What’s at Stake in Debates about Plant Agency? The Promise of Transdisciplinarity and a “New Biology”
By Stella Sandford / Edited by Russell Powell
To understand what is at stake in contemporary debates over plant agency, it is helpful to situate them within the well-accepted narrative of recent biological theory. It goes like this: at the beginning of the twentieth century, the concept of the organism (first developed in the eighteenth century) still played a major explanatory role. But in the second half of the twentieth century, the modern synthesis of Darwinian theory and Mendelian genetics, the rise of molecular biology, and the unraveling of the structure of DNA displaced the concept of the organism almost entirely. This ushered in the era of “reductionist” biology in which living beings could now be explained wholly as a sum of processes and parts. This new paradigm had no need for and thus dismissed supposedly “metaphysical” categories such as “life” and attendant notions like “agency.”1
However, the early twenty-first century may be witnessing the “return of the organism” as the limitations of reductionist biology become apparent, particularly the limitations of purely genetic explanations for evolution and development. Once again, the concept of the whole organism and its mutually constitutive relationship with the environment is being accepted (by some, at least) as wielding crucial explanatory power in biological and evolutionary theory.2
There are various ways of explaining the eclipse of the organism in mid-twentieth-century biology, but a comparison of the concepts with which it is associated with those of ‘reductionist’ biology provides a crucial clue. The concept of organism often accompanies terms like “agency” and “autonomy” that seem to be insufficiently well-defined for scientific discourse. I will suggest, however, that it is precisely the complexity of these concepts that allows us to see the various things that may be at stake in their introduction into biology.
The language of reductionist biology has the advantage of being crisp and scientifically universal. For example, the standardized terminology for cell components and molecular processes may include specific concepts for the plant as opposed to the animal. But the language of chemistry underlying both plant and animal is shared, unambiguous, and uncontroversial. The de facto acceptance of common linguae francae avoids trans-linguistic conceptual differences to a significant extent.
In contrast, the concept of the organism occupies a constellation of related concepts—agency, agents, autonomy, intelligence, teleonomy, purpose, and intention—which are highly contested and multivalent. There is no discipline-specific agreement over the meanings and extensions of these concepts. The fact that they may be used differently across disciplines—including in the humanities and the social sciences—makes them appear to some as, if not entirely useless, then at least vague and unhelpful. It is understandable, then, that scientists might reject these concepts in favor of those used in reductionist biology.
If those who argue for organism-centered biology also wish to argue for the usefulness and explanatory necessity of concepts such as agency and agent, then it is also necessary for them to define and delimit the use of these concepts—that is, to make them “scientific.” But here we run up against an insuperable problem. Concepts such as “agency,” “agent,” and “autonomy” are transdisciplinary concepts—there is no reason to believe that any transdisciplinary concept, precisely because it is transdisciplinary, will ever be assigned any one universally accepted meaning.
A “transdisciplinary” concept is one that does not belong to any specific discipline or domain of knowledge but rather functions across disciplines even as it takes different inflections in each. Transdisciplinary concepts function meaningfully across disciplines, in fact, precisely because their use surpasses their disciplinary origin. For some of these concepts—and “agency” and “agent” are clear examples of this—the meaning of any one concept is also inseparably bound up with the meaning of any number of others.
For “agency” and “agent” to function meaningfully as concepts in any domain, then they inevitably and perhaps necessarily must still resonate with the other domains in which they function, too. The claim that a plant is or should be treated as an “agent” is counted a meaningful proposition only to the extent that its “agentic” status resonates in some way with the “agent” concept in natural philosophy, law, sociology, theology, economics, linguistics, politics, and so on.
