Becoming More Vegetal, Energywise

“Becoming more” is a rather vegetal theme in and of itself.¹ For isn’t this the very definition of growth, the plant process par excellence, one that defines, from ancient Greece forward, vegetal being? The tacit overtones of the topic are telling: We still talk and think about plants when it seems to us that something else entirely is the subject of our conversations or thoughts—or, as I put it in Plant-Thinking, “in our highest endeavors, too, we remain sublimated plants.”²

But why insist on “becoming more” of anything? Is minimalism a thing of the past? Are we ready for a new excess, multiplication, proliferation, and abundance in the entwined realms of the arts and thinking when the suffocating excesses of pollution and political violence are ruling the day? My immediate reaction to “becoming more” is to bring up the need for reduction and to assert that, from plants, we can learn how to become more by becoming less; that is to say, by minimizing the occasions for consuming and despoiling the world. Further, just as growth (above all, its vegetal variety) cannot be confined to a quantitative increase in extension, so “becoming more” cannot be understood in a strictly arithmetical sense. We must appreciate the qualitative dimension of growing and becoming, to recode “more” in terms of intensity. And that is already a matter of energy, as I showed in my monograph Energy Dreams. 

“A matter of energy” is purposefully ambiguous. It hints at the co-imbrication of matter and energy in the wake of Albert Einstein and Max Planck, or, more generally, in the footsteps of relativity and quantum theories in physics. In addition to dealing with their vegetal permutations, what I hope to begin elucidating is how plants invest with meaning—including at the conceptual level—our relation to both matter and energy. With this, I respond to a recent question posed to me: “Have you left the world of plants?” No, quite the contrary: I am only preparing to re-enter it via the gateway of what has become a mere buzzword—energy—and a fig leaf for petroleum, coal, and natural gas companies. 

But let me backtrack. What was the rationale behind Energy Dreams?³ In it, I sought the foundations for an unconventional energy model in the realm of vegetal life. The energy plants derive from the sun through photosynthesis is nondestructive, world-preserving, and essentially superficial. Could it be that our stubborn denigration of all things vegetal colluded with the desire to burn everything and everyone instead of receiving the bountiful energy of the solar blaze in the manner of vegetation? If so, then we must learn from plants how to live a more ethical life, respectful of the other’s claim to existence and operating with a drastically different energy than the one we are accustomed to. The locution “green energy” would need to acquire a literal green tinge to be truly momentous.

It is necessary, for all that, to bear in mind that matter and energy are inseparable. Their specific quantities affect the space-time curvature and, together with it, the volume of objects or particles contained within it.⁴ In turn, the shrinking or expanding, rounded or slightly flattened space-time curvature is full, deriving from the distributional relations of matter and energy in the universe. Notwithstanding Husserl’s critique of Einstein, the premises of the theory of relativity resemble those of phenomenology, with which it is contemporaneous.⁵ Husserl ventures to bring philosophy back to the things themselves, tracing the abstractions of conceptual and geometrico-mathematical thinking back to their experiential foundation in the lifeworld. Einstein writes that the “only justification for our concepts and systems of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy.”⁶ Both phenomenology and relativity physics begin with the updated concepts of time and space, allowing them to rejoin their material, experiential base. The outcomes of this exercise are also similar. They prove that, rather than ideal unities, time and space are relative to the affective, cognitive, and other states of the subject (phenomenology) or to the unique distributions of matter and energy (relativity).

If that is so, if matter and energy are two aspects of the same reality, then a vegetal conception of the latter must be tightly bound to an equally plant-based notion of the former. Consider Aristotle, who gave us the language of philosophy by refiguring, delimiting, and, yes, inventing a number of Greek words. He also gifted us with the concept of matter. Or, rather, not quite a concept, and not exactly of matter, at least in the literal register implied in our translation of this term from Latin into English.

Perhaps more than other expressions excised from their everyday context and borrowed for philosophical use, matter remained profoundly marked and incompletely separated from the (immemorial) place and time of its initial enunciation. What we call “matter” in an adaptation of the Latin materia is first denominated by Aristotle with the common Greek noun hulē, referring to wood. A paradox is already apparent in this semantic choice: a particular kind of “stuff” from which something can be made stands in its singularity for any material and, finally, for all the “stuff” of which the world is comprised. Just as the growing plant that, as a being among other beings, condenses (thanks to the growth it embodies) the whole of nature in the pairing phuton-phusis, so vegetal matter comes to define matter as such. Synecdoche reigns supreme.

