The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  For Humboldt, it is not primarily the education of children, but education as such that matters. Further, Humboldt is interested in the relationship between education, on the one hand, and science and scholarship, on the other. Education is not a stage one leaves behind upon graduation, but a life-long endeavor. This reflects back on life in the university. In Humboldt’s view, the time has come to change the structure of an institution that, since the Middle Ages, has served to reproduce the dogma of clergymen and worldly authorities.30 Under his tenure, education is not perceived as a one-way process in which established knowledge is transferred from professor to students. In fact, education is no longer a pragmatic means to an end, but a goal in itself, an ideal that is shared by students and professors alike.31 It is in this climate that the university, as we know it today, takes shape. The ideal—though an ideal whose realization, even in the twenty-first century, leaves a lot to be desired—is not to reproduce the ideologies of past and present authorities, but to produce knowledge for the future.

  Humboldt’s vision for the new university is based in his image of the knowledge-seeking individual whose path is one of life-long learning. Goethe’s Faust (1808) had dramatized the costs of this curiosity—this insatiable appetite for the new—were it not funneled into a productive and healthy trajectory. The Humboldtian university was to serve such a task; it was to steer the restless modern individual onto a path where potential vice would be turned into manifest virtue and thus allow the individual as well as society at large to benefit from the thirst for knowledge. How, then, is this achieved?

  Humboldt’s university does not cultivate one-dimensional experts. Education—and, again, we hear the echo of Pestalozzi’s teaching—should facilitate the development of a well-rounded personality. A well-rounded personality is the opposite of narrow technocratic expertise. But the opposite of excellence, it is not.32 According to Humboldt, excellence can only be achieved by scholars who are able to transcend the narrow limits of one particular discourse and situate their knowledge within a larger context of learning. In order to broach a broader platform of knowledge, students must be able to choose classes across departments and disciplines. They should be exposed to a variety of teaching styles and methods. If knowledge takes independence, then students must be given an increasing amount of responsibility for their own learning. What students need is not, primarily, to master a body of knowledge, but to develop the tools adequate to contributing independently to the overall body of learning. Doctrines and drills will no longer do; learning to learn is the motto. The goal of education is to ensure long-term success and give students the capacity ultimately to move beyond their teachers. The professors, in turn, thrive in and through interaction with critically-minded students.33 In Humboldt’s ideal institution, teaching and research go hand in hand. Only thus can the academic institution serve as free and self-correcting, nurturing and sheltering the human drive to Bildung, ultimately also the development of humanity itself.34

  In this way, Herder, Pestalozzi, and Humboldt contribute to the nineteenth-century discussion of Bildung by translating the ideal of freedom into the fields of societal education, schools, and the university.

  35.5 TRANSCENDING SUBJECTIVE IDEALISM: SCHILLER, SCHLEIERMACHER, AND HEGEL

  Philosophy of Bildung had been an important aspect of the work of Herder, Pestalozzi, and Humboldt. With Schiller, Schleiermacher, and Hegel—who drew on their idealist predecessors, but also followed the more practical attitudes of Herder, Pestalozzi, and Humboldt—it moves into the very center of philosophy.

  In the context of nineteenth-century philosophy of Bildung, Friedrich Schiller is almost larger than life. As the editor of the journal Die Horen, he provides both inspiration and a venue for the experimental thoughts and poeticizing of the Romantic generation, both in its Tübingen coinage (Hölderin, Schelling, and the young Hegel) and in its Jena variety (the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Schleiermacher, and Tieck). Schiller, further, seeks to realize his philosophy of Bildung through art (poetry and drama) as well as theory. His name not only brings to mind philosophical works like The Aesthetic Education of Mankind (1795) and On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795), but also historical plays, Bildungsdrama one could almost call them, such as Don Carlos (1787), Mary Stewart (1800), and Wilhelm Tell (1804).

