Alexander von Humboldt: Perceiving the World

Alexander von Humboldt: Perceiving the World provides an interdisciplinary exploration into Humboldt’s approach to seeing and describing the many subjects he pursued. Though remembered primarily as an environmental thinker, Humboldt’s interests were vast and documented not just in his published works, but also in his extensive correspondence with scientists, artists, poets, and philosophers internationally. Perceiving the World covers Humboldt’s perceptions during intercontinental travels and scientific discoveries, as well as how he visualized nature, geography, environments, and diverse cultures, including Indigenous Peoples.

This collection draws heavily on the English translations of Humboldt’s work housed in the Purdue University Archives, which were collected by John Purdue. The book is divided into three parts: Humboldt’s contributions to science since the nineteenth century; his work on nature, climates, environments, and the cosmos; and his lasting cultural impact, including his imaging techniques, modes of visual presentation, and contributions to the arts. Humboldt’s intricate approach to perception still resonates today, as his nuanced and unique way of seeing the world was just as important as what he wrote.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781612498300

Book preview

PREFACE

It is immensely enjoyable to witness how individual students you have taught over the years have become equal colleagues, productive in the profession, wonderfully capable scholars and writers, be it in the same or in related disciplines. The intellectual spark that once motivated you to read and write as a professor reflects suddenly in the glow of their eyes and in the writing of such dear, just a bit younger, excellent colleagues. What a great experience! This book is such a celebration, co-authored and co-edited with such contributions. It gathers a fascinating network of collaborations between professors, students, and merely only professors (since the students have grown!) over the past few years. The book is in a sense a tangible meeting of deeply shared interests, and we thank Purdue University Press for being our host.

Alexander von Humboldt triggered a spark among the writers of this volume that began with classes and individual study projects. It spiraled out into elaborate research. The editors and contributors of this book share a great devotion and interest in the work of Alexander von Humboldt since they all found in this person a kindred spirit with a passion for environmentalism, nature, the sciences, and the arts. We are fascinated with the link that Alexander von Humboldt described as something vital and real for everyone who experiences a personal connection with the cosmos. He refers to it as a spiritual dimension and approaches nature as a kind of art to learn from. What he describes as painting(s) of nature must be explored in communication with scholars, scientists, artists, and people of various cultures and languages across the continents. Six of the ten contributors to this volume were once graduate students of one of the contributors, taking classes with Beate Allert at Purdue University. Now they are well-established scholars at various universities. The research community grows and continues.

By tapping into our network at Purdue, an opportunity arose across the College of Liberal Arts with the Mathematics Department. Moreover, it has been a pleasure to interact at numerous conferences devoted to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies, international Romanticism (ASECS, GSNA, GSA, ICR, SLSA), and to learn together and from one another over the years. Purdue University has become an ideal center for Humboldt scholarship since it houses an archive with documents collected by John Purdue, founder of Purdue University, on this author and is now, as documented in this book, the location where much fruitful research on this author germinated and from where it developed widely. We are fortunate to those archives that still hold documents on Alexander von Humboldt, who once traveled across the United States, met President Jefferson, and was particularly interested in the cultural wealth of Indigenous Peoples and in the State of Indiana. And we are forever grateful to our students, who are curious and open to learning, and to our colleagues to keep motivating our travels and investigations further. Finally, we are very grateful to Justin Race, director of Purdue University Press, and also to Andrea K. Gapsch, Christopher Bannon, and Katherine M. Purple for their help and support in the publication process; the external readers for their peer reviews, which led to important editing of this book manuscript; and the Editorial Board for unanimously accepting it.

INTRODUCTION

THE PRESENT-DAY SIGNIFICANCE OF ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT (1769–1859) can scarcely be overestimated. Our engagement with Humboldt is currently most significant in a time when we must acknowledge how we have wrought enormous changes in the atmosphere, on the land, and in the seas, threatening our very existence through climate change around the world. The environment in which we live is fragile and we must learn to be attentive to it, not only through what we can experience personally, but also through what we can learn about it from the sciences, literatures, and the arts. Alexander von Humboldt cultivated creativity, not only in observing and transmitting data, but also in ways of communicating them to his contemporaries.

