Abstract
Thomas Mann defined Bildung in the following way:
The inwardness, the culture (Bildung) of a German implies introspectiveness; an individualistic cultural conscience; consideration for the careful tending, the shaping, deepening and perfecting of one’s own personality or, in religious terms, for the salvation and justification of one’s own life; subjectivism in the things of the mind, therefore, a type of culture that might be called pietistic, given to autobiographical confession and deeply personal, one in which the world of the objective, the political world, is felt to be profane and is thrust aside with indifference.1
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Notes
W.H. Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation (Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. vii. Perhaps the source of the term ‘culture’ moving from horticulture to the human mind is Cicero who, in the Tusculan Disputations, talks of cultura animi as the cultivation of the mind, in stating that cultura autem animi philosophia est (philosophy is the culture of the mind) Academic Questions and Tusculan Disputations, trans. C.D. Yonge (London, George Bell and Sons, 1880)), II.5 (and see also III.3, III. 13, IV. 58, and V.2). Petrarch spoke of cultus anima in De remediis (II.17); Francis Bacon spoke of the culture or cultivation of the mind in The Advancement of Learning (book 2, XX.3). Montaigne spoke of culture de l’ame, cultivation of the mind or soul, in On Presumption (2.17); Montaigne’s meaning is Ciceronian, similar to the meaning of humanitas: ‘ethical-urbane refinement, in contrast to raw power’ (H. Friedrich, Montaigne (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1991)), pp. 377–8.
‘Theory of Bildung’, fragment 1793–4, in I. Westbury, S. Hopman and K. Riquarts, Teaching as Reflective Practice (New Jersey, Lawrence Eribaum, 2000), p. 58.
For a discussion of the etymology and various meanings of Bildung, see S.E. Nordenko, ‘Bildung and the thinking of Bildung’, Educating Humanity, Lovlie, Mortensen and Nordenko (eds.) (Oxford, Blackwell, 2003), pp. 25–35.
W. von Humboldt, Limits of State Action (Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 1993), p. 22.
Humboldt in M. Cowan, Humanist Without Portfolio (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1963), pp. 143–4.
Humboldt, Limits, p. 51. Rousseau had noted that ‘true happiness consists in decreasing the difference between our desires and our powers, in establishing a perfect equilibrium between the power and the will’ — J.J. Rousseau, Emile (London, Everyman, 1974: 44; 1993: 52). Ficino noted that ‘only he has all he desires who desires all he has’ (M. Ficino, Meditations on the Soul (Rochester, Inner Traditions, 1997), p. 27).
D. Sorkin, ‘Wilhelm von Humboldt: The Theory and Practice of Self-Formation (Bildung) 1791–1810’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 44, no. 1, (January–March 1983), p. 63.
A. Flexner, Universities (New York, Oxford University Press, 1930), p. 275.
R. Horlacher, ‘Bildung — a construction of a History of Philosophy of Education’, Studies in Philosophy and Education, vol. 23 (2004), p. 420.
See J.H. Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 313.
I. Kant, ‘Lectures on Pedagogy’, Anthropology, History, and Education, trans. R.B. Lowden (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 448.
J.G. Fichte, The Purpose of Higher Education (Maryland, Nightsun Books, 1988), p. 58.
Gadamer notes, from Schaarschmidt, the origin of the term Bildung in mediaeval mysticism, ‘its continuance in the mysticism of the baroque, its religious spiritualisation in Klopstock’s Messiah... And finally Herder’s basic definition as “reaching up to humanity”’ (H.G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (London, Sheed& Ward, 1979), p. 11).
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1967)
See Hegel’s, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. T.M. Knox and A.V. Miller (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 50.
H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Ladder, The Odyssey of Spirit (Indianapolis, Hackett Publishers, 1997), p. 258.
See G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), p. 417
Hanna Holborn Gray, Searching for Utopia, Universities and their Histories (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2012), p. 43.
F. Paulsen and E.D. Perry, The German Universities: Their Character and Historical Development (London, Macmillan and Co., 1895), p. 54.
W. Schmidt-Biggemann, ‘New Structures of Knowledge’, in W. Ruegg (ed.) A History of the University in Europe, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 517.
B. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers (New York & London, Teachers College Press, 1986), p. 165.
F. Rudolph, Curriculum (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 1977), p. 196.
Rudolph, Curriculum, p. 215. Oakley argues that ‘the old collegiate values not only survived into the late-twentieth century but recovered much of their vitality’; F. Oakley, Community of Learning (New York, Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 29.
A. O’Hear and M. Sidwell, The School of Freedom (Exeter, Imprint Academic, 2009), p. 174.
Conclusion to Part I
M. Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Basic Writings, ed. D. Krell (London, Routledge, 1993), p. 225.
There is no space to undertake a critique of Heidegger’s position here, but see Tubbs, Philosophy’s Higher Education (Dordrecht, Kluwer, 2004)
Tubbs, Philosophy of the Teacher (Oxford, Blackwell, 2005)
Tubbs, ‘Existentialism and Humanism: Humanity — Know Thyself’, Studies in Philosophy and Education, September, 2013, vol. 32, no. 5, pp. 477–90.
P.O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 31.
F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London, Penguin, 2001), p. 251.
J.P. Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism (London, Methuen, 2007), p. 38.
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham, Duke University Press, 2007), p. 134.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London, Continuum, 2001), p. xix.
Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom (London, Athlone Press, 1990), p. 170.
I. Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent’, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1983), p. 29.
R. Bernasconi, ‘Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Racism’, in J.K. Ward and T.L. Lott (eds.) Philosophers on Race (Oxford, Blackwell, 2002), p. 147.
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace & AV Miller (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 42.
Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, p. 43. To say that Kant and Hegel are merely expressing the common sense truths of their time is undermined somewhat for example by Herder who promotes women, rejects the concept of race, denounces slavery and colonialism and argues for ‘equal respect for all peoples’ (in M.N. Forster, Herder, Philosophical Writings (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. xxxiii.
Kant, ‘Determination of the Concept of a Human Race’, in Anthropology, History, and Education, G. Zoller and R.B. Louden (eds.) (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 153.
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 41.
I argue that we think dualisms as relations all the time. It is the idea that thinking is not a relation which is in fact the illusion. To describe metaphysics, for example, as Kimball does, as ‘a sort of Hegelian cloud’ (B. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers (New York & London, Teachers College Press, 1986), p. 37)
Hanna Holborn Gray, Searching for Utopia, Universities and their Histories (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2012), p. 17
F. Rudolph, Curriculum (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 1977), p. 279).
Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1936), p. 105.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. 8, trans. by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oats and Washbourne Ltd, 1920), Part II, 94.4, p. 47.
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© 2014 Nigel Tubbs
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Tubbs, N. (2014). Bildung and the New Age. In: Philosophy and Modern Liberal Arts Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137358929_5
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