Cosmos Volume II
The Cosmos Volume II is the 1847 published second volume of Alexander von Humboldt's work " Cosmos. Draft of a physical description of the world ”. In it, Humboldt rises from the “ circle of objects ” traversed in the first volume into the circle of sensations. He considers “ the reflex of the image received through the external senses on the feeling and the poetic imagination ” of people.
General Introduction
In the preface to his first volume , Humboldt described the main drive for his work as “the endeavor to understand the appearances of physical things in their general context, to understand nature as a whole that is moved and animated by inner forces.” Perhaps it is this endeavor towards a closed wholeness, which also makes the structure of the second volume of his cosmos very rough. The book, which is more than 500 pages long, is divided into two large sections in addition to the table of contents of the first and second volumes at the end:
- A. Stimulants for studying nature. Reflex of the outside world on the imagination (pp. 3–103) and
- B. History of the physical worldview. Main moments of the gradual development and expansion of the concept of the cosmos as a whole of nature. (Pp. 135-400).
Stimulants for studying nature
introduction
In his first volume, Humboldt presented, closely lined up, the main results of the observation of the whole of nature, stripped of the imagination, in the form of a purely objective, scientific description of nature and the world. In the second volume of his cosmos he then removes himself from “the circle of objects” and enters the circle of sensations. His draft of a physical description of the world in this “book of nature” becomes a draft of the description of a physical worldview. In this volume, Humboldt wants to explore the imagination of people, to describe “the source of living intuition, as a means of increasing a pure feeling for nature” and to trace the causes which have such a powerful effect on the love of nature studies and the tendency to travel far. Humboldt generalized three suggestions which, in his own words, sparked his wanderlust and stimulated him to study nature.
“If I were allowed,” he writes in the introduction, “to invoke my own feelings, to ask myself what gave the first impetus to an ineradicable longing for the tropical region, I would have to name: Georg Forster's descriptions of the South Sea islands; Paintings by Hodges depicting the banks of the Ganges in Warren Hastings' house in London; a colossal dragon tree in an old tower of the Botanical Garden near Berlin. "
In this sense, Humboldt distinguishes between three kinds of stimuli for studying nature:
- aesthetic treatment of natural scenes in animated descriptions of the animal and plant world as a very modern branch of literature,
- Landscape painting, especially insofar as it has begun to understand the physiognomy of plants and
- Cultivation of tropical plants and contrasting composition of exotic forms.
The poetic description of nature
The aesthetic treatment of natural scenes, in animated depictions of the animal and plant world, as a feeling for nature according to the diversity of times and tribes
Humboldt traces the history of the description of nature, beginning in ancient Greece, where expressions about the feeling of nature are still very rare because humans are the measure of all things ( Homer , Hesiod et al.). “ A [...] proof of the existence of heavenly powers from the beauty and infinite greatness of the works of creation is very isolated in antiquity. “( Aristotle ). With the Romans, so Humboldt, literary productivity in terms of descriptions of nature was even more economical than with the Greeks. Subjectively evaluating according to his time, he adds: “A nation which, according to the old Siculian custom, was primarily devoted to agriculture and rural life, would have justified other hopes” (descriptions of nature in Lucretius , Virgil , Ovid , Tacitus and Pliny the Elder, etc.) With the birth of Christianity, according to Humboldt, a tendency to describe nature would have come into the world, since Christians wanted to prove the greatness and goodness of the Creator from the beauty of nature ( Basil the Great , Gregorius von Nyssa, etc.). He only briefly addresses the minstrels , animal epics and travelogues of the European Middle Ages and then turns to the Near and Middle East to the description of nature of the Indians, Persians and the "symbolic but clear natural poetry" of the Hebrews, in which monotheism is reflected (the whole of the world as a unit). Back in Europe he speaks of Dante Alighieri , Petrarca , Vittoria Colonna . Christopher Columbus , highly esteemed by Humboldt , is also cited as a descriptor of nature, whose beauty and simplicity in expression, however, according to Humboldt's personal assessment, can only be appreciated by those who are familiar with the ancient power of the language of the time. This is followed by Spanish poetry, the fresh images of Cervantes in contrast to the frosty, tiring shepherd novels, Calderon , Don Alfonso de Ercilla . In considering the English area, he speaks of Milton , Thomson and Shakespeare . The latter almost never had the time or opportunity to depict nature in the urge for moving action, but his hints always brought the landscape to life in the reader's imagination. Although the mass of what is known has increased excessively in modern times, it cannot crush intellectual perception under the material weight of knowledge. Examples of this in France are Buffon , great and serious, Rousseau with greater depth of emotions and a fresher spirit of life, Bernardin de St. Pierre , Chateaubriand . For Germany he names the soulful Ewald Christian von Kleist , Hagedorn , Salomon Gessner , as well as travelogues by Paul Fleming and, of course, Georg Forster , who shows with his work that descriptions of nature can be sharply delimited and scientifically accurate, “without giving them an invigorating breath remains withdrawn from the imagination ”.
