Libertine botany?

I've been reading Guy de La Brosse's De la nature, vertu et utilité des plantes [On the Nature, Properties, and Usefulness of Plants] (1628). The book is not much read, either by botanists or humanists, and that's a shame, because La Brosse was one of the most original and forward-thinking intellectuals of his time.

Guy de la Brosse (1586-1641) was the médecin ordinaire [staff physician] to Louis XIII (1601-1643) and it was in this capacity that he obtained, in 1626, royal authorization to create a garden of medicinal plants in Paris in the Faubourg Saint-Victor, the Jardin des Plantes. In addition to conserving medically important plants, the garden would also serve as a laboratory and a teaching establishment. The Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris did not look favorably upon the competition and fought to prevent its opening. After a protracted dispute, the Jardin des Plantes opened in 1640.

View of the Jardin des Plantes

But the Jardin was not just any competition. It was Guy de La Brosse's brazen rejection of authority, his unorthodox botany, and his personal connections to high-profile freethinkers that especially troubled the conservative faculty or, as La Brosse dismissively called them, "philosophes par livres" [bookish philosophers]. La Brosse's quest for knowledge rested on empirical foundations, including the direct observation of botanical phenomena that led to the publication of De la nature, vertu et utilité des plantes in 1628. Ostensibly a book about botany, La Brosse's theory of plant sentience upsets the traditional understanding of the nature of the soul as tripartite--consisting of a vegetative part responsible for growth, an animal part responsible for locomotion and perception, and a rational part unique to human beings--and comes perilously close to proposing a materialist account of our vitality.

Detail from the frontispiece of De la nature [...] des plantes.

La Brosse's rejection of received wisdom and traditional authority is manifest in the frontispiece of De la nature des plantes, where the sun, here a symbol of enlightenment, shines on the motto "Truth and not Authority." There is a lot to say about the treatise, but I want to focus here on some of La Brosse's more daring theses: that plants have souls, that these souls are unique and indivisible, and ("la question la plus hardie" [the boldest question] by his own admission) that they are incorruptible.

La Brosse establishes in the first part of the treatise that plants, as living things, have souls (p. 18). The attributes of the vegetative soul--growth, nutrition, reproduction--are not unique to plants and thus, he concludes, these attributes are better understood as "faculties" of the soul, shared by all living things. Further, he locates the attributes of the sensitive or animal soul in plants, noting that plants move toward the object of their appetite (e.g., water, sun), some more dramatically than others. "The Cucumber," for example, "so loves water that if one places a full basin near its fruit, it will stretch out to reach it" (p. 60). A fanciful image? Sure. But it is also typical of La Brosse's forward-thinking empirical approach to the pursuit of truth, pitting direct observation against bookish authority. Such empirical evidence also proves, for La Brosse, that the souls of plants are unique, that no two plants are alike. "Let us observe [emphasis added] differences in plants of the same species that closely resemble one another, never will we encounter two exactly the same" (p. 32). Now, for the incorruptibility of plant souls, La Brosse anticipates and deftly avoids accusations of impiety by distinguishing between two "durées" [time spans]: one, divine and immortal, extends to the great beyond, the other, natural, exists as long as the world does. It this one that the souls of plants "enjoy" (p. 43). According to this view, plants cease to grow once they fulfill their allotted time span, at which point their souls retire in a kind of sleep to rest until called forth again. Perhaps, he conjectures, all plant souls have existed since the beginning (interestingly, he does not write "creation") of the world, coming and going in a kind of ceaseless botanical metempsychosis. Who fashioned these plant souls? "L'Artisan" [The Artisan], who may or may not be God. What does this have to do with philosophical libertinage? La Brosse does not go so far as to question openly the immortality of the human soul, but he does sketch out--through his defense of plant souls--an alternative that allows for the existence of a kind of materialist soul independent of the Christian framework.

I haven't yet figured out what's going on here, but I sense there's an untold story about botany's role in early modern freethought... 


Further reading:
La Brosse, Guy de. De la nature, vertu et utilité des plantes (Paris, 1628) Read on Gallica
Pintard, René. Le Libertinage érudit dans la première moité du XVIIe siècle. (Geneva: Slatkine, 2000)