| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
12 Jan 2005 09:30:13 AM |
| Object: |
Alexander von Humboldt |
"Alexander von Humboldt was a democrat before democracy, an
anti-nationalist before Germany had achieved national unity. He
preempted achievements usually attributed to mid 19th and 20th century
modernity; the temporization of explaining nature, the global
application of instrumental reason in science, and the cultural
relativism in describing and explaining societies."
Alexander von Humboldt - His Past and his Present
http://www.berlinews.de/archiv/432.shtml
Festvortrag von Wolf Lepenies
auf der Jahrestagung der Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 31. Mai 1999
Informationen zum Symposium =BBDer Aufbruch in die Moderne=AB - Das
Programm
I=2E A SHIPWRECK - AND A TRUE CATASTROPHE
On June 12, 1859, on its return voyage from Arabia through the Suez
Canal to Europe, the Alma, a fine vessel belonging to the Peninsular
and Oriental Steamship Company, ran up against a coral reef in the Red
Sea and began to sink. An eyewitness reported on this incident in his
memoirs:
"The ship lay almost completely on its side, and the great
life-and-death question for every living being on it was whether it
would come to rest or capsize, casting us all into the depths. I
erected a small observation post, by means of which I could follow the
continuing tilt of the ship against an especially brilliant star, and
from minute to minute I proclaimed the result of my observations.
Everyone listened in suspense to this news. The call 'At rest!' was
greeted with a short, joyful murmur, and the call 'Sinking!' was
answered with isolated cries of anguish. Finally, no more sinking could
be observed, and the paralyzing fear of death gave way to energetic
rescue efforts."
Eventually, the passengers and crew of the Alma took shelter on a small
rocky island from where, after days of fear and exhaustion, they were
rescued by a British ship and brought to Cairo. In the meantime, as the
author is eager to tell, they were informed of a true catastrophe: On
May 6, Alexander von Humboldt had died in Berlin.
The eyewitness whose report I have quoted was Werner von Siemens. When
the Prussian artillery lieutenant and engineer had submitted his
"M=E9moire sur la T=E9l=E9graphie Electrique" to the Academy of
Sciences in Paris, Alexander von Humboldt, then eighty years old, had
written to Siemens at once and announced his visit to congratulate his
young colleague upon his magnificent achievement. Werner von Siemens
had good reasons to remember Alexander von Humboldt, his friendship and
his natural noblesse, even in times of deadly peril. Yet, his personal
memoir reflects a general mood in the middle of the 19th century: with
Alexander von Humboldt, the last polymath had passed away, not just
"a person/but a whole climate of opinion" (W.H. Auden).
Looking back upon Alexander von Humboldt's long life and career, one
is attempted to believe Edward Gibbon, who wrote that the history of
empires is that of the miseries of humankind, while the history of the
sciences is that of their splendour and their happiness. And what a
splendid life this was indeed! At the Humboldt home in Tegel, the boy
was taught botany by Willdenow and learned how to draw from Daniel
Chodowiecki. A walk through the woods with Moses Mendelssohn might
easily be interrupted because Goethe had come to visit. His classmate
in G=F6ttingen was Clemens Metternich, who would later manipulate the
map of Europe, and Alexander took his grand tour with Georg Forster,
who had sailed around the world in the company of Captain Cook. Upon
their arrival in London, Forster and Humboldt visited Parliament,
where, in a single session, they heard speeches by Burke, Pitt and
Sheridan. In Paris, Alexander von Humboldt attended the private lessons
of Auguste Comte and in Russia he was listened to by Alexander
Puschkin.
The novel in which the heroine longs to see Alexander von Humboldt was
written by a friend, but this friend was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and
the title of the novel was Die Wahlverwandtschaften. Jealous of his
fame were kings and emperors, Napoleon among them, while Sim=F3n
Bol=EDvar sought his company and followed his advice. En route from
South America back to Europe, Alexander von Humboldt would talk about
politics and science with the American President at Monticello and
predict a marvelous future for the United States. What an epoch of
excellence in which Jefferson was the family name, not the second given
name of the American President!
A life con brio - from early boyhood through old age. Nothing but
excellence! How exciting and how boring at the same time! There is a
routine of excitement in Humboldt's writings and in the writings on
him that could easily make a tale of his achievements dangerously dull.
The danger is even greater for me, because I am addressing you - a
group of scientists and scholars who are members, if only in a
metaphorical sense, of the Humboldt family.
