The Origins of German Self-Cultivation: <em>Bildung</em> and the Future of the Humanities 9781800738607

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Self-Cultivation and the Police State: Th e Political Context of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Concept of Bildung
Chapter 2. Fichte’s Conception of Bildung and German National Identity
Chapter 3. Becoming Solid: Bildung and Storage Media in Moritz’s and Goethe’s Travelogues
Chapter 4. Schinkel’s Altes Museum as Bildungsmuseum: Th e Aesthetic Education of a National Community and the Makings of the Modern Museum
Chapter 5. From Bildungsmaschine to Willenserziehung: Nietzsche’s Project of Heroic Minds Chapter
Chapter 6. The Self-Formation of Poetic Expression: Wilhelm Dilthey’s Geistesgeschichte
Chapter 7. Bildung as Dialectical and Th eological Hermeneutics in the Service of the Humanities
Conclusion
Index

Citation preview

THE ORIGINS OF GERMAN SELFCULTIVATION

SPEKTRUM: Publications of the German Studies Association Series editor: David M. Luebke, University of Oregon Published under the auspices of the German Studies Association, Spektrum offers current perspectives on culture, society, and political life in the German-speaking lands of central Europe—Austria, Switzerland, and the Federal Republic—from the late Middle Ages to the present day. Its titles and themes reflect the composition of the GSA and the work of its members within and across the disciplines to which they belong—literary criticism, history, cultural studies, political science, and anthropology. Recent volumes: Volume 27 The Origins of German Self-Cultivation: Bildung and the Future of the Humanities Edited by Jennifer Ham, Ulrich Kinzel, and David Tse-chien Pan

Volume 20 Names and Naming in Early Modern Germany Edited by Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer and Joel F. Harrington

Volume 26 Invested Narratives: German Responses to Economic Crisis Edited by Jill E. Twark

Volume 19 Views of Violence Representing the Second World War in German and European Museums and Memorials Edited by Jörg Echternkamp and Stephan Jaeger

Volume 25 Football Nation: The Playing Fields of German Culture, History, and Society Edited by Rebeccah Dawson, Baston Heinsohn, Oliver Knabe, and Alan McDougall

Volume 18 Dreams of Germany Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor Edited by Neil Gregor and Thomas Irvine

Volume 24 What Remains: Responses to the Legacy of Christa Wolf Edited by Gerald A. Fetz and Patricia Herminghouse

Volume 17 Money in the German-speaking Lands Edited by Mary Lindemann and Jared Poley

Volume 23 Minority Discourses in Germany since 1990 Edited by Ela Gezen, Priscilla Layne, and Jonathan Skolnik Volume 22 Beyond Posthumanism The German Humanist Tradition and the Future of the Humanities Alexander Mathäs Volume 21 Feelings Materialized Emotions, Bodies, and Things in Germany, 1500–1950 Edited by Derek Hillard, Heikki Lempa, and Russell Spinney

Volume 16 Archeologies of Confession Writing the German Reformation, 1517–2017 Edited by Carina L. Johnson, David M. Luebke, Marjorie E. Plummer, and Jesse Spohnholz Volume 15 Ruptures in the Everyday Views of Modern Germany from the Ground Andrew Bergerson, Leonard Schmieding, et al. Volume 14 Reluctant Skeptic Siegfried Kracauer and the Crises of Weimar Culture Harry T. Craver Volume 13 Migrations in the German Lands, 1500–2000 Edited by Jason Coy, Jared Poley, and Alexander Schunka

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: http://berghahnbooks.com/series/spektrum

The Origins of German Self-Cultivation Bildung and the Future of the Humanities

 Edited by JENNIFER HAM, ULRICH KINZEL, and DAVID TSECHIEN PAN

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Jennifer Ham, Ulrich Kinzel, and David Tse-chien Pan All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ham, Jennifer, 1956– editor. | Kinzel, Ulrich, 1956– editor. | Pan, David, 1963– editor. Title: The origins of German self-cultivation : “Bildung” and the future of the humanities / edited by Jennifer Ham, Ulrich Kinzel, and David Tse-Chien Pan. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: Spektrum : publications of the German Studies Association ; 27 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022045362 (print) | LCCN 2022045363 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800738591 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800738607 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Education—Germany—Philosophy—History—18th century. | Education—Germany—Philosophy—History—19th century. | Education, Humanistic—Germany—History—18th century. | Education, Humanistic— Germany—History—19th century. | Identity (Philosophical concept) —Germany. | National characteristics, Germany. Classification: LCC LA721.5 .O75 2023 (print) | LCC LA721.5 (ebook) | DDC 370.943—dc23/eng/20221115 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045362 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045363

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80073-859-1 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-860-7 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800738591

 CONTENTS 

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

viii

Introduction Jennifer Ham, Ulrich Kinzel, and David Tse-chien Pan

1

Chapter 1. Self-Cultivation and the Police State: The Political Context of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Concept of Bildung Ulrich Kinzel

12

Chapter 2. Fichte’s Conception of Bildung and German National Identity David Tse-chien Pan

28

Chapter 3. Becoming Solid: Bildung and Storage Media in Moritz’s and Goethe’s Travelogues Sean Franzel

56

Chapter 4. Schinkel’s Altes Museum as Bildungsmuseum: The Aesthetic Education of a National Community and the Makings of the Modern Museum Andrea Meyertholen

76

Chapter 5. From Bildungsmaschine to Willenserziehung: Nietzsche’s Project of Heroic Minds Jennifer Ham

101

Chapter 6. The Self-Formation of Poetic Expression: Wilhelm Dilthey’s Geistesgeschichte Anna Guillemin

120

Chapter 7. Bildung as Dialectical and Theological Hermeneutics in the Service of the Humanities John H. Smith

136

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Contents

Conclusion Jennifer Ham, Ulrich Kinzel, and David Tse-chien Pan

151

Index

155

 ILLUSTRATIONS 

Figures 4.1. Karl Daniel Freydanck. Das Alte Museum in Berlin, 1836. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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4.2. Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Medieval City on a River, 1815. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

80

4.3. Franz Ludwig Catel. Karl Friedrich Schinkel in Naples, 1836. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

82

4.4. August Ahlborn, after Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The Blossoming of Ancient Greece, 1836. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

85

4.5. Carl Emanuel Conrad. View of the Rotunda of the Altes Museum, after 1830. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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4.6. Perspective view of the upper vestibule, main staircase, and colonnade of Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin with a view of the Lustgarten, 1829. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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1 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 2

The publication of this book benefited from research support by the Institut für Neuere Deutsche Literatur und Medien, University of Kiel, Germany, from the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. We editors would also like to thank Marina Schmidt, Sulaiman Ahmad, and Keara Hagerty for their editorial work on this volume and the anonymous reviewers for their insights and constructive comments.

 Introduction JENNIFER HAM, ULRICH KINZEL, AND DAVID TSECHIEN PAN

O

ur contemporary notion of the humanities and of the very structure of the academic curriculum and the university itself have their origins in the development of the ideal of Bildung (education), a concept guiding academic pursuits since its origin in eighteenth and nineteenth century German culture. While recent divestitures in the humanities call the idea of Bildung into question, they also invite reconsiderations of this idea from a contemporary perspective. Some recent appraisals have attempted to move toward a general concept of Bildung, either by surveying past conceptualizations,1 or by linking the discourse of Bildung to other traditions of thinking on education.2 An alternative approach focuses on the German tradition as a specific historical development, for instance, by studying individual depictions of Bildung in theoretical and literary texts to illuminate the development from the lofty ideals of the early nineteenth century to the realities of late nineteenth and twentieth century German history,3 or by analyzing the general trajectory of how the concept of Bildung has shaped interpretation and action in the past.4 Orienting themselves within the context of these historical approaches, the essays in this volume interpret specific depictions of Bildung in the German tradition as a way of establishing their meaning for current discussions of the humanities. These interpretations reveal an abiding contradiction between (1) the idea that Bildung represents a universal education grounded in a freedom of individual development, and (2) the consideration of Bildung as a particular form of culture that began to replace religious instruction as the mode of moral and cultural education. If the first perspective dominated the discourse in the nineteenth century, merging the march of universal humanity with both a process of secularization and the progress of European colonialist expansion, its universalist optimism began by the turn of the twentieth century to give way to doubts about the universal character of Bildung. The language crisis documented by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the Expressionist search for a new lan-

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guage, and the growing antisemitism highlighted by the Dreyfus Affair were all directed ultimately against the perceived intellectual hollowness of the Bildungsbürgertum (educated middle class) and the liberal, internationalist values that it represented. The general crisis of Bildung, this modern intellectual malaise, expressed itself on both sides of the contradiction of Bildung both as ideal practice and as particular culture. That is, the practice of the free development of the individual spirit led especially European youth not necessarily toward cosmopolitan values, but also toward a nationalist understanding of the Bildung tradition. So if the war fever that overcame a generation of intellectuals— including writers such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, Ernst Toller, and Thomas Mann—was on the one hand a rejection of a pre-war internationalist spirit of universal progress, it was on the other hand an outgrowth of the free development of the European intellectual spirit. The continuing crisis of Bildung stems from this all-encompassing aspect of the idea, which includes both a general respect for knowledge and a specific secular Europeanist metaphysical-theological attitude. Both of these aspects continue to influence the organizing structure of education, even though they push in opposing directions. If respect for scientific knowledge allied itself in the nineteenth century with the culture of Schiller and Goethe, in the twentieth century this respect led to a universalization of a technological focus on utility, in which, for Ernst Jünger, “free inquiry is impossible in a situation in which its essential purpose must be understood as the preparation for war.”5 From Jünger’s instrumental view of Bildung, the older conception of a universal culture of Bildung has the characteristics of a “fetish.”6 But if Jünger’s unmasking of a universal conception of Bildung serves for him to move it away from a liberal, individualist conception, it also opens up Bildung to a critique of its cultural particularity along post-colonial lines, which include liberal premises of Bildung as part of its European pedigree. Although the multiculturalism debates in the United States sought to open up the canon of Bildung to a broader cross-section of world culture, they ultimately side-stepped the question of the relationship between Bildung and political identity. Today, the problem of Bildung much more clearly coincides with the challenges to European identity as well as the tensions between globalization and nationalism. The current global relevance of these issues leads us disquietingly back to nineteenth and twentieth century intellectual debates on Bildung and the political implications of those debates as inextricably linked to questions of national and international identity. This volume’s contributions provide us with the material for a sober look at the historical precedents for our current situation as well as cultural resources useful for contemplating the future. Our consideration of this history begins with the idea of Bildung developed in Germany in the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt. As conceived in German philosophy around 1800, Bildung was understood to be the formation of the

Introduction



3

self through the acquisition of knowledge across biographical time, which implies the ability “to connect our ego to the world by the most general, vivid, and free reciprocal action.”7 This definition with its emphasis on individuation as Wechselwirkung (a reciprocal process), one both dependent on and constitutive of understanding of the world, underscores the close affiliation of Humboldt’s idea with the humanities and academic culture in general. For Hegel, for example, the emphasis of academic work lies not on a systematic representation of knowledge, but on its acquisition by a subject, and it is the process of this acquisition that Hegel defines as Bildung.8 Humboldt’s starting point is the individual’s desire to define and enhance the value of their existence.9 To be able to do so the self needs the outside world as its counterpart, as a material on which it can imprint the character of its spirit. All of these reflections focused on the spirituality of Bildung establish a close connection with an emphatic concept of culture and have inspired the long and far-reaching German tradition of Geisteswissenschaften (the humanities or human sciences).10 What has attracted less attention, as Ulrich Kinzel points out in chapter 1 of this collection, is the political context from which Humboldt’s idea of Bildung emerged. The aim of Kinzel’s chapter is thus to show how Humboldt in his early, fragmentary essay Ideen zu einem Versuch die Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen (1792) confronts and contradicts the eighteenth century model of the welfare state as defined and outlined by contemporary Policeywissenschaft (political science). Moving from the Humboldtian origins to the neoliberal present, Kinzel shows how the nineteenth century ideal of Bildung, founded on an ethics of the self, has been absorbed by the idea of human capital. Another key figure in the development of the German idea of Bildung, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, has been in turn praised and criticized for his linking of Bildung with a defense of German nationalism. As David Tse-chien Pan lays out in chapter 2, Fichte’s project was, in the first place, an attempt to merge individual freedom of development with moral constraints on this development. He claimed to have achieved this reconciliation of opposites with the idea of reason, which would place natural constraints on the search for knowledge and would lead it inevitably toward a set of natural scientific and moral laws. At the same time, he sought to provide support for this development by linking it to the establishment of a German national identity that would be the basis for political action against Napoleon and the French occupation of the German territories. By imagining the development of Bildung as a progress toward a German national identity understood as the manifestation of a world-historical emergence of reason, his Addresses to the German Nation end up with an ambiguous linking of the affirmation of the superiority of the German nation with support for a cosmopolitan perspective. The subsequent interpretations of Fichte’s work in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reflect this ambiguity to the extent that different interpreters emphasize one or the other aspect

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of Fichte’s ideas depending on their particular interests and values. The final conclusion for the question of Bildung is that it remains intimately connected with the establishment and continuing relevance of nationalism as a definer of collective identity and that its meaning today depends on the importance of interpreting the past in order to inform the nation-state’s understanding of its obligations and responsibilities. Some of the ethical practices that constituted Bildung at the time of German classicism appear to be rather static; others, like traveling, imply movement and transgression. But, as Sean Franzel argues in chapter 3, if Bildung is also presumed to be the effect of traveling, this effect only materializes through media-based practices. Franzel compares Goethe’s Italienische Reise with Moritz’s Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien in order to examine the repository practices that these authors engage in as travelers, antiquarians, spectators, and writers. A principal process among the different processes of archivization they reveal affects the building of the subject, itself an archive of experience. Working out this connection between Bildung and archive at this early stage in the history of Bildung, and exploring the ways in which the legitimate contents of a cultural tradition are internalized and stored, introduces a new perspective and deepens our understanding of the defining consequences archivization has for the construction of the subject in late nineteenth century historicism. If the political and repository context of Bildung has hitherto been undervalued, so too has the role of architecture, as evidenced in particular in Schinkel’s concept of the museum as a vehicle of Bildung. In chapter 4 Andrea Meyertholen investigates how Berlin’s Altes Museum contributed to the Bildung of a national German citizenry through the public display of classical aesthetics as designed by the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Such references to Greek art were intended to establish a continuity between the German present and an imagined classical past in order to teach the public how to be ideal German citizens within a unified cultural whole. The chapter’s narrative tour of the Altes Museum displays how specific exhibitionary modes and explanatory frameworks structured public consumption of the ideals informing Greek art and effectively created a site where cultivating the German self facilitated the cultivation of a German nation, where visitors entered this Bildungsmuseum (educational museum) as individuals, but left as citizens of a greater, albeit imagined, German national community. German nationhood became political reality in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, and this development cannot be separated from the cultural mission of Bildung. The philosophy and literary culture supporting Bildung was already divided between nationalist and universalist ambitions since Fichte’s time, and by the middle of the nineteenth century this conflict had intensified. In Adalbert Stifter’s work, the concept already begins to rid itself of its exclusive idealistic foundation, as his protagonists in his Bildungsroman

Introduction



5

(novel of education), Der Nachsommer (1856), couple their antique self-restraint with a scientific and economic interest in the real world. This combination of humanism with realism shapes and reflects a debate in which the aspiring middle-class molds its vision of classicism as a unifying culture and at the same time demands new forms of public education to meet the challenges of the growing industrial and commercial sphere.11 Alongside this development we see the rise of the natural sciences and, as an ambiguous companion, the rise of the Geisteswissenschaften (the human sciences) which are shaped both by the humanist tradition and by a new scientific methodology. After 1871 and the foundation of the German Reich, cultural reference to antiquity, of paramount importance for the cultural orientation of Bildung, begins to crumble and give way to Bildung as a vehicle for nationalism. The change is humorously illustrated in Theodor Fontane’s Frau Jenny Treibel (1893), a novel in which the idealism of Schiller is represented and parodied by Jenny Treibel, the wife of a patriotic manufacturer of (Prussian) blue-colored dye, while a small group of teachers and professors hold their occasional meetings under their circle’s name “Die sieben Waisen” (a pun on Waise [orphan] and Weise [sage]), commemorating the loss of traditional values like authority and discipline.12 It is within this nineteenth century context of the middle class’ superficial adoration of the classics and the rise of authoritarian nationalism that Friedrich Nietzsche gives vent to his cultural despair in his revaluation of Bildung. The starting-point of the second half of the volume, focused on the internal cognitive mechanisms of Bildung, is Nietzsche, who in the history of Bildung represents a watershed. A product of the culture of Bildung himself, he became its disillusioned critic in order to save and reformulate it on a new existential basis. He thus set an example for critiques that led to a proliferation of new possibilities for realizing the idea of Bildung in the twentieth century within the problematic context of nation-state structures. These reformulations—in the higher cultural segment of hermeneutics and Geistesgeschichte (intellectual history)—attempted to hold onto the emancipatory potential of the idea by continuing to promote individual development and creativity, while at the same time overturning a static notion of Bildung tied to specific cultural and social forms. As Jennifer Ham indicates in chapter 5, Friedrich Nietzsche understood Bildung, first, as a merging of ancient Greek and German culture, and, second, as a process of individual self-transformation whereby what he called true great men first undertake an artistic fashioning of their own lives and then transform humanity through the establishment of new cultural forms. Within this conception, Nietzsche on the one hand criticizes the educational institutions of his day for promoting a mechanical rote learning, and on the other hand promotes a kind of education that focuses on building the individual will. The means of building the will are grounded in a practice of asceticism in which individu-

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als impose on themselves the kind of discipline that Nietzsche rejects when it comes from the educators. Consequently, Ham distinguishes Nietzsche’s “gymnastic of the will” from an exclusive focus on work by insisting that the former, while subordinating the body, does so in a way that affirms the sovereignty of the individual will rather than its subordination to communal goals. Nietzsche’s ideal of Bildung focuses on the development of exceptional heroic minds that set themselves apart through their ability to transform themselves and establish metaphysical goals for their communities as well. Nietzsche’s ideas on Bildung have had a double legacy. On the one hand, he was lamenting what he saw as the degradation of the concept of Bildung from the neo-humanist ideal focused on life learning and active self-betterment to one invested solely in the static possession and expansion of specialized knowledge, used as a kind of cultural capital, whose ultimate exchange value was reduced to solidifying status and privilege for Germany’s Bildungsphilister (cultural philistines). Nietzsche admonished educators for creating national educational policies that moved away from character formation and free thought toward an instrumentalized application of education, knowledge, and innovation for narrow state purposes. On the other hand, if Nietzsche could be recuperated as a defender of free inquiry, his focus on the individual aesthetic will rather than the objectivity of knowledge also brought about a new focus on interpretation as a creative act, whose significance cannot be evaluated scientifically, but only through its ability to develop an aesthetic and ideological power. This emphasis on individual will and power as the goals of Bildung risks affirming any expansion of power, regardless of its goals. It is with regard to methodology, inquiry, and ways of knowing in the humanities that Wilhelm Dilthey promised a way out of the educational impasse that Nietzsche’s work posed. Dilthey, one of the first to bring the word Geisteswissenschaften into circulation, sought to distinguish, sanction, and thereby protect the autonomy of the humanities from the predominant academic methodology of Wissenschaft (science), one dominated by a scientific orthodoxy aimed at amassing evidentiary data and producing fruits of objectivistic empirical research. Whereas humanistic disciplines like philology and philosophy had historically enjoyed a status as the unquestioned dominant models of Bildung, the natural sciences—once considered an integral part of philosophy, having developed their own empirical method—were now competing for that position. At stake was not just particular domains of knowledge, but also the very methods of its production. Focusing squarely on investigative method, Dilthey distinguished humanistic fields as taking an interpretive or hermeneutic approach, as opposed to disciplines in the natural sciences, which he viewed as proceeding by nomothetic means, intent primarily on establishing laws. Anna Guillemin explores Dilthey’s reflections on the poetics and hermeneutics of humanistic Bildung as a method of scholarly inquiry. As she elucidates

Introduction



7

in chapter 6, Dilthey rejuvenates the concept of Bildung in part by restoring the centrality of the concept of Bild (image) and bilden (to create) at the heart of a self-education grounded in Erlebnis (experience). Dilthey suggests that the distinctive method of self-fashioning that the human sciences facilitate is actually integral to the organic nature of poetics and the poetic imagination itself. As opposed to the natural sciences, whose aim is to erklären (explaining) phenomena, knowledge production in humanistic disciplines is an aesthetic, interpretive, and reciprocal practice of verstehen (understanding) or decoding poetic forms, on the one hand, and image formation on the other. Borrowing from both Johannes Müller’s and Goethe’s portrayals of the workings of Einbildung (imagination), and applying rigorous analysis and even experimentation himself, Dilthey identifies the method of literary study and the decoding of poetic forms as vehicles for cognition and self-formation. By placing the formative power of image and imagination at the core of visualization, perception, and learning, Dilthey turns Bildung itself, as Guillemin suggests, into a method of scholarly inquiry. For Dilthey, the humanities in general and poetry and literature in particular invite a pedagogy of productive inductive questioning that, in its ability to reveal humans making sense of the world, yields unique insights into the human condition. The experience of National Socialism (Nazism) led to a reevaluation of the meaning of Bildung as a cultural program. The 1950s saw cultural movements cling to a cultural tradition which was—in those movements’ perception— wrongly stained by history. Christian existentialism that unfolded around Heidegger championed a return to the European tradition of self-fashioning.13 In the same philosophical context Emil Staiger tried to preserve Bildung in a timeless garden of classical literary heritage, a project that was to become the target of heavy and sustained criticism in the course of the 1960s.14 At the same time Thomas Mann’s anthology of essays Adel des Geistes (1945) became programmatic for a Nietzschean vision of democracy led by the aristocracy of a superior spirit of heroic minds. But by the 1960s this ethical type of direct reference to cultural tradition embraced as exemplary and of value comes under attack and Bildung, now relativized as a historical and social phenomenon, is exhausted, much as its twin principle history. It is in this situation that HansGeorg Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode appears and offers a way to reconnect with tradition—through methodical understanding and dialogue. In the context of a rising radical criticism of Bildung and its alleged timeless values, Gadamer—across the abyss separating the post-war subject from history and cultural tradition—reopens a path to history in which the historical dimension of texts and their cultural value are united. In this respect hermeneutics offered an alternative to Benjamin’s idea of a redemptive critique of tradition, which Habermas15 introduced into the contemporary debate about how to authorize tradition after the fall of history and Bildung.

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As John H. Smith points out in chapter 7, Dilthey’s reflections on the nature of literary interpretation influenced not only Heidegger, but also his student Gadamer, who reflects on hermeneutics as a model for learning in the humanities. Like Dilthey, Gadamer analyzed the different ways of knowing fostered by the humanities, on the one hand disavowing the newly adopted scientific approaches to the humanities aimed at objectively analyzing texts, and on the other criticizing Dilthey’s approach to hermeneutics as being overly aesthetic and subjective. For Gadamer, understanding in the humanities is not a practice of unearthing an intended meaning in the text itself, but rather of garnering insights that emerge out of a dynamic between the text horizon and the horizon of the reader, both of which are changed in the process. While attempting to resuscitate notions of tradition and echoing to some extent Humboldt’s portrayal of learning as Wechselwirkung, Gadamer views knowledge acquisition less as a reproductive endeavor and more as a productive undertaking. He famously refers to this reiterative dynamic of interpretation as the hermeneutic circle, which he contrasts with the scientific method of knowledge production, focused on observations of an Erkenntnisobjekt (object of cognition) with the straightforward aim of deducing objective conclusions. According to Smith, Gadamer’s argument cut across the grain of secularized Bildung in the nineteenth century. An agnostic himself, Gadamer appears less interested in the revelatory process of religious belief than he is in the exegetic mode of theological interpretation itself as a model of service underlying humanistic understanding. For him, the purpose of humanistic inquiry was not only to expose the Wunder des Verstehens (miracle of understanding), but also as Bildungswissen (cultural knowledge) to replicate the posture of care, application, and Dienstwissenschaften (theological service). Accordingly, the kind of understanding the humanities produce is not won by Herrschaftswissen (mastering knowledge), vanquishing the unknown through gestures of mastery, power, and possession, but rather by a humble attitude of Dienst (servitude) operant in establishing relevance, significance, and applicability to the here and now. Unlike the believer reading scripture for confirmation and empowerment, the humanities students’ disposition is one of humility and openness, one that seeks through various discursive practices to recognize themselves at the present moment in another’s (past) consciousness. According to Smith, this specifically humanistic and miraculous practice, at the root of the phenomenon of humanistic understanding, leads to the kind of transformation Gadamer considers true Bildung. In looking at the past with this hermeneutic perspective, the chapters in this volume attempt to plot out visions for the future of Bildung that arise out of their interpretations of the past. The history of such interpretations constitutes a way of considering Bildung, not as a static set of ideals or texts, but the arena for discussing and revising collective identity in light of present concerns.

Introduction



9

At the same time, the essays demonstrate a continuing conflict in the history of the idea of Bildung between a nationalist and a cosmopolitan context for interpretation. Hermeneutics implies a specific tradition, and part of the transformation of cultural life implied by Bildung has been the reorganization of culture along national trajectories, even as the ideal of Bildung has consistently appealed to universal concerns. Jennifer Ham is professor of German and humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where she teaches courses on German literature, culture, and language and has served as division chair of humanities the past few years. In addition to this volume and her earlier book, Elastizität: Movement, Time and Space in Frank Wedekind’s Dramatic Works, Jennifer has also published and presented on subjects such as animal studies, Nietzsche, femininity, cabaret, Frank Wedekind, and German cinema; she is also coeditor of Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, published by Routledge. Ulrich Kinzel is professor of German literature at the University of Kiel. His research and teaching include seventeenth to twentieth-century German literature and culture as well studies in comparative literature and culture. He has recently published articles on Thomas Kling’s and Gerhard Richter’s reflections on 9/11, Ferdinand Kriwet’s media work and Peter Weiss’s concept of Bildung. He is the author of Ethische Projekte. Literatur und Selbstgestaltung im Kontext des Regierungsdenkens. Humboldt, Goethe, Stifter, Raabe (2000) and edited London—Urban Space and Cultural Experience (2010). He is currently preparing a continuation of his ethical studies into literary experience covering German literature of the first and the second half of the twentieth century. David Tse-chien Pan teaches at the University of California, Irvine, in the department of European languages and studies and serves as the editor of Telos. He is the author of Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism and Sacrifice in the Modern World: On the Particularity and Generality of Nazi Myth.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Horlacher, Educated Subject, 3. Siljander, Theories of Bildung, 1. Bruford, German Tradition, vii–x. Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur, 18–20. Jünger, On Pain, 20, translation modified; Jünger, Über den Schmerz, 163. Jünger, On Pain, 20, translation modified; Jünger, Über den Schmerz, 162. Humboldt, “Theorie der Bildung,” 235. Smith, The Spirit and Its Letter, 5.

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9. Humboldt, “Theorie der Bildung,” 234–40, 235, 237. 10. Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur, 143–48, esp. 148. 11. These positions are well described in Feuchtersleben, “Über die Frage vom Humanismus,” 93–110. For a contemporary critique of both concepts from a perspective of radical self-fashioning see: Stirner, “Das unwahre Prinzip,” 7–23. This debate continues well into the twentieth century where it contributes to the collapse of the Bildungsideal (ideal of education); see Litt, Das Bildungsideal der deutschen Klassik. For the rise of the Bildungsbürgertum and its cultural capital of Bildung, see Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur, 160–288. 12. “Wo ehemals die klassische Bildung als ein heiterer Selbstzweck gegolten hatte, den man mit Ruhe, Muße und fröhlichem Idealismus verfolgte, da waren nun Begriffe wie Autorität, Pflicht, Macht, Dienst, Carrière zu höchster Würde gelangt.” Mann, Buddenbrooks, 722. 13. See Guardini, “Askese als Element menschlicher Existenz,” 232–48 and 49–56. 14. See, e.g., Walser, “Imitation oder Realismus,” 66–93, 78–79; and Weiss, Hölderlin, 159. 15. Habermas, “Bewußtmachende oder rettende Kritik,” 302–43.

Bibliography Primary Sources Feuchtersleben, Ernst von. “Über die Frage vom Humanismus und Realismus als Bildungsprincipe” [1849]. In Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Kritische Ausgabe, vol. 3, edited by Hedwig Heger. Vienna: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2006. Guardini, Romano. “Askese als Element menschlicher Existenz and Was ist ein Gentleman?” In Vom stilleren Leben, edited by Eduard Spranger and Romano Guardini. Würzburg: Werkbund-Verlag, 1956. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. “Theorie der Bildung des Menschen.” In Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 1, 2nd ed., edited by Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960. Jünger, Ernst. On Pain. Translated by David Durst. New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2008. ———. Über den Schmerz. In Sämtliche Werke, Band 7, Zweite Abteilung, Essays 1: Betrachtungen zur Zeit. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980. Litt, Theodor. Das Bildungsideal der deutschen Klassik und die moderne Arbeitswelt. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Heimatdienst, 1955. Mann, Thomas. Buddenbrooks [1901]. 62nd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2012. Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Ideas [1873]. New York: Random House, 1935. Stirner, Max. “Das unwahre Prinzip unserer Erziehung oder Der Humanismus und Realismus” [1842]. In Der Einzige und sein Eigentum und andere Schriften, edited by H. G. Helms. Munich: Hanser, 1968. Walser, Martin. “Imitation oder Realismus.” In Erfahrungen und Leseerfahrungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1965. Weiss, Peter. Hölderlin [1971]. In Werke in sechs Bänden, vol. 6. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991.

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Secondary Sources Bollenbeck, Georg. Bildung und Kultur: Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Deutungsmusters. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1994. Bruford, W. H. The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: “Bildung” from Humboldt to Thomas Mann. London: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Habermas, Jürgen. “Bewußtmachende oder rettende Kritik—Zur Aktualität Walter Benjamins” [1972]. In Kultur und Kritik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973. Horlacher, Rebekka. The Educated Subject and the German Concept of Bildung: A Comparative Cultural History. New York: Routledge, 2016. Siljander, Pauli, Ari Kivelä, and Ari Sutinen, eds. Theories of Bildung and Growth: Connections and Controversies Between Continental Educational Thinking and American Pragmatism. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2012. Smith, John H. The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel’s Philosophy of Bildung. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.

CHAPTER 1



Self-Cultivation and the Police State The Political Context of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Concept of Bildung ULRICH KINZEL

I

n 1792 the young Wilhelm von Humboldt, who had just decided to turn his back on the Prussian state and quit his post as civil servant, published parts of his essay, “Ideen zu einem Versuch die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen,” which was translated as “The Limits of State Action.” In that essay the following definition of Bildung can be found: “Der wahre Zwek des Menschen—nicht der, welchen die wechselnde Neigung, sondern welchen die ewig unveränderliche Vernunft ihm vorschreibt—ist die höchste und proportionirlichste Bildung seiner Kräfte zu einem Ganzen.”1 Or, as translated by Joseph Coulthard, “The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole.”2 This definition asserts that the individual should be an end in itself and that to achieve this end, the individual must mold their energies into a whole. This complete and consistent whole is nothing but the self itself. It is characteristic for this as for many other forms of self-culture that the activity of the self returns to its agent (the self ) and in this circular movement constitutes itself as subject. This subject, for Humboldt, is an “inneres Sein (inner being),”3 which should “remain der erste Quell und das lezte Ziel [the chief source, the ultimate goal] of all his labors.”4 Thus, Bildung, before anything else, is strictly defined as a form of self-constitution. Prominent references to the ethics of Bildung can be found in the nineteenth century, for example in the literary genre of the German Bildungsroman, most notably in Adalbert Stifter’s Der Nachsommer, an outline of self-cultivation as

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a comprehensive existential economy; in Dandyism; or in the European context of liberalism. John Stuart Mill, in citing Humboldt and his definition of Bildung half a century later, stresses both the necessity to accept “the free development of individuality”5 and the necessity of an active subject that uses its faculties in order to change and perfect its own being.6 Mill adopts Coulthard’s translation of Entwicklung (development) for Bildung, which stresses the aspect of a temporal process. This, indeed, meets Humboldt’s later notion of Bildung as personal growth in biographical time. In his unpublished fragment Theorie der Bildung des Menschen, Humboldt explains how, in taking an overview of a completed life, one can recognize, “wie die Bildung des Menschen durch ein regelmäßiges Fortschreiten Dauer gewinnt (how the development of man becomes permanent through regular progress).”7 In Nietzsche’s definition of Bildung—which marks another fragile moment in the history of this concept—this epistemological context of Entwicklung (development) is eliminated and the principle of pragmatic action—actions that reform our selves, as Nietzsche says8—is emphasized instead. This (re-) formation of the self is (similar to Humboldt) associated both with the ascetic tradition and the aesthetic idea of form. All the moral schools (like Stoicism and Epicureanism), Nietzsche says, are experimental places where skills of life prudence are being practiced, and the results of all these experiences belong to us.9 The result of such self-practice becomes visible in somebody’s shape, thus, “Gebildet nennen wir den, der ein Gebilde geworden ist, eine Form bekommen hat.”10

Bildung In looking back to its historical origins, it is noteworthy that Humboldt’s reflections on Bildung were articulated in a fragmentary, yet systematically structured essay, which refers to a particular political discourse in a fundamentally critical way. Humboldt’s political critique, however, has for a long time been misunderstood or simplified. Critics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reduced Humboldt’s political message by saying that what he aimed at was a complete refusal of the absolutist state and the state as such.11 But this is clearly not what Humboldt’s essay is about. In order to understand the aim of Humboldt’s critique, it is necessary to take a much more differentiated view of the reality of the state at the end of the eighteenth century and resort to a more subtle conception of power. In the third part of his essay, Humboldt defines the purpose of the state: “A State, then, has one of two ends in view; it designs either to promote happiness, or simply to prevent evil. . . . If it restricts its solicitude to the second of these objects, it aims merely at security; and I would here oppose this term security to every other possible end of State agency, and comprise these last under the general head of Positive Welfare.”12 This definition clearly refers to a system-

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atic reflection of the state called tableau politique. One can find such a tableau politique, for example, in the writings of the German political philosopher August Schlözer, who was one of Humboldt’s academic teachers at Göttingen.13 Schlözer distinguishes the negative end of the state to guarantee security from the positive end of the state to effect the happiness of the citizens. This fundamental matrix of political thought was also known to and discussed among other intellectuals at the time, of course, like Georg Forster, or Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, or Johann Heinrich Jung–Stilling.14 And they all were familiar with two more fundamental concepts, namely that of politics as a means to secure citizens’ lives with the help of a strong army and a whole range of means to positively induce people’s well-being; and these positive means were summarized under the heading of Polizey (police). According to Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi, one of the eighteenth century’s most prominent police scientists, the aim of the police is to fit together the well-being of families with the welfare of the state15 and thus to found, preserve and increase the powers of the state.16 This, of course, implies nothing else but a massive intervention of the state into the lives of its citizens; the amount of areas that the police was designed to care for shows just how vast the field of intervention was comprising unmovable goods (geography, population, city and country), movable goods (the complete economy) and the moral constitution of citizens (religion, families, consumption etc.).17 Now, what is it exactly that Humboldt criticizes about the police state and what is his own political vision? The general target of his criticism is what Mirabeau (in a motto preceding Humboldt’s essay) calls “fureur de gouverner.”18 Humboldt does not call the principle of government into question, in the same way that he does not reject the state in toto. Humboldt is worried about the scope and intensity of political intervention, and his intention is to explore the limits that a state, which is dedicated to the idea of good government, should stick to. Following are some issues and principles that Humboldt criticizes about the police state. First, the aim of the police is not to suppress citizens but to increase their well-being. But it does so not for the sake of the individual, but to increase the power of the state; Michel Foucault speaks of the “marginalistic integration of individuals in the state’s utility.”19 This implies that citizens have to live and work in order to be useful for the state. The direction of citizens’ actions according to the principle of usefulness further produces uniform living conditions and heteronomous ways of conduct.20 The positive care of the state, in other words, is nothing but power disguised as welfare. Second, the care of the state, says Humboldt, also has a negative effect on the conduct of individuals because their strife for the physical and moral goods of happiness weakens their personal energies as they increase the welfare of the whole state. This disempowerment is seen by Humboldt as a strategy to

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stifle Mündigkeit (responsibility). In an argument modeled along the lines of Kant’s What Is Enlightenment?, he maintains that those who are used to being governed are likely to endlessly expect care from the state: The evil results of a too extensive solicitude on the part of the State, are still more strikingly shown in the suppression of all active energy, and the necessary deterioration of the moral character. . . . The man who is often led, easily becomes disposed willingly to sacrifice what remains of his capacity for spontaneous action [Selbstthätigkeit]. He fancies himself released from an anxiety which he sees transferred to other hands, and seems to himself to do enough when he looks to their leadership and follows it.”21

Finally, Humboldt’s picture of the conditions fabricated by the police is not that of total repression but rather of unbridled government. Its effects are not deprivation but limpness, laziness, and easing. The state resembles a physician who nourishes the social disease, and the whole welfare system is guided by “the fruitless struggle to escape pain.”22 Young Humboldt’s intention is not only or primarily to criticize the police, but rather to positively draw up a juridical and moral sketch of politics. With respect to individual behavior one can detect a number of moral principles with which Humboldt counters the power claim of the police. It, first, starts with turning around the situation of the individual. The police—a combination of knowledge (statistics) and administrative instruction—tries to turn subjects into objects of political government. Bildung aims at doing the opposite. We can decipher this movement, this return to ethics from Humboldt’s reflections on the self: “It is impossible to estimate a man’s advance towards the great and the beautiful, when he ceaselessly strives for this supreme object, the development of his inner life; so that it may remain the chief source, the ultimate goal of his labours.”23 To turn all your energies to the development of your inner life does not mean (as in Romanticism) to descend into subjectivity but instead means to fashion a strong and sustainable relationship to yourself, and this inner being (the self ) has to receive absolute priority in a person’s life. It implies that the cultivation of the self is the individual’s prior existential task, a task that will secure the subject’s grandeur and beauty. To explain and illustrate this moral act, Humboldt relates to principles of classicist aesthetics. But elsewhere in his essay he also mentions the activities that operate behind and create the harmonious whole of the moral subject. And he permanently directs his attention to the sensual and intellectual energies of the individual, which should not be projected on objects and commodities,24 but need to be kept and stored within oneself and then multiplied in order to constitute a powerful basis for manifold activities. These activities are meant to organize and transform, elevate and empower the self—Humboldt speaks of

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the hard work of modifying oneself, a work that takes the form of Übung (exercise).25 Bildung is thus not only associated with contemporary aesthetic discourse,26 but it also connects to the philosophical tradition of moral exercises27 whose aim is to achieve a turnaround in the subject. Thus Humboldt’s concept must be seen as an attempt to restore an ethics of the self. Before anything else, Bildung was designed by the young Humboldt as a practice to resist the interventions of the welfare state. While the political aspect of the idea of Bildung was forgotten—if ever it was recognized and acknowledged—another aspect that was added later by Humboldt became prominent: the relationship of Bildung to knowledge and time. By acquiring knowledge and relating it to your self throughout your life, you are forming yourself in a process of lifelong learning. Establishing a strong relationship between self and knowledge must be seen as a resistance to the Cartesian type of scientific knowledge whose acquisition does not imply a modification of the subject. Humboldt’s later anthropological orientation, however, helped to divert the ethical orientation of Bildung by turning personal into a general acquisition of knowledge, which then became the core of Hegel’s understanding of Bildung.28 As such, Bildung was assimilated by school and university and merged with nineteenth-century work ethics. By the time Nietzsche entered the discourse on Bildung, its ethical concept was corrupted by Gymnasium (grammar school) and university leaving behind a self deadened by grammatical drill, stuffed with knowledge, and with a weak relationship to itself. Against this backdrop Nietzsche’s vision of an anti-academic life becomes a significant step in the history of Bildung, which is why he—in powerful words—found fault with the lack of education and educators in the academic sphere.29 “We” (as Nietzsche has his nameless new generation say30) have a different way of living, “we” prefer living freely on a small intellectual diet to living stuffed and without freedom. This style of living suits those who are geared up for swift adventurous movements, who do not want to put on fat, but who unfold with power and agility (like a dancer). An offspring of nineteenth century German Bildung himself, Nietzsche subjects it to a radical diet and ends its ponderous dialectical mechanism by reducing the weight of knowledge and by reconnecting Bildung to the end of the self instead.31 Humboldt’s alternative, second, restructures the whole order of the state. Humboldt’s fundamental criticism of the police aims at its complete obliteration and its substitution by the moral realm of Bildung. In Humboldt’s political set-up, the state is reduced to the negative task of ensuring security, and the entire social space that is left is to be filled with Bildung. The positive solicitude of the police is substituted in toto by the ethics of self-cultivation. Just how relentlessly ethical and cultural Humboldt’s orientation was can be seen in his idea that the constitution of the state should be checked against the moral claims of the educated individual.

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This rearrangement revives the Greek model of the polis as an ethical community, and later reflections by Humboldt suggest this ethical revival of antiquity was intended.32 But the supremacy of Bildung over police also participates in a special moment in the history of modern politics, when American republicanism within a decade reversed the traditional concept of politics33 based on the ideal of the corporate, all-encompassing commonwealth, which had to integrate all parts of society into a harmonious whole. Realizing individual interests in this context was seen as an aberration, a violation of the common good. By the end of the revolutionary process, according to Gordon Wood, republicanism highlighted individual interest as the real basis of a political community no longer conceived of as an embodied whole. In a similar way, Humboldt, by introducing a personal ethics into the political field, destroys the political ideal of an embodied entity. Although Bildung itself at this point is being separated from political technologies, Humboldt’s reflections must be seen in the revolutionary context of introducing individual interests and personal freedom— previously an antithesis to the common good—into the political process.

Bildungspolitik A further historical reflection of Bildung requires a change of perspective, as Bildung stops being a cultural practice and a mode of existence by the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. While in the educational institutions the inspirations of Bildung give way to the imperatives of discipline and constraint, Bildung loses its moral and cultural spell altogether in the modernist movements and their fundamental opposition to bourgeois individualism. However, there definitely is a return to Bildung in the twentieth century, but no longer as a moral, but rather as a political practice. Thus, to understand the historical fate of Bildung entails to understand the concept of Bildungspolitik, a word that for Humboldt would have been a contradictio in adiecto. Humboldt’s critique of state action can be seen as a parallel project to Adam Smith’s or the French physiocrats’ critique of contemporary political economy. In the same way as they are telling their sovereigns that they cannot oversee the complete economical process and are well-advised to leave the market untouched, Humboldt is telling the Prussian king that he should refrain from controlling society and instead allow citizens to cultivate and control their own lives. Later, in the nineteenth century, with Robert von Mohl, a liberal police scientist, the promotion of Bildung becomes an end of the state—“Sorge des Staates für die geistige Persönlichkeit der Bürger” (solicitude of the state for the spiritual personality of the citizens)34—without the state interfering with the processes of Bildung.

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However, Mohl’s interest in Bildung exhibits a political dimension of education, which—since Humboldt’s days—has accompanied the history of Bildung like a shadow. From the introduction of compulsory schooling to Max Weber’s observations on formal education as part and object of bureaucratic power, it turns out that Bildung has been part of the social context and hence of a utility that it resents as a moral practice. And it is significant that this relationship of Bildung to social rationality becomes the focus of attention with the beginning of the 1960s. There is a general perception at this time that Bildung can and should no longer be excluded from its social accountability. Theodor Litt in his famous postwar essay Das Bildungsideal der deutschen Klassik und die moderne Arbeitswelt35 confronts Humboldt’s notion of Bildung with the modern world of labor and technology and finds Bildung unfit to prepare young people for the modern world. Georg Picht, who in the 1950s praised education’s aim to found a cultural community against the “murderous pragmatism”36 that is often encountered in economic circles, suddenly becomes aware of the vast economic significance of Bildung and the necessity to introduce Bildungsplanung (educational planning).37 Starting from this general awareness, one can detect two matrices into which the assumed and demanded relatedness of Bildung to social utility is integrated at the time. First, education and training become the key factors in the political framework of German ordoliberalism. According to this model the market forms the center of society, a center that is surrounded by a frame helping to influence market transactions and competitive processes in a positive way.38 Although market activities are not to be regulated from outside, political government can and should influence the frame to create favorable conditions for the market to produce economic growth. Given the broad range of conditions to be developed Foucault has spoken of an intervening liberalism,39 whose aim is not to govern economy (like eighteenth century police), but society. In this frame Bildungspolitik has the task of setting up, monitoring and maintaining a system of qualifications that ensures enough skilled individuals are produced to join the labor force. Picht demands that Bildungspolitik should be a part of Sozialpolitik (social policy),40 which is no longer just a set of welfare measures, but a comprehensive government of society. Under ordoliberalism Bildungspolitik received a prominent and powerful political role, one completely reversed to Humboldt’s vision of Bildung: conceived to fill the empty space left by a suspended police and to form the center of society, it now finds its place in the political frame to serve the heteronomous purpose of stimulating economic growth. Second, the so-called Bildungskatastrophe (crisis of public education) of the 1960s—the observation that the contemporary system of formal education

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failed to produce enough junior employees—must be seen as a watershed separating those who believed in the traditional cultural aims of Bildung and those who demanded a Bildungsökonomie (economics of education) insisting on the reflection of Bildung in the modern societal context. This type of reflection was picked up and newly designed by a movement that had totally different intentions. The idea was to understand Bildung as a personal practice that was historically conveyed through economic rationality and could in turn be implemented in education to produce models of an enlightened self in a rational society. In literature pedagogy the aim was to convey through literature and art an aesthetic sensitivity that had to work at the same time as a heightened perception of social reality and a resistance to the control mechanisms of this society.41 In Critical Theory reference to Bildung ends in a kind of paradox— even though the fact that it is interwoven with economic irrationality (division of labor, social injustice etc.) is clearly perceived and criticized,42 resorting to it in an ostentatious anachronistic move appears as an act of resistance against an ongoing social irrationality: “so ist der Anachronismus an der Zeit: an Bildung festzuhalten, nachdem die Gesellschaft ihr die Basis entzog.”43 In looking back it is curious to observe how with respect to Bildung the liberalism of the Freiburg School and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School could coexist. Foucault offered a formula to pinpoint their antagonistic intentions, which provides a sound matrix for the understanding of postHumboldtian Bildung. Foucault points out that the Frankfurt School tried to design a social rationality that suspends economic irrationality (mostly that of the exchange process), whereas the Freiburg School tried to define an economic rationality (that of the market) that allows the irrationality of society to be suspended.44 Both these fundamental intentions can be found in Bildungspolitik: For liberalism, education is to be integrated into the economic logic of productivity, which then produces social effects (like upward mobility). For Critical Theory education becomes part of a project to create models of rational social practices, which expressly include practices of Bildung, that is the subjective acquisition of knowledge and culture. This rationality was also designed to effect fairer and more transparent labor relationships, yet, capitalist economy was seen as so totally irrational that critical thinking simply resorted to socialism and controlled economy to get rid of economic irrationality. Most striking about the coexistence of both schools with their powerful impact is the fact that despite the idea of Bildungsplanung there was no intervention into the curriculum of institutionalized education, as well as there was no objection to the massive expansion of schools and universities from the part of critical thinking. In other words, the study of critical thinking—Bildung—did not hamper the goals of Bildungsplanung (educational planning), as long as an increase in the number of graduates was achieved, and liberalism did not undermine a strong relationship between education and culture.

