Sons of Goethe: Alexander von Humboldt
How Humboldt connects both the lessons of the ancient Mediterranean and the works of Goethe to the developments of the modern era.
Because this article is meant to act as the first entry in a wider series, I feel the need to re-introduce the ideas central to the work at hand. Often, it can be deleterious to one’s understanding and even dangerous to boil down the work of a people, a time, or a place to one individual figure from history. In the case of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, it happens to be undeniably true. His body of work spans multiple different disciplines, and concentrates all the different lessons we can learn from classical antiquity through a singular focal point. If we look towards the greatest minds of our era, an overwhelming majority of them ought to have a connection to a) the original work of the greatest minds of the ancient Mediterranean, and b) the refinements of Goethe. Otherwise, there’s a very good chance they’re selling you something. The latter set of connections may not always be direct to the man himself, but if we read closely and look at history with a keen eye, there’s always a way to trace a lineage of the important ideas from literature, politics, history, and science all the way back to him. From there, we can begin to draw up a family tree of influences that sums up the greatest achievements of humankind.
It only seems fitting to begin a series about the “Sons of Goethe” with a man who ought to be considered his first “son.” Many people in the Weimar classicism movement have enjoyed special attention because of their associations with Goethe, but most of them had already begun their careers by the time they met up with him. Herder had been a student of Kant and published a handful of philosophical works before joining the Weimar court, and Schiller is more of a collaborator and a contemporary than someone who took inspiration from the movement as a whole, for example. No, Alexander von Humboldt1 is among the first polymaths to have a relationship with him as a mentor and to have such a lasting impact on the world he worked in to merit further investigation.
It is strange to begin any series of articles on this newsletter with such a major figure in a STEM field. Admittedly, it’s not the first time we’ve extended the olive branch outside of the humanities (most notably with the Euclid article), but it ought to stress the importance of Humboldt’s accomplishments that he is being featured in such a way. Keep in mind that the “big” article on Goethe only briefly summarized the major themes of three works; we never had the opportunity to discuss his work in the fields of science or diplomacy. Of his two published scientific works, his Theory of Colors appears to have more of a direct impact on the discipline it is relevant to, but The Metamorphosis of Plants is undoubtedly the work that cements his role in the scientific community. There are a handful of wise men who observed and wrote about the theory of evolution before Charles Darwin came through and cemented the idea as a genuine biological phenomenon, but his work (as great as it is) often lampshades his predecessors. Credit will occasionally be doled out to Lamarck or de Buffon in the more intensive biology textbooks, but even if Darwin himself hadn’t plucked the feathers of a single finch, his last name would have gone down in history because of the botanical contributions of his grandfather. This is the category that both Goethe and Humboldt fall under.
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