Peripheral Desires. Robert Deam Tobin
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a sexuality, he rather consistently attributes that language to his intellectual opponents. It is critics of male love who argue that the men-loving men have “laid aside” their original nature.62 It is men who are sexually attracted to women who say things like, “I was born with my sexual love [Geschlechtsliebe].”63 Hössli asserts that such people regard their sexuality as a separate thing with which they are born, rather than as an essence that constitutes them. He continues the elision of the universal nature and the personal nature when he has such critics saying to men-loving men that male-male love “is not nature and is not your nature.”64 The focus of his word play is that nature (the universal order of the world) has room for the individual natures (essences) of men who are man-loving as well as those who are woman-loving.
As he begins to sum up his arguments near the end of his second volume, Hössli confidently asserts that the sexual aspect of human nature is not a product of arbitrary will, but rather a matter of the “individuality, the basic being, the most primal depths of the human psyche, his inmost unchangeable nature and being.”65 He is certainly moving here in the direction of what Foucault would call the “truth” of sex in modern society. For Hössli, Plato provides a prime example of someone whose sexuality completely imbues his productive nature: without Plato’s love of men, “the world would have no Plato, this fullness of mind, this splendor of the soul, this harmony of the body would be sunk in night and vice and would have given birth to the opposite of everything that it did bear.”66 Whereas many would like to disassociate the philosopher from his lived experience in order to concentrate on his transcendental truths, Hössli insists that Plato’s Greek love was no coincidence, but rather integral to his personality. Sexuality is at the nexus of the unified mind and body.
By the end of his first volume, he asserts that he has demonstrated that “there is a man-loving, purely humane, specific, male human nature” (eine männerliebende, rein menschliche, bestimmte, Männermenschennatur).67 His reference to a “specific” male human nature implies that this is not just part of the more general sexual nature of all men, but rather that a specific group of men have (or “are”) this nature. It is not the case, as in the Biblical story of Sodom, that any and every man in a community might be struck with lustful desires for another man. Only men with a specific immutable type of human nature are sexually attracted to other men, as Hössli flatly asserts: “The large and general portion [of the human population] that loves the other sex cannot be the sort [literally, ‘the nature’] that does not love the other sex, and the sort [again, literally, ‘the nature’] that loves its own sex cannot be lovers of the other sex.”68 The implication of the unchangeability of sexual nature is that there are discrete categories: men who sexually desire men are distinct from those who love women.
Hössli mocks the notion that any man could change his sexual desire for other men when he sarcastically paraphrases the position of women-loving men, who foolishly assume that “the man-lover has set aside his most original first nature and now glows in an arbitrarily adopted love, in a nature other than his own visage; in this other love his emotional being now suffers for completion, his heart burns, his eyes swim in tears, his bosom heaves, his soul gleams.” His antagonists erroneously argue that this male-male love “isn’t his nature, he’s set that [his real nature] aside, he’s arbitrarily exchanged it, his actual nature is silent, even when this other non-nature should lead him to destruction and even to death.”69 Hössli adds that the terrible discrimination that men who love other men face would prevent any man from exchanging a love for women with a love for men:
Is it thinkable that in this case a person, a man, would exchange an inborn love—in which he enjoys his life, his being, his general human destiny in honor, under the protection and recognition of the law, in the unperturbed enjoyment of external and internal human rights [Menschenrechte], with the respect of his people and of the entire human society, with the blessing of the dominant religion, with the public recognition of his life questioned by no one, so that he can act, effect, live as a man, as a person, as a spouse and as a citizen and can enjoy his being—for a notorious, forbidden, dishonorable outcast nature that is everywhere condemned and universally persecuted?70
The sentence is hard to get through, but Hössli’s point is that the civil protections given to male-female love are so powerful that it is virtually impossible to imagine male-male sexual love emerging as a frivolous lark.
It is instructive to contemplate the vision of justice that Hössli has in mind. While not a trained lawyer, Hössli relies on a liberal vocabulary of human rights in the context of honor, legal protection, respect, religious acceptance, and public recognition. He expects “protection and recognition” from the law. His demand that a male-loving man should enjoy “honor” and “recognition of his life” suggests that he hopes that same-sex love will be able to express itself openly and publicly. Notably, he argues that religion too should support the rights claims of the men about whom he is writing. Intriguingly, he insists that such men should be able to function “as a spouse and as a citizen,” suggesting that marriage itself belongs to the rights of citizens and that both marriage and citizenship need reassessment.
In a sense, Hössli is building on the glorification of love that had already taken place in bourgeois literature of the eighteenth century. He repeats that love in general—whether a man’s or a woman’s, whether for a man or for a woman—“is not up to a person’s arbitrary will, but rather a specific given primary component of the purest, deepest, individuality.”71 This Romantic argument, relying on the centrality of sexual love for human identity, spurs Hössli to uncharacteristic eloquence as he grapples with the definition of “sexual love (we are not speaking here of mere sexual drive)” as it pertains to male-male desire: “it involuntarily desires, searches out, and needs a masculine being, because of his sex, and not a feminine being, again precisely because of her sex, because whatever in our sexual life addresses, grabs, excites, thrills, attracts, possesses, completes, perfects us—that tells us which love is in us.”72 In this case, Hössli works with the conventions of his era, which had already declared the primacy of love, and sharpens them to bring out the importance of sexuality and the body. When he asks “which love is in us,” he adds the notion of specific sexual categories to the mix.
For Hössli, one of the “natural” aspects of this desire has to do with its innateness: “The whole man is in the seed, in the germ, in the embryo.”73 He asserts “we cannot bring anything into it [the seed, germ, embryo], but can only let that which is within him develop and at least not eliminate it, even if much that is in him is not allowed to flourish and is strangled or crippled.”74 Sexual nature is inborn—society’s only choice is whether to let it develop or not. The notion that an organism’s being springs from its embryo, germ, or seed was a crucial part of a variety of efforts by German Romantic thinkers to explain development and the concept of Bildung, which was to become extremely important for German culture. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) used the vocabulary of embryos to explain his Bildungstrieb, or drive to development, in his 1781 essay Über den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugungsgeschäft (On the Drive to Development and the Operation of Reproduction). As Blumenbach puts it, “there exists in all living creatures, from men to maggots, and from cedar trees to mold, a particular, inborn, lifelong active drive.”75 Continuing the eighteenth-century tradition of employing plants for discussions of sexuality, Bildung appears in Goethe’s discussion of the growth of plants in his Metamorphosen der Pflanzen (Metamorphoses of the Plants) of 1790 as the preordained pattern of development of an organism.
Ramdohr relies explicitly on Blumenbach’s notion of Bildung to describe his understanding of sexuality. “The unnamable drive is the grounds for the unnamable pleasure,” he declares, defining that pleasure as “that circumstance of effusive voluptuous effectiveness of the power of development [Bildungskraft] of our vegetable organism.”76 “Unnamable” though the pleasure may be, Blumenbach is fairly bold to discuss it so openly in his analysis of the sexual drive. His theory that sexual pleasure belongs to the human being’s vegetable nature is yet another legacy of Linnaeus’s discussion of sexuality in the realm of plants. Blumenbach restates the connections between Bildung