BILDUNG m

---------. Sew undJe/l. Tiibirvgen: Niemeyer, 2006. Translation by Joan Stambaugh:8emg and Time. Rev. ed. Buffalo: State University of New Yorit Press, » to .

Kant. Immanuel. Critique o f Pure ttea\on. Translated by Norman Kemp. London: Macmillan, 200J.

---------. bauçumlOnteitaiion 0I1770. Translated by William >eckoff.WTiitefoh. MT:Kessmget 2004.

Libera. Alain de.'la théotogiede 1'image.. .'In la myitiquf thénone. Paris: Editions du SeuiL 1984.

Longuenesse. Beatrice. Koni el le poumir de ¡uger. Pam: Presses Univerutaires de Franc«, 1993-

Marquet, Jean-Fran^ois. liberti el exMente, ttude turia formation de la ptoiknophie de $<hettmç. Pans: Gallimard/ La Plêiade. *973.

Oltmanns, Kite. M enltr fckhort. Frankfurt: Klostermann, >93$.Philonenko, Alexis IXZuwe dr AcAfr. Parrs: Vnn. *984.Schelling. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. H nlorkaKritkal Introduction to the Pht-

kxopby o f Mythology. Translated by Mason Richey et al. Buffalo: State University of NewYofk Press, 2008.

-------- . Phiknophit tier Kimt. In S<titHmgs Wtrte, vol. s. Edited byO.Wetss. Leipzig:Eckhardt. 1907.

-------- . SftitHmg's Phihiophy o f Mythology and (tevelotion. Translated by V. C.Hayes. Australian Association for the Study of Religions, 199$.

Schonborn (von). Chnstoph. Ckôoe du Chmt: fondemtnts thMogiques. Pans: Edi­tions du Cerf, >986. First published in >976.

-------- . Cod's Human Fa«:The<hnstKon, Translated b y L Krauth. San Francisco:ignatius Press, 1994.

Tilliette X ScheHtng. jnd ed. Paris: Vnrv 1992.Wackernagel. Wolfgang. Imagine denudan.' In Cthique de ftmoge el miiaphyitqoe

defabstrodtoncltezMoltie&khon. Pan: Vnn. 1991.

B ILD U N G , K U LT U R , Z IV IL IS A T IO N

french cvlturt, portion, Education. formation, liberation d n prt/ugts, raffintmcnt d n m oeun, civilisation

Greek p<»<fei<}[naiSeia]LATIN cultura

> CULTURt and AUFHEBEM BEHAVIOR. BILO, CIV1LTA. CONCETTO. 1MAG£IMAGINATION, LIGHT. MORALS. PERFECTIBILITY. PEOPLE. PLASTtCITX PRAXIS.STRUCTURE

Designating alternatively physical beauty, intellectual cultivation, the divine imprint on the hum an m ind, the integration of the in­dividual into society, and the constantly em phasized parallelism between Greek culture and Germ an culture, the term Bildung is cer­tainly o n e of those words w hose translation seem s the m ost alea­tory. The difficulty also has to do w ith the persistence of secondary m eanings that are not elim inated by the choice of a prim ary m ean­ing but are always conveyed in the background. Moreover, there is a tension betw een the term 8ildung and the term Kultur that d e ­velops starting in the Enlightenm ent and designates the progress of m ores thanks to civilization and then gradually com es to refer to the organic coherence of a social group. The term s Bildung, Kultur, and Zivilisalion thus define each other in a variable relationship, but Bildung rem ains the word most difficult to transpose. Between the universality of the nation or of know ledge and immediate singularity, in the Germ an context Bildung represents the elem ent of particularity, w hich explains w hy it is usually anchored in the two privileged dom ains of language and art. This particularity of Bildung can have an identity-related dim ension only by postulating its difference. The Germ an notion of Bildung includes precisely an elem ent of program m ed incom m unicability w ith regard to anyone w ho tries to approach the term from the outside.

I. T h e Q u e st io n o f H o lism

By “culture” we can mean, depending on the context o r pe­riod, a certain amount of knowledge in the domains o f his­tory, literature, art, music, and language that distinguishes a person who possesses it from one who does not, and serves as a sign o f recognition among members o f a group. The German definition of Btidumj implies, on the other hand, an actualiza- tion o f human perfectibility. In this sense, it is not reducible to any definite content. I f Humboldt praises the Greeks and advocates im itating them, it is especially in order to posit as a paradigm a principle of self-determination and self-regu- lation that he perceives as central to Greek culture. In many respects, the Greek reference is interchangeable. Far from being an accumulation o f objective knowledge, the theory o f Bildung, as Humboldt defines it, is constructed on the basis o f the observation o f a gap between the multiplication of fields o f partial knowledge and the moral progress o f humanity. The point is to take over the positive sciences in order to sub* ject them to the Rousseauian imperative o f moral progress. Reducing external reality to imaginary representations pro­duced by EinbiMuntjsfcni/r, art constitutes a way of extending Bildung that contributes to the self-determination that places the subject o f Bildung at the center o f the perceived world. It reduces the indefinite m ultiplicity o f phenomena to a small number o f symbolic elements referring to the infinite. This self-fashioning o f autonomous individuality is nonethe­less fu lly realizable only through the mediation o f language, which, better than art, provides a symbolic relationship to the world and enables the subject to appropriate it. But through language we pass from human individuality to the singular­ity o f the group in which a relationship to the world can be expressed. At the same time that it expresses the individual's aspiration to the universal, Bildung marks a difference be­cause the modes o f appropriation and expression of the world through language are not identical. We have often been struck by the theological dimensions of a theory that makes o f the human being involved in the dynamism o f Bildung a veritable monad. In this respect, we can only approve of the idea that Bildung is the expression o f a holistic dimension o f German culture, whereas in his Sociology o f Religions Max Weber speaks o f an Emshdtsicuitur {homogeneous culture), and in his book on Oer Historismus und seine Probleme {Historicism and its ProWfms) Ernst Troeltsch aspires to a Ku/tursynthese (cultural synthesis). To develop a theory o f Bildung is to postulate a coincidence of the singular with the universal in a dynamics that is history envisaged from a German point o f view. The degree of generality attained by a term that can then be asso­ciated with the totality o f the elements o f an intellectual tra­dition arouses distrust. Btfdung is less a pernicious ideologeme than an empty place in discourse, a cotnctctenfid oppcsiforum whose postulated existence makes it possible toengage in dis­courses on the singularity o f the subject and the coherence o f the group. It is certainly in this function of touchstone or interstitial glue between conceptual sets that the term Bi/dung is most untranslatable.

It would in fact be rather absurd to claim that a word des­ignating the acquisition of theoretical or practical knowledge can be translated only if it does not assume an identifying function. The idea of a co-extensiveness o f language and

TU BILDUNG

human understanding, o f a necessary mediation o f language in the symbolic appropriation o f the world, is not absent from the linguistic thought of eighteenth-century France, whether we th ink of Condorcet or his posterity among the members of the Societe des Ideologues frequented by Hum* boldt during his stay in Paris and his turn toward linguistics. To a certain extent, the term BiMuntj is thus invested with an arb itrary w ill to untranslatability. To define the term Bi/dun<j as an index o fa holism peculiar to German culture is thus to accept uncritically a form o f intellectual self-perception and the marked-out paths that it implies for anyone who wishes to explore it only from the inside. Whether one thinks the notion o f Bildung can o r cannot be translated ultim ately de­pends only on the arb itrary choice o f an intellectual position inside or outside the discourse that it structures.

