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Home , Friedrich Nietzsche

FRANZ-MICHAEL KONRAD

7. WILHELM VON HUMBOLDTHUMBOLDT’S’S CONTRIBUTION TO A THEORY OF BILDUNGBILDUNGBILDUNG

INTRODUCTION: NIETZSCHE’S CRITICISM OF BILDUNG

In the first months of the year 1872, (1844-1900), who had been teaching as a professor of classical at the University of , held five lectures at the invitation of an academic in Basel. After Nietzsche’s death (1900), these lectures were published under the title, die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten (On the Future of Our Educational Institutions). In these lectures, Nietzsche strongly criticised the state of the German schools, in particular, of the Gymnasium (secondary school). The schools, according to Nietzsche, were no longer places of true Bildung, but “institutions of existential hardship” (Nietzsche, 1988, p. 717). The of Bildung, which, above all, the Gymnasien, had long upheld, had, in Nietzsche’s opinion, been completely ruined. Nietzsche named three aspects of this deterioration: Firstly, the economisation and utilitarisation of Bildung. Bildung was seen only as an economic factor. And this held true for society as a whole, which regarded Bildung as a productive factor, as well as for the , who hoped to turn Bildung into money as quickly as possible. Secondly, Nietzsche referred to massification. In the meantime, everyone was striving for Bildung. The driving force behind this development – and this is the third aspect which Nietzsche cited – was the state, which hoped to use Bildung as a means of binding its citizens to it. Economisation, massification and nationalisation – those were the three central points of criticism with regard to the state of Bildung which Nietzsche described. Nietzsche was by no means alone in his criticism of the society and its culture. authors voiced similar views. The decades between 1870 and 1900 were an epoch in which a rapid and dramatic modernisation of the economy and society took place. New social values became more and more attractive; old values declined. It was inevitable that there was considerable consternation among many contemporaries because of the dynamics of this change and uncertainty about which direction such change would take. A colleague of Nietzsche’s at the , (1818- 1897), spoke in lectures and speeches between 1868 and 1871 of a “historical crisis” which had taken hold of the . As was the case with Nietzsche, Burckhardt’s lectures were published several years after his death in 1905 under the title, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (World-Historical Views). Although, at the , many voices expressed criticism of the prevailing culture, Nietzsche’s comments were, however, of greater significance because, due to their extreme harshness, they were still remembered long after. After his death, Nietzsche very quickly became a widely-read author, and continued to

Siljander, P., Kivelä, A. & Sutinen, A. (Eds.), Theories of Bildung and Growth, 107–124. © 2012 Sense Publishers. All reserved. KONRAD exert an enormous influence on powerful social movements such as the youth movement and the educational reform movement. What, then, was the normative background against which Nietzsche was able to criticise the decline of the classical idea of Bildung in his time? Although he was actually fighting for “the German ”, Nietzsche preferred to make reference to the ancient Greeks as well as to the great heroes of German intellectual , Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and (1759-1805). In these instances, that is in the case of the ancient Greeks as well as Goethe and Schiller, the idea of Bildung evolved in a classically pure form. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) is not mentioned by Nietzsche, which is not surprising, because most of the works of Humboldt were either published during Nietzsche’s long mental infirmity or after his death. Nietzsche was thus able to know only a relatively small part of Humboldt’s works. There is evidence, however, in Nietzsche’s work that Humboldt was by no means completely unknown to him. What Nietzsche of Humboldt be discussed briefly at the end of this paper. Humboldt lived in and in the years immediately prior to 1800 and had close contact with Goethe and Schiller (on Humboldt’s biography, see Sweet, 1978/80). Humboldt’s correspondence with Schiller is considered to be a collection of some of the most important intellectual documents in the German language from the nineteenth century, and it bears witness to the intensive intellectual exchange between Schiller and Humboldt. Goethe sought Humboldt’s advice on many occasions, when the questions concerned Greek mythology or the linguistic subtleties of the . Humboldt was far more knowledgeable on the ancient Greeks than was his friend, Goethe. One might also say that Nietzsche related his criticism of Bildung – with respect to normativity – to the circle around Goethe and Schiller – and, as a member of this circle, Humboldt was an important provider of and recipient of impulses, who then, in the twentieth century, became the most important representative of the modern humanistic idea of Bildung. Even today, it is hardly possible to conduct a discussion on Bildung without, sooner or later, mentioning the name Humboldt.

COMMENTS ON THE TERM BILDUNG

The word, Bildung, appears in the works of Humboldt again and again. This was no coincidence, since Bildung had long been a term in the German language (see Vierhaus, 1972). Already in the language of the Middle Ages the word, bildunga, appeared. This referred to a kind of intellectual self-formation of the individual in ’s own likeness as was propagated and practiced in Gothic . Most recently Bildung plays an important role in the writings of (1744-1803), (1724- 1804), and Schiller. Goethe, too, used the term – for instance, in his novel Wilhelm Meister, which deals with the spiritual maturation of a bourgeois individual. In addition, there are those in circles abroad who also contributed catchwords, as for example Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) in his novel Emile (1762) or the Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), an English writer and

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