Texts:Rom-E-19a-OFWFWW

On the Free Will that the Free Will Wills

A Response to Krassimir Stojanov

¶1

As Krassimir Stojanov suggests in his enlightening discussion of Hegel, we have, as philosophers and as educators, paid too little attention to Hegel’s ideas about Bildung. I agree. Hegel has been one of the central figures, along with Kant, Herder, Goethe, Fichte, Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schleiermacher, and others less famous, I am studying to clarify the importance of formative experience in human life. I’ve begun to question my initial understanding of Bildung in their work. I want to introduce these doubts as a basis for indicating a reservation I have about Stojanov interesting paper.

¶2

Does Bildung identify a complex development, something like “mass democratization” might in modern life, or does it indicate a specific agency significant within a development, akin say to the role of advertising in affecting popular tastes? By translating Stojanov’s title into German, a redundancy becomes evident, for “Bildung as formation of mindedness …”, becomes “Bildung als Bildung der Geistigkeit.” Are we looking at a general phenomenon, the formation of mindedness, or at an agency, Bildung, key in developing mindedness? Later educational efforts to impart Bildung through a pedagogical effort suggest the second construction—Bildung der Geistigkeit nach Hegel, the educational cultivation of mindedness according to Hegel. But Hegel wrote when a formal pedagogy of Bildung was only beginning to emerge from literary, historical, philosophical, anthropological, theological, and pedagogical writings. These included frequent uses of the noun, Bildung, and the verb, bilden, and their many compounds. The root verb, bilden, very old and powerful, spawned a family of common words used then and now with a wide spectrum of meanings.

¶3

Here I want to sketch a hypothesis. Although later critics interpret important uses of Bildung by Hegel as indicating ideas about formal education, Hegel primarily used Bildung as a summative term, a descriptor that itself did not indicate an active agency, but rather served as a catch-all identifier for the complicated process through which Geist creates itself through personal and collective life. The whole process was Bildung. By fulfilling this summative Bildung, Geist creates itself as Recht, as right, “the free will that the free will wills,” which Hegel explained in The Philosophy of Right.

¶4

Hegel initially explained that process in his long introduction where he presented, step by step, the hard work that Geist performs in forming itself as Right. Whether incarnated collectively in historical experience or in our personal lives, Geist creates itself through an immanent, dialectical recursion, using its capacities to actualize itself, in-and-for-itself in the world. This recursive activity does not take place in a long, causally linear sequence, but in multiple interactions, immanent and reciprocal, operating within a temporal duration and over a spatial extent. Geist emerges through nonlinear self-formation. The Introduction gave a compact phenomenology of Geist forming itself as Recht.

¶5

Throughout his work, Hegel refers to aspects of Geist with the term das Moment, not “moment” in its temporal sense, but “element, factor, viewpoint, aspect, situation.” Geist can manifest itself in three moments or factors—will (Geist in-itself acting), thought (Geist for-itself conceptualizing), and actualized Geist (Geist in-and-for-itself, a rational actuality). Unlike temporal moments, Geist in the form of these factors has substantiality, enduring through significant transformations. Will, the in-itself of Geist, and thought, the for-itself of Geist, and actual Geist as the in-and-for-itself, interact in and with a moot world, characterized by a striving which Hegel often spoke of as expressing Triebe, drives. But a Trieb in Hegel’s time had a special, somewhat animistic meaning, indicating an effort or endeavor. All three factors—will, thought, Geist—in all their manifold instantiations, expressed this restless endeavor to flourish in the world, and any instantiation of Geist would encounter limits and insufficiencies in its endeavoring, which were opportunities for Geist to sich aufheben, to heave itself up into some other instantiation of itself, reconfiguring its in-itself, its for-itself, and its in-and-for itself in a way that incorporated its factors in another form.

¶6

These Aufhebungen, upheavals to use the noun, appear to give some historical and biographical sequence to the self-formation, for they help shape the recursive process taking place over an extended duration. Hegel’s having to explain the whole process sequentially in a linear text amplified this impression of sequence, but if one considers his analyses carefully, it becomes evident that the recursive self-creation of Geist takes place with Geist forming itself through many parallel Triebe heaving themselves up through various Aufhebungen. Hence, Geist does not form itself through a sequence with a beginning, middle, and end, but through a complex, enduring recursion that achieves completion when all the possibilities of Geist, the in-and-for-itself of life, are actual.

