Milton's plant eyes: Minimal cognition, similitude, and sexuality in the garden

Abstract

This essay turns to minimal cognition, a theoretical extension of embodied cognition, to argue for plant sentience in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton imagines plants as minimally cognitive beings within an affective ecosystem, where they readily enter into the epic poem’s complex circuits of desire with appetites of their own. Specifically, the essay claims that botanical cognition arises at the convergence of two seventeenth-century philosophical systems: the first, Milton’s materialist monism, and the second, Paracelsian medicine, which avers a plant’s therapeutic effect on a human body part sharing morphological resemblance. The essay concludes that Milton’s eroti-cization of similitude enables a new sensus communis where cognition is subtler and where nonhuman desire engenders alternate forms of ecologic communality.