I cannot do much more than remind you of familiar stories. Has this
task become even more difficult since I have been asked to speak in
English? Yes and No. Yes - because not to speak in Humboldt's mother
tongue entails a loss of colour and a lack of precision that I cannot
compensate by any means. No, because if I were to speak the only
language that Alexander von Humboldt himself thought he spoke
correctly, I would have to speak - Spanish. Even more adequate,
however, would be to constantly switch from one idiom to so many
others, Latin included, as Alexander von Humboldt himself did. He could
learn a language in less time than it took others to buy a dictionary.
It took myself - an amateur and admirer of Humboldt's works - some
time to buy a dictionary and now I'll speak, as requested, in English
and for fifty minutes.
II. TRAVEL, TRAVEL, TRAVEL
What's in a name? Shipwrecks, we have come to learn, are key
metaphors of intellectual history. Sometimes, even the names of ships
are revealing. As if the vessel finally coming to rescue Werner von
Siemens had been christened by a philosopher of history, it bears a
conspicuous name: Nemesis. Nemesis, however, is not so much the goddess
of vengeance as the goddess of compensation, balance and just
retribution. What at first glance appears to be an accident, is in
reality a metaphor for salvation, thus asserting the optimistic message
of physico-theology, which still had its adherents in the 19th century.
The name of the ship Alexander von Humboldt and Aim=E9 Bonpland boarded
in La Coru=F1a on June 5, 1799 was - Pizarro. As if to compensate for
the cruelty of the conquistador who had destroyed the realm of the
Incas more than two hundred years earlier and who had murdered their
last emperor, the ship that bore his name now carried another
conquistador who came to see and to marvel at what he saw, who wanted
to observe and to measure, to collect and to communicate, and who
risked nothing but his own life to learn as much as possible about an
unfamiliar nature and about foreign lives.
It has been said that Alexander von Humboldt's greatest achievement
on his voyage to South America was the fact that he survived. This is a
less than obvious remark. For quite some time, Humboldt was convinced
that it was his destiny to be drowned on the high seas. Reading
Alexander von Humboldt's descriptions of the risks and perils of his
explorations and expeditions - descending deep into a volcano, trying
to climb the Chimborazo, preserving his calm while encountering a
jaguar in the jungle or swimming in a river without being disturbed by
admittedly small crocodiles - one cannot but feel that he is constantly
and deliberately exposing himself to sacrifice and that he is
conducting an experimentum crucis upon himself.
When Charles Lyell was asked by a young geologist for three words of
advice, he replied: Travel, Travel, Travel. In the time of Alexander
von Humboldt, travelling served, as it always had done, to satisfy
curiosity and to fulfill youthful dreams, as he himself recalled again
and again: "The pleasure I derived as a child from the contemplation
of the form of continents and seas as outlined on maps, the yearning to
behold those southern constellations which never appear above our
horizon, the pictures of palms and cedars of Lebanon in a pictorial
Bible, may all have contributed to excite in me the desire to travel in
foreign lands."
This was the emotional reason for taking the risk of travelling. It was
not the only one. When Humboldt was born in 1769, Buffon was still busy
completing his Histoire Naturelle and Linnaeus was still teaching at
Uppsala. When Humboldt was crossing the ocean on his way to the 'West
Indies', the term 'Biology' was for the first time used in
Europe. When Alexander von Humboldt died in 1859, Charles Darwin was
about to publish a book with the title On the Origin of Species by
Natural Selection. Humboldt was born into a time when space still
mattered most in the attempt to understand nature, the whole of Nature,
'Das Ganze der Natur' as his friend Georg Forster had called it,
one of the great travellers of all times, who died while studying the
map of India.
Every naturalist was a traveller in those times, and when, like
Linnaeus, he had travelled enough or did not want to travel anymore, he
at least wrote a travel guide, an Instructio Peregrinatoris. When
Alexander von Humboldt died, Time had taken over. Natural History,
which had been the attempt to describe and to classify all realms of
Nature by complicated spatial arrangements, had been superseded by a
true History of Nature whose objects had an origin, developed and did
change considerably in the course of time.
When Humboldt and Bonpland first set foot on American soil they were so
overwhelmed by the newness of what they saw that the success of their
expedition seemed in jeopardy before it even had begun: "In the first
three days," Humboldt wrote, "we couldn't proceed with any
scientific work. We would pick up an object and within seconds reject
it for a more striking one." On September 1, 1800 Bonpland and
Humboldt counted that they had already collected more than 12,000
plants. One does seriously misunderstand such a statement if one only
hears the obvious triumph in it and ignores the nervous undertone. To
add so many things to the store of human knowledge of nature was a
marvelous achievement and at the same time a threat to the capacity of
human understanding. Each day, traditional schemes of classification
had to be enlarged and established nomenclatures had to be changed.