Landscape painting
Graphic representation of the physiognomy of the plants
Humboldt proceeds in a similar way with landscape painting. It shows the different ways of dealing with landscape painting in the course of history. Beginning in antiquity, where landscape painting could just as little as poetic description be an object of art in itself ( Philostratus , Herculaneum , Pompeii ), he finally reached the beginning of the Middle Ages via traces of landscape painting in India and Christian painting under Constantine in the 17th century, "the brilliant epoch of landscape painting" ( Ruysdael , Gaspard and Nicolaus Poussin , Everdingen and others).
With the later striving for the natural truth of the vegetation forms and the depictions of the tropical vegetation (e.g. Franz Post ), he arrives at the present and predicts that with the increasing development of cultures, landscape painting will also acquire a new impetus and a great character. “ The concept of a natural whole, the feeling of harmonious unity in the cosmos, will become all the more lively among people as the means multiply to shape the entirety of natural phenomena into vivid images. "
Cultivation of exotic plants.
Contrasting arrangement of plant shapes
Here Humboldt begins with landscape gardening, the early parks in central and southern Asia, and then comes primarily to speak of the Chinese gardens under the Han dynasty and the Chinese garden reports from the 11th century. He also considers the influence of the connection between Buddhist monastic institutions on the spread of beautiful and characteristic plant forms.
History of the physical worldview
introduction
Disambiguation
For Humboldt, the history of the physical world view is just as little the entire cultural history of humanity as the history of the natural sciences, but the history of knowledge, the gradual conception of the concept of the interaction of forces in a natural whole. The history of the physical worldview is thus the path to knowledge of what Humboldt describes in the first volume of his Kosmos. He does not consider this path with the often recurring fluctuations between truth and error, but restricts himself to the main moments of the gradual approach to the truth, from an early foreboding fantasy to real knowledge.
The origin of striving for the cosmos
“ History knows no primitive people, not a single first seat of culture, no primordial physics or natural wisdom whose splendor would have been darkened by the sinful barbarism of later centuries. “In Humboldt's opinion, all genders and peoples have made their own contribution to the history of the physical worldview through the conscious or unconscious promotion of the most diverse areas of knowledge. He rejects the idea of a source.
Tools for the development of the physical worldview
The rational tools of the evolving theory of the cosmos were and are, in Humboldt's opinion, extremely diverse. The most important, however, would be the exploration of the linguistic area, the deciphering of old scripts and historical monuments in hieroglyphics and cuneiform script, and the perfection of mathematics, especially the mighty analytical calculus that dominates the shape of the earth, the sea and the sky.
