[A note to travelers and museum-goers: Happily, Humboldt seems to be coming back into fashion a little in the last few years, and Berlin is embracing its own son as well as bringing the arts and the sciences together with the opening of Humboldt Forum expected on 17 December 2020.]
[A 2nd note, to hikers: Humboldt’s influence on America itself can be seen in the Humboldt Redwoods State Park (just over 200 miles north of San Francisco along the 101) which has wonderful red woods, the tallest living trees on Earth (and so far spared from this year’s fires); walk in wonderment in communion (and keep gazing upwards!) with these hundred-year-old (and up to 2,000-year-old) trees on the Bull Creek trail, an 8-mile round-trip walk through some of the world’s largest remaining continuous old-growth redwoods, or do the Avenue of the Giants.]
Introduction
When we think about those whose passion, interest and legacy bridged the arts and the sciences, we thought of two Germans, Alexander von Humboldt and J W von Goethe, two men who changed the course of history, who knew each other and became friends and fruitful sparring partner to each other. Indeed, the pair developed a wonderful friendship that revolved around the city of Jena in Germany that was a university town some 150 miles south-west of Berlin and was known as a centre of learning.
It was the year 1894, and Goethe, who requires no introduction, was by then already acknowledged as the greatest German poet and he was to meet Humboldt through the latter’s brother Wilhelm, and they all spent time in Jena, whose university was where resident poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller observed “liberty and truth ruled”. Humboldt was then in his mid-20s; he was visiting his brother who lived in Jena, while Goethe lived in Weimar, just 15 miles away.
The two were known to have met every day during Humboldt’s visits. He “forced us” into the natural sciences, Goethe enthused about Humboldt who was younger by 20 years, as they talked about zoology and volcanoes, as well as about botany, chemistry and Galvanism. “In 8 days of reading books, one couldn’t learn as much as what he gives you in an hour”, Goethe observed.
Goethe’s ideas about the marriage of the sciences and the arts
Today Goethe is famed for his literary works but he was a passionate scientist too, fascinated by the formation of the earth as well as botany. He had a rock collection that eventually numbered 18,000 specimens. As Europe descended into war, he quietly worked on comparative anatomy and optics. In the year of Humboldt’s first visit, he established a botanical garden at the University of Jena. He wrote an essay, the Metamorphosis of Plants, in which he argued that there was an archetypal, or primordial, form underlying the world of plants. The idea was that each plant was the variation of such an urform. Behind variety was unity. According to Goethe, the leaf was this urform, the basic shape from which all others had developed – the petals, the calyx, and so on.
These were exciting ideas, but Goethe had no scientific sparring partner with whom to develop his theories. All that changed when he met Humboldt. It was as if Humboldt had ignited the spark that had been missing for so long. The two went on long walks and dined together. They conducted experiments and inspected the new botanical garden in Jena. Humboldt was making him dizzy with ideas, Goethe told a friend.
Goethe’s belief in the marriage of art and science can be seen in the wide-ranging nature not just of his interests but of his works: amongst other things, he developed a colour theory in which he discussed how colour was perceived – a concept in which the role of the eye had become central because it brought the outer world into the inner. His also chose a contemporary scientific term, Elective Affinities, for his novel about marriage and love, where he described the tendency of certain elements to combine.
The chance discovery involving a frog’s leg
The two men made an interesting (and poetic!) scientific discovery by chance during Humboldt’s 3-month visit to Jena 3 years after his first visit. One morning, Humboldt placed a frog’s leg on a glass plate and connected its nerves and muscles to different metals in sequence – to silver, gold, iron, zinc, and so on – but this generated only a gentle twitch in the leg. It was when he leaned over to check the connecting metals that the frog’s legs convulsed violently and it leapt off the table. The realization finally dawned on Humboldt that it was the moisture of his breath that had triggered the reaction. As the tiny droplets in his breath had touched the metals they had created an electric current that had moved the frog’s leg. It was the most magical experiment he had ever carried out, Humboldt declared, because by exhaling on to the frog’s leg it was as if he were “breathing life into it”. It was the perfect metaphor for the emergence of the new life sciences.
Goethe had already formed the idea that, while a machine could be dismantled and then assembled again, the parts of a living organism worked only in relation to each other. It took Humboldt to widen this concept and apply it to nature on a much broader level – interpreting the natural world as a unified whole that is animated by interactive forces. If everything was connected, then it was important to examine the differences and similarities without ever losing sight of the whole. Comparison became Humboldt’s primary means of understanding nature, not abstract mathematics or numbers.
The broader intellectual context: the big question of how we “know” the world
It must be said that these conversations between Humboldt and Goethe were about one of the big questions of the time, the relationship between the internal and the external world, a question also about where knowledge comes from. Rationalists tended to believe that all knowledge came from reason and rational thought, while the empiricists argued that one could “know” the world only through experience. And a few years before the two met, another German, Immanuel Kant had taken up a position between rationalism and empiricism. The laws of nature as we understand them, Kant wrote in his famous Critique of Pure Reason, only existed because our mind interpreted them. What Kant brought to the table was the so-called transcendental level: the idea that when we experience an object, it becomes a “thing-as-it-appears-to-us". Our senses as much as our reason are like tinted spectacles through which we perceive the world. Though we may believe that the way we order and understand nature is based on pure reason – upon classification, the laws of motion, and so on – Kant believed that this order was shaped by our mind, through those tinted spectacles. We impose this order on nature, and not nature upon us. And with this, the “Self” became the creative ego – almost like a lawgiver of nature even if it meant that we could never have a “true” knowledge of the “thing-in-itself”. The result was that the emphasis was shifting to the Self.
