SOURCE: Sweet, Paul R. “Wilhelm von Humboldt (1967-1835): His Legacy to the Historian.” Centennial Review 15, no. 1 (winter 1971): 23-37.

[In the following essay, Sweet offers an account of Humboldt's achievements in linguistic theory and education, focusing particularly on his ideas about history.]

I

As a mature man with substantial claims to distinction as statesman, man of letters and accomplished scholar in several fields, Wilhelm von Humboldt reportedly let it be known that he wished to be identified simply as “Baron Humboldt, brother of the famous explorer.” This not entirely characteristic modesty expressed a resigned attitude about his public reputation which time has tended to validate. For Alexander von Humboldt, scientist, explorer and younger brother by two years, is still the more famous name. The educated public, at least outside Germany, is likely to think of Wilhelm, if it recalls his name at all, as “the other Humboldt.” Yet in his own way, Wilhelm von Humboldt has shown as impressive durability, which Lord Acton anticipated years ago when he called him “the most central figure in Germany” in his time. It is remarkable how many strains of current thought and discussion lead back to Humboldt and how vital he remains as a personality.

If it is a question of the character of humanistic education and of its place in modern society, or of the nature of historical truth; if it is a question of the quality of liberalism in Germany and why it took its particular course; if it is a question of the influence of the German idealist way of thinking in any field of cultural scholarship, or of currents in linguistics and anthropology; if it is a question of what the Germans mean by Bildung, of a particular kind of cultural ideal and of its importance in their history, Humboldt emerges as a central figure. When Benedetto Croce wrote a book on esthetics, he devoted a chapter to Humboldt's philosophy of language. When the nineteenth-century Austrian novelist, Adalbert Stifter, wanted a prototype for the main character in his masterpiece, the Nachsommer, he picked Wilhelm von Humboldt. It was not by accident that John Stuart Mill introduced his famous essay “On Liberty” with a quotation from Humboldt, or that Jacob Burckhardt described him as one of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century, for both of them wrote in the Humboldt tradition, and they knew it. When an American scholar of our day, Leonard Krieger, wrote a book on the German Idea of Freedom, he gave a substantial chapter to Humboldt. Humboldt's youthful treatise, “The Limits of State Action,” was published last year for the first time in English in over a hundred years in a new edition by the Cambridge University Press. This liberal classic was hailed by Noam Chomsky as a profound, though premature anti-capitalistic study with ideas suggesting the early Marx and anticipating nineteenth-century anarchism.

It has been asserted, perhaps too daringly, that Humboldt knew more foreign languages than any man up to his time. Certainly his knowledge of languages was very great. In an age which often used the term “universal” when it meant Europe, Humboldt was truly universal in interest and outlook. He was a serious student of the Indian languages of the New World, as well as of Chinese, Sanskrit, and the Basque language. His last and crowning work was a monumental treatise on the Kawi language of Java. He was versed in the modern western languages as a matter of course. Coleridge after brief, perhaps too brief, acquaintance wrote that he knew few Englishmen whom he “could compare with Humboldt in the extensive knowledge and just appreciation of English literature.”

Although he is often described in standard encyclopedias as primarily a philologist, Humboldt's true concern was with what can be learned about man through language. Linguistics from an anthropological standpoint became in the last phase of his life his main interest and his main preoccupation. His interest in classical philology—and he was an accomplished scholar in that field too—developed also in a cultural and anthropological direction; understanding the Greeks, their mentality and culture through their language, was his goal. His linguistic theories, which had their ups and downs over the years, are currently in vogue again. Herbert Marcuse has proclaimed the relevance of Humboldt's “classical philosophy of grammar” to current philosophical thought. Ernst Cassirer gave him a respectful chapter in his magnum opus, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.