  Kant’s theory of freedom—as further sharpened by Fichte—makes up the theoretical platform of Schiller’s philosophy of Bildung (or Erziehung, as he puts it in his letters). In fact, for Schiller, being a Kantian or not is not a choice: as moderns, we are all de facto Kantians.35 Schiller’s work on aesthetic education seeks to realize the Kantian-Fichtean call for freedom in the form of a historical theory, a political utopia, a theory of art—and, most importantly, a theory about how human existence, facing its status as both free and a being of nature, realizes its determination through aesthetic education. In this sense, Schiller deliberately (yet critically) carries on the spirit of the third Critique.36

  The Greeks, Schiller thought, understood themselves as nature. We moderns, by contrast, see ourselves as split between reality and our ideals. Indeed, the modern individual often identifies with this lacuna, this gap between the real and the ideal, and hence perceives him- or herself as a void, rather than a presence. Art serves as a bridge between nature and culture, it helps us win ourselves (and our first nature) through second nature (LAE 90). Art frees humanity from the “cold hearts” of an alienated, un-aesthetic state (LAE 102).

  Through his friendship with Goethe, Schiller developed a theory of drama as exemplifying the gist of this aesthetic state. As laid out in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, it is through drama that the modern individual overcomes an estranged existence and wins not only love, but also the free sociality that enables self-realization (Goethe, in turn, borrows amply from their common friend and collaborator Wieland’s discussion of the utopian, aesthetic being of the beautiful soul). Modern life, though, begs modern expressions. Schiller distinguishes between naive and sentimental art, between the immediate expressions of pre-modern culture and a modern culture born with the consciousness of such an immediacy being irrevocably lost. While Schiller’s philosophy is sometimes mistaken for a cultivation of classical ideals for their own sake, a more charitable reading would emphasize how he maps out the differences between ancient and modern lifeforms so as to allow us moderns to understand our situation and inhabit it in a meaningful way—a way enabled through aesthetic Bildung.

  Why, then, is art so central to this picture of modern life and Bildung? Or, put otherwise, why does Schiller cast education (Erziehung) as an aesthetic enterprise? As Kant had pointed out, a human being is both nature and culture, sensuousness and form, passive receptiveness and synthetic spontaneity. Along these lines, Schiller speaks of a material drive and a form drive (LAE 118–25). In modernity, the form drive has gained the upper hand. Law (rather than material content) and conceptual orientations (rather than sensuous ones) dominate our lives. What is needed is a mediation of these different aspects of humanity (Schiller here draws on the Fichtean notion of Wechselwirkung). Art presents such a mediation. As Kant had shown, aesthetic feeling is generated by the free play between conceptual understanding and the imagination. Schiller views the play drive as the higher unity through which the human being can be brought back to itself. To this extent, his ideal of Bildung is an aesthetic ideal (LAE 169–70). However, when fully realized, this aesthetic ideal coincides with morality. Even though this point of Schiller’s philosophy would be subject to a gross misappropriation during the Third Reich (as were a number of other ideals from this period, including that of Bildung itself37), his analysis of the alienated modern individual and art’s role in healing this predicament remains an important educational insight—a point that resounds, albeit in a social and hermeneutically modified version, in Schleiermacher’s theory of Bildung.

  Friedrich Schleiermacher was unfortunate enough to have his reputation coined by his critics. His rivalry with Hegel gave rise
to a bitter mischaracterization of his philosophy of religion as a naive celebration of unmediated feeling (even a dog can feel, Hegel chides him).38 In the twentieth century, Hans-Georg Gadamer mistakes Schleiermacher’s work for a fatal mix of Romantic aestheticism and positivist thought—and stages this in contrast with Hegelian Bildung.39 Schleiermacher, however, is no more a philosopher of feeling than one of Bildung, though his theory of Bildung is, as we will see, quite different from that of Hegel.