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This was beginning to change after the involuntary happy coexistence of liberalism and critical thought had ended and liberalism prevailed. To understand this last significant change, in which Bildung is turned into “eine Form von Kapital” (a form of capital),45 one has to go back to the 1960s and the emergence of the theory of human capital. Important for this change is one aspect of Bildung—skills. In 1960 Theodore Schultz submitted this concept of skills to a fundamental revaluation in the field of economics: “Although it is obvious that people acquire useful skills and knowledge, it is not obvious that these skills and knowledge are a form of capital, that this capital is in substantial part a product of deliberate investment, that it has grown in Western societies at a much faster rate than conventional (nonhuman) capital, and that its growth may well be the most distinctive feature of the economic system.”46 To conceive of skills as human capital marks a thorough change in a number of ways. First of all, the idea that people invest in their or their children’s education and training implies that the static notion of labor as a mere force is substituted by acquired abilities that are of economic value, as they allow its human agent to earn or increase its income flow. Thus “laborers,” concludes Schultz, “have become capitalists,”47 and all techniques are—practically and analytically—treated as forms of capital. In fact, the transformation of technology into capital is the decisive feature of a neoliberal economy. Second, one has to take into consideration that skills are “embodied in man”48 and cannot be separated from the human agent. This implies that skills need to be taught and personally acquired and that a technology of learning needs to be developed. It is no surprise that the scientific inquisition into the learning process49 moves along with the development of personal skills as capital. After its forced cohabitation with Critical Theory in the 1960s and 70s neoliberalism found its love match in constructivism. This leads to a third point: specific technologies, however, cannot be designed by general education; their fabrication needs the knowledge and the traditions of specific subjects and their pedagogies. The magic word in this context is “competence.”50 Whereas the art of reading texts may enable access to cultural experience, reading literacy as a pragmatic competence, which helps a person to make use of texts in an everyday communicative environment, is a matter of Literaturdidaktik (literature pedagogy). In Europe the political breakthrough of this perspective on basic skills or literacies took place with the PISA study in 2000. In a more recent edition, PISA says that “reading literacy skills matter not just for individuals, but for economies as a whole”; they are considered as human capital, “the most important form of capital.”51 Those Fachdidaktiken (subject didactics) have in the past two decades worked out comprehensive technologies of defining, scaling, teaching, testing, and verifying particular skills, and have documented them in so-called Bildungsstandards (educational standards).52 All these inventions fulfil an early vision of Schultz

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that education and scientific research would be regarded as “skill-producing activities, as ‘industries’ producing new forms of capital.”53 Empirische Bildungsforschung (empirical educational research)54 and Bildungsmonitoring (educational monitoring) are the two pillars of this new architecture of Bildungspolitik (educational policy); their task is to observe and control, to constitute empirical knowledge of learning processes, and to use this knowledge in the government of Bildungsprozesse (educational processes). There are a few specific consequences that qualify this latest development of Bildung. First, the activities of transmitting and acquiring competences in schools and universities are no longer preparations for future applications of those skills; they are—in the very process of teaching and learning—investments. Thus, a student is not somebody who after graduation will apply what he learned in a phase of unnoticed diligence; he is, while engaged in his studies, a “ ‘self-employed’ producer . . . of capital.”55 Second, as part of this pragmatic and economic reorientation, skills have been defined, redefined, modified, catalogued, and scaled. In reading literacy this work of modification and adaptation was accompanied not by the respective philological subjects, but by a general science of texts and of discourse production and comprehension, which then was adapted and processed by the subject didactics.56 That is to say, in order to adapt reading skills to the requirements of pragmatic qualifications, new sciences and institutions intervene into the traditional academic subjects. The goals and skills of reading are no longer defined by hermeneutics to challenge reflection and to enable experience, but by pedagogy and psychology in order to secure comprehension. Third, because reading skills are designed to meet pragmatic functions, which, furthermore, produce capital, reading is gradually cut off from cultural experience. This happens in the context of a historical transformation, in which Bildung is substituted by a general technology of learning, which again concurs with the concept of neoliberalism according to which the cultural effects of education matter only as consumption, and are irrelevant as investments in human capital.57 Since its definition and political contextualization by Humboldt the history of Bildung spans more than two centuries. Over this time Bildung advanced to become one of the most frequently used words in German pedagogical discourse. But its meaning has changed considerably in these two hundred years. In the nineteenth century, Bildung was fundamentally opposed to labor in the sense that, while labor, a static element in economics, was constituted by innate physical strength and quantities of workers,58 Bildung proved to be a very dynamic cultural experience: it served the fabrication of the self in the process of time and by acquiring knowledge. Bildungsromane from Goethe to Raabe and philosophical reflections from Humboldt to Nietzsche were the discursive workshop, in which this moral technology was crafted. Today this dynamic process has come to a standstill, to say the least, and the political intention of

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resisting sovereign power has dissolved. While Adorno in the 1960s found a way of rescuing Bildung as a remnant of culture and subversive potential of society, Luhmann and current pedagogical discourse refer to it simply as a negative practice,59 or as a practice whose particular cultural references have become outdated and need to be replaced by a general, faceless learning ability coping with every possible pragmatic situation.60 The notion of positively and actively creating selves and skills through cultural activities has faded away (in favor of a reactive deciphering of the self ) and with it the dynamics of a discourse on Bildung. This dynamism has swapped sides and can now be found in realms that used to be held by labor and are now conquered by the technology of human capital. It is here that the fabrication of selves and the personification of skills is worked out with a high level of differentiation and dynamism in a new matrix that covers trainings in self-management, in moderating processes of organization, the production of skills, and so on.61 With the downfall of the cultural and moral dynamism of Bildung and its disdain for labor, the economic dynamism of human capital has begun to rise. In between these two movements, Nietzsche, in a lonely effort, tried to move Bildung out of the way of social change by declaring it an aristocratic virtue. These changes, of course, imply changes of power. Even though current pedagogical and political discourse is punctuated by the word “Bildung,” nothing resembles its original moral and political intentions. Designed as a moral practice of the self, which was molded from exclusively cultural material, Bildung was meant to push back sovereign political power and the machinery of the police state. In the current context of the liberal state, it has lost its subversive moral promise and functions in the context of Bildungspolitik—that is, as an integral part of a government of society. In the course of this political transformation public education—as far as it is involved in this process—has given up its cultural reference in order to help build a useful machine of pure technologies. Ulrich Kinzel is professor of German literature at the University of Kiel. His research and teaching include seventeenth- to twentieth-century German literature and culture as well studies in comparative literature and culture. He has recently published articles on Thomas Kling’s and Gerhard Richter’s reflections on 9/11, Ferdinand Kriwet’s media work, and Peter Weiss’s concept of Bildung. He is the author of Ethische Projekte. Literatur und Selbstgestaltung im Kontext des Regierungsdenkens. Humboldt, Goethe, Stifter, Raabe (2000) and he edited London—Urban Space and Cultural Experience (2010). He is currently preparing a continuation of his ethical studies into literary experience covering German literature of the twentieth century.

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Notes 1. Humboldt, “Ideen zu einem Versuch,” 64. 2. Humboldt, Sphere and Duties of Government, 11. 3. Letter of Wilhelm von Humboldt to Caroline from 19 June 1804, Wilhelm und Caroline von Humboldt in ihren Briefen, 2: 191. Also see Bruford, “The Idea of ‘Bildung.’” 4. Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, 27; and Humboldt, “Ideen zu einem Versuch,” 76. 5. Mill, “On Liberty,” 63. 6. Mill’s reflections on the self are directed against collective mediocracy and the despotism of custom. 7. Humboldt, “Theorie der Bildung,” 240 [my translation]. 8. Nietzsche, Umwertung aller Werte, 732. 9. Ibid., 785. 10. Ibid., 749. “We call educated [gebildet] a person who has become a shape [Gebilde].” (My translation). 11. See Haym, Wilhelm von Humboldt, 50; Kaehler, Wilhelm von Humboldt und der Staat, 139; Kawohl, Wilhelm von Humboldt in der Kritik, 138 ff.; Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur, 143. Spitta, Die Staatsidee looks at Humboldt’s political reflections in a more systematic fashion, which, however, is blurred by his partly anthroposophical perspective. Konrad, Wilhelm von Humboldt, 21–24, is barely systematic. Sorkin, “Wilhelm von Humboldt” and Vick, “Of Basques” take a more differentiated approach, but do not look at the systematics of contemporary political discourse. 12. Humboldt, Sphere and Duties of Government, 19. 13. See Schlözer, Stats–Gelartheit, 9–28. 14. Forster, “Fragment eines Briefes,” 34; Forster, “Über die Beziehung der Staatskunst,” 700 f.; Jacobi, “Etwas das Lessing gesagt hat,” 2: 373; Jung [–Stilling], Grundlehre der Statswirthschaft, § 612–796. For the historical significance of this distinction, see Foucault, “Political Technology of Individuals,” 159. 15. Justi, Grundfeste zu der Macht, vol. 1: Vorrede. See also Scattola, “Die politische Theorie in Deutschland,” 119–33. 16. This being a maxim of the ratio status, see G. Botero, Della Ragione di Stato [1589], quoted in Meinecke, Idee der Staatsräson, 78. 17. See Justi, Grundfeste zu der Macht. 18. Humboldt, “Ideen zu einem Versuch,” 56. The motto stems from Mirabeau’s Sur l’education publique, 69. 19. Foucault, “Political Technology of Individuals,” 153. 20. See Humboldt, “Ideen zu einem Versuch,” 72. 21. Humboldt, Limits of State Action, 25 (quote); Humboldt, “Ideen zu einem Versuch,” 74. Burrows’s translated term “spontaneous action” does not adequately translate Humboldt’s “Selbstthätigkeit” (personal activity). 22. Humboldt, Limits of State Action, 35. 23. Humboldt, Sphere and Duties of Government, 27. 24. Humboldt, “Ideen zu einem Versuch,” 86. Humboldt’s argument must be seen against the backdrop of a rising consumer society; see Purdy, Tyranny of Elegance. 25. Humboldt, “Ideen zu einem Versuch,” 218. 26. See Price, “Wilhelm von Humboldt und Schillers ‘Briefe’.” 27. See Rabbow, Seelenführung; Hadot, Exercises spirituels.

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28. Here the individual must go through the “Bildungsstufen des allgemeinen Geistes” (stages in the development of the universal spirit; my translation) (Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 32.) 29. See Nietzsche, “Götzen–Dämmerung,” 107–8. 30. Nietzsche, “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft,” 635. 31. The opposite diet of Bildung at the end of the nineteenth century is (ironically and literally) embodied in “Stopfkuchen,” a character from Wilhelm Raabe’s novel of the same name, who turns to himself by stuffing himself. See Graevenitz, “Der Dicke im schlafenden Krieg.” 32. See Kinzel, Ethische Projekte, 97–98; Vick, “Of Basques.” 33. See Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 53–70, 606–615. 34. Mohl, Die Polizei-Wissenschaft, 1: 403 (my translation). 35. Litt, Das Bildungsideal, 54–59. 36. Picht, “Die soziale Funktion,” 75. 37. See Picht, “Begriff und Aufgaben.” 38. Foucault, Biopolitics,140. 39. Ibid., 141–42. 40. Picht, “Bildungsplanung,” 318. 41. Ivo, Kritischer Deutschunterricht, 5; Förster, Ästhetische Erkenntnis im kritischen Deutschunterricht; Huyssen, The Great Divide, 158/9. 42. Adorno, “Theorie der Halbbildung,” 70/71. 43. “Thus it is time for the anachronism: to cling to Bildung after society withdrew its basis.” (My translation) Ibid., 94. 44. Foucault, Biopolitik, 153–54. 45. Picht, “Bildungsplanung,” 319 (my translation). 46. Schultz, Human Capital, 24. 47. Ibid., 108. 48. Ibid., 48. 49. “Relevance, meaning, and interest are not automatically embedded within subject areas or topics. Relevance emerges from the learner. Constructivist teachers, acknowledging the central role of the learner, structure classroom experiences that foster the creation of personal meaning.” (Brooks/Brooks, Constructivist Classrooms, ix.) 50. See Weinert, “Concept of Competence.” 51. OECD, PISA 2012, 61. 52. To give an example, the Bildungsstandards for the German Abitur (final exam at Gymnasium or secondary school) are laid down in a 264-page document, which comprises the normative description of the various proficiency scales for reading and writing (Kultusministerkonferenz, Bildungsstandards im Fach Deutsch). Another example of this kind of competence technology would be Council of Europe, Common European Framework. 53. Schultz, Human Capital, 20. 54. Bayrhuber et al., Empirische Fundierung; Bayrhuber et al., Formate fachdidaktischer Forschung. 55. Schultz, Human Capital, 83. 56. See Kintsch and van Dijk, Strategies of Discourse; Kintsch, Comprehension; Willenberg, Lesen und Lernen; Willenberg, Kompetenzhandbuch für den Deutschunterricht. 57. See Schultz, Human Capital, 53, 81, 162. 58. Schultz, Human Capital, 22, 26. Serres puts the nineteenth-century world of labor under the mythological emblems of Prometheus and Hephaistos, who personify the

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physical transformation of things through fire, and in contrast to the present world of Hermes or communication, in which we are no longer workers, but instead are messengers (See Serres, Atlas, 113–16). 59. Reich, Konstruktivistische Didaktik, 97. 60. See Luhmann, Erziehungssystem der Gesellschaft, 194. 61. See Bröckling, Das unternehmerische Selbst.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. “Theorie der Halbbildung.” In Gesellschaftstheorie und Kulturkritik, 2nd ed., 66–94. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981. Bayrhuber Horst, Ute Harms, Bernhard Muszynski, Bernd Ralle, Martin Rothgangel, Lutz-Helmut Schön, Helmut J. Vollmer, Hans-Georg Weigand, eds. Empirische Fundierung in den Fachdidaktiken. Münster, New York, München, Berlin: Waxmann, 2011. Bayrhuber, Horst, Ute Harms, Bernhard Muszynski, Bernd Ralle, Martin Rothgangel, Lutz-Helmut Schön, Helmut J. Vollmer, Hans-Georg Weigand, eds. Formate fachdidaktischer Forschung: Empirische Projekte—historische Analysen—theoretische Grundlegungen. Münster, New York, München, Berlin: Waxmann, 2012. Bollenbeck, Georg. Bildung und Kultur. Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Deutungsmusters. Frankfurt am Main, Leipzig: Insel, 1994. Bröckling, Ulrich. Das unternehmerische Selbst: Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007. Brooks, Jacqueline Grennon; Martin G. Brooks. The Case for Constructivist Classrooms. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1993. Bruford, Walter Horace. “The Idea of ‘Bildung’ in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Letters.” In The Era of Goethe. Essays Presented to James Boyd, 17–46. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1959. Colli, Giorgio, and Mazzino Montinari, eds. Friedrich Nietzsche. Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, 15 vols. New York: de Gruyter, 1988. Council of Europe, The. Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Flitner, Andreas, and Klaus Giel, eds. Wilhelm von Humboldt. Werke, 5 vols. Darmstadt: WBG, 1960. Forster, Georg. “Fragment eines Briefes an einen deutschen Schriftsteller, über Schillers Götter Griechenlands” [1789]. In Steiner, Werke, vol. 3: 31–47. ———. “Über die Beziehung der Staatskunst auf das Glück der Menschheit” [1789]. In Steiner, Werke, vol. 3: 695–726. Förster, Jürgen. Ästhetische Erkenntnis im kritischen Deutschunterricht. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1977. Foucault, Michel. “The Political Technology of Individuals.” In Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. London: Tavistock, 1988. ———. The Birth of Biopolitics. Edited by Michel Sennelart. New York: Picador, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Graevenitz, Gerhart von. “Der Dicke im schlafenden Krieg: Zu einer Figur der europäischen Moderne bei Wilhelm Raabe.” In Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft, 1–21, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990. Hadot, Pierre. Exercises spirituels et philosophie antiques. Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1981.

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Haym, Rudolf. Wilhelm von Humboldt. Lebensbild und Charakteristik. Berlin: Gaertner, 1856. Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm. Phänomenologie des Geistes [1807]. 5th ed. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. “Ideen zu einem Versuch die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen [1792].” In Flitner and Giel, Werke, vol. 1: 56–233. ———. “Theorie der Bildung des Menschen [posth.].” In Flitner and Giel, Werke, vol. 1, 234–40. ———. The Limits of State Action. Edited by J. W. Burrow. Cambridge: University Press, 1969. ———. The Sphere and Duties of Government. Translated by Joseph Coulthard. London: John Chapman, 1854. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide. Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Ivo, Hubert. Kritischer Deutschunterricht. Frankfurt am Main: Diesterweg, 1969. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. “Etwas das Lessing gesagt hat. Ein Commentar zu den Reisen der Päpste” [1782]. Werke, 5 vols. 2: 1815. Leipzig: Fleischer, 1812–20. Jung [-Stilling], Johann Heinrich. Die Grundlehre der Statswirthschaft, ein Elementarbuch für Regentensöhne und alle, die sich dem Dienst des Staats und der Gelehrsamkeit widmen wollen. Marburg: Neue academische Buchhandlung, 1792. Justi, Johann Heinrich Gottlob. Die Grundfeste zu der Macht und Glückseeligkeit der Staaten; oder ausführliche Vorstellung der gesamten Policey-Wissenschaft. 2 vols. Königsberg, Leipzig: In verlag seeligen Johann Heinrich Hartungs Eerben, 1760–61. Kaehler, Siegfried A. Wilhelm von Humboldt und der Staat. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte deutscher Lebensgestaltung um 1800. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1927. Kawohl, Irmgard. Wilhelm von Humboldt in der Kritik des 20. Jahrhunderts. Ratingen: A. Henn Verlag, 1969. Kinzel, Ulrich. Ethische Projekte. Literatur und Selbstgestaltung im Kontext des Regierungsdenkens. Humboldt, Goethe, Stifter, Raabe. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000. Kintsch, Walter, and Teun van Dijk. Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. New York: Academic Press, 1983. Kintsch, Walter. Comprehension: A Paradigm for Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Konrad, Franz-Michael. Wilhelm von Humboldt. Stuttgart: UTB, 2010. Kultusministerkonferenz, Bildungsstandards im Fach Deutsch für die Allgemeine Hochschulreife. Cologne: Wolters Kluwer, 2012. Litt, Theodor. Das Bildungsideal der deutschen Klassik und die moderne Arbeitswelt. Bonn: Verlag Bundeszentrale für Heimatdienst, 1955. Luhmann, Niklas. Das Erziehungssystem der Gesellschaft. Edited by Dieter Lenzen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. Meinecke, Friedrich. Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte. Werke vol. 1. 4th ed. Edited by Walter Hofer. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1976. Mill, John Stuart. “On Liberty” [1859]. In On Liberty and Other Essays, edited by John Gray, 5–128. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Mirabeau, Honorè-Gabriel de Riquetti comte de. Travail sur l’education publique. Paris: Gabanis 1791. Mohl, Robert von. Die Polizei-Wissenschaft nach den Grundsätzen des Rechtsstaates. 2 vols. Tübingen: Laupp, 1832–33.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft.” In Colli and Montinari, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 3: 343–651. ———. “Götzen-Dämmerung.” In Colli and Montinari, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 6, 55–161. ———. Umwertung aller Werte. Edited by Friedrich Würzbach. Munich: dtv, 1977. OECD. PISA 2012: Assessment and Analytical Framework. Geneva: OECD Publishing, 2013. Picht, Georg. “Die soziale Funktion und der Bildungsauftrag der deutschen Gymnasien” [1953] in Die Verantwortung des Geistes. Pädagogische und politische Schriften. Stuttgart: Klett, 1969. ———. “Begriff und Aufgaben der Bildungsplanung.” In Die Verantwortung des Geistes. Pädagogische und politische Schriften. 283–333. Stuttgart: Klett, 1969. Price, Cora Lee. “Wilhelm von Humboldt und Schillers ‘Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen’.” In Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 11 (1967), 358–73. Purdy, Daniel. The Tyranny of Elegance. Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Rabbow, Paul. Seelenführung: Methodik der Exerzitien in der Antike. Munich: Kösel, 1954. Reich, Kersten. Konstruktivistische Didaktik. 4th ed. Weinheim, Basel: Beltz, 2008. Scattola, Merio. “Die politische Theorie in Deutschland zur Zeit des aufgeklärten Absolutismus.” In Fördern und Bewahren. Studien zur europäischen Kulturgeschichte der frühen Neuzeit, edited by Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer. Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1996. Schlözer, August Ludwig. Stats-Gelartheit nach ihren Haupt-Theilen im Auszug und Zusammenhang. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1793. Schultz, Theodore. “Investment in Human Capital” [1960]. In Investment in Human Capital: The Role of Education and Research. New York: The Free Press, 1971. Serres, Michel. Atlas. Berlin: Merve, 2005. Sorkin, David, “Wilhelm von Humboldt: The Theory and Practice of Self-Formation (Bildung), 1791–1810.” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1983): 55–73. Spitta, Dietrich. Die Staatsidee Wilhelm von Humboldts. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2004. Steiner, Gerhard, ed. Georg Forster. Werke, 4 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1970. Sydow, Anna von, ed. Wilhelm und Caroline von Humboldt in ihren Briefen. 7 vols. Berlin: Mittler, 1906–16. Vick, Brian, “Of Basques, Greeks, and Germans: Liberalism, Nationalism, and the Ancient Republican Tradition in the Thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt.” Central European History 40 (2007): 653–81. Weinert, Franz. “Concept of Competence: A Conceptual Clarification.” In Defining and Selecting Key Competences, edited by D.S. Rychen and L. H. Salganik, 39–49. Göttingen: Hogrefe, 2001. Willenberg, Heiner. Lesen und Lernen: Eine Einführung in die Neuropsychologie des Textverstehens. Heidelberg: Spektrum, 1999. ———, ed. Kompetenzhandbuch für den Deutschunterricht. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag Hohengehren, 2007. Wood, Gordon S. The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787. 2nd ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

CHAPTER 2



Fichte’s Conception of Bildung and German National Identity DAVID TSECHIEN PAN

B

ildung seems to be a protean term without a fixed meaning. Variously translated as cultivation, self-cultivation, formation, self-formation, selfdevelopment, education, or edification, the only point of agreement seems to be about the indefinable and untranslatable quality of the term.1 These difficulties arise from a basic contradiction in the concept itself. The inability to choose between cultivation and self-cultivation points to the quandary in which the idea of Bildung on the one hand envisions a freedom of individuals to follow their own trajectories of self-development and on the other hand expects this process to result in the building of moral constraints on those individuals’ characters. These two contradictory purposes—freedom of individual development and moral constraints on these individuals—could only be harmonized if one imagines that free development always leads to the same place. While commentators have pointed to precursors in the educational program of Plato’s Republic, in the idea of a communion with God in Meister Eckhart, and in the shift toward individual engagement with the word of God in the Reformation and in Pietism,2 the modern notion of Bildung has generally been oriented around the eighteenth century philosophical project of a Bildung—not just of individuals, but of the entire human race toward a universal morality. A generation of thinkers, including Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, believed that freedom might thereby be reconciled with morality. Kant established the philosophical basis for this project, and Fichte developed the idea of Bildung as a cultural and educational program for the German nation. Yet if joining freedom with constraint lies at the heart of the project of Bildung as a civilizational task, its continuing indefinability as a concept results from the vicissitudes of that project. Since the contradiction remains unre-

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solved, the harmonization that is contained in the meaning of the concept of Bildung remains at odds with the phenomenon that it is meant to describe, resulting in the elusiveness of the idea itself. The project of creating a general progress of humanity by linking the freedom of individual development with moral constraints has had at best a mixed history. Yet the attempt resulted in an epochal shift toward modern modes of education based in the nation rather than in family or religion. The project of Bildung has not led to a civilizational merging of freedom with morality, but instead has led to the establishment of national culture as the organizing principle for education and cultural development.

Freedom and Constraint in the Development of Knowledge The philosophical basis for the idea of Bildung was established when Kant imagined that the rational cognition of the moral law would lead people to obey this moral law in order to remain consistent with their understanding of it. The freedom of the individual involves the individual’s free use of reason to establish moral laws, which should convince the individual to act accordingly rather than obey compulsions. Kant emphasizes that the following of the moral law is a matter of duty, not of desire, because such duty would be based on the individual’s understanding of the rational necessity of the moral law. Consequently, Kant separates moral actions from any kind of inclination or desire, considering emotional responses to be poor guarantors of moral laws.3 He views education as part of a broader project of Enlightenment in which humanity could gradually make progress in the use of reason.4 At the same time, in his late work Kant recognizes that moral actions adhere to aesthetic patterns that he explores in his analyses of beauty and the sublime. Because it is linked to a sacrifice of material concerns for spiritual concerns, the experience of the sublime involves an enactment of a sense for morality that includes an affective dimension that goes beyond duty.5 As it is grounded in the experience of the sublime, this affective dimension of morality has an aesthetic aspect that leads to the question of culture and education. The experience of the sublime creates a representation of how the freedom of the individual is linked to the subordination of the individual to something greater, and this aesthetic experience consequently becomes important for imagining how freedom establishes moral constraints. Kant’s analysis leads to the project of Bildung, which has both an educational role in developing the rational faculties and an aesthetic role in bringing rationality into harmony with morality. In response to Kant’s emphasis on duty in issues of morality, Fichte indicates that an education that relies on duty is uncertain because it depends on

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free will, and so the individual could choose to either fulfill or deny their duty. He insists that precisely in this acknowledgement and in this reckoning on the pupil’s free will lies the first error of the existing education, and the clear admission of its impotence and futility. For in admitting that, despite its best efforts, the will is still free—that is, remains wavering between good and bad—this system admits that it neither can nor means nor at all desires to form the will or, since the will is the proper primary root of man himself, to form the human being, and that it holds this to be altogether impossible.6

Because duty depends on a choice to deny self-interest so as to fulfill a duty that one recognizes, duty will always struggle against inclinations. Fichte indicates that his plan for education depends on eliminating this freedom of the will by shaping the will into a particular form that will seek to carry out the educator’s goals. “By contrast the new education would consist precisely in this, that on the soil whose cultivation it takes over, it completely annihilates freedom of will, producing strict necessity in decisions and the impossibility of the opposite in the will, which can now be reckoned and relied on with confidence.”7 For Fichte, desire cannot be left up to the vagaries of individual decisions. Instead, the individual’s desires must be shaped according to the goal of establishing a particular structure of willing. It would not suffice to exhort individuals to act according to their duty. Rather, education needs to determine the will of the individual: “If you wish to have influence over him, then you must do more than merely appeal to him; you must fashion him, fashion him such that he cannot will anything save what you want him to will.”8 The Bildung that Fichte has in mind here is a cultivation of the will so that the individual unfailingly desires that which the individual should desire. In this sense of cultivation, Bildung is a means of constraining individual decision-making. To create such a subject, Fichte does not want to use compulsion, however. Instead, he imagines that the will can be shaped by promoting learning that encourages the free development of the individual’s desires and faculties.9 Fichte first notes that this individual development naturally leads the pupil to scientific truths, and he provides the example of how a pupil left to freely develop will naturally come to the conclusion that at least three straight lines are required to enclose a space. In this way, the pupil arrives at an understanding, not of a constancy and fatefulness of the world, but of the power of the intellect to develop universal principles according to which reality develops. For example, when the pupil, in the free exercise of his imagination, attempts to delimit space by drawing straight lines, this is the primary mental activity that is stimulated in him. If he discovers through his experiments that he can delimit no space with fewer than three straight lines, then this knowledge is the by-product of a second quite different activity of the cognitive faculty, one that restricts the

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free operation of the first faculty to be stimulated. Thus, at its very commencement this education gives rise to a knowledge that truly surpasses all experience, that is supersensuous, strictly necessary and general, that embraces in advance all subsequently possible experience.10

Fichte emphasizes the way in which the free activity of the pupil leads to a restriction of this freedom based on rules of mathematics, and this natural interaction of freedom and restriction becomes the model for Fichte’s idea of Bildung. The goal of education for Fichte is not to receive accepted wisdom or a static image of the world, but instead to have the pupils exercise their own freedom so that they eventually arrive at rules on their own, leading to the universal and necessary cognition of supersensuous knowledge. Such knowledge is not subordinate to reality but rather establishes the structures according to which reality appears. Fichte’s mix of activism and law establishes the basis for his hoped-for merging of freedom and constraint. The form of education that Fichte imagines is one in which pupils are not simply to reproduce traditional forms based on rote memorization. Rather, pupils must engage in active and free intellectual activity that ultimately leads to the physical laws for reality.11 The free development of creative capabilities encourages an inner passion that will naturally lead to an expanded understanding of the law.12 In this passion for learning, the pupil does not simply learn historical facts but arrives at the philosophical laws according to which the world develops. “This education is therefore in its final consequence the cultivation of the pupil’s faculty of cognition, and on no account an historical schooling in the permanent qualities of things, but the higher and philosophical schooling in the laws according to which such a permanent quality of things becomes necessary.”13 By linking passion for learning with a belief in the natural development of consciousness toward a set of universal physical and philosophical laws, Fichte establishes a conception of pedagogy that emphasizes the free creativity of the individual while also affirming the universal validity of such an individual’s development. The philosophical necessity of the results of this learning becomes the key to the way in which Fichte merges freedom with constraint. In this way, Fichte establishes the inevitability of universal and necessary laws as the culmination of the development of individual freedom. By contrasting this mode of learning with “an historical schooling in the permanent qualities of things,” Fichte sets up the philosophical approach against a historical one. If Fichte presumes that such a free development of capacities will naturally lead to the discovery of laws and constraints, he develops a philosophical model of knowledge in which an initial seed develops in a predictable way. Rather than taking individual goals or historical contingency as the starting point for such knowledge, Fichte assumes that all knowledge takes a similar development from basic concepts that then develop toward natural laws. Philosophy occupies a privileged position for

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Fichte because he sees knowledge as essentially systematic.14 By providing insight into the systematic unity of knowledge, philosophy establishes the framework within which all other knowledge will necessarily develop. With the example of the three lines that enclose a space, Fichte leads the reader to the idea that the education of individuals allows them to discover universal laws through their own free activity. Fichte imagines a rational development that would only be the case if there were one true philosophy and knowledge that all individuals would develop if allowed their own individual development. In this conception, knowledge is only false when it is historical, and is therefore constrained by outside authorities and traditions, rather than philosophical and thus necessary. Fichte accepts the truth of mathematics and natural sciences as a single development that does not arise out of human purposes, but in fact becomes the source of human purposes in the movement of reason toward the establishment of a basis for morality. Embedded in Fichte’s conception is a particular philosophy of history that sees human history as a single development rather than as a variety of developments in different cultures. This latter idea was adumbrated by Johann Gottfried Herder in an alternative notion of Bildung, which was seen by idealists like Fichte as a relic of the eighteenth century.15 If one imagines that different traditions might have equally legitimate developments, Fichte’s presumption of a single path of knowledge would seem to leave out the different human purposes that might provide the context within which knowledge develops in alternative directions.

From Love of Knowledge to Morality Fichte extends this model to the development of a morality that is based not on compulsion, but rather on the individual’s desire for the good. To achieve this shaping of the will toward moral actions Fichte focuses on love rather than duty, pointing to a structure of affect in which love becomes the determiner of the will: “Man can only will what he loves. His love is at once the sole and infallible impulse of his willing and of all his vital stirrings and motions.”16 In contrast to a focus on duty, which requires the subject to constantly struggle to subordinate inclinations to follow the dictates of duty, Fichte’s emphasis on love creates a subject whose own self-actuating activity orients the subject around the educational goals of the collective. Not only does the student’s intellectual freedom and creativity lead to the affirmation of mathematical truths, but also this freedom of the subject leads to a moral stance in which moral laws are to be honored more than interest. He is impelled by a love that absolutely does not aim at some sensuous enjoyment, because such a motive holds no appeal to him, but a mental activity and

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the law governing this activity for their own sake. Now, although it is not this mental activity in general with which morality is concerned—for that purpose a special direction must be given to the activity—this love is nevertheless the general constitution and form of the moral will. And so this method of mental culture is the immediate preparation for the moral one; the root of immorality, however, it eliminates completely, by never allowing sensuous enjoyment to become the motive.17

Fichte merges the love of knowledge with a generally moral stance, and for him education’s first task is to develop a love for mental-spiritual activity. Once this love of intellectual activity is established over the needs of sensual enjoyment, this activity becomes itself the goal that leads to laws and then by extension to morality. He imagines that the free activity of the individual will lead to a passion for learning that also affirms moral laws. In the first place, it is clear that the pupil’s mental activity, which earlier was exercised on other objects, must be stimulated to project an image of the human social order, as it ought to be according to the law of reason. Whether this image projected by the pupil is correct can most easily be judged by an education that is in sole possession of this correct image. Whether it was projected by the pupil’s self-activity and on no account apprehended merely passively and parroted credulously in schoolish fashion; whether, furthermore, it was raised to the proper degree of clarity and vividness—this the education will be able to judge in the same way as it earlier passed correct judgements on other objects in the same regard. All this is a matter of knowledge pure and simple [noch Sache der bloßen Erkenntnis], and remains in its domain, access to which is exceedingly easy in this education.18

As with the knowledge of mathematical laws, Fichte sees the laws of the human social order to be “a matter of knowledge pure and simple” that results from the application of the law of reason. But as James points out, there is no necessary link between theoretical reason, which provides the basis for natural laws, and practical reason, which justifies moral laws, and the link between the two is at best an analogy.19 Consequently, Fichte recognizes that he needs to provide an additional support for morality that goes beyond cognition of the moral law. When Fichte extends such a form of education to moral laws, he runs into the problem of the will. As with mathematical laws, the images of morality and a collective meaning should not be simply received. Instead, the student needs to become active in creating the cognitive basis of the world. In his project of shaping the will, Fichte does not imagine a detached subject but rather a subject who is engaged in imagining meaning. “The faculty of self-actively projecting images that are by no means merely copies [Nachbilder] but rather potential pre-figurations [Vorbilder] of reality must be the starting-point for

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the cultivation of the race by the new education.”20 By emphasizing that the resulting images of the collective are to be pre-figurations rather than copies, Fichte lays out a conception of knowledge in which the image becomes formative for the construction of the world. The images of this education are not reflections of reality but projections that are to shape the way in which reality will become. This shaping character of knowledge would seem to indicate that different ideas would lead to different developments, and Fichte recognizes that his educational program has to limit such differences by establishing the structures that would constrain the development of the will of the pupils. While Fichte notes that the self-activity of the pupil can lead to correct knowledge of the good, such knowledge is insufficient for developing morality because knowledge is insufficient for shaping the will. He indicates that this goal can only be achieved through a form of education that integrates self-activity with work for the commonwealth. He proposes that pupils relate to their school as to a small commonwealth, in which they must both obey certain rules and be subject to punishment for infractions and be encouraged to perform without additional reward additional tasks for the benefit of the commonwealth of pupils.21 Through such engagement for the commonwealth, each individual learns not just the knowledge of laws of morality but the will to perform them.

Morality and German Nationalism Yet, even if he emphasizes morality in his conception of Bildung, Fichte introduces his lectures as part of a political project, and the relationship between morality and politics becomes central to his conception. The mechanisms of state power would typically create the punishments and incentives that would manipulate individual self-interest in order to stabilize the political order. To the extent that the state uses external means of hope and fear to compel obedience to the laws, it assumes an individual who acts out of self-interest. “The statecraft practiced hitherto, as the education of man in society, assumed as a certain and universally valid rule that each loves and wills his own sensuous well-being, and to this natural love it artificially linked, by means of hope and fear, the good will that it desired, the interest in the commonwealth.”22 The collective interest in this mode of education is opposed to the interest of the individual, requiring various carrots and sticks that manipulate individuals into supporting the collective’s goals. Rote memorization describes the form of education that corresponds to such a structure of the commonwealth. Such memorization is similar to obedience to the state out of fear and hope in that there is no inner compulsion to learn but only an acceptance of an outside constraint on one’s inclinations.

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If he does not want his new form of education to function as a form of compulsion, one of the key reasons is the political situation in which the French occupation of German territories means that the Germans no longer have control of the state’s means of compulsion. The French control of state institutions forced the inhabitants of the occupied German-speaking territories to cooperate with the state authorities out of self-interest.23 Self-love as a principle of education is no longer an available strategy for the Germans because they are living under foreign occupation. The French rulers have the monopoly on force by which they can make use of self-love in order to force people to act for the current rulers and against the German nation. Consequently, Fichte indicates that to resist the French it would be necessary to create a kind of affect that would work against self-interest. His primary recommendation is an education plan that would not simply provide students with knowledge but rather would form the will. This forming of the will would serve to move the students toward a relationship to morality, religion, and intellect that would be grounded in love and affect rather than duty. This new, intimate relationship to morality would be the basis for creating the national community. The orientation of education around love becomes for Fichte a way to introduce a new kind of politics that replaces a political order that depends on the self-love that is the driver of policies based on fear and hope. “We must therefore replace this self-love, which can no longer be connected with anything that is good for us, with another kind of love, one that aims directly at the good, simply as such and for its own sake, and plant it in the minds of all those whom we wish to reckon among our nation.”24 Rather than replacing self-love with duty, Fichte seeks to shift the subject’s inclinations from self-love to love of the good. The resulting political order is not to be built around a state that manipulates people based on their self-interest but around a national community based on affect, in which the people are not motivated by self-interest but by a love for the greater good. There is thus nothing we can do save bring the new education to all who are German, without exception, so that it becomes not the education of a particular class but simply of the nation as such, and without exempting a single individual member; in which—namely in the cultivation of an ardent pleasure in what is right—all distinctions of class, which may in the future obtain in other branches of development, are completely abolished and disappear; and in this way there arises among us not a popular education [Volks-Erziehung] but rather a specifically German national education [National-Erziehung].25

As with Kant, Fichte sees the moral definition of the good as a universal project, in which all individuals will naturally arrive at the same conclusions, just as in mathematics. Fichte attempts to demonstrate the universality of this conception by imagining a reconciliation of all classes within a unified German

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nation. But this universality also happens to accord with support for a German nationalist project. The merging of universal morality with German nationalism, i.e. duty with love, separates Fichte’s project from the Kantian one, in which duty and love are to be strictly separated. In doing so, Fichte does not see himself as betraying the universality of this project. Rather, he understands German nationalism to be the way in which universality is expressing itself in the world. In this conception, universal morality cannot remain on the level of a neutral duty but must be integrated with love, and thus particular relationships, in order to exist in the world. In the case of a possible conflict between the commitment to civic duty and love of the nation, however, Fichte is clear that the latter would have to prevail. In times of political instability, Fichte emphasizes the importance of sacrifice for the nation over all else: But if this orderly progress is imperiled, and now is the time to decide about new and unprecedented cases, then a life is required that lives out of itself. What spirit is it that may in such cases take the helm, that with its own sureness and certainty, and without uneasy to-ing and fro-ing, is capable of making a decision, that has an undisputed right to command everyone who may be concerned, whether he wants to or not, and to compel the objector, to jeopardise everything, even his own life? Not the spirit of calm civic love for the constitution and laws, but the blazing flame of the higher love of fatherland that embraces the nation as the vesture of the eternal, for which the noble man joyfully sacrifices himself and the ignoble, who exists only for the sake of the former, should likewise sacrifice himself.26

The truly important decisions that must be made in times of political instability have to be undertaken in a nationalist spirit of sacrifice rather than a commitment to the constitution and the law. If law is subordinate to nation, then morality itself must be subordinate to a political will to establish a particular kind of order in the world, and Fichte emphasizes the importance of the nation as higher than the state’s laws because it represents the progress of the human. This goal becomes so important that Fichte regards those who do not share it as the ignoble. Though he is careful to indicate that they should sacrifice themselves, his desire that they agree to this self-sacrifice contradicts the fact that they have shown their ignobility by seeking to avoid such sacrifice. Though the situation remains ambiguous, the apparent contradiction seems to open the door to the use of compulsion against the ignoble due to their refusal to sacrifice themselves for the nation. By treating individuals as those who might have to sacrifice themselves toward a higher end, the overriding political goal of the progress of the nation threatens to undermine the idea of a Kantian universal morality. “From all this it follows that the state, as the mere regiment of human proceeding along its usual peaceful course, is not something primary,

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existing for itself, but is merely the means to a higher end, that of the everuniform and continuing development of the purely human in this nation; that it is only the vision and love of this eternal development which is unceasingly to supervise the administration of the state, even in times of peace, and which, when the independence of the people is endangered, alone can save it.”27 The continuing development of the nation into the future is the highest purpose for humanity, transcending the constitution and laws of the state. With the establishment of this purpose, Fichte affirms love over duty and human development over the adherence to law. This conception begins to strain the idea that the individual human should be considered as an ultimate purpose because the individual’s development serves that of the nation.

