What We Can Learn from Plants about the Creation of Values

This contribution challenges the view that value creation circumscribes the realm of the human. It argues, first, that human value creation is continuous with value creation in animals and plants. Second, I argue that life is a normative force that manifests itself in and through human value creation but can also be found in the moral character of plants and animals. And, finally, that what we can learn from plants is not how and in what way we are determined by our cultural and biological history and environment but, on the contrary, how and in what way we can be free and creative as plants and become the future value creators Nietzsche envisages.