Reading through Jennifer Herdt’s Forming Humanity, I felt a flicker of hope that this book, so deeply considered, lucidly structured, and carefully argued, might also reach the rather insular precincts of literary studies and help them overcome their decades-long overindulgence in a hermeneutics of suspicion. Thus, most interpretive fields today take as axiomatic the naturalistic and secular conception of human beings (no longer “persons”) and of cultural “production” (no longer “expression”), and in so doing have reduced human agency to an unwitting relay station for sundry ideological currents and fluctuating desires. Opting instead for a very different methodology and focus, Forming Humanity explores what may have been the last concerted attempt to develop an alternative to the reductionist model of human agency and the skeptical epistemologies that had been on the ascendant since the days of Hobbes, namely, the ambitious reinterpretation of the human being in light of the imago Dei conception that came to be known as the German tradition of Bildung. To that end, Herdt recalls for us that tradition’s dual root in Renaissance Humanism and, especially, in medieval Rhineland mysticism and early eighteenth-century Pietism, a theologically intricate prehistory that, tellingly, has been all but ignored within the precincts of literary studies. It is Herdt’s choice of an integrative and genealogical approach, rather than a disjunctive and narrowly analytic one, which also made me feel hopeful that, just maybe, Forming Humanity might usher in some kind of rapprochement between the study of aesthetic and literary form, on the one hand, and that of spiritual and theological inquiry, on the other. Certainly, it is to be hoped that Forming Humanity—a terrifically smart, insightful, and rewarding book—will be studied and valued not only by readers in Herdt’s own discipline but also in the discipline of literary studies, which arguably is most in need of the kind of corrective her account offers.

Let us begin with Herdt’s carful parsing of the central term—Bildung, and its various cognates—which turns out to be replete with semantic ambiguity and metaphysical ambivalence. Is Einbildung, to choose but one of Bildung’s many cognates, a case of divine in-forming the human being as imago Dei, of Grace received? Or do Herder and Goethe in particular resolve it into a case of humankind unilaterally “imagining” and “forming” (bilden) its ethical and spiritual completion? Already, Pietism’s view of “human and divine formative activity as competing with one another” (74) hints at the concept’s univocal underpinnings by positing that God and man occupy one and the same metaphysical plateau, differing, for now, in degree, though never in kind? Yet Herdt’s reassurance that, for Pietism, “practical Christianity . . . is not finally understood as a form of human activity at all but rather as a form of divine activity in and through human beings” (71) does not quite persuade. For in the end, it is in affect-laden, human interiority alone that God’s handiwork stands to be traced; and once we grant Pietism’s major premise, namely, that all phenomenological Evidenz of Grace is to be sought in (and validated by) the drama of human inwardness, it is but a small step, as Talleyrand would say, from Eckhart’s apophatic mysticism to Schleiermacher’s fetishizing of a purely immanent conception of the imago Dei as “religious feeling” and, soon thereafter, to Feuerbach’s dismissal of Christianity’s God as sheer projection.

In the end, Forming Humanity still reads, as indeed its subject matter warrants, as a secularization narrative of sorts, even as Herdt rightly insists that reading the record thus “is in need of revision in a number of respects” (29). Time and again, her prose thus works hard to balance a conception of Bildung as neither simply repurposing Christian tropes for strictly immanent ends nor as standing in outright continuity with the mystical and Pietist traditions from which it draws many of its conceptual and spiritual resources. Thus, Herdt writes, Bildung is “not simply a reworking . . . but also a retrieval and reimagining of classical notions of the virtue of humanitas and of education as paideia” (29–30). Likewise, “if Pietism was an expression of autocratic humanism,” to recall Karl Barth’s disapproving phrase, Herdt contends that “it was also an attempt to flee from it” (55). Early on, Herdt gives programmatic expression to the both-and logic informing the project of Bildung:

The Bildung tradition is an effort—or constellation of efforts—not just to hold . . . contradictory points of view in permanent tension but so to understand humanity and the process of its formation that these “infinite incommensurabilities” do not contradict but rather embody the fully human. . . . In grappling with the Bildung tradition, we can grasp human self-formative agency precisely as mediated through critically self-conscious dialogically developing carriers of social practices. (19)

To put it thus persuasively and supplely characterizes the aspiration of the Bildung project. Yet could an undertaking, conceived in such overwhelmingly immanent terms, have possibly succeeded? The big question that continues to loom over much of Forming Humanity is whether the theological bearings of Bildung do not inevitably reduce to the old wine of Pelagianism served up in new bottles. The fact that Herder draws on modern natural law theory so as to “discern the Creator’s intentions for humanity without recourse to divine revelation” (90) speaks volumes here. Herder’s “providentialist optimism” and his largely Kantian view of universal history as “an arena in which progress was assured” (83) certainly has more than a whiff of Pelagianism and human-engineered salvation about it. As Herdt shows, Herder’s oeuvre reveals a clear shift in the meaning of Bildung, away from Pietism’s understanding of the term as the Grace-dependent formation of human beings in the image of God and toward the deification of a distinctly new imago humanitatis.

It is hard not to conclude, as Barth so unceremoniously did, that in construing “human beings as self-formers” (52) the late-Enlightenment concept of Bildung fundamentally called into question a Christian metaphysics of Creation and Grace. Hence, even as “a radically transcendent God does not compete with the dignity of the human” (239), the obverse of that thesis may well hold true for Herder, Goethe, and especially Wilhelm von Humboldt. For they often do conceive human agents as striving to fulfil divine providence (Herder), as creators of quasi-divine, symbolic forms (Goethe), as participants in a cosmopolitan, strictly anthropomorphic order (Humboldt), and as dialectically realizing the immanent eschaton of an “ethical” (sittliche) community (Hegel). While the human being’s nature continues to be accepted as transcendently given, there is a decisive shift in focus, away from the “primary cause” (God) to secondary causes as these can be seen to operate in history. As Herdt shows so well, Herder and Hegel in particular conceive of “humanity” as a temporal process of progressive self-realization that depends less on a numinous, transhistorical God than it is wrought by historically contingent agents incessantly generating forms of knowledge whose scope exceeds what their finite and limited perspective allows them to conceptualize.

Not coincidentally, it is Herder and Hegel’s philosophy of history that was to prove especially vexing to Karl Barth, whose unsparing critique of the Bildung tradition Herdt engages so perceptively throughout. Indeed, Herdt’s interweaving of her own narrative with Barth’s sharply different appraisal of the concept of Bildung struck me as one of the most riveting features of Forming Humanity. Unsurprisingly, Barth bristles at Herder’s unabashedly Pelagian commitment to a model of salvation firmly centered in, if not outright engineered by, humanity (Menschheit) as it actuates its potential in historical time. “Filling in on Barth’s behalf,” Herdt writes, Herder’s principal shortcoming is that he “fails to recognize God’s Word as coming from outside, a forgiving but thereby also standing in judgment on, human experience and activity” (108). In what seems a subtle intellectual exorcism of sorts, Herdt’s intermittent dialogue with Barth’s harsh critique of the late-Enlightenment ideal of Bildung brings into focus the central problems and questions associated with the term’s often bewildering theological and philosophical moorings. The central question, I’d venture, is whether Bildung still presupposes a transcendent and normative authority external to its own operative logic or whether, alternatively, the progressive narrative of Bildung amounts to a speculative “internalization” (Verinnerlichung) of divine agency unfolding within historical, secular time.