Hierarchy of Nations While this conception would seem to treat the nation as a higher purpose than the individual, it would still be possible to consider every nation as having an equal relationship to the overall purpose of improving the human condition. But to avoid establishing a hierarchy of nations, it would be necessary to abandon the idea of a progressive movement toward ever-increasing Enlightenment. Since such a progressivist philosophy of history implies a hierarchy of cultures, Fichte’s continuing commitment to this idea leads him to insist that “there are, with respect to their education, two quite distinct and completely opposed classes of men.”28 Echoing Kant’s similar assumption that some cultures are inferior to others in terms of their rationality,29 Fichte does not consider all humans as equal with respect to their suitability for national development and posits two classes of humanity. The first class is driven solely by self-interest and is dominated by obscure feeling. This feeling most commonly and as a rule comprehends [erfassen] the fundamental drive [Grundtrieb] as love of the individual for himself, and indeed presents this self at first only as one that desires life and well-being. Hence arises sensuous selfishness as the actual fundamental drive and developing power of such a life engaged in translating its original fundamental drive. For as long as man continues to understand himself thus, he must act selfishly and can do no other; and this selfishness is the one thing that is permanent, identical and predictable in the ceaseless change of his life.30

In contrast to those who are driven by obscure feeling and thus only selfinterest, Fichte imagines a second class of those who pursue knowledge. “The second kind of consciousness, which as a rule does not develop of itself but must be carefully nurtured in society, is clear knowledge. Were the fundamental drive of humanity to be comprehended in this element, it would yield a

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second class of men quite distinct from the first.”31 In laying out this distinction between two classes, one driven by obscure feeling and self-interest and the other driven by clear knowledge and selflessness, Fichte establishes a dichotomy within humanity, both in terms of a moral distinction between two types of individuals, the noble and the ignoble, and a hierarchical differentiation between two types of cultures. The two kinds of culture are distinguished, not just in terms of selfish feeling in contrast to selfless knowledge, but also based on the ability to develop into the future. Fichte distinguishes between a stagnant or backward-looking culture and a future-oriented one. “Now, when this fundamental drive of man is translated into clear knowledge, it does not aim at an already given and existing world that can only be accepted passively, as it is, and in which a love that drives original and creative activity were unable to find its own sphere of efficacy. Rather, raised to knowledge, it aims at a world that shall be, an a priori world, one that exists in the future and remains ever in the future.”32 By focusing on a world that exists in the future, Fichte lays out a framework in which the only way to be moral is to support a national culture of continuous, progressive development, as opposed to a static culture that would stay within a set of conceptual limitations. Fichte imagines national culture as a form of progress like the development of an individual, and his form of education is expressly designed to establish the continuing progress of national culture in contrast to one that is defined by the constraints of the state. “The proper ground of distinction lies in whether one believes in something absolutely primary and original in man himself, in freedom, in infinite improvability, in the perpetual progress of our race; or whether one does not and indeed fancies that one distinctly perceives and grasps that the opposite of these things holds true.”33 As with his differentiation of the noble and the ignoble, the orientation around national development becomes the overriding purpose to which other ones are to be subordinated. This purpose then becomes the basis for Fichte’s definition of the German nation. In conceiving of this development as grounded in clear knowledge, Fichte imagines an objective truth of the social order that he sees as a particular achievement of his philosophy as well as of a German national development understood as part of a world historical transformation. In his imagining of an ethics of progress through a differentiation of two classes, one dominated by obscure feeling and the other by clear knowledge, Fichte lays out the framework for the progress of the world from the first to the second class. This new form humanity can give itself, if the present generation educates itself as the future generation, in the way that only it can: through knowledge, as that alone which can be shared and freely communicated, the true light and air of this world, uniting the world of spirit. Hitherto humanity became simply

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what it became and could become. This haphazard evolution is over; for where it has developed the most it has become nothing. If humanity is not to remain in this nothingness, it must henceforth make itself into everything that it is yet to become. The true vocation of the human race on earth, I said in those lectures whose sequel these addresses are, shall be this, that it fashions itself with freedom into that which it really and originally is. This self-fashioning, achieved deliberately and according to a rule, must now begin somewhere and somewhen in space and time, so that a second principal epoch, in which the human race develops freely and deliberately, would follow the first, when the development was not free. We are of the opinion that, with respect to time, this time is now, and that at present the race stands at the true midway point of its life on earth, between its two principal epochs. With respect to space, however, we believe that it falls first and foremost to the Germans to inaugurate the new age, as pioneers and exemplars for the rest of humanity.34

By focusing on the way in which philosophical knowledge creates an objective and universal form of both science and morality, Fichte links his German nationalist form of education to a world-historical mission of bringing humanity to a new stage of development. Fichte consequently links German national identity to a two-class conception of humanity that is the foundation for the moral superiority of a conception of humanity based on progress. While Fichte’s distinction between selfish and selfless actions has frequently been read as a justification for nationalist sacrifice,35 an alternative interpretation of this merging of the German people with a world-historical mission is that it demonstrates Fichte’s continuing cosmopolitan attitude and support for the advance of freedom.36 Fichte indeed demonstrates such a cosmopolitan attitude when he encourages the Germans to participate in this universal project, not as its particular carriers, but as one nation amongst many who have an equal claim to be pursuing this project. “Those who believe in spirituality and in the freedom of this spirituality, who desire the eternal progress of this spirituality through freedom—wherever they were born and whichever language they speak—are of our race, they belong to us and they will join with us.”37 However open this attitude might seem, the idea of world-historical progress contains within it the corollary of a hierarchy of cultures within the framework of such progress. Fichte accordingly links the world-historical progress in both knowledge and morality to a German national development, and his two-class conception of humanity leads to his description of the German nation as especially well suited to the world-historical mission he imagines: “In a word, we must acquire character; for to have character and to be German undoubtedly means the same, and in our language the thing has no special name precisely because it ought to go forth, without our knowledge and awareness [Besinnung], immediately from our being.”38 Because having character and being German mean the same thing, there seems to be for Fichte an objective basis for this connection,

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and he cites the lack of a special name in German as evidence for the innate tendency of character to go forth from German being. But to the extent that the moral superiority that places humans beyond self-interest would have to be a goal in any culture’s development, there should not be any particular link between Germanness and character. While his argument can be taken as an exhortation to the Germans, Fichte’s focus on the link between character and a particular action can also become the foundation for a hierarchical conception. To the extent that Fichte’s idea of Bildung contains this linking of morality with a particular culture’s development, it continues the two-class conception of humanity that he expresses in his critique of the feudal state. In his adumbration of his linguistic argument, Fichte justifies the elevation of the German nation above others with the argument that the German language is superior to other languages, specifically to French, in its ability to express supersensuous ideas and thus to pursue knowledge. According to Fichte, because the German language uses everyday, practical words as the building blocks for more abstract ideas, it is better able to establish the link between the world and universal laws. “With a view to depicting the particularity of the Germans, we have set forth the fundamental difference between them and the other peoples of the Teutonic descent, namely that the former remained in the uninterrupted flow of an original language [Ursprache] which has developed continuously out of the actual life of the nation, whereas the latter adopted a foreign language which under their influence has become dead.”39 As with the two classes of humans, Fichte divides language into living languages like German, in which everyday words form the basis for more abstract words, and dead languages like French, in which the expressions for abstract ideas have been taken over from Latin and the original Germanic expressions for everyday objects are cut off from the language. He then imputes to the living languages the ability to create true poetry and philosophy as well as to enable a people to reach the highest levels of development through education.40 As with the argument about classes of humans, Fichte’s pronouncements about language are not based on observations or experiments but on a set of philosophical arguments about the practical consequences of different linguistic characteristics. In the case of language, he focuses on the role of an Ursprache, an original language, out of which a living language must develop without interruption if it is to maintain its efficacy for thought. Now, this living efficacy of thought is very much favoured, indeed even made necessary, if the thinking be only of the proper depth and strength—by thinking and designating in a living language. In a living language the sign itself is immediately alive and sensuous, representing anew the whole of its own life and thus taking hold of the same and intervening in it. To the possessor of such a language the spirit speaks directly, and reveals itself to him as one man

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to another. By contrast, the sign of a dead language does not immediately stimulate anything; to enter the living stream of the sign one must first recapitulate historical knowledge of an extinct world and transport oneself into a foreign mode of thought.41

The opposition between the mode of understanding of a living and a dead language is paradigmatic for Fichte’s approach to Bildung. In a living language, the sign is “immediately alive and sensuous,” and this immediacy of the sign means in the first place that the initial sensuous meaning of a word becomes determining for the supersensuous meaning that arises out of it. Fichte uses the example of the opposition between two words with the same meaning of humanity: Menschlichkeit and Humanität. He differentiates them based on the extent to which they are linked to an original German language or borrowed from Latin. “If instead of the word Humanität we had used the word Menschlichkeit, as the former must literally be translated, then the German would have understood us without need for further historical explanation.”42 Because Menschlichkeit arises out of Mensch (human), there is an immediate sensuous basis for Menschlichkeit, while the foreign word Humanität remains estranged from this sensuous foundation. According to this theory of language, the supersensuous meaning is already present in the initial sensuous meaning of a word, and the development of thought proceeds as an unfolding of the initial possibilities already embedded in the Ursprache, the original language.43 Such an approach to thought and thus of Bildung limits thought to a single predetermined development, as if the progress of Bildung is part of a predictable course that is on the one hand philosophically determined and on the other hand established by the general progress of the nation, within which individuals exist as free only insofar as they follow the predetermined path without compulsion. The free development of the individual naturally leads in all cases to the single path of Bildung because the entire development is already predetermined from the beginning. By contrast, the use of the foreign word Humanität “must first recapitulate historical knowledge of an extinct world and transport oneself into a foreign mode of thought.” Because it is derived from a Latin word, Humanität cannot profit from the direct sensuous tie to Mensch and must instead depend on an historical knowledge of the extinct world of the Romans and create a tie to the foreign mode of thought. Fichte sees a fundamental deficiency in this mode of thought because it is estranged from the initial sensuous image. Rather than progressing from a sensuous image, thought in this case must rely on an historical method that seeks to interpret the past, which for Fichte means that the bond will always be impossible to reliably establish in the “neo-Latin” languages that have accepted Latin terms for abstract concepts. He concludes that “the Germans still speak a living language and have done so ever since it first streamed forth from nature, whereas the other Teutonic tribes speak a language that stirs only on the surface yet is dead at the root.”44 While Fichte

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clearly rejects any racial definition of the German people,45 the distinction between living and dead languages is already sufficient to justify a questionable and dangerous hierarchy of cultures. But there is more at stake in his account of linguistic development. In rejecting the method of historical interpretation to arrive at concepts, Fichte displays a general antipathy to history as a source of knowledge. As a consequence, he maintains a view of language and knowledge as products of a development from an initial idea rather than as the result of an interpretive consideration of the past that can lead in a variety of possible directions. Fichte already develops this approach to language in his 1795 essay, “On the Linguistic Capacity and the Origin of Language,” in which he argues that language originates out of a human need to “discover rationality outside of himself [sic]” and to indicate thoughts to one another.46 From this initial premise, Fichte then outlines eine Geschichte der Sprache a priori (an a priori history of language),47 in which all languages follow the same path within a “natural development guided by reason.”48 In contrast to his insistence on the continuing vitality of the original language in Addresses to the German Nation, in this earlier essay Fichte presumes that “the primitive language [die rohe Natursprache] will gradually perish and be replaced by another which carries in itself not even the slightest trace of the former.”49 But he emphasizes in the 1795 essay that even in such cases where modern languages do not manifest the structures of the original language, they will have still gone through the same development as the others. The traces of that development are lost, though, because these languages have evolved beyond the original language. In contrast to Addresses to the German Nation, “On the Linguistic Capacity” does not differentiate between living and dead languages in discussing the way in which words for sensuous objects form the basis for supersensuous concepts.50 Yet, both essays project a single ideal development for language that arises out of the dictates of reason. There is a single development of language that is rationally determined, and there is no need to consider the concrete history of language. Fichte’s approach is determined by his conviction that language presupposes reason, and he insists that “language has been held to be much too important if one believed that without it no use of reason at all would have occurred.”51 Because language for Fichte presupposes reason,52 his approach contrasts with Johann Gottfried Herder’s discussion of the origin of language, in which language and reason are linked. Fichte’s argument is a response to Herder’s contention “that not even the least use of reason, not even the simplest distinct recognition, not the most primitive judgment of human reflection is possible without a distinguishing mark [Merkmal], for the difference between one and another can never be recognized through anything but a third. Precisely this third, this characteristic mark, becomes thus an inner characteristic word: so that language follows quite naturally from the initial act of reason.”53

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The difference between their two conceptions defines a fundamental dichotomy between two visions of Bildung. While Fichte imagines a predetermined path of Bildung that the pupil will inevitably discover through free activity, Herder’s linking of language and reason outlines a more open-ended development. Since every judgment must link one element with another and such a linking requires a third element that provides the motivation for the comparison, a distinguishing mark, or sign, is indispensable for the slightest use of reason. The origin of language is identical with the origin of reason for Herder, and reason consequently cannot provide any determination for the development of language. Instead, the invention of a sign, i.e. the coining of a word, becomes the key act that establishes the connection between the first and the second element that is required for the creation of meaning.54 Rather than being dependent on an original language, every development in language is equally original in that it establishes a new distinguishing mark that would be necessary for two elements to be linked to each other in a proposition. Every new insight is the result of the creative act by which two elements are brought together by means of a sign. This sign establishes the figure through which meaning appears. In this way, both language and reason come into being simultaneously. For Herder, reason is consequently both arbitrary and insightful in its development, and such is also the progress of education. In contrast to the open-endedness of Herder’s conception of Bildung, Fichte tries to create a more consistent moral order that can train citizens to work for the common good rather than for their own self-interest. Through his mode of pedagogy, students are to learn to love the intellectual activity that for Fichte should naturally lead to scientific truths and the political community that supports the nation. The result, however, is a conception of the nation that takes its particular historical development to be a universal one. Rather than defending a love for the nation that is grounded in tradition and history, Fichte’s conception of the German nation claims a rational validity. Fichte rejects the focus on the state and turns to the nation as the carrier of universality because it brings with it an affective and activist relationship to morality. In linking the nation to universality, however, Fichte also chooses a particular nation to be the one that is linked to his vision of the progress of humanity. As much as Fichte recognizes the centrality of the will for the stability of political order, the linking of a German national development to a universal one can result in a consideration of the German nation as the sole carrier of a universal law.

Bildung and the Nation-State While Fichte’s conception of Bildung was ultimately more successful in establishing parameters for the development of the German nation, the character of

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this success has borne out Herder’s sense of the unpredictability of reason and education. Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation did not have a significant impact during his lifetime and only achieved wider influence with the 1862 celebrations of his hundredth birthday in the midst of a wave of growing German nationalism.55 Heinrich von Treitschke established the canonical perspective on the meaning of Fichte’s work for German nationalism in an essay of this period. In recruiting Fichte for the project of promoting the establishment of a German nation-state, Treitschke is judicious in pointing out the positive aspects of Fichte’s approach while at the same time criticizing the more problematic aspects of his idealism. For Treitschke the most valuable aspect of Fichte’s ideas was the establishment of the goal of promoting the national will to create a unified state to replace the scattered principalities. “But this speaker to the German nation goes far beyond the academic specialists and the journalists when he announces with the boldness of a prophet the ethos of our national politics, when he preaches to the fragmented Germans the spirit of true love for the fatherland that is able, through and beyond death, to hate and to love.”56 The key to Fichte’s significance is his ability to create a consciousness of a German national identity that must be politically defended in order for German culture to continue in to the future. As Treitschke perceived, such a notion of German culture would be dependent on a project of Bildung that would remove individuals from their loyalty to their families in order to inculcate in them a higher loyalty to the nation. Treitschke insightfully interprets Fichte’s attack on self-interest as in fact an attack on the family and dynastic loyalties that had been the primary drivers of politics and individual meaning. “A new lineage must be nurtured, far from the vulgarity of the epoch, torn away from the squalidness of family life, strengthened into a complete rejection of selfinterest through Bildung, which should not be a possession but a component of the individual person.”57 If Treitschke describes the key political meaning of Fichte’s work as a shifting of political loyalties away from family and dynasty and toward a republican national community, “a ‘republic of Germans without princes and nobility,’”58 he also recognizes the importance of Bildung for this project and the need to construct a national culture that includes figures such as Luther, Kant, and Fichte in a pantheon of the German tradition. Accordingly, Treitschke rejects Fichte’s idealism as a model for Bildung that “sought to block the youth from any contact with the idea-less but in truth would have eradicated any true academic freedom.”59 In this way Treitschke rejects Fichte’s philosophical idealism while praising the way in which Fichte also establishes an interpretation of history that constructs a German tradition. At the same time, Treitschke foregrounds the cosmopolitan aspect of Fichte’s Addresses while criticizing the arguments for the inherent superiority of the German nation. Rather than pleading for an essential Germanness that is to be set higher than other nations, he foregrounds the way in which the pro-

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motion of the German nation should fit within a more general project of support for the equality of all humans: “let us raise ourselves up on Fichte’s vision that in Germany a land will proceed out of the cultivation of personal freedom and the establishment of a true land of law, grounded on the equality of all those who carry a human visage. Such would truly be the image of the most modest and justified expectations of the Germans.”60 In laying out this cosmopolitan vision of Germany taking its rightful place amongst other nations on a basis of equality for all humans, Treitschke is then also careful to differentiate this approach from the arguments for German superiority that he also finds in Fichte’s text. “In order for the Bildung of humanity to be maintained, this nation must save itself, as the original people of humanity due to the originality of its character and language. Let us strictly suppress the satisfied smile of our superior knowledge. For without such presumption our people had never found the courage of revolt against the superior power.”61 In summing up in the first sentence Fichte’s argument about the superiority of the German character and language, Treitschke counsels the reader in the second sentence to show some understanding for Fichte’s exaggerations, as such hyperbole was perhaps necessary in order to encourage the Germans to rise up against the French oppressors. Treitschke points out Fichte’s accomplishments as well as his failings, and in doing so he lays out a historical argument for Bildung that contrasts with Fichte’s philosophical one, while also affirming Fichte’s importance for laying the groundwork for the historical establishment of an idea of German national culture and identity. Treitschke recognized that the establishment of a German nation-state would be the condition for the entrance of Germany into global politics. This goal was not simply the result of an ideological impulse but was part of a broader modern historical development. As Ernest Gellner has argued,62 the nation-state has become the dominant political form because its structures are the ones that best fit the needs of industrial capitalism, the success of which has been the foundation for economic, political, and military power in the modern world. Industrial capitalism requires atomized individuals that can be easily shifted around an advanced economy according to the needs of a continual growth model. Consequently, industrial capitalism could not develop until people could be separated from their traditional rural networks and made into individuals who could be more easily moved around geographically as well as functionally. In the first place, the need to shift people geographically meant that the autonomy and self-sufficiency of rural enclaves had to be broken down so that people no longer stayed their whole lives in small, local communities. Instead, these self-sufficient economies had to be replaced by ones in which trade and production were integrated into larger systems of circulation. In the second place, industrial capitalism’s model of continual growth required a constant transformation of old ways of doing work. This shifting set of needs in a

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work force necessitated a new kind of education in which the medieval model of a separation of a learned clerical elite from a mass of illiterate peasants would no longer suffice. Whereas agricultural society was best served by an apprenticeship model of education into very specific skills early on in life, industrial capitalism would require a long period of primary and secondary schooling followed by a comparatively short period of training into the specific kind of tasks to be done at a job. As it happened, these two exigencies of industrial capitalism—the breakdown of the autonomy of local agricultural subsistence economies and the development of a broadly educated workforce—were also the two main achievements of the development of a nationalist rather than a feudal organization of culture. Gellner argues that nationalism has been selected for as the key form of ideology for the modern world because of its necessity for industrial capitalism. There have been advantages that have accrued to any society that has been able to develop the kind of unified culture that could create this large mass of fungible workers. But once society has developed in this direction, nationalism becomes a recurring structure because the sources of meaning for individual identity are no longer organized locally but around nationalist ideas that develop according to the definitions of culture transmitted by a system of universal public education. This functionalist argument does not explain the genesis of nationalism so much as the reasons for nationalism’s success as a political structure. That is, Gellner does not delve into the specific historical sequence of events that led to the development of a nationalist organization of culture in Germany or any other state. Instead, he lays out the reasons why any country that developed nationalist structures would subsequently be in a position to reap rewards from these structures because they supported the development of industrial capitalism. Similar to the way biologists talk about natural selection, he separates the question of the historical genesis of a structure such as nationalism from the question of the functional utility of that structure and focuses on the latter. Because nationalism is selected for as a form of political identity that supports capitalist growth, once nationalism develops, for whatever reason, it will gradually spread to other areas due to its success in serving the needs of industrial capitalism, which in turn provides the basis for modern military and political power. If the economic and political advantages of a national culture tended to reward successful nationalist movements in the nineteenth century, these advantages of a homogeneous national culture organized within a nation-state are still with us today. Accordingly, today’s nationalist movements must be seen as just the most recent emergence of a cultural phenomenon that is endemic to industrial capitalism and will always continue to reappear, and it would make no sense to simply condemn and suppress nationalism. Rather, the current political situation requires us to embrace German nationalism in order to then re-interpret it in ways that create a unity of German national identity

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rather than divisions. Accordingly, as the form of education suited to building national identity, Bildung will continue to remain relevant as the framework for humanities education.

Interpreting Fichte in the Nazi Period While the situation of Bildung is inextricable from the project of national identity, this project also can be understood in a variety of ways. In Germany, the conflict between conceptions of Bildung has been waged through a variety of interpretations of Fichte’s notions. While some of the recent interpretations have returned to his philosophical notion of Bildung, Treitschke expounds the historical approach to Bildung that emphasizes the judicious interpretation of the past in a way that accords with present concerns. Yet, there are no moral guarantees in this method. Some examples of Fichte interpretation during the Nazi period illustrate the complexities. During the Nazi period, the philosopher Alfred Baeumler developed an interpretation of Fichte’s notion of Bildung that emphasized the move toward a racist theory of culture, foregrounding precisely those Fichtean ideas that Treitschke sought to suppress: idealism, superiority of German character, and voluntarism. Fichte’s philosophy is heroic—not only because it contains such passages that depict the image of the heroic being, but because it sketches out the image of the world from the perspective of the heroic being. His philosophy of the “I” is the grand attempt to establish the concept of the human, independent of all dogmatics of being. The world and its logos are not primary. Rather the primary is the creative will. This is the world. Truth does not exist in the knowledge of what exists but only in the knowledge of what should become eternal through us and our freedom.63

Bauemler focuses on Fichte’s linking of knowledge and will as well as his emphasis on freedom of the individual in order to develop a notion of Bildung that foregrounds the free personality. This concept describes the individual’s will as more important than law and order. “The German thinker cannot speak of law and order without speaking about the free personality. For him the word order loses all meaning as soon as the possibility is allowed that there might be an order in itself—which would mean in the end the priority of Logos before Ethos -, that it would be possible therefore in case of need to abstract from freedom and personality.”64 Baeumler is justified in emphasizing the importance of freedom and personality in the development of order to the extent that Fichte indeed emphasizes freedom of the individual and the importance of the will in his theory of Bildung. Fichte argues, as we have seen, that the development of

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individual creativity will lead to the forming of the world rather than a copying of it. At the same time, Bauemler certainly takes Fichte’s ideas in a specific direction by emphasizing personality. Baeumler recognizes the way in which he is fitting Fichte’s idealism into a National Socialist interpretation, but also sees this as a justified historical linkage. As three high points, reformation, idealism, and National Socialism [Nazism] follow upon each other. No one can dissolve this destined linkage any longer. Luther spoke of belief and taught the independence of the faithful soul from every priestly work, opus operatum. The idealist spoke of freedom and meant the independence of the “I” from every natural and spiritual compulsion. The National Socialist however says personality and raises up the banner of the free personality against the resistance of the world. Freedom in the sense of idealism is something other than the justification through faith, and personality in the sense of National Socialism is something other than the absolute “I” of the idealists. But as different as these expressions of the Teutonic substance in the German soul are from each other, they are tied together by a common trait. These events have a sort of family resemblance to each other.65

In constructing a history that links Luther to Fichte to the Nazis, Baeumler uses a similar method as Treitschke in that they both attempt to establish an historical development by selecting out elements that they would like to emphasize. Rather than seeing a philosophical necessity in the development, Baeumler speaks of a family resemblance that links the three stages of a German movement toward National Socialism, which requires a willful interpretation in order to crystallize into his conception of German history. Consequently, Baeumler participates in the process of Bildung to the extent that his interpretation depends as much as Treitschke’s on a willful selection from Fichte’s ideas in order to establish a vision that links Baeumler’s present with an image of Fichte’s meaning. While it would be incorrect to treat Baeumler’s interpretation as a falsification, it is also clear that it would be equally misleading to take his interpretation to be the correct one, thereby condemning Fichte’s ideas as necessarily complicit in promoting a National Socialist (Nazi) approach to Bildung. But if Fichte’s significance is not fixed but will depend on the shifting interpretations of later critics, his philosophical approach to Bildung would need to be revised to move toward a historical perspective in which Bildung involves not the unfolding of knowledge and reason, but rather the struggle of competing interpretations of the past. In this case, the opposition to the Nazi reading of Fichte and Bildung would have to depend on the establishment of an alternative interpretation. Ernst Bloch responds directly to the Nazi approach by insisting in a 1943 essay that the Nazis have misread Fichte to the extent that they use his work as a justification for a nationalism that sets Germans above other peoples. Bloch argues, “Fichte began as cosmopolitan and never stopped being such in his final will

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and purpose.”66 He interprets Fichte’s nationalism as part of a broader cosmopolitan project in which “the nation stands as a middle link between individual and humanity. The latter is manifestly concretized in the nation but is thereby in no sense given up.”67 Bloch relativizes the passages where Fichte seems to set German national character above all others by arguing, like Treitschke and in reference to him, that Fichte was in a situation in which a weak German national consciousness needed to be encouraged.68 More importantly, Bloch points out that Fichte was not trying to defend German national character itself so much as he was attempting to establish an ideal vision of what this character should become as a moral task.69 In fitting Fichte’s nationalism within this broader moral vision, Bloch returns to Fichte’s philosophical approach to history as the development of a rational idea. “Fichte’s Germany refers to—corresponding exactly to his ‘practical science of knowledge’ (‘The things are in themselves that which we should morally make of them.’)—an enjoined humanization of inner and outer nature and all of their reciprocal relationships. That is for him the progressive self-legitimating overcoming of the Not-I [Nicht-Ich] by the ethical Rational-I [Vernunft-Ich]. So, and only so, does Fichte bring the cause and honor of the Germans together with the cause of the Humanity-I [Menschheits-Ich].”70 Bloch fits Fichte’s nationalism into his moral philosophy by pointing out the way in which German character is meant to follow the path of the subject toward a cosmopolitan subjectivity that is held to be the culmination of a rational development. By invoking the philosophical rationality of Fichte’s approach, Bloch seeks to reduce the historical contingency of German development and imagine the true path of Fichte’s ideas as one that would move toward a humanist and socialist reality: “The German idea signified for Fichte solely morality and socialism.”71 In this way, Bloch argues that the Nazi interpretation of Fichte was in fact a falsification and that there is a progress toward a particular socialist future that would be part of a rational development of human history into the future.72 In doing so, Bloch cites Fichte’s critique of self-interest as the primary enemy: “Fichte’s addresses hold the era of self-interest and sinfulness to have exhausted themselves on their own, and they see a higher social impulse arising along with his time.”73 If Treitschke treated the critique of self-interest to be in fact a way of criticizing family and dynastic loyalties, Bloch’s return to Fichte’s moralizing perspective envisions a world of good and evil that establishes a universal measure for historical development. Such a view overlooks the ways in which even the Nazi world view held on to a view of sacrifice for the collective as an essential aspect of its ideology, just as Fichte praises the sacrifice of the individual for the nation as a necessary element of a moral subject.74 Bloch’s reading of human history as part of a progressive advance of law, reason, and truth sets up Bildung as a philosophical rather than a historical project, implying, like Fichte, a hierarchy amongst human cultures.75 Following Fichte in

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this interpretation of Bildung as a form of progress toward reason, Bloch’s approach must read the contingency that surrounds the process of interpretation as falsification in order to establish his own cosmopolitan socialist perspective as the only true one. Not only does this approach to Bildung have to ignore the shifting interpretations of Fichte’s ideas over the past two hundred years as perversions of the so-called one true interpretation, but also, in so doing, it must seek to establish the socialist vision of society as definitive while suppressing any other organizations of society. In attempting to return to Fichte’s reconciliation of freedom with constraint in the notion of Bildung, Bloch’s approach risks reestablishing a hierarchy based on adherence to socialism.

The Future of Bildung Our understanding of Bildung will have to accept both its inextricability from national culture and the contingency and freedom that characterize its interpretive form of development. The economic and political forces that have established the nation-state continue to be dominant today, and they are ultimately what make Bildung relevant as the form in which culture develops in modern societies. The post–World War II suppression of German national identity, necessary though it was, had to be a temporary situation, and the return to nationalism provides an opportunity to reinterpret German nationalism in a way that can overcome the Nazi legacy. Rather than equating German nationalism with a resurgence of Nazism and thus pushing nationalism down that road, part of the project of Bildung for Germany is to recover a pre-Nazi or anti-Nazi notion of nationalism that can provide alternative models for imagining German identity. One way of affirming German national identity is to argue that we should be moving beyond nationalism to a form of cosmopolitanism in which the circulation of people could go on at a global level rather than a national one, and in which the educational system should be accordingly organized around world culture rather than national culture. The difficulty with the creation of a world culture of cosmopolitanism is that the issue of love and the will that Fichte theorized in fact still remain relevant for the way in which collective identity can be maintained. There are only specific and limited possibilities for development at any moment, just as the development of individual personality does not make large jumps but instead follows trajectories that are available to individuals based on the current choices they make in light of past history. A cultural order cannot be shaped according to a rational design method but by responding to the directions that are already inherent to a culture at a particular time and place. These directions are dependent on the interpretation of the past. The process of Bildung would consequently require the analysis of the specific his-

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tory of a collective that sees itself as such in order to evaluate the interpretive options that are available. To the extent that individual and collective identity are built on specific histories, a world culture would be inherently problematic, since it would have to suppress such histories. A world culture would require a homogenization that denies the inherent diversity and creativity of the world’s cultures. To imagine a unified world culture would ultimately require the imposition of a single perspective. An alternative cosmopolitan approach would be to develop a constitutional patriotism that links German identity with liberalism as opposed to a German nationalism that seeks to preserve a German ethnic identity. Historically, the distinction between the two options has correlated with our understanding of the difference between the development of French nationalism dedicated to the rights of man as opposed to German nationalism grounded in ethnic identity, with the implication that the French model is more supportive of liberal and cosmopolitan values. But as Alasdair Macintyre has argued, both of these modes of national culture have their own specific dangers, leading to a fundamental quandary in deciding on a cultural basis for political order. While ethnically based nationalism runs the constant moral danger that one would sacrifice the good of humanity for the good of the nation, the problem with an impartial and impersonal sort of liberal culture is that it tends to dissolve the bonds of loyalty that are essential to individual meaning in life, which cannot be contained within oneself but must include an understanding of the larger narrative of one’s country as a place of moral responsibility. As Macintyre writes, A central contention of the morality of patriotism is that I will obliterate and lose a central dimension of the moral life if I do not understand the enacted narrative of my own individual life as embedded in the history of my country. For if I do not so understand it I will not understand what I owe to others or what others owe to me, for what crimes of my nation I am bound to make reparation, for what benefits to my nation I am bound to feel gratitude. Understanding what is owed to and by me and understanding the history of the communities of which I am a part is on this view one and the same thing.76

For Germany in particular the dissolution of German ethnic identity within a larger liberal cosmopolitanism would deemphasize German culture and history, with all its triumphs and calamities, leading to a dissipation of the specific moral identity and attendant responsibilities of being German. The maintenance of a German national identity coincides with a project of collective moral responsibility, and the dissolution of national identity within a broader constitutional patriotism would essentially be a ducking of that responsibility. Bildung as a project of national self-understanding would involve the continual interpretation of the past so as to constitute a collective history in a way that affirms such moral responsibility. As a process that is rooted in a freedom

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of interpretation on both the individual and collective level, there would be no guarantees about the moral outcomes. But the embrace of Bildung as a collective national project would ensure that the process is taken seriously and with a realization of the extent to which interpretive struggles about the past have serious consequences for moral and political decision-making in the present and the future. The interpretation of Fichte’s work has certainly been a key aspect of that process in Germany over the past two centuries—not so much as a model to be realized, but rather as a puzzle with which to engage. David Tse-chien Pan teaches at the University of California, Irvine, in the department of European languages and studies and serves as the editor of Telos. He is the author of Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism and Sacrifice in the Modern World: On the Particularity and Generality of Nazi Myth.

Notes 1. Horlacher, Educated Subject, 1–3; Siljander, Theories of Bildung, 2; Horkheimer, “Begriff der Bildung,” 14–15. 2. Horlacher, Educated Subject, 8, 12–15; Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur, 103–7. 3. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 47–53; Kant, “Kritik der praktischen Vernunft,“ 33–39. 4. Kant, Pädagogik, 444. See Kivelä, “From Immanuel Kant,” 63–68, for a description of Kant’s approach to education. 5. Pan, “Kant on Sacrifice,” 94–96. 6. Fichte, Addresses, 23; Fichte, Reden, 564. 7. Fichte, Addresses, 23; Fichte, Reden, 564. 8. Fichte, Addresses, 23–24; Fichte, Reden, 565. 9. On this point, see James, Fichte’s Republic, 150. 10. Fichte, Addresses, 28; Fichte, Reden, 571–72. 11. Fichte, Addresses, 26; Fichte, Reden, 568–69. 12. Fichte, Addresses, 26; Fichte, Reden, 569. 13. Fichte, Addresses, 26; Fichte, Reden, 568–69. 14. See James, Fichte’s Republic, 160–62. 15. Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur, 123. 16. Fichte, Addresses, 24; Fichte, Reden, 566. 17. Fichte, Addresses, 30; Fichte, Reden, 574. 18. Fichte, Addresses, 31; Fichte, Reden, 575–76. 19. James, Fichte’s Republic, 155–56. 20. Fichte, Addresses, 25; Fichte, Reden, 567–68. 21. Fichte, Addresses, 33; Fichte, Reden, 578. 22. Fichte, Addresses, 24; Fichte, Reden, 566. 23. Fichte, Addresses, 14–15; Fichte, Reden, 553–54. 24. Fichte, Addresses, 25; Fichte, Reden, 566–67. 25. Fichte, Addresses, 19; Fichte, Reden, 559.

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.



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Fichte, Addresses, 107; Fichte, Reden, 672–73. Fichte, Addresses, 111; Fichte, Reden, 677–78. Fichte, Addresses, 39; Fichte, Reden, 585. Kant, Pädagogik, 442. Fichte, Addresses, 39–40; Fichte, Reden, 585–86. Fichte, Addresses, 40; Fichte, Reden, 586. Fichte, Addresses, 41; Fichte, Reden, 588. Fichte, Addresses, 96; Fichte, Reden, 659. Fichte, Addresses, 42–43. Fichte, Reden, 589–90. Aichele, “Singend sterben,” 624–29. Becker, Fichtes Idee, 360–62; Bloch, Politische Messungen, 300. Fichte, Addresses, 97; Fichte, Reden, 660. Fichte, Addresses, 155; Fichte, Reden, 734. Fichte, Addresses, 60; Fichte, Reden, 612. Fichte, Addresses, 53–59. Fichte, Reden, 603–12. Fichte, Addresses, 63. Fichte, Reden, 616. Fichte, Addresses, 55; Fichte, Reden, 606. David Martyn explains many of the inconsistencies of Fichte’s account. Martyn, “Borrowed Fatherland,” 305–13. Fichte, Addresses, 58; Fichte, Reden, 609. Fichte, Addresses, 49; Fichte, Reden, 597. Both Etienne Balibar and Marc Redfield emphasize that Fichte rejects a racial account of German character. Balibar, “Fichte,” 76–77; Redfield, “Imagi-Nation,” 75. Fichte, “On the Linguistic Capacity,” 124; Fichte, “Von der Sprachfähigkeit,” 309. Surber reads this argument about the desire to communicate as the impetus for the origin of language as Fichte’s establishment of a link between the origin of language and democratic processes. Surber, Language and German Idealism, 62. See also Fiala, “Fichte and the Ursprache,” 186. Fichte, “On the Linguistic Capacity,” 121; Fichte, “Von der Sprachfähigkeit,” 304. Fichte, “On the Linguistic Capacity,” 143; Fichte, “Von der Sprachfähigkeit,” 339. Fichte, “On the Linguistic Capacity,” 144; Fichte, “Von der Sprachfähigkeit,” 340. See also Fiala, “Fichte and the Ursprache,” 186–87. Fichte, “On the Linguistic Capacity,” 133–34; Fichte, “Von der Sprachfähigkeit,” 323– 24. See Fiala, “Fichte and the Ursprache,” 187. Fichte, “On the Linguistic Capacity,” 124, fn *; Fichte, “Von der Sprachfähigkeit,” 341, Anmerkung (footnote) *. Surber, Language and German Idealism, 50–51. Herder, Essay, 120; Herder, Abhandlung, 726. Pan, “J.G. Herder,” 2–5. Engelbrecht, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 128–32, 160–76. Treitschke, “Fichte und die nationale Idee,” 149–50, my translations. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 139. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 8–37. Baeumler, “Fichte und wir,” 191–92, my translations.

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64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

Ibid., 193–94. Ibid., 187–88. Bloch, “Fichtes Reden,” 301; my translations. Ibid., 303. Ibid., 306–7. Ibid., 308. Ibid., 308. Ibid., 309. Ibid., 311. Ibid., 310. See Pan, Sacrifice in the Modern World,113–43. Bloch, “Fichtes Reden,” 312. MacIntyre, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” 224–25.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Baeumler, Alfred. “Fichte und wir.” In Bildung und Gemeinschaft, edited by Alfred Baeumler, 183–95. Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1942. Bloch, Ernst. “Fichtes Reden an die deutsche Nation.” In Politische Messungen, Pestzeit, Vormärz, edited by Ernst Bloch, 300–12. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Addresses to the German Nation. Edited by Gregory Moore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ———. “On the Linguistic Capacity and the Origin of Language.” In Surber, Language and German Idealism, 119–45. ———. Reden an die deutsche Nation (1808). In Sämmtliche Werke und Nachlass. Electronic Edition, edited by I. H. Fichte, Dritte Abtheilung 2, 541–788. Ed. I. H. Fichte. Berlin: Veit und comp., 1845–46. ———. “Von der Sprachfähigkeit und dem Ursprunge der Sprache.” In Sämmtliche Werke und Nachlass. Electronic Edition, edited by I. H. Fichte, Dritte Abtheilung 3, 301–22. Vermischte Aufsätze. Ed. I. H. Fichte. Berlin: Veit und comp., 1845–46. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache. In Werke in zehn Bänden, vol. 1: Frühe Schriften 1764–1772, edited by Ulrich Gaier, 697–810. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985. ———. Essay on the Origin of Language. In On the Origin of Language, edited by JeanJacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder, 85–166. Translated by John H. Moran and Alexander Gode. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002. ———. “Kritik der praktischen Vernunft.” In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, Königliche Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften. ———. Pädagogik. In Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 9, Logik, Physiche Geographie, Pädagogik, 441–56. Kants Gesammelte Schriften. New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1902. Treitschke, Heinrich von. “Fichte und die nationale Idee.” In Historische und Politische Aufsätze, vornehmlich zur neuesten deutschen Geschichte, 3rd ed., 123–52. Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1867.

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Secondary Sources Aichele, Alexander. “Singend sterben—mit Fichte nach Langemarck: Authentischer Fichteanismus im Ersten Weltkrieg.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 81, no. 4 (2007): 618–37. Balibar, Etienne. “Fichte and the Internal Border: On Addresses to the German Nation.” In Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, edited by Etienne Balibar, 61–84. Translated by James Swenson. New York: Routledge, 1994. Becker, Hans-Joachim. Fichtes Idee der Nation und das Judentum: Den vergessenen Generationen der jüdischen Fichte-Rezeption. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Bollenbeck, Georg. Bildung und Kultur: Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Deutungsmusters. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1994. Engelbrecht, H. C. Johann Gottlieb Fichte: A Study of His Political Writings with Special Reference to His Nationalism. New York: AMS Press, 1968 [1933]. Fiala, Andrew. “Fichte and the Ursprache.” In After Jena: New Essays on Fichte’s Later Philosophy, edited by Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore, 183–97. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008. Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. 2nd ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Horkheimer, Max. “Begriff der Bildung.” In Gegenwärtige Probleme der Universität, edited by Max Horkheimer, 14–23. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1953. Horlacher, Rebekka. The Educated Subject and the German Concept of Bildung: A Comparative Cultural History. New York: Routledge, 2016. James, David. Fichte’s Republic: Idealism, History and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Kivelä, Ari. “From Immanuel Kant to Johann Gottlieb Fichte—Concept of Education and German Idealism.” In Siljander, Kivelä, and Sutinen, Theories of Bildung, 59–86. Macintyre, Alasdair. “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” In Theorizing Citizenship, edited by Ronald Beiner, 209–28. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995. Martyn, David. “Borrowed Fatherland: Nationalism and Language Purism in Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation.” Germanic Review 72, no. 4 (1997): 303–15. Pan, David. “J.G. Herder, the Origin of Language, and the Possibility of Transcultural Narrative.” Language and Intercultural Communication 4, nos. 1–2 (2004): 1–10. ———. “Kant on Sacrifice and Morality.” In Mimesis and Sacrifice: Applying Girard’s Mimetic Theory Across the Disciplines, edited by Marcia Pally, 90–102. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. ———. Sacrifice in the Modern World: On the Particularity and Generality of Nazi Myth. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012. Redfield, Marc. “Imagi-Nation: The Imagined Community and the Aesthetics of Mourning.” Diacritics 29, no. 4 (1999): 58–83. Siljander, Pauli, Ari Kivelä, and Ari Sutinen, eds. Theories of Bildung and Growth: Connections and Controversies Between Continental Educational Thinking and American Pragmatism. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2012. Surber, Jere Paul. Language and German Idealism: Fichte’s Linguistic Philosophy. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996.

CHAPTER 3



Becoming Solid Bildung and Storage Media in Moritz’s and Goethe’s Italian Travelogues SEAN FRANZEL

A

midst his first weeks in Rome, after a day of visiting historic monuments that dominate a city in which “there is nothing small” and all traces of antiquity partake of “general grandeur,” Goethe writes, “No one can take a serious look around this city, if he has eyes to see, without becoming solid, without forming a concept of solidity that had never before been more vivid to him.”1 Here Goethe initiates a remarkable thought experiment, proposing first, through the metaphor of becoming solid, that experiencing the monuments of the past imparts something of their lithic solidity to the viewer and thus occasions a physical transformation of the self. In the next clause, however, Goethe shifts from the level of the body to that of the conceptual imagination, proposing that such seeing compels the self to grasp a most lively and intuitive concept of solidity. Goethe’s careful, yet ambiguous, phrasing distinguishes two distinct processes of transformation (one bodily and one intellectual) and implies that these processes are connected and even interdependent, but he refrains from explicitly establishing a relation of direct causality. Is the mention of conceptual transformation a gloss or reformulation of becoming solid, or is the notion of physical transformation simply a figurative expression describing a shift in consciousness? What does it really mean to become solid, to have an individual subject take on certain characteristics of antique monuments? This tenuous, yet integral relationship between embodied, material practices and imaginative work—between becoming solid and thinking solidity—is at the heart of the idea of Bildung articulated by travelers in Italy such as Goethe and Karl Philipp Moritz, and this relationship has remained to this day a point of contention among scholars seeking to describe the concept of Bildung.

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The interplay between embodied form-giving and imaginary, even ideological, thinking is inherent in the very term “Bildung” and its late eighteenthcentury rise to prominence. On the one hand, the concept was commonly used to describe the organic growth of natural forms, including the human body.2 Analogously, the term could also describe the creation or emergence of cultural forms, including works of art and more generally the self-expression of historical cultures.3 This expansive idea of Bildung as a principle of both manufactured and natural formation encourages comparison between different material structures and media, a type of analogical thinking that is evident in Goethe’s likening of architectural structures to his own body as something capable of solidification. On the other hand, Bildung has also commonly referred to an ideal or utopic type of particularly modern education, implying the development of a certain level of cultural and historical consciousness. Critics of the concept have since historicized Bildung as a hegemonic discourse of cultural elites by highlighting the intellectual and/or imaginary operations involved in being gebildet (educated). The fetishization of certain artworks and an inflated sense of national calling, for example, have been viewed as part of the ideological repertoire of the self-satisfied German Bildungsbürgertum of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This fictional or self-deceptive inflection of Bildung certainly figures in Goethe’s conceit that he might attain monumental greatness through feats of aesthetic appreciation. Thorny questions as to the precise relationship between the material and the ideological are thus inherent to configurations of Bildung. In this chapter, rather than coming down wholly on one side or the other—viewing Bildung solely as shorthand for specific material practices, or as nothing but a figment of the cultural imagination—I read material and imaginary structures as mutually informing each other. Here I draw on Roger Chartier’s call not to “separate the analysis of symbolic meanings from that of the material forms by which they are transmitted,”4 as well the work of Daniel Purdy and others on discourses of Bildung that emerge out of the subject’s mimetic encounter with material objects—where individuals describe themselves as buildings, monuments, or statues.5 To be sure, parsing the effects of material practices on concepts of selfhood is especially complicated in the cases of the travel writings of Moritz and Goethe, whose accounts of their personal transformations abound with elaborate analogies of the self to specific media ensembles. The notion of becoming solid is quite telling in this regard, for Goethe asserts both that encounters with monuments as material artifacts shape individual viewers, and that this formative process also remains figural in some essential way. This chapter focuses on certain techniques of storage and inscription in which Goethe and Moritz are engaged as travelers, antiquarians, spectators, and writers.6 Models of medial storage have a long history, going back to the

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memory techniques of antiquity and leading up to current media theory. In the case of writings about travel in Italy, such models pertain to experiences of archives of varying levels of stability and varying levels of concreteness and materiality. Moritz and Goethe persistently return to the contrast between the individual’s own fleeting experiences and the permanence of ancient artifacts and monuments. This tension between permanence and impermanence, monumentality and ephemerality, informs these thinkers’ explorations of medial processes that store various forms of experience, meaning, and information as well as of the models of embodied memory that these processes make manifest. Moritz and Goethe arrive at new conceptions of the self or subject through the comparison of their own writing to a variety of art objects, built structures, written materials, and other cultural techniques. Questions of storage and archiving have figured prominently in recent theoretical diagnoses of Bildung as a defining feature of the age of Goethe, questions that thereby take up the vexed relationship between material and conceptual processes at the heart of this term. Siegrid Weigel, for example, argues that Bildung is an expressly intellectual activity, defining it as the creation of what she calls an imaginary archive. Glossing Goethe’s famous vision of the genesis of the Veronese amphitheater in the Italian Journey, she writes, “[One] might describe this scene as the establishment of a structure of the imaginary in which everything that is heterogenous and corporeal [alles Heterogene und Leibliche] is transformed into a unified image, or an image of unity, thereby first creating the precondition for an imaginary archive for ideas and ideologies.”7 Presumably this expressly imaginary archive institutes familiar concepts such as unity and totality, the autonomous work of art and its standing vis-à-vis natural forms, the Volk (people) and the political body, and more. For Weigel, Bildung is the establishment of a metaphorical space of cognition and the ability to manipulate the key terms that are archived therein across a range of acts of historical, institutional, aesthetic, and political interpretation. Though Weigel’s notion of the imaginary archive is compelling and useful, her emphasis on the imaginary is symptomatic of recent theoretical accounts of the period that account for the medial filiations of the aesthetic imagination first and foremost in terms of the production of virtual or figural images. This is evident in the work of Friedrich Kittler, for example, who describes the foundational moment of discourse network 1800 as a kind of visual hallucination of presence and immediacy that elides or ignores the medial practices that enable such visualization. Similarly to Weigel, Kittler associates Romantic discourse overwhelmingly with a psychologized (Lacanian) model of the imaginary, such that embodied sensation leads to a process of inner visualization that leads to subject formation. Though Kittler does argue that discourse network 1800 inserts the subject into the flow of medial circulation—whereby the subject comes to be thought of as an integral part of the media environment and thereby

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comparable to other technical media—he suggests, at the same time, that the cumulative effect of the media environment is to transport the individual to imaginary inner scenes rather than to renew his awareness of the specific media ensembles at his disposal. Without wanting to downplay the role of the figural imagination, I do think that more light can be shed on how specific techniques of inscription, depositing, storage, and transmission shape concepts of Bildung. First, I am interested in Moritz’s and Goethe’s obsession with the “monument” as a medium that preserves and conveys something of antiquity to the present.8 Second, I examine the journals, letters, and drawings so eagerly produced by travelers: these are items that are avidly collected, rolled or folded up, sent home in packages, and published. The writing, filing, and posting home of written materials comes to be deeply implicated in the self-conception of Moritz and Goethe and in the formal structure of their travel writings.9 The many accounts of Italy by other authors—the travel guides used and emphatically discarded by Goethe and Moritz—likewise belong to this set of artifacts. Third, I argue that Moritz and Goethe see the individual self or subject itself as an archive, as a repository for Bilder (images and impressions) that are to coalesce into a Bild (cohesive form) and that persist after the trip’s end. In each case, Moritz and Goethe gravitate to ideas of ephemerality as shorthand for the challenge of achieving permanence, both on a personal, subjective level and on the level of historical culture (i.e., via the comparison of antiquity to modernity, of Italy to Germany, etc.). Though it is perhaps a banal observation that travelers in Italy enthusiastically sought to capture their experiences in writing and other forms of cataloguing, documentation, and memorialization, it is instructive to take a closer look at how these travelers conceived of their own processes of self-development in analogy to specific media ensembles.10 Building on Goethe’s suggestion that the self both does and does not really become a solid monument, I suggest that it is important to linger with the tenuous metaphoricity that is inherent in the complex relationship between material practices and concepts of personal transformation.

