ABSTRACT
For Alexander von Humboldt, the European discoverer par excellence was much more than the resolute hero of an adventurous discovery story that had made history. Humboldt succeeds countless times in demonstrating how errors and miscalculations have an inherent power of movement that advances history. Different from stereotypical common sense, they are movens that anticipate Humboldt’s magic word movement, which applies to spatial discovery as much as it does to ideas. One may confidently use Humboldt’s self-reflective insight to argue against an age that believes to have finally broken the “code of nature” and to be only a few steps away from revealing a formula for the world. Humboldt’s analyses, presented with great philological meticulousness, are aimed at the imagined worlds to which his contemporaries at times ascribed little significance for the advancement of knowledge. The most celebrated episode from the life of Alexander von Humboldt is his risky attempt at climbing the summit of Chimborazo.
