Joachim Noller

 

As if it were mandatory for science to destroy the image-creating power of the imagination

Alexander v. Humboldt and the representation of the totality of Nature

 

Translation: Philip Marston

 

The natural sciences investigate our reality and present the results they generate from doing this, so that they are in fact representations of something of this reality. We might say: each scientific discipline works on shaping one piece of the puzzle. The goal is to complete the picture, and the guessing game as to what the whole picture might show begins as soon as we make the first “moves” to fit together such pieces. This begs the question: who is going to fit the individual pieces together? Who exercises an integrative function in the scientific community? If we look back in history we might find that this function was carried out at times by theologians or philosophers. The other sciences would today vehemently resist such mediators: the sovereignty of specialists must be insisted upon, and yet the community is very far removed from any kind of fraternal concord in this demand: an endless battle rages for the supremacy; claims to formulate the paradigm are asserted (yesterday it was sociology, today the neurosciences), as if any one single, leading science could be responsible for coordinating the others, which in their turn were only required to contribute their tiny piece. And after those have long since been fitted in, then one or the other of the contributors comes along and modifies their position and what it represents, so that the picture is constantly in flux and can find no formal end point. So the players think that they can tell us what the entire reality looks like, each of them from the perspective of his own thinking, but they lack the ability to take an integrative viewpoint. Nearly all of them, however, even if with reservations, do believe that an entire reality exists, and the goal of achieving its representation is common to all. Such representation is part of the intention inherent in science, but it never comes about. The mimetic efforts of our puzzlers remain fragmentary. And while the game goes on and on without reaching a conclusion, we are tempted to think of a mythical analogy, a story with a protagonist by the name of Sisyphus …

But perhaps our metaphor of the jigsaw puzzle is missing the holistic point, since it fails to include essential aspects of the problem. In this, we are in line with scientific method, which also emphasizes certain aspects and suppresses others. We might give as our excuse – the scientific one is not enough for us by itself – that we have only just begun our argumentation.

When Alexander von Humboldt places the “Erkenntniß eines Naturganzen” in the centre of the major work of his late period, Kosmos. Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung (first published in five volumes between 1845 and 1862), and speaks in it of his own contribution to “the striving of mankind to grasp how the forces at work on Earth and in the heavens interact”, it is not – as one is sometimes tempted to suspect – a repudiation of the progressive scientific principles current in his time. The history of this “knowledge of the entirety of the natural world” refers to “the periods which made progress in generalizing men’s perceptions” (K 240[1]), and the onward march of science only makes it possible to come closer to this knowledge. Humboldt is not proposing a radically alternative design for science here, he is obviously painstakingly careful to fit his ideas into the existing state of scientific development. Of particular interest in this context is a passage from a work which foreshadows the description of the world (“Weltbeschreibung”), entitled Ansichten der Natur [2], in which the author quotes from a work on anatomy which describes organic life as follows: “It is the sum total of the cells” – so we read in the essay quoted – which make up “an organism, and the organism is alive as long as the parts are active in the service of the whole”[3]. Humboldt, we may surmise, might have found his paradigm of holistic thinking, and thus his path towards acquiring the knowledge to grasp the totality of things in the organic world here. And this organicist line of argument would not be the first, and certainly not the last, of its kind. But our author is pursuing another line of thought: “The difficulty in attributing the phenomena of life in the organism satisfactorily to the laws of physics and chemistry lies mainly, and almost as in forecasting the meteorological processes occurring in the atmosphere, in the complicated nature of the phenomena, the multiplicity of forces acting simultaneously, as well as in the conditions regulating their action”[4]. This way of thinking seems almost to anticipate the chaos theory: organic nature differs from the anorganic world through its complexity, a difference defined in incremental steps, but not a difference of category. There seems to be no alternative structure of existence, and consequently no alternative way of thinking[5].

