Background
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt was born at Potsdam on June 22, 1767, into a family of the Prussian nobility.
Diplomat linguist philosopher statesman
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt was born at Potsdam on June 22, 1767, into a family of the Prussian nobility.
After completing his studies at the universities of Frankfurt-an-der-Oder and Gottingen, he moved in 1794 to Jena, where he formed a lifelong friendship with the poet Friedrich Schiller.
He studied law in Berlin and Göttingen.
As Prussian minister of education (1809 - 1810), he sent teachers to Switzerland to study Pestalozzi's methods, and he founded the University of Berlin (1809).
He resigned from the ministry in protest against the reactionary policies of the government.
In The Sphere and Duties of Government (published in part in 1792 and completely in 1851) Humboldt held that although the nation-state is a growing body, government is only one of the means aiding its welfare, a means whose sole aim should be to provide security for social development.
His Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen (1792, published 1851; "Sketch of an Attempt to Determine the Limits of the State's Operation") reflects the admiration of British institutions that he shared with most of the Prussian reformers.
From 1801 to 1819, during the Prussian "reform period, " Humboldt served the Prussian state in various important capacities: minister plenipotentiary to Rome, minister of education, and Prussian representative at the congresses of Prague (1813), Vienna (1814 - 1815), and Aix-la-Chapelle (1818).
When Humboldt could not agree to Hardenberg's reactionary Carlsbad Decrees (1819)--abolishing the patriotic student fraternities (Burschenschaften), censoring books, and otherwise curbing nationalism and liberalism--he followed Stein into political retirement.
About 16 years, until his death, he devoted himself to scholarship at his family castle, Schloss Tegel, near Berlin, where he died on April 8, 1835.
Humboldt is discussed or mentioned in the following works: Henry Barnard, Pestalozzi and His Educational System (1881); Eugene Newton Anderson, Nationalism and the Cultural Crisis in Prussia, 1806-15 (1939); Leonard Kreiger, The German Idea of Freedom (1957); and Walter Horace Bruford, Culture and Society in Classical Weimar, 1775-1806 (1962).
He was one of the founders in 1809 of the University of Berlin, which was renamed Humboldt University in 1949.
He 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 is widely recognized as having been the architect of the Humboldtian education ideal, which was used from the beginning in Prussia as a model for its system of education and eventually in countries such as the United States and Japan.
(The first modern translation of any writing by Wilhelm vo...)
(2014 Reprint of 1854 Edition. Full facsimile of the origi...)
(Modern Political Philosophy)
In his essay Ü ber das Studium des Klassischen Altertums (1793) he summarized his program for educational reform, which was basically the program of German neohumanism.
If it tries to do too much, it interferes with and retards the beneficial effects of other agencies. Under the influence of romanticism Humboldt became almost mystical as he placed more stress on supra-individual and historically conditioned nationality and viewed individual nationality in turn as part of the universal spiritual and divine life which was the characteristic expression of humanity.
He viewed language as the characteristic expression of the soul of a people (Volksgeist), the growth of which mirrors the people's intellectual and spiritual development. Humboldt's humanism led him to an interest in education form, and as Prussian education minister (1809) he was largely responsible for the current form of the German "humanities high school" (humanistisches Gymnasium).
In essays on the German (1813) and Prussian (1819) constitutions he advocated a liberalism which would preserve the unique character and traditions of individual states, provinces, and regions, with the constitution of any state adapted to the particular genius of its national character.
Quotations:
His 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 do not 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. "
In Jena (1794 - 1797) he was a member of Friedrich von Schiller's circle.
He was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1820, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1822.
Humboldt was influenced by the educational principles of Johann Pestalozzi.
In June 1791, he married Karoline von Dacheröden. They had eight children, of whom five (including Gabriele) survived to adulthood.
geographer, naturalist, and explorer
