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1 An example of such a reading is found in Bruford’s The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation. Bruford largely identifies the notion of Bildung (up to, but not including, the late Thomas Mann) with that of self-cultivation, understood in light of an “inner man.” See W. H. Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: “Bildung” from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), vii–x. For a critical treatment of this tradition (and its ramifications in German academia and twentieth-century politics more widely), see Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Hanover, New England: Wesleyan University Press, 1969).
2 For an overview of the religious roots of the notion of Bildung, see Franz Rauhut, “Die Herkunft der Worte und Begriffe ‘Kultur’, ‘Civilization’ und ‘Bildung,’” in Beiträge zur Geschichte des Bildungsbegriffs, ed. Carl-Ludwig Furck, Georg Geißler, Wolfgang Klafki, and Elisabeth Siegel (Weinheim: Verlag Julius Beltz, 1965), 11–25.
3 The importance of the Bildungsroman for the modern novel is emphasized and analyzed in Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971), 132–44. We could add to this genre, however, that of the anti-Bildungsroman from
Gustave Flaubert and Stendhal, via Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, to Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938) and the education of Nabokov’s tragic-comical protagonists in works such as Lolita (1955) and Pnin (1957).
4 For a discussion of this development, see Stephen Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 421–53.
5 For a study of the prominence of this idea in the enlightenment tradition, see Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
6 As far as literature goes, two early examples, both fictive in style, are Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Voltaire’s Candide (1759). Another example is the travel letters sent home from by Captain James Cook in the 1770s, 1770 which were swiftly translated into French and read by the Enlightenment philosophers.
7 In the German language, the terms “Bildung” and “culture” appear at the same time. See Beiträge zur Geschichte des Bildungsbegriffs, 14–17.
8 Hans-Georg Gadamer is among the twentieth-century philosophers who have been interested in the idea of Bildung and, in his magnum opus Truth and Method, made it the very core of his own hermeneutic theory. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2003), 9–19. In Gadamer’s work, the turn to Bildung is staged as an alternative to transcendental philosophy. He sketches a contrast between an orientation towards tradition and history in Bildung, on the one hand, and a search for the a priori conditions of experience, its transhistorical ground, on the other.
9 Kant’s definition of enlightenment is discussed all the way to Adorno, Foucault, and Habermas. For a helpful collection of texts on this issue, see James Schmidt (ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
10 Kant, “Announcement of the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1765–6,” trans. David Walford, in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and Other Writings, ed. Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 253.
11 Aesthetic judgment is, as Kant puts it, subjectively universal; it is “not connected with the concept of the object considered in its entire logical sphere, and yet it extends it over the whole sphere of those who judge.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §8.
12 The humanistic reading of Kant (along the lines of Goethe’s work) is pursued, among others, by Ernst Cassirer. See his Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 271–5. Hannah Arendt offers a broader political recapitulation of this dimension of Kant’s work in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 42–5 and 72–7.
13 In this context, Kant’s pedagogical manifesto seems to have been less influential. For this manifesto, see Immanuel Kant, “Lectures on Pedagogy,” trans. Robert B. Louden, in Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For a collection of essays dedicated to this text, see Klaus Roth and Chris W. Surprenant (eds.), Kant and Education: Interpretations and Commentary (London: Routledge, 2011).
14 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Science of Knowledge. With the First and Second Introductions, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 4–5.
15 Fichte, Science of Knowledge, 93–100.
16 This is even more so to the extent that Hegel, himself heavily influenced by Fichte, tends to emphasize the subjectivism of his theory, thus, by implication, taking the sole credit for the intersubjective articulation of human spirit. See, for example, Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Medieval and Modern Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 479–506. For a discussion of Fichte’s influence on Hegel, see Allen Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 77–83.
17 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 147–50. Further references to this work will be abbreviated EPW, followed by page number.
