What Vegetablesare Saying

About ThemslvesTim Morton

In order to consider something good, I must always know what sort of thing the object is [meant] to be; i.e., I must have a [determinate] concept of it. Flowers, free designs, lines aimlessly intertwined and called foliage: these have no significance, depend on no determinate concept, and yet we like [gefallen] them.Kant, Critique of Judgment, §4 (49)

Consider flowers, blossoms, even the shapes of entire plants, or consider the grace we see in the structure of various types of animals, which is unnecessary for their own use but is selected, as it were. Consider above all the variety and harmonious combination of colors, so likable and charming to our eyes (as in pheasants, crustaceans, insects, down to the commonest flowers); since these colors have to do merely with the surface, and even there have nothing at all to do with the figure [i.e., (visible) structure] of these creatures—which might be needed for these creatures' inner purposes after all—is seems that their sole purpose is to be beheld from the outside.Kant, Critique of Judgment §58 (221–222)

Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz and Aristid Lindenmayer, The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants, with James S. Hanan, F. David Fracchia, Deborah Fowler, Martin J. M. de Boer, and Lynn Mercer (Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, 2004); available at algorithmicbotany.org/papers/.

The roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

[Socrates] But let me ask you, friend: have we not reached the plane-tree to which you were conducting us? [Phaedrus] Yes, this is the tree. [Socrates] By Here, a fair resting-place, full of summer sounds and scents. Here is this lofty and spreading plane-tree, and the agnus cast us high and clustering, in the fullest blossom and the greatest fragrance; and the stream which flows beneath the plane-tree is deliciously cold to the feet. Judging from the ornaments and images, this must be a spot sacred to Achelous and the Nymphs. How delightful is the breeze:—so very sweet; and there is a sound in the air shrill and summerlike which makes answer to the chorus of the cicadae. But the greatest charm of all is the grass, like a pillow gently sloping to the head. My dear Phaedrus, you have been an admirable guide. [Phaedrus] What an incomprehensible being you are, Socrates: when you are in the country, as you say, you really are like some stranger who is led about by a guide. Do you ever cross the border? I rather think that you never venture even outside the gates.

Plato, Phaedrus

Narcissism! There is not narcissism and non-narcissism; there are narcissisms that are more or less comprehensive, generous, open, extended. What is called non-narcissism is in general but the economy of a much more welcoming, hospitable narcissism, one that is much more open to the experience of the other as other. I believe that without a movement of narcissistic reappropriation, the relation to the other would be absolutely destroyed, it would be destroyed in advance.Jacques Derrida, “There Is No One Narcissism”)

Loops

Since things neither exist nor don't exist,Are neither real nor unreal,Are utterly beyond adopting and rejecting—One might as well burst out laughing!

(Longchenpa)

The trees that have it in their pent-up budsTo darken nature and be summer woods—Let them think twice before they use their powersTo blot out and drink up and sweep awayThese flowery waters and these watery flowersFrom snow that melted only yesterday.

Robert Frost