The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Whereas Schiller and Schleiermacher, though in different ways, had seen Bildung as a way to overcome alienation, Hegel takes alienation to be the very engine of Bildung. The goal of overcoming alienation is not postponed to a utopian future, but realized in the philosophical process itself. Bildung is spirit externalizing itself, leaving its imprint in the world—and then recognizing itself in that which is other, hence appropriating and making its own what initially was unknown and alien. This labor of understanding is generously rewarded. At the end of the journey, spirit understands the purpose of its hardship; it is able to see how one formation leads to another and why each of the transitions is indeed necessary: spirit has found itself. Freedom is reached when spirit is able to recognize itself in the world, that is, when the world is seen as shaped and known by human beings.54 At this point, reality and concept are one. Philosophy no longer traces the journey towards true and universal knowledge, but lays out the structures of knowledge, hence also of reality itself. Such is Hegel’s grand narrative of spirit’s Bildung in world-history and its culmination in a logic that, in one and the same gesture, lays out the structures of mind and world.55

  35.6 SCHOPENHAUER AND NIETZSCHE

  If Hegel is critical of the (Kantian) idealists and their hypostatizing of an abstract notion of subjectivity, he still remains within their framework. At least this is the judgment of the last two philosophers to be discussed, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, whose respective contributions seek to recast the notion of Bildung in a distinctively non-humanist language, thus issuing a fundamental assault on earlier nineteenth-century apologists of Bildung, yet an assault that aims to rescue the ideal of Bildung by liberating it from a presumably philistine coinage.

  Schopenhauer deliberately positions his philosophy against Hegel and the Hegelians who, in his view, dominate intellectual life and education in Germany. He calls for a return to Kant, in whose work he finds a lucid philosophical prose and an exceptional clarity of thought, but also (and, for Schopenhauer, not unrelatedly) an attentiveness to the limitations of rationality.56 Hence, what Schopenhauer values in Kant’s philosophy is precisely what Fichte, Hegel and their generation saw as its most fundamental problem: the division between, on the one hand, a noumenal realm of things in themselves and, on the other, the domain of individuation, understanding, and appearances. In Schopenhauer’s work, though, the ultimate reality is constituted by a purposeless, blind will. This dimension of reality not only makes the talk about freedom, responsibility, and rationality appear as Schein, but is also the most fundamental condition of (human) life, an endless striving for a satisfaction that is tragically beyond reach. For Schopenhauer, a philosophy that denies the fundamental suffering at the heart of human existence is guilty of false idealism. In Schopenhauer’s mind, philosophy should theorize the human condition, but it cannot offer much by way of consolation. Only art can disclose existence in its true colors and, in the experience of a truth that transcends all individuation, offer a sublime, yet transient sense of bliss. While the general contours of his thinking are laid out in The World as Will and Representation (first edition in 1818), Schopenhauer’s distinction between natural and artificial education is explained in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851).57 His discussion of these educational models reflects his metaphysical pessimism and his disrespect for the academic establishment, but also his hope that the future might open the way for individuals whose aesthetic attunement makes them susceptible to the ephemeral beauty of art (as it captures the tragic essence of human existence).58

  Artificial education is all about passively absorbing the dominant doctrines of books, a digestion of readymade ideas (PP II, §372). As such, it stunts individual development. Popularity, false profundity, and professorial pomp characterize this domain, as it, in Schopenhauer’s judgment, saturates the educational system. This is a model that, along the lines of bad Hegelianism, prioritizes conceptual understanding. As Schopenhauer puts it, “with artificial education, the head is crammed full of concepts by being lectured and taught through reading, before there is yet any extended acquaintance with the world of intuitive perceptions” (PP II, §372).

  Reflecting the Enlightenment ethos he openly criticizes, Schopenhauer insists that natural education begins with perception and intuition. This is not a study of books, but of the “real ways of the world” (PP II, §376). Whereas concepts divide and compartmentalize, intuition is one and unifying. Perception and intuition not only serve to educate through the book of the world, but also, in some cases, to “eradicate the prejudices of [false] education” (PP II, § 373). Education through experience is, Schopenhauer insists, a lifelong commitment (PP II, §376). Yet the attunement to intuition is rewarded with the capacity to experience the redemption of art, in particular music. Novels, by contrast, often present a false view of life, though Schopenhauer grants that an ironic Bildungs-novel such as Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605/1615) helpfully demonstrates the limits of artificial education (PP II, §376).

