The Western canon contains innumerable references to trees. Many of these are metaphorical, such as Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the arboreal and the rhizomatic, Hegel’s truth as a tree in blossom, and Descartes’s philosophy as a tree. If not metaphorical, these references exemplify a concept, but rarely do trees themselves become the focus of philosophical interest and inquiry. The references expand somewhat when enlarged to include the whole plant kingdom, and yet trees and plants have remained on the periphery of philosophical thought.
For instance, Plato notes a plant is “alive, to be sure, and unmistakably a living thing, but it stays put, standing fixed and rooted, since it lacks self-motion,” and Aristotle claims plants are “entirely without [loco]motion” (akínita).[1] While trees and plants are not able to change location, they do move, and with decisiveness, yet they do so much more slowly and often in places that are inconvenient for human perception, such as underground.
Charles Darwin and his son, Francis Darwin, showed in 1880 that plants do in fact move, and more recently in 2003 plant physiologist Anthony Trewavas cited the difference in time scales between plants and humans as part of his argument for plant intelligence.[2] Trees work in decades, centuries, and sometimes millennia, rather than the human timeframes of days, weeks, months, and years. Researchers also know that trees are relational and communicate, sharing nutrients and information, and that plants learn and remember.[3] Humanities and interdisciplinary scholars, such as philosopher Michael Marder and evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano, also critically address trees and plants in their work.[4]
These findings alone are cause for reconsidering vegetal ontology, and with it arboreality. Trees deserve more philosophical attention both because this new scientific research shows that plants have previously unknown capacities and because deforestation continues to impact environmental and social systems planet-wide. With its focus on embodied perception, phenomenology is a practice tool from within the Western lineage that can reopen questions around trees themselves.
Trees appear in the works of phenomenologists Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Reconsidering arboreal phenomenology has implications for our human relationships to trees and forests, both personal and societal.
Trees and Phenomenology
Trees are a common exemplar in the phenomenological tradition. Husserl, considered the progenitor of phenomenology, illustrated the human perception of phenomena using an apple tree in blossom. He states,
The tree plain and simple, the thing in nature, is as different as it can be from this perceived tree as such . . . The tree plain and simple can burn away, resolve itself into its chemical elements, and so forth. But the meaning—the meaning of this perception, something that belongs necessarily to its essence—cannot burn away; it has no chemical elements, no forces, no real properties.[5]
Husserl sought to describe this essence, and his phenomenology is a first-person study of the world that appears to us, including trees, initiated by inquiring into human consciousness and experience to understand phenomena.
His method requires both a phenomenological reduction, which is a focus on relevant experience, and epoché or bracketing, which involves temporarily setting aside preconceptions and judgements in order to describe the world anew.[6] He differentiates between the tree itself and our perception of the tree, and he claims our perception is a way of accessing the tree’s essence. In his example, Husserl does not break with philosophical tradition regarding arboreal ontology, calling the tree in the example above “the thing, the object of nature.”[7] He engages with the tree as an object in the world, which is a preconception about arboreal being.
Following Husserl, both Heidegger[8] and Merleau-Ponty utilize trees to illustrate their philosophies. In his existential phenomenology, Heidegger explores an encounter with his own blossoming apple tree to investigate how ideas form in reference to phenomena as part of his larger study of thinking. In his example, we meet a tree in bloom as we stand before it alongside him. Heidegger says of this meeting, “As we are in this relation of one to the other and before the other, the tree and we are . . . This face-to-face meeting is not, then, one of these ‘ideas’ buzzing about in our heads.”[9] He is encountering the tree as a tree.
As Heidegger understands this meeting, when we encounter a tree, “the thing that matters first and foremost, and finally, is not to drop the tree in bloom, but for once let it stand where it stands.”[10] With this move, he recognizes the tree as a being that can be met and is deserving of life. In his philosophy, Heidegger wrestles with the being of plants, acknowledging that they are living, but he does not grant trees and plants what he calls world, which is linked to his concept of Dasein. Dasein is characterized by an inquiry into being and is always Being-in-the-world, with the world distinguished from the environment, describing the everyday things that are around. He variously claims plants are both worldless and not worldless, pointing to his concept of environment as a precarious resolution, maintaining throughout his corpus that tree being and human being are separated by an existential abyss.[11] Though Heidegger does not fully develop his ideas of vegetal being, his explication illuminates the parallels and differences between human being and tree being.
