The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine (review)

We would have to coin another cliché, one that goes beyond "beating a dead horse," to describe the extent to which contemporary philosophers have critiqued the atomistic subject typically, or stereotypically, associated with Descartes and Hobbes. Elaine Miller's The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine develops an alternative to this model of subjectivity without dwelling on the by now tiresome criticisms of it. Her alternative to the modern subject is the plant. Following Kant and Nietzsche, Miller suggests that we have formed the notion of the human subject on the basis of our bodies, or the form of an organism. "Animals have a definitely individuated shape from birth onward" (8), and for this reason are able to identify themselves across time, if only by bodily appearance. "Animals can move and carry everything they need for sustenance within them" (8), and thus can be seen as self-motivated, autonomous, and self-sufficient. In sum, the modern subject is an individual; a self-contained unit; complete, whole, and organic; individuated by the space it occupies; and separate from and opposed to everything else in world. By contrast, a "plant is dispersed, multiple, in many places at many times even as it remains rooted" (8). And it "is difficult if not impossible... to identify a plant as an individual: where does it begin and where does it end? What part of it is 'it,' and what part its offspring?" (8) The "vegetative soul," a phrase Miller takes from Aristotle, "is radically opposed to the figure of organism as autonomous and oppositional; its stance to the world is characterized by the promise of life and growth... its individuation is much less radically defined, is subject to metamorphosis, and maintains an identity that transfigures itself over time" (5).

The notion of the vegetative soul stems from, of all places, German Idealism. Miller develops her way of thinking about subjectivity through examining the function and role of plants in Kant, Goethe, Hölderlin, Hegel, and Nietzsche, and concludes with the "Legacy of the Vegetative Soul" as it appears in Irigaray's notion of efflorescence and Deleuze and Guattari's conception of rhizomes. She writes that "even though we might want to insist that German Idealism remains a metaphysical system based on the primacy of the subject, we must also concede that the form of that subjectivity has little in common with the atomistic subject found in Descartes and Hobbes, among others" (200). This is partly because "Kant's description of the involuntary spontaneity of the active, transcendental subject inspired German Idealism's understanding of Geist, or spirit, as the interdependent relationship of this dynamic spontaneity with the ontological ground of nature, often conceptualized as a plant-like, metamorphosing growth" (28).

Kant also thought, Miller points out, that we can understand nature only through analogy with art. A work of fine art, according to Kant, is spontaneously created by a genius—meaning that "[g]enius itself cannot describe or indicate scientifically how it brings about its product, and it is rather as nature that it gives the rule" (Kant 1790, 308). The work is governed by a form or "rule" that organizes its spontaneously produced, seemingly arbitrary parts into a coherent whole. By the same token, nature appears wild and arbitrary, yet it also seems to be purposive. The forms of animals' bodies, for example, seem to have developed for a purpose—look at giraffes. But purposiveness is only a human projection onto nature, or in Kant's terms a "reflective," not a "determinative," judgment about nature. Purposiveness is found only in our thinking about nature, not in nature itself. "Just...