Some scholars have examined Humboldt's intellectual life as though it were to be interpreted primarily in terms of the history of philosophy, as though he himself had been concerned preeminently in philosophical system-building. To determine where he stood in the “progression” from Leibniz to Kant seemed to such writers to be the central problem for the understanding of Humboldt. True, Humboldt could not undertake any study without examining first its theoretical foundations; but he was not a system-builder. With maturity he became increasingly aware of the problems of cardinal importance to him, and he developed consistency of approach in attacking problems, though not infrequently a solution eluded him. Hence it happens that many of his most significant papers—as we see his entire work in retrospect—were fragments unpublished in his lifetime and unknown to his contemporaries, imaginative but uncompleted efforts to come to grips with questions which were important to him. One of his casual writings, “On the Historian's Task,” appeared for the first time in English translation in 1967 as a “classic in the philosophy of history.” The great historian of the Hellenistic world, J. G. Droysen, who wrote a treatise on the theory and method of history which long enjoyed a great vogue in Germany, called Humboldt the Bacon of historical thought.

In addition to this many-sided intellectual life, of which the foregoing is intended to provide only some clues, Humboldt had a public career which lasted seventeen years and fully absorbed his energies from his forty-second through his fifty-second year (1809-1819). He is best known for his part in founding and shaping the character of the University of Berlin, thereby setting his stamp on the German university in general in the nineteenth century, and hence on the American university as it later developed. He was also, in the era of Napoleon's downfall, among the inner circle of leaders on the international diplomatic stage. After going as ambassador to Vienna in 1810, when Prussia had been reduced for practical purposes to a Napoleonic satellite, he became a key participant in the reassertion of Prussian pretensions as a great power which culminated in the settlements of 1815. Gordon A. Craig, after pondering the record of these years, called Humboldt the most formidable diplomatic talent produced by Prussia before Bismarck. After 1815 Humboldt failed, however, in his effort to move the Prussian government away, at least a little, from its authoritarian tradition. The eminent German historian, Friedrich Meinecke, considered the dismissal of Humboldt and his political friends in 1819 as a turning point in nineteenth-century German history. All his life, Meinecke was fascinated by Humboldt. At the age of eighty-four, when he briefly resumed teaching at the new Free University in Berlin, his first course was a seminar on Humboldt.

The best known of Humboldt's biographers in this century, Siegfried Kaehler, interpreted Humboldt's failure in 1819 to shift more power into his own hands and those of his political allies as the virtually inevitable culmination of his political career. In Kaehler's hands Humboldt became the epitome of political ineffectuality: he was a man destined for political failure because his dominating urge was for contemplation and the savoring of life in all of its manifold aspects. He lacked the instinct for single-minded pursuit of power and (Kaehler is still speaking) the talent for effectively facing political reality.

From these examples it is evident that diversity characterizes the interpretation of Humboldt's political career. Diversity also characterizes the interpretations of his personality in general. To some biographers he is a man of Apollonian serenity; to others a Faustian figure, full of inner tensions; to some a man of action, to others a man of withdrawal, of self-cultivation, of self-indulgence. Yet Humboldt is one of the best “documented” figures of his age. His diaries, his letters which fill many volumes, and the extraordinary sonnets, one of which he wrote every day in his last years until they totaled 1,183, reveal his inner life with exceptional fullness and depth. Among the letters, the seven large volumes of correspondence with his wife are a unique and fascinating record of a German marriage of the period. As a crowning monument to him the Prussian Academy of Sciences, spurred on by a great editor, Albert Leitzmann, published his collected writings in seventeen volumes. But the more one learns about him, the more conscious one becomes of the complexity of Humboldt's personality.

Since 1883 statues of the brothers Humboldt have guarded the entrance to the University of Berlin on Unter den Linden. They are still there. Indeed the University, now in East Berlin, has been renamed the Humboldt University. Why is the name Humboldt equally acceptable on both sides of the Berlin Wall? The question admits of no pat answer. Doubtless the combined reputations of the brothers contribute to the phenomenon. The one achieved to a remarkable degree universality in humanistic learning, the other universality in scientific synthesis. In 1967, upon the two-hundredth anniversary of Wilhelm von Humboldt's birth, an exhibition of his writings at the Staatsbibliothek in East Berlin contained the following words of appraisal: “Liberal-oriented Prussian statesman, important theorist in politics and art … he embodied the neo-humanistic bourgeois ideal of a cultivated man, favored national education and advocated comprehensive universal education.” It was not an unqualified tribute. It did, however, bear witness to the fact that the humanistic ideals to which Humboldt's life bore testimony still receive a respectful bow on both sides of the iron curtain.