When Humboldt was planning to write a history of plants, in the
literary usage of his time, this meant writing a geography of plants by
describing their distribution on earth. For man had not yet the
intellectual means and the moral courage at his disposal to accept
evolution, i.e. a change of Nature, and to arrange her objects by
temporal sequence. The courage of a brave naturalist like Linnaeus had
been limited to the eventual exchange of one keyword in his worldview:
instead of claiming that God had created everything on earth ab initio
as he originally had written, he ventured to speculate, at the end of
his life, whether one should not go a bit further and only admit that
God had created all species in principio - a notion that left room for
a glimpse of history in a world that began to change dramatically.
Alexander von Humboldt's courage was not - and could not be - much
greater. His whole work can be read as an anticipation of the process
of 'temporalization', i.e. the discovery of time in Nature, that
characterizes his epoch but would find its adequate expression only
with the work of Charles Darwin.
Not merely a fashion for travel but also a travel frenzy are
characteristic for Humboldt and his time: ultimately, one had to see
everything and travel everywhere if one wanted to uncover Nature's
secrets. Humboldt travelled to Venezuela, to Colombia and to Peru, to
Mexico, Cuba and to the United States, but his firm plan was to return
home via Asia and Africa. Later, his travel to Russia and Siberia as
far as the Chinese border was another attempt to have been everywhere.
Each journey, no matter where it went, remained, from an intellectual
point of view, incoherent and incomplete if it was not planned as a
journey around the world.
Travelling was a preponderant but not the only and certainly not the
undisputed strategy for enlarging one's world view in the time of
Alexander von Humboldt. One might, for instance, rank philosophers in
terms of mileage, with Descartes, who had been to France and Bavaria,
to Poland and Prussia, to Switzerland, Italy, Holland and Sweden, at
the upper end of the scale, whereas its lower end must certainly be
occupied by Immanuel Kant. Kant never left his native K=F6nigsberg in
East Prussia, which for him was his true 'Terra Firma', a
metropolis, he claimed, that offered everything the philosopher needed
to understand man and his place in the world. Kant was a master of
drawing large consequences from minor experiences: he literally never
travelled, but when, just once, he went for a short sea trip that
lasted for only a few hours, the result was a lengthy and authoritative
footnote on seasickness in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of
View. Kant's anthropological pragmatism was a pragmatism of
principles whereas the anthropology of Alexander von Humboldt - who, by
the way, was never seasick - might be called a pragmatism of
experience. And his experience was based on travel.
III. INSTRUMENTAL REASON AND ITS VIRTUES
A brillant career in an epoch of excellence - and yet there was a
nervousness in everything Alexander von Humboldt did. Already the
child, the petit esprit malin, as he was called in Tegel, showed a
restless disposition that turned out to be the anticipation of an
uprooted life. Travel was an antidote but not a cure. It was the
nervousness not just of a person but of a whole period in which the
study of nature was carried out between the extremes of lofty thinking
and speculation on the one hand, experiment and calculation on the
other. Humboldt's genius consisted not least in making his own
nervousness such a productive one.
Humboldt always regarded himself as an empiricist; against Schelling
and the natural philosophy of German Romanticism, he played the
advocate of disciplines, like chemistry, that dirtied one's hands.
That, however, was not enough to establish a clear distinction between
himself, who always wanted to see Nature as an 'integrated design',
and Romantic thought. Some Romantics didn't mind dirty hands at all,
and, like Humboldt, Novalis also had a career in mining. Humboldt's
travels, this long series of experimenta crucis, always display a
mixture of realism and romanticism, but nowhere does the dual nature of
his thought emerge more clearly than in the experiments on his own body
which he carried out under the influence of Volta's and Galvani's
thoughts on animal electricity, until a physician, alarmed by the ill
effects on Humboldt's health, advised their discontinuation.
Humboldt always remained more interested in the subjective sensations
his experiments produced than in the attempt of establishing their
objective results. Humboldt himself was clearly aware of this tension
when he insisted on having tried to separate observable facts from
explanatory statements because "it would grieve me no end to discover
later that these studies, which were carried out with such extreme
efforts, could be forgotten because of incorrect hypothetical
conclusions."
Humboldt's scruples created enemies for him on both sides of the
great divide. "I am afraid that, despite all his talents and restless
activity, he will never contribute much that is important for
science", one critic wrote on August 6, 1797 and continued: "There
is a little too much vanity in all his doings, and I cannot see a sign
of purely objective interest in him. Absurd as it may sound, yet I
experience through him, with all due respect for the tremendous wealth
of his subject matter, a poverty of meaning, which in his profession is
the worst of all evils. He is the undisguised dissecting intellect that
measures nature shamelessly [...] and with such impudence as I cannot
conceive. His are empty words and narrow concepts [...]. He has no
imagination. Nature should be contemplated with feeling [...]."
