SCREWING HUMBOLDT AND HIS HAGIOGRAPHERS
TO THE MEMORY OF ALL FORGOTTEN QUITEÑO ‘MINING ENGINEERS’, NEVER WHITE ENOUGH TO BE REMEMBERED, MY FATHER FOREMOST
The 250th anniversary of Alexander von Humboldt’s birth has been marked by dozens of meetings, conferences, and books. The sage who spent five years traveling in Spanish America appears as the inventor of everything. The German “gay” scholar allegedly was the father of modern psychology, aesthetics, cultural anthropology, ecological criticism, and good taste. He not only appears as a radical republican (who drew his income from a Prussian despot) but also as an anti-colonialist and vocal abolitionist (whose trips in Cuba were financed by leading slavers and who upon arrival in Venezuela purchased an Indian to carry his barometer around for five years). The plants, minerals, clouds, and heights of Chimborazo inspired the sage; Goethe, Kant, and Jefferson made him think. These hagiographies have invented a Humboldt that epitomizes the larger problem of academia: in the geopolitics of epistemological authority, the global south has tarantulas and the north ideas. The scholarship on Humboldt has reproduced what the German sage deliberately did: conceal, obfuscate, and erase his many intellectual debts to Mexican, Quiteño, Bogotano, and Limeño antiquarians, botanists, physicists, librarians, mineralogists, and cosmographers. Humboldt took from Spanish America not just cute, aristocratic gay companions and desiccated hummingbirds. The contemporary scholarship on Humboldt continues to be fixated on the trope of the heroic genius who by thinking hard single-handedly invented the “tropics.”
My talk is on “screwing.” It is therefore divided into two parts. The first half is entirely devoted to screwing Humboldt himself. The second, his hagiographers.
MOVEMENT i (in e minor)
“Screw Humboldt. How could the Prussian claim any authority on geo-distribution on the Chimborazo if Humboldt half-climbed once the volcano for a few hours and then left? Humboldt’s maps are cute but wrong. In fact, empirically they are crap.
Let me tell you how to really do and map biodistribution.”
For the lovers of Humboldtiana, I am appending a few images. These images were produced at about the same time (ca 1803–04) by Alexander von Humboldt (image 1)
and the son of Popayan, Francisco Jose de Caldas (the rest), when both lived in Carlos Montufar’s hacienda near Quito for 8 months.
When Humboldt left Quito for Lima-Mexico-Cuba-Philadelphia-Paris, he took the Marquess Carlos Montufar, not Caldas. Caldas was no Marquess. He was a struggling letrado (intellectual) of very modest means, completely dependent on the charity of well-off friends to get books: the scion of a family constantly struggling with illegitimacy as his sisters had shacked up with priests.
Caldas was furious.
Caldas then wrote to Celestino Mutis a series of letters: In these letters and reports, Caldas summarized his findings and research program. To paraphrase: “Screw Humboldt. How could the Prussian claim any authority on geo-distribution on the Chimborazo if Humboldt half-climbed once the Chimborazo for a few hours and then left? Humboldt’s maps are cute but wrong. In fact, empirically they are crap. Let me tell you how to really do and map biodistribution. Here are some maps of the biodistribution for several plants (in different colors) in the northern Andes. They include several parallel measurements of temperature, barometric pressure, heights, and other variables. Bye. Don’t let bed-bugs bite you, great man!”
Humboldt KNEW about all these maps and of Caldas’s innovations. Humboldt was pissed by Caldas’s much better command of accuracy in measurement and empirical mastery (Caldas irritated Humboldt by recalibrating the German’s instruments and pointing out his inaccuracies — Warning: Don’t try this on a Prussian).
What did the great Prussian, anticolonialist, lover of birds do? Humboldt did not cite Caldas in his “groundbreaking” 1806 Geography of Plants.
It took Humboldt 23 years to introduce the name of Caldas once, in passing. Caldas appears buried in a footnote in the 1826 edition of Geography of Plants, along with a list of some 20 other scholars building on Humboldt’s “original” insights. Humboldt buried Caldas in neglect. Humboldt was unable to concede Caldas any epistemological authority in 1803 and less so after 1809, the year Caldas took Humboldt publicly to task in the pages of Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada.
In 1809, Caldas published an annotated translation of Humboldt’s original manuscript of Geography of Plants that the Prussian left as a gift to Mutis. It was not nice. Caldas turned his edition into a vehicle to criticize the Prussian sage: Humbodlt was a bird of passage whose many empirical flaws stemmed from lack of acquaintance with local realities.