II. F ro m th e Im a g e o f G o d to H u m a n D e v e lo p m e n t

A. Lexical stages

Friedrich Kluge's etymological dictionary (RT: An Etymological Dictionary o f the German Language) explains that the term Bi/dumj (bildungo in Old High German), which derives from Bi/d, "image," signified at first creation, fabrication, the fact o f giving form. The transition to the idea o f intellectual training and then to education is supposed to have proceeded from the language of mysticism, in which mbilden designates the acqui­sition of a figurative representation, establishing a de facto re­lationship between BtMumj and Embtfdung (imagination). The mysticism of the late Middle Ages, like Pietism, maintained that God imprinted his image (sich einbildet) on humans. In his 1793 dictionary, Johann Christoph Adelung attributes to the term Bild three main meanings: that o f the form of a thing, that o f the representation o fa thing, and finally that of a per­son or thing considered from the point o f view o f its appar­ent form (a man can be designated by the term Mannsbi/d). According to Adelung, the verb biMen signifies giving form to something, but also reproducing a thing’s form (a mean­ing that subsists residually in the concept o f bildende Kiinstf, "plastic arts," “ arts of reproduction"; see ART, Box 2). The noun Bi/dumj is thus supposed to designate both the action o f giving a form and the form itself, notably the form o f the human face. Theodor Heinsius’s dictionary (1818) lists these two meanings and adds that o f a cultivated person's state, as well as that o f the ability o f the mind to recompose, in a whole that did not previously exist, the singular representations transmitted by the imagination (Einbt/dungskra/t). In their dictionary (1860), the Grimm brothers observe that the term Bt/dung is charac­teristic o f the German language, and that it is not found, or found only in forms derived from German, in other Germanic languages. The term is supposed to have designated an image, imago, and then, more broadly, a form (fcstofr). It is still in this sense that Winckelmann himself knew the term when he wrote that over time, scientific advances taught Etruscan and Greek artists to free themselves from primitive fixed and rigid forms. And, speaking of the Laocoon, Lessing explains that it had "a form [Sidling] which inspired pity because it possessed beauty and pain at the same time." The Grimm brothers also note the meaning o f cu/tusammi, hurruim'Mris, which they attri­bute notably to Goethe (see MENSCHHEIT). The numerous com­pounds into which the word Bildung enter» can help explain

its meaning. Thus BiJdungsansta/t (educational institution) re­fers to the most intellectual sense o f the term , whereas the concept o f Bildungstrieb (formative drive; see DRIVE), borrowed from the anthropologist and anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, designates nature's aptitude for causing forms to emerge.

Whereas the classical dictionaries o f the German language reveal a great wealth o f meanings for the term Bi/dung, they are much more circumspect about KuZtur and Zivilisation. Adelung defines Cu/tur (culture), whose roots he recognizes in both French and the agricultural vocabulary, as a purifi­cation of the mental and physical strengths of a person or a people, so that Cu/rur can signify both a liberation from prejudices (Enlightenm ent, Aufklärung', see LIGHT) and re­finement o f manners. The term Zivilisation is unknown to Adelung, but he defines “c iv il" as bürgerlich, characteristic of thecitizen , and notes thatcivi/isteren, borrowed from French civiiiser, signifies “ give good manners." Heinsius adopts these definitions and notes the term civiiisation in the sense of improvement o f manners, derived from the Latin civi/ifas, civifis.The term civi/isarion, in its oldest stratum, refers to the political organization o f the city. From this survey we can conclude that the great lexicographical investigations that are chronologically close to German idealism do not give the terms Kultur and Zivilisation a historical or ethnological sense, but sim ply designate a process o f the purification of manners from the point o f view o f the Enlightenment. Thus these two terms appear in the Hegelian lexicon, and even then rarely, w ith a processual value.

B. Aufklärung and culture

lnÜb?rdteFm^:lV<uhm$ráu/k/à>?n?(1784),Mo$esMendel$$ohn complains that the words Aufklärung, Ku/tur, and Bi7dun<j are newcomers in the German language. They belong only to the language o f books and the common man does not un­derstand them. Mendelssohn's complaint allows us to note a semantic equivalence or extreme proxim ity among three terms that moreover belong largely to scholarly language.

From Kant's point o f v iew , the determ ining term is not Bildung but Kultur. Starting out from a rude, uncultivated state, humans arrive , thanks to the development o f the ir dispositions, at cu lture ("aus der Rohigkeit zur Kuítur”), at the organization o f th e ir lives in accord w ith th e ir goals and w ith the deployment o f th e ir own strengths. Humans elaborate cu lture in society (Idea fo ra Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose [Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht], chap. 4). From this point o f view, culture is a lso a duty to oneself and to others. In fact, the transition to cu lture does not resu lt from a continuous evolution, but is produced instead by a tension, humans being, according to Kant, both social and opposed to so­ciability, inclined to confine themselves to individual be­haviors. C ulture, more a process than a resu lt, arises from the effort to d iscip line the tendencies to re ject sociability. However, dissensions are not in princip le contrary to cu l­ture , and may even serve as its motive force. Culture does violence to nature, but at the same time it develops na­ture’s v irtu a litie s . Humans’ goal is indeed to develop their natural strengths, "d^r Anbau-cultura—seiner Naturkräfte" (Metaphysics o f Morals [Mrtap/rysiJc der Sitten], 1797), and

BILDUNG 113

these natural strengths are not lim ited to in tellectual and sp iritua l strengths, but also include physical strengths.

The development o f cu lture culm inates in a constitution defined in accord w ith the concepts of human rights, in an overall refinem ent of the m anners and the intellectual qualities, not o f the ind ividual, but o f c iv il society. Thus cu lture ’s vocation i$ to find it$ fu ll realization in politics. In his Anthropo/cgy from a Pragmatic Point o f View (Anthro­pologie in pragmafisc/ier Hinsicht, 1798) Kant uses the terms kultivieren, zivilisieren, and moralisieren alm ost as synonym s. Culture includes education and upbringing and finally obtains a certa in aptitude. The term Zivilisierung is said to emphasize cu lture , insofar as cu lture inclines people to enter into the social whole (Ober Pädagogik). According to the distinctions made in Kant’s posthumously published w ritings, m orality represents a th ird stage in the progress o f hum anity toward perfection, fo llow ing cu lture and c iv i­lization . The re lative absence o f the term Bildung in Kant's work is revelatory of an approach that is comprehensive, collective, and po litical, w ithout any m ystical o ro rgan icist dimension.

C. Bildung and hum anity

The notion o f Bildung becomes central once again in the language o f Herder, who stresses movement and becoming in relation to any fixed situation. In his work, Bildung ac­quires a status that allows it to include the reference both to the biological and organic development o f forms and to intellectual education and the refinement o f manners. The tension between Kant and Herder is projected in the seman­tic opposition that leads one o f them to prefer to speak o f Kultur and the other to speak o f Bildung. Furtherm ore, Bildung applies less to the individual than to humanity as a whole. As a result, it tends to coincide purely and sim ply w ith his­tory, a history that would not be solely a history o f ideas, but also one o f behaviors, feelings, and sense impressions, which is already suggested by the title Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit {Another Philosophy o f History for the Cultivation o f Humanity. 1774). Bildung is deter* mined first of all by external conditions and tendencies, by appetites based on the im itation o f a model.

What were these tendencies? What could they be? The most natural, the strongest, the simplest! For every cen­tury, the eternal foundation o f the education o f men (Mfn$chfnbi?dung]: wisdom rather than science, the fear o f Cod rather than wisdom, love among children and spouses instead o f elegance and extravagances, order o f life, domination over a house in conform ity w ith Cod's order, the prim itive image (das UrfeiW] o f every order and ever)' c iv il organization—in all that the simplest and deepest enjoyment o f humanity, how could that have been, not conceived [erbildet], but even developed [an- gebildet], perfected [fortgebildet], except by that eternal power o f the model [Vorbild] and of a series of models [ Vorbild?) around us?

This eternal model that is the source of all Bildung has a pronounced theological dimension. While Bi/dung is a kind o f education, it cannot be limited to an intellectual education transmitted by books and libraries:

The education [Bi/dung] and improvement [Fortbildung] of a nation are nothing other than the work o f destiny: the result o f countless causes that converge, so to speak the result o f the whole element in which they live.

