Piante e filosofia, piante o filosofia

Abstract

This article explores the fraught relationship between philosophy and plant life, proposing that Western metaphysics has historically defined itself through the repression of vegetal being. Plants, characterized by metamorphosis, growth, and decay, represent the very opposite of the immutable ideals privileged by philosophy, from Plato’s Ideas to the transcendental subject. Marder argues that granting plants subjectivity risks reproducing the metaphysical and capitalist logic of objectification and commodification, where even non-human life becomes absorbed into circuits of value extraction. Instead, he develops the notion of “vegetal thinking,” inspired by Plotinus’s noesis phutiké, as a non-instrumental mode of thought that resists commodification and opens a space for rethinking ontology, epistemology, politics, and ecology beyond the subject-object divide. Ultimately, the essay frames the choice as one between “plants or philosophy,” insisting on the revolutionary potential of vegetal life to disrupt metaphysical and capitalist frameworks while offering alternative models of community, intelligence, and existence.