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In Defence of Plant Personhood

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In Defence of Plant Personhood religions Article In Defence of Plant Personhood Matthew Hall Victoria University of Wellington, Kelburn Parade, Wellington 6023, New Zealand; [email protected] Received: 21 March 2019; Accepted: 3 May 2019; Published: 10 May 2019 Abstract: The philosopher Michael Marder has asserted that animist engagement with plants involves a projection of human purposes and goals leading to veneration. He has also argued that an extension of a categorical concept of personhood underpins my previous work on plant personhood. This paper draws on the growing scholarship of animist traditions following the work of Hallowell to reject Marder’s characterization of a naïve animist approach to plants. It draws on these insights from animist traditions to outline a relational plant personhood, which is fully realized only in grounded, situated relationships of care that seek to enable the flourishing of plants. Keywords: plants; personhood; animism; kinship; relational autonomy; ethics; care; subjectivity 1. Introduction The geographer Puleo(2019) has recently charted the ever-increasing body of research into plant subjectivities. Starting his journey with Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, Puleo navigates through the work of Stefano Mancuso, a pioneer of plant neurobiology, name checks this author’s work on plant personhood and explores Michael Marder’s vegetal ontology alongside Jeffrey Nealon’s work on plant theory. Of particular interest to this author, and to this Special Issue on religions and plants, is Marder’s criticism of the concept of plant personhood. In a discussion of plants as subjects, Puleo cites Marder’s assertion in his work Plant-Thinking (Marder 2013, p. 55), that in attributing concepts of autonomy or personhood to plants, philosophers “render more refined the violence human thought has never ceased unleashing against these beings ::: ”, and connects this with another rejection of the concept of personhood by the plant biologist Daniel Chamovitz. Puleo dips his toe into an analysis of competing depictions of plant life, contrasting the idea of personhood with Marder’s attempt to emphasise the radical alterity of plant being. He presented Marder’s view of plant ontology as “so radically different from that of humans, that words such as persons, subjectivity and self cannot be applied. Indeed, to call a plant a person is an insult” (Puleo 2019, p. 224). A view of plant ontology in which you can insult a plant by calling it a person stems from Marder’s philosophy of plant thinking. According to Marder(2013, p. 43), “plant thinking starts with the explosion of identity”, that is, following Derrida’s deconstruction of “the animal”, plants are regarded as multiplicitous assemblages, modularly composed of parts capable of independent rejuvenation. The plant is not a differentiated organism, but a collection of many. Therefore “if the plant is not an organism consisting of interdependent organs, we should avoid conceiving it as a totality or as a differentiated whole” (Marder 2013, p. 84). This assertion of non-identity is intimately connected with a lack of “interiority”, presented as such both because plants do not (on the whole) consume other organisms, but also because plants, as generally sessile, are rooted in place and, according to Marder(2013, p. 107), completely open to their environment, a “sheer exposure in space and time.” Therefore, for Marder(2013, p. 89), “Given that the plant’s self, bound to the universality of the elements and of light, is always external to itself, its unity is at once a disunity ::: .” For Marder, the clearest symptom of this non-identity of the plant is its “unrest”, a restless, intentional growth and plasticity, a “ceaseless striving towards the other and becoming-other in Religions 2019, 10, 317; doi:10.3390/rel10050317 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religions 2019, 10, 317 2 of 12 growth and reproduction, as well as in the metamorphosis of these vegetal qualities into human and animal potentialities” (Marder 2013, p. 162). Marder connects this “ceaseless growth” and ontological openness with the “generosity” of plant life. Therefore to “attribute a static identity is to disregard this vivacity” (Marder 2013, p. 162). Indeed, to pay heed to a vegetal non-identity is to also acknowledge vegetal “ontological indifference”, which (Marder 2013, pp. 133–35) exemplifies through the plant “selflessly” throwing away its pollen, fruits and seeds. The acknowledged “ontic” (material) facts of plants possessing self-defence mechanisms do not deter this argument. Marder’s deconstruction of plant ontology renders the plant as a non-autonomous, self-less, non-identity, indifferent, non-organism. I will argue directly against these claims in a later paper. Here, I wish to focus on his dismissal of personhood. To do so, I wish to highlight two further claims by Marder. The first of these arises in his discussion of the “fetishism” of plants in his book