It is this question, whose eschatological dimension goes largely unaddressed throughout Forming Humanity, that I would like to press a bit further. While Herdt offers an impressively nuanced and deeply informed account of Bildung as an ambitious program for a human-centered, ethical community, rather less attention is given to key concepts of theological inquiry that under this new dispensation have ceased to play any operative role. The fact that the theological virtues, as well as key concepts such as humility, sin, and increasingly grace (both enabling and cooperative) no longer play a normative and indispensable role in the writings of Herder, and just about no role at all in Goethe and Hegel, strongly suggests that the window has at last closed on the realist and normative framework that had dominated (though never uncontested) Western thought from Plato to Leibniz. Take the concept of sin. Herdt is right, I think, to demur at Barth’s rejection of the “rational autarchy” and “autocratic humanism” of the Bildung tradition simply on the basis of Luther’s self-certifying conception of faith. Properly to engage Hegel on the question of the subject’s rational and ethical autonomy takes a logos theologian, not an antinomian fideist. In fact, Herdt notes, Hegel’s principal “failure is not that of denying human sinfulness” but, rather, his blanket “identification of history as the site of divine self-realization” (234). In qualified assent, I would merely suggest that one might be the cause of the other, that where philosophy would trace the dialectical self-realization of the divine “idea” in history, sin (along with any variety of other normative theological concepts) will be superseded by a strictly immanent view of human freedom as the central idea to be “realized” (verwirklicht) in finite, human time as a definitively self-aware “concept” (Begriff).

Yet another aspect of Hegel’s argument concerns the gradual calcification and eventual collapse of the concept of Bildung that extends from his immediate successors all the way into the twentieth century. Both for Herder and Goethe, Bildung was essentially dynamic and experimental, deeply vested in aesthetic practice and prospective in its view of human flourishing. As unfolded in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, subject of yet another rich chapter in Herdt’s book, narratives of Bildung at the beginning of the Romantic era shuttle back and forth between spontaneous expression and intermittent reflection. Yet already in his early, Schiller-inspired writings from Bern, and most prominently in his Phenomenology (1807), Hegel’s description of Bildung as a kind of practical rationality is forensic, not participatory, animated by analytic detachment rather than intuitive commitment. It is this transmutation of Bildung from a function of dramatic “presentation” (Darstellung) to an object of dialectical reflection and its quasi-sociological description that foreshadows the ideal’s eventual demise.

Forming Humanity does not tell us much about this emergent pattern of reflexive detachment, philosophical prevarication, and ultimate loss, which I would argue is just integral to the Romantic conception of Bildung and, starting in the 1820s, has become virtually synonymous with it. Indeed, this mournful quality unsettling the providential optimism of the Bildung tradition explains the surge of interest in classical antiquity, that shadows the development of the Bildung ideal from its very beginnings in Herder. As interpreted by Winckelmann, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, and Hölderlin, the ideal of Bildung seems inseparable from its original precursor in classical Greece, a luminous if transient era of collective intellectual and artistic flourishing equally impossible to retrieve or to forget. The affective and formal counterpoint to Herder’s “providentialist optimism” and Goethe’s similarly prospective view of Bildung thus is found in Schiller’s das Sentimentalische and in the genre of the elegy. Hölderlin’s lyric paean to the lost plenitude of Greek paideia and its ruined legacy (“Denn lang schon stehst Du, / Oh Stolz der Welt, die nicht mehr ist.”)1 is the photographic negative of the immanent conception of the imago Dei at the heart of the Bildung tradition, whose anthropomorphic confidence it relentlessly shadows and ultimately exposes as a transient cultural moment. A fuller consideration of the astonishing range of literary output associated with the Bildung tradition (Schiller, Novalis, Hölderlin, Eichendorff, Heine) would have brought out the project’s ethical precariousness and formal paradoxes, which I submit go a long way toward explaining the project’s inevitable and, after 1813, rapid decline.

All this is to remind ourselves that the internal fracturing of the Bildung tradition had come into focus from its very beginnings and, by the time Barth enters the scene, had been the subject of dystopic accounts by Oswald Spengler and Thomas Mann, particularly in “Death in Venice” (1912) and The Magic Mountain (1924). The latter novel, often described as an Umbildungsroman, lampoons both the cosmopolitan and the nationalist ways in which Bildung had been variously inflected during the long nineteenth century. Somewhat earlier, Robert Musil’s Confusions of Young Törless (1906) had offered an unsparing diagnosis of how a typical Bildungsanstalt deforms the moral, intellectual, and sexual personae of the protagonist and his peers. Now, while literary modernism’s exposure of the monstrous underbelly of Bildung as a rigorously institutionalized project seems to postdate the concerns of Forming Humanity by almost a century, this is not actually so. For already in Schiller, Hegel, and Humboldt, Bildung has begun to mutate from an expressivist practice to a sociocultural institution; and by the time Hegel arrives at the University of Berlin (1818) at a time of surging political repression, Bildung has mutated from a verb to a noun, as it were, from imaginative practice to the philistine’s virtual property. Far from denoting the “self-formation” of human individuals and communities in search of an ethically viable and meaningful existence, Bildung has become enshrined in rigid, state-sponsored and administered institutions: encyclopedias, national museums, almanacs, historical dictionaries, philologically accurate editions of medieval sources, and coveted diplomas from the new universities of Bonn, Breslau, and Berlin that had been founded in its Humboldtian imago.

Herdt, of course, is right to insist that “the task of forming humanity” not only “requires hope . . . but also repentance, [and] acceptance of forgiveness,” absent which “the infinite harmonious relatedness that Christians name as trinitarian life” (242) is bound to degenerate into an empty phrase. Yet this ideal of an ethical life consummated in “infinite . . . relatedness” was betrayed the very moment that Bildung defined itself as an immanent and, yes, essentially secular project alternately fixated on the fetish of a German national Kultur or pledged to what Kant in 1784 calls a “cosmopolitan [weltbürgerlich] point of view.” Indeed, Herdt’s opening claim that “the Bildung ideal was cosmopolitan at heart,” aimed at realizing a “shared humanity” rather than idealizing an autochthonous, monolingual culture” (3) may hold mostly true for Herder and Kant. Yet even then it already contains the seeds of its eventual undoing. For one thing, there is the paradox of Bildung envisioned as an ostensibly cosmopolitan ideal of culture whose promotion, however, is almost entirely confined to a single geographic and linguistic domain. Once we factor in how this “cosmopolitan” ideal flourishes just as Germany’s linguistic and cultural domain seeks to realize itself as a German nation, the avowed cosmopolitanism of the Bildung tradition begins to take on a chimerical quality.

While Herdt’s decision to focus on Herder and Goethe as her protagonists makes good sense, it overlooks the concurrent emergence of an alternative, rather more menacing counter-genealogy of Bildung. It would include works such as Fichte’s Bestimmung des Menschen (1800), followed by the rabid nationalism of his Reden an die deutsche Nation (1806), as well as Novalis’ reactionary Die Christenheit oder Europa (1799), the programmatic writings of Franz Brentano (including his virulently anti-Semitic 1813 polemic against Jewish Bildungsbürger), and similar writings by the Catholic Restoration writers Friedrich von Gentz and Joseph Görres. Hence, even as Herder, Goethe, and Humboldt at various points struggle to “repudiate” such notions of Germany’s racial and cultural superiority, surely they cannot be said to have done so “decisively” (94). Unfailingly circumspect in the way she unfolds her argument, Herdt of course also takes note of this “dark side” of Bildung, one “that legitimated injustice, private projects of self-cultivation and the political withdrawal of a cultural elite content to polish itself” (241). Hence, too, as she notes, the young W. von Humboldt, who more than any of the other writers discussed in Herdt’s book helped smooth the passage from Bildung as an ideal to Bildung as an institution, was almost immediately forced to push back against the looming misconstrual of Bildung as sheer “uniformity” and “narcissistic self-cultivation” (115).

