{"id":6401,"date":"2017-11-03T17:04:00","date_gmt":"2017-11-03T16:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.humboldtforum.org\/magazin\/artikel\/humboldts-kosmos\/"},"modified":"2020-05-22T17:30:19","modified_gmt":"2020-05-22T15:30:19","slug":"humboldts-cosmos","status":"publish","type":"magazine-article","link":"https:\/\/www.humboldtforum.org\/en\/magazine\/article\/humboldts-cosmos\/","title":{"rendered":"Humboldt\u2019s Cosmos \u2013 Our World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Ideas can be useful only if they spring to life in many minds.<\/blockquote>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
Alexander von Humboldt<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n
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This precept of Alexander von Humboldt\u2019s may well have sustained him when he arrived in Berlin one gray November day in 1827. It had been more than twenty years ago that he had left the Prussian capital for Paris to get his writings ready for publication. Now he was finally returning with luggage filled with journals and records from his travels in the Americas, all ready to go to the printers. But although the memories and impressions of his research expeditions and discoveries were still fresh in his mind, he was also preoccupied by a highly ambitious project: He was committed to supporting his brother Wilhelm\u2019s efforts to make the Prussian capital bloom into a center for science and research, and had very specific ideas about how this could be accomplished. The key, he believed, was to make the citizens of Berlin active participants in the ongoing process of scientific discovery. But he also knew that before he could arouse the public\u2019s fascination in the new cosmos of discovery, he would first have to build an interested audience.<\/p>\n

And so the public lecture became a special space of resonance for Alexander von Humboldt \u2013 a format that he deliberately used to impart his findings to the public in a popularized form they could readily understand. Having organized a twin series of parallel lectures on the \u201cphysical description of the world,\u201d he was able to attract a broad audience to his podium during the winter semester of 1827\/28: Between November 3rd, 1827, and April 26th, 1828, he held a total of 61 lectures before 400 students and those teaching them in one of the University of Berlin\u2019s auditoria. Concomitantly, he gave no less than 16 presentations to 1,000 listeners at a time in the great hall of the neighboring Singakademie \u2013 an unprecedented audience for that time. Even Friedrich Wilhelm III and his son, the later King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, accepted Humboldt\u2019s invitation to attend; indeed, it seemed as though half of Berlin had come to hear him, from lowly laborers and craftsmen to city councilors and members of court society.<\/p>\n

These talks known as the \u201cCosmos lectures\u201d have since gone down as milestones of scientific and cultural history. His contemporaries confirmed that Alexander von Humboldt was able to relate his eye-witness accounts in a conversational yet gripping manner, drawing surprising intellectual connections while making scientific concepts comprehensible with the flair of a poet. Thus, he managed to seamlessly integrate the findings, experiences, and adventures of his five-year American voyage into the broader, holistic context of the latest discoveries in the natural sciences. In his capacity as a naturalist, he presented falling stars and fossilized shells as tangible witnesses to the primordial origins of the world. He spoke about black holes, distant comets, and the multifaceted beauty of nature, such as one finds not just in the Tropics but even in the wide expanses of the Antarctic Ocean. His fascinating research reports ran the gamut from \u201cthe painting of nature\u201d (Naturgem\u00e4lde) depicting general geographic features to discussions of \u201cthe most remote nebulae and circulating binary stars of outer space,\u201d \u201cthe telluric manifestations of the geography of organisms,\u201d or the \u201cthe plants, animals, and races of man.\u201d Yet they all served to communicate the one discovery which Alexander von Humboldt regarded to be his most important and incisive: namely, the inner linkage between the general and the particular, or \u201cnature as an organic unity moved and animated by inner forces,\u201d as he put it. In other words, the idea that every form of life must be seen as part of a complex whole.<\/p>\n

Alexander von Humboldt was convinced that this fundamental insight could be understood by anyone regardless of their educational level. He was therefore determined not to charge admission for his lectures and to make his knowledge freely accessible to all \u2013 particularly including women, who were precluded from attending Prussian universities and would remain so until the end of the 19th century. He even paid the rent for the lecture hall out of his own pocket. Happily, Alexander von Humboldt\u2019s vision was to bear real fruit: His universal description of the world became a sensation and went on to form the core of his last great publication \u201cCosmos\u201d (1845-62), an encyclopedic, five-volume survey that was to remain unfinished. With over 87,000 copies printed, this was quickly recognized as a seminal work. As Humboldt had intended, the spirit of exploration and inquiry he had worked so hard to foster \u201csprang to life in many minds.\u201d It was an intellectual spark that would soon spread like a blaze \u2013 and that continues to shape Berlin as a center of science and research to this day.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t <\/div>\n<\/section>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About 200 years ago, the whole of Berlin would eagerly congregate to hear his lectures \u2013 a paragon for the Humboldt Forum<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1963,"template":"","magazine-topic":[221],"magazine-format":[],"magazine-author":[216],"class_list":["post-6401","magazine-article","type-magazine-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","magazine-topic-humboldt-brothers","magazine-author-neil-macgregor-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.humboldtforum.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-article\/6401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.humboldtforum.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.humboldtforum.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/magazine-article"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.humboldtforum.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-article\/6401\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.humboldtforum.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.humboldtforum.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"magazine-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.humboldtforum.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-topic?post=6401"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-format","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.humboldtforum.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-format?post=6401"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.humboldtforum.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-author?post=6401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}