This reminds me of a childhood incident: My family was christian. My best friend/neighbor's family were functionally atheist Unitarians. I casually referred to her as a heathen one day-- to me it was a judgement-free statement of fact. But she was really offended! Took us like a week to get back on friendly terms.
Whether it's a friend or a plant, the relationship is important. You know them by your relationship with them. Knowledge is downstream of relationship. And if you put some sort of intellectual theory or classification system in line ahead of the relationship, then you damage the relationship and the resulting knowledge is faulty. I think this means that you can still have the theories and intellectual reasoning *about* things, but in order to be the good/helpful/truth sort of intellectual activity, it MUST be downstream of the relationship. You can't let the theory get in the way of treating persons as persons (and IME, plants are people too!). I firmly believe that this is how herbal medicine started out. Some of those things... there's no way people just *figured that out* by trial and error. That's bogus. I'm pretty sure the plants just *told* them.
This comes up in gardening in a really visceral way. Many years ago, when I started out, I did things by the book: dig up rows, add fertilizer, plant things, add water. Like a recipe, or a machine. Results were dismal. I get vastly better results now, by treating the garden as a community. It's not plants, inputs, and produce. It's plants, animals, birds, insects, worms, fungi, bacteria, snakes, lizards... everybody! I plant in groups not rows now, and I aim to take care of the soil community first and foremost, and everything else is downstream of that. Mulch, compost, mulch, shade, mulch, more mulch... and then I talk to them all, pray for them, ask blessings on them *as a community* (including the aphids!), and... produce is more than I've ever had before, but still seems like more of a side-benefit rather than the primary purpose. There's just so much *living* in there, and my purpose is not really to exploit it, it's that I serve it. I feed the worms and fungi and make sure they are protected. They feed the plants. The plants give me food. It's a friendly gift, not a business deal. I stood out there one day, praying for the garden community-- each bit individually, and all together: Lord, please bless the sunflowers, the hibiscus, the pumpkins, the moles, the worms, the bugs... help them all to live in harmony and be well etc-- and I opened my eyes and there were two hummingbirds (first I've ever seen in this garden) right in front of me, going flower to flower. One flew up and perched on a twig over my head, not two feet away. I've never seen one so close before, and not in flight. It was magical. It was like the garden reaching back and giving me a pat. May have gotten a little misty-eyed.
That's the difference between coming up with a theory and imposing it on a relationship, and just focusing on the relationship and maybe having some theories about it later.
Which is not to dispense with the logicians. I'm just very ambivalent about the proper place of logic in the grand scheme of things. We were gifted it for a purpose: what is that purpose? Can that purpose be arrived at by logic, or must it be simply harnessed in service to our relationships? It seems sort of perverted to try and pursue logic as an exercise in pure intellect, and the philosophers end up in some really weird places doing it, whether that's Aristotle or Aquinas.
But also, in some ways this may reflect gender-- male approaches to the world tend to lean on logic and intellect more, and female approaches toward relationship. With anything so gendered, perhaps it's a case of: the world needs both, working in tandem :) Whether this is the case or not, I certainly incline more to the mystical approach than the intellectual.
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Whether it's a friend or a plant, the relationship is important. You know them by your relationship with them. Knowledge is downstream of relationship. And if you put some sort of intellectual theory or classification system in line ahead of the relationship, then you damage the relationship and the resulting knowledge is faulty. I think this means that you can still have the theories and intellectual reasoning *about* things, but in order to be the good/helpful/truth sort of intellectual activity, it MUST be downstream of the relationship. You can't let the theory get in the way of treating persons as persons (and IME, plants are people too!). I firmly believe that this is how herbal medicine started out. Some of those things... there's no way people just *figured that out* by trial and error. That's bogus. I'm pretty sure the plants just *told* them.
This comes up in gardening in a really visceral way. Many years ago, when I started out, I did things by the book: dig up rows, add fertilizer, plant things, add water. Like a recipe, or a machine. Results were dismal. I get vastly better results now, by treating the garden as a community. It's not plants, inputs, and produce. It's plants, animals, birds, insects, worms, fungi, bacteria, snakes, lizards... everybody! I plant in groups not rows now, and I aim to take care of the soil community first and foremost, and everything else is downstream of that. Mulch, compost, mulch, shade, mulch, more mulch... and then I talk to them all, pray for them, ask blessings on them *as a community* (including the aphids!), and... produce is more than I've ever had before, but still seems like more of a side-benefit rather than the primary purpose. There's just so much *living* in there, and my purpose is not really to exploit it, it's that I serve it. I feed the worms and fungi and make sure they are protected. They feed the plants. The plants give me food. It's a friendly gift, not a business deal. I stood out there one day, praying for the garden community-- each bit individually, and all together: Lord, please bless the sunflowers, the hibiscus, the pumpkins, the moles, the worms, the bugs... help them all to live in harmony and be well etc-- and I opened my eyes and there were two hummingbirds (first I've ever seen in this garden) right in front of me, going flower to flower. One flew up and perched on a twig over my head, not two feet away. I've never seen one so close before, and not in flight. It was magical. It was like the garden reaching back and giving me a pat. May have gotten a little misty-eyed.
That's the difference between coming up with a theory and imposing it on a relationship, and just focusing on the relationship and maybe having some theories about it later.
Which is not to dispense with the logicians. I'm just very ambivalent about the proper place of logic in the grand scheme of things. We were gifted it for a purpose: what is that purpose? Can that purpose be arrived at by logic, or must it be simply harnessed in service to our relationships? It seems sort of perverted to try and pursue logic as an exercise in pure intellect, and the philosophers end up in some really weird places doing it, whether that's Aristotle or Aquinas.
But also, in some ways this may reflect gender-- male approaches to the world tend to lean on logic and intellect more, and female approaches toward relationship. With anything so gendered, perhaps it's a case of: the world needs both, working in tandem :) Whether this is the case or not, I certainly incline more to the mystical approach than the intellectual.