Yet not only did Humboldt’s caveats, like Herder’s, ultimately go unheeded, but his successful effort at transposing Bildung from a spontaneous practice into an institutional framework tells us a lot about why the project of Bildung ultimately had to fail. Thus, starting in 1800, Bildung is being co-opted, and its ethical vision effectively vanquished, by the harsh antinomy between the autochthonous ideal of German Kultur and a cosmopolitan (read: French) Zivilisation. In the event, it took but one generation and a pan-European war for the “creative, imaginative engagement of unique persons” (240) outlined in Herder’s and Goethe’s ideal of Bildung to expire in the petit-bourgeois philistinism lampooned in Heine’s On Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1833) and in Carl Spitzweg’s Bookworm (1859).2 Yet another generation later, their alternately humorous or satirical take on the miscarriages of Bildung will be supplanted by the withering polemics of the young Nietzsche in On the Future of Our Educational Institutions (1874). Summing up at that point the fate of Bildung during the preceding half century or so, Nietzsche acerbically remarks on how the vaunted “classical” ideal of Bildung has contracted into the hidebound idea of “training” (Erziehung), that is, into the institutional and administrative socialization of politically conformist and solidly credentialed petit-bourgeois Bildungsbürger content to worship at the barren altar of historicist, specialized “scholarship” (Gelehrsamkeit).

Jennifer Herdt has written an impressive book about the beginnings of Bildung. Yet where a project as ambitious in its ethical and intellectual scope as the Bildung tradition seeks to absorb its metaphysical conditions of possibility (e.g., God, Grace, Redemption) into a process of immanent and increasingly institutionalized “self-formation,” its end turns out to have been indelibly woven into its very beginnings.

Jennifer Herdt offers a fascinating re-narration of the “story of Bildung,” which until recently has been understood as a “tale of secularization” (8). She convincingly argues that it would be an oversimplification to paraphrase the conceptual change that took place as “human beings took responsibility for something they had earlier left in the hands of God” (7). Rather, the story of Bildung, properly told, needs to include the loss and partial recovery of Christian Humanism. Herdt approaches her task from two angles: she invites the reader on a journey through the intellectual history of Bildung, while at the same time offering a critical perspective inspired by Karl Barth’s theology. In doing so, she subtly excavates categories from the tradition that might help us define the telos of Bildung today.

Core to the whole endeavour is the distinction between autocratic and authentic humanism; Herdt being in favour of the latter. Autocratic humanism perceives human and divine agency as mutually exclusive and in strict competition when it comes to forming humanity. Moreover, autocratic humanism is defined by the tendency to annihilate genuine otherness by absorbing it into the self—this is the main reason why Barth reproached Pietism’s inwardness. In contrast, the openness to accept the formative power as a gift and the ability to be “called into question, disturbed by otherness” (54) is assigned to authentic humanism.

I would like to contribute to Herdt’s endeavour to redeem the German idea of Bildung. To that end, I will introduce a religious thinker whose work can be read as a subversive engagement with almost the whole Bildung tradition as described by Herdt.

On first sight, adding Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) to the row of German Bildung thinkers does not seem adequate—after all, he was not German. However, the Dane was writing in a cultural context that exceeded the borders of nations, and he genuinely contributed to the Bildung discourse, albeit indirectly and in a dispersed manner, and until recently largely unnoticed.1 Kierkegaard’s focus on the individual and inwardness seems to indicate that his idea of Bildung is a variation of the Pietistic account of Bildung. As such, it would incur the label of “autocratic humanism.” While Kierkegaard’s thought evolved in deep contact with Pietism, it does not bear the negative aspects of autocratic humanism that Herdt and Karl Barth criticise. Rather, his perspective undermines the dualism of autocratic and authentic humanism.

In Two Ages (1846) Kierkegaard castigates his contemporaries for not being “essentially educated” (“væsentligen dannet”).2 The emphasis is on essentially. Due to the mass print media, there is an abundance of knowledge available, but people prefer this knowledge to be boiled-down, quickly accessible. Rather than reading a whole book, they turn to journals, which publish reviews of novels and plays, summaries of philosophical works and social-political commentaries humouring the public opinion. In addition, there are manuals available that teach cultivated behaviour. Thus, Kierkegaard’s contemporaries are cultivated or gebildet only in a superficial sense. Neither do they engage with the tradition and the contemporary culture thoroughly nor as individuals, reflecting on what something means for their particular existence.

In Two Ages, Kierkegaard goes to great lengths in order to show how mass media gave rise to a public (Danish Publikum), which is the opposite of Kant’s ideal of a self-educating, reasonable public that discovers its self-forming potential. As a member of the Publikum the individual loses her will, together with any feeling of responsibility: “Even good-natured and worthy people become like totally different creatures as soon as they become ‘the crowd’ (Mængde).”3

Being a member of the public distracts the individual from herself and relieves her of the responsibility to become a self. As Klaus-M. Kodalle observes, “Where the ‘I’ is too weak to form [bilden] itself to a distinctive individual, the obsession for surrogates of the self increases.”4 According to Kierkegaard, the main substitute for selfhood in the nineteenth century is being a member of the Publikum. As such, the individual not only forgets about her task of developing an authentic selfhood, but also actively devaluates and annihilates the uniqueness of other individuals. The superficial Bildung that takes place via an engagement with the reading public is thus linked with “levelling” (Nivellering) of otherness.5 The overzealous adaptation to the public opinion leads to inauthenticity all round, manifesting itself in an empty chatter: “The conversation will tend to become a trivial rattling and name-dropping.”6 And while “the inward orientation of silence is the condition of cultured conversations (den dannede Tale i Omgang)”; chattering is the “caricaturing externalization of inwardness, is uncultured (Udannethed).”7

This udannedhed (literally “un-formedness”) also affects those relations in which otherness is usually encountered and cherished: in the relation to a beloved. Kierkegaard is deeply worried about the fact that in Germany—the homeland of Bildung!—there are “handbooks (Haandbøger) for lovers, so it probably will end with lovers being able to sit and speak anonymously to each other.”8 They will not acknowledge the other as a particular individual, but rather use him or her as stage partner to articulate a compendium of romantic feelings and seemingly deep thoughts learned by rote.

People might show all signs of refinement and seem to fulfil the Kantian idea of Bildung, but according to Kierkegaard, this usually is a persiflage. The public annihilates individual differences, lets enthusiasm shrivel and, as a consequence, hampers action. The Bildung of Kierkegaard’s contemporaries is thus not only superficial. It is also impotent. It is distracting the individual from her existential task of relating to the world individually, developing a life view and then acting on it, changing—forming—the world in accordance with it.

Kierkegaard is relentless in his criticism, and the clear-cut talk about essential Bildung is highly normative and judgmental. This, however, does not serve a social exclusivism. It does not legitimate a cultural elite to rule over the still uneducated. Quite to the contrary. Kierkegaard attacks the powerful majority that has the means to cultivate itself. The criteria for true Bildung are not to be found in the bourgeois salons and literary cafés, but in the kitchens and coal cellars: it is the handmaidens and workmen who according to Kierkegaard are essentially educated. They relate to others, themselves and the events in their lives with earnestness, acting on their passions and beliefs.9

Needless to say, this is of course an idealisation. Nevertheless, it suggests that Kierkegaard develops a version of Bildung that would classify as “autocratic humanism” due to its focus on (Pietistic) inwardness, but that does not foster an annexation of otherness or a depreciation of the powerless members of humankind.

But what exactly is essential Bildung, and how is it achieved? Kierkegaard can only say what it is not, as the actualisation of true Bildung is essentially individualistic: “What then, is education (Dannelse)? I believe it is the course (Cursus), the individual goes through in order to catch up with himself (indhente sig selv), and the person who will not go through this course is not much helped by being born in the most enlightened age.”10 The phrase “catching up” with oneself suggests that we are supposed to become what we are—a hidden reference to the idea that it is precisely through their particular individual existences that human beings are the image of God.

Four more things are worth noting here. First, Bildung for Kierkegaard is not possible without de-formation or Entbildung—thus, quite similar to what Herdt has identified as characteristic feature of Meister Eckhart’s account of restoring the imago Dei (42–47). Second, in this twofold process human and divine agency are intertwined, much more than in Eckhart’s account. Third, this has consequences for the author’s relationship to the reader, and fourth, Kierkegaard’s writings can be understood as mediating the opposition of Kunst-Religion and the Pietistic condemnation of human craft.

