The German Bildung Tradition(form "The German Bildung Tradition by Antonie Dubbelman)
The German term Bildung dates to 16th century Pietistic theology, according to which, the devout Christian should seek to cultivate (Bildung) his talents and dispositions according to the image of God, which was innate in his soul. In addition to this theological usage, Paracelsus (1493-1591), Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), and Leibniz (1646-1716) also used the term in natural philosophy to refer to “the development or unfolding of certain potentialities within an organism.” In the 18th century, Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), the founding father of the Jewish Enlightenment, used the term in the sense of unfolding one’s potential in an influential essay in 1784, “What is Enlightenment?,” identifying Bildung with Enlightenment itself. Pedagogical theorists, like Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746-1818), also focused on how pedagogical reform could promote the development (Ausbildung) and education (Bildung) of the citizenry. By the end of the 18th century, Bildung was becoming a term with not only spiritual, but also philosophical and political connotations. Increasingly, Bildung was associated with liberation of the mind from tradition and superstition, but also liberation of the German people from a pre-modern political system of small feudal states that owed allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire.
This political usage is apparent in the writings of Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), in which he went beyond the sense of individual formation or development to the development of a people (Volk). For Herder, Bildung was the totality of experiences that provide a coherent identity, and sense of common destiny, to a people. Although Herder is rightfully associated with late-eighteenth-century German nationalism, he conceived the German Volk as including both royalty and peasants, envisioning a classless society. Accordingly, Herder’s cultural nationalism required that social unity be promoted from the bottom up, in contrast to the top down political nationalism to which many historians have attributed the rise of German militarism that ultimately culminated in the Third Reich. Because of the quality of his ideas and pervasiveness of his influence, it would be difficult to overemphasize Herder’s importance in Western intellectual history.
It has been said that Goethe (1749-1832) was transformed from a clever but conventional poet into the great artist we remember today by his encounter with Herder in 1770, and his continuing friendship with the philosopher. Herder developed fundamental ideas about the dependence of thought on language that are taken for granted today, and that inspired work by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) that are widely viewed as the foundation of modern linguistics. Herder developed the methodological foundations of hermeneutics, or the theory of interpretation, that Schleiermacher (1768-1834) later built upon, and that ultimately culminated in nineteenth-century German classical scholarship and modern Biblical scholarship. Herder’s writings also led to the establishment of the modern discipline of anthropology and its methodology. Additionally, Herder profoundly influenced intellectuals as diverse as Hegel, J.S. Mill (1806-1873), Nietzsche (1844-1900), and Dilthey (1833-1911).
In a series of works written over a period of almost fifty-years, Herder developed and defended the conception of philosophy that is at the very heart of the German Bildung tradition. The titles of some of these works are revealing: How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People (1765), This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity (1774), Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity (1784-91), and Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1793-1797). As these titles suggest, Herder believed philosophy must have a practical result, which can be summarized as human growth, and that philosophical ideas have to be understood within their social and historical context. Similar to the Renaissance Humanists, Herder believed that the proper study of man is man, and thus sought to displace academic philosophy with philosophical anthropology. For Herder, philosophy is, quite simply, the theory of Bildung; more precisely, philosophy is the theory of how the individual develops into the sort of organic unity that will constantly work toward the full development of its talents and abilities and that will drive social progress or social Bildung. For Herder, properly understood, philosophy must transform individuals and, at the very same time, it must have a broad social impact. John Zammito rightly asserts that the conception of philosophy Herder defended carried “forward from Herder to Wilhelm von Humboldt and G.W.F. Hegel, to Friedrich Schleiermacher . . . to the Left Hegelians . . . and Wilhelm Dilthey: the tradition of hermeneutics and historicism.” At about the same time that he encountered Herder, Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) inaugurated the pre-Romantic Sturm und Drang movement in literature, which emphasized the unpredictable emotional life of the individual. Thus in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the protagonist is driven to suicide by despair.
In the late 1780s, Goethe and Schiller launched a new literary movement that became known as Weimar Classicism. Spurred on by Enlightenment themes as well as efforts to recover ancient aesthetic values, Weimar Classicism sought the enlightenment or liberation of man through an organic unification and harmonization of thought and feeling, mind and body. Both men were also critical of the contemporaneous movement of German Romanticism. Although there are distinct similarities between Weimar Classicism and German Romanticism, no doubt owing to the fact that both developed in the same milieu, unlike the Romantics, Goethe sought to harmonize the vivid emotions he had emphasized in his Sturm and Drang period with the clarity of Enlightenment reason. Moreover, Goethe criticized the Romantic notion that an individual could intuitively tap into their genius in order to apprehend transcendent truth. Similarly, Goethe followed Herder’s lead by rejecting the transcendent reason of the Enlightenment, claiming, for example, that the laws of a country cannot be based on pure reason because geography and history shape the habits of individuals and their cultures. For Goethe, both the Enlightenment and Romanticism had erred by their excessive devotion to their respective ideals, thus undermining the sort of inner balance and harmony that he championed. Unlike his earlier novel, in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship the protagonist undergoes a journey of Bildung, or self-realization. Thus Goethe initiated the tradition of the Bildungsroman, the novel of formation. The only sort of transcendence that Wilhelm seeks in the novel is to rise above the soulless life of a bourgeois businessman by reconciling or shaping his particular interests so that they serve a greater good, which is service to his society. W.H. Bruford correctly points out that this novel represents “the very essence of German humanism,” the ideal of which is the formation of individuals whose conduct is governed by a highly developed inner character rather than imitation of the conduct of others. The type of character formation sought requires the identification and molding of one’s talents and inclinations through wise education and life experience. This education teaches Wilhelm that the individual must find his vocation, a calling to which he is well-suited and that contributes to the growth and maturation of the culture in which he lives. In so doing, the individual harmonizes not only mind and body, but also self and society. As this tradition develops through Goethe, into what is often called German neo-humanism, it is assumed that all individuals have different talents and thus need to live in a society in which the unique talents of others compliment their own. Hence a well-developed society is one that allows wide scope for the unique development of each individual as the very catalyst of social harmony. Rather than depict the individual as at odds with his society, German neo-humanism champions a harmony of the individual with his society through the development of his uniqueness and an acceptance of his social responsibility as the avenue toward self-development. Self-realization is unattainable for those who wallow in their own narrow emotions or self-interest. Satisfaction is not found in a romantic transcendence of social bonds, but in the activities of concrete social life. Goethe developed these ideas further in the sequel to Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. As Thomas Mann explains, Wilhelm Meister's Travels (1821)
“begins with individualistic self-development through miscellaneous experiences and ends in a political utopia. In between stands the idea of education……teaches us to see the element of education as the organic transition from the world of inwardness to that of the objective; it shows how the one grows humanely and naturally out of the other.”
