Heyman Center
Department of English and Comparative Literature, The University Seminar on Ecology and Culture
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS)
In this talk Michael Marder reimagines Plato’s allegory of the cave through the lens of vegetal life. Contrasting the Platonic linear ascent with plants’ simultaneous rooting in darkness and striving
toward light, he develops the concept of vegetal enlightenment: an embodied, non-oppositional, and context- driven form of growth. Marder explores how plants model positional multiplicity, enflesh light, and blur boundaries between being and knowing. Drawing on Western metaphysics, Buddhist thought, and ecological philosophy, he proposes a radical rethinking of enlightenment as both radiance and quiescence, metamorphosis and decay, grounding thought in the fertile paradoxes of plant existence.