Kierkegaard was deeply inspired by Eckhart and Johannes Tauler.11 Their influence plays a crucial role in conceptualizing Bildung as depending on its necessary counterpart, i.e., the Entbildung of worldly images. Kierkegaard maintains that in order to become an authentic self, one needs to empty oneself of the cultural imagery instilled by the Publikum and by one’s previous education. These images cover all aspects of life, serving a “secular human mentality that wants to settle down and fancy (bilde sig ind) that now there is total peace and security, now we have achieved the highest.”12 The images concern ethical values, e.g., what constitutes a good human life, religious ideas like neighbour love, and also the person of Jesus Christ. Kierkegaard criticises his culture for exchanging the image of the God-man in his suffering and abasement (a provocative, incomprehensible sign of contradiction) with a neat and pleasant “fantasy picture of Christ (et phantastisk Billede af Christus)” in his glory.13

In the Upbuilding Discourse “One Who Prays Aright . . .” (1844) and Practice in Christianity (1950), we can observe how this cleansing happens. It is a process of letting go of one’s expectations and one’s socially constructed understanding, of the image one has of oneself and of God. However, it is not simply a surrender of all individuality to God, as Eckhart and Tauler suggest. The ultimate goal of Entbildung according to Kierkegaard is the imitation of Christ, but he also stresses that human agency is not meant to be annihilated in order to provide de-individualized vessels of God’s will. Jesus Christ only draws individual selves to himself, as Anti-Climacus explains:

To draw to itself depends upon the nature of what is to be drawn. If this is in itself a self, then to draw to itself cannot truly mean merely to draw it from being itself, to draw it to itself in such a way that it has now lost all its own existence by being drawn into that which drew it to itself. . . . No, when that which is to be drawn is in itself a self, then truly to draw to itself means first to help it truly to become itself in order then to draw it to itself, or it means in and through drawing it to itself to help it truly become itself.14

Becoming a self thus involves a cooperation of divine and human agency. Even though at the end of the day, this is a matter between every single individual and God, others are allowed to help us in this process. Kierkegaard’s authorship can thus be understood as an assistance in becoming a self, focusing on the preparative part, on Entbildung. It is for the purpose of making the reader stumble and question her concepts and mental images that Kierkegaard applies many of his literary tools, like the narrative repetitions (e.g., of the Akedah in Fear and Trembling), catachreses and the clash of content and form (e.g., the scrofulous structure of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript that aims at deconstructing the very idea of philosophy as a system).15

However, there is a deep ambiguity regarding Kierkegaard’s aesthetics and his self-understanding (or his self-stylization) as an author. On the one hand, Kierkegaard wants his work to be perceived as an assignment given to him by God (Danish Styrelese), who seems to dictate the text, while his own task is solely to “write each word, each line, almost unaware of the next word and the next line,” without any “poet passion.”16 Thus, Kierkegaard reinterates the Pietists’ mistrust of human craft (Menschen-Kunst) as explained by Herdt in the second chapter. On the other hand, however, Kierkegaard also values the text as the last sanctuary where the reader can become essentially gebildet (an idea that bears close resemblance to Kunst-Religion). Furthermore, Kierkegaard has a clear, bold goal concerning the impact of his writings, and thus, of his agency as an author. He wants to be a gadfly like his role model Socrates, spurring his contemporaries to think for themselves and to take responsibility for their existence. The entertaining literary aspects of his texts, including the panoply of lively fictive author personalities or “pseudonyms” serve the purpose to catch the attention of the Publikum and fascinate the reader so intensely that at first she will not notice that she has embarked on the process of Entbildung and Bildung.

Admittedly, the ethics of such authorship bear an ethically problematic element: after all, Kierkegaard tried to “deceive” into the truth.17 However, since the “truth” is not a dogmatic set of values and ideas, but rather the radical individual responsibility for one’s life, such deceptive means are provisional. Moreover, many of the literary images, metaphors, and analogies serve an additional purpose. As Ettore Rocca has shown, Kierkegaard uses analogies in order to recall them, drawing our awareness to images and then making us experience their foundering.18 Undermining reading habits like that, Kierkegaard aims at cleansing the readers from their cultural imagery that clogs their receptivity for the divine. The playful, “aesthetic” works thus also have a theological goal: they prepare the reader for the Bildung or the edification in the veronymous discourses.

However, also in these upbuilding texts, Kierkegaard acknowledges that he can only offer his assistance. It is as if one would stretch out a hand to a young child that learns to walk. One can help the child find her balance and give encouragement, but in the end, we all have to walk by ourselves, everyone individually according to their particular physical constitution: “It is the same for the great ones as for the little people—first one creeps, then one walks in a walker, then one walks holding on to a person’s hand, then one walks alone.”19

Some of the questions arising from Kierkegaard’s account of Bildung are these: Do we need to be entbildet in order to become ge-bildet? If so, what are the “images” that we need to let go in the twenty-first century? The modern idea of Bildung arose in temporal proximity with mass print media, so what are the implications of today’s social media for forming humanity? What could be the role of a teacher, coach, and role model—and what must it not be? Does it still make sense to speak of a humanity that is to be formed, or is Bildung something that concerns the individual only? And, last but not least, how do we listen to the voice- and powerless, how do we become perceptive of a potential, genuinely “other” Bildung without idealizing, romanticizing and patronizing its proponents?

In Forming Humanity, Jennifer Herdt tells a story that is wonderfully alluring. It is alluring because it aligns with conventional wisdom, in a deep rather than banal sense—with the emphasis on wisdom. While the book proceeds through detailed scholarly engagements with great thinkers, the thesis of the book is of general interest. Indeed, it addresses the deepest questions that we grapple with: how do we come into ourselves, how do we mature? The first person here means each of us, individually, but also all of us, collectively—all of us here, in this culture, or all of us in general, humanity. Herdt’s compelling claim is that these first person singular and first person plural versions of this question should be answered in the same way: what it means for me to mature, to come into myself, takes the same shape as what it means for us to mature, to come into ourselves.

We all grapple with these conjoined questions, and we call grappling with them well wisdom. It is easier to describe foolishness. The fool sees human maturity as moving from incompleteness to completeness. Moving from deficiency to sufficiency. Moving from the beta version to the fully polished, flawless product, ready for market. Just as children start with small feet and hands and bodies, and baby teeth, and with time grow into full-size adults, with adult-size feet, hands, and bodies, and grown-up teeth, each of us, in our humanity, grows from immaturity to maturity—or so the fool thinks. Similarly, a culture begins partial, grappling, babbling, and moves from stone age to bronze age to iron age, to classical culture to modernity, to the full maturity of postmodernity. This is the caricature of the Bildung tradition; Herdt seeks to distinguish the wisdom of Bildung from this caricature.

Why do such stories of maturity warrant the label foolish? Because our humanity is never complete. In fact, what makes humanity distinctive is the capacity to grapple with that inescapable incompleteness. Time does not bring us from the zero of an embryo to the one of a grown person, nor do we asymptotically approach that point of full maturity. Rather, Herdt in her wisdom, channeling the wisdom of the Bildung tradition she recovers, sees maturation as a process of becoming better and better at losing and recovering—at losing the sense of order and certainty and the work of recovering a livable life in conditions of disorder and uncertainty. This does not happen once, in a singular, grand drama, but again and again, forming the substance of life, individually and collectively—a structure Herdt suggestively identifies with the theological categories of exitus and reditus.

To mature now means to abandon foolishness, to become wise. When we are immature, when our humanity is in its childish stage, we run to order and stability or we run away from it. Put another way, the world of social norms dominates us, exercising its seemingly arbitrary authority over us, and we take comfort in complying or rebelling. As we mature, we come to realize that our relationship to social norms is not one of domination. Norms constitute us, and grappling with them makes it possible for us to become ourselves: our life’s work, our culture’s work. We grapple, but we never control: as soon as we feel as if we have things worked out, as soon as we have become comfortable with our place in the world, the world slips away, disorienting us, forcing us to once again try to seek out a mode of living that is sustainable, that offers comfort. We love and lose love, we become parents, our own parents become ill and die, we lose jobs and gain jobs, we discover new passions and find old passions inaccessible.