The critic was Friedrich Schiller. One hundred years later, Emil Du
Bois-Reymond used a poetic metaphor to critize Alexander von Humboldt
for a reason exactly the opposite of Schiller's. Humboldt had climbed
high, higher than any human being, Du Bois-Reymond admitted, but in the
end he had not been able to reach the peak of the Chimborazo. In all
his scientific adventures the same thing had happened: eventually, his
ambitions turned out to be much higher than his achievements. What
prevented him from achieving true scientific excellence was his lack of
mathematical understanding. Basically, he was a collector of phenomena.
Overjoyed to collect and to arrange and to describe, he often forgot to
dissect, to reduce and to explain. First, he had wanted to write a
Physique du Monde, but Kosmos was a much better title - for Kosmos is
but another name for Chaos and a chaos Alexander von Humboldt had
finally created indeed.
Faced with these two views I feel myself in the position of the Paris
journalist of the 17th century who told his readers: "Some say that
Cardinal Mazarin is dead, others that he is alive. I think that both
are wrong." If I had to choose between Schiller and Du Bois-Reymond,
I'd choose - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Even Goethe's criticism of Alexander von Humboldt may easily be
turned into a compliment. I am referring to Goethe's attitude, best
expressed in Faust, that one might describe as
'Anti-Instrumentalism':
Ihr Instrumente freilich spottet mein,
Mit Rad und K=E4mmen, Walz und B=FCgel.
Ich stand am Thor, ihr solltet Schl=FCssel sein;
Zwar euer Bart ist kraus, doch hebt ihr nicht die Riegel.
Geheimnisvoll am lichten Tag,
L=E4sst sich Natur des Schleiers nicht berauben,
Und was sie deinem Geist nicht offenbaren mag,
Das zwingst du ihr nicht ab mit Hebeln und mit Schrauben.
Alexander vom Humboldt, however, was an unfailing lover of instruments.
On the deck of a ship, he could rarely be seen without a sextant or a
telescope. The last two nights he spent in La Coru=F1a before setting
sail for South America, he was worried because he was separated from
his instruments, which had already been brought aboard the Pizzaro. At
the beginning of his narrative, he needs nearly four pages to describe,
in loving detail, his physical and astronomical instruments. His
equipment was the most up-to-date of his time. He never failed to test
it for accuracy throughout the journey, and when he returned to Europe,
checking his instruments was the first and most important task. One of
his biographers has rightly remarked: "Humboldt, like so many
explorers before and after, came to be sentimentally attached to his
instruments. Through them he could feel safe in the vastness of ocean
and jungle. They brought him close to a familiar order of things,
helped him forget the dreadful hazards and lurking dangers of his
existence" (de Terra 1955:90).
Much as I agree with this statement, I do believe that the
'sentimental' aspect of the use of instruments is given too
prominent a place in it. The rational aspect should not be
underestimated. Humboldt may have lacked the mathematical rigour and
motivation that would have made him an even greater scientist, as Du
Bois-Reymond argued. Yet instruments helped him to overcome the
constant danger of falling into the trap of Romantic speculation.
Alexander von Humboldt may not have calculated, but measure he did -
and more and with greater enthusiasm than any other explorer before
him. He was not just observing and collecting. He was the measuring
traveller. Instruments for him were not merely technical devices, but
theories that had taken on the form of tools. Alexander von Humboldt
embodied the virtues of instrumental reason.
I should like to remind you once more of the shipwreck that Werner von
Siemens suffered in the Red Sea in 1859, the year Alexander von
Humboldt died. When Siemens, the 'Prince of Technology', was
threatened with drowning, he organized his own rescue and that of his
fellow passengers with the help of instrumental reasoning. Even in the
midst of the worst catastrophe, relief is always at hand for one who
knows how to measure correctly. Werner von Siemens never lost this
belief. From the bridge of the sinking ship, as if driven by an
inexhaustible source of inner strength, he used the starry firmament as
a standard by which to determine his position and thus to clarify his
chances of surviving.
Even if it seems unusual and the product of chance to victims and
eyewitnesses, each catastrophe falls within a tradition. An accident
seldom comes alone. All catastrophes inscribe themselves in memories
mediated by language. Under Arabian skies, Werner von Siemens'
attitude therefore recalls, on the one hand, the mood with which
Immanuel Kant concludes his Critique of Practical Reason: "Two things
fill the soul with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more
often and continuously thought concerns itself with them: the starry
sky above me and the moral law within me." On the other hand, one can
hardly fail to speculate that also Alexander von Humboldt must have
been a model for such an attitude.
