Karl wilhelm von humboldt biography of rory

Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian statesman, humanist, and linguistic scholar, was born in Potsdam; a younger brother was the scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Wilhelm von Humboldt's early education was placed in the hands of private tutors and was augmented by private instruction in Greek, philosophy, natural law , and political economy from distinguished men of Germany's Enlightenment.

The former was the crowning accomplishment of.

From these youthful studies Plato's idea of the soul and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 's concept of force left lasting impressions on his thought. Like Johann Gottfried Herder, he viewed human society as a manifold of organic forces, closer to nature than to reason, and came to believe that true knowledge of humanity depended on the cultivation not of pure analytical reason but of deep-lying intuitive faculties.

Humboldt's political philosophy was outlined in a long essay, Ideen zu einem Versuch die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen , written in Focused on the central theme of his thought — the inalienable value of the individual — this work propounds the humanistic creed that man's goal is "the highest and most proportional development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole.

He criticized state control of education and religion for inflicting an arbitrary framework on diverse, organically developing human forces, whose unity could not be imposed from without but sought only from within. In the last decade of the eighteenth century Humboldt was occupied with various scholarly projects, none of which he completed; at the same time his growing friendship with Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe brought him into contact with contemporary aesthetic problems.

From to he was Prussian ambassador to the Vatican, and in he was appointed to the ministry of religious and educational affairs in Berlin, in which position he drafted several papers on education and was chiefly responsible for the foundation of the University of Berlin. Thereafter, he served as Prussian diplomatic representative in Vienna — , at the peace negotiations before and after Napoleon Bonaparte's downfall — , and in London — Defeated in his effort to achieve a constitutional monarchy for Prussia in , he retired from public service and devoted the remainder of his life to study.

Although Humboldt's linguistic writings predate Darwin's Theory of Evolution () by at least thirty years, his understanding of the “organic”.

Humboldt's humanism was based on his idea of historical experience. Sharing his generation's enthusiasm for ancient Greece, Humboldt believed that the study of Greek culture in its broadest aspects would promote a true philosophical knowledge of men, including "the knowledge of the manifold intellectual, sentient, and moral human powers.

His plan for a comparative anthropology was to study the moral character of different human types; a great variety of sources would provide the data for establishing an ideal norm, which was not adequately represented by any specific individuality. To comprehend the wholeness in the diversity of human types required aesthetic insight, which was fundamental to the art of the historian.

In an essay on Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea , he concluded that epic poetry, of which Goethe's drama was an example, could be compared to history. The most notable feature of this essay is Humboldt's attempt to elucidate the role of ideas in history.