The frame of reference is modern science; Humboldt repeatedly emphasizes that his methodology is based on scientific principles, described as being empirical and inductive: “[…] where existence and development only remain subject to direct investigation, where we do not venture to stray from the path of empirical observation and a stringently inductive methodology” (K 39). The urge to understand the plan underlying the world leads “to observing what the empirical world offers us while thinking about it, but not ‘to a view of the world developed through speculation and born out of ideas conceived in a vacuum, not to a universal dogma in isolation from experience’ ” (K 389)[6]. Humboldt does not want to discard the empirical method of generating knowledge, he wants to proceed from the particular to the general, but is not seeking some a priori general proposition which precedes and transcends all experience. As we already said in our analogy of the jigsaw puzzle: the philosopher in his old role, simultaneously hegemon and mediator, is no longer tolerated here. Humboldt nevertheless observes that philosophical generalization is still part of his holistic epistemological task, it is just that it must recognize the primacy of empiricism: “The misuse of intellectual effort or the fact that it sometimes follows erroneous paths does not necessarily justify the assumption, which defames intellectual effort, that the world of thought is by its very nature the realm of fantasy and illusion; as if the overabundant riches of empirical observation gathered over so many centuries were threatened by philosophy as though by a hostile power. It ill behoves the spirit of our times to reject as a baseless hypothesis each and every generalization of conceptions beyond the particular, or any attempt to penetrate further into the linkages connecting natural phenomena based on inductive and analogous thinking” (K 37).

Modern natural science is empirical science. Humboldt holds fast to this principle, even when it leads him into an irresolvable impasse: the knowledge of the totality of nature gained on the basis of empirical investigation should be achievable by adding together all the individual facts ascertained, yet the goal recedes into the infinite distance: “The unfinishable nature of empirical observation, the limitlessness of the domain to be observed, render the task of explaining the mutability of matter in terms of the forces of matter itself indeterminable. What has been perceived is far from exhausting the dimension of what is perceptible” (K 397). The scientist postulates a totality of nature, but he is unable to encompass it within his grasp.

Humboldt is now concerned to relativize the goal of knowledge, but without calling the purpose of such effort into question: “But if the whole is out of our reach, then at least the partial solution to the problem, the striving to understand the phenomena of the world, remains the highest and eternal goal of scientific investigation into nature” (K 36). On the path to the whole lies the knowledge of many interdependencies and linkages, and these constitute the real substance of scientific progress “just as humanity has gradually come over the centuries to a partial insight into the relative dependency between phenomena” (K 39); “the investigation of a partial causal relationship and the gradual increase in general inferences from it” are for Humboldt “the highest goals of cosmic intellectual effort” (K 870), since they are what constitute the factual results of the utopian striving towards the knowledge of the whole. We might conclude from this, in a freely interpreted analogy with Apostle Paul’s words in I Corinthians, 13,9: human knowledge remains only a patchwork, but even this patchwork knowledge is only meaningful if it points the way to “that which is perfect” – or at least more perfect. That which is pointed to cannot perhaps be represented, but it determines the value of the patchwork which is represented. In this sense, Humboldt’s thinking could be described as intelligent fragmentarism[7].

To return to our metaphor of the jigsaw puzzle, the much-travelled explorer and discoverer can shape not only one piece of the puzzle, but in fact several; he may even be able to identify shapes which other players have failed to recognize. And all this while abiding by the rules of the scientific game and using its potentialities to the full, until he reaches the limits imposed by scientific conventions, but not his cognitive limits, not the limits of knowledge per se. There are other “games” which men play in order to further their perceptions, and he now wants to put these at the service of his great idea of the entirety of nature. This is not an alternative programme, but a complementary one. Humboldt refers to the broad anthropological spectrum of all those motives which underpin cognitive processes: “Thus obscure feelings and the chains linking the perceptions of the senses, as well as later the activity of reason which collates them, lead to the realization which runs through all the stages of human acquisition of knowledge that there is a common bond of connectivity rooted in laws and thus eternally valid which binds the living whole of nature together in its embrace” (K 11). The imperative is to include and maximize all forms of realizing knowledge, whatever they might be, available in his age. And here lies the reason why a cultural scholar can still find it profitable to turn to the Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung.