Alexander von Humboldt can be regarded as a prototype for any modern person of science. From his early years on, he had an enormous curiosity to see the world beyond the culture in which he grew up. With whatever means he could muster, he decided to travel, to observe, and to experiment on nature, which he then did in different parts of the world, journeying overseas from Spain and Tenerife to the Americas, Mexico, Cuba, then back to Germany and Europe, and later overland to Russia and finally back to Berlin. He discovered innovative ways to record and present his key observations, which were often obtained under adverse circumstances. He and his fellow adventurers encountered wild animals, mosquitoes, uncomfortable temperatures, at times torturous travel circumstances and nearly impossible writing conditions, all of which he nonetheless endured and described vividly with great discipline from more than one perspective and not only by words, but often also via images, charts, or drawings.

Humboldt studied nature in a variety of climates, including the tropics, and spent extensive periods of time on various continents carefully observing nature, people, and their relationships to their environments. His autodidactic energy seemed inexhaustible and he took every opportunity to learn. He was proficient in communicating in various languages. Beyond his native German he was eloquent in French and Spanish, publishing books and essays in both. He immersed himself in studying the various languages of the people he encountered on his journeys. He persistently engaged with various disciplines and used his personal contacts and correspondences to obtain and develop new skills, remained active as a writer and painter, and associated with experts of diverse cultural and intellectual backgrounds from around the world while leaving his own legacy in many publications for future scientists and scholars.

This volume presents Alexander von Humboldt as an important figure in early nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural disciplines, conversant in many fields, especially scientific ones. Initially he found inspiration in Georg Forster’s (1754–1794) description of islands of the South Sea and in the paintings he saw when visiting the house of Warren Hastings in London, namely paintings by William Hodges (1744–1797).¹ Then he was drawn to images, verbal and visual, and tropical plants, soon developing a passion for discovery, research, and experimentation in the sciences, especially in botany, geography, and anthropology. Meanwhile, he grew more knowledgeable in the visual arts, most interested in landscape paintings, etchings, and the technology of cartography. He also developed means to communicate with, and to learn from Indigenous cultures.

In comparison to his brother Wilhelm, who has become well known as founder of Berlin’s Humboldt University and as a philosopher, linguist, and author, it may come as a surprise that the younger of the two, despite his elaborate travels around the globe and a much less desk-bound lifestyle, also found knowledge, time, and energy to write extensively, and in fact published more than ten volumes of completed books (Darmstädter Ausgabe 2018), plus ten volumes of collected essays (Berner Ausgabe 2019), and a massive collection of sketches, diagrams, paintings, and drawings in a variety of editions of his works. We editors and contributors approach Alexander von Humboldt’s work from a variety of disciplines including comparative literature, German and Hispanic literatures and cultural studies, astrophysics, American and English literatures, mathematics, and history. We hope that, through the diversity of viewpoints represented here, we are able to illuminate key issues in Humboldt studies as we find them thought provoking today.

The first part of the book centers on the topic Cultural Impact, studying Humboldt’s influence on culture and discourses among his contemporaries and in subsequent years. In the first chapter, Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo presents his discovery that the founder of Purdue University, John Purdue, held a strong admiration for Alexander von Humboldt and had collected some of his works, now held in the Purdue Special Archives. Quintana-Vallejo traveled to various archives and libraries throughout Indiana to collect information on Humboldt’s cultural impact in the state and how his contemporaries have witnessed his influence in the reception history ever since. This essay reveals that Humboldt had great consequences, not only for American studies and history, but specifically for the State of Indiana and Purdue University. Situating the volume geographically and historically in the State of Indiana, this chapter argues that Humboldt’s work had strong and documented effects on the discourse of antislavery and environmental policy and thought throughout his century, and that its effects are still felt to this day.

