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Dialogue http://journals.cambridge.org/DIA Additional services for Dialogue: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here The Life of Plants and the Limits of Empathy Michael Marder Dialogue / Volume 51 / Issue 02 / June 2012, pp 259 273 DOI: 10.1017/S0012217312000431, Published online: Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0012217312000431 How to cite this article: Michael Marder (2012). The Life of Plants and the Limits of Empathy. Dialogue, 51, pp 259273 doi:10.1017/S0012217312000431 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/DIA, IP address: 141.161.91.14 on 04 Jan 2013 Dialogue 51 (2012), 259– 273 . © Canadian Philosophical Association /Association canadienne de philosophie 2012 doi:10.1017/S0012217312000431 The Life of Plants and the Limits of Empathy M ICHAEL M ARDER IKERBASQUE/University of the Basque Country ABSTRACT: This article examines the possibility of an ethical treatment of plants grounded in empathy. Upon considering whether an empathetic approach to vegetal life is compatible with the crucial features of plant ontology, it is concluded that the feeling of empathy with plants disregards their mode of being and projects the constructs and expectations of the human empathizer onto the object of empathy. Vegetal life, thus, reveals the limits of empathy, as well as its anthropocentric and potentially unethical underpinnings. RÉSUMÉ : Cet article analyse la possibilité d’un traitement éthique des plantes basé sur l’empathie. Après avoir examiné la compatibilité de l’approche empathique a la vie végétale avec les caractéristiques essentielles de l’ontologie des plantes, il est conclu que le sentiment d’empathie à l’égard des plantes ne tient pas compte de leur mode d’être. Au contraire, ce sentiment projette les conceptions et les attentes de l’empathiseur humain sur l’objet de l’empathie. La vie végétale révèle donc les limites de l’empathie, ainsi que ses fondements anthropocentriques et potentiellement antiéthiques. Denn wir sind wie Baumstämme im Schnee. Scheinbar liegen sie glatt auf, und mit kleinem Anstoß sollte man sie wegschieben können. Nein, das kann man nicht, denn sie sind fest mit dem Boden verbunden. Aber sieh, sogar das ist nur scheinbar. Franz Kafka, “Die Bäume” 1 Consider the birch and oak trees being cut down in the Khimki forest, just to the North of Moscow, as a part of the government’s plan to connect the capital of Russia to St. Petersburg by means of a new highway, slated to pass right in 260 Dialogue the middle of the massive wooded area. The buzzing of chainsaws and the infernal noise of heavy “tree removal” equipment join in an uncanny, deafening choir with the cracking of the felled birches and oaks that have given in to the unforgiving metal. What do human observers feel at the sight (and sound) of the unfolding destruction? Much depends on the perspective, of course. Municipal and federal state ofﬁ cials experience a sense of satisfaction with the exercise of their unlimited power to convert, at a great ﬁ nancial gain, the entire forest into a network of highways, hotels, and housing units. Law enforcement ofﬁ cers appear not to feel anything, save for their blind rage at the protesters opposed to this environmental crime. But what about the concerned members of the civil society, the activists, who have been camping in Khimki and in front of the Russian Parliament around the clock and who have attempted to defend the forest with their bodies in the face of disproportional, state- sanctioned violence and the overwhelming chances of defeat? The rationale for their intense commitment is a microcosm of the broader debate surrounding the motivations behind ethical concerns with the environment. The forest on the verge of disappearance is deemed to be a part of the legacy bequeathed to future generations, an indispensable natural “puriﬁ er” of the already dangerously polluted Moscow air, an intrinsic value incommensurate with any economic calculations and beneﬁ ts from the projected highway… Putting the diverse rational explanations to one side, is it possible that, emotionally, the opponents of deforestation in Khimki and elsewhere sense a certain empathy with the felled trees, vicariously identifying with the fate of the uprooted plants, as the narrator in Kafka’s “The Trees” seems to do? And if empirically this is the case, does the empathetic relation of human beings to plants, not to speak of animals, hold the potential for grounding environmental ethics the way it has recently shored up the relational ethics of care? 2 While it is conceivable that someone could empathize with the plants them- selves, philosophical accounts of this possibility disregard the uniqueness of vegetal beings and treat them