becoming oneself: dimensions of 'bildung' and the facilitation of personality development

Becoming oneself

Käthe Schneider(Ed.)

Becoming oneself

Dimensions of ‚Bildung’ and the facilitation of personality development

ISBN 978-3-531-18635-1 ISBN 978-3-531-19156-0 (eBook)DOI 10.1007/978-3-531-19156-0

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EditorProf. Dr. Käthe SchneiderUniversity JenaGermany

Support with funding from „Landesgraduiertenkolleg Protestantische Bildungstraditionen in Mitteldeutsch-land“ of the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena

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The volume Becoming oneself: Dimensions of Bildung and the Facilitation of Person-ality Development has its beginning in the lecture series on “Research of Bildung: Dimensions and Perspectives”, which was held in the frame of the Landesgradui-ertenkolleg Traditions of Protestant Bildung in Central Germany at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena in summer semester 2011. The substantive orientation of the Landesgraduiertenkolleg is determined by the question of what impulses have determined the modern structure of Protestantism, and to what extent Bildung is to be interpreted in terms of its religious implications. The lecture series has thereby focused on the general perspective of Bildung.

At this point it is of special importance for me to thank those who have contrib-uted to the publication of this book. First I wish to warmly thank the authors for their contribution to this volume, as well as the lecture series. The Landesgradui-ertenkolleg is supported with funding from the state of Thuringia. I wish to thank the Free State of Thuringia for providing financial support for the lecture series and the publication. Likewise I wish to thank Mareike Keppler M.A., Janine Näder M.A., and Nikola Herold for editorial support. Finally, I especially wish to thank the VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften for including the volume in its publishing program and for its excellent cooperation.

Jena, December 19, 2011 Käthe Schneider

Foreword

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1 Introduction �� 1Käthe Schneider

2 BecomingOneselfthroughFailureandResolution�� 5Jan Bransen

3 EducationalReciprocityandDevelopingAutonomy:TheSocialDimensionofBecomingOneself �� 29Jérôme Eneau

4 TheNarrativeDimensionofBecomingOneself�� 55Käthe Schneider

5 TheConceptofBildunganditsMoralImplications�� 75Krassimir Stojanov

6 BildungandFreedom�� 89Michael Winkler

Contents

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Prof. Dr. Jan Bransen Behavioural Science Institute and Department of Philosophy, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

Prof. Dr. Jérôme Eneau Department Sciences de l’Education, UFR Sciences Humaines, Place du Recteur Le Moal, Rennes Université Haute Bretagne, 35000 Rennes, France e-mail: [email protected]

Prof. Dr. Käthe Schneider Institut für Bildung und Kultur, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Am Planetarium 4, 07743 Jena, Germanye-mail: [email protected]

Prof.Dr.KrassimirStojanov Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, 85071 Ingolstadt, Germanye-mail: [email protected]

Prof. Dr. Michael Winkler Institut für Bildung und Kultur, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Am Planetarium 4, 07743 Jena, Germanye-mail: [email protected]

List of Contributors

1

In a world characterized by pluralism and change, there are no prescriptions for how people ought to be. They have a choice among a multiplicity of even contra-dictory pictures of man as possible models for their self and are continually con-fronted with the challenge to reflect on and determine a design for self-formation. The phenomenon of Bildung that comes to expression thereby is consequently of fundamental significance.

If we follow the current and topical debates in educational science, Bildung rep-resents a central issue, both nationally and internationally, even if the concept and word Bildung is commonly used in only a few languages.

Despite the centrality of Bildung in research, von Prondczynsky1 has pointed in an historical review to the lack of a relationship between theories of Bildung and research on Bildung: With a few exceptions, there is research on Bildung with-out theories of Bildung and conversely. The conceptual categories of theory and research are here understood as comparing and contrasting the theory of Bildung with empirical research on Bildung. The newer biographical research, in the view of von Prondczynsky is one way to empirically determine the vagueness of the con-cept of Bildung.

The non-relationship of the theory of Bildung to empirical research on Bildung is, on the one side, clear from studies that claim to be devoted to empirical Bil-dung research, but in which Bildung is reduced to, among other things, knowledge,

1 cf. von Prondczynsky, 2006.

K. Schneider (ed.), Becoming oneself, DOI 10.1007/978-3-531-19156-0_1,© VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften | Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2012

1Introduction

Käthe Schneider

K. Schneider ()Institut für Bildung und Kultur, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Am Planetarium 4, 07743 Jena, Germanye-mail: [email protected]

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abilities or competencies.2 In studies of the sociology of Bildung, e.g., that offer an important foundation of policies for Bildung, Bildung is operationalized above all by the amount of time spent in school and training, or by the highest certifica-tion achieved in school and training or by measures of the richness or poverty of competence, whereby the competencies specified are, for example, competence in reading, mathematics or the natural sciences.3 Poverty of Bildung would accord-ingly be expressed in measures of lack of certification or of the poverty of cognitive competence! Furthermore, we see that the measures of educational certificates and measures of competencies do not converge.4

The non-relationship of empirical research on Bildung to the theory of Bildung is displayed, on the other side, e.g., in the desirability for research, to make it pos-sible to connect the important processes of Bildung implied in theories of Bildung, as, e.g., “renunciation” or “openness” to empirical research. Since the 1980s there have, to be sure, been tendencies toward making it possible to connect the theory of Bildung to empirical research.5 Empirical researchers of Bildung must, however, consider that all empirical research clearly comes up against limits set by the pos-sibility of human freedom.6

To reduce Bildung to knowledge or even to acquired school degrees would not correspond to the phenomenon of Bildung. Competencies or knowledge are at most necessary, but by no means sufficient conditions for a person’ s self-determination. The epistemologically determined processes of renunciation and openness are al-ways closely tied to a person’ s value decisions.

Before this background of Bildung, the articles collected in the present volume attempt to clarify the basic dimensions of Bildung. The central concern is to deter-mine the preconditions of self-becoming and to show their significance and their perspectives for educational science and pedagogical practice. In all the articles, fundamental dimensions are understood as precondition of self-becoming.

Jan Bransen explores in his contribution Becoming Oneself through Failure and Resolutiona well-known but peculiar feature of human life. People are apparently capable of really becoming themselves, sometimes after many, many years of self-alienation. How is this possible? How can identity be an emergent property of our lives? What can it mean to say of people that they fail to be themselves?

2 cf. Götz, Frenzel & Pekrun, 2009.3 cf. Allmendinger, Ebner & Nicolai, 2009.4 ibid.5 cf. Ehrenspeck, 2009.6 cf. Esser, 2011.

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This chapter tries to make sense of this phenomenon without taking recourse to implausible assumptions about deeply hidden true essences. The more general claim of the chapter is that we can learn much about the processes of self formation by investigating the possibility of losing and regaining oneself.

The phenomenon under consideration is approached from a naturalistic per-spective: what properties does an ordinary natural being need to possess to be ca-pable of failing to be itself? It is argued that such beings, notably persons, should be capable of thinking about alternatives of themselves. An exemplary situation is described in which people cannot but address the question of which alternative of themselves is the most appropriate one. In such a situation people experience reaching a deadlock. It is argued that such experiences are crucial to make sense of the phenomenon of losing and regaining oneself, and that the latter is to be under-stood as the experience of overcoming the deadlock situation. Certain standards of success are discussed which are related to the experience of peace of mind.

At the heart of Jérôme Eneau’ s work Educational Reciprocity and Developing Au-tonomy: the Social Dimension of Becoming Oneself lies the idea of reciprocity. By studying the exchanges that take place in the gift-gift paradigm, reciprocity allows us to envisage the different ways in which the other can participate not only in the construction of the adult learner’ s autonomy as an individual, but also and more generally in his or her development as a person, a responsible actor, a citizen and party to the social contract that allows us to live together.

In research on adult education and self-directed learning, work on how exactly to define autonomy and what it is has occupied a prominent place since the 1970s. Yet on the two opposite sides of the Atlantic work comes out of different traditions and there are still many ambiguities remaining, among them the recurring paradox of the role of the other in the construction of a learner’ s autonomy. On the French side, over the past years some researchers have highlighted the major role played by interpersonal relationships and exchanges in the construction of learning in adult-hood and more generally for the development of autonomy for the adult learner

Käthe Schneider postulates a narrative dimension of Bildung in her contribution The Narrative Dimension of Becoming Oneself. The determination of the self is cen-tral to Bildung: In this process of self-determination, narration plays a key role. The process of Bildung, which Schneider views as reflexive and aimed at the formation of the self, is closely linked with narration, as a fundamental aspect of human ex-perience and understanding. The thesis on which Schneider bases this paper is that narration, especially also telling a person’ s life story, strengthens the sense of self and makes sense of objects. In her discussion, she clarifies and justifies this thesis.

In the paper The Concept of Bildung and its Moral Implications Krassimir Sto-janov argues that the central topic of the concept of Bildung is the individual’ s pro-

1 Introduction

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cess of world-encountering understood as necessary condition of individual’ s self-development. Stojanov’ s first attempt in the article is to reconstruct Humboldt’ s and Hegel’ s explorations on the interplay between Self and World as the kernel di-mension of Bildung. In a next step Stojanov discusses the ways, in which the classic notion of the world-relatedness of self-development is being spelled out within the framework of the contemporary neo-analytic Philosophy – namely as relatedness to conceptual contents; a relatedness that comes into play in one’ s practicing the social game of reasoning and argumentation. Stojanov’ s claim is that one’ s becom-ing capable of playing that game requires one’ s having sustainable experiences with empathy, respect, and social esteem. The conclusion is that these three forms of social relations imply the moral standards that educational institutions and single educators shall meet, if they shall be capable of initiating and supporting Bildung.

Michael Winkler presents in the paper Bildung and Freedom a sophistic argu-ment. It scrutinizes the modern debates on Bildung as a kind of highly functional gossip to reproduce society under the modern conditions of liquidity and frailty. To that end it first reconstructs a basic theory of Bildung, of how this may be identi-fied in a long tradition of philosophical reflection. Secondly it shows that modern discourses on Bildung miss a substantial sense and semantic content, even if the term is used in the so called evidence based studies on education and teaching. In a third part the papers argues that Bildung still carries on with a convincing idea. Although set free by the immanent processes of modernisation people still trust in an intuition that Bildung will give them a human perspective of life. For that the concept of Bildung supplies an element of resistance even to the devastating processes of modernity.

References

Allmendinger J, Ebner C, Nicolai R (2009) Soziologische Bildungsforschung. In: Tippelt R, Schmidt B (eds) Handbuch Bildungsforschung. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wi-esbaden, pp 47–70

Ehrenspeck Y (2009) Philosophische Bildungsforschung: Bildungstheorie. In: Tippelt R, Schmidt B (eds) Handbuch Bildungsforschung. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wi-esbaden, pp 155–169

Esser AM (2011) Vernunft in der Entwicklung. Kants Konzept der Erziehung und Bildung. In: Hutter A, Kartheiniger M (eds) Bildung als Mittel und Selbstzweck. Korrektive Erin-nerung wider die Verengung des Bildungsbegriffs. Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg, pp 16–41

Götz T, Frenzel AC, Pekrun R (2009) Psychologische Bildungsforschung. In: Tippelt R, Schmidt B (eds) Handbuch Bildungsforschung. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wi-esbaden, pp 71–91

von Prondczynsky A, (2006) Bildungstheorie—Bildungskritik—Bildungsforschung. Zum Wandel der Bildungssemantik. Z Philos Soz 2(2):7–36

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2.1 Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to show how we can account for a most peculiar feature of human life: i.e. the need to address the real possibility of failing to be ourselves. I am thinking of situations such as these:

1. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day we witness a butler, Stevens, recalling his days of service under the late Lord Darlington, a German sympa-thizer, and more especially his never-defined relationship with Miss Kenton, the head housekeeper. Stevens remains unable to voice his love for Miss Kenton, but he comes to realize that he may have failed to live his own life in professionally and trustingly serving his misguided lord for all those years.

2. Fatima, a young Islamic woman who came to Western Europe as the child of an immigrant, likes to dance and have fun at school parties but also wants to be a good daughter to her traditional father. She is convinced that her problem is not a matter of loyalty to either her friends or her father, but a matter of not knowing how to be true to herself.

3. Martin is an alcoholic—or at least that is what other people say. He knows he drinks a lot, fair enough. But he is in full control—or at least that is what he is convinced of. A friend of him just lost his wife. It is either me or the booze, she had said. Martin knows this much: better get rid of a woman who is forcing your hand.


2Becoming Oneself Through Failure and Resolution

Jan Bransen

J. Bransen ()Behavioural Science Institute and Department of Philosophy, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

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4. Charles is a rather humble, quiet man, inclined to listen, mainly, when he is at a party, a reception or a family dinner. He can be quite funny, but he prefers to shy away from center stage. This night, however, he dramatically acts out of charac-ter. Making jokes, telling rather personal stories, laughing loudly. He just does not seem to be himself.

To be sure, there are many ways to rephrase stories such as these. One may wish to avoid the rather confusing descriptions in terms of persons that fail to be them-selves. But in this chapter I shall start from the assumption that phenomenologi-cally speaking we sometimes experience it just like that, as a failure to be ourselves. I shall therefore try to account for such experiences in a way that does not imply implausible claims about deeply hidden true essences. The more general claim of this chapter is that we can learn much about the processes of self formation by in-vestigating the possibility of losing and regaining oneself.

This chapter contains six main sections. In Sect. 2.2, I make some distinctions to specify some of the features of those entities, human beings, of which it makes sense to say that they can fail to be themselves. Section 2.3 discusses the concept of an alternative of oneself, a concept I claim is needed to account for the phenomenon of failing to be oneself in a way that does not involve a metaphysically problematic story about an original blueprint and a mistaken copy. In Sect. 2.4, I shall discuss in some detail the experience of reaching deadlock. This, I argue, is a crucial experi-ence to come to a proper appreciation of what it could mean to be true to oneself. In Sect. 2.5, I explore the conditions of a life that could result in reaching deadlock, after which I discuss, in Sect. 2.6, how someone facing deadlock might get over it and thereby might improve his way of being himself. This involves, as I discuss in Sect. 2.7, meeting certain standards indicated by the experience of peace of mind. Becoming oneself in this way, I claim, is not a trivial but a highly significant feature of living one’s life.

2.2 Being Capable of Failing to be Oneself

Stones, trees, hutches and flocks, to name but a few items, cannot fail to be them-selves. They just are what they are, with no possibility at all for there to be some distance between what they are, essentially, and what they are, existentially. These words from Sartre may seem to help, for a start, but as soon as we would focus on essences and existences, and on the related concepts of pour-soi and en-soi it is likely that we easily create more confusion than understanding. Looking at the dif-

J. Bransen

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ferences between the ways in which stones, trees, hutches and flocks can merely be themselves might be more instructive.

Stones and trees differ quite dramatically from one another. The issue is not just a matter of a difference between inanimate, or dead, matter on the one hand and living beings on the other hand, although that is obviously significant. But just on a more superficial level stones do not seem to change, or change very, very slowly, requiring external influences and a very long time-scale to make those changes perceptible. Trees, however, change a lot. They do so, not merely as a matter of environmental influences, but also in virtue of their inner dynamics. Trees follow a developmental trajectory. Trees are one of those things Aristotle commented upon when he faced the problem of change and identity and conceived of a solution in terms of the concept of development, entailing the concept of a final cause and the idea of actualizing potentialities.

It is this latter idea, the distinction between what a thing is, actually, and what a thing is, potentially, that is helpful in beginning to understand what it might entail to say of something that it fails to be itself. Stones, for instance, are actually just stones, but almost any stone, even though it is actually just a stone, may at the same time be a biface, potentially. Whether or not a specific stone becomes an actual biface is, however, crucially a matter that extends the stone itself and that depends on the attitude and the capacities of a potential biface-user. This seems a remark-able difference between stones and trees. An acorn becomes an oak, whether or not there is a subject to shape the acorn into an oak, or take the resulting tree for an oak. But just how much of a blueprint is present in the acorn and how much causal efficacy, if at all, can be provided for by this blueprint is unclear.

There is an obvious difference, in this respect, between a tree and for instance a hutch, say a rabbit hutch. Every rabbit hutch is constructed, somehow, sometime by someone. Rabbit hutches do not fall out of the sky, just by accident. There must have been a plan, a blueprint of how the hutch would look like if the construc-tor would succeed in executing this plan. Such a blueprint functions, according to Aristotle, as the constructor’s final cause. He undertakes his job, intending to con-struct the imagined perfect rabbit hutch. But as things often happen, reality does not cooperate as nicely as one would have hoped for. The actual result is therefore often quite removed from what the hutch potentially could have been. This idea of a blueprint and the companion idea of a less than perfectly cooperative reality gives us a way of thinking about something as not being what it could have been, or even more strongly as not being what it should have been, what it was intended to be.

But, obviously, the materials out of which someone may construct a rabbit hutch have nothing intrinsically to do with the blueprint of the rabbit hutch. The piece of wood, say, that serves in the completed hutch as its left hind leg would not have

2 Becoming Oneself Through Failure and Resolution

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missed its final destination if it would have ended up being the hutch’s right front leg. Pieces of wood do not have a final destination. Things have many potentialities and which one of those becomes actual is most of the time merely a matter of accidental luck. This is definitely the case with construction materials, but it is also, in almost any relevant sense, the case with the potentialities of a tree. Whether it ends up be-ing nine meters high, or with just a few heavy branches facing north, is merely ac-cidental. Of course, trees cannot become giraffes or vulcanos, to mention just some very silly potentialities that any tree lacks. But this is not to say that there is just one potentiality that should become actual. There are many, countlessly many ways for a tree to be the tree it is. And there seems to be no point in distinguishing between the many potentialities of a tree, marking a specific subset as more apt for actualisation.

Compare this with the form and direction of a flock of birds. The spectacular phenomenon, for instance, of hugh flocks of starlings forming the most magical shapes in the air is well-known, and even though we have something of a story about why starlings flock (safety against predators) and are capable of describing the transformations of a flock with some very simple and basic mathematical for-mulas, it is obvious that none of all these possible shapes are somehow privileged. Some potentialities may be more likely, or may become more likely given the details of a flock’s history, but, as we also know from mathematical models of flocking, the process is unpredictable. A similar kind of story applies to the potentialities of a tree. There are many and none of them is privileged.

The differences between stones, trees, hutches and flocks gives us the ingredi-ents of a possibly plausible account of what it would be to say of some entity that it failed to be itself. Unlike the stone, such an entity should undergo perceptible changes on a relatively short time-scale. Unlike the flock, such an entity should have a limited number of potentialities captured in a blueprint, potentialities that are privileged, that should be actualized over time. Unlike the hutch, the blueprint determining the potentialities to be actualized should be internal to the constitu-ents of the entity. And unlike the tree, an entity that can fail to be itself should be capable of actualizing a potentiality that is wrong, that diverts from the blueprint in a normatively significant way.

