The Invention of Plant Consciousness: Science, History, and Contradiction

By Russell C. Powell / Edited by Rachael Petersen

Have you heard? Plants, we’re learning, might be conscious. They’ve been shown to possess abilities to communicate, to exhibit complex decision-making processes, to remember, and to learn. Not only are such recent findings challenging long-standing assumptions of what it means to be vegetal; they’re challenging science itself.

Science has long struggled to acknowledge phenomena that challenge established cognitive and epistemic categories. For instance, science reserves the category of “consciousness” solely for organisms with a central nervous system. In response to these methodological limitations, scholars like the cognitive scientist Paco Calvo, the research scientist Monica Gagliano, and botanists like Stefano Mancuso are calling for new scientific approaches for comprehending plants’ previously unrealized capacities. The stakes for this work are sky high, Calvo argues, not just for plants and our relationship to them, but for the future of the world: “If we can truly understand what it means to be a plant,” he writes, “we will learn much about what it means to be human, and how we might be ourselves in ways that work with the organic world rather than destroying it.”[1]

While I agree with Calvo, Gagliano, and Mancuso that it’s important to push the boundaries of science, I want to explore a different story from the one about plant consciousness that’s currently being told. Rather than ask how science can be made more suitable for exploring the idea of plant consciousness to help us to keep from destroying the world, I’d instead like to ask: What if what we’re calling “plant consciousness” actually emerged from the destruction that’s already been wrought? The key distinction, I’ll argue, is between seeing plant consciousness as merely an object of scientific inquiry and something we, amid the shifting conditions of life in the Anthropocene, have ourselves invented.

As a start, let me quickly say that, by “invention,” I don’t mean to suggest that the consciousness of plants is something we’ve somehow made up. Plants demonstrate distributed systems of intelligence, vibrational communication, repeated response patterns implying something like what we’d call “memory,” and much more. Moreover, no scientist claims to have discovered plant consciousness outright. Only a small subset of thinkers speculate that plants might have a subjective experience of the world—what the American philosopher Thomas Nagel called “something it is like” to be a plant.[2]

Rather, when I say plant consciousness is an “invention,” I mean it in the sense that the philosopher J.B. Schneewind means when he argues that the concept of autonomy wasn’t merely discovered by Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century German idealist philosopher, but invented. Autonomy—the idea that moral agents are self-governing, capable of determining right and wrong independently of external authority—wasn’t always central to the modern conception of the self, Schneewind argues. Instead, it was invented through a gradual shift in thought that took place in the early modern period when philosophers like Kant began to move away from traditional moral frameworks that emphasized divine command and other hierarchical structures of moral authority.

Autonomy, then, wasn’t a philosophical discovery. It arose in response to a broader demand for a moral framework that could better address the fragmentation of traditional sources of authority. By recasting morality as self-government, modern European philosophy developed a new moral vocabulary that grounded ethical obligation in reason and individual freedom rather than in external commands or inherited social roles. 

Just as moral autonomy emerged in response to the collapse of divine and aristocratic authority, the idea that plants might possess something akin to consciousness can be seen as a conceptual response to the urgent need for new ways of understanding and valuing nonhuman life in an era defined by ecological crisis. To frame plant behavior as a form of “consciousness” isn’t simply a neutral description of biological processes, therefore. It’s to pursue an interpretive move shaped by today’s pressing demands for new ways of thinking about agency and planetary interdependence. 

Recall Calvo’s appeal: To understand plant consciousness is to understand the potential of reversing our destructive ways, the potential of remaking our relations with more-than-humankind. What we’re seeing in the discourse and debates around the idea of plant consciousness is a basic reevaluation of human exceptionalism as a result of the interpretive moves the Anthropocene is motivating. The assumption of human mastery demands its own undoing in a world that’s careening toward ecological catastrophe. Both Kant’s example in Schneewind’s analysis and the idea of plant consciousness thus help us to see that it's precisely the point at which reason doesn’t make sense in history (or, put differently, the point at which reason appears inadequate to its own historical conditions) that conceptual inventions emerge to fulfill the new spirit of the age. 