In Herdt’s writing, form matches content: she explicates a tradition of thought, and her mode of engagement is itself characteristic of the best of that tradition. She points to ways in which the great German intellectuals moved toward wisdom, and ways in which they remained caught up in foolishness, only to have their successors correct, sometimes overcorrect, for that foolishness. Her story nearly culminates with Hegel, not as all-wise master but as an exemplar of wisdom who himself, when it came to matters of race and history, exhibits stunning foolishness. Inextricable from this story is the theological, and particularly the Christian. Foolishness is another name for secularism, measuring humans and cultures exclusively against worldly terms, testing for completeness, ranking maturity (a trap Hegel falls into with his account of history). Wisdom names an appreciation for a world that is fallen but also creation that is abundant. Theologians, at their best, tell stories that involve the right doses of fallenness and abundance, that is, the right mix of the inexplicable and the chaotic and, out of that disorder, new possibility, new beauty, new life.

The real culmination of Herdt’s account is not Hegel but Barth. That towering theologian turns out, on Herdt’s reading, to be a friendly critic of the Bildung tradition rather than a sworn enemy. Hegel’s story does not get the balance quite right between fallenness and abundance, and the result is sacralizing European forms of life while denigrating others. On Herdt’s reading the way to correct for this error is to learn from Barth to listen, and in particular to listen to the margins, to those whose way of life is very different from one’s own (assuming one is at the center). This practice of listening can restore the proper balance between fallenness and abundance, and so make us, in the secular idiom, wise, in the theological idiom, faithful.

No one wants to be the fool. We all want to grow in wisdom, perhaps in faith. The framing of Forming Humanity is deeply appealing, as a story of self, of culture, and of humanity. I worry that much of that allure comes from the romance of youth. For reasons specific to European and North American culture, when we see a life, we see, first, growth, possibility, and creative transformation, each day after birth bringing new adventures. But each day that passes is also a day closer to death. We are living, but we are also dying. We will suffer in ways that will never open to new, creative vistas: the suffering will increase until our bodies cease, and we are no more. Indeed, in crudely biological terms, we grow for less than two decades, then we slowly and unpredictably move toward our end.

In our era of climate change, not to mention nuclear proliferation, polluted air and water, and other mortal hazards, it is similarly apt to talk about cultures, and humanity, dying rather than maturing. Only the fool imagines technological salvation that will bring collective eternal, worldly life. It seems quite plausible that North America, and humanity as a whole, is geriatric, moving in fits and starts toward our imminent end.

As Herdt explicates it, the German Bildung tradition offers eloquent wisdom for coming of age but has little to say about coming to death. By some calculations,1 less than half of Germans born in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries survived to the age of fifteen. Herdt is right that the great men of the Bildung tradition should have listened more, but they did not have to listen to the margins. Even at the “center,” right around them, millions of children were dying. And of course they themselves were dying, too, their bodies injured, sick, failing, moving in fits and starts toward final collapse. Moreover, in Africa and in indigenous communities in the Americas, millions were dying prematurely due to European adventures and economics, and whole cultures were dying, then died.

What do foolishness and wisdom look like from the perspective of life’s end rather than life’s beginning? What had been orderly, in mind and body, loses its order, likely never to be regained. Capacity for enjoyment, and even simply comfort, diminishes. We become less and less capable of partaking in the activities that once gave us pleasure, and the habits that once gave us solace become painful, eventually impossible. Instead of love opening new horizons of beauty, goodness, and truth, new possibilities for joy, bonds of love become essential for survival. The unpredictable heat of love becomes cooler and cooler bonds of dependency, fueled by obligation (which, of course, may still deserve the name love). Old friends fade, become inaccessible, and, eventually, die. Friendships that remain become rote and hollow, repetition of an imagined past. To imagine a peaceful death, a happy death, or a wise death is to be the fool. We will descend into a world of puss and vomit and excrement. Or perhaps we will die young, suddenly or slowly, painfully or in an instant, but with the same effect: a pile of bones and flesh, no life.

To be wise, from the perspective of death, is to recognize death’s inevitability and its gruesomeness, and still to live. It is to recognize that tremendous suffering approaches, nearer each year, each day, each hour, individually and collectively, and still to enter the fray. Rather than moments of collapse inevitably being followed by superabundance, from this perspective moments of superabundance are inevitably followed by collapse. The former strikes me as a comforting myth that the world tells, the latter strikes me as a story that calls for wisdom, or faith. To have a clear-eyed view of our status among the dying and to, nevertheless, find in the world moments of superabundance, of joy and beauty, of humor and goodness, how could this be possible but by deep wisdom, or deep faith?

And this I take to be the great insight of Christianity (remaining silent on the uniqueness of this insight). Death does not have the last word. Somehow, unimaginably but unquestionably, there is life everlasting. The joy and beauty, the humor and goodness we find in this world need not be dismissed as delusional given the magnitude of our impending suffering and demise. The promise of eternal happiness offers a warrant for happiness in this world, even as the world itself offers no warrant. From this perspective, it is the moments where we encounter fallenness that fill the soul even more than the moments where we encounter superabundance. For when we encounter the limits of worldly order, our belief is strengthened that the world does not have the last word, that death does not have the last word. Paradox and faith are, of course, twins.

In contexts of comfort, of relative privilege, it takes some work to see the time of our life counting down rather than up. But beyond those rarefied corners of the world, those enchanting refuges of the global 1 percent, people and cultures face decline, decay, and demise as their overwhelming realities. Life is lived in the shadow of death: paradigmatically, in the Atlantic slave trade and Native genocide, but also in the many places were poverty, disease, and pollution run rampant. Enchantments, the languages of fools, may try to distract from or deny death, but for most people, in most of the world, death’s shadow over everything and everyone is undeniable. Yet life goes on, sometimes with difficulty, sometimes with joy, often with suspicion of the wisdom of the world that attempts to give order and sense while really denying mortality and securing the status quo.

When we take such contexts—misdescribed as precarious, actually death-bound—at the center rather than margin of our reflection, or our scholarship, our understanding of tradition changes. Well-explicated norms are not the precondition for freedom and flourishing, as Hegel would have it. Engagement with the world, and worldly norms, matter, but what is essential are the punctuations, the encounters with paradox, with the limits of language and life. Tradition, at its best, laces together paradox. It does not capture, hold, and upbuild us; if anything, it purges us. The Bildung approach to tradition, in contrast, takes paradox as ornamentation, or occasion for further maturation. No amount of humbling by listening to the distant other will redeem the intellectual project of these German men.

Jennifer Herdt narrates the Bildung tradition not as a secularizing movement but as an expression of Christian humanism with continuing relevance. The second half of Forming Humanity focuses on a debate within the Bildung tradition about the role of human agency in processes of ethical formation. Herdt is not neutral about what she takes to be the theological stakes of this debate. She turns to Karl Barth to frame her challenge to those within the Bildung tradition who fall back on “autocratic humanism,” understood as a “self-authorizing humanity that has no need of God” (56). The failure of modern theology, for Barth and for Herdt, is the failure to listen for the voice of God, particularly in and through the voice of the neighbor. Herdt writes that “Barth rightly saw that what was at stake in autocratic humanism was a refusal to listen for the Word of God in what is other and different from ourselves” (59).

The last figure whom Herdt considers before returning to Barth in the conclusion is Hegel. As Herdt notes, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is itself a kind of Bildungsroman. Its protagonist, consciousness, sets off on a voyage of discovery. What it discovers is that its sense of itself—who it is, how it knows things, what grounds it has for action—is inadequate. Through experience, it comes to a richer and more adequate sense of what it is and what is authoritative for it—that is, what counts as a reason for belief or action. We, the readers, learn alongside consciousness, which is why Hegel insists in the preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit that its conclusions cannot be presented in advance. Like the bud that becomes a blossom and then a fruit—preserving, overcoming, and fully realizing the truth of the bud—consciousness and the reader are engaged in a process of becoming.

