Il paesaggio di Humboldt: un modo di pensare le relazioni / Humboldt’s Landscape: A Way of Thinking about Relationships

Humboldt’s case has quite a lot to do with recurring fluctuations be tween basic research—the foundations of matter—and shape, pattern-oriented research, that uses, as preferential work tool, mapping, not just measuring. Amongst the many themes that make Humboldt’s research especially close to our sensibility we can mention: the self/nature dialectic, between subjective and objective, between science and imagination, in relation to the great influence Kant’s theories had on all the members of the “circle of Jena;” the natural world intended as a whole being animated by interactive forces that in Humboldt’s thought had a structural consequence in relation to his research methods based on “comparison;” the Humboldt’s effort to preserve natural balances and to achieve greater social justice. The reconciliation with Landscape as a way of thinking about the rela tions, in the way it affirmed in the second half of 20Th century and briefly discussed in the article, is a way to recognize Humboldt’s legacy in recent times. A first path of relational thinking re ferred to the landscape is identified in the systemic vision of structuralism. This vision, in Calzolari’s interpretation, will indicate the way of the “reunification” of the landscape in the context of the natural and human sciences, definitively overcoming the dualism between “individual components and contexts.” A second path can be identified in the new ecological way of thinking living systems that puts on the foreground connectivity, relations, patterns, configurations, context, highlighting how parts’ properties can be understood only looking at the whole’s organization. Finally, a last way, connected to the progressive spread of new models of non-linear dynamics, allows to deal with the “immeasurable complexity” linked to the observation of living systems, leading to a massive production of maps, focusing on the ethical responsibilities of the “scien tist” towards “other” living specie.