A civilized nation: Japan and the Red Cross 1877–1900

Abstract

The history of both the Red Cross and the Japanese Red Cross is based on a teleological and eurocentric narrative which is strongly shaped by national histories and focused on persons. To assume 1863 as the founding date of the Red Cross is highly debatable, considering that most national relief organisations were renamed ‘Red Cross Societies’ only in the 1880s. In this Japan is no exception, since first a Haku-Ai-Sha (Philanthropic Society) was founded in 1877 and then turned into the Japanese Red Cross Society in 1887. Japanese actors must be regarded as intrinsically motivated and active participants in the Red Cross movement who saw an ideal and a model in the Euro-American ‘way of civilisation’ and humanity. It has taken about 30 years to turn the Haku-Ai-Sha in Japan into a humanitarian society which is accepted both at home and abroad and, with its 728,507 members in 1900, which constituted the largest Red Cross Society in the world.     

Laplace schreibt nach Gotha

Around 1800, Laplace had an intense correspondence with his colleagues in Gotha on problems in celestial mechanics, especially on the lunar theory. Most of these letters are not included in Roger Hahn's New calendar of the correspondence of P. S. Laplace (1994).     

Wisse die Wege! Hildegard von Bingen zum 900. Geburtstag

Hildegard is regarded as one of the most important women of the Middle Ages. Her contemporaries from all over the world wrote letters to her searching for help and prayer. Universally working she wrote works about medicine, natural history, compositions of chants for the honour of God and his creation and more than three hundred letters to people all over the world including the popes and the emperor. Hildegard's work and the way she understood herself were strongly marked by vision and prophecy. Her works were of divine origin by vision and audition. Her aim was the religious interpretation of the whole universe and a Christian life in the sense of the bible. Heaven and earth, faith and natural science, medicine and religion, the human existence in all its facts and potentials, everything was a mirror of divine love to her. In her first work Scivias ("Know the Ways") she is considering on the history of creation and salvation, from the origin of the world and of man over Christ's salvation to the fulfillment at the end of times. In the centre is standing the human being as microcosm reflecting the whole world in all conditions and laws. Man is the main work of god, reflecting in his doing and thinking God's love. Man has to know the ways that means to live the life of love in all consequences including reproduction by creating a new human being for the praise of God.     

Erfahrung und Vorurteil im naturwissenschaftlichen Denken Johannes Keplers

The change from ancient and medieval to modern natural science, called Wende (instead of ‘revolution’), must be associated with the work of Johannes Kepler and not that of Nicolaus Copernicus. Copernicus merely showed the way, introducing heliocentricity as the order of the planets. This Wende resulted from the synthesis of several disciplines formerly isolated from each other, namely mathematical (i.e. hypothetical) astronomy, new physics, mathematical harmony, astrology, new physical optics, and natural theology. Whereas Copernicus united mathematical astronomy and peripatetic (Aristotelian) physics, Kepler was first to see the necessity for providing a physical explanation and an ontological foundation to the heliocentric system. He was the first to consider and measure the movement of the planets in depth. The elements for his new physics Kepler obtained not from newly observed data, but from a harmonic archetypus of the regular polyhedra fitted in between excentric planetary spheres. On the basis of this archetypus (which he considered to be God's model in creating the universe) he accepted the new heliocentric planetary system as a physical reality. That is why astronomy, by way of taking into account stereometric quantities, is, in Kepler's eyes, a kind of divine worship. Later, the best empirical data had also to be taken into consideration as a means of proving this a priori archetypus (Vorurteil, preconception). The result was, on the one hand, a universal natural science able to explain natural processes in grater abundance than ever before or since in the history of science. Although accepted only in parts, it resulted in founding a new natural science with adherent mathematical and empirical methods. It also led Kepler to establish, step by step, the elliptical path of the planets, thereby overcoming, for the first time, the two axioms of ancient astronomy, requiring uniform and circular planetary motion. It has been shown that this Keplerian Wende was possible only within the Historischen Erfahrungsraum (‘historical field of experience’) of Renaissance Humanism (cf. this Journal 9/1986, p. 201), which came about itself as the result of reactivating the scientific and philosophical thinking of the ancient Greeks and was accomplished by three steps (phases) relating to the revival of (1) original ancient writings, (2) the ancient knowledge of natural facts and data, and (3) the ancient scientific and philosophical ideas and mentalities (Drei-Phasen-Modell).     