Take, for example, his description of an incident on Palm Sunday 1801,
when he and his company sailed into the port of Cartagena: "We were
trying to force our way against the wind into the harbor. The sea was
forcefully rough. Our tiny craft [...] could not master the waves, and
suddenly was thrown on her beam-ends. A tremendous wave broke over us
and threatened to engulf the ship. The man at the helm remained
undismayed at his post. All of a sudden he called '=A1No gobierna el
tim=F3n!' (The rudder does not work). We all gave ourselves up for
lost. In this, as it seemed to us, our utmost danger, we cut away a
sail that had been flapping loosely, when the ship righted herself on
top of another wave, enabling us to find refuge behind the promontory
of Gigante. But here a new and almost greater danger awaited me. For
the better observation of an eclipse of the moon, I put off to shore in
a boat. Scarcely had I landed with my assistants when we were startled
by the clanking of chains, and a party of powerful Negroes, freshly
escaped from the Cartagena prison, fell upon us from a thicket,
brandishing their daggers, apparently ready to seize our boat, as they
saw us without arms. We fled at once to the water and boarded ship."
Also instrumental reason is not almighty. We can trust it to help us
overcome many dangers of nature, but it will not always help us to
fight the evils of mankind.
IV. TWO BROTHERS - TWO CULTURES?
When Alexander von Humboldt was not yet six years old, he already knew
how to read and write. For this, he was not praised but blamed, because
another boy had been able to master these skills when he was just
three: his brother Wilhelm. Throughout their life and despite all
quarrels the brothers liked and loved each other and yet the temptation
is overwhelming to stress the differences between them. Wilhelm never
left Europe and Alexander sometimes found it difficult to return to the
old continent; no German was more German, even abroad, than Wilhelm,
and no one was more cosmopolitan, even at home, than Alexander; Wilhelm
admired antiquity and ancient Greece as much as Alexander liked the
Americas and believed in a glorious future for the New World; when
Wilhelm served Prussia as Minister of Culture, Alexander was busy with
his research in Paris, in the land of the enemy; Wilhelm's marriage
with Caroline, as exemplified in their correspondence which found its
place in German literature, was regarded as a public masterpiece of
private bonding, whereas Alexander must sometimes have been at great
pains to conceal his sexual leanings, which translated into the great
respectable fad of the time: the cult of friendship. It would be easy
to describe the relationship of the two brothers as a confrontation of
two cultures. This would be wrong.
The French use the term un homme n=E9cessaire to describe a historical
figure that appears at the right moment on the historical stage. In
their Prussian brotherhood, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt
represent two necessary temperaments of late 18th and early 19th
century thought, two sides of the same coin that would be much less
valuable and not nearly as much au courant if one of the brothers
dropped out of the picture.
From G=F6ttingen, Humboldt had written to his former tutor, Johann
Heinrich Campe: "A man should early accustom himself to stand alone.
Isolation has much in its favor. One learns thereby to search inwardly
and to gain self-respect without being dependent on the opinions of
others, which are likely to be too favorable." At first sight, one
would think of Wilhelm as the sender of this letter - but it was
Alexander who wrote it. "To search inwardly" remained a guiding
principle for both brothers. Yet it would be difficult to identify
either Wilhelm or Alexander with the German ideology at the end of the
18th century, that mixture of pride and sorrow with which the attempt
was made to play off Romanticism against the Enlightenment, the Middle
Ages against the modern world, culture against civilization, the
subjective against the objective, community against society and the
heart against the head.
Withdrawal from society into the sphere of privacy was not only seen as
legitimate but as a prerequisite for leading a good life. It was
characteristic of this peculiar philosophy to prefer in art the genius
to the rule, in religion the prophet to the dogma, in morality the hero
to the convention and in the sphere of law and the state human
creativity to all systems and theories.
Neither Wilhelm nor Alexander von Humboldt can be seen as fully
embodying this ideology or falling into its traps. The cult of the
Middle Ages, for instance, did never appeal to them and, though
Prussian subjects, they were both rather reluctant to glorify the state
- an attitude that was made somewhat easier for them by the fact that
they had inherited a fortune large enough to give them independence of
thought and, though to a necessarily limited extent, of action. Though
both were quite successful politicians and able diplomats who held high
offices - whereby Alexander once had to resist Hardenberg's offer to
become Wilhelm's successor within the latter's lifetime - they more
than once expressed their wish to lead a life far from society and free
from politics.
Obviously, there is more of German ideology or Weltanschauung in
Wilhelm von Humboldt than in Alexander. When Alexander had returned
from his voyage to South America, Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote to his
wife: "From his boyhood on, Alexander strove toward outer activities,
while I chose a life dedicated to the development of the inner man.
Believe me, my dearest, in this lies the true value of life." Reading
sentences like this, one might wish that the German university which we
still regard as Humboldt's, i.e. as Wilhelm's university, might in
the future become associated a bit more with Alexander.
