Aristotle placed plants at the bottom of a hierarchy of living things. He outlined this in his treatise De Anima – Latin for ‘On the Soul’.
In it, he introduced a hierarchical framework for living things known as the Scala Naturae, or ‘the Ladder of Nature.’
When he talks about soul, he isn’t referring to a theological concept. He views soul as the essence or form of a living body – basically a blueprint of what makes a living thing function.
Because plants take in nutrients and reproduce, he argued they had what he called a nutritive soul.
From that point onwards, nobody questioned it. Aristotle didn’t believe plants had any form of sensation or movement, and therefore, in his view, they had no inner life.
I do not accept hierarchy as a given, because I do not see it as the default in the ecosystem.
Note that I said default – which doesn’t mean it never happens. Wolf packs, primate troops, and chickens are prime examples.
But to assume that hierarchy is the main organising principle of life is a mistake.
When I experience the ecosystem – either in my felt sense or by looking at what I observe – its default organising principle is interdependence and decentralised networks: ecosystems, symbioses, webs.
That’s a controversial thing to say, but you have to realise that our assumptions about the living world come from ideological positions instilled into the culture, either consciously or unconsciously, by dusty old patriarchal philosophers.
Domei is about dealing with what we have right now, right in front of us – outside the cage of ideology or fixed belief.
Over time, the Domei practices loosen the ideologies and belief systems we carry as we move through the world.
Look at the current global situation. If you unpack the conflict, ideology is the consistent thread running through all the chaos. I’d go further: ideology and belief are the causes of that chaos.
Is there a way to live that adapts easily? Can we find a framework that we can hold loosely as we move through life and head towards the future?
A framework that adjusts to our daily reality, instead of a rigid, top-down ideology that feels more like a cage than a state of liberation.
Whenever I hear people spout ideology, I bring it back to ecological reality. The Earth’s ecosystems are approximately 3.7 billion years old.
Plants are 470 million years old. Homo sapiens are 300,000 years old. Put that way, you see how young we are – yet we go around believing we sit at the top of Aristotle’s Ladder of Nature.
We believe we’re the smartest species on Earth. But we often overlook the fact that everything else is older than us. Other species have organised and adapted in ways that support the planet’s structure.
We humans act like self-destructive teenagers, believing might is right. Now, we’re paying for that arrogance.
Plants adapt to survive. They continuously process information about light quality, soil chemistry, and the presence of threats and opportunities.
They communicate chemically with neighbouring plants and fungi – and vice versa – and adjust their architecture in response to wind, damage, and competition.
They shape their response to current conditions based on previous experience. This isn’t metaphorical. It’s documented plant behaviour.
The philosopher Michael Marder argues for what he calls ‘plant thinking’ – the idea that plants possess their own modes of being and knowing, which are very different from animal cognition.
He’s also clear that these modes are not inferior. It’s not that plants don’t think. It’s that they think differently, if we broaden what the word ‘thinking’ means.
Philosophy has asked big questions for centuries: What does it mean to think, to know, or to experience something? And yet it has done so through the human perspective of what a mind is.
The plants, meanwhile, have been quietly waiting for us.
With the crisis we face on this earth, maybe it’s time to ask: what do they know that might help us, and how do we navigate these curious times?