The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America
Explorer, scientist, writer, and humanist, Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended with Darwin. With Cosmos, the book that crowned his career, Humboldt offered to the world his vision of humans and nature as integrated halves of a single whole. In it, Humboldt espoused the idea that, while the universe of nature exists apart from human purpose, its beauty and order, the very idea of the whole it composes, are human achievements: cosmos comes into being in the dance of world and mind, subject and object, science and poetry.
Humboldt's science laid the foundations for ecology and inspired the theories of his most important scientific disciple, Charles Darwin. In the United States, his ideas shaped the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Whitman. They helped spark the American environmental movement through followers like John Muir and George Perkins Marsh. And they even bolstered efforts to free the slaves and honor the rights of Indians.
Laura Dassow Walls here traces Humboldt's ideas for Cosmos to his 1799 journey to the Americas, where he first experienced the diversity of nature and of the world's peoples-and envisioned a new cosmopolitanism that would link ideas, disciplines, and nations into a global web of knowledge and cultures. In reclaiming Humboldt's transcultural and transdisciplinary project, Walls situates America in a lively and contested field of ideas, actions, and interests, and reaches beyond to a new worldview that integrates the natural and social sciences, the arts, and the humanities.
To the end of his life, Humboldt called himself "half an American," but ironically his legacy has largely faded in the United States. The Passage to Cosmos will reintroduce this seminal thinker to a new audience and return America to its rightful place in the story of his life, work, and enduring legacy.
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Laura Dassow Walls is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and the author of several books, including, most recently, Emerson's Life in Science: The Culture of Truth.
--Nicolaas A. Rupke "Science "
"Not the least of the qualities of Dassow Walls’ erudite and wide-ranging narrative is that she enables us to understand something of the man’s genius and polymathic range. Humboldt’s fundamental assumption, she tells us, was that neither humans nor nature could be understood in isolation."—Jeremy Jennings, "Times Higher Education" --Jeremy Jennings "Times Higher Education "
"By recovering the excitement of Humboldtian explorations and travel experiences, Walls wins back Humboldt for the 21st century. Through her account, he joins forces with present-day heroes such as Edward O. Wilson and his "Cosmos "of a sort, "Consilience", all of them reorienting and transforming disciplines and divisions that threaten ''to leach the poetry out of our technologically driven lives.'' Walls reclaims for the present a man whose personality and work had a formative influence on the cultural landscape of antebellum America and whose legacy may to good effect be used in addressing current affairs. I recommend "The Passage to Cosmos "as a fine piece of Humboldt scholarship, a heartfelt plea for environmental holism, and an enjoyable read."--Nicolaas A./i>
--Nicolaas A. Rupke "Science "
"Not the least of the qualities of Dassow Walls' erudite and wide-ranging narrative is that she enables us to understand something of the man's genius and polymathic range. Humboldt's fundamental assumption, she tells us, was that neither humans nor nature could be understood in isolation."--Jeremy Jennings, "Times Higher Education"--Jeremy Jennings "Times Higher Education "
