Are Plants Animals Like Any Other?

A review of philosopher Florence Burgat's Qu'est-ce qu'une plante? Essai sur la vie végétale (Seuil, 2020). Through a phenomenology of plant life, Burgat argues — against the wave of popular books ascribing a "secret life" to plants — that plants are defined above all by what they don't have: intentional consciousness, a lived world, sensation in any phenomenologically meaningful sense. Utria walks through her argument, distinguishing reactive responsiveness from genuine inwardness, and asks what is at stake ethically when we project animal-like interiority onto vegetation.