The Alpine Enlightenment, Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and Nature’s Sensorium | Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University

The Alpine Enlightenment, Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and Nature’s Sensorium

The Alpine Enlightenment, Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and Nature’s Sensorium
by Kathleen Kete

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2024
272 pp., illus. 21 b/w. Trade, $115.00; paper, $32.50; eBook, $31.99
ISBN: 978-0-226-83546-4, ISBN: 978-0-226-83548-8, ISBN: 978-0-226-83547-1.

Reviewed by: 
Giovanna Costantini
February 2025

Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740-1790), great-grandfather of the linguist and semiotician Ferdinand di Saussure (1857-1913), was a Swiss physicist, geologist, inventor, and early Alpine explorer known for his more than 30 years of geologic studies, including experiments on the origin of granite. He is also known for his invention of instruments, such as the electrometer, used to measure electric potential, and hygrometer, used to measure atmospheric humidity. A professor of physics and philosophy at the Academy of Geneva from 1762 to 1786, he authored Voyages dans les Alpes, précédés d’un essai sur l’histoire naturelle des environs de Geneve (Voyages in the Alps, preceded by an essay on the natural history of the environs of Geneva), an account of his researches and climbs in the upper ranges of the Alps, published in four volumes from 1779 to 1796. Long admired as a record of his numerous explorations throughout the Chamonix valley and the Mont Blanc massif, Saussure’s compendia represent a major environmental study of the arclike span of mountains stretching from Lake Geneva to the pinnacle of Mont Blanc touching parts of Switzerland, France, and Italy.

Kathleen Kete’s The Alpine Enlightenment traces the precipitous journeys, observations, and experiments of Saussure’s Voyages, attuned to a vision of the arctic world that is at once empirical as it is experiential. Consistent with environmental psychology’s engagement with sensory ecologies, her approach invokes Lucretius’ De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) whereby humankind is one with a natural order in an expanded universe. That the natural world had intrinsic value independent of human life is a message Kete insists is relevant to an age of global warming, glacial melting and climate crisis.

In close step with the unfolding of Saussure’s discoveries, Kete’s text consists of seven chapters, the first an examination of Geneva as a walled city of the eighteenth century, its enclosed, defensive posture, political orientation, pastoral patterns of life, Saussure’s family background, and professional relationships that underscore his early preparation in botanical science. The next chapter traces Saussure’s explorations of the Jura Mountains during the 1750s primarily to gather plants for the physiologist Albrecht von Haller’s (1708-1777) catalog of Swiss flora. Through these climbs he sought to investigate the region extending from Geneva into the Alps to lay the groundwork for his further studies in minerology and stratigraphy, sciences that were yet in their infancy. Kete offers relevant scientific context for the period: astronomer Jérome Lalande’s (1732-1807) observations of the transit of Venus and efforts to establish the distance of the earth from the sun; geographic expeditions to the equator by Charles Marie de La Condamine (1701-1774) and Alexander von Humboldt’s (1769-1859) travels in the Americas conducive to geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring; Marc-Auguste Pictet’s (1752-1825) and Jacques-André Mallet’s (1740-1790) studies of planetary movement; astronomer Jacques Cassini’s (1677-1756) orbital and geodesic mapping. With natural history having replaced mathematics as a primary method of investigation, Saussure’s interest in the formation of mountains accompanied efforts to establish the phenomenological criteria for earth science in the manner of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon’s (1717-1788) Histoire Naturelle, one of the most popular works of the century. The third chapter traces Saussure’s walks up the Arve river valley to Chamonix beginning in 1760 to observe the rushing rivers Arve and Rhône, the streams sourced by swollen rain and snowmelt in the high glaciers that source Lake Geneva, the rocks over which the waters surge, the flora and fauna that germinate. A chapter titled “Bodies of Desire” provides a sociological portrait of village culture of the Alpine region on the cusp of transformation to modernity through the rise of tourism and broader scientific research of the 1770s. Evidenced by the sale of Saussure’s library following the French Revolution, his collection included technical studies into physics, minerology, medicine, zoology, ornithology, entomology, botany, natural history and philosophy, including the Encylopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert. Chapter Five explores the various accessible routes through the mountains that could lead in the 1780s to the slopes of Mont Blanc, including Mont Buet a point that offered the most spectacular view of the highest peaks.  These expeditions involved the shared interests of science, installation of instrumentation, computations, but also observations concerning evolutionary transformations of the earth’s crust, relationships of surface to core, the effect of atmospheric elevation on human physiognomy.

With Mont Blanc “the lodestar” Chapter Six details the first successful ascent of Mont Blanc in August 1786 by the Savoyard mountaineers Jacques Balmat (1762-1834) and Dr. Michel Paccard (1757-1827), for which Saussure had offered a reward to the first to scale the summit. An account of the climb includes this passage:

“At 6:23pm—the time noted by observers below—they were on the summit, presumably together, with Balmat claiming later that he had had to pull the doctor, who was fainting from fatigue, up to the top. With no place to bivouac, a dangerous nighttime descent back to the Montagne de la Côte and sleep ensued; both men were frostbitten, and Paccard was snow-blind. For athletic ability, physical courage, and route finding, Alpinists say, theirs was one of the ‘greatest feats’ of mountain climbing.”

Saussure, 20 years older than Balmat and Paccard, would follow their success with his own ascent of Mont Blanc the following year amid a troupe of guides and servants to transport instruments for a mobile laboratory to be installed on the summit. These and numerous other ascents would follow together with scientific research and observations that continue to this day. A final chapter recounts the political transformation of the Mont Blanc environs, its absorption into the Genevan territory of France following the French Revolution, and the “common” region’s inclusion in the UN Framework for Climate Change concerning global warming.

Kete’s study captures the excitement of Saussure’s lifelong quest to understand the formation of the earth, its life-giving properties, and the place of human life within the universe itself:  “…how the planet as an orb in space relates to the worlds around it; totalizing visions that accompanied the rise of natural philosophy; speculation about the meaning of the universe.” Saussure’s desire “to see the planet as a whole,” Kete emphasizes, from the study of plants to the earth’s deeper history, constitutes an aspect of experience that extends beyond the writings of Rousseau, the travel diaries of literati, the Voyages pittoresques of artists of the period. In the spirit of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), ideas and knowledge of the connection between human life and the living Earth derive from a combination of “soul-stirring sensations” and mental acuity that seek intrinsic oneness with the cosmos. Associated also with theories of the sublime posited by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, this experience of the vastness, majesty, and grandeur of the universe can be apprehended, Kete insists, through a transcendent experience of nature.  As a form of microcosmic/macrocosmic correspondence, Kete’s scrupulously researched text identifies Saussure with the higher aims of human endeavor, with the Enlightenment’s penetrating rigor, and with a pursuit of knowledge through systematic enquiry and elemental union with nature’s “sensorium.”