Along these lines we can give the beginnings of an account of our human condi-tion as entailing the possibility of failing to be ourselves. We change over time. We actualize potentialities. Some of these potentialities are privileged. Some of them are wrong. I shall argue in this chapter, however, that the image of a blueprint deter-mining which potentialities are privileged and which are wrong is mistaken.

But first I need to say just a bit about what it means for an entity to really have potentialities, alternative possibilities.

A ball can move through a pinball machine in many different ways. There are many possible routes the ball might take, but it does not really make sense to say

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that the ball has many possibilities. Does it make sense to say that there are alterna-tive possibilities for the ball? If we would want to say things like that, it seems we need a subject, capable of imagination. I, for instance, can imagine the many ways the pinball might roll through the playfield, in anticipation. I can look at the ma-chine and imagine how the ball might roll from the moment it is hit by the plunger to the moment it leaves the game. But if there is no relation at all between on the one hand the alternative possibilities I imagine and on the other hand the ball and its movements, it still does not make much sense to talk about these possibilities as real possibilities for the ball. We need some link between the anticipated trajectories and the real movements of the ball to make sense of a language in which alternative possibilities are a reality as possibilities. I may, for instance, think about two alterna-tive routes for the ball, one in which I use a flipper to bounce the ball back in the game and one in which I do not touch the flipper button and let the ball leave the game. These two possibilities, it seems, become real possibilities in virtue of two of my capacities: my imagination which allows me to pay attention in anticipation to either of these two possible scenarios; and my capacity to intervene, to choose which of these possibilities will be actualized.

Thinking clearly about these capacities is not easy. The philosophy of free will is loaded with complexities and I am not going to engage with that here. But if there are real possibilities and if someone is able to actualize the wrong possibility—that is, if someone can fail to be himself—then it will be someone with at least three ca-pacities. One of these is the capacity to intervene in a course of events. I leave that one for others to discuss. It is a very general precondition for the kind of experience I am interested in here.1 I shall restrict my attention to the other two capacities. Firstly, someone who can fail to be himself should be someone with imagination, someone who is capable of imagining alternatives of himself, alternatives that are in the relevant sense real possibilities. And, secondly, someone who can fail to be himself should be capable of knowing, or appreciating, that some of these real pos-sibilities are privileged, are meant to be actualized.

2.3 Alternatives of Oneself

I have elsewhere developed the distinction between alternatives for oneself and al-ternatives of oneself 2, a distinction that will be relevant for the kind of experience I try to account for in this chapter. Linguistically speaking the distinction is simple and straightforwardly enough. Alternatives for oneself are options one can choose

1 Steward (2012).2 cf. Bransen (1996, 2000, 2008).


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from, say pushing or not pushing the flipper button. Such alternatives are available as possible courses of action to agents capable of choosing. In the case of the pin-ball, these alternatives are alternatives for an agent, say, for me, when I am playing a game on the pinball machine. These alternatives involve alternative routes the pinball may follow through the playfield, but it is obvious that these alternative routes are not alternatives for the pinball. Nothing can be an alternative for a pin-ball, because a pinball lacks the required capacities: imagination and free will. At the same time these different routes are alternatives of the trajectory a pinball may take through the pinball machine’s playfield. That is just a matter of the syntax of the prepositions “for” and “of ”.

With respect to the reflexive pronoun “oneself ” these different prepositions mark significant features of what may be involved in choosing different courses of action. Look, for instance, at the differences between these two choices:

1. Eating a croissant or eating cereals with yoghurt.2. Buying a croissant or stealing a croissant.

On a superficial level these choices may look quite similar. Each sentence, one may think, presents two alternatives for oneself, suggesting that the sentences together describe a total of four different alternative courses of action. However, the second sentence does not merely present alternatives for oneself, but also, and by the same token, alternatives of oneself. Why? Because the second sentence presents one with a choice that will have a rather dramatic effect on the kind of person one will turn out to become by making the choice. One can either become an honest citizen who is slightly poorer or a thief who has to run and look out for the police. Of course, something happens too with the person who makes the first choice, between eat-ing a croissant or eating cereals with yoghurt. Choosing the croissant will give you slightly more greasy hands, but such a change is merely temporary, accidental, and external. It does not affect or concern your identity. And that is what the distinc-tion between alternatives for and of oneself is about. A choice between alternatives for oneself is a choice between alternative courses of action that will leave one’s identity untouched. But a choice between alternatives of oneself is precisely a choice between two ways of forming one’s identity, or in the words used above: a choice between actualizing either this or that potentiality.

In my earlier work the main aim of the distinction between alternatives for and of oneself is to point our attention to illuminating reinterpretations of apparently innocent choice situations. Many choices, I argue, have hidden identify-forming effects and focusing on these effects may urge us to reconsider habitual, mindless ways of living our lives. In this chapter my aim is slightly different. My interest

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here is primarily in questions of identity underlying the concept of an alternative of oneself. In what sense is an alternative of oneself a real potentiality of the person one is? Relatedly and for present purposes more importantly, in what sense can such an alternative of oneself be privileged? What does it mean to say about such alternatives that they are meant to be actualized, or conversely, that they are wrong, mistaken?

The question is not about forms of social or natural aptitude. Stealing a croissant is wrong, morally, and so there are moral reasons why “being a thief ” is a potential-ity that is not meant to be actualized. But that is not what I am interested in. Nor am I interested in other forms of meeting external norms. If you are a violinist, say, you should practice, care for your violin and bow, and wear a proper dress if there is a performance of your orchestra. But my question precedes these concerns. My question is about an internal normativity, if that is the right phrase. In this example my question would be: should you become, or have become, a violinist in the first place? Are there alternatives of you that are privileged, meant to be actualized, be-cause of you, of who you are, because of the intrinsic value for you of this alternative of you?

It has been argued that the question is empty; that it is meaningless, confused.3 It has been argued that there can be no answers that could qualify as appropriate. I am not inclined yet to accept these arguments nor this conclusion. The question seems to haunt Stevens, the butler in The Remains of the Day. He became a butler, a very good one. Professional all over. But looking back at his live, appreciating—slightly with bitterness—how good he has been, as a butler, he is confused and wonders whether he should have been a butler in the first place, or, given that he is a butler all over, whether he should have been this particular butler of this particular Lord, neglecting possibilities that may have been more privileged, alternatives of himself that actually were meant to be realized rather than the butler he turned out to have become. And the question haunts Fatima, the young Islamic woman. After all, it is not because of other people’s expectations that she wants to be faithful to her father and also wants to have fun at dance parties. It is because of these expectations that she is having a difficult time figuring out how to realize the alternative of herself she considers to be privileged, the one meant to be realized. It is not so obvious that she is mistaken about herself.

But neither is it obvious how best to make sense of the question. The problem is, after all, that these alternatives of oneself are identity-forming. The problem is one of bootstrapping.4 If I become a violinist, it is in virtue of the choices I make that I

3 see Bruckner (2009).4 Schick (1997, pp. 75–77).


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come to have the identity of someone who wants to be a violinist. So you can ask me about the fact whether I consider “being a violinist” to be a privileged alternative of me. But then, when I am in fact already a violinist, I most likely, and trivially, will confirm this. If you would, however, have asked me before—if you would find a way to ask my rudimentary, underdetermined self (if that is the plausible phrase here) whether he (whether “I”) would consider “being a violinist” to be a privileged alter-native of me, it is unclear whether he would have sufficient reason to give an answer at all, and if he does, it seems unclear what weight we should give to his answer.5

Let me recapitulate and identify the question that should be addressed if we are to make sense of the experience of failing to be oneself. Stevens, the butler, looks back at his life and wonders whether the alternative of himself he actualized over the years is the wrong one. Should he not have lived a different life? The normativity at stake in this question is not a matter of morality, socialization, adaptive survival or any other form of external aptitude. The normativity in question is a matter of authenticity, for lack of a better word. The issue is that given who he is,who he really is, whether there were privileged potentialities, identified, let us say, in a blueprint safeguarded in his “deep self ”. Is there an alternative that should have been actual-ized, that was meant to be actualized, such that he really failed to be true to himself by having become this particular butler of this particular Lord.

It is this issue of being true to oneself and of failing to be oneself that I want to take seriously. And it is this issue that I want to rescue from popular misconstruals based on an essentialist, Platonic model of “original” and “copy”. I used bits of such an essentialist model above by talking about a blueprint and about a “deep self ”. But an essentialist model faces two very obvious and serious problems.

The first is its fixed, static nature. Human beings unfold over time and develop their identity over time. Any person’s identity is seriously contingent, determined as it is by all those identity-forming choices we make over our life span. Accepting this contingency, yet appreciating the justifying normative constraints of our identity is at the heart of my problem. A Platonic model solves the question of contingency in a drastic, far too static and essentialist way, by suggesting that all contingency is really a matter of the way in which the actualized copy is a shadow of the real, i.e. ideal original. In the final analysis, however, such a model is bound to accept a property-less core self, a Cartesian soul, but that is obviously also a reductio ad absurdum of the very idea.6

The second problem is the reverse side of the first. The original that is supposed to contain a blueprint of the kind of person one should become, is in principle

5 I discuss this problem at length in my 2004.6 cf. Cuypers (2001).

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unknowable. Think about the question of finding out whether or not becoming a violinist would be the right, i.e. the authentic thing to do for your child. How would you be able to know unless by just trying out? But trying out involves tampering with what I have elsewhere analysed as your child’s interest-defining desires.7 Trying to figure out the contours of the original person your child is meant to become is necessarily an interpretative affair, a matter of hammering out a copy of your child. We may find out, in due course, whether or not your child will flourish as a violin-ist, whether being a violinist is her all over. But nothing in this process would justify us in claiming that we finally discovered the original through all these exercises with all these alternative copies of your child. In terms of what there is to know, it is copies all the way down. And, likewise, in terms of a well-determined blueprint, it is, again, copies all the way down. The Platonic model of an original behind the copy is defunct.

In the next section I shall introduce and discuss the idea of a “deadlock scenario”, an idea, I shall argue, that allows us to make sense of the justifying normativity implied by our identity while accepting at the same time the contingency of our identity.

2.4 The Deadlock Situation

Late one night, you find yourself in the kitchen, holding the refrigerator door open and peeking inside, but you have forgotten what it is that you are looking for. Is it a piece of cheese, or some orange juice, or perhaps a bottle of beer that you wanted out of the fridge? Perhaps you wanted to check on the supply of milk and eggs. You are befuddled, and feel foolish—even a bit helpless. You feel sort of frozen, as if in a paralysis, in the middle of an action.8

This citation from Jaegwon Kim describes a situation that is fairly commonly known even though it is, fortunately, comparatively rare. It is a quite innocent situ-ation of reaching deadlock and an easy one to solve too. Most of the time you de-cide to return in vain to the place from where you came, hoping to remember your original reason for visiting the kitchen and for looking in the fridge. Often this works. But my interest in the deadlock situation and in the paradigm of Looking in the Fridge is a matter of the way in which lacking a unified, sincere, accurate and articulate reason-citing description of what you are doing, makes it impossible for you to complete the action you find yourself in the middle of. Note the different ingredients of the deadlock situation:

7 Bransen (2004).8 Kim (1998).


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1. You find yourself in the middle of an action.2. You cannot complete this action—you will feel frozen, paralysed, forced to

retrace your steps—unless you have an appropriate description at your disposal of what you are doing.

3. Such an appropriate description cites the reason for your action, and is further-more characterised by being articulate, accurate, sincere, and unified.

Looking in the Fridge is a deadlock situation that merely concerns a choice between alternatives for oneself: cheese, orange juice, beer. But it is relatively easy to imagine how the abstract scheme of such a deadlock situation might be exactly similar in case the paralysis would arise out of a choice between alternatives of oneself. Fatima might experience, even literally, how her voice falters when she is about to ask her father permission to visit a school party. She then finds herself in the middle of an action she cannot complete, because there is no description available to her of her action that would, or even could, cite in an articulate, accurate, sincere and unifed way her reason for choosing to be a party girl in the eyes of her father.

In the remainder of this chapter I shall use the deadlock situation as a crucial experience agents need to acknowledge two different modes of being. The first mode is that of failing to be themselves. The second is that of anticipating a way of resolving their failure and of becoming themselves again in a more significant mode. The more significant mode in question is a matter of authenticity, again for lack of a better word. It is captured, or so I argue, by the normativity entailed in the four qualities the description of an action should have in order to be really capable of completing precisely this action. These qualities are:

1. Articulate. There are many actions we can perform just like that, in a habitual, mindless way. There is a tremendous lot of automaticity that governs most of our movements, without the need for a well-determined, articulate description of what it is we are doing or why we are doing it. This is so, even with most of our actions in Looking in the Fridge. We hold the door open. We peek inside. We frown. We let our eyes wander through the fridge. We may even move our hand and reach out for… well, for what? That is where we need articulateness. In a deadlock situation we lack an articulate identification of the “what” of an action such that the intended action cannot be performed. There is an obvious problem here, a problem that is precisely at the heart of the deadlock situation: how can an action be intended without there being an articulate description of it?

2. Accurate. Being truthful is a two-fold accomplishment, comprising accuracy and sincerity.9 Accuracy is directed outwards, sincerity is directed inwards. A

9 see Williams (2004).

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description of the action I find myself in the middle of is accurate if it truth-fully locates me as the agent in an unfolding scenario. I cannot be checking my email when I am looking in the fridge, but I may be checking the milk supply. An accurate description identifies the appropriate affordance my action is the correct response to.10 That may be why Fatima is really in a deadlock when she is looking in the eyes of her father: he does not afford her to identify herself as a girl who wants to have fun at dance parties.

3. Sincere. People are quite good in adapting themselves to what they conceive of as the obvious, normal, required, “only game in town” kind of action. We are quite good in neglecting an edifying reflective attitude11 towards our own deeper motives. It is not difficult to imagine how Fatima will continue to please her father on the one hand and how she will try to get along lightly with her friends at school on the other hand, pleasing them too, slightly feeling uncomfortable about how to squeeze all her promises and obligations into one course of action. The deadlock situation as an experience concerned with alternatives of oneself is crucially a matter of sincerity. It requires a description of an agent in an unfold-ing scenario that truthfully acknowledges that the agent is aware of herself being this agent and that she herself affords her to identify herself as this agent. That is, in matters of sincerity it is not so much the case that the environment constitutes an affordance for the agent to respond appropriately, but rather that the agent’s identity constitutes such an affordance. The deadlock situation I am interested in, is a situation in which for instance Martin, the alcoholic, really cannot afford himself one more opportunity to get drunk. Think of it in terms of nausea, of really feeling disgusted, abhorred, repugnant to continue in this self-denying way of acting. Think of how Fatima will look at her father, as if looking in the fridge, simply being unable to complete the insincere action she finds herself in the middle of. That is the deadlock situation I argue is relevant to the experience of failing to be oneself.

4. Unified. A reason-citing description of one’s action tends to be singular and coherent. The description, that is. “What are you doing?” “I am looking in the fridge to check the milk supply.” Actions do not tend to be that singular nor that coherent. We behave in more or less inarticulate ways, often being quite unable to describe, explain or understand what exactly it is that we do. Other people interpret what we are doing, respond to their interpretations of our actions,

10 The concept of affordance plays an important role in contemporary ecological psychology. Roughly, an affordance is a clue in the environment that indicates possibilities for action. It was originally introduced by Gibson (1977).11 see Sect. 2.6.


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thereby transforming our actions into joint accomplishments that most of the time fit loosely in ongoing narratives. Fatima’s father will endorse some story of what he takes his daughter to be doing, of what he heard her say about what she does at school. And so will her friends at school. And so will she, herself. Between the lines of things said and unsaid Fatima may continue for as long as she can stand it to please her parents and friends, to act as ambivalently as required, to cope with life in ways that are as equivocal and as non-committal as possible. The deadlock situation brings such self-deceiving ambivalence to an end. What needs to be completed, in such a situation, is a singular and coherent action, one individuated by a unified, reason-citing description. Absent such a description, the agent blocks, unable anymore to act.

2.5 How to Provoke a Deadlock Situation?

Arguing against some of my views on authenticity, Donald Bruckner gives us a small story about a banker who considers giving up his life of banking for a life of sheep farming.12 As I read the story it is seriously underdetermined and it is not about alternatives of oneself, but merely about some alternatives for oneself, some optional courses of action. Let me explain this by emphasizing the relevance of a deadlock situation for questions of authenticity, for questions of being true to oneself and of failing to be oneself.

Suppose you are, indeed, a banker. And suppose you wonder how your life would look like if you would have become a sheep farmer instead. You would have different values, would do many different things and would make different choices for you as well as for your beloved ones. The world would be a different one. You would be someone else. You would be someone else. Well, how are we to imagine that? Would you still be you, while being someone else? Or would we merely be talking about another world containing another person, a person that somehow, somewhere, sometime occupied one and the same “spot” as you in a predecessor world out of which both the actual and this imagined alternative world could have developed? Can you—you—really, literally, be someone else?

I argue that this is not an empty question for those of us who face and resolve a deadlock situation. It may be an empty question for others, people in the middle of lives that unfold in quasi-automatic ways. So, does our banker face a deadlock situation? Suppose our banker in the actual world W1 has a wild imagination and

12 see Bruckner (2009, p. 357).

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begins to dream about being a sheep farmer. Suppose he imagines another world W2 in which he really is a sheep farmer. However he gets along with this fantasy, he must find some place for W2 in the actual world W1. Suppose that every now and then he dreams away, imagining this nonreal, potential world, W2, a world he “visits” in those spare moments. Let us assume that W2 is real enough in those moments, and let us further assume that those spare moments in W1 in which our banker “actually lives” in W2 are enough, from our banker’s perspective, for W2. He does not really want to be a sheep farmer, but merely wants to dream away, some-times, imagining that he is a sheep farmer.

Such a story simply makes sense. We are well-acquainted with many such sto-ries, varying in all kinds of ways and degrees. We imagine ourselves in various ways. Charles, the humble, quiet man from the introduction above, may imagine himself being very extravert, bravely flamboyant. He may try to enact this imagined alter-native. We often enact portions of such imagined worlds in our real lives. When I play football, I imagine, and enact, being a real football player. Transvestites may often have some kind of a double life, living part of their lives as an ordinary male adult in world W1and another part of their lives as an irresistible, stunning female in an imagined, fictitious quasi-world W2. On the whole such a double life may be a balanced, unified life, albeit probably not the most easy kind of life to live. But most of us will have slightly similar problems of themselves too. There will often be some corners in our lives that rebel a bit against the main, overarching narrative. We may, for instance, regret our ineradicable indulgence when our neighbours transgress what we feel are private boundaries, or, on the positive side, forget about our timid-ity when playing music on stage. Such diverting bits may cause difficulties, may cause little cracks in our narratives, but most of the time they will merely remain inconveniences we can quite well live with. And so may our banker with his fantasy of being a sheep farmer.

