The Life of Plants

A Metaphysics of Mixture

Emanuele Coccia

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509531554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

We barely talk about them and seldom know their names. Philosophy has always overlooked them; even biology considers them as mere decoration on the tree of life. And yet plants give life to the Earth: they produce the atmosphere that surrounds us, they are the origin of the oxygen that animates us. Plants embody the most direct, elementary connection that life can establish with the world.

In this highly original book, Emanuele Coccia argues that, as the very creator of atmosphere, plants occupy the fundamental position from which we should analyze all elements of life. From this standpoint, we can no longer perceive the world as a simple collection of objects or as a universal space containing all things, but as the site of a veritable metaphysical mixture. Since our atmosphere is rendered possible through plants alone, life only perpetuates itself through the very circle of consumption undertaken by plants. In other words, life exists only insofar as it consumes other life, removing any moral or ethical considerations from the equation. In contrast to trends of thought that discuss nature and the cosmos in general terms, Coccia's account brings the infinitely small together with the infinitely big, offering a radical redefinition of the place of humanity within the realm of life.

II
Leaf Theory
The Atmosphere of the World

5
Leaves

Firm, immobile, and exposed to the elements to the point of merging with them. Suspended in the air, effortlessly, without having to contract a single muscle. A bird without flight. The leaf is the first great reaction to the conquest of terra firma, the principal result of the terrestrialization of plants, the expression of their passion for aerial life.

Everything plays a role in its existence, from the anatomical structure of the trunk to the general physiology of the plant, passing through its history, which is the history of all the evolutionary choices that have taken place over the course of millennia. Everything is presupposed and teleologically enclosed in this green surface that opens up to the sky. The plants’ arrival into aerial space has pushed them toward an infinite bricolage of forms, structures, and evolutionary solutions. The structure of the trunk is above all the invention of a “mezzanine” that makes it possible to overcome gravitational force without losing all relation to the Sun and to earthly humidity. Constant and direct exposure to air and sun has required the construction of a resistant and permeable structure.

It is on leaves that rests not only the life of the individual to which they belong, but also the life of the kingdom of which they are the most typical expression, that is, the whole biosphere.

The whole world of living things, be they plants or animals, is supported and rigidly conditioned by the energy that plastids steal from the sun in order to construct the lines that hold the glucose molecule together. Life on earth—the autonomous life of the vegetal world as much as the parasitic life of the animal world—is thus made possible by the existence and the operating capacity of the plastid chlorophylls¹

present in leaves. Leaves have imposed upon the vast majority of living beings a unique environment: the atmosphere.

We are in the habit of identifying plants with flowers, their most sumptuous expression, or trunks with trees, their most solid formation. But the plant is first and foremost the leaf.²

Leaves are not just the principal part of the plant. Leaves are the plant: trunk and root are parts of the leaf, the base of the leaf, the simple extension by which leaves, in staying high up in the air, are supported by and nourish themselves from the soil. […] The whole plant is identified in the leaf, to which the other organs are just appendages. It is the leaf that produces the plant: leaves form the flower, the sepals, the petals, the stamens, the pistils; and it is also the leaves that form the fruit.³

To grasp the mystery of plants means to understand leaves—from all points of view, and not just from the isolated perspectives of genetics and evolution. In them is unveiled the secret of what we call “the climate.”

The climate is not the collection of the gases that envelop the terrestrial globe. It is the essence of cosmic fluidity, the deepest face of our world, the one that reveals it as the infinite mixture of all things, present, past, and future. The climate is the name and the metaphysical structure of mixture. In order for a climate to exist, all the elements within a given space must be at once mixed and identifiable—united not through substance, form, or contiguity but through the same “atmosphere.” If the world is one, this is not because there is only one substance or one universal morphology. At the climatic level, everything that is and has been constitutes a world. Climate is the being of cosmic unity. In all climates, the relation between the container and the contained is constantly reversible: what is place becomes content, what is content becomes place. The medium becomes subject and the subject becomes medium. All climate presupposes this constant topological inversion, this oscillation that undoes the border between subject and environment, a role-reversing oscillation. Mixture is not simply the composition of elements but this precise relationship of topological exchange. Mixture is what defines the state of fluidity. A fluid is not a space or a body defined by the absence of resistance. It has nothing to do with the states of aggregation of matter: solids, too, can be fluids, without having to pass from a gaseous state to a liquid one. The structure of universal circulation is fluid, the place where everything comes into contact with everything else and comes to mix with it without losing its form and its own substance.