Perhaps, then, we should slow down and loosen the associative links between “matter” and “stuff” to which we are so accustomed. The Aristotelian hulē is not only timber, not only the dead wood left behind as a trace of past vitality after a tree has been chopped down, but also the woods, that is, living vegetality in its flourishing multiplicity as an ecosystem. The Russian philosopher Vladimir Bibikhin dedicated an entire seminar to the woodiness of Aristotelian matter; major sections of that text appeared in my 2015 translation of Bibikhin’s work into English.⁷

There are certainly signs of life in the matter, which Aristotle’s philosophy discovers or uncovers, encounters or invents—the signs that are absent insofar as we moderns or ultramoderns are concerned. They include self-directed movements, such as growth, decay, and metamorphosis. The living character of matter as vegetal helps explain the ancient view of kosmos, too: a shining order, ornamental and breathing with vitality in each of its parts. Whereas for us life is an exception in the cosmic scheme of things, for ancient Greeks it was death that stood out from the general rule of a living totality. At the same time, the inherent ambiguity of hulē should complicate this black-and-white caricature: as the woods and wood, as the trees themselves and timber, matter is both living and dead, the line between life and death (not to mention nature and culture) rendered indeterminate thanks to the indeterminacy of matter. And, as soon as its constitutive ambiguity dissipates, it changes beyond recognition. Separated, if only for analytic purposes, from a living form with which it co-originated, such unambiguous matter cannot help but reflect the absence of life, a feature that has gradually become predominant in our thinking about it. 

How did hulē get transformed into materia? Did that transformation have anything to do with the deadening of matter? Note that the meaning of materia is overdetermined, insofar as the Greek ambiguity persists in it. On the one hand, it names the mother, mater, vis-à-vis form gendered or engendered in the masculine; on the other hand, it invokes madera, wood as timber, in a selective inheritance of Aristotle. The emergent conceptual matrix, consequently, assigns to the feminine a passive-receptive attitude. To the masculine is assigned the principle of individuation, of an active form, of forming activity to be received by materia-mater-madera. Flora, too, is understood in terms of a passive mode of existence, entirely subservient to animal and human needs and desires. Which is why, as this line of thinking goes, it is so propitious for figuring matter. 

Though influenced by Aristotle’s philosophical formalization of hulē, the Latin grasp of that quasi-concept misses the point of his take on the Platonic khōra as the “material” receptacle, the womb of the world, the place that takes place in and with the taking place of everything. In the paradigm operating within the category materia, the segregation of form from matter has already happened, such that the latter has received the imprint of the former from the outside. In Aristotle, however, unless hulē obtains a form (morphē) from itself alone, in forging a relation to itself as other to itself, hylomorphism (i.e., the co-originariness and co-belonging of “matter” and “form”) makes little sense.

With this brief sketch of the idea of matter, we are prepared to consider both the roots and the branches of its affinity to the vegetal world. Crucially, a turn to plants does not lead to a naïve, because insufficiently abstract, perspective on materiality. What it suggests, instead, is a middle path between the Scylla of interpreting matter as a chaotic agglomeration of atoms or subatomic particles and the Charybdis of its determination as a rigid, teleologically inflected order. Rolling the theoretical dice and seeing whether matter is purely alive or purely dead is not enough, since the purity of these respective qualifications invariably deadens by representing that which they in each instance qualify as either a direct or an inverted reflection of the ideal, nonmaterial form. A more appropriate question is: What sort of life is proper to matter? 

The response seems obvious: Every sort is. Yet, in its blatant indifference to the unique, my curt reply decides before offering a cogent argument against hylomorphism. To respond in this manner is to blind oneself to “the proper” of matter, which is an extension of pre-ontological hospitality to what is other to it, namely to “the improper.” Vegetal life welcomes all the other modes of living, as well as nonlife, into its midst; hence, the doubling of hulē into the living woods and dead timber. (In another context, in a mid-1970s seminar, Jacques Derrida baptized this condition la vie la mort, or “life death,”⁸ without, he insists, the hyphen that could have mediated between the two.) This self-expropriation, this self-subtraction of the vegetal from essence (indeed, from the very essence of essence) gives it the right to be the synecdoche that it is.    