  Natural education produces independent thinkers (whom Schopenhauer contrasts with the servile intellectual bureaucrats that populate academic institutions). In seeking to evoke independent thought, Schopenhauer thus prepares the ground for the readership he sorely misses. After his death, though, he would perhaps have taken a certain pleasure in observing that of all the nineteenth-century philosophers of Bildung, it would be he, with his uncompromising standards of style and truthfulness, that came to influence some of the greatest twentieth-century writers, Emil Cioran, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Thomas Bernhard being amongst them. His most avid reader, though, would be none other than Friedrich Nietzsche, whose youthful vision of philosophy is expressed in the essay “Schopenhauer as Educator” (1874).59

  Nietzsche’s theory of Bildung works on two levels. On the one hand, he views philosophy, as it is, as a grand project of Bildung, yet one that has been misunderstood and is therefore in need of critique. On the other, his reflections on Bildung, as it should be, are funneled into more specific thoughts on education and scholarly obligations, most clearly presented in the 1872 lecture series On the Future of Our Educational Institutions.60 To understand Nietzsche’s contribution to Bildung is to see how these planes of thinking mutually inform and support each other.

  As far as his general philosophical framework goes, Nietzsche’s position is in constant development. Yet it is possible to ferret out a set of concerns that seem particularly important throughout his work. First, Nietzsche, from his early days as a classicist in Basel, wishes to analyze the conditions for and nature of modernity. He worries that we moderns have come to underappreciate life. Facing the inescapable finality of all things human, the modern individual is marked by a tendency to turn life into a quasi-bureaucratic project, something that needs to be managed, organized, and taken care of rather than lived.61 Greek culture allowed for a different point of view: it was built around the affirmation of human life, short and miserable though it is. Consequently, Greek culture (and in particular the art of early tragedy) provides a lens through which we moderns might gain a perspective on the choices upon which our way of living rests. Influenced by Schopenhauer and Wagner, the philosophical-artistic heroes of his youth, Nietzsche sees early Greek tragedy (and festivals) as an expression in which the fundamental experiences of human existence, the suffering, the burdens, the constitutive loneliness of an individualized being, get articulated in a way that, through the immediacy of music, also discloses the most fundamental meaning and value of life, drawing audience and actors into a sublime, yet ephemeral experience of transcendence.62

  Is such transcendence through art available to us moderns? Nietzsche vacillates, though in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) he initially airs the hope that Wagner’s music can bring this possibility to life.63 Equally important to Nietzsche’s conception of Bildung, however, are the general methodological tenors of his early work, how he recommends that we, as philosophers in search of the conditions of a worthy hum
an life, proceed by looking into what he calls the unexamined value of values. Nietzsche views Socratic philosophy as one such system of unexamined values, Christianity as another one. Common to these systems of value is the investment in a life beyond this, and thus the preaching of potentially life-denying attitudes.64 According to Nietzsche, final human life allows for no absolute values. What tradition has taught us to see as fundamental values is, in reality, reflective of self-centered interests and will to power.

  How, then, do we get a perspective on the value paradigms in which we are raised and through which we are shaped? Nietzsche suggests that we proceed by way of historical criticism. Tradition is no larder of meaning to be appropriated and consumed, but a field in which values and world-views reach domination. Consequently, the critical philosopher should study the dominant values of his time by tracing them back to their early beginnings, examine the interests they reflect, their historical competitors, their rise to power, and the cost to pay for their domination.65 This is Nietzsche’s genealogical method, his answer to the stifling model of history as a museal cabinet of past events or as a series of heroic, tradition-forming deeds and actions.66

  Finally, Nietzsche seeks, through a series of stylistically playful yet philosophically provocative essays, to explore the alternatives to a conception of life that, as this-worldly and human, is deprived of metaphysical meaning. In this context, Nietzsche infamously presents his critique of democratic ideals and their tendency to level all values. Against this tendency, Nietzsche propagates the notion of a higher, exceptional existence through which life celebrates and manifests itself in culture.67 This, for him, is the opposite of passive nihilism. It is nihilism in the active, creative sense, the celebration of man’s liberation from the yolk of ideology and religion.

