Uncommon Fruits

“The Earth was different back then,” spoke the stone again, now reminiscing about a time more than 4 billion years ago, the one remembered only by a fortunate few. “Tell us the story again,” cried the stonelets. “The skyline was covered with a hazy mixture or red and orange as the early atmosphere was thick with methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapour. The dissolved iron in the oceans danced with sunlight, producing a mysterious greenish hue to the world’s waters. The land was dark and continuous volcanic eruptions were producing a thick layer of gray smog,” exclaimed the old stone in a nostalgic tone as if it wanted to call back to a return to those times when oxygen didn't creep through the earth's atmosphere yet and when life was still unimaginable. “And then — the Event.” The stonelets held their breath, even though every single one of them knew precisely about the Event, the Great Oxygenation Event. Tiny organisms called cyanobacteria, the first harbingers of life, started to evolve about 3.5 billion years ago, but it was around 2.7 billion years ago when they mastered photosynthesis, the ability to turn sunlight into the chemical energy necessary to fuel their activities, producing dioxygen as a byproduct. “The oxygen released by cyanobacteria steadily accumulated over vast swathes of the ocean and oxygenated the water. Gradually, the accumulated oxygen started escaping into the atmosphere, where it reacted with methane. As more oxygen escaped, methane was eventually displaced, and oxygen became a major component of the atmosphere,” the stone quoted from a recent article.¹ The waters first turned red as the dissolved iron started to rust in raction to the newly born oxygen. The greenhouse gases were getting displaced by free oxygen, cooling the temperatures of the atmosphere. “Anaerobic friends got poisoned by all of the freed oxygen and the world turned into an ice ball, killing off most of life, even the cyanobacteria,” added the stone. But oxygen acted as a pharmakon: at first as poison and later as remedy. Through symbiotic partnerships, cyanobacteria gave rise to plants, creating the conditions for vegetal life resembling the one we know today. Oxygen provided by photosynthesisers made all of it possible. “The Great Oxygenation was their masterpiece, a gift that reshaped the world and set the stage for the grand story of life that followed.” The stone paused, its ancient memory drifting away, turned to the little stonelets and said: “And still today, people feed off the gaseous excretions of plants. [They] couldn’t live but off the life of others.’”²

“The life of a plant is limited to its outward extension, itself unlimited by anything but the environmental conditions: the amount of sunlight, the moistness of the soil, and so forth. In dialectical geometry, the plant thus finds its schematic representation in the incompletion of the line tending to (bad) infinity without closing unto itself in the circularity of a return; growth dooms the plant to strive toward exteriority without establishing any sort of inwardness, a quality Hegel associates with the soul. [...] Plant growth is also seen as purposeless because the vegetal soul does not attain to any higher capacities other than those of endless nourishment and propagation. Having been exempted from the logic of means and ends, it may reach completion only from the external standpoint of those who will impose their ends onto these essentially goalless living things. [...] Such monstrous growth and immoderate proliferation, whose possibilities are, stricto sensu, never realized, have always been unspeakably terrifying for philosophers, who in one way or another have busied themselves with, on the one hand, establishing the “proper limits” for desire, reason, life, or action, and, on the other, with setting up conceptual police authorities to safeguard these limits against potential transgressors. The plant’s “endless growth outwards,” its total externalization, the “infinite distances of the floral world [Unendliche Ferne der Blumenwelt],” and infinite temporality are anathema to the basic orientation of philosophy toward completion and perfection. Whenever a metaphysical philosopher speaks of plants at all, it is with the purpose of taming their proliferation and of appropriating their time, measuring it, and declaring it deficient in keeping with this measure alien to human beings.”

“Life is tend­ency, and the essence of a tendency is to develop in the form of a sheaf, creating, by its very growth, divergent directions among which its impetus is divided. This we observe in ourselves, in the evolution of that special tendency which we call our character. Each of us, glanc­ing back over his history, will find that his child-person­ality, though indivisible, united in itself divers persons, which could remain blended just because they were in their nascent state: this indecision, so charged with promise, is one of the greatest charms of childhood. But these interwoven personalities become incompatible in course of growth, and, as each of us can live but one life, a choice must perforce be made. We choose in re­ality without ceasing; without ceasing, also, we aban­don many things. The route we pursue in time is strewn with the remains of all that we began to be, of all that we might have become. But nature, which has at com­mand an incalculable number of lives, is in no wise bound to make such sacrifices. She preserves the different tend­encies that have bifurcated with their growth. She creates with them diverging series of species that will evolve separately.”

Within the body of a plant, a slow and continuous silent communication takes place: roots sense gravity and moisture, transmitting signals to leaves that stretch toward the light, while wounds — caused by pests and others — trigger the production of protective substances in distant tissues. This is intra-communication: not the expression of a singular will, but the coordination of multiplicities — cells, hormones, electrical impulses — that together compose the plant’s distributed, decentralised intelligence.
Communication also unfolds silently between plants themselves: through root exudates, via fungal networks, and so on. A tree attacked by insects alerts its neighbouring trees of the danger; seedlings adjust their growth when they sense the presence of others. They respond. Inter-communication among plants resists anthropocentric notions of dialogue. It is a mode of attunement, a relational sensing shaped by contact, chemistry, and time.
Plants teach us that communication is not necessarily the exchange of meanings, but rather the capacity to affect and be affected, to emit signals without domination, to respond without the need for recognition. It is a quiet co-presence, marked by resonance rather than representation.