But things may become more drastic, up to the point of reaching deadlock. If so, this will be highly significant about one’s identity. The banker’s fantasy of be-ing a sheep farmer may get a firm hold on him. Should such a drastic experience of sincerely being captivated by an imagined alternative of oneself occur, then it should be based in many significant clues concealed in one’s narrative over the years. Think about Martin, the alcoholic. We may give him many credits in believ-ing that he is a willing addict, as he reports. He may be happy just with the way his life unfolds. He may be a loner, more comfortable without a girl friend. It just may be. But there will be another story of his life too, if only in the remembered hopes and wishes of his mother who cannot believe he is born to be a drunk. We may take pains to trigger Martin’s sensitivity for this other story. We may be his friends, his parents, his children. We may hope to drive Martin to the experience of seri-


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ous, abhorrent nausea. We may hope to push him towards his deadlock situation, a situation he would not be able to leave without resolving the fate of his life. He is an alcoholic, sure, but not merely. He may be an unwilling addict. He may reach deadlock, unable to get drunk once more, unable to complete his action because he lacks a unified, sincere, accurate and articulate reason-citing description of what he would be doing finishing his drink.

The same kind of deadlock may overcome the banker, but only if in the end he is really unable to merely put away his desire to be a sheep farmer in the spare mo-ments of the life he lives as a banker. Reaching deadlock, to be sure, is not the same as becoming aware of the fact that one actually is somebody else. When the banker reaches deadlock this does not mean he finally comes to believe that he is “really” a sheep farmer. The deadlock situation offers an alternative to the Platonic model of original and copy. When the banker reaches deadlock it is not as if he finally discovers the blueprint hidden deep inside him and realizes that his being a banker is an actualization of a mistaken copy. But what he does discover is that there is no opportunity any more to carry on with his life in an inarticulate way, in a way that fails to address the crucial questions of sincerity, accuracy, and identity.

Reaching deadlock does not come cheap. It is not easy to sincerely and accurate-ly confront oneself with a “look in the fridge”, really being as articulate as needed to acknowledge that the flow of one’s life came to a halt. Full stop. Human beings cannot just make this up. People cannot create just like that an impasse at the center stage of their lives unless the world—the actual world W1—cooperates. The banker will not reach deadlock, unless there are real sheep farmer values at stake that are incommensurable with his banker values and that somehow played an unclear, concealed role in the life he lived so far. It is this single life that he were able to live so far, but that now uncovers itself, in the deadlock situation, as being burdened by an unbearable conflict between being a banker and being a sheep farmer.

The deadlock situation is seriously captivating. The story of Fatima may offer the most striking illustration. We can imagine her, speaking to her father, trying to explain to him that she values him as her father, that she respects him as a sincere, devout, good parent, but that at the same time she really wants to… ehh… wants to…. It is in such an internal interruption, being unable to say what it seems she was about to say, that she reaches deadlock.13 Just like in Looking in the Fridge there are, of course, many easy and superficial ways to get out of the deadlock and to ignore the real issue. The deadlock captivates Fatima. She is unable to complete the action she finds herself in the middle of. But she may retrace her steps, as we would do in

13 There are attempts in psychological research to study these processes empirically. See, for instance, Hermans (1996).

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Looking in the Fridge. Fatima may refuse to address the question of incompatible alternatives of herself. She may refuse to address the question of her identity, of looking for an articulate, accurate, sincere, and unified reason-citing description of what she needs to tell her dad. And so may Martin, the alcoholic. But both Martin and Fatima know, or should be able to be sensitive enough to acknowledge, that the question of identity is haunting them. This is probably not the case with the banker as he is depicted in Bruckner’s argument. This banker is merely choosing between alternatives for himself. But in a different world this banker may be forced to acknowledge that he reached deadlock.

2.6 Regaining Flow

It is in managing such a deadlock situation that people will be able to spot a glimpse of what it means to fail to be oneself and what it would mean to be true to oneself in a more mature, more edified way. Such a glimpse is not of the original in the Platonic model; but it is an instance of sensing ‘authentic quality’, if that is the right word. Such a glimpse, I argue, happens when we regain the flow of our lives, using, firstly, our imagination in discerning viable alternatives of ourselves, and, secondly, our edifying reflection to determine which of these is the best alternative. Trying to regain the flow of our lives involves a process of dramatic rehearsal, of an imaginary mental dry run.14 It requires that we imaginatively organize an inner conversation between the alternatives of ourselves. In a series of turns we should take the per-spective of each of the contingent, viable alternatives of ourselves that play their part in the deadlock situation we are in. We should try to arrange empathic access to what we will feel if we would be either one of the alternatives. There is no guaran-tee that we will regain the flow of our lives, but if we will, it will, I argue, be a matter of enjoying peace of mind in acting on the articulate, sincere, accurate and unified reason-citing description of our own behaviour. Let me elaborate a bit on the suc-cessive steps in this process.

1. Entering the world of real possibilities. In a deadlock situation we experience our ordinary course of action, our habitual, quasi-automatic behaviour, as a pos-sibility, a real possibility. Mindlessly living our lives, we may have thought that our actions are not optional at all, that what we find ourselves doing is somehow bound to happen. But reaching deadlock, strikingly enough in the experience of being unable to act, we acknowledge that the action we find ourselves in the

14 The phrase “dramatic rehearsal” is coined by Dewey (1922).


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middle of and cannot complete, is not bound to happen. Even stronger, it cannot happen. We are simply unable to do what we once were capable of doing without any further thought. But this paralysis, this full stop, does not confront us with the absence of free will. Quite the contrary. In a deadlock situation we experi-ence the need, and the capacity, to be the “arbiters” of our own lives, to choose who we will become, to perform a self-forming action.15 What we experience in the deadlock situation is that we would be capable of acting if only we would have an articulate, sincere, accurate and unified reason-citing description of our action at our disposal. It is this need for an appropriate reason-citing description that we will have to take seriously, once we reach deadlock.

Take Looking in the Fridge. Our imagination is quick enough: “Is it a piece of cheese, or some orange juice, or perhaps a bottle of beer that you wanted out of the fridge? Perhaps you wanted to check on the supply of milk and eggs.” No action is simply available yet, but we discern many possibilities. We are quickly alert, attentive to clues, haunting our memory that forsakes us. The standard option, the option for dummies, is a possibility too: give in and retrace your steps back to your study, hoping that your reason for looking in the fridge will spring back to mind.

2. Discerning alternatives of oneself. In the examples of the introduction above, Ste-vens, Fatima, Martin and Charles, our imagination will not be as quick as in such ordinary cases as Looking in the Fridge. Alternatives of oneself do not flock around in numbers. Ishiguro needs an entire novel to give Stevens, the butler, a few glimpses of a real alternative of himself. And even then Stevens is not really capable of experiencing the deadlock and of imagining that another life, a life with Miss Kenton, could have been a real possibility for him, a real alternative of him. Fatima, however, is really facing deadlock. She really needs to resolve her ambivalence. It would be good for her, I suggest, to imagine her situation as a real either/or. That would require her to imagine herself being a good, faithful daughter of her traditional Islamic father. Full stop. And it would require her to imagine herself being a modern, Westernized, young, Islamic woman. Full stop.

My suggestion is that Fatima can only really address the question of her identity by imagining herself to be merely one alternative of herself. She could try them out in turns in a mental dry run. She should imagine a number of alternatives, each being a wholeheartedly unified continuation of what so far appeared to be merely a part of herself. And she should imagine how an inner conversation between these alternatives would develop. She obviously needs a serious amount of sophisticated and careful imagination for this. For reasons of clear exposi-

15 see Kane (1999).

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tion let me focus here merely on Fatima and merely on one of her alternatives: the alternative of her being a faithful daughter of a traditional Islamic father. In order for this alternative to be a continuation of Fatima’s life, beyond the dead-lock situation, this alternative should include a sincere and accurate story about her, Fatima’s, desire to have fun at school parties. This story will probably involve some agent-regret, albeit agent-regret that now has found its place in the alter-native’s overarching and comprehensive motivational profile. There is a desire Fatima once had, a desire that once made her tick. It is a desire she did not act on, which initially seemed a pity, but not anymore, since now she happily and wholeheartedly is a faithful daughter of a traditional Islamic father.

My suggestion is that Fatima imagines what it would be like to be wholehearted in this sense. That is, in terms used above, Fatima needs her imagination to provide a unified, sincere, accurate and articulate reason-citing description of what her life would be like for her, Fatima, the woman who is facing deadlock, if she would be a faithful daughter of a traditional Islamic father. Three comments are in place here. One: there is no guarantee for success. Fatima might be unable to come up with such a description of things to do as a faithful daughter. And there is no guarantee that she will be able to come up with such a description of any of her other alternatives. The deadlock may remain an unsurmountable obstacle, as it might, sometimes, in Looking in the Fridge. Sometimes you retrace your steps never to remember again what it was you were looking for. Two: the reason-citing description should not be a description of an alternative for her. The point is not that Fatima should try to conceive of a way in which some faith-ful daughter of a traditional Islamic father would think about school parties. A generalised story does not work. Fatima needs to imagine herself being such a daughter.16 The reason to be cited by the appropriate description, that is, should be a reason of her own, a reason grounded in an alternative of herself, an alterna-tive that is a proper continuation of the person Fatima is.17 Three: the point of discerning imagined wholehearted-yet-partial continuations of the person one is, alternatives of oneself, is not meant to favour some kind of alienating strat-egy18, but is rather precisely meant to force the agent to really address the inner conflict as an issue the resolution of which the agent should take responsibility for. In this way, I suggest, dramatic rehearsal becomes fruitful.

16 I analyse this in my 2008 in terms of a person’s need to have “empathic access” to the “no-tional subject” of imagined experiences.17 I developed an account of a person’s “reason of her own” using the concept of an alternative of oneself in my 2004.18 Frankfurt’s work on wholeheartedness is sometimes interpreted along these lines. See, e.g., Poltera (2010).


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3. Determining the best alternative of oneself. The verb “to determine” is ambiguous in an important way. It includes both a contemplative sense, as if it involves a discovery, and a constructive sense, as if it involves an active, decisive identifi-cation.19 Determining which of a couple of alternatives of oneself is the best has both components: it is both a matter of ‘finding’ this alternative to be the best and of ‘making’ it the best. This requires what I shall call “edifying reflection”. It begins in dramatic rehearsal, imaginatively taking in turns the perspective of each alternative, trying to answer all the questions the other alternative(s) will direct at each imagined, unified, wholehearted-yet-partial possible self. Such an internal dialogue is quite common, but the idea of dramatic rehearsal is to really position oneself in turns in either one of these inner voices, imagining oneself to be unified, sincere, accurate and articulate in citing one’s reasons for what one would do if one would really and wholeheartedly be this alternative of oneself. Imaginatively tak-ing position, I suggest, activates affective response patterns.20 When Fatima tells herself in imagination that she loves to be the daughter her father hopes she is and that she does not regret anymore that she never dances at school parties, what she experiences will feel some way, will emotionally be highly significant.

Paying serious attention to one’s own affective response patterns requires reflec-tion. And this reflection, I argue, will have an edifying character. The inner conversation, switching positions, voicing appropriate reasons that are available from specific, partial points of view will enable one to grow, psychologically. As I said above, there are no guarantees. Dramatic rehearsal is as contingent and as empirical as any ordinary experiment. And describing the steps here is not much more than a conceptually balanced account of how to execute edifying reflection. Reflectively paying attention to one’s own affective response patterns to one’s own attempts to voice a unified, sincere, accurate and articulate reason-citing description of the thing to do, is edifying in that it leads to the determination of the best alternative of oneself. This process will lead one to a more mature, more comprehensive acknowledgement and appreciation of one’s own identity.

2.7 Peace of Mind

We have come a long way. To get an idea of what it could mean to fail to be oneself I started in Sect. 2.2 with making some distinctions between stones, trees, hutches, flocks and human beings. The stones may reappear here as examples of things that

19 I analysed this ambiguity in my 1996 and my 2008.20 In a fascinating paper Tamar Gendler introduces the concept of “alief ” to account for the specific type of mental state that produces these affective response patterns. Gendler (2008).

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dramatically lack perturbation, things that are so quiet and peaceful. What could be more deeply quiescent than a stone? Yet, it is obvious that the immobile silence of a stone can only metaphorically be a model for peace of mind. But the absence of perturbation quite nicely captures what I am thinking of in using “peace of mind” as an indication of having determined the best alternative of oneself.21

Peace of mind, as I use it, is a sign that one’s actual, contingent self-understand-ing meets certain standards. These are standards that indicate on different levels that one’s actual, contingent mode of being is privileged, is a potentiality meant to be actualised. These standards specify intersubjectively and realistically grounded normative constraints of authenticity. Let me explain what I have in mind by using the example of Looking in the Fridge.

a. Intelligibility. Citing reasons for action is part of our narrative practices. In explaining my behaviour I take care to come up with a story that makes sense. Those present to respond to my reason will minimally expect my behaviour and the accompanying reason-citing description to be intelligible. When I look in the fridge and fail to remember what it is I am looking for, I am unable to com-plete the action I find myself in the middle of. Just in this situation I may, of course, complete many nearby actions, actions that begin in the same way. I may, for instance, look in the fridge, release my watch from my wrist, put it in the fridge and close the door. Just as it stands, this does not make sense. An action like this obviously violates implicit intersubjective and realistic normative constraints that govern narrative patterns of intelligibility. My action may make sense, but unless I add an intelligible reason, anyone present will undoubtedly have a perturbed mind.

I could also have done something else, of course, something other people would not recognize as odd. I could have opened the door, look inside, acknowledge that I have not the faintest idea what I am looking for, grab just an arbitrary item, say a bottle of beer, and close the door. My son may be around and he may see me take a beer. It would not disturb him, say, for I regularly take a beer while work-ing. But I myself will have a perturbed mind. For me it would not be intelligible why I would just grab an arbitrary item when I do not remember what it is I am looking for. That does not make sense. The implicit intersubjective and realistic normative constraints that govern our ordinary narrative patterns of intelligibil-ity do not merely serve to give other people expectations about my behaviour.

21 I borrow with approval the term “perturbation” from Maturana and Varela who use it in their 1987 to describe the effects of external influences on the internal states of dynamic systems.


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They give me such expectations too. They constrain my self-understanding. Just taking out a bottle of beer does surprise me. I need some story here to keep in touch with my own behaviour.

And precisely because I am the agent in the story, my need goes deeper. The story I tell about my behaviour does not merely need to make sense, it does not merely need to possess an internal intelligibility, but it should intelligibly hook on to the larger story of my life as it unfolds in local scenarios such as Looking in the Fridge. That is why a mere arbitrary exercise of impression management is not enough for the agent himself in such a situation. Agents do not merely observe their lives. They live their life; they want to spin a coherent, ungoing story. That is why I will ordinarily retrace my steps when I forget what it is I am looking for in the fridge. I want to connect, that is, in a meaningful way my actual behaviour to my memories and my intentions.

The best alternative of oneself will definitely be intelligible. It will silence all questions about how to continue one’s life, not merely questions of intelligibility, but also, as we shall see, questions of rationality and goodness. The best alterna-tive of oneself is the one that makes one’s life regain its flow.

b. Rationality. Not all stories that make sense are rational. Rationality is a stronger normative constraint. It requires that what we do fits in a plan, a plan settled around our beliefs and desires, a plan in which our action fits for instrumental reasons. Suppose you saw me put my watch in the fridge. You ask me why. Sup-pose I give you three stories, just for fun, inviting you to accept this as a little multiple choice game. Firstly, I say, there is an invisibly small yeti that lives in my watch. I hate him. I know he loves the cold. I therefore put him in the fridge. Sec-ondly, I say, there is an invisibly small yeti that lives in my watch. I care for him and he complained that it is so hot. I therefore give him a chance to cool down in the fridge. Thirdly, I say, I forgot what it was I was looking for in the fridge and instantly thought it would be fun to lure you with a bizarre story about a yeti in my watch, making you feel silly rather than me.

The first story is irrational in its own terms. If I really hate that yeti and know he loves the cold I may settle on a number of plans, but in none of those plans my putting my watch in the fridge would fit instrumentally. It would help the yeti, rather than agonize him. The second story does better, in this respect. It is rational, internally. But it will be irrational on external grounds. Believing that an invisibly small yeti lives in my watch is so lunatic. Rational people would test their beliefs, discarding those that fail to be true. And it may just be true, but it sounds so terribly implausible, to say the least. Yeti’s do not exist. And if they would, they would be huge, not small. And even if they would be small, it is dif-ficult to believe they would be invisibly small. How small would that be? And

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even if there would be such a small yeti, why on earth would it live in my watch? If I were you, I would accept the third story as the only acceptable one. It meets a standard of rationality. It explains a plan, grounded in beliefs and desires, and my actions, putting my watch in the fridge and inviting you for a little multiple choice game, fit in this plan, instrumentally, as steps in its execution. Whether or not this really was my plan and whether or not this is a good plan to settle on, are questions that may be too difficult for you to answer. These questions need not bother you.

But as the agent framed in Looking in the Fridge these questions should bother me. Why would I choose to play a little multiple choice game with you? Of course, I may go with the winds, catch up each and every whim, and ridicule my friends when the occasion arises. But if I looked in the fridge for some reason, if there was some larger plan I was in the middle of executing, there may be better things for me to do than merely to let me be distracted by a silly chaff.

Living my life in local scenarios such as Looking in the Fridge, but also on the larger scale of my life span will make me sensitive to instrumental rationality as a standard to meet. It invites and requires me to think of stretches of my life as coherent plans to settle on. This standard will definitely play a role in determin-ing the best alternative of myself. Peace of mind is hard to come by when you settle on a frustrating plan, a plan that does not fit your circumstances, your competences, your opportunities. Charles, the humble man from the introduc-tion above who loudly acts out of character, may be experimenting with new behaviour. He may set up small plans (does he follow up a therapist’s advice?), trying out behaviour he hopes will fit him. These plans will fit in a larger plan, and the point of this discussion of rationality as a relevant standard is that deter-mining the best alternative of oneself will involve an attempt to settle on a plan that gives a person the best prospect for peace of mind. Charles may be very annoyed by his own shyness. He may feel alienated, sincerely, from his own unsociable behaviour. It may make him feel very uncomfortable. And so he tries to enact a more extravert version of himself. It may work. He may catch up. Other stories are possible too, of course, about Charles. Was he drunk, for once? Does he try to be someone he is not, someone he thinks others hope he can be? Instrumental rationality is one of the standards here. It is not a cold standard. It is not overly rationalistic nor overly intellectualistic. It is about behaviour that fits a life. It is about emotions, about our affective response patterns. It is about the peace of mind that will follow in the wake of a good plan to settle on.

c. Goodness. Not all rational plans are good plans. Not all rational plans add up to a good life. There is a third standard: goodness. Goodness is best understood,


26

I should like to argue, along broadly virtue ethical lines.22 Take Looking in the Fridge again. I peek inside without a clue of what it is I am looking for. How long will I look? How swift will I let my eyes glide over what is in the fridge? When will I decide it is best to retrace my steps? How attentively should I try to remem-ber what brought me there in the first place? We can try to think of these ques-tions as having an answer that merely needs to meet a standard of rationality. That is, I could try to calculate on the one hand the costs of continuing to look in the fridge hoping to find a clue and on the other hand the costs of returning to the study to remember my reason. It may be possible to compare these costs in terms of their instrumental value to my overall plan that night. There may be psychological mechanisms in play and there may be a general way of calculating a break even point. It may be irrational, from such a rational choice theoretic point of view, to return to my study too early or to hang on in the kitchen for too long.