  Like Schiller, Schleiermacher’s theory of Bildung grows out of a concern about modern alienation—and a hope that this alienation can indeed be overcome. If Kant and Fichte were right to celebrate individual freedom, their transcendental orientation still prevented them from asking whether post-Enlightenment society offers a context in which such freedom can be realized. A notion of abstract, subsumptive, and identity-forming reason had led philosophers to overlook the irreducibility of the individual and its world. And it had led them to overlook the fact that the universals of ethical, social, political, and historical life, of nature as it realizes itself in and through history and culture, is but the sum of diverse individualities that represent a manifold of outlooks and worldviews.

  Schleiermacher had experienced such a sociality during the short and happy years of the salon culture in Berlin. With the Schlegel brothers, the Humboldt brothers, Fichte, and others, Schleiermacher had been part of the social circles that were gathering in the homes of intellectually gifted women such as Dorothea von Schlegel (née Mendelssohn) and Rahel Varnhagen.40 Even in his own time, Schleiermacher was seen as the philosopher who gave voice to the informal symphilosophizing of the salons.41 In this environment, the Enlightenment culture of critique and self-reflection was translated into a language of free sociality and informal exchange of works and ideas, of exposing one’s thoughts to the responses of others. The community was conceived organically and along the lines of a work of art: each part, each individual, reflects the whole of which it is a part, yet this whole is but the unity of different, individual parts. According to Schleiermacher, it is not the insistence on abstract laws or freedom, but, rather, the interplay, the mutual recognition, and the ongoing mix of critical and supportive sociality that sparks true Bildung. Every person is different; every person needs to realize his or her potential in a unique way. Yet this individuality can only find its shape in a social world, that is, in and with the recognition of other individuals.

  Historically speaking, the social equilibrium of the salon was but a brief intermezzo. By the early 1800s, 1800 more conservative societies had gained influence. Neither women nor Jews were welcomed in their quarters. This was a period of political and social reaction.42 Schleiermacher, however, had anticipated this backlash in his early writings. His image of free sociality is contrasted with the picture of a tradition that has become estranged to itself and clings to lifeless and stifling mediation of classical texts.43 Bildung represents the opposite of this; it keeps tradition alive through ever new, individual adaptations. This indeed is tradition—surely identity-forming, but through the freedom that rests with ongoing, individual appropriation.

  In this way, Schleiermacher issues a hermeneutic program that insists that understanding—of other people, of the symbolic expressions of the present and the past—is always about understanding an utterance as a particular outlook on, or grasping of, a given subject matter.44 Just as Bildung requires a universal form through which the individual can externalize or express herself, so the arena of culture and tradition only lives in and through individual mediation.45

  From his early On Religion (1799) to his last lectures at the university of Berlin almost 35 years later, Schleiermacher combats what he takes to be an inherent tendency of modern reason to unify that which is different, to level individuality in the name of universality—in spite of the fact that reason, at the end of the day, only lives and thrives in difference. If the universal is seen as an abstract universal, as a uniform, undivided mass, then there is no way in which the self can be unified with its concept or ideal. Nor, however, can the universal be attained in the finite, historical world. In this way, Schleiermacher’s philosophy of Bildung represents a social propaedeutic, an attempt to bring the freedom postulated by Kant and Fichte down to a concrete, empirical-historical level and translate it into a quest for real knowledge and self-understanding.46 Some of these thoughts were realized when Schleiermacher, being called from Halle, became a key force in the establishment of the new University of Berlin.47 In his reflections on the university, he makes it clear how philosophy should be a unifying intellectual power, keeping together and providing the justificatory discourse for the faculties of law, medicine, and theology. Philosophy thus plays a key role in promoting academic freedom.48

  Much of this thinking resonates with the central topoi of the Enlightenment conceptions of Bildung, though it does so in a way that further develops the humanist commitments of the third Critique. Moreover, much of Schleiermacher’s thinking on history and Bildung resonates in the work of Hegel, in spite of Hegel’s outspoken animosity towards his colleague in Berlin.

