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

Conclusion Dissemination, Rhizomes, Efflorescence The Legacy of the Vegetative Soul in Twentieth-Century Thought

The rose is without why, it blooms because it blooms It pays no attention to itself, asks not whether it is seen. —Angelus Silesias Nineteenth-century German literary and philosophical thought sowed the seeds of the displacement of binary metaphysical oppositions and the questioning of the atomistic conception of the subject that became such important focal points for twentieth-century Continental philosophy . The twentieth-century critique of subjectivity, which starts explicitly with Nietzsche and continues through the philosophical schools of phenomenology, genealogy, deconstruction, and French feminism, among others, builds indirectly on Kant’s critique and the massive reworking of metaphysics into an organic, living growth by German Idealism. The concern that links these movements is a search for the assumptions or presuppositions that underlie classical metaphysical tenets, particularly modern metaphysics, which grounds truth in the rational self-transparent subject. Martin Heidegger for example, using a plant metaphor, writes: Conclusion DISSEMINATION, RHIZOMES, EFFLORESCENCE The Legacy of the Vegetative Soul in Twentieth-Century Thought 181 Descartes, writing to Picot, who translated the Principia Philosophiae into French, observed: “Thus the whole of philosophy is like a tree: the roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches that issue from the trunk are all the other sciences.” Sticking to this image, we ask: In what soil do the roots of the tree have their hold? Out of what ground do the roots—and through them the whole tree—receive their nourishing juices and strength? What element, concealed in the ground, enters and lives in the roots that support and nourish the tree? What is the basis and element of metaphysics? What is metaphysics, viewed from its ground?”1 Here, a tree, a form of plant, is likened to an individual, to philosophy considered in its entirety. Clearly there is no one model for plant growth, and clearly one might challenge the metaphor of plant growth on the basis of the tree, which appears, especially as Descartes describes it, to be a self-sufficient individual in the same way that an animal is. Yet Heidegger ’s point is to ask about the surrounding environment upon which the tree is dependent and in which it is fixed. The roots of a plant in this image, which must remain enclosed by a concealed ground in order to allow the rest of the plant to flourish, reflect the silent ground that metaphysics rarely questions, the unspoken assumptions that make it possible . The aspect of modern metaphysics that Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida , Irigaray, and others question is the assumption that this ground can be found in the metaphysics of presence, and in particular in the animallike configurations of the thinking “I,” the rational subject, whose boundaries are known to itself and defensible. This is certainly where Descartes found the roots of metaphysics to be securely grounded. At the same time that they trace the assumptions that metaphysics makes, however, the critiques of these thinkers do not seek an alternative univocal origin; displacing the fiction of this origin is one of the things the plant-like reading seeks to achieve. Heidegger speaks of the “groundless ground” of Being with reference to the rose, which is “without why,” in the words of the seventeenth-century mystic and poet Angelus Silesius.2 Heidegger’s interest in this line from a poem occurs in the context of his study of Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, which states that nothing is without a why, without grounds. Heidegger considers how a rose can simultaneously be grounded—insofar as it becomes an object for human cognition, as we can deduce the causal mechanism at the origin of its blooming—and be without why—insofar as it does not explicitly take itself into consideration, does not “insert itself in between its blooming and the grounds for blooming, thanks to which grounds could first be as grounds.”3 Heidegger goes on to interpret the fragment as saying that “humans, in the concealed ground of their essential being, first truly are when in their own way they are like the rose—without why.”4 For Heidegger, heeding and uncovering this concealed ground of human 182 The Vegetative Soul essential being, that which is prior to calculative thinking, causal determination , and human action considered in terms of explicit conscious agency, is philosophy’s task in confronting the hegemony of the modern subject which has been characterized in just such ways. To trace a linear history of...