Self-Branching Beings: Hedwig Conrad-Martius as Plant Philosopher

By Isabel Jacobs / Edited by Russell Powell 

Before retiring to his cabin in the Black Forest in the 1970s, Martin Heidegger gave lectures in Switzerland that revisited his phenomenological ontology of Dasein, developed in Being and Time (1927). In one lecture, Heidegger argued that Galileo, in his experiments, was concerned “neither in the apple nor in the tree from which it fell.”^[1] This apple, this tree, this meadow were hidden in plain sight. Heidegger was struck by Galileo’s failure to see the wood for the trees (a critique that could, one might note, be applied to Heidegger himself, who championed fascism in the 1930s.) 

Hedwig Conrad-Martius (1888–1966), a fellow phenomenologist, grappled with similar challenges in understanding plants and their being in the world. A woman philosopher with one Jewish grandparent, she faced significant barriers to an academic career under the Nazis. So, Conrad-Martius made her living from a fruit orchard, writing plant philosophy in the winter. 

Long overlooked in the Western tradition, plants have recently taken center stage in the so-called vegetal turn.^[2] Yet this contemporary plant philosophy, emphasizing process and plasticity, reflects an earlier wave of interest in plant thinking that emerged in the 1920s and ‘30s. 

Conrad-Martius’ book The “Soul” of the Plant: Biological-Ontological Considerations (1934) played a crucial yet largely overlooked role in that earlier shift toward plant thinking. In it, she explores the plant’s autopoietic capacity—its ability to generate and sustain itself. Conrad-Martius’ plant philosophy challenges twentieth-century debates between vitalism and mechanicism, particularly Hans Driesch’s concept of entelechy as a teleological life force. Rather than framing life in teleological terms, she emphasizes how plants actively reshape themselves in response to their environments. 

For Conrad-Martius, plants are defined by their capacities for self-founding, self-design, and self-branching. They constantly reshape their chemical composition, growing into new forms while nevertheless maintaining their identity. Unlike crystals, which simply accumulate layers, plants actively absorb and metabolize substances, forming their own structures “as a true chemist.”^[3] Plant life, Conrad-Martius argues, is marked by schöpferische Potenz)^[4]—a creative potentiality in which living matter (Stoff) as formed Gestalt. 

Conrad-Martius distinguishes plants from other life forms by demonstrating that their transformations of selfhood emerge from experience (Lebnis), though this experience never fully imprints itself as an “event” (Erlebnis).  In the tradition of phenomenology in which Conrad-Martius worked, Erlebnis refers to a lived experience that takes on the character of an event, a moment in which Dasein—Heidegger’s term for human existence—authentically encounters its world by recognizing its own embeddedness. 

Using Heidegger’s terms, Conrad-Martius adapts his anthropocentric commitments while centering plants’ own agency. While humans possess an inwardly directed self, she argues, plants lack Dasein—yet they still create their own world. As self-branching multitudes rooted in their ability to self-create (Selbstgestaltungsfähigkeit), plants embody the capacity for self-creation. They are not mere machines but true living beings. A single plant manifests multiple forms—in its buds, leaves, and flowers—each an expression of its dynamic, form-shaping matter. Rejecting the notion that plants are static and inert, Conrad-Martius emphasizes their movement, as seen in Mimosa pudica, the sensitive plant: 

What a marvelous abundance of the most complex natural movements can be already found in the unfolding of a single leaf or flower bud. So that the more eye-catching cases, when the mimosa folds up its leaves and lowers its stems, … basically do not differ from the autonomous sequences of movements that occur everywhere and at all times in plants.^[5]

Plants do not merely follow a fixed blueprint or teleology. They actively and creatively shape themselves. While fundamentally different from human Dasein, they possess a distinct form of life that demands its own ontological attention. To capture this specificity, Conrad-Martius introduces the term “self-branching” (Selbstverzweigung) to identify the defining characteristic of plant existence. 

Though newly created plants are not identical to their source, they remain connected through a shared relationality of form. Anticipating post-structuralist theories of the subject, Conrad-Martius argues that a plant becomes fully itself only by becoming other—it grows into itself by branching beyond itself. In this sense, a plant can be seen as a transindividual multitude:

But a plant branches itself! In this self-branching lies its entire individual essence (Wesen). When a plant branches out through ever new budding (Knospung), it is and becomes what it is itself. In doing so, it does not lose its individuality (Einwesigkeit), but rather only gains it. It possesses in and of itself an open individuality, not a closed one like the animal. It is total self-branching.^[6]

The plant’s essence, characterized by its infinite self-generation (Neuerzeugende) and self-rebirthing (Wiedergebärende), finds expression in its flowering crown, with the blossom representing its “soul.”^[7] Conrad-Martius’s assertion that plants possess a “soul” resonates with contemporary theories of plant agency and subjectivity while drawing on Aristotelian ideas of the vegetal soul, which were widely debated in the 1930s. 

