The Tree, in Theory

A few pages into the Phaedrus, Socrates declares himself a consummate city dweller with little interest in the things of nature: “Now the country places and the trees won’t teach me anything, and the people in the city do” (230d). If we choose to take the father of philosophy at his word, this blunt statement corroborates Emanuele Coccia’s suspicion that Western thought is intrinsically biased against vegetal life, to which it has always denied the ontological dignity bestowed on animals.1 Yet if there is nothing we can learn from trees, it is remarkable that “the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western thought,” as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari famously lament (28). From Descartes’s tree of knowledge to Darwin’s tree of life; from the Neoplatonic Arbor Porphyriana to Chomsky’s syntax trees, which respectively subsume substances and language under arborescent structures; from the apple tree to which Newton reputedly owes his intuition about the universal law of gravity to the fictional chestnut tree that prompts Roquentin’s existential epiphany in Sartre’s Nausea, trees have a habit of cropping up as metaphoric, diagrammatic, or even anecdotal archetypes of knowledge.

How can we make sense of the paradoxical centrality of trees, at once unknowable or unworthy of being known and yet the quintessential figure of knowledge? Is there really nothing we can learn from these unthought emblems of thinking? It is precisely what makes them unavailable as objects of thought, I will argue, that makes them so readily available as epistemic structures or “images of thought.”