Requirements for the knowledge of the world as a whole
- World events that suddenly broadened the horizon of observation or given natural conditions that promoted the expansion of people's circle of ideas (such as the geological nature, warming of countries depending on the relative location). For example, right at the beginning of his description, Humboldt made the observation that although Europe was expanding in its shape from southwest to northeast, it would be repeatedly traversed by cracks and elevations that were almost quite real (Red Sea, lowlands with the double currents of the Euphrates and Tigris, Adriatic , Aegean Sea etc.). He attributes it to tremors from the interior of the earth and claims that it was precisely the crossing of the two systems through the facilitation of international traffic that had a central influence on the fate of humanity.
- The invention of new medium-sensory perception, as it were, the invention of new organs, which bring man into closer contact with earthly objects as well as with the most distant world spaces, which sharpen and multiply observation ( e.g. compass, barometer and thermometer, hydrometric and electrometric apparatus, telegraph and above all binoculars, which, according to Humboldt, made it possible to explore the macrocosm and, as a microscope, that of the microcosm).
- The independent striving of reason for knowledge of natural laws, that is, a thinking consideration of natural phenomena .
Content of the history of the physical worldview
Humboldt traces the history of human knowledge of the world as a whole in eight steps.
The Mediterranean as a starting point
The Mediterranean Sea as the starting point for attempts at distant shipping to the northeast ( Argonauts ), south ( Ophir ), west (Phoenicians and Colaeus of Samos). Alignment of this representation with the earliest culture of the peoples who lived around the basin of the Mediterranean Sea.
After considering the general and geographical conditions around the Mediterranean Sea, Humboldt begins the history of the physical worldview with Egypt . This great, powerful and old empire had done less than other much-moved smaller tribes because of the continually necessary preoccupation with matters of internal order, for the expansion of cosmic views.
For example the Phoenicians with their large nautical ventures, e.g. B. the legendary sailing around the Cape of Good Hope under Neku II in the 6th century BC. Humboldt said they were the first to move west. According to Humboldt, they were the first to venture out onto the Atlantic Ocean, which they still believed to be a Mare tenebrosum, a “muddy, shallow, misty sea of darkness”. On their way to the western edge of the earth, directly to Elysium, the Phoenicians would have penetrated the Canary Islands and the Azores and would have partially colonized them. Above all, however, her contribution to the expansion of the physical worldview consists in her work as an active mediator of the international connections around the Mediterranean. As a bold trading people, they would have worked on the enrichment and diversity of world views, the coin as a medium of exchange and the letter writing spread.
Not as an intermediary like the Phoenicians and the geographical horizon cited by Humboldt next were less conducive to Tusker . They too did trade, namely a not inconsiderable land trade through northern Italy, but primarily as inquiring naturalists ( Diodorus ) they became immortal. According to Humboldt, they mainly made observations of the meteorological processes in the air, researched lightning and created official registers of thunderstorm observations.
The “peculiar charm of the Greek landscape in its amalgamation of solid and liquid” , Humboldt then suspects, prompted the Greeks to take up shipping and trade early on. For him it is clear that no people in the world founded more numerous and, for the most part, more powerful daughter cities than the Hellenes . The small Hellenic motherland stepped into broad circles of life of other peoples and absorbed foreign elements without losing its own identity and thus created a wide realm of ideas and types of art. It must be viewed critically here that Humboldt, guided by his modern thinking, always starts from a nation of Hellenes in the sense of a modern state, which of course never existed in ancient Greece.
The campaigns of Alexander the great
Campaigns of the Macedonians under Alexander the Great. Merging the East with the West. Hellenism promoted the mixing of peoples from the Nile to the Euphrates, the Jaxartes and Indus. Sudden expansion of the world view through one's own observations as well as through the intercourse with old, cultivated industrial peoples.
