The five-year research expedition to the South American tropics on which Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) embarked in 1799 laid the foundation for his fame.  In his monumental work Cosmos, Humboldt attempted to describe the entire material world, including the universe.  According to German author and poet Hans Magnus Enzenberger, Alexander von Humboldt has become recommended reading for everyone as a “man for the 21st century.”  Humboldt traveled the Río Negro, the Casiquiare, and the Orinoco in Indian boats and claimed to have set a record in climbing Mount Chimborazo, believed at that time to be the highest mountain on earth.  When the second volume of Humboldt’s Cosmos appeared in 1847, buyers “scrambled” for the book, as Humboldt’s publisher Johann Georg von Cotta remarked. 

Guided by notion of the “unity of nature,” which he understood as “an integrated whole, moved and enlivened by inner forces,” Humboldt viewed natural phenomena as “a network linking all elements, not in a single, linear direction, but as a web-like, entwined fabric.”  He saw the land as a realm of interaction within nature and between man and nature.  “My true and only goal is to examine the interweaving and interacting of all the forces of nature, the influence of inanimate nature on living plant and animal life,” Humboldt wrote six decades before the term ecology was invented.

Research pioneer

Alexander von Humboldt pioneered many new fields of research for generations of scientists.  For example, he created the discipline of plant geography, he recognized the regularity of the drop in temperatures in relation to sea levels, and he invented isotherms – cartographic lines representing locations with equal average annual temperatures.  Today, he is seen as the founder of modern geography, modern climate research, archeology in America, and the science of global cultural comparisons.  What every advanced scientist now embraces as a basic principle, Humboldt masterfully practiced over 200 years ago: transdisciplinary research.  Humboldt took an approach to science, which he called “global physics,” not from the perspective of one single discipline but instead from the view of the broadest range of specializations, and he did so with a certainty and virtuosity never again achieved.

Guiding principle

The global nature of his thinking overcame all geographic and political frontiers.  As early as 1793, Wilhelm von Humboldt had said of his then 24-year-old brother that there was no other who was capable of “linking the study of physical nature with the ethical world and, only then, of actually bringing true harmony to the universe as we know it.” 

Nature and ethics – these two concepts were of fundamental importance in Alexander von Humboldt’s life, as were the ideals of the French Revolution: liberty, fraternity, and equality.  His guiding principle was that “everyone is equally destined for freedom.”  Science and politics were inextricably linked for him.  He saw his researcher role as that of a responsible, politically thinking and acting human being.  Even in his largely scientific texts, he defended human rights, criticized racism and slavery, and called for the equal treatment of all citizens on the basis of law.

It is worthwhile to trace and become inspired by the life of one of “the most unusual natures that ever was,” as Wilhelm von Humboldt once described his brother.  Also remarking on Alexander von Humboldt, the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson once said he was “one of those wonders of the world . . . who appear from time to time, as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind, the force and range of the faculties – a universal man.”

Frank Holl