The leaf is the paradigmatic form of openness: life capable of being traversed by the world without being destroyed by it. But it is also the climatic laboratory par excellence, the oven that produces oxygen and frees it into space, the element that renders possible the life, the presence, and the mixture of an infinite variety of subjects, bodies, histories, and worldly beings. The little green limbs that populate the planet and capture the energy of the Sun are the cosmic connective tissue that has allowed, for millions of years, the most disparate lives to cross paths and mix without melting reciprocally, one into the other.

The origin of our world does not reside in an event that is infinitely distant from us in time and space, millions of light years away; nor does it reside in a space of which we no longer have a trace. It is here and now. The origin of the world is seasonal, rhythmic, deciduous like everything that exists. Being neither substance nor foundation, it is no more in the ground than in the sky, but rather halfway between the two. Our origin is not in us—in interiore homine—but outside, in open air. It is not something stable or ancestral, a star of immeasurable size, a god, a titan. It is not unique. The origin of our world is in leaves: fragile, vulnerable, yet capable of returning, of coming back to life once they have passed through the rough season.

Notes

1. Sergio Stefano Tonzig, Sull’evoluzione biologica: Ruminazioni e masticature, unpublished manuscript (owner Giovanni Tonzig), p. 18. 2. This is an idea that goes back to Goethe and his essay The Metamorphosis of Plants, first published in 1790: “Whether the plant grows vegetatively, or flowers and bears fruit, the same organs fulfill nature’s laws throughout, although with different functions and often under different guises. The organ that expanded on the stem as a leaf, assuming a variety of forms, is the same organ that now contracts it in the calyx, expands again in the petal, contracts in the reproductive apparatus, only to expand finally as the fruit” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Metamorphosis of Plants, ed. by Gordon L. Miller and trans. by Douglas Miller, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009, p. 100). See also Lorenz Oken, Elements of Physiophilosophy, vol. 10, trans. by Alfred Taulk (London: Ray Society, 1847), section 1133, p. 224: “A leaf is a whole plant with all its tissues and systems; with cells, ducts, tracheae; bar, liber, wood, stalk, and branches.” On the history of this debate, see the classic work by Agnes Arber, The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950) and her essays “The Interpretation of Leaf and Root in the Angiosperms,” Biological Review, 16 (1941): 81–105 and “Goethe’s Botany,” Chronica Botanica, 10.2 (1946): 63–126. See also the text by H. Uittien, “Histoire du problème de la feuille,” Recueil des travaux botaniques néerlandais, 36.2 (1940): 460–72. For a more modern discussion of the question, see R. Sattler (ed.), Axioms and Principles of Plant Construction: Proceedings of a Symposium held at the International Botanical Congress, Sydney, Australia, August 1981 (Dordrecht: Springer, 1982); Neelima R. Sinha, “Leaf Development in Angiosperms,” Annual Review Plant Physiology and Molecular Biology, 50 (1999): 419–46; and Hirokazu Tsukaya, “Comparative Leaf Development in Angiosperms,” Current Opinion in Plant Biology, 17 (2014): 103–9. For a synthesis of the biology of the leaf, see the wonderful book by Steven Vogel, The Life of a Leaf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 3. Tonzig, Sull’evoluzione biologica, p. 31.

6
Tiktaalik roseae

In 2004 a group of American paleontologists discovered, in a rock formed out of Devonian sediments on the island of Ellesmere, the remains of a species of boned fish that dated back 380 to 375 million years and looked like a hybrid between a fish and an alligator. Indeed, this animal, whose scientific name is Tiktaalik roseae,¹ brings together the anatomical characteristics of a fish and those of a tetrapod. It can be considered one of the pieces of evidence for the marine origi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Author’s Preface
• I Prologue
• II Leaf Theory: The Atmosphere of the World
• III Theory of the Root: The Life of the Stars
• IV Theory of the Flower: The Reason of Forms
• V Epilogue
• End User License Agreement