  In different ways, Schiller and Schleiermacher had made Bildung entirely central to philosophy. With Hegel, however, Bildung is philosophy, that is, it is identified with the dynamic that leads reason to express and understand itself so as to enable its historical and systematic determination, thus realizing, in a grand philosophical synthesis, the Fichtean idea that freedom consists in the ability to live up to one’s concept.49 In this way, Hegel, like Herder, links Bildung to an overall historical development, that of the human species.

  Hegel develops his notion of philosophy through a critique of Kant and Fichte. According to Hegel, idealism establishes subjectivity, spontaneous and free as it is, as the principle of reality. Philosophy, in turn, seeks to lay out the a priori principles of subjectivity and is, as such, a subjective idealism. Subjective idealism fails to account for the way in which the mind is situated in the world. Schelling, Hegel’s friend from his student years in Tübingen, had made this clear. His was an objective rather than subjective idealism.50 However, if objective idealism counters subjectivity with a principle of reality, it still fails to take into account the mediation between the two—it fails to take into account how mind and world interact dialectically in and through history. Or, rather, it fails to see how human spirit forms (bildet) nature and, in this process, recognizes itself in that which is other. This, and not simply a process of individual self-formation, is for Hegel the material of Bildung—that which makes Bildung the very principle of history: history as a process of learning.51 Philosophy must account for this process of learning and experience as it proceeds, often through difficulties, mistakes, and misunderstandings. It must make explicit, bring to concept and system, the knowledge gained through experience and, thus, facilitate spirit’s (self-)education. This, Hegel insists, is the goal of absolute idealism.

  In this sense, philosophy finds itself standing on the sideline of history, always arriving too late, observing and conceptualizing rather than being a part of the action. In this reflection, however, philosophy shelters an action of its own. Once human spirit realizes the norms, ideas, and principles on which it acts, once it uncovers the rationale behind its actions and practices, this rationale can be reflectively assessed and adjudicated. Spirit is driven forward by criticism, reflection, and an increased degree of self-knowledge. And to map this process of knowledge—this process of growth and education—is the project of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).52 It is his unspoken goal that the dialectical progress of spirit, as retrieved by the philosopher, unifies the Bildung of world-historical spirit with that of the reader, culminating at the point where the two perspectives merge and turn into one.

  Like Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, Hegel’s Phenomenology, though written at a stage when the French Revolution had turned into terror, is a celebration of freedom and a reflection on the historical-philosophical conditions of possibility for
its realization.53 Freedom—the idea that we, qua human, are furnished with a capacity for rational deliberation and that a sound political system allows this capacity to be realized in its full—is tantamount to self-determination. But only a self that knows itself can determine itself in a mature and meaningful way. The Phenomenology seeks conceptually to map the development of increasing individual and social autonomy, thus also bringing it to awareness and furthering the path to self-understanding (PS 50). This process is driven by the tension between what spirit claims to know and what is true. The ultimate goal is not only knowledge, but also insight into what knowing is (PS 17). Spirit strives for ever more reflective and transparent knowledge, but in the educational process of the Phenomenology, that which it thought was true and valid proves only partially true (only a stage in the process of knowledge-acquisition and not the final end-product). Hence, what matters is the capacity to learn from experience, that is, for spirit to retain that which is true and lasting in and through historical change. Hence, the Phenomenology is itself an education of consciousness to the standpoint of science (PS 50).

  In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes this process of education, formation, and learning through a series of shapes or figures of thought. Initially, these figures are rather general and bear resemblance to a broader spectrum of philosophical positions. Later on, as humanity has recognized itself in its other, hence also as its own object, the educational stages are pitched as a series of transformative historical periods and world-views. Each figure represents but one approach to knowledge and holds no more than a partial truth. Hence, the self-discovery of spirit is but the discovery that its own ideals and models of understanding fall short and must be subject to continuous dialectical revision and improvement. Hegel speaks of this as the journey of despair: of spirit learning to know itself through confronting its own shortcomings (PS 49).