V=2E THE DIALECTICS OF HUMBOLDT'S ENLIGHTENMENT
For Wilhelm von Humboldt, freedom is only a necessary, not a sufficient
condition for the formation of man. To perfect himself, man must live
under different conditions or in different contexts.
'Mannigfaltigkeit der Situationen' is the German term used by him.
Freedom requires variety. Of course, we must understand this 'variety
of contexts' as a metaphor that should not be reduced to a
geographical space. And yet one is tempted to detect a slightly
Eurocentric undertone in Wilhelm von Humboldt's remarks, when one
remembers that his own context of experience varied within a rather
narrow, i.e. European geographical sphere that included, besides
Germany, just France, Spain and Italy. In contrast, Alexander von
Humboldt - like Johann Reinhold and Georg Forster and others before him
- opened the whole world for Europe. Whereas Wilhelm confined his
curiosity to the Latin countries of Europe and to the remembrance of
Antiquity, Alexander sought to enlargen his horizon in what one might
call a 'serious South'.
Alexander von Humboldt lived in a variety of contexts indeed. His age
was already an age of globalization. Globalization meant experiencing
variety in any part of the globe and paying tribute to that variety by
not accepting simple schemes of progress or development. The theme of
European decadence and a fresh future for the New World was prominent
in Alexander von Humboldt's writings, but it hardly yielded new
insights or discoveries. To prefer the mores of the South Sea to the
ceremonial of the Spanish court was not regarded as a scandalous
statement in the first half of the 19th century, rather, it had already
become a fashion and an all too easy fa=E7on de parler.
At the same time, Humboldt was very scrupulous in insisting that
mankind, in the course of time, had developed different worldviews and
value systems that equalled each other. The numeral system which the
Incas used was as complicated as ours, their metaphors were as telling
as ours and their gardens - here Humboldt must have shocked many a
reader across the channel - were as good as if not even better than the
great gardens of the English countryside.
These were not fashionable statements at all. Humboldt despised many of
the Spanish padres and missionaries he met, because they saw themselves
as members of the gente blanca y de raz=F3n - as if reason was white.
For Humboldt, in contrast, the Incas could rightly be compared to the
Romans. They were worthy to be our ancestors. As if it had been a
matter of course - which, as we all know, is not the case even today -
Alexander von Humboldt acknowledged the historicity of so-called
'primitive cultures' and admired not just the presence but "the
great antiquity of Indian traditions".
We must remember that Alexander von Humboldt said this at a time when
Europe was still unaware of the great civilizing achievements of
pre-Colombian traditions. He had seen with his own eyes that old mores
and modern habits coexisted in many places: while Mexico, on the one
hand, minted more gold coins than France, the native Indians, on the
other hand, were still paying their debts to each other with cacao
beans. Alexander von Humboldt never tired of telling tales in which the
direction of human development seemed to have reversed itself - as in
Lima, where gentlemen had to speak the Indian language and not
castellano if they wanted to impress their lady companions. Guano, the
natural fertilizer that European business men feverishly sought to
import, became a key metaphor for Alexander von Humboldt: in the
future, the excrements of the New World would secure the survival of
the old continent.
In the New World, many an island of civilization could be found deep in
the wilderness. The governor of the Cuman=E1 province in Venezuela, for
example, easily pronounced technical terms like nitrogen or ferric
oxide and even seemed to know what he was talking about. When Humboldt
spent the night in a small monastery close to the Amazon jungle, he was
surprised to find, in the prior's cell, a copy of the Trait=E9 de
l'Electricit=E9 by the Abb=E9 Nollet. Even greater was his surprise -
and his delight - when, thirty years later, the third volume of his own
Essai politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne was presented to
him in, of all places, Orenburg near the Ural Mountains. In Siberia,
some of his hosts spoke Arabic and entertained private orchestras that
played overtures by Mozart and Rossini over dinner. Humboldt - who was
not particularly fond of music, whether at home or abroad - ironically
coined a special term for those Russian ambitions: he called them
Orinoco plus epaulettes.
Alexander von Humboldt was well aware of the ubiquity of the scientific
mind. At Mexico's famous Colegio de Miner=EDa, he met colleagues and
friends who had studied mineralogy at Freiberg with him under the
guidance of Abraham Gotthelf Werner. In Bogot=E1, talking with the
venerable Jos=E9 Celestino M=FAtis, the prince of American botany,
equalled a visit to Linnaeus in Uppsala. The business of science, so it
seemed at first sight, was to be pursued anywhere in the world. This
science, however, was Western science, for which context did not matter
at all.