“In no other epoch (with the exception of the incident eighteen and a half centuries later, the discovery and opening up of tropical America) is a part of the human race suddenly a richer abundance of new views of nature, a greater material for the establishment of the physical knowledge of the earth and the comparative ethnological study has been presented. "
With these words, Humboldt begins his euphoric report on the merits of the Macedonians under the leadership of Alexander the Great . It was through him, he continues, that the knowledge of a large part of the earth was truly opened up. News of Indian products and artifacts was secured and disseminated through Macedonian settlements. The Hellenes' insight into subtropical nature triggered an otherwise alien enthusiasm in them. For example, they were amazed to report huge trees with leaves as big as the shields of the infantry. Humboldt even goes so far as to describe Alexander's conquests, " the Macedonian expedition which opened up a large and beautiful part of the world to the influence of a single and also a [...] highly educated people ", as a scientific expedition. After all, it was the first in which a conqueror surrounded himself with scholars from all fields of knowledge: with naturalists, surveyors, historians, philosophers and artists.
The expansion of the physical worldview by the Macedonians led to the overthrow of paradigms. For example with regard to the influence of the atmosphere on the color of people. “The god [the sun]”, it was believed earlier, “colors the skin of man with the soot's dark sheen and curls his hair as it dries up”. However, the Indians who lived on at sunrise had straight hair.
The Ptolemies
Increase in worldview among the Lagids [ Ptolemies ]. Museum in the Serapeum. Encyclopedic scholarship. Generalization of the views of nature in the earth and sky. Increased sea trade to the south.
“The Ptolemaic epoch with its peculiar character then turned,” Humboldt opens the third section of his story, “after many centuries - until the appearance of Aristotle - the natural phenomena were beyond any sharp observation, in their interpretation the sole rule of ideas, yes Had fallen victim to arbitrariness of dull premonitions and changeable hypotheses, finally to respect empirical knowledge again. "
During this epoch from the 3rd to the 1st century BC Advances above all in the exact sciences, mathematics, mechanics and astronomy, knowledge that would not have been lost even in dark centuries and would not have let the healthy scientific intellectual power die. For Humboldt, the Ptolemaic era is also to be praised as the time of the Greek schools of philosophy and the Alexandrian library , the time when Eratosthenes of Cyrene created a systematic universal geography and attempted to measure the earth for the first time . New inventions, such as the hydraulic clock of Ktesibius , gradually helped man to gain a more precise knowledge of the movements of the planetary systems.
The time of the Ptolemies was the “most brilliant in the assessment of mathematical knowledge” only the “knowledge of the absolute size, shape, mass and physical structure of the celestial bodies” made no progress for thousands of years.
The Roman world domination
Roman world domination. Influence of a large state association on cosmic views, advances in geography through land trade. The emergence of Christianity creates and favors the feeling of unity of the human race.
“From the western end of Europe to the Euphrates, from Britain and a part of Caledonia to Gätulia and to the border of the desert Libya, there was not only the greatest variety of soil design, organic products and physical phenomena, the human race was also there in all degrees Culture and wilderness, in possession of ancient knowledge and long-practiced arts, like in the first twilight of intellectual awakening. "
For Humboldt, the numerous and long expeditions during the era of Roman world domination are of course worth mentioning . Particularly noteworthy is the appearance of Roman legates at the Chinese court (in the 2nd century). But he deeply regrets that “in this long period of undivided Roman world domination, in almost four centuries [...] only Dioscorides the Cicilians [botanists and others ] were observers of nature . Botanist] and Galen of Pergamum [observers of fauna and flora, in this area with Aristotle almost equal footing (after Cuvier )] "occurred. In addition to Ptolemy, of course, whom he praises primarily because of his findings in optics and his universal geography, not because of the geocentric view of the world , which is designed in the latter, but because of the representation of the world both graphically and numerically.
Humboldt Strabo , who already assumed around the birth of Christ, cites as foresightful and far-sighted , “that in the northern hemisphere, perhaps in the parallel circle that goes through the columns [of Hercules], between the coasts of western Europe and eastern Asia there are several others inhabited land masses could be. "
For organic natural history, Humboldt mentions the anatomist Marinus and only the "Affenzergliederer Rufus von Ephesus ", which differentiates between sensory and movement nerves . For him, who lived in an age when dissecting and experimenting with the bodies of various animal species was a widespread fashion, it is also incomprehensible "how the myriad of rare animals that were murdered in the Roman circus for four centuries (elephants, rhinos, Hippos, elks, lions, tigers, panthers, crocodiles and ostriches), for which comparative anatomy was so completely unused ” .
