The Invention of Nature

 Wulf

He was also a man of contradictions. He was a fierce critic of colonialism and supported the revolutions in Latin America, yet was chamberlain to two Prussian kings. He admired the United States for their concepts of liberty and equality but never stopped criticizing their failure to abolish slavery. He called himself ‘half an American’, but at the same time compared America to ‘a Cartesian vortex, carrying away and levelling everything to dull monotony’. 

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In the spring of 1790, Forster and Humboldt went to England, the Netherlands and France but the highlight of their journey was London, where everything made Humboldt think of distant countries. He saw the Thames choked with vessels bringing goods from all corners of the globe. Some 15,000 ships entered the port every year loaded with spices from the East Indies, sugar from the West Indies, tea from China, wine from France and timber from Russia. The whole river was a “black forest’ of masts. In between the large trading ships were hundreds of barges, wherries and smaller boats. Undoubtedly crowded and congested, it was also a magnificent portrait of Britain’s imperial might. 

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 They talked about ‘art, nature and the mind' as Goethe wrote in his diary. The ideas they discussed were engaging scientists and thinkers across Europe: the question of how to understand Nature. Broadly speaking, two schools of thought vied for dominance., rationalism and empiricism. Rationalists tended to believe that all knowledge came from reason and rational thought, while, the empiricists argued that one could ‘know’ the world through experience. Empiricists insisted that there was Nothing in the mind that had not come from the senses. Some went so far as to say that at birth the human mind was like a blank piece of paper without any preconceived ideas — and that over a lifetime it filled up with knowledge that came from sensory experience alone. For the sciences this meant that the empiricists always had to test their theories against observations and with experiments, while the rationalists could base a thesis on logic and reason. 

A few years before Humboldt first met Goethe, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant had declared a philosophical revolution that he had boldly claimed was as radical as that of Copernicus some 250 years previously. Kant took 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. Just as Copernicus had concluded that the sun couldn’t be moving around us, so, Kant said, we had to completely change our understanding of how we made sense of nature. 

The dualism between the external and the internal world had preoccupied philosophers for millennia, It was a question that asks: Is the tree that I’m seeing in my garden the idea of that tree or the real tree? For a scientist such as Humboldt who Was trying to understand nature, this was the most important Question. Humans were like citizens of two worlds, occupying 

both the world of the Ding an sich (the thing-in-itself) which Was the external world, and the inter nal world of one’s percep“on (how things ‘appeared’ to individuals), According to Kant the ‘thing-in-itself could never be truly known, while the internal world was always subjective. What Kant brought to the table was the so-called transcendental level: the concept 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 towards 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 forty years, Kant taught this lecture series forty-eight times. In his Physische Geographie, as the series was called, 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 linchpin of Humboldt’s later thinking.