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1. "Theory" of Bildung from Teaching as a Reflective Practice 2. Bildung
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetics-19th-romantic/#Bild)
Bildung is another characteristic romantic
value that each individual should develop in herself. While literally meaning
“formation”, Bildung is best understood as a mode of ethical and cultural
cultivation, or self-realization that allows the individual to mature into
independence and responsibility. “Concerning Bildung, we speak not of external
culture, but the development of independence” (F. Schlegel, TPL II: 148).
Bildung is a particularly modern value, formed at least in part as a challenge
to what the romantics regarded as the rift between sensibility and reason in
modern life. To achieve Bildung, each individual has to constitute herself as a
unified whole that coordinates a balance between sensibility and reason: “The
end of humanity isˇto achieve harmony in knowing, doing and enjoying” (F.
Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, in KA I, 627).
The artwork is a good model for such an
ideal insofar as it is, according to the romantics, an organic and harmonious
whole of diverse and even conflicting parts:
Poetryˇmust be a harmonious mood of our
mindˇwhere everything finds its proper aspectˇ. Everything in a truly poetic
book seems so natural—and yet so marvelous. We think it could not be
otherwiseˇand we feel the infiniteˇsensations of a plurality in agreement.
(Novalis, Last Fragments: #3)
This is why “Every human being who is
cultivated and who cultivates himself”, namely, the person who achieves
Bildung, “contains a novel within himself” (F. Schlegel, AF: #78).
Aesthetic judgment is also a harmony of
reason and sensibility. On this issue too, the romantics were inspired by
Kant’s aesthetics, according to which aesthetic judgment consists in the free
play between the understanding, imagination and pleasure. Approaching the
world, ourselves and one another aesthetically, then, is approaching it with a
harmony of “knowing, doing, and enjoying”. And achieving this harmony
constitutes a genuine moral being: a balanced rational, sensible and affective
person. For that reason, it is not surprising to find Coleridge, the critic,
aiming to establish “the close and reciprocal connections of Just Taste with
pure Morality” (Lecture I, CLL).
Romantic Bildung was a political ideal as
much as it was an ethical one. It was needed, not only for the sake of independent
individual responsibility, but also for the possibility of a genuine
non-revolutionary republic:
There is no greater need of the age than
the need for a spiritual counterweight to the Revolution and to the despotism
which the Revolution exercises over peopleˇ. Where can we seek and find such a
counterweight? The answer isn’t hard: unquestionably in ourselvesˇthe center of
humanity lies there. (F. Schlegel, Ideas: #41)
The French revolution had shown the
romantics both the value of a republic based on liberty, equality and
fraternity, but also the dangers of anarchism and strife that revolutions carry
with them. The proper path to a republic, they thought, is not through a
revolutionary act, but through proper education. Art does not only offer a model
for a harmonious, cultivated soul, but is also the best medium through which to
achieve the moral education that leads to this harmony and, on its basis, to
the best republic. Attending to art (as well as producing it) is a form of
self-cultivation because the spirit of art allows human beings to transcend
baseness (a particular danger given modern instrumentalism and materialism),
and to develop their humanity.
As we now turn to see, the romantics
regarded art also as a particularly effective medium for uniting people, no
matter their differences, and so took it to be a great spur for united, social
and political action.
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