Furthermore, in the fourth section of his history of the physical worldview, Humboldt goes into the great undertaking of Pliny the Elder , who sought to create a description of the world in 37 books. In the whole of antiquity, so Humboldt, nothing similar had been attempted. But despite the uniqueness of the company, he judges harshly. The work lacks "internal connections between the parts of the whole", Pliny 's style possesses "more spirit and life than actual size [and is] seldom painterly indicative", probably because the direct impressions were missing (his own direct impressions, from his Humboldt describes travel as very beneficial for his company in the preface to the first volume of Kosmos). In itself, however, it is quite evident in Pliny " that the ingenious man had a single big picture in mind ". In any case, the experiment is a draft of a physical description of the world.
At the end of the section, Humboldt writes: “In the end, in the description of a great world historical epoch, that of the rule of the Romans, their legislation and the emergence of Christianity, it must be remembered above all how it expanded the views of the human race and created a mild, has had a long-lasting, albeit slow-acting influence on intelligence and morality; only the spread of Christianity coined the concept of the unity of the human race. "
Burglary of the Arab tribe
Burglary of the Arab tribe. Spiritual plasticity of this part of the Semitic peoples. Tendency to interact with nature and its forces. Pharmacy and Chemistry. Expansion of physical geography, astronomy, and the mathematical sciences in general.
Humboldt sees the Arabs as the real founders of the physical sciences as a sculptural, noble human tribe who lived for a long time enjoying the great outdoors and retained a fresher sense of every kind of view of nature. Humboldt sees the peculiarity in their work in the fact that, after simply observing nature, they turned to exploration, but then also to fathoming and finally to experimentation. From pharmacy and materia medicia, their knowledge fed by the influences of India Hellas and the Christian Nestorians , they derived on the one hand the study of botany and on the other hand that of chemistry. They also made important discoveries in algebra and astronomy, optics, physical geography, thermodynamics and the like. Theory of magnetism. Humboldt names Avicenna , Averroes , Serapion from Syria and Ebn-Junius as the most important representatives of the Arab expansion of the cosmos .
The great world-historical merit of the Arabs was that, with their attacks to the west, they "partially scared away the barbarism that has covered Europe, which has been shaken by the storms of nations for two centuries."
The 15th and 16th centuries
Time of great oceanic discoveries. Opening of the Western Hemisphere. America and the calm sea. the Scandinavians, Columbus, Cabot, and Gama; Cabrillo , Mendana and Quiros . the richest abundance of material to substantiate the physical description of the earth is offered to the western peoples of Europe.
“The 15th century is one of those rare epochs in which all intellectual endeavors indicate a specific and common character, which reveal unalterable movement according to a given line. the unity of this striving, the success that crowned it, the active energy of whole masses of people give the age of Columbus, Sebastian Cabot and Gama greatness and lasting splendor. In the midst of two different stages of human education, the 15th century is, as it were, an epoch of transition that belongs to both the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times. It is the epoch of the greatest discoveries in space, of those that encompass almost all latitudes and all heights of the earth's surface. If it doubled the works of creation for the inhabitants of Europe, it also offered the intelligence new and powerful means of stimulation to perfect the natural sciences in their physical and mathematical parts. "
Of course, Humboldt does not forget that the Norwegian Leif Eriksson came to the North American coast via Iceland and Greenland in the 11th century and intended to settle there because of the pleasantly mild climate (at least 11 ° C). But this discovery had no world-historical consequences. According to Humboldt, the Scandinavians did not have the scientific knowledge to research the new country. Therefore, for him it was only the rediscovery of the continent by Christopher Columbus that was considered to be influential in the expansion of the physical worldview. A fact that, writes Humboldt, does not change if you consider that Columbus and Vespucci died knowing that they had discovered large parts of East Asia. "A strange age in which a mixture of testimonies from Aristotle and Averoes, Esra and Seneca about the small extent of the seas in comparison with that of the continental masses could give the monarch the conviction of the safety of a costly enterprise." Columbus, for example, followed suit a nautical chart by the Florentine Toscanelli in which it was recorded that Japan must be about 216 nautical miles from the Hercules Columns.