Let us read what Humboldt exhorts us to consider on the very first pages of his essay: “A one-sided approach to the physical sciences, the never-ending accumulation of raw data, were what contributed to creating the preconception, now almost a thing of the past, that scientific knowledge must lead of necessity to a cooling of all feeling, must extinguish the creative power of the imagination and thereby disrupt any enjoyment of nature. Whoever still nurtures this prejudice in the turbulent times we live in fails to recognize, in the midst of the general progress of human learning, the joys of a higher sphere of intelligence, a school of thought which subsumes the diversity into a higher unity and occupies itself by preference with the general and the higher view. In order to enjoy this higher view, the details in the painstakingly researched field of specific forms and phenomena in nature must be pushed into the background and carefully shrouded from view by the very persons who recognized their significance and whose view they widened to see the bigger picture” (K 18). Here we see a vivid faculty of imagination introduced into the discourse - which however does not generate imaginary phantasies, but which provides a countervailing force to resist scientific particularism and advocates the skills to integrate partial knowledge. In order to “penetrate further into the linkages connecting natural phenomena”, we need “the rational faculty which ponders to detect causal relationships” just as much as “the imagination which is indispensable for and spurs us to all discovery and creation” (K 37). Humboldt presses artistic realms of thinking into service here in order to come another step closer to his idea of nature as a whole. But how can the imagination bring light to bear on knowledge about nature? “In order to show the natural world in its full sublime grandeur, we may not linger only on its external appearances; nature must also be represented in the way in which it is reflected in Man’s inner perceptions, how it populates this land of physical myths shrouded in mist with attractive forms thanks to this reflexive faculty, and unfolds in due course the noble seed of representative art” (K 189). The “objective depiction of appearances” must be supplemented by the “reflection of external nature on the intellectual mind in the cosmos, the world of thoughts and feelings” (K 869). Humboldt expresses it even more clearly in another passage: through the “Reflection of an image received through the senses on the inner world of a person, the vortex of his ideas and his feelings” (K 386). The appearances of nature are what stimulate the human mind to spring into action by itself creating images. The creative person generates visual forms in which nature is reflected. This reflection may comprise the reproduction of what the eye sees, but also, and above all, may transform it imaginatively. At any rate Humboldt is convinced that it is in such “reflections” that forces of nature become recognizable which cannot be detected in phenomena simply as an object of observation for the scientist. In the final resort what we are talking about here is the principle of natura naturans, a fertile nature “caught in the act”, in the ongoing process of creation (set over against already created nature, natura naturata). Nature impacts on the human mind and, via this interface (assuming that it is capable of it) expresses something of its inner nature, thus making it recognizable. This field would therefore only become accessible to the scientist via this indirect route.

 

A digression: Heisenberg’s artistic swan-song

 

In 1969 the physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) had published a book under the heading Der Teil und das Ganze - Gespräche im Umkreis der Atomphysik (The Part and the Whole - Talks around atomic physics, published in English as Physics and Beyond - Encounters and Conversations[8]). In the preface he writes

“I wanted to show that science is done by people, and the most wonderful ideas come from dialogue”. It was the author’s intention, he says, “to give even people for whom modern atomic physics is very remote an impression of the thought processes which accompanied the genesis of this science”[9]. Of particular interest in our context is the final complex of conversations dealing with “Elementary particles and Platonic philosophy”: it has as its theme the understanding of elementary particles on the basis of the most recent physical research (the quantum theory etc.). Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker refers to the (limited) feasibility of philosophical (Plato’s theory of ideas) and mathematical explainability, “thinking on such a supremely abstract level”, as Heisenberg comments, “as has never before, at least in physics, been propounded”[10]. Heisenberg’s wife Elisabeth expresses her doubts that the younger generation of scientists was interested in such problems; her impression was that they concern themselves “almost exclusively with the details” as if “the big picture were almost subject to some kind of taboo”[11]. Heisenberg defends his young colleagues, and the transcript of the conversations ends on that note.

