Editor’s Note: This piece was the runner up of the APA Blog’s first Public Philosophy Award for Undergraduates.
What would it be like to be a mushroom? More specifically, what does the world of a mushroom look like? During the summer of 2017, I spent a few months in a New England forest, nominally doing ecological research but really just wandering about in the outdoors. It took me a few weeks to get used to walking through forest, but once I learned to orient myself, I discovered the incredibly variety of life that lived on and under the forest floor. In particular, I was amazed by number of fungi growing in dozens of shapes and colors and on nearly every forest substrate available. I knew very little about fungi, and it soon became my topic of interest for the summer. Beyond learning fungal anatomy and evolution, however, I was curious to know how fungi occupied and experienced the forest differently from the way I did. As it turns out, there is a field within philosophy that investigates just that. Here I present a report on the world of fungi that aims to provide a fuller account of fungal existence than a mycological handbook provides.
The World of a Fungus
Biosemiotics, as developed by Jakob Uexküll, a German biologist and philosopher, essentially studies how meaning is produced in the biological realm without the use of language. In his classic example, Uexküll imagines the world of a tick: Of all the stimulus a tick receives from its surroundings, it only responds to specific “perception marks”—the body heat and the chemical signals of its prey, for example. These signs make up its Merkwelt, or marker-world. Anything that does not fall within the Merkwelt does not exist for a tick, even if it does exist for something else. What, then, would be the perception marks for a fungus? Fungi grow when and where conditions are right, somewhat like a plant. Yet despite the similarity, fungi have a different relationship to their substrate than plants: many live almost entirely underground with no direct need for sunlight and no ability to produce their own food. Moreover, if we were to force fungi into the food chain pyramid that we learn about in elementary school, we’d have to insert it between every level: they do not just consume a single type of organism, like carnivores, but every member of the pyramid that has happened to die. A fungus’ incompatibility with our traditional food pyramid schematic tells us that there is a world lying in the interstices of the plant and animal realms. Fungi live in a world where water is not wet and light is not bright, but in which conditions are either right or not. When conditions are right, fungi take, qua animal, and thereby grow.
We’re often taught to think of fungi as decomposers, and as such, we might place them at the limit between organic life and nonlife, the entity that returns organisms into their constitutive, separate molecules. When we abandon our pyramid schematic and consider fungi more broadly, we find that the characterization on fungi-as-limit still holds. For one, mycorrhizae are symbiotic relationships between fungi and plants that enable plants to obtain the nutrients and water they need to live. That plants obtain from their surroundings material otherwise inaccessible shows us that if fungi exist at a limit, it is not unidirectional from life to nonlife qua decomposer. Lichen is a variation on the same example: A symbiosis between moss and fungus often becomes the first organism to grow on a barren rock, again serving as the limit between abiotic factors and new life. For ecology, this is the first step of a succession that culminates in a new ecosystem. Thus, if we have reached any account of the world of the fungus, which we have first sketched through the limits of plants and animals, it is that the fungal world is a limit beyond limits: It is the limit between the abiotic and biology and exists at the fringe of plants and animals.
To Be a Fungus
The most recent phylogenetic understanding places the fungus closer to the animal than to the plant. Accordingly, we could try to consider the subjective experience of a fungus, as Thomas Nagel famously did for bats. Yet I confront a different problem than Nagel’s. The problem is not such that I am limited to knowing my experience as human that prevents me from forming a conception of what it is like to be fungus. Rather, it is somewhat difficult for me to conceive that fungi have subjective experience at all. In a world where water is not wet, it is not just that fungi lack a sensory apparatus familiar to us. Instead, the world consists only of growth and reproduction made possible by perception markers unavailable to me. By deciding that the experience of fungi is non-subjective, I leave aside the attempt to conceive of it. In its place, I turn to explore the nature of fungal growth—perhaps growth is what it means to be a fungus.
I know now that, if I see a mushroom by a trail, it is a very small part of the actual fungus that grows underfoot. The above-ground outcroppings, the actual mushroom part, are for reproductive purposes; the bulk of the fungus spends its existence buried. We may also say that fungal growth is sporadic, not just because the reproductive bodies occur less frequently, but because many fungi reproduce asexually, via spores. In his text The Metamorphosis of Plants, Goethe declares that “all is leaf” within a plant: He reconceives the nature and development of plants as a single, repeating process of transformation whose unit is the leaf. Every other feature of a plant is a variation of the leaf. When we consider fungal growth from spores with Goethe in mind, it would seem that “all is leaf” is more visibly the case with fungi. If an organism creates identical copies of itself and thereby transcends generational logic, it is not just uncontroversial to say “all is spore” for a fungus. Specifically, “all is one spore,” created and recreated ad infinitum. Goethe’s Metamorphosis also suggests that plant ought to be understood like a poem, that is, in constant motion folding in on itself. Given our understanding of fungi as the liminal world occurring between organisms and nutrients and lifeless elements, and given that growth, including mass-spore-production, is what characterizes fungi, this world also does not cease to move. It constantly moves other things and itself, via growth and creation, respectively.
In sum, the world of fungi consists in being just outside the worlds of plants and animals, but acting as their portal into the abiotic world. Thus, fungi are at once outside of and in other worlds, for in many cases, as decomposers or first-ecological-colonists, they are intermediaries. Fungi exist in the liminal world of a limit, in which the status as a world-habitant is obtained by growing and being growth. The process is constant if slow, but it is invariably creative and driving towards further growth via sporadic dissemination.