In 1809, Caldas and Jorge Tadeo Lozano produced an amazing, annotated translation of Humboldt’s Geography of Plants in the Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada (1809 #16–26).
Caldas shreds the original to pieces, relentlessly showing every empirical mistake. A typical note by Caldas would read “Baron von Humboldt visited Popayan at time of storms. He stayed for 20 days. He left/vanished (desaparecio) holding ideas about [Popayan’s] atmosphere that are very different from those held by those who have [actually] grown under the influence of this sky”(note 21). In another passage on Humboldt’s generalizations about herds of sheep and goats in the Venezuelan frontiers, Caldas would forcefully call the Prussian out: “I believe Humboldt is wrong; there are no herds of goats in the countries where the boundaries of agriculture end. Actually, goat herds inhabit temperate countries and tropical valleys.”(note 25).
The annotated translation probably annoyed the Prussian sage. It is no wonder that Humboldt obfuscated his debt to Caldas and Mutis at every turn. In short, he acted like a dishonest prick.[1]
Screw Humboldt and all he represents: Epistemological colonialism and the cult of saints.
MOVEMENT ii (in g minor)
Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World has won countless prizes in Italy, Germany, England, USA, and most recently China. A new paperback edition lists the NYT, the Atlantic, the Economist, Nature, and ten other major publications among the venues that have declared The Invention of Nature one of the best books of the year (2015). What is the origin of so much success? Clearly the book fulfills a pent-up demand for heroes in an age of current and pending environmental catastrophes.
Wulf traces the origins of our modern ecological sensibilities back to Alexander von Humboldt who spent five years in Spanish America in the early 1800 exploring deserts, mountains, and jungles. According to Wulf, Humboldt understood nature as a constantly changing global system, working aesthetically and harmoniously, if not violently disrupted, and eliciting adaptations and transformations. Humboldt became an inspiration to all early advocates of environmentalism: Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, and John Muir. He was also an inspiration to Darwin. Darwin embarked on a five-year voyage on the Beagle having Humboldt as his vicarious companion. Darwin came to think of speciation and even natural selection through Humboldt’s writings
Humboldt was the first ecologists, we are told, because he refused to separate the organic from the inorganic, the individual from the whole. Drawing on Kant, Humboldt also did away with the Cartesian divide between mind and body, reason and matter. Humboldt embraced the Kantian revolution and engaged in observation, experimentation, and auto exploration. The study of nature was not to be severed from the exploration of the self and culture. Humboldt experimented with electricity not just to understand the mysteries of this fluid in nature but also to understand his own mind. Like rocks, plants, and animals, humans belonged in a specific geography and landscape. Human racial and cultural diversity was the expression of the formative power of climates, mountains, plants, rivers, and cloud formations. Staunch supporters of Darwin like Ernst Haeckel drew inspiration on Humboldt to investigate the connection between art and science. Haeckel studied the biological structures of jelly fishes and his research inspired architects to use urchins and radiolarians as structural models to design buildings. Gaudí drew heavily on Haeckel. According to Wulf, the late-nineteenth-century emergence of Art Deco was partly Humboldt’s creation.
But Wulf does more than to present Humboldt as the founder of modern ecological, global sensibilities. She also firmly connects him to the politics of his time and thus own. Humboldt, we learn, was a republican at heart who nevertheless got his income as the chamberlain of the Prussian monarch for fifty years. Humboldt came of age in Napoleonic France and therefore felt compelled to use the language of organic global connections to denounce inequality and oppression.
Wulf demonstrates that Humboldt’s language of nature supported revolutionary political change. Jefferson learned from Humboldt to understand Spanish America as a rapacious colonial state that caused deforestation, desertification, and erosion. Wulf suggests that Jefferson’s empire of liberty was partly Humboldt’s making. Instead of being the spy who transferred massive amounts of information on Spanish American mining, cartography, and political economy to Jefferson’s white-white supremacist empire, Humboldt appears in Wulf’s hands as avatar of the freedom of the continent.
Nouveau Continent […], Paris, 1814 -1834
Bolivar also took from Humboldt a critique of the colonial state. More important Bolivar learned from Humboldt to see the Andes as a force of geological, revolutionary change. Like Humboldt, Bolivar came to see America as tropical, bountiful, powerful, and full of unfulfilled potential, instead of corrupt and degenerate as Count Buffon had suggested at the height of the Enlightenment.
