Walnutting – Some Reactions to Leslie’s presentation on Section III, Chapter II

Topic

“A human being is merely a gene’s way of reproducing itself”
– paraphrase of a quote from an outspoken materialist who
nevertheless yearns for teleology and purpose in the universe

Leslie provided us with another quite powerful lens under which to examine Whitehead’s discussion of “Primary Feelings” with her gardening metaphor. I would like to react to it in this short note.

I always appreciate practical examples as portals opening into complicated abstractions and I lean toward analogy and metaphor as ways to understand. I also have developed a firming belief over the past decade in the sentience (though not necessarily the consciousness) of plants. Nevertheless there were some aspects of the garden-plant metaphor that unsettled me. I was not sure what it was, though until I recalled a brief incident that occurred this weekend while I was babysitting my grand-daughter. Rocking her into a pre-nap somnolence we were both startled by a loud crack on the roof above her upstairs bedroom. Walnut!

There is a small Black Walnut grove on our country property and in the years when the trees are “masting” I often collect the nuts and dehusk and dry them for later, wintertime, cracking. It is a rich, flavorful nut-meat unmatched by your bland commercial walnuts and the flavor is much enhanced by the hours of labor that go into producing even 8 ounces of the meat from a five-gallon bucket of the nuts. This year the walnut grove has decided, collectively as is usual, not to mast. But the single Black Walnut tree on my sons property in town has showered them with nuts. This has also meant showering their truck with small dents and their soundscape with the loud bangs of nutfall on rooftop – followed each time by a resonant roll down the eaves. Aside from interrupted naps the principle effect of all this walnut activity has been a burst in the activity and presence of squirrels all over his yard.

It occurs to me that a description of the walnut tree as an individual and the nuts as its mode of reproduction is misleading and entrapped in the substance ontology that guides and undergirds our culture.

It is true that a dropped walnut on the ground, in a narrow range of right circumstances, will sometimes be observed to produce a small sprout the next spring and, again under a complex matrix of weather and soil and deer and water circumstances, will continue to grow into a walnut tree. But outside of the abstraction which a laboratory study creates, any observer of the full richness of the walnutting process could only conclude that the primary function of the walnut tree is to produce slightly fatter squirrels!

I realize that Leslie’s metaphor was not meant to linger on the individual garden plant and furthermore that all gardeners and growers move within an awareness of the interconnected processes of growth and decay. Nevertheless I wonder if some of the unsettledness I experienced as I worked to follow the argument from the metaphor was not due to that initial, substant’ial grounding. It is hard to shake that from the structure of our thought and language.

I may try to organize my thoughts on the metaphor itself and on plant- or non-human consciousness later. For now I will just share this uncertainty – and also a book which I recently completed and recommend as germane to this processual concern. Rein Raud’s “Being in Flux” makes a stalwart attempt to forego substantialist framings to describe a reality which is wholly comprised of relations and process. He falls down, in my opinon, only in his complete abstinence from spiritual thinking but as a “pairing” his very readable account works well with a Whiteheadian view of things.