But it is quite likely, especially in such trivial cases as Looking in the Fridge, that we do not care that much about rationality. Rationality, that is, is just one of our standards. It is a fairly universal one, just like intelligibility, but these two are not the only values to govern our lives.23 An obvious third standard is morality. Social choice theory couples the standards of rationality with explicit ethical constraints. Trying to make you feel silly by telling a story about the small yeti in my watch may free me from feeling a fool myself because I forgot what it is I am looking for. But even though trading our feelings in this way may be profit-able for me, morality may stop me and may encourage me to choose a more pro-social course of action. If I am the fool here, I should not try to distract the attention from me by making you look silly.

Goodness, as I understand it, is broader and more comprehensive than morali-ty.24 Goodness is the overarching standard that allows us to accept that the ques-tion “Why be moral?” can be as meaningful as “Why be rational?”, and that enables us to understand that the question “Why be good?” is a different and pointless question. Sometimes it is not good to be rational. Sometimes it is not good to be moral. But it is always good to be good. The difficulty is, of course, to know what is good, but once you know what is good there is no further question about what to do or whom to be. Being good, whatever it is, is the point of being

22 see Foot (2003), for a wonderful account.23 There is a lot of serious debate about whether or not rationality and goodness are inti-mately related, up to the point of claiming that in the final analysis they are the same. See for an accessible, slightly partial exposition Blackburn (2001, pp. 108–135).24 cf. Bransen (2006).

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alive. Being good is what you are up to when you try to determine not merely a good but the best alternative of oneself.

Peace of mind functions as an indicator of this general goodness in dramatic rehearsal. Each alternative of oneself will take turns voicing as articulately, sin-cerely, accurately and unifiedly its reasons for doing what it does. Each alterna-tive will raise and address questions, concerns and expectations. Each alternative will cite culturally available resources. Each alternative will confront the others with the demands of intelligibility, rationality and goodness. Peace of mind will result when this inner conversation comes to an end, when one of the alter-natives succeeds in silencing the others, or when some of the alternatives suc-ceed in discerning a novel potentiality, a more comprehensive, better alternative of themselves. Peace of mind, that is, will result when this inner conversation passes into a life that regained its flow: the life of the best alternative of itself.

2.8 Conclusion

In this chapter I have explored the phenomenon of failing to be oneself and the related phenomenon of succeeding in being true to oneself. I have explored this phenomenon not merely because it seems to be a highly significant feature of hu-man life, but also because it allowed me to develop an account of some of the main characteristics of the process of human self formation. I have emphasized that the experience of a deadlock situation is crucial to becoming oneself on a deeper level. I have shown how we can try to provoke a deadlock situation, but only if we live in a world that cooperates, a world that really fuels our being captivated by an impasse because in this world we fail, so far, to be ourselves. And I have shown how we can try to overcome a deadlock situation, by regaining flow. This, I have argued, is a matter of a dramatic rehearsal of an inner conversation between a number of alternatives of oneself that try to provide an articulate, sincere, accurate and unified reason-citing description of the best thing to do. If we succeed in producing such a description, peace of mind—happy reconciliation with ourselves—will be our part. This, I take it, is an indicator of the “authentic quality” of our life that is compatible with our life being contingent.25

25 I should like to thank Marc Lewis and Wim de Muijnck for their useful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.


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References

Blackburn S (2001) Being good. Oxford University Press, OxfordBransen J (1996) Identification and the idea of an alternative of oneself. Eur J Philos 4(1):1–16Bransen J (2000) Alternatives of oneself. Recasting some of our practical problems. Philos

Phenomenol Res 60(2):381–400Bransen J (2004) Anticipating reasons of one’s own. In: Sie M, Slors M, Van Den Brink B (eds)

Reasons of one’s own. Ashgate Publishing Limited, Hampshire, pp 87–105Bransen J (2006) Selfless self-love. Ethical Theor Moral Pract 9(1):3–25Bransen J (2008) Personal identity management. In: Mackenzie C, Atkins K (eds) Practical

identity and narrative agency. Routledge, New York, pp 101–120Bruckner DW (2009) Silent prudence. Philos Explor 12(3):349–364Cuypers SE (2001) Self-identity and personal autonomy: an analytical anthropology. Ashgate

Publishing Limited, AldershotDewey J (1922) Human nature and conduct. In: Boydston JA (ed) The middle works, 1899–

1924. Southern Illinois University Press, CarbondaleFoot P (2003) Natural goodness. Oxford University Press, OxfordGendler TS (2008) Alief and belief. J Philos 105(10):634–663Gibson JJ (1977) The theory of affordances. In: Shaw R, Bransford J (eds) Perceiving, acting,

and knowing. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, pp 67–82Hermans HJM (1996) Voicing the self: from information processing to dialogical inter-

change. Psychol Bull 119(1):31–50Kane R (1999) Responsibility, luck, and chance: reflections on free will and indeterminism.

J Philos 96(5):217–240Kim J (1998) Reasons and the first person. In: Bransen J, Cuypers SE (eds) Human action,

deliberation, and causation. Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp 67–87Maturana HR, Varela FJ (1987) The tree of knowledge: the biological roots of human under-

standing. Shambhala Publications, BostonPoltera J (2010) Is ambivalence an agential vice? Philos Explor 13(3):293–305Schick F (1997) Making choices: a recasting of decision theory. Cambridge University Press,

CambridgeSteward H (2012) A metaphysics for freedom. Oxford University Press, OxfordWilliams B (2004) Truth and truthfulness. Princeton University Press, Princeton

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3.1 Introduction

When we take a look at studies done on autonomy, in education and in training, we quickly realize that the idea is as ambiguous as it is hard to define. The ultimate in self-referentiality, in Gaston Pineau’s formula, the very etymology of autonomy re-fers to the ability to “define for oneself one’s own laws”. However, autonomy cannot be reduced to self-sufficiency; being autonomous does not simply mean getting by without others. In terms of education, Legendre actually defines it this way:

autonomy is a type of voluntary balance between accepting a degree of dependence on family authority, the surrounding environment, society and peers and on the other hand acquiring a degree of independence from them.1

In other words, and as far as adult education is concerned, autonomy is closer to a form of temporary interdependence with others than it is total independence. Au-tonomy requires one to be dependent for certain aspects of training in order to be better able to take on relative independence as concerns one’s personal development or one’s maturity as an adult. How then can we reconcile these two paradoxical as-pects? To strive for autonomy in another person in an educational relationship would mean accepting a somewhat dependant relationship, at least temporarily and at least

A short version of this paper was published in 2011 in Parier sur la réciprocité. Vivre la soli-darité, Claire Héber-Suffrin (ed.). Lyon: Chronique Sociale. Translation: Kate Davis.1 Legendre (1993, p. 120)


3Educational Reciprocity and Developing Autonomy: The Social Dimension of Becoming Oneself

Jérôme Eneau

J. Eneau ()Department Sciences de l’Education, UFR Sciences Humaines, Place du Recteur Le Moal, Rennes Université Haute Bretagne, 35000 Rennes, Francee-mail: [email protected]

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in certain aspects. But what kind of autonomy are we referring to exactly in that case? Is it autonomy “to learn”, “to train oneself ”, “to construct” oneself or “to develop”?

In adult education, the quest for and the nature of this autonomy are fundamental questions, and they have been for many years. Autonomy as the aim of education can be traced back to Kant and the Age of Enlightenment (here the purpose of education was to create an “adult”, that is to say an “autonomous, responsible, civic-minded” individual); it was seen as an ideal to reach, something that was always ahead of one, never totally possessed. It is with this view that some adult education researchers in France, such as Gaston Pineau or Jean-Marie Labelle for example, have developed their work on adult education and self-education over the past 30 years or more, with the aim of promoting the development and construction of this very autonomy. However these same authors stress the fact that, particularly as adults, we learn first and foremost “with and through others” as we meet new people at different stages of our lives who help us to create who we are, through constant relationships of attach-ment and detachment, dependence and emancipation. Thus, as Philippe Carré puts it so well “while we always learn alone, it never happens without others”.

What part then does the other play in our own education? Why do we need these connections, this dependence (even temporary) that is intended to set us free, this indestructible tie to another; why are they absolutely necessary to our training, our education and the development of our autonomy?

Very little work in the field of adult education, excepting work on reciprocity which we will look at in more detail later, has examined this crucial question. Quite the opposite has been true for the notion of autonomy, which has been the subject of much research and has remained for more than four decades a central focus of research on self-education, autodidactism and self-directed learning, to the point of forging, in the prefix self- (or in French auto-) a logical tautology for adult educa-tion. According to many researchers, this seeking out of the term “self ” in educa-tion has to do with the construction of the self; the very aim of education is the “construction of the self ”. Thus as in the German concept of Bildung and the advice “Become what you are”, education and life become intertwined.

However, in most studies that look at self-education and self-directed learning, there remains a fundamental ambiguity between autonomy that one can learn to practice and that can be developed within education, and more basic autonomy, related to the status of adulthood.

3.2 Adult Education, Self-Directed Learning and Autonomy

These distinctions are made in two different approaches and two traditions of study which examined autonomy in adult education beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, on both sides of the Atlantic. Having developed these comparisons at length else-

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where2, I will not go into them in detail here, but for the reader I will briefly sum-marize the characteristics and differences between the two approaches.

Rooted in the history of adult education that is linked to self-management and the education of a person in the fullest sense of the concept, the French tradition has long favored an epistemological and nearly teleological vision of “learner au-tonomy”, where this autonomy is perceived as an ideal to pursue, as the final cause (as understood in the sense of moral philosophy) for adult education. On the other hand, while the North American tradition shares the same roots and humanist background, adult education there has focused mainly on “self-directed learning” rather than on “the autonomous learner”.3

Despite how far back such work dates both in Europe and in North America4, autonomy remains an ambiguous, ill-defined notion, and throughout all this time the notion has been the subject of debates and persistent differences in approach in terms of European as compared to North American research. Ambiguity and paradoxes appear again and again most notably because the autonomous individual must construct his or her own laws (auto-nomos) as the etymology of the term indicates, whereas in every learning situation the adult is confronted with external standards, be they environmental, institutional or those handed down by another person.5

As Adèle Chené demonstrated in a now famous article, autonomy is inevitably the source of paradoxes precisely because it cannot be reduced to merely the idea of self-sufficiency and further because “being autonomous” cannot be reduced to the simple fact of knowing how to “learn autonomously”. Autonomy in the wid-est sense has to remain within a dialectic between individual freedom and outside constraints, in an intermediate or “middle way” (in the philosophical sense) that is dependent on others, the situation and the context—in any event, the individual, like learning itself, can only ever be qualified as being very “relatively autonomous”.

Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, North American work focused mainly on research specifically seeking to understand the phenomenon of autonomous learn-ing. The body of work on self-directed learning continued to grow throughout the 1980s and 1990s. As part of this work, many papers dealt with the “measuring au-tonomy” of a learner (the psychometric current in self-education). Others were in-

2 see Eneau (2005, 2008),Tremblay and Eneau (2006), Eneau and Develotte (2012).3 Tremblay 2003.4 Allen Tough, in Canada spoke as early as the 1960s about “self-planned learning”; the first American work, by Malcolm Knowles, on “self-directed learning” was published in 1975; for work in French, Gaston Pineau’s reference research relating “self-education and autobiogra-phy” dates to 1983.5 see Chené (1983).

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terested mainly in the way in which educational systems could take this autonomy into consideration in order to better adapt systems to individual particularities (in-dividualization), while still others focused on specific groups, such as adults edu-cating themselves in the work environment (managerial current), etc.

The vast majority of these North American researchers (including Long, Hiem-stra, Guglielmino and others) seemed to have come to an unspoken agreement to only consider the self-directed learning process, understood as the process through which the learner assumes complete or partial responsibility for the organization, planning and evaluation of learning itself, or even, as Tremblay would later define it, as an “educational situation” in which the learner “assumes predominant control of (at least) one dimension of his/her project (content, goals, resources, how it is carried out and evaluation)”.6

In Canada as in the United States, these researchers most often considered only very indirectly the learner’s autonomy as an aim of the process. Some of them did address, implicitly, the idea that learning to make choices, take initiatives and main-tain control of and responsibility for one’s own learning may help develop more general autonomy in an adult (understood here as “relative independence” in gen-eral acquired through life experience). However the vast majority stopped with the learning process and did not imagine the development of autonomy in the perspec-tive of a wider educational goal that encompasses the civic facet of an adult learner, someone who is responsible to others for his or her decisions and an active member of collective life.

In North America, it was not until the late 1980s and early 1990s that this re-strictive view of autonomy was questioned and several syntheses of the literature highlighted the extent to which the paradoxes brought to light by Chené remained a current topic, something which had not been resolved by researchers. Among these syntheses, Rosemary Caffarella and Phillip Candy’s work in the early 1990s were a major step forward. For Caffarella, numerous works had already shown the diversi-ty of viewpoints—the learning process, she reminds us, is not a linear one that takes place in successive, predictable stages, but rather a process that takes advantage of the opportunities afforded by the context, the situations and chance meetings. In addition, Caffarella pointed out that in the different studies in the field some researchers seemed to see autonomy as a characteristic of an adult (people who by definition are capable of making decisions, taking on responsibility, etc.) while oth-er researchers viewed autonomy more as a value, an aim or an ideal to be pursued.

However it is most likely Candy who provided the most complete synthesis of research on autonomy in adult education and who outlined its main dimensions.

6 Tremblay (2003, p. 80).

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We find then in Candy’s work7, a complete review of the work mentioned above, concerned with autonomy’s psychometric aspects, research into individualization, self-planned and self-directed learning as well as the critical perspective on self-ed-ucation, borrowed from Mezirow’s work. But more importantly, Candy developed a constructivist approach that shows that this autonomy, as part of learning, cannot be reduced to strictly linear, cumulative, easily describable aspects as if it were a simple series of tasks, or a set of characteristics or a certain number of skills that adult learners may (or may not) have. Rather, Candy showed that autonomy is too complex an idea to be approached simplistically. Autonomy in learning and learner autonomy, while inherently connected, are distinctly separate things that cannot replace one another, even if the autonomy in both cases is the result of a precarious balancing process, the fruit of constant interaction between resources (and restric-tions) provided by others and the environment.8

Candy thereby proposed a distinction between different types of autonomy (situational and epistemological autonomy, personal and instrumental autonomy, etc.), that are required independently, depending on the case, the situation, the type of learning and the individuals; certain individuals may be very autonomous in some aspects of their lives, their decision-making, their responsibilities, etc. and not at all autonomous in affective or emotional matters, for example. In general then, two types of autonomy can be brought into play according to Candy when we speak of autonomy in learning or of learning to be autonomous:

1. First the “situational” or “procedural” autonomy which consists of organizing learning in a relatively independent manner, either because that is how a par-ticular learner typically functions, works or learns or because we have devel-oped that capability by learning to manage by ourselves the various dimensions mentioned above (to identify our needs, set goals, make use of resources, call upon the appropriate people, evaluate results for ourselves). This then will be called autonomous learning, therefore autonomy developed through and for learning.

2. But another form of autonomy, what Candy calls “epistemological” autonomy, a more elaborate and more complex form, comprises and surpasses procedural autonomy. It can be seen in our ability to make informed judgments about the context and the situation that influence our learning and our actions, in our ability to step back and reflect critically on the world around us, in a certain

7 see Candy (1991).8 This is what biologist Francisco Varela described at nearly the same time but using other terms in his work Principles of Biological Autonomy, borrowing from a “complex” and “con-structivist” epistemology to reveal the bases of autonomous systems.


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form of general “intellectual maturity” that leads us to understand that we are not isolated or independent but rather interdependent with other people and the environment. This autonomy can be learned and be developed just like the first, but this is a lifelong process that is reflected, particularly when we are adults, in how we perceive our mutual dependence as adults inhabiting and creating a shared world. Although Candy does not use exactly these terms, this is a type of autonomy that both authorizes us to think for ourselves and at the same time makes us responsible for others. This type of autonomy is then directly linked to our condition as social beings; it is because we can be autonomous adults in an environment inhabited by other autonomous beings that we must assume responsibility for our actions and decisions (responsibil-ity towards ourselves, towards others and to participate in the construction of our shared world).

With regard to this work, it becomes possible to conceive of autonomy as a process of learning, integrating and constructing knowledge, a process inscribed in human beings’ living system (biological autonomy, as expounded by Varela), and also as a psychosocial process that accompanies the development of the individual through-out his/her life (in the construction of the psyche, internally; as part of his/her iden-tity through exchanges with other people, part of one’s language and culture) or even as a process of intellectual maturation that is part of one’s wisdom or spiritual development throughout a lifetime9, that makes it possible to learn to reflect on “living together”. Thus, learning to be autonomous cannot be reduced to simply acquiring the ability to manage learning, knowledge and skill acquisition oneself. Learning to be autonomous ultimately means learning to live with others and to construct one’s own character while also creating the world we share together. In other words, and as Ricœur so rightly put it concerning the ethical aim developed in Oneself as Another [Soi-même comme un autre]: “to create for oneself a good life with and for others in just institutions”.10

A far cry from any restrictive vision of independence, total freedom and self-sufficiency, this work urges us rather to understand autonomy as a process that takes place first and foremost through others. If we take Ricœur’s invitation, should we not then take “the shortest path from the self to oneself, which is through an-other”? It is this question, essential yet all too rarely asked (at least in work on adult

9 This dimension, rarely examined in research is nonetheless present in some work on self-directed learning (and adult education in general) in Rosemary Caffarella’s work in the Unit-ed States as well as René Barbier’s work in France.10 Ricœur (1996, p. 202).

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education and self-directed learning), that the work concerning “the role played by the other” in adult education leads us to reflect upon, even if perhaps it does not lead to the answer, and this is particularly true as concerns the original contribution of the concept of reciprocity.