This is all seemingly novel and insightful yet there is little in this list that is not already well known. Wulf’s structure and arguments are identical to Laura Dasson Wall’s The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago, 2009), another book that garnered many prizes and attention.
Like Wulf, Wall seeks to trace the large impact of Humboldt on modernity. His most important contribution was to make evident hitherto unseen connections among global natural phenomena. Humboldt, Laura D. Walls insists, has to be seen as a hero for our time because he was able to build bridges between sciences and humanities and between sciences and politics. For Laura Walls, Humboldt was literally the father of almost all nineteenth-century intellectual and social disciplines and movements, from aesthetics to anthropology, from republicanism to ecology, from geography to national park movements, from abolitionism to psychology, from physics to evolutionary theories. Like Wulf, Laura D. Walls seeks to track the great impact of Humboldt on Darwin, Thoreau, Emerson and Muir.[2]
To reiterate, most of Wulf’s insights are not new. The scholarship on Humboldt and Romanticism, via Goethe and Kant’s epistemological Copernican Revolution, is vast; so too is the scholarship on Humboldt’s relentless empiricism to find hidden connections in a global web of life and nature.[3] Not even the idea of Humboldt as a self-declared pioneer in the study of human- induced climate change is hers.[4]
There is an aspect of Wulf’s book, however, that is strikingly new: her condescending, colonialist, patronizing tone. Wulf reduces Spanish America to a black hole of ideas and a socially engineered dystopia. The contrast between the ways Wulf describes the origin, evolution, and distribution of ideas in the global north and south should shock no one. In an old critical review of Wall’s The Passage of Cosmos that was widely available to Wulf, I called attention to Wall’s lack of interest in one of the “bridges” Humboldt built throughout his career. Wall uses “passage” in her title as a reference to the two “bridges” Humboldt allegedly built to connect disparate areas of human endeavor that our contemporary world both ignores and needs. One bridge, Wall argued, was that connecting science to the political and another was that connecting science to the humanities. My review went over a “missing bridge”: Humboldt also connected the scholarships of Spanish America to Europe’s and the United States’. Given our current political toxic debate on the building of walls to block entrance to the contaminating cultural influences of the immigrant, impoverished global south, Wall’s lack of attention to this obvious third bridge was jarring. [5] The problem with Wulf’s biography is that she goes well beyond omissions; she tramples over every possible connecting roads.
Wulf organizes The Invention of Nature on the trope of ideas; the book is divided in four sections according on whether ideas are “collected”, “sorted”, “spread” or “evolved.” And yet, she rarely stops to explore those ideas Humboldt might have learned in Spanish America. In Wulf’s book (like in Wells’), Spanish America is there as a background: animals, plants, and rocks. The global South has tarantulas, the North ideas. The book is typical of a genre in the history of science that is patronizingly colonial.
Humboldt spent five years in Spanish America and learned from intellectual communities in the Canaries, Cumana, Caracas, Angostura, Cartagena, Mompox, Bogota, Popayan, Ibarra, Quito, Cuenca, Loja, Trujillo, Lima, Acapulco, Mexico City, Puebla, Veracruz, and Habana. Humboldt spent most of his time in cities not jungles, amongst manuscripts, archives, and firmly established traditions of scholarship and analysis.[6] None of this ever makes a cameo appearance in Wulf’s The Invention of Nature.
This is what the book has for Humboldt in Lima (and his travel companions Ame Bonpland, Carlos Montufar, and “José”)[7]:
“They arrived in Lima at the end of October of 1802…Here they found passage to sail north to Guayaquil” (104–105).
Wulf reduces the intellectual significance of Lima to four words in 552 pages. This is what Wulf has for Humboldt’s one year in Mexico City:
“After their departure from Guayaquil in February 1803, they [“Jose” and Humboldt, Montufar, and Bonpland] had spent a year in Mexico [mainly in Mexico City]. He [Humboldt] had scoured the extensive colonial archives, and libraries, interrupting his research only for a few expeditions to mines, hot springs, and yet more volcanoes. It was time to return to Europe” (108–109).
The significance of one year in the largest city in the western hemisphere is reduced to 60 words.
When Humboldt leaves Mexico City for Philadelphia to meet with then-President Jefferson, this is how she describes the transition:
“For five long years, Humboldt had seen nature at its best — lush magnificent, and awe-inspiring- and now he wanted to see civilization in all its glory, a society built as a republic on the principles of liberty” (p. 110).
