Laura Walls

University of South Carolina

The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and Planet America

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), cosmopolitan explorer, scientist, and prolific writer, was a giant of intellectual and popular culture for most of the nineteenth century, second in fame only to Napoleon. He has been called the founder of modern science, and his studies both enlarged traditional
scientific fields and seeded whole new ones: botany, meteorology, astronomy, geology, geophysics, geography, oceanography, ethnology and anthropology, ecology. His strong visual sense (he had some talent as an artist) led him to introduce now-standard ways of representing data, such as the iso-line
weather map and the vertical elevation showing climate zones. Americans called him their “second Columbus,” “scientific discoverer of the New World,” and bestowed his name on cities, rivers, and parks across North America; the United States’ numerous exploring expeditions across the West relied on Humboldt’s maps and writings, and politicians claimed him as godfather to manifest destiny. Humboldt returned the favor by calling himself “half an American,” for although he visited the United States only briefly in 1804 (on his return from South and Central America, to meet Thomas Jefferson), he identified with the United States’ democratic ideals even as he grew bitter when those ideals were betrayed by America’s defense of slavery. The rise of environmental thinking began with his work, and his was the first powerful voice to argue, based on what he witnessed in Venezuela and Mexico, that colonial exploitation of the environment was destroying both the land and its native peoples.

Coming to America showed Humboldt how to see the world. In turn, by putting America on the global map, Humboldt showed American writers and artists how to place themselves in the sweep of scientific progress, global exploration, and progressive democratic reform, even as he helped turn their
attention to the specific density of being American writers, situating their global imagination in the grounded materialities of home. Washington Irving met Humboldt in Paris and worked with him on the biography of Columbus and the origin of the word “America”; Thoreau wrote Walden as a response to Humboldt’s Cosmos, and launched a new career as a naturalist based on Humboldtian principles; Whitman, “a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,” wrote Leaves of Grass with a copy of Cosmos on his desk; Poe dedicated Eureka to Humboldt; Emerson used Humboldt “to show us the possibilities of the human mind” (his friend Caroline Healey Dall called Emerson “the millionaire of Cosmos.”) Humboldt was transformative for both John Muir and George Perkins Marsh, for he gave these pioneers of environmentalism a vision of nature as a sublime network of mutually interdependent elements with humans as full participants. The American artist Frederic Church was inspired by Humboldt to travel to South America, and his sublime paintings of the tropics are an index to Humboldt’s cosmic vision. Darwin, too, followed his hero Humboldt to South America, and nowhere is Humboldt’s scientific vision of unity in diversity so evident as in Darwin’s profound insights into nature’s ecological complexities, insights that led Darwin to the theory of evolution.

No book has ever fully assessed the role of Humboldtian ideas in American thought and literature. By recalling this key figure from our past, we deepen the foreground of American environmental thinking and greatly extend our understanding of the global dimensions of American intellectual,
cultural and literary history. Hence the goal of this project is not to write a biography of Humboldt, but to write the story of an idea: Cosmos. This was the name Humboldt gave to the book, published in five volumes from 1845-62, that would culminate his long career and that became an international
phenomenon. In recovering the ancient Greek word he sought to designate an idea at the heart of his philosophy: the physical, material universe does exist apart from humanity, but the beauty and order of that universe, the idea of the whole, is a human achievement. The universe exists without us, no doubt, but the Cosmos needs us, for the universe as a Cosmos exists only in the dance of subject and object, mind and world, humans and nature.

In developing this theory that reciprocally incorporates mind and nature, humans and their natural environment, Humboldt created what we now call an environmental discourse. In his social writings, nature was never merely background but played an essential role in the development of human
societies; in his natural writings, the social construction of the idea of nature and the modes of its representation were crucial to understanding natural processes. In letters, conversations, political negotiations, the organization of scientific societies and international scientific research,
and lectures and publications both popular and technical, Humboldt created institutions and practices that expanded on his particular way of thinking about humans and nature. He succeeded spectacularly: Humboldt virtually invented modern international science and seeded so many fields with
productive new ideas that historians of science give his name to this era, the age of “Humboldtian science.” However, the scientific results of his initiating efforts soon overtook him, and by his death in 1859, his pre-disciplinary insistence that the physical and natural sciences, economics,
politics, cultural history, ethnology and aesthetics all be practiced together in an environmental network of interacting discourses was fractured by the rise of specialization and standards of objectivity, and suppressed, particularly in the United States, as useless and old-fashioned.

This makes it all the more necessary to recover Humboldt’s voice and theories today, for before “ecology” and “the environment” could be imagined as part of science, it had to exist as a discourse. It was, in fact, Humboldt’s discourse, and it inspired scientists, explorers, poets, and painters to circulate and reimagine his ideas in works of great beauty and power. We know who a few of them were: Darwin, Emerson, Thoreau, John Charles Frémont, the artist Frederic Church, John Muir and George Perkins Marsh, Franz Boas and many others, all members of the generation who were moved by Humboldt’s words and pictures to imagine a new way of envisioning humans and nature. As we grope today for a language and a methodology by which we can again see science and the humanities as parts of one whole, we may be ready to see, once again, the power and beauty of Humboldt’s Cosmos.