Reasoning and understanding alone cannot in any case be the sole vehicles o f this education of humanity that Herder calls for in the context o f the Enlightenment. The heart, blood, warmth, life are all elements that are involved in the education o f humanity and cannot be reduced to a rational mechanism. In its double meaning o f a process o f acquisition and a term inal state, culture (Kultur) remains in Herder the distinctive trait of a people and even suggests the possibility o f outlining hierarchies among peoples. In Herder, the term Bi/dung is applied to humanity and to the nation, but also to language, the vehicle of culture. While he likes to talk about the formation of language (Bi/dung einer Sprach?), this is natu­ra lly in the triv ia l sense of the term . In order for a language to take form it must go through a certain number of phases that historians o f the language can reconstruct and scan. But here Bi/dung also signifies that the language is enriching itself, that it is accomplishing a process o f improvement, ennobling itself:

Our language is in a phase o f formation (Bi/dung)—and the expression "formation (Bi/dung) o f the language" is almost a motto that is today on almost everyone's lips: w riters, art c ritics , translators, scientists. Each of them wants to form (bilden) it in his own way: and one is often opposed to the other. What should we do i f everyone is allowed to form (bi/dfn) it: shall I then be authorized to ask what "form ” (bi/den) means? What is a language without formation (ungebildete Sprache)? And what rev­olutions have other languages undergone before they appeared formed (ausgebildet)?This questioning is followed by a series o f historical

considerations on the best ways o f enriching the language among which translation, notably the translation of ancient authors who are distant from Cerman in the ir mode o f ex­pression, plays a central role.

III. Formation or Self-Making

A. Self-Making

The essential dimension that the term Bildung acquires around 1800 is that o f reflexivity . The development that B il­dung implies is not only the acquisition o f competences w ith a v iew to improvement, but corresponds to a process o f the self-fashioning of the individual who becomes what he was at the outset, who reconciles h im self w ith his essence. This use o f the word is found notably in Hegel, who devotes long passages to Bildung in the fourth part o f the Phenomenology o f Mind (Phänomenologie des Geistes), the one entitled "Sp irit" :

The means, then, whereby the individual gets objec­tive valid ity and concrete actuality here is the forma­tive process of Culture [Bildung]. The estrangement [Enr/remdung] on the part o f spirit from its natural exis­tence is here the individual’s true and original nature, his very substance.. . . Th is individuality moulds itself [bildet sich] by culture to what it inherently is, and only

114 BILDUNG

by doing so is it then something per se and possessed of concrete existence. The extent o f its culture (Bildung) is the measure o f its reality and its power.

We can see how difficu lt it is to express otherwise than by convention the whole of the semantic field covered by the term Bildung in its Hegelian acceptation. Individual self* fashioning is at the same time a transition from substance to a reality that makes it alien to consciousness.

The process in which ind ividuality cultivates itse lf is, therefore, ipso facto, the development o f individual* ity qua universal objective being; that is to say, it is the development o f the actual world. Th is world, although it has come into being by means of individuality, is in the eyes o f self-consciousness something that is directly and prim arily estranged.

In other words, Bildung is a process that both produces and alienates individuality. In order to accede to Mduru;. individ­uality distances itse lf from its Self. A splitting takes place, and the language of th is splitting is the perfect language of the world o f culture. The overthrow and mutual alienation of reality (Wirklichkeit) and o f thought define "pure culture" (reine Bildung). "The spiritual condition of self-estrangement exists in the sphere of culture as a fact.” In the play o f the formation o f individuality in a process of self-fashioning on the one hand, and o f alienation, the estrangement from that same individuality, on the other, thought acquires a content and Bildung ceases to be a pure virtuality.

The notion o f Bi/dunc; is im portant in Fichte’s po liti­cal w ritings, notably in his Addresses to the German Nation (1808), where the education that modifies not only the individual's heritage but his nature itse lf becomes a kind o f glue unifying the people. Bildung is no longer a specific education but a “ general cu lture” (allgemeine ßi/duntj). Schelling shares w ith Hegel a comprehensive conception o f Bildung and in his Vorlesungen über die Methode des akade­mischen 5tudiums (On University Studies) (1808) he explains that "to attain absolute form , the sp irit must test itse lf in a ll domains, that is the universal law o f a ll free education (Bildung).” Nonetheless, in Schelling the term has a much weightier meaning in a passage in his treatise on the es* sence o f human freedom (Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusam­menhängenden Gegenstände (1809]) that illum inates the movement from the Grund o r in itia l obscurity to d ivision. According to Schelling, th is movement can take place only through a “ veritable in-form ation (Ein-Bildung), things in development being informed (hineingebildet) in nature or more precisely by an awakening, the understanding high* lighting the unity o r idea concealed in the separation from the Grund." When Hegel was w riting the Phenomenology o f Mind, Bildung s t ill conveyed a m ystical meaning inherited from the representation o f a form breathed into matter. But th is process is henceforth situated str ic tly w ith in the fram ework o f a self-constituting subjectivity.

B. The indefinite

In many of the contexts in which it is used, Bildung includes an element of indetermination that makes it unsuitable for

designating solely a process of education, whether it is a matter o f intellectual or moral education. The highest form in the h ierarchy o f forms, the one that would best represent Bildung, the form ing or shaping w ith theological roots, would be precisely, in an ever-latent reversal, the absence of form. We encounter this sense of the term Bildung notably in the work of Friedrich Schlegel, and particularly in his 1799 novel, ¿ucinde. Carried away by a love without object in the chaos of his inner life , the hero.Julius, feeling that he is destined to be an artist, discovers how far behind he still is in Bildung ("dass er noch so iveit zurück sei in der Bildung"). But the decision to educate h im self (bildete sich) leads him to forget his century and take his models among the heroes o f the past o r to proj­ect him self into the future, in short, to emancipate himself from temporal determinations. Bildung is almost as indeter­minate as the state it allows us to leave behind. Schlegel even develops a theory o f Bildung whose highest degree would be passivity, the abandonment o f forms, and the acceptance of idleness. Women are supposed to attain spontaneously this state of openness to the indefinite. Men, on the other hand, should seek to achieve it. “ That is why in women’s love there are no degrees or stages of Bildung.” The indefinite dimen­sion of Bildung, its openness to a vague in fin ity and its rever­sal into a v ictory over the tyranny of forms, is not peculiar to Romanticism. Paul Natorp, in a very nationalist work entitled Die Seele des Deutschen (The German Soul, 1918), em­phasized the fact that Goethe, beyond his philosophical, aes­thetic, and literary qualities, acted as a LebensbiMner (shaper of life). A fter him , "the term Bildung should never have been understood in a superficial sense, because for him , and for anyone who remained faithfu l to his sp irit, it meant nothing less than the organization o f the whole o f life into a living masterpiece.” Bildung is supposed to be the act of giving life and in that way moving beyond forms. Natorp appeals to the model o f Goethe's Prometheus: “ I am here and give form to men in accord with my image, to a race that resembles me." Understood in this way, Bildung becomes a kind of organic duty to express a German idea that cannot be limited to the individual but includes the collectivity.

C. Bildung and philology

Despite its numerous extensions, Bildung corresponds to a specific kind of education: the study o f antiquity and espe­cially Greek philology. There is a very dear reason for this. The Greeks had an all*encompassing cultural system, paid- eia (n a ifc ia ], whose paradigmatic value in turn permitted the construction o f national cu ltura l systems in Europe: T h e original Greek creation of culture (Kultur) as a system of paideia and pure forms that served as its organ produced the effect o f an illum ination on the peoples of the world” (Jaeger, Humanistische Reden und Vorträge).■ See Boxt.