In the wilderness, whether in Terra Firma or in Siberia, Humboldt did
not miss the amenities of a civilized life. What he did miss was the
'enlightenment', i.e. the free commerce and the liberal exchange of
ideas that were going on in Europe. Eventually he wanted to return home
because he felt the desperate need to catch up with the scientific
progress that must have been made during his absence. Humboldt admired
Condorcet, whose works had been edited by his friend Arago, and he
shared Condorcet's firm belief that nature has set no bounds to
man's hopes and that humanity, as he exclaimed enthusiastically,
"marches forward, liberated of all chains, escaping from the rule of
chance and of the enemies of progress, secure and industrious on the
paths of truth, virtue, and happiness". Scientific and technological
activity, properly conducted, will inevitably lead to reasonable and
wise results.
Here, Humboldt's empathy with the native found its limits. Indians
who held him personally responsible for the outbreak of a volcano or
Negroes who tried to kill him while he was trying to measure the
eclipse of the moon were displaying a primitive superstitition that
could not be tolerated. If the conflict arose, empathy had to yield to
instrumental reason and scientific curiosity had to be stilled at
almost any cost. In 1800, Humboldt and Bonpland visit the cave of
Ataruipe, where a vanished Indian tribe had buried its dead. Their
well-preserved skeletons - as a rule, not a single rib was missing,
Humboldt notes - were stored in baskets which the Indians call mapires.
Humboldt and Bonpland ask the Indians what techniques their ancestors
used in the process of preservation and then, to the dismay and anger
of their guides - "zum gr=F6=DFten Aergerni=DF unsrer indianischen
F=FChrer" -, take several skulls and the complete skeleton of an old
man with them. One of the skulls, Humboldt proudly remarks, was later
used by Blumenbach in his craniological work. The skeleton, however,
was lost near the African coast in a shipwreck that cost the life of
the Franciscan monk, Juan Gonzales, who had been Humboldt's
companion. As if aware, though only in retrospect, of Nemesis doing her
work here, Alexander von Humboldt closed the chapter "Ueber die
Wasserfaelle des Orinoco", in which this incident is described with a
curious and moving passage where he complained that humankind would
forever remain a species marked by blasphemy.
We might describe the limits of Alexander von Humboldt's
non-eurocentric thought by praising his liberalism in the social
sphere. He never failed to pay attention to the specific context in
which human beings live and to the peculiar history that shape their
traditions and their thoughts. There was one human activity, however,
where all of a sudden context no longer mattered or at least did not
matter enough. In principle, science and technology could be conducted
everywhere in the world and by everyone. The West did not own them.
This is an impressive legacy of Humboldt's thought. The reason for
this ubiquity of science was its uniformity. Science and technology
were not context-bound. This is an important limit of Humboldt's
thought.
VI. A BETTER GERMANY
Alexander von Humboldt has often been quoted for having called the
Humboldt family seat at Tegel Schlo=DF Langweil, 'Castle of
Boredom'. This seems to have been a rather private statement. Put
into context, however, it becomes obvious that this was also an
expression of political belief. Henriette Herz, who gave so much social
and intellectual glamour to Berlin's Jewish community in those days
said of Alexander von Humboldt: "Whenever [he] wrote to me or any
other member of our intimate circle from the family seat at Tegel, he
usually inscribed his letters from 'Castle of Boredom'. He did this
chiefly in the letters he wrote in the Hebrew script, in which I had
given him and his brother some instruction, and which, with the
additional help of our friends, they wrote very successfully. It was
unheard of that a young nobleman should confess in letters that could
be read by anyone how much more entertaining was the society of Jewish
ladies than a visit to his ancestral mansion."
Humboldt never renounced his vigorous support for the emancipation of
the Jews, he fought unequivocally against slavery at home and abroad,
and Leopold von Ranke noted with astonishment that, even in the
presence of the Prussian king, Alexander von Humboldt was unwilling to
give up his enthusiasm for the 'Ideas of 1789' that the terreur had
not been able to destroy. More than once he was carried away by French
charm, and quite often he remained neglectful of his German heritage,
as Wilhelm von Humboldt complained. Alexander von Humboldt the
aristocrat was a democrat before democracy and an anti-nationalist
before Germany had achieved its national unity. Benito Ju=E1rez called
Alexander von Humboldt a Benefactor of the Nation, Benem=E9rito de la
Patria, but one might have called him a benefactor not just of his own
but of the European nation. When Alexander wrote that he left home he
meant that he had left Europe.