In case my point goes unnoticed: Wulf equates Latin America with raw nature and the USA with the glory of civilization. Wulf goes on for ten more pages describing Jefferson’s family, Jefferson’s Monticello, farming in Virginia, Washington’s Mt Vernon, and the building of Washington DC without uttering the word “slavery” once. When she finally acknowledges the centrality of slavery in Philadelphia and Virginia, she does it by devoting two pages to an analysis of slavery and oppression in Spanish America.
Readers could counter that Wulf does devote one entire chapter (ch. 12) to the relationship between Bolivar and Humboldt. But the chapter does nothing to explore ideas Humboldt might have learned from Spanish American intellectuals. The chapter simply assumes that Humboldt provided the instruments for Bolivar to conceptualize the true evilness of Spanish colonialism (in the systematic degradation of nature through slavery and mining) and to deploy the languages of volcanoes to signify revolution and of tropical-primal nature to signify future possibilities.[8]
It is clear that the literature on Humboldt is relentless in its prejudices. The narrative is always the same: Humboldt brought the larvae of Kantian, Goethean, Forsterian ideas with him. Once exposed to the tropics, these ideas metamorphosed into beautiful butterflies in Humboldt’s mind and cabinets.
America is backdrop where the ideas of Europe take shape. The intellectual communities of the global south lay patiently, waiting to be led into reason and modernity by the white sage. This is applicable to all transitions and mutations: from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, from Romanticism to Liberalism, from Natural right to abolitionism, from republicanism to socialism, from Catholicism to debauchery.[8]
.
The literature on Humboldt is relentless in its colonialism and the deliberate effort to silence and skip due memorialization.[9] This should surprise no one, for Humboldt himself dismissed the Spanish American intellectual communities he encountered on his trip. “In Lima, I learned nothing of Peru” Humboldt declared in 1803 in a letter to a correspondent.[10] As Greg Cushman has shown, this statements was both accurate and patently false. Humboldt simply assumed that Spanish colonialism destroyed the environment. Humboldt concluded, for example, that overgrazing, erosion, and utter collective mismanagement irrevocably transformed Lake Valencia in coastal Venezuela. Local Venezuelans knew better, however. Locals had seen the waters of the lake dry up before in recurring regional cyclical droughts. He had these testimonies but ignored them as obscurantist nonsense. Humboldt had the same wrong interpretation of dryness in coastal Peru. He blamed it on local ecological colonialism. Limeño intellectuals, however, had accumulated for decades vast amounts of observations. Their interpretations of climate did not fit Humboldt’s, so the Prussian dismissed them. Limeño climatologists offered a much global interpretation of Peru’s coastal desserts than Humboldt. Hipolito Unanue, for example, figured out the interactions among south-north oceanic circulation, equatorial warmth air currents, and Andean heights to interpret coastal desertification and Andean patterns of rain. In fact, it was Unanue who described the oceanic current we now know as Humboldt’s. Humboldt eventually embraced Unanue’s model. Not surprisingly European scholars read Humboldt, not Unanue, and wrongly attributed to the Prussian the priority of “discovery.” Humboldt did nothing to correct the mistake.[11]
Wulf cites Cushman, yet she repeatedly uses Humboldt’s cautionary warnings on the lowering Lake Valencia to press her point, namely, that Spanish America was Humboldt’s model of ecological mismanagement. She turns a myth into a central theme of her monograph. Like her Prussian hero, Wulf commits Unanue to oblivion. Wulf deliberately repeats and amplifies Humboldt’ canard: “I learned nothing in Lima.”
The most serious problem with Wulf’s biography, however, lies in her argument: Humboldt “invented” nature because nature was thought for the first time globally. Humboldt used painstaking observation, data gathering, visual imagination to unmask buried global patterns of connections and resemblances. Such an argument goes against the grain of massive historical evidence, for the study of global nature dates back to the pre-Socratics. Built on cosmologies of four elements and a quintessence, ancient-classical meteorology and ancient and Islamic-Christian medieval astrology were sciences of the global; they were Cosmos in the most Wulfian and Humboldtian sense of the term.
