17 F. W. J. Schelling, Von der Weltseele, in Schellings Werke, ed. Manfred Schröter, 3rd ed., 12 vols. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1927–59), vol. 1, 416–17. Schelling refers to Goethe’s concept of Metamorphose. Richards states that Kuno Fischer referred E. Haeckel to this passage to demonstrate that Schelling was rejecting Kant’s strict division of mechanical and organic nature and was at least alluding to the idea of an overall organic evolution: Robert Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 298.
18 Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, in Schellings Werke, vol. 2, 62–3.
19 Richards The Romantic Conception of Life, 304, suggests that Schelling’s later rejection was directed against Erasmus Darwin’s more mechanical account of transmutation.
20 Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1803), Schellings Werke vol. 2, 342.
21 See Die Weltalter, frg., Schellings Werke, ed. Manfred Schröter (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1976), vol. 13 (Nachlassband), 43f., 47.
22 See Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life.
23 Philip R. Sloan, ‘The making of a philosophical naturalist’, in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, 2nd Edition, ed. J. Hodge and G. Radick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 21–43; P. R. Sloan: ‘“The Sense of Sublimity”: Darwin on Nature and Divinity’, Osiris 16 (2001), 251–69; P. R. Sloan: ‘Darwin’s Romantic Biology: The Foundation of His Evolutionary Ethics’, in J. Maienschein and M. Ruse, eds., Biology and the Foundation of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 113–53.
24 Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life, 421–503, 479.
25 Sloan, ‘Darwin’s Romantic Biology’.
26 Richard Owen, On the Nature of Limbs (London: John Van Voorst, 1849).
27 See Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life, 528–32.
28 Michael Ruse, ‘The Romantic conception of Robert J. Richards’, Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 37, no. 1 (Spring, 2004), 3–23. Peter J. Bowler, ‘The Eclipse of Pseudo-Darwinism? Reflection on some Recent Developments in Darwin Studies’, Hist. Sci., xlvii (2005), 431–43.
29 Against the interpretation of Schelling as a forerunner of Darwin, see Diedrich von Engelhardt, ‘Schelling’s philosophische Grundlegung der Medizin’, in Hans Jörg Sandkühler ed., Natur und geschichtlicher Prozess: Studien zur Naturphilosophie F. W. J. Schellings (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 305–32; for criticism directed against Romantic science generally, see E. O. Wilson, Consilience (New York: Knopf, 1998), 40; Töpfer, Historisches Wörterbuch Biologie, vol. 1, 494 critically distinguishes Goethe’s theory of ‘Metamorphose’ from Darwinism.
30 Töpfer, Historisches Wörterbuch Biologie, vol. 1, 493, states that leading German biologists up until the first decades of the twentieth century rejected Darwin’s views. For the controversy between mechanists and idealists, see Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth Century German Biology (Dordrecht, Netherlands and Boston, USA: D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1982).
31 Peter J. Bowler, ‘Revisiting the eclipse of Darwinism’, Journal of the History of Biology xxxviii (2009), 19–32; P. J. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1988).
32 See Wolfgang Welsch, ‘Absoluter Idealismus und Evolutionsdenken’, in Klaus Vieweg and Wolfgang Welsch (eds.), Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes: ein kooperativer Kommentar (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 655–88; Dieter Wandschneider, ‘Hegel und die Evolution’, in O. Breidbach, D v. Engelhardt (eds.), Hegel und die Lebenswissenschaften (Berlin: VWB, 2002), 240–55. For an investigation of the relation of causes and conceptual structures, see David Kolb, ‘Darwin Rocks Hegel: Does Nature have a History?’, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, nos. 57/57, 2008, 97–116.
33 Vittorio Hösle, Hegel’s System (Hamburg: Meiner,1988), vol. 1, 314, links this structural idea to the elaborated theory of the hypercyclus of Manfred Eigen.