Transposing the Greek paradigm to German reality re­quired a special fam iliarity w ith the ancient Greek language and the texts that transmitted it. Bildung became prim arily a philological activity. Even before Friedrich August Wolf made in clear in his Prolegomena ad Homenim (Prolegomena to Homer, 1795) that understanding the /liad and the Odyssey required an understanding of how they were transmitted

BILDUNG 115

1

Paideia, cultura, Bildung: Nature and culture> im a G L LOGOS, R eilG tO , VIRTU, WORLD

A fragment of Democritus quoted, via Ar­istotle. by Stobaeus. sums up the impor­tance of patdeia and its aura: "Paideta is the world [¿cosmos [koo^o^I; Diels-Kraru suggests Schmuck (ornament)] of those for whom this goes well (fors eutuchousin (toic iuruxoOoivJ), and the refuge of those for whom it goes badly (atuchousin de kotaphu- gion latwxovoiv 5i natatpC'Yiov))'’ (69 6 180 DK). The word paideia. which designates both •youth" and ‘education, culture,"derives from pais [rock], “child'; not the child as his mother gives birth to him, teknon [tixvo v] (from tiktd (tixtw ]), engender, and as he is brought up (trepho Ir^cpw)). feed, cause to grow), like any animal at all. but the human offspring whose body and mind have to be shaped, whence a common phrase, nota­bly in Plato, paideia kai tropht [nai&tia xa i Tgo<f>rj] (Ptioedo, io7d, e.g.. translated by L. Robin as 'formation morale et regime de vie”, and "culture et gouts” by M. Dixsaut. Paideta is understood in its proximity to patdia |nai5 i«L 'p lay': thus Plato's Laws call for legislation 'on paideta and paidia relative to the Muses* (2.656c). Patdeia is opposed to apaideusta [ana»6evoia l, the ignorance of the badly educated, as is shown, for example, by the myth of the cave, which opens like this: 'Next, said I, compare our nature in respect of education and its lack to such an experience as this' {Republic, 7.5143 1 - 2). Or again: 'By education, then, I mean goodness in the form in which it is first acquired by a child" (tin paiagignomen$n prdton paisin arettn [tr|v iwcC«Y,Yvot,s vi1v *e w to v n<*wiv ageTiiv]) (ia m , 2.653b 1 - 2). From Socratk dialectic to the austerities of the laws, everything in Plato is thus persuasive and pedagogical, oriented toward the standard of virtue that would be taught by the philosopher-king and con­veyed through institutions.

Everything in Plato, but also everything in Aristotle, for whom paideia is a way of fulfilling the definition of man as an animal endowed with logos (Xoyoc). No one. neither the child, nor, of course, women, nor even slaves, achieves this without patdeia: each one is in his own way not only a living being, like an ox. but a living being endowed with enough logos to acquire more {'Wherefore they are mistaken who forbid us to converse with slaves and say that we should employ command onty, for slaves stand even more in need of admonition than children'; Poli­tics, 1260b $-r. cf. Cassin, Ahstote). No one has logos from the outset, totally and once and for all. because logos constitutes for us nature's goal politics, 7 13 .1334b is): to lead

toward logos by logos is the very essence of patdeia (Cassin. Anstote). In other words, man's nature is his culture. The breadth of paideia ranges from politics— it is the logos that makes man a 'more political' animal than others [Politics, 1 .1253a 7- 10)— to on­tology— it is evidence of apaideusia (lack of education) to demand that everything be demonstrated (Metaphysics, 4 4 10 0 6 a 6; cf. 3.ioosb 3- 4 ). and. in the case of the principle of noncontradiction, we are then 'no bet­ter than a vegetable" (Metaphysics 4 4 .1006a14-is).

As Hannah Arendt emphasizes, it is a mat­ter of our m odeof relation to the thingsof the world (fefiveen Past andFuturéi.to character­ize Greek culture in its relationship to the art that is often confused with it. Arendt cites the statement Thucydides puts into the mouth of Pericles in his funeral oration for the latter: *We love beauty within the limits of politi­cal judgment, and we philosophize without the barbarous vice of softness' (philokalou- men te gar met' euteletas kai phiiosophou- men aneu malaktas [(piAoxaAoúvrfv rc yàç }i£t' eúteAsíaç x a i q»Aooo<poOpev âveu liaAaxíaçD (Thucydides, 24 0 : Arendt, Be­tween Past and Future; cf. Cassin. LEffet sophis- tique). in opposition to the over-refinement of the barbarians, the political and practical standard of paideia delines the Greeks' rela­tion to beauty and wisdom. In relation to the baibaiians. and then to the Romans, we see that the logos constituted par excellence by the Greek language can become the de­pository of patdeia (see GREEK, Box 1), and that in the Hellenistic schools, culture was presented in the form of mimésis rhêlonché llrípnou; pnToçixnl, "literary culture." mean­ing the appropriation of great authors and of creative imitation, but of culture and no longer of nature (Cassin, CEffet sophistique).

We also see why it ts Greek paideia and not Roman cultura that functions as a model in German Bildung. Cultura derives from colere, 'to inhabit, cultivate, practice, maintain." from the root Akweh, like pehm ai [n^AonaiL 'to turn around.' which we find again in ‘'cir­cle,' and the verb designates both humans’ relation to the gods— they cultivate them, make them the object of a cult— and that of the gods to humans— they live with them, protect and cherish them (cf. A. Ernout and A. Meillet). Literally and first of all, cultura is agricultura, 'the culture of the earth’ : the mind is like a field that cannot produce un­less it is suitably cultivated and'philosophy is the culture of the m ind' (cultura autem antmt philosophic est; Ckero, Tusculan Orations,

2.13). Arendt notes emphatically:“« was in the midst of a primanly agricultural people that the concept of culture first appeared, and the artistic connotations which might have been connected with this culture concerned the incomparably close relationship of the Latin people to nature, the creation of the famous Italian landscape" (8etween Post and Future). It is precisely here that we see one of the fundamental differences between the Greeks, who conceived cultivating the earth as a Promethean act. almost a rape, and the Romans, who fashioned nature into a habit­able place:'The reason why there is no Greek equivalent of the Roman concept of culture resides in the predominance of the arts of fabrication in Greek civilization, whereas the Romans tended to see even art as a kind of agriculture, as the culture of nature, the Greeks tended to see even agnculture as an element of fabrication, as one of the inge­nious and skilful technical artifices through which humans, who are more frightening than anything else that exists, domesticate and dominate nature.'

Bildung is located on the side of techn# l« x v n). art. of aitifke and fabrication, and noton the s*deofna(t/ra. Werner Jaeger never ceased to emphasize its relation to plastic ac­tivity. the plassein (nActocsiv) through which the sculptor models his creation: "The term culture [Bildung] should be reserved for this kind of education (Art der Erziehung) alone, the one for which Plato uses the material metaphor of the character that is fashioned [ah bildlicher Ausdruck (ur das erzieherische Tun). The German word Tun indicates very clearly the nature of Greek education in the Platonic sense: it suggests just as much the artist's plastic composition (das künstlerische Formende, Plastische) as the guiding model which is always present to the mind of the artist (dem Bildner innerlich vorschwebende normative Bild), the idea or lypos“ (Patdeia; see a r t and p la st ic ity ). And what is thus shaped by the legislator is 'the living man': ‘Other nations have created gods, kings, spirits: only the Greeks have shaped men' (cf. this phrase which we will not try to translate: 'Ausbildung. Durchbildung, Vor­bildung, Fortbildung, nicht Bildung,' Jaeger, Humanistische Reden und Vortragei.

Thus it is through humanism and not cul­ture that Bildung, which considers humans as works of art, inheiits the very action of paideia.

Barbara Cassin

(«wrwottfl

116 BILDUNG

(conflowed)

8 I B L I O G R A P H Y

Arendt Hannah.TheC^is in Culture* In Between Pan and Future. New York: Viking Pm v »9ii; rev.ed., 19W. 197-22«.

Amtolle. PoUks. In 8ask rtto/ki of Anstotle. edited byfl M<Keon arvd translated by 6. Jowett- Mew York:Vintage. 200V

C«un, Barbara. LWel iophrttique.Parrs: Galtmard / La Pteiade, 1995.

