Recent research into plant intelligence is challenging long-standing assumptions about vegetal life. Plants communicate, remember, and even learn, botanists have found. Yet just as significantly, these findings are challenging not just what we think we know about plants, but how we know it. Science, long criticized for its anthropocentrism and mechanistic biases, struggles to accommodate phenomena that resist its existing methodologies. Figures like the ecologist Monica Gagliano (2018, 2021), the botanist Stefano Mancuso (2017, 2021), and the cognitive scientist Paco Calvo (2022) argue that if we wish to take plant intelligence seriously, we must reform the scientific method itself, expanding its conceptual capacities to grasp the distributed, non-neuronal cognition of plants (cf. Simard 2021, Trewavas 2014, and Vieira 2021). The limits of science, on this view, are obstacles we must overcome.
Yet what if these limits are not obstacles, but invitations? Drawing on pragmatist readings of Hegel, I suggest that the idea of plant intelligence marks not the deepening of science's grasp of an antecedent reality but the reconfiguration of what counts as intelligence in the first place. Because knowledge is not merely the accumulation of facts but the continual transformation of our epistemic frameworks, the rise of plant intelligence as a topic of inquiry signals not a new object of study, I will argue, but a shift in the conditions of knowledge itself. This shift is both epistemological and ethical: what we think plants are capable of is intimately tied to the changing ways we imagine our responsibilities toward nonhuman life.
At stake in debates over what plant intelligence is and how we know it is a distinction between two ways of thinking about the limits of knowledge. In the Kantian framework in which conventional scientific inquiry operates, limits are fixed: there is an absolute horizon beyond which knowledge cannot extend, defining what remains as necessarily unknowable. By contrast, a Hegelian perspective—particularly one read through a pragmatist lens (e.g., Brandom 2009, 2019; Pinkard 2012; Pippin 2008; Stern 2009)—views such limits as historically contingent and revisable. They rather are boundaries. And boundaries mark not what is impossible to know but what is possible to think at a given moment. What we recognize as intelligence, agency, and communication does not emerge directly from nature. Rather, they are shaped by the conceptual vocabularies available to us at whatever historical juncture at which we find ourselves.
Take, for example, J.B. Schneewind’s (1998) argument that the concept of autonomy was not simply discovered by Kant. Instead, it was invented as a response to the breakdown of earlier frameworks of moral authority. In a world where divine command and aristocratic rule were losing their grip, autonomy provided a new vocabulary for grounding ethical obligation. In a similar way, the idea of plant intelligence is not merely an empirical revelation; it is a conceptual intervention in response to a world in crisis. At a moment when human mastery over nature has led to environmental collapse, plant intelligence offers a counter-narrative, destabilizing the inherited assumption that cognition and agency are the sole domain of the human.
This perspective has implications for philosophy of religion, particularly as the field grapples with intelligence, agency, and communication beyond the human. If knowledge is historically conditioned, then philosophy’s task is not simply to determine what counts as intelligence but to ask what it means that we are now compelled to recognize nonhuman intelligence in the ways that we currently are. In other words: Why plant intelligence now?
Just as Greek tragedy exposed the contradictions of Athenian democracy—revealing, for instance, how a society ostensibly founded on freedom was in fact predicated on exclusion and domination (Hegel 1807/2019; cf. Pinkard 1994)—our present discourse on plant consciousness exposes the contradictions of an era that has wielded knowledge as a tool of mastery over nature, only to find that this very mastery threatens planetary survival. If tragedy set the stage for Socratic philosophy by revealing the limits of its age’s self-understanding, then plant intelligence may mark a similar inflection point, compelling us to rethink intelligence and agency in a way that disrupts long-dominant epistemological hierarchies.
Yet the lesson of history is that such disruptions do not simply abolish old contradictions; they generate new ways of thinking precisely where contradictions emerge (Hegel 1837/1956). This is why the call merely to reform science, while important, is insufficient. If the emergence of plant intelligence signals a transformation in how we conceive of intelligence, the challenge is not simply to make science universally competent. It is to recognize that our ways of knowing are always shaped by the demands of history. Rather than treating the limits of empirical knowledge as barriers to be resisted or outflanked, we might see them as the shifting boundaries of thought itself—boundaries that move precisely as we reimagine what it is possible for us to know.
When the emergence of inventive, disruptive, and even revolutionary thought occurs precisely where conventional thinking finds itself in a moment of internal opposition, the task of thinking is not merely to remedy or resolve contradiction. It is to move forward by entrusting thought to the very possibilities that that contradiction reveals. As Emerson observes, “The sphinx must solve her own riddle” (1841/1983). If we are witnessing the rise of a new way of understanding intelligence, agency, and communication as we are finding in new scientific understandings of plant life, the task is not simply to document this shift but to ask what it reveals about the contradictions of our time—and what those contradictions make newly thinkable in response.
The rise of plant intelligence is both an epistemic and ethical event, revealing the contradictions of an age that has wielded knowledge in pursuit of mastery over nature—only to find that human mastery now demands its own undoing. Prominent botanists argue that recognizing plant intelligence requires reforming the scientific method, surpassing its limits to grasp cognition beyond the human. But this assumes that knowledge takes root in an antecedent ground revealed once we get our methods right. Drawing on pragmatist readings of Hegel, I argue that knowledge is instead rooted in the shifting criteria of historical authority, which change as thought’s boundaries are redrawn. Thought takes root not in fixed foundations, in other words, but in justification’s provisional grounds. The recent emergence of plant intelligence thus marks not just an expansion of knowledge but a reckoning with human mastery as the criteria justifying our domination of nature shift beneath us.