Plato’s depiction of the human as the ‘heavenly plant’ has had a profound impact on Western thought. Portraying humans as ‘creatures rooted in heaven,’ determined by their upright bodies and suspended heads and ideally comported towards anamnesis, Plato not only initiated a longstanding tradition of interpreting vertical posture as the defining human characteristic but highlighted the prescriptive powers of morphological description, revealing how morphology can decisively shape understandings of what the human was, is, and should be. 

Despite the success of historicism and Darwinism in bringing the human ‘back to earth,’ the foundational elements of the heavenly plant hypothesis have persisted into Western modernity. Vertical posture continues to play a pivotal role in influential accounts of anthropogenesis, serving as a canvas upon which numerous aesthetic, intellectual, political, and ethical ideals can be inscribed and interpreted.

This paper examines Johann Gottfried von Herder’s adaptation of the ‘heavenly plant’ hypothesis against this background. It seeks to unravel the underlying ‘morphologics’ at play in Herder’s line of analogical reasoning, where the Platonic hypothesis is adapted within a historicist framework to position the human as at once a summation of existing natural forms, and as a ‘middle’ link on the path to future natural formations. Herder, it argues, demonstrates a keen understanding of the full explanatory and prescriptive power of morphological reasoning, and affords us an expansive view of how claims at once abstract and intuitive, transcendental and historical, can be read into and out of human form.