Plant-Thinking (Marder 2013). Here, Marder rejects what he called “animist mentalities”, which find something “inexplicable and miraculous” in the plant and therefore treat it as “worthy of veneration” and whose myths are found to be “paving the way for the projection of human purposes and goals onto it.” (Marder 2013, p. 29). The second claim, published in a journal article titled ‘Is it Ethical to Eat Plants?’, is worth quoting. The problematic assumption that the concept of personhood can be extended to plants underpins Matthew Hall’s recent book, Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany ::: (Marder 2013, p. 37) There are in fact three sub-claims here: that my book Plants as Persons (Hall 2011) assumes that a categorical personhood can be extended to plants, that this underpins the work, and that such an idea is problematic. Marder does not expand on the latter claim, but from the treatment of “plant fetishism”, I assume that he regarded personhood as a human-centred projection based on an obfuscation, sublimation or eradication of a plant’s nature. This, also presumably, is at the heart of the alleged violence toward plants that Puleo(2019) charts. The purpose of this article is to reject Marder’s claims about the animist understandings of plants and of the concept of plant personhood as it appears in my previous work. Such endeavours are interlinked, as in Plants as Persons, I draw deeply on the concepts of personhood found in animist cultures. With a simple purpose, the structure of this article will also be fairly straightforward. I will very briefly sketch out the broad categories of personhood, as they have been employed in Western philosophy, to help situate the animistic personhood that Marder both mischaracterises and with which he takes offence. I will explore the work of leading scholars in the study of animism, to understand how relational personhood works, before outlining how such ideas have shaped my own notion of plant personhood. We will close with a brief discussion of how the relationships of care that personhood requires can be effected without recourse to philosophical violence. 2. Approaches to Personhood First, it will be useful to outline the general landscape with regards to the concept of personhood. Even the briefest of dips into the literature illustrate that there are a myriad of claims to the concept. Thankfully, there is also plenty of existing scholarship that can provide an overarching view of how the concept has been deployed, without copious detail distracting us from our central purpose. Here, I will draw on the recent work of Foster and Herring(2017a,2017b), which provides a broad categorisation of the existing theories of personhood and will fill a couple of noticeable gaps with Teichman(1985) older and more detailed account of the definition of a person. Foster and Herring(2017a) outlined two general approaches to the definition of person. The first of these is the person as a member of the human species. In the language of Gallie(1955), this is the archetypal “exemplar” of personhood, from which all other uses derive (in Western scholarship at least). Certainly, the common language use of the word person is synonymous with human being, a fact exemplified by one of the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of person as “An individual Religions 2019, 10, 317 3 of 12 human being: a man, woman, or child” (OED online). This definition has been defended as a natural bias in favour of human beings (Williams 2006), but has also been criticised by animal rights theorists and activists as a form of speciesism (See Singer 2009; Francione 2008). For Foster and Herring(2017a), such criticism is founded on the argument that membership of a species is not morally relevant and should not confer moral status. The second broad category is where much of the contemporary action is. This category designates persons as those with certain mental capabilities. The obvious conflict is over which capabilities are deemed morally relevant—with major candidates including consciousness, self-interest, cognition, rationality and self-awareness—and who exactly possesses these capabilities. An influential example from the philosophical literature is provided by Locke’s definition of a person as “A thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself” (Locke 1825, p. 225). This privileging of reason and self-consciousness is also found in numerous theological explications of person (Teichman 1985, pp. 179–81) and has persisted within Western philosophical thinking to the modern day.1 Historically, both of these categories have almost entirely overlapped on the concept of human being = person. Both have underpinned the legal sense of the concept of “person” as based on the notion of juridical rights (Teichman 1985, p. 180). However, as an essentially contested concept2, the boundaries of personhood are not fixed. Most notably, the boundaries of the mental capacities category have been widened by animal theorists arguing for personhood on the basis of the capacities of non-human animals.
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