The Invention of Nature (6 page)

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 Königsberg (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.

There was no avoiding these ideas in Jena – everybody was talking about them – with one British visitor remarking that the small town was the ‘most fashionable seat of the new philosophy’. Goethe admired Kant and had read all his works and Wilhelm was so fascinated that Alexander worried his brother would ‘study himself to death’ over the Critique of Pure Reason. One of Kant’s pupils, who was teaching at Jena University, told Schiller that within the next century Kant would be as famous as Jesus Christ.

What interested those in the Jena circle most was this relationship between the internal and the external world. Ultimately it led to the question: How is knowledge possible? During the Enlightenment the internal and the external world had been regarded as two entirely separate entities, but later English Romantics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and American Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson would declare that man had once been one with nature – during a long vanished Golden Age. It was this lost unity that they strove to restore, insisting that the only way to do so was through art, poetry and emotions. According to the Romantics, nature could only be understood by turning inwards.

Humboldt was immersed in Kant’s theories and would later keep a bust of the philosopher in his study, calling him a great philosopher. Half a century later, he would still say that the external world only existed in so far as we perceived it ‘within ourselves’. As it was shaped inside the mind, so did it shape our understanding of nature. The external world, ideas and feelings ‘melt into each other’, Humboldt would write.

Goethe was also grappling with these ideas of the Self and nature, of the subjective and the objective, of science and imagination. He had developed, for example, a colour theory in which he discussed how colour was perceived – a concept in which the role of the eye had become central because it brought the outer world into the inner. Goethe insisted that objective truth could only be attained by combining subjective experiences (through the perception of the eye, for example) with the observer’s power of reasoning. ‘The senses do not deceive,’ Goethe declared, ‘it is judgement that deceives.’

This growing emphasis on subjectivity began radically to change Humboldt’s thinking. It was the time in Jena that moved him from purely empirical research towards his own interpretation of nature – a concept that brought together exact scientific data with an emotional response to what he was seeing. Humboldt had long believed in the importance of close observation and of rigorous measurements – firmly embracing Enlightenment methods – but now he also began to appreciate individual perception and subjectivity. Only a few years previously, he had admitted that ‘vivid phantasy confuses me’, but now he came to believe that imagination was as necessary as rational thought in order to understand the natural world. ‘Nature must be experienced through feeling,’ Humboldt wrote to Goethe, insisting that those who wanted to describe the world by simply classifying plants, animals and rocks ‘will never get close to it’.

It was also around this time that both read Erasmus Darwin’s popular poem Loves of the Plants. The grandfather of Charles Darwin, Erasmus was a physician, inventor and scientist who in his poem had turned the Linnaean sexual classification system of plants into verses crowded with lovesick violets, jealous cowslips and blushing roses. Populated by horned snails, fluttering leaves, silver moonlight and lovemaking on ‘moss-embroider’d beds’, Loves of the Plants had become the most talked-about poem in England.

Four decades later, Humboldt would write to Charles Darwin how much he had admired his grandfather for proving that a mutual admiration for nature and imagination was ‘powerful and productive’. Goethe was not quite as impressed. He liked the idea of the poem but found its execution too pedantic and rambling, commenting to Schiller that the verses lacked any trace of ‘poetic feeling’.

Goethe believed in the marriage of art and science, and his reawakened fascination with science did not – as Schiller had feared – remove him from his art. For too long poetry and science had been regarded as the ‘greatest antagonists’, Goethe said, but now he began to infuse his literary work with science. In Faust, Goethe’s most famous play, the drama’s main protagonist, the restless scholar Heinrich Faust, makes a pact with the devil, Mephistopheles, in exchange for infinite knowledge. Published in two separate parts as Faust I and Faust II in 1808 and 1832, Goethe wrote Faust in bursts of activity that often coincided with Humboldt’s visits. Faust, like Humboldt, was driven by a relentless striving for knowledge, by a ‘feverish unrest’, as he declares in the play’s first scene. At the time when he was working on Faust, Goethe said about Humboldt: ‘I’ve never known anyone who combined such a deliberately channelled activity with such plurality of the mind’ – words that might have described Faust. Both Faust and Humboldt believed that ferocious activity and enquiry brought understanding – and both found strength in the natural world and believed in the unity of nature. Like Humboldt, Faust was trying to discover ‘all Nature’s hidden powers’. When Faust declares his ambition in the first scene, ‘That I may detect the inmost force / Which binds the world, and guides its course’, it could have been Humboldt speaking. That something of Humboldt was in Goethe’s Faust – or something of Faust in Humboldt – was obvious to many; so much so that people commented on the resemblance when the play was finally published in 1808.2

There were other examples of Goethe’s fusion of art and science. For his poem ‘Metamorphosis of Plants’, he translated his earlier essay about the urform of plants into poetry. And for Elective Affinities, a novel about marriage and love, he chose a contemporary scientific term as a title that described the tendency of certain chemical elements to combine. Because of this inherent ‘affinity’ of the chemicals actively to bond with another, this was also an important theory within the circle of scientists who discussed the vital force of matter. The French scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace, for example, whom Humboldt greatly admired, explained that ‘all chemical combinations are the result of attractive forces’. Laplace saw this as nothing less than the key to the universe. Goethe used the properties of these chemical bonds to evoke relationships and changing passions between the four protagonists in the novel. This was chemistry translated into literature. Nature, science and imagination were moving ever closer.