The role of human and divine agency in this process is a matter of debate in Hegel scholarship. On one interpretation—the one that Herdt appears to adopt—God does not just direct this process of becoming but is this process in some important sense. Herdt writes that “Hegel’s God is not fully or perfectly God apart from the historical process; the immanent Trinity is incomplete” (218). Thus, on Herdt’s reading, Hegel avoids one form of autocratic humanism; Hegel’s God is everywhere in the process of Bildung because God is in and through this becoming. But, according to Herdt, this way of avoiding autocratic humanism leads to a different theological problem, namely, that God’s becoming Godself appears to depend on conflict and evil. Herdt writes that, for Hegel, “God does not merely permit evils to happen, and stand in solidarity with sinful, suffering spirit, but is realized in and through this process of happening” (218). On Herdt’s reading of Hegel, the tragedies and catastrophes of history risk becoming part of God’s unfolding perfection. She argues that “Hegel finally regarded the historical process itself as necessary to divine realization. He could not but thereby legitimize historical evils” (241). Hegel’s Bildung avoids the form of autocratic humanism that plagued some members of the Bildung tradition, but, Herdt argues, at great cost.

But it is not obvious that Hegel means by God what Herdt takes him to mean when she criticizes him in this way. One outcome of consciousness’s voyage of discovery in the Phenomenology of Spirit is a different understanding of what “God” and “the absolute” are. At various points in the Phenomenology of Spirit, consciousness posits the absolute as an undifferentiated substance, a wholly transcendent Other, a divine inner voice. Even revealed religion’s understanding of the trinitarian God is, ultimately, sublated (preserved, overcome, fully realized) in philosophy’s conception of the absolute. For Hegel, it is in and through the dialectical method that one can see what is self-sufficient and authoritative. Christianity calls that which is self-sufficient and authoritative “God”; philosophy calls it the “absolute.”

It is only in history that what is self-sufficient and authoritative is achieved. That much is true. But that is because we, fallible humans, are social and historical creatures and our judgments about self-sufficiency and authoritativeness are both situated in social and historical circumstances and emerge from them. History’s “necessity” is necessary in a retrospective sense. We look back to see how we came to be the kinds of creatures that we are, the kinds of creatures for whom this and not that can be taken as authoritative for us.

In the conclusion, Herdt returns to Barth, writing:

The community in which confession arises is not first and foremost a community of virtue, of shared goodness or wisdom. Rather, it is a community of those able to be vulnerable in listening to one another precisely because they acknowledge their sinfulness, and with it their lack of self-sufficiency. “I can confess my faith . . . ,” Barth insists, “only with neighbors, that is with those known to me as fellow believers—and that means known above all as fellow sinners and fellow prisoners.” “We must have found one another mutually, not just in a sentimental brotherly love but in the criminality common to them and to us, and in the pardon for criminals common to them and to us.” Hence, he insists, confession takes place “in the muck and misery of this definite earthly place.” (247–48)

Given the centrality of repentance in Herdt’s final assessment of the importance of the Bildung tradition, it is surprising that she skips over significant parts of Hegel’s own account of repentance. For instance, as Herdt summarizes the final section of the “Spirit” chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit: “Having displayed the bankruptcy of the Enlightenment critique of religion and the unsatisfactory character of the way in which Kant seeks to bring God in to overcome the dualisms he inscribes in morality Hegel turns from the dialectic of spirit to that of Religion” (210–11). But in this summary, Herdt omits one of the most profound sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit, particularly given her concerns: Hegel’s discussion of “evil and its forgiveness.” In that section, Hegel describes the confession and forgiveness between two fallible agents—confession and forgiveness that give rise to their reciprocal recognition. The recognition that emerges is the recognition not of the humanity of the other (in some bland or contentless sense), but of their mutual authority and accountability. Hegel says that this is “a reciprocal recognition which is absolute spirit” (Hegel, PhG §670). We can read our conceptions of “God” back into Hegel here, or we can think about what it might mean for people’s practices of grappling with fallibility and forgiveness to give rise to something that is worth calling “absolute.” I have my own reading of this section, and given our other interpretive differences, I suspect that Herdt would disagree with it. But I suspect that her charge—that Hegel’s repentance gives rise to a premature reconciliation with a God perfected in history—misses Hegel’s insistence on a reciprocal recognition that is premised on repentance and also on forgiveness, on the recognition that we are fallible, that our perspectives are partial, that we had better continue to listen to one another and cast our lots together.

Repentance is crucial to the avoidance of autocratic humanism—for Herdt, Barth, and Hegel; it involves recognizing and admitting our fallibility and remembering that no individual is self-sufficient. This is why, for Hegel, repentance is that which makes reciprocal recognition possible; it is in confession and forgiveness that what Hegel calls absolute spirit appears. But this is not the same as saying that we have achieved a premature reconciliation with a God perfected in history. For Hegel, confession and forgiveness are not a one-and-done kind of thing.

If Barth provides the standard by which the various figures in the Bildung tradition are to be judged, then Hegel may indeed fall short. Hegel’s absolute is not Barth’s God. Nevertheless, I think that Hegel’s account falls short only when the theological terms are set in advance. Living traditions, of course, are more dynamic than that. Terms may be set in advance, but they are never set once and for all. What the terms ought to mean, when they ought to be used, and what the consequences of their application ought to be are among the things that the members of a tradition argue about. Hegel’s project, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, at least, is to follow such arguments about the terms, and to proceed in such a way that the meaning of terms such as spirit, God, and the absolute are given their content only in and through such arguments, in which the flaws of the assumptions we bring to the table are exposed through our experiences—and where we engage in the ongoing practices of holding one another to account for those flaws. This process is Hegel’s Bildung.

*

Forming Humanity presents the Bildung tradition as a living tradition in the MacIntyrean sense: an argument across time. The figures on whom Herdt focuses—including Meister Eckhart, Luther, Boehme, Humboldt, Herder, Goethe, and Hegel—hold that aesthetic and ethical formation are crucial to the achievement of humanity, but argue about what that achievement might look like and how it might come about.

I love MacIntyre’s definition of a living tradition. I love its emphasis on argument alongside continuity. Not least, I love how it changes how we might think about who is included or excluded from our stories about traditions. There’s room for a great deal of disagreement within those stories.

This is one way in which I wonder about Herdt’s broader narrative of the Bildung tradition. Herdt highlights the goods shared by those whose stories she tells, as well as the argument they had or that might be had amongst them about how to understand and to achieve those goods. I have no qualms about including any of those figures in the tradition as she narrates it. But I wonder whether the boundaries around the tradition are too closely drawn. What would her story about the Bildung tradition look like if she included the German Jewish intellectuals who were concerned about the relationship among God, the Jewish people, and religious practice? How would that complicate her story about Christian humanism, and about what Bildung was supposed to achieve? Or what would it look like if she included the women, such as Dorothea von Schlegel and Rahel Varnhagen, who hosted salons in which the very topic of Bildung was discussed, debated, and practiced? Particularly given Herdt’s insistence, in the conclusion of the book, on listening to differently situated others as an aspect of Bildung, how might the shift from the written word to embodied dialogical practice change Herdt’s story about the arguments about what Bildung could be? This would not even take us out of the homes and neighborhoods in which figures such as Humboldt, Goethe, and Hegel lived and wrote, but might develop our picture of the tradition they occupy more fully.

I hesitate to criticize Herdt for the book she did not write. There are always hard choices to be made in crafting a book of this type. The story of the Bildung tradition that Herdt tells has many merits. It is ambitious in its scope, and careful in its details. It is deeply learned, and brings clarity to a set of texts and thinkers and intellectual movements that share concerns, if not conclusions. But in her focus on these texts and thinkers and not others—even others in their midst—Herdt sidesteps important questions: whose humanity, which formation?