At the Wissenschaftskolleg, the German Institute for Advanced Study in
Berlin, each year we invite up to fourty fellows from all disciplines
and from all over the world to spend a year of untrammeled research and
thinking with us. In many a year, we pay a visit to the Humboldt family
seat at Tegel. This visit never fails to make a deep impression upon
our fellows, whether they come from Europe or from Asia, from the
Americas or other parts of the world. Enhanced by the hospitality and
the charm of the hosts, the family von Heinz, the visitors admire the
modesty and the seriousness of the Humboldt home that Schinkel had
rebuilt and the tombs of the brothers Humboldt in the flowering park
nearby. This is a place where the German Enlightenment lives.
Tegel, of course, was much more Wilhelm's than Alexander's place,
but Alexander also makes his presence felt there in an unconspicuous
yet moving way. As his contemporaries report, Alexander von Humboldt
was full of wit and irony. Visitors hesitated to leave him because they
feared what he would say after they had left: On tremble de le quitter.
Today, one cannot leave Alexander von Humboldt without great regret and
without a small dose of pride: he represents the best that our country
has to offer to the cultures of the world.
For writing this paper I have made use of Hanno Beck's Alexander von
Humboldt, 2 vols., Wiesbaden (Franz Steiner) 1959/1961 and Helmut de
Terra's Humboldt. The Life and Times of Alexander von Humboldt
1769-1859, New York (Alfred A. Knopf) 1955.
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CV Lepenies
http://www.radiobremen.de/nordwestradio/
Symposium =BBDer Aufbruch in die Moderne=AB
Programm
Beachten Sie auch diese Seiten in BerliNews
Wolf Lepenies: Anmerkungen zur ausw=E4rtigen Bildungspolitik
http://www.berlinews.de/wista/archiv/22.shtml
Rede auf dem Bildungsforum der Berliner Universit=E4ten am 5.November
1997
BerliNews, 31.5.99
Der letzte Universalist - Berlin feiert Alexander von Humboldt
http://www.berlinews.de/archiv/431.shtml
mit vielen Links zu AvH
Die gro=DFe Website:
Alexander von Humboldt im Netz
http://www.uni-potsdam.de/u/romanistik/humboldt/index.html
=DCbersichtsseite der Berliner Festspiele: Alexander von Humboldt
Homepage der Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung
http://www.avh.de/
Der Namenspatron der Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung
Homepage des Wissenschaftskollegs
http://www.wiko-berlin.de/
Geschichte, Zielsetzung, Funktionsweise des Wissenschaftskollegs - -
Die Fellows
Kooperationen und Projekte des Wissenschaftskollegs
Point Sud - Muscler le savoir local - Forschungszentrum Lokales Wissen
in Bamako, Mali
Committee on Intellectual Correspondence (CIC)
AGORA: Arbeit - Wissen - Bindung
http://www.wiko-berlin.de/kolleg/projekte/agora
AGORA ist ein Forschungsvorhaben des Wissenschaftskollegs, in dem
derzeit etwa f=FCnfzehn j=FCngere Wissenschaftler aus neun L=E4ndern
kooperieren. AGORA ist ein wissenschaftlicher Beitrag zu den
Milleniumsfeierlichkeiten der Stadt Berlin.
Presse- und =D6ffentlichkeitsarbeit
Ein anderer wissenschaftshistorischer Vortrag in BerliNews:
"Verehrte An- und Abwesende"
http://www.berlinews.de/archiv/424.shtml
J=FCrgen Renn =FCber die historischen Verbindungen zwischen Physik und
Massenmedien
HeN-095b
Autor: Manfred Ronzheimer
Alexander von Humboldt
http://news.google.com/news?num=3D100&hl=3Den&lr=3D&ie=3DUTF-8&oe=3DUTF-8&q=
=3D+%22Alexander+von+Humboldt%22&sa=3DN&tab=3Dgn
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22Alexander+von+Humboldt%22&sa=3DN&tab=3Dnw
http://www.google.com/search?num=3D100&hl=3Den&lr=3D&ie=3DUTF-8&oe=3DUTF-8&=
q=3D+%22Alexander+von+Humboldt%22&sa=3DN&tab=3Dwd&cat=3Dgwd%2FTop
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images&ie=3DUTF-8&oe=3DUTF-8&as_scoring=3Dd&lr=3D&num=3D100&hl=3Den
--
"I formerly admired Humboldt. I now almost adore him." - Charles Darwin
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| User: "Wieland der Schmied" |
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| Title: Re: Alexander von Humboldt |
12 Jan 2005 08:44:01 PM |
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maff wrote:
"Alexander von Humboldt was a democrat before democracy, an
anti-nationalist before Germany had achieved national unity. He
snip
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"I formerly admired Humboldt. I now almost adore him." - Charles Darwin
Thank you for posting it, as a graduate (1968) of the Humboldt high
school of Dortmund, Germany, I really enjoyed reading this.
The folks living near the Humboldt river should enjoy this too, anyone
out there ??
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