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Paper short abstract

How should we conceptualize human-plant relations and entanglements? This paper discusses the possibility of resonance between human and vegetal life, drawing on the work of Hartmut Rosa, in light of various philosophical critiques of the idea of world.

Paper long abstract

How should we conceptualize human-plant relations and entanglements? What does it mean for us humans to be in a world with vegetal life? Recent philosophers of plant life and, more generally, the environment have offered several different accounts from Timothy Morton’s (2013) “mesh” and Michael Marder’s (2013) “vegetal existentiality” to Emanuele Coccia’s (2019) metaphysics of mixture. What links these various philosophical perspectives, I will argue, is a radicalization of the idea of “world”—an intentional reaction to the (post)Heideggarian tradition. Yet, might there still some reason to a hold on to the idea of the world as it has been influential in phenomenological and existential strands of thought? In this paper, I want to explore whether Hartmut Rosa’s (2019) resonance theory, which belongs, in part, to these traditions as it understands alienation as a sort of “muteness” of world and non-alienation as a state of positive world-relation, offers useful resources for thinking about the way in which humans and plants can resonate with each other. While Rosa’s theory has been insightfully applied to nature writing (Dürbeck & Lu 2024), this paper investigates, more broadly, what Rosa’s theory means for these radical critiques of world found in the works of philosophers of vegetal life. By engaging with these other theoretical perspectives, Rosa’s idea of resonance applied to plant life, I will argue, must undergo revision, yet it still ultimately provides a fruitful framing for positive human-plant relations.