Barth and Post-War Humanisms

In the brief respite between total wars, most Christian intellectuals in Europe––from Catholics such as Jacques Maritain and Simon Weil to Protestants such as W. H. Auden and C. S. Lewis––professed an allegiance to humanism, as did an array of confessing and non-confessing Communists, Dada-ists, Futurists, liberals, and Marxists.1 But beyond a general commitment to the human, they tended to agree on little else.

After the Allies dropped the final bombs on Berlin and Dresden, the United States devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the world began to learn that the German National Socialist regime had murdered millions of Jews, disabled persons, homosexuals, political dissidents, and all those people they categorized as not fully human, the moral salience of the human could have collapsed. As Aimé Césaire wrote in 1950, at the end of humanism “there was Hitler.”2 After Hitler, however, there was yet more humanism.

Following the end of the war, intellectuals, politicians, scholars, and scientists across Europe returned to the question of the human. They debated it in periodicals and at conferences devoted to recovering “the human,” “humanism,” and “humanity.” In September of 1949, Karl Barth spent ten days in Geneva at one such event, a conference titled “Pour un nouvel humanisme.” Those invited to Geneva advocated a number of different humanisms, from ontological naturalism and idealism to existentialism and neo-classicism.

Reflecting on the event six months later, Barth described how after he and a French Dominican priest, Pierre Maydieu, had spoken “frankly” as confessing theologians, Karl Jaspers had complained of the “odious pretense to the absolute.” Like the other “respectable modern liberals” in attendance, explained Barth, Jaspers “feared us.”3

But these same “liberals” similarly feared Henri Lefebvre, the only communist in attendance. “Since the beginning” of the conference, interjected one attendee according to Barth, “I have felt caught between two jaws: on the one hand Professor Barth and Reverend Father Maydieu who tell us: ‘Repent and everything will be simple!’ And on the other hand, Henri Lefebvre who answers: ‘Imitate the homo sowjeticus.’” Whereas the “modern liberals” offered humanisms that simply consoled, the communists and theologians pointed to humanisms that “call[ed] one to decision and responsibility, to belief and obedience,” to action (“Humanismus,” 26, 107).

As I read Jennifer Herdt’s Forming Humanity, Barth’s description of the Geneva conference returned again and again. I could hear his refrain: it was all so “menschlich.” We got nowhere, we agreed on nothing, but it was all so nice. In what follows, I want to consider the fears expressed by Jaspers and his fellow “modern liberals” as well as expand on what I take to be Herdt’s own Barthian concerns, doubts even, about Christian Humanism.

Recovering a Christian Humanism with Barth and Hegel

Herdt wants to retrieve a Christian humanism through a reappropriation and reinvention of the German Bildungstradition. She hopes that such a reappropriation will provide a “renovated humanism that accepts the task of the formation of humanity through projects of individual and collective human self-realization as participation in the reditus of creation to a radically transcendent God whose life is overflowing self-gift and invitation into friendship” (9). She calls it a “groping after a form of immanent transcendence” in which Christian love for God leads not to a rejection of this world but sustains a commitment to “universal human solidarity in the face” of this world, this life, and these humans.

Herdt brilliantly succeeds in much of this, showing how elements of the Christian tradition are woven through modern reflections on cultivating, forming, and loving humanity. She shows how the Bildungstradition has been and can continue to be reinvented. She mines it for complex accounts of human agency and finitude; provocative descriptions of the relationship of human development and the natural world; examples of the importance of virtue and tradition in self-consciously modern traditions; instances of the living-on of an imago dei tradition; and, perhaps most clearly, a confidence in the potential of human reason chastened by profound awareness of human finitude and, even, evil.

Although Herdt closely engages an extensive array of historical figures, Barth and Hegel are central to her project. She identifies Hegel as the “culminating figure in the Bildung tradition’s retrieval of a dialogical Christian humanism,” and claims that “as far as the uncompleted theological task of Bildung is concerned, today we remain essentially where Hegel left us” (17). Herdt turns to Barth for what she calls an “immanent critique” of the Bildungstradition. His critique of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century philosophy an theology serves as a check on the Bildungstradition’s tendency to totality, the desire for completion, and the satisfactions that humanity as already been achieved. For Herdt, Barth provides eschatological restraint.

My question for Herdt is whether Barth’s “immanent critique” turns out to be more than a check on undesirable philosophical proclivaties. Is it not, more accurately, an explicit contradiction of the (post-Hegelian) Bildungstradition? And, if this were true, what are the consequences for Herdt’s own project to reinvent a Christian Humanism?

The Catechism of Philosophical History; or, How to Become a Hegelian

In Die Protestantische Theologie im 19 Jahrhundert, Barth wrote that what was “astonishing” about Hegel was not that he considered his own philosophy to be the culmination of the history of philosophy. That was simply an expression of the “self-assurance” Hegel had lent human thought. What was so “astonishing” about Hegel was how quickly he was forgotten, superseded by “the positivism, the pessimism, the materialism, and even neo-Kantianism” that characterized German intellectual life after Hegel.4 Herdt mostly follows Barth in identifying Hegel as a cesura between the speculative idealism, metaphysical aspirations, and foundationalism that characterized philosophy from Reinhold to Hegel and the anti-foundationalism, empiricism, and sense of crisis that characterized it after the Prussian meister.5

Yet, after Hegel these same metaphysical desires and philosophical ideals persisted even as they were reoriented to different ends in ways that prove consequential for Herdt’s reappropriation of the Bildungstradition for a Christian Humanism. This reorientation was especially evident in the transformation of eighteenth-century world or universal history into what I, following Ian Hunter, would call nineteenth-century philosophical history.

In 1789, Friedrich Schiller described world history as a “full and complete view” that enabled certain Europeans to look upon the “long chain of events lead[ing] from the present moment back to the beginning of the human race and link them together like cause and effect.” To “divine” that the

refined European of the eighteenth century is . . . simply a more advanced brother of the contemporary Native North American or the ancient Celt? All these accomplishments, artistic impulses, and experiences, all these creations of reason, have been cultivated and developed in humanity in the space of a few millennia.6

Kant, Hegel, and their acolytes endowed Schiller’s world history with a philosophical framework and metaphysical purpose. In so doing, they helped to transform Bildung from a primarily individual process to a civilizational one that proceeded over millennia. In his various essays on race and lectures on anthropology, Kant intimated how his moral ontology of human being––the purported gap between reason and feeling, mind and body––could be overcome in and through history. Hegel transposed this same moral ontology onto history and thought that the reconciliation of reason and its others (feeling, irrationality, myth, religion) would be achieved through historical progress.

Both right and left Hegelians of the 1830s/40s committed themselves to some version of this philosophical history. They believed that instances of particularity––aesthetic, religious, historical, legal, political––would of historical necessity ultimately be translated from their particular language of origin or representation into systematically articulated universalist, rational social structures and norms. Philosophical history linked individual Bildung to species Bildung.

Although the neo-Hegelians, especially those more to the left, largely rejected Hegel’s metaphysics, they believed in the identity of reason and history, the necessity of historical progress, and historical laws. They argued about the degree and form of these rationalizations and translations through the historical process of this intellectual, moral, and social learning process (or Bildung), but they presumed that the ultimate outcome of the history of reason would be a distinctly and identifiable European modernity. This developmental historical account––not intellectual intuition, self-evident principles, or a priori or deductive reasoning––legitimated the norms, ideals, and practices for which they argued. These philosophical histories were meant to alert one to the ubiquity and tragedy of alienation and induce a desire to participate in their reconciliation through history and, thereby, the realization of human autonomy and freedom.

Philosophical history demonstrated, as the left Hegelian Karl Ludwig Michelet put it in 1843, that the “goal of history is the secularization [Verweltlichung] of Christendom.” He also identified the primary agents of this progressive secularization: The “holy flame of Wissenschaft, which will bring life-giving warmth to all nations and lift up the human race in the image of God in reality, will be carried by the Germans, its true conservators.”7

After the failed Revolution of 1848, Hegelian-inspired philosophical history echoed far beyond self-identified Hegelians. It could be found in the Rankian critical methods of Prussian historians, the histories of science written by natural scientists such as th physiologist and secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences Emil Du Bois-Reymond, or, with renewed fervor, among the student movements that took shape at the turn of the century.