Moritz’s Monuments Moritz was an accomplished travel writer even before setting off for Italy. His 1783 English travelogue expands on the conventions of the sentimental journey made popular by Laurence Sterne, offering impressionistic accounts of bustling urban settings and countryside wanderings. With its many passages on modern Rome, Moritz’s Travels of a German in Italy in the Years 1786–1788, published in 1792–93, extends his interest in contemporary urban life, but also documents Moritz’s growing fascination with antiquity. Many critics identify

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a transition in Moritz’s thought, whereby his encounter with Greek and Roman antiquity helped him complete his influential vision of the self-standing, autonomous work of art.11 While building on suggestions that Moritz’s selfconception as subject increasingly draws on the model of the classical or classicizing work of art, I want to take a closer look at how specific features of the ancient monument, in particular, play this function. Moritz’s description of the cumulative process of individual Bildung relies heavily on the semantics of auffassen (conceiving), aufsparen (preserving), tragen (transmitting), einprägen (impressing), and zum Eigentum machen (appropriating), which he closely associates with the monument. Indeed, Moritz describes his reflection on past travels as an inscriptive process: stamping or imprinting something on himself, “mir ein bleibendes Bild einprägen” (impressing a lasting image upon myself ).12 Moritz sets off to Italy with the express task of processing his experiences in writing, and he was financed by the influential author and publisher Joachim Heinrich Campe, who offered advance payment for “the finished notebooks” that Moritz was to send back to Germany “month by month.”13 Intended to complement to his descriptions of Roman antiquities, which themselves would make up a separate, more scholarly work (what would ultimately become the Anthusa project), Moritz’s travelogue would hopefully become, as he put it in a letter to Campe, “a pendant to the Roman antiquities which I still have to work out, and, like these, a lasting work.”14 Though travelogues differ in style and genre from antiquarian works, Moritz hoped that his travel writings would achieve the lasting existence characteristic of Roman antiquities themselves, as well as of authoritative scholarly treatments of them. Indeed, the travelogue is to emerge from the process of learning from ancient monuments, and it is to attain some of their permanence, but it is positioned differently to history as well as to the contemporary moment. It was to be “a kind of deceptive composition . . . in which general observations would be made lively and intuitive at just the right place.”15 As a modern work, it would combine the general and the particular, the ancient and the modern, the universal as well as specifically current features of modern travel. In contrast to monuments of the past, which tend to be associated more with a kind of classicizing permanence and universal validity, Moritz positions his travelogue as an expressly mixed, serial composition that straddles the monumental and the momentary. Keenly aware, then, of the challenges faced by more subjective modes of literary and travel narrative, the Travels of a German foregrounds the difficulty of processing an overwhelming sequence of fleeting experiences and Bilder. This problem of Bilderflut (flood of images) and Bilderüberflut ( deluge of images) is deeply relevant for theories of perception and the imagination around 1800,16 but it is also part of a growing consciousness of medial oversaturation typical of tourism in Italy, as travelers depend on travel guides and many other written and visual representations of Italy while at the same time seeking out

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authentic, unmediated, or direct experiences of the many sights.17 At one point, Moritz describes feeling overwhelmed by images in terms of his imagination being weighted down, a decidedly negative inflection of Goethe’s “ethos of solidity”18: “I have lost myself in a sea of impressions, and my imagination sinks under their weight.”19 Feeling overburdened with impressions is characteristic of travel in Italy, but for Moritz it is part and parcel of modernity: earlier, he contrasts life in a medieval cloister to the clutter of the modern day, where “the imagination is filled and plugged full of a grotesque juxtaposition of countless images and evermore little images from a self-made world of ideas that there is no room left for a singular, great, sublime image from nature” (436).20 It is striking here that the “self-made world of ideas” belongs to the worldly, modern traveler rather than to the medieval cloister inhabitant with his limited geographical and medial horizon. For Moritz, medial oversaturation leads to a particular kind of modern, subjective confusion avoided by the selfless devotee to God. Moritz’s travelogue goes on to document his search for ways to counteract this image overload and make room for more meaningful, sublime images.21 As Moritz puts it, this entails attaining a proper point of reference that is capable of processing both experiences of art and the daily impressions of travel (442). It is striking, though, that Moritz returns to the fragmentary, impressionistic travelogue to do so, presenting his readers with a text that presents its reader with a “many faceted  .  .  .  mosaic-stone like” image.22 Flirting with the danger of the self-made world of ideas overtaking the form and content of his travelogue, Moritz sought ways to immunize himself from the deleterious influence of the ephemeral and the subjective as well as of the sights of Italy that have been overly processed by previous travelers, while making the most of their positive aspects. Moritz’s attempts to adequately process his impressions in writing build on his growing understanding of the many monuments that he encounters. Both he and Goethe apply this term rather expansively to a range of artworks, artifacts, and historical documents from antiquity, often using the term “Monumente” (monument) synonymously with others, including “Denkmal,” (monument) “Denkstein,” (monument stone) “Merkmal,” “Merkstein,” and “Merkzeichen.” (token)23 The interrelated semantics of these words brings together ideas of reflection and memorialization as well as the deictic activity of selecting a specific event or occasion out from myriad other events and directing attention to it as especially significant. Moritz thereby comes into view as an avid amateur antiquarian. Here he describes the encounters with ancient artifacts—“Merkmal[e] uralter Menschenbildung” (monuments of age-old human Bildung) (501)—in museum and library visits: “If anything designates a high level of development among humankind, it is the works that are left behind for posterity and that defy destruction. For when intellectual development decreases, one’s horizon becomes increasingly limited to the needs of the present day. . . . Huts emerge

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that do not last as long as their inhabitants. Nothing majestic or great emerges from the efforts to merely satisfy one’s daily, most pressing needs” (500). Juxtaposed with the topos of the fragile, impermanent hut, the monument preserves ideas, events, and achievements of the past, marking them as historically eventful. Here Bildung refers both to artistic form-giving and to a mode of cultural consciousness that carries with it specific experiences of historical time. The less a given culture fixates on the fleeting concerns of the present moment, the more that culture evidences Bildung, preserving traces of past greatness for future generations. Along with transmitting the most significant ideas, forms, and practices up into the present day, these artifacts likewise call to mind the temporal duration between past and present: “Gazing at thousand year-old ruins, it is as if the massive gap of time is brought into view, and the past manifests itself once more in the fog of the present, as if in a magic mirror” (498). Moritz applies this same dual temporal structure to painting and to other art forms: the painting brings a sight from fifteen hundred years ago to the eyes of the contemporary viewer, but his pleasure in viewing this sight is likewise enhanced by being aware of his temporal distance from the painting’s moment of creation.24 Moritz repeatedly emphasizes that acts of inscription enable this multilayered temporal experience: writing, carving, drawing, and painting record phenomena and deposit them with future generations. At one of his many visits to the Capitoline Museum (which he describes as “the largest collection of antiquities” in Rome), Moritz speaks glowingly of the museum’s collection of inscriptions, calling them “the actual holy place of history, where the same writing that was dug into bronze and marble still fully emerges alive before our eyes, and those bygone times enchant the soul anew” (600). Here the solidity of the medium that preserves these texts lends a sense of permanence to their informational content—the lack of deterioration of the very letters carved into metal and stone facilitates the very experience of “bygone times.” Moritz also finds this ability to archive and reproduce bygone times in painting, sculpture, literature, and other art forms, and large parts of the Travels of a German are taken up with descriptions of various works of art and antiquities. Moritz’s travelogue thereby shares much with other travel writings and guidebooks available at the time, as ekphrastic passages bleed into surveys of museums’ must-see collections. Since Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68), German paeans to the artistic genius of antiquity had privileged sculpture as the highest form of ancient art, and so it is not surprising that Moritz finds sculpture to be the medium best suited for preserving bygone times. However, it is a particular experience not limited to sculpture that facilitates one of Moritz’s most telling accounts of the capacity of antique artifacts to archive the past: Moritz recalls another visit to the Capitoline Museum where he contemplated the busts of ancient philosophers at the same time as reading Plutarch’s Lives. Using the conceit of leading

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his reader through the museum,25 Moritz testifies to encountering the spirit of these ancient thinkers “in the shifting features of the human face . . . upon which the traces of the all-enlivening intellect are imprinted in multiple ways” (644). The spirit leaves its imprint on the face, marking or writing on the body; these busts record this imprint, and in doing so, convey a spiritual substance of the past that would otherwise have dissipated. The highest peak of human development is sculpture itself . . . which, through the surface of its being, turns the individual’s gaze back upon its inner self, and, as here, preserves the fleeting features that otherwise would be washed away through the flood of time. . . . And because these busts represent the different time periods of the art in which they were reproduced from their living patterns, they are akin to the open book of the past. And when one walks through this room with Plutarch’s biographies, it is as if one looks into a mirror where all of the lifeless forms are filled with spirit and the letter comes alive. (644)

By combining his experience of these busts with the process of reading Plutarch as well as with his own reflective process of retrospective writing, Moritz sets a medial experience in motion in which analogies between different media proliferate to a striking extent. Sculpture is textual, capable of enlivening the letter; Plutarch’s book is a mirror of the individual self and of the sculptures; and the museal positioning of the busts in proximity to each other conjures up the idea of an open Buch der Vorzeit (book of pre-history), a historical chronicle of great personalities (which is the project that Plutarch himself hoped to realize). Here the overlay of different medial operations does not have a distracting, oppressive effect on the viewer or reader of the kind evoked in Moritz’s cloister analogy, but instead intensifies his impressions. The sculpture captures the fleeting nature of human individuality through the interplay between the surface and its perceptible volume, and different forms of reflective reading and writing intensify this effect. The monument is a point of departure for a palimpsestic experience of the past and present, and the convergence of the museum setting, the reading of a historical book, and writing reflectively about it after the fact sets various models of capturing and archiving time and ideas in motion, in the face of the steady current of the “flood of time.” Moritz leads his readers through the museum, but Plutarch likewise leads him and his readers through the museum; transposed into the modern period, Plutarch becomes an ideal travel guide, truer to the spirit of the age than any contemporary travel guide. In turn, as a modern writer, Moritz can likewise glean something of the past by recreating the spirit of the past via the Plutarchian letter. Reading, writing, and sculpture all enhance each other and are all necessary for the mutual enhancement of each. This intermedial operation thus intensifies an experience of historical time; of individual, historical personalities; and of the individual self, which sees itself mirrored in the media surrounding it.

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Moritz develops an understanding of the self as archive out of moments such as these, in analogy to and imitation of a variegated media ensemble typical of travel in Italy. And again, it is an awareness of ephemerality that helps him articulate a positive sense of the subject’s storage capacities. Here Moritz writes of an evening walk along the Tiber at the end of his stay in Italy: Current and time roll ceaselessly past before me; but I still stand firm and gaze into the future; my inner feeling tells me that this powerful, all-consuming swirl will not yet topple the trunk that I am growing on, nor will it sever its roots from their base. I grasp what is passing quickly by and make it my permanent possession that time and accident cannot rob me of!26

Here Moritz casts himself as a stone-like monument: the Lutheran trope of standing firm as an assertion of conviction and belief takes on a neo-humanist, antiquarian hue: the self is like a stone monument, but one that is likewise growing on a tree-like trunk with steady roots, activating organicist implications of the concept of Bildung. Just as a sculpture or monument sits on a base or pedestal, so too does Moritz imagine himself being connected to the ground through a Grundfeste (the foundation or base of a building or fundamentum [foundation]). Planted firmly in the world, the self takes in and processes the ephemera around him, resisting being blown around by the whirling storm of time and chance, and works through the many recollections that the self has stored on his travels. The very end of the travelogue extends the themes and imagery of this passage, closing with one final scene beside a river with book in hand, as Moritz contrasts the activity of standing still to the constant motion of the river flowing beside him, itself a symbol of the “flood of time.” This concluding passage exudes a sense of accomplishment and completion, which he expresses as carrying an “authentic image” of the objects he has encountered within him: “I carry an authentic image in my soul of the objects, which back then still only hovered before me in dark dreams” (840). Again, Moritz takes up the notion of preservation in conjunction with the act of writing: “I am collecting what my quill forgot or neglected to depict in a series of letters. / In these still river meadows I let the most captivating images of the past two years pass by my soul once more.”27 The river flowing by once more conjures up a sense of the unceasing sequence of ephemeral experiences enabled by his travels, but his sense of standing firmly and solidly and of carrying stable images of these past events is strengthened by the act of writing. This scene of recollection occurs “in diesen stillen Gründen” (in these still river meadows), but along with denoting a river plane or valley, the word “Gründe” (depths) accesses the semantics of the Grundfeste (foundation or base) from the passage above. Moritz “lets the most captivating images pass by [his] soul once more” “in these still depths,” suggest-

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ing that the Gründe are a physical place that might hold such images.28 These depths are metaphorical depths of memory, to be sure, but they might likewise refer to the material archive of images and impressions mentioned in the previous sentence, namely all of the additions and supplements Moritz adds to his travelogue on top of the personal notes and letters already collected, a material archive that Moritz appears to be in the process of rereading. Again, Moritz associates memory and practices of writing with a sense of being grounded, of being connected to a specific time and place in the same way that, prior to his travels, the “objects” were accessible only in “dark dreams.” This metaphorical as well as material grounding allows Moritz a sense of being able to regulate the flow of images rather than being overwhelmed by them. A crucial interplay thus emerges between the storage functions of stone monuments and modern writing, but this interplay brings with it a particular paradox: though the art of antiquity instructs Moritz on developing a proper relationship to the passing of ephemeral time, the grandeur of the art of the past (on Moritz’s own account) is constituted by the turning away from the fleeting and the ephemeral. Sculpture and related forms of monumentalization excise everything unnecessary so as to preserve the most lasting forms, the most lasting ideas. The ephemeral is preserved at best as the empty space that surrounds the sculpture, if you will. For the modern travelogue, however, it is all the more important to incorporate, process, and archive what is “passing quickly by,” the fleeting impressions that are perhaps only important in their effects on the individual subject. Moritz thus approaches modern Bildung as a process of learning from the monuments of the ancients but in order to create works that are positioned differently to history and to ephemeral time.29

Goethe’s Files and Packages Goethe uses a range of metaphors to conceptualize processes of learning and study, likening Bildung to architectural structures, acts of writing, drawing, engraving, sculpting, and much more. The Italian Journey’s story of selfdevelopment through aesthetic experiences oscillates between scenes of mastery and dilettantism, and many of Goethe’s attempts to gain control over his experiences occur through multiform experiments in writing. Like Moritz, Goethe struggles to come to terms with the striking dissonances between the fleeting experiences of the traveler, the apparent permanence of monuments left over from the past, and the unstable status of the artifacts that travelers create in order to process these antiquities, tensions that he registers in the following passage: “Go where one will, there is always a scene of some kind to look at, palaces and ruins, gardens and wilderness, vistas and confined areas, little houses, stables, triumphal arches and columns, often so close together that

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they could be drawn on one sheet of paper. A pen is useless here, one needs to write with a thousand slate pencils! And then in the evening I am tired out and exhausted from looking and marveling.”30 Goethe’s impulse to understand the many things he sees by differentiating and ordering them goes hand in hand with the impulse to document through writing. Despite wishing for additional prostheses to capture all the sights, and despite frequently reaching a point of exhausted overexposure, Goethe did in fact generate plenty of material to send back home: letters, copies of his diary, new versions of poems and other literary works, scientific projects, and drawings, and he was constantly ordering and reordering the written traces of his experience.31 Ernst Robert Curtius has described the collecting and ordering of written materials as a basic feature of Goethe’s character.32 Goethe’s extensive Aktenführung (file management), as Curtius puts it, is a key point of overlap between his artistic and scientific endeavors and his official bureaucratic activity. His propensity for systems of filing and archiving bleeds into the organization and editing of his works, and thus into their very structure, as Curtius and others have suggested.33 An awareness of filing and archiving is decidedly at play throughout Goethe’s travel writings: in a letter to Schiller he calls his notes from a different trip “Actenstücke” (archival documents) in need of ordering,34 and as we know, the first publication of the Italian Journey in 1816–17 was the result of compiling diverse materials. In the Italian Journey, this process of collecting and filing away experiences comes to bear not only on Goethe’s organization of his impressions for his own personal purposes, but also on his impulse to constantly send materials back to Germany to be processed by his friends and preserved for him to rework at a later date. It is important to remember that Goethe’s travels involve many carefully coordinated shipments of items ahead and back home, and his constant attention to the cycles of postal transmission is in part due to his method of travel, for he often does not rely on servants to manage his affairs as much as someone of his position normally would. Furthermore, Goethe frames many of his writings through personal, often intimate address. This is especially prominent in his travel diary addressed to Frau von Stein; Goethe tasks his confidante with sharing his travel diary in their circle of friends back in Weimar, who are the diary’s primary audience prior to 1816–17. In a letter accompanying a package back home after having spent a little over two weeks in Venice, Goethe reflects on this relationship between traveler and absent readers: “After I have, in conclusion, gone through my diary and inserted little remarks from my notebook, the documents shall be [rolled up and] referred to a higher court, namely, sent to my friends for their judgment. I have already found much in these pages that I could state more explicitly, expand upon, and improve; but let them stand as a monument to the first impression, which we continue to

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delight in and treasure, even it is not always true. If only I could send my friends a breath of this lighter existence!”35 This passage describes one of the fundamental circuits of transmission guiding Goethe’s writing while in Italy: on the one hand his diary is for himself, a medium of self-observation, but on the other hand he writes for a friendly audience back home, using the address of his beloved to reach (with modest revision36) their circle of friends. Goethe posts materials back to Weimar, slowly but surely creating an archive of documents to process once more upon his return. The metaphor of rolling up his documents accesses this particular route of address and transmission: Akten inrotulieren is a legal term describing the process of processing and sending legal documents from a lower to a higher court. Goethe transposes the relation between lower and higher to the geographical situation of his travels, along with flattering his audience that they might be more qualified than he to pass authoritative judgment. Traces of Goethe’s legal training and the official business hastily left behind in Weimar are clear. Goethe’s description of the diary as a Denkmal to his own impressions likewise stands out. Similar to the many monuments preserved from antiquity, this diary preserves a memory of fleeting, bygone phenomena, a faint “breath of this lighter existence.” Here Goethe notes the provisional, subjective nature of these jottings, opposing their ephemerality to the weighty solidity of the monument, but he nonetheless refers to them as memorializing objects despite their flimsiness. Much like Moritz, Goethe is aware of the tenuous ephemerality of acts of modern writing in the face of the monumental past, casting his diary and other sundry notes as both congruous and incongruous with the more stable storage technologies of the past. And also, like Moritz, Goethe readily compares the very form that his travel writings take to such modes of medial storage. Along with referencing the circuit of transmission between home and abroad and contrasting preserved and fleeting experiences, this passage also activates another dichotomy that is key to Goethe’s files and archives—that between initial drafts and later reworking and editing. Such a monument to ephemeral experiences still remains delightful and treasured, even if its truth might better be accessed by more deliberate form-giving—“expand upon, and improve,” as Goethe says—stretched out over time. The condition of possibility of such subsequent editing is the existence of a textual archive, and this is what Goethe creates by sending materials home. Like many long-incubating early-modern travel narratives, the Italian Journey emerges from Goethe’s later reworking of these materials, adding another layer of historical reflection and rewriting.37 I want to suggest that there is a recursive relationship in Goethe’s travel writings between the media ecology and individual self-conception, a relationship that helps to redescribe Bildung as both material practice and ideology. It seems clear that Goethe’s account of his diary pages as rolled up legal records

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is more than simply a metaphorical embellishment. This activity of packing up and posting (as well as receiving38) materials saturates Goethe’s conception of himself as traveler and writer. In the entry from the Italian Journey dated directly after the entry discussed above, he describes his departure from Venice: “Meanwhile I have loaded up well and shall carry the rich, strange, unique picture away with me”.39 The traveler carries images of a place with him after he leaves it, he loads up (aufladen), as operations of the imagination and actions of packing up, organizing, and sending off materials become deeply analogous. As in the “inrotulieren” passage, the traveler archives an image with or in himself by packing up and transporting (or sending) something. The techniques of organizing, sending off, and depositing material—ab- or aus-laden, if you will—correspond to a process of aufladen (depositing). Put differently, depositing materials in an external archive takes place simultaneously with depositing them in the internal archive that is the self, the memory, the imagination (“Ich habe indes gut aufgeladen”). The self thus takes on basic features of the external archive that he is creating, but it is not enough to say that this archival self is purely figural or imaginary. Indeed, we can see the implications of this in the verb “mit mir tragen”—he is carrying images with him—this has both figural and literal meanings. The well-known episode of the pheasant dream in the Italian Journey returns to these semantics of loading, carrying, and memorializing, revealing yet another side to the interpenetration of material and imaginary storage functions in Goethe’s self-conception. Goethe first had this dream prior to his travels in Italy and shared it with his Weimar friends; in Italian Journey it is related shortly before Goethe’s arrival in Rome and referenced again right before his departure for Sicily.40 In the dream, Goethe purchases a Schock (bevy) of pheasants with long, exotic tails on an island and transports them back to a more populated port via a Kahn (boat or barge). While returning over water with his catch, Goethe eagerly calls to mind the different friends whom he would inform of his colorful, newly acquired treasures. The dream ends with his arrival at a large port, where he looks for a safe landing berth. Commenting on this dream, Goethe notes the clear analogy to other aspects of his life: “We delight in such phantoms, which, since they arise out of ourselves, must surely have some analogy with the rest of our lives and fortunes.”41 Among other things, this is a dream of mediation and transport, of delivering something from one location to another. The pheasants might well be read as aesthetic objects, corresponding to Goethe’s excitement (but also anxiety) about the encounter with works of art as well as his own literary production. This passage has figured prominently in psychoanalytical readings of Goethe’s personal biography, with Kurt Eissler interpreting it as a scene of castration anxiety (for Eissler, the pheasants’ plumes are phallic symbols).42 But rather than jump directly to a psychosexual reading, I would suggest that this dream

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can be linked rather more mundanely back to Goethe’s material habits as writer, bureaucrat, and traveler. In the original diary entry corresponding to the Italian Journey’s expanded account, Goethe compares the dream to the project of his own Bildungsreise (educational journey) quite explicitly, linking dream imagery and travel experiences quite explicitly through the very word “aufladen” (“The pheasant dream is starting to be fulfilled, for truly, I can compare that which I load up to the most delicate fowl, and I also intimate the development”).43 Of course, much depends on the status of this comparing, and this takes us back to the question of Bildung as primarily material or symbolic process. On the one hand, one might argue that the dream image of exotic freight corresponds directly to the many packages sent and received by Goethe, and that this image expands on Goethe’s sense of his travel as a process of auf- (and aus-)laden. It also seems indisputable that the address of absent friends pervading his travel writings is a key feature of this dream. On the other hand, this address structure might also be taken as evidence of psychosexual and professional anxieties that trump any connection to the realm of material practice.44 This dream is certainly overdetermined, something that Goethe does not shy away from. But it does stand out that so many key passages in the Italian Journey mark moments of transition, eminent departure, or arrival. Goethe uses these episodes to great effect in creating a larger narrative arc; indeed, his later reworkings of the material often highlight and expand on such themes of transition and travel. It is significant, I want to suggest, that Goethe makes repeated reference to this dream at a time in his travels when he is preparing packages to be sent off and he himself is about to be transported by boat. A second mention of the pheasant dream occurs as he prepares to depart for Sicily from Naples. Writing of the mundane activities required for this extended trip, Goethe mentions the requisite transport there by Paketboot (packet boat), the term for a vessel traveling at regular intervals between two ports commonly used to deliver mail. “These days are entirely taken up with packing and saying goodbye, with attending to things and paying bills, doing what has been neglected and making preparations.”45 The list-like rattling off of infinitive verbs emphasizes the mundane practicality of these preparations, and in the next diary entry, Goethe takes leave of his friends as part of posting another package back to Germany: “Now let me say one more sincere farewell to all my friends in Weimar and Gotha! May your love accompany me, for surely I shall always need it. Last night I dreamt that I was back at my work again. It does seem as though I could never unload my pheasant-ship anywhere except among you. But may it first be filled with a very stately cargo!”46 It is significant that the phrase here is “in meinen Geschäften träumen” (dreaming that I was back at my work) rather than dreaming his affairs into his interior psychological state, suggesting that it is the affairs that structure the landscape of the dream rather than the dream that structures how he views

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his affairs. Again, this passage foregrounds Bildung as a process of collecting and archiving at the intersection of the imagination and material practices. Speaking to this intersection of metaphorical self-conception and embodied practice is Goethe’s awareness that he himself soon will be a package to be transported on the Paketboot (packet boat), that he himself is taking on certain features of the letters and diaries he has prepared for delivery. Goethe’s sense of himself as a transportable item saturates the Italian Journey from its very first pages, where Goethe tells of “throwing himself into a postal carriage, bringing with him nothing else but a hastily packed valise and backpack.”47 In describing himself as an object, Goethe repeatedly likens himself to packages and boxes, three-dimensional structures that can store a variety of items. Seen in this regard, the Fasanentraum (pheasant dream) reflects certain basic conditions organizing Goethe’s sense of mediation, address, and aesthetic experience and the cultural techniques in which they are rooted. Goethe’s awareness of his own activity as writer or traveler as a form of preservation and archiving brings us back to Siegrid Weigel’s account of Bildung. One the one hand, it seems hard to disagree with Weigel that the cumulative effect of the Bildungsreise is indeed a metaphorical conception of subjective inwardness as archival space. It seems clear that Bildung relies on active processes of inscription, but that Bildung is also a self-conscious process of selfmetaphorization via comparison to medial artifacts. Again, though, I want to suggest that this is not solely a solipsistic or self-deceptive projection of the self onto objects, but rather that specific media enable this self-conception, in a recursive way. Both Moritz and Goethe ascribe storage functions of the monument and other forms of inscription to their own inner states, and both take their readers through medial experiences construed as necessary preconditions for conceiving of the self as an archival space. It is not so much that the discourse of Bildung describes the self from the very beginning as a metaphorical storage medium, but rather that varied encounters with techniques of storage and transmission, both one’s own and those from the past, help Moritz and Goethe bring this self-understanding into focus. Part of learning about objects is through writing about them, drawing them, re-presenting them, and Goethe famously describes this process in the Italianische Reise as “sich an den Gegenständen kennen lernen” (getting to know oneself in/through the objects).48 Restating this process as getting to know oneself through intermedial practices of representation, storage, and preservation helps to reconceptualize the interplay of material practices and cultural imagination in concepts of Bildung around 1800. Sean Franzel is associate professor of German at the University of Missouri. He is currently working on a monograph on seriality and time in nineteenth-century periodical literature, which has been enabled by a grant from

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the Alexander von Humboldt foundation. His first book is titled Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture (2013), and has published widely on media discourses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Recent projects include a coedited and cotranslated volume of essays by Reinhart Koselleck, and a coedited special issue of Colloquia Germanica on periodical literature in the nineteenth century.

Notes 1. “Wer sich mit ernst hier umsieht und Augen hat zu sehen, muß solid werden, er muß einen Begriff von Solidität fassen, der ihm nie so lebendig ward.” Goethe, Italienische Reise I, 144. Unless noted, all English translations are taken from Goethe, Italian Journey; here, 111, translation altered. 2. On Bildung’s central role in anatomical discourse around 1800, see Engelstein, Anxious Anatomy. 3. See Koselleck, “On the Anthropological.” 4. Chartier, Inscription and Erasure, vii–viii. Following Chartier, my project shares more with the approach to the medial filiations of cultural memory by Aleida Assmann, who suggests that every concept of the self involves the metaphorization of medial practices, than with the polemical media-historical materialism of the likes of Wolfgang Ernst, who argues that media history should exclusively pursue technical analysis and purge itself of all Erinnerungsmetaphysik (metaphysics of memory). See Ernst, M.edium F.oucault, 95; and Assmann, Cultural Memory. 5. In describing shifting ideas of architecture at the end of the eighteenth century, Purdy argues that the self-identification by Goethe and others with architectural structures involves the mutual revision of notions of subject and object: “The viewer’s identification with the building was not a closed circuit in which the same subjectivity was reflected back as had been projected outward. Identification also allows for a mimetic relation, so that the viewer becomes like the building.” Purdy, On the Ruins, 12. See also Siegel, Desire and Excess, esp. chap. 2, “Monuments of Pure Antiquity.” 6. On the theory of cultural techniques, see Siegert, Cultural Techniques. 7. Weigel, “‘Irrendes Tier,’” 25. 8. On the relationship of Goethe and Moritz to classical antiquity, see Grair, “Antiquity and Weimar Classicism.” 9. Here the consideration of the formal structure and print format of their works must remain underthematized, though I address these questions in relation to Moritz and Goethe in my forthcoming monograph, Writing Time: Studies in Serial Literature (1780-1850). 10. See also Holm’s work on what she calls the broader “Andenkenkultur um 1800,” which is characterized by dynamic processes of “Warenzirkulation, die Narrativität, die Handhabung, und die Materialprozesse von Dingen.” Holm, “Bewegte und bewegende Dinge,” 249. 11. See Meier, “Von der enzyklopädischen”; and Meier, “Im Mittelpunkt.” 12 Moritz, Reisen eines Deutschen, 714. Translations are my own. Henceforth page numbers cited in the main body of the essay refer to this document.

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13. Quoted in Hollmer and Meier, “Kommentar to Reisen,” 1166. 14. Quoted in ibid., 1167. 15. “Eine Art von täuschender Komposition . . . worin die allgemeinen Bemerkungen immer auf den gehörigen Fleck lebhaft und anschaulich gemacht würden.” Quoted in Hollmer and Meier, 1166–67. 16. See Schneider, Simon, and Wirtz, Bildersturm und Bilderflut. 17. On Goethe’s ambivalence about the proliferation of representations of Italy by other writers and artists, see Purdy, On the Ruins, especially the chapter entitled “The Building in Bildung: Goethe, Palladio, and the Architectural Media.” 18. Eibl, “Kommentar,” 739. 19. Moritz, Reisen eines Deutschen, 475. 20. Henceforth page numbers cited in the main body of the essay refer to Moritz, Reisen eines Deutschen. 21. See also Schreiber’s recent monograph on Moritz, which explores various metaphors of space—as well as actual spatial configurations—in Moritz’s oeuvre. Schreiber, Topography of Modernity. 22. “In der Art von Mosaiksteinchen ein vielfältig facettiertes, subjektiv-eindringliches Gesamtbild vor allem des römischen Lebens.” Meier, “Von der enzyklopädisches,” 298. 23. On the importance of this semantic field in Goethe, see Muenzer, “Wandering among Obelisks.” 24. “So dass also dieselbe Aussicht, welche vor anderthalbtausend Jahren ein Dichter pries, nun auch durch die Malerei erhoben, dem Auge des Abwesenden und Fremden näher gerückt wird, und bei ihrer Betrachtung, der Gedanke an die Vergangenheit den Reiz des gegenwärtigen Genusses erhöht” (Moritz, Reisen eines Deutschen, 597). 25. “Ich führe Sie nun in das zweite Zimmer des Kapitolinischen Museums” (Moritz, Reisen eines Deutschen, 642). 26. “Flut und Zeit rollen unaufhaltsam vor mir vorbei; aber ich stehe noch fest, und blicke in die Zukunft; mir sagt mein inneres Gefühl, daß dieser mächtige Wirbel des alles verschlingenden Wechsels diesen Stamm, worauf ich wachse, noch nicht umreißen, und seine Wurzel auch nicht aus ihrer Grundfeste lösen wird. // Ich fasse das Schnellvorübergehende auf, und mache es mir zum bleibenden Eigentum, das Zeit und Zufall mich nicht rauben kann!” (Moritz, Reisen eines Deutschen, 804) 27. “[Ich] spare auf, was meine Feder in einer Reihe von Briefen zu schildern vergessen oder versäumt hat. // Ich lasse in diesen stillen Gründen die reizendsten Bilder von zwei verflossenen Jahren noch einmal vor meiner Seele vorübergehen” (Moritz, Reisen eines Deutschen, 840). 28 Moritz, Reisen eines Deutschen, 840. 29. Again, the next step in the argument here would be to consider works such as Moritz’s Anthusa and the ways in which that work’s structure operates differently from the travelogue’s structure. 30. Goethe, Italian Journey, 108; Goethe, Italienische Reise, 140. 31. See Michel and Dewitz, “Kommentar,” 1060. 32. “Sammeln und Ordnen des Gesammelten war ein Grundzug von Goethes Wesen.” Curtius, “Goethes Aktenführung,” 58. 33. See also Schneider, Archivpoetik, 1–35; and Böhmer, “Goethe, schreibend.” 34. Quoted in Michel und Dewitz, “Kommentar,” 1452. 35. Goethe, Italian Journey, 81, translation altered; Goethe, Italienische Reise, 104.

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36. Directing Charlotte von Stein to copy his diary, Goethe asked her to change all of the instances of the intimate “Du” to “Sie” before sharing it with others; see Michel and Dewitz, “Kommentar,” 1451. 37. On processes of reworking in Goethe, Italian Journey, see Böhmer, “Goethe, schreibend,” 17–18. On Goethe’s processes of rewriting more generally, see Koselleck, “Goethe’s Untimely History.” 38. For example, Goethe receives Schächtelchen (little packages) (Goethe, Italienische Reise , 352) from Charlotte von Stein and others. 39. Goethe, Italian Journey, 83, translation altered. “Ich habe indes gut aufgeladen und trage das reiche, sonderbare, einzige Bild mit mir fort” ( Goethe, Italienische Reise, 106) This passage is a revision of Goethe’s original journal entry, which does not contain the word “aufladen” (to deposit) but works with related semantic and thematic fields: “Ich trage das sonderbare, einzige Bild mit mir fort und so vieles andere. Ob ich gut aufgepaßt habe, sollst du sagen, wenn ich zurück komme und wir über diese Gegenstände sprechen. Mein Tagebuch biß heute habe ich dem Fuhrmann mit gegeben, es kommt also später als ich glaubte.” Goethe, Tagebuch der italienischen Reise, 721. 40. “Es träumte mir nämlich: Ich landete mit einem ziemlich großen Kahn an einer fruchtbaren, reich bewachsenen Insel, von der mir bewusst war, dass daselbst die schönsten Fasanen zu haben seien. Auch handelte ich sogleich mit den Einwohnern um solches Gefieder, welches sie auch sogleich häufig, getötet, herbeibrachten. Es waren wohl Fasanen, wie aber der Traum alles umzubilden pflegt, so erblickte man lange, farbig beäugte Schweife, wie von Pfauen oder seltenen Paradiesvögeln. Diese brachte man mir schockweise ins Schiff, legte sie mit den Köpfen nach innen, so zierlich gehäuft, dass die langen, bunten Federschweife, nach außen hängend, im Sonnenglanz den herrlichsten Schober bildeten, den man sich denken kann, und zwar so reich, dass für den Steuernden und die Rudernden kaum hinten und vorn geringe Räume verblieben. So durchschnitten wir die ruhige Flut, und ich nannte mir indessen schon die Freunde, denen ich von diesen bunten Schätzen mitteilen wollte. Zuletzt in einem großen Hafen landend, verlor ich mich zwischen ungeheuer bemasteten Schiffen, wo ich von Verdeck auf Verdeck stieg, um meinem kleinen Kahn einen sichern Landungsplatz zu suchen.” (Goethe, Italienische Reise, 116). 41. Goethe, Italian Journey, 91. 42. See Eissler, Goethe, 1273–85. 43. “Der Phasanen Traum fängt an in Erfüllung zu gehn. Den warrlich was ich auflade kann ich wohl mit dem köstlichsten Geflügel vergleichen, und die Entwicklung ahnd ich auch.” Goethe, Tagebuch der italienischen Reise, 727. 44. Alt splits the difference between a psychoanalytical and a more materialistic interpretation: “Der Fasanentraum ist ein symbolisches Ereignis. Als Gegenstand der Briefverständigung und als literarisches Objekt hilft er gleichermaßen, Goethes SchrifrstellerSelbstbild zu bestimmen. Das heißt auch, daß er dazu beiträgt, Individualität über Außenwahrnehmung zu begründen. Indem Goethe die Weimarer Freunde an seinen Wunschträumen teilhaben läßt, bearbeitet er sein subjektives Erfahrungsmaterial.” Alt, Der Schlaf der Vernunft, 197. 45. Goethe, Italian Journey, 182; Goethe, Italienische Reise, 240. 46. Goethe, Italian Journey, 182; Goethe, Italienische Reise, 241. 47. “Ich warf mich, ganz allein, nur einen Mantelsack und Dachsranzen aufpackend, in eine Postchaise” (Goethe, Italienische Reise, 11). 48. Goethe, Italienische Reise, 49.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Italian Journey. Edited by Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons. Translated by Robert B. Heitner. Vol. 6 of 12. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. ———. Italienische Reise I and II. Volumes 15/I and 15/II of Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993. ———. Tagebuch der italienischen Reise, in Italienische Reise, 15/I of Sämtliche Werke, 599–746. Moritz, Karl Philipp. Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien in den Jahren 1786 bis 1788, in Karl Philipp Moritz Werke, vol. 2, 411–848. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1997. Moritz. Anthusa oder Roms Alterthümer, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 4.1, edited by Yvonne Pauly. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005.

Secondary Sources Alt, Peter-André. Der Schlaf der Vernunft: Literatur und Traum in der Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit. Munich: Beck, 2002. Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Böhmer, Sebastian. “Goethe, schreibend, auf dem Brenner: Anmerkungen zu zwei Fassungen eines denkwürdigen Moments.” Goethe-Jahrbuch 129, no. 1 (2012): 13–21. Chartier, Roger. Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Curtius, Ernst Robert. “Goethes Aktenführung.” In Kritische Essays zur europäischen Literatur, edited by Ernst Robert Curtius, 57–69. Bern: Francke, 1958. Eissler, Kurt R. Goethe: A Psychoanalytical Study. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1963. Eibl, Karl. “Kommentar.” In Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Briefe, Tagebücher, und Gespräche vom 3. September 1786 bis 12.Juni 1794, vol. 2/3 of Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, 723–1068. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991. Engelstein, Stefani. Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009. Ernst, Wolfgang. M.edium F.oucault. Weimarer Vorlesungen über Archive, Archäologie, Monumente und Medien. Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2000. Grair, Charles A. “Antiquity and Weimar Classicism.” In The Literature of Weimar Classicism, edited by Simon Richter, 63–90. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005. Hollmer, Heide, and Albert Meier. “Kommentar to Reisen eines Deutschen.” In Karl Philipp Moritz, Werke, vol. 2 of 2 vols., 1163–266. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1997. Holm, Christiane. “Bewegte und bewegende Dinge: Überlegungen zur Zeitstruktur des Andenkens um 1800.” In Schläft ein Lied in allen Dingen? Romantische Dingpoetik, edited by Christiane Holm and Günter Oesterle, 243–61. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2011.

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Koselleck, Reinhart. “On the Anthropological and Semantic Structure of Bildung.” In The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, 170–207. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. ———. “Goethe’s Untimely History.” In Sediments of Time. On Possible Histories, translated and edited by Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, 60–78. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. Meier, Albert. “Im Mittelpunkt des Schönen: Die metaphysische Aufwertung Roms in Karl Phillip Moritz’s Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien in den Jahren 1786 bis 1788.” Goethe Yearbook 6 (1992): 143–67. ———. “Von der enzyklopädischen Studienreise zur ästhetischen Bildungsreise.” In Der Reisebericht: Die Entwicklung einer Gattung in der deutschen Literatur, edited by Peter J. Brenner, 284–305. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989. Michel, Christoph, and Hans-Georg Dewitz. “Kommentar.” In Goethe, Italienische Reise, vol. 15/2 of Sämtliche Werke, 1039–165. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993. Muenzer, Clark S. “Wandering among Obelisks: Goethe and the Idea of the Monument.” Modern Language Studies 31, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 5–34. Purdy Daniel. On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library, 2011. Schneider, Helmut, Ralf Simon, and Thomas Wirtz, eds.. Bildersturm und Bilderflut. Zur schwierigen Anschaulichkeit der Moderne. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2001. Schneider, Steffen. Archivpoetik: die Funktion des Wissens in Goethes “Faust II.” Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005. Schreiber, Elliot. The Topography of Modernity: Karl Philipp Moritz and the Space of Autonomy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library, 2012. Siegel, Jonah. Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-century Culture of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Siegert, Bernhard. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Weigel, Siegrid. “‘Irrendes Tier’ und ‘edler Körper.’ Der Gründungsmythos der Kunst als Urszene des zweigestaltigen Volks in Goethes Italienischer Reise.” In “Die andere Stimme”: das Fremde in der Kultur der Moderne; Festschrift für Klaus R. Scherpe zum 60. Geburtstag, edited by Alexander Honold and Manuel Koeppen, 21–27. Cologne: Böhlau, 1999.

