Alexander von Humboldt

Charles Darwin described him as "the greatest scientific traveler who ever lived." He is widely respected as one of the founders of modern geography. Alexander von Humboldt's travels, experiments, and knowledge of nature, transformed western science in the nineteenth century.

His conception of Nature

What makes society change and is history a clue to its causes?

Von Humboldt, Herder and historicity as Herodotus’ gifts: ethnic identity is tied to particular characteristics of places,

historicity, the use of facts, authenticity, he use of an understanding of history as a basis for trying to change it.

historicism, the use of the past to understand nature and human purpose. Hegel's concept of the inevitable working forward to fruition of underlying ideas in history such as the dialectic. But the compelling notion that local conditions and peculiarities influence the results in a decisive way. These concepts influenced the economic analysis of Karl Marx and thre anthropological work of Franz Boas in that peculiarity of cultures arise from the past conditions quite particular to local situations.
- Herder, Johann Gottfried von Herder (August 25, 1744 – December 18, 1803), German born thinker and prelate: Outline of a Philosophical History of Humanity which largely originated the school of historical thought and German romanticism. Herder's philosophy stressed the influence of physical and historical circumstance upon human development, arguing that "one must go into the age, into the region, into the whole history, and feel one's way into everything". The historian should be the "regenerated contemporary" of the past, and history a science as "instrument of the most genuine patriotic spirit". He and others conceived of the "Volk" as the embodiment of the national spirit tying blood and soil together in a sort of nationalistic esprit.
Not unlike Bartholomew de las Casas,two centuries earlier, Herder's empathy for the native Amerindian or indiginistas, fueled a rediscovery of cultural traditions that found merit in customs and folkways unique to the tribal peoples or "First Nations" of the Americas.

Herder replaced the traditional concept of a judicial-political state with that of the "folk-nation" or Volkstat as an organic entity with historical growth. He championed the volk as a promoter of democracy and free expression of the underlying "volksgeist" of spirit of the people in a sort of German variation on Rousseau's General Will.

Herodotus, a Greek writer from Ionia who lived in the 5th century BCE (ca. 484 BCE–ca. 425 BCE) whose extensive travels led to a series of inquiries and thus defined history as an inquiry into the character and ethos of a people distinguishing them from all others but particularly from adjacent peoples, of different ethnicity, such as the Greeks from the Persians, Hindus, or Babylonians, or Egyptians.

Herodotus reported that the Phoenicians had circumnavigated Africa and contended that the Nile flood was due the melting of snow in the southern mountains.

His travels inspired Renaissance Europeans to chart the earth and he is now recognized as a pioneer not only in history, but in ethnography and also anthropology.

By suggesting that ethnic identity differs due to the climate and geographical conditions of places, Herodotus established a method of relating the means of subsistence to explaining the differences among nationalities.

Herodotus and the Hippocratic corpus

How does ethnicity arise from one's conditions?

Comparisons
	historicity	historicism	ecology
• decisive elements	the fact	the place	the interdependent milieu
• outcomes	people create events	settings compel change	multiple causes

Mintz on sugar and power.

Ecological elements:

climate,
vegetation,
domestic crops & animals,
disease,
settlements and
place.

Humboldt wished to study places and determine their underlying scientific universality.

Alexander von Humboldt was born in Berlin, Germany in 1769. His father, who was an army officer, died when he was nine years old so he and his older brother Wilhelm were raised by their cold and distant mother. Tutors provided their early education which was grounded in languages and mathematics.

Once he was old enough, Alexander began to study at the Freiberg Academy of Mines under the famous geologist A. G. Werner. Von Humboldt met George Forester, Captain James Cook's scientific illustrator from his second voyage, and they hiked around Europe.

In 1792, at the age of 22, von Humboldt began a job as a government mines inspector in Franco, Prussia. In 1799 he was off to South America, the Caribbean and Mexico, and the discoveries of a lifetime.

What is Humboldt's significance?

Places exhibit peculiarities of geography, climate, characteristic species and a "genii loci" according to the Romans. This South American bear is but one example of how the wildlife of a place is determined by its ancestry.

The South American bear in Ecuador, J. Siry , photograph 2007.

Photo Essay

“Discovery is a virtue”
by
Joseph Siry

On June 5, 1799, the 29-year-old Alexander von Humboldt embarked on a five-year research expedition to Spain’s South American colonial empire at that time, which now includes Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Mexico.

Never before was a research explorer away for so long at his own expense and without political backing. In the malaria-infested rain forest and in climbing active volcanoes, he placed himself in dangerous situations in order to arrive at new scientific findings.

200 years after his departure on this journey, the mind of Alexander von Humboldt –who concerned himself throughout his life with topics we call today: ecology, human rights, the origin of rocks, and inquiries into the energy of life-- has shaped our minds because his five volume work, entitled Kosmos, was the most widely read scientific work in the 19th century consulted by Darwin, Marx, and Engels among others.

Because Humboldt's Kosmos was the most influential collection of ideas about the earth in the nineteenth century and he inspired generations of adventurous explorers.

Alexander von Humboldt was a modern manager as well as a research explorer and innovative scientist. He provided fascinating insight into the structure of reality and provided those who did not perceive the world in terms of individual sciences, a means to study and understand their surroundings as a fully integrated whole.

Kosmos (1845) attempted to unify the various branches of scientific knowledge from astronomy to geology, geography, biology and anthropology.

He postponed until his seventy-sixth year, and then successfully executed, the crowning task of his life. Yet this was Humboldt's Cosmos, in five volumes.

The first two volumes of the Kosmos were published, and, in the main, composed, between the years 1845 and 1847. The idea of a work that should convey not only a graphic description, but an imaginative conception of the physical world. Humboldt was devoted to the continuation of his work, of which the third and fourth volumes were published in 1850-58, while a fragment of a fifth was to appear posthumously in 1862. In these volumes he sought to elaborate upon the individual branches of science broadly surveyed in the first volume.

Humboldt wrote:

"I will collect plants and fossils, be able to make astronomical observations with splendid instruments, and I will chemically dissect the air. But all of this is not the main purpose of my trip. My attention will be constantly directed towards the harmony that exists in the combination of all forces and the influence of non-living creations on the living plant and animal worlds!"

FROM Kosmos, Book One:

"Insight into the connection of phenomena as the aim of all natural investigation. Nature presents itself to meditative contemplation as a unity in diversity. Differences in the grades of enjoyment yielded by nature. Effect of contact with free nature; enjoyment derived from nature independently of a knowledge of the action of natural forces, or of the physiognomy and configuration of the surface, or of the character of vegetation. Reminiscences of the woody valleys of the Cordilleras and of the Peak of Teneriffe. Advantages of the mountainous region near the equator, where the multiplicity of natural impressions attains its maximum within the most circumscribed limits, and where it is permitted to man simultaneously to behold all the stars of the firmament and all the forms of vegetation."

Cosmos, I, p. 23-33.

Alexander von Humboldt

Octavio Paz | Sydney Mintz | Alfred Crosby | Jamaica Kincaid

Ecological Invasions

J. Siry,

Marshes of the Ocean Shore.

Sources

study guide

Date: 9 February 2008