In my recent book, I argued at some length that Hegel was profoundly influenced by German neo-humanism, eschewing transcendent realities and timeless truths, and championing a metaphysics of experience according to which philosophy deals with the world of human experience rather than a noumenal realm that transcends possible human experience. Hence, Hegel’s logic is not a theory of the categories of reality, but a theory of the categories according to which we experience reality. But most importantly, I contend that Hegel was first and foremost concerned with Bildung, the self-development of the individual human spirit as well as the self-development of the human race. As Josiah Royce and others have noted, the Phenomenology of Spirit can be read as a Bildungsroman, a story about the individual’s, as well as humanity’s, development. In the Phenomenology, Hegel shows the reader the development of an open and intelligent mind in a complex society that lacks universally accepted values, as the main character encounters a wide variety of experiences. As is typical of a Bildungsroman, the center of interest is the links between the main character’s successive experiences and his gradual achievement of a fully rounded personality and well-tested philosophy of life.
For Hegel, the self is always engaged in a project and ordinarily proceeds in a state of harmony with its environment, which Hegel calls “natural consciousness.” In this state, there is no subject/object dualism because the self is at one with its environment. Periodically, the self encounters an obstacle to its project, which Hegel terms a negation. When this occurs, consciousness is rent asunder, identifying an object over and against the self, that is to say the obstacle that disrupted its project. After analysis of the negation, the self imagines solutions that will alter itself, by modifying its project, and alter the object in such a way that consciousness can be reunified and the self can resume its project. When the self succeeds at reunification, the negation becomes a “determinate negation,” meaning a negation that leads to progress or growth. The self emerges from experiences of this kind not only unified but also enlarged because it has gained valuable experience. Rather than a metaphysical reality, subject/object dualism is a moment within experience that serves a particular function. The process I have described here is Hegel's dialectic, but it also Bildung. Accordingly, rather than a theory of knowledge, Hegel developed a theory of learning, and philosophy became the philosophy of education. Although textbook accounts claim that the dialectic is driven by contradiction, this term oversimplifies Hegel’s concept of negation. Although, for Hegel, negation can lead to a fairly routine learning process, it can also lead to existential crises. In either case, rather than a contradiction of propositions, negation is a disruption of the process of living, which Hegel often describes as a pathway or road. To use Hegel’s words, when the self encounters a negation, it loses its truth on this path. The road can therefore be regarded as the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair. For what happens on it is not what is ordinarily understood when the word 'doubt' is used: shilly-shallying about this or that presumed truth, followed by a return to that truth again, after the doubt has been appropriately dispelled—so that at the end of the process the matter is taken to be what it was in the first place. The self presumes to have knowledge until it encounters a negation, which leads it into a state of doubt or despair. If and when the self successfully resolves the problem that initiated the process, it gains knowledge that is has tested for itself. Quite literally, the self gains self-determination. Hegel’s concept of Bildung, which is prominent throughout all of his works, dovetails with his view that knowledge is gained only from experience, and that it also requires us to seek, like the protagonist of a Bildungsroman, the widest variety of experience. Furthermore, on the Bildung model, learning involves activity. Hence Hegel rejected Locke’s passive spectator theory of the mind, according to which we should restrain our passions in order to gain objective knowledge. For Hegel, learning requires a passionate search for truth; it is a matter of conscious self-development that requires arduous individual effort and responsibility. For Hegel, fulfillment must come in the activities of real life. Finally, Hegel’s emphasis on self-knowledge, an accurate perception of one’s talents, interests, and abilities, explains his criticisms of the Enlightenment’s fixation on a narrow conception of knowledge as a search for indubitable truth. The notion of timeless truth worried Hegel for very practical reasons. He was convinced that the French Revolution had turned to terror because revolutionaries believed they had apprehended transcendent truth that provided them with a preconceived blueprint to which their society must conform. In short, Hegel argued that the notion of transcendent truth tends toward an inflexible dogmatism that not only foreshortens inquiry, but can also lead to fanatical, and even violent, devotion to an ideology.