The Invention of Nature

Over thousands of years crops, grains, vegetables and fruits had followed the footpaths of humankind. As humans crossed continents and oceans, they had brought plants with them and thereby had changed the face of the earth. Agriculture linked plants to politics and economy. Wars had been fought over plants, and empires were shaped by tea, sugar and tobacco. Some plants told him as much about humankind as about nature itself, while other plants gave Humboldt an insight into geology as they revealed how continents had shifted. The similarities of their coastal plants, Humboldt wrote, showed an ‘ancient’ connection between Africa and South America as well as illustrating how islands that were previously linked were now separated – an incredible conclusion more than a century before scientists had even begun to discuss continental movements and the theory of shifting tectonic plates. Humboldt ‘read’ plants as others did books – and to him they revealed a global force behind nature, the movements of civilizations as well as of landmass. No one had ever approached botany in this way.

By showing unexpected analogies, the Essay, with its engraving of the Naturgemälde, unpeeled a previously invisible web of life. Connection was the basis of Humboldt’s thinking. Nature, he wrote, was ‘a reflection of the whole’ – and scientists had to look at flora, fauna and rock strata globally. Failure to do so, he continued, would make them like those geologists who constructed the entire world ‘according to the shape of the nearest hills surrounding them’. Scientists needed to leave their garrets and travel the world.

Similarly revolutionary was Humboldt’s desire to speak to ‘our imagination and our spirit’, an aspect highlighted in the introduction of the German edition where he referred to Friedrich Schelling’s philosophy of nature, the Naturphilosophie. In 1798, at the age of twenty-three, Schelling had been made a professor of philosophy at the University of Jena and had quickly become part of Goethe’s inner circle. His so-called ‘philosophy of nature’ became the theoretical backbone of German Idealism and Romanticism. Schelling called for ‘the necessity to grasp nature in her unity’. He rejected the idea of an irreconcilable chasm between the internal and the external – between the subjective world of the Self and the objective world of nature. Instead Schelling emphasized the vital force that connected nature and man, insisting that there was an organic bond between the Self and nature. ‘I myself am identical with nature,’ he claimed, a statement that paved the way for the Romantics’ belief that they could find themselves in wild nature. For Humboldt, who believed that he had only truly become himself in South America, this was a deeply appealing concept.

Humboldt’s reference to Schelling also showed how much he himself had changed in the previous decade. By highlighting the relevance of Schelling’s ideas, Humboldt introduced a new aspect to science. Though not moving entirely away from the rational method that had been the mantra of Enlightenment thinkers, Humboldt now quietly opened the door for subjectivity. Humboldt, the former ‘Prince of Empiricism’, as a friend wrote to Schelling, had changed for good. Whereas many scientists dismissed Schelling’s Naturphilosophie as being incompatible with empirical investigation and scientific methods, Humboldt insisted that Enlightenment thought and Schelling were not ‘quarrelling poles’. Quite the contrary – Schelling’s emphasis on unity was how Humboldt also understood nature.

Schelling suggested that the concept of an ‘organism’ should be the foundation of how to understand nature. Instead of regarding nature as a mechanical system, it should be seen as a living organism. The difference was like that between a clock and an animal. Whereas a clock consisted of parts that could be dismantled and then assembled again, an animal couldn’t – nature was a unified whole, an organism in which the parts only worked in relation to each other. In a letter to Schelling, Humboldt wrote that he believed this was nothing less than a ‘revolution’ in the sciences, a turn away from the ‘dry compilation of facts’ and ‘crude empiricism’.