You Should Empathise With Plants
What do I mean by this?
I don’t mean any pseudoscientific woo about plants having spirits in the supernatural sense. They don’t have “brains” or “thoughts” in the way we define thoughts (narrowly) as being the product of electrical impulses between neurons in the brain.
Empathy means the ability to feel something that another being feels. Normally when we talk about empathy we only use it to refer to other humans, or at most, other mammals, but I would like to propose that you can and indeed should try and cultivate empathy for plants as well.
What feeling do you share with a plant? You can’t share with it the sensory experiences you have, the feedback from your skin, eardrums, retina, taste-buds or nose. Because a plant doesn’t have those senses, it doesn’t have a central nervous system. Plants have other senses: they have statoliths that help them understand which way is down, they have photoreceptors that detect light, they can maintain homeostasis by self-regulating water absorption and transpiration, they can swap nutrients with other plants via the root systems etc.
To try and empathise with a plant on a sensory level is limited as it can only really be done by analogy. We can try and compare a plant’s awareness of sunlight, with how it feels on our own skin, we can call a dehydrated plant “thirsty”. But this is not the kind of empathy I’m talking about.
What do you feel, if you were to strip away your sensory input? If you did not know you were human, or what words were, or how to define anything around you? At your core, you know that you are alive. And this “knowing that you are alive” is something that your body does without your brain having to be consciously thinking the thought “I am alive” in words. If you are asleep or unconscious, your body still “knows it’s alive” because it continues to breathe, digest food, circulate blood, filter waste from the blood, fight infection, grow new cells — essentially carry on the vast majority of functions associated with life without your ego being aware of it.
Your body knows it’s alive on a fundamental level, beyond words and beyond thought. And this core “knowing you are alive”, which is indistinguishable from actually being alive, is what a plant knows. Is what all living beings know.
Take a minute to think about the trees outside your home or office, the “weeds” that grow in the cracks on the sidewalk. Perhaps you have a potplant or several (I know I do). Think about the grass. How do you think of plants? Do you see them as objects?
I feel that typically, that’s my default state, unless I wake myself up to the life of plants via empathy. When I tend to my myriad indoor plants, it’s easy to think of them as decorative objects that respond to my watering and the sun in a very simplistic way, almost like machines that convert water and light into pretty green shapes. When I eat vegetables and fruit (I’m a vegan, so I do this a lot), it’s easy to think of the plants I consume as merely “things” that I put into myself to ease discomfort (hunger) and cause pleasant sensations (taste). Even if I intellectually know better, I don’t necessarily internalise these feelings unless I remember to.
Even when I walk outside and appreciate nature, unless I remind myself and cultivate empathy for plants, I find it all too easy to slip into a state of mind whereby trees are like objects plunked down and stuck upright in the ground by humans “to look nice”. To think of these life forms that share the earth with me purely in terms of function. “They look beautiful”. “They produce oxygen”. “They provide shade and habitat”.
Be honest with yourself, is that how you perceive plants in your everyday life?
If it is, how do you feel about your place in the world? Are you a solitary subject, interacting with an environment composed totally of objects that can either benefit you, harm you or do nothing for you? Isn’t that lonely?
In the past few months I’ve been cultivating the habit of listening to lectures by Alan Watts while walking in nature and extending my awareness to the life all around me, the life I am a part of.
When I extend my empathy to a plant, I am suddenly richly and vividly aware of how life is everywhere around me. Plants are not objects stood up in the ground, they are actively pushing against gravity and towards the sunlight. When I breathe out, a plant breathes in (metaphorically). When I breathe in, I absorb their exhalation.
“There’s an interdependence between flowers and bees. Where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees, there are no flowers. They are really one organism. And so in the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else.” — Alan Watts
In a sense, animals and plants are two parts of the same endless process, the cycle of carbon dioxide and oxygen, the cycle of sunlight converted to energy and creating different forms that dissolve and reform and come back again and again in different guises.
I am not separate from the environment, a lone subject in a maze of objects. I am continuous with it. There is no “gap”. What I consider “space” or emptiness is air — and where does the oxygen in air come from? And is there a point at which the inside of me becomes the outside? The alveoli in my lungs take oxygen from the air into my blood. The perception of solidity, of impermeable barriers between “me” as an individual and “everything else”, is an illusion.
Life is everywhere, and life is continuous with me. And that awareness — where you don’t just intellectually know that a plant is alive in a clinical scientific sense, but you feel it within yourself, because ultimately we are all connected and all part of the same process together — that is a form of empathy. One that makes day to day experience intensely beautiful and harmonious.
“And we all have the feeling ‘I come into this world!’ but that isn’t true, you came ‘out of this world’ like a leaf comes out of a tree”. — Alan Watts