--------. Arntott et to logos. Contes d e bphinomfnoktgie ordinaire. Paris:Presses Universitaires de France, >997, (haps 2 and j.

Jaeger, Werner. H umumtrxht fatten urui Vortrogt. Beilin: Oe Griryter, 196a.

-------- . Ptndtto. Die form ing d tr GnecftucftenAfrnx/ien.Vol. 1. Berlin: De Gniyter. 1934. Translation by <3. Highet Pwdeia: The Ideals o f Greek Culture. New Yoik: Oxford University Press, >945-.

Plata lows. In The Collected Dialogue* 0 /Plato, edited by E. Hamilton and H. Cairns,

translatedbyA.£.Taytof-Pnn<eton,NJ: •Bollin^en, 1961.

— .Wwedo. Translated by M Dusaut Pans: |Flammanon, 1991. :

— .Mxie(fo.Tran$latedbyL.RotHn.Pan$:Les IBelles lettres, 1926. j

— .RtpubkcAnTheCoDectedDKtloguefof |Plato, edited by i . Hamilton and H. Cairns, {translated byP. Shorey. Princeton, NJ: Bollmgen, j 1961. {

WaterheW, Robin, ed. The First Philosophers: The •Presoeratiesand Sophists. Oxford: Oxford :University Press, 2009. •

during the intellectual history o f Greece. W ilhelm von Hum­boldt had told him that in his opinion there was, alongside the particular forms o f intellectual learning, another that federated humans’ various modes of expression and gave them their unity.

This education (Ausbi/dung) is increasingly losing its importance and achieved its highest degree among the Creeks. It can be better promoted, it seems to me, only by studying great and remarkable men from this point o f view, or to put it in a word, by studying the Creeks.

Letter from Humboldt to Wolf, 1 December 1792

In his Darsre/Jung der Altertumswissenschaft (1807), Wolf pointed out a radical difference between the ancient peoples of the Orient on the one hand, and the Greeks and Romans on the other:

One of the most important differences is . . . that the former scarcely rose, or only by a few degrees, above the kind o f culture (Bi/dung) that is called politeness (Po/icirung) o r civilization (Civi'teari'on), in contrast to superior intellectual culture (Gfisteskuftur) properly so called.

The germ o fa dichotomy between Ku/tur and Zivilisation is already present here. By an obvious paradox, in W olf’s work the term Ku/rur often designates the education of the mind, whereas Bi7dung designates the social condition attained. The conceptual divisions do not exactly coincide w ith the semantic divisions.

To create a new German culture, to gather together what had been dispersed, to restore a unity comparable to that o f the model of paideia, Germans had to study Greek, fit/dung be* came a kind o f substitute for a centralized state a t the same time as a humanistic improvement o f the individual. This simultaneously educational and political function of Bi/dung was in fact o f a very different nature depending on whether the Greek paradigm was invoked to construct a German cul­ture around 1800 or to magnify the German Empire and its subjects' conformism during the W ilhelm ine period.

It is chiefly Humboldt who can be considered the theoreti* cian o f Bildung as a transfer o f the Greek paradigm to Ger­many. Moreover, we find in Humboldt a competing use o f the term s Bildung, Ausbi/dung, and Ku/rur that challenges the frequently alleged opposition between BiVdung as intellectual

education and Ausbi/dung as practical training. We can show, Humboldt writes in Uber das Studium des A/rmums (On the Study o f Antiquity), that the attention given to physical and in­tellectual culture (Bt/dung) was very great in Greece and was guided principally by ideas o f beauty, and that "a strong ten­dency among the Greeks to educate [<mzubi/<ten] man both in his greatest diversity and in his greatest possible unity is undeniable.” The parallel between the fragmentation of Greece and the fragmentation o f Germany being obvious in Humboldt’s w riting . Bi/dung appears as a form of constructive tension between identity and plurality. The Bi/dung o f Ger­man Hellenist philologists from Wolf to Wilamowitz by way of Philipp August Boeckh, Gottfried Hermann, Otfried Muller, Hermann Usener, and others is also a way the individual par­ticipates in the collective.

D .The individual and the collective

The term Bi/dungsro/nan, generally translated as “ novel of education," was introduced into c rit ica l term inology by W ilhelm Dilthey, who makes use of it in h is Leben Schleier- machcrs (Life o f Schleiermacher, 1870) to characterize the novels o f German classicism . A novel about a young m an’s coming to awareness of h im se lf and at the same time finding his place in the social world , the Bi/dungsroman, which is often also called the Entwick/ungsroman, “ novel of developm ent," or Erziehungsroman, “ novel o f character development,” combines Rousseauist roots (the German reception o f Emife, ou de ¡’education, 1762) w ith Pietist roots (Karl-Ph ilipp M oritz's Anron Reiser, 1785). Th is twofold background corresponds to the structura l am biguity o f the notion of Bi/dung as both the education of the social ind ividual andan in terna l education independent of any context. A subset o f the Bi/dungsromon genre is the Kunstlerroman (novel about an a rt is t), in w hich the hero's discovery o f the world o f art enables him to succeed in his exploration o f both an inner space and a social life.

The main example o f the Bh’dungsrcvnan is provided by Goethe’s Wi/JiWm Miisrer, and more particu larly by the first volume, VVi/hWm Meisters Lehrjahre {Wilhelm Meister's Appren­ticeship, 1795-96). For Goethe and his hero, the notion of Bt/dung implies a shaping of singular existence by the ac­ceptance of outside influences, fam ily relationships, art and especially the theater, P ietistic religious trends, and ce r­tain social m ilieus, especially the nobility. The hero him self explains what he means by Bildung: “ Let me te ll you: ever

BILDUNG 117

sine« I was a boy, m y wish and intention has been to educate m yself completely as I am.” According to Goethe, German bourgeoisie were able to acquire practical training, to de­velop some o f their abilities w ith a view to being socially useful, and even to acquire a general intellectual education. However, he considers this education in ferior to the one he thinks was previously reserved for the nobility, an educa­tion o f the person taken as a whole, w ithout any amputa* tion. The influence of a complete, unamputated personality can be obtained through a new form o f aristocracy whose acquisition depends notably on artistic education, it is easy to show that the various phases of the acquisition o f Bi/dung in IVilhWm Meister correspond to the phases through which German culture passed in the eighteenth century, thus mak­ing the individual development o f W ilhelm ’s personality an allegory o f the education o f the German people itself. Another notable characteristic o f Goethe's conception of Bi/dung has to do with the role accorded to action. Whereas the complete education o f the personality, analogous to the education o f the people as a whole, transcends the acquisi* tion o f separate abilities, it must, when it is once acquired, reconnect with practical activity. lVitfii/m M m rm Wander- jahre {Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years, 1821,1829), a sequel to the first novel, justifies this return to the practical, as i f the notion of Bi/dung, in the simple context o f Goethe’s work, were already evolving and included w ithin itse lf the neces* sity o f a theoretical reform ulation. “ In any case, society now forces us to have a general education; therefore we do not need to w orry about it anymore, it is the particular that we have to appropriate." Let us note that in his poem Hermann und Dorothea Goethe uses the term Bildung in an archaic sense of harmonious physical constitution, at the same time that in WilhWm Meister he is developing the theory o f BiMung as intellectual education.

