Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801 to 1887) was a German physicist and philosopher, a founder of psychophysics, the measurement of how sensation relates to physical stimulus. Yes, he thought plants have souls; in Nanna (1848) he set out the case that plants sense and feel, and are individual living beings, not mechanisms, and in later books he extended the same view to the Earth and the whole cosmos. Therapeutic Shamanism also holds that plants are conscious, as the Plant People, though it reaches that through experience in place of argument and describes plant consciousness differently.
Who was Gustav Fechner? #
He was born on 19 April 1801 at Gross Särchen in Saxony, the son of a village pastor who died when Gustav was five. He took degrees in medicine at Leipzig, turned to physics, and became professor of physics there in 1834; he lived in Leipzig for almost his whole adult life.1
In 1839, whilst studying afterimages, he damaged his eyes by gazing at the sun through coloured glasses.2 From December 1839 to October 1843 he went through a long breakdown, with severe headaches, sleeplessness, obsessive thinking, near-blindness and near-starvation. He recovered, and was working again by Christmas 1843.1 The view of the world he spent the rest of his life arguing for, that the world is ensouled through and through, grew, by one account, from an experience on 5 October 1843, though he argued for it on empirical grounds.1
His Elements of Psychophysics (1860) set out to describe in precise laws how the mental and the physical relate. The Weber–Fechner law, that within its useful range a sensation grows with the logarithm of the stimulus, carries his name, and he is counted, with Wilhelm Wundt and Hermann von Helmholtz, among the founders of experimental psychology.2 He died in Leipzig on 18 November 1887.2
Did he think plants have souls? #
Yes, and he wrote a whole book to say so: Nanna, or the Soul-Life of Plants, its preface dated August 1848, named after the Norse goddess Nanna. He tells of the moment the question took hold of him, looking at a water lily. His argument is mostly one of fairness. Every reason commonly given for denying plants a soul, he held, either fails for animals too, or asks of plants something animals do not actually have. Plants share the basic marks of life with animals closely enough that we have no right to draw a hard line between souled animals and soulless plants.3
The commonest objection was that plants have no nerves. Fechner answered with music. Strings are the ‘nerves’ of a piano or a violin, yet flutes and organs make music with none, so plants may feel by other means than nerves. Animals, he said, are like soul-lamps that can be carried about; plants are like lamps set in one place.4
He went further than kindness to plants would need. He rejected the idea that a plant’s inner life is dim, like sleep or dreaming. It is, if anything, more purely a life of sensation than ours, fully awake in its senses, though without memory, forethought or reflection.5 He suggested that scent is to a plant what the voice is to an animal, coming from within and making it known even in the dark.6 And he described a plant’s unity as one without a centre. Where an animal is like a beehive under one ruler, a plant is like a self-governing anthill, and no less one being for that.7
He also saw why people resist the idea. We deny plants feeling, he suggested, partly to spare ourselves uncomfortable feelings about how we treat them. His conclusion was not that we must stop picking, cutting or eating plants, but that it would do no harm, and much good, to treat them a little more gently where there is no need to hurt them.8
What did he think about the Earth and the cosmos? #
That they are ensouled too. In Zend-Avesta (1851) he made the case that the Earth has a soul, and that the cosmos as a whole is ensouled by God, each individual soul being part of a wider consciousness.9 In his last statement of his view, The Day View Compared with the Night View (1879), he set the joyful ‘daylight view’ of a living, conscious world against what he called the dreary ‘night view’ of materialism.10
The American psychologist and philosopher William James admired him. In his introduction to the English translation of Fechner’s early Little Book of Life After Death (first published in 1836 under the pen-name Dr Mises), James summed up the daylight view as holding that the whole material universe is “inwardly alive and consciously animated”.11 He gave a whole lecture to Fechner in A Pluralistic Universe (1909).12
What did his critics say? #
Many in his own day dismissed the idea. The physician and philosopher Carl Gustav Carus held that a plant is only a gathering of many small units, with no single centre where consciousness could arise. Fechner quoted both, and answered them in the book.13
Later scholars have pointed to weaknesses in the argument itself. Fechner never clearly defined ‘soul’ or ‘mind’, his test for consciousness shifts between feeling, purpose and organisation, and he admitted that his larger claims about the cosmos were a matter of faith, not exact research. The same scholarship also notes that views like his have often been dismissed on narrow grounds by critics who simply assumed what they set out to prove.14 For today’s research on the question, see What does science say about plant intelligence?
How does Fechner’s view connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely, at its heart. In shamanism everything is made of Spirit, Spirit is conscious, and so everything is conscious; many people simply struggle to recognise consciousness in beings very different from themselves.15 Plants are not less conscious than humans, but conscious in a different way. Most people take self-awareness to be the only real form of consciousness; there is also collective-awareness, like the shared life of the cells in a body, and understanding it is the key to understanding plant sentience.16 Fechner’s plant, one being without a centre, sits very near that picture.
His reason for why people miss it also has a match. Plants live at a much slower pace than animals, and humans are, in effect, moving too fast most of the time to notice their sentience.17 And his ensouled Earth is close kin to Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this, from whom, in the shamanic picture of the world as a great tree, the trunks of Stone, Plant and Animal all grow.18 See What are Plant People and what gifts do they bring?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
First, in how it knows. Fechner reached his conclusion by argument and analogy, a physicist reasoning from the outside. For shamanic peoples the aliveness of the world was not a belief or a theory but how the world was actually experienced, and Therapeutic Shamanism starts there, from direct experience.19
Second, in what it says plants are like. Fechner pictured plant life as pure sensation, without memory or reflection. In Therapeutic Shamanism the Plant People are older and wiser than humans, second only to the Stone People, and each Plant has healing gifts and teaching of its own.20 21
Third, over up and down. Fechner’s souls are gathered into ever larger ones, the Earth’s and finally God’s as the soul of the whole,22 and he described life after death as merged with other souls “into the higher life of the Supreme Spirit”.23 Shamanism is free of the judgement that up is better than down: the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer is not better than the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer, and God is not superior to Goddess.24 See Is animism the same as ‘all is one’?