The entire book and its reported conversations is now concluded with a Platonic “image”. This is a scene from a visit by Erich von Holst. The reason for this meeting is not his professional expertise as a biologist, but his skill as a viola player and violin maker. Heisenberg’s sons have brought along their instruments and now play together with Holst Beethoven‘s Serenade in D major, “which fairly bubbles with vitality and joyfulness and in which the faith in a central ordering force everywhere prevails over timidity and fatigue”[12]. Thus the author also discusses the “big picture” in this last chapter, the insight into the totality of nature to use Humboldt’s words (and this is where the German title of the book, Der Teil und das Ganze - the Part and the Whole - reveals its true meaning). Heisenberg seems to find in both physics and philosophy tentative explanations which can only be concretely verified in some imagined future. He is satisfied, at least for the moment, with the conceptual associations prompted by the experience of hearing a piece of music. And he speaks here with an assurance which he would never presume to express as a physicist.

A century on after Humboldt, science still struggles to formulate any insight into the totality of nature; it is still an imperative necessity not only to push back the frontiers of science, but also to transgress them. And once again a field most conducive to insight proves to be art, in this case music, which becomes the paradigm for forms of holistic representation in Modernism[13].

 

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Humboldt sees the “Reflection of Nature on the human mind” (see above) as being a visual thing, either in reality or in a metaphorical sense. The latter is realized in a language charged with imagery; it is Humboldt’s primary medium for representing nature. If we wish to allocate it to a genre, he seems to be modelling it on a kind of travelogue with literary ambitions. In places, his language – and not for the first time in Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung – enters the realm of the poetic (which also prompts him to self-critical remarks). He summarizes the core character of his diction in a letter to his friend Karl August Varnhagen von Ense as follows: “To transpose the technical terms into aptly chosen, descriptive words, words which paint a picture. […] The twinkling stars above delight and enthrall us, yet everything in the firmament moves in its circles according to mathematical configurations. The main thing is that the style of expression should always be noble, then the impression of the grandeur of nature does not get lost”[14]. In another letter he tries to explain the success of his Kosmos essay: “It must be due to what people think for themselves when reading it and to the plasticity of our German language, which makes it so easy to evoke visual associations about something, to paint with words”[15]. Painting, in a figurative sense and, alongside that, the abstract language of mathematics as a scientific polarity – one which creates knowledge (wissenschaftliche, Wissen schaffende Polarität): here we have once more the two components, the familiar dualism, which Humboldt uses to deepen the quest for knowledge.

He concedes the greatest gain in knowledge outside science to painting, more precisely to landscape painting. And this enhancement of knowledge seems to him so great because, in Humboldt’s view, it brings us closer to an integrative perception: “The blue of the sky, the configurations taken by the clouds, the scents permeating to the far horizon, the undergrowth bursting with sap, the lustre of the foliage, the contours of the mountains - these are the elements which determine the total impression of a location. It is the task of landscape painting to assimilate all these and to reproduce them in a visual symphony”. He is especially fascinated by the cycloramas or panoramic paintings of the British (Irish) painter Robert Barker[16] (1739-1806). These cycloramas, he believes, could “almost replace going on a walking tour through various climate zones”. These words could be attributed to the impulse of a globetrotter to express his personal thoughts. But a few sentences later he goes even further, expressing his idea in both abstract and concrete terms; Humboldt tells us what the purpose of such panorama scenes (in the sense of their core contribution to our experience) is in the last resort: “The idea of a totality of nature, the perception of a unity and harmonious concordance in the cosmos becomes more vibrant among men the more diverse the means we employ for representing the totality of natural phenomena in vivid images” (K 233 f.). It may seem surprising to read what importance is being attributed to landscape painting in the pursuit of knowledge concerning the totality of nature here. And Humboldt is not alone in this.

 

 

A digression: landscape painting

 

We will now attempt to go back in history, to the epoch of the Late Middle Ages and the early Modern era. We will not try to pretend that we can put ourselves in the place of thinkers in these times, so that we will approach them via a mix of imagination and the cultural memory embodied in works of fiction. We are thinking here of the artistic testimony the people of that era have left us, and so we find ourselves all of a sudden in a virtual museum whose walls are covered with paintings. They date from the fourteenth or fifteenth century. In what way is nature depicted in them? Let us focus on the paintings with a religious theme. There we see a great number of crucifixions, scenes before the Cross. Somewhere on them, rather towards the edge of the painting, there is a plant, perhaps a flower. This plant motif originally had a symbolic meaning, is intended to tell us something about the crucifixion in particular, but above and beyond that, about the Christian message of salvation through it. Over the course of the years, greater and greater care is taken in the accurate depiction of the plant. We can see that the painters have devoted intensive study to observing its form, its structures. We recognize the meticulous reproduction of every detail of its outward appearance. The plant morphs into an object whose symbolic content is still present, as a fading memory, but in which the representation of nature in its reality as perceived by the senses now stands in the foreground.

