Wilhelm von Humboldt

Wilhelm von Humboldt

Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand, Baron von Humboldt (June 22, 1767 – April 8, 1835), was a government official, diplomat, philosopher, linguist and educational reformer, famous for introducing a knowledge of the Basque language to European intelligentsia. He was the founder of Humboldt Universität in Berlin, and was influential in developing the science of comparative philology.

His younger brother, Alexander von Humboldt was an equally famous naturalist and scientist.

Life

Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt was born on June 22, 1767 in Potsdam, Prussia (today’s Germany), into the family of Alexander Georg von Humboldt and Baroness von Holwede. As a child, he was tutored by Johann Heinrich Campe, who later became one of the famous members of the German philanthropic school. In 1779 his father died, an event that left young Humboldt traumatized. The education of Humboldt's brothers was taken on by Christian Kunth, a famous German educator. He guided Humboldt through his law studies at the University of Brandenburg in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, and later at the University of Göttingen.

In 1789, Humboldt became a law clerk to the Supreme Court in Berlin. He married Karoline von Dacheröden, the daughter of the President of the Prussian Council in Erfurt. In 1793 he published his essay Über das Studium des Klassischen Altertums, in which he summarized his program for educational reforms, which were in progress in many European countries after the French Revolution.

Humboldt resigned from his position at the Supreme Court after only one year, and resided mostly at his in-laws' in Thuringia and in Jena. While in Jena, from 1794 to 1797, he was a member of Friedrich von Schiller's circle.

After the death of his mother in 1796, he was left with a larger inheritance, enabling him to live a comfortable life. He undertook several journeys around Europe for the purposes of educational research, and became particularly interested in philology. He made several scientific works in this period of his life.

In 1802 he was appointed Prussian envoy to Vatican in Rome, the duty he carried on for six years. In 1807 he was called by Baron von Stein to return to Berlin and take over the reforms of the education. In 1809 Humboldt became a head of the Educational Department in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. He became particularly interested in the work of Johann Pestalozzi, and has sent his teachers to Switzerland to study Pestalozzi’s method. In 1809 Humboldt founded the University of Berlin.

From 1810 to 1819 Humboldt served as the Prussian representative in Vienna, London, and Berlin. In 1819, he was appointed Minister of Estates in the Prussian government, but he resigned that position in protest against the reactionary policies of the government. He retired into his estate in Tegel near Berlin, and concentrated on writing and research. In 1829, he served as Chairman of the Commission on the Foundation and Interior Design of the newly founded Berlin Museum.

Humboldt died at Tegel, Prussia, on April 8, 1835.

Work

Wilhelm von Humboldt was a well-known philosopher, a diplomat, a linguist, and an educational theorist.

Philosopher

Humboldt was a known philosopher, whose book On the Limits of State Action in 1810, was the boldest defense of the liberties of the Enlightenment. It anticipated John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty by which von Humboldt's ideas became known in the English-speaking world. He describes the development of liberalism and the role of liberty in individual development and in pursuit of excellence. He also described the necessary conditions without which the state must not be allowed to limit the action of individuals. He believed, similar as in biological development, that all growth is good and a part of a natural process. Government thus should not interfere too much in the development of any organization within the state, for it may retard the normal development of that organization.

He advocated a type of liberalism that would preserve the individual states and provinces, with their unique character and traditions. He believed that those small units need to have their own government and constitution, adapted to the particular genius of its national character.

In his The Limits of State Action (1791), Humboldt presented his concept of the human being. He saw humans as both individual and part of a society. He believed that human nature needs freedom for self-expression, but also social support and life in a community.

He said:

"If we would indicate an idea which, throughout the whole course of history, has ever more and more widely extended its empire, or which, more than any other, testifies to the much-contested and still more decidedly misunderstood perfectibility of the whole human race, it is that of establishing our common humanity — of striving to remove the barriers which prejudice and limited views of every kind have erected among men, and to treat all mankind, without reference to religion, nation, or color, as one fraternity, one great community, fitted for the attainment of one object, the unrestrained development of the physical powers. This is the ultimate and highest aim of society." (cited in Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos).

Diplomat

As a successful diplomat between 1802 and 1819, Humboldt was plenipotentiary Prussian minister at Rome from 1802, ambassador at Vienna from 1812 during the closing struggles of the Napoleonic Wars, at the congress of Prague (1813) where he was instrumental in drawing Austria to ally with Prussia and Russia against France, a signer of the peace treaty at Paris and the treaty between Prussia and defeated Saxony (1815), at Frankfurt settling post-Napoleonic Germany, and at the congress at Aachen in 1818. However, the increasingly reactionary policy of the Prussian government made him give up political life in 1819. He was particularly critical of the government’s harsh persecution of ‘demagogues’ following the attack on Kotzebue.

Linguist

Wilhelm von Humboldt was an adept linguist who translated Pindar and Aeschylus and studied the Basque language. He saw human language as a rule-governed system, not merely a collection of words and phrases paired with meanings.

His work as a philologist in the Basque language has had the most extended life of all his other work. The result of his visit to the Basque country was Researches into the Early Inhabitants of Spain by the help of the Basque language (1821). In this work hee endeavored to show, by an examination of geographical place-names, that a race or races speaking dialects allied to modern Basque once extended throughout Spain, southern France and the Balearic Islands. He identified these people with the Iberians of classical writers, and he further surmised that they had been allied with the Berber people of north Africa. Humboldt's pioneering work has been superseded in its details by modern linguistics and archaeology.