II

Up to the time when Humboldt delivered an address on the “Task of the Historian” before the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1821, he had had little to say publicly regarding the nature of history and its accessibility to the historian; but he had been pondering the subject for thirty years. This is not the place to describe what those thirty years had meant in terms of historical projects started and abandoned. There had been, among others, a fin-de-siècle Characteristics of the Eighteenth Century which had consumed parts of several years. There had been an ambitious, but still-born, Rise and Fall of the Free City-States of Greece. Fragments found among his papers and published long after his death bear abundant testimony to the extent of his labors and to his preoccupation with theoretical aspects of the problems he was tackling. Thus, although he brought to a finish no major historical work in the conventional sense of the term, in theorizing about history he was reflecting in substantial measure his own encounters with the humdrum concerns of the practicing historian. Gradually it became apparent to him that his own bent was toward linguistics and comparative anthropology, and his scholarly life was crowned by a three-volume masterpiece, The Kawi Language of the Island of Java, with its great introduction, book-length in itself, entitled “Concerning the Differences in the Structure of Human Languages and their Influence on the Cultural Development of the Human Race.”

Although he refined some of his formulations and shifted accents of emphasis, a consistency of outlook is evident in all of Humboldt's writings on the nature and method of history. In basic concepts he was a man of the eighteenth century in the tradition of Leibniz. He had intensively studied the Kantian system. But in his approach to history and the problem of historical knowledge he developed, by the middle of the 1790's, ideas which bore his own stamp. Implicit in this approach was the notion that the foundations of historical knowledge are different from those of the natural sciences: Kant's Critique, valid as it might be for scientific knowledge, did not suffice for the historian. Humboldt did not set out to match Kant with a Critique of Historical Reason, as Dilthey nearly a century later was to attempt to do, but he anticipated Dilthey to a remarkable extent. The characteristic feature of Humboldt's historical thought was its symbiosis of the empirical exactitude of the scholar with the creative imagination of the artist. He started with the methods of critical analysis which were being developed by classical scholars and were to dominate all scholarship in the humanities, he brought them within the frame of a general idealist interpretation of history, and confidently held out the prospect, through the penetration of imaginative understanding, of grasping historical truth. Much as he stressed the artistic dimension, however, he did not conceive of history as primarily an art. Empirical exactitude came first. His writings are studded with passages like the following: “So far as I am capable, my aim is to seek to form a true picture … from the concrete detail.” The first step in the approach to historical truth is “the exact, impartial, critical investigation of events.” The true historian “subordinates his imagination to experience and the investigation of reality.”

Humboldt was not troubled by doubts about the validity of the phenomena observable by the historian. Historical facts, he was sure, were ascertainable in overabundance by the methods of critical scholarship. But was it possible to make sense of them? Within limits, he was confident that it was.

In his view, historical phenomena were explainable in terms of a directive energy to which he attached, in his most mature consideration of the problem, the curious label Weltregierung, literally “world government,” or “governance.”¹ This “directive energy” expressed itself in what Humboldt called “ideas.” (The terminology is not devoid of ambiguities and has been much discussed and debated.) He once described these “ideas” as incorporeal essences, vital forces, “which lie outside the compass of the finite, and yet pervade and dominate every part of world history,” but he varied the applicability of the concept in his various writings. Whatever their particular usage, his “ideas” and “vital forces” belong in the realm of the spirit and of the transcendent and are of the essence of his idealist view of history.

Humboldt held that these directive energies and “ideas” constitute history's inner truth. Among their characteristics were: freedom, creativity, and endless individuation. But there were limitations on their autonomy—limitations imposed by particular cultural and historical situations. From the time of his early speculations, Humboldt conceived of history in terms of the tension between freedom, in the above sense, and necessity, out of which emerged what he called “the predominating trend of ideas at a given time.” This was the “reality” of history, the transcendent reality of the “ideas,” which manifested itself, but only as through a glass darkly, in the events of the external world.

