Everything about Wilhelm Von Humboldt totally explained
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Humboldt (
June 22,
1767 –
April 8,
1835), government functionary,
diplomat,
philosopher, founder of
Humboldt Universität in
Berlin, friend of
Goethe and especially of
Schiller, is especially remembered as a
linguist who made important contributions to the philosophy of language and to the theory and practice of education. In particular, he's widely recognized as having been the architect of the
Prussian education system which was used as a model for education systems in countries such as the
United States and
Japan.
Humboldt was born in
Potsdam,
Margraviate of Brandenburg, and died in
Tegel,
Province of Brandenburg. His younger brother,
Alexander von Humboldt, was an equally famous naturalist and scientist.
Philosopher
Humboldt was a
philosopher of note and published
On the Limits of State Action in
1810, the boldest defence 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 describes the necessary conditions without which the state must not be allowed to limit the action of individuals.
Humboldt wrote a publication entitled ‘Ideas for an endeavour to define the limits of stateaction’ which was completed in 1792, but wasn't published in full until long after his death. The section dealing with education was published in the December 1792 issue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift under the title ‘On public state education’. With this publication, Humboldt took part in the philosophical debate on the direction of national education which was in progress in Germany, as elsewhere after the French Revolution.
Minister of Education
As
Prussian Minister of Education, Humboldt oversaw the system of
Technische Hochschulen and
gymnasien. Humboldt’s plans for reforming the Prussian school system were not published until long after his death, together with his fragment of a treatise on the ‘Theory of Human Education’ which had been written in about 1793. Here Humboldt states that ‘the ultimate task of our existence is to give the fullest possible content to the concept of humanity in our own person [...] through the impact of actions in our own lives’. This task ‘can only be implemented through the links established between ourselves as individuals and the world around us’(GS, I, p. 283). Humboldt’s concept of education doesn't lend itself solely to individualistic interpretation. It is true that he always recognized the importance of the organization of individual lifeand the ‘development of a wealth of individual forms’ (GS, III, p. 358), but he stressed the fact that‘self-education can only be continued [...] in the wider context of development of the world’ (GS, VII,p. 33). In other words, the individual isn't only entitled, but also obliged, to play his part in shaping the world around him.Humboldt’s educational ideal was entirely coloured by social considerations. He never believed that the ‘human race could culminate in the attainment of a general perfection conceived in abstract terms’. In 1789, he wrote in his diary that ‘the education of the individual requires his incorporation into society and involves his links with society at large’ (GS, XIV, p. 155). In his essay on the ‘Theory of Human Education’, he answered the question as to the ‘demands which must be made of a nation, of an age and of the human race’. ‘Education, truth and virtue’ must be disseminated to such an extent that the ‘concept of mankind’ takes on a great and dignified form in each individual (GS, I, p. 284). However, this shall be achieved personally by each individual who must ‘absorb the great mass of material offered to him by the world around him and by his inner existence, using all the possibilities of his receptiveness; he must then reshape that material with all the energies ofhis own activity and appropriate it to himself so as to create an interaction between his own personality and nature in a most general, active and harmonious form’ (GS, II, p. 117).
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; and from that time forward he devoted himself solely to literature and study.
Linguist
Wilhelm von Humboldt was an adept
linguist and studied the
Basque language. He translated
Pindar and
Aeschylus into German.
Humboldt's work as a
philologist in
Basque has had more extensive impact than his other work. His visit to the
Basque country resulted in
Researches into the Early Inhabitants of Spain by the help of the Basque language (
1821). In this work, Humboldt endeavored to show by examining geographical placenames, that at one time a race or races speaking dialects allied to modern
Basque extended throughout
Spain, southern
France and the
Balearic Islands; he identified these people with the
Iberians of classical writers, and further surmised that they'd been allied with the
Berbers of northern
Africa. Humboldt's pioneering work has been superseded in its details by modern
linguistics and
archaeology, but is sometimes still uncritically followed even today.
Humboldt died while preparing his greatest work, on the ancient
Kawi language of
Java, but its introduction was published in
1836 as
The Heterogeneity of Language and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind. This essay on the philosophy of speech:
» "... first clearly laid down that the character and structure of a language expresses the inner life and knowledge of its speakers, and that languages must differ from one another in the same way and to the same degree as those who use them. Sounds don't become words until a meaning has been put into them, and this meaning embodies the thought of a community. What Humboldt terms the inner form of a language is just that mode of denoting the relations between the parts of a sentence which reflects the manner in which a particular body of men regards the world about them. It is the task of the morphology of speech to distinguish the various ways in which languages differ from each other as regards their inner form, and to classify and arrange them accordingly."
1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
He 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
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. However, Chomsky's use of Humboldt has been criticized as being highly misleading.
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 but Humboldt's view of the differences between languages was more subtle and less rigid.
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