Where Thought Takes Root: Plant Intelligence and the Undoing of Human Mastery

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.