IV. R es ist in g O rg a n ic ism

A. 8ildungsbtirgertumThe French occupation o f Germany during the Revolutionary Wars and especially during the Napoleonic Wars was a sort of incubation period during which the concept o f Bi/dung acquired its central place in Germany’s philosophical self- image. Th is French period of German history is characterized by a radical reduction of spatial fragmentation and the emer­gence o f the idea o f a German state that would be the heir to the Enlightenment, that is, of a pedagogical state. Whereas in old Germany intellectual education was one of the duties o f certain social groups, v irtua lly the prerogative o f corporate organizations after 1800, and more precisely after the foun­dation o f the Humboldt University in Berlin (1810), it became the distinctive insignia o f servants o f the state, of a state that was in itia lly v irtual or partial but after 1871 included most of the Germanic world. Bi/dung, a reference point that was clearly less important in Alemannic Switzerland and Austria than in Germany proper, was the condition of membership in the universality o f the state, ju st like property. Real property or m ilitary office that was not accompanied by cultural capi­tal, that was not legitimized by Bildung, even became suspect. Educating a new kind o f citizen or subject, theBildungsbur^r (roughly, middle-class intellectual) tended to deprive Bi'/dung

o f its subjective, individual, reflexive dimension and make it a form o f property or symbolic capital. In the second half o f the nineteenth century the idea o f technical, professional* ized, socially pertinent training was established, and led to a previously almost imperceptible opposition between general education, culture, Bildung and specialized training, even technical training. dusbi/dung, fiachausbi/duncj. The German state, drawing its legitimacy from its pedagogical functions— a new type of legitimacy that obviously inspired the French Th ird Republic, traumatized by the defeat at Sedan—sought to make ever*broader groups participate in the integrative system o f Bi/dung. Social Democratic movements f it perfectly into this dynamics, which led to the notion o f Vo/ksbtVdung (popular education) and the multiplication o f VolJcsbi/dungs- vereine (popular education associations).

By becoming institutionalized and transform ing itse lf into social glue, Bildung lost its individualistic dimension and es­poused social strategies. It no longer provided the unity o f a culture. In the second o f his l/nzeirgfmti&f Brtrachtiingfn (Untimely Meditations), Nietzsche deplores the fact that his* toricism has substituted Gebildetheit (erudite culture), the prerogative of the philistine (BiMungsphi/isr^r, a term that appears around 1860), for Bi/dung. According to Nietzsche, Germans, in the grip o f historical studies, were losing their human dimension and becoming “creations o f historical cul­ture, wholly structure, image, form without demonstrable content and, unhappily, ill-designed form and, what is more, uniform." In fact, for Nietzsche there is no longer any true Bifdung but only a historical knowledge o f its components. People lim it themselves to ideas o f Bi/dung {Bildungsgedanken) or to the feeling of Bi/dung (Bildungsgefiihl) in order to avoid making a decision about Bildung (Bi/dungsirttsch/uss). Far from recognizing culture in contemporary' Germany, Nietzsche was persuaded that the Greeks (whom, like Humboldt, he regarded as the criterion in this area) would call Germans "walking encyclopedias." To designate authentic Bildung, the Bildung that has disappeared, and in particular that o f Greece, Nietzsche liked to use the term Kulfur, emphasizing a liv ing unity, the "unity o f artistic style in a ll the expressions o f the life o f a people."

B. Culture and organicism

Starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, the term "cu lture” ceased to designate a future and expressed instead an entity, a state o f national communities. Jakob Burckhardt understood Kulfur as referring to "the totality o f the intel* lectual developments that take place spontaneously and w ithout aspiring to universality or monopoly” (DieCulturder Renaissance in ítalien). Processuality is not completely lack* ing, but it is a process that takes place w ithin the unity o f an organism. In relation to the simply totalizing tendencies o f holism , organicism implies a quasi-biological functionality. Culture is thus “the process o f m illions of persons through whom the naive action determined by their race is trans­formed into a conscious aptitude." Cultures are born, flour­ish, and die, and this organic life o f cultures is governed by “ superior, inaccessible laws of life." For Burckhardt, culture represents the critica l authority o f c iv il society as opposed to the state and religion, it includes the fine arts, to be sure, but also livestock-raising, agriculture, maritime shipping.

118 BILDUNG

commerce, and crafts; all these elements enter into various combinations in the notion of culture. The diversity o f the internal programming of culture allows us to distinguish major h istorical periods and to speak o f cultures in the plural. The sense of the term in Burckhardt is very close to that used by ethnologists. W hile Burckhardt thinks that “ the m iracle of language” is at the origin o f culture as a federating bond, we must remember that language is also what Franz Boas—who was trained in Germany before leaving for the United States—made central to ethnological investigations and methods.

In Oswald Spengler's Decline o f the West (Der Untergamj des Abendlandes, 1923), the concept o f culture becomes an operative concept for the h istorian. To understand West* ern culture, he wrote, “we must first know what culture is. how it is related to visible history, to life , to the mind, to nature, to the sp irit, in what forms it manifests itse lf and to what extent these forms—peoples, languages, and periods, battles and ideas, the arts and works o f a rt, the sciences, the law, great men and great events—are symbols and can be interpreted as such." Culture corresponds to a network o f symbolic form s, to the ir concentration around a people and even a race—a term that in Spengler's term inology is not too far from that of "culture.” Peoples are sp iritual en­tities Einhiififn) based on symbols, but Spenglerdraws a distinction between prim itive peoples, such as the sea people during the Mycenaean period, who do not have a strong coherence, and peoples of culture (Ku/furvd/Jo’r), who are much more precisely determined. After the moment of culture, peoples sank into the era o f fellahs, the condition o f Egypt during the Roman period. Moreover, to prim itive cultures Spengler opposes great cultures in a hierarchy o f values that is also applied to languages. Whereas Bi/dunjj is considered only in the singular, cultures are plural and hierarchized.

The symbolism that guarantees a culture's organic un ity may be religious in nature. W ithin a cu ltura l com* m unity (Kulturgemeinschaft) like Judaism , culture's func* tion is to regulate morals (sttth’ch? Kultur). In his RWitjion der Vernunft (Religion o f Reason), Hermann Cohen further notes that cu lture , the glue that holds a people together, is based on an unwritten religious law regarding “ this eternal, th is unwritten that precedes, must precede, all w riting and so to speak a ll cu lture , because it creates the foundation for a ll culture.” In his PJriiosop/nf der $ym- boiischen Former! (Pfii/osopfiy o f Symbolic Forms), Ernst Cas­sire r speaks of the "cu ltu ra l myths (Ku/turmythfn) that d iffer from natural myths in that the ir function is not to explain the orig in o f the world and to legitimate a cos­mology, but to explain the genesis o f ‘cu ltura l goods’ (Ku/rurtjutir).” Through the interm ediary o f m yths, notably salvation m yths, “cu lture becomes conscious o f itself.”

C. Culture or civilization

Did Freud write on “ Civilization and Its Discontents" or on “Culture and Its Discontents” (Unbehagen in der Ku/fur)? The question that divides translators reveals a semantic dichot­omy in which French privileged the term civi/isan'on before gradually importing the stakes involved in the German d i­chotomy. It is certain that for Freud, Ku/tur corresponded to

a constraint exercised on drives: 'T h is replacement o f the power o f the individual by the power of a community con­stitutes the decisive step o f civilization (der entscheidende kul- turelle Schrirr].. . . The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization [Ku/rurgut].” Cosmopolitan, universalist, marked by the sp irit o f the Enlightenment, democratic in its essence. Zivi/isatio/i includes on the other hand a threat o f decomposi­tion for the national entities that it transcends or federates. The notion o f Kuifurfcmtjc/ (culture war), which designated the politics of the Prussian Protestant Bismarck with regard to Catholic groups, well expresses the menace that weighs on culture and obliges us to defend it. Th is defense does not shrink from using radical means, and in the belligerent lan­guage used during the First World War, Thomas Mann himself did not hesitate to champion a defense o f the idea of culture, including the brutal forms its affirmation might take. In any case Germany, better rooted in nature, was supposed to be resistant to civilization conceived as prim arily intellectual. In its exacerbated form, the opposition between culture and civilization reflects the ancient German mistrust with regard to a universality inherited from the Enlightenment that was supposed to conceal a French desire for hegemony. We can understand why the French political vocabulary at the be­ginning of the twentieth century appealed to the notion of civilization in reaction to the German instrumentalization of the dichotomy. This semantic opposition, which arose from Franco-German distrust, became a structuring factor in eth­nological studies that could be scientific only by studying con­crete societies rooted in their particularity, and thus cultures, but without seeking to see to what extent these cultures drew on the universal reservoir o f possible human behaviors, and thus on a human civilization. When Freud uses the term Kul- tur. he does not do so to appeal to its radically organicist and nationalist dimension, but rather to challenge the pertinence of the opposition itself.

