plant ontology

Concern for what we do to plants is pivotal for the field of environmental ethics but has scarcely been voiced. This paper examines how plant ethics first emerged from the development of plant science and yet also hit theoretical barriers in that domain. It elaborates on a case study prompted by a legal article on ''the dignity of creatures'' in the Swiss Constitution. Interestingly, the issue of plant dignity was interpreted as a personification or rather an ''animalization of plants.'' This sense of irony makes sense when one realizes that on scientific grounds the plant is a ''second animal,'' i.e., it differs from the animal in degree of life or some ethically-relevant criterion but not in nature. From the point of view of ethics however, plants should be defended for what they are by nature and not by comparison to external references: the ethical standing of plants cannot be indexed to animals. It is thus reckoned that to circumvent this odd fetishism, the plant ethics can only be adequately addressed by changing the theory of plant science. Common sense tells us this: plants and animals belong to radically different fields of perception and experience, a difference that is commonly captured by the notion of kingdom. In this paper we remind the ethical conversation that plants are actually incommensurable with animals because they are unsplit beings (having neither inside nor outside), i.e., they live as ''non-topos'' in an undivided, unlimited, non-centered state of being. It is concluded that the unique ontology of plants can only be addressed through a major change from object-thinking to process-thinking and a move from ego-centric to ''peri-ego'' ethics.

The New Treatise on Physics, a little-known work by François-Joseph Hunauld (1701-1742), was published in 1742. Noteworthy for being his only attempt to adorn science with fictional elements, the New Treatise drew its main inspiration from Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds and Pluche’s Spectacle of Nature. In his account of a fantastic voyage with allegorical and mythical figures as guides, Hunauld intended to give readers a tour inside the great machinery of the world, from the mineral and the vegetable kingdoms to the human body. While sugarcoating his teachings with the narrative devices of the marvelous, Hunauld summoned the discursive resources of the expected references to Cartesian mechanical philosophy, which he quite unexpectedly intertwined with wondrous images borrowed from analogism and alchemy. Indeed, even though he remained a staunch defender of mechanicism, the physician perceived that machines failed to convey sensitive images of the living body. We argue that Hunauld found in traditional chemistry better tools for representing and understanding living matter, in the belief that chemical imagery and universal analogy re-insufflated life into a nature that mechanicians had robotized. Interestingly, the images that best fitted his conception of living matter pertained to the vegetable kingdom.