What the plants have to 'say'

Elsewhere in his work Schopenhauer went a few steps further. In very bold formulations he tried to express what plants might have to 'say' to one engrossed in regardless them: 'Indeed it is remarkable how the plant world in particular invites one to aesthetic contemplation, and as it were obtrudes...itself thereon. ...... Thus they yearn for this entrance, so to speak, in order to attain at any rate indirectly what directly is denied to them' Schopenhauer was inclined to leave this 'idea that perhaps borders son the visionary' undecided, but nevertheless, in a later edition of his principal work, quoted a sentence of St. Augustine which hints at a similar thought: 'The trees offer to the senses for perception the many different forms by which the structure of this visible world is adorned, so that, because they are unable to know, they may appear, as it were, to want to be known'.

As Schopenhauer referred to Augustine, so Marcel Proust was later to refer wo Schopenhauer as a kindred spirit in the art of silent communication with plants. One might recall the famous passage in 'Remembrance of Things Past' www.gutenberg.org/files/7178/7178-h/7178-h.htm where the narrator, engrossed in the contemplation of whitethorn hedge, has the irresistible feeling that these blossoms have something to 'tell' him. In this gaze and 'listening' the narrator loses his sense of here and how, as well as the consciousness of himself. His grandfather discovers him and brings him back to the everyday world. ~ Page 216