Skip to main content
punctum books

Metaphoric Plants: Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants and the Metaphors of Reason

  • Dalia Nassar (author)
Chapter of: Covert Plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World(pp. 99–120)

Export Metadata

  • ONIX 3.1
    Cannot generate record: No publications supplied
  • ONIX 3.0
    • Thoth
      Cannot generate record: No publications supplied
    • Project MUSE
      Cannot generate record: No BIC or BISAC subject code
    • OAPEN
      Cannot generate record: Missing PDF URL
    • JSTOR
      Cannot generate record: No BISAC subject code
    • Google Books
      Cannot generate record: No BIC, BISAC or LCC subject code
    • OverDrive
      Cannot generate record: No priced EPUB or PDF URL
  • ONIX 2.1
    • EBSCO Host
      Cannot generate record: No PDF or EPUB URL
    • ProQuest Ebrary
      Cannot generate record: No PDF or EPUB URL
  • CSV
  • JSON
  • OCLC KBART
  • BibTeX
  • CrossRef DOI deposit
    Cannot generate record: This work does not have any ISBNs
  • MARC 21 Record
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 Markup
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 XML
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
Metadata
TitleMetaphoric Plants
SubtitleGoethe's Metamorphosis of Plants and the Metaphors of Reason
ContributorDalia Nassar (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0207.1.10
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/covert-plants/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightNassar, Dalia
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2018-09-11
Long abstractPhilosophers have long appealed to various metaphors or images to describe, elucidate, or explicate reason and its place in the uni-verse. These metaphors usually came from the natural world, and more often than not, they involved trees. Porphyry’s tree might be the most well-known example of a philosopher invoking the metaphor of the plant in order to elucidate the structure of the world and the place of reason within it, but it was by no means the only. In his Principles of Philosophy (1644), René Descartes uses the metaphor of a tree to explicate his understanding of the various sciences and of the place of philosophy (as metaphysics) within his system: ‘The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is phys-ics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics and morals.’1 These metaphors provided (and continue to provide) significant means by which to articu-late fundamental philosophical ideas. Porphyry’s and Descartes’ images express unity, on the one hand, and hierarchy, on the other. While Descartes’ metaphor implies that reason furnishes the foundation of reality, Porphyry’s regards reason (the highest branch of the tree) as the most complex manifestation of what is already present in other parts of the natural world (in other branches of the tree). By contrast, Leibniz’s image of reason as a seed ‘implanted’ in the mind by God — an image invoked to explicate the notion of innate ideas — carries a different implica-tion: human reason is eternal, independent from the ephemeral world of the senses.
Page rangepp. 99–120
Print length22 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Dalia Nassar

(author)