Merleau-Ponty’s focus is on the body, which for him is the site of perception, and he develops Husserl’s phenomenological method in the direction of greater somatic understanding. Merleau-Ponty rarely addresses trees directly, preferring instead to address nature as a whole.[12] However, he does exemplify trees in his work, stating, “If I am to recognize this tree as a tree, then beneath this acquired signification, the momentary arrangement of the sensible spectacle must begin afresh—as if at the origin of the vegetal world—to sketch out the individual idea of this tree.”[13]
Merleau-Ponty implies here seeing a tree as itself, as a relation between oneself and the tree, seeing the tree as an other. He reminds us that “it is precisely my body that perceives the other’s body and finds there something of a miraculous extension of its own intentions, a familiar manner of handling the world.” This is relevant both for human-to-human interactions, and it opens up space for analyzing the interactions between my own body and the body of a tree.
While Merleau-Ponty does not take up the project to “sketch out the individual idea of this tree,” I have taken on his call to re-cognize a tree. Studying my own perception of trees has led to a new respect for my arboreal neighbors. The longer I have applied a phenomenological lens to my experience of trees, the more their ontological value as living beings has become apparent. Recent science on plant signaling and behavior suggests that trees have capacities such as intelligence, relationality, and agency and affirms my own perspective.[14]
Approaching Stillness
How do you approach a tree? Walking up to the redwood, as unassuming as a redwood can be, behind some brambles in a local forest parkland, I attempt to clear my mind of preconceptions. This practice is an intentional clearing, a setting aside and suspending as best I can any ideas and conceptions I have to see what emerges in the interaction. The tree remains in place, so I walk toward them, advancing from the path just a few short steps on a springy bed of needles. What first strikes me is this approaching. I must approach this stationary entity, and my choice informs my perception.
I must approach this entity; they cannot approach me. I must orient towards them; they do not orient towards me. I maintain distance. Then, I choose a spot a few feet from the massive column, overlooking a small creek bed, the column of my body parallel to the body of the tree. The entity beside me seems like a wall receding into the distance at either edge, rising with branches into the sky, bifurcating into two large trunks just above my head.
The whole is mysterious. I feel their quiet immensity, their stillness on my timescale. I see why we sometimes think these organisms are dead, inert. The forest around me is alive with bird song, and buzzing, tender oils shoot forth on new leaves poking through the old. The entity remains in place, not the slightest visible change in the outcropping of bark. We are both situated. Me in my heritage, my history, and this redwood in the parklands of California, a native habitat, though dwindling, suckling deeply from the neighboring stream where roots are visible.
But I can’t even tell with my own perception that this entity drinks. And do they grow? Do they change? I begin to think that a phenomenological reduction must be performed on tree time, rather than human time. Staccato hours and days marked on a calendar seem insufficient for the phenomenological method needed for such a massive and seemingly immobile entity. A true study of trees requires a longitudinal study, akin to the ones enacted by Henry Thoreau and Aldo Leopold, which included years of watching, years of studying, years of bracketing. The longevity of these entities is enough to shift understanding.
Over the course of a year studying my consciousness as I thought about trees, I moved into slowness and stillness, into a quiet within. Only when my human pace had been bracketed could I begin to recognize the livingness of trees. Removing from my thought the ways I had seen and interacted with trees is part of what precipitated the slowing. To approach a tree, my movement slowed. I sat with a tree for hours, and nothing happened, but at the same time my inner world was alight, similar to the bevy of action unfolding beneath the bark.
Rather than being by the tree, I noticed I was in them, sitting on what seemed like ground but was actually above the roots and under the branches. I was enclosed within the body of the tree. I found how I was connected, or disconnected, from other entities in the forest that came and went, dependent or not on the tree. To be in the presence of a tree for hours or even days is insufficient. Their being operates on timescales beyond human comprehension, and this remains the primary block to understanding tree being.
