Humboldt in Copenhagen

Wilhelm von Humboldt never went to Copenhagen. Not in a physical sense, anyway. But the ideas connected to his name did, the amalgam of idealist philosophy of German thinkers such as Kant, Schleiermacher, Schiller and Fichte who formulated the ideal of ‘Synthese zwischen Bildung und Wissenschaft, Synthese aus Forschung und Lehre, Synthese der Disziplinen.’ ¹ The idea of a university embedded in this thinking had scholarship (Wissenschaft) ² as the key concept. The aim of scholarship was to create knowledge for no other purpose than knowledge itself. Scholarship was to be the cornerstone of the university and the primary and defining pursuit of academic practice. A concomitant emphasis was put on research as the core of scholarship and scholarly activities. Scholarship was primary to teaching and teaching was dependent on it; in this sense there was a unity of research and teaching. The outcome of teaching was Bildung, another central concept of the ‘Humboldt model’ and the New Humanism on which it drew. Bildung was something essentially individualistic, self-motivated and non-utilitarian. Neither research, nor teaching, nor study should be limited by external concerns or constraints. Freedom should prevail for the scholar and the student; their only guidance should be their interest in gaining knowledge. This freedom would have to be secured by the state. A final aspect was the unity of knowledge. ³ The idea of unity of knowledge points to a general tendency of the organicism on which this thinking was founded. Wholeness and unity was perceived as positive, partition and fragmentation was seen as negative.