"The Inner Concatenation of the Universal with the Particular": Humboldt's Planetary Hermeneutics

Abstract: This article examines Alexander von Humboldt's scientific practice of relating the broad overview back to the granular level of particulars in order to allow a greater scope to reemerge in an oscillary pattern. Despite Humboldt's predilection for the Totalansicht or total overview, such views prove alienating and cannot be properly understood without moving between differing scales and timeframes and dissecting the individual parts of which they are composed. The planetary thus emerges in glimpses of insight within a process that continually relativizes this perspective and relates it to others, both in order to render it intelligible and to not become disconnected from it. Such a reading practice not only preserves particularity while revealing universal connectedness, but furthermore precludes an absolute perspective by demonstrating that these scales are fundamentally interlocked. The article contextualizes Humboldt's ecological hermeneutics vis-à-vis historical precedents and contemporary cognates (aesthetic, morphological, Romantic-speculative). It moreover suggests that this conception of interpretation extends Humboldt's own research practices to an ever-widening circle of readers.