Pure science is an erotic pursuit. Unlike applied research, which merely aims to create and control, the pure scientist’s quest is a reaching towards mystery. It is an attraction to what is glimpsed but hidden, felt but veiled, possibly elusive, and possibly untouchable. It is filled with risk and uncertainty and yearning. And like any erotic dynamic, its success is often deflationary. When first uncovered, scientific insights are earth-quaking— but quickly become quotidian. Who marvels much anymore that the earth revolves around the sun, or that humans are the product of evolution? Can you imagine how stunning these discoveries must have been when they first arose? The great insights science sometimes achieves are revolutionary moments of human communion with nature, moments of synchronicity— when our way of understanding meets the world. They ought to be lingered upon and revered, not shuffled into the minds of children as mere fact. What happens when schools or societies merely present the world without its startling or hidden aspects, without its fathomless depth? What ought we do to retain and enrich the erotic potential of existence?
I ask these questions as I consider the work of plant scientists investigating the secret lives of the vegetal world. On the one hand, I am enthralled by such research and excited by where it may take us. I see it as a key of hope that might unlock the modern, anaesthetised mind to the wonder of the plant world. The plethora of books on plant intelligence, communication and behaviour certainly suggests a contemporary appetite for such insight. But I am also concerned this might be a deal with the devil. At what point have we gathered enough suggestions that the plant world is more than it appears to be? Does science need to rush in and bring every dark underside into the glare of its explicit light? Of course, plant explorations may be endless, in which case we need never worry about all these sacred question marks getting flipped on their heads. Each answer would always reveal new questions, and the erotic would be forever intact. Yes, perhaps everything in the universe has infinite sides to it— an insurance against the sloppy greed of reaching hands. It would be a gift we hardly deserve.
But perhaps not.
There was only one Copernican revolution. From that point on, progress has been about filling in details. Consider the discovery that Jupiter has moons. Fascinating to be sure, but not earth-shattering. That the sun itself spirals around the Milky Way, while still cool, does not have the same mind-bending significance as earth’s original displacement. It is a variation on a theme, as is the finding that the Milky Way is itself spinning around some even greater celestial centre. So, too, there was only one Einsteinian revolution, and one Darwinian revolution— even though people continue to discuss how spacetime works and evolution occurs. So, perhaps one day there will be no more revolutions left to be had. Perhaps after discovering plant learning and plant communication, we will continue to debate all the bits and pieces of how it happens, but in a sense, it will all be the equivalent of finding more moons orbiting Jupiter.
I suppose I am beginning to wonder heretical things. Has the time come to ask if slowing down, or even stopping scientific research into plants might be needed? We have enough empirical data to meditate upon for decades to come. Perhaps we need to work out what kind of relationships are being asked of us given the insights gained, given the silences we can still feel, and to do more listening than quarrying. But we seem hellbent on pushing past what we have tasted rather than dwelling on it and allowing it into our minds and hearts. I have often argued that pure science is important, and been critical of what seems instrumentalising and corrupt about applied science. But would it really be all that bad if capitalism continued to claw away at pure science and succeeded in reducing all inquiry to technological research and development? If, in desecrating our capacity to uncover the glory, the churning economy accidentally protects it? I suppose the eros that drives me to pure science is the same eros that hesitates before it.
One might counter: what you say about scientific progress might be generally true, but scientific facts that point towards and make more plausible the possibility of sentience in another creature are an exception. For hundreds of years, Western science has fixated on explaining the world through identifying underlying mechanisms and regularities. As a consequence of this way of thinking filtering down into society, many people see plants as no more than very complex molecules. Beautiful perhaps, but certainly not as having any inner life. One could see the explosion of interest in plant intelligence as an attempt to culturally recover from the grip of this worldview. The surprising complexity and responsiveness that science reveals makes it again conceivable to ask questions such as: ‘What is it like to be a plant?’ In this way, science may be saving plants from the effects of former science, of lifting itself out of its own limitations. By opening up the possibility of sentience in another, science is thereby birthing an unknowability into the universe it presumes to know. Further scientific insight into plants would become more beguiling the more we catch glimpses of the previously unknown because the sentience of another
can only be inferred but not experienced directly. So, at least in this instance, science might be bringing the mist back to the mountaintops.
But is this the antidote we need? I tend to think this gain is temporary and full of risk. It seems to me that intelligence, decision-making, communication, or behaviour revealed in plants by science invariably appears under the vice of mechanical explanations. Science cannot do otherwise. Its entire strategy is to create explanations that are reliably and physically observable. Even our brains, conscious if anything is, appear as but a dizzying network of chemistry and physics when looked at closely enough by science. Even if the organisation of the material world causes consciousness to emerge, no model of the brain leads intuitively from stuff to subjectivity. It is not clear whether neuroscience, let alone plant science, would be able to free anyone from the totalising clutch of scientific mechanism. The only reason we are able to defer this perspective in plant science or in neuroscience is because we have not yet discovered all the mechanisms. Here, remaining question marks provide a promissory note, a space where the objective and the subjective might paradoxically co-exist. But as long as science is the principle means of discovery, only objects will be pulled from that ever-diminishing pool of space.
In any case, knowledge is too cheap in our era. We google it for a quick fix. The erotic is fragile, the mist on the mountain burned away by the sun. We run to the light in the glee of revelation, and the erotic becomes an ever more endangered experience. We must do what we can to nurture it. I suppose what I am suggesting is that human knowing should slow down and re-join the rest of the human spirit, get back into intercourse with the ecology in which it exists— which includes the heart, the body, and the world. I suppose I am suggesting we sit back and spend some time quietly with the plant world, rather than reading about it on the backs of their fallen ancestors. The meaning of recent insights needs to circle back into direct experience, so new intimacies and new questions can arise in encounter with the plant world around us.