AT HOME IN THE WORLD: THE SAVANT IN THE SERVICE OF GLOBAL EDUCATION Karl S. Guthke The Emergence of the Idea of Global Education in the Eighteenth Century “The proper study of mankind is man”—but why include the exploration of the ways of New Zealand cannibals? In the second half of the eighteenth century Europeans had an answer: awareness of the world at large and its inhabitants would result in nothing less than a new, comparative under- standing of human nature in general—and of themselves in particular. From about mid-century, scholars, scientists and public intellectuals championed this idea, intrigued by what Burke called “the great map of mankind”1 unfolding under their eyes in the increasingly numerous accounts of expeditions to remote corners of the world. Unlike the voy- ages of an earlier age, undertaken for profit or the saving of savage souls, the “philosophical voyages” of the “second age of discovery”, with their naturalists and anthropologists aboard, while not always innocent of political or commercial motivation, were to gain more knowledge of the world and especially a more adequate “idea of our species”.2 To qualify as an educated person, it was no longer sufficient to look inward or to study European cultural history all the way back to Antiquity; global, rather than traditional humanistic education was becoming the order of the day. As Burke, Herder and others postulated, Europeans should now turn their attention to contemporary Persia, Egypt, China and Japan rather than ancient Greece and Rome and take cognizance of the various degrees of “barbarism” and “refinement” (Burke) encountered in distant latitudes and longitudes; “to study man”, Rousseau claimed, “one needs to learn to look in the distance”.3 What counts now, as the horizon is widening, is 1 Thomas W. Copeland (ed.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke (Cambridge 1958– 1978), 10 vols., III: 350–351. 2 Georg Forster, Georg Forsters Werke. Sämtliche Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe, ed. by Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin 1958ff.), vols. 1ff., V: 295. 3 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, où il est parlé de la mélodie et de l’imitation musicale, ed. by Charles Porset (Bordeaux 1970), 89; Burke: see note 1; Johann © Karl S. Guthke, 2013 | doi:10.1163/9789004243910_025 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.Karl S. Guthke - 9789004243910 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:08:29PM via free access 570 karl s. guthke the encounter, ideally in person, but realistically through reading travel accounts, with non-European ways of living, thinking and feeling; these are considered, at least in principle, to be just as valid as the occidental ones and therefore an invitation to rethink and reconfigure one’s own Bil- dung. What beckoned as the prize of such an endeavour was a “truly wise life” [echte Lebensweisheit].4 By the time Victoria came to the throne, the idea had come close to being a cliché, even in non-colonizing German lands whose “unfamiliarity with the world”, Lichtenberg had attested in 1778, was “unusual”.5 In 1836 Karl Heinrich Hermes, a prominent anthologist of exotic travelogues for the young, felt that it was now agreed that “no part of the earth, no nation, no matter how remote, must remain unknown to us, if our Bildung is not to be highly deficient”.6 Global education had become an integral feature of the Enlightenment. The emergence of the concept and the reality of global education did not just happen; it was brought about by the intellectuals of the age. Not limiting themselves to mere rhetoric, they pursued specific strategies and undertook concrete steps to ensure that the new Bildung would once and for all make the educated classes feel “at home” in parts of the world that their parents had at best known as mere names or fabled locations, as Johann Christoph Adelung put it.7 These strategies and practises may be grouped under three headings (among which there is, however, some overlapping): accumulation, consolidation and organization of knowl- edge about the extra-European world, transfer of such knowledge inside and outside the scholarly community, advancement of such knowledge beyond the status quo. Gottfried Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden, ed. by Günter Arnold et al. (Frankfurt/M. 1985– 2000), 10 vols., IX/2: 70. 4 Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Fragmente, ed. by Ernst Behler and Hans Eichner (Paderborn 1988), 6 vols., I: 194. For a comprehensive treatment of this topic, see Karl S. Guthke, Die Erfindung der Welt. Globalität und Grenzen in der Kulturgeschichte der Literatur (Tübingen 2005), 9–82. 5 Wolfgang Promies (ed.), Schriften und Briefe (München 1967–1992), 6 vols., III: 269. 