34 On this problem, see Thomas Kalenberg, Die Befreiung der Natur. Natur und Selbstbewusstsein in der Philosophie Hegels (Frankfurt am Main: Meiner, 1997), 300ff.; Christian Spahn, Lebendiger Begriff—Begriffenes Leben. Zur Grundlegung der Philosophie des Organischen bei G. W. F. Hegel (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2007), 177–203, 188.
35 John Niemeyer Findlay, Hegel: A Re-Examination (London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Macmillan, 1958).
36 Hösle, Hegels System, vol. 1, 283, Spahn, Lebendiger Begriff, 268–75. See also Errol E. Harris, ‘How Final Is Hegel’s Rejection of Evolution?’, in Stephen Houlgate, Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature (Albany: State University of New York Pres, 1998), 189–208.
37 Stephen Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel, Freedom, Truth and History (Malden, MA, and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2005), 173–4; see also Wandschneider, ‘Hegel und die Evolution’, 235; Spahn, Lebendiger Begriff, 269.
38 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan, 1992).
39 Schopenhauer read the Times Review of Darwin’s Origin of Species and critically mentions Darwin in a letter shortly before his death; see Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford (UK) and New York (USA): Oxford University Press, 1997), 98.
40 David Asher, ‘Schopenhauer and Darwinism’, Journal of Anthropology, January 1871, 312–32.
41 Ludwig Noiré, Der monistische Gedanke: eine Concordanz der Philosophie Schopenhauer’s, Darwin’s, R. Mayer’s und L. Geiger’s (Leipzig: Veit, 1875).
42 Emerich DuMont, Der Fortschritt im Lichte der Lehren Schopenhauer’s und Darwin’s (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1876).
43 Arthur O. Lovejoy, ‘Schopenhauer as an Evolutionist’, The Monist, vol. 21, no. 2 (April 1911), 195–222.
44 Gustav Weng, Schopenhauer—Darwin; Pessimismus oder Optimismus? (Berlin: Ernst Hofmann & Co. Verlag, 1911).
45 See Julian Young, Schopenhauer (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 242–5, and Bryan Magee, Philosophy of Schopenhauer, 287, for Schopenhauer’s understanding of the mind in ‘biological terms’.
46 Dirk R. Johnson, Nietzsche’s Anti-Darwinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
47 John Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism, (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). See already the comparison in Alexander Tille, Von Darwin bis Nietzsche (Leipzig: Naumann, 1895).
48 Georg Lukács, Von Nietzsche zu Hitler oder: Der Irrationalismus und die deutsche Politik (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1966).
49 Karl Popper, Open Society and its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1945), vol. 1, 230.
50 Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002).
51 Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich eds., Nietzsche: Godfather of Fascism? On the Use and Abuse of a Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
52 See references in fn. 46 and 47.
53 See Gregory Moore, ‘Nietzsche and Evolutionary Theory’, in Keith Ansell Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche (Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 517–31, 519.
54 Johnson, Nietzsche’s Anti-Darwinism, focuses on Nietzsche’s critical stance on the sciences and calls Nietzsche’s view non-metaphysical and non-naturalistic.
55 Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, 1878, 2.
56 Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism.
57 For this biologism see Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor.
58 See also Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor.
59 See Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism.
60 See Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, ‘Der Organismus als innerer Kampf: Der Einfluss von Wilhelm Roux auf Friedrich Nietzsche’, Nietzsche Studien, 7, 189–223; Moore, 2002, 2006; Töpfer, Historisches Wörterbuch Biologie, 1, 494–5.
61 Moore, Niet
zsche, Biology and Metaphor, 522, points out that the preparatory notes to this aphorism are titled ‘On Darwinism’.
62 Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism, 171.
63 Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism, 142–6.
64 Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism, 171.
65 For very recent criticism, see Vittorio Hösle, Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie (München: C. H. Beck, 2013), 206–7, 260.
66 See Töpfer, Historisches Wörterbuch Biologie, 1, 493; Thomas Junker’s Der Darwinismus-Streit in der Deutschen Botanik. Evolution, Wissenschaftstheorie und Weltanschauung im 19. Jahrhundert (Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2011), analyses the conflict between Darwinian materialism and idealistic biology in German botany: see esp. the claim that many botanists of the times reject Darwinism, 357–60.
