Abstract
The idea that Bildung is central to Hegel’s account of the unending, historical development of individual human subjects and of humanity at large is widely recognized. However, there is no agreement about the exact meaning in which Hegel uses the term, nor about its systematic significance within his philosophy. This chapter outlines the basic connotations of Bildung, how Hegel conceptualizes it, and discusses the role this concept plays in his philosophy. It shows that in Hegel’s philosophical systematic, Bildung is conceptualized as a fundamental, social-historical project of the spirit’s self-cultivation, a path toward rational autonomy and actively attained freedom from natural immediacy of life, a path, which unfolds through contradiction, difference, dialectic of alienation, and intersubjective interactions within the social realm, and on the plain of cultural history. In this sense, Bildung, which is prominent throughout all of Hegel’s work – from the Phenomenology to Philosophy of Right and to the Lectures on the World History – provides important insights into his humanistic philosophy and is instrumental to understanding of his philosophical project.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Bibliography
Arndt, Andreas. 2010. “Kultur, Geist, Natur.” In Staat und Kultur bei Hegel, edited by Andreas Arndt and Jure Zovko, 93–104. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
Brandom, Robert. 2007. “The Structure of Desire and Recognition. Self-Consciousness and Self-Constitution.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 33: 127–150.
Braudel, Fernand. 1972. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. 2 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Braudel, Fernand. 1981. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. 3 vols. London: W. Collins Sons & Co.
Bruford, Walter H. 1975. The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: Bilding from Humboldt to Thomas Mann. London: Cambridge University Press.
Bykova, Marina F. 1990. “War Hegel ein schrecklicher Mensch? Überlegungen über die Persönlichkeit des jungen Hegel.” Wiener Jahrbuch für Philosophie 22: 135–153.
Bykova, Marina F. 2009. “Spirit and Concrete Subjectivity in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.” In The Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, edited by Kenneth R. Westphal, 265–295. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Bykova, Marina F. 2016. “Fichte’s Nationalist Rhetoric and the Humanistic Project of Bildung.” In Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation Reconsidered, edited by Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore, 133–152. Albany, NY: State University of New York.
Bykova, Marina F. 2019. “On Hegel’s Account of Selfhood and Human Sociality.” In Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit: A Critical Guide, edited by M. F. Bykova, 164–185. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coe, Cynthia D. 2014. “Narration, Bildung, and the Work of Mourning in Hegel’s Philosophy of History.” In The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism, edited by Matthew C. Altman, 626–647. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
De Laurentiis, Allegra. 2005. Subjects in the Ancient and Modern World: On Hegel’s Theory of Subjectivity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Delon, Michel, ed. 2013. Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. Oxon: Routledge (First published in 2002).
Ferguson, Adam. 1787. An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 5th ed. London: Cadell; Edinburgh: Creech & Bell (Critical edition by F. Oz-Salzberger, Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Forster, Michael N. 2012. “Bildung bei Herder und seinen Nachfolgern: Drei Begriffe.” In Bildung und Freiheit: ein vergessener Zusammenhang, edited by Klaus Vieweg, 75–89. Paderborn: Schöningh.
Furck, Carl-Ludwig, Georg Geiβler, Wolfgang Klafki, and Elisabeth Siegel, eds. 1965. Beiträge zur Geschichte des Bildungsbegriffs. Weinheim: Verlag Julius Beltz.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed. Edited and translated by J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marschall. London: Sheed & Ward.
Gjesdal, Kristin. 2015. “Bildung.” In The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the nineteenth Century, edited by Michael N. Forster and Kristin Gjesdal, 695–719. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harris, Henry S. 1997. Hegel’s Ladder, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Co.
Hodgson, Peter C. 2012. Shapes of Freedom: Hegel’s Philosophy of World History in Theological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Honneth. Axel. 1995. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Translated by J. Anderson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hösle, Vittorio. 1998. Hegels System. Der Idealismus der Subjektivität, 2 vols. 2nd ed. Hamburg: Meiner.
Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1903a [1792]. “Ideen zu einer Versuch die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen.” In Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, 97–254. Berlin: Reimar.
Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1903b [1793]. “Theorie der Bildung des Menschen.” In Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, 282–287. Berlin: Reimar.
Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1980. “Theorie der Bildung des Menschen.” In Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 1, edited by Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel; der 2. Auflage, 234–240. Stuttgart: J.G. Cottasche Buchhandlung.
Hyppolite, Jean. 1979. Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Ikäheimo, Heikki, and Arto Laitinen, eds. 2011. Recognition and Social Ontology. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Kaufmann, Walter, ed. 1977. Hegel: Texts and Commentary. Translated and edited by W. Kaufmann. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Kojève, Alexandre. 1980. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, edited by Allan Bloom. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Kojève, Alexandre. 2000. Outline of a Phenomenology of Right. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Levi, Albert W. 1984. “Hegel’s Phenomenology as a Philosophy of Culture.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 22 (4), 445–470.
Liebruck, Bruno. 1975. “Recht, Moralität und Sittlichkeit bei Hegel.” In Materialien zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie, vol. 2, edited by Manfred Riedel, 13–51. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.
Lukács, Georg. 1977. The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations Between Dialectics and Economics, translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977.
Markus, Gyorgy. 2011. Culture, Science, Society: The Cultural Constitution of Modernity. Leiden: Brill.
Marx, Karl. 1975. “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.” In Marx/Engels Collected Works, translated by Jack Cohen et al., vol. 3, 229–348.
Marx, Karl. 1981. “Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844.” In Werke, Ergänzungsband, 1. Teil, K. Marx u. F. Engels, S. 465–588. Berlin: Dietz Verlag [Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, Band 3. Berlin, 1932].
McDowell, John H., 2006. “The Apperceptive I and the Empirical Self: Towards a Heterodox Reading of ‘Lordship and Bondage’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology.” In Hegel: New Directions, edited by Katerina Deligiorgi, 33–48. Chesham: Acumen.
Merz, John Theodore. 1907–1912. A History of European Thought in the 19th Century, 3rd ed., 4 vols. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons.
Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, de. 1989. The Spirit of the Laws, translated by A. M. Cohler, B. C. Miller, and H. Stone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Munzel, G. Felicitas. 2003. “Kant, Hegel, and the Rise of Pedagogical Science.” In A Companion to the Philosophy of Education, edited by R. Curren, 113–139. Oxford: Blackwell.
Odenstedt, Anders. 2008. “Hegel and Gadamer on Bildung.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy XLVI: 559–580.
Pinkard, Terry. 2017. Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Pippin, Robert R. 2005. The Persistence of Subjectivity. On the Kantian Aftermath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pippin, Robert R. 2010. Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Royce, Josiah. 1919. Lectures on Modern Idealism. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Rudwick, Martin J. S. 2005. Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Seigel, Jerrold. 2005. The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Siep, Ludwig. 1979. Anerkennung als Prinzip der praktischen Philosophie: Untersuchungen zu Hegels Jenaer Philosophie des Geistes. Freiburg: Karl Alber Verlag.
Solomon, Robert C. 1983. In the Spirit of Hegel. New York: Oxford University Press.
Taylor, Michael C. 2000. Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. New York: Fordham University Press.
Uljens, Michael. 2002. “The Idea of a Universal Theory of Education—An Impossible but Necessary Project?” Journal of Philosophy of Education 36 (3), 353–375.
Westphal, Kenneth R. 2018. Grounds of Pragmatic Realism: Hegel’s Internal Critique and Reconstruction of Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Westphal, Kenneth R. 2019. “Kant, Hegel and our Fate as Zoôn Politikon.” In Hegel and Contemporary Practical Philosophy: Beyond Kantian Constructivism, edited by J. Gledhill and S. Stein. London and New York: Routledge—forthcoming.
Williams, Robert R. 2000. Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition. Oakland: University of California Press.
Wood, Allen W. 1998. “Hegel on Education.” In Philosophers on Education: New Historical Perspectives, edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, 300–318. London: Routledge.
Wood, Ellen Meiksins. 1995. Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wood, Ellen Meiksins. 2002. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London and New York: Verso.
Wood, Ellen Meiksins. 2008. Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought, from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. London and New York: Verso.
Wood, Ellen Meiksins. 2012. Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought, from Renaissance to Enlightenment. London and New York: Verso.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bykova, M.F. (2020). Hegel’s Philosophy of Bildung. In: Bykova, M.F., Westphal, K.R. (eds) The Palgrave Hegel Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_22
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-26596-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-26597-7
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)