Humboldt names Roger Bacon and Vincenz von Beauvais among the great men who prepared the epoch of Columbus ; in addition, Albert the Great must be mentioned as a self-observer in the field of decomposing chemistry.
Humboldt's praise for the 15th century seems limitless. “ Where does the history of the peoples have an epoch to point to, the one in which the most momentous events: the discovery and first colonization of America, the navigation to the East Indies around the promontory of good hope and Magelheans ' first circumnavigation, with the highest flowering of art [see: Renaissance ] , with the achievement of spiritual, religious freedom [see: Reformation ] and the sudden expansion of geography and celestial science? Because even before Luther published his theses, "says Humboldt," the most splendid forms of ancient Hellenic art emerged from their graves: the Laocoon , the torso [...] and the Medicean Venus. Michelangelo , Leonardo da Vinci , Titian and Raffael flourished in Italy , and Holbein and Albrecht Dürer in our German fatherland . The world order was discovered by Copernicus , if not publicly proclaimed, in the year of Christopher Columbus's death, fourteen years after the discovery of the new continent. "
But in passing, he also mentions the dark side of the epoch: “ As in all earthly things, here too, happiness is related to deep woe. the advances in cosmic knowledge were bought at the cost of all the violence and atrocities which the so-called civilized conquerors spread across the globe. "
17th century
Time of the great discoveries in the heavens through the use of the telescope. Main epoch of astronomy and mathematics from Galileo and Kepler to Newton and Leibniz.
For Humboldt, there was an intimate ideological chain between the 16th and 17th centuries. He explains that the expanded astronomical world view in the latter would not have been possible and could not have been described without the suggestions from the former. What, as the most important invention of the 17th century, paved the way for expanding the idea of the whole of the world into the heavens was the invention of binoculars explained above . Copernicus never set up his world system as a hypothesis, but as an irrefutable truth, which could now be at least partially proven empirically. The sighting of the small world of Jupiter, for example, spoke decisively against the uniqueness of the earth with its satellite, on which Galileo also made out mountain landscapes with the help of the telescope. The moons of Jupiter and their rotation around the planet spoke against the old paradigm of the fixed stars on the crystalline celestial shells, as the moons should have penetrated them with each orbit. The discovery of the crescent shape of Venus put the sun at the center of the universe (also discovery of the swarms of stars and the Milky Way, tri-shape of Saturn, sunspots, etc.). Kepler's great discovery of the elliptical orbit of the planets around the sun finally freed the Copernican system from the “eccentric circles and epicyclics”. “ Even if the 17th century, ” says Humboldt, “ owes its main brilliance to the sudden expansion of the knowledge of heavenly spaces by Galileo and Kepler, and at the end to the advances in pure mathematical knowledge by Newton and Leibniz , then in During this great period the most important part of the physical problems in the processes of light, warmth, and magnetism received fruitful care. “Humboldt mentions, for example, the discovery of double refraction and polarization , then approaches to the knowledge of the interference in Grimaldi and Hooke , the separation between magnetism and electricity, Halley's assumption that auroras are magnetic phenomena, Torricelli's tube and height measurement, ideas Via a spirit nitro-aereus , a basic material of the air cycle, the various degree measurements, etc.
Humboldt's presence
Versatility and closer interlinking of the scientific endeavors in recent times. The history of the physical worldview is gradually merging with the history of the cosmos.
