2.12
Plants also have meaningful relations. They relate and open to soil, light, water, mycorrhizal fungi, pollinators, other plants, and so on.[1] It seems to me that there’s no strong reason, besides a lack of (direct) access combined with a lack of imagination, that we should deny that plants, and living beings more generally, have their own worlds.
The proposition that plants have their own worlds may be uncomfortable for some of us. One could retort that, as with non-human animals, plants aren’t open to their surroundings in the way we are; they merely react to stimuli and are under the dictates of laws of nature. But, again, the fact that we can analyze something through the conceptual lens of stimuli doesn’t mean that phenomena begin or stop there;[2] we must ask what makes openness to stimuli possible (if this is the model we’re using) (§2.11).
World is the totality of meaningful involvements (§2.4), of sense and significance. Worlds are how other beings stand forth and are oriented and gathered for the enworlded being.
Plants show their character (§2.9), for they aren’t all the same, but are distinct; different plants have different styles and ways of being. In their placedness, they have distinct relations to things. These are relations of directedness (towards/away/etc.) and thus reveal meaningfulness for the plant in question, for meaning resides in directed behaviour, not in reason, intelligence, or consciousness. The directed behaviour reveals the sense that things have for the plant.
Many plants are phototropic: they move towards the sun, which draws them towards itself. They’re oriented to water: they move towards it, and it draws or calls them. The sun and water hold significance for the plant. There’s a meaning-full economy of give-and-take and call-and-response.
Meaning occurs when, for beings that can orient themselves, things fit.[3] Things cohere in their relatedness to one another: their relatedness is a making of sense.
Plants engage with the world in a way similar to animals insofar as, in Uexküll’s sense, there are different tones to different things for them. And so, building from what I said above regarding animals (§2.11), I take this to mean that there are plant worlds, and life worlds more generally.
[1] David Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses (New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (Australia: Black Inc. imprint of Swartz Publishing Pty Ltd., 2017). See also, as examples: Marcus Anhäuser, “The Silent Scream of the Lima Bean,” Congress Report, MaxPlanckResearch 4 (2007): p. 60–5; Kevin J. Beiler et al., “Mapping the wood-wide web: mycorrhizal networks link multiple Douglas-fir cohorts,” New Phytologist 185 (2010): p. 543–53; Monica Gagliano, “In a green frame of mind: perspectives on the behavioural ecology and cognitive nature of plants,” AoB Plants 7 (2015): p. 1–8; Monica Gagliano, “Learning by Association in Plants,” Scientific Reports 6.38427 (2016): p. 1–9; Monica Gagliano, “The mind of plants: Thinking the unthinkable,” Communicative & Integrative Biology 10.2 (2017): p. 1–4; Suzanne W. Simard et al., “Mycorrhizal networks: Mechanisms, ecology and modelling,” Fungal Biology Reviews 26 (2012): p. 39–60; Suzanne W. Simard et al., “Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field,” Nature 388 (1997): p. 579–82; Yuan Yuan Song et al., “Defoliation of interior Douglas-fir elicits carbon transfer and stress signalling to ponderosa pine neighbors through ectomycorrhizal networks,” Scientific Reports 5.8495 (2015): p. 1–9.
[2] For example, see Heidegger on how this type of analysis wouldn’t capture the phenomenon of being human: B&T, 55/82, 181/226, 232/275, 246–7/290–1.
[3] David Morris, “From the Nature of Meaning to a Phenomenological Refiguring of Nature,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 72 (2013): p. 329–30.