The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  35.2 ENLIGHTENMENT PRELUDE

  It is a common misunderstanding to think that Enlightenment philosophy harbors no notion of Bildung, and that the philosophical turn to the formation of the self only emerges with Romanticism and its interest in art and genius. At stake, according to this standard narrative, is an aesthetic upholstering of the Cartesian ego, an attempt to furnish it with creativity and culture. This model, however, overlooks the very context in which the discourse of Bildung takes form: that of the late Enlightenment and its discovery of the historicity of human life and reasoning. The central terms in this context are those of freedom, self-understanding, and cultural diversity.

  The new scientific world-view, and the Enlightenment currents that followed in its wake, went hand in hand with a process of secularization. This not only changed the prevalent understanding of God and nature, but also that of the human being. Secularization involved a new sense of freedom, yet this new sense of freedom could not be conceptualized with reference to the point of view of eternity. It would have to be a freedom that is realized in concreto. Hence a new challenge emerged: how can freedom be related to history and tradition? The answer to this question seemed to lie within human nature itself. As expressed through art, language, science, and politics, human nature is not given once and for all. Human spirit forms itself in an on-going process of education. Thus freedom is linked to the way that a human being—at an individual as well as societal level—realizes itself and its world. This, further, is related to the fabric of beliefs and practices against which actions, events, and expressions gain meaning.

  As such, the premises for historical work must be rearticulated.4 History is no longer a collection of brute facts and fragments, but involves synthesis, understanding, and narrative models of explanation. To the extent that a human being is itself historical, historical understanding is not only a study of the past, but also contributes to the present. By definition, historical understanding involves a dimension of self-understanding.

  If reason, as historically and culturally situated, is deprived of a point of view that is culturally and historically untainted, then we have to ask how it can at all grasp, critique, and expand its own limits in a way that facilitates freedom and rationality. The late Enlightenment responds to this challenge by pointing out that whereas culture, in the singular, may be limiting, cultures in the plural are not.5 Throughout history and across traditions, human rationality gets realized in an endless number of ways. Reason gains in universality by learning to know the varieties of its expressions. This is the age of history, anthropology, travel literature, and philosophical reflection on the differences between East and West, North and South.6 The realization of humanity through culture opens the possibility of ascending from a local life-world context to a cosmopolitan point of view.

  Here lies the key to a codetermination of freedom and history. If finite humanity allows for a dimension of freedom, then freedom must be realized within the realm of tradition and culture itself. Freedom is not a postulate, but a project. And the responsibility for carrying through this project rests with the human being alone. This is the soil in which the philosophical discourse of Bildung initially takes shape.

  35.3 A NEW IDEAL OF HUMANITY

  The ideal of Bildung was expressive of a new ideal of the human: a being who can and should take responsibility for itself and its world. Only such a being can be educated to freedom. Human existence is not passively created in the image (Bild) of God or tradition, but must form (bilden) itself and its world in its own image. Knowledge is the tool through which freedom is realized. Its arena is that of culture, broadly speaking. Bildung and culture are two sides of the same coin, or, to put it otherwise, Bildung is culture in the active, progressive sense of cultivation.7

  The new-won interest in history and culture is sometimes staged as the antidote to another dominant trend of the period: that of transcendental idealism, as it reaches its shape in the works of Kant and Fichte.8 Although this picture has some truth to it, it is not entirely justified. As it responds to, furthers, and transcends the Enlightenment spirit, transcendental philosophy does itself reflect a notion of Bildung. Kant and Fichte, however, were not only interested in the practical aspects of Bildung, but also sought theoretically to justify the new image of the human being, the subject who understands itself in and through ongoing striving towards freedom.

  With regard to Enlightenment discourse, Kant’s critical philosophy is often ascribed a somewhat paradoxical status. On the one hand, Kant offers a most stringent definition of Enlightenment as man’s liberation from his self-inflicted tutelage, yet, on the other hand, he suggests that this notion of Enlightenment can only be realized to the extent that we embark on a new, philosophical trajectory: that of transcendental philosophy.9 With this, history and culture are sidelined as central fields of philosophical inquiry. The backbone of philosophy, the job that it alone can do, is to lay bare the conditions of possibility for epistemic, moral, and aesthetic judging. How, then, can Kant at all be said to interact with the paradigm of Bildung? His is, one could argue, a philosophy that seeks to defend the image of the human being as a creature who is not only capable of taking responsibility for itself, but is indeed compelled to do so. If Kant pushes the self-formation in culture to the margins of philosophical research, he does so in order to demonstrate, from a transcendental point of view, that the self-responsibility that enables and calls for Bildung is not something that can be chosen or rejected: it is the defining core of subjectivity, of that which makes us human. The young Kant’s philosophical heroes, Rousseau, Shaftesbury, and Hume, not only awakened him from his dogmatic slumber (as he is known to have said about the latter), but also shaped his larger vision of transcendental idealism as it revolves around the question “what is a human being?” The philosophical backbone of the three critiques, the mapping of legitimate (and exclusion of illegitimate) uses of reason, reflects the image of a finite, sensuous being, a being who is an indisputable part of nature (and thus subject to causal laws), but is nonetheless able to rise above nature and form itself as free and self-determining (and thus as being its own law-giver).