Humboldt closes his second volume on the cosmos, in which he expresses the conviction that man's conquered possession of the world is only a very insignificant part of what free humanity will achieve in the centuries to come, with progressive activity and common training. “ Everything researched is only a step to something higher in the fateful course of things. “For him, progress in knowledge in the 19th century is the successful endeavor not to restrict the view to what is new, but rather to“ strictly examine everything that has been touched earlier, according to measure and weight, all parts of knowledge, physical astronomy as well as studies to subject the earthly forces of nature, geology and antiquity to a critical method and to make the limits of the individual sciences recognizable. "
“ The closed electrical current carries thoughts and will into the furthest distances faster than the light. Forces, whose quiet activity in elemental nature, as in the delicate cells of organic tissue, still escapes our senses, are recognized, used, awakened to higher activity, one day join the incalculable series of means which the mastery of the individual " Bringing closer natural areas and the more vivid knowledge of the world as a whole. "" From now on, intelligence produces great things, almost without external stimulus, through its own inner power in all directions. The history of the physical sciences thus gradually melts together with the history of the idea of a natural whole . "
Critical consideration of the "cosmos"
In his second volume on the cosmos, Humboldt praised the travel descriptions of his friend and role model Georg Forster for the fact that his work proves that descriptions of nature can be sharply delimited and scientifically accurate, “ without depriving them of the invigorating breath of imagination. "
This is a claim that Humboldt also made for his cosmos. When reading it, you can clearly feel how he tries “to show that a certain thoroughness in the treatment of the individual facts does not necessarily require colorlessness in the presentation.” The more poetic than scientific presentation of some objects is therefore more critical because it is more subjective Euphoria or rejection. For example, the sections of the story that concern his personal favorites Alexander the Great and Christopher Columbus (an analysis by Dr. Gentz-Werner really shows that Humboldt cited these two most frequently, besides himself), are correspondingly long full of praise from Humboldt and his time. In contrast to this, he only touches upon the "dark age" of the European Middle Ages for him and his contemporaries. Both in the description of the stimulants of nature and in the history of the physical worldview, he understands how to skilfully bypass this epoch by jumping into the Near and Middle East and the time between the ancient and admired epoch in the 19th century above all others to fill their rebirth (Renaissance in the 15th century) with the representation of Indian and Arab achievements. His approach of describing the history of the physical worldview in a kind of optimism for progress with virtually no stagnation or regression should also be viewed critically.
Humboldt shows himself here as a person of his time. A time before historicism , when Leopold von Ranke, with the principle of individuality and the declamation of the intrinsic value of each epoch, made a claim to objectivity to scientists (consider that at the end of the 19th century the historian Theodor Mommsen was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his “Roman History” was honored).
Humboldt's sometimes quite popular scientific spelling, scarce data, but rich in anecdotes, undoubtedly contributed not a little to the extraordinary success of the work, in addition to the popularity of the author, and still makes up a significant part of his reading enjoyment today. The enjoyment of reading a literary work from the 19th century, of course, not a universally valid draft of a physical description of the world. Humboldt's Kosmos is a work that today is characterized less by its scientific knowledge than by its enormous source and entertainment value.
bibliography
- Petra Gentz-Werner: Heaven and Earth. Alexander von Humboldt and his Kosmos , Akad. Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-05-004025-4
- Alexander von Humboldt: Cosmos. Draft of a physical description of the world . Vol. 2, Stuttgart / Tübingen 1847. Digitized and full text in the German text archive
- Fritz Kraus (Ed.): Cosmos and Humanity. A selection of Alexander von Humboldt's work . Schünemann, Bremen 1961.
- Bernhard Sticker: Humboldt's cosmos. The real and the ideal world . Speech on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the death of Alexander von Humboldt on May 6, 1959, Bonn 1959.
Web links
- Alexander von Humboldt: Cosmos. Second volume in the Gutenberg-DE project ( archive version )