Desiring Plants: Vegetal Libido And Human Morality In German ...

Some German Literary Reflections of the Sexuality of Plants, 1779-1799Linda Dietrick

Among German contributions to literature and philosophy in the 18 th century, one of most significant was the idea of vegetable genius. The theories of artistic creation elaborated by Herder, Goethe, Karl Philipp Moritz, the brothers Humboldt and Kant fundamentally transformed how Europeans thought about literature by replacing traditional religious or mechanist metaphors with those drawn from the language of natural generation. "Generation" should be understood here in the older sense that encompasses both growth and reproduction, but I would like to concentrate today on the reproductive aspect of botany -not so much plant growth as plant love -in several German literary texts of the late 18 th c. Let me begin (actually, in 1778) with Herder's seminal essay, "Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele." No doubt inspired by Edward Young's formulations about the vegetable nature of original composition, which "rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius," Herder's text teems with botanical metaphors for human creativity and its fruits: Sieh jene Pflanze, den schönen Bau organischer Fibern! […] Wie wunderbar emsig läutert eine Pflanze fremden Saft zu Teilen ihres feinern Selbst, wächst, liebt, gibt und empfängt Samen auf den Fittigen des Zephyrs, treibt lebende Abdrücke von sich, Blätter, Keime, Blüten, Früchte […]. (II: 669-70) In contrast to Young, for Herder genius is not merely associated with the quality of spontaneous growth, but with the reproductive bounty of plant sexuality: the giving and receiving of seeds, the bringing forth of new versions of the self in leaf, flower, and fruit. Nevertheless, his exchange-of-seeds metaphor does not strictly reflect the actual process of fructification through pollen transfer. A few years later, however, in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784), he continues the analogy between human life and vegetation; paraphrasing the depiction of the so-called marriage of plants in the Philosophia botanica of Karl von Linné, or Linnaeus: Insonderheit, dünkt mich, demütiget es den Menschen, daß er mit den süßen Trieben, die er Liebe nennt […] beinah eben so blind wie die Pflanze, den Gesetzen der Natur dienet. Auch die Distel, sagt man, ist schön, wenn sie blühet; und die Blüte, wissen wir, ist bei den Pflanzen die Zeit der Liebe. Der Kelch ist das Bett, die Krone sein Vorhang, die andern Teile der Blume sind Werkzeuge der Fortpflanzung […]. (III/2: 54) Although Linnaeus is more graphic about the "Werkzeuge der Fortpflanzung" equivalents in plants and people, Herder clearly indicates his awareness and acceptance of the great botanist's sexual system of plant classification and, more importantly, its equation of plants with humans and human social arrangements. Based upon the disposition of the female pistil and the male stamens in the flower, Linnaeus' twenty-four classes of plants include, for example, the Monandria, Diandria and Polyandria,

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