18 At this point, we observe, in spite of their different philosophical approaches, a significant overlap between Fichte and Herder. It is this overlap that later made it possible for Dilthey to situate Schleiermacher and the beginning of modern hermeneutics in the intersection between Herder’s empirical philosophy and Fichte’s transcendental program. See Wilhelm Dilthey, Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant Hermeneutics (1860), trans. Theodore Nordenhaug, in Hermeneutics and the Study of History, Selected Works, vol. IV, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 89 and 100–3. See also my “Enlightenment, History, and the Anthropological Turn: The Hermeneutic Challenge of Dilthey’s Schleiermacher Studies,” in Anthropologie und Geschichte. Studien zu Wilhelm Dilthey aus Anlass seines 100. Todestages, eds. Guiseppe D’Anna, Helmut Johach, and Eric S. Nelson (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013), 323–55.
19 Hence Fichte views class and occupation as, ideally, a matter of choice rather than a predicament into which the individual is born. See Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation,” EPW 167.
20 Herder discusses this point in an early essay, “How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People (1765),” in Johann Gottfried Herder, Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3–33. Further references to this work will be abbreviated PW, followed by page number. Herder follows Kant, who notes, in the same period, that “nothing has been more damaging to philosophy than mathematics, and in particular the imitation of its method in the context where it cannot possibly be employed.” Immanuel Kant, “Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (1764),” trans. David Walford, in Observations, 230. The pre-critical Kant also speaks of the need to move from a notion of learning philosophy to one of learning to philosophize. “Announcement of the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1765–1766,” in Observations, 253.
21 This is how Herder describes rationalist school philosophy in 1765. His text, though, is polemical throughout and Herder later speaks approvingly of philosophers such as Wolff and Leibniz (PW 5). For an affirmative reading of German rationalism, see Frederick C. Beiser, Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
22 Herder at this point is more progressive than his teacher Kant, who suggests that women can only view learning as external decorum. See Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. and trans. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 209. Kant also held this position in the period when he was mentoring Herder’s intellectual development. See, for example, Observations, 111–12.
23 This point would later be misread along wrongful political lines and create the impression of Herder as a nationalist philosopher. For alternative readings of Herder’s contribution and relevance as a philosopher, see Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 98–167 and Michael N. Forster, After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9–283.
24 See, for instance, PW 231 (footnote). Bhikhu Parekh misunderstands Herder when claiming that he (Herder) only acknowledges diversity between cultures, but not within them. See Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 72–3. For a more sympathetic reading of Herder’s contribution to political philosophy, see Frederick C. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution and
Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 189–222. For a translation of some of Herder’s work in political philosophy, see Johann Gottfried Herder, On Social and Political Culture, ed. and trans. F. M. Barnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
25 See Herder’s early hermeneutic study, “On Thomas Abbt’s Writings,” PW 167–78.
26 See Heinrich Pestalozzi, The Education of Man: Aphorisms, trans. Heinz and Ruth Norden (New York, NY: Philosophical Library, 1951), 3. Further references to this work will be abbreviated EM, followed by page number.
27 See, for example, how Fichte, in his discussion of the scholar’s vocation, incorporates a discussion of Rousseau (though not so much Emile as First Discourse) and seeks, with a credo that was to generate much hermeneutic dispute, to understand the author of this work “better than he understood himself” (EPW 178).
28 Pestalozzi had met with Goethe, Wieland, Herder, and Fichte during a trip to Germany in 1794. For his influence on Anglophone education, see William H. Kilpatrick’s preface in EM vii–xii.
29 For an overview of Humboldt’s 1809–10 tenure as Head of the Section for Religion and Education in the Prussian Ministry, see David Sorkin, “Wilhelm von Humboldt: The Theory and Practice of Self-Formation (Bildung), 1791–1810,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 44, nos. 1–1983, 5–73.
30 As Humboldt puts it: “Whatever does not spring from man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but still remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with true human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.” Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action (written in 1791–2, posthumously published), ed. J. W. Burrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 23.
31 In Humboldt’s words, “anything which charms us by its own intrinsic worth awakens love and esteem, while what is only looked on as a mere means to ulterior advantage merely appeals to self-interest,” The Limits of State Action, 23–4.
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