The issue of Humboldt’s identity either as an exponent of the Enlightenment, or as a confirmed Romantic, is taken up by Peter Hanns Reill in the volume’s second chapter, "Alexander von Humboldt: Between Enlightenment Vitalism and Romantic Naturphilosophie. Critics have been divided on this question: Susan F. Cannon, who coined the phrase Humboldtian science and tagged Humboldt as the ultimate empiricist, clearly supports the former proposition associating him with Cartesian and Kantian philosophy, whereas others including Mary L. Pratt and Robert J. Richards align Humboldt instead with Romantic trends and thinking along the lines of the philosophical approach by Fichte and Schelling. Reill takes a third path; beginning with an examination of Humboldt’s early tale Life Force or the Rhodian Genius: A Story (1795; Die Lebenskraft oder der rhodische Genius") and his Experiments on the Irritated Muscle and Nerve Fibers: Along with Conjectures Concerning the Chemical Process of Life in the Animal and Vegetable World (2 vols., 1797–1799; Versuche über die gereizte Muskel- und Nervenfaser nebst Vermuthungen über den chemischen Process der Lebens in der Tier- und Pflanzenwelt), Reill shows how Humboldt highly valued analogical thinking and the imagination, two essential ingredients in his manner of performing science. These two intellectual tools are essential for understanding how nature operates; however, they are potentially limitless—for example, they run wild in the work of Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the renowned nineteenth-century evolutionist Charles Darwin. In order to impose limits on these tendencies, Humboldt is compelled to measure phenomena profusely and to conduct extensive experimentation on virtually everything he studies. Thus, empiricism for its own sake is not the point of Humboldt’s fieldwork; rather, he uses his results to limit and contain what imagination and analogy have suggested. On the other hand, Humboldt rejected the essential opposition of forces and principles, the eternal repulsion at the heart of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, and instead promoted what he discovered as cooperation or the congress of forces in nature. Reill concludes that, while Humboldt may not have directly played a role in the development of German biology, as the discipline has been termed, nevertheless he is responsible for the thoughts and practices that became part of its conceptual core, and he has recently undergone a significant revival, celebrating his larger vision of a complex world of interrelated and interconnected natural forces in which humanity was embedded.

Christopher R. Clason argues in the third chapter of this volume that features of Humboldt’s personality, as well as his way of performing scientific investigations, become prototypical for the image of the scientist, as they are interpreted in two works by later Romantic authors. According to Clason, Humboldt left a major impression on Adalbert von Chamisso, a German writer of French national origin, who, while living in the vibrant, Prussian cultural capital of Berlin, authored the 1814 Kunstmärchen Peter Schlemihl’s Marvelous Tale (Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte). The loss of Schlemihl’s shadow to the diabolical Gray Man results in his social rejection and isolation. However, he chances upon a way out of his abject misery by acquiring a pair of Seven-League-Boots, which allow Schlemihl to travel the world and engage in botanical studies as a service to humanity. Chamisso’s friend and literary colleague E. T. A. Hoffmann borrowed the Schlemihl character for a cameo appearance in his New Year’s Eve Adventures (Die Abenteuer der Silvesternacht), continuing and also adding something to the Humboldtian image of the early nineteenth-century scientist.

The fourth chapter of Part I is Andrew Kroninger’s comparative study, linking two Alexanders: Alexander von Humboldt and Alexander Pushkin, who met in 1829 when Humboldt traveled to Siberia. Obviously, the scientist and the Russian poet got on well together; however, what it may have been that connected the two, and what features or approaches to their respective poetic work may have been shared, despite very different circumstances in life, are not nearly so readily apparent. Kroninger detects proto-environmentalist themes particularly in the first volume of Humboldt’s Kosmos and in Pushkin’s The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish (Сказка о рыбаке и рыбке) as a folktale that can be traced back to the Grimms’ collection of fairy tales and to a letter by the painter and poet Philipp Otto Runge. Pushkin’s tale reveals that the endless drive for more, whether knowledge or some other coveted commodity, should be measured in context, so that it does not become the source of egotism but rather something shared for the improvement of society.

The volume’s second part, On Nature and Environment, presents three essays that examine Alexander von Humboldt’s role as one of the first environmentalists. In the fifth chapter of this volume, Melanie Swan addresses what she calls Alexander von Humboldt’s Environmental Holism and elaborates on his approach to science with respect to the three scopic regimes as theorized by Martin Jay: Cartesian perspectivalism, the Baconian, and the baroque. Humboldt can be associated with all three depending on his own various perspectives, with which he experiments in his works. She also links Humboldt with current debates on ekphrasis and pursues the question regarding how the visual can, or sometimes cannot, be made verbal. Humboldt marks an important new interest in diagrams and logical illustrations that do not only rely on words. Swan is especially concerned with describing Humboldt’s intellectual position for contemporary environmental ethics. He emphasized that humans live in the context of their environment, surrounded by plants, animals, and organic matter, entities that connect with them via a web of nature that spans the entire cosmos. Swan builds on the notion on Humboldtian science as it has been developed in recent scholarship by Susan Cannon, Malcolm Nicolson, Aaron Sachs, and others, while she illustrates the far-reaching relevance of Humboldt’s Views of Nature in the context of scientific and environmentalist debates. She links her study on Humboldt and his Holistic Science with larger philosophical debates and especially taking into account the paradigm shifts that are articulated by Michel Foucault.

