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Alexander von Humboldt - His Past and his Present
Festvortrag von Wolf Lepenies Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 31. Mai 1999 Informationen zum Symposium »Der Aufbruch in die Moderne« - Das Programm
I. A SHIPWRECK - AND A TRUE CATASTROPHE
“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 “Mémoire sur la Télégraphie 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 Göttingen 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 Simón Bolívar 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, TRAVELWhat’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 Aimé Bonpland boarded in La Coruña 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 Königsberg 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 VIRTUESA 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, 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 Coruña 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 ‘¡No gobierna el timón!’ (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 nécessaire 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 Göttingen, 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. THE DIALECTICS OF HUMBOLDT’S ENLIGHTENMENTFor 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 façon 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 razón - 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 Cumaná 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 Traité de l’Electricité by the Abbé 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 Minería, he met colleagues and friends who had studied mineralogy at Freiberg with him under the guidance of Abraham Gotthelf Werner. In Bogotá, talking with the venerable José Celestino Mútis, 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 größten Aergerniß unsrer indianischen Führer” -, 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 GERMANYAlexander von Humboldt has often been quoted for having called the Humboldt family seat at Tegel Schloß 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 Juárez called Alexander von Humboldt a Benefactor of the Nation, Benemérito 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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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:
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