The Influence of Goethe's Farbenlehre on Early Geological Map Colouring: Goethe's Contribution to Christian Keferstein's General Charte von Teutschland (1821)

An analysis of Goethe's Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours), and of its significance for the development of geological mapping, requires an interdisciplinary approach and specific knowledge of both the history of cartography and the science of chromatics. Thus far there has been little research in either of these areas by historians of geological cartography or by students of Goethe's Farbenlehre. In particular, the influence of Goethe's Theory of Colours on early geological map colouring has not yet been explored, and the present article is an attempt to rectify that omission. After an introduction to the emergence of geological maps during the Age of Enlightenment, the discussion focuses on Goethe's substantial contribution to the selection of colours for Christian Keferstein's General Charte von Teutschland (1821). Detailed study of the available textual and cartographical source material reveals that Goethe applied the principles of his Farbenlehre as a basis for the colour chart that Keferstein used to delineate the rock formations shown on his map. The article concludes with a brief consideration of the extent to which the joint Goethe–Keferstein venture influenced the future of geological map design.     

The Professors' Africa: Economists, the Elections of 1907, and the Legitimation of German Imperialism

German economists led by Gustav Schmoller created the KolonialpolitischesAktionskomité (colonial-political action committee) duringthe so-called ‘colonial crisis’ of 1906–1907to promote the German colonial empire at a time when it wassuffering much scandal and criticism. Widely esteemed and enjoyingthe appearance of non-partisanship, they worked closely withthe government of Bernhard von Bülow during the electionsof 1907, arguing that colonial empire was economically and politicallyindispensable and that its financial burdens were bearable.Straddling a position between the economic imperialism of manyGerman liberals and the settler colonialism prevalent in conservativeand radical nationalist circles, they helped secure a middleground that enabled the Bülow bloc and developed many ideasfor colonial reform that came into currency during the Dernburgera (1906–1910). Through lecturing, the mass disseminationof relatively high-quality literature, and the demarcation ofthe new academic sub-discipline known as Kolonialwissenschaft(colonial science), a potent complex of liberal-nationalistambitions was fused with a new ‘scientific’ colonialismthat helped redefine and legitimate a German civilizing missionin Africa and forge an imperialist ideology that gained a nationalaudience.     

Nur „Zweite Wahl”︁ oder Die Berufung Adolf Butenandts zum Direktor des KWI für Biochemie

The remarkable career of the nobel laureate Adolf Butenandt in Germany before 1945 and especially after the second world war is well known. But in recent years several publications have questioned his personal behaviour in the Third Reich. But all these articles interpreted Butenandts career and his attitude from our knowledge today about Nazi Germany. From archival sources this article will view on the situation in the 1930s and will show that Butenandt was originally not the first choice of the government for the position of director at the Kaiser‐Wilhelm‐Institute for Biochemistry. Finally it is shown, that Butenandt did knew what was going on behind the scenes, because through his close connections with officers of the Rockefeller Foundation he got several information on the selection.     

Between Leibniz and Kant: The Political Thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt

Abstract

In his early text, The Limits of State Action, Wilhelm von Humboldt raises the Kantian question of the permissibility and legitimate extent of political and juridical coercion, as his contribution to a debate amongst Kantians launched by the publication in 1785 of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In arguing for a minimal state, concerned exclusively with internal and external security of its members but not at all with their felicity, Humboldt inflects Kantian political thought in the direction of a liberal laissez-faire state, in marked contrast to the strong interventionism that his fellow-Kantian Fichte derived from similar Kantian grounds. The article argues that the underlying conception of the individual retained by Humboldt has markedly Leibnizian traits, namely the notion of freedom as the spontaneous unfolding of a highly personal, monadic developmental trajectory toward perfection, which ought not to be impeded or homogenized by unnecessary state intervention. Humboldt thus represents not only a ‘rightist’ libertarian reading of Kant, but a particular appropriation of significant Leibnizian themes. His combination of these sources is compared with that of other contemporary theorists like Hufeland and Fichte.