67 While Haeckel embraces a version of materialism and links life to inorganic forces, Haeckel’s student Hans Driesch famously opted in his neo-vitalism for an irreducible life force. Against the demonizing of vitalists, see Ernst Mayer, This is Biology (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997), 3–23 who argues for the historical importance of the vitalists’ challenge to naive versions of mechanical explanations in biology.
68 See P. J. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution. Bowler calls Haeckel and others provokingly ‘Pseudo-Darwinians’.
69 Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
70 For an overview of the debate, see Nick Hopwood, ‘Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud: Ernst Haeckel’s Embryological Illustrations’, Isis, 2006, 97: 260–301.
71 Against Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life, see recently Peter J. Bowler, ‘Revisiting the Eclipse of Darwinism’, 438–42. The distance between Darwin and Haeckel is also emphasized in Töpfer, Historisches Wörterbuch Biologie, 1, 494; and in Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
72 Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (London: Macdonald; New York: American Elsevier, 1971). See further Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hilter: Evolutionary Eugenics and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and Andre Pichot, The Pure Society. From Darwin to Hitler (London and New York: Verso, 2009 (see fn. 77)). For an overall more favourable view of Haeckel, see recently Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life (2008), who defends him against exaggerated charges of forgery and against the charges of evolutionary racism. Richards stresses both the Romanticism of Haeckel’s views and the similarities between Darwin and Haeckel. Similarly a bit more benevolent towards Haeckel, especially in regard to his embryonic drawings, is Nick Hopwood in ‘Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud’.
73 Hösle, Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie, chs. 8–13.
74 Marx to Engels, 18 June 1862 in MEW (=Marx-Engels Werke, Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–90), vol. 30, 249.
75 For Marx’s ‘ambivalence’ towards Darwinism, see Richard Weikart, Socialist Darwinism: Evolution in German Socialist Thought from Marx to Bernstein (San Francisco, CA: International Scholars Publications, 1998).
76 Marx wanted to dedicate his book Das Kapital to Darwin, but Darwin politely declined; for discussion of Marx’s theory and his philosophy of nature, see recently John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). For Freud’s connection to Darwin, see Lucille B. Ritvo, Darwin’s Influence on Freud: a Tale of Two Sciences (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
77 Darwin himself rejects Social Darwinism and embraces a more traditional stance in ethics, that was especially attacked by sociobiological views and their focus on the ‘egoism’ of genes. Very recently biologically informed anthropology goes back to more traditional views of the importance of altruism; see C. Spahn, ‘Altruism, Egoism and Altruism again. How to properly reduce human ethics?’, in Gabriele de Anna ed., Willing the Good (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 126–47.
78 See the quoted controversial books of Weikart, From Darwin to Hilter; Socialist Darwinism and, independent of the intelligent design debate, see Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, Pichot, The Pure Society: From Darwin to Hitler. Critically against these and similar views, see Bowler, ‘Revisisting the eclipse of Darwinism’, 440–3.
79 For such very recent discussions in the German tradition, see Vittorio Hösle, Morals and Politics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), ch. 4, and Christian Illies, Philosophische Anthropologie im biologischen Zeitalter: zur Konvergenz von Moral und Natur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006).
CHAPTER 35
BILDUNG
KRISTIN GJESDAL
35.1 INTRODUCTION
IT is no exaggeration to claim that nineteenth-century philosophy stands under the sign of Bildung—formation in culture, as it is often translated in an effort to distinguish it from mere Erziehung, child-rearing, upbringing, and school education. The history of nineteenth-century philosophy is, in a certain sense, the history of the idea of Bildung, as it includes (but is not limited to) the work of Johann Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schiller, the Romantics, G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Across its different shapes and permutations, the discourse on Bildung explores a form of knowledge that presupposes the intertwining of the I and its symbolic-historical world and insists that understanding culture and tradition initiates a deeper and more profound self-understanding that, in turn, translates into the wider spheres of judgment and action. In this sense, Bildung targets a kind of knowledge that, in its crossing of the boundaries between theoretical and practical knowledge, cannot be formalized, nor learned by imitation or imitation-based training, but must be self-motivated. Towards the end of the century, the notion of Bildung had shaped the conception of culture and cultural education all over the Western world.
