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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226467351 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 03/27/2019 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Beginnings
1754–1772
* * *
Johann George Adam Forster was born on November 27, 1754, in Nassenhuben, a village near Danzig, the first-born son of Johann Reinhold Forster and his wife Justina Elisabeth, née Nicolai; three brothers and four sisters followed. He was called "George" until the family moved to Germany, at which point he became "Georg." In 1765 his father took him along on a journey of several months to the Volga, on behalf of the Russian empress Catherine the Great. In 1766 father and son moved to England, where Reinhold Forster accepted a position at the Warrington Academy. His family joined him there. In 1772 Reinhold Forster was invited to accompany James Cook on his second expedition around the world. Georg went with him.
* * *
Like a Blank Slate
The Greek historian Herodotus, at the beginning of the second book of his Histories, recounts a remarkable experiment. The Egyptian Pharaoh Psammetichus wanted to know which people were older, the Egyptians or the Phrygians. So he arranged for two newborns who were selected at random to be placed in the care of a shepherd. From that point on, the children were kept isolated; their only companions were goats, so that they could get milk. Left on their own in this manner, the children, it was thought, would develop without external influence. The children's first word would thus reveal whether the Egyptian or the Phrygian people were older. It so happened that one day the shepherd heard the two children — now two years old — calling out, with outstretched hands, bekos, the Phrygian word for bread. With this it became apparent to the Egyptian Pharaoh that the Phrygians' culture surpassed his own in venerability. The reliability of this experiment, as Herodotus's account suggests, stemmed from the inconvenient outcome for the Egyptians.
In this case, it is the research design that is important. Isolating the test subjects from all social ties was underscored by agrarian simplicity, because what could be learned from goats? Cultural stimuli were minimized to such an extent that the children would be able to develop from a natural state. The hope was that an immediacy would emerge from the two children if they were not encumbered by education. This model of creating an ideal situation for unhampered findings proved fascinating for modern science, because among the most peculiar findings of natural science to date was the insight that knowledge can make one blind. Modern science virtually began with a motion for censure against the traditional knowledge base. There was good reason for this position: in 1492 Columbus pushed the limits of the known world; in 1543 Copernicus displaced the earth from the center of the planetary system; in 1610 Galileo first pointed his telescope at the night sky, and the number of known stars grew immeasurably. The ancients' knowledge, passed down over generations, was being proved false. The suspicion was becoming palpable that the tomes in the libraries were full of nonsense about the world.
Ever since, all knowledge has borne the caveat that we operate with "world models" and cultivate a skeptical caution toward the latest truths and homogeneous worldviews. Above all, though, tradition has forfeited its aura of normativity. The history of science that has been handed down seems like a sequence of errors and corrections. The sheer willingness to join issue with experience as the basis for all knowledge owes its triumph to modern science. The abundance of existing knowledge can be a hindrance, however, to the acquisition of experience. It stands in the way of comprehending that which is new. What, though, if one could shelve the knowledge that has been handed down, refute it, neutralize it? No thought experiment has been more fascinating to modern thinkers than the premise of a possible tabula rasa, a new beginning without preconceptions. Since Plato's dialog Meno, in which Socrates demonstrates a slave's capability for mathematical learning through skillful questioning, it had been accepted that the human mind has innate ideas that need only to be roused. In the seventeenth century, this was the departure point for thinkers like John Locke, for whom the human mind resembled a blank slate, free of all ideas. It is only from impressions, as David Hume formulated it in the eighteenth century, that our ideas are derived. Without experience, however, we can possess no knowledge of the world. Forster expressed this same view. He consistently defended the advantage of experience over mere ideas, which he mistrusted because, in his view, "for there to be innate ideas" was not possible. Indeed, humankind has command only over "inherited organizations and inherited susceptibility." At a prominent opportunity, during the inaugural lecture of his professorship in Vilna in 1784, Forster made his position public, provoking the clergy in attendance: "Dominicans, Franciscans, Benedictines, and Jesuits were present when I demonstrated yesterday," he wrote in a letter to his publisher, Johann Karl Philipp Spener, "that mankind has no innate ideas, that its mind is material, that the whole of reason rests on received sensory impressions."