Now, if matter is vegetal—wooden and of the woods—then it must partake of the phenomena and movements characteristic of the plant world: growth, decay, metamorphosis. While it will be fairly uncontroversial to assert that matter is in a constant flux, lending itself to ever-new forms, the ascription to it of the first two vegetal markers will raise eyebrows. Within the limits of the prevalent metaphysico-scientific framework, regardless of all the changes that take place in them, matter and energy themselves, as such, do not change, as they are uncreated and indestructible. But what if matter and energy, the one as the other, grew and decayed, plant-like? More than a hundred years ago, Gustave Le Bon alluded to this possibility when he retracted from the two concepts their “privilege of immortality” and argued that they “also must enter into the cycle of things condemned to grow old and die.”⁹

Wooden and woody, materiality is also finite in the sense of its aesthetic delimitation; far from amorphous, matter is replete with its own forms. Its infinity lies in its infinite finitude and an open-ended chain of synecdochal variations, prompting Leibniz, for instance, to define materiality as a garden within a garden within a garden. But all this—growth and decay, the stain of finitude, delimitation by material forms—conveys the corruption of pure ideality in the most intransigent strains of the metaphysico-theological tradition (e.g., Gnosticism). Matter becomes evil—the evil that ought to be expunged for the ideal and unburdened spirit to triumph.¹¹ The element of light to which the plant-hulē tends above ground denotes the spirit St. Clement wishes to preserve in its purity at the expense of matter, the indwelling of the flesh with its sinfulness, falsehood, and “frivolousness.” Much of the same happens in the post-revolutionary Terror in France, with Robespierre decrying “corruption,” “l’excès de la corruption humaine,” his preferred term for the materiality of existence.¹² Like the Gnostics, he bemoans the fall of spirit into matter, the loss of the human in the wooden and woody density of existence, the corruption of our rational dimension by its entwinement with the opaqueness of the body. If the ensuing purges were of such a total, totalizing nature, it’s because their target was, besides corrupt public officials and institutions, everything corruptible—matter taken as a whole, whether in its actual or potential aspect. Valid as they are, current complaints about political corruption, presupposing the vanished Golden Age or the utopian ideal of purity, either run the risk of falling flat as vague attempts to blow off the steam of discontent, or, provided they are substantive, flirt with a maximally anti-material posture, culminating in the purges. 

To be clear, this does not mean that we should fatalistically accept the ever-worsening abuse of power wielded for the sake of private interests. Instead, working with the hylomorphism of vegetal matter within the political sphere (which cannot rot infinitely, just as it cannot grow indefinitely), reinventing political energy should help along those changes in materiality that would bring with them new forms of organizing shared existence. The choice we face is stark: to excoriate corruption by setting the wooden and woody body of the world and body politic on fire, the element of choice for rituals of purification and sacrificial practices; or to cultivate or craft—depending on when it shows itself as the woods and when as wood—hulē in a different manner, letting alternative forms emerge from it while fully accepting that they, too, are destined to metamorphose, grow, and decay. There will always be something “rotten in the state of Denmark.” The problem is how to turn this rottenness into fresh energy and fertile ground for another growth.

¹ This paper is loosely based on a talk given at the Dutch Art Institute’s (DAI’s) Fourteenth Roaming Assembly, “Towards Entangled Modes of Becoming More,” which took place over ten days in May 2017 in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

² Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013), 40.

³ Michael Marder, Energy Dreams: Of Actuality (Columbia University Press, 2017).

⁴ “[…] the way the volume of small balls of test particles in free fall behave in a region is determined by the amount of matter and energy in that region. The more matter and energy, the greater the Einstein curvature and the more the volume of the ball will shrink” (in Tim Maudin, Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time [Princeton University Press, 2012], 139). 

⁵ Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Northwestern University Press, 1970), 4 and 125–126.

⁶ Albert Einstein, The Meaning of Relativity (Princeton University Press, 1923), 2.

⁷ See Chapters 1, 6, and 8 in Vladimir Bibikhin, The Woods, trans. Michael Marder, Stasis 3 (2015): 8–52. 

⁸ Jacques Derrida, Life Death, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (University of Chicago Press, 2020).

⁹ Gustave Le Bon, The Evolution of Forces (D. Appleton & Co., 1908), 10.

¹⁰ G.W. Leibniz, Monadology, ed. Nicholas Rescher (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 228. 

¹¹ “[T]he gnostic soul must be consecrated to the light, stripped of the integuments of matter, devoid of the frivolousness of the body and of all the passions, which are acquired through vain and lying opinions, and divested of the lusts of the flesh” (Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 5.11). 

¹² Maximilien Robespierre, Textes Choisis, vol. 3 (Éditions Sociales, 1958), 60. 

Marder, Michael. "Becoming More Vegetal, Energywise" in Thinking with Plants and Fungi: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Ecology, Mind, and the More-than-Human World, edited by Rachael Petersen, Russell Powell, and Natalia Scott Schwein. Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2026.  https://doi.org/10.70423/0003.11