In a German context, the Second World War abruptly ended the unquestioned faith in the culture of Bildung. Theodor W. Adorno, Thomas Mann, and others took it upon themselves to ask why the rich and wide-spanning tradition of philosophy, art, literature, and music had offered so little resistance to the atrocities of the “Third Reich.” The culture of Bildung, it seemed, had failed massively; with its fostering of the beautiful soul, it had naively turned its back on real life and the critical and political attitudes needed in order to stand up against the machinery of fascism. This, no doubt, is an important concern—one that must be part of any contemporary discourse of the relevance of Bildung. Yet we must not let a naïve and apolitical commitment to education in culture (characteristically portrayed in the petit bourgeois anti-hero of Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain [1924]) stand in for the philosophical, political, and educational potential of the notion of Bildung as such. And to the extent that educational politics is still on the agenda (which is very much the case in Europe, especially Germany, after the educational reforms within the European Union, and in the United States and the United Kingdom, where tuition fees have soared over the past years), the reference to Bildung plays an important role in contemporary debates. Hence an effort to understand the roster of positions developed in the nineteenth century is, at the same time, an effort to acquire a set of tools that might help fine-tune our contemporary thinking about the aims and objectives of higher education.
It is the ambition of this chapter to question the notion of Bildung as an aesthetic or aestheticizing cultivation of the self and its inner space.1 I trace the philosophical notion of Bildung back to its beginnings in the Enlightenment, and suggest that this discourse does itself offer the critical commitment—the emphasis on individual responsibility, the democratic ethos, and the appeal to reflection and independent thought—needed in order to stand up against the lukewarm and accepting attitudes of the Bildungsbürger that
Adorno, Mann, and others so relentlessly criticized in the wake of the Second World War. At the end of the day, only this critical and reflective notion of Bildung can explain why even its staunchest critics, in spite of their misgivings and worries, were never willing entirely to abandon this ideal.
A discussion that isolates the philosophical approaches to Bildung risks narrowing down a discourse that knows no disciplinary boundaries. The notion of “Bildung” has roots in a religious context (pietism and its cultivation of the inner as the space of divinity and worship),2 and traverses political discourse (both the optimistic build-up to the French Revolution and the sobering reflections on its outcome), meta-discussions in history (in particular the birth of history as an academic discipline and its expansion from a mere fact-oriented discourse to a comprehensive concept of culture and tradition), and the birth of the modern novel (in works that center on individual character development and retrieve the protagonist’s growth toward self-understanding, Christoph Martin Wieland’s The History of Agathon [1766–7], Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister [1795–6], and Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion [1797–9] being cases in point).3 While there nonetheless appears to be a particularly close relationship between Bildung and nineteenth-century thought—which is what feeds the image of the nineteenth century standing under the sign of Bildung in the first place—this is not because extra-philosophical disciplines or practices have not contributed to our understanding of Bildung, but, rather, because philosophy is the discipline that systematically explores and conceptually articulates the idea of Bildung, thus opening the way for an inquiry into the distinction between Bildung and Erziehung and a discussion of the relationship between Bildung and self-determination, as well as the particular kind of truth, knowledge, and understanding that Bildung yields. By comparing and contrasting it to other kinds of knowledge-acquisition, nineteenth-century philosophers would view Bildung as the distinguishing mark of the human sciences at large. Most importantly, however, philosophers came, in this period, to see the search for Bildung as intrinsic to philosophy itself. From this point of view, reflection on Bildung and its place in modern society is but reflection on philosophy’s place and function in past as well as contemporary life.
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 128
