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Vegetable life : applications, implications, and transformations of a classical concept (1500–1700)
Bigotti, Fabrizio
Throughout the pre-modern era, plants, animals, and humans shared a deep ontological continuity as different levels in the hierarchical organisation of life. Popularised by Lovejoy as ‘the great ...chain of being’ (scala naturae), such continuity relied on extensive use of metaphors, as well as on functional and psychological analogies in which the vegetable realm was understood as the primary and most fundamental manifestation of life. An appeal to the vegetable powers and to the plant-like functions of animals continued even during the golden period of mechanical philosophy and was actually revived as part of different theoretical strategies, stretching from Renaissance naturalism to eighteenth-century vitalism and materialism. From this standpoint, the survival of a classical model poses questions as to the kind of applications, implications, and transformations the vegetal imagery was susceptible to. In this paper I take a longue-durée approach to the notion of vegetable life in order to show the complexity of the theme and its variations in medical and philosophical sources as well as in its technological applications and visual renderings. Notably, in the first part, I consider the analogical assumptions underlying the use of vegetable metaphors in ordering, classifying, and visualising of the materia medica. In the second, I analyse the survival of the notion of vegetable soul in the seventeenth century and its interaction with various trends proper to the new mechanical philosophy. Finally, in the third part, I dwell on the anthropological implications of ‘the vegetable’ as a means to highlight the ‘material’ and ‘natural’ side of human existence, an approach that runs counter to but parallels the dualist accounts of mind and body in Descartes and his epigones.
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