradually has to accept her role as an unreliable narrator, no longer detached from the landscape she is observing.

Often these fictions describe a transition – or mirroring – between the interior mental states of their protagonists and the exterior world of plant life or landscape and their rhizomatic or fungal networks of ‘consciousness’. In Vaster than Empires and More Slow, Ursula K. Le Guin (1975) writes about the merging of planetary vegetal consciousness and an empathic alien. Hothouse, by Brian Aldiss (1962) a story of a continent-spanning banyan tree, plants with nervous systems, and a symbiotic, knowledge bearing morel fungus. In JG Ballard and Margaret Atwood there have been fusions of interior states and exterior landscapes (The Crystal World, Ballard 1966 & Death by Landscape, Atwood, 1991). Alan More’s comic series Swamp Thing is a cult deviation on these ideas, grandiose passages of imagery and prose propose the union of a human and plant and eventually intergalactic consciousness. In the obscure, quite beautiful film, Silver Heads, by Yvgent Yufit, (1999) Soviet scientists design an experiment to form a synthesis of human and tree DNA, which needless to say results in increasingly irrational behaviour and integral psychological contradictions in the subjects. Vegetable life perhaps is more difficult to master. 

All words by Nicholas William Johnson