It would almost seem as if nature itself engaged in an experiment when it brought Georg Forster into the world on November 27, 1754, in a remote village near Danzig. Nassenhuben, as the scattered group of farmsteads was called — Mokry Dwór in Polish — seemed isolated enough to keep the talent he was blessed with from the ballast of education. His father, Johann Reinhold Forster, was of English descent, and he attended secondary school in Berlin, studied in Halle an der Salle, and went to lectures by Christian Wolff. Despite all his ambitions, reflected by his library of twenty-five hundred scientific works, issued in wood and copperplate, he became a Lutheran pastor in the provinces, without any prospect of what one might call a career. His son Georg did not attend school in Nassenhuben. He later missed the opportunity to complete his university studies, too, and thus lacked a proper education. Reinhold Forster taught Georg, but Reinhold was a dogmatic man with a tendency to quarrel.
That he might sail around the world with James Cook was something Georg scarcely could have imagined as he grew up in his parents' cloistered home. The particular appeal of his observations during his three-year exploration of the world stems from the fact that he was highly gifted but had not been shaped by any educational canon that might have guided or constrained him in his observations of new and strange things. In that respect he was uneducated but tremendously capable. He himself did not consider it a flaw that he lacked the systematic outline of knowledge: "There is no wisdom from education; wisdom is merely the child of one's own experience," he later said. He was a thoroughly "sensual person," so much so that his reflections, theories, and philosophical approaches routinely fell short of the force of his descriptions of nature. "Nature is all the world to me," he professed.
Nevertheless, he certainly saw the limits to his powers of reflection. He "neither read nor heard logic, nor metaphysics, nor natural law" and admitted to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, "Truthfully all that I know is not much more than mere feeling." "My complaint was always," he disclosed to Johann Gottfried Herder, "that I was yoked too soon, that I was forced to work when I still should have been learning." Such comments imply that the incredible liveliness of his descriptions stems precisely from the unspoiled quality of his immediate experience, which was virtually without prejudice, at least in intention. Forster proved himself, even in the most bewildering experiences, to be open-minded and unbiased. From Heinrich Heine comes the bon mot "Nature wanted to see how she looked, and she created Goethe." We might also say, when nature wanted to be sensitively described in all her variety, she created Forster.
To be sure, this claim is unfair to the others who have explored the world and discovered nature. But the most significant German-language naturalist after Forster, Alexander von Humboldt, learned from Forster how to describe nature: not to dwell on outer appearances alone, but to portray how those appearances are reflected in the interiority of humankind. Charles Darwin, in turn, admired Humboldt, particularly the chronicle of his journey to the tropical regions of the new world. As if Forster had taken heed of the terms by which he was contracted in nature's experiment, he later wrote:
Truly, it is from darkness that man comes into the world. His soul is as naked as his body; he is born without knowledge, as he is without defenses. Bringing only a capacity for suffering into the world, he can only receive impressions of his external circumstances and allow his sense organs to be touched. The light shines long in front of him before he is illuminated by it. In the beginning he receives everything from nature and gives her nothing in return. As soon as his senses have attained greater sharpness, however, as soon as he can draw a comparison between his feelings, he goes into the wide world with his views; he sets his own terms, he maintains them, expanding them and making connections between them.
Forster conceived of himself as a blank slate, willing to accept all that nature dictated to him by impression. He upheld the advantage of life and experience over theory. "Letters, formulae, and conclusions," he argued, "will never prevail over that dark and mighty drive in the young sprout to investigate through his own actions the properties of things and to ascend by experience into the wisdom of life." Often it was "precisely this systematic knowledge which bars an otherwise fine mind from grasping good ideas." From childhood, Forster was familiar with Carl von Linné's system of botanical and zoological taxonomy, and he expressly recognized its defining achievement of a scientific classification of nature. Increasingly, though, the system proved to be a restrictive "framework," into which Linné "fitted the things of nature." To Forster, every system that nature seeks to bring to order is only of provisional value, because "as soon as the range of vision is expanded and the viewpoint shifted," the systematic definition becomes "one-sided and half true." All systems follow from experience. For Forster, the "impartial observer" is the source of natural classification, not the definition that purports to be able to guide experience. He wants "to eavesdrop" on nature, to "only record facts," then "carefully draw conclusions," thereby "banishing all exuberant hypotheses back into the narrow room" in which they are conceived by disallowing immediate experience. In light of nature's exuberance, Forster is seen as being such an opponent of systems that he is distrustful of the immobilizing achievement of nomenclature: "I have adopted no particular system," he writes in A Voyage round the World. Humankind is generally inclined "more to action than to speculation" in the world and influenced "more by feeling than by abstraction."