How does the historian apprehend this reality? The first requirement, as we have seen, was an exact knowledge of events. Not easy. “For nothing is rarer than a narrative which is literally true; nothing is better proof of a sound, well-ordered, and critical intelligence, and of a free objective attitude.” Secondly, the historian must guard against imposing his own preconceptions on his vision of reality. Third, by the combined exertions of all his faculties—reason, imagination, intuitive understanding—he must by a creative act reach for the “actual inner truth,” for the true reality, the transcendent reality of the “ideas.”

Thus, although the historian needed to have the tools of his trade, he required something more to be a true historian: namely, a special “talent” for penetration behind phenomena to their reality, a special “passion” in the throes of which “a human being remains in perfect harmony with the whole of nature … in a manner incomprehensible to cold prosaic thought.” To be sure, there were always aspects of reality which eluded even the most attuned intelligence, but, on the whole, Humboldt's message had the effect of heightening the historian's confidence in his capacity to divine the inner reality. A leading German sociologist has called this doctrine “the elite theory of manifest truth”: the notion that inner truth manifests itself in events, but only the specially endowed can penetrate the hidden meaning.

In addition to these views, significant for the future, regarding the problem of historical knowledge, Humboldt was also one of the first to elaborate a full-fledged “historicist” view of man in his world. In Humboldt's sense, this involved a conception of mankind as a marvelous galaxy of personalities, nations, cultures, each of them unique and developing in accord with the tensions of their existence. Humboldt gave much minute attention to the problem of how to distinguish what were actually those characteristics which gave individuality to an Individuum (be it person, nation or culture). There was great liberality and breadth of sympathy in his point of view. Everything connected with human life had its own interest and worth; Humboldt placed high value on the capacity to comprehend imaginatively strange individualities in their own terms. “The finest and highest instruction that history can give … is surely that which springs unsought from the pure appreciation of historical individualities as such. … It is then history's own value which becomes valuable to us. … It follows … that history is nothing but the history of culture, culture signifying the production of unique spiritual values, of historical individualities.” The words are those of Friedrich Meinecke, written in a classic essay of 1925, but the thought is nearly pure Humboldt.

In time this way of looking at history, with its relativist implications, was to lead to intellectual crisis among the inheritors of the Humboldt tradition, but the problem of establishing standards of judgment, though it repeatedly engaged Humboldt's serious attention, does not appear to have caused him anguish. He was too confident that all is not chaos for that.

Fundamentally, his was a dynamic conception. The quality of an individual or of a culture depended upon the quality of its activity and creativity. But how does one determine the quality of activity? Upon one occasion Humboldt tackled the problem through the concepts of striving (Streben) and longing (Sehnsucht), striving being defined as activity directed toward the obtainable object, longing as activity toward an unattainable ideal. “The ideality of a character,” he wrote, “depends on nothing so much as the depth and kind of Sehnsucht that inspires it.” There was no doubt a strong subjective element here, but it would take us too far afield to follow Humboldt in his efforts to objectify his standards of judgment. He sought to do it by defining the qualities of human greatness. In the process he elaborated the notion of ideal types; indeed it is said that he was the first to have developed the concept of ideal types systematically.

In Humboldt's world view, the Greeks occupied a special position. Books have been written about Humboldt and the Greeks. For our purposes here it suffices to say that they typified for him great humanity. They symbolized how godlike men could be if they lived at full stretch, reaching out to fulfill all the human possibilities of which they were capable. “If every other part of history enriches us with its human wisdom and human experience,” he once wrote, “then from the Greeks we take something more than earthly—something almost godlike. … They move us, not with compulsion to be more like them, but with inspiration to be more ourselves.”

