From Bildung to Learning Society. Philosophical Foundations and Mutations of a Modern Ideal

Project Information

BildungLearning

Grant agreement ID: 101043433

DOI

10.3030/101043433

EC signature date 30 August 2022

Start date 1 January 2023

End date 31 December 2027

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 987 500,00

EU contribution

€ 1 987 500,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BildungLearning (From Bildung to Learning Society. Philosophical Foundations and Mutations of a Modern Ideal)

Reporting period: 2023-01-01 to 2025-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The main objective of this project is to compare the modern philosophy of Bildung and the contemporary paradigm of the Learning Society (LS) by systematically analyzing their homological structures. Through this comparison, we aim to expose the important conceptual mutations of the ideal of educational autonomy, especially in the philosophical conceptions of university and of academic freedom, occurring from the first paradigm to the latter.
This research combines history of philosophy and political philosophy and will follow a plan in four steps.
The first two years were devoted to achieving the project’s first two research objectives:
1. To provide a historical reconstruction of the texts formed around the concept of Bildung in classical German philosophy, through an original typology of the various and contrasting positions of the main authors of this period (Herder, Kant, Fichte, Schiller, Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, Humboldt), according to how they conceptualize the dialectics of educational autonomy and, in particular, how they theorize the political and cultural missions of University in their conceptions of the emancipating project of the Bildung.
2. To identify and analyze the most significant critical transformations of the Bildung concept by influential philosophical figures from the second half of the 19th century to the end of the 20th century, to bring to light the main theoretical divergences concerning the conditions of a partial reactivation and actualization of the modern emancipating project of the Bildung.
The next three years of the project will be dedicated to the last two research objectives:
3. Establishment of a corpus of scientific and political texts and discourses on the LS, for comparing the paradigm of LS to the modern philosophy of Bildung following an analytical grid pointing the conceptual and normative homologies and mutations between them.
4. Concrete application of this systematic comparison and testing of the heuristic potential of the Bildung philosophy in the context of the current debates on the transformations of the Idea of University and on the concept of academic freedom.
Through an analysis of political-educational narratives, we want to show that the great narratives of the philosophical modernity – such as emancipation through self-cultivation – have not become obsolete or ineffective but continue to be operating in current discourses under critical and fragmented forms.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

To achieve the first objective of our research, we selected and invited to collaborate some thirty researchers specializing in the major authors included in our base corpus. Our first general hypothesis was that, despite the lack of homogeneity between uses of the concept, there are points of junction and lines of opposition and tension between these uses, making it possible to establish a typology.
This typology has been based on three axes of tensions: a) tensions between socio-politically engaged conceptions of the educational autonomy as collective emancipation and individualistic conceptions of the process of Bildung as an intimate and personal culture of the self; b) tensions between the tendency towards a scientific and cultural elitism and the ambition of fostering the project of a popular and national education; c) tensions between liberal visions and more authoritative conceptions of the self-organization of University as an institution of Bildung and of emancipation through education. One provisional conclusion we have drawn from this observation is that the very heterogeneous constellation of the concept of Bildung between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th is mainly unified by the lines of tensions that run through it, confirming our general interpretation that the concept of Bildung entails from its first theorizations an essential and strong dialectical dimension, i.e. it is made up of a series of tensions between opposing values or conceptual poles that cannot be overcome except by producing new syntheses.
To realize our second objective, we have tested on a vast corpus of texts our second general hypothesis, following which the critiques and transformations of the Bildung concept from the second half of the 19th century to the end of the 20th century are characterized by fundamental ambivalences and normative tensions between a radical critique of the modern rationality and the attempt at a transformative rescue of this ideal. On this assumption, with the different researchers involved in our activities, we sought to show that the main axis of opposition throughout these critical transformations was related to the genealogy of liberal political thought of education and to the self-formation of individuality, in a series of authors who both positively inherited the modern Bildung ideal and criticized its limits (Emerson, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Dewey, Cassirer, Freud, Elias, Adorno, Horkheimer, Rawls, Sen).

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The most significant achievements from those first two years are three major collective publications: two scientific journals issues (issue 14 of the journal Phantasia entitled “Devenir soi, former son caractère. Emerson, Mill, Nietzsche” (2024), and issue 59 of Klésis entitled “La Bildung aux XIXe et XXe siècles : Critiques, crises et transformations” (forthcoming, 2025)), as well as a volume entitled Bildung. Figures of an Untimely Modern Ideal (PUSL, forthcoming, 2025).
With a total of 38 articles and 5 original translations (texts of Humboldt, Fichte and Mill), those contain the essence of results stemming from regular research seminars combined with two international conferences held in Brussels (2023) and Strasbourg (2024).
Within these three volumes, three studies have particularly advanced our research:
1. In their article entitled “Crise et critique de la Bildung. La politique inactuelle de la culture chez le jeune Nietzsche”, Quentin Landenne and Nicolas Quérini, offer an original reading of the five lectures delivered by F. Nietzsche in 1872 On the future of our educational institutions (Über die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten) and Nietzsche’s writings on culture from the same period, showing that, behind the acerbic criticism of these institutions, Nietzsche was in fact dealing with a radical crisis of Bildung.
2. In “Entre adaptation et autonomie. L'actualité de la réflexion d'Adorno sur la Bildung”, Susanna Zellini sheds a new light on how Th. W. Adorno, during his American exile (1938-1939), was confronted with the need to find a dialectical mediation between the German ideal of Bildung, placed in crisis by the catastrophe of historical events, and the American liberal tradition, linked to pragmatism and distrustful of the European humanist tradition and its principles of “academic freedom” and “autonomy”, as promoted by Humboldt.
3. In one article entitled “Formation et expression de la liberté chez Fichte: liberté de penser, liberté de communiquer et liberté académique”, Quentin Landenne provides a better understanding of the philosophical meaning, historical development and systematic function of the conceptual constellation of freedom of expression in Fichte's practical philosophy, by reconstructing the theoretical coherence underlying his major texts on freedom of thought, freedom of communication and academic freedom.