Nevertheless, if there is a formative influence on the young Forster that can be read in A Voyage round the World, it is most likely that of the Scottish school, as represented by authors like David Hume, Henry Home, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson. Ludwig Uhlig thoroughly examined Forster's "prior understanding" of this school and singles it out as being decisive for his reflection on the circumnavigation of the world. Although it cannot be dismissed, it also should not be overstated. Uhlig himself emphasizes that Forster's reflections in A Voyage round the World are "always derived from observations and do not, in turn, color the chronicle." Surrounded by books since childhood, Forster wanted with all his heart to remedy the limitations of his unsystematic education and always give preference to the freshness of immediate impressions over reflection.
Even if the conditions of Forster's upbringing did not seem favorable, sometimes "eccentricity" is a "condition without which the highest point in the education of certain assets cannot be achieved, whereas a broadly dispersed balance of strengths is present throughout the bounds of mediocrity." If Forster's remarks about the psychological conditions for the possibility of great character may be read geographically, then, Nassenhuben — this backwater in what was then the Prussian part of Poland — was eccentric enough to draw out Forster's gift for observation as a defining trait. Or, to put it another way, it was boring enough to awaken an irrepressible appetite for the world.
First Impressions from Afar
Even Reinhold Forster seemed bored to death in Nassenhuben. If one quality were found to emerge from all of the documents about the elder Forster's life, it would be his self-perception of being called to greater things. After all, he was well educated, owned scientific literature, including rare and valuable books — and had a highly talented son at his service. He actively sought out contacts, maintaining extensive correspondence with scientists and academics. And he did not shy away from change.
Catherine the Great, who ascended to the czar's throne in 1762, becoming empress of Russia, had ambitious plans. Conversant in the ideas of the Enlightenment and a correspondent of Voltaire's, she sought ways to modernize her empire. For this purpose she recruited German settlers by holding out the prospect of a golden future. The reality was different: conditions were too poor and the Russian empire too vast, for the settlers to successfully cultivate the land. Fortuitously, Reinhold Forster, who had already made inquiries about the possibility of a professorship in the enlightened absolutist's empire, was given the opportunity to undertake, at Catherine's behest, a journey into the areas settled by German emigrants to get a picture of the situation and draw up an on-site report of the conditions there, knowledge of which had only been rumored. Georg, just ten years old at the time, became his travel companion. We may imagine him as being timid, since he said, "The impression of timidity and melancholy made in my youth" did not abate for some time. On March 5, 1765, the two set out on the journey, which was to last one year. Reinhold Forster's pregnant wife stayed behind with the children, meagerly provided for in Nassenhuben. After a few weeks, father and son reached St. Petersburg.
What followed must have been the ten-year-old's first experience with vast expanses. In less than six months they covered a distance of twenty-five-hundred miles. From Petersburg they traveled through Moscow to the colonies on the Volga. They encountered Kalmyks, Tatars, and Cossacks and came to know stark, endless landscapes like the great Steppe east of the Volga. "In all that time, my son exercised his knowledge of nature with me," Reinhold Forster recalled. Even as a child Georg was able to identify plants according to Carl von Linné's system.
A wildfire they witnessed in the steppe offered a frightening spectacle. It made a profound impression on Georg; he later said of the experience: "He who knows the steppe fire in Russia will be able to imagine the terrifying speed with which fire spreads through dry grass." That was when the power of nature was first manifested in Georg's life.
The German settlers' situation was abysmal. Reinhold Forster wrote a report that did not whitewash anything, but it had no effect. The journey was a financial failure, too. The ministry demurred about paying Forster the agreed-upon sum for his report. Moreover, his requested admission into the Russian Academy of Sciences was left pending. During those eight months of waiting for payment and admission to the academy, however, Georg attended school in Petersburg, where he had lessons in Latin, French, Russian, history, geography, mathematics, and statistics. This was at least a start.
