Uprooting Thought: Religion and the Vegetal Turn

Submitted to Program Units
1: Theology and Continental Philosophy Unit

Dorothy Dean, Hastings College

Plant-Thinking and Arboreal Theology

Abstract

Combining Michael Marder's "plant-thinking" with apophatic theology, this paper proposes that if language can be understood as a coming-into-being as plant–a self-articulation into spacethen I argue that plant-thinking provides a new lens through which to consider the ecological significance of apophatic theology. I will ask: what is “God-talk” if language itself can be corporeal? Further, if language is spatial articulation, then trees are “speaking” themselves constantly–and perhaps also communing with the divine? In my paper, I will argue that plant-thinking (as described by Marder and similar thinkers) can be read with apophatic theology and argue that this may suggest that the very doing of theology derives from a property of matter.
Beatrice Marovich, Hanover College

Refugees, Longing for Shade: The Soothing, Unsettling Power of Trees

Abstract

As our warming planet heats and burns, shade—that refuge from the sun—becomes increasingly precious, and rare. The refuge we find below the canopy of trees is soothing, essential, and yet also threatened. We find ourselves facing a world that is more difficult for arboreal survival, and so for our own. In conversation with trees—perhaps the paradigmatic shade provider—this paper explores the unsettling, but also soothing, powers of shade (and of the trees who provide it). In conversation with anthropologists, and philosophers like Michael Marder, this paper invokes the chthonic dimensions of shade that provides refuge for those who’ve been forced to migrate too far from their world of plants.
Rachael Petersen,

Seeing Plant Souls: Reviving Gustav Fechner’s Vegetal Vision

Abstract

This paper analyzes the vegetal theology of Gustav Fechner by drawing upon the author’s original translation of his previously-untranslated 1848 book, Nanna, Or On the Soul-Life of Plants. I explore the telelogical and aesthetic implications of Fechner’s category of plant-soul (Pflanzeseele), and explore how it rests on a thoroughgoing dual-aspect monism. I put Fechner’s arguments in dialogue with monistic predecessors, including Spinoza, Goethe, and Schelling, and contextualize the uniqueness of Fechner’s methods in the context of post-Hegel Germany. Finally, I characterize my translation project as a kind of vegetal ressourcement, along the lines of philosopher Michael Marder, whose 2013 book Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life attempts to “vegetalize” the Western philosophical cannon.

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90 Minutes

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Uprooting Thought: Religion and the Vegetal Turn

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