Herdt rightly worries about the entailments of Hegel’s identification of God and history for the question of evil, but does she think a post-Hegelian concept of Bildung can be fruitfully decoupled from the more basic and pervasive identification of Bildung with the story of intellectual, moral, and social development that takes a particular (European) modernity and form of human being as the necessary and normatively compelling outcome? Or should it entirely?

Habermas, Translation, and the Intractable Problem of Bildung

To put my concern differently, what would Herdt make of Jürgen Habermas’s recent arguments that what our current world needs now is more translation between “religious” and “secular” citizens? In a global world defined by sharply divergent social systems, increasing pluralism, and the persistence of religious faith, the most pressing question, writes Habermas, is this:

How can respect for the inviolability of human dignity, and, more generally, a public awareness of the relevance of normative questions, be kept alive in the face of growing and disarming systemic strains on the social integration of our political communities?8

Since 9/11, Habermas has repeatedly suggested that the prospects for shared normative commitments, common goods, and a “new form of [global] consciousness” rest on the possibility of translation between secular society and religious communities.

Habermas’s so-called post-secular notion “translation” is itself a translation of what he termed the “Versprachlichung” of the sacred in Theory of Communicative Action. There Habermas cast modernity as the “development” toward the communicative rationalization of the life world. According to his developmental model, changes from one worldview to another can be explained not only in terms of external factors but also in terms of progressive advances within a broader, more universal “process of learning” in which previous ones are “devalued.”9 He even associated these developments with “mythical” and “modern” worldviews.

Habermas tied this “learning process” and his theory of communicative action more explicitly to a historical account and narrrative of modernity. For Habermas, modernity refers to a particular historical process in which the socialization and expressive functions of ritual practices (religion) “changeover” [übergehen] to communicative action. The “authority of the holy,” he writes, is successively replaced through the “demystification” and “disempowerment” of the sacred. Or what he calls the “making-into-language of basic normative understandings secured in ritual.”10

Considered in these terms, Habermas’s post-9/11 argument that “secular reason” ought to “recover” or “salvage” [Bergen] the cognitive and semantic content of religious communities and traditions by translating it into “secular” forms does not represent a profound shift in his thinking.11 Like his nineteenth-century neo-Hegelian predecessors, Habermas presupposes that religious and secular (or properly philosophical) spheres, just like religious and secular languages, have been and will remain separate and mutually unintelligible. Any act of translation, then, just like any development in the historical learning process, is a movement from one domain or sphere into another; translation, just like neo-Hegelian forms of rationalization, moves in one direction––into a more rational, more universal, more verweltlicht future.

But what might be lost in translation?

Epistemologically and linguistically, religious communities and traditions function as cognitive and semantic Bestand for a (temporally) deficient secular reason. Ethically, the philosophical historical underpinning such acts of translation and encounter between the “religious” and “secular” citizen would, so it seems to me, cultivate a particular disposition, especially in the latter. Even if the “modern” and “secular” citizen imagined by Habermas is willing to engage a “religious” citizen, could she engage with humility, openness, and real interest if she knows that her interlocutor confesses and practices a mythical form of life that will in time be superseded by a more modern, more rational, more secular form of life? That is, the form of life to which she herself remains confidently committed. She assumes a basic disposition to herself and to the non-secular or religious other. She is the product of a distinct Bildung and relates to others in terms of this formation, a formation whose philosophical history has a clear ethical force.12

What would Herdt make of all this? There is a certain irony that in Habermas’s account, at least, the “more expansive conceptions of speech and listening” Herdt hopes for would ultimately be translated into readily recognizable forms of secular reason. Herdt’s theological figures would be transformed into Habermasian interlocutors.

Hegel and Habermas, Barth and Herdt

I think Habermas’s reinterpretation of the Bildungstradition––presumably elaborated in his recently published two-volume book Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019)––serves to highlight what I assume Herdt would consider its own limitations. Habermas’s suggestion that modernity is the result of an intellectual and moral process presumes that “religious” believers and theologians live within less well-developed spheres of existence. Even with his purported rejection of totality, finality, teleology, and unilinearity, Habermas also reveals Barth’s critique of the Bildungstradition to be not only an immanent critique but a contradiction of the Bildungstradition, at least in its post-Kantian, post-Hegelian forms. My point is that if Herdt hopes to recover a Christian Humanism consonant with both the post-Hegelian Bildungstradition and Barth, the chasm she seeks to bridge may be wider than she acknowledges.

In order to bridge this divide, Herdt appeals, for example, to Barth’s account of revelation as listening for the Word of God, a “command and self-revelation [that] always comes to us through our fellow creatures” (Herdt, 18).13 Here and throughout her book, Herdt toggles back-and-forth from specific instances of this self-revelation to invocations of “humanity,” “humanism,” or “the fully human” (e.g., 19, 23, 251). It is at these moments that Herdt’s Hegelian tendency to identify, or at least analogize, fellow creatures in their shared here and now with “humanity,” “the human,” or “Christian humanism” that her rehabilitation of the Bildungstradition threatens to domesticate and ultimately blunt what she calls Barth’s “immanent critique.” Do such analogies not short circuit Barth’s critique or, at least, translate it into neo-Hegelian forms of rationality?

In 1949, Barth considered the various forms of humanism on offer in Geneva meaningful and legitimate “possibilities” for living a human life adequate to its “allotted time.”14 He contended that they were to be engaged, lived out, and cultivated, but also not mistaken as in themselves complete or comprehensive. And this went for Christians as well. “There is no Christian style of life,” he said. “There are styles, yes, in different ages . . . I refuse to imprison Christian life in a certain frame.”15

In the here and now of postwar Europe, Barth thought that it was imperative to reassess what theologians, philosophers, and historians had long taken to be the audacious claim of Christianity to a universalizable and sure moral order. Like any good post-Hegelian thinker, he was guided by the ideal that any self-evident, deduced, or intuited definition or analysis of concepts such as “human” or “God” would bear the all-too-human traces of our finitude.

“Christian humanism,” wrote Barth using an idiom both Feuerbach and Heidigger had used to describe the idea of a Christian philosophy months after the Geneva conference, is a “wooden iron [hölzernes Eisen].” Here, Barth treats “Christian Humanism” as a tool with particular affordances. Those who try to use it for their own purposes are induced to speak in abstractions and airy principles. They become beholden to the very factions they hoped to transcend. Whoever uses it risks self-delusion; once in the fire of this world, it burns to ash. “One must,” he concludes, “abstain” using it.16

Against all this Barth pointed to the witness of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ: “The Gospel is neither a principle nor a system . . . it is spirit and life, the good news of God’s presence and work in Jesus Christ . . . [and it] builds congregations that serve among all people.”17 Understood in this light, a Christian theology would aspire to know and understand the varied and incomplete practices of being human as pointing not only forward through Bildung, but backwards to a person and event beyond itself. Here, ethical practice points; it reports; it testifies to that which it is never fully is. It is, as Barth put it, “Einübung”: a learning process that unfolds in time through accumulated experiences, acquired habits of perception, and at an insurmountable distance from its only legitimate exemplar.18

Regardless of whether one shares Barth’s commitment to grace (or in Hegelian terms, the underlying negativity of his humanism), it seem clear to me that Barth ultimately contradicts all humanisms. Furthermore, Barth’s own critique highlights how an attempt to recover a Christian humanism by appealing to the Bildungstradition might end up, unwittingly or not, casting theologians and “voices” formed in religious communities within a developmental narrative that fates them to irrelevance, translated into “voices” they would not recognize as their own.

I think this situation is precisely what Herdt hopes to avoid by rejecting totality and embracing an eschatological ethical stance. But with both Barth and Hegel as her primary guides can she? What is to prevent another Christian humanism from becoming what it has so often been: a more humane, more moral sheen for all-too-human interests?