Are Plants Animals?
Because Coral Confuses My Children and Redwoods Confuse Plant Documentary Speakers
As we discussed last week, living creatures that have the power of sensation along with its concomitant appetitive power are more lively than living creatures which only have the power of growth (plants). Having a sensitive (and thus appetitive) power is what makes things animals and not plants. Next week, I intend to dive into this sensitive power, but I think this week it is worth our time to linger over the question of what differentiates plants and animals. After all, a quick search finds proclamations that plants have feelings too, plants secretly talk to each other, plants perceive themselves and their environments, and that plants hear and see and taste from both popular level and academic sources. So, is there really any distinction between plants and animals? And why does it matter?
Let’s answer the second question first. The reason the distinction between plants and animals matters is because when people want to animalize plants, part of what they are presuming in their argument, as philosopher Marie George rightly points out in her article A Defense of the Distinction Between Plants and Animals, is “that if a living thing responds in a teleological1 way to something in its environment…it must sense that thing.” This error is important to take seriously because it assumes that creatures can only act for the sake of an end because they have at least some knowledge of that end (through sensation, minimally). This error ultimately claims large parts of the cosmos either do not have an end, or they only have an end imposed on them by higher natures, which in fact have the ability to act for the sake of something.2
This error ultimately claims large parts of the cosmos either do not have an end, or they only have an end imposed on them by higher natures.
But, perhaps you want to object that it seems as if God imposes natures on things. This would be to misunderstand God’s activity in creating: God creates natures that have ends, He does not impose an end on some nature which is not that for the sake of which the creature is. In other words, to create a being with this end which follows from the very nature of the creature is different than to have an existing creature on which an end is externally imposed. Further, having an end is not limited to creatures aware of that end; rather, all of the cosmos has an end that it seeks through its own proper activity brought about by its own powers.
This vegitizing of animals acts to reduce the hierarchy of beings to a materialist understanding of their natures, making each thing a composition of complex chemicals
A second error which we might make here would be to say that if plants and animals have no distinction, that both “sense,” and by sense we mean the chemical reactions a plant undergoes when, say, it turns towards blue light, devoid of awareness of that experience in some sort of psychological sense, then we might likewise be tempted to reduce the worm inching along a warm ground or the cat turning to the sun and enjoying it to merely the chemical reactions. This vegitizing of animals acts to reduce the hierarchy of beings to a materialist understanding of their natures, making each thing a composition of complex chemicals. Which does not in fact match the activities of life we see. We see animals, especially higher animals, acting in a way that indicates they derive pleasure from an experience, and they want to avoid pain. They act as if they experience their experiences and respond to them.
The living activities of a dandelion and those of a lion are different, and it is important that we are able to ground ourselves in the common sense experience of things.
If we step away from philosophizing for a moment, and think about our experience, we observe a difference between a dandelion and a lion, however dapper he might be. The living activities of a dandelion and those of a lion are different, and it is important that we are able to ground ourselves in the common sense experience of things. We see that sunflowers respond to light, and that lions are aware of light, and that humans are puzzled by light—that all three are alive but in different ways and we can know something of that life through the operations of life revealed in the living activities of such creatures.
Specifically when we consider the difference between plants and animals, we see that plants have the nutritive power, while animals have along with the nutritive power the sensitive power. They have the ability to experience the world in a conscious way. And, concomitant with that sensation comes the imagination and appetite for “where there is sensation, there is also pain and pleasure, and wherever these are, there is necessarily also desire” (Aristotle, De Anima, 413b23-24). And who of us hasn’t seen a dog linger in a particularly delightful tummy rub or beg for some food? Even my mother in law’s chickens seek the pleasure that comes from the treats she brings if she shakes the food container. This also points to the relationship of locomotion to sensation—locomotion helps sensation achieve the objects of desire known by sensation, and animals which lack locomotion seem to be closer to plants in that respect (take coral, the status of which as a plant or an animal is a topic of hot debate among the emergently rational animals in my life. Because it looks like a plant, but it is in a book about marine animals).
Animals are alive in a way that makes them more one being than plants are one being .
What is especially worth reflecting on before we move to considering the powers of the human soul is what these vital activities (activities indicating life) tell us about the unity of the beings. See plants, with their nutritive vital function, can be cut and re-propagated from clippings. We’ve done this here as a garden-based observation at my house, learning we can regrow celery, onions, mint, oregano, rosemary, and we attempted to do this with potatoes but failed (this was more on us than nature I think, though). We can graft oranges onto lemon trees and pears onto apple trees. This suggests that at least some plants are particularly unified, or one. Animals seem to have a greater unit than plants: even earthworms can only be cut so many times before they die. And while some animals can regrow limbs (starfish and salamanders, for example), they appear to have this ability in the service of maintaining the unity of their individual being. Animals are alive in a way that makes them more one being than plants are one being (and it’s worth considering how a plant’s vital function of growth makes it more one than how a rock or a heap of dirt is one). Among the animals, it seems those creatures with more perceptive sensation and greater self motion are more one and more alive than those which have those powers in a lesser degree: think about the unity of an earthworm compared to that of a dog, or the ability for movement an octopus has when compared to coral.
This distinction—recognizing that the vital activities indicate vital powers, the possession of which offers different ways of living, some which are more fully the perfection of life than others, sets us up to see the importance of reflecting on how the possession of intellectual vital activities differentiates us from animals. And that is where we will pick up next week.
Teleology means to act “for the sake of something.”
Drawing out this position, one might find themselves arguing justice is the will of the stronger, and now you are in The Republic.