Emanuele Coccia

These are all quotes from his book The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture:

[Plants’] absence of movement is nothing but the reverse of their complete adhesion to what happens to them and their environment.

They see the world before it gets inhabited by forms of higher life; they see the real in its most ancestral forms. Or rather they find life where no other organism reaches it. They transform everything they touch into life, they make out of matter, air, and sunlight what, for the rest of the living, will be a space of habitation, a world.

To imagine does not mean to place an inert and immaterial image before one’s eyes, but rather to contemplate the force that allows one to transform the world and a portion of its matter into a singular life. By imagining, the seed makes a life necessary, lets its body couple with the course of the world. The seed is only the site in which form is not a content of the world but the being of the world, its form of life. Reason is a seed because, contrary to what modernity has insisted on believing, it is not the space of sterile contemplation, not the space of the intentional existence of forms, but the force that makes it possible for an image to exist as the specific destiny of a given individual. Reason is what allows an image to become destiny, a space of total life, a spatiotemporal horizon. It is cosmic necessity, not individual whim.

What we, more or less arbitrarily, call “philosophy” was born as—and in the beginning took itself to be—an enquiry into the nature of the world, a discourse on nature (peri tēs phuseōs) or on the cosmos (peri kosmou). This choice was not by chance: to privilege nature and the cosmos as objects of thought meant to assert, implicitly, that thought does not become philosophy unless and until it confronts its objects. It is in front of the world, in front of nature, that the human being can truly think.

Conversely, the world is neither the logical combination of all its objects nor a metaphysical totality of beings, but the physical force that traverses all that comes to be and that transforms itself. There is no separation between material and immaterial, or between history and physics. At a more microscopic level, nature is what allows the world to be; on the other hand, everything that ties a given thing to the world is part of nature.

I think I must have highlighted about half of this book, which is really short. What I like about it is that instead of all-encompassing whatever being consciousness it is nature, or, as I might put it, aliveness. We are immersed in aliveness (or perhaps "the conditions of livability"... still uncertain) and that aliveness is immersed in us.

Anyway, these quotes taken out of context may communicate little other than confusion, but this book has touched me deeply... as though a connection to the world through plants is being strengthened.