3.3 Exchange, Cooperation and Reciprocity

The role of the other remains a dimension that surprisingly is hardly examined in work on adult education and self-education, at least in France. Since the early 2000s, only a few colleagues in a few collective works or special editions of reviews have noted the variety of “support figures” in education, the various ways for an adult to “learn from others” or the importance of “social ties” in self-education.11

Taking a historical look at the question, it is fairly surprising that researchers have always noted the importance of external resources for adult education, includ-ing in self-directed learning (beginning with Tough’s first work in the late 1960s), without dedicating any systematic research to the issue. Similarly, today everyone notes the importance of the social aspect of learning, referring most often to socio-constructivist models to explain the knowledge construction process, but oddly, the reason behind this need for others in learning has not been explored in any depth. Of course, relying on others in self-directed learning may seem paradoxical or at the very least somewhat counterintuitive. But if, as Candy demonstrated, autonomy is the result of a process of increasing interdependence that is developed within and through exchanges with the outside (other people, the opportunities available in the context) and if, as Tremblay demonstrated, even the most autonomous learners develop specific skills among which “learning with and through others” is one of the characteristic meta-skills, this is because this paradox is a paradox in appearance only.

What happens then during these exchanges which are so necessary for the con-struction of knowledge? Why do we systematically need to “go through others” in order to create our own selves? This is the question that researchers attempt to answer when examining work on social ties and exchange, reciprocity and the gift, which goes far beyond the field of adult education. And in this field, it should be noted that there has been very little research in this direction. In recent work, the idea of reciprocity has been almost clandestinely hidden away in studies on adult education and self-directed learning. “Reciprocal knowledge exchanges” are

11 see for example: Alava et al. (2000), Héber-Suffrin et al. (2000), Mayen et al. (2002), Paul (2004), Boutinet et al. (2007).


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nothing new (for example the RERS—Réseaux d’Echanges Réciproques de Savoirs or Networks of Reciprocal Knowledge Exchange that grew up in the 1970s in France, or linguistic exchange Tandem, begun in Germany around the same time), how-ever reciprocity was only examined much later in this field, at least in theoretical terms. It is surprisingly discreet in research by French speakers until the 2000s and remains nearly inexistent in Anglo-Saxon research, with the exception of work on cooperation and collaboration, which we will touch on later. The main piece of work dedicated to it in adult education is Labelle’s work from 1996 on “educational reciprocity”.

It is likely necessary then to explore other disciplines beyond education and self-directed learning and to spread the scope wider and dating back further to en-compass older work in philosophy, anthropology and sociology if we hope to find the origins of these notions of reciprocity, cooperation and social ties and better understand the ramifications today for social sciences in general and for education in particular. Of course, the limited space we have here does not allow us to fully develop our examination into all of the disciplines, but we will attempt to follow the major paths. Similarly, it would be impossible to explore all the instances relat-ing to these ideas as that would require looking into religion (the “Golden Rule” of reciprocity is found in the main monotheistic religions from their very earliest writings), literature (the major works of many cultures as well as some biographical and autobiographical accounts are simply more examples of this notion through-out history) and even economics and law (treaties on trade and reciprocity which govern bilateral relations between countries are part of the history and the current state of international relations). While each of these fields deserves to be studied in depth respectively, we cannot develop that examination here. We can therefore only give a partial and subjective view and must leave out completely other fields and numerous studies that deal with these exchanges.

While one could argue with the choice of the few works selected to illustrate our point, everyone will agree upon the origin and the connecting thread throughout all of this research to be the pioneering work of Marcel Mauss and in particular his The Gift, first published in French as Essai sur le Don in L’Année Sociologique in 1924.

Mauss, Durkheim’s nephew, is considered along with his uncle one of the found-ers of French social sciences in the early twentieth century12. In his The Gift, while highlighting the multiple religious, legal, economic and even moral implications of reciprocity, he further introduced the new notion of the “total social fact” [“fait social total”]13 in relation to the the gift. Mauss’ most important contribution was

12 see for example: Fournier (1995), Tarot (2003).13 Lévi-Strauss (1968).

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then to reveal the central position of reciprocity in social ties: all human societies recognize reciprocity, at least in the form of the “triple obligation” that governs hu-man interaction—the obligation to give, to receive and to give in return. What is so original and so particular in Mauss’ work is the revelation of a timeless constant in human morality (and Mauss himself speaks of these “human rocks on which our societies are built”), that is, an unchanging core that is common to all morality, for every known society.14

It might seem surprising therefore that the reciprocity described by Mauss in the forms of exchange and gift/gift, such a basic, universal and timeless building block of social ties, has only appeared recently in education in analyses of the interactions at work in interpersonal relationships. There are several explanations for this ap-parent hesitation in exploring the nature of reciprocal relationships: the theoretical connection to the notion’s philosophical sources, the step back one must take from the field of education, the necessity of a cross-disciplinary exploration, etc. And this effort (or this scattering of effort) may seem both unusual and very risky seen from the point of view of the scientific process. Whatever the reasons, a brief multidisci-plinary detour will afford us the occasion to open new paths for understanding the socio-constructivist dimension of adult autonomy, in education.

3.4 A Philosophical Root, Between Morality and Ethics

In sociological works, Boltanski proposed a detailed examination of the notion of reciprocity, going back from Durkheim (for its sociological sources) all the way to the Ancient Greeks (in the most philosophical perspective) to analyze altruism that calls for reciprocity, meant in the sense of “a general love of humanity”15. Although uncommon in educational science, this notion of “socialized love” that is the foun-dation of reciprocity (excluding any religious or sentimental overtones) hides, ac-cording to Boltanski, Comte-Sponville or even Ricœur16 a series of distinctions concerning the word love (or even friendship) that are summed up in the ancient Greek lexical forms of érōs¸ philía and agápē.

The principal characteristic of érōs, notes Boltanski, is the need to satisfy a lack which results in desire and attraction; it is the lack and the desire that guide this form of love (or need) of others. On this level, the social order is maintained between desire and relationships of solidarity, between individual appetites and the moral order that society requires. It is therefore not so much érōs that is the foundation

14 see Caillé (1996), Temple (1998, 2000).15 Boltanski (1990).16 ibid, Comte-Sponville (1995), Ricœur (2004).


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of reciprocity, unless we consider it in terms of reciprocal lack and desire, but more the distinction between agápē and philía that relates the Maussian understanding and the contemporary sense of the term. Further, still according to Boltanski, it is philía in particular that is always to be translated as “love as reciprocity”.

Philía includes the connection that exists between friendship and reciprocity and can be equated with the modern term sociability. In its “interactionist” dimen-sion, philía supposes not only a reciprocal relationship of goodwill between two people, it also requires proximity in the exchanges (of pleasure, interest or profit, or even proximity in space and time). The reciprocity in question here then supposes equality between individuals, for which the French current of sociology of conven-tions favors the term “equivalence”. In this sense, philía as reciprocity implies a giv-ing back: friendship means giving and at the same time receiving. However, as it is applied, reciprocity, understood in the sense of philía is completely foreign to any calculation or expectation; it is not concerned as érōs is with lack or desire.

Agápē finally is to be understood, still according to Boltanski, as a relation-ship that transcends interpersonal relationships to qualify love of human beings in terms of a “requirement”. This requirement of love for another, while it predates any religion and is now firmly claimed by non-religious societies, is closely related to Christian theology, at least in Western civilization. In Christian theology, agápē designates “the relationship of God to man” and by extension “the relationship be-tween human beings which is made possible by God’s gift of love to man”17. His-torically, the philosophical truth of agápē is completely summed up in the famous Golden Rule—“love thy neighbor as thyself ”, a practical-historical requirement to love, as Boltanski sees it, and a veritable “standard of reciprocity” to use Ricœur’s terms. Since ancient times, through Confucian, Greek, Latin, or Christian forms and in its equivalents in Islam and Judaism, the Golden Rule of agápē remains, throughout history and independent of any specific religious belief, “profoundly tied to humanity’s secular wisdom”18. It is not exclusive to Judeo-Christian civiliza-tion, rather it transcends history; it is found in different forms (social, anthropo-logical, symbolic or religious rules) in different periods of history, in all religions irrespective of the society. It is universal.

In other words, érōs, based on lack and on desire, expects a “submissive” form of reciprocity in return. Quite the opposite, agápē is constructed on giving but con-tains no notion of desire, does not depend on the value of the object and expects no gift in return. Philía is different from agápē in the notion of value ( philía recognizes

17 “Men’s love for God or love between men, which is the result of the former” as for Boltan-ski, agápē comes from “Divine love, if God exists, and perhaps even more so if God does not exist”! says Comte-Sponville (1995, p. 357).18 Du Roy (1970, pp. 31–42).

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the value of its object, agápē creates that value), even if in both case, as Du Roy notes, the principal of reciprocity does not express the adequacy of “two selfish de-sires, but the selfless drive to arrive at a personal exchange and supposes the desire for true happiness, both for oneself and for others”. It is this “refusal of equivalence” that separates agápē both from érōs and from philía and that allows Boltanski to state that reciprocity thereby is the foundation of the principle of justice. To love (in the widest social sense of the term) means wishing good for another, without calculation or personal interest inasmuch as the other wishes both for him/herself and for others this same good in return. For, if reciprocity, as Du Roy says “cannot be avoided”, it necessarily raises the issue of how these gifts are shared out through exchanges, and therefore the question of justice.

Seen philosophically, reflection on the idea of reciprocity enriches the debate (and the tensions) surrounding love and justice: how can we move beyond conflicts of interest? How (and why) do we want what is good for another person, when it sometimes comes at the cost of our own personal interest? And how, as Cordonnier puts it so well “can we wish what we ourselves do not want and what is in our power to prevent”?19

For Ricœur20, it is the “ethical aim” that makes it possible to reconcile these paradoxes—the relationship with another is both our main obligation and our only escape; to live well, with and for others, is the only ethic that we should im-pose upon ourselves. Along this ethical line (the “guideline” that all people should force themselves to follow), there is no competition between love and reciprocity, between equivalence and agápē; this mutual connection, according to Ricœur, in-cludes reciprocity “in its most elementary definition”. Reciprocity, notes Ricœur, can of course extend within love to a shared, cooperative “living together” and even to intimacy; however, from its simplest interpretation, in the interaction between two individuals, reciprocity “is a requirement” at the same time as it is the “categori-cal imperative” to respect21. Respect, confidence and esteem go together: to esteem another requires that one respect and esteem oneself (interest in one’s own benefit can be perfectly compatible with unselfishness, in the moral sense) because to love means being able to give the best of oneself to another. The “obligation to love” in this philosophy of reciprocity notes Comte-Sponville, was already in its essence contained in Saint Augustin’s command “Love, and do what you will”.

These conditions taken together explain the third phase of the ethical aim of the “good life” (for oneself and for others) which is to cooperatively create “just

19 Cordonnier (1997).20 Ricœur (1996).21 ibid.


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institutions”22; according to Ricœur, esteem for the self and concern for others are the preconditions for “living well together” within fair social structures, resolving the problem of love and justice. And, says Ricœur, therein lies the dialectic of au-tonomy wherein our individual freedom lies in being obedient to another but with no trace of dependence or submission because in return there is an obedience to oneself that includes respect for the self and for others, making it possible, finally, to live together23. This ethic is based on the “moral requirement of reciprocity” which is never taken for granted, never complete but that governs relationships of individuals who take care to “live well together”, while respecting the autonomy of each individual, which as Todorov notes is the fundamental paradox of the human condition24.

3.5 Anthropological as well as Socio-Economic Dimensions

In terms of anthropology, research on reciprocity has shown the validity and the importance of Mauss’ initial model, in particular with regards to the threefold ob-ligation involved in gift/gift type of exchanges—the obligation to give, to receive and to give back. This triple obligation represents a basic constant in every kind of society and in this way, reciprocity could be considered the basis of social con-nections; reciprocity is then at the root of all forms of “sociality”, balancing and regulating social ties25.

From an anthropological point of view, reciprocity exists “prior” to exchange, the latter being only a limited range of the former. Giving cannot in fact be con-sidered an exchange, because when something is truly given it is done so freely, expecting nothing in return—two reciprocal gifts are not an exchange; when one gives back for an initial gift, the debt is not paid off26. Unlike exchange or trading,

22 However, as Buber notes, institutions by nature are not just and it is important therefore that one not submit to and accept them as one’s fate: “the only thing that can be fatal for man is to believe in fate […] to stop believing in slavery is to become free” (Buber 2002) which explains the advantages of alliances between autonomous individuals to cooperate in the construction of just institutions (which some call justice and others refer to as citizenship).23 see Ricœur (1996, 2004, 1998).24 see Todorov (2003).25 see Mauss (1968), Lévi-Strauss (1968), Caillé (1996), Temple (1997, 1998), Ricœur (2004).26 And it is even less something that can be turned to profit, even if, as Douglas (2004) shows, a gift is never entirely “free”; while an exchange creates an asymmetrical situation the “duty of thankfulness” does not have to do with the “symmetry of trade” but with “the heterogeneity of two realities” as stated by Goux (1996).

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which generates a debt, giving generates a gift in return and neither gift can be assigned a book value. In economic terms, the gift is considered “incalculable”27 because even before the obligation to give back, which can only be symbolic, the obligation to receive is the pivotal point in the giving-receiving-giving back trip-tych. It is the act of receiving that gives the initial gift the only “value” that it can ever have—the immeasurable, or “incommensurable” value according to Ricœur of generosity, gratitude and thankfulness.

This explains why the paradigm of reciprocity allows anthropologists to refute any utility (in the sense of economic utility) in the act of giving. It is rather an in-vitation to work with the paradoxical obligation to generosity, mixing the rules of life in society and the social contract with those of cooperation and shared inter-ests to explain the process of balancing social relationships, the broader regulation of the relationship between givers and receivers, between actor and object. While reciprocity can be defined as a balance between contradictory situations (a social form of the “happy medium” or “middle way”) it is also the basis of the constructed meaning that defines the barrier between nature and culture in human society, as Lévi-Strauss demonstrated. From the anthropological point of view, the connec-tion created by the obligation to reciprocity explains not only the commitment as part of social ties and explains the principal of responsibility through the obligation to give back, it also creates a symbolic tie between individuals and even, as Mauss himself put it, a much more general and permanent contract. In this way, according to Lévi-Strauss, reciprocity governs numerous obligations (marital and family ties) as well as a whole list of prohibitions (including the prohibition against incest and endogamy). Reciprocity therefore plays a major role on an anthropological level in the relationship to same and different by bringing into play a symbolic included third party (much like the hau or mana described by Mauss) that transcends inter-personal relationships and makes it possible to create society.

Finally, beyond the social relationships understood in terms of “otherness”, reci-procity implies an understanding of these same relationships in terms of “revers-ibility”. Reciprocity grows out of a dual process combining otherness and alterna-tion, upsetting roles, obliging one to give, receive and give back, each person in turn but at different times (giving at one moment, receiving at another). By being both giver and receiver, every person is part of a community in which they demonstrate solidarity and share responsibility, depending on others and fulfilling the role of the other in the gift/gift relationship. Whether it is “intergenerational reciprocity” with the one-way pathway of giving within a family, in which we pass on what was passed on to us (or we give back what was given to us) or a “cycle of giving” within

27 Chabal (1996), Cordonnier (1997).


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a community where the person who received something must then give something, even if (and perhaps especially if) it is not given back to the same person, each person is the recipient of one form or another of reciprocity. Reciprocity can in this sense be considered the key to equal rights and duties among free and equal indi-viduals, in other words, “the basis of the social contract”28.

From a socioeconomic point of view, the reciprocity paradigm asks us to consid-er trade or exchange differently from classic models of interest and rationality. Reci-procity in fact imposes an alternative approach to classic economics because while it maintains the same concern for traditional questions of value, debt and interests, it invites critical reflection on the dominant models (utilitarianism, methodologi-cal individualism) starting from the gift and turning the perspective on its head29. For example in his study on reciprocity and cooperation, Cordonnier proposes to re-examine the classical models of strategy in game theory and in particular the Prisoner’s Dilemma30 using this alternative analysis. With this example, Cordon-nier illustrates the limits of theories based on the so-called rationality of individuals considered as economic agents in the classical sense. If on an economic level each person were indeed able of consider his/her own interest, he/she must do so while making the calculations from a perspective that includes cooperative action and the interests of both parties. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the interest of each person is maximized only if both decide to “play the cooperation game” and arrive at a win-win strategy. In other words, what Cordonnier shows is that doubt can only be overcome by taking the risk of cooperating: if the other person, like me is capable of cooperating, we are both certain to benefit from it. Thus, confirms Cordonnier, reciprocity is not the result of the exchange but the governing rule. While the mo-tive of the exchange is interest, gain or the lure of profit, Cordonnier demonstrates that in order to answer the question “can we wish what we ourselves do not want and what is in our power to prevent?” it is first necessary to “know how to give up

28 Chabal (1996, p. 135).29 see Caillé (1996), Douglas (2004).30 Cordonnier (1997) examines this case: two suspects are taken into custody where the in-spector must get a confession out of them (e.g., for armed robbery) but he has no proof of that crime, only of a much more minor one (carrying an illegal weapon). The inspector uses a trick to get the suspects to confess. He meets separately with each one and explains that if neither person confesses, they can only be charged with carrying a weapon, which carries a minor sentence (2 years); if both suspects confess they will be convicted of the more serious crime but the jury will be lenient with them (5 years); finally, if one suspect confesses while the other remains silent, the former will quite simply be released and the latter will get the maximum (10 years). The inspector’s strategy is truly fiendish because what the Prisoner’s Dilemma regularly reveals is the partners’ incapacity to cooperate or to “take a gamble and trust one another” in order to both benefit. By accusing the other, both are surely lost.

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or lose something in order to later obtain what we desire”. It is the very motion of exchange and the nature of reciprocity that allows each person to initiate giving and to share the future profits of cooperation.

However, what is also at stake here is proving that a cooperation strategy based on reciprocity supposes that the partners will place both their individual and col-lective interests first, thinking in the long-term and not only about their individual gain in the short-term, which would be less advantageous anyway. But then it must be accepted that giving is a “voluntary action” in which an individual will inten-tionally let go of his or her personal interest for the benefit of another in the hope that in the long term both will benefit from it. And while this action is based on trust, on the intrinsically paradoxical “gamble of giving” it also marks the subjects’ autonomy: the “initiator of giving”, the one who is able to show unselfishness is in the end the only truly “autonomous” one, someone able to make a choice in an uncertain situation, to gamble on trust and abandon his/her individual interests in the short term, with the knowledge that the benefits of cooperation, such as a gift in return, will come back eventually, even if it takes another form.

In short, the economic perspective of reciprocity allows us to highlight the di-mensions of incompleteness, uncertainty, reciprocal trust and a sufficiently long time-frame (the “delay in reciprocity”) that are necessary for reciprocity to function fully and bring about the hoped for effects. If it is a question of collective trades, preferably non-utilitarian ones subject to the principle of reversibility (allowing each individual to occupy the various roles), this perspective also highlights the fact that reciprocity cannot be brought about without a set of rules (what Cordon-nier calls a “corset of obligations”) that apply to everyone. Even if the return gift is always chosen by the person who is giving back (and who then gives in his/her turn) and cannot be measured, the three-fold obligation of reciprocity only works if these various dimensions (rules and obligations, long-term frame, autonomy of the actors) are all respected. The command “cooperate so that the other person cooper-ates” can be a principal of action and conditional cooperation that combines indi-vidual interests and the collective optimum, while respecting the actors’ autonomy and marked by their commitment in their actions.