Norbert Elias seeks to outline the sociogenesis of this opposition. W hile he does not hesitate to use the term “civiliza tion ," he does so on the one hand to account for an investigation that is in ternational o r a t least extends to the whole of the West—he even discusses a national feeling on the part o f the West. On the o ther hand, c iv iliza tion , which he connects w ith the “c iv ilit ie s ” o f court society, includes forms of concrete life that the h istory o f m entalities has taken as its favorite object of study:

The French and English concept o f civilization can refer to political or economic, religious o r technical, moral or social facts. The German concept o f Ku/tur refers essen­tia lly to intellectual, artistic , and religious facts, and has a tendency to draw a sharp dividing line between facts o f this sort, on the one side, and political, economic, and social facts, on the other. The French and English con­cept o f civilization can refer to accomplishments, but it refers equally to the attitudes or “ behavior” o f people, irrespective o f whether or not they have accomplished anything. In the German concept o f Kuifur, by contrast, the reference to “ behavior,” to the value which a person has by virtue of his mere existence and conduct, w ith­out any accomplishment at a ll, is very minor.

Elias, Oberden Prozessder Zivi/isation

BILDUNG 119

These definitions show the sp ira ling overdeterminations to which these terms have been subjected. Taken over by the social sciences long ago, the term "cu lture" can have in German the sense that Elias gives to the term Zivi/isation. But the national closure o f culture in 1936 made the word unusable in German for a discourse that intends to be inter­national. The term ZiVifisatfon. against which Thomas Mann railed during the F irst World War, was invested with the most positive semantic core o f the term “culture," culture becoming in turn the refuge of Getsf, with which the soci* ologist was incapable of coping. Ku/rur and Zivi/isation are in fact semantic variables that can draw, depending on the intellectual context, on an interpretive tradition based on the postulate o fa Franco-German opposition.■ See Boxes 2 and j.

Michel Espagne

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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, >997-------- Werte. Vol. 1. Edited by K. Schlechta. Munich: Hanser, 1966.Schilling. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. Of Human Freedom. Translated by J. Gutmann.

Chicago: Open Court 1936.--------. On Univenity Studies. Translated by E. S. Morgan. Athens: Ohio University

Press, 1966.--------. ScheBngs Werke. Edited by 0. Weiss, Leipzig: Eckhardt 1907.Schlegel Friedrich. Ausgabe. Vol 5. Edrted by E. Sehler. Munich: Schóningtv 1962. Spengler. Otto. Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Munich: DTV, 1974.Troettsch, Emst. DerHistonsmvs und seme Probleme. Tübingen: Mohr. 1922). Transla­

tion: Hntoritismondits Problems. Tübingen. 1922.Weber, Max. The Sociology of fteiigion. Introduction by T. Parsons. 8o$ton: 8eacon

Pres* 1993-

2Kulturgeschichte

ln 1909, the historian Karl Lamprecht founded in Leipzig an Institut für Kultur und Universalgeschichte (Institute of Cul­tural and Universal History), its goal was to introduce into the field of historical studies, in opposition to the political mode of his­toriography that was then dominant, the economy, artistic productions, the history of printing, and all the other phenomena of life that might play a role in defining a historical period. While the notion of Kufturdesignates an effort to apprehend concrete life in all its aspects, an effort facilitated by the region­alist orientation of lamprecht's first works, the epithet "universal* immediately corrects

that limitation. Cultural history seeks to be universal, and Lamprecht's institute was characterized by a concern to see to it that the cultural histories of the diverse nations were taught, and in their own language. It was the whole method of historical studies that was overthrown by cultural history's self-definition, unleashing in the last years of the nineteenth century the methodologi­cal quarrel Wtthodenstr&t), but also echoing a tradition discernible among the historians in Gottingen at the end of the eighteenth century. Even though the direct connection is controversial cultural history precedes and in a way anticipates the kind of investigations

carried out by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre under the name of the history of mentalities.

The theoretical basis for Lamprecht's attempt to write a cultural history was located farther back in German psycholo­gy's tendency to broaden its domain of ap­plication from experimental psychology to the psychology of peoples. The term Volk- erpsychologie, wtiich is the logical if not lexical antecedent of Kvlturgeschichte (cul­tural history), does not designate the psy­chological characteristics that an empirical science is supposed to have attributed to

(conftoued)

120 BILDUNG

(conflowed)

different peoples. For Wilhelm Wundt, it was a matter of attempting a universal history of the psyche after observing that w hen experimental psychology ignores the social dim ension, it ends up in an impasse. This general history of the psyche brings in social practices, the economy, and art. A particularly important elem ent of col­lective psychology explored by Heymann Steinthal and Wilhelm Wundt, who thus

opened the way to the concept of cultural history, was provided by language. Al­though Wundt's psychology, like Lampre- cht's historiography, rejects Hegelianism, one cannot fail to see a continuity between cultural history and the efforts made by Hegel's disciples and readers to realize the concrete elem ents of an encyclopedic system that was only sketched out. The his­tory of art played an especially important role in this deconstruction-realization of Hegelianism.

it cannot be denied that in some respects the universalist dimension of Kulturgeschtchte could serve as a justification for the Wil- helmine Empire's imperialist tendencies, the reference to Kultur not being capable, in the context of 1900, of eliminating all ambiguity. It was only through a series of predictable linguistic shifts that the term "cultural history" came more recently to designate the history of intellectual life in these diverse forms, re­ducing the initial Kulturgextokhte to only one of its dimensions.

3"Humanities" (or "The Unnatural Sciences")

The Anglo-American term 'the humanities'* overlaps with the French sciences humaines and the German 6 *isteswissens<baft but only to a small and questionable degree. Most of the sM ix e s humaines would be called social sciences in English, and Ceisteswissenschaft is usually translated, all too narrowly, as In te l­lectual history.'' History itself, understood in its broadest sense, is taken in some (although far from all) American divisions of the terri­tory to be a social science.

‘'Humanities'’ is a term much used now in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Latin America, but until recently the applica­ble word, in the United Kingdom especially, was 'arts,' as opposed simply to "sciences.* This old usage is still visible in the names of faculties in the United States called Arts and Sciences. Confusingly, 'the Arts' now refers more and more to the practice of the arts, and "humanities" refers to the informed study of such arts {literature, theater, cinema, paint­ing, sculpture, dance, photography, etc.), along with philosophy and languages, native and foreign.

Nietzsche did not have all of these matters in mind when he wrote of the "unnatural sci­ences* but his notion of the unnatural in this context evokes almost everything that now seems difficult, bewildering, and necessary about the humanities:

The great certainty of the natural sci­ences in comparison with psychology and the critique of the elements of consciousness— with the unnatural sciences, one might almost say— rests precisely on the fact that they take the strange as their object, while it is nearly contradictory and absurd even to want

to take the not strange as one's object (The 6 ay Science).

"Psychology and the critique of the ele­ments of consciousness'* have turned spe­cifically into (some) psychology, (some) philosophy, and several zones of literary the­ory and anthropology— and more broadly into the humanities themselves. Again. Nietzsche says, "What is known is what is hardest to know" which we might translate as "The humanities as forms of organized knowledge seek to make intelligible what seems mysterious because it is familiar* Stu­dents of literature, for example, manage to make interesting sense of a whole series of magnificent but not-at-all strange objects, from the predictable rage of Achilles to the inevitable fall of Milton's Adam and Eve, and from Candide's unsurprising adventures to Molly Bloom's repetitive infidelities.