We could trace this pattern of conceptual invention back to the advent of the Western intellectual tradition, back to Socrates, to demonstrate the same point. The Greeks, in their tragedies, dramatized the effects of the contradictions that had emerged in their own form of life, which in turn compelled the conceptual inventions that have shaped the trajectory of Western thought. In the play Agamemnon, for instance, Aeschylus exposed how the Greek polis, ostensibly committed to freedom, actually required domination (of women, of conquered peoples, of kinship ties) to sustain its democratic ideals. Antigone by Sophocles similarly dramatized how Greek politics, despite its claims to righteousness, was in fact built on exclusion. 

Tragedy’s power to demonstrate the contradictions inherent to Greek life was twofold. First, it revealed that Greek life, awash as it was in hypocrisy, contained the seeds of its own destabilization. Yet it also revealed that the very act to consider and confront the contradictions inherent to life—most notoriously the contradiction that Greek democracy depended on a slave economy—creates the conditions for the remaking of thought. Indeed, it was only after Aeschylus and Sophocles that Socrates could invent a morality of universal obligation, which rejected the spurious distinction between free and enslaved individuals. 

The internal contradictions of Greek democracy cried out for new ways of thinking about ethical responsibility, much as those of early modernity set the stage for Kant’s own intervention. And just as Kant could be said to have “invented” autonomy as a way of making sense of reason’s contradictions in his day, plant consciousness has emerged as a conceptual innovation in response to a basic contradiction of our own age: that human mastery over nature simultaneously leads to environmental collapse. The growing discourse around plant consciousness thus can be understood as an attempt to think beyond this contradiction, seeking a more stable conceptual footing when the very reasoning that defines thought in the Anthropocene—reasoning that’s responsible for climate change, the sixth mass extinction phase, and all manner of environmental justice concerns—has proven to be shifting sand. 

A key lesson of seeing “plant consciousness” as a conceptual invention I especially wish to highlight is the idea that thought possesses within itself the resources for resolving its own difficulties. “The sphinx must solve her own riddle,” as Emerson observed. Inventive, disruptive, and even revolutionary thought emerges precisely where conventional thinking finds itself in a moment of internal opposition. Our task is not merely to remedy or outflank contradiction simply by getting our methods right. It’s to move forward by entrusting thought to the very possibilities that that contradiction reveals. 

I contend that, for plant consciousness advocates, the pursuit of a definitive resolution to the contradictions that might drive inventive thinking around plants’ capacities—namely, by reforming scientific methodology to eliminate categorical limits on what qualifies as consciousness—confuses the role of responsible thought when intellectual antagonisms emerge in history. Claims that plants are “conscious” amount to an ongoing negotiation over the limits of cognitive categories themselves shaped by the evolving and conditioned nature of historical knowledge. 

Making plants’ capacities more accessible to scientific measure will no doubt benefit our understanding. However, what we need most isn’t simply more and better science—it’s a greater openness to the demands history imposes, to the demands history makes on us.  

At its best, science provides a structured, verifiable framework for organizing knowledge. Recognizing science’s limits—such as its failure to capture plants’ capacities fully—isn’t an invitation merely to expand those limits to make science universally competent. Instead, it offers an opportunity to reflect on what sort of inventive thinking the contradictions of our age have called out from us. Only then will we see that the limits of empirical knowledge that science struggles to overcome aren’t limits to knowledge itself. They’re merely boundaries to what we might claim to know at a given moment. 

And if history teaches us anything, it’s that the boundaries of thought are moving all the time.  

Recommended Reading:

Paco Calvo. Planta Sapiens: Unmasking Plant Intelligence. London: Bridge Street Press, 2022. 

Monica Gagliano. Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants. Berkeley, Cal.: North Atlantic Books, 2018. 

G.W.F. Hegel. Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree. Revised edition. New York: Dover Publications, 1956 [1837]. 

Stefano Mancuso. The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior. New York: Atria Books, 2017. 

J.B. Schneewind. The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 

Russell Powell's research is on the religious, ethical, and political resonances of contemporary environmental issues, particularly the religious dimension of American environmental thought. Prior to joining the CSWR he taught at Boston College as a Core Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Theology and Ethics. Russell earned his doctorate in the multidisciplinary Religion and Society program at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2019. He has held teaching positions at the College of the Holy Cross, Amherst College, and Princeton University.

[1] Paco Calvo, Planta Sapiens: Unmaking Plant Intelligence (London: Bridge Street Press, 2022), 224. Original emphasis. 

[2] Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review, vol. 83, no. 4 (1974): 435-50.