3.6 Social and Even Political Implications

Laying the “first pillar of the arch” in order to allow reciprocity to extend further, represents an act, even a unilateral one that involves another person and in the long term, the entire community31. This type of individual actions with voluntarily or

31 see Chabal (1996).


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involuntarily collective repercussions is a profoundly social, even a political act. Taking the gamble of cooperation supposes that one can imagine the other’s com-mitment, like one’s own, in a dynamic that goes against any type of individualism or the sole calculation of one’s own interest. In short it comes to placing one’s lot with social ties that bind and what it means, for everyone, to “create society”.

For many writers then, reciprocity confronts the problem of “modern individu-alism” head on and poses anew the question of the meaning of solidarity and soci-ality, community and society for us today32. The increase in individualism in our modern society is too vast and controversial an issue to be developed here, but it is indeed the case that the principal of reciprocity calls into question in every case the phenomena of individualization and even of “privatization” observed in behavior and social structures (of work, training, recognition, or even identity) which in our so-called “developed” modern societies have often, rightly or wrongly, beaten out the gift to favor strict market exchange, interest and ownership logic33. This is why the logic of reciprocity favors a more social and “humane” economy, in which the production of goods and services for giving encompasses and surpasses the simple logic of accumulation that only yields models of rivalry, domination and competi-tion34. Opposite that, the principal of reciprocity is an invitation to reconsider the questions of responsibility in a broader examination of the models of justice (and how it is shared); “to be responsible” in this sense means recognizing that “sharing is the precursor to any community”.35

Lastly, the question of reciprocity among members of one group brings up once again the question of “social ties” and more generally, of connections between com-munity and society. If reciprocity in the sense of philía is a phenomenon that we might be more likely to observe among members of a community (between people who know each other, who can trust each other and who can easily give because they can bet on a future gift in return, perhaps not immediately but still one that is very likely), the idea of a “dilution” of this social tie among individual mem-bers of a society (who do not know each other and who rely first and foremost on themselves) calls into questions what exactly it means to “create society”36. Tön-

32 see Caillé (1996), Godbout (1996, 2007), Cordonnier (1997), Temple (1997), Todorov (2003).33 see Caillé (1996), Todorov (2003), De Singly (2003), Ricœur (2004), Honeth (2007).34 see Cordonnier (1997), Temple (1997).35 Temple (2000, pp. 35–50).36 Cordonnier (1997, p. 117), refers to Tönnies’s work on this subject ( Gemeinschaft und Ge-sellschaft, 1887), distinguishing between society and community as respectively forming a link between individuals by contract (society) or by harmonious agreement (community), coincidentally (in society) or permanently (in community); in a community, individuals are

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nies’s work, which distinguishes between community and society, as does Polanyi’s, proposes a re-embedding of economics in social considerations and for this reason deserves a close reading.

More generally, any theoretical research on reciprocity invites us to reflect on how to optimize the balance between individual freedom and social justice. A so-cial model that ignores the principal of reciprocity deprives itself of the possibility of considering the relationship of the individual to society. On a political level, it would be particularly difficult to try to ignore the effects of reciprocity; while it is seen as mainly part of a virtuous dynamic that makes it possible to reconcile individual interests with collective ones, cooperation modes and interpersonal ex-changes that are part of a gift–gift logic reciprocity can, if denied, have a much darker side following a logic of vengeance or rivalry37. Reciprocity can then go from being a virtuous cycle to being a vicious cycle of vengeance where the Golden Rule is replaced by “an eye for an eye”38. Refusal to show thankfulness, the desire for revenge, one bad turn for another are then simply another form of reciprocity, a closed, escalating cycle that it is very difficult to escape from39. In fact, if ven-geance can be seen as another form of giving-back and also another form of war, the other question raised by the gift is then “who are friends and who are enemies, with whom can we form alliances (and against whom), who must we give to and from whom can we accept gifts”40. Thus for Baudrillard, the principal of reciproc-ity which ensures a symbolic balance between people and things, if we also take into consideration its negative version, is always the strongest logic, including (and perhaps especially) for those who are “are in the position of slaves whose lives have been spared, leaving them bound by an unbreakable debt”, locked in by their vio-lent, negative, destructive passions “which are the degraded form of the return gift made impossible”41.

Escaping from the vicious cycle of vengeance to move to a virtuous cycle of giv-ing is never easy and often demands bold, political gestures, symbolically charged with this vision which can, as shown by René Girard, go as far as “sacrifice”. This, for Chabal, is the case in acts of unilateral disarmament or even Gandhi’s non-

thus “bound despite their separation” while in society they remain “separate despite their bonds”. In adult education, André Moisan is one of the few French authors to have examined this distinction, in his case looking at the difference between socius and societus (see Moisan 2000, 2002).37 see Anspach (2002), Ricœur (2004).38 Ricœur (2004).39 Baudrillard (2002), Honeth (2007).40 Caillé (1996, p. 50).41 Baudrillard (2002, 81 f.).


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violent struggle, which are examples of parties relying on “the gamble on giving”. Similarly, for Ricœur, Chancellor Brandt’s gesture, kneeling before a monument to the victims of the Holocaust in Warsaw is an example of the gestures that help “history move forward to a state of peace”42. This “peaceful vocation” born by reci-procity is completely contained in the political and social relationships of alliances and vengeance, peace and justice, in that “need that we have for one another” to use Aristotle’s words “which safeguards life in society”.43

It is for this reason that the ambivalence surrounding reciprocity, something that is constantly calling into question individuals’ commitment, their mutual com-mitment, has remained at the heart of problems of political philosophy throughout history and is to be found, from Hobbes to Rousseau, in the idea of the “social contract”. This is also why the paradox of giving remains at all times and places profoundly political, because according to Caillé:

the primal question, which is the political question, is discovering under what condi-tions it becomes possible to get along, to become allies rather than to fight against and kill one another. There are no rational solutions, grafted on to calculation […] or onto logos, only reasonable solutions.44

Looking to the gift and to reciprocity means then a “middle position” on the po-litical level, which like the “happy medium” (Aristotle’s mesotes), offers a solution that is concerned with the common good as much as with faith in exchanges, but which does not depend solely on either one of them. It means imagining the social and political order on a wider scale where the principles of interest and restriction, liberty and reciprocity, the gift and obligation can coexist tempered by one another, and where each person, by agreeing to follow common rules, can participate in creating this social contract.

And if we must note, as Todorov does, that people do not live in society out of interest or by virtue, but because there is “no other form of existence possible”45, it is no less true that altruism is likely the only possible way out of the bond of inter-dependence that binds them together. Sociality is neither an accident nor a contin-gency but rather “the very definition of the human condition”46. As for reciproc-ity, it can only grant human beings, united in their dependence, a relative, fragile freedom, with an appeal to calm in the most conflict-ridden situations as their only

42 Ricœur (2004, p. 354).43 Cordonnier (1997, p. 15).44 Caillé (1996, p. 47)45 Todorov (2003, p. 20).46 Todorov (2003, p. 30).

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hope. This balance Todorov remarks is always precarious: “communal life guaran-tees, even in the best circumstances, only slight happiness”.47

3.7 What Reciprocity Teaches

Taking from Mauss’s founding work and his essay The Gift, research on reciprocity has made it possible to highlight the essential place of the relationship to others that remains at the heart of the notion of reciprocity. The relationship between love and friendship, the philosophical concepts found in the Greek words érōs, philía and agápē clarify the distinctions between different levels of relationship to another, in terms of sociability and sociality and the necessity of being able to “live together”. The philosophical level of this examination introduces several paradoxes, such as the interpersonal relationship that is (possibly) chosen and the social justice that is (partly) endured in order to live together in society, requiring an ethical reflec-tion by each person. The close connection to Mauss’s work clearly reminds us of reciprocity’s triple obligation to give, to receive and to give back. From an anthro-pological perspective, reciprocity is then the heart of social ties, a founding element for any type of society and the binding agent in social exchange. From this point of view reciprocity has several functions—through the triple obligation it regulates so-cial ties both on a material level in exchanges (exchange being seen here as a conse-quence only and not the cause of the obligation to reciprocity) and on the symbolic level (in order to create shared meaning). This is why the social dimensions and the political implications of reciprocity are both the prerequisite conditions and the aim of such a reflection—by questioning the notions of debt and interest, reciproc-ity encourages us to also question the notions of individualism, the social contract and the economy of traded goods. Based on initiative and individual autonomy with regard to a democratic ideal of society, reciprocity also questions the notion of justice and how it is distributed through alliances and rivalries.

From a pragmatic point of view, reciprocity also encourages reflection on the nature of the goods exchanged because the gift and return gift cannot be part of mercenary logic as a gift is considered to be incalculable. Reciprocity then raises the question of the nature of debt, interest and even the rationality of actors in these exchanges. An “alternative” economic perspective stresses the prime importance of giving, from a collective point of view, of cooperation and of the common interest in the long term, to the detriment of competition and short-term individual inter-est. In this sense, giving up one’s own interests in the short term is the same as “bet-

47 Todorov (2003, p. 192).


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ting” on reciprocity, which can only be done by autonomous actors. The obligation to cooperate (“cooperating so that the other cooperates”) goes hand in hand then with collective responsibility and a set of rules (the “corset of obligations”), and it is understood that the balance of exchanges is only regained after a certain “delay of reciprocity”.

3.8 Recognizing the Particular Shapes and Values of Reciprocity

By giving a third party (real or symbolic) the role of mediator, reciprocity works like a powerful social regulating tool. It can take different forms in the regulation of exchanges, forms that Dominique Temple has classified in the following way48:

The elementary structures of reciprocity are firstly “positive” (reciprocity of giv-ing) or negative (reciprocity of vengeance); both types are dynamics that create a cycle (virtuous or vicious) in which the exchanges follow on logically.

The most common models of reciprocity (or “matrix” to use Temple’s term) can be either “binary” or “ternary” and imply “particular values”:

1. “Binary” (or bilateral) reciprocity concerns the face-to-face, ‘fair’s fair’ exchange. We find this in the exchanges such as Tandem, where two learners teach each other their own native language. Its particular values are sharing and confidence. It applies particularly in close relationships (friendship) and supposes that the exchanges will be considered balanced by each party.

2. “Ternary” reciprocity (in which three exchanges are a minimum to symbolize the cycle of “giving in rounds”) is a more complex relationship in which we act on one partner and are acted on by a different one; this is a form of reciprocity in which each person is in an intermediary position (receiving from one per-son, giving to another), within a related circle of close friends or family or also in a much wider network. Ternary reciprocity supposes relationships that are based on and that develop the particular values of responsibility and justice. Ternary reciprocity can be further divided into different forms:− “Diachronic” ternary reciprocity assumes transmission over a span of time;

it concerns the forms of reciprocity related to filiation, to preserving tradi-tions or the passing on of culture between generations (for example, funeral rites);

48 see Temple (1998, 2000).

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− “unilateral” ternary reciprocity involves a feeling of responsibility to a col-lective whole; in this form of reciprocity, the individual cannot fail the triple obligation of giving or else others might not be able to give or receive in their turn; everything relies on each person’s commitment, out of respect for another (and therefore for all others), in the form of shared responsibility; each person is responsible for everyone (the tacit reciprocity that is found in a family, a group of close friends or a community such as an immigrant diaspora);

− “bilateral” ternary reciprocity requires the feeling of responsibility to be sub-ject to the obligation of justice (for example to regulate exchanges, to bal-ance out the giving); here the giver’s objective is to give as much as possible because the more he/she gives the more social ties are created (in the case of the societies studied by Mauss); but in this configuration, the person who is in a position of receiving from two givers must reproduce the gifts of both in a “appropriate” way (which is socially or culturally codified); this con-cerns the feeling of justice (which, since it is only a feeling, can remain very symbolic);

− “centralized” ternary reciprocity, unlike the two previous types, produces subjugation (voluntary or otherwise), through obedience or submission; in this form of reciprocity, a single intermediary links together all the mem-bers of the community and becomes the “redistribution centre” or even the “supreme authority”.

Although as Temple remarks, it is rare for a society to experience this last form of reciprocity exclusively (which could lead to possible abuses of power), all societ-ies experience different degrees of reciprocity that produce the particular values of sharing and trust, responsibility and justice. According to Cordonnier, the function of the Leviathan for Hobbes or the social contract for Rousseau somehow comes down to delegating to even a symbolic third party this centralization of reciproc-ity in order to redistribute justice (more or less equally). In some way, the social or community structures that are based on reciprocal exchanges are always based on forms that are very close to these matrices, whether they are for “passing on” knowledge (not with the expectation that the other will give us back the same thing, but because we ourselves have already been given to) or to “centralize” the gift/gift in local exchange trading systems or models like the RERS (Networks of Recipro-cal Knowledge Exchange) in which the commitment (even if it is not here a form of subjugation), requires one to abandon, at least temporarily, one’s own interest in order to be able to benefit collectively and in the long term from the shared benefits of reciprocity.


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3.9 Identifying the Conditions for and the Effects of Reciprocity

From all of the work concerning reciprocity in the fields of philosophy, anthropol-ogy and socioeconomics and their impact on a larger reflection on the social and political order, the following summary was drawn49:

1. The prerequisite conditions for reciprocity: Starting from the hypothesis that reciprocity is a fundamental part of social ties

and a way of “making society” (in interpersonal exchanges, in the co-construc-tion of relationships by actors and the collective), recognition of this reciproc-ity requires us to take into consideration individuals’ autonomy (adults and leaders, who are capable of taking the initiative, of making choices, taking risks and responsibility for the consequences), and at the same time to encourage at the collective and individual level a certain number of social values concerning others (from valuing behaviors like listening and dialogue to promoting values like respect for others and for difference, confidence and cooperation or even co-responsibility in terms of the collective whole).

2. The operational dimensions of reciprocity: In its operational dimensions, reciprocity is based on asymmetrical roles and

situations (it recognizes, takes into account and uses each person’s autonomy, their singularity and their differences), and at the same time imposes revers-ibility in these roles and situations (between alternation and otherness, each person must in turn be giver and receiver). It implies also that the three steps of the obligation to give-receive-give back be followed (encouraging actors to take the gamble of cooperation, to give initially before expecting something in return) and that we give without counting on an exchange of equal value in return (reciprocity is based on incalculable gifts), in a timeframe that is not known beforehand and the whole of which cannot be calculated in terms of interest.

Thus, reciprocity favors cooperation between actors for collective benefits over the long term possibly to the detriment of short-term individual interests (the collective interest takes precedence over individual interests and the logic of cooperation takes precedence over the logic of competition). Taking a risk by committing to giving is the ultimate sign of a subject’s autonomy: this is because the obligation to give is in part a symbolic one, that giving itself allows one to hope for a gift in return, even if the giver is not the same as the original

49 see Eneau (2005).

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recipient; risk and trust therefore reveal actors’ autonomy. However, in order to cooperate, reciprocity invites each person to ask the question of alliances (with whom to cooperate? Under what conditions? To what aim?).

3. The expected effects of reciprocity: Once these principles have been met we can expect reciprocity to make it pos-

sible to regulate and even balance various social ties within a community. In fact, it makes it possible, as exchanges slowly take place, to reverse individual asymmetrical situations so that each person can in turn give, receive and give back and the collective interest can gradually benefit every person. By gam-bling on reciprocity there is an added value for everyone: it is possible through reciprocity to achieve greater individual autonomy, in a “happy medium” between new commitment to the community and more balanced interdepen-dent relationships. But this newly acquired autonomy cannot be reduced to independence or self-sufficiency nor to an illusory individual freedom that takes no account of others’ well-being.

Moreover, gambling on reciprocity also involves an improved prospect for social justice for all. This form of balancing and regulating the individual against the col-lective in terms of roles and interests works as a completion of the circle, over time actuating the complete first dimension of reciprocity involving all its nature and principles (improved social ties and a more united, more coherent collective; great-er autonomy of individuals; promotion of cooperative values and the experience of the justness of moral values that are oriented towards others). Thus, through the simple retroactive action of reciprocity a lasting collective system is created that shows more solidarity and is itself therefore stronger and more autonomous.

3.10 Conclusion

Finally, the long detour through research on reciprocity, exchange and social ties that we have taken here highlights the original relationship between reciprocity and autonomy and allows us to revisit a wider range of the research on adult edu-cation and self-directed learning, including in its social dimensions, which have been largely under-explored. While researchers in the field have generally agreed for some time upon the idea that learning remains an eminently social process, the role of others, the form and the nature of learner communities and even the modes of exchange within a collective are all dimensions that remain to be examined.

By placing the emphasis on the control that the individual is able to exert (or un-able to exert) on his or her own learning, North American research has, as we have


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seen, often reduced autonomy to a merely procedural dimension and restricted the study of this autonomy to something in and for learning. French researchers on the other hand have favored a vision of the autonomy of the learner, seeking through the education process to preserve the existential and developmental di-mension of autonomy which is seen as a goal of education. In other words, work done on reciprocity serves to support this vision of autonomy of an adult (that is to say someone who is autonomous, responsible and civic-minded, to use Labelle’s threefold description), who takes it upon him/herself to educate him/herself as well as through others and for others, taking part in the shared work (in an autonomous, responsible way) to create a “just world” and therefore collective institutions and rules that make it possible to “live together”.

Of course in work on adult education and self-directed learning, researchers who have tried to erect bridges between different visions of autonomy of learners and autonomy in learning have already stressed the existence of a “societal” or “so-cial current” in adult education, especially in France; Joffre Dumazedier in particu-lar was one of its founders. In this current, work on the French RERS as well as work on self-directed learning in one’s professional life have already clearly shown what an important role other people play in adult education. Yet work on reciprocity helps create new ties to other fields of research both in the educational and collec-tive association fields as well as in the professional world and in distance learning. Let us consider for example the professional world and research on communities of practice, professional co-development and collaboration in professional situations. In these various contexts the training systems are all based simultaneously on the learner’s commitment to the exchange relationship, calling into play his or her own autonomy and the “gamble on the gift/gift” that the actor makes although it re-mains unnamed as such, this gamble that anticipates the collaboration of the other person and the benefit that can be gained from participating in such an exchange. In a more concrete example, work that examines trust in cooperation, in particular as part of new work and training systems (on-line collaboration, virtual networks, workers’ collectives on pilot projects over the Internet, etc.) has been a subject of study for many years in management sciences (examples include collaboration be-tween firms or subsidiaries, company takeovers, client-supplier relationships, etc.). All of this work, particularly the work on distance learning, highlights to what ex-tent anticipating something of reciprocity is based on an actors’ autonomy, on in-completeness and uncertainty, on the dynamic of the process itself and finally on the hope of a “balanced” exchange which in other words, shows that collaboration will be lasting… if each person who has agreed to forfeit some of their personal short-term interests benefits on the whole from the operation.

