{"id":11724,"date":"2025-10-16T18:56:50","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T22:56:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/humboldt-on-the-essence-of-science-and-how-to-read-the-poetry-of-nature-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-10-16T18:56:50","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T22:56:50","slug":"humboldt-on-the-essence-of-science-and-how-to-read-the-poetry-of-nature-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/humboldt-on-the-essence-of-science-and-how-to-read-the-poetry-of-nature-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Humboldt on the Essence of Science and How to Read the Poetry of Nature \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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Born in the heyday of the denial of the human animal\u2019s animality, in a world where nature was considered an ember of wildness to extinguish with civilization, its partitioned mystery dissected by various sciences walled off from one another, Alexander von Humboldt<\/a> (September 14, 1769\u2013May 6, 1859) set out to \u201cestablish the unity and harmony of this stupendous mass of force and matter,\u201d in which \u201cno single fact can be considered in isolation,\u201d giving us the modern understanding of nature as a system. Napoleon hated him for his impassioned anticolonial and abolitionist views. Goethe cherished him as his greatest thinking partner, whose briefest company and conversation felt like \u201chaving lived several years.\u201d Thoreau thought his very eyes \u201cnatural telescopes & microscopes.\u201d Whitman declared himself a \u201ckosmos\u201d<\/a> after the title of Humboldt\u2019s epoch-making book. Darwin, looking back on his life, readily acknowledged that without Humboldt\u2019s inspiring memoir-travelogue, entire passages of which he could recite by heart, he never would have boarded the Beagle<\/em>, never would have written On the Origin of Species<\/em>, never would have had his most transcendent experience<\/a> while ascending the Andes in Humboldt\u2019s footsteps. <\/p>\n

\"Alexander
Alexander von Humboldt by Friedrich Georg Weitsch, 1806<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Humboldt understood that a different way of seeing demands a different way of articulating the seen. Because nature is all there is, he insisted, writing about it demands prose \u201cworthy of bearing witness to the majesty and greatness of the creation\u201d \u2014 in other words, almost poetry. (A century and half after him, Rachel Carson would catalyze our ecological imagination with books emanating her conviction that because nature is inherently poetic, \u201cno one could write truthfully about [it] and leave out the poetry.\u201d<\/a>) Such worthiness only comes form a perspective that recognizes interdependence as the source of that majesty. <\/p>\n

Humboldt writes:<\/p>\n

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In considering the study of physical phenomena, not merely in its bearings on the material wants of life, but in its general influence on the intellectual advancement of humankind, we find its noblest and most important result to be a knowledge of the chain of connection, by which all natural forces are linked together, and made mutually dependent upon each other; and it is the perception of these relations that exalts our views and ennobles our enjoyments.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Such a \u201cglimmering perception\u201d of nature\u2019s interdependence, Humboldt observes, was always present in so-called \u201cprimitive\u201d societies as kind of shadow form, intuited rather than investigated, until science emerged to illuminate its elemental truth through its process of \u201clong and laborious observation.\u201d His intimation, two centuries before physicist Richard Feynman made a kindred case in his superb ode to a flower<\/a>, is that a scientific understanding of nature\u2019s processes and phenomena doesn\u2019t diminish but deepens our sense of their majesty and of our bright participation in this \u201cgreat chain of cause and effect.\u201d <\/p>\n

And yet for all \u201cthe pleasure of finding things out,\u201d in Feynman\u2019s lovely phrase, Humboldt located the beating heart of this transcendent enjoyment not in the mind but in our animal sensorium. He was able to see nature as a system because he \u2014 unlike his contemporaries, unlike most of us \u2014 refused to forget that we are nature too<\/a>, that we ourselves are systems in which thought and feeling, sensation and perception, impression and imagination are intertwined, that we can only apprehend the rest of nature not as disembodied intellects analyzing it from above but as embodied animals feeling it from within. In the Cartesian era of \u201cI think, therefore I am,\u201d Humboldt seems to be saying: \u201cI feel, therefore I understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>
Art by Icinori from Thank You, Everything<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Epochs before that process of \u201clong and laborious observation\u201d we call science discovered the transcendent state of \u201csoft fascination\u201d<\/a> that stills the brain\u2019s Default Mode Network \u2014 the turbine of overthinking \u2014 to lens the world through embodied feeling, Humboldt describes it perfectly in this prose poem of a passage from the preface to the first volume of his Cosmos<\/em>:<\/p>\n

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In reflecting upon the different degrees of enjoyment presented to us in the contemplation of nature, we find that the first place must be assigned to a sensation, which is wholly independent of an intimate acquaintance with the physical phenomena presented to our view, or of the peculiar character of the region surrounding us. In the uniform plain bounded only by a distant horizon, where the lowly heather, the cistus, or waving grasses, deck the soil; on the ocean shore, where the waves, softly rippling over the beach, leave a track, green with the weeds of the sea; every where, the mind is penetrated by the same sense of the grandeur and vast expanse of nature, revealing to the soul, by a mysterious inspiration, the existence of laws that regulate the forces of the universe. Mere communion with nature, mere contact with the free air, exercise a soothing yet strengthening influence on the wearied spirit, calm the storm of passion, and soften the heart when shaken by sorrow to its inmost depths. Every where, in every region of the globe, in every stage of intellectual culture, the same sources of enjoyment are alike vouchsafed to man. The earnest and solemn thoughts awakened by a communion with nature intuitively arise from a presentiment of the order and harmony pervading the whole universe, and from the contrast we draw between the narrow limits of our own existence and the image of infinity revealed on every side, whether we look upward to the starry vault of heaven, scan the far-stretching plain before us, or seek to trace the dim horizon across the vast expanse of ocean.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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