Educational theorist

Statue of Wilhelm von Humboldt, outside Humboldt University, Unter den Linden, Berlin

Already in his early career Humboldt turned to the theory of education. After the French Revolution in 1789, many countries in Europe undertook extensive educational reforms. Even though Humboldt acted as a Prussian minister of education, he has never seen himself as merely a Prussian official. He advocated a system of education that surpassed the boundaries of the State of Prussia; he searched for the universal system of education that would benefit the whole humankind.

Humboldt traveled around the world to find the laws that govern human development on earth. He wanted to find the purpose of life, in order to design the system of education that would support that purpose. He found knowledge to be of utmost importance in human life, and thus argued that individuals need to be free from any restraint in their search for knowledge. State government and even parent’s authority are seen as potential threats to human development, as their authority might retard normal human growth. He advocated for the children’s rights and the maximal freedom of individuals within the state. Humboldt however didn’t hold that individualism is the goal of human development. He rather believed that educated individuals were essential for the development of the world, and thus should actively engage in solving world problems.

Humboldt was a great admirer of Johann Pestalozzi and his method of education. As a minister in the Department of Education, he has sent numerous teachers to Switzerland to study with Pestalozzi and apply his teachings to Prussian schools. Humboldt saw humans going through three “natural” stages of development, and thus advocated education be also divided into three stages – elementary, secondary, and university education. He argued that according to this model schools also need to be divided into elementary schools, secondary schools, and universities.

Humboldt regarded elementary education as the most important in one’s life, for it sets the foundation for all later levels of education. He believed that everybody, regardless of their social status or career goals, need to undertake the same elementary training. Such education needs to include a complete mental training - the training of personality. He proposed that State needs to provide funds for those who cannot pay for education.

Legacy

Humboldt’s ideas of the universal elementary education and the division of the schools into the three levels – elementary school, secondary school, and universities – did not gain acceptance until well into the 20th century. His model of the university is characterized by the unity of teaching and research, which became embodied in his Berlin University. As Prussian minister of education, Humboldt oversaw the system of Technische Hochschulen (Technical high schools) and gymnasiums, that made Prussia, and subsequently the German Empire, the strongest European power and the scientific and intellectual leader of the world.

Humboldt is credited with being the first European linguist to identify human language as a rule-governed system, rather than just a collection of words and phrases paired with meanings. This idea is one of the foundations of Noam Chomsky's transformational theory of language. Chomsky frequently quotes Humboldt's description of language as a system which "makes infinite use of finite means", meaning that an infinite number of sentences can be created using a finite number of grammatical rules. In recent times, Humboldt has also been credited as an originator of the linguistic relativity hypothesis (more commonly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), approximately a century before either Edward Sapir or Benjamin Whorf.

Publications

• Van Humboldt, W. 1790. Sokrates und Platon über die Gottheit.
• Van Humboldt, W. 1794. Über den Geschlechtsunterschied.
• Van Humboldt, W. 1795. Über männliche und weibliche Form.
• Van Humboldt, W. 1797. Plan einer vergleichenden Anthropologie.
• Van Humboldt, W. 1797. Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert.
• Van Humboldt, W. 1799. Ästhetische Versuche I. - Über Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea. Braunschweig
• Van Humboldt, W. 1808. Geschichte des Verfalls und Untergangs der griechischen Freistaaten.
• Van Humboldt, W. 1821. Über die Aufgabe des Geschichtsschreibers. Berlin: Bei Ferdinand Dümmler
• Van Humboldt, W. 1821. Prüfung der Untersuchungen über die Urbewohner Hispaniens vermittelst der vaskischen Sprache. Berlin: Bei Ferdinand Dümmler
• Van Humboldt, W. 1822. Über die Entstehung der grammatischen Formen und ihren Einfluss auf die Ideenentwicklung.
• Van Humboldt, W. 1826. Über die unter dem Namen Bhagavad-Gítá bekannte Episode des Mahá-Bhárata. Berlin: Druckerei der Königl. Akademie der Wissenschaften.
• Van Humboldt, W. 1827. Über den Dualis. Berlin: Druckerei der Königl. Akademie der Wissenschaften
• Van Humboldt, W. 1828. Über die Sprache der Südseeinseln.
• Van Humboldt, W. 1913 (original published in 1830). On Schiller and the Path of Spiritual Development (orig. Über Schiller und den Gang seiner Geistesentwicklung). Leipzig: Insel-Verlag.
• Van Humboldt, W. 1938 (original published in 1824). Upon Writing and its Relation to Speech (orig. Über die Buchstabenschrift und ihren Zusammenhang mit dem Sprachbau). Berlin: Mergenthaler Setzmaschinen-Fabrik
• Van Humboldt, W. 1993 (original published in 1791). The Limits of State Action (orig. Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen). Liberty Fund. ISBN 0865971099
• Van Humboldt, W. 2005 (original published in 1836). On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species (orig. Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaus und seinen Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts). Michael Losonsky (Ed.), Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521667720

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Humboldt, Alexander von. 1848. Cosmos: A sketch of a physical description of the universe (5 Vols.). London: Bohn's Scientific Library
• Klencke, H. 1852. Alexander von Humboldt. Leipzig: Spamer. Retrieved on April 1, 2007, <http://www.archive.org/details/AlexanderVonHumboldt>
• Manchester, Martin L. 1986. Philosophical Foundations of Humboldt's Linguistic Doctrines. John Benjamins Pub Co. ISBN 9027245142
• Miniter, Richard. 1991. Wilhelm von Humboldt. Retrieved on April 1, 2007, <http://www.libertyhaven.com/theoreticalorphilosophicalissues/philosophy/wilhelmvon.html>
• UNESCO. 2000. Wilhelm von Humboldt. International Bureau of Education <http://www.ibe.unesco.org>. Retrieved on April 1, 2007, <http://www.ibe.unesco.org/publications/ThinkersPdf/humbolde.PDF>

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