Plant Intelligence and the Undoing of Human Mastery

This article examines the recent resurgence of interest in plant intelligence at the intersection of botany, philosophy, and religious studies, arguing that contemporary debates over vegetal cognition are best understood as historically situated responses to crises within modern regimes of knowledge and authority. Drawing on research in plant neurobiology, behavioral ecology, and studies of plant communication, the article situates current scientific controversies in a longer intellectual and genealogical arc. It then turns to philosophical and “more‐than‐human” humanities literature that mobilizes plant intelligence to challenge modern epistemology and the disenchanting legacy of Enlightenment rationality. While these approaches often aim to unsettle human exceptionalism and mastery, they frequently reproduce foundationalist structures of authority by reinscribing nonhuman nature as a privileged source of epistemic normativity. To reframe these dynamics, the article draws on Hans Blumenberg's account of modernity as a reoccupation of vacated theological positions and on G. W. F. Hegel's conception of knowledge as historically contingent and conceptually revisable. From these perspectives, plant intelligence emerges not primarily as an empirical discovery but as a conceptual invention prompted by ecological crises. The article concludes by suggesting that debates over plant intelligence reveal shifting boundaries of intelligibility that are simultaneously epistemological, ethical, and religious in character.