By Ghadeer Alsabah.
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| Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt by Friedrich Georg Weitsch, 1806. |
In 1834, Alexander von Humboldt wrote to a friend of a ‘mad notion’ that refused to leave him. He wanted to encapsulate ‘the whole of the physical aspect of the universe in one work’, from its celestial wonders to its terrestrial events, as attentive to the nature of nebulae as he was to the ‘mosses clinging to a granite rock’.
The book was to be called Cosmos, the word vast enough to accommodate the multifarious nature of Humboldt’s vision. It means the universe, of course, but also order and harmony. Similar to his fellow Naturphilosophen, Humboldt believed that the universe functioned as a unified organism, its internal order ever-shifting, with harmony arising from active, opposing forces balancing each other out.
Cosmos has a third meaning, too: ornament, or adornment; beauty as the finishing touch to a whole that could well do without it. But perhaps that is where Humboldt diverges most clearly from the literal definition of the word. Beauty, to him, carried far too much significance to be written off as an embellishment, or to diminish its role in elucidating the science he meant to convey.
‘Nature is a free domain,’ Humboldt writes in the introduction to the first volume, ‘and the profound conceptions and enjoyments she awakens within us can only be vividly delineated by thought clothed in exalted forms of speech.’
Indeed, beauty abounds in Cosmos. It courses through Humboldt’s writing in the form of literary descriptiveness. He assigns language a role that goes beyond the mediation of ideas. Surely the content of a sentence imparts knowledge, but so does its composition, its form. Language shapes how we understand and relate to the natural world through the aesthetic character of prose.
Here, for instance, Humboldt complements his reflection on the value of sensation with imagery meant to evoke emotion and awaken the sensuous imagination:
'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 ... 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; everywhere, the mind is penetrated by the same sense of the grandeur and vast expanse of nature, revealing … the existence of laws that regulate the forces of the universe.'
If one were to insist on clarity by way of linguistic economy, Humboldt’s sweeping, literary prose would likely seem unnecessary, a vestige of a bygone era that insisted on expressiveness. Yet Humboldt justified his style in his reflections and, in a way, presented a philosophy of science communication: knowledge is formed by attending faithfully to particulars.
He writes:
'The delineation of that which appeals most strongly to the imagination, derives its collective interest from the vivid truthfulness with which the individual features are portrayed.'
And these features include the sounds, smells, and sights of a scene, as well as the underlying machinations that make all of these facets of reality possible—science, coloured by the human experience rather than standing apart from it.
This proximity between science and scientist, nature and observer, became a source of tension in a positivist, post-Humboldtian era, which held the belief that objective science demanded a strict separation between the researcher and the object. In contrast, literature is subjective by nature. Even the most solid facts must pass through a filter of interiority before becoming part of a literary piece.
And that glimpse into a writer’s interiority can take the form of something as simple as wonder. When a scientist marvels at the night sky, even if merely describing the icy composition of a comet or mapping the life cycle of a star, they imbue the reality of a physical phenomenon with their subjective experience.
The wonder that slips free from Humboldt’s writing is not the accidental lapse of a staunch and inflexible empiricist. Humboldt wants his reader to feel wonder; he nurtures it specifically to enrich the reader’s experience of the natural world. Beyond its contribution to a well-rounded curriculum, he views science as a prerequisite for cultivating genuine awe.
He disagrees with Edmund Burke’s assertion that ‘it is our ignorance of natural things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passions’. Knowledge only deepens a researcher’s admiration, and that admiration is made accessible to others through heartfelt prose. ‘The vault of heaven, studded with nebulae and stars’ is as sublime to the astronomer as it is to the non-expert stargazer.
It is dry exposition that Humboldt critiques, as it instills the belief that science is inherently incompatible with the emotional human experience:
'The mere accumulation of unconnected observations of details, devoid of generalisation of ideas, may doubtlessly have tended to create and foster the deeply-rooted prejudice, that the study of the exact sciences must necessarily chill the feelings, and diminish the nobler enjoyments attendant upon a contemplation of nature.'
How can language convey a world that is richer than language itself? Humboldt seems to believe that the answer lies in literature. The splendours of nature, after all, are much more discernible in a sentence that spills over and delights in describing that which enlivens its writer and inspires its reader.
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Ghadeer Alsabah holds an MSc in Science & Health Communication and is the Social Media Editor for Public Understanding of Science. She writes about the literary and aesthetic dimensions of science communication, with a focus on Romantic science, in her newsletter The Romantic Scholar.
LinkedIn: Ghadeer Alsabah.