On this Report
I have attempted to give an account in the way I encountered fungi: A walk in the woods led me to reconsider my childhood understanding of hierarchical food chains. That I place fungi as a limit “between” plants and animals is somewhat informed by phylogeny and the categorizing methodology at work therein. Nonetheless, my report attempts to stem from experience. As a basic example, I have at some point experienced fungal growth, be it on a wall in a humid room or on a fingertip. Neither substrate is dead; this steers my account away from the rudimentary “pyramid” framework of understanding fungi that I began with. Certainly, my report lacks a charitable attempt at glossing the subjective experience of fungi: I don’t even try to imagine what it feels like to be a mushroom. Yet my Uexküllian wanderings have led me to consider that the world of a fungus is far removed from my own experience, yet approachable with some guided creative liberties. We have considered fungal perception marks, the various limits a fungus can represent, and the poetics to be found in fungal reproduction. As it turns out, the philosophical categories of existence, our rigid food-pyramid schemes of organization, stand to benefit from an imagined stroll through worlds parallel to ours.
At the end of the summer, my research group sautéed some of the fungi we had collected on our mycology walk. Our resident expert identified it as “Chicken of the Woods,” an edible, and reportedly tasty fungus. It now strikes me that perhaps fungi, and their world, may be described as “Woods of the Chicken,” given its plant-like aspects, or better yet, “Chicken and the Woods,” having established fungi as a limit in itself. Regardless, the bright-orange snack of the day was the fruit of the woods that was neither fruit, nor chicken, nor plant, and yet was all three.
Héctor Hernández
Héctor Hernández is a philosophy major at Yale University.
Dear Hector–Thank you for undertaking a very worthy project, to explore “how fungi occupied and experienced the forest differently” from you as a human being. I happen to think it’s kind of imperative that we humans start to consider how nonhuman life may experience the world, now that we’ve taken over so much of the planet and, for example, reduced the mass of all wild terrestrial mammals to a pitiful less than 2% of the combined biomass of us and our cattle. I hope your foray into the world of fungi encourages others to attempt such a plunge, and then possibly to consider stopping any further encroachment on nonhuman lives and territory.
I do have a question about just what you have in mind when you talk about “our traditional food pyramid schematic” that we supposedly learn about in elementary school. Do you have in mind a “pyramid” of the foods making up our diets, like we might have heard about in “health” class, or do you mean the pyramidal shape of what Aldo Leopold called “the biotic pyramid,” the “fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals,” the basic structure of ecosystems that I WISH was taught to everybody in elementary school. Some people have the crazy idea that “nature” is merely a product of human culture and therefore quite arbitrary, but no, it has an actual structure that we all need to understand, since it is the structure of the system that actually supports our lives, and right now we humans are eating way, way above our appropriate trophic level. Please don’t tell us to “abandon our pyramid schematic” if you’re referring to the latter type, since we humans are going to have to grasp it if we are going to feed everybody that is expected to be on the planet by 2050.
I’m also a little concerned that you speak in the language of Uexküll, somebody who worked many decades ago, and seem to take for granted he’s correct that “of all the stimulus a tick receives from its surroundings, it only responds to specific ‘perception marks’—the body heat and the chemical signals of its prey, for example,” and to go on from there speaking as if “perception marks” are the real things that the entirety of tick perception can be “reduced” down into. It is troubling that there seems to be a belief within the more “humanities”-bent subdisciplines that knowing something about the contemporary science is just a waste of time, but I can assure you that what is available for “us”–all of humanity able and interested enough to inform themselves about the science–to learn about perception in plants, fungi, and other organisms is vastly more sophisticated than this–do not fall into the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” by taking a particular concept, serviceable at one time, for a complete description of the reality for a that we’re only beginning to scratch the surface of now (yes, there is one, and no, we will never be able to know it “completely”). There does seem to be a fairly robust discussion ongoing among scientists over the degree of subjectivity possessed by plants, and I think Evan Thompson’s case for “Mind in Life” is quite plausible–as a living organism, you are a system that is continually enacting the “purpose” of maintaining your own life–and you must have some sort of awareness of what’s going on outside of you in order to respond appropriately from within; as Life evolved and diversified, the complexity of perception and response expanded enormously. It is our anthropocentrism that has narrowed down our conception of what “subjective experience” might be–often so tightly that only the human is granted the capacity to have any. Hey, at least you’re honest about it–instead of denying that fungal experience can exist at all (a pretty arrogant assertion), you say “By deciding that the experience of fungi is non-subjective, I leave aside the attempt to conceive of it.” Right–it is, basically, a DECISION to erase certain possibilities from our consciousness–it makes it so much easier to just not think about what the animals—who are, unlike fungi, very definitely equipped with nervous systems–experience in the livestock industry, or as the targets of “bushmeat” hunters.
I will leave you with a thought from “Traditional Native Hawaiian Philosophy” by Michael Kioni Dudley. As he explains, the difference between the way a typical westerner experiences reality and the way a traditional Hawaiian would can be illustrated by imaging yourself in two different situations. In one, you are rushing to a meeting in a strange building and mistakenly throw open the door to a storeroom filled with canned goods. In the other, in your haste you open a door to a crowded lecture hall and find a large number people staring at you. Two very different feelings: the canned goods are dead “resources”; the lecture hall is filled with subjects who are aware of their worlds, and aware of you as an intruder. The two scenarios illustrate two different relationships with and experiences of nature that we can have as human beings. As Dudley puts it, “for the Hawaiians, there are no empty storerooms.”
[…] have to be an essay titled “Finding the Chicken of the Woods: The World of Fungi,” which was featured on the APA Blog earlier this year. I wrote a first version of the essay for a class that pushed to the limits what […]