By engaging with thinkers like Gustav Fechner and Jagadish Chandra Bose, whose research on plant behavior gained global attention at the time, Conrad-Martius sought to distinguish her own plant philosophy from that of her contemporaries. Bose, in particular, argued that plants exhibit intelligence and self-expression through heliotropism. The shameplant (Mimosa pudica), for instance, “at the slightest touch, folds its leaflets one after the other and the leaf stalks finally fold up completely by lowering.”^[8] 

While Conrad-Martius agrees that plants have “a self-acting life”^[9] that transcends mere responsiveness to stimuli, she argues that a plant’s “soul” lies in its capacity for self-branching, with the highest expression in the flower. The plant is an organism in motion that requires a particular method of observation—a phenomenological ontology, or Wesensschau— which is a unique way of attending to the unchanging essence within the multiplicity of its forms.

Drawing on Goethe’s morphology, Conrad-Martius reimagines phenomenological plant philosophy as a search for an Urform, a primal form that guides the plant’s transformation and reproduction. The plant’s ability to organize itself according to its own laws (eigengesetzliche Selbstgestaltungsfähigkeit)^[10] reflects a non-material forming power that shapes and organizes matter. This forming power is not external but intrinsic to its capacity for active self-founding and self-branching.

Conrad-Martius was not interested in reducing plant life to biology. Instead, she employs Goethe’s morphological framework, developed in Metamorphosis of Plants (1790), to explore plants’ ever-shifting forms. In Conrad-Martius’ hands, morphology becomes a way of understanding forms as non-teleological and non-linear. Forms may appear in a serialized sequence but can also emerge in different orders and combinations. 

New forms emerge from a process of transformations that moves both forward and backward. Again, the life of the plant is inherently non-linear. The unique series of forms in which a plant expresses itself suggests the possibility of self-creation as a form of non-human intelligence. Plant life ends when self-design ceases—death marks the end of form. This idea raises crucial questions about the necessary relationship between form and mind. 

It was after World War II that Conrad-Martius focused her critical attention directly on Diesch’s neo-vitalism. Driesch, a student of Ernst Haeckel, used “entelechy” to describe the vital force that activates and realizes an organism’s dormant forms. In The Self-Building of Nature: Entelechies and Energies (1944), Conrad-Martius rejected Driesch’s teleological approach, arguing that life is not a teleology towards order but an active process of self-creation. 

For Conrad-Martius, there is no teleological “essence” in the organic. Life emerges at the boundaries of matter and the non-material, “rooted (wurzelnd) in the former, projected (hineinragend) into the latter.”^[11] This becomes evident in how a plant’s self-branching transforms a chaotic heap into an organized organism, Conrad-Martius argues:

When looking at a higher plant, for example, there is hardly anything more impressive than the fact that the plant produces such a variety of material in its own workshop from a few individual material building blocks, which it finds within itself and absorbs from the outside, leading from the most delicate, wafer-thin (hauchdünnen), ‘papery’ or ‘silky’ shells (Hüllen) to ‘untearable’strands and supporting substances (Stützsubstanzen).^[12]

Using external energy and technologies, plant life “emerges from itself by virtue of itself (ein sich Kraft seiner selbst aus sich selbst Herauszeugendes).”^[13] Form-change arises from creative interactivity (Wechselwirkung) rather than teleological necessity. Conrad-Martius’ concept of the plant soul as transmaterial potentiality sharply contrasts with ideas of an inner self, seeing the soul as a dynamic force that shapes matter. While human life is being there (Da-Sein), plants exist beyond themselves. They grow across space and time, embodying the pure plasticity of life as a constant motion of self-shaping.

Isabel Jacobs is a writer and researcher specializing in Russian, German, and French thought. She is an active member of the Plant Agency Study Group which organized the 2024 conference "Doing Philosophy with Plants" at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her current work critically explores early Soviet ecology and the role of plant life in socialist culture and thought. She holds a PhD  in Comparative Literature from Queen Mary University of London.

^[1] Michael Marder. 2014. The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. New York: Columbia University Press, p.176.

^[2] See Marcello Di Paola (ed.) 2024. The Vegetal Turn: History, Concepts, Applications. Switzerland: Springer Nature.

^[3] Conrad-Martius 1934, p. 53.

^[4] Conrad-Martius 1934, p. 59.

^[5] Conrad-Martius 1934, p. 47.

^[6] Conrad-Martius 1934, p. 64.

^[7] Conrad-Martius 1934, p. 70.

^[8] Conrad-Martius 1934, p. 25.

^[9] Conrad-Martius 1934, p. 22.

^[10] Conrad-Martius 1934, p. 31.

^[11] Conrad-Martius 1944, p. 36.

^[12] Hedwig Conrad-Martius. 1944. Der Selbstaufbau der Natur: Entelechien und Energien. Hamburg: H. Goverts Verlag, p. 419f.

^[13] Conrad-Martius 1944, p. 38.