6 Karl Heinrich Hermes (ed.), Neueste Sammlung merkwürdiger Reisebeschreibungen für die Jugend (Braunschweig 1836), 2 vols., I: V–VI. 7 Geschichte der Schiffahrten (Halle 1768), 3. Karl S. Guthke - 9789004243910 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:08:29PM via free access at home in the world 571 Accumulation, Consolidation and Organisation of Knowledge Knowledge has to be consolidated and organized to yield its significance and allow for systematic augmentation. Such consolidation and organiza- tion takes two forms (not entirely new, but significantly invigorated in the eighteenth century): the collection and pertinent arrangement of plant, animal and cultural specimens from non-European parts of the world and the critical assembling of what has appeared in print concerning those regions. The former would lead to the establishment of institutions such as botanical and zoological gardens and ethnological museums, the latter to universal histories, encyclopedia entries and, above all, to collections of travel accounts and book series specializing in exotic travelogues, with libraries taking a middle position between institutional and publishing enterprises. Botanical and zoological gardens that scholars established (with the help of a vast network of overseas contacts) everywhere in Europe—from Haller’s Göttingen and Linné’s Uppsala to Buffon’s Jardin du Roi and Joseph Banks’ Kew Gardens, from the Imperial Menagerie at Schönbrunn to the zoo added to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris—recreated foreign habitats, with the accent on the exotic strongest perhaps in the Jardin d’Acclimatation des végétaux exotiques in Nantes.8 More important from an anthropological viewpoint were (in the absence of nineteenth-century Völkerschauen à la Hagenbeck) ethnological museums featuring the arti- facts of exotic populations. Evolving from earlier “cabinets of curiosities” both natural and artificial, these collections included Blumenbach’s “Ethnologische Sammlung”, incorporated into the Göttingen University Akademisches Museum in 1773, Hans Sloane’s myriad of artifacts (rang- ing from bark textiles to fishing hooks) that were acquired through an Act 8 Jean-Marc Drouin and Luc Lienhard, ‘Botanik’, in Hubert Steinke, Urs Boschung and Wolfgang Proß (eds.), Albrecht von Haller. Leben—Werk—Epoche (Göttingen 2008), 292– 314: 309 (Linné); Hubert Steinke and Martin Stuber, ‘Haller und die Gelehrtenrepublik’, ibid., 381–414: 400–401 (Haller); Regina Dauser et al. (eds.), Wissen im Netz. Botanik und Pflanzentransfer in europäischen Korrespondenznetzen des 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin 2008); Lucille Allorge and Oliver Ikor, La fabuleuse odissée des plantes. Les botanistes voyageurs, les Jardins des Plantes, les herbiers (Paris 2003); David Philipp Miller, ‘Joseph Banks, Empire and “Centers of Calculation” in Late Hannoverian London’, in David Philipp Miller and Peter Hanns Reill (eds.), Visions of Empire. Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (Cambridge 1999), 21–37; Hector Charles Cameron, Sir Joseph Banks, K.B., P.R.S. The Auto- crat of the Philosophers (London 1952), chapter 2; Pierre Huard and Ming Wong, ‘Les Enquêtes scientifiques françaises et l’exploration du monde éxotique aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, Bulletin de l’école française d’extrême orient 52 (1964), 143–154. Karl S. Guthke - 9789004243910 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:08:29PM via free access 572 karl s. guthke of Parliament in 1753 and incorporated into the British Museum as well as the turn-of-the-century acquisitions of the Muséum d’histoire naturelle in Paris. They all held sizeable contingents of objects brought home by the “philosophical voyagers” of the time, Cook and the Forsters prominently among them.9 Similarly, Napoleon’s Egyptian loot, resulting from the expertise of scores of savants recruited for his military expedition of 1798, ended up in various European collections, including the British Museum, which to this day displays the Rosetta Stone that was one of the major objects of scholarly interest and cultural consequence at the time, opening up, after Champollion’s decipherment, a whole new intellectual world. That such collecting activity, which brings into full view the world- wide diversity of cultural self-articulation, has an educational aspect is self-evident. Johann Gottfried Gruber, a universal historian, spelled it out in 1798 à propos of Blumenbach’s De generis humani varietate nativa: noth- ing less than “true humanity” had developed from the new awareness of such diversity.10 More concrete were the 1741 instructions for guides in the “Wunderkammer” of the Francke Foundation in Halle (which boasted Egyptian mummies, Indian ritual objects, articles of clothing from China and Greenland among its many artifacts): the main purpose of the collec- tion was “to bring the whole world (natural objects as well as artifacts) together here in miniature, . not just to be looked at but for the benefit of local pupils as well as others so that early in life they may gain a better idea of God and the world.”11 9 Peter James Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind. Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge 1982), 58–59; Hans Plischke, Die ethnographische Sammlung der Universität Göttingen.