Forming Humanity: Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition
Jennifer A. Herdt
Abstract
This book offers a theological re-narration and interrogation of the late 18th-/early 19th-century German Bildung tradition, arguing that it yields vital resources for contemporary debates over humanism. Uncovering the roots of this tradition in Rhineland mysticism, Pietism, and earlier Christian humanisms, it articulates how Bildung ceased to mean passive formation or reformation at the hands of divine formative agency, and came to refer instead to active and autonomous human self-realization. At the same time, it argues that standard secularization narratives fail to account for the ways in ... More
This book offers a theological re-narration and interrogation of the late 18th-/early 19th-century German Bildung tradition, arguing that it yields vital resources for contemporary debates over humanism. Uncovering the roots of this tradition in Rhineland mysticism, Pietism, and earlier Christian humanisms, it articulates how Bildung ceased to mean passive formation or reformation at the hands of divine formative agency, and came to refer instead to active and autonomous human self-realization. At the same time, it argues that standard secularization narratives fail to account for the ways in which Bildung was conceived as an individual and collective task of ethical and political formation. Thinkers such as Herder, Humboldt, Goethe, Schiller and Hegel creatively transformed inherited theological understandings of humankind as created in the image of God and called to play a special role in the reditus of creation to God. With Karl Barth as critical theological interlocutor, the book exposes the complicity of Bildung tradition in the evils of bourgeois indifference, racism, colonial empire, and fascism, while arguing that it demands not repudiation but critical reappropriation, in service of a form of dialogical humanism.
Keywords:
Bildung,
Karl Barth,
humanism,
secularization,
empire,
Johann Gottfried Herder,
Wilhelm von Humboldt,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Friedrich Schiller,
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226618487 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: January 2020 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226618517.001.0001 |