CHAPTER 4



Schinkel’s Altes Museum as Bildungsmuseum The Aesthetic Education of a National Community and the Makings of the Modern Museum ANDREA MEYERTHOLEN

T

oday Berlin’s Altes Museum (old museum) seems to live up to its name. With no single must-see object to splash across advertisements, the museum appears to offer little in the way of novelty: its neoclassical façade could be any nineteenth century art museum, its rooms were intentionally designed to foster the quiet contemplation we tend to associate with art, and even its raison d’être hardly defies assumptions. Defining the museum as a cultural institution of Bildung, its architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841) wrote that its objective was: “Im Publikum den Sinn für bildende Kunst, als einen der wichtigsten Zweige menschlicher Kultur, wo er noch schlummert, zu wecken, wo er schon erwacht ist, ihm würdige Nahrung, und Gelegenheit zu immer feinerer Ausbildung zu verschaffen.” (To awaken in the public the appreciation for the fine arts as one of the most important branches of human culture where still slumbering; where already awakened, to provide worthy nourishment and opportunity for ever finer formation.)1 If this building with its emphasis on cultural enrichment and public edification would seem to embody many of the typical characteristics that we have come to expect of an art museum, there is good reason. When in 1830 what was then called the Königliches Museum (royal museum) opened its doors as the flagship museum of Berlin’s Museumsinsel (museum island), it was not only the city’s first public art museum, but also the first freestanding one constructed solely for that purpose. Schinkel’s ideas on aesthetics and belief in the civic virtue of Bildung as proclaimed by the architectural statements of his revolutionary design set the standard of what popular cultural imagination has

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come to know and expect regarding the appearance, the experience, and the purpose of the art museum as public institution. To examine some of these architectural statements, the narrative they tell, and their effects on the visitor, this chapter takes a tour of the Altes Museum— not as it is today, but as it once was. Progressing through the chambers, it reconstructs the ideal path of the average mid-nineteenth-century visitor to show how Schinkel and his architecture shifted the emphasis away from the artwork as historical document and onto the visitor’s reception of it as aesthetic object. Emergent from Schinkel’s controversial choices was the model for a new type of museum and museum experience: it asserted the significance of the art museum as an autonomous social institution in which the Bildung of autonomous individuals could take place. As such, it cultivated the quiet and disinterested contemplation now customarily associated with art museums. In achieving these goals, however, the museum also problematized if not undermined the very notion of autonomy it strove to establish for itself and instill in its visitors. Indeed, the building’s design demarcated the art museum as a space for disinterested contemplation with specific sociopolitical interests in mind. Schinkel’s architecture works to construct a continuity between the German present and an imagined classical past, while at the same time distancing itself from French art policies to advance a conception of Bildung rooted in the formation of individual visitors and their reformation into a new Prussian populace. In an explanatory framework compellingly consonant with the Schillerian paradigm for aesthetic education, the museum structures public consumption of aesthetics for the political end of achieving a unified cultural and national community. Even though this museum tells a particular story and is a product of a particular era, its influence and innovation still echo throughout art museums today, be their architecture classic or contemporary.2 The significance of this museum and Schinkel’s achievement is underscored by the fact that this building really was the first of its kind: a freestanding building constructed solely for the purpose of exhibiting art to a general public.3 Previous museums such as the Louvre or Uffizi had been installed in preexisting spaces or been added to preexisting structures as extensions.4 Earlier plans for a national museum had been interrupted by the Napoleonic Wars, and then further complicated when the royal art collection was appropriated in 1807 by the then-victorious French.5 After Napoleon’s eventual defeat, the artworks were delivered back into the hands of their rightful owner. Amid the spirit of victory, patriotism, and solidarity, plans for the new museum were reintroduced with added urgency. For the first time, the public would have access to the royal collection, and how visitors experienced these national treasures would define the role of the museum and of art in the newly enlarged Prussian state. Initial plans envisioning the Altes Museum as an architectural addendum to the Berlin Academy were scrapped when they crossed Schinkel’s desk in 1822.6

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Realizing the importance of the new museum, Schinkel took it upon himself to draw up a completely different design, a radically original proposal for a new building that reconceptualized the museum as experience and as institution (figure 4.1). It was not to be a repository for objects, a private playground for the king, or a didactic resource for scholars; it was to be an aesthetic encounter open to ordinary citizens, to all visitors in search of personal enrichment. To make his point, Schinkel relocated the building site to the geographical heart of Berlin at the northwestern end of the city’s public park, the Lustgarten (pleasure garden). Here was to be the starting point of the visitor’s ideal path as imagined by the architect and as retraced in this chapter.7 From the city’s central axis, the treelined boulevard Unter den Linden (under the linden trees), visitors promenaded through the Lustgarten and headed north. Approaching the Altes Museum, they were confronted by what Schinkel described as “eine einfache Säulenhalle in einem großartigen Styl” (a basic portico in grandiose style), a neoclassical vision of simplicity and monumentality that “wird dem Gebäude am sichersten Charakter und schöne Wirkung geben” (will endow the building with the surest of character and beautiful effect).8 Even as Schinkel describes the external appearance of the museum his focus is on the internal experience

Figure 4.1. Karl Daniel Freydanck. Das Alte Museum in Berlin, 1836. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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of the visitor and the effect the building has on the human body and mind. Its architectural shape is simple and rectangular, but it is powerful since the elevated foundation thrusts the imposing line of eighteen fluted Ionic columns farther upward to loom over the heads of visitors climbing the steps to the portico. While a great many art museums have since been built with similar façades, in Schinkel’s time neoclassicism was not yet popularly associated with museums. The unprecedented nature of such a building presented Schinkel with the exciting opportunity but challenging task of creating a new architectural genre. His choice for something in the style of Greek revival was not immediately intuitive, particularly in a northern climate that was less hospitable to temple designs.9 Coinciding with the Enlightenment and French Revolution, the neoclassicist style with its Athenian overtones of government and law were especially in vogue, but so were other styles. Although the excess and ornamentation of baroque were falling from favor, the neighboring armory and recently renovated palace were both in this style, and renaissance style was still popular as evidenced by new buildings in Dresden and Munich.10 Given the exceptionality of the occasion, given that Schinkel might have had his pick of styles, it merits deeper exploration into the question of why the architect did not go for baroque, renaissance, or for that matter, gothic style. While each presents a plausible alternative, it is the latter that I believe would have seemed the most obvious option in view of its ascending cultural currency as “the” native and national style of the German peoples, not to mention the architect’s personal preferences. Though represented on or near Unter den Linden by various neoclassical projects, Schinkel is often characterized as a romantic architect, likely due in no small part to outstanding gothic structures such as the Kreuzberger Memorial and the Friedrichswerder Church. Indeed, the writings and sketches from his journeys in Italy exhibit a partiality toward medieval towns and the gothic cathedrals, while the unrealized designs for Queen Louise’s memorial chapel and a memorial cathedral for the wars of liberation attest to the patriotic, religious, and völkisch (folkish-racial) ideology the style meant to evince.11 Having lived the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, Schinkel numbered among the many intellectual and political figures turning to a sentimentalized version of the medieval past for a unifying principle in the search for common cultural ground amid regional particularism.12 Reclaiming the so-called Dark Ages as a simpler, peaceful time of prosperity also predicated the recuperation and appropriation of the gothic style as a symbol of Germanic artistic achievement.13 The barbaric style, which had previously been dismissed as excessive and disorderly, was reevaluated and refashioned as a deutsche Baukunst (German architecture) that expressed the profound character and Christian spirit of the German peoples. The harsh realities of life in the Middle Ages were conveniently overlooked

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so that the glory days of the Holy Roman Empire could serve as a historical model for a future utopia. Accordingly, gothic spires and fragmented arches arose from the German artistic and literary landscape to symbolize rebirth and unity.14 The 1815 Mittelalterliche Stadt an einem Fluss (medieval city on a river; figure 4.2), a metaphorical representation of King Friedrich Wilhelm III’s triumphant return after Napoleon’s defeat, clearly presents a cathedral coming into its glory and does not commemorate the fragment of lost splendor.15 The hope for national regeneration and cultural unity is embodied in the nearly completed gothic cathedral whose large façade and twin spires are tellingly reminiscent of the unfinished Cologne Cathedral. Bearing a Prussian banner, the left spire remains a work in progress, much like the project of a unified German nation, whereas its fully executed counterpart on the right reaches into the heavens as a signifier of divine authority and spiritual transcendence. In the foreground of the composition, a peasant crowd in traditional German garb gathers as testament to a sentimental attachment to medieval feudalism, and then embarks on a celebratory march to the cathedral on a path through a forest of mighty oak trees. These symbols of heroism and German cultural identity surround the cathedral’s base, the trees’ foliage concealing it from the spectator’s view so that the building appears to sprout forth from the earth like a dynamic growth of nature akin to the encompassing oak trees. In many ways, this painting illustrated Schinkel’s aspirations for his museum as a means of

Figure 4.2. Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Medieval City on a River, 1815. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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bringing together the Prussian people into a unified cultural identity and harmonious organic totality not unlike the magnificent gothic edifice. Nevertheless, gothic is not the style of the museum, the depicted city is not Berlin, and, as the setting sun would indicate, the tableau is not the future of the German peoples. That utopian imagining Schinkel presents on another canvas meant to be exhibited alongside this one. The overarching rainbow would have led the eye from the medieval city on the river to a Greek city on the sea glistening in the dawning light of the companion piece Griechische Stadt am Meer (Greek city on the sea, 1815).16 This utopian image represented the goal that the peasants celebrating before the cathedral were destined to achieve: the peaceful political freedom embodied by the ideal of ancient Greece. Like the German states, the Greek peoples had liberated themselves from foreign conquest when victory over the Persians had ushered the era of Pericles, a golden age of culture and beauty that was idolized as the pinnacle of Western civilization.17 For Schinkel and his contemporary German Philhellenes, classical antiquity represented the paragon of communal spirit and self-perfection, offering both a model toward which to aspire and the means to achieve that model. Where Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68) called for his readers to emulate the “edle Einfalt und stille Größe” (noble simplicity and quiet grandeur) of Greek aesthetics, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) looked to the language and schooling.18 Advocating a humanistic education, he praised the German people for “das unstreitige Verdienst, die griechische Bildung zuerst treu aufgefasst und tief gefühlt zu haben” (the undisputed credit of being the first to truly comprehend and deeply feel the nature of Greek Bildung).19 In ancient Greece, Humboldt found a social model harmonizing individual freedom with political demands, where providing the individual citizen with appropriate state institutions in which he could realize his full human potential would provide the state with an orderly and willingly participative citizenry of morally responsible and like-minded individuals. The Prussian educational reforms that begun in 1809 under Humboldt’s direction extended this formative development to the middle class, fostering a Bildungsbürgertum that regarded civil service as a duty, albeit a virtuous one.20 To be sure, Schinkel might have embodied the sort of civil servitude that his good friend Humboldt envisioned and that is oft invoked when one speaks, for example, of a Prussian sense of duty or a Protestant work ethic.21 The architect’s austerity, reserve, and seriousness are manifest in Franz Ludwig Catel’s 1824 interior portrait Karl Friedrich Schinkel in Neapel (Karl Friedrich Schinkel in Naples, figure 4.3).22 In an unostentatious room, Schinkel sits unassumingly in the lower right quadrant, ceding center stage to the framed Italian landscape vista. His attire, equally unpretentious, identifies his middle-class status, while the letters on the desk and in hand could allude to his flourishing career, for Schinkel was in

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Figure 4.3. Franz Ludwig Catel. Karl Friedrich Schinkel in Naples, 1836. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

fact designing the museum while on this trip. Besides placing Schinkel among the Bildungsbürgertum, Catel’s painting positions him in the line of artists who were making the pilgrimage south to study the art and architecture of antiquity. Indeed, Schinkel conducted his journey in Italy after the type of grand tour or Bildungsreise made popular by Goethe, who would become a resolute

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advocate of classicist aesthetic principles.23 This admiration of antiquity is famously displayed in Johann Heinrich Willhelm Tischbein’s famous representation of Goethe in the Roman Campagna from 1787. Tischbein, a prominent portrait painter and contemporary of Schinkel, presents an idealized version of his subject garbed in a sweeping traveler’s coat and wide-brimmed hat reclining amongst ruins designed to express classical humanist principles: fragments of a Hellenistic frieze reference Goethe’s Greek tragedy Iphegenia in Tauris (1779), while the crumbling facades of identifiably Roman structures and aqueducts recede into the background. In his painting of Schinkel, Catel evokes the humanist spirit of Tischbein’s portrait, but takes care to distinguish the personality of his sitter. Whereas the grand and idealized form of Goethe sprawls across the picture plane, Schinkel sits unassumingly in the corner, allowing the vista over the Italian countryside to monopolize the focal point of the painting. He does not indulge in the sensuous pleasures of the country (the basket of grapes at his feet have not even been made into wine), but quietly and diligently goes about his work of researching antiquities for the Prussian collection, including the Augustan pedestal and Grecian amphora assembled in the lower left foreground. Schinkel as portraited exhibits the virtues of bourgeois civility—self-discipline, industry, restraint—that both he and Humboldt imagined as existing in ancient Greece and now wished to see in citizens exiting state institutions for education and socialization, and among those institutions was Berlin’s new museum. At the same time, Schinkel was mindful of what sort of individuals would be entering his museums: individuals for whom Bildung not only promised formation in Humboldt’s sense, as a constructive process, but also seemed to entail the idea of re-formation as a corrective measure. Like gothic architecture, the German peoples were an organic force, a culture of the earth defined against the pretentious superficiality of French civilization. As such, however, they lacked refinement and cultivation; the barbarism associated with gothic style may have been reappropriated as a positive Germanic value, but the barbarians still required domestication into the Beamte (civil servants) and Bürger (citizen) of the new political state. Schinkel believed that art and architecture, specifically the clean lines and rational designs of classicism, had the power to smooth the rough edges of the uncultivated populace he had come to know and perhaps distrust during tours of the kingdom’s provinces necessitated by his post. Unconvinced of the public’s undirected capability for the virtuous activity of civic duty, the architect even advanced a proposal to place all privately owned buildings under government regulation in the hopes that improved surroundings would encourage self-improvement and elevate the population into proper Prussian citizens.24 The formative and reformative potential of architecture is not unlike the philosophy of ästhetische Erziehung (aesthetic education) theorized by Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), who published his ideas as a series

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of essayistic letters in 1792 under the title Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the aesthetic education of man). The work intended to provide a roadmap to the political and social utopia once enjoyed by the ancient Athenians but now lost amid the alienating effects of contemporary society. Specialization of labor had reduced individuals to mere cogs in the social collective, where usefulness is measured according to isolated contributions. Every piece plays an incomplete part, but no one person (or cog in the wheel) realizes a project’s harmonious completion. Schiller wrote his theory on aesthetic education in response to the Reign of Terror, whose savagery had reversed his opinions about the once-promising French Revolution along with the potential of revolution in general for effecting a liberal state. As evidenced by the French, individuals alienated and fragmented by the conditions of modern life were not yet capable of perfecting a harmonious political whole. Necessary was a reforming (and re-forming) of the individual instituted from above through education (both Bildung and Erziehung [education] appear in Schiller’s vernacular). Bringing together Winckelmannian admiration for Greek aesthetics and Humboldtian concerns for self-cultivation and individual freedom, Schiller located humanity’s salvation in the aesthetic condition. While the key to his educational program was the connectivity between beauty and moral fulfillment first intimated by Kant, the beautiful for Schiller was found not in nature, but in the objects of fine art, specifically the classical art of ancient Greece. By his logic, emulating the beautiful forms of Greek art would reconcile the inner duality between instinct and reason, which, although occurring on the level of the individual, would resonate throughout the masses to forge a moral, unified whole. Thus, an ästhetische Erziehung was an empowering education that ennobled individuals and prepared them to create the “vollkommensten aller Kunstwerke,” the “Bau einer wahren politischen Freiheit” (“most perfect of all works of art;” “building up of true political freedom”).25 As improvement in the political sphere proceeded from the ennobling of character, in affecting and perfecting one person through art, social betterment and civic harmony becomes possible.26 On these fundaments Schinkel constructed his Altes Museum. Here, exposure to and emulation of the art of classical antiquity would ennoble and cultivate museum visitors, make them “rein und voll Menschen” (perfect and complete persons), as fellow Philhellene Humboldt asserted.27 An aesthetic education on an individual level would render the public ready on a social level to coalesce into a national community, a modern reincarnation of ancient Greece, such as seen in the 1825 panorama Blick in Griechenlands Blüte (The blossoming of ancient Greece; figure 4.4).28 Schinkel called this painting his “Hoffnungsbild für Spree-Athen” (image of hope for an Athens on the River Spree); in it he depicts not so much his wistful nostalgia for a bygone era as he does his utopian hope for the future

Figure 4.4. August Ahlborn, after Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The Blossoming of Ancient Greece, 1836. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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and ambition to turn Berlin into the new Athens on the River Spree through architecture.29 Instead of the overgrown ruins of a fallen civilization, portrayed is a blossoming culture in the midst of a massive building project. Citizens work industriously toward the common goal of constructing a Grecian temple, in harmony with each other as well as with nature. Evocative of Winckelmann’s homoerotic descriptions of Greek youth, strapping, half-clad male bodies emphasize both the perfection of the human form and the physicality of labor. Schinkel extends this physicality to the audience, who inhabit the split-position of passive spectators and active participants. Drawing on his experience designing theatrical stages, dioramas, and perspectival-optical paintings, Schinkel brings the spectator into the painted scene by enveloping the eye through an unusually horizontal format and situating the body at the threshold of the temple’s top-most tier through a stage-like foreground. From this vantage point, the audience shares the fore-grounded space with the temple builders and yet can supervise the background activity. At once participants and spectators, they can watch the workings of a well-ordered society while also accepting their place assigned within it. Schinkel articulated in paint why the neoclassic idiom befitted the purposes of his museum more appropriately than the gothic idiom. Where the medieval city on the river evoked sentimental reflection about a time long past, the panorama’s vision of a culture still actively perfecting itself invited similarly active participation in the formation of the Prussian future happening at present.30 The ideal coincidence of building and Bildung imaged by the painting was made into a livable, walkable reality through the construction of the museum. More than a reflection of prevailing cultural sentiment, Schinkel’s choice of an architectural style obviously meant to evoke ancient Greece to convey the function of the museum as a social and socializing institution. The uncultured growth of the towering cathedral speaks to the spirit of the people, but it is precisely this raw organicism needing to be tamed and cultivated into the hardworking community that restored postwar Athens to greatness. Unlike the cathedral spire pointing to a Christian heaven, Schinkel does not want his museum-going public preoccupied with the afterlife but firmly focused on this one. Just as the painting situates the viewers as one among the workers, encouraged to participate in the formation of the city, so too does Schinkel’s museum ask its visitors to participate in their own formation as individuals. The use of Grecian-inspired architecture conveys this invitation in manner that gothic architecture, for all its patriotic subtext, cannot. Standing under the Ionic columns that guard the museum while also connecting it to the outer world, visitors would be reminded of a temple such as the Parthenon. In fact, Schinkel modeled the covered colonnade after a Greek stoa, specifically the stoa poikile (painted porch) of ancient Athens.31 From this painted porch Zeno of Citium lectured to the public about a philosophy that came to be called Stoicism, a

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school of thought (named after the stoa where he taught), whose values of virtue and duty fostered Humboldt’s own philosophy of Bildung.32 Recalling its architect’s stated objective to educate and cultivate a wide audience, the visual allusion to a stoa circumscribes the function of this art museum. As opposed to previous exhibition spaces, at the center of Schinkel’s museum is neither art nor artist—it is the audience, the singular citizens who visit and physically experience its space. When in the above-cited mission statement Schinkel invokes that great pillar of German culture, the idea of Bildung, he speaks not of imparting facts nor disseminating information, even art historical information; instead, he speaks of cultivating the individual, of awakening the slumbering yet innate capacity for cultural betterment through the nourishment provided by the fine arts. The museum further communicated the need for said betterment through the presence of two curiously violent statues waging battle in front of the museum: a Herculean Löwenkämpfer (lion fighter) and the Amazone zu Pferde (Amazon woman on horseback), who spears an attacking panther. Mounted on an elevated pediment alongside the entrance steps where visitors must pass these bare-chested warriors are monumentalized as stages in an upward development of human triumph over brute forces. They demonstrate the organic and Germanic character celebrated by the gothic, but their external location at the building’s base implies that visitors must now overcome this natural state. Although both lack explicit identification, evoked by their forms are Hercules’s labored path to enlightenment and the carnage of Hippolyta’s reign, testimonials to the journey and the value of acculturating the human beast. Providing reinforcement is the cycle of frescoes emblazoned across the upper regions of the building’s outer façade and stairways that chronicle the Bildungsgeschichte des Menschengeschlechts (educational history of the human race), the ordained natural development of humankind from primal beings to civilized culture that originates with the Greek gods.33 The series of paintings announced the interrelatedness of Bildung and Greek aesthetics, as well as its larger significance. Widening the scope to include the whole of the human race, Schinkel signaled that something larger than a mere museum visit is at stake. Bildung was not restricted to educating a select few about art but instead concerned the historical development of culture as encompassing all of humanity. To connect this imagined past with actual present, statues of contemporary figures stood below the frescoes next to the visitors as the only reference to modern artistic production. Through this juxtaposition, Schinkel traced the path of cultural development from Greek to German people as culminating at the steps of the Altes Museum, thereby implicitly placing the responsibility on the visitor to continue this progression. Indeed, Schinkel conceived these statues as visitors who had turned to stone.34 Prompting visitors to historicize their Bildung with respect to the future of their German state, the statues stayed frozen in the past

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as visitors continued through the museum in the present and eventually out its doors into the future. While the frescoes exhorted the idea of cultural advancement as a universal virtue, they also warned against its impediments with images reminiscent of Schiller’s paradigm. Schinkel’s panels illustrated the processes of civilization that is propelled forward through the conflicting human faculties of reason and instinct, not unlike the Formtrieb (formal drive) and Stofftrieb (sensuous drive) posited in Schiller’s educational program. Like Kant, Schiller accepted the conception of human as composed of these two extremes. He departed from the older philosopher’s theory by arguing for a harmonious reconciliation of the two in a third drive, the Spieltrieb (play drive) that reunited individuals with themselves, thereby freeing them from inclination and obligation and perfecting their wholeness as human beings. Schiller went beyond Kant to consider the political implications of these three drives. A political state favoring the Formtrieb imprisoned its people in an “ethischen Staat der Pflichten” (“ethical state of duties”) that made Barbaren (barbarians) of them by wielding the law as weapon to fetter individual will.35 Equally undesirable was the opposite extreme. A “dynamischen Staat der Rechte” (“dynamic state of rights”) that subjugated baser human instincts through force reduced its citizenry to Wilde (inhuman savages).36 Without first resolving this inner duality, the result is a defective, even disastrous, body politic: a society plagued by either the Barbaren or Wilde that, as Schiller saw it, had been the downfall of the French Revolution. These barbarians and savages ravaged certain scenes in Schinkel’s frescoes in which natural forces and uncontrolled impulse, such as exemplified by war, threatened the forward momentum of human culture. In other panels, the presence of art tempered and cultivated humanity, ennobling its individuals to a higher level of civilization. The idea of Veredelung (ennoblement) was vital to Schiller’s aesthetic education. Activation of the Spieltrieb renders individuals at play and fully human, thus having attained the beautiful and moral condition preconditioning the construction of true political freedom. For Schiller, the ideal political state was an “ästhetischen Staat” (“aesthetic state”), such as epitomized by the mythologized Athens of ancient Greece where each citizen enjoyed the freedom to become whole but was still subsumed within a cohesive national community.37 Founded in the “dritten, fröhlichen Reiche des Spiels” (“third joyous realm of play”), the aesthetic state releases its citizens from the shackles of circumstance and constraint, whether physical or moral.38 As was clear from the Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution, the reconciliation of reason and instinct required assistance from a mediating authority, but one independent of the current political framework—after all, it “hat das Übel veranlaßt” (“brought about the evil”).39 Instead, the crucial “Werkzeug ist die schöne Kunst,” a source “die sich bei aller politischen Ver-

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derbniß rein und lauter erhalten” (“instrument is the Fine Arts;” “which will keep pure and clear throughout every political corruption”).40 Through the experience of art, of Greek art, individuals could ascend from the physical to the moral, but could still carry within their souls the respect for natural beauty and truth. Only after first undergoing an aesthetic education could humanity be prepared to realize true political freedom. Offering a special and separate site for this purpose, Schinkel’s freestanding museum asserted the autonomous status of aesthetics and defined itself as both civic institution and formative instrument for administering Bildung to a wide audience. It promised an aesthetic education that would ennoble visitors, and that enabled their entry into a higher cultural community. Once these individuals passed through the curtain of columns and into the building, they crossed a threshold that transported them into the rarified space of Schinkel’s temple-like museum of art. They then followed a darkened narrow corridor that emptied out into a two-storied, sky-lit rotunda (figure 4.5). Modeled after the Roman pantheon, this innermost cavity is the architectural and symbolic centerpiece of the museum. Although Schinkel was not the first to reference the pantheon, he was the first to do in such a unique and physically affective manner.41 The moment of leaving the dark, tightly enclosed hallway and suddenly entering a bright, open chamber was skillfully engineered by Schinkel, who perhaps for this reason considered the museum his “beste Arbeit” (finest work).42 The first-time visitor hardly anticipated the presence of a domed space. The severe rectangularity of the outer façade concealed the curvilinear contours of the rotunda waiting within, a surprise reinforced by the cornered roof covering the half-sphere of the cupola. The floor plan directing visitors from the entrance through the corridor into the rotunda also led their bodies through extreme sensory contrasts. The abrupt and unexpected transitioning from outer to inner heightened the dramatic effects. Further increasing the drama, twenty Corinthian columns drew the eye upward to the skylight centered in a coffered ceiling adorned with rosettes, zodiacal symbols, and images of gods and geniuses. In contrast, the lower recesses were surprisingly spartan. Save for an encircling of Greek sculptures interspersed between support pillars, the rotunda was emptied of objects. The attention, if not privileging, of aesthetic effect and bodily affect over practicality represents a decisive conceptual break from tradition. Whereas rotundas had previously been deployed as entry halls or exhibition rooms, Schinkel’s had no such use. Instead, its function existed in its lack of a function. Not filling this precious floor space with exhibits aligned with Schinkel’s intentions, but frustrated other voices involved in the building’s construction. Indeed, the rotunda was especially controversial among the museum’s planning committee, who protested the needless expense of constructing a room that, by the architect’s own admission, was impractical and superfluous.43 Yet

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Figure 4.5. Carl Emanuel Conrad. View of the Rotunda of the Altes Museum, after 1830. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Schinkel fought for its inclusion, arguing for its practicality on the grounds of its very impracticality. He convinced the famously frugal monarch that his rotunda was the “würdiger Mittelpunkt” (dignified center) of the building, and the crux on which the entire museum experience rested.44 As he explained, “Diesen Ort betritt man zuerst, wenn man aus der äußeren Halle hineingeht, und hier muß der Anblick eines schönen und erhabenen Raums empfänglich machen und eine Stimmung geben für den Genuß und die Erkenntniß dessen, was das Gebäude überhaupt bewahrt” (This is the first space one enters when leaving the outer hall, and here the sight of a beautiful and sublime space must induce receptivity and create a mood for the enjoyment and awareness of what the building contains).45

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With its emphasis on creating a mood conducive to instilling pleasure and appreciation, the rotunda was not intended for viewing, socializing, or even learning. Its sublime space overtook and overwhelmed visitors to compel solitary reflection, silent contemplation, and preparation. In the tranquil rotunda, sequestered and shielded from the commotion of everyday life, visitors were made empfänglich (receptive) and ready for the aesthetic education through the art that they would shortly perceive. Debatable still is what Schinkel meant by empfänglich and how the rotunda’s contemplative atmosphere should elevate individuals to this state. Many scholars point to the religious content introduced by the unmistakable allusion to the pantheon and echoed in the Romantic ideology of Kunstreligion (religion of art), a topos explored in the contemporaneous writings of Wackenroder, Tieck, and the Schlegels, not to mention Schiller and Humboldt.46 Schinkel invokes an architectural language of the temple to affect the viewer’s sensibilities and to suggest the spiritual dimension of the museum experience. Physically subsumed and united in awe under the magnitude of the rotunda, mere individuals gleaned the awareness of being metaphysically subsumed by something greater. I believe this “something greater” is of a predominantly secular nature coinciding with the rest of the building and its narrative of Bildung.47 The rotunda played a key role in this narrative not in spite of, but because of, its stylistic, spatial, and functional separation from the encompassing architecture. This disjuncture symbolically demarcated the autonomous status of art as consonant with Schiller’s aesthetic education. Independent from the rest of the museum, the rotunda operated as an autonomous realm, unpolluted by the interests and distractions of the outside world. Due to this autonomy, the rotunda was capable of conditioning disinterested spectators free from inclination, prejudice, and instrumental objectives. Visitors were at play in the realm of the Spieltrieb, where the proper Stimmung (mood) harmonized Formtrieb with Stofftrieb to awaken the proper mindset for receptivity.48 Yet just because the rotunda fostered a disinterested and contemplative spectator does not mean that the education that visitors were about to receive was without interest. Despite the Humboldtian aura of Bildung and humanism, the progression through the museum as designed by Schinkel conveyed a clear and normative message leading from the glory of Greece to the palace of Prussia. As will be seen, visitors not only consciously or unconsciously registered this message through their psychological engagement with the art, but they also performed it with their physical movements through the museum. Visitors left the reflective solitude of the rotunda and rejoined the social space of the interior rooms. Starting in the lower floors, they circulated among the sculptures and vases of antiquity (all original, no casts or copies) distributed across several large halls.49 Their marbled walls alternated among deep reds, greens, and yellows to signal transitions between rooms and vividly contrast with the

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art objects, while rhythmic lines of granite columns ran down the length of the room to break up the space. In a departure from convention, Schinkel pulled the displays away from the walls so that the three-dimensional works could be observed from more than one side, even positioning some against the dark columns for contrastive visual effect. To further enhance the experience of the visitor, pedestals were individually customized so that each work could be viewed at what was deemed its proper height. Though Schinkel again incurred criticism for the privileging of aesthetic effect, the classical art objects were not organized into an encyclopedic or taxonomic arrangement.50 Rather, they were presented as a historical unity, a tribute to the timeless character of Greek art. Once visitors viewed the treasures of the ancient world, Schinkel’s architectural design forced their bodies to double back to the main staircase to access the upper level where the art of the Neuzeit (early modern era) was showcased. Here hung the artwork of Western Europe, represented predominantly by the Old Masters of the Italian Renaissance, who themselves rediscovered and reintroduced Europe to classical humanism and art. In consigning antiquity to the lower recesses below its European successors, Schinkel both symbolically and literally situated the art of the Western world as the next step above that of the classical tradition in the cultural development of humanity. How the architect then partitioned the exhibition space and organized the royal collection—or that he even did so—deviated from typical modes of display. Whereas the spacious cavities of the ground floor flowed into one another, the upper level was broken into thirty-seven equally sized chambers by wooden screens that constructed intimate environments for visitors and facilitated a more systematic arrangement of artworks.51 The goal was to nurture aesthetic contemplation, not to overwhelm audiences with sensory stimuli or an overabundance of factual data. Great museum spaces such as the Louvre displayed their holdings in floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall arrangements, in a loose sense of the word. Even displays grouped by some broad logical principle often lacked internal organizational coherence. As a result, and as revealed by accounts from the period, an outing to the likes of the Louvre could result in physical and intellectual frustration when overcrowding of halls and walls created inclement conditions for simply seeing, let alone appreciating or understanding, the art.52 Schinkel bristled at the disorderly display in the Uffizi, but it was his observations at the Louvre that attuned the architect to what deleterious effects poor planning and visual excess had on visitor behavior. Noting visitors’ tendency to stroll past paintings instead of engaging with them, he lamented how a potentially enlightening experience devolved into a rendezvous of the Parisian social scene.53 Opening an institution to cultivate the self through art did not guarantee that the masses would know how to do so.

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Schinkel’s innovative restructuring helped define his German institution against the conventions in France, but, more importantly, it worked to focus and discipline the public. It guided their gazes and behavior so that this valuable opportunity for Bildung was not squandered. For a more purposeful and powerful use of space, he decluttered the walls and housed only a small number of paintings in each chamber, organized in an aesthetic but rationally intelligible manner. Eschewing arbitrary placement or chronological arrangement by artist, Schinkel opted for a historical yet aesthetic sequencing in which exemplary works were selected and grouped by school, but also hung in meaningful relation to one another to emphasize key moments of stylistic continuity or reciprocity. This systematic approach proved advantageous for the museum, which could pinpoint gaps in the collection with greater ease and make acquisitions accordingly. The end effect for the visitor was a representative overview of the king’s collection that revealed the development of Western art and delivered a totalizing impression that respected the singularity of its components. Along with an identifying placard, each painting received its own frame suited to both the proportions of the picture and style of the period so as not to distract the viewer and impede contemplation of the art.54 At the time, the conscious decision to display fewer pictures meaningfully arranged in smaller rooms met with resistance, not only for its exceptionalism, but also again on account of its impracticality. As critics pointed out, these compartments were simply not built to handle large groups of people; they were too small to allow adequate distance for viewing the art, too claustrophobic to comfortably avoid overcrowding, and not constructed to dampen acoustics.55 In short, Schinkel’s ideal scenario was not wholly practical for the real issues arising in an art museum. Yet clinging to the ideal, he prioritized the cultural enrichment of the individual visitor, sacrificing practicality for the benefits of Bildung as programmed through a loosely directed aesthetic education. These compartments granted visitors the opportunity to contemplate, digest, and engage with each picture in its singularity. They were not told about the art but were encouraged through their juxtaposition to draw their own conclusions and forge their own connections. Nevertheless, the conclusions they drew and connections they forged were not completely subjective and were still beholden to a normative standard of sorts. Though visitors enjoyed the freedom to cultivate their cultural consciousness in the supposedly autonomous realm of aesthetics, the structure of the museum influenced, even dictated, what lesson they should learn. Exiting the upper galleries, they returned to the main staircase and reencountered panels from the cycle of frescoes viewed upon entry, the Bildungsgeschichte des Menschengeschlechts. From their perch at the top of the stairs, they gazed on this one last reminder of the museum’s mission, thinking about the aesthetic education they had just experienced and reflecting on their personal

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responsibility to be good students of and participants in the furthering of human culture. After visually recounting the historical progression of culture in the frescoes and mentally recalling its symbolic staging in the museum, visitors could turn their heads and see the very culmination of the Bildungsgeschichte: a panoramic view of the city of Berlin (figure 4.6). Though having devoted much time looking in the museum and at the museum, the one instance in which visitors were to look away from the museum is perhaps the most significant. This spot on the balcony of the Altes Museum looked out over the Lustgarten, the German soil where the Berliner Stadtschloss (Berlin palace) stands directly across the way. Flanking the garden on either side are the Berliner Dom (Berlin cathedral), and the Zeughaus (armory). Together museum, palace, cathedral, and armory—culture, monarchy, religion, and military—construct the four walls of the house of Prussia, the new aesthetic political state. Behold the new Athens on the River Spree. After having progressed from the golden age of Greece to the art of Western Europe, visitors were confronted with the next phase in the cultural history of humankind, as hoped for by Schiller and imagined by Schinkel. Indeed,

Figure 4.6. Perspective view of the upper vestibule, main staircase, and colonnade of Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin with a view of the Lustgarten, 1829. Pen and black ink. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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the architecturally contrived scene paralleled the very same Blick in Griechenlands Blüte panorama that Schinkel completed during the construction of the Altes Museum.56 The Ionic pillars and compositional perspective structured an equivalent view over a prospering city on the grow. The procession on the frieze recalled the Parthenon as well as the Bildungsgeschichte frescoed around the front of the Altes Museum. Most telling was the warrior monumentalized in the middle-ground of the painting, whose stance mimicked those of the Löwenkämpfer and the Amazone. Through this visual analogy, especially as the culmination of the entire museum experience, Schinkel makes the ancient ideal of Greece culturally real and socially relevant to post–Napoleonic Prussia. Asserting the central role of art, Schinkel aesthetically educated and prepared the Prussian people, the natural progeny of the classical world, for the true political freedom espoused by Schiller. Thus, even as the museum reinforced the autonomous status of art and sought to build independent thinkers out of alienated individuals, its architectural design and display strategies undercut this autonomy, channeling it into the precast mold of the ideal Prussian Bürger. Contemplating beautiful art and encouraged to self-reflect, visitors actively participated in their own Bildung, but while being passively shaped by the halls and walls constraining their physical motion and regulating their gazes. Engagement with the artworks trained the eye and shaped the mind; movement through the museum trained the muscles and shaped the body. When visitors ascended to the top of the museum, they placed themselves into perspective vis-à-vis the panorama of the Prussian state as deferential civil servants. The transcendence of Bildung was a simultaneous surrender to this higher power, while each human made whole was subsumed into the greater political whole. Although aesthetic education was aimed at the individual, the museum was ultimately a public institution that brought singular visitors together into a communal space. As individuals were encouraged to discard discord and unite as one national community, the Altes Museum restored the promise of the past to the political demands of the present and resurrected the Athens of old in the Berlin of the future. Andrea Meyertholen is assistant professor of German studies at the University of Kansas. Her interests connect German literature and culture with art history, particularly literature and painting from the nineteenth to earlytwentieth centuries, museum and tourism studies, fairy tales and gender, and animals as represented in text and visual culture. She is the author of The Myth of Abstraction: The Hidden Origins of Abstract Art in German Literature (2021). Her article “Zum ersten Mal sah ich ein Bild: Goethe’s Cognitive Viewing Subject as Scientist and Artist” was awarded the Richard Sussman Essay Prize by the Goethe Society of North America.

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Notes 1. Schinkel quoted from Vogtherr, “Königliches Museum,” 120. All translations of Schinkel’s words are my own. 2. Histories of museums in Germany can be found in Bilsel, Antiquity on Display; McIsaac, Museums of the Mind; and Sheehan, Museums in the German. For histories of the Western museum, see Alexander, Museums in Motion; Bennett, Birth of the Museum; Duncan, Civilizing Rituals; and Giebelhausen, Architecture of the Museum. 3. Crane, Collecting and Historical Consciousness, 138; Spiero, “Schinkels Altes Museum,” 54; McIsaac, Museums of the Mind, 59; Ziolkowski, German Romanticism, 314. 4. Ziolkowski provides the best account of other structures that do not quite meet the criteria (German Romanticism, 316). 5. The idea for a national museum was originally proposed in 1797 by Alois Hirt, professor of archeology at the Berlin University. Hirt was Schinkel’s most vocal critic and chief detractor of his museum design with its emphasis on aesthetic effect. For more, see Bilsel, Antiquity on Display, 68–70; Moyano, “Prussian Arts Policy”; Sheehan, Museums in the German, 54–55, 79–80; Trempler, “Preußen als Kunstwerk,” 158–59; and Ziolkowski, German Romanticism, 310–19. 6. For an overview of Schinkel’s life and career see Altcappenberg, “Das Leben Schinkels”; Betthausen “A Universal Man,” 1–8; Bonet, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 6; Johannsen, “Architekt für den Hof;” Pundt, Schinkel’s Berlin; Steffens, Architect in the Service; Trempler, Karl Friedrich Schinkel. 7. Compare to Vogtherr, “Königliches Museum,” 137–48 and Sheehan, Museums in the German, 80. 8. Schinkel quoted from Vogtherr, “Königliches Museum,” 130. 9. Compare to Ziolkowski, German Romanticism, 319. 10. Ibid., 321–22. 11. Pundt, Schinkel’s Berlin, 79. For Schinkel and gothic revival, see Deicher, “Ästhetische Fragmente”; Haus, “Schinkels Einstellung zur Gotik”; and Koch, “Schinkel und die Architektur des Mittelalters.” On Schinkel’s first trip to Italy (1803–5), see BörschSupan, Bild-Erfindungen, 44–50; and Trempler, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 39–55. 12. Compare to Börsch-Supan, Bild-Erfindungen, 51–61; Dorgerloh, “Wege zur Nation”; and Trempler, “Preußen als Kunstwerk,” 159. 13. The most famous of such attempts are Goethe’s “Von deutscher Baukunst” (“On German Architecture,” 1772) and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich—even if, as oft noted, the gothic style has French roots. See Dorgerloh, “Wege zur Nation,” 98; Pundt, Schinkel’s Berlin, 52; and Robson-Scott, “Gothic Revival.” 14. See Dorgerloh, “Wege zur Nation.” 15. Compare to Börsch-Supan, Bild-Erfindungen, 400–401; Dorgerloh, “Wege zur Nation,” 98–99; and Wesenberg and Förschl, Nationalgalerie Berlin, 374. 16. Compare to Börsch-Supan, Bild-Erfindungen, 398–99; and Wesenberg, Nationalgalerie Berlin, 374. 17. See Börsch-Supan, Bild-Erfindungen, 398–99. The Greek War of Independence of 1821 also resonated with the Prussian populace considering their own war of liberation waged against Napoleon. 18. Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung, 20. My translation. 19. Humboldt, “Geschichte des Verfalls,” 184. My translation. 20. For Humboldt’s role in the founding of the museum and influence on Schinkel, see

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Deicher, “Ästhetische Fragmente”; Lübbe, “Wilhelm von Humboldt”; and Trempler, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 52–54. 21. See Betthausen, “A Universal Man”; Bilsel, Antiquity on Display, 59–60. 22. Compare to Wesenberg and Förschl, Nationalgalerie Berlin, 84–85. 23. On Schinkel’s second Italian journey (1824), see Börsch-Supan, Bild-Erfindungen, 72–80. 24. Compare to Bilsel, Antiquity on Display, 60; and McIsaacs, Museums of the Mind, 58–63. 25. Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung, 9. All translations from this document will rely on Schiller (trans. Snell), On the Aesthetic Education, here 25. 26. Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung, 33; Schiller (trans. Snell), On the Aesthetic Education, 50. 27. Humboldt, “Über den Charakter,” 611. My translation. Compare to Trempler’s concept of “Preußen als Kunstwerk” (Prussia as artwork) in “Preußen als Kunstwerk,” 158–59; and Trempler, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 160–65. 28. Compare to Altcappenberg, “Das Leben Schinkels,” 28; Bilsel, Antiquity on Display, 29–38; Börsch-Supan, Bild-Erfindungen, 454–55, 262–63; Trempler, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 166–68. 29. Schinkel quoted in Vogtherr, “Königliches Museum,” 127. My translation. 30. Compare to Dorgerloh, “Wege zur Nation,” 98. 31. Sheehan, Museums in the German, 73; Vogtherr, “Königliches Museum,” 130; BörschSupan, “Schinkel the Artist,” 15. 32. Bruford, German Tradition, 5. 33. The planned cycle was installed only in the years following the museum’s initial opening. For more on individual scenes—history and designs—see Altcappenberg, Johannsen, and Lange, “Geschichte und Poesie,” 11–12; Börsch-Supan, Bild-Erfindungen, 480–96; Sheehan, Museums in the German, 79; Trempler, Wandbildprogramm; and Vogtherr, “Königliches Museum,” 130–34. 34. Trempler, “Preußen als Kunstwerk,” 160. 35. Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung, 120; Schiller (trans. Snell), On the Aesthetic Education, 137. Original emphasis. 36. Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung, 120; Schiller (trans. Snell), On the Aesthetic Education, 137. Original emphasis. 37. Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung, 120; Schiller (trans. Snell), On the Aesthetic Education, 137. Original emphasis. 38. Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung, 120; Schiller (trans. Snell), On the Aesthetic Education, 137. 39. Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung, 29; Schiller (trans. Snell), On the Aesthetic Education, 45. 40. Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung, 33; Schiller (trans. Snell), On the Aesthetic Education, 50. 41. See, e.g., the rotunda in the Vatican’s Museo Pio-Clementino (1775), which Schinkel visited first in 1803–4 and again in 1824. On the rotunda and the entry hall, see Hofmann, “Baukunst,” 24; McIsaacs, Museums of the Mind, 59–63; and Trempler, Wandbildprogramm, 83–102. 42. Riemann describes the design of the rotunda and its effect as “supreme achievements, not only in Schinkel’s work, but in the whole field of nineteenth-century architecture” (Riemann, “Schinkel’s Buildings,” 20).

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Moyano, “Prussian Arts Policy,” 589. Schinkel quoted in Vogtherr, “Königliches Museum,” 137. Ibid. Compare to Herdt’s discussion of Kunstreligion in Forming Humanity, 112–32. Both Sheehan (Museums in the German, 76–77) and McIsaac (Museums of the Mind, 60– 61) consider the museum as a temple of art with specific reference to the rotunda. Compare to Vogtherr, “Königliches Museum,”130. Compare to Sheehan, Museums in the German, 76–77. Bilsel, Antiquity on Display, 71. A taxonomic arrangement was favored by Hirt (ibid., 70). Ziolkowski points to these screens as anticipating the moveable walls used to rearrange exhibits in twentieth-century museums (German Romanticism, 318). McIsaac, Museums of the Mind, 58–59. Ziolkowski, German Romanticism, 318; McIsaac, Museums of the Mind, 59. While labels identified artist and title, further information was made available to the visitor in a catalogue. See Ziolkowski, German Romanticism, 320. Vogtherr, “Königliches Museum,” 145–46. Compare to Bilsel, Antiquity on Display, 67; and Vogtherr, “Königliches Museum,” 127.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Humboldt, Wilhelm von. “Geschichte des Verfalls und Unterganges der griechischen Freistaaten.” In Gesammelte Schriften Band III, edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 171–218. Berlin: B. Behr’s Verlag, 1904. ———. “Über den Charakter der Griechen, die idealische und historische Ansicht desselben.” In Gesammelte Schriften Band VII, vol. 2, edited by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 609–18. Berlin: B. Behr’s Verlag, 1908. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. Translated by Reginald Snell. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1965. ———. Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000. Winckelmann, J. J. Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1969.

Secondary Sources Alexander, Edward Porter. Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2008. Altcappenberg, Hein-Th. Schulze. “Das Leben Schinkels. Person, Familie, Freunde und Beruf.” In Altcappenberg, Johannsen, and Lange, Geschichte und Poesie, 27–54. ———. “Karl Friedrich Schinkel—Geschichte und Poesie.” In Altcappenberg, Johannsen, and Lange, Geschichte und Poesie, 10–16. Altcappenberg, Hein-Th. Schulze, Rolf H. Johannsen, and Christiane Lange, eds. Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Geschichte und Poesie. Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2012.

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Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge, 1991. Betthausen, Peter. “Karl Friedrich Schinkel: A Universal Man.” In Snodin, A Universal Man, 1–8. Bilsel, Can. Antiquity on Display: Regimes of the Authentic in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Bonet, Llorenç. Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Düsseldorf: Te Neues, 2003. Börsch-Supan, Helmut. Karl Friedrich Schinkel: Bild-Erfindungen. Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2007. ———. “Schinkel the Artist.” In Snodin, A Universal Man, 9–15. Bruford, Walter Horace. The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: Bildung from Humboldt to Thomas Mann. London: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Crane, Susan. Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Deicher, Susanne. “Ästhetische Fragmente über die Ordnung in der Architektur. Karl Friedrich Schinkel und Wilhelm von Humboldt in Rom 1803/04.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 68, no. 3 (2005): 391–412. Dorgerloh, Annette. “Wege zur Nation—Schinkels Denkmalsentwürfe.” In Altcappenberg, Johannsen, and Lange, Geschichte und Poesie, 97–122. Duncan, Carol. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London: Routledge, 1995. Giebelhausen, Michaela. The Architecture of the Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Haus, Andreas. “Gedanken über K.F. Schinkels Einstellung zur Gotik.” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 22: 215–31, 1989. Heilmeyer, Wolf-Dieter, Huberta Heres, and Wolfgang Maßmann, eds. Schinkels Pantheon. Die Statuen der Rotunde im Alten Museum. Mainz: Von Zabern, 2004. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990. Herdt, Jennifer A. Forming Humanity: Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Hofmann, Werner. “Die Baukunst in der Kette des Universums.” In Altcappenberg, Johannsen, and Lange, Geschichte und Poesie, 17–26. Johannsen, Rolf H. “Architekt für den Hof—Hofarchitekt.” In Altcappenberg, Johannsen, and Lange, Geschichte und Poesie, 187–226. Koch, Georg Friedrich. “Karl Friedrich Schinkel und die Architektur des Mittelalters: Die Studien auf der ersten Italienreise und ihre Auswirkungen.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 29, no. 3 (1966): 177–222. Lübbe, Hermann. “Wilhelm von Humboldt und die Berliner Museumgründung, 1830.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 54, no. 4 (1980): 656–76. McIsaac, Peter. Museums of the Mind: German Modernity and the Dynamics of Collecting. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. Merkel, Jayne. “The Museum as Artifact.” Wilson Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2002): 66–79. Moyano, Steven. “Quality vs. History: Schinkel’s Altes Museum and Prussian Arts Policy.” Art Bulletin 72, no. 4 (1990): 585–608. Pundt, Hermann. Schinkel’s Berlin: A Study in Environmental Planning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972. Rave, Paul Ortwin. Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Berlin I. Teil, Bauten für die Kunst, Kirchen und Denkmalpflege. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1941.

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Riemann, Gottfried. “Schinkels Buildings and Plans for Berlin.” In Snodin, A Universal Man, 16–25. Robson-Scott, William Douglas. “Georg Foster and the Gothic Revival.” Modern Language Review 51, no. 1 (1956): 42–48. Sheehan, James J. “Aesthetic Theory and Architectural Practice: Schinkel’s Museum in Berlin.” In From the Berlin Museum to the Berlin Wall: Essays on the Cultural and Political History of Modern Germany, edited by David Wetzel, 11–30. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996. ———. Museums in the German Art World: From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Snodin, Michael, ed. Karl Friedrich Schinkel: A Universal Man. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Spiero, Sabine. “Schinkels Altes Museum in Berlin: Seine Baugeschichte von den Anfängen bis zur Eröffnung.” Jahrbuch der Preußischen Kunstsammlungen 55 (1934): 41–86. Steffens, Martin. K.F. Schinkel 1781–1841: An Architect in the Service of Beauty. Cologne: Taschen, 2003. Trempler, Jörg. Das Wandbildprogramm von Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Altes Museum Berlin. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2001. ———. Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Baumeister Preußens. Eine Biographie. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2012. ———. “Preußen als Kunstwerk—Schinkels Berliner Bauten.” In Altcappenberg, Johannsen, and Lange, Geschichte und Poesie, 187–226. Vogtherr, Christoph Martin. “Das Königliche Museum zu Berlin. Planungen und Konzeption des ersten Berliner Kunstmuseums.” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 39, 1997. Wesenberg, Angelika, and Eve Förschl, eds. Nationalgalerie Berlin: Das XIX Jahrhundert. Katalog der ausgestellten Werke. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Leipzig: EA Seemann, 2015. Ziolkowski, Theodore. German Romanticism and its Institutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. ———. “Schinkel’s Museum: The Romantic Temple of Art.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 131, no. 4 (1987): 367–77.