In the sixth chapter Joseph D. Rockelmann tells the tale of a lonely parrot, which Humboldt describes in his writings. The story is a tragic one and relates the fate of the Atures tribe, which became extinct a short time before Humboldt’s expedition. Before they died off, only the members of their tribe spoke their Aturian language, and their demise meant the death of their language as well. Only their pet, a lonely bird, survived. Of course, parrots are renowned for their longevity, as well as for the ability to imitate the human voice and to repeat what humans have verbalized in their presence. Before their complete extinction, the Atures had taught this parrot various words and phrases in their language; thus, after its benefactors had all died out, the bird lived on as the only speaker of an otherwise extinct language. The remarkable creature became the subject of a poem composed by Humboldt’s friend Professor Ernst Curtius and was published by Humboldt in his Views of Nature. Rockelmann uses this example to attest to Humboldt’s honest appreciation of the Indigenous Peoples he encountered during his expedition to the Americas, and he argues that Humboldt makes his readers aware that cultural and natural habitat, as well as possibly entire species and human communities, may be threatened with extinction, vanishing because of our failure to discharge our environmental responsibilities. More than merely an admonishment of early nineteenth-century colonial society, however, Rockelmann’s chapter illustrates the relevance of Humboldt’s writings in our current era of global warming and environmental crisis.

Niall A. Peach’s study of Humboldt’s exploration of the waterways and rivers, past and future, of New Spain and the transatlantic politics of water constitutes chapter 7. Peach argues that Humboldt shows how water interrupts imperial politics of control in colonized territory, while he examines Humboldt’s writings, particularly those that deal with rivers, from a scientific, ecological, and geopolitical perspective and in the context of contemporary postcolonial and Hispanic studies. It is interesting to see how Humboldt dealt with architects, builders, and constructors, how he conceptualized entire landscapes and discussed them, not only with politicians but people from various walks of life, to explore the effects of canalization. He warned against straightening all the rivers because that impacts the environment fundamentally. The chapter builds on philosophies surrounding the role of water and political agendas. Peach sheds a new light on territorial behavior and important political questions at the time, as well as on aspects of colonialism and nation-building. He shows that water is essential and at the core of the relationship between the people and the empire, it questions who has the say. Peach illustrates that water marks a key topic for environmentalism and serves as the transition to nation-building in nineteenth-century Latin America. Humboldt obviously cared for people above profit and power and actualizes what landscaping could further mean in an era of drought, flooding, or environmental crisis, such as the one of global warming in our own era.

Part Three of the volume is titled Humboldt from Art to Science and Science as Art. The first essay in this section, which is the eighth chapter in our volume, composed by Ralph M. Kaufmann, "Beseelte Natur: Alexander von Humboldt and Data-Driven Paradigm Segues," showcases Humboldt in the context of chemistry, biology, and thermodynamics. Kaufmann documents how Humboldt contributed to the scientific episteme of his time. Humboldt’s exposition of new phenomena, species, and observational data necessitated techniques for the systematic organization of observation, measurement, discovery, and incorporation of knowledge into the current episteme. Humboldt pioneered methods and means for accomplishing this difficult task and he eloquently describes each step of his path between discovering more of nature while acquiring more accurate scientific knowledge, which then, as Kaufmann explains, led to a major paradigm shift in the representation of scientific data and in processing and disseminating a mass of information. Humboldt challenged the previous representational model by integrating new discoveries, for example, of isotherms, into his quest for a more dynamic approach. Humboldt applied his new framework in his Kosmos, which, as Kaufmann argues, can be identified as characteristic for segue-type transitions in organizational, explanatory, and fundamental principles. Humboldt’s inventive energy was driven by a rapid expansion of data at that historical time in science. Our current era may similarly require another paradigm shift and in such a transition we perceive a need to redefine not only what we study, but also how we study it. What tools and methodologies will be available with which we can understand nature? Kaufmann argues that what he calls scientific performance is needed. In this effort, Kaufmann suggests, one could possibly learn much from Humboldt.

