The Apophatic Botany of Agnes Arber: Toward a Vegetal Mysticism

The mid-twentieth century Cambridge botanist Agnes Arber (1879-1960) has been woefully neglected in the scholarship of critical plant philosophy and religion.  While botanists have engaged her reflections on botany and scientific method, Arber’s vegetal philosophy in its more metaphysical, cosmological, and mystical registers still offers much to scholars in critical plant studies, especially in religion and science.  This paper engages cosmological-mystical fragments in The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form (1950), The Mind and the Eye (1953), and The Manifold and the One (1957).  Many scholars view her latter scholarship as a rift or departure from her earlier approaches in plant morphology and philosophy.  Instead, I’ll argue that Arber’s contemplative practice of “giving an account” of a plant (evoking and dialoguing in a posthuman way with Judith Butler’s work on the moral self), expands into a lush and strangely apophatic vegetal cosmology where a form of moral ecospiritual regard might emerge.