Of course, not all forms of group work and learning refer to the principal of reciprocity to explain or illustrate the exchanges within a collective. However, what

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work on reciprocity has shown is that not all exchanges are of the same type, are constructed in the same timeframe or for the same reasons nor do they all result in the same balance. From this point of view, work on reciprocity does more to open the way for new research than it does to clearly define the concrete process of autonomy construction and development in individuals. It does however show that the types of relationships developed (from érōs to philía to agápē) in communi-ties and societies can be influenced by the size of the collective, the nature of the relationships formed within it and the methods of regulations proposed, be they more or less centralized. It also shows that by deciding to gamble on individuals’ autonomy, the gift dynamic can encourage increased autonomization in each actor, serving the interests of all both individually and collectively.

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l’action. Métailié, ParisBoutinet JP, Denoyel N, Pineau G, Robin JY et al (2007) Penser l’accompagnement adulte.

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du don. Revue MAUSS 105:12–58Candy P (1991) Self-direction for lifelong learning. A comprehensive guide to theory and

practice. Jossey Bas, San FranciscoChabal M (1996) Quand la réciprocité semble non réciproque. Revue MAUSS 8:132–141Cordonnier L (1997) Coopération et réciprocité. Presses Universitaires de France, ParisChené A (1983) The concept of autonomy in adult education: a philosophical discussion.

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Colin, ParisDouglas M (1990) No free gifts. Foreword to the gift. In: Mauss M (ed) The gift. Routledge,

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Eneau J (eds) Apprentissages pluriels des adultes: Questions d’hier et d’aujourd’hui. L’Harmattan, Paris, pp 189–208

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Godbout J (1996) Les bonnes raisons de donner. Revue MAUSS 8:167–178Godbout J (2007) Ce qui circule entre nous. Seuil, ParisGoux JJ (1996) Don et altérité chez Sénèque. Revue MAUSS 8:114–131Héber-Suffrin C, Pineau G et al (2000) Réciprocité et réseaux en formation. Educ Perman

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grammar of social conflicts] (1992). Cerf, ParisLabelle JM (1996) La réciprocité éducative. PUF, ParisLegendre R (1993) Dictionnaire actuel de l’éducation. Guérin et Eska, Montréal et ParisLévi-Strauss C (1968) Introduction à l’œuvre de Marcel Mauss. In: Mauss M (ed) Sociologie

et anthropologie (1950). Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, pp IX–LIIMayen P et al (2002) Apprendre des autres. Educ Perman 151, 87–107Moisan A (2000) Autoformation et lien social: Sociogenèse réciproque par l’échange. In: Ala-

va S (ed) Autoformation et lien social. Editions Universitaires du Sud, Toulouse, pp 21–33Moisan A (2002) L’autoformation au risque de l’incomplétude et de l’échange don/contre-

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Paul M (2004) L’accompagnement, une posture professionnelle spécifique. L’Harmattan, ParisRicœur P (1996) Soi-même comme un autre [Oneself as another] (1990). Seuil, ParisRicœur P (1998) De la morale à l’éthique, La Revue Parlée. Centre Pompidou, ParisRicœur P (2004) Parcours de la reconnaissance [Course of recognition]. Stock, ParisTarot C (2003) Sociologie et anthropologie de Marcel Mauss. La Découverte, ParisTemple D (1998) Les structures élémentaires de la réciprocité. Revue MAUSS 12:234–243Temple D (2000) Les origines anthropologiques de la réciprocité. Educ Perman 144(3):35–50Todorov T (2003) La vie commune (1995). Seuil, ParisTremblay NA (2003) L’autoformation. Pour apprendre autrement. Presses de l’Université de

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“What makes a person a subject who both has a sense of self and makes sense of objects?”1 This question is central to Bildung. In this process of self-determination, narration plays a key role. The process of Bildung, which I view as reflexive and aimed at the formation of the self, is closely linked with narration, as a fundamental aspect of human experience and understanding. The thesis on which I base this pa-per is that narration, especially also telling a person’ s life story, strengthens the sense of self and makes sense of objects. In my discussion, I clarify and justify this thesis.

4.1 �Bildung as Self-Determination

Every person has the task and freedom to determine who he or she is. This task involves action, not merely thought. “The essence of personhood—of human ex-istence—is to make sense … of oneself, the world, and one’ s place in the world”.2 I understand Bildung as an action aimed at one’ s own person, not only as subject-determination, but also as self-determination.

The subject and the self differ from each other, however: The subject is an indi-vidual, “… who can say I and adopt a first-person perspective”.3 From the viewpoint

1 Auyang, 1999, 2.2 Drath, 1990, 485.3 Auyang, 1999, 12.


4The Narrative Dimension of Becoming Oneself

Käthe Schneider

K. Schneider ()Institut für Bildung und Kultur, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Am Planetarium 4, 07743 Jena, Germanye-mail: [email protected]

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of action theory, the subject stands for the consciously acting person. An essential characteristic of action is its intention: “Intentionality means that my mental state is directed at an object or that I am thinking about an object”.4 With regard to the epistemological position of Karl Jaspers, who coined the concept of the “subject-object split”, the subject stands for the knowing person and the object for the object of knowing:

“Allen… Anschauungen ist eines gemeinsam: sie erfassen das Sein als etwas, das mir als Gegenstand gegenübersteht, auf das ich als auf ein mir gegenüberstehendes Objekt, es meinend, gerichtet bin. Dieses Urphänomen unseres bewußten Daseins ist uns so selbstverständlich, daß wir sein Rätsel kaum spüren, weil wir es gar nicht befragen. Das, was wir denken, von dem wir sprechen, ist stets ein anderes als wir, ist das, worauf wir, die Subjekte, als auf ein gegenüberstehendes, die Objekte, gerichtet sind. Wenn wir uns selbst zum Gegenstand unseres Denkens machen, werden wir selbst gleichsam zum anderen und sind immer zugleich als ein denkendes Ich wieder da, das dieses Denken seiner selbst vollzieht, aber doch selbst nicht angemessen als Objekt gedacht werden kann, weil es immer wieder die Voraussetzung jedes Objekt-gewordenseins ist. Wir nennen diesen Grundbefund unseres denkenden Daseins die Subjekt-Objekt-Spaltung.” (One thing is common to all… viewpoints: they grasp exis-tence as something that faces me as an object, to which I, as to an object facing me, thinking of it, am oriented. This ur-phenomenon of our conscious existence is so self-evident to us that we scarcely sense its riddle, because we do not even question it. That which we think, of which we speak, is always something other than we, [it] is that to which we, the subjects, are oriented, as to something facing us, the objects. If we make ourselves the object of our thinking, we ourselves become as-it-were the other and are always at the same time again there as a thinking I who does this thinking itself, but indeed can never itself be adequately thought as object, because it is always again the precondition for every [case of] having become an object. We name this innermost finding of our thinking existence the subject-object split).5

The subject determines itself in relation to the object, because the subject is not a preexisting entity. It arises simultaneously with the intelligibility of objects and in-tersubjective understanding. Auyang regards intentionality as an intrinsic relation-ship in which the subject becomes aware of himself only when he can encounter objects in the world.6

The “self,” to the contrary, refers to a meaning-making system.7 In psychology, the concept of the self often refers to a set of characteristics that a person connects to himself. People find it difficult or impossible to imagine themselves without

4 ibid.5 Jaspers, 1953, 24f.6 cf. Auyang, 1999.7 cf. Auyang, 1999.

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these characteristics.8 I also understand the term “identity” in this sense. Identity represents the quality of the “me”; it reflects the efforts of the “I” to bring various narratives into a larger narrative context in order to endow life with meaning. In philosophy, however, the self is the agent, the subject of desires, and the one who knows himself and the possessor of thoughts and sensations.9

If the present thought of future reward or punishments is to encourage or deter me from some course of action, I must be thinking of the person rewarded as me, as myself, as the same person who is now going to experience the hardships of righteous-ness or not experience the pleasures of sin to gain this reward.10

Auyang adopts a similar viewpoint regarding the determination of the structures that characterize a subject who has a sense of self: “Together, the first-person I and the third-person One constitute the existential self, our full sense of subject and our consciousness as personal identity”.11 In personality psychology, the I is viewed in the process of “selfing”, of narrating experience to create a modern self, whereas the me can be viewed as the self that the I constructs.12 The self thereby encompasses both the subject as the I and the consciousness of one’ s own person, here of the subject as the me. Equally, the self is the locus of identity.

I conceive of Bildung as self-determination, and because of the consciousness of identity it reaches beyond subject-determination. The process of becoming oneself takes place in Bildung. Bildung refers to the action of forming the self. The object of the action of Bildung is the self: I justify this line of reasoning as follows. Barresi and Juckes13 refer to the personality “… as a unity that is a self-conscious agent, an intentional being”. In agreement with McAdams, I understand the personality as a construct with three sub-constructs or construct levels:14 Level 1 is character-ized by the construct of dispositional characteristics. These are not contingent, but are rather stable and remain constant in different situations: “Dispositional traits are those relatively unconditional, relatively decontextualized, generally linear, and implicitly comparative dimensions of personality”.15 Level 2 is determined by the “characteristic adaptations”, which for McAdams include personal endeavors, life

8 cf. Perry, 2002.9 cf. Perry, 2002, 190.10 ibid.11 Auyang, 1999, 14.12 cf. McAdams, 1996, 295.13 Barresi & Juckes, 1997, 694.14 cf. McAdams, 1996, 301.15 McAdams, 1996, 303.

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tasks, defense mechanisms, coping strategies, domain-specific abilities, values and other motivational and strategic constructs. Characteristic adaptations are embed-ded in a context of time, place and role.16 They “… speak to what people want, often during particular periods in their lives or within particular domains of action, and what life methods people use … to get what they want or avoid getting what they do not want over time, in particular places, and/or with respect to particular roles”.17 Contextualization differentiates “characteristic adaptations” from “dispositional traits”. On Level 3 there are pictures of a person’ s constructions, of his “life stories”. People tell life stories and thereby give their own life a meaning, a purpose.18 Since purpose is central on this level, it is characterized by meaning formation.

Personality and developmental studies prove that the intentional formation of the personality is oriented in its ontogenesis in an exemplary manner to different centers of gravity of the personality. From studies, we know that the development of personality proceeds from the level of “traits” to the level of “characteristic ad-aptations” to the level of “life stories”. Empirically we see that dispositional traits are, of course, established relatively early, but we can also find changes occurring in adulthood. From the life course perspective, it is above all the adult who poses the question of the life story, on Level 3 of the personality. What children and ado-lescents can examine and intentionally form in their own personality is located on Levels 1 and 2, because typically they are still not yet able to experience the unity and purpose of their life as problematic.19 In the frame of personality develop-ment the person sees himself confronted on Level 3 with the fundamental question: “Who am I?” In modern societies, no specific life stories are prescribed for adults. “Rather, modern selves must be made or discovered as people become what they are to become in time”.20 One consequence of the pluralization of life forms is that the subject’ s development is no longer determined by an innate telos or image of God. The anthropological position that is developing and continues to be held to-day assumes that the person is basically open under conditions of indeterminacy and is not predetermined.21

If Bildung were understood as the determination of the person as a subject, then this process would, first of all, be related to the level of characteristic adaptations, for the subject is perceived as knowing and acting; for it is precisely intentionality

16 cf. ibid., 301.17 McAdams, 1996, 301.18 cf. ibid.19 cf. ibid.20 ibid.21 cf. Buck, 1984.

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that constitutes the relationship between subject and object.22 Bildung as action in-cludes, however, as well the highest level of the personality. It refers to the meaning-forming system, the self, which has a reciprocal interactive relationship with the two other levels. For: To portray Bildung as on the first level, namely on that of dispositional traits, would remove it from its context and from the personality. This is because in the sense used here the dispositional traits would be reduced to per-sonality factors that, admittedly, manifest themselves in different variants, but in a de-individualized manner. To the contrary, the characteristic adaptations are rather context-specific, but individuality still does not yet have an effect even in interac-tion with dispositional traits. To place Bildung on these two levels would ignore the question of self-determination, which according to McAdams genuinely character-izes the third level in the personality construct.

I will explain this train of reasoning from a further perspective with regard to Husserl’ s phenomenological or image concept: Husserl23 refers in connection with the concept of the picture to a terminology that differentiates among the repre-senting material, the depicted real object and the physical representation on the material. Husserl refers to the representing material as the picture bearer. This can be paper, wood or a canvas. Husserl refers to the portrayed real object that is rep-resented in the picture as the subject of the picture. The object of the picture is, finally, the representation perceptible in the picture of the subject of the picture. A self that is forming itself can in turn be understood as a representing material, as a picture-bearer. The physical picture stands for the depicted real object, for the sub-ject of the picture or in the case of Bildung essentially for mentifacts. The concept of culture refers to what is created by people, that manifests itself and is mediated by artifacts, mentifacts and sociofacts. Artifacts refer to material objects, sociofacts to created social relationships, and mentifacts, as the most enduring and central components, to created ideas. Artifacts are material forms of expression, including tools, architecture and clothing. With mentifacts the focus is on mental disposi-tions, such as knowledge, ideas, convictions, values and attitudes. Sociofacts refer to sets of rules, conventions and interaction patterns, customs and practices that are collectively shared and to which the members of a group orient their action. “Das Bild … bezieht sich auf die Sache durchÄhnlichkeit, und fehlt sie, so ist auch von einem Bilde nicht mehr die Rede”. (The picture … refers to the subject matter through similarity, and if this is lacking, one can hardly speak of a picture.)24 A pic-ture in Husserl’ s sense is only present if there are analogies to the real object, or in a

22 cf. Auyang, 1999.23 cf. Husserl, 1904/05/2006, 31.24 Husserl, 1920/1992, 587.


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figurative sense, if the subject of the picture that a person makes of himself, starting from the real object, to stay with Husserl’ s language, exhibits analogies, e.g., to the nature of the most important mentifact. “Das physische Bild weckt das geistige Bild, und dieses wieder stellt ein anderes: das Sujet vor”.25 (The physical picture gives rise to the intellectual picture, and this again introduces another: the subject.) In the process of Bildung the picture subject represents the object of action. At heart, what concerns the subject is meaning formation, here the level of the life story, so that the meaning-forming system can be derived from this analogy-formation as a specified object of the action of Bildung. Thereby it holds that: “Eine Abbildung kann Abbildung eines Abbildes sein, das selbst wieder ein Abbild sein kann usw.; wie wenn eine Reproduktion, etwa eine Handzeichnung einer Statue vorliegt, und dann später eine Reproduktion dieser Handzeichnung selbst”. (A portrayal can be the portrayal of a portrayal that itself can again be a portrayal, etc.; as when a repro-duction is available, e.g., a hand sketch of a statue, and then later a reproduction of this hand sketch itself.)26

The picture object, finally, is the visible representation in the picture of the pic-ture subject. With reference to Bildung, the picture object represents the result of the action of bringing a picture subject of itself as a person to expression, which manifests itself in a general way in the meanings that mentifacts, e.g., have for a person.

In the process of the action of Bildung, the object of action, the meaning system, assumes a central role. The formation of meaning is a process that reflects one’ s own existence, in which the person creates a new perspective that entails specific changes for the person. Meaning formation, which first occurs on Level 3 of the personality27, is anthropologically central: “It is meaning that gives life unity and coherence”.28 The concept of the self refers to the meaning-making system.29

Bildung, in contrast to the non-intentional formation of the self, acquires greater theoretical significance with advancing age: “As development forms action and in-tentionality, intentional action gradually comes to form development”.30 When an educand is young, it is primarily the educator who sets the aims of education, but as the educand matures, the educator tries to support him in achieving his own aims. Bildung is, however, neither a continuous process with a telos that an identical

25 Husserl, 1904/05/2006, 31.26 Husserl, 1923/24/1992, 133.27 cf. McAdams, 1996.28 Emmons, 1996, 333.29 cf. Fingarette, 1963.30 Brandtstädter, 1999, 58.

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subject underlies, nor an absolute action of the person. The moment of contingency is inherent in it.

Since Bildung is understood as action, this action is characterized by aims. To systematically classify these aims, I draw on Hoff and Evers31 and distinguish four levels of action:

1. Level of everyday action2. Level of action going beyond the everyday3. Level of biographically significant action4. Level of identity action

It becomes clear that the first three levels do not represent Bildung in the sense defined here. These are: first, that of everyday action with concrete, repetitive and quickly realizable tasks (e.g., going shopping); second, actions going beyond ev-eryday action units, such as monthly or annual projects (e.g., renovating a house); third, that of biographically significant action, that sets the switches for life and comprehends several years (e.g., the choice of a program of studies and studying). Bildung can be located on the fourth and highest action level, namely that of iden-tity action. Bildung is neither repetitive action nor quickly realizable. Bildung is per-formed with the aim to design an ideal scheme and realize it in the self, to trans-form a complex system. If Bildung is identity-creating action, then we can infer the conclusion of a relatively low consciousness of this action, for generally formulated, identity aims not characterized by an explicit end state are stored in the implicit mode.

4.2 The Development of the Self

If Bildung as action is aimed at a person’ s own meaning system, at the self, the ques-tion arises of what attributes or structures should be used to identify the develop-ment of the self. I understand the concept of development, in agreement with Paul Baltes32, as referring to all changes in the organism’ s adaptive capacity. Develop-ment comprehends, according to Baltes, the joint product of processes of growth (gain) and breakdown (loss). The determination of gains and losses is a normative process that can take place in theoretical, subjective and objective regards. I do not

31 Hoff & Evers, 2003, 131 ff.32 Baltes, 1990.


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understand development as a process directed at a specific end-state with a set, unidirectional sequence of developmental steps followed in an ascending manner.

Hans Thomae finds fundamental formal developmental processes in differentia-tion, progressing from an undifferentiated whole to greater differentiation, as well as integration, as a regulatory process. Related to the life narrative, this does not become simply a sequence of formal structures in development, but rather the story of a theme and its variations.33

The development of the self, which finds expression in life narratives, occurs in the subsystems of the “meaning-making” and “significance-making” systems: “Meaning (whether semantic, logical, physical, or psychological) … consists of the relations between an object or event and other objects or events …”.34 While “mean-ing” stands for knowledge that is marked by relations among objects and events, the meaning of events and knowledge for a person is expressed with the concept of “significance.” The concept of “significance” refers to the “… relations objects and events have with people’ s values, needs, interests etc”.35 “Significance” endows a person with unity and coherence. Conferring meaning on one’ s own person is a process “by which we imbue an event with self-relevant meaning and connect it to the self ”.36 In combining “significance making” and “meaning making,” cognitive, affective and conative processes are integrated: “The knowledge must combine with the deeper levels of the person, with feeling and strivings”.37

If development is characterized by the fundamental mechanisms of differentia-tion and integration, we should ask how the differentiation and integration of the “meaning-” and “significance-making systems” find expression. In the process of differentiation, a system is reduced to smaller units, in integration, differentiated sub-elements and structures are related to each other, and a more complex whole is created: “… the basic underlying principle of ‘complexifaction’ of mind is not the mere addition of new capacities (an ‘aggregation model’) nor the substitution of a new capacity for an old one (a ‘replacement model’), but the subordination of once ruling capacities to the dominion of more complex capacities”.38

The foundation of development occurs in accord with the “theory of the onto-genesis of the self ” developed by Robert Kegan. Kegan regards the ontogenesis of the self as occurring in stages: The structuring of the stages occurs according to the “ways of knowing” that determine how a person creates meanings. A specific

33 cf. Thomae, 1959.34 Blasi, 2009, 17.35 ibid., 22.36 Weeks & Pasupathi, 2011, 471.37 Steindorf, 1985, 201.38 Kegan, 2001, 194.

