The Philosopher's Plant by Michael Marder

The Philosopher's Plant by Michael Marder

Author:Michael Marder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI009000, Philosophy/History & Surveys/General, NAT026000, Nature/Plants
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-11-03T16:00:00+00:00


The Plant as Monad: A Theoretical Conundrum

The powers of perception at the disposal of plants testify to the fact that they are ensouled entities and, therefore, monads. “The great analogy,” Leibniz writes, “which exists between plants and animals makes me believe that there is some perception and appetite even in plants; and if there is a vegetal soul, as is generally thought, then it must have perception.”42 But the treatment of vegetal soul in a “great analogy” to that of animals raises fresh problems, which the philosopher leaves largely unacknowledged. The soul, for Leibniz, is the place—a withdrawn place that occupies as little volume as possible—where the infinite series of divisions into body-machines comes to an end. Lacking extension, it is “a simple substance or ‘monad,’”43 which preserves the identity of the entity it animates44 and ensures “the real unity”45 of the organism. Is this monadological description adequate to plants?

The answer is a resounding No. Plant monads are a contradiction in terms, because each “individual” plant is a loose assemblage of other, semiautonomous plants that do not persist in the state of real unity. Consequently, we may conjecture either that plants are, despite Leibniz’s vigorous objections, to be banned from the domain of psychic life or that they have a material, extended, divisible soul figured in nonmonadological terms. If the second, more provocative, conclusion holds, then vegetal souls will be freed from the yoke of metaphysical identity, self-enclosure, individuality, and originality. No longer will it be the case that “if plants and brutes have no souls, then their identity is only apparent, but if they do have souls their identity is strictly genuine.”46 Rather, in plants we will discover souls shorn of identity, the souls whose restlessness and disquietude express the vivaciousness of life itself (in the guises of growth, spatial movement, thought…). Living is incongruent with the monadic self-enclosure of organisms, with the stasis of identity, and with the “real unity” of a “simple substance.” We would be more faithful to the spirit of Leibniz’s thought than Leibniz himself were we to locate essential difference not only in the body-machines of all forms of life—vegetal, animal, and human—but also within their respective souls or modes of subjectivity.

Leibniz is not entirely oblivious to psychic differentiation, which he grants in Proposition 70 of his Monadology: “Every living body has a dominant entelechy, which in an animal is the soul. But the members of this living body are themselves full of other organisms—plants or animals—each of which also has its own entelechy or dominant soul.”47 Let us go over this difficult passage slowly and methodically. Entelechy is, certainly, an Aristotelian word meaning “the actualization of the merely potential,” and it accounts for the process whereby the soul enlivens the body. Leibniz complicates this one-to-one relation between the body and the soul with reference to the multiplicity of organisms comprising each living being, organisms with the bodies and souls of their own. Extending to the lowest microscopic levels of being, the chain of



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