Alexander von Humboldt Handbuch: Leben — Werk — Wirkung ed. by Ottmar Ette

Abstract

MLR, .,   overview detailing the archival situation and the general literature about Opitz, as well as offering a history of the various editions of Opitz’s work, ending with the most reliable and recent edition, the Kritische Ausgabe, begun by George SchulzBehrend in the late s; this edition publishes Opitz’s work in chronological order, based on Opitz’s first editions and ending in . Jörg Robert finishes the Schulz-Behrend edition by remaining loyal to his predessor’s editorial principles. In addition to the printed volumes there will be a digital edition, so that Opitz’s German and Latin texts and letters will finally be available in a reliable edition. B A S Alexander von Humboldt Handbuch: Leben — Werk — Wirkung. Ed. by O E. Stuttgart: Metzler. .  pp. €.. ISBN ––––. e image of Alexander von Humboldt we have inherited from the Age of Irony is marked by Daniel Kehlmann’s novel Die Vermessung der Welt (). In order to fashion himself as a witty meta-reflexive voice, the narrator invents a Humboldt character that has little in common with the historical model who was born two hundred and fiy years ago. He thus turns his character into a caricature of all the Prussian virtues that Humboldt in fact thoroughly abhorred and consistently tried to run away from. Far from being a narrow-minded empiricist, Humboldt, influenced by Kant, Goethe, and the Jena circle, was much more concerned with comparative analysis, the exploration of interdependencies, and methodological self-reflection. Far from lashing out at the world condescendingly or chauvinistically , he was in fact famed for his conviviality, his unprecedented respect for indigenous cultures, and his unwavering support of human rights. And while he may not have lacked in self-confidence, he was certainly not a grumpy lone wolf single-mindedly scanning the world for new taxa and data to further his reputation; rather, he was, first and foremost, an innovative team player who revolutionized the methodology, management, and popularization of science. An aesthetics of irony may have lost some of its lustre in a time of ‘fake news’. e publication of an Alexander von Humboldt handbook is, therefore, a welcome opportunity to provide a summary of Humboldt research and set the record straight. is new Metzler Handbuch showcases the considerable additions scientific, historical , cultural, and aesthetic research have made, over the course of the past three decades, to our understanding of this polymath. e editor, Ottmar Ette, is a scholar of Romance languages and has brought a fresh perspective to Humboldt. He has emphasized the importance of writing practices, polyglossia, and intermedia aesthetics for Humboldt’s approach to science; he has consistently foregrounded the aspect of jouissance in his empiricist and documentary practices; and he has presented him as a proto-ecologist whose ability to wed an empiricist paradigm to the self-reflection of scientific culture (and thus to an ethics of life sciences) speaks particularly powerfully to us today. It sounds as if Ette wants to create not only a role model for reunified Germany, but for the fractured legacy of the Enlightenment, liberal democracy, and cosmopolitanism at large. Humboldt will never meet these  Reviews expectations—nor will he ever heal the wounds inflicted by the ‘two cultures’ war between the sciences and the humanities. But that is beside the point. Ette’s reading of Humboldt’s cultural and aesthetic practices as an ‘unvollendetes Projekt einer anderen Moderne’ (p. ) helps us to understand our current predicaments. His versatility in doing so is infectious, and clearly many of the collaborators he has enlisted for this project have contracted the virus. e handbook sets itself the aim of uncovering the ‘verschüttete Traditionslinien’ (p. vii) of Humboldt scholarship that have been eclipsed by scientific paradigms decoupled from the transcendental and self-reflexive context from which the combinatory , comparative, and proto-ecological endeavour called Humboldtian Science emerged. It foregrounds the constitutive role that knowledge as cultural practice, epistemes of nature as interdependency—‘Alles ist Wechselwirkung’—and aesthetic practices play in such a science (Alexander von Humboldt, Das Buch der Begegnungen : Menschen, Kulturen, Geschichten aus den amerikanischen Reisetagebüchern, ed. and trans. by Ottmar Ette...