¶7

Hegel explained the philosophy of right on this vitalistic grounding. The Introduction presents it largely from the phenomenological standpoint, explaining the experiential process of Geist’s self-formation, and the body of the work presents it largely from the standpoint of achieved Wissenschaft, science. ¶1-¶3 delimit the science of right and differentiate it from jurisprudence. Hegel then starts the phenomenological forming of Geist as Recht, right, with the will as it finds itself free in the world and in ¶4-¶10, Hegel explicated how Geist experienced this existential basis of the free will. Then in ¶11-¶21, he examined how the subjective will, pursuing all manner of goals contingently, encounters their contradictions and using thought works to clear away the conflicts. That frees them from the contingency of their content.

¶8

But that is only the subjective side, the will experiencing itself as an in-itself. In ¶22-¶28, initiative shifts to the for-itself, showing how the subjective will strives to objectify its freedom as a substantial actuality, something for-itself, embodied in the world it inhabits. In doing that, ¶29-¶32, Hegel indicates how the will, now becoming in-and-for-itself, constitutes the combined subjectivity and objectivity of the system of right, which he would present, now as philosophy, not phenomenology, in the three aspects in which the will “is free in and for itself:” first as abstract right (property, contract, and tort), second as morality (purpose and responsibility, intention and welfare, the good and the conscience), and third as ethical life (the family, civil society, and the state).

¶9

An important passage in the phenomenological introduction, ¶20, a short paragraph, stated the role of Geist as thought, the for-itself, in purifying the various drives, Triebe, of their contingency by bringing out the formal universality immanent in them. It concludes, “This effort to bring forth the generality of thought is the absolute value of Bildung (cf. ¶187)” That later paragraph occurs within the part on ethical life where Geist shifts from its incarnation in familial experience to its participation in the diverse experiences of civil society. Its sense of self—formed within the family, immediate and particular—enters into the complexities of civil society and must raise its immediacies and particularities to a higher level of generality. Hegel uses the noun, Bildung, and the verb, bilden, significantly in examining the transition.

¶10

In his paper, Stojanov interprets Hegel’s usage in ¶187 as one pointing to a pedagogical effort to form mindedness among the members of civil society, a plausible reading of Hegel’s language and one highly consistent with what has taken place in practice globally during the past two centuries. I think Stojanov effectively separates a pedagogical program of Bildung on Hegelian principles from those who would make it “an appropriation of a canon of classic ‘high culture’ for its own sake” (Stojanov, p. 9). And he astutely explains Hegel’s ideas about the formative power of properly studying Greek and Latin language and literature in the gymnasium as an instance of the productive alienation, the Entfremdung, that people undergo in making their places in civil society. Stojanov concludes that Hegel calls for Bildung that develops mindedness (Geistigkeit), “in the form of conceptual self-articulation.” Only a dialectical or Socratic education of this sort can reconcile the individual Geist with the full objective Geist of civil society. “This end can be reached only with the help of formal education which mediates between the subjective life-worlds of the students and the objective world of concepts.” (Ibid., pp. 9-11)

¶11

To me, this conclusion is a bit disquieting, although Stojanov leaves it unclear the degree to which he espouses the position he finds Hegel to have taken. It makes me uneasy, first as I’m not sure formal education has such power, and second as I doubt it would lead to a desirable democratic humanism if it did have such power. I think, however, that reading Bildung in these passages as a summative descriptor of a broader process would lead in less problematic directions.

¶12

As phenomenology, what Hegel described as taking place in ¶187, is precisely what takes place in the Phenomenology of Spirit in the section on “Self-alienated Spirit. Culture [Bildung]”. It would be a stretch to take that section in the Phenomenology as a discussion of Bildung as formal education. We can understand what Hegel described in ¶187 as the self-alienation of the individual Geist into objective cultural works in the objective lifeworld. If we do so, the continued discordance between personal Geist, as we each experience ourselves in-and-for-ourselves, and historical Geist, the in-and-for-itself of our lifeworld, suggests that the duration of the whole formative process yet endures and we each and all have much formative work to do in our lives to keep moving it towards fulfillment. I think a philosophy of Bildung in its comprehensive sense might offer persons greater clarity about how, each from their respective life situation, can better manage their work of self-formation. The free will that the free will wills should carry on.