Or as Faust says, knowledge could not be wrenched from nature by observation, instrument or experiment alone:

We snatch in vain at Nature’s veil,

She is mysterious in broad daylight,

No screws or levers can compel her to reveal

The secrets she has hidden from our sight.

Goethe’s descriptions of nature in his plays, novels and poems were as truthful, Humboldt believed, as the discoveries of the best scientists. He would never forget that Goethe encouraged him to combine nature and art, facts and imagination. And it was this new emphasis on subjectivity that allowed Humboldt to link the previous mechanistic view of nature as promulgated by scientists such as Leibnitz, Descartes or Newton with the poetry of the Romantics. Humboldt would thus become the link that connected Newton’s Opticks, which explained that rainbows were created by light refracting through raindrops, to poets such as John Keats, who declared that Newton ‘had destroyed all the Poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism’.

The time in Jena, Humboldt later recalled, ‘affected me powerfully’. Being with Goethe, Humboldt said, equipped him with ‘new organs’ through which to see and understand the natural world. And it was with those new organs that Humboldt would see South America.

1 It was the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta who proved Humboldt and Galvani wrong, showing that animal nerves were not charged with electricity. The convulsions that Humboldt had produced in animals were in fact triggered by the contact of the metals – an idea that led Volta to invent the first battery in 1800.

2 Others also made connections between Humboldt and Mephistopheles. Goethe’s niece said that ‘Humboldt seemed to her as Mephistopheles did to Gretchen’ – not the nicest compliment since Gretchen (Faust’s lover) realizes at the end of the play that Mephistopheles is the devil and turns to God and away from Faust.

3

In Search of a Destination

AS HUMBOLDT TRAVELLED across the vast Prussian territory, inspecting mines and meeting scientific friends, he continued to dream of faraway countries. That longing never disappeared but he also knew that his mother, Marie Elisabeth von Humboldt, had never shown any patience with his adventurous dreams. She expected him to climb the ranks of the Prussian administration and he felt ‘chained’ to her wishes. All that changed when she died of cancer in November 1796 after battling the disease for more than a year.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, neither Wilhelm nor Alexander grieved much for their mother. She had always found fault in whatever her sons did, Wilhelm confided to his wife, Caroline. No matter how successfully they had completed their studies or excelled in their careers, she had never been satisfied. During her illness, Wilhelm had dutifully moved from Jena to Tegel and Berlin to look after her, but he had missed the intellectual stimulation in Jena. Oppressed by his mother’s dark presence, he couldn’t read, work or think. He felt paralysed, Wilhelm had written to Schiller. When Alexander briefly visited, he had left as soon as possible, leaving his brother in charge. After fifteen months Wilhelm had not been able to bear the vigil any longer and returned to Jena. Two weeks later their mother died, with neither son at her bedside.

The brothers did not attend her funeral. Other events seemed of greater importance; Alexander was more excited about the attention that his new miner’s lamps were receiving, along with his experiments in Galvanism. Four weeks after his mother’s death, Alexander was announcing his preparations for his ‘great voyage’. Having waited for years for the opportunity to control his own destiny, he finally felt unshackled at the age of twenty-seven. Her death didn’t affect him much, he confessed to his old friend from Freiberg, because they had been ‘strangers to each other’. Over the previous few years Humboldt had spent as little time as possible at the family home and whenever he left Tegel, he had been relieved. As one close friend wrote to Humboldt: ‘her death … must be particularly welcomed by you.’

Within a month Alexander had resigned as a mining inspector. Wilhelm waited a little longer but moved a few months later to Dresden and then to Paris where he and Caroline turned their new house into a salon for writers, artists and poets. Their mother’s death had left the brothers wealthy. Alexander had inherited almost 100,000 thalers. ‘I have so much money,’ he bragged, ‘that I can get my nose, mouth and ears gilded.’ He was rich enough to afford to go anywhere he liked. He had always lived relatively simply because he was not interested in luxuries – lavishly printed books, yes, or expensive new scientific instruments, but he had no interest in elegant clothing or fashionable furniture. An expedition, on the other hand, was something very different, and he was willing to spend a large part of his inheritance on it. He was so excited that he couldn’t decide where to go and mentioned so many possible destinations that no one knew what his plans were: he spoke of Lapland and Greece, then Hungary or Siberia, and maybe the West Indies or the Philippines.

The precise destination didn’t yet matter because first he wanted to prepare, and now did so with pedantic drive. He had to test (and buy) all the instruments he needed, as well as travel through Europe to learn everything he could about geology, botany, zoology and astronomy. His early publications and growing network of contacts opened the doors – and he had even had a new plant species named after him: Humboldtia laurifolia, a ‘splendid’ tree from India, he wrote to a friend, ‘isn’t that fabulous!!’

Over the next months he interviewed geologists in Freiberg and learned how to use his sextant in Dresden. He climbed the Alps to investigate mountains – so that he might later compare them, as he told Goethe – and, in Jena, he conducted more electrical experiments. In Vienna he examined tropical plants in the hothouses of the imperial garden, where he also tried to convince the young director, Joseph van der Schot, to accompany him on his expedition, declaring that their future together would be ‘sweet’. He spent a cold winter in Salzburg, Mozart’s birthplace, where he measured the height of the nearby Austrian Alps and tested his meteorological instruments, braving icy rains as he held his instruments in the air during storms to detect the electricity of the atmosphere. He read and reread all the travellers’ accounts he could get hold of, and pored over botanical books.