Volume 21, Issue 2, Fall 2024
Hayden Kee
Pages 155-179
https://doi.org/10.5840/envirophil2025115142
Roots of Sentience
An Alternative Phenomenological Approach to Empathy with Plants
Can we empathize with plants? Critics object that supposed empathy with plants entails anthropomorphic or zoomorphic projection. In reply, a phenomenological account of empathy claims to avoid this objection. However, phenomenological accounts of empathy center on one sentient (phenomenally conscious) mind accessing another. If plants are not sentient, then they appear to be inappropriate targets for empathy. I reply by exploring how the organic body is implicated in sentience, even if it is not usually focal. Interoceptive experience gives us indirect access to our own organic body, and thus provides a basis for a problematic, paradoxical empathy with plants.