In the ninth chapter in this volume, Christina Weiler engages with the dynamic vitality Humboldt perceives not only on earth, but in outer space and the cosmos as a whole. She shows how Humboldt attempts to construct knowledge through analogical thinking and creative imagination regarding the parts of the universe that at the time were technologically out of reach. However, Humboldt had thus far based his work on principles that he considered universal: If we understand how the local and measurable universe operates, we can employ analogical thinking to understand that infinite expanse of the universe beyond our grasp. Nature, both terrestrial and cosmic, evinces principles of unity and harmony in which Humboldt strongly believed, and the great summary of his findings, Kosmos, reflects his strong conviction that natural ecology is both sublime and fragile, both here and in the infinity of space.

In the concluding, tenth essay of the volume, Beate Allert explores Humboldt’s approach to the visual and his translation of images into his writing, while considering his many intricate interactions and correspondences with contemporary artists, including Goethe, Schinkel, Thorwaldsen, Carus, Runge, and Hildebrandt, as his relationships with them and their ideas changed through his lifetime. Unlike many other authors of travel and scientific texts, Humboldt’s writing engages the world around him from a scientific perspective, as well as from an aesthetic one. His concerns on the one hand are those of expanding sense perception and knowledge through measurement and experiment; on the other hand, he seeks to express effectively, through the languages, charts, and images he employs, the connectedness of everything across space and time and to bring awareness to the great beauty and energy he existentially perceives in the natural world. Allert finds that, in the final analysis, the former, based on copious data, instrumentation, and painstaking precision (all virtues of scientific endeavor), nevertheless acquires a secondary dimension, one of equal importance with respect to the latter, which is based on aesthetics, the core of visual art, as engrained in poetic language and images. Allert argues that Alexander von Humboldt’s mode of visualizing his surroundings finds expression in the aletheic gaze (a term adopted from David Michael Levin), a contextually aware approach to seeing without invading or taking possession of the perceived object. Employing a particularly Romantic technique for constructing an aesthetic of nature, Humboldt deploys scaling or multiple leveling to foster several frames of reference, which allow us to perceive relative perspectives, modalities, framing devices, and moods. From painters such as Schinkel and Runge, Humboldt learned the importance of depth, height, and individual focus, which preserve nature’s integrity, reflect on one’s own distance from the object perceived, and evince reverence for the natural world, its multiple meanings, or the distinct characters. Through the trope of veiled nature, he draws attention to the invisible being made visible only gradually. The unveiling of nature often makes use of a programmatic Romantic (Schlegel, Novalis) technique of analogy, one of Humboldt’s most significant epistemological tools, as Reill’s and Weiler’s essays also emphasize elsewhere in this volume.

Finally, Allert, similar to Swan above, makes the case for Humboldt’s reputation as a German Romantic proto-environmentalist. He proposed strategies to contribute to an environmentally aware aesthetics. He situated humans within their ecological milieu and described them in connection with their environments, while he acknowledged the value and integrity of each as equally valid, regardless of their status in a given society. Humboldt’s artworks suggest a spiritual dimension with powerful consequences. He thus initiates a change in how we perceive the world, makes us think about it proactively, encourages us to treasure our Kosmos, and urges us to protect it against fragmentation and decay. In forming an overall image of Humboldt as a historical figure, it is important to evaluate and to appreciate this and the other, perhaps more commonly discussed facets of this explorer, natural historian, artist, and writer.

