Milton's Plant Eyes: Minimal Cognition, Similitude, and Sexuality in the Garden

Abstract

This essay turns to minimal cognition, a theoretical extension of embodied cognition, to argue for plant sentience in John Milton's Paradise Lost. Milton imagines plants as minimally cognitive beings within an affective ecosystem, where they readily enter into the epic poem's complex circuits of desire with appetites of their own. Specifically, the essay claims that botanical cognition arises at the convergence of two seventeenth-century philosophical systems: the first, Milton's materialist monism, and the second, Paracelsian medicine, which avers a plant's therapeutic effect on a human body part sharing morphological resemblance. The essay concludes that Milton's eroticization of similitude enables a new sensus communis where cognition is subtler and where nonhuman desire engenders alternate forms of ecologic communality.Whereas Charles Darwin devoted his early career primarily to geological study and to the collection of data that would eventually serve as the basis for On the Origin of Species, his later work turned to the subject of plants. With his son Francis, the elder Darwin published one of his final studies, The Power of Movement in Plants, which makes the controversial claim that plants behave like the lower animals. Specifically, the Darwins argue for what science now calls the root-brain hypothesis, the postulation that a brain-like organ located in the anterior pole of the plant body controls growth and tropism. This underground brain, or phytocerebrum, acts cognitively insofar as it senses its environment and conveys information to other parts of the plant; that is, in their words, "it transmits an influence