How Forests Think

Introspection and intersubjectivity are semiotically mediated. We can only come to know ourselves and others through the medium of signs. It makes no difference whether that interpreting self is located in another kind of body or whether it is “that other self”—our own psychological one—“that is just coming into life in the flow of time,” as one sign is interpreted by a new one in that semiotic process by which thoughts, minds, and our very being qua self emerge.

Because all experiences and all thoughts, for all selves, are semiotically mediated, introspection, human-to-human intersubjectivity, and even trans-species sympathy and communication are not categorically different. They are all sign processes.

That is, all thinking and knowing is mediated in some way.

knowability is based on intrinsic self-similarity. It implies that there exists such a thing as “being itself” in all its singularity, which we might comprehend if we could just adopt “bug eyes.”

The life of thoughts depends on confusion—a kind of “forgetting” to notice difference. Generals, such as kinds and classes, emerge from and flourish in the world through a form of relating based on confusion. The real is not just the unique singularity, different from everything else. Generals are also real, and some generals emerge as a product of the relations among living thoughts beyond the human.

After collecting for so many years, he now has “mushi” eye, bug eyes, and sees everything in nature from an insect’s point of view. Each tree is its own world, each leaf is different. Insects taught him that general nouns like insects, trees, leaves, and especially nature destroy our sensitivity to detail. They make us conceptually as well as physically violent. “Oh, an insect,” we say, seeing only the category, not the being itself. (2010: 345)

“Oh, an insect,” we say, seeing only the category, not the being itself.

It is true that categorization can be socioculturally specific and that it can lead to a form of conceptual violence in that it erases the uniqueness of those categorized. And it is also true that the power of human language lies in its ability to jump out of the local in ways that can result in an increased insensitivity to detail.

The world of living beings is neither just a continuum nor a collection of disparate singularities waiting to be grouped—according to social convention or innate propensity—by a human mind.

This iconic confusion is productive. It creates “kinds.” There emerges a general class of beings whose members are linked to each other because of the ways they are all noticed by ticks, who do not discriminate among them.