Humboldt as Guide

February 20, 2006

Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, most easily available through an abridged Penguin edition, mostly recounts his journeys through relatively unknown portions of the South American continent. As one might anticipate for this systematic thinker, Humboldt begins by setting out the aims of his travel through this strange abundant land:

…rather than discovering new, isolated facts I preferred linking already known ones together. The discovery of a new genus seemed to me far less interesting than an observation on the geographical relations of plants, or the migration of social plants, and the heights that different plants reach on the peaks of the cordilleras. [6]

While Humboldt was certainly collecting samples of plants discovered in the course of this travels, his overriding concern was to find systems. We might call him an ecologist on account of this passion for the system of nature. A little later Humboldt writes: “The great problem of the physical description of the planet is how to determine the laws that relate to the phenomena of life with inanimate nature” (7). A traveler with that aim would not simply describe curious natural phenomena, but also look for.. and sometimes find.. the underlying reasons for the phenomena.

Unfortunately most travelers lack the ability to seek out these underlying reasons, and contented themselves with simply noting the marvels they witnessed.

When I began to read the many travel books, which form such an interesting branch of of modern literature, I regretted that previous learned travelers seldom possessed a wide enough knowledge to avail themselves of what they saw. [6]

Now this website is something of a geographical project, which may yet reach the multi-volume heft of Humboldt’s Narrative. We claim no ability in the physical sciences, but we do begin with the goal of understanding the systems by which human beings make sense of this world. Such systems will not be discovered by scientific experimentation, nor will they ever be subject to scientific proof.. they are the outcome of careful attention to human beings and the cognitive constructions they spin out upon everything around them.

This is a human geography. Our laws will not be physical laws, but the laws of human cognitive experience. We will think about how meaning is organized and emplaced and socialized. Let the spirit of Alexander von Humboldt hover over this web project.

[References to Alexander von Humboldt. Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. New York: Penguin Press, 1995.]