Sleepy notes...
Reading a bit on the Stanford philosophy site about Wilhelm, I notice that his ideas on aesthetics seem to be of interest, so must get around to reading his Aesthetische Versuche.
Must really take a closer look at plato.stanford.edu when I'm not so sleepy:
"Humboldt's approach differs radically from that of his predecessors. “The Nature of thinking consists in reflecting”, he states in thesis 1, “that is, in the act by which the thinking subject differentiates itself from its thought” (im Unterscheiden des Denkenden vom Gedachten). This basic fact that every person can easily verify by performing such an act is the starting point of Humboldt's deliberations. Now, in order to reflect we must in our mind arrest the continuous flow of impressions in order to concentrate on something, comprehend this something as a separate “unit” (Einheit), and set it as an object over against our thinking activity (thesis 2)
Now.. how does this compare with Pierre Hadot's Plotinus? There was something about a 'simple view', not reflecting, but looking at an object, then closing your eyes, beholding the form without the object, thereby getting access to the Ideal within the particular object.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
The Humboldt brothers
Whilst reading John Sears' Sacred places : American tourist attractions in the nineteenth century (Oxford, 1989), primarily because of its descriptions of travellers' descriptions of Niagara Falls as a destination, about which Margaret Fuller also wrote in her Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, I came upon a line mentioning Alexander von Humboldt's Cosmos... a kind of eureka! moment for sure!
Googling around, I discovered a recent book by Laura Dessow Walls, A Passage to Cosmos (Chicago, 2009). I was over the moon when discovering this book and couldn't wait to get to Foyles to get it. So far it's proven very very interesting; haven't read this hungrily since childhood!
On Page 153 there's a mention of Wilhelm von Humboldt's essay "On the Historian's Task" (I think):
"The key, Wilhelm had said, was to use the method of the artist to grasp the truth of nature organically from within, to study "the way in in which the outward shape emerges from the idea and structure of the whole". Now, that does surely remind me a bit of Plotinus.. where does this come from? Goethe? Via Plotinus? Via someone else? I know from Daniel Walker Howe's Making the American self : Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, Mass., 1997) that there was a huge stream of Platonism/Plotinian thought coming into the United States, particularly after Thomas Taylor's translations into English, so can these Plotinian streams be gathered and connected?
Googling around, I discovered a recent book by Laura Dessow Walls, A Passage to Cosmos (Chicago, 2009). I was over the moon when discovering this book and couldn't wait to get to Foyles to get it. So far it's proven very very interesting; haven't read this hungrily since childhood!
On Page 153 there's a mention of Wilhelm von Humboldt's essay "On the Historian's Task" (I think):
"The key, Wilhelm had said, was to use the method of the artist to grasp the truth of nature organically from within, to study "the way in in which the outward shape emerges from the idea and structure of the whole". Now, that does surely remind me a bit of Plotinus.. where does this come from? Goethe? Via Plotinus? Via someone else? I know from Daniel Walker Howe's Making the American self : Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, Mass., 1997) that there was a huge stream of Platonism/Plotinian thought coming into the United States, particularly after Thomas Taylor's translations into English, so can these Plotinian streams be gathered and connected?
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