  When approaching Kant’s philosophy from the point of view of Bildung, we ought to ask if the postulation of such a distinction between nature and spirit (a human being realizing itself as free to the extent that it transcends nature) does not break with the interest in culture and cultivation (Bildung) as fields in which causality and freedom are co-posited as phenomenal and noumenal aspects of subjectivity. If Kant’s philosophy had consisted of only the first and the second Critiques and if we, in addition, bracket the early Kant’s call for a turn from philosophy (as a set of doctrines) to philosophizing (as a critical activity),10 the question could perhaps be answered in the affirmative. However, in his early work, Kant explicitly addresses the task of education. And, in the third Critique, he discusses the possibility of a higher synthesis of freedom and nature, thus reiterating, to some extent, the concerns from his so-called pre-critical period. Seeking to unify the approaches pursued in the first two critiques—the idea of nature as subject to laws and the idea of the human being as free—the Critique of Judgment (1790) presents the possibility of nature as a field of intentionality and freedom. The experience of natural beauty hints in this direction. Judgments that are based on this experience cannot be ascribed objective validity (this would violate the conclusion of the first Critique); as disinterested and pure, however, they can be granted a subjective universality: they purport to be valid across the realm of judging subjects.11

  This is expressive of a humanist ethos in Kant’s work—one that is articulated in his pre-critical writings, serves as a motivating factor in his Copernican turn, and gets its systematic formulation in the Critique of Judgment.12 Given the (self-imposed) limits of transcendental idealism, Kant can hardly be seen as a central figure within philosophy of Bildung. Yet it would be wrong to stage his work as opposed to this tradition—especially wh
en considering how the third Critique influenced central proponents of Bildung: Goethe, the Romantics, and Hegel included.13 However, with the turn to Fichte, who perceived his work as the true realization of Kantian philosophy, the link between idealism and philosophy of Bildung is beyond dispute.14

  Fichte launches a critique of the Kantian dualism between nature and freedom, yet suggests that this dualism must be overcome with reference to an absolute I, an I who is spontaneity, not only postulating itself, but also its counterpart, the non-I.15 At first glance, Fichte thus appears an unlikely candidate for a philosopher of Bildung.16 Still it was Fichte who would influence Humboldt and his talk about a Bildungstrieb and stake out a path that was soon to be followed by Hegel, Schleiermacher, and the Schlegel brothers. Unlike Kant, Fichte does indeed have a pronounced philosophy of Bildung. Further, this part of his work is not added to his system, his Wissenschaftslehre, as some kind of extra-philosophical decorum, but is integrated into his program from the very start.17 Fichte’s lectures on the vocation of the scholar (1794) summarize his thoughts on academic life, life in and for the sake of Bildung. If a human being is free and self-determining, then it is the task of the scholar to think through the nature of this freedom and how it ought to be put to societal use (EPW 146). The scholar reflects on, but also exemplifies, the “spiritual element in man” (EPW 147). For Fichte, a human being never exists as a means to an end, but simply for its own sake and by virtue of being an I. Being an I is to be autonomous, a person who has the capacity for self-determination (EPW 149). Indeed, the human being is characterized by its striving to live up to and gain unity with its own self-image (Bild). This, for Fichte, is the highest good: the complete harmony of a rational being with itself (EPW 151). It is the vocation of the scholar, as of man in general, to approximate this goal in a process of self-perfection (EPW 152, 176–7).

  The drive to Bildung—and this, in part, is what must, in spite of its transcendental baggage, have made Fichte’s philosophy so attractive to Humboldt—cannot be realized by an isolated individual. Or, rather, the individual can only see and understand itself as an individual to the extent that it encounters, acknowledges, and is itself acknowledged by other individuals. Humanity, in short, is only realized in society, understood as the field of free interaction and mutual recognition (EPW 157).18 In order to be free, the individual must grant freedom to others. Fichte insists that it is impossible to be free alone (and, for that reason, deems the freedom of the slave owner an illusion [EPW 158–9]). In this sense, Bildung is not, strictly speaking, self-formation, but a formation of the self in society and of a society with “complete equality of all of its members” (EPW 163).19

  This political mission rests at the heart of Fichte’s later, somewhat discredited Bildungs-manifesto, Addresses to the German Nation (1807–8), which was written after the French Revolution turned stale and Fichte envisioned that the Germans, through education and critical reason, were to take on the mission of liberty, equality, and brotherhood that the French had let down. With its mix of pompous rhetoric of the fatherland and profound insights into the need for an educational reform that would facilitate democracy and self-determination, this text makes it clear how Fichte, throughout his work, seeks to develop the Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s teaching for large-scale educational, cultural, and political-philosophical purposes. Thus we now need to turn to the work of Herder, Pestalozzi, and Humboldt, who were, roughly, contemporaries of Kant and Fichte, but whose philosophies seek to implement the ideal of Bildung in the concrete contexts of society, schools, and universities.