Let us now imagine another series of pictures (here, too, arranged in more or less chronological order so that they document the transition between the two epochs); these are not crucifixion scenes, but depict the Annunciation. We see the Virgin Mary with the angel. The scene takes place in a chamber, and at the back is a window or a wall opening, and it is on this detail that we shall focus our attention. The horizon thus opens out and we see a landscape; here too, the frame of reference was originally a symbolic one, and here too, the scene eventually takes on a life of its own, as it were, just like the individual natural objects in the crucifixion scenes. Although it only plays a secondary role in its iconographic meaning, the landscape becomes the main focus of the painter’s attention to detail. It is obvious that he spent considerable time on executing this “window”. The representation of the landscape (remember, we are still in our virtual museum imagining a historical succession of paintings) becomes ever more detailed, and little by little every part is depicted with greater realistic accuracy, but at the same time greater expressive power.

The individual plant and the landscape: in iconographic terms this means the juxtaposition between the parts of nature and the totality of nature. The fact that the landscape represents a totality is not easy to understand, seen from the perspective of pre-Modern, but also late Modern, Medieval and our own contemporary thinking. One of the keys to understanding it lies in the empiricism which Humboldt - by no means the first to do so - called for as an axiom of scientific thinking, and which had been transferred to art (and to every activity of the imagination) ever since the Renaissance – just think of Leonardo da Vinci’s theoretical treatises. “The mission of the empirical sciences is never finally accomplished, the abundance of perceptions available to the senses is inexhaustible” (K 35). According to this, empirical experience culminates in perception via the senses (in this way art and science assume an aesthetic dimension in the Modern era[17]). Therefore the resources available to realize this aesthetic/empirical approach must be put into service: what are the capabilities of the relevant sense organ? In the case of the eye, it means fully exploiting the scope of the human field of vision. What emerges are panoramic views, and every landscape is a sort of panorama, since this is the widest possible empirical unit, the maximum “mega-portion” of nature which it is humanly possible to perceive at any given moment. It is the inductive starting point of the most holistic kind from which the knowledge of nature is possible[18].

Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869), a contemporary and correspondence partner of Humboldt, calls landscape painting “the art of creating images of life on Earth” (Erdlebenbildkunst). The empirical totality is formulated here in concrete terms: the landscape is not only something perceived through us observing it, but is Nature, a biosphere, the space and ecology within which all life forms exist, placed in relation to our existence: “Thus it is only by such testimony to the life of humanity that life on Earth and its artistic representation are brought to perfection”; there is a caveat however: “humans and their achievements must appear in the image of life on Earth as determined by nature on Earth”[19] - human beings come into the picture, but not as Homeric heroes shown against a natural backdrop, but as parts of a totality represented by the depiction of a landscape[20].

Such interpretations of the landscape have become obsolete in the twentieth century. Artists who want to achieve an impression of the whole make use of means tending to the abstract, or indeed of completely abstract modes of representation. With this, nature is quasi re-symbolized. “Art does not reproduce what is visible, it makes visible”, writes Paul Klee in 1920 in his Schöpferischen Konfession (Creative Credo). In earlier times things were depicted “which could be seen on Earth, which one liked to look at or would have liked to see. Now the relativity of visible things is made manifest, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is only an isolated example in relation to the totality of the world [..]”[21]. Excerpts taken from nature, delineated fields of vision have been stripped of their power to serve as pointers to the totality of the world. Everyday, aesthetically verified experience is no longer the starting point for artistic representation. Empiricism (not experienced reality, but rather as a paradigmatic function), still called for by Humboldt in the Modern tradition, thus lapses into irrelevance i.e., it can no longer be accepted as the premise of holistic perception.