  In this way, Nietzsche’s philosophy is indeed a philosophy of Bildung: of a human being seeking to be itself—not as an alienated citizen of bourgeois culture, but as a being through which life, even when facing the ultimate finitude of all things human, affords celebration and affirmation. This notion of Bildung is meant to replace the idealism of Hegel and the German tradition. Bildung is an education to life and action, not to reflection and conceptual clarity. It does not aspire to individual and societal autonomy (which, for Nietzsche, is but another ideology), but seeks to spark a life that affirms itself through acts of strength and release of will. This becomes clear in Nietzsche’s lectures on education. In these lectures, Nietzsche voices his disappointment with the academic field, but also bolsters his commitment to education, as the only possible cure to the lethargy of modern academia.

  In its existing form, education provides a shelter for barbarism (FE 12). It does not act in the service of life, but is ruled by utility-oriented strategists seeking simple human beings whose lives can be priced and classified without too much ado (FE 11–12). Repetition and passive imitation dominate this kind of education. The democratization of culture, the turning of it into a mass phenomenon, has, all the same, gotten rid of value questions by absorbing them into a language of brute quantification. These are bleak times, the times of the last human being.68

  For Nietzsche—and, again, he challenges the Enlightenment spirit out of which the modern notion of Bildung was born—true Bildung is never a matter of democracy. Nor is it a matter of institutionally mediated knowledge. Following his friend Jacob Burckhardt, who was present when these lectures on education were given, Nietzsche suggests that culture always aspires towards a transcendence of the status quo. The state, by contrast, strives towards preservation. Hence a strong state implies a weak culture, and vice versa. Culture should not be the playing field of the populus, but an arena where exceptional individuals posit their values in a dynamic agon, thus reconnecting us with the multitude of values that is an integral possibility in all things human.

  This is also the purpose of Nietzsche’s own educator, Zarathustra, and his mythical-poetical teaching. And it is, one could add, the purpose of the late Nietzsche’s (ironic) Bildungsroman, Ecce Homo. In both cases, Nietzsche seeks to overcome what he sees as a stifling and inhuman state—one in which culture is reduced to the farce of civilization—by evoking the hope and inspiration for an active nihilism and a will to creativity and truly human values.69 Nietzsche thus seeks to rescue the notion of Bildung from its philistine defenders by making it key to a philosophical program that flies in the face of the petit bourgeois culture by which Bildung, in Nietzsche’s eyes, has been grossly perverted.

  35.7 CONCLUDING REMARKS

  If nineteenth-century philosophy stands under the sign of Bildung, the discussion in this chapter remains but a basic roadmap. More names could have been mentioned, more points could have been explored in more detail and more complexity. Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, through explicitly staging their work as an alternative to the distorted idealism of Bildung, nonetheless draw on this paradigm in that they, though in different ways, stage philosophy (criticism) as the project of making explicit (ausbilden) the very structure and principles of society and individual minds, thus initiating a process of societal and individual healing. Yet nineteenth-century philosophy of Bildung should not be thought of as a development where each position builds on and sublates the previous one in a neat progressive structure. At stake, rather, is a roster of different, systematic ways of thinking about Bildung and the particular role of philosophy when it comes to theoretically conceptualizing and practically contributing to the education of human reason and understanding.70 Moreover, the fascination with the notion of Bildung is related to the way in which theoretical questions (what is Bildung?) and practical implementation (how can philosophy contribute to Bildung?) cannot be kept apart. As such, nineteenth-century philosophy of Bildung is not a thing of the past, but a repertoire of philosophical tools and concepts that enables critical reflection on our lives as students, scholars, and educators. By viewing philosophy through the lens of Bildung, we form the picture of an on-going self-critical theorizing in which reflection springs out of and works back on tradition as well as present-day culture and thus establishes the ceaseless intellectual consciousness of society itself. This, obviously, is a grand vision of philosophy. Yet it is a vision of philosophy that, as the watchdog of society, culture, and human self-understanding, enables the kind of critical reflection that figures such as Adorno and Mann were missing in the period leading up to and following the Second World War in Europe. While the bourgeois culture of Bildung has sought to preserve prevailing traditions, the philosophy of Bildung, in its endless fight against a lukewarm domestication of culture, pitched itself as a critical theory. This, in my view, is the true legacy of nineteenth-century philosophy of Bildung and it is a legacy—and a challenge—that twentieth-century philosophers, from Gadamer to John McDowell, have sometimes overlooked in their identification of Bildung with historicity, second nature, or culture in the more conservative meaning of the term.71

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