The Philosopher’s plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (Plotinus’ Anonymous “Great Plant” (chapter 3), Heidegger’s Apple Tree (chapter 10))

Abstract

The third chapter is dedicated to Plotinus. In six books of the Enneads, Plotinus managed to combine the teaching of the pre-Socratic Parmenides with the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. The best idea of Plotinus' philosophy can be formed by analyzing his allegory of the world as a giant tree, a single plant, whose appendages, branches and leaves are everything that exists. At that stage of the development of philosophical thought, the idea of an integral soul was certainly not something new. For example, in Plato's Timaeus, the universe is represented as a huge living being. An innovative aspect of the Plotinus image is the plant form given to the universal soul. What is behind this change of perspective? The deep implication of the vegetable image of the world, permeated by the Universal Soul has the following meaning: there is nothing in the universe outside the soul, which, taking care of the animate body, contributes to the well-being of the world, saving it from immersion in materiality. For the philosophy of the twenty-first century, the relativization of reason is especially relevant in Plotinus' writings. There are as many varieties of mind in the world as there are forms of life, and each form of life is the material embodiment of the corresponding form of thinking. Plants, according to Plotinus, also have intelligence and have their share in the happiness and well-being that all living things desire. With this bold statement, the author of the Enneads resolutely breaks with the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. Plotinus's mind permeates the entire universe and is no longer limited to the rational part of the human soul or the eternal existence of the gods. Plotinus' system of views seems to the author of the book to be closer to modern scientific views than the obvious immutability characteristic of Aristotle's biology. Proceeding from them, but trying to be more Plotinian than the ancient Greek philosopher himself, he paraphrases Plotinus' dying words into the slogan: Try to bring back the plant in you to the Plant in the All!

Chapter ten is about Martin Heidegger. If Plato's philosophizing took place in the shade of the plane tree, whose height is surpassed by the incommensurably distant world of Ideas, Heidegger opens to us another primary stage of philosophy: the thinker standing face to face with the tree. A full relationship to the apple tree is possible because we share being with it, even though man and tree have quite different kinds of existence. In the light of Heidegger's ontological concept of phusis as one of the ancient words for “being”, the plant should denote the being closest to the activity of being as such. In this understanding, nature is the common “ground of being”, and the same is true of the plant, whose principle of vitality makes possible the existence of all other living things. According to Heidegger's classification, the stone is worldless, the animal is poor in world, and man is world-forming, and the absence of plants in this hierarchy indicates their rejection, their extreme poverty in the world, bordering on the worldlessness of the stone. Heidegger later gives a harsher verdict: they have nothing. The world is created from the environment with a language that plants and animals do not have. The worldlessness of the stone is a consequence of its silence; the belittling of plants is the result of their apparent silence. Heidegger prefers to contrast man with the plant, which has in common with man the fact that it is alive. But the plant, in its living being, is closed in on itself, dim, irrelevant to anything else we call “revealed”. As Heidegger says, we ... use “life” only to designate beings of plant or animal origin; by doing so we distinguish the human being from these other kinds, the human being means something more and something other than mere “life”. The subtlest distinction between mere life and true existence is death. In Heidegger's thought, logos takes the structural place of death. If the plant, bearing fruit, fulfills its promises, the human being's arrival at the end is always a disappointment and unfulfillment, because at the hour of death countless existential possibilities remain unrealized. All along, Heidegger thought, the world of the Ideas was not above us, but right before our eyes; it becomes apparent every time we come face to face with beings, because eidos is their appearance or face. A flowering tree, devoid of any resemblance to a human face, has an eidetic one outlines of which come through when we stand next to it. The philosophical encounter with the tree, on the ground where it is rooted, demands phenomenological attention to how it looks. But above all, this rendezvous symbolizes the end of the era known as “metaphysical”.