Alexander von Humboldt’s American expedition resulted in a vast number of measurements, collections, and detailed observations. Such data underpinned Humboldt’s work, which then led to a paradigm change in organizational and explanatory principles. By embracing precise perception, experiment, and description he tried to maintain and record factual truth, while yet also bringing to awareness related potentialities in the same contexts. Humboldt anticipated an advanced, modern, and public image of the scientist and at the same time contributed to comparative literature, culture studies, and discourses on sensory perception and the pathbreaking role of art. Typically, many modern researchers go out into the field as Humboldt did; they conduct science by traveling to the location where the phenomena under study take place, whether in the forests, the ocean, on a mountaintop, or in the middle of a desert. At the turn of the nineteenth century, however, travel for science’s sake was not yet commonplace. This resulted in a somewhat skewed modus operandi of so-called scientific investigation. Furthermore, Humboldt and his work provided a link between naturalists, politicians, intellectuals, artists, and others, supplying them with context that often had been lacking in the scientific discourse of the late eighteenth century; in other words, he invented new framing devices, modes of conceptualizing and means of representing scientific knowledge. As a scientist he explored the geographical locale and environment relative to each person, plant, or animal he was studying, each layer of rock he found interesting in his archaeological study, and he did not readily rely on traditional ways of reporting findings, since they were usually referring only to specimens that had been removed from their natural context and connections. Humboldt was responsible for trying to understand not only the object but also its position, movement, and development within its natural flora or fauna. This is perhaps what made his reputation as the most celebrated scientist² of the early nineteenth century.³ We find it important to highlight that he and his work were often the link between naturalists and politicians. He often provided them with new and important contexts that had most often been lacking in the previous scientific discourses of the late eighteenth century. He attempted to take into account as much information as possible about the contexts and developments of objects, peoples, and places, something which then offered another dimension to so-called scientific research and provided a more culturally attentive, contextually attuned approach.

Humboldt’s awareness of not only what he presented, but also how he presented it, proved instrumental in his effects on the public language of science. While involved with the gathering of data, Humboldt relied on measurements with state-of-the-art instruments and a broad variety of other empirical observations; however, his publications were usually couched in prose that evinced great beauty and aesthetic sophistication. As several of the essays in this volume demonstrate, Humboldt was an Augenmensch, a person for whom vision is a key sensual experience; however, in some of his works he reveals himself to be a precise and careful observer of other kinds of sense perception. For example, his sensual and lush prose in the essay on Das nächtliche Tierleben im Urwald (Nocturnal Animal Life in the Primeval Forest) presents the author’s experiences in sensory-beautiful, auditory language, and provides a new kind of poetic discourse that affords readers aesthetic pleasure as well as supplying them with scientific information.

During their much-celebrated American journey (1799–1804), Humboldt, his colleague Aimé Bonpland, and their small but courageous and faithful entourage of guides and porters were able to traverse a large area of South America. They explored a substantial section of the watershed of the Río Orinoco and followed the Casiquiare Canal to the Río Negro, a tributary of the Amazon, proving that the two systems, Orinoco and Amazon, are linked. Eventually, their explorations took them to the summits of numerous South American volcanoes, where they gathered copious quantities of data, touching on a very broad span of scientific phenomena, from altitude and barometric pressure to botanical and insect habitat. At that time, one mountain, the Chimborazo in the Ecuadorian Andes, was erroneously considered to be the tallest mountain in the world.⁴ It posed one of the most dangerous challenges Humboldt’s party of explorers encountered, and conditions forced them to turn back before achieving the summit. Yet, even though they were not able to complete the goal, the adventure nevertheless made Humboldt the most famous explorer of his time. He was both proud and humble to report that although he had not been on the summit as he had hoped, he could now well imagine what was in the abyss behind the cliff (Schlucht), and he was happy to be alive despite the great efforts to hike this far and to explore this much already. He also commented that it was perhaps more important to look more into the depths of the earth. He defined the new term subterranean meteorology (unterirdische Meteorologie), having also gained experience as a miner, as is well documented in an essay by Michael Strobl titled Unterirdische Atmosphäre und Atmosphärenchemie des Ozeans. Humboldt paid great attention to chemical processes in and above the earth, observed visible and normally hidden processes of organic and inorganic growth, and studied their atmospheric interactions with the geosphere.⁵

Humboldt’s legacy was sustained for many years by his extensive publication activity. Unfortunately, paying for the books he produced ensured that his later years of life would be spent under great financial pressure.⁶ His writings appeared in various languages, since, as we pointed out above, he spoke and wrote fluently in French and Spanish, in addition to his native German; he also could function well in English. His most significant works include his Views of Nature (Ansichten der Natur, 1807), in which he provided his readership several fascinating chapters on South American geology, zoology, and botany, including his important essay Ideas for a Physiognomy of Plants (Ideen zu einer Physiognomik der Gewächse, 1806); his multivolume Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent (Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, 1805–1839), which offer a broad variety of essays of both scientific and political interest; and finally, his massive Kosmos (Cosmos, 1845–1862), an attempt, literally, to comprehend all of the universe in five volumes. Numerous less well-known essays, including an extensive correspondence, fill many other volumes of Alexander von Humboldt’s published works.⁷ He had many interactions with scientists, writers, artists, and politicians, including the astronomer François Arago, his botanist colleague Aimé Bonpland, King Wilhelm III, President Thomas Jefferson, James Cook, Georg Forster, Henriette Herz, Goethe, Carlos IV of Spain, Colombian naturalist José Francisco de Caldas, Martín Sessé y Lacasta, and Simon Bolívar, with whom Humboldt maintained extensive epistolary correspondences.

