Scientific Forms of Sexual Knowledge in Romanticism

This essay has two aims: to begin to lay out some of the groundwork for how sexuality became a legitimate object of scientific knowledge in the late eighteenth century , and to begin to unpack how some of the various disciplinary and figurative forms that knowledge took helped to construct these narratives into seemingly coherent bodies of knowledge. I do so by focusing upon flexible rhetorics of empiricism within scientific and popular treatments of sexuality that initially separate the visible surface from the invisible theoretical depth, making the two seem coherent through analogy and through narratives that transformed the visible into the effects of invisible causes or structure into function. To put it in quintessential Romantic terms, these rhetorics of empiricism enabled scientists working on sexuality to half create what they half perceived, masking creation as perception or the visionary as vision. Towards the earlier part of the eighteenth century, more emphasis is placed upon abstract theorizing as a form of biological and physiological knowledge; hence, observation and experimentation are often secondary to airy speculation but nonetheless provide some pontoons. Because as Buffon put it in 1741, "our senses reach not beyond the external parts of bodies," we must use our sensory knowledge of the external to help us theorize the invisible internal. The 1761 editorial policy for the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions captures this divide between visible surface and theoretical depth in the sciences generally by announcing that since the editors could neither "pretend to answer for the certainty of facts" nor the "propriety of the reasonings," the editors had to base their decisions on whether or not to accept papers upon "the credit of judgement of their respected authors." Judgment of authors, then, guarantees knowledge by shuttling back and forth between visible empirical facts and invisible abstract reasonings. As medical men increasingly needed to prove their legitimacy and distinguish themselves from quacks towards the end of the eighteenth century , however, they became more skeptical of invisible theories, and they could do so because visible surface seemed transparently to reveal theoretical depth. What were once relegated to the realm of the invisible now became part of the surface. Within scientific treatments of sexuality, the rise of epigenesis, vitalism, along with the localization of sexuality to the brain and the imagination paradoxically help explain this collapse of surface and depth. Although the internalization of sexuality would seem to indicate the decreasing influence of the visible as a form of sexual knowledge in fact the opposite is true. Epigenesis took the place of preformationism which argued that since unorganized matter is incapable of producing an organized being, organisms must preexist as a whole. Those who saw homunculii within sperm were preformationists who could partly rely on microscopic resolution for evidence. Epigenesis, by contrast, took generation beyond the resolution of the compound microscope since each new birth was a new formation, a theory that accounted for variability but which implied the existence of an invisible vital force that could organize living matter into complex forms. Yet proponents of epigenesis like Wolff and Blumenbach paradoxically turned to what they perceived as the absence of "real" visible evidence for preformationism as a kind of visible proof for epigenesis; this visible absence compensated for their own inability to render visible the vitalistic forces behind epigenesis. Blumenbach, in particular, mocked the "imaginary dignity of the animaculae in semen." My immediate point here is to use the epigenesis and preformation debate as a brief example of how complicated scientific visibility was with regard to scientific treatments of sexuality, and to suggest how this vexed visibility could …