There was more that interested Humboldt. One of Kant’s most popular lecture series at the university in Konigsberg (today’s Kaliningrad in Russia but then part of Prussia) was on geography. Over 40 years, Kant taught this lecture series 48 times. In this series, Kant insisted that knowledge was a systematic construct in which individual facts needed to fit into a larger framework in order to make sense. He used the image of a house to explain this: before constructing it brick by brick and piece by piece, it was necessary to have an idea of how the entire building would look. It was this concept of a system that became the lynchpin of Humboldt’s later thinking.
There was no avoiding these ideas in Jena – everyone was talking about them.
Fruitful conversations, mutual influence
Interestingly also, it has been known that Goethe wrote parts of turned out to be his most famous play, Faust, during the time Humboldt was visiting him, and there have been more than a few who have commented on how both Faust and Humboldt believed that ferocious activity and enquiry brought understanding. Like Humboldt, Faust was trying to discover “all Nature’s hidden powers”; Humboldt had a wonder for the world and a conviction that knowledge could, in his words, never “kill the creative force of imagination”.
Indeed, the inspiration was mutual, and Humboldt learned from Goethe not only to deal with nature through his instruments, but also to understand it in an emotional way. Goethe encouraged and inspired Humboldt to combine the arts and the sciences.
A man who changed our view of nature: remembering Humboldt and his legacy
While his friendship with Goethe add interest to his work and offer some contemporary perspective on it, Humboldt was one of the most profound polymaths – a naturalist, explorer, meteorologist, and classical liberal – and his achievements and influence are wide and far.
When we think of Humboldt, we also remember how great a traveler he was, exploring, observing and enjoying what he saw about our world through travelling; the range and depth of his work – as well as its legacy and influence – is inseparable from his travels.
He also spent time staying for months or years in various different places in Europe, including Paris, Berlin and Russia, and everywhere he went in he sought out fellow scientists and naturalists to help him with his work. He was a true “citizen of the world”.
In fact, he was consumed by Fernweh, a longing for distant places. Humboldt travelled thousands of kilometres in his life: he went down to the mines in Mexico, advocated against slavery while in Cuba, climbed Ecuador’s Chimborazo, at that time considered to be highest mountain in the world (reaching a height of 5,878m, 500m shy of the summit and a world record at the time), explored the air volcanoes of Turbaco in Colombia, explored the upper Orinoco River in a large canoe and confirmed the existence of the Casiquiare canal, which connected the Orinoco and Amazon water systems, met Jose Mutis, the most famous naturalist in the Spanish colonies, made detailed notes on the cold current moving up the Peruvian coast (today called the Humboldt current), amongst many other things. (Today, roughly 300 plants are named after Humboldt, as well as numerous animals and even an area on the moon.)
He left legacies in various countries also because of his humanist philosophy and progressive thinking: today he is not only respected but revered In Latin America because he respected everyone, no matter where they came from or what they looked like. As a knowledgeable mining assessor, he went down into the mines in Latin America, down to the deepest brine. What he saw horrified him, especially in New Spain, today's Mexico. The cruel conditions for the indigenous population working underground were unacceptable to him. In Mexico, Humboldt is theretofore regarded as part of the independence movement and as one of the country's founding fathers. In Cuba, he is still revered for his advocacy against slavery. And in Venezuela, he is still known amongst the farmers of the Chaima people, because he once took action against the Catholic Church and its methods of oppression.
In fact, even as a 60–year–old, Humboldt traveled more than 10,000 miles to the remotest corners of Russia. He was curious and restless, driven by a “perpetual drive,” he admitted, as if chased by “10,000 pigs.”
Humboldt was a thinker far ahead of his time. He invented isotherms – the lines connecting places of equal temperature and pressure (into somewhat concentric irregular shapes) that we see on today’s weather maps – and he also discovered the magnetic equator. He came up with the idea of vegetation and climate zones that snake across the globe.
Most important, though, Humboldt revolutionized the way we see the natural world. He found connections everywhere. Nothing, not even the tiniest organism, was looked at on its own. “In this great chain of causes and effects”, Humboldt said, “no single fact can be considered in isolation”. With this insight, he invented the web of life, the concept of nature as we know it today.
Humboldt was a very large influence on Charles Darwin who took with him onto the HMS Beagle Personal Narrative, the former's 7-volume account of his Latin American expedition and the reason why Darwin was on the ship, and who knew parts of the Narrative by heart. Darwin also sent a first copy of his trip report, Voyage of the Beagle, the book eventually that made him famous, to Humboldt who praised it as an “excellent and admirable book”. And even his later Origin of Species was inspired by Humboldt’s work in the Personal Narrative and in the idea of “web of life”.
But perhaps most of all, Humboldt inspired today’s environmental and ecological movement. People he directly influenced include not only Charles Darwin but also Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh and John Muir, amongst others.
His vision of nature as a web of life, a sublime network of mutually interdependent elements with humans as full participants transformed the way natural scientists and others thought about the Earth and cause and effects and directly shaped environmental thinking. “In this great chain of causes and effects,” Humboldt said, “no single fact can be considered in isolation.
In fact, in the 4-volume Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, which first made Humboldt a household name and was the result of his observations and experience during a year exploring Mexico's landscapes and archives, he first warned that in remaking the landscape, humans were also destroying it.
The impact of bringing artistic and scientific thinking together can be large indeed!