Nothing lasts forever, though. Reinhold Forster left Petersburg without having received his outstanding payment and made his way with his son, not to Danzig where his wife and children were, but to England. The country of his ancestors was to bring him more luck.
The Right Place at the Right Time
The first piece of writing by Georg Forster that has been preserved is an addendum to a letter of his father's, dated November 19, 1772. No records from his childhood and youth, none of his notes or journal annotations, are available to us. We also do not know what impression London made on him.
But we do know what a visit to London might have been like in the second half of the eighteenth century. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, a brilliant aphorist and professor from Göttingen who possessed a heightened attentiveness to inner and outer worlds, described a London street in a 1775 letter from his second visit to England. "Imagine a street," he begins his chronicle of the metropolis, that has
on both sides tall houses with plate glass windows. The lower floors consist of shops and seem to be entirely made of glass; many thousand candles light up silverware, engravings, books, clocks, glass, pewter, paintings, women's finery, modish and otherwise, gold, precious stones, steel-work, and endless coffee-rooms and lottery offices. ... The confectioners dazzle your eyes with their candelabra and tickle the nose with their wares. ... In these hang festoons of Spanish grapes, alternating with pineapples, and pyramids of apples and oranges. ... All this appears like an enchantment to the unaccustomed eye; there is therefore all the more need for circumspection in viewing all discreetly; for scarcely do you stop than, crash! a porter runs you down, crying "By your leave," when you are lying on the ground. In the middle of the street roll chaises, carriages, and drays in an unending stream. Above this din and the hum and clatter of thousands of tongues and feet one hears the chimes from church towers, the bells of the postmen, the organs, fiddles, hurdy-gurdies, and tambourines of English mountebanks, and the cries of those who sell hot and cold viands in the open at the street corners. Then you will see a bonfire of shavings flaring up as high as the upper floors of the houses in a circle of merrily shouting beggar-boys, sailors, and rogues. Suddenly a man whose handkerchief has been stolen will cry: "Stop thief," and every one will begin running and pushing and shoving — many of them not with any desire of catching the thief, but of prigging for themselves, perhaps, a watch or purse. Before you know where you are, a pretty, nicely dressed miss will take you by the hand: "Come, my Lord, come along, let us drink a glass together," or "I'll go with you if you please." Then there is an accident forty paces from you; "God bless me," cries one, "Poor creature," another. Then one stops and must put one's hand into one's pocket, for all appear to sympathize with the misfortunes of the wretched creature: but all of a sudden they are laughing again, because some one has lain down by mistake in the gutter; "Look there, damn me," says a third, and then the procession moves on. Suddenly you will, perhaps, hear a shout from a hundred throats, as if a fire had broken out, a house fallen down, or a patriot were looking out of the window. ... Where it widens out, all hasten along, no one looking as though he were going for a walk or observing anything, but all appearing to be called to a deathbed. That is Cheapside and Fleet Street on a December evening."
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Prologue: Nature, a Perilous Word 1. Beginnings: 1754-1772Like a Blank Slate First Impressions from Afar The Right Place at the Right Time 2. View of Nature: The Voyage around the World, 1772-1775
Patterns of Perception A Well-Told Tale The Sea Distances Hardship Perils in the Ice Sunny Arcadia First and Final Sightings Noble Savage? Among Maneaters Bloodshed and Mayhem A Community of Equals The General Rights of Mankind 3. Interludes: 1776-1788
Blue Devils Nature’s Balm Physical Anthropology A Debate about the Human Race Political Sheet Lightning: Cook, the Statesman 4. Views of the Political: The Revolution, 1789-1793
Paris Unrest and the Political Public Sphere Historical Signs of the New World: Revolution Political Views of the Lower Rhine Nature as Fate The Principle of Political Change: Fermentation The Liberty of French Mainz The Mainz Republic Experts on Subterranean Passages: Forster and Goethe 5. The End: The Great Perplexity, 1793-1794
The Monstrous Head of Revolution: Paris The Cold Fever of Terror Dancing on the Brink of Absurdity: Adam Lux Back to Nature: Human Dignity The Revolution Is the Revolution Forsaken Like a Child A Source of Strange Introspection Epilogue: The Mahogany Trunk
Notes English-Language Works Bibliography of the German Edition Index