HOTEL PRO FORMA | Calling Clavigo

GOETHE AND THE CONCEPT OF ‘BILDUNG’

Extracts of the text by Per Øhrgaard. (Translated by John Irons)

The German concept of ‘Bildung’ is impossible to translate into English. It is cultivation, education, breeding, enlightenment, sophistication and personal development rolled into one. In German it is called ‘Bildung’. Out of desperation, the English even refer to a novel describing the inner development of the main character as a ‘Bildungsroman’. Whenever the Danish word that corresponds to ‘Bildung’ is being translated, any of the above words may have been substituted.

An educated human being. Posterity has often looked back at Goethe as the man who – if anyone – represented European ‘Bildung’, the last man with the overall view, who, on the threshold of the modern age, was both able to handle a cultural heritage and understand that which was in the offing. And posterity has therefore usually completed the circle by defining ‘Bildung’ on the basis of Goethe, precisely as the ability – perhaps less universally, yet nevertheless – to have a considerable overview and, at the same time, be capable of adopting a personal and creative attitude towards it.

‘Bildung’, then’ as the opposite of over-specialisation – the ability to see beyond the confines of one’s own special concerns. And ‘Bildung’ as more than objective knowledge: the cultivated person is in the world, but the world is also in him or her. However, certain conditions have to be fulfilled for a person to be cultivated – although exactly what is never precisely stated.

That is an ideal picture, although ‘Bildung’ would not be worthy of the name if it did not also include an awareness of the fact that ideal and reality never coincide. And Goethe himself preferred not to speak of ‘Bildung’ as something one had – he spoke more of the lifelong process of acquiring it. In his novel about Wilhelm Meister he lets the strange girl Mignon answer Wilhelm, who feel that something should be done about her ‘Bildung’, with the words: ‘I am educated enough to love and to care.’
Very central human emotions are to be found both before and beyond ‘Bildung’ – if not beyond it. It is possibly the crowning glory of an assignment, but the actual assignment – man himself – is a sine qua non.

‘Bildung’ can only be relevant where society has not been written off in advance as something totally wrong, and where man has not been rejected in advance as something incurably sinful. So the origins and basic nature of ‘Bildung’ are a human utopia – or a utopia concerning that which is human. It is not a concept with a fixed definition or a sum of knowledge or skills which one can acquire and then be ‘cultivated’ once and for all.

So it is not all that strange that seminal texts on the subject do not use the theme in their title, but deal with something else – with reason and the faculty of judgment, in Immanuel Kant, with man’s ‘aesthetical’ education in Schiller, or with a young man’s personal development, his ‘prentice years’, related in the form of a novel, in Goethe. The process is just as important as the final result.

The idea of ‘Bildung’ arises when it becomes imperative to define what is distinctively human in a new way, because the meaning of life is not necessarily given from above or because man has become the sovereign force in the world. The development of both thought and material possibilities that became so evident in the course of the 18th century has not ceased since then – so it is all the more important to speculate on how man, with all his power, can retain his inner balance and his tractability – his ‘Bildung’.

in danish