CHAPTER 5



From Bildungsmaschine to Willenserziehung Nietzsche’s Project of Heroic Minds JENNIFER HAM

For your true nature lies, not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (UM 3:129)1

F

riedrich Nietzsche spent roughly a third of his life in classrooms, where he was subjected to a variety of pedagogies at a wide range of educational institutions, from the catechistic pedagogy of poor one-room rural schoolhouses, such as the overcrowded Elementarschule (grammar school) in Röcken and the “derber und lärmender Ton” (the rather rough and raucous atmosphere)” (KSB 5:28)2 of classes in die städtische Knabenbürgerschule (the public boys’ school) in Naumburg, to individualized instruction at the privileged Institut des Kandidaten Weber. He also experienced first-hand the impersonal Prussian bureaucracy of state-controlled public education at the once monastic Domgymnasium (ecumenical secondary school), as well as the notoriously rigid academic discipline at Schulpforta, one of Europe’s most elite humanistic private boarding schools—all of which not only prepared him for a career as a classical philologist, but also introduced him to various applications of the concept of Bildung and notions of the educated self. Despite being, as he put it, “seized by an incredible thirst for knowledge and universal education” (BAW 1:152).3 Nietzsche portrays this long arduous education as weighing “way too much on me, since when?, almost from the time I could walk” (KGW 7:3[53].4 His description of education as a burden echoes a primary concern voiced in the Prussian school debate; the question of Überbürdung (overburdening), the physical and intellectual overloading of students and its disastrous consequences.5 The controversy, which focused on the limits of state control and

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students’ rights to bodily autonomy and leisure, was sparked by a physician, Karl Lorinser, who complained that Prussia’s Gymnasia, with their “numerous subject areas, countless hours of instruction and massive homework assignments,” were responsible for undermining the health of the student body and causing an overall decline in national physical strength.6 Others warned that overburdening the mind at the expense of the body would lead to so-called Krankheiten der Gelehrten (scholars’ diseases)7 and cautioned that this overemphasis on mental conditioning in the schools, on “eternal writing and reading,” would result in “anemia, scrofula, consumption and tuberculosis.”8 Nietzsche’s own suffering in German schools, first as a student and later as a local school teacher and professor himself, inform his broad critique of primary, secondary, and university education. From his first writings on education, in 1872, throughout his mature philosophy, he argues that contemporary formal education in Germany is a travesty of the original spirit and meaning of Bildung as a process of human self-realization and radical individuality and freedom. As we will see, Nietzsche derided the repetitive, will-crushing brain dressage that went on in the schools, which he labeled Bildungsmaschinen (education machines). In place of this pedagogy of conformity and utility, Nietzsche called not for a more systematic means of imprinting knowledge on rational minds, but rather for Willenserziehung (a training of the will), an education that harnessed the will as part of the project of becoming. Reviving ancient ascetic practices designed to fortify, not weaken, the will, as centuries of Christian education had done, Nietzsche discovered and reformulated ancient humanistic practices; he was, according to Peter Sloterdijk, “the Schliemann of asceticisms.”9 In contrast to the Bildung tradition developed by Herder, Humboldt, and Hegel, Nietzsche’s cultivation of the self is pointedly anti-modern and physically grounded. He chose the word Erziehung, which implies a training or apprenticeship for a craft, to name his method of education and self-actualization; he called his greatest teacher (Schopenhauer) an Erzieher (educator), not a Lehrer (teacher). Nietzsche belongs to the Bildung tradition; there is much in his philosophy of education that is derived from Herder, Goethe, and Schiller, but his Bildung is primitive and pre-Socratic, one could say, and not progressive, Hegelian, and modern; his models and metaphors for thinking are deliberately and provocatively physical and acrobatic. Nietzsche is always thinking with and as a body. Nietzsche’s schooling, particularly the austere monastic regimen at Schulpforta, which he attended between the ages of fourteen and twenty from 1858 to 1864, had a profound effect on his overall thinking about the educative process. The Fürstenschule (elite boarding school), situated in a former Cistercian cloister, had adopted the compulsory Prussian school reforms, designed to replace local aristocratic loyalties with an instilled nationalist spirit and esteem for the Prussian state, its military, and its bureaucracy. Like Prussian cadet schools, Schulpforta was also charged with acting in loco parentis, to complete the boys’ formation and make them into whole men. In a humanistic Gymnasium,

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neo-classical training, largely in the humanities, became the means to that end. As part of that curricular reform, instruction in modern languages, mathematics, history, music, natural sciences, and geography—but also in ethics—were added on top of the already rigorous and demanding traditional Latin and Greek neo-humanistic curriculum. As stated in an honorary Festschrift in 1843, the school’s military-like pedagogy was intended to produce pupils, who were to “become obedient to the law and the will of their superiors [and] . . . habituated to the punctual and punctilious fulfilment of duty, to self-control, to serious work, to taking initiative with originality . . . to being thorough and methodical in their studies, to systematic organization of the time at their disposal, to self-confident politeness and conscientious reliability in their dealings with their equals, [this] is the fruit of its [Schulpforta’s] discipline and education.”10 Following Prussia’s defeat, one of the reform’s major proponents, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), himself a former student at Pforta, famously addressed the German nation in 1807: “If you want to influence [the student] at all, you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will.”11 Classroom instruction at the school was geared toward mastery of subject matter through rote learning. According to the school’s headmaster, “The pedagogy of instruction consisted of teacher-centered lectures [Lectionen] and independent hours of repetition and exegesis [Repetierstunden], where the older pupils led the younger ones.”12 Transgressions were not tolerated and were usually met with dismissal. Suicides were not uncommon, and reports indicate that Nietzsche himself reflected on the subject of suicide while a student there.13 It is no wonder he tells his family on vacation, “Whatever, just not back to Pforta, where only strictness reigns.”14 Having survived his formative education and after eventually graduating as a Leipzig University philology student, in his early twenties Nietzsche accepted a position in 1869 as an assistant professor of classical philology at the University of Basel,15 where for ten years he endured a crushing teaching load, which included an academic appointment at the local Pädagogium (preparatory high school), as well.16 Nietzsche’s pupils described him as “an eternally sleepless man,” often “sitting pale and tired at the rostrum.”17 “[He] spoke wearily, and seemed exhausted.”18 In a letter to a friend Nietzsche wrote, “Truth is not possible here. . . . I cannot go on breathing the academic atmosphere much longer. So one day we shall cast off this yoke—for me that is certain” (KGB 2:1[160]).19

The Future of Educational Institutions Nietzsche first made his views about education known in a series of five public lectures entitled “On the Future of our Educational Institutions,” which he delivered as an (overburdened) twenty-seven year old professor at Basel be-

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tween January and March of 1872. These lectures, which he originally intended would become his second book, to follow Schopenhauer as Educator (1874), constitute Nietzsche’s systematic and often vitriolic challenges to secondary and university education in Germany and express his rejection of both the prevailing practice of Bildung and the role of the scholar as educator. These early essays are, in a sense, the beginning of a long letter of resignation from his university position, which would eventually be authorized in 1879, for health reasons. The five lectures are not as polished and forceful as Schopenhauer as Educator, but they contain many of his nascent ideas about education and, as he states in the introduction, allow him “like a Roman haruspex, to steal glimpses of the future out of the very entrails of current [school] conditions” (UM:10). He later elaborates on these conclusions in the Schopenhauer essay and further develops them throughout Zarathustra and his mature philosophy in the Genealogy of Morals and elsewhere. The Basel lectures are presented in the form of a philosophical fable, a fiction, based on an actual hike he took with friends in 1860 while at Schulpforta. The narrative of these lectures begins with two university students from Bonn traveling up the Rhine by ferry to spend a day hiking and shooting pistols in the forest near the village of Rolandseck. While in the forest the young students encounter two rustic philosophers who engage in a long discussion about the ills of contemporary education. The two wise men, perhaps early versions of Zarathustra, are contemptuous of modern civilization, one of them admonishing the youths, “I must divest you of the skin of modern culture which you have donned” (EI 3:33). The irascible aged philosophers decry “rapid education,” whose aim is to produce a “money earning creature at all speed” (EI 3:37). Learning dispensed in the secondary schools and universities, according to the two sages, is narrowly technical and utilitarian, subordinated to the interests of the state, its military and its commerce, and completely removed from the grand design of culture, whose purpose it is to provide a medium for the creation of radically free, exceptional individuals—geniuses—who appear in the form of the philosopher, the artist, and the saint. Two sources and cultural models are at the center of Nietzsche’s educational vision: ancient Greece, “the land of yearning . . . the only real home of culture” and “our German classical writers” (EI 3:61). In accordance with the principles of classical Bildung from Herder to von Humboldt, ancient Greek civilization was considered the unquestioned model of beauty and perfection. In ancient Greece, philosophy was a way of life, and not an abstract system of thought or a series of propositions to be adhered to. Hellenic philosophers taught “through their facial expressions, demeanor, dress, food, and habits, rather than through what they said or wrote” (SE:172). The artefacts of Greek culture are characterized by their simple beauty and functionality: “According to Schopenhauer, the beauty of ancient vases is that they express with such simplicity exactly

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what they are meant to be and do” (SE:213). Nietzsche’s love of Greek culture and the Greeks themselves, whom he considered in On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life (1874) to be the “models of all future nations” (UM:10), was not, however, that of an antiquarian. For him, as he states in Human All Too Human, the Greeks were exemplary paragons of humanity: “Those exceptional Greeks. . . . He who tells of them, tells the most heroic story in the history of the human spirit!” (HH:221). Like other heroes, these “brave soldiers of knowledge” (D: 567:227), these geniuses, are courageous in part because, like Zarathustra’s rope-walker, they are not afraid to risk their former notions and values, indeed, their former selves. The genius, in work and deed, is necessarily a squanderer: that he squanders himself, that is his greatness! The instinct of self-preservation is suspended, as it were: . . . [and] forbids him any such care or caution. People call this “selfsacrifice” and praise his “heroism,” his indifference to his own well-being, his devotion to an idea, a great cause, a fatherland: without exception, misunderstandings. He flows out, he overflows, he uses himself up, he does not spare himself—and this is a calamitous involuntary fatality, no less than a river’s flooding the land. Yet, because much is owed to such explosives, much has also been given them in return: for example, a kind of higher morality (TI 9:44).

Although Nietzsche was stridently aristocratic and anti-democratic in his outlook, and was concerned above all with the means of creating a few exceptional geniuses, he does assign an essential role to “all those noble and sublime plastic forces which have their material origin in the unconsciousness of the people, and which fittingly terminate in the procreation of genius” (EI 3:76). Genius can emerge only from a living cultural milieu, hence his prioritization of authentic German literature and philosophy over attempts by his contemporaries to imitate French manners and styles. Philosophy, art, and ethics needed to be grounded in a living culture; it was thus necessary to immerse students in German culture as well, as he says, the “true German spirit that speaks to us so wondrously from the inner heart of the German Reformation, German music, and German philosophy, and which, like a noble exile, is regarded with such indifference and scorn by the luxurious education afforded by the State” (EI 3:89). What Nietzsche proposes is a blending and merging of Greek and German elements. At the end of the second lecture on education he presents the idea of a borderline between Greek and German culture as the basis for this new classical education. It is a very complex and difficult task to find the border-line which joins the heart of the Germanic spirit with the genius of Greece. Not, however, before the noblest needs of genuine German genius snatch at the hand of this genius of Greece as at a firm post in the torrent of barbarity, not before a devouring yearning for this genius of Greece takes possession of German genius, and not

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before that view of the Greek home, on which Schiller and Goethe, after enormous exertions, were able to feast their eyes, has become the Mecca of the best and most gifted men, will the aim of classical education in public schools acquire any definition (EI 3:68).

So much of Nietzsche’s educational ideal is expressed in this passage: the exalted, Dionysian celebration of unconscious forces that bind together “the Germanic spirit” and “this genius of Greece” at an obscure borderline; the creation of culture as a dramatic, vital struggle, where German genius must “snatch at the hand” of Greek genius; the process of education driven by “devouring yearning,” and the biblical allusion to Moses feasting his eyes on the Promised Land, replaced here by “the Greek home.” Stated more prosaically, it is clear that desire, motivation, and will feature at the center of Nietzsche’s pedagogy.

Sei du Selbst! (be yourself ) Beyond its grounding in a merging of Greek and German cultures, Nietzschean education is a radical transformation of the self—a paradoxical becoming what one already is, as noted in the subtitle of Ecce Homo. Nietzsche first mentions “the serious desire to cultivate the individual” (EI 3:64) as one of the aims of the classical educational revival inspired by Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824), the father of Nietzsche’s chosen subject, philology, which Wolf defined broadly as “knowledge of human nature as exhibited in antiquity” (EI 3:64). It was largely Wolf and Humboldt who translated the Greek paradigm of paideia, the Greek conception of education as the cultivation of virtue, into a German reality. Bildung was a philological activity, a kind of humanistic molding and improvement of the individual. As Humboldt explained to Wolf, there was another sort of learning, alongside intellectual learning, one gained from studying heroic and great men: “This education [Ausbildung] is increasingly losing its importance and achieved its highest degree among the Greeks. It can be better promoted it seems to me, only by studying great and remarkable men . . . To put it in a word, by studying the Greeks.”20 Studying historic battles, not in terms of military strategy or service to the state, but as a means of understanding the decisions and strengths of heroic individuals, was, at least in part, also what Nietzsche did at Schulpforta. As he states in Schopenhauer as Educator (1874), it is only such rare true men—the philosophers, artists and saints—who lift up and transform humanity through their creation of new models and metaphors: It is the fundamental idea of culture, insofar as it sets for each one of us but one task: to promote the production of the philosopher the artist and the saint within us and without us and thereby to work at the perfecting of nature. For,

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as nature needs the philosopher, so does it need the artist, for the achievement of a metaphysical goal, that of its own self-enlightenment, so that it may at last behold as a clear and finished picture that which it could see only obscurely in the agitation of its evolution—for the end, that is to say, of self-knowledge (UM 3:160).

Nietzsche takes up the goal of self-transformation again in the essay, where he applauds the exemplary life of Schopenhauer, his greatest teacher and true educator, his Erzieher, as in the title of the essay. “Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the true basic material of your being is, something in itself ineducable and in any case difficult of access, bound and paralyzed: your educators can be only your liberators” (UM 3:129). At the core of educational experience is a revelation, a radical questioning, a “total upheaval of [the student’s] nature whose attainment is the real meaning of life” (SE:189). “Be yourself!” Nietzsche proclaims to his students, “You are none of those things you now do, think, desire” (SE:163). This “dangerous” questioning and taking total responsibility for the authentic self is the beginning of true education. “We are accountable to ourselves for this existence of ours. . . . Nobody can build you the bridge over which you must cross the river of life, nobody but you alone. . . . In this world there is one unique path which no one but you may walk. Where does it lead? Do not ask; take it” (SE:165). In this stirring and direct address to his readers, like a prophet or a spiritual guide, Nietzsche writes with a pathos as powerful as any of the voices of subjectivity in the West (the author of the Psalms, the Apostle Paul, Augustine, Montaigne, Rousseau, Goethe, or Schopenhauer—the last four cited by Nietzsche as his most important educators). As he notes, the task of asserting one’s self and becoming what one is requires patience, strenuous effort, and humility. “But how can we find ourselves again? How can man know himself? He is a dark and veiled thing and whereas the hare has seven skins, man could skin himself seventy-times-seven and still not say, ‘This now is you yourself, this is no longer skin’ ” (SE:165). Nietzsche paints a picture of a difficult life, filled with never-ending trials, loneliness, and the incomprehension of one’s peers—but a life of risk and final victory in the completion of “the task of making human beings human” (SE:153). A long passage from Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena sums up this defiant attitude toward life: “A happy life is impossible; the highest life attainable by man is a heroic life. This is the life of the man who, for whatever motive and in any way, fights against immense difficulties for the benefit of all and who finally conquers but receives little or no reward. So, at the end, he finds himself like the prince in Gozzi’s Re Corvo, turned to stone, but in a noble stance and with magnanimous features” (SE:190). The ultimate achievement and justification of life is the attainment of a lasting aesthetic stance or posture, an artistic fashioning of one’s own life.

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Informing Nietzsche’s educational ideal is an absolute commitment to the truth, which promises to make the student uncomfortable, unwelcome in groups, and shunned in society. Schopenhauer’s personal motto, vitam impendere vero (to stake life on truth) (SE:215), also exemplifies this commitment, which Richard Schacht glosses as “the truth of existence, at once sobering and promising, to be grasped through its unflinchingly honest, un-myopic and imaginative assessment.”21 At the basis of one’s personal commitment to truth is an elevation of individual subjective experiences in the world. The properly educated, philosophically oriented person “sees things for the first time,” with a sense of wonder, which was always at the core of Greek pedagogy, going back to Aristotle (SE:214).

Those No Longer Animals The goal of Nietzschean education is to become a whole human being. This means integrating and synthesizing all aspects of the complete human being: the animal and human mind and body. This involves recognizing and never forgetting that the human is an animal, part of the fabric of nature, which is cruel and relentlessly purposeful. Nietzsche borrows this melancholy view of nature as well from Schopenhauer. “No harsher fate can be imagined than that of the beasts of prey who are driven through the desert by the most devouring torment, seldom ever satisfied; and even when it is, the satisfaction turns into pain in the flesh-tearing struggle with other animals, or in nauseating greed and satiety” (SE:193). Through the process of education and artistic expression, the human being completes and transcends their animality. Nature, the uninterrupted chain of being, makes an exception with the human being. “Nature, who makes no leaps, makes her only leap, a leap of joy” (SE:195). This leap of joy is a movement upward towards humanity. It is a physical leap, none-the-less, not a denial or a leaving behind of the animal body, but rather a lifting up and redemption of the body. The genius, the artist, and the properly educated human being remain linked to nature and fulfill her aims by their artistic activity. “It is nature’s will that the artist do his work for the good of other men” (SE: 212).

Puppets, Robots, and Slaves In contrast to the lofty, transcendent aims of culture, which Nietzsche found in Schopenhauer and Greek culture, what he observed in his day was a counterfeit culture, devoid of human meaning and fulfillment, mechanistically churning out “puppets, robots and slaves,” who go on to serve as politicians,

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officers, and managers (SE:209). The Basel philologist spells out a list of thirteen things wrong with contemporary German education, all of which are ultimately the fault of the “scholar,” a Bildungsphilister (educated philistine), far from a true philosopher. Among Nietzsche’s complaints: Scholarly education is guided by idle curiosity, the pursuit of the truth, and not the truth itself. The scholar prostitutes his truth to bolster and legitimize a church, a government, or a class. Scholarly education exalts conventional rules and personalities and censors exceptional individuals. University professors are slavishly loyal to their own teachers; they suffer from low self-esteem. Scholars are concerned, above all, with earning a living. “The scholar is by nature sterile—the result of his origin—and he feels a quite natural hatred for the creative man” (SE:208; emphasis in original). For Nietzsche, the gravest sin of Germany’s educational system is that it is inhuman, collective, and mechanical—the opposite of the ideal of a bodily leap to a higher, improvised, evolving humanity. The machine is particularly abhorrent for Nietzsche because the human, swallowed up in a mechanical assemblage, loses all identity, integrity, and individuality, and is reduced to the level of a passive and unreflective part of a totality he or she does not comprehend. This is the negative image of Nietzsche’s Bildungsmaschine and the nightmarish vision of physical shrinking and deformation brought about by the acroamatic method of education.

Die Bildungsmaschine In language reminiscent of Marx, Nietzsche argues that the conventional teaching methods of his day, the actual classroom mechanisms of the Lernfabriken (education factories), produced an alienation among students similar to that experienced by factory workers: “The teacher . . . speaks to . . . listening students. Whatever else he may think and do is cut off from the student’s perception by an immense gap. The professor often reads when he is speaking. . . . One speaking mouth, with many ears, and half as many writing hands—there you have to all appearances, the external academical apparatus; the university engine of culture [Bildungsmaschine] set in motion.”22 In another passage of the Basel lectures, he describes the alienated student as a mere cog in this machine, who “may choose what he is to listen to; he is not bound to believe what is said; he may close his ears if he does not care to hear. This is the ‘acroamatic’ method of teaching.”23 Nietzsche denounced this acroamatic style of teaching, the passive pedagogy of transmission that proceeds mechanistically from mouth to ear, as actually being “not a real culture [Bildung] at all but only a kind of knowledge of culture [Bildung]” (UM 2:78), an idea of education.24 For Nietzsche, students subjected to the acroamatic

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method acquire a pseudo-education, rather than one that actually produces truly educated individuals. He points out that this ancient, seemingly innocent pedagogy of transmitting values is, in fact, not at all a disinterested enterprise. While teachers and students are under an assumption that the ritual is autonomous and voluntary, in reality, as Nietzsche points out, the ubiquitous state is never far away, a reminder that the nation is in fact students’ final objective. “They may again recognise the State as the highest goal, as the reward of all their strivings after education.”25 In a striking dreamlike passage in Also Sprach Zarathustra, the philosophernarrator recounts a vision of the kind of physical disfigurement that such an imbalanced approach to teaching produces in its subjects. “And when I came out of my solitude and went across this bridge for the first time, I could not believe my eyes and had to look, and look again, before saying at last: ‘That is an ear! An ear as large as a human being!’ Then I looked more closely, and in fact under the ear there was something else moving, something pitifully small and meagre and puny. And in truth, the enormous ear was sitting on a thin little stalk–but the stalk was a human being!”26 Nietzsche uncovers here the relevance of the body for the acquisition of knowledge and locates the very impetus of learning not in rationality, but within the body itself, in Wisstrieb (the drive or desire to know), or more specifically, in Erkenntnistrieb (the cognitive instinct). The author of Zarathustra suggests that without considering individual desires to learn or engaging the vital energies inherent in the tiny emaciated stalk of a student body, the impersonal Bildungsmaschine creates not only passive, homogeneous, listening subjects, but also illness, disfigurement, and cultural atrophy.

Willenserziehung: A “Gymnastic of the Will” For centuries, as also reflected in Fichte’s earlier commentary, the main purpose of education had not been to arouse the desire to know, but rather to break the will, to soften the ground, to prepare the will to accept the seeds of a higher authority, an external will—as Friedrich Schwarz, a professor of theology and education in Heidelberg asserted in 1835: “Education consists foremost of making the child will-less of rendering it selfless and thus acclimating it to its subservience to a foreign will.”27 Since the child’s will was seen as evil, “a completely will-less child was deemed the best.”28 Childrearing manuals at the time advised that the most effective way of destroying the will was by force, through acts of Prügelstrafe (corporal punishment), according to well-worn biblical adages, such as “Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline will drive it far from him.” (Proverbs 22:15).”29 Heinrich Hoffmann helped popularize some of the most fear-inducing depictions of this older pedagogy of breaking the will in his stark

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warnings to willful children in Der Struwwelpeter (1845), which graphically instructs children about the harsh consequences of disobedience: the willful Pauline who insists on playing with matches burns to death, a tailor finally cuts off the thumbs of the resistant Daumenlutscher (thumb sucker) with scissors; the obstinate Suppen-Kasperl refuses to eat and wastes away in his grave. Such Schwarze Pädagogik (black or poisonous pedagogy) focused on using brutality to eradicate the will and insert in its place an Über-Ich (a super ego).30 At the same time the Educational Reform Movement of the nineteenth century began expressing resistance to the institutionalized repressive education of the will. Prompted by new democratic politics, educational reformers, such as Friedrich Fröbel, Max Stirner, and Ellen Key, came to the defense of individuals’ Willensfreiheit (free will), building on earlier child-centered approaches by Pestalozzi and the philanthropists. Such revolutionary voices led to a new direction in educational theory, one aimed at enhancing and employing the will, rather than breaking or taming it.31 Such was the cultural background against which Nietzsche formulated his concept of Willenserziehung. He presents this dichotomy between müssen (having to) and wollen (wanting to) in Will to Power: “Our absurd pedagogic world . . . thinks it can get by with ‘instruction,’ with brain drill [Gehirn-Dressur]; it has not the slightest idea that something else is needed first—education of will power [Willenserziehung]; one devises tests for everything except for the main thing: whether [students] can will, whether they can keep promises; the young man finishes school without a single question, without any curiosity even concerning this supreme value-problem of his nature” (WP:484).32 Instead of the “weakening and extinguishing . . . of the will,” through a regimen of suppression, negation, and creation of docile subjects for social purposes, Nietzsche’s pedagogy is an interior one aimed at affirming and strengthening the individual’s motivations and resolve. For this he turns to asceticism, which he calls the “indispensable . . . educator of the will” (WP:484), the ancient means, first created by the Stoics, Sophists, and Platonists for disciplining the body in order to free the soul, and later applied to spiritual training in early Christianity for the purpose of attaining higher virtue. It is this second application, asceticism’s life-diminishing aim of self-denial as practiced by priests, that Nietzsche rejects in Will to Power in 1887: “It is my desire to naturalize asceticism: I would substitute the old intention of asceticism, ‘self-denial’ by my own intention, ‘self-strengthening’: a gymnastic of the will; a period of abstinence and occasional fasting of every kind, even in things intellectual” (WP:483)33 By adopting such a means of painful Selbstzucht (self-training), one would, despite all appearances of torture and self-negation, actually be harnessing animal passions and strengthening the self. All learning is through suffering, but unlike meaningless suffering, which devolves into nihilism, asceticism valorizes the pain of hard-won lessons and thus creates meaning. According to Nietzsche, “Man, the bravest animal and most prone to suffer does not deny suffering as

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such: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering” (GM 3:28[120]); emphasis in original). Life and the expansion of the self should be the aim of this pedagogy, not self-flagellation and penance. By identifying and overcoming outside obstacles and tests of will, students will learn Standfestigkeit (resoluteness) and develop the fortitude to be “able to suspend decision” when facing impulse (TI 8:6). Steadfast higher types “find their happiness where others would find their destruction . . . in hardness against themselves and others . . . their joy is self-conquest; asceticism becomes in them, nature, need and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens which crush others, a recreation” (AC:57). In Schopenhauer as Educator Nietzsche remarks: “How inadequate to the task of making a human being are the highest institutes of learning, the universities, the leaders and the institutions with which we are content!” (UM:142). To escape the mediocrity of this schooling and its democratic leveling, Nietzsche calls for the building of figures of exceptional individualism—the creation of “heroic minds.” The author of Will to Power places himself, along with Schopenhauer, Beethoven and others, among these “hard, strict, abstinent, heroic minds who make up the glory of our time, all these pale atheists, Antichrists, immoralists, nihilists, these sceptics, ephectics” (GM 3:24[111]). Propelled by the will to truth, these “heroic minds” “carry on in the absence of . . . meaning or vindication, [and] give up, in effect, asking ‘Suffering for what?’” (GM 3:28[120]). Although Nietzsche acknowledges that such heroes “overestimate the truth” (GM 3:24[113]), he is impressed with “the basic fact of the human will,” that “it needs an aim—and it prefers to will nothingness than not will” (GM 3:1[68]) at all. Such minds reinvent the human—not as priests transforming bad conscience into guilt in a cruelty turned inward, nor as scientists or scholar subjects inscribing and archiving knowledge, but rather they treat self-knowledge as action, participatory, something won heroically from resistance, a courageous choreography, a life-affirming rope dance leading forth and über (above), despite the abyss. Only the highest, the strongest, the most heroic minds can avoid suicidal nihilism and embrace this formula for human greatness. If we can speak of a goal to this kind of Bildung, this process of individuation, selfovercoming and becoming who one is, it lies in negotiating the gap between animal and overman, relinquishing the need for assurances and grasping the courage to bravely affirm or love one’s own fate, that is amor fati.

The Schliemann of Asceticisms In Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (2009), Nietzsche is hailed as “the Schliemann of asceticisms.”34 The title of Sloterdijk’s book refers to the final line of Rilke’s famous sonnet, “Archaïscher Torso Apol-

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los.” Sloterdijk interprets the admonition at the end of the poem—“Du mußt dein Leben ändern”—to mean that the observer of the headless torso of Apollo must respond to the beauty and vitality of the statue by rising to a higher level of humanity, through strenuous athletic training and constant upward striving toward perfection: “I am already living, but something is telling me with unchallengeable authority: you are not living properly.”35 The last line of the poem is a modern call for a return to ancient practices of anthropotechnics—the process whereby elite humans literally compose or perform their human nature. Sloterdijk argues that this “ancient somatic idealism”36 that first returned to the West around 1400, during the philological and artistic renaissance, received its greatest modern impetus and formulation in Nietzsche’s philosophy. “With his find, Nietzsche stands fatally—in the best sense of the word—at the start of modern, nonspiritualistic ascetologies along with their physio- and psychotechnic annexes, with dietologies and self-referential trainings, and hence all the forms of self-referential practicing and working on one’s own vital form that I bring together in the term ‘anthropotechnics.’”37 This somatic and athletic renaissance spread throughout modern culture; its signature event was the restarting of the Olympic Games in 1896. It has infiltrated many aspects of modern life, rendering the circus and acrobats popular in real life and in art; it made the athlete a role model, imitated by thousands of amateur athletes; it was responsible for the founding of many secular practices of the self, which Foucault grouped together under the aegis of the care of the self. All of these practices are characterized by a never satisfied vertical striving that is the essence of Nietzsche’s anthropology. Most relevant for our study, this personal and vertical human fashioning took root in the schools and universities, where it competed with and was amalgamated with classical Bildung. We recall that the ambition of creating whole human beings was one of the stated goals of Schulpforta, one culminating in pupils’ subservience to “the law and to the will of their superiors” as well as their commitment to “serious work.”38 It is precisely this ambition of creating whole human beings that Nietzsche thought the conventional Bildung education of his day utterly incapable of accomplishing. “How inadequate to the task of making a human being are the highest institutes of learning, the universities, the leaders and the institutions with which we are content!” (UM:142). There are many reasons why Nietzsche’s and the rector of Schulpforta’s vision of anthropotechnics collide, the most essential being the subordination of human fashioning to obedience and work in the rector’s program. Industry and production are antithetical to the Greek tradition of ascetics, which is modeled on athletic and artistic performance, not productivity and labor, and which witnessed a massive intensification in the nineteenth century. Marx went so far as to declare that man defines and separates himself from animals by changing his physical environment through work: “Humans begin to distinguish themselves

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from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence, men are indirectly producing their actual material life.”39 As the “Schliemann of asceticisms,” Nietzsche represents an opposed conception of the self-fashioning activities of humans and the values that result from training and care. Sloterdijk insists on this distinction: “Since practice as an activity type—together with aesthetic play—stepped out of the shadow of work, a new ecosystem of activities has been developing in which the absolute precedence of product value is revised in favor of practice values, performance values and ‘experiential values.’ ”40 Nietzsche’s fierce rejection of state-subordinated Bildung, and his insistence on the inherent unproductiveness of education, stems from his view that, in these practices of learning and acrobatic activities, the human being, and especially the genius, accomplishes tasks that are, in Sloterdijk’s words “out of the shadow of work.” Nietzsche’s response to the ideal of Bildung, as it was taught in the Gymnasia and universities of his day, was an attempt at a radical purification and restoration of ideals of Greek civilization, as he understood them, fused with the more recent German cult of genius. More important for Nietzsche than the actual accumulation of knowledge in the educational enterprise is the radical call out to students to be themselves and to forge an adventurous pathway through life, not just through a curriculum. “Nobody can build you the bridge over which you must cross the river of life, nobody but you alone” (SE:165). As an elitist and a believer in geniuses, like his mentor Schopenhauer, Nietzsche taught an illustrious and continuing line of artists and thinkers—Rilke, Heidegger, the Existentialists, Bataille, Foucault, and the Frankfurt School in continental Europe, and many others in the Americas and around the world. Although ancient Greece has less of a hold and unquestioned acceptance as a cultural model now than it did in Nietzsche’s day, his vitalist appeal to philosophy to defend and protect life, including animal life, continues to echo, as does his depiction of human life as a tragic struggle redeemed, ultimately, by the contemplation of the aesthetic and self-fashioning as a supreme work of art. In the defense of the humanities, Nietzsche certainly took the hard, alpine road. At a time when the humanities are in danger of decline, they are perhaps, from Nietzsche’s perspective, about to show their true value. As Zarathustra says to the fallen tightrope walker, “You have made danger your calling: there is nothing in that to despise. Now your calling has brought you down: therefore will I bury you with my own hands.”41 As defenders of the humanities in a political environment that looks increasingly like Nietzsche’s, we may not wish to be buried by Zarathustra as a reward for our efforts. Nietzsche’s ringing, untimely insistence, however, echoed by Sloterdijk, that Bildung, in its proper sense, occurs out of the shadow of work, makes it far from archaic and no less valuable or strenuous.

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Jennifer Ham is professor of German and humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where she teaches courses on German literature, culture, and language and has served as division chair of humanities the past few years. In addition to this volume and her earlier book, Elastizität: Movement, Time and Space in Frank Wedekind’s Dramatic Works, Jennifer has also published and presented on subjects such as animal studies, Nietzsche, femininity, cabaret, Frank Wedekind, and German cinema; she is also coeditor of Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, published by Routledge.

Notes 1. “denn dein wahres Wesen liegt nicht tief verborgen in dir, sondern unermeßlich hoch über dir, oder wenigstens über dem, was du gewöhnlich als dein Ich nimmst” (KSA 1:340-341). The following translations of Nietzsche’s works are cited parenthetically with volume (if a multi-volume work), then part or section number followed by page number (i.e. KGW 7: 3[53]), using the following abbreviations: AC: The Antichrist (trans. Kaufmann); D: Daybreak (trans. Hollingdale); EI: “On the Future” (trans. Kennedy); GM: On the Genealogy (trans. Diethe); HH: Human All Too Human (trans. Hollingdale); SE: “Schopenhauer as Educator” (trans. Arrowsmith); TI: Twilight of the Idols (trans. Hollingdale); UM: Untimely Meditations (trans. Hollingdale); WP: Will to Power (trans. Kaufmann and Hollingdale); Z: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (trans. Parkes). Sources of the original German by Nietzsche are abbreviated as follows: BAW: Werke und Briefe; KGB: Briefe: Kritische Gesamtausgabe; KGW: Werke; KSA: Kritische Studienausgabe; KSB: Sämtliche Briefe. 2. “[Wo] ein zwar ganz gesitteter, immerhin doch etwas derber und lärmender Ton herrschte.” Letter from Förster-Nietzsche, 1912. 3. “Mich hat jetzt ein ungemeiner Drang nach Erkenntniß, nach universeller Bildung ergriffen.” 4. “Allzuviel auf mir, seit wann?, fast von Kindesbeinen an.” Quoted also in Hoyer, Nietzsche und die Pädagogik, 84. 5. For a more detailed discussion of the debate about the overburdening of students, see Albisetti, Secondary School Reform, 119–139. 6. Schmidt, Die Geschichte der Pädagogik, vol. 4, 375. 7. Tissot, Gesundheiten der Gelehrten, 11. Quoted also in Lempa, Beyond the Gymnasium, 216. 8. Albisetti, Secondary School Reform, 123. For more about the issue of the detrimental health effects of the scholarly lifestyle, see also May, Medicinische Fastenpredigten, vol. 1. 9. Sloterdijk, You Must Change, 34. 10. Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche: Biographie, part I, 65–66. 11. Fichte made this statement in his address “The General Nature of the New Education.” Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, 21 (quote, emphasis my own). 12. “Methodisch bestand er wie bisher aus lehrerzentrierten Vorträgen (Lectionen) und selbständigen Wiederholungs- und Ausarbeitungsphasen (Repetierstunden), bei denen die älteren Schüler die jüngeren anzuleiten hatten.” (Landesschule Pforta Boarding School. n.d.).

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13. “That is the unfortunate suicide of Kretzschmer in Schulpforta. The reasons are really unknown, or are being well hushed up.” From Nietzsche’s letter to Carl von Gersdorff in 1867, quoted in Nietzsche, Selected Letters, 30. It is not surprising that student suicides, such as the famous Steglitzer Schülermord case in a suburb of Berlin, were a prevalent and growing embarrassment for schools during this period. Only Denmark exceeded Prussia in numbers of suicides below the age of sixteen. Emile Durkheim shows in his epochal study “Le Suicide” (1901) that student-age suicide rates were much lower in France and Italy. Durkheim recommended strengthening physical education and alleviating anxiety about exams and failing classes. 14. “Nicht nach Pforta zurück, wo nur die Strenge regiert” Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe, KSB 1: 95. 15. Gilman, Conversations with Nietzsche, 40. 16. The Basel Pädagogium was an institution and college prep curriculum run by Basel University consisting of three classes geared to 15 to 18-year-old senior Gymnasium students that was designed to facilitate their entrance to university studies. Most Basel University faculty were also required to teach in the program. Nietzsche taught classes in Greek and ancient studies there from 1869 to 1876. Jakob Burckhard also taught at the Pädagogium, and Johann Jakob Bachofen was a student there in 1834. 17. Gilman, Conversations with Nietzsche, 98. 18. Ibid.,100. 19 From Nietzsche’s letter to Erwin Rohde in 1870. 20. Letter from Humboldt to Wolf, December 1, 1792, cited in Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables, 116. 21. Richard Schacht, from the Introduction, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, 159. 22. Levy, The Complete Works. Translated by J.M. Kennedy, 125-126. “Ein redender Mund und sehr viele Ohren, mit halbsoviel schreibenden Händen – das ist der äußerliche akademische Apparat.” (KGW 2:232). 23. Ibid.,126. “Er kann sich wählen, was er hören will, er braucht nicht zu glauben, was er hört, er kann das Ohr schliessen, wenn er nicht hören mag. Dies ist die “akroamatische” Lehrmethode.” (KGW 2:232). 24. “Die moderne Bildung ist nur noch ein Wissen um die Bildung, keine wahre Bildung.” (KSA 3: 273). See Adorno’s discussion of this notion of pseudo-education. For salient texts by Nietzsche on education, see “Schopenhauer as Educator”; “On the Uses”; “David Strauss”; “On the Future”; and, the preface to the second edition of The Gay Science. For secondary sources on Nietzsche and education, see Bingham, “What Friedrich Nietzsche”; Cooper, Authenticity and Learning; Cowan, “Gynastics of the Will”; Gordon, “Nietzsche’s Zarathustra”; Hoyer, Nietzsche und die Pädagogik; Johnston, “Nietzsche as Educator”; and Marshall, Nietzsche’s Legacy. 25. “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions.” In Levy, The Complete Works. Translated by J.M. Kennedy, 86. 26. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Graham Parkes, 120. (For a further discussion of the student as ear, see Derrida, “All Ears”). 27. Schwarz, Lehrbuch, 26. “Die Erziehung besteht also einzig darin, dass sie nur vorerst das Kind willenlos mache, es ganz entselbste, und es dann gewöhne sich dem fremden Willen zu unterwerfen, und also das göttliche Gesetz mit völliger Selbsverläugnung zu befolgen.” (Translation mine). 28. Ibid.

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29. Solomon’s Old Testament wisdom justifying discipline also echoed in Proverbs 13:24: “Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline him.” 30. For an extensive discussion of the concept see Rutschky, Schwarze Pädagogik. 31. This position, which Nietzsche helped to popularize, informs most modern pedagogy to this day. Corporal punishment in schools was outlawed in East Germany in 1949 and in West Germany in 1972 (1983 in Bavaria). In 2000, after parents’ elterliche Züchtigungsrecht (right to discipline) was abolished, German children were granted the right to a gewaltfreie Erziehung (a violence-free education). 32. Note that this text is often viewed with reserve as it was edited posthumously by his sister. 33. “Ich will auch die Asketik wieder vernatürlichen; an Stelle der Absicht auf Verneinung die Absicht auf Verstärkung; eine Gymnastik des Willens; eine Entbehrung und eingelegte Fastenzeiten jeder Art, auch im Geistigen” (KSA 12:387). 34. Sloterdijk, You Must Change, 34. 35. Ibid., 25. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Krell, The Good European, 22. 39. Marx, “The German Ideology,” 653. 40. Sloterdijk, You Must Change, 212. 41. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Graham Parkes, 18.

Bibliography Primary Sources Colli, Geogio, and Mazzino Montinari, eds. Kritische Studienausgabe. 15 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988. Levy, Oscar, ed. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Translated by J. M. Kennedy. New York: Macmillan, 1924. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer.” In Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, edited by Daniel Breazeale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. Daybreak. Edited by Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. Human All Too Human. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. ———. “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions.” In Levy, The Complete Works. Translated by J.M. Kennedy. London: T.N. Foulis, 1910. ———. On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated by Carol Diethe, edited by Keith AnsellPearson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” In Nietzche, Untimely Meditations, (trans. Hollingdale). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe, hsg. Georgio Colli und Mazzino Martinari, 8 Bände, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986.

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———. “Schopenhauer as Educator.” In Unmodern Observations, edited and translated by William Arrowsmith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. ———. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. Edited by Christopher Middleton. Cambridge: Hacket Publishers, 1996. ———. The Antichrist. Translated by Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking, 1982. ———. The Gay Science. With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams, Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Graham Parkes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. Twilight of the Idols. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. ———. “Über die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten: Sechs öffentliche Vorträge“ (1872). In Colli and Montinari, Kritische Studienausgabe, 641–752. ———. Untimely Meditations. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale and edited by Daniel Breazeale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. “Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen. Erstes Stück: David Strauss der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller“ (1873). In Colli and Montinari, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 1, 157–242. ———. Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen. In Werke in drei Bänden, edited by Karl Schlechta, Band I. Munich: Hanser, 1954. ———. Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, edited by Hans Joachim Mette, Band I. Munich: Beck, 1933. ———. Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, begründet von Georgio Colli und Mazzino Martinari. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967. ———. Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House, 1968.

Secondary Sources Adorno, Theodor. “Theorie der Halbbildung.” In Soziologische Schriften I, edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003. Albisetti, James. Secondary School Reform in Imperial Germany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. Landesschule Pforta Boarding School. n.d. Website home page. Begabtenförderung und Internatsleben an der Landesschule Pforta. http://www.landesschule-pforta.de Bingham, Charles. “What Friedrich Nietzsche Cannot Stand About Education: Toward a Pedagogy of Self-Reformulation.” Educational Theory 51, no. 3 (2001): 337–52. Cassin, Barbara, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood, eds. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Cho, Daniel. “Adorno on Education or, Can Critical Self-Reflection Prevent the Next Auschwitz?” Historical Materialism 17, no. 1 (2009): 74–97. Cooper, David. Authenticity and Learning: Nietzsche’s Educational Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1983. ———. “On Reading Nietzsche on Education.” Journal of Philosophy of Education 17, no. 1 (1985): 119–26.

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Cowan, Michael, “Gymnastics of the Will: Abulia and Will Therapy in Modern German Culture” Kulturpoetik 5:2, Fall 2005, p. 169–89. Derrida, Jacques. “All Ears: Nietzsche’s Otobiography.” Yale French Studies 63 (1982): 245–50. Durkheim, Emile. Le Suicide: Etude de Sociologie. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1897. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Addresses to the German Nation. Translated by R.F. Jones and G.H. Turnbull. London: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1922. Gilman, Sander ed. Conversations with Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Gordon, Haim. “Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as Educator.” Journal of Philosophy of Education 14, no. 2 (1980): 181–92. Hoyer, Timo. Nietzsche und die Pädagogik: Werk, Biografie und Rezeption. Würzburg: Könighausen und Neumann, 2002. Janz, Curt Paul. Friedrich Nietzsche: Biographie. Munich: Hanser, 1978, 1993. Johnston, James Scott. “Nietzsche as Educator: A Reexamination.” Educational Theory 48, no. 1 (2005): 67–83. Krell, David. The Good European: Nietzsche’s Work Sites in Word and Image. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Lempa, Heikki. Beyond the Gymnasium: Educating the Middle-Class Bodies in Classical Germany. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. Marx, Karl. “The German Ideology.” In Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. London: Blackwell, 1998. Marshall, James, Michael Peters, and Paul Smeyers, eds. Nietzsche’s Legacy for Education: Past and Present Values. Westport CT: Praeger, 2000. May, Franz Anton May. Medicinische Fastenpredigten oder Vorlesungen über Körper und Seelen-Diätetik zur Verbesserung der Gesundheit und Sitten, vol. 1. Mannheim: Schwan & Götz, 1793. Rutschky, Katharina. Schwarze Pädagogik. Quellen zur Naturgeschichte der bürgerlichen Erziehung. Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1977. Schmidt, Karl. Die Geschichte der Pädagogik in weltgeschichtlier Entwicklung. Gothen: Paul Schettler, 1862. Schwarz, Friedrich Heinrich. Lehrbuch der Erziehungs- und Unterrichtslehre 1802–1813. Besorgt von H.-H. Groothoff unter Mitwirkung von U. Herrmann. Paderborn, 1968. Sloterdijk Peter. You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2013. Tissot, Samuel André. Gesundheiten der Gelehrten. Zürich: Fueßlin, 1768.