  35.4 EDUCATION TO FREEDOM

  The discourse on Bildung reflects a new understanding of the human being. The individual is not determined by inherited identity and privileges, but viewed in light of his or her on-going capacity for self-formation, as this does itself borrow from and contribute to the community of which he or she is a part. Philosophy is the discipline that traces the structures of this process—not at the individual level, but in the sense of its constitutive dynamics. But philosophy cannot stop short at theorizing education (Bildung), be it in a descriptive or normative language. It must also educate (bilden), that is, translate its theoretical concept formations into the language of practice. These twin commitments—to theoretically conceptualize and practically actualize Bildung—become particularly clear in the work of Herder, Pestalozzi, and Humboldt.

  Starting out as a student of Kant (but also of Johann Georg Hamann), Herder writes in a climate in which philosophy has lost much of its prestige and the academic establishment, in order to save the discipline, had sought shelter under the aegis of mathematics and theoretical natural science.20 In this environment, Herder asks how the truths of philosophy can be defended and find application. In its existing form—as coined by rationalist school philosophy and its model of passive learning21—philosophy can have no use, save that of reproducing mediocrity and advancing individual, academic careers. In its ideal form, however, philosophy should foster self-understanding, independence, and freedom. If the truths of philosophy are to be useful, then the notion of philosophy, the notion of truth, and the notion of usefulness must be subject to revision. All three must be recast in light of the new ideal of Bildung that Herder characterizes as a logic that is not yet invented (PW 11).

  Philosophy must evoke curiosity and a thirst for learning and thus cultivate the kind of questioning and reflection that makes up the backbone of modern citizenship. As such, philosophy cannot be the privilege of the few. Herder pleads for an education (Bildung) of all classes, and of women as well as men (PW 27).22 A first step in this direction is a learning that addresses humans as both cognitive and sentient beings, and communicates in the native German rather than French and Latin, the languages of the educated elite.23 Herder’s philosophy of Bildung seeks to build a society of self-determining individuals, individuals that—in realizing the ideal of freedom—demand respect and recognition independently of class and social standing.24

  But the educating individual does not only beg recognition regardless of rank. As historically and culturally situated, human understanding only proceeds on its path to Bildung by taking on and contemplating the world as it might possibly look from other points of view. By being able to see the world through the eyes of others, the individual gains in experiential richness, expressive sophistication, and cognitive depth.25 Diversity is not the enemy of reason, but a sine qua non of its development, and the diversity of outlooks encompasses individuals within a given culture as well as the expressions and points of view of horizons that are temporally, geographically, and culturally distant from the interpreter. For Herder, Bildung does not simply involve the development of the individual human being, but also of the human species as a whole (a point that would later be taken up by Hegel).

  This co-thinking of Bildung and humanity also lies at the heart of Pestalozzi’s program.26 Pestalozzi suggests that humankind does not strive for divine salvation, but for “a civilized humanity” (EM 4). Humanity, however, can only be achieved through individual human beings taking responsibility for themselves. However, such a responsibility is not given; it must be earned. And according to Pestalozzi, it can only be earned to the extent that one begins with a revolution in early childhood education. Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Emile (1762) came to shape a whole generation of educators and philosophers,27 Pestalozzi translates the larger, Enlightenment ideal of Bildung into an educational program that would gain influence in Germany, France, and even the United States.28

  According to Pestalozzi, the goal of education is an integrated, well-rounded personality. This, in turn, requires self-knowledge (EM 13). Only self-knowledge enables self-determination, that is, freedom. The kind of freedom Pestalozzi has in mind is not simply liberation from outer force and authority. By his lights, freedom is related to maturity—that is, the capacity to make use of this liberation in a responsible way. Pestalozzi observes that if a man in chains is
a dreadful thing, it is still the case that for every one stuck in chains a hundred lay them on themselves (EM 80). The ultimate goal of education is the ability to lead a full and worthy human life.

  Philosophically speaking, Pestalozzi’s notion of education addresses two kinds of challenges. First, there is the question as to what extent independence and self-determination can at all be taught. Bildung cannot be externally imposed, but must come from within. The teacher should be a facilitator, not an authority. Second, education should not seek to make the student into somebody else, but further the process of uncovering his or her real self. Again, the call for such a self-discovery must come from the student. The teacher sets an example through encouragement and affirmation. Love, not force, is what powers education (EM 33). Initiating a Copernican turn in pedagogy, a shift from an authority-centered to a student-centered model of education, Pestalozzi’s teaching conveys a new respect for the developing human being, while, all the same, insisting that only through Bildung is this development realized and brought to fruition.

  Though his thoughts would shape educational ideals for centuries to come, Pestalozzi was not involved in state level Realpolitik. Humboldt, by contrast, was in a position to put force behind his ideas—and, to that extent, those of Pestalozzi. A high-ranking administrator in Prussia, he played a central role in revamping the educational system and founding the new university in Berlin.29 In fact, Humboldt’s thoughts on Bildung are still brought up in contemporary debates about the future of higher education, especially (but not exclusively) in a European context.