The vocabulary of sexuality itself appeared a little bit later than the vocabulary of “drives.” A critical piece by William Cowper (1731–1800) on “Lives of the Plants” by Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) provides an early citation in English: “All of his flowers undergo a change, not a simple one, but each into as many persons, male and female, as there are symptoms of either sex in their formation: for it is on their sexuality that he has built his poem.”44 Cowper uses “sexuality” to refer to the sexing or the “sexedness” of the plants—he is interested in the masculinity and femininity of the characters that emerge from Darwin’s plants. It is no surprise that the term comes up in a discussion of plants, for many intellectuals in Europe probably first encountered it through Carl Linnaeus’s studies of botany, which described the “sexuality” of plants with graphic detail that at times shocked its readers. By 1798, though, for instance, one French translation of Linnaeus’s works was given the title Systême sexuel des végétaux (Sexual System of Plants). It is around this time that German word starts to make its first appearance. The absence of a vocabulary of sexuality prior to these developments is one of the factors leading Isabel Hull to argue that one cannot responsibly talk about “sexuality” in the German context prior to the nineteenth century.45
By the time Hössli is writing, however, the vocabulary of “sexuality” is in circulation. In Eros, Hössli quotes a medical essay by the gynecologist Joseph Hermann Schmidt (1804–1852), demonstrating once again his highly developed connections to the contemporary scientific world: “The concept of sexuality [Sexualität] is no longer derived exclusively from the sexual organs, but rather from the entire organism.” Schmidt continues with an observation about gender: “The woman is primarily vegetation, the man primarily animality,” adding that odd hybrids can develop between these two polarities.46 As in the case of the Cowper citation, the term is being used primarily to describe the sexedness of an organism, whether it has been sexed as male or female. Interestingly, the connection to plants remains strong.
As Halperin suggests, a fundamental prerequisite for any modern understanding of sexuality is the belief in the unity of mind and body. Steeped in the Romantic tradition of the organic oneness of the physical and mental worlds, Hössli takes for granted such a belief in mind-body unity. He cites Menzel, the editor of the Literatur-Blatt, as arguing that “in the human being the mental and the physical are so internally and vitally bound up with each other that they necessarily always stand in the most intimate interaction with each other.”47 The unity of mind and body could have multiple consequences. For the philosophical physicians and their Romantic successors, the unity of mind and body meant that artistic and poetic insights into the body had as much validity and legitimacy as scientific ones.48 Later in the nineteenth century, somaticists would approach the union of mind and body from the perspective of the body, suggesting that physical cures could solve mental and psychological problems. In either case, however, bringing together mind and body was a necessary prerequisite for the assumption of sexuality.
It is telling that physicians were among the intellectual leaders in the effort to reconceptualize the unity of mind and body; nor is it surprising that Hössli’s use of the term “sexuality” comes in a quotation from a distinguished expert in the medical field of gynecology. The modern field of medicine, which rose to unprecedented prominence in the nineteenth century, is practically coterminous with the category of sexuality. For many physicians, the unity of mind and body meant that forms of sexuality could be viewed as a matter of health or illness. This thinking already pervades much of Zschokke’s text, in which one of Zschokke’s characters attempts to understand Lukasson’s love of Walter as the result of a faulty mental process, perhaps even a matter of nerves. The explanation moves in the direction of mental illness and implies psychiatric or medical solutions. Claudia floats the idea that Lukasson’s “corrupt way of thinking” perhaps caused the turn of events. Beda, the narrator, uses the vocabulary of “sick” to describe these corrupted thought processes, suggesting that a “misattuned structure of nerves” made it impossible for Lukasson to act properly. Gerold, Claudia’s husband and the king’s counselor, concludes that “sickness” was present in Lukasson’s actions and they therefore cannot be compared with criminality. This leads then to a discussion of whether and how the civil code needs to be changed to allow for the accommodation of those who act on impulses that are beyond their control. It hints at a tentative argument for the decriminalization (or at least the reduction of the severity of the criminalization) and a medicalization of sexual love between men.49
A corollary to the notion that sexuality resides in the body as well as the mind is the belief that it is “natural.” Hössli explicitly announces that “male love is true nature, a law of nature.”50 Here it is of course worth recalling that male-male love was frequently condemned as “unnatural,” “the crime against nature.” Particularly in the eighteenth century, legal codes referred with increasing consistency to sodomy as “unnatural” or “against nature.”51 Johannes Valentin Müller’s 1796 Entwurf der gerichtlichen Arzneywissenschaft (Plan for a Forensic Medicine) refers to sodomy as “unnatural” as well.52 Common to both these legal attacks on sodomy and Ramdohr and Hössli’s defenses of Greek love is a Romantic Rousseauian belief in the goodness of nature. In his one extensive case study, Ramdohr describes the love of the two young men as natural: “The youth loved first—that was nature. He admired, he was suffered, felt, led, and eventually loved back—that also was nature.”53 Hössli reveals his implicit debt to Rousseau when he argues that the true “sinner against nature” is he who lacks sympathy, he “who has no tears for the misery of his brothers and the injustice and misdeed of his fathers and his fatherland.”54 This view of a sympathetic nature should ground all human institutions, he argues. Nature must undergird all pedagogy, laws, and religion: “it must say yes wherever we establish or remove laws or education, wherever we want to achieve a salutary goal for humanity, it must say yes to the marriages and religions everywhere where there is supposed to be a blessing or a salvation of our race.”55 Hössli specifically mentions marriage as an institution that needs rethinking in light of his conception of the naturalness of male-male love. At the end of volume 2, he remains certain that “this love had to be alive, present, grounded and completely a given in nature itself before laws, knowledge and the arts could lead, appreciate, understand, represent, teach and elevate it, could introduce into house and temple as life in the life of human nature.”56 In arguing that same-sex desire is “natural,” he is also claiming that it should be allowed to flourish.
Because Greek love is “natural” in the sense that it appears in “nature,” Hössli also considers his work “natural research” (Naturforschung).57 Hössli hopes for a scientific solution to the question of sexuality. The use of scientifically quantifiable, often medical sources for evidence is a hallmark of liberal approaches to sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hössli’s discussion of nature is complicated, however, by his use of the term in the sense of “human nature” or the “nature” or a particular person.58 In a locution that is particularly awkward to translate, he at times refers to people “being,” rather than “having,” a nature: those who love the other sex “cannot be the nature of those who do not love the other sex.”59 Discussing the linguistic structures of modern English, Judith Butler writes suggestively about the tension between the notion of “being” a gender and “having” a sexuality.60 Hössli contests this linguistic structure, asserting that people are their sexuality. He implies with this phrasing that the sexual nature of a person is identical with that person—that there is not even the distinction that exists between a person and the nature that he or she has. (Kertbeny also makes use of this rhetorical