The problem is not just that the word “agent” might signify different things in different domains. The stakes of its use might be different, too. “Agent” is only applied to a legal subject for a specific and time-limited purpose in contract law, for example. It carries no ontological value (even if it cannot but evoke the metaphysical idea of ‘powers’ invested in a subject). The stakes, in this case, are largely transactional and give the agent responsibilities or duties. All of this is quite alien to the concept of a biological agent, which is either the concept of an entity that is, ontologically speaking, an agent or that is treated, heuristically, as if it were one.3 Here, the stakes are often ethical (as agent organisms become morally considerable) or methodological (treating organisms as agents for the purposes of a better scientific understanding of their life processes). But in the discussion of biological agents, the stakes may also be philosophical, aiming to get clear about the concept or to understand its history.
The assertion of agency can also be political—part of a demand to bring about the conditions in which the recognition or the exercise of the agency of particular groups (human or otherwise) becomes possible. Here, the concept of agent is bound up with the concept of the person, so the ultimate indissociably of certain domains (for example, the legal and the political) becomes obvious. If “agent” and “agency” involve the inevitable crossing and imbrication of different disciplines and the muddied waters of the various agents having a stake in their agency, is it any wonder that a reductionist biology aiming to cut out all extraneous conceptual noise—perhaps aiming to be “purely” scientific—turned its back on the concept of organisms and the question of their agency?
This helps us to understand why “agency” is so controversial in the plant sciences. When the concept of agency is introduced into discussions of plants, it resonates with the use of the concept in philosophy, where the agent has historically been human. Applying the concept of biological agency to other animals and other motile life forms seems relatively easy compared with the application to plants. “Agency,” this is all to say, entered into the terminology of the biological realm on the back of a human-animal model, meaning that its use in relation to plants imposes an additional justificatory burden.
As the use of the phrase “biological agency” suggests, it requires a specific version of the concept “agent” for biology, quarantined from infection with the meaning of other disciplinary domains. But as I have suggested, this is impossible to achieve with a transdisciplinary concept like “agency,” which gets its meaning from its relation to other domains. Even the scientifically-minded philosopher of biology (the clarifier of concepts) can’t help here since they, too, can only propose a working stipulative definition of agency for plants, which will always come up against the same problem, evoking the same associations and thus inviting the same criticisms.
But what if the transdisciplinarity, multivalency, and the invested nature of the concept of “agency” were not a problem at all? I would like to suggest that it is, instead, the enabling condition of what Carl Woese calls a “new biology” and, thus, a new way of thinking about plants.
This raises the question: what is at stake in plant agency debates? As one might expect from the above, there is no one single concern at stake here. From the standpoint of the plant scientist, clearly, the point is not simply to find a new concept (“agency”) that fits the conceptual structure of the “old biology,” thereby adding another string to the plant’s bow, as it were. It is not that the plant has, in addition to its other physiological properties, an additional property called “agency,” as if that were the name for a constituent element or a process within the plant identifiable in other life forms, too.
For the plant scientist, the idea of plant agency introduces a new perspective into the study of plants, opening up a new set of questions not just about “the” plant in isolation but as a co-creator of its environment. What is at stake for the plant scientist, ultimately, is a new plant biology, one in which biology’s relations to other disciplines, including the humanities and the social sciences, are constitutive (and one, importantly, that prominent plant scientists are beginning to call for). The use of transdisciplinary concepts like “agency” allow one to accept transdisciplinary relations as productive and interesting, not as what needs to be eliminated in the interest of maintaining disciplinary purity.
Stella Sandford is Professor of Modern European Philosophy in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University London. Her latest book is Vegetal Sex: Philosophy of Plants (Bloomsbuty, 2022).
[1] See Carl R. Woese, “A New Biology for A New Century,” Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, June 2004, Vol. 68, No. 2: 173–186.
[2] See Daniel J. Nicholson, “The Return of the Organism as a Fundamental Explanatory Concept in Biology,” Philosophy Compass 9/5 (2014): 347–359.
[3] See S. Okasha, “The Concept of Agent in Biology: Motivations and Meanings,” Biological Theory 19, 6–10 (2024).