The science of global nature through the classical genre of Aristotle’s Physics and Meteorology, Ptolemy’s Tetralibos, and Sacrobosco’ Sphera became truly global in the 16th and 17th Spanish monarchy. The working out of global oceanic currents: it all happened in 16th and 17th century Spanish America, not in the Berlin cabinet of our beloved Prussian mining engineer. The analysis of the Andes as Sacrobosco’s Sphera, that is, as a mountain whose verticality and heights transformed the scorching heats of tropics into a microcosmic global sphere with all 7 climate zones of the earth: it all happened in 16th and 17th century Spanish America, not in the Parisian cafes of Alexander von Humboldt. The use of calibrated measurement and instrumentation to uncover unexpected global graphic correlations: it all happened among Iberian Africans, Mexicans, and Peruvian crews, plying their way through known and unknown oceans, not in the great mind of Humboldt, the white sage. This is not the place to offer this analysis. I have already done it somewhere else.[12]
MOVEMENT iii: FROM HUMBOLDT TO TRUMP
No more screwing around. It is time to offer one final reflection. The raving reviews and the many prizes that have greeted the publication of Wulf’s biography illustrate that since Humboldt the geopolitical ill distribution of global epistemological authority remains firmly entrenched: The global south has tarantulas and electric eels and the global north ideas. The bricks of Trump’s wall have been baked in the ovens of historiography.
[1] These series of Caldas’ maps are taken from Mauricio Nieto Olarte’s La obra cartografica de Caldas (2006), an amazing research in archives in Spain and Colombia. My references to the Caldas-Humboldt-Mutis relationship are based on the scholarship of Alberto Gomez (Humboldtiana neogranadina- 5v) and Jose Antonio Amaya (Ojos en el cielo pies en la tierra: mapas, libros e instrumentos en la vida del sabio Caldas)
[2] Humboldt’s impact in 19th century US ecological and political thinking was also already expertly explored by Aaron Sach’s The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (Viking Books, 2006)
[3] Nicholas Jardine and Andrew Cunningham, eds. Romanticism and the Sciences (Cambridge 1990); see also Susan Cannon, Science in Culture (New York, 1978); Michael Dettelbach, ‘Global Physics and Aesthetic Empire’, in David Miller and Peter Reill, eds, Visions of Empire (Los Angeles: 1996) 258–92; and Michael Dettelbach, The Face of Nature: Precise Measurement, Mapping, and Sensibility in the Work of Alexander von Humboldt, Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci., 30 (1999): 473–504.
[4] Gregory T Cushman, “Humboldtian Science, Creole Meteorology, and the Discovery of Human-Caused Climate Change in South America.” Osiris 26, (2011): 16–44.
[5] See my review in ‘The Passage to Cosmos: A Symposium’, Studies in Travel Writing, 15(2011): 1, 68–70
[6] Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “How Derivative Was Humboldt? Microcosmic Narratives in EarlyModern Spanish America and the (Other) Origins of Humboldt’s Ecological Sensibilities,” in Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, 2006), 112–28.
[7] Jose de la Cruz, Humboldt’s mestizo servant hired in Cumana and who for four years was charged with protecting Humboldt’s barometer.
[8] In the process of demonstrating connections between Bolivar and Humboldt, Wulf builds on a myth that the German historian Michael Zeuske in his Simon Bolivar (Berlin, 2011) debunked. Zeuske shows that the meeting of Bolivar and Humboldt in Paris (1804) was a late 19th century invention: “Humboldt und Bolívar — über ein Gespräch, das nie stattfand (“Humboldt y Bolívar –on a conversation that never took place.” On a critique of Wulf as purveyor of Bolivarian myths, see Andres Otavalo, Reseña Wulf’s The Invention of Nature, Anuario colombiano de historia social y cultural 45 (2018): 278–282. On the meeting of Humboldt and Bolivar in Italy, see Fred Rippy and E. R. Brann, “Alexander von Humboldt and Simón Bolívar,” American Historical Review 52 (1947): 697–703
[9] Cañizares-Esguerra, “How Derivative Was Humboldt?”
[10] Humboldt to Ignacio Checa, 18 January 1803, in Alexander von Humboldt en el Perú: Diario de viaje y otros escritos (Lima, 2002), 214–15.
[11] Cushman, “Humboldtian Science, Creole Meteorology.” For a wider yet somewhat dated interpretation of Unanue, see Cañizares-Esguerra, “La utopía de Hipólito Unanue: comercio, naturaleza y religión en el Perú,” Marcos Cueto ed.,Saberes Andinos (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1995), pp.91–108.
[12] “On Humboldt and Epistemological Colonialism” Susanne Schlünder/Rolando Carrasco (Edits): Asymmetric Nature(s) Concerning the Historic Semantics of Transatlantic Environmental Relations during the 18th and the 19th century.(De Gruyter, forthcoming)
