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454 i Flora Unveiled

is precisely in this manner that propagation by seeds takes place. Such propagation is the

development of countless identical individuals from the womb of the mother plant.

(emphasis added)^72

Here, Goethe reiterates the scholastic interpretation of asexual seed reproduction by
comparing seeds to buds, both of which are said to produce clones from “the womb [pith] of
the mother plant.” By equating seed and bud formation, Goethe resurrects the Aristotelian
doctrine that seed production occurs by something resembling female parthenogenesis.
Whereas in The Metamorphosis of Plants he seemed to accept the sexual model of seed pro-
duction, by 1807 he is describing seed production in parthenogenic terms.
What role did gender politics play in the reactionary asexualist movement that became
associated with Nature Philosophy? In his three volume Critique of the Theory of Plant
Sexuality published in 1812, Schelver argued that because plants were dependent for their
development on the external environment, such as light and soil, they lacked self- sufficiency
and were therefore too passive (feminine) to embody “male potency,” which represents a
“contradiction” of the female:

Only animal life has sex. It issues from an internal stimulus, it contains contradiction

between man and woman. Animal life exists through the power of difference within

itself. Plant (i.e. vegetative) life does not contain the stimulus of its own development;

if it is not excited by an external stimulus, it remains in a primordial state. It does not

govern itself; showing internal passivity, it is only potentially able to develop. It does

not embody male potency and never attains it.^73

According to Schelver, plants play the role of the “prolific wife,” while Nature (soil, water,
air, and temperature) serves as their “husband”:

The life of plants is that of the always prolific and embracing wife. Nature, its hus-

band, is the general external stimulus of development.^74

Other early nineteenth- century German philosophers and natural scientists, such as
A.  W. Henschell, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, were also challenging the sexual
theory of plants. Hegel’s use of the female– plant analogy was blatantly political. In 1820,
Hegel published a treatise on legal and moral philosophy, The Philosophy of Right, in which
he grounded his arguments against equal rights for women on a plant/ woman metaphor:

The difference between men and women is like that between animals and plants. Men

correspond to animals, while women correspond to plants because their development

is more placid and the principle that underlies it is the rather vague unity of feeling.^75

Regarding the sexual theory of plants, Hegel acknowledged that some plants produced
seeds sexually, as in the case of dioecious species, but since sex was unnecessary and redun-
dant in plants, he considered such cases to be exceptions representing intermediate stages
between plants and animals. Further evidence that sexuality is very weak in plants can be