Perceiving, sight, and the ekphrastic quality of Humboldt’s writing go well beyond the remit of measuring the heights of the mountains or the quality of the soil in the plantations of Spanish America. Changing the way in which we perceive and conceive of the world around us, Humboldt participated in the same rhizomic web-making that he saw in the natural world’s ecologies. The kind of information exchange in which Humboldt participated involved bringing together naturalists and politicians from various corners of Europe, stretching as far as Russia, North, Central, and South America, among other places that the chapters in our collection highlight. Uniting such a diverse group of people with the purpose of increasing that which was knowable and that which could be experienced brought to life the interplay of the human and nonhuman in the creation of the landscapes through which Humboldt traveled and about which he wrote. The individuals with whom Humboldt crossed paths and exchanged letters throughout his time in Spanish America played a pivotal role in the political ecology of the age, which inevitably involved the domestic politics of the various European nations and territories and their respective imperial endeavors.⁸ Humboldt’s expedition occurred during a time of drastic political change in intra- and interimperial relationships. The Haitian Revolution had begun in 1791 and the French and Spanish had joined forces against the British in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) despite battles fought between the two nations over Spain’s imperial possessions.⁹ Shifting imperial interests undergird the late colonial period in Spanish America and mark the beginning of the transition to the formation of independent nation states. In fact, as some of the chapters in this volume and other scholarship on Humboldt note, the intrepid Prussian naturalist did not shy away from commenting on local, colonial, international, and imperial politics. Talking about his work in light of these relationships and the comparative approach he takes in attempting to offer a complete representation of the places and people described, he states:

The possessions of the Spanish King in the Americas surpass in production the far-reaching Russian Reich or Great Britain’s colonies in Asia. I have attempted to represent these striking dissimilarities and differences between the European Motherlands and their colonies in landmass and population together on one plate. […] Such images on their own are capable of prompting serious considerations for those whose job it is to ensure the prosperity and calm of the colonies. Fear of future evils does not have a place amongst the noble motives of human action, but this fear is the most powerful motivation for vigilance for governments as for private citizens or subjects.¹⁰

What is striking about this statement is the allusion to the power of the image in allowing for a complete representation of what there is and what exists, and the underlying fear that the revelation of such information could occasion. Humboldt’s mention of künftige Übel or future evils brings into perspective the interplay and complex placement of his work both within Spanish America, the Spanish Empire, and wider European politics. Just as the works of earlier Spanish naturalists, José Cardenas, Martín Fernández de Enciso, Fernando de Oviedo, among others whose writings on the Americas challenged the principles by which early climate science had been established in Europe, so too did Humboldt’s work. Humboldt’s writings in the transatlantic networks, building on previous European scholarship and working alongside leaders of the Spanish American independence movement, influenced the ways we perceive the world and are valid contributions to concerns that were discussed in colonial and postcolonial, neo-imperial politics. For Latin Americanists and transatlantic scholars, the type of knowledge production that pervades the networks in which Humboldt participated ties colonization and the politics of empire to the so-called invention of the Americas. Moving past a reframing of the discovery of the Americas as the moment of initial colonization, this invention emerges from the narratives told about and the information written on the Americas by its colonizers. This is the history of the Americas, a history that inserted the Americas into a European chronology, conceptualizing the colonial world through a sociocultural, political, economic, and religious discourse, which cast the continent as underdeveloped, but which, in turn, also created modern Europe.

Within the last thirty years scholarship on Eurocentric knowledge production and its relation to the continued creation of the Americas has focused on engaging with the politics of the Spanish Empire and other European nations in the late colonial period, in order to redefine the contours of colonization and the mechanisms by which it functioned. One