Toward a Lush Metaphysic
In both of my reflections, the slow timescale of trees as compared to my own human timescale is a barrier to my perceptive capability. How I must approach a tree shows how their being so differs from that of human being. In the act of approaching, I choose the orientation of my body as I perceive the body of the tree, and this impacts my conscious experience. Recognizing the tree as another body in space causes a shift in consciousness, and realizing that to be near the trunk of a tree is to be within their body caused another shift, allowing me to see the tree’s value as a being.
However, there are limits to my perceptive capacities in that I am unable to experience what happens above me in the branches or underground in the tree’s roots. Tree and plant behaviors are not always accessible to human perception. Trees have capacities that are more complex than we have imagined, which points to a metaphysic based on interconnection rather than hierarchy, to what I might provisionally call a lush metaphysic.
Trees surround us, but in the West, trees are often seen as either a resource available for use or as simply beautiful scenery in the landscape, a backdrop, no more than things that happen to be alive, even in the writings of the phenomenologists who exemplify trees. Trees are used not only for wood for furniture and building material, but for everything from food to medicine to goods like toothpaste. In addition to consumer products, there are many other drivers of deforestation globally, and the planet has lost a net of 3.3 million hectares of forested land, an area the size of Maryland, each year since 2010.[15]
My own reflections, and also much recent scientific and philosophical work, points to a different perspective: that arboreal ontology is valuable and deserves further consideration. This understanding requires rethinking the human exceptionalism used to justify environmental destruction. Trees are beneficial for human health and well-being as well as for planetary health, especially as forests sequester carbon, which positively impacts the affects of climate change. If trees are ontologically valuable, we in the West must change our relationship to forests, trees, and the tree-based goods we welcome into our lives. Beginning with a phenomenological inquiry with the trees that live nearby is one place to start.
[1] Plato, Timaeus in Plato: Complete Works, 1277 and Aristotle, Physics in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 1, ed. by Jonathan Barnes, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), VIII.7, 261a17. By motion, Aristotle here refers to locomotion. He does grant them his other types of motion: growth, decay, and alteration.
[2] Charles Darwin and Francis Darwin, The Power of Movement in Plants (London: John Murray, 1880), and Anthony Trewavas, “Aspects of Plant Intelligence,” Annals of Botany 92, (2003).
[3] See Suzanne W. Simard, David A. Perry, Randy Molina, Melanie D. Jones, Daniel M. Durall, and David D. Myrold, “Net Transfer of Carbon between Ectomycorrhizal Tree Species in the Field,” Nature 388, no. 6642 (Aug 7, 1997): 579–582, and Monica Gagliano, Charles Abramson, and Martial Depczynski, “Plants Learn and Remember: Let’s Get Used to It,” Oecologia 186, no. 1 (2018): 29–31.
[4] See Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), and Monica Gagliano, “Inside the Vegetal Mind: On the Cognitive Abilities of Plants,” in Memory and Learning in Plants, ed. by František Baluška, Monica Gagliano and Guenther Witzany, (New York: Springer, 2018), 215–220.
[5] Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. by W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Routledge, 2002), 187. Italics original.
[6] Husserl, Ideas, 3, 59.
[7] Husserl, Ideas, 189.
[8] It would be remiss to address Heidegger’s thought without addressing and denouncing his support of the Nazi party and National Socialism. For an eco-phenomenological perspective on this ongoing discussion among Heidegger scholars, see Michael Zimmerman, “Martin Heidegger: Antinaturalistic Critic of Technological Modernity,” in Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology, ed. by David Macauley (New York: The Guilford Press, 1996), 59-81.
[9] Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? trans. by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 41.
[10] Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 44.
[11] See Martin Heidegger, “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, ed. by David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperPerennial, 2008), 170, and Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. by David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperPerennial, 2008), 230.
[12] See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège De France, trans. by Robert Vallier (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003).
[13] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012), 46
[14] Monica Gagliano, “In a Green Frame of Mind: Perspectives on the Behavioural Ecology and Cognitive Nature of Plants,” Aob Plants 7, (2014).
[15] Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, Global Forest Resources Assessment 2015, Rome: 2015, 3–4.