Without Why: Useless Plants in Daoism and Christianity

Sam Mickey

doi:10.3390/rel10010065

Abstract

This article focuses on three examples of religious considerations of plants, with specific attention to the uselessness of plants. Drawing on Christian and Daoist sources, the examples include the following: (1) the lilies of the field described by Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke; (2) the useless tree of Zhuangzi; and (3) Martin Heidegger’s reading of a mystic poet influenced by Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, for whom a rose blooms “without why,” which resonates with Heidegger’s deconstruction (Destruktion) of the history of metaphysics and his interpretation of uselessness in Zhuangzi. Each of those examples involves non-anthropocentric engagements with the uselessness of plants, which is not to say that they are completely free of the anthropocentrically scaled perspectives that assimilate uselessness into the logistics of agricultural societies. In contrast to ethical theories of the intrinsic value (biocentrism) or systemic value (ecocentrism) of plants, these Christian and Daoist perspectives converge with ecological deconstruction in suggesting that ethical encounters with plants emerge through attention to their uselessness. A viable response to planetary emergency can emerge with the radical passivity of effortless action, which is a careless care that finds solidarity with the carefree ways of plants.

Highlights

This article focuses on three examples of religious considerations of plants, with specific attention to the uselessness of plants
What if some sort of uselessness, listlessness, or emptiness were crucial for ethical interactions with plants? In other words, what if radical passivity could open a path toward ethical relationships with plants? This paper explores this possibility, by interpreting three examples of religious considerations of plants
It communicates in terms that make sense in agrarian contexts, and it affirms a radical passivity that is not a lack of action but a carefree and spontaneous florescence, which reverses and displaces hierarchies

Summary

Lilies of the Field

Part of the Sermon on the Mount portrayed in the Gospel of Matthew is a sermon against worrying. It communicates in terms that make sense in agrarian contexts, and it affirms a radical passivity that is not a lack of action but a carefree and spontaneous florescence, which reverses and displaces hierarchies (e.g., active/passive, powerful/weak, spiritual/vegetal) This is not to say that the injunction to consider the lilies of the field is not without problems. Terms like transaction, interaction, and intra-action are still caught in an active/passive dichotomy that It is not merely the agency or subjectivity of things that gives them power, for the usefulness of any agency is predicated on something unseen and overlooked, not unlike the uselessness of empty space. The uselessness of a tree’s sum of parts makes way for uniquely focused agencies, which exhibit some degree of intentionality and purpose, agential capacities like self-organization, reproduction, photosynthesis, and as more contemporary research continues to indicate, even sensation and communication (Karban 2015).

Blooming without Why

Conclusions