CHAPTER 6



The Self-Formation of Poetic Expression Wilhelm Dilthey’s Geistesgeschichte ANNA GUILLEMIN

W

ilhelm Dilthey begins his chapter on Goethe in Poetry and Lived Experience (1910), a book that would unexpectedly reverberate throughout the field of German literature, with a bold disciplinary reorientation. The central concern of all literary history, he asserts, is the poet’s imagination.1 Literary studies, if we follow the statement to its logical conclusion, is a form of cognitive science, a surprising proposition in and of itself, but one that further begs the question: Why would a philosopher of the social sciences, phenomenology, and hermeneutics feel compelled to intervene so emphatically in the far-flung field of literature? In the first version of his article, published three decades earlier, Dilthey argues even more forcefully that the poet’s imagination is the “be all and end of all literary history” and the basis for the “scientific study of poetry.”2 Here the stakes become clear, for by “scientific study” he means the rigorous, inductive analysis on which he had founded the field of Geisteswissenschaft (the human sciences). Dilthey’s life-long philosophical project, informed by his magisterial biography of Schleiermacher, begun in the 1860s and articulated in his Introduction to the Human Sciences in 1883, sought in studying the social sciences as distinct from the natural sciences to establish a new, critically grounded understanding of human and historical life. He envisioned a Critique of Historical Reason that would expand Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to social and cultural knowledge.3 His 1877 essay on Goethe, which would anchor Poetry and Lived Experience, situates a rigorous poetics at the center of this project. He would retrospectively call it nothing less than “the foundation of the human sciences upon a descriptive psychology.”4 Dilthey would later recall that his research into Goethe laid the groundwork for his “inductive analysis of poetry.”5 In the Goethe essay he uses the adjec-

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tive “descriptive” for the first time,6 a concept he would continue to develop philosophically for the human sciences in general.7 Dilthey developed the descriptive method to accommodate the phenomenon of poetry. Literature, he observed, as an organic branch of the human sciences, followed its own rules; it could not be explored with recourse to preconceived theories.8 But while the reading of poetry invites inductive questioning, Dilthey would argue, it also lies at the heart of the human sciences for a second reason. Dilthey’s title and essay announce that poetry is intensified lived experience (the German word “Erlebnis” [experience] embeds the word “Leben” [life] within it),9 and as such it provides exceptionally rich material for an investigation of the human. Even in the theoretical milder terms of the last edition of Poetry and Lived Experience, Dilthey treats Goethe’s writing as data with which to study the genus homo sapiens. Poetry reveals the human mind at the height of its creativity. It lays bare consciousness, it uncovers acts of sense-making, and, more than any other human construction, it vividly shows what it means to be human. Such an ardent philosophical defense of poetics led to an uneven reception for Poetry and Lived Experience. To philosophers, the book’s four literary essays written for the most part in the 1860s and 1870s and reedited (according to the first preface) at the insistence of Dilthey’s students, seemed a peripheral contribution. Yet to some literary historians the book was a masterful achievement of groundbreaking theoretical scope.10 On the heels of its unexpected success, it came to be regarded (rightly or wrongly) as the foundational text of the practice of Geistesgeschichte (history of ideas) in German literature.11 What explains the book’s cross-disciplinary celebrity? Did it offer a way out of the extreme specialization of nineteenth century philology and the deadening detailcollection of positivism?12 Was it due to the enormous expansion of universities in imperial Germany, during which the number of philology and philosophy students surged six-fold between 1891 and 1911?13 Or was it the vitalism of Dilthey’s language, his insistence on concepts like life/lived experience, spirit, and meaning that galvanized students of literary history?14 All of these factors undoubtedly contributed to the book’s popularity, and yet, for a collection of essays on the age of Goethe, Dilthey’s appealing word for lived experience, “Erlebnis,” has an oddly anachronistic ring.15 It was not used in Goethe’s own time, emerging only much later, rapidly gaining traction with Dilthey and his contemporaries in the 1870s. On the other hand, another word, one native to Goethe’s time period and aesthetics, appears and refracts itself in multifaceted iterations throughout Dilthey’s essay. It is invoked in his description of the germinating branches of the humanities and articulated early on in a quotation from Goethe himself, observing his “ever more active, internalizing and externalizing drive towards poetic creation” or Bildungstrieb (creative drive).16 Bildung (education, formation, development) I argue, even more fundamentally than the nexus Leben/Erlebnis, stands as the organizing idea of

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the Goethe essay and, more broadly, Dilthey’s field of the human sciences. The essay, through a close reading of Goethe’s aesthetic and methodological development, reinvigorates a term associated with the German new humanism of 1800 while reconceptualizing it in fresh, cognitively nuanced, and empirically grounded vocabulary.

Visualization. Most later-nineteenth-century scholars of Goethe associated the term “Bildung” with the Bildungsroman.17 Dilthey’s essay is striking for mentioning Goethe’s important innovator of that genre, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), only in passing. The world of the novel of education, with its busy, complicated, social narratives, seems not to have captured the imagination of this philosopher in search of elemental data about human consciousness. Rather, Dilthey finds inspiration in the less frequented world of Goethe’s natural sciences. Indeed, a crucial insight comes from Goethe’s contemporary, Johannes Müller, and his study of the physiology of the senses. Müller in turn found critical evidence for his book in a passage from Goethe. In it Goethe describes the imagination at work with the morphological precision he had brought to his Metamorphosis of Plants (1790). Goethe’s account of mental visualization reads, “I had the ability, when I closed my eyes and, with lowered head, conjured a flower in the center of my inner eye, that it would transform within an instant from its original form, opening itself up from its interior, unfolded ever new flowers, with colorful, sometimes even green petals. They were no natural flowers, but rather fantastical, although as regular as a sculptor’s rosettes.”18 Goethe observes how his mind could move with ease from the real to the imaginary, even as the flowers he pictures follow clear morphological laws. Their petals may color unnaturally but maintain a recognizable shape and structure. Indeed, their precision takes them out of the realm of nature into art, from petal into artificial carving. Goethe goes on to liken his imaginative work to another kind of technical manipulation. He continues, “I could elicit the same phenomenon when I thought of the decorations on a colorfully paneled window pane, which likewise would transform continually from center to periphery exactly as the (in our time) newly invented kaleidoscope.”19 Just as this optical toy mirrors colored objects to create regularly changing patterns within the constraints of a mechanical symmetry, so, too, the imagination rearranges the real within fixed visual parameters. Johannes Müller found Goethe’s account of mental visualization evidence for a dynamic model of image formation, countering a previous static model of reproduction.20 Dilthey found something even more valuable, namely the key to understanding

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the process of poetic creation itself. At work on a chapter on poetic form and technique in 1886, he wrote to his friend Paul Yorck von Wartenburg of how he hesitated to set his thoughts down definitively because “in the case of my analytically rendered elemental steps, I feel myself on the verge of a discovery as great as the phonetic laws in the field of historical grammar.”21 As a philosopher who aimed to ultimately expand Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to describe not just the knowledge of nature, but also of social and cultural experiences, he sensed palpably how understanding poetic imagination could render this possible. Goethe’s passage on mental imaging illustrates three points that, although contested by modern cognitive theory, decisively shaped Dilthey’s understanding. First, it asserts that imaginative work is a process of visualization, an apprehension neither of sounds nor concepts, but rather of the Bild. Second, this visualization behaves dynamically, perpetually forming itself, as in a process of Bildung. Third, Einbildungskraft (imagination) is made accessible through disciplined self-observation. Just as Johannes Müller practiced laborious, even painful experiments on himself, Goethe here performs an experiment of cognition simply by closing his eyes. The link between representation and formation, between Bild and Bildung, has been recognized within the genre of the novel of education, initially a classical humanist exploration of shaping and perfecting.22 Dilthey’s project, on the other hand, connects this nexus of words—Bild/ Bildung/Einbildung—not within fiction, but within the psycho-physiological act of poetic imagination itself. Wilhelm Dilthey’s human sciences, in other words, investigate not primarily the self-formation of authors, audiences, or fictional characters, but of poetic expression. In doing so, he turns one of the central moral and aesthetic concepts of the age of Goethe into a method of scholarly inquiry, establishing philological criticism as a discipline of the human sciences. Its ocular makeup grounds Dilthey’s poetics in a practice of induction and close reading that brings the true subject of his research into focus: the extraordinary, creative, self-reflective genus homo poeta (born poet). Throughout his writing, Dilthey used two words to describe imaginative work: “Phantasie” (fantasy) and “Einbildungskraft.” His earliest literary essay explores fantastical visions in Goethe, Tieck, and Otto Ludwig, and does so by borrowing so heavily from Johannes Müller’s physiological study, On Visual Hallucination (including the title), that it is now considered, by modern standards, an act of plagiarism.23 He also used the word to describe the literature of modern Europe (fantasy art) in an unfinished literary-historical book from 1895.24 Goethe himself used both words (writing that the flower he sees in his mind’s eye is fantastical), yet Dilthey, in writing about Goethe, tends to favor the second term.25 While he sometimes uses the two words synonymously, he nonetheless tends to assign to the word “fantasy” the characteristics of impulsiveness or free play, while giving the word “imagination” the power of image

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formation and sense-making. Indeed, Einbildungskraft becomes in the Goethe essay both the object of study—via descriptive psychology—and the tool of observation itself. Dilthey insists that the descriptive method remains free of prejudicial hypotheses,26 while positing imagination as a faculty that consciously reflects on its constitutive elements. Descriptive psychology, in other words, imaginatively generates understanding. Nonetheless, Dilthey’s own attempts to understand the workings of the imagination descriptively proved challenging. Müller undoubtedly supplied the core ideas for the original essay, yet Dilthey continued to edit subsequent drafts, reworking and expanding especially his section on the poetic imagination.27 Surviving notes to the manuscripts are often corrected beyond legibility28 in an attempt to answer the question he asks in early revisions: “What is ultimately the relationship between accumulated experiences and free creative fantasy?” (383).29 The question leads Dilthey to break the process of apprehension down into two stages. He separates immediate sense impressions—what he calls “perception” (118) or the Augenblicksbild (immediate image) (118)—from memories, including Erinnerungsbilder (memory images) (116) or Nachbilder (after images). Like Müller and Goethe, Dilthey experiments on himself, fixing an object and attempting to recall it with eyes closed. He observes that the memory retains only parts of the original and becomes further distorted as the mind collects other associative images and emotions. Dilthey’s language emphasizes the visual dimension of this experiment: each perception becomes an image that, as a memory, copies itself to become the after-image. Memories use images as building material to build themselves up into visual constructions. He concludes that, even at this most elemental level of imagination, memories enact the creative work of representational art—“thus the construction of such an image departs markedly from a lifeless reproduction and comes much closer to that of an artistic representation” (118). Memories are of course subjective (Dilthey argues with physiological precision that they vary individually in tonality and clarity [116]), yet Dilthey’s theory hinges on the observation that poets as a group possess an unusual aptitude, almost an aberrant sensory gift (116). They are geniuses not of language, but of vision, possessing “an exceptional ability to preserve remembered or freely imagined ideas accurately and with brilliant clarity” (116). Goethe serves, repeatedly, as exemplar: along with the description of his imagined flower, Dilthey relates how Goethe first mistook his visual recall for painterly talent (124) and late in life reflected how “it was the eye, above any organ, with which I grasped the world” (164). Nonetheless, Dilthey insists, Goethe’s exceptionally vivid imagination operated along precisely the same lines as all human cognition, moving through perception, memory, and reproduction (118). These three stages of memory production inevitably entail transformation. Dilthey

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uses Goethe’s naturalist vocabulary to conclude, “Re-remembering is simultaneously metamorphosis” (118). Dilthey concedes that he cannot access the dexterity with which poetic imagination metamorphoses through mere self-observation, but must rely on the testament of poets. Poetry offers proof of the vast possibility for image formation: “The transformation of images and visual connections, as they take place in memory, is the simplest and therefore most frequently examined case of fantasy’s formative processes [Bindungsprozesses]. Intensifying, modulating, categorizing, generalizing, typecasting, arranging and rearranging, now unconsciously, now arbitrarily; these processes generate an infinity of new visual material” (118). The richness of mental visualizations Dilthey lists echoes Goethe’s passage on the kaleidoscopic flower, for implicit in each is its internal structure, or morphology. Images, Dilthey insists, do not just connect or shift shape, but also organize themselves conceptually, creating morphological types. This Bildungsprozess (formation process), when fully realized, allows for unparalleled fluency and freedom of movement. “A thinking in pictures arises,” Dilthey writes. “In it fantasy reaches a new level of freedom” (118). Only in defining poetry as pure, unfettered visualization does Dilthey then turn, in the case of Goethe, to the aspect of verbalization. Even here, the visual arts serve as a close, dynamic analogy. Dilthey likens Goethe’s skill with rhythm and melody to a painter’s gift with outline and color (122). Poetry, as the medium of intensified lived experience, transforms impression to expression. Dilthey argues that the youthful Goethe excelled at verse because he experienced life with immediate, physical expressivity. Dilthey pictures him hiking fields, composing to his body’s inner rhythms of hymns and dithyrambs. In this context, the word Dilthey uses is “fantasy,” praising Goethe’s “unparalleled gift of fantasy in the sphere of the word” (122). This biometrical languagefantasy—freedom, spontaneity and musicality—undergirds Goethe’s unparalleled neologistic creativity: “He harnessed the living energy of the verb. He worked by means of unprecedented word constructions [Wortbildungen]. He conjoined verbs with new prefixes, nouns with particles, and verbs with their objects, or, by leaving off the verb’s particle, intensified its immediate energy. He built nouns into newly expansive neologisms [Wortgebilden], he heightened expressiveness by repeating key words, and ran through question, answer, and response to capture the innate motion of conversation” (122). Goethe’s kaleidoscopic words morph and change, the verbal equivalent of mental visualization. With formative skill, the poet deftly plies his craft, shaping, rearranging, welding, and shoring up. One might conclude that this creativity, this showcasing of poetic imagination as Bildung, has reached the heights of its powers: free, energetic, unfettered.

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Yet fantasy, in Dilthey’s analysis, is the endpoint neither of Goethe’s poetic production nor of the human sciences more generally. The work of mental visualization in this early poetry remains unfinished. Dilthey pointedly distinguishes between two concepts when he observes of Goethe that, while “fantasy reigned in the youth amidst the richest, but unregulated powers” (126), in his maturity, “he disentangled himself from his own immediate conditions by separating himself—as if he was a stranger from them, one who found his place in the realm of poetic imagination” (126). Einbildungskraft, Dilthey will go on to demonstrate, is the desired result of trained detachment and dispassionate observation, the model of critical self-formation toward which the human sciences strive. The subsequent essay narrates at length how Goethe tamed his inborn fantasy into introspective imagination. With the breadth of the social scientist, Dilthey plots the development on multiple levels: stylistic, biographical, and historical. A few examples will suffice to illustrate his approach. Stylistically, Goethe, by consciously modulating his tone and perception, schooled the realm of German letters: “And thus arose . . . the classical education [Ausbildung] of our written prose” (123). Later this modulation seems as the unconscious result of Goethe’s unified, harmonious personality: “His life is a growth governed by an internal law, and how simple this law is, how regularly and steadily it unfolds!” (129). Goethe’s development unfurls both pedagogically and biologically. Dilthey relates his transition from youthful creativity through introspection and Selbstbildung (self-education) in Weimar to an aesthetic education of perception in Italy (147). By synthesizing his passions for art, public life, and the sciences, Goethe attains a poetically accessible universale Bildung (universal education) (148). Several pages later this Bildungsroman turns horticultural: “His poetic development is like the growth of a plant. He takes from the ground what he finds homogeneous, and assimilates it into the law of his being” (165). Exposure to literatures—Shakespeare and Corneille, Lessing and Herder, Kant and Fichte—nourishes his writing like an auspicious climate (166). His contributions to the broader history of modern Europe, both aesthetic and scientific, present him as morphological type. On the one hand, Goethe fully expresses the preceding century’s celebrations of humanity (transcendental philosophy, Beethoven’s music, Romantic poetry) (129–30), while on the other hand he articulates a vision of mankind that builds on the past century’s discovery of modern sciences, and of man as its pivotal subject (156– 67). “Thus science matures mankind,” Dilthey observes (157). As if looking through Goethe’s kaleidoscope, these changing views of harmonious growth, self-expression, synthesis, and maturation tilt and turn, yet remain connected and contained by a unifying word: Bildung. If Dilthey’s contribution to German literary studies is remembered for his invigorating concept of lived experience, a reading of his multifaceted Bildung shows how his analysis captures the con-

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cept’s sensory, energetic, organic aspects, linking it directly to life and experiential reality.

Imagining. Dilthey’s concept of Bildung, as shown above, relied heavily on Goethe, both as poet and naturalist. As such, Dilthey used the word differently from many of his contemporaries.30 By the end of the nineteenth century the term had taken on a static dimension. Many associated it with knowledge rather than the act of learning. Indeed, in the minds of late-nineteenth-century cultural pessimists, the idea so central to the aesthetic and moral project of German classicism had fallen into danger of self-negation. A principle of active self-betterment—pedagogic, moral, social, and political—had degenerated into a farce of immutable possession: cultural capital in the exclusive possession of society’s privileged, educated elite. Practical-minded bureaucratic implementation, pursued on a broad, national scale, had destroyed the new humanist vision of education. Nietzsche famously saw contemporary Bildung as a contradiction in terms. German pedagogy had engendered the insufferable specter of the Bildungsphilister: a self-satisfied consumer of art preternaturally incapable of open-minded inquiry. He warned that national educational policies had undermined Bildung’s central principle of innovative, free thought.31 Without polemicizing, Dilthey, in positing Bildung as a process of selfreflection and imagination, recuperates an earlier meaning of the term. If Erlebnis was a late-nineteenth-century concept, Bildung, in its secular sense, predated it by only a century, emerging in Germany between 1770 and 1830. It bridged the Enlightenment and Classicism, replacing the optimistic notion of education as (quite literally) bringing up—Erziehung—with a more nuanced concept of mankind’s capacity for learning. Dilthey’s Bildung returns the word more closely to its literal roots, before its figurative meaning of educating became dominant. A perusal of Johann Christoph Adelung’s Grammatical-Critical Dictionary of the High German Dialect (1774–86) illustrates this point.32 Here Bildung does not even garner its own entry, being simply noted as a substantive of the verb bilden (to form). Adelung defines that verb literally, as to physically give body to an outward form based on an image (“to form a bird out of wax”).33 The verb only secondarily takes a figurative meaning—forming or shaping a character—that Adelung connects to the verbs einbilden (imagine) and vorstellen (put forward or advance), just as Dilthey would later stress the link between image and imaginative work. A second entry defines the verb as nachahmen (to imitate) or abbilden (to replicate). Indeed, Adelung notes, a successful reproduction, most commonly of a human figure or face, had come to refer to the beauty of the original. In

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this case, Bildung refers exclusively to the outward form of a person, as in the example, “She had an excellent, engaging stature [Bildung].”34 The usage shows how the word can move into the realm of morphology, its modeling referring always back to an original form, type, or ideal. The dictionary’s definition of einbilden (to imagine), moreover, reiterates this meaning, noting as synonyms bilden and abbilden: to form something in accordance with the image of an object. Nonetheless, already by the end of the eighteenth century a figurative meaning predominates, especially when used reflexively. Sich einbilden means to create an image or impression of something in one’s mind. In close accordance with Dilthey’s later model of image formation, the related noun, Einbildungskraft is defined as “the ability of the soul to produce an image or sensory impression of an absent object.”35 The secondary meaning of einbilden, though, is less optimistic about the mind’s reproductive capacities. When used reflexively, the dictionary notes, sich einbilden can mean to hope, to falsely imagine, or to deduce based on false assumptions. The definition of Fantasie provides a synonym. Adelung (like Dilthey, a century later) first defines it simply as Einbildungskraft. A second entry, though, posits deviations: “to have fantasies, inaccurate impressions”36—quite literally, to falsely imagine. Such a meaning is found in painting, where a Fantasie depicts something out of accord with nature or composition. Similarly, in music, a Fantasie is composed against accepted rules. In each case, in other words, it deviates from, rather than copies, the original. The verb fantasieren (to fantasize) retains this negative meaning, referring either to hallucinations—“to have irrational fantasies, to rant in a fever”—or to deviate creativity in the arts: “to follow one’s imagination without sticking to the rules of nature or art.”37 Adelung’s definitions express a phenomenon remarked by scholars.38 Imagination and fantasy, as words, began to diverge within European parlance in the eighteenth century. Already at this time, both imagination and understanding were associated with a distancing, reflective capacity. With increasing frequency, imagination, rather than fantasy, was conceded the power to work creatively.39 Dilthey’s analysis, set against Adelung’s definitions, suggests a precise reason for fantasy’s demotion. The imagination works with images, adhering always to a model, a type, a set of internal rules that prevent it from spinning into falsehood. Its reflexiveness (and thus capacity for understanding) is both literal (mirroring an image) and figurative (casting an impartial gaze). Fantasy, on the other hand, is not structured reflexively, and thus can be led as easily to falsehood as to understanding. Fantasy deviates from type, and thus prevents understanding in Dilthey’s use of the term. Without a model or original, it offers no connection between the particular and the universal, and thus no potential for meaningful interpretation. Fantasy, by its very nature, blocks the possibility for self-formation, for Bildung.

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Insight. In 1895, working on a study of modern literature, Dilthey jotted down a series of notes under the title “Thema probandi.”40 He hoped to acknowledge the ascendent centrality and independence of poetry in the modern consciousness. And this because “the poet in our time, independently, has something to say about the true nature of life, as seer.”41 The word connects the poet’s ocular powers to higher levels of prophecy, wisdom, and social responsibility. Dilthey never published the book, but expanded on the idea in his last revisions to Poetry and Lived Experience.42 He begins here not with the poet, but with the poem. A poem’s ambitions are modest, he relates: “Every poetic work makes a singular event present” (127). In other words, a poem brings an instance into visual consciousness; rather than generalizing, it particularizes its subject, expressing its unique totality. Yet precisely through this concentration, Dilthey writes, the poem lifts up this slice of reality and reveals it in a manner “in which it has not been seen before” (127). The poem reveals itself as a part of life; the particular reflects the universal. Dilthey describes this phenomenon botanically. A poem is alive, “a living creation of its own kind” (129), one which reaches its full potential, “like an organic growth” (129), by expressing both its particularity and a deeper life truth. Put another way, a poem, like a plant, can be read as morphological subject, as both organism and type. Dilthey praises the vision of poets for their unifying focus and sweep (127) and mobilizes the language of prophecy when he commends “the seer-like gifts of the poet” (128). They are nonetheless fully part of the material world; they see the “worth and connection of human things” (127); they teach about the depth of “human nature” and about the fullness of individuality (129). Their subject is the human, and their insight comes from their gifted practice of observation and understanding. If Dilthey had thus begun his meditation on poetic imagination by considering human cognition, he ends by elevating the modern poet to the status of humanist and, indeed, descriptive psychologist par excellence. Dilthey praises Goethe’s ability to move from the inner to the outer world, observing how his inner psychic workings react to the rich social life he encounters. Reflecting, translating, reformulating, Goethe models the hermeneutic work that Dilthey explored more and more in his later philosophy.43 In the end, Dilthey’s final addition suggests that introspection and conscious selfcreation, rather than the raw images of lived experience, produce the material for poetry. Yet, while Dilthey describes the imaginative work necessary for a poem, it is worth noting that neither in this section nor elsewhere does he provide a detailed reading of a poem. He does, though, expand and elaborate on the way one might make such a reading. Thus, while scholars identify the hermeneutic turn of Dilthey’s late

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scholarship (and the poem’s circularity between particular and universal undoubtedly gestures toward such reading), his essay on Goethe does something more. With its exclusive focus on the optical work of the poet, the poem, and the reader, it introduces an inductive, observational poetics. The practice is grounded in science but does not require the specialized knowledge of language enjoyed by the linguist, philologist, or archivist. Rather, it is a practice open to any reader with a vivid, receptive imagination. Dilthey’s essay on Goethe articulates and anticipates the practice of close reading. It legitimizes the moral, philosophical, and academic worth of such an act and depicts the ensuing interpretations as a triumph of both creative and inductive understanding. Scholars agree that Bildung plays an important role in Dilthey’s pedagogical writings.44 But it anchors his poetics as well, where the imagination serves both as vehicle for self-formation and for understanding. In Dilthey’s telling, Goethe’s major contribution is not just the vividly experienced lyrical poetry of his youth, but the very exploration of the borders between the autobiographical and the fictional in Dichtung und Wahrheit (167). An awareness of self and world reenforce each other, nurturing a deep understanding of mankind as a whole.45 Dilthey’s word is important here: he praises Goethe’s “abiding understanding of everything human” (154). The practitioner of the descriptive method strives to understand material, whereas the natural scientist aims in an “explanatory psychology” simply to explain data.46 In his essay, Dilthey shows the revelatory power of understanding a poem both as humanistic interpretation and as personal experience of self-formation. If Dilthey’s concept of Bildung recuperates much of the literal meaning of the verb bilden, of forming and modeling, in so doing it also captures its older theological meaning. Dating back to the fourteenth century, the term referred to humankind as an imitation or image of God.47 Dilthey, in arguing that the poet in modern consciousness takes over the moral and spiritual space vacated by religion, nonetheless retains in his vision of the humanities some of the reverence of this earlier formulation. “The poet of the ancients, as seer, bore witness to his religion’s insights,” he writes. “I want to show . . . the way the modern poet gives voice to this.”48 Dilthey’s human sciences, one could argue, celebrate the spiritual potential of humanity in terms that are no less optimistic than those of its theological predecessors. All of these associations, nonetheless, link Dilthey’s term Bildung to the optimism of the German humanists around 1800. Kolk has argued that Geistesgeschichte became so popular in the early 1900s because it expressed the very idea of the German university, not just as a source of knowledge, but as a vehicle of character development.49 In doing so it invoked the Humboldtian concept of the university in all its insistence on the self-formation of the free and creative individual. Indeed, Dilthey’s description of the imagination embraces the Humboldtian model at its very core. With Goethe as his model, Dilthey

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demonstrates Wilhelm von Humboldt’s assertion that all Bildung is Selbstbildung, self-descriptive, self-reflective, and transformative. Through his descriptive method, Dilthey, in recouping Bildung’s literal meaning, reanimated its new humanist, figurative power as well. Examining Dilthey’s word-field of Bildung shows how he turns the term into a practice of inductive scholarly inquiry. Dilthey’s Geistesgeschichte promises to unearth the laws governing poetic production and thus to scientifically establish philological criticism as a discipline of the humanities. But it does more as well. The self-formation of poetic expression through image-creation offers a model for aesthetic processes in two ways. On the one hand, it sketches the unfolding of poetic inventiveness and ingenuity, and on the other hand, it suggests a personal, moral trajectory for their creator, thus linking the aesthetic Gestalt to the path of a biography, for both the poets and the readers. The decoding of poetic forms becomes an exercise in this new form of aesthetics, and even more so an act of self-education on the part of the reader. Implicit in Dilthey’s vision, then, is a blueprint for the humanities that firmly establishes them as an academic field with a methodology in its own right, one that rivals the sciences, and that harnesses the ever-growing archive of human creativity for a higher form of self-formation, thereby uniting artists and scholars as practitioners in a common quest, Bildung in its most expansive, vivid, colorful, kaleidoscopic manifestation. Anna Guillemin has taught at the College of the Holy Cross, University of Michigan, and University of Illinois at Chicago on subjects including German Romanticism, Classicism, and folk and fairy tales. Her PhD (Princeton, comparative literature) explores the formative impact of style theory on twentieth century art history and comparative literature. Her interests include aesthetics, art history and visual studies, translation theory, world literature, and the history of philology. She has presented and published on subjects ranging from Winckelmann, Goethe, and Diderot, and Georg Büchner, to Aby Warburg, Romance philology, Hofmannsthal’s Divan reception, and Walter Kappacher.

Notes 1. Dilthey, Erlebnis, 113. Translations are my own. 2. “The study of poetic imagination is the natural foundation for any scientific study of literature and its history.” Dilthey, Erlebnis, 375. 3. For an overview of Dilthey’s philosophical project, see Makkreel, Dilthey; Rickman, Wilhelm Dilthey; Lessing, Wilhelm Dilthey; de Mul, Tragedy; Nelson, Interpreting Dilthey. 4. Dilthey wrote in his notes to the final draft that “my early conception of grounding the human sciences on a descriptive psychology remains intact.” Dilthey, Erlebnis, 370.

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5. “What is here written down could be substantiated by evidence that I have collected for several years to use in an inductive examination of poetry.” Ibid., 399. 6. Ibid., 117. See also Dilthey, Sammlung Literarhistorischer Aufsätze, 572. 7. See Dilthey, “Ideen,” 139–240. 8. “Thus each branch of the human-social sciences grows from a conjunction of philosophical and comparative-historical approaches in accordance with its own rules, without being dictated by any pre-conceived theories.” Dilthey, Erlebnis, 375. 9. “Poetry is the representation and expression of life.” Dilthey, Erlebnis, 115 10. See, for example, Rudolf Unger’s review from 1912: “For a long time, [Dilthey’s essays] have secured themselves a leading, indeed, to many, the preeminent place among recent literary studies, and led in the development of our discipline with multifaceted, inspiring, fruitful and elevating points of view.” Dilthey, Erlebnis, 310–11. Literary historians who were especially influenced by Dilthey include Rudolf Unger, August Korff, Herbert Cysarz, Paul Kluckhohn, Friedrich Gundolf, Emil Ermatinger, Fritz Stich and Oskar Walzel as well as scholars of younger generation, including Wolfgang Kayser and Emil Staiger. 11. See Kindt and Müller, “Eine Wende,” 333–47. 12. See Wehrli, “Was ist,” 23–37; Kolk, “Refelxionsformel,” 38–45. Unger would call the positivism of the Scherer school, among other things, “mikrologische Nichtigkeitskrämerei” (small-minded bean counting). Kolk, “Refelxionsformel,” 41. 13. Kolk, “Refelxionsformel,” 38. 14. See Hahn on literary historians’ misreading of Dilthey’s philosophical terms, 208. 15. See Wehrli, “Was ist, ” 27. Hans-George Gadamer was the first to point this out, followed by Karol Sauerland, Diltheys Erlebnisbegriff. 16 Dilthey, Erlebnis, 114. 17. See Voßkamp, “Bildung als Synthesis,” 21. 18. Dilthey, Erlebnis, 123. The passage originally comes from Goethe’s review essay of Purkinje’s studies of phenomena of subjective seeing. 19 Ibid., 123. 20. Müller, Gesichtserscheinungen, 83. On Dilthey and Müller see Rodi, Morphologie und Hermeneutik; Lessing, “Dilthey und Johannes Müller,” 239–54. 21. Dilthey, Briefwechsel, 64. Dilthey was at work on the manuscript for Poetik (1887), which would eventually become part of Poetry and Lived Experience. 22. Voßkamp, for example, explores how the novel builds on the formative and transformative power of images—Wilhelm Meister’s paintings or Thomas Bernhard’s photographs. See Voßkamp, “Ein anderes Selbst.” 23. See Rodi, Morphologie; and Malsch, “dieser Fechtmeister,” 175–92. Also see Dilthey [Hoffner], Phantastische Gesichtserscheinungen, 258–65; Müller, Ueber die Phantastischen Gesichtserscheinungen. 24. Dilthey, Sammlung Literarhistorischer Aufsätze. 25. He originally called his essay “On the Imagination of the Poet” (1877), and then “Goethe and Poetic Imagination” until settling on “Goethe and Poetic Fantasy.” The final title echoes the epitaph Dilthey added from Goethe’s poem “My Goddess,” which praises “Fantasy.” Dilthey, Erlebnis, 113. 26. He would use “the descriptive method without recourse to the interference of any explanatory hypotheses.” Dilthey, Erlebnis, 117. 27. Ibid., 371.

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28. For example, a lengthy draft entitled “Explanatory Sentences on the Fantasy of the Poet.” Dilthey, Erlebnis, 383–84. 29. Hereafter all page numbers in parentheses refer to pages in Dilthey, Erlebnis. 30. Koselleck, “Struktur der Bildung.” 31. Ibid., 133; Nietzsche, “Bildungsanstalten”; Nietzsche, “David Strauss.” 32. Adelung et al., Wörterbuch. The first volume (A–C) was published in 1774. 33 Ibid., vol. 1, 1015. 34 Ibid., vol. 1, 1016. 35 Ibid., vol. 1, 1689. 36 Ibid., vol. 2, 41. 37 Ibid., vol. 2, 41. 38. Schulte-Sasse, “Einbildungskraft/Imagination.” 39. Vietta, Literarische Phantasie, 104. 40. Dilthey, Sammlung Literaturhistorischer, 3. 41. Ibid., 3. 42. He entitled the section he wrote for the final edition “Lived Experience and Poetry.” Dilthey, Erlebnis, 370. 43. Dilthey, “Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik.” 44. See Lichtenstein, “Bildung.” On Dilthey’s pedagogy see especially “Über die Möglichkeit,” 70. 45. Dilthey writes of Goethe, “Self-formation and worldliness were one in this being.” Erlebnis, 154. 46. On the development of this important distinction see Lessing, Wilhelm Dilthey, 75–104. 47. Lichtenstein, “Bildung,” 924. 48. Dilthey, Sammlung Literaturhistorischer, 3. 49. “The human sciences—and I see herein their decisive potential—appealed to the ‘Idea of the German University.’” Kolk, “Reflexionsformel,” 42.

Bibliography Primary Sources Adelung, Johann Christoph, Dietrich Wilhelm Soltau, Franz Xaver Schönberger, and Bernhard Philipp. Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart. Wien: Bauer, 1811. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und dem Grafen Paul Yorck von Wartenburg, 1877–1897. Halle an der Saale: Max Niemeyer, 1923. ———. Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin. Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Gabriele Malsch, vol. 26. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005. ———. “Dichter als Seher der Menschheit:” Die geplannte Sammlung Literarhistorischer Aufsätze von 1895. Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Gabriele Malsch, vol. 25. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. ———. “Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik” (1900). In Abhandlungen zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften. Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Georg Misch, vol. 5, 317–38. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1924.

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———. “Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie” (1894). In Abhandlungen zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften. Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Georg Misch, vol. 5, 139–240. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1924. ———. [Pseudonym: Wilhelm Hoffner]. “Phantastische Gesichtserscheinungen von Goethe, Tieck und Otto Ludwig” (1866). In Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Ulrich Herrmann, vol. 15, 93–101. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970. ———. “Über die Möglichkeit einer allgemeingültigen pädagogischen Wissenschaft” (1881). In Abhandlungen zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften. Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Georg Misch, vol. 6, 56–82. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1924. Müller, Johannes. Ueber die phantastischen Gesichtserscheinungen. Coblenz: Jacob Hölscher, 1826. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Ueber die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten: Sechs öffentliche Vorträge” (1872). In Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 1, 641–752. ———. “Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen. Erstes Stück: David Strauss der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller“ (1873). In Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 1, 157–242. ———. Kritische Studienausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols. New York: de Gruyter, 1988.

Secondary Sources de Mul, Jos. The Tragedy of Finitude: Dilthey’s Hermeneutics of Life. Translated by Tony Burrett. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Hahn, Nina. “Geistesgeschichte (Ideen-/ Problem-/ Form-/ Stilgeschichte).” In Methodengeschichte der Germanistik, edited by Jost Schneider, 195‒224. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. Kindt, Tom, and Hans-Harald Müller. “Eine Wende ohne Folgen: Die Fassungen von Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung und die Dilthey-Rezeption in der Literaturwissenschaft.” In Dilthey und die hermeneutische Wende der Philosophie, edited by Gudrin KühneBertram and Frithjof Rodi, 333–47. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008. Kolk, Rainer. “Reflexionsformel und Ethikangebot: Zum Beitrag von Max Wehrl.” In König and Lämmert, Literaturwissenschaft, 38–45. König, Christoph, and Eberhard Lämmert, eds. Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 1910 bis 1925. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1993. Koselleck, Reinhart. “Zur anthropologischen und semantischen Struktur der Bildung” (1990). In Begriffsgeschichten: Studien zu Semantik und Pragmatik der politischen und sozialen Sprache, 105–55. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006. Lessing, Hans-Ulrich. “Dilthey und Johannes Müller: Von der Sinnesphysiologie zur deskriptiven Psychologie.” In Johannes Müller und die Philosophie, edited by Michael Hagner and Bettina Wahrig-Schmidt, 239–54. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1992. ———. Wilhelm Dilthey: Eine Einführung. Cologne: Böhlau, 2011. Lichtenstein, Ernst. “Bildung.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 13 vols., edited by Joachim Ritter, vol. 1, 922–37. Basel: Schwabe, 1971–2007. Makkreel, R.A. Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975; 2nd ed., with afterword, 1992. Malsch, Gabriele. “ ‘dieser Fechtmeister der Einbildungskraft‘: Aspekte der Poetik Wilhelm Diltheys.” In Diltheys Werk und die Wissenschaften: Neue Aspekte, edited by Gunter Scholtz, 175–92. Göttingen: V & R unipress, 2013. Nelson, Eric S., ed. Interpreting Dilthey: Critical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

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Rickman, H. P. Wilhelm Dilthey: Pioneer of the Human Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Rodi, Frithjof. Das strukturierte Ganze: Studien zum Werk von Wilhelm Dilthey. Göttingen: Velbrueck Wissenschaft, 2003. ———. Morphologie und Hermeneutik: Zur Methode von Diltheys Ästhetik. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1969. Sauerland, Karol. Diltheys Erlebnisbegriff: Entstehung, Glanzzeit und Verkümmerung eines literarhistorischen Begriffs. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1972. Schulte-Sasse, Jochen. “Einbildungskraft/Imagination.” In Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Historisches Wörterbuch in Sieben Bänden, edited by Karlheinz Barck and Martin Fontius, vol. 2, 88–120. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2000–2005. Vietta, Silvio. Literarische Phantasie: Barock und Aufklärung. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1986. Voßkamp, Wilhelm. “Bildung als Synthesis.” In Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik im 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Jürgen Fohrmann and Wilhelm Voßkamp, 15–24. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1994. ———. “Ein anderes Selbst:” Bild und Bildung im deutschen Roman des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Wallenstein, 2004. Wehrli, Max. “Was ist/war Geistesgeschichte?” In König and Lämmert, Literaturwissenschaft, 23–37.

CHAPTER 7



Bildung as Dialectical and Theological Hermeneutics in the Service of the Humanities JOHN H. SMITH

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here is an understandable tendency in times of uncertainty to seek out security and mastery in the form of certain dogmas. This tendency accounts for, and deeply unites, the present trends toward the opposite poles of religious fundamentalism and the natural sciences. But there are alternatives to this tendency. This chapter responds to the sense of vulnerability that so many of us teachers and scholars in the humanities feel as our universities increasingly consider our fields to be service disciplines, as if we are the ones doing the menial intellectual labor on campus. Composition, foreign language, and literature teaching are increasingly seen as offering mere critical thinking skills that prioritize forms of marketable problem-solving over the content of a wider tradition. One particular catchphrase among education scholars—“transferable skills”—is telling: it implies that what the humanities offer as such is not important; only what can be transferred to other fields and markets is important. My argument is designed to rethink and restructure this narrative by building on a formulation in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method published in 1960) that Geisteswissenschaften (the humanities, literally sciences of mind or spirit), like dialectical and theological hermeneutics, are Dienstwissenschaften (sciences of service) rather than Herrschaftswissenschaften (sciences of rule, mastery, or domination) when they serve the Sache (matter) they study. I wish to go on the offensive with the trope of service, then, asserting that, as practitioners of sciences of service in the tradition of Bildung, we are doing something different from the natural and social sciences when we endeavor to inspire students to approach their objects of study with patience, care, responsibility, and—I will argue with Max Scheler and Alain Badiou—even love.

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More precisely, the humanities can bring to the fore and thematize the service endeavors that are, in fact, indispensable to good work in all sciences. A specific tradition of Bildung can show us that knowledge might indeed be power, but not all power involves securing mastery. Genuine study involves a recognition of a power beyond the self—in the form of history, community, tradition, or language, or even better: in the form of histories, communities, traditions, or languages—into the service of which one places oneself. In this critical fidelity to the claims texts make on us as their interpreters, humanistic service keeps open the question of what we are serving, calling on resources of the past to address challenges of the future that are still unnamed. Gadamer opens his now sixty-year-old magnum opus, Wahrheit und Methode, with a discussion of the concept of Bildung as a “guiding concept of the humanistic tradition.”1 Indeed, one of the goals of his philosophical hermeneutics is to provide new grounding for and justification of the significance of Bildung for the humanities. Hegel plays a major role in this project, for, Gadamer says, “Indeed, Hegel worked out the nature of Bildung more precisely than any other thinker.”2 What I would like to focus on in this chapter is the way Gadamer draws not just on a dialectical philosophical tradition but also on theological hermeneutics as models for the activities of understanding, interpretation, and application. While decidedly agnostic himself in religious matters and methodologically bracketing out actual matters of faith, Gadamer uses theological examples at crucial points in his text and thereby runs counter to the secularization of Bildung that took place during the nineteenth century. That is, he highlights the origins of Bildung in theology, origins that continue to leave their mark in what we might call pedagogical theology—in parallel with political theology. Precisely here Gadamer should be able to draw not just on Hegel but also on Friedrich Schleiermacher, whom Hegel otherwise opposed for psychologizing faith, since Schleiermacher’s concern with preaching and theology, as well as with many aspects of translation, led him to be one of the first major theorists of hermeneutics. It is, then, more than a mere metaphor when Gadamer more than once refers to “the miracle of understanding,”3 a wonder whose practice and illumination is the task of the humanities. In a way that could bridge the faith-versus-reason divide, Gadamer (with Hegel and Schleiermacher, Max Scheler and Alain Badiou) indicates how, without imposing dogmatic beliefs, we might be able to demonstrate the productive force of theological traditions for Bildung today. My point of departure is a long but rich passage from Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode that connects the pursuit of the humanities, understood on the basis of a general hermeneutics, to the discursive sphere and practices of theology. In order to win back a broader concept of the process of understanding from the limiting influences of historicism and subjectivizing approaches (which he, rightly or wrongly, like Hegel, attributes to Friedrich Schleier-

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macher), Gadamer turns to the practices of legal and theological interpretation. In both cases he finds that the component of application is essential. The jurist interprets the law always with an eye toward the applicability to the present case; the preacher interprets the Bible always with an eye toward the meaning it will have for the listening congregation. This act of application does not disregard the meaning of the text, whether the law or scripture. Rather, it involves precisely a mediation between the claim that the text makes and the present moment in which it is received. In his words, and I quote at length in order to bring out important features: We have the ability to open ourselves to the superior claim the text makes and to respond to what it has to tell us. Hermeneutics in the sphere of philology and the historical sciences is not “knowledge as domination”—i.e., an appropriation as taking possession; rather, it consists in subordinating ourselves to the text’s claim to dominate our minds. Of this, however, legal and theological hermeneutics are the true model. To interpret the law’s will or the promises of God is clearly not a form of domination but of service [Dienst]. They are interpretations—which includes application—in the service of what is considered valid. Our thesis is that historical hermeneutics too has a task of application to perform, because it too serves applicable meaning, in that it explicitly and consciously bridges the temporal distance that separates the interpreter from the text and overcomes the alienation of meaning that the text has undergone. (emphasis added)4

The key lines for me involve the unique power and ability we have to open ourselves to the superior claim that texts (or, more generally, modes of representation) make on us, whereby openness here entails taking a kind of subordinate position to the dominating claim of the text and a unique kind of Erfahrung (experience; Erfahrung is a crucial term for Hegel’s dialectic of spirit). Confronted with any cultural artifact, especially one from a more or less distant past, from our own culture or another, we are being asked what it says to us. This confrontation with a potential meaning does not hypostasize a timeless essence behind the text; on the contrary, it assumes that the otherness of the text is also extending to us in time. The question of the text’s meaning does not deny its otherness; to the contrary, it calls on us to confront that otherness so that we can understand what it is. We are faced with something that dominates in the text, that we place ourselves in the service of “was gelten soll” (that which needs to be acknowledged, legitimated, respected, validated). But it has meaning for us. Like the judge who attempts to decide how a law applies in a particular case, there is a process of mediation between the interpretation of what the law itself means and what therefore it can possibly mean for us in this case. What the text (of the law, the Bible, the literary work, etc.) means shows up or appears to us (as a phenomenon) only from the particular context that we occupy—not that we impose our perspective, but rather that we ask,

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“What is the text saying to me, here and now?” In this model, the humanities, like theology and legal hermeneutics, stand in a position of service—which is not the same as servitude—vis-à-vis their objects of study (which, therefore, are no longer mere objects to be mastered). As Gadamer says, “The judge who adapts the transmitted law to the needs of the present is undoubtedly seeking to perform a practical task, but the interpretation of the law is by no means merely for that reason an arbitrary revision. . . . To understand and to interpret means to discover and recognize [and I add, serve] a valid meaning. The judge seeks to be in accord with the ‘legal idea’ in mediating it with the present.”5 I would like to dispel some possible misinterpretations and raise some consequences that arise from this approach to humanistic inquiry. First, it is not claiming that religious phenomena (be they scriptural or not) and literary texts are somehow identical or that they function the same way in society or have the same significance for us as practices. That issue is simply bracketed out of the analysis here, although it is certainly a valuable question to raise. That is, to say that literary, or more generally humanistic, hermeneutics can learn from the tradition of scripturally based religions is not to take a position concerning the content or validity of any or all of those traditions. Rather, and this is the second point, the commonality that religious phenomena and literature possess consists in the fact that they are both meaningful utterances (again, even if the religious phenomena are not in scriptural form). When religious phenomena or literary texts show up for us and when we approach them, we wonder, What do they say to us? What do they want from us? They engage us in a dialectic that, as we will explore more below, moves between two poles: a scripture’s claim in and of itself and the significance of that claim as we see it from our contemporary perspective. They ask something of us and we respond with a question to them. We thereby open ourselves up to them and break them open. We do so by viewing them as questionable (i.e., frag-würdig [worthy of questioning]) and taking an open inquisitive position toward them. As Gadamer says a little later in his wonderful discussion concerning the priority of the question for hermeneutics, “The path of all knowledge leads through the question. To ask a question means to bring into the open.”6 In encountering and responding to religious phenomena and literary texts we recognize not our mastery but our humility vis-à-vis this openness. Whereas Sir Francis Bacon notoriously claimed we must force Nature to reveal her secrets, the function or art of questioning in hermeneutical Bildung creates a kind of third space of encounter between the text and us. We have what Gadamer in another context calls “the experience of the finitude of the infinitely inquiring spirit.”7 (These are terms to which I will also return to below.) Third, while religion, law, and literature are different discursive registers, our attitude or disposition toward them, our quasi-passive openness, is the same. I say quasi-passive because questioning and listening to what they have

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to say is both active and passive. A genuine listener must be actively passive with an interlocutor, demonstrating a willingness to hear what the other is saying. The texts are not dead objects, for how else could they speak to us? And we, the interpreters, are not absent from the encounter, for how else could the questions otherwise be posed if not to and from the position where we are? This is what Gadamer means when he says that, in interpreting, we are always applying the interpreted text to our own situation. But that application always presumes we are willing to hear what the text says. Our interpretive engagement is therefore one of service, even indebtedness, to the meaning offered by the other. Fourth and finally, this view could have interesting consequences for how we conceive the role of the humanities at the university. We often decry the way the administration is degrading our contribution to that of mere service departments. And rightly so, since this role implies that the real knowledge is being generated elsewhere in order to get something done. But our response to this degradation, Gadamer is saying, is not to imitate the Herrschaftswissen (knowledge of domination) practiced in those fields that operate on the basis of objectification and the imposition of methodologies. Rather, what we offer is a different kind of knowledge, or, for Gadamer, truth, that comes about only by putting ourselves at the service of the meaningful phenomena we are interpreting. Again, this is by no means a merely or submissive passive stance because it demands an active engagement to attain a productive state of openness. Thus, it is not that in studying literature we are merely providing a service; rather, like theology and the law, literary study is always demonstrating how we as finite beings can never master the world full of meaning into which we are thrown, but we can and must find ways of understanding it by attending to it—in other words, by offering our service. I will return to this aspect of the humanities later in this chapter. What is the theological framing of mediation that Gadamer proposes and how does it relate to dialectical (Hegelian) mediation as the experience of Bildung? It may seem, to begin with, that a concept of Verheissungen (divine promise) as a basis of what we are trying to get at when we interpret any text might sound just too metaphysical for our postmodern ears. Does this lead hermeneutics on a search for some meaning behind the text, waiting there for us to discover? That is not his point. Rather, Gadamer is simply considering the difference in the interpretive efforts that a believer and a nonbeliever would be engaged in when confronting a sacred scripture. The latter will understand all the words and could provide a historical, philological, psychological, anthropological, or some other reconstruction of the text as an object. And these are crucial activities. But for such a reader the text—say, Romans 3:28, “a man is justified by faith,” that meant so much to Luther—does not say anything or make a claim to him or her. There may be much scholarly activity, but, as Max