On the other hand radical questions are being asked about the very meaning of truth, and these do not make an exception for the depiction of nature. The painter and essayist Emilio Tadini, for instance, subscribes to a Nihilistic view of the world which calls the conventional connotations of naturalness into question, but endorses with hindsight the conventionalization of holistic interpretations of the genre of landscape painting: “Even though we often use the word “nature” to refer to the landscape, nature is in reality something quite different, so much more. For nature can be nothing other than the self-creating totality of the universe – of that infinite organism without a subject. Including, for the most part, us. [..] We are always doing our utmost to proclaim the aesthetic value of the landscape. It is a minor religion – with postcards as its saints’ portraits. A minor religion through which we are in reality trying to push the absolute meaninglessness of nature out of our minds”[22].

 

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But to return to Humboldt’s view of landscape painting. In his thinking, this genre fulfils the cognitive or epistemological function of artistic perception in an exemplary fashion. We have here imitation, but also human creativity. It must be stressed in this context that imitation has no pejorative connotation for Humboldt, and indeed fulfils a necessary function in the acquisition of knowledge. Our author is convinced that the recipient of an artistic experience can be given an experience of nature which is a substitute, yes, but no less valuable for that. We have already mentioned this in our example of cycloramas or panoramic paintings: “Cycloramas have a greater effect than stage sets, since the spectator, as if spellbound in a magic circle and removed from all distracting reality, imagines himself to be surrounded by a natural reality outside himself. They leave behind memories which, years later, mingle before the inner eye in a miraculously deceptive way with scenes of nature seen in reality”. (K 233 f.). Humboldt is thus convinced by a kind of illusionism which is taken to an extreme in the various art forms in the nineteenth century. The illusion allows people to have a fully valid experience of nature via the work of art. Humboldt even goes one step further: he, the explorer over half the globe, wants to convey the impression of subtropical and tropical vegetation to his contemporaries in Europe, since he believes that such vegetation is able to make people more truly aware of the magnitude and grandeur of nature than the “Nordic” type. And the medium for this is artistic illustrations. For years, Humboldt searches for artists to accompany him on his journeys with the remit to capture on paper and canvas the vivid impressions and expressions of unfamiliar, exotic landscapes. Here once again we see the illusionistic conviction, and thus the “miraculous” deception becomes a legitimate path to knowledge (whose half-life, when we see how it developed historically, is however very short).

Imitation, then, is meaningful, and yet Humboldt advocates creative freedom, the second step in aesthetics – we might also term it the “overpainting” of the object depicted; he is not only following a longstanding artistic and aesthetic tradition in this, but asserts it out of a firmly held conviction that the mimesis of nature - in the interaction of natura naturata and natura naturans – can only in this way be truly authentic. To quote from Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung: “Landscape painting, which is every bit as little mere imitation, […] has need of a great quantity and diversity of direct perception via the senses, which the mind and sensibility absorb and which they should then, fertilized by means of their own potency, give back to the senses as if it were a freely composed work of art. […] we must distinguish, in landscape painting and in every other field of art, between works which generate in a more limited way an impression through and for the senses and direct observation and those which conjure up something which goes beyond those limits from the deep wells of intuition and the mental power to create an ideal form. The wonderful quality which landscape painting owes to this creative power of the mind, more or less as an impassioned poem inspired by nature […], is, like Man himself with his faculty of imagination, something which is free of the fetters binding it to the earth.” (K 232). In a true perception of nature, it is not merely seen (and registered), but intuited as something actively functioning, as a creative force, one which changes the consciousness of the observer receiving the impression (which is as close to a short definition of the natura naturans principle as makes no difference).

