Flora Unveiled

406 i Flora Unveiled

If plants were associated with innocence and piety, a certain repugnance was felt
toward animals and their bodily functions, especially their sexuality, which was associ-
ated with original sin. The rejection of carnality was something upon which both sexual-
ists and asexualists could agree. To asexualists, the disgust they felt toward carnality was
based on morality. Sexualists, on the other hand, were more strongly influenced by aes-
thetic considerations than by morality. For example, in Sponsalia Plantarum Linnaeus
wrote that:

Just as the genital parts of all animals have a strong and repulsive odor during the sea-

son of rut, so do flowers, or the genital parts of plants, exhale an odor, which, though

quite varied in different plants, is most of the time very sweet. This is why man himself

imagines he is drinking in nectar with his nostrils.

Linnaeus makes it clear that while sex may be repellant in animals, it is delightful in
plants. According to Linnaeus, the sexual organs, which are “considered as almost shameful
in the Animal Kingdom, are almost always hidden by nature.” On the other hand, Linnaeus
notes, “[I] t is agreeable to recall that the genital organs of plants are exposed to the view of
all in the Plant Kingdom.” In other words, plant genitals cannot be shameful, otherwise
God would not have displayed them for all to see.
Rousseau expressed a similar sentiment when he remarked that whereas sexual union in
animals “revealed itself to me only in a hideous and disgusting form,”^3 the opposite was true
of sex in plants:

There is no rarer rapture or ecstasy than that which I  felt each time I  observed the

structure and organization of a plant and the interplay of the sexual parts.^4

Like Linnaeus, Rousseau based his contrasting responses to sex in animals versus plants
on the pleasure principle.
During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, materialistic phi-
losophy gradually undermined the medieval duality between the debased body and
the exalted soul. As the moral status of the body improved, there emerged a new
emphasis on the senses. British philosophers John Locke and David Hume chal-
lenged Descartes by asserting that the evidence of the senses was a better proof of
one’s existence than reason alone. French philosophers, such as Étienne Bonnot de
Condillac, Charles Bonnet, and Claude Adrien Helvétius, argued for the establish-
ment of “a new authority of experience” based on seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting,
and touching— an epistemological theory known as “sensationism.”^5 Linnaeus and
Rousseau responded to sexuality in animals versus plants in a sensationist context.
If plant sexuality were shameful or immoral, God would not have made f lowers so
pleasing to the senses.
In contrast, Rousseau considered the study of human anatomy particularly repulsive, as
he reflected after visiting an anatomical amphitheater at a medical school:

What a frightful paraphernalia an anatomical amphitheater contains, with its stink-

ing cadavers, fresh, livid, and oozing, blood, disgusting intestines, terrifying skeletons,