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Weber said, lacking the ear for it leaves much unheard. It is not that the Wunder des Verstehens (miracle of understanding) would result in an epiphany or a complete collapse of the interpreter with the text. The mediation between past and present that Gadamer refers to is never total and never stops—How could it, since the present is itself always evolving? Rather, we are talking about a dialectic that is the precondition of interpretation. Gadamer is not interested in having us become preachers (rabbis, imams) or congregants, but he does want us to see that when they grapple with what a scripture really means for them—with all the tension between “really means” and “for them”—they are modeling an activity that we are also engaged in when we also try to experience the phenomenon of understanding. Consider the graduate student (real, but unnamed) writing a dissertation on Deleuze’s reading of Proust, which she holds up as the greatest challenge to a hermeneutics of understanding. After all, Deleuze sees in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) the endless resistance of the sign, and the failure of encounter with the other because of the impossibility of reading. No possible stable meaning can emerge, on this view. This is a brilliant analysis and insight on the part of all three, Proust, Deleuze, and the student. But in their readings, both Deleuze’s of Proust and the student’s of both Proust and Deleuze, they are nonetheless handing themselves over to the text of the other even if it is to recognize and experience the resistance of that other. The claim of discovering the radical difference of the text at hand has legitimacy, ironically, always thanks to a moment of overcoming that difference. “To know oneself in [engaging with] the Other” is indeed Gadamer’s notion of Bildung.8 This phrase needs to be understood in its full dialectical tension, for it is but a variation of Hegel’s formulation from the preface of Phenomenology of Spirit. The absolute otherness of the other needs to be maintained, but that can only be done if one recognizes that otherness and thereby understands it. With this we can relate the phenomenon of the Wunder des Verstehens to the notion of Bildung in a Hegelian mode. The key moment of the experience of consciousness, which was the project Hegel set for himself originally in the Phenomenology of Spirit,9 lies in the very nature of the way that consciousness relates to its objects. When we know something to be true, we are raising a validity claim about something that we sense is, in essence, outside of us, or at least is not us. And yet, we also know upon reflection that all such knowledge of something else is our knowledge of something. There is no possibility of my having knowledge of something, then, if there is not this duality of the something and my conceiving that something. In Hegel’s only slightly abstracted terms, “Consciousness knows something, and this object is its essence or in-itself; but it is also and in-itself for consciousness; and in this way the ambiguity of this truth enters. We see that consciousness now has two objects, the one an in-itself and the other the in-itself as it is for consciousness.”10

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We already see the way he has transformed the core project of the Critique of Pure Reason into a kind of gestalt shift of two modes of knowing that occurs within every act of consciousness. That is, what Kant saw as a duality between the Ding an sich (thing in itself ) and consciousness or awareness of the thing as it appears to us (as phenomenon), this Kantian duality is converted by Hegel into a polarity in which the poles are related to and dependent on each other. Now, the nature of that shift, Hegel continues, is where the creativity of his approach emerges. At this point, it seems that we have two Gegenstände (things): the one outside and the one inside, and so Hegel seems to be merely restating the age-old subject-object dichotomy. After all, the formulations of the das Ansich ([object] in-itself ) and the Für-es-Sein dieses Ansich (in-itself as it is for consciousness) echo Kantian noumena and phenomena, things in themselves and things as they appear to us. Hegel teases us with this reading (and note his use of scheint [appears] in this next sentence, since he is performing an example of a process he is also explaining, as we shall see below): “The latter [i.e., the in-itself as it is for consciousness] appears to be at first as only the reflection of consciousness in itself, a representing not of the object but only of consciousness’s knowledge of it.”11 However, these objects are not left side-by-side in their two realms à la Kant, or matched up in some relation of correspondence. Rather, they are shown to be mutually interdependent because in recognizing that the Ansich (object), is, in fact, not what we took it to be but is, rather, framed by our own für uns (conceptions) in some way, that first object is no longer the same. Consciousness changes and with it its once-taken-to-be-independent objects. Hegel continues, “However the first object [the in-itself ] thereby changes for it [consciousness]; it stops being the in-itself and becomes such an object that is only and in-itself for it [consciousness]; but then, this in-itself as it is for consciousness [is] what is actually true, and that means that it has become its essence or its object.”12 This reflection occurs in trivial cases—“Oh,” we might say, “X is not really the case, I only thought it was”—or in the history of science as described by Thomas S. Kuhn as “the structure of scientific revolutions”—which we could summarize as: “What we had accepted as the ‘true nature’ of X was shaped by a given paradigm of our theoretical thinking”—or in situations that we might associate with Ideologiekritik (ideology critique), of which Hegel’s analysis should be seen as the origin—formulating it with Hegelian-Marxist terms: “Any given constellation of modes of production tries to sell as Ansich what is, in fact, only the view of the world for it.” And while we might not recognize it in the more trivial cases, the new standpoint of consciousness emerges through a powerful negation, and this negation makes for experience itself: “This new object contains the annihilation of the first, it is the experience that is made through it.”13 By using the formulation “contains the annihilation (or negation or nothingness)” of the old object of consciousness within the new, Hegel hints at the richer conception of Aufhe-

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bung (sublation) that he will formulate throughout the writing of the Phenomenology and define more explicitly later in his Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic). The object is both cancelled and preserved. And the phrase über ihn gemachte Erfahrung (the experience made through it) gets picked up a little farther along when Hegel mentions “der Übergang” (the transition)14 from one object of knowledge to another and lays out another way of differentiating his approach from Kant’s: where Kant rejected reason’s jumps outside of itself to a transcendent realm, and therefore restricted his philosophy to transcendental arguments in the sense of explorations of the conditions of possibility of experience, Hegel defines experience as fundamentally self-transcending or, to use a Nietzschean formulation, self-overcoming. It involves necessarily a “reversal of consciousness itself,”15 he says, a inversio (philosophical irony). To summarize this discussion of Hegel and to link it explicitly to the topic at hand, we can now have a better appreciation of his actual definition of experience as movement: “This dialectical movement, which consciousness exercises on itself, both in terms of its knowledge as in terms of its object, in so far as the new, true object emerges out if it, is, properly speaking, what is called experience.”16 Such a movement that Geist (consciousness), or we might say the Geisteswissenschaften, all undergo in the production of knowledge out of a state of active passivity or passive activity—this movement that is called Erfahrung—is at the heart of Bildung. Or, in Gadamer’s terms, every encounter with a text must strive to understand what it, an sich (in itself ), is saying, but since it only speaks to us, its meaning entspringt (emerges) anew with each interpretation. To undergo the process of Bildung is to undergo the process of having an experience, namely, the movement by which new knowledge of the world and the self emerges via a (not unpainful) act of negation. Now, whether or not Hegel and Hegelianism maintained the essential tension of this dialectical movement is a matter of interesting debate and it is certainly relevant for the question of Bildung today. In reminding us of the theological underpinnings of a process of Verstehen or Bildung, I would like to add a voice to this discussion to make sure the dialectic does stay open-ended, namely the greatest Protestant theologian of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schleiermacher. It is unfortunate that Gadamer provides only a limited reading of Schleiermacher in order to dismiss his Romantic hermeneutics as too psychologistic and subjective, for in fact his theology offers a valuable alternative, or better, counterweight, to Hegel’s pan-logistic tendencies. To be unpardonably brief, I can only introduce Schleiermacher’s definition of Frömmigkeit (piety) from his Der christliche Glaube (Christian Faith, 1821 and 1830) as the certainty “that we are conscious of ourselves as absolutely dependent as such, or, in other words, as in relation with God.”17 While Hegel famously mocked this formulation—writing that, if this were the case then a dog dependent on its master would be the most religious being—it offers a crucial reminder of

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our finitude and, to use a later existentialist term in part derived from it, our thrownness. Hermeneutically it places us in a position of Dienst—or religious piety—rather than Herrschaft (domination) as it demands a communal openness to the other on which we depend. I turn now to two ideas of service that are undoubtedly in the background of Gadamer’s discussion of Bildung in the humanities, the one highly ambivalent and problematic, the other ultimately more productive. The first, which can also serve as a kind of warning, we find in Martin Heidegger. Here we see that the openness to the Sache was dangerously confused with a service to a particular historical cause, a dangerous turn we see Heidegger take in his notorious address, “Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität” (On the selfassertion of the German university) at the time of his inauguration as rector of the university of Freiburg in 1933. There he also calls for three kinds of service for the student body: Arbeitsdienst (labor service), Wehrdienst (military service), and Wissensdienst (knowledge service).18 This third kind of service unfortunately has nothing to do with an openness or a caring relation toward being that might have been a possible formulation of the early or later Heidegger. Rather, it is a service to the intellectual mission of the German Volk. Indeed, Heidegger turns the three forms of service into a united will to the Kampf (struggle) for the fate of Germany. Heidegger thereby transforms the idea of service from the call to interpret and mediate the claims made on us into a subservience and obedience to a unified historical mission. Now, it certainly by no means exonerates Heidegger’s clear ploy to position himself favorably before the National Socialists (Nazis) who recently attained political power in Germany, but at least we can draw something from two of his formulations. One hears Heidegger’s ambivalence in the tortured notion of Wissensdienst. It is, he writes, a spiritual task in the service of the Volk, “insofar as it places its [the Volk’s] history into the open, where it faces the superiority of world-forming powers and struggles to redefine its spiritual world.”19 If there is anything of value in this formulation of Nazi ideology, it can be drawn out only with our own tortured interpretation. Such a task could argue for the necessity of understanding the vulnerability of all nations within the broader constellation of historical forces. That is, knowledge serves a nation by bringing its history into a historical space of all nations. And one hears, perhaps, a hint of opposition to the Führerprinzip (Hitler’s leader or Führer principle) near the end when Heidegger discusses a dialectic of leading and being led: “All leadership must grant those who follow their own proper force. Each act of following bears within itself resistance. This essential opposition in leading and following must not be erased, not to mention eradicated.”20 Unfortunately—and perhaps even intentionally—such a nuanced call for the inherent resistance, because of the essential otherness, within service was lost on the party leaders in the audience—if, indeed, Heidegger ever intended such a reading to be heard.

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The other model for a kind of knowledge rooted in service allows also for an apparent detour to connect this idea of service in the name of the claim made by the other to a discussion of love. At this point in the passage from Wahrheit und Methode from which I quoted above, Gadamer alludes in a brief footnote to a work by the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century phenomenologist, philosopher, and sociologist, Max Scheler (1874–1928). One of the most influential thinkers of the post–World War I period (Heidegger, for example, interjected a homage in the middle of his lectures on the metaphysical foundations of logic upon hearing of his death in 1928) Scheler transformed Husserl’s phenomenology into wideranging explorations of how human beings live in a world of meaning and value. In the 1920s Scheler developed a tripartite understanding of basic types of knowledge in his groundbreaking approach to the Wissenssoziologie (sociology of knowledge). They are first outlined in his 1925 lecture in Bonn, “Die Formen des Wissens und die Bildung” (The forms of knowing and Bildung) and then extensively analyzed in his short monograph, Bildung und Wissen (Education and Knowledge). The first is the Beherrschungswissen (knowledge of domination)21—that Gadamer himself clearly alludes to as Herrschaftswissenschaften (sciences of rule, mastery, or domination). It involves the goal of manipulating both external and internal nature—in other words, attaining of mastery or control over the world and the self. He argues that modernity in the West has been deformed by the overemphasis on this modality, an argument that was to play itself out in Husserl’s later Krise der europäischen Wissenschaften (Crisis of the European sciences) and Heidegger’s work on the essence of technology. Scheler’s second form is the difficult-to-translate Bildungswissen, which refers to a kind of knowledge that involves not so much mastery but, rather, expansion and exploration of the individual self.22 Modeled on a Humboldtian and Goethean ideal, this formative knowledge sees the self as a microcosm of the universe, not as an empty vessel to be filled with information. The third kind of knowledge expands on the concept of Bildung by associating it with its theological origins. It has the religiously tinged name of Erlösungs- or Heilswissen (redemptive).23 (Scheler, a converted and then somewhat fallen Catholic, never shied away from the religious dimension of human experience.) Although all three modalities have their legitimate place as human beings find their way through the world, according to Scheler it is this third approach that comes closest to the very essence of what knowledge is, for it is associated most closely with Spinoza’s conceptions of pure intuition and an amor dei intellectualis (an intellectual love of God). Rejecting strictly epistemological and logical conceptions, Scheler thus ultimately views knowledge in ontological terms: “Knowledge is a relationship to or comportment toward being.”24 Here we see his view of phenomenology that he has learned from Husserl but in an adapted form that refuses to convert it into a method, instead maintaining phenomenology as an attitude vis-à-vis the world.

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Scheler terms this relationship as unique kind of loving participation in being, and it underlies his entire conception of human being in the world. Love permits one being to take part in and be taken in by the mode of being (the Sosein) of another. He writes, “Without a tendency in the being who ‘knows’ to come out of itself and extend to a participation in an other being, without this there would be no possible ‘knowledge.’ I see no other name for this tendency other than ‘love,’ devotion [Liebe, Hingebung]—a kind of transcending the borders of one’s own being and way of being through love.”25 And with this convergence of love and knowledge that is different from the model of Platonic eros (erotic love)—for it is here not a question of desire to fulfill a lack in the self—I see an important connection to the contemporary French philosopher, Alain Badiou, who has also placed love at the center of his philosophy. Now it might seem that raising the question of love–even via Scheler’s phenomenological intervention—takes us into touchy-feely territory when our vulnerable times would seem to require something more like hardcore action. But Badiou—despite reservations I have about much of his thought—has made an important case for the philosophical significance of love, parallel to other major domains. Badiou’s own version of phenomenology is organized primarily around the notion of the event, which arises out of a given concrete situation but cannot be reductively explained by the constants of the situation. (In the realm of politics, he speaks often of the French Revolution and May 1968.) Because the event cannot be reduced to something else as its efficient cause, it reveals a basic axiom for Badiou, also related to his mathematical approach to ontology, namely, “There is Twoness,”26 or more generally the primacy of multiplicity and difference in being. Love, for Badiou, is thus that interruption in our lives that confronts us with radical otherness. As he says in his interviews, collected under the title, In Praise of Love, “What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be.”27 That is, not unlike Scheler’s notion of redemptive knowledge, Badiou’s approach to love eschews all psychology of the passions or quasi-mystical romanticism for the sake of an ontological relation. Knowledge (even truth) does emerge from the love relationship, but not by means of a reflection on experience, but as a necessary verbalization of the duality of positions between lovers that calls for a fundamental fidelity. As Badiou says in Praise of Love, “In today’s world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their own self-interest. Love is an antidote to that. Provided it isn’t conceived only as an exchange of mutual favors, or isn’t calculated way in advance as a profitable investment, love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the perspective of difference. In this respect it has universal impli-

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cations.”28 The possibility of events calls into being the subject who is engaged in truth procedures in order to come to grips with such possibilities. Badiou develops four such truth procedures: science, politics, art, and, the important one for my purposes, love. Crucial here is the necessity of risk and vulnerability in the love relationship. If inherent in the love relationship is the ontological reality of duality, then risk and vulnerability are fundamental to love, and especially to the move toward the truth procedure; that is, each declaration of love in whatever form runs the risk of misstatement and misunderstanding. Applied to historical events, Badiou’s theory would see the failure to enter the risk of self-transcendence as precisely where the Nazi revolution failed to be truly revolutionary—and where Heidegger’s early commitment to it was likewise evil; namely, both never rose above the particularity of the situation of the German Volk. On a lighter note, Badiou criticizes with an air of playful seriousness one phenomenon in contemporary society that dramatizes the very loss of the possible encounter of the love relationship, namely, online dating services.29 Precisely by answering dozens or hundreds of detailed questions, the partners strive to reduce the risk of otherness. My point in linking Scheler’s “loving participation or partaking in the process of being” as a model of knowledge with Badiou’s ontology of “Twoness” via love is that the notion of service in the humanities, or that which is essential to humanistic practices in any discipline, creates a similar kind of vulnerability insofar as it accepts the power of claims over us. This vulnerability is more than, and therefore is not, a physical vulnerability; it is deeply ontological and epistemological. That means precisely that it is not about some actual vulnerability to our well-being. Rather, as absolutely crucial as vulnerability and service is in opening us up to knowledge of the other, it is essential at the level of politics to ensure physical and financial security; indeed, only then can the seriousness of the other vulnerability become clear. It is a testament to what Gadamer calls the universality of hermeneutics that we, today, are, in fact, engaged in the very practice that we have just been exploring. It has been the aim of this chapter, and the entire volume of which it is a part, to demonstrate that the historical notion of Bildung, critically interpreted, still has much to say to the humanities today in our vulnerable times. The context of our exploration—explicitly or implicitly—is the need most of us feel at our institutions of higher learning to offer a defense of the humanities. Although he never used the terms “Bildung” or “Geisteswissenschaften,” Kant laid out in his 1798 Streit der Fakultäten (Conflict of the Faculties) the foundational argument for defending a certain kind of intellectual engagement from the encroachment of instrumentalization. But in doing so he introduced an ambivalence typical to the logic of the Enlightenment. On the one hand, he claimed that the philosophical faculty played a different conceptual and institutional role in the society and university. As the lower faculty it is further

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removed from the dictates of the state and practical life than the upper faculties of theology, law, and medicine. His image is that the social directives to regulate society’s well-being come from on high, and so the upper faculties must teach members of society how to best formulate and carry out those directives. Only the philosophical faculty, or what we might more generally consider the humanities, questions the reasonableness of those directives as such. This view powerfully protects a mode of pure inquiry from functionalization and legitimates it for providing a necessary space of critique. However, it also threatens to isolate humanistic Bildung from the very roots in other hermeneutic practices that are its source of self-understanding. That is, while we in the humanities recognize Kant’s call for our distinct discursive position vis-à-vis religious dogmatism, state power, and the natural sciences, we should not be blinded to the common practices that also unite us. Indeed, we might take this one step farther and go on the offensive. By this I mean that the service to the claim made by a text that Gadamer sees as the basis of legal and theological hermeneutics and thus also of humanistic inquiry, a service that puts us into the position of questioners and open receivers of the claim the text has on us, should form the bond to the social and natural sciences as practices that generate knowledge. True, there is increasing pressure to see knowledge as a tool for mastery and control. Nevertheless, things look different when we ask about the very condition of possibility of generating knowledge in the first place. The how of Bildung as a dialectic between subject and object, between the text (or book of nature) as such and what it says to us, here, now, has deep theological roots, but it could and should provide the basis for uniting the faculties in the midst of their conflict. John H. Smith is professor of German in the Department of European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He has published books on Hegel and rhetoric (The Spirit and Its Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel’s Philosophy of Bildung), philosophies of the will (Dialectics of the Will: Freedom, Power, and Understanding in Modern French and German Thought), and the death—and return—of God (Dialogues between Faith and Reason). He has essays on a range of literary and philosophical topics. He is coeditor of the digital Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts.

Notes 1. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 1:15–24; the phrase quoted is the title of the section. 2. “In der Tat hat Hegel, was Bildung ist, am schärfsten herausgearbeitet.” Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 1:17. 3. “das Wunder des Verstehens.” Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 1:297, 1:316; quote on both pages.

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4. “Wir vermögen uns...dem überlegenen Anspruch des Textes zu öffnen und der Bedeutung verstehend zu entsprechen, in der er zu uns spricht. Die Hermeneutik im Bereich der Philologie und der historischen Geisteswissenschaften ist überhaupt nicht ‘Herrschaftswissen,’ d.h. Aneignung als Besitzergreifung, sondern ordnet sich selbst dem beherrschenden Anspruch des Textes unter. Dafür aber ist die juristische und die theologische Hermeneutik das wahre Vorbild. Auslegung des gesetzlichen Willens, Auslegung der göttlichen Verheißung zu sein, das sind offenkunding nicht Herrschafts-, sondern Dienstformen. Im Dienste dessen, was gelten soll, sind die Auslegungen, die Applikation einschließen. Die These ist nun, daß auch die historische Hermeneutik eine Leistung der Applikation zu vollbringen hat, weil auch sie der Geltung von Sinn dient, indem sie ausdrücklich und bewußt den Zeitenabstand überbrückt, der den Interpreten vom Texte trennt und die Sinnentfremdung überwindet, die dem Texte widerfahren ist.” Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 1:316. 5. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 1:333. 6. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 1:333. 7. Gadamer, “Kant and the Question of God,” 16. 8. “Sich selbst zu erkennen im Anderen.” Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 1:19. 9. Recall that the original title Hegel proposed for the work was Die Wissenschaft der Erfahrung des Bewußtseins (The Science of the Experience of Consciousness). It is as if Hegel posed the apparently simple but deeply rich question: What happens to us and the world when we have an experience? 10. “Das Bewußtsein weiß etwas, dieser Gegenstand ist das Wesen oder das Ansich; er ist aber auch für das Bewußtsein das Ansich; damit tritt die Zweideutigkeit dieses Wahren ein. Wir sehen, daß das Bewußtsein jetzt zwei Gegenstände hat, den einen das erste Ansich, den zweiten das Für-es-Sein dieses Ansich.” Hegel, Phänomenologie, 78–79; emphasis in original. 11. “Der letztere [i.e., das Für-es-Sein dieses Ansich] scheint zunächst nur die Reflexion des Bewußtseins in sich selbst zu sein, ein Vorstellen nicht eines Gegenstandes, sondern nur seines Wissens von jenem ersten [i.e. the Ansich].” Hegel, Phänomenologie, 79. 12. “Allein . . . ändert sich ihm [dem Bewußtsein] dabei der erste Gegenstand [the Ansich]; er hört auf, das Ansich zu sein, und wird ihm zu einem solchen, der nur für es [das Bewußtsein] das Ansich ist; somit aber ist dann dies: das Für-es-Sein dieses Ansich, [ist] das Wahre, das heißt aber, dies ist das Wesen oder sein Gegenstand.” Hegel, Phänomenologie, 79; emphasis in original. 13. “Dieser neue Gegenstand enthält die Nichtigkeit des ersten, er ist die über ihn gemachte Erfahrung.” Hegel, Phänomenologie, 79. 14. Hegel, Phänomenologie, 79. 15. “Umkehrung des Bewußtseins selbst.” Hegel, Phänomenologie, 79. 16. “Diese dialektische Bewegung, welche das Bewußtsein an ihm selbst, sowohl an seinem Wissen als an seinem Gegenstande ausübt, insofern der neue wahre Gegenstand daraus entspringt, ist eigentlich dasjenige, was Erfahrung genannt wird” [Hegel’s emphasis]. Hegel, Phänomenologie, 78. 17. “daß wir uns unsrer selbst als schlechthin abhängig, oder, was dasselbe sagen will, als in Beziehung mit Gott, bewußt sind.” Schleiermacher, Der christliche Glaube, 13. 18. Heidegger, Selbstbehauptung, 16-17. 19. “indem es seine Geschichte in die Offenbarkeit der Übermacht aller weltbildenden Mächte des menschlichen Daseins hineinstellt und sich seine geistige Welt immer neu erkämpft.” Heidegger, Selbstbehauptung, 17.

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20. “Alle Führung muß der Gefolgschaft die Eigenkraft zugestehen. Jedes Folgen aber trägt in sich den Widerstand. Dieser Wesensgegensatz im Führen und Folgen darf weder verwischt, noch gar ausgelöscht werden.” Ibid., 19. 21. Scheler, Bildung und Wissen, 26. 22. Ibid., 26. 23. Ibid., 26–27. 24. “Wissen ist ein Seinsverhältnis.” Ibid., 24. 25. Ibid., 24–25. 26. Badiou, Being and Event, 206. 27, Badiou, Love, 22. 28. Badiou, Love, 16–17. 29. Ibid., 5–11.

Bibliography Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2005. ———, with Nicolas Truong. In Praise of Love. Translated by Peter Bush. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Kant and the Question of God.” In Hermeneutics, Religion, Ethics. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. ———. Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. Gesammelte Werke I [Truth and Method: Outlines of a Philosophical Hermeneutics. Collected Works I]. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phänomenologie des Geistes [Phenomenology of spirit]. Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970. Heidegger, Martin. “Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität” [On the self-assertion of the German university]. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1990. Kant, Immanuel. Conflict of the Faculties. Translated by Mary J. Gregor. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. Scheler, Max. Bildung und Wissen [Bildung and knowledge]. Verlag G. Schulte-Bulmke: Frankfurt am Main, 1947. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Der christliche Glaube, nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche [Christian faith, based on the principles of the evangelical church]. Halle: Verlag Otto Hendel, 1830.

 Conclusion JENNIFER HAM, ULRICH KINZEL, AND DAVID TSECHIEN PAN

I

n light of present developments in Germany and Europe, the question arises of what the significance of national education is now, particularly in response to ongoing attempts to internationalize higher education and institutionalize uniform policies and practices intended to ensure compliance and comparability of standards and qualifications at universities across all European Union countries. Nietzsche’s warning that the free pursuit of knowledge purely for its own sake was in jeopardy of being made vulnerable and subservient to outside interests is a very old political concern, one stretching back to the origin of the notion of self-formation in ancient Greece. Just as Aristotle declared in Book 4 of the Politics that the liberal arts were to remain sovereign, free, autonomous, and valuable in their own right, Seneca similarly rejected any notion of the pursuit of knowledge for profitable ends: “I respect no study, and deem no study good, which results in money-making. Such studies are profit-bringing occupations, useful only in so far as they give the mind a preparation and do not engage it permanently. . . . Hence you see why ‘liberal studies’ are so called; it is because they are studies worthy of a free-born gentleman.”1 The word “free” or “liberal,” in the sense of beyond the reach of outside investments, still informs liberalia studia (liberal arts) and definitions of the humanities. Yet, the recent conceptions of Bildung demonstrate that it is precisely this freedom that also enables its ideological manipulability through interpretive processes. More than a century before Nietzsche, Kant reiterated the ancients’ insistence on the academic autonomy of the humanities but deemed this freedom was ensured not owing to particular subject matter or to defeating threats brought by external political investments, but rather by the particular investigative method inherent in the humanities, grounded as it is in a practice of critique, subject solely and exclusively to pure reason.2 Critical inquiry formed the ideological groundwork of the humanities and is at the heart of the clas-

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sical ideal of the university as a free Gelehrtenrepublik (republic of letters), a jurisdiction Leibniz and Klopstock espoused as well. If the humanities were to remain liberal arts, they owed this condition not to any attempt to shirk outside influence, but rather to their particular impartial and objective methods of investigation and knowledge production. This focus on the liberalizing effect of the critical analytical method inherent in the humanities, beholden only to reason, later helped to legitimize humanistic disciplines facing the growing influence and prestige of the natural sciences in the nineteenth century, an era von Siemens and Virchow declared as the age of natural sciences. But Nietzsche’s turn to the priority of the will as well as the accompanying shift toward a focus on interpretation overturned the Enlightenment belief in the idea of universal reason that could establish a unity to the idea of Bildung. His work ushered in, not a new unity of Bildung, but rather a stunning proliferation of world views, cultural movements, and political ideologies, all of which could claim legitimacy due to their claim to embody a new creative will and metaphysical structure for the future. While Dilthey’s and Gadamer’s attempts to develop a hermeneutical method for Bildung have been able to establish the interpretive structure of humanistic knowledge, this centrality of interpretation has rendered the concept of Bildung a preeminently political one, in which the idea of Bildung would have to define its specific ideological import within a broader cultural and political landscape. Since the ideal of free inquiry can no longer be seen as an objective path toward a unified rational culture, the cultural tradition of classical learning as individuation embedded in the Bildung ideal must be considered as a specific tradition rather than a universal one. It competes with a utilitarian notion of learning on the one hand, and other world traditions with an equal claim to legitimacy on the other hand. Both of these interpretations of the tradition of Bildung challenge its idealism, though in different ways. One remaining viable defense of Bildung would be to embrace and defend its parochial character. Against the pragmatists, it would have to emphasize that all learning implies a set of goals of knowledge and that a reflection on such goals must lie at the core of any educational endeavor. In response to alternative cultures, the participants of a German culture, or of any specific cultural tradition, must reflect on their tradition as well as transform it based on the reception of ideas from other traditions. In this sense, one would have to recognize the connection, already proposed by Fichte but then borne out historically, between the idea of Bildung and the development of national culture. At the same time, it would still be possible to unabashedly champion liberal standards of free expression and human rights as specific ideals that have arisen out of a European context but can have an orienting role for the expression of cultural ideals all over the world.

Conclusion



153

Jennifer Ham is professor of German and humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, where she teaches a broad array of courses on German literature, culture and language and has served as division chair of humanities the last few years. In addition to this volume, which evolved to some extent out of earlier research for her book, Elastizität: Movement, Time and Space in Frank Wedekind’s Dramatic Works, Jennifer has also published and presented on subjects, such as animal studies, Nietzsche, femininity, cabaret, Frank Wedekind and German cinema, and is also coeditor of Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History published by Routledge. Ulrich Kinzel is professor of German literature at the University of Kiel. His research and teaching include seventeenth- to twentieth-century German literature and culture as well studies in comparative literature and culture. He has recently published articles on Thomas Kling’s and Gerhard Richter’s reflections on 9/11, Ferdinand Kriwet’s media work, and Peter Weiss’s concept of Bildung. He is the author of Ethische Projekte. Literatur und Selbstgestaltung im Kontext des Regierungsdenkens. Humboldt, Goethe, Stifter, Raabe (2000) and edited London—Urban Space and Cultural Experience (2010). He is currently preparing a continuation of his ethical studies into literary experience covering German literature of the first and the second halves of the twentieth century. David Tse-chien Pan is professor of European languages and studies at the University of California, Irvine, and the editor of Telos. He is the author of Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism and Sacrifice in the Modern World: On the Particularity and Generality of Nazi Myth.

Notes 1. “1. You have been wishing to know my views with regard to liberal studies. My answer is this: I respect no study, and deem no study good, which results in money-making. Such studies are profit-bringing occupations, useful only in so far as they give the mind a preparation and do not engage it permanently. One should linger upon them only so long as the mind can occupy itself with nothing greater; they are our apprenticeship, not our real work. 2. Hence you see why “liberal studies” are so called; it is because they are studies worthy of a free-born gentleman. But there is only one really liberal study, – that which gives a man his liberty. It is the study of wisdom, and that is lofty, brave, and great-souled. All other studies are puny and puerile. You surely do not believe that there is good in any of the subjects whose teachers are, as you see, men of the most ignoble and base stamp? We ought not to be learning such things; we should have done with learning them.” Seneca, Moral Letters, Letter 88, 349. 2. Kant, “Conflict of the Faculties,” 225.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Kant, Immanuel. “The Conflict of the Faculties” [1798]. In Immanuel Kant: Religion and Rational Theology, edited by A. W. Wood and G. Di Gionanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Seneca. Moral Letters to Lucilius. Vol. 2. Translated by Richard Gummere. London: William Heinemann, Loeb Classical Library, 1920.

 INDEX 

Adelung, Johann Christoph, 127–28, 133 Adorno, Theodor W., 22, 19n43 aesthetic education, 77, 81, 83–84, 88–91, 93, 121, 126 community mission of, 4, 76, 84, 94–95 Dilthey on, 121, 126, 131 for ennoblement, 88–89 and freedom, 89 Schiller on, 77, 83–84 Schinkel on, 4,76–77, 84–93 Winckelmann on, 62, 81, 84 Altes Museum, 4, 76–78, 84, 87, 90, 94–95 animal, 108, 111–14 antiquity, 5, 17, 56–62, 65, 67, 82–84, 91–92, 106. See also Classicism; Greece Goethe on, 61, 83 Humboldt on, 17 memory techniques, 58 and modernity, 59 Moritz on, 59–61 and nationalism, 5 and permanence, 59, 65, 67 Schinkel on, 82, 84, 91, 92 and sculpture, 62, 91 Aristotle, 108, 151 asceticism, 5, 102, 111–14 Badiou, Alain, 136–37, 146–47 Baeumler, Alfred, 47–48 barbarians, 79, 83, 88 Berlin Altes Museum, 4, 76–78, 84, 87, 90, 94–95 architectural styles, 78–81, 83, 86 Berlin Academy, 77 Berlin and the nation, 95, 96n5

Berliner Dom (Berlin cathedral), 94 Lustgarten (pleasure garden), 78, 94 Museumsinsel (museum complex), 76 Spree (river), 84, 86, 94 Stadtschloss (city palace), 79, 89, 91, 94 Unter den Linden (boulevard), 78–79 Zeughaus (armory), 79, 94 Bildung (formative education). See also education and archivization, 4, 58, 60, 68 (see also storage media) as autonomous individuality, 77 Bildungsbürgertum (educated middle class), 2, 57, 81–82 Bildungskatastrophe (crisis of public education), 18 Bildungsmaschine (education machine), 101–2, 109–10 Bildungsmonitoring (educational monitoring), 21 Bildungsökonomie (economics of education), 19 Bildungsphilister (educated philistine), 109 Bildungsplanung (educational planning), 18, 19 Bildungspolitik (politics of education), 17–19, 21 Bildungsprozesse (educational processes), 21 Bildungsreise (Grand Tour), 69–70, 82 Bildungsroman, 4, 12, 21, 122, 126 Bildungsstandards (educational standards), 20 as cultivation, 28 as cultural capital, 4, 6 definition of, 28 as ennoblement, 84, 88–89

156



Index

Entwicklung (development), 13 formation, re-formation, 83, 122, 125 Gadamer on, 137, 139, 141 and Geistesgeschichte, 130–31 German tradition of, 1 Hegel, Bildung and dialectic of experience, 143 and Hegel’s dialectic of experience, 143 and image (Bild), 34, 41, 59–60, 122–32 and imagination, 57–60, 61, 68–70 (see also imagination) and individual development, 1, 3, 5–6, 28 and interpretation, 6–8 and material practices, 56–59, 65–69 and morality, 1–2, 28, 51–52 and multiculturalism, 2 and museum, 86–88, 91, 93, 95 and nation, 29, 50 Paideia, 106 as philological activity, 106 as philosophical way of life, 104 and poetic imagination, 121–28 Scheler on, 145 Bloch, Ernst, 48–50 body, 101–2, 108, 110–11, 113 Catel, Franz Ludwig, 81–83 Karl Friedrich Schinkel in Neapel, 81–83 Chartier, Roger, 57, 71n4 Classicism, 4–5, 15, 60, 83–84, 105–6, 127, 152. See also neo-classicism cognition, 31 columns, 65, 79, 86, 89, 92 cosmopolitanism, 2–3, 9, 39, 44–45, 48–51 Critical Theory, 19 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 66 dandyism, 13 Deleuze, Gilles, 141 democracy, 7, 105, 111–12 Descriptive Psychology 120–21, 124, 129–31. See also imagination Dilthey, Wilhelm, 6–8, 120–35 Poetry and Lived Experience, 120–21, 129, 132

education, 101–11, 113–14. See also Bildung; pedagogy aesthetic education, 4, 76–77, 81, 83–84, 88–91, 93, 95, 121, 126 (see also Schiller) Education Reform Movement, 111 educational system, 108 pseudo-education, 110, 116n24 self-education, 57–59, 70, 126 Überbürdung (overburdening), 101, 115n5 universal education, 126 utilitarian use of, 104 educational institutions, 101, 103. See also university boarding schools, 101–2 gymnasia, 16, 101–2, 114 museums, 4, 76–77, 83–84, 87–88, 95 schools, 16, 34, 102, 104 Schulpforta, 101–4, 106, 113 Eissler, Kurt, 6 Enlightenment, 79, 87, 107, 127, 152 Epicureanism, 13 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 3–4 address to German nation, 10, 103 on education, 31, 110 on freedom of the will, 30, 110 idealism, 44, 47–48 on imagination, 30, 34, 41 on language, 40–42 on love, 32–33 on morality, 33–34 on progress, 38–39 on rationality, 32, 42 on the nation, 35–40, 43, 152 on the state, 34, 110 Fontane, Theodor, 5 Foucault, Michel, 15, 18, 19, 113–14 Frankfurt School, 19, 114 Freiburg School, 19 French Revolution, 79, 84, 88, 146 Friedrich Wilhelm III, 80 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 7–8 miracle (Wunder) of understanding, 137, 141

Index

on sciences of service vs. sciences of domination, 138 on theological and legal hermeneutics, 137–41, 143, 147–48 Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method), 136–39, 144–45 Geistesgeschichte. See also humanities and Bildung, 130–31 Dilthey’s notion of, 120–31 and experience, 121 hermeneutics and, 5 and self-education, 131 as poetic inquiry, 131 as university concept, 130 Geisteswissenschaft, 120. See also humanities Gellner, Ernest: on capitalism 45–46 on nationalism 46–47 genius, 62, 104–06, 108, 114 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Bildungsreise, 69–70, 82 concept of solidity, 56–57 on Einbildungskraft (imagination), 122–23, 125–26 and Friedrich Nietzsche, 102, 106 gothic style, 79, 96n13 and history of education, 21, 126 and image formation, 122–25 and imagination, 56, 122, 126 Italian Journey (Italienische Reise), 69–70 metaphors of learning, 65 monuments, 61, 67, 70 permanence and impermanence, 58–59, 65, 67 pheasant dream (Fasanentraum), 68–70 portrait, 82–83 and scientific knowledge, 2 self-education, 57–59, 70, 126 storage and archiving, 57–59, 67–68, 70 travel writings, 57, 59, 66–67, 69–70 universal education, 126 and Wilhelm Dilthey, 120–24, 127, 129–30 gothic, 79, 80–81, 83, 86–87, 96n11 Greece, Ancient, 81, 83–86, 88, 104, 114, 151. See also antiquity, Classicism Athens, 79, 84, 86, 88, 94–95 Parthenon, 86, 95



157

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 3, 16, 102, 136–38, 140 dialectic of consciousness and experience, 138, 141–43 Heidegger, Martin, 7–8, 114 and Nazism, 144–45, 147 “On the Self-Assertion of the German University,” 144 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 32, 42–43, 102 hermeneutics, 5–9, 21, 120, 136–43, 147–48 human capital, 3, 20–22 human nature, 106, 108, 111, 113, 129 humanities. See also Geisteswissenschaft disciplines, 6, 7, 152 foundational concepts, 1–3 humanistic education, 81, 106, 148 humanistic practices, 6–8, 102, 130, 137, 139, 147, 151 relevance of, 1, 7, 47, 114–15, 130–31 as Dienstwissenschaften, 136–37, 140–47 (see also service) Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 18–19, 77, 83–84, 87, 96n20, 104 on Bildung, 2, 13, 16, 21, 81, 102, 105–7 and classical aesthetics, 15, 83 on Entwicklung (development), 13 and moral education, 15, 17, 28, 91 on the state, 12–17, 81 on welfare state, 3, 16 imagination (Einbildung), 120, 122–33, 135. See also Adelung; Fichte; Goethe aesthetic imagination, 58 cultural imagination, 57, 70, 76 definition (Einbildung vs. Phantasie), 123–28 Dilthey on, 7, 123–25, 127, 129–30 figural imagination, 59 Humboldt on, 130 and image (Bild), 7, 34, 41, 59–61, 122–32 and material practices, 58, 60, 70 Moritz on, 61 poetic imagination, 7, 120, 123–26, 129 and travel, 68 Italy Capitoline Museum, 62–63

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Index

Italian Journey (Goethe), 58, 65–70 Italian travel, 56, 58–61, 64, 79, 82 (see also Goethe) Naples, 69, 81–82 Pantheon, 89, 91 Rome, 56, 59, 62, 68 Tiber river, 64 Jünger, Ernst, 2 Kant, Immanuel, 28, 34, 37, 44, 84, 88, 126, 142–43, 148 Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason), 120, 123, 142 on morality, 29, 36 Streit der Fakultäten (Conflict of the Faculties), 147 on universities, 147–48 vs. Hegel on thing-in-itself, 142 Was ist Aufklärung? (What is Enlightenment?), 15 Litt, Theodor, 18 Luhmann, Niklas, 22 Macintyre, Alasdair, 51–52 Marx, Karl, 109, 113, 142 Mill, John Stuart, 13 Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel, 14 Mohl, Robert von, 17, 18 monuments, 56–59, 61–64, 67, 87, 95 Goethe on, 56–61, 65, 68, 70 modern, 63, 67 Moritz on, 59–65, 70 statues, 57, 87 and storage function, 65, 70 Moritz, Karl Philipp, 56–65, 67, 70 reading Plutarch, 63–64 Müller, Johannes, 7, 122–24 Mündigkeit (responsibility), 15 museums Altes Museum, 4, 76–78, 84, 87, 90, 94–95 Capitoline Museum, 62–63 as educational institution, 4, 76–77, 83–84, 87–88, 95 Louvre, 77, 92

national importance of, 77, 80–81, 86, 89, 95 Uffizi, 77, 92 visitors‘ experience, 63, 77–78, 86, 88, 91, 94–95 Napoleon (Napoleon Bonaparte), 77, 80, 96n17 Napoleonic Wars, 77, 79 nation, 3–5, 28–29, 35–46, 49–51, 80, 102–3, 110, 144 national identity, 3. 39, 44, 46–47, 50–51. See also Fichte; Treischke nationalism, 3–5, 34–40, 43–44, 46–47, 50. Neo-classicism, 76–79, 81, 83–84, 86, 89, 92, 95, 103. See also Classicism Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5–6, 13, 16, 21–22, 101–14, 116n16 acroamatic teaching, 109–10 on animals and humans, 107–9, 113–14 asceticism, 112–13 Basel lectures, 104, 109 critique of universities, 103–4, 108–9, 114 on classical Greek and German culture, 104–6, 114 Genealogy of Morals, 104 on genius and “heroic minds,” 101, 105–7, 112 his own education, 101–3 “On the Future of our Educational Institutions,” 103 role of the will, 110–12 on scholars, 108–9, 114 “Schopenhauer as Educator,” 104, 106, 112 transforming the self, 106–7 Will to Power, 111–12 Zarathustra, 104–5, 110, 114 ordoliberalism, 18 panorama, 84, 95 pedagogy, 101–3, 106, 108–12 acroamatic method of teaching, 109 Fachdidaktik (subject didactics), 20

Index

Lernfabriken (education factories), 109 Literaturdidaktik (literature pedagogy), 20 Schwarze Pädagogik (black or poisonous pedagogy), 111 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 111 physiocrats, 17 Picht, Georg, 18 Prussia Bildungspolitik, 17, 95 education of its citizens, 83, 95 future of, 86 museum visitors in, 77, 81, 94–95 Prussian educational reforms, 81, 102–3 war of liberation, 96n17 Raabe, Wilhelm,16n31, 21 Reign of Terror, 84, 88 rotunda, 89–91, 97nn41–42, 98n46 Scheler, Max, 136 on Bildung, 145 on love, 146 Schiller, Friedrich “aesthetic state,” 88, 94 ästhetische Erziehung (aesthetic education), 77, 83–84, 88, 91, 95 and Goethe, 2, 66, 106 and human drives, 88 idealism, 5 and Immanuel Kant, 88 Kunstreligion (religion of art), 91 Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, 84, 88–89, 91 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 4. See also Altes Museum; Berlin; museums aesthetic philosophy, 76–77, 83, 86–87, 91–95 as architect, 77, 79, 86–87, 89–90, 92–95 Bildungsgeschichte des Menschengeschlechts, 87, 93–95 Blick in Griechenlands Blüte, 84–85, 95 city planning, 78, 94–95 as civil servant, 81–83 Griechische Stadt am Meer, 81



159

Mittelalterliche Stadt an einem Fluss, 80–81 as painter, 80–81, 84–86 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 120, 137, 143–44 Schlözer, August, 14 scholars, 78, 91, 104, 108, 109, 112, 131 “scholars’ diseases,” 102 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 102, 104, 107–8, 112, 114 “Schopenhauer as Educator,” 104, 106, 112 sculpture, 62, 87, 89, 91, 95 self-education, 7, 57–59, 70, 126, 131. See also will and ennoblement, 84, 88–89 Entwicklung (development), 13 ethics of the self, 16 self-cultivation, 13, 15–16 self-culture, 12 self-fashioning, 7, 39, 114 self-overcoming, 112, 143 self-realization, 102 service (Dienst) 8, 136, 138–39, 140. See also state: service to the state and National Socialism, 144 Sloterdijk, Peter, 102, 112–14 anthropotechnics, 112–13 Smith, Adam, 17 state, 101–2, 104–5 Polizey, police, 14 security, 13–14, 16 service to the state, 106, 110 Sozialpolitik (social policy), 18 state control, 101, 110, 114 statistics, 15 tableau politique, 14 welfare, 13–16, 18 Stifter, Adalbert, 4–5, 13 Stoicism, 13, 86, 111 storage media, 57–59, 65, 67, 69–70 inscription, 57, 59, 62, 70–71n4 Tischbein, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm, 83 travelogue, form of, 60–65, 72n29 Treitschke, Heinrich von on cosmopolitanism, 45 on German national identity, 43–44

160



Index

Tuaillon, Louis Amazone zu Pferde, 87, 95 universities, 2, 19, 21, 112–14, 121, 136, 147–48 and Bildung 1, 16, 102, 104 and Gelehrtenrepublik (republic of letters), 152 Heidegger on, 144 Humboldtian concept of, 130 Kant on, 147 Nietzsche’s critique of, 103–4, 109 professors, 109 role of humanities at, 140, 147

Weber, Max, 18 Weigel, Siegrid, 58, 70 Weimar, 66–69 will (Wille), 102–3, 106, 110–13 Willenserziehung (education of the will), 102, 110–11 “gymnastic of the will,” 110–11 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 62, 81, 84, 86 Wolf, Friedrich August, 106 Wolff, Albert Löwenkämpfer, 87, 95 Zeno, 86