Precisely accurate illustration is regarded in a scientific context as being expedient[23], but it remains a mere accessory to the main purpose, a necessary but limited form of representation. Humboldt is definitely fascinated by the new techniques of reproduction offered by the forerunners of photography, notably the daguerreotype. He is very much in favour of promoting their use and developing them further and has great hopes for the possibility they offer to capture details and particular aspects[24]. The new techniques are only able in a limited way, however, to contribute to reaching the overriding goal, which still retains its validity, of making visible the totality. They have their function, but cannot take the place of painting, of the artistic creation of a form: “Although Humboldt compared the daguerreotype with the finest steel engravings, he nevertheless mistrusted this method with regard to its content, since it only captured the appearance of things in a momentary snapshot of reality. What he wanted to see, on the contrary, was the essence of a thing, filtered and shaped through the eye of the artist”[25]. To be content with the possibilities offered by technical reproduction would mean to lose sight of the goal of acquiring knowledge of the totality of nature. In order to come closer to this goal, however, the researcher points to the epistemological potency of the imagination and the fictional faculty. In Humboldt’s awareness of reality there is a tension between such a meta-level and his efforts to build up a body of scientific documentary evidence, one which he can sustain but never quite succeeds in bringing into harmony. This is also revealed in his relationship to his own writing style: on the one hand he praises the “plasticity of our German language” (see above), on the other he is irritated by his own style (prompted by critical contemporaries): “an unfortunate tendency to all too poetic phrasing”[26]. But what would works such as Ansichten der Natur and above all Kosmos (purely in terms of its length) be without the intermeshing warp and weft of metaphors, the ability to paint things colourfully in their context with words?

 

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The example of Humboldt’s reception shows how difficult broad swathes of the practitioners of cultural theory find it to see differing epistemological approaches, differing paths to the acquisition of knowledge as complementary, parts of a whole, or at least parts of a larger unity. Up till today, our protagonist has still not been forgiven for overstepping certain bounds of (scientific) propriety, it is asserted that he was deficient in the scientific ethos, whereby this criticism rebounds on his accusers: his “cosmos” conception – one of them judges – reveals “a strongly conservative clinging on to the idea and goal of natural science - as opposed to the dynamic, infinite, constantly changing process of acquiring empirical knowledge of nature”[27]. We might well claim that the opposite is true: namely that clinging on to particularistic forms of acquiring empirical knowledge of nature stands in the way of making real gains in knowledge. At any rate Humboldt does not leave the confines of scientific method in a regressive direction. But he denies its claim to a monopoly of knowledge, consistently overstepping its “outer frontiers” – and setting foot on meta-rational terrain. Scientific knowledge – as we have already quoted above - should not “freeze out feeling, or destroy the image-creating power of the imagination” (K 18).

The frame of reference for such thinking is a totality which does not lose itself in the vast expanses of space, a totality which proves itself to be perceptible on a human scale. Humboldt wants to take account of the entire bandwidth of human cognitive possibilities. This does not mean that he advocates the restoration of the ancien régime of natural philosophy, but rather the epistemological mobilization of the human mind in all its facets. It is about activating the totality of empirical thinking without straying into cosmological speculation. When Humboldt speaks about the knowledge of the totality of nature he is setting himself a task in which the maximization of knowledge about the natural world is preceded by the maximization of the epistemological routes to acquiring such knowledge.

Let us stress here: Humboldt’s holistic approach is also an established anthropological fact. In order to verify that the world can in fact be perceived and represented at all, the scientific researcher explores various mimetic operations, different means of grasping overarching correlations; and these means correspond to different vital functions of human life and are deployed in ways which complement each other. But of course this would hardly influence critics to react differently than they did to the cosmos idea: the idea of the deconstruction of the personality would now speak against the discredited idea of a holistic view of nature. Humboldt’s efforts would be likened to trying to prove the existence of ghosts, the hunting of the Snark, pursuing a chimera. The only way to realize a totality of perception would then be ex negativo, in the total loss of empirical perception through the senses.

If we were to discuss Humboldt’s Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung today critically, but in as unbiased a way as possible, certain components – whether scientific or artistic – would undoubtedly be up for correction (and our protagonist would have expected no less). We have another state of scientific knowledge, and our ideas of the relationship between the image of nature and nature itself have changed fundamentally. What would however meet with his unreserved affirmation, and indeed could claim to have greater relevance than in the century before last, is the project to gain knowledge of the totality of nature. In this respect, Humboldt was far ahead of his time. Today as well, the functions of art and science in this quest are complementary.