III

The historical ideas of Humboldt had much innovative force and enduring impact. That is why Georg Iggers, for example, began his scholarly work on The German Idea of History (1968) with extensive treatment of Humboldt and why, similarly, Joachim Wach gave Humboldt intensive analysis at an early stage of his magisterial volumes on “Historical Understanding” (Das Verstehen; new edition 1966). Through the nineteenth century and into our own day the Humboldtian notions have provided a dominant strain in German academic historiography. In a summing up a few years ago, a Swiss historian at the Free University of Berlin asked: Has anyone come closer to the last secret of history than did the idealists in the Humboldt-Ranke tradition? The lineage through Droysen, Dilthey, Troeltsch and Meinecke has been often traced and is well known. Generations of American historians, from George Bancroft on, went to school to these Germans as the prestigious masters of historical studies, but by a curious transmutation, these pupils who by the end of the nineteenth century were setting up the first doctoral programs in American universities, made over Humboldt-Rankean empirical idealism into their own brands of positivism. German historical idealism did not turn out to be a particularly exportable commodity. Nevertheless, its penetration, unlabeled, into writings in English on the nature of history and of historical knowledge is greater than is commonly recognized.²

A case in point is G. R. Elton, a prominent Cambridge historian specializing in the Tudor period, whose lively book, The Practice of History (1967) is among those frequently placed in the hands of graduate students these days as part of their introduction to the nature and method of their subject. At the outset Professor Elton stresses his commitment to common sense and ventilates his “suspicion that a philosophic concern with such problems as the … nature of historical thought only hinders the practice of history.” Then, almost at once, he asserts that there is accessible to the historian a “profound knowledge which beyond the facts (italics mine) comprehends setting, atmosphere, possibility, probability—all those tenuous compounds in the lives of men which we call the spirit of an age.”

Knowledge of the spirit of an age! This was precisely the kind of knowledge Humboldt pondered when he set out to write the Characteristics of the Eighteenth Century. And how does the historian acquire such knowledge? Here Elton resorts to a distinction between “amateur” and “professional.” The amateur historian, he says, has not grasped that research means more than “reading a lot of books”; he has not grasped “that it means assimilating into oneself the various and tiresome relics of the past.” “The hallmark of the amateur is failure of intuitive understanding” (italics mine); he sees “the exceptional in the commonplace” and finds the unusual ordinary. And in case the reader wonders whether Elton has specific amateurs in mind, he names names: dead but high-class amateurs: Lord Acton and G. M. Trevelyan. “On the other hand,” he continues, “the professional, truly understanding an age from the inside—living with its attitudes and prejudices—can also judge it.”

Confident that the amateur-professional criterion he has offered “has about it a quality of precision,” Elton proceeds then to describe how the professional comes to grips with insubstantialities like “the spirit of an age”: “He knows his evidence. … He knows the right questions. His instinctive familiarity with the evidence results in a useful and necessary sense (italics mine) which extends his range beyond the strict confines of the evidence. … He fights through to an explanation grounded on evidence,” his tools being “selection and divination.” Divination! That word so favored by the German romantics, “with its overtones,” in Theodore von Laue's telling phrase, “of inward delight.”

Yes, with Elton we are back with a Humboldtian question and we get an astonishingly Humboldtian answer. The scholar who has mastered the empirical evidence by the highest critical standards, who possesses in addition a particular “talent” and “passion” (through the quality of his “professionalism”) for an intuitive reach beyond the evidence is a true historian. It is the “elite theory of manifest truth” all over again.

There are, it seems to me, serious dangers inherent in the kind of professional hubris engendered by this theory. I think again of Ranke's rather alarming statement: “What a marvel when gradually you advance to a point where with justified self-confidence you can divine … which turn mankind took in each age, what it aimed for, what it acquired and what it truly gained” (italics mine). Ranke's was the kind of self-confidence engendered by Humboldt's assurance that the “predominating trend of events at a given time” could be discerned by the properly endowed historian. As I have suggested elsewhere, some German historians in the idealist tradition may have been led astray earlier in this century by their confidence that as “professionals” they could “divine” that the Nazi movement was the wave of the future. I myself prefer the epistemological pessimism, or at any rate limited optimism, of Karl Popper, with his formulation that our access to truth is finite, our access to error is infinite.