In his book The Humanities and the Dream of America. Geoffrey Harpham recognizes that the term "humanities* *did not appear for the first time in the United States," and astutely tracks its European history, and its shifting meaning within the United States. In the 1960s the humanities in America were part of what Professor Harpham calls "the m ilieu'in the i 990sth ey bore the blame for every instance of disaffection, relatrvism, and "weakening of our vision and resolve."

Harpham lists some of the "many . . . no­tions associated with the humanities," and the list is impressive:

[they] inculcate, often through atten­tion to works of art, a sense of other minds and cultures; require and reward attention to formal and textural fea­tures as well as to literal or manifest

m eaning; invite individual interpre­tation and inference; cultivate the faculty of judgm ent; awaken a sense of values; engage the em otions as well as the intellect; enlarge our im agina­tive capacities; challenge, deepen, and enrich our understanding of the world; provide fertile ground for the growth of self-knowledge; and under the right cir­cum stances. open the way to tolerance, restraint, humility, and even wisdom.

This is a lot; but there is also a certain modesty lurking everywhere in the list, ex­cept perhaps in its last clause.The hum ani­ties will not make bad persons good, they may even help them to justify the way they live; and they will not support one political program rather than another. This is why Harpham's last clause, even w ith its careful "under the right circumstances" and *open the way," goes too far. People have been known to become tolerant and w ise while pursuing humanistic studies, and it may seem as if their studies have made them tolerant and wise. But as long as those same studies are pursued by torturers and camp commandants, without any noticeable ef­fects on their careers, it is fitting to claim less rather than more for the disciplines of the humanities. Indeed, properly under­stood. less is more, it would, in an extreme but not perverse sense, be part of hum an­istic understanding to allow even torturers and cam p commandants to make what they will of their education. Whether they should be allowed to have the jobs they have is an­other question.

Harpham carefully considers useless knowledge, knowledge that is "useless in

BOGO^ELOVEiESTVO 121

{ the best sense.'H e also w rites o f 'th e use-| fulness of useless know ledge* There are{ two crucial ideas lurking in these phrases.| One is that m uch useful knowledge, espe-{ d a lly in physics and m edicine, started outj as useless knowledge, that is, as disinter-I ested inquiry, inquiry for inquiry's sake. If| no one risks pursuing know ledge for no{ reason, there w ill finally be no knowledgej that m atters. This is a powerful claim , andj a fine argum ent against eager pragma-j tists. The other claim is more elusive butj also more hum anistic. It is that disinter-j ested inquiry is a value in its own right,

even if it is never cashed in materially, it is one part of being hum an, and in this sense string theory is as hum anistic as Aristotle, more so in a way because less practical, it is easy to see that these two claim s go together: the first denies ulti­mate or inevitable uselessness, the sec­ond helps scholars to keep going in the dark, and redeem s uselessness if it needs redeem ing. The first claim on its own is a little too pragm atic, and could be accused of selling inquiry short, even in the lon­gest run; the second claim may be a little too pure, and certainly, in hard political

tim es, needs all the reinforcem ent it can get from the first.

Mkhael Wood

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Ootfakis {Winter 2009) ('Reflecting on the Kumanihes'')-

Harpham, Geoffrey. The Humanities and the Drtom o! America. Chxago: Univeruty of Chicago Press, aou

Nietzsche. Fnedrich. TTwGoySf/ence.Traniljtton by Josefine Nawckhcft Cambridge- Cambridge Unrversity Pré«, aoov

B O G O C ELO V EC ESTV O [SoroMenoseMecTBoJ

FRENCH divino-hvrnamti, thtanlhroptc, dtihumanitt, thtandric

GREEK to thcandnkos (ro 0£av5giKO<;|LATIN Deui-Homo

> GOD. HUMANITY, sod AlON. GOOD/EVIL HISTOWA UNtVEftSALK. MENSCHHEIT.MOMENT. NAftOD. RUSSIAN. SOBORNOST: SVET

B ogoidoveiestvo (6oro«te^o8e«<ecT8o] (divino-humanity), a Russian term that refers to the Greek patristic concept to theandrikos (t o 0eav5eiKoc;], has a central place in nineteenth- and twentieth- century Russian philosophy. It designates two m ovem ents directed toward each other: that of the divine m oving toward m an and that of hum anity rising toward the divine. It presents both Christ in the hypostatic union of his two natures, divine and hum an, and the hum anity of m en taken in the sense of the accom plishm ent of their true divine-hum an relation. In both cases it involves an ontological encounter.

The term bogoieloveiestvo is marked by the influence o f diverse philosophical traditions, mystical par excellence, and Western as well as Eastern. Two aspects are essential for understand­ing it. An initial interpretation allows us to see in it a “the- anthropy" that takes into account a whole previous patristic heritage and appeals solely to debates about the nature of Christ, the Incarnation, and the meaning of salvation and orig­inal sin. A second interpretation is authentically Slavophile and Russocentric and refers to questions concerning the des­tiny of humanity, the Russian people, Slavic unity. Orthodoxy, and the universal church ts?rJa>v' (bce/ieHckaanepkoBb]).

I. T h e H is to ry o f th e W ord

In the form oboiirbja [o6o>KHTHca] (become God), which refers to rhidsis [Oeu>o«J (d ivin ization), the idea of the on­tological encounter of the human with the divine is a l­ready present in 1076 in the /zbomik (“Compilation") (RT: Materialy dlia slovaria drevnerusskogo iazyka, 2:532). Greek authors (such as John Climacus, Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory o f Sinai, and Gregory Palamas) who stressed the idea o f the divinization o f man were subsequently translated into

Slavic languages. There is an uninterrupted tradition, both lite rary and practical, that leads from the Greek Hesychasts (Gregory Palamas, Gregory o f Sinai, Nicholas Cabasilas, Nicephorus) to the Russian Hesychasts (N il Sorksy, fifteenth century) and ultim ately to the startsy [cTapubi] (erem itic fa­thers) o f Optina Pustyn’, a monastery in Central Russia that V ladim ir Solovyov and Dostoyevsky visited during the sum­mer of 1878, the year in which Solovyov wrote his Lectures on Codmanhcod (BessedyoBogofelovefestve).

In the Lectures we encounter for the first time the term bcgoieloveiestvo [6oroMenoseMecTBo] w ith a philosophical meaning, in the context of universal history. In turn, Sergei Bulgakov considerably enriched this notion by attributing to it s trictly theological—and particularly Christological and T rin ita rian —meanings in his work on divine wisdom and theanthropy (1933-36). The notion was developed in the direction of religious existentialism and Russophile univer- salism by N. Berdyayev in his Spirit and Reality (1932), The Russian Idea (1946), and The Divine and the Human (1949). It was later given various inflections—cosmic and salvational in the work o f G. Fedorov, personalist in L. Chestov and S. Frank, and “ mathematicizing" in P. Florensky.

Bcgocdovetestvo is the strange product o f disparate in tel­lectual influences in the form o f a synthesis o f the Jew ish Kabbalah, the anthropology o f the Greek church fathers, the m ysticism ofjakob Bohmeand Meister Eckhart, and fina lly o f Spinoza and theGerman philosophy o f identity, in particular in Schelling’s system. The latter’s influence on the work o fV. Solovyov is remarkable. Thus vs££dmstvo [BceeAHHCTBo] (un i-totality), a central notion in Russian universalist phi­losophy, is nothing other than a Russian version o f the German A/teinhdn sim ilarly, Solovyov's vseobscee znanie [Bceo6tuee 3Hamie] echoes Schelling’s Anschauumj. For his part Berdyayev wrote two im portant studies on Jakob Bohme and his influence on Russian thought (Berdyayev, Mysterium Magnum, 1:5-28, 29-45). The influences o f Ger­man philosophy were exercised on this notion in parallel (Stepoun, 1923) w ith purely Russophile intentions, creating a conception o f the world based on the ecclesiastical con­sciousness o f Russian Orthodoxy (A. Khomiakov, I .K iryevsk i, I . Sam arin, C. Aksakov).