as representatives of something larger than them- selves, namely Life. Empathy presupposes this elemental commonality, the substantial sameness of the empathizer and the empathized with, united by the fact that both are living beings. The commonality or, indeed, the community of the living would then furnish the desired foundation for the ethical comport- ment. In what follows, however, I argue that plants and their peculiar ontology should be interpreted as embodied limits to empathy and as points of resistance to a totalizing vitalism. As such, they pose a series of barriers to the humanistic, anthropocentric, and narcissistic ethics predicated on the underlying sameness of the ethical actor and the object of his or her action. That is not to say that the being of plants necessarily undermines the ethics of empathy in general, nor is it to conclude that an alternative (non-empathetic, or non-emotional, and non-rational) ethical approach to vegetal life is unfathomable. An ethics ori- ented toward and arising from plants would preclude human self-recognition The Life of Plants and the Limits of Empathy 261 in and projection onto the world of the ﬂ ora, or, more positively, would entail an afﬁ rmation of the irreducible difference between this world and that of human beings. Plant Ontology as a Barrier to Empathy Moral philosophers tend to draw conceptual lines of demarcation between compassion, pity, and empathy. 3 Compassion, as both the Latin origin of the English term and the German Mitleiden indicate, entails a sense of together- ness in pathos or suffering. Although the deepest etymological stratum of meaning is irrevocably lost in most contemporary discussions, as in Martha Nussbaum’s deﬁ nition of compassion as “a painful emotion occasioned by another person’s undeserved misfortune,” 4 nineteenth-century thinkers, most notably Schopenhauer, underscore the burgeoning community that comes together through the experience of suffering-with. 5 The scope of compassion at its most profound is not narrowed down to other human beings but poten- tially embraces all suffering creatures, so that the “basis of morality is not any kind of abstract concept nor a rational conception of duty, but rather the felt connection we have with all living beings capable of suffering.” 6 The “ felt connection” forged in this sentiment, albeit less anthropocentric than the ties binding us exclusively to other persons, inevitably leaves out those beings, like plants, we deem incapable of suffering. Humans, to be sure, join in communities, ecosystems, and rhizomatic assemblages with plants, but these multifaceted interactive formations do not usually involve a compassionate rapport. It is thus questionable whether one can be with the plants at all, precisely because the prospects of “suffering with” them are severely restricted. The attitude of pity is perhaps more inclusive of all living beings than com- passion, even though the difﬁ culties it raises outweigh any advantages it might yield. At its worst, it objectiﬁ es the pitied creatures, treats them from the stand- point of moral superiority, and, therefore, bars the possibility of mutual deter- mination that would unite the one who pities and the object of pity. This is why, according to Nietzsche’s observations, it multiplies suffering, rather than put an end to misery, and revels in reactive affect. 7 Pity is the emotional supplement to the very injustice it sanctions, the injustice to which it bows, as though to the iron necessity of fate. Pitying the trees cut down to clear space for a highway does not prevent but, in fact, makes it easier to carry on the practices of deforestation accompanied by this most heartfelt emotional appendage. Resigned in the face of the ruthless logic of (contrived) economic necessity, pity permits the subjects who indulge in it to perceive themselves as caring individuals, not as participants in a cold-blooded destruction of the environment. In contrast to the symmetrical community of sufferers that comes together in compassion, on the one hand, and the asymmetrical, condescending attitude of pity, on the other, empathy is an attempt to get in touch with the experience of the other qua other, or, literally, to feel into the other, as the German Einfühlung 262 Dialogue suggests and as Edward Titchner’s English coinage from the early twentieth century afﬁ rms. Instead of compassionately suffering with the other or sensing pity for the other, empathy bears upon the other’s psychic interiority, into which it probes by means of projective imagination. Why then should we think, as I suggested above, that empathy presupposes the “substantial same- ness of the empathizer and the empathized uploads/Ingenierie_Lourd/ life-of-plants-amp-limits-of-empathy-16michael-marder 2 .pdf