Nevertheless, though one may find fault with Humboldt's theory of historical knowledge, its past and continuing importance is scarcely to be denied. Furthermore, his view that historical “understanding” is a process involving all human faculties has by no means lost its vitality.³

Another important aspect of Humboldt's position in historical thought was summed up by Friedrich Meinecke when he wrote: “Wilhelm von Humboldt was perhaps the first to call for … history oriented to all of mankind's spiritual (geistigen) values.” This meant, as we have seen, the cultivation of an objectivity capable of comprehending strange and remote individualities and cultures in their own terms, but not history written against a backdrop of absolute standards nor a history consciously directed toward supplying substance for a particular ideology. To a certain extent Leopold von Ranke became an exemplar of the historian in this sense. On the other hand, the history Ranke actually wrote was of a sort which did not interest Humboldt very much. Study of great-power relations based on diplomatic papers and with a strong political emphasis was not his preferred genre. In my view, it is a misreading of Humboldt to assert, as has recently been done, that he strongly promoted power-political, state-oriented history in the Ranke pattern. This is not say that he ignored power and politics. On the contrary, in his political career, he was a German patriot and effective promoter of Prussian power, and this outlook is naturally reflected in his papers as a functioning statesman. But the kind of history he advocated and tried to put into practice had a prevailingly cultural orientation. To be sure, the nation in his schema had a central role as focus for cultural analysis, but Humboldt beat no drum for history exalting the state. Indeed, in the period of German national revival, in which he played a conspicuous part, his historical interests were increasingly directed toward the Basques, the American Indians, and finally Sanskrit, the ancient cultures of India and of Indonesia.

In his cultural emphasis Humboldt was in accord with a tradition of the eighteenth century, but he enlarged the dimensions of cultural history by adding the methods of the cultural anthropologist in the modern sense to those conventional to the historian. Thus, though he anticipated in some ways history in the style of Jacob Burckhardt's Renaissance in Italy, he developed in time a sensitivity to all humanity which Burckhardt did not have.

It has often been said that culture in Humboldt's usage was largely conceived in terms of what geniuses or persons of superior talents achieved in art, literature, science, philosophy, and so on; that it was an aristocratic conception with anti-democratic implications for the society which was to be influenced by it as a cultural ideal. It is no doubt true that he gave little attention to methods of production, or to the analysis of social and economic aspects of culture. In this he was a man of his own epoch.

His fundamental conception, however, was of the intrinsic worth of every human personality. As parts of the human family, all men, all cultures, achieved greatness not by what they attained, but by the quality of their efforts to attain great humanity within the limits of their own potentialities. All cultures, advanced and primitive, were appropriate to the attention of the historian. Universal history should be truly universal. This was his real message. If it was sometimes lost from view because other parts of his legacy were given greater attention, he cannot be blamed for that.⁴

Notes

1. This is not to be confused with the Hegelian “world spirit,’ for Humboldt thought that teleological history, whether theological or philosophical, with its search for final causes and goals, could only lead the historian into error.

2. In his presidential address to the American Historical Association, December 1969, C. Vann Woodward alluded to the continuing tendency of the historian to imagine himself as a “sort of centaur,” “half scientist, half artist.” Professor Woodward added some pungent comments; American Historical Review, Vol. 75 (Feb. 1970), esp. pp. 713-720.

3. See for example Sir Isaiah Berlin's strong defense from the empirical standpoint of “those who, without mystical overtones, insist on the importance of common sense, or knowledge of life, or width of experience, or breadth of sympathy or imagination, or natural wisdom, or ‘depth’ of insight” in seeking historical understanding; “The Concept of Scientific History,” History and Theory, Vol. I (1960), pp. 1-31. Reprinted in William H. Dray, ed., Philosophical Analysis and History (New York, 1966), esp. p. 41.

4. Professor Theodor Schieder has remarked on the failure of history in the above sense to have “any effect on German political consciousness” in the nineteenth century, and he has added some interesting reflections; “The Renewal of the Sense of History,” The State and Society in Our Times (London, 1962), pp. 149-165.