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subject-object relationship characterizes each developmental stage of meaning for-mation, and indeed with regard to the relationship of the person to himself, to oth-ers and to the world. The subject is that with which a person is involved, with which he identifies himself and with which he is so engaged that he feels it to be himself. The object, to the contrary, represents that which the person can regard, reflect on and change. If meaning formation changes, a transformation takes place: The subject becomes the object. The process of “meaning and significance making” is characterized by an epistemic structure that undergoes change in the life course.39 In all, Kegan40 arrives at the following stages in the ontogenesis of the self:

Stage 0: A new-born child lives in an objectless world in which it experiences reflexes, movements and feelings.

Stage 1: On the first developmental stage, independent elements represent the object: The child can recognize objects as separate from himself. The movements and feelings of the first stage become the object of attention. The new subjec-tively experienced forms are perceptions and impulses.41 “Their attachment to the momentary, the immediate, and the atomistic makes their thinking fantastic and illogical, their feelings impulsive and fluid, their social-relating egocentric”.42

Stage 2: This development follows the acquisition of the ability to think about and know permanent categories: “… children’ s capacity to organize things, others and self as possessors of elements or properties enables their thinking to become concrete and logical, their feelings to be made up of time-enduring needs and dispositions rather than momentary impulses, and their social-relating to grant themselves and others a separate mind and a distinct point of view”.43 At this age, a person acquires concrete knowledge by recognizing and naming objects. A person is, however, still not in a position to organize facts into comprehensive abstract ideas, categories and value systems.

Stage 3: On the third stage a person is able to develop trans-categories: She has developed a comprehensive understanding of her needs and of the world, inter-nalized the values of the environment and can fulfill expectations that become permanent. A person is, to be sure, in a position to think abstractly and share feelings with others, but she still does not experience herself as a person inde-pendent of others, however.44 “The capacity to subordinate durable categories to

39 cf. Kegan, Lahey & Souvaine, 2009.40 cf. Kegan, 2000, 107 ff.41 cf. Kegan, 2000.42 ibid., 32f.43 Kegan, 2000, 32f.44 cf. Kegan, 2000.


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the interaction between them makes their thinking abstract, their feelings a mat-ter of inner states and self-reflexive emotion …, and their social-relating capable of loyalty and devotion to a community of people or ideas larger than the self ”.45

Stage 4: Characteristic of the next developmental stage is that a person can make a system an object. She has developed a type of inner authority that enables her to determine for herself what she regards as valuable. This transformation enables a person to live in a self-determining manner in a society with different value systems. However, she still cannot recognize the limitations of the institu-tional I of this inner authority.46

Stage 5: On this stage, a person can contemplate various abstract systems. The person makes the world accessible from an integrating perspective and recog-nizes the limits of self-determination, as well as the one-sidedness of his own internal personal system. The new worldview brings together contradictions and oppositions; thinking is dialectical. The self can move between various psy-chic systems that have become part of the self.47

The development of the self is an objectivation process that is equally a process of becoming conscious. A person creates objects. “That which was subject becomes object to the next principle. The new principle is a higher order principle (more complex, more inclusive) that makes the prior principle into an element or tool of its system”.48 Simultaneously, a loss of the subject occurs that leads to self-determi-nation, for on each stage a person is better able to recognize who she is, because she can observe, reflect on and change more of herself. “We have object; we are subject. We cannot be responsible for, or in control of, or reflect upon that which is subject”.49 The development or creation of the other that the person has held to be herself constitutes the process that proceeds from the experience to the experi-enced: “Experience is the moment of life in the presence of …; the experienced is the therein emerging moment of reflexivity …, that knows of the ‘Me’ in the ‘I’”.50

The objects of the subject’ s knowledge or respectively of the person are the per-son himself, the others or the world. If the person is himself the object, then with Perry self-knowledge is present: Self-knowledge seems “essentially indexical”51: You can only express self-knowledge when using the first-person.

45 ibid.46 Kegan, 2000.47 ibid.48 Kegan, 2000, 32f.49 ibid.50 Witsch, 2008, 54.51 Perry, 2002, 211.

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Self-knowledge can however be differentiated, because a person can also have know-ledge of his relationship to himself, to the world and to others: “Self-know-ledge is knowledge about a person by that very person, with the additional require-ment that the person be cognized via the agent-relative role of identity. This agent-relative role is tied to normally self-informative methods of knowing and normally self-effecting ways of acting. When these methods are employed, there will be im-munity of misidentification as to whom is known about, or whom is acted upon”.52 As a bearer of identity, a person enters into a relationship to the world, to others or to himself and has knowledge of this.

The objects of perception through which the self determines itself are not only the world, others and the person, but also knowledge that a person has of her rela-tionship to the world, to herself and to others. In this process of objectification, or also of becoming conscious, fundamental changes take place that determine how insights are generated in regard to thinking, feeling and interacting.53 There is not only an increase in what we can reflect on and change, but there is a qualitative change in perception brought about by an increase in complexity – the person gains a new perspective from which to regard herself, others and the world.54 “Greater complexity means being able to look at more [take more as the object]. The blind spot [which is the subject] becomes smaller and smaller”.55

Since the subject-object transformation in self-development implies that the object status is subordinated to the subject status, the question arises of whether the transformation of experience into the experienced is essentially a growth process: The increase in complexity manifests itself in that the earlier principle forms an element of the developing more complex principle. At first, this integra-tion does not comprehend the specific experience, but rather it is the object that changes into a new principle, for example, permanent categories into trans-cat-egories. The reflected experience as the experienced does not, however, exclude experience on the object stage. Rather, experience finds another form and quality through reflection. Experience is the basis of the experienced, because without experience this cannot be reflected. With reference to Carl R. Rogers’56 theory of personality development, experience per se is relevant for the person, and not just in its instrumental function for the reflection of experience. The development of the personality and the self is manifest for Rogers in the reduction of incongrui-ties between organismic experience and its evaluation by the person. The concept

52 ibid, 212.53 cf. Kegan, 2000.54 Kegan & Lahey, 2009.55 ibid., 22.56 Rogers, 2009.


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of experience includes everything that takes place in an organism in a specific moment and which is potentially accessible to being made conscious. A faulty adaptation is present if the organism rejects specific experiences of becoming aware or distorts its conscious perception so much that this cannot be integrated exactly symbolized into the pattern of the self-structure. Congruence refers to the agreement between the perceived self and the actual organismic experience. For Rogers, adequate perception of organismic experience and adequate experi-ence are a basic precondition for self-development. The synthesis of the subject-transformation finds expression in an increase in complexity and in integrated experience.

Depending on the development of the “meaning-making system”, a person has different amounts of knowledge available for creating relevance. And knowledge, however complex it is, has varying degrees of relevance for the person and there-by for the creation of significance. The developmental processes of the self can be understood as a differentiation and integration of the “significance-making” and “meaning-making” systems: For the “meaning-making” system, it is clear that this process is above all an epistemic one that integrates differentiated knowledge into a more complex system, even if emotions play an important role here. The growth of the “significance-making” system is, in contrast, an affective and conative process that, however, also comprehends cognitive processes.

4.3 Narration in Bildung

Drawing on McAdams, the formation of identity occurs above all on the level of life stories. Life stories are episodic self-representations of the person, while dis-positional traits are semantic self-representations that offer the most abstract and important categories and adjectives with regard to one’ s own person.57

A life story can be understood as a narrated product of a characteristic sort, as the “I” arranges elements of the “Me” in a temporal sequence.58 In the story of a person’ s life, the “I” as subject narrates its own experience and thereby constructs the “Me” as the object or respectively as the self. The “I” functions as the narrator, while the “Me” is the protagonist of the story.

What is a “life narration”? In terms of its architecture, a story corresponds es-sentially to the grammar of aim-directed behaviour: A protagonist acts in order

57 cf. Diehl, 2006.58 cf. McAdams, 1996, 307.

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to achieve an aim and then reacts to the consequences.59 “Narrative is the natural mode of expression to match the inherent structure of personal experience”60, for a person’ s intentionality is also the core of every narrative, which is a retrospective interpretation of the action.

The components of the story, the setting of the initiating event, the internal re-sponse, the attempt to act, the consequences, and the reaction, are arranged in a causal chain. Good stories present a network of causal chains: they are coherent. In poorly told stories, narrative elements are not connected to each other, and at the end of the story many narrative elements are not brought together.61

The narration of a life story or respectively of parts of the life story represent from an educational science viewpoint a method for subject-object transforma-tion and for integration and can thereby be regarded as a means of furthering self-development, as a constitutive process of Bildung. Objectivation and integration are processes that are achieved by telling life stories qua form, even if with varying degrees of success. The premises are first made explicit in order to identify, starting from this, facilitating moments to set forth the objectivation and integration of the life story.

Through the narration of one’ s own life story, a person becomes an object of his own thinking and gains a perspective from which he can examine himself, others and the world. The objectivation of the self is a process inherent in telling or writing about oneself.62

Telling a life story also serves an integrative function for the self. The approach of the narration of one’ s own life story assumes that intra-psychic coherence is cre-ated in that the individual develops a story, a narrative, that is suitable for himself. Experiences are of little value as long as they are not connected to a story, because the unity created in the story is still not present in the experience.63 Telling the life story can integrate disconnected experiences: “By binding together disparate ele-ments within the me into a broader narrative frame, the selfing process can make a patterned identity out of what may appear, at first blush, to be a random and scattered life. The I can provide an integrated telling of the self as a more or less followable and believable story”.64 In all, it thus holds that through a purpose vari-ous aims are shaped into a unity, and the implicit meaning of life is made explicit

59 cf. Stein & Policastro, 1984.60 Barresi & Juckes, 1997, 695.61 cf. Stein & Policastro, 1984.62 cf. Wiener & Rosenwald, 1993, 32.63 cf. Widdershoven, 1993, 7.64 McAdams, 1996, 309.


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in a story. “… [I]n telling stories we try to make sense of life”65, and “… in telling … stories we also change the meaning of our experiences and actions”.66 A “story … is an articulation of life that gives it a new and richer meaning”.67

Identity represents the quality of the “Me.” It mirrors the ability of the “I” to bring various stories into a greater narrative context in order to confer meaning on life. The life story is able to endow the “Me” with a unity and a life purpose.68

A person can have more than one life story or dispose of numerous discon-nected stories about herself. Studies have shown that persons answer the question of the sense of continuity, direction and purpose in life in various different ways. The various forms of dealing with the creation of identity make it clear that the fur-thering of self-development is a relevant pedagogical aim, and especially, moreover, of adult education. Reflection on one’ s own life begins already in adolescence, but it likewise characterizes above all the phase of “emerging adulthood”69 and because of the decreasing time horizon reaches its peak at a later age.

4.4 The Determination of the Self Through Furthering Conflicts

The development of the self as a transformation of the life story is facilitated when a person acquires the ability to experience the limits of meaning formation.70 Kegan and Lahey draw on research by Piaget, Inhelder, Baldwin, Werner and Kohlberg, who represent the optimal conflict as a central force in changing the self.71 This is characterized in a person’ s experience in that the person senses discrepancies be-tween the demands and the level of meaning formation. Conflict has the effect that the person feels the limits of the way of knowing.72 In this experience of limits, the object becomes, in a very real sense of the word, an “ob-jectum”, something that has offered resistance and thus becomes an object.73 The motor for the development of meaning and sense formation are the demands of life. In a person’ s life, transitional

65 Widdershoven, 1993, 9.66 ibid., 7.67 ibid., 6.68 cf. McAdams, 1996, 309.69 cf. Arnett, 2000.70 cf. Kegan & Lahey, 2009.71 cf. Shantz & Hartup, 1992.72 cf. Kegan & Lahey, 2009, 54.73 cf. Fichte, 1794, 418.

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phases represent triggers for retrospectively examining his life and times of inten-sified self-reflection. They are linked with a person’ s attempts to form meanings. “… [O]ne can describe a life-trajectory of meaning-making as a sequence of con-frontations between one’ s actual way of making meaning and societal demands, as a sequence of conflicts, solutions for these conflicts, and new conflicts”.74 Conflict arises as a motor for the development of meaning and sense formation if a person can no longer give a relevant demand a stable and satisfying meaning. The greater the discrepancy between the demand and one’ s own level of meaning formation, the greater is the probability that this situation will lead to conflict. “Thus, one level at which adults must respond to difficult life experiences is the level of challenge to narrative identity”.75 Also pointing in this direction is the finding that narrative identity is constituted from memories of emotionally significant experiences, be-cause they have self-defining functions and are compressed to form a life story.76

In phases where there is a challenge to narrative identity by a crisis of meaning, telling the story of negative experiences can contribute to self-development and thus to Bildung. A specific mode of narration facilitates self-development in that by negatively experiencing an event, the optimal conflict, personal learning results occur that are explored, and positive significance is ascribed to the negative event.

Ligendahl and Pahls77 regard the development of the self as a “… result of a two-step process of (1) acknowledging the impact of a negative event and openly exploring its meaning and potential to change the self and (2) coming to a sense of positive resolution”. These processes involve differentiation and integration. The optimal conflict, which is here specified as the negatively experienced event, is to be understood in its positive sense for the person: The generation of meaning contributes to an increase in coherence, to the integration of life experiences. The recognition of learning potential through a furthering conflict is also a process of differentiation: The more differentiated the “meaning-making system” becomes, the more potential learning possibilities a person has available to help him interpret the crisis as positive for the development of his personality.

A person’ s maturity, which finds expression in a high degree of consciousness and in cognitive complexity, is connected with an exploratory narrative mode. This is grasped as: “… the active, engaged effort on the part of the narrator to explore, reflect on, or analyze a difficult experience with an openness to learning from it and

74 Kunnen & Bosma, 2000, 60.75 Pals, 2006, 1081.76 cf. McAdams, 2001.77 Pals Ligendahl & McAdams, 2011, 395.


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incorporating a sense of change into the life story”.78 More complex perspectives that result from the exploratory narrative mode are, for example, a new view of the domains of work or of religion. The unexplored life lacks meaning.

Besides the exploratory narrative mode, the coherent positive conclusion of a difficult life situation in a story facilitates the transformation of the self. “Coherent positive resolution is defined here as the construction of a coherent and complete story of a difficult event that ends positively, conveying a sense of emotional resolu-tion or closure”.79 The positive conclusion of a story aims not at an objective solu-tion of the problem. The meaning of a positive conclusion to a narrative lies much more in that a person can free himself from the fetters of negative emotional events.

If a person is able to recognize the learning and developmental potential con-nected with a crisis, it is probable that the crisis will be given a positive meaning. Persons who succeed in doing this in narration display “greater self-understanding, emotional awareness, and complexity” and an “enduring sense of positive self-transformation within the life story”.80 The relevance of a positive emotional con-clusion likewise lies in that negative feelings would harm the mode of mastery of new demands and likewise in the course of time a person’ s ego-resilience.81

If we focus a life course perspective on these furthering conditions of becom-ing aware, we see that with increasing age there is a greater potential for Bildung, for self-determination. Anthropologically speaking, losses not gains predominate in the second half of life. As people age, losses become manifest not only in the deterioration of the body, but also in the increasing relevance of the basic human situation, as well as in the insistent surfacing of human meaning constitution. “Die leiblichen, zeitlichen, interpersonalen und geschichtlich-kulturellen Konstituentien treten, gerade durch ihr Gestörtwerden, aufdringlich zutage. Mit ihnen melden sich Grenzen des Lebens”. (The physical, temporal, interpersonal and historical-cultural constitutions insistently surface, precisely through their being disturbed. With them the limits of life announce themselves (italicized in original)).82 In view of the pre-dominance of loss, age offers a possibility for self-transformation. Spranger83 also identifies these changes as a process of becoming aware or conscious. Age makes possible insight into the interpenetration of finiteness and sense and intensifies the urgency of the question as to the deeper relationship to and a deeper and more

78 Pals, 2006, 108.79 ibid.80 ibid.81 cf. ibid.82 Rentsch, 1992, 301.83 cf. Spranger, 1958.

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complex meaning acquired by the world and one’ s own person. The problem of unity and purpose in adulthood, and above all in later adulthood, challenges the person in the construction of her life story and conferring identity. These unity-creating processes of Bildung increase in importance during middle and later adult-hood.

4.5 Conclusions

To place Bildung in a broad context means, for one thing, that Bildung is to a great extent epistemically determined: The world in all its complexity must be made the object, grasped and intellectually delved into. Bildung is, for another, also affectively structured: First, experience is a basic precondition of Bildung. Negative feelings experienced in a crisis represent initiating events for the reflection of the self. Or generally, it is the moment that constitutes a stimulus. Second, emotionally delving into knowledge, through which its significance for one’ s personality is grasped, is a further fundamental moment of Bildung, for knowledge is situated in relation to one’ s own values and aims. Values and aims are characterized by emotions.

Staudinger84 specifies the “life reflection” that is relevant for self-determination as a “meta-regulatory” process of development that furthers wisdom and maturity in the context of losses, weaknesses and setbacks. Bildung and self-determination are relevant for wisdom. Crises or transitional phases represent the events in a per-son’ s life through which meaning creation is challenged in a special manner, and reflection becomes imperative. However, it is not just in the frame of crises that narrations become relevant for purposes of self-development. Narrations on inter-action with oneself, the world or others make it possible for a person to gain a sense of objectivation and an experience of others, events or knowledge as meaningful for one’ s person, so that to support Bildung narrations are pedagogically also beneficial even in the absence of crises.

Finally, I emphasize again that narration is a fundamental form with which to promote a subject-object transformation as a synthesis. In the synthesis subjective and objective aspects are separated from the relationship of merely being in opposi-tion and unified. In that the subject and the object are led to a synthesis, they should undergo a transformation and be filled with new contents.85

The synthesis may lead to self-determination through the integration of subject and object: The increase in complexity, the subordination of once-ruling capacities

84 Staudinger, 2001.85 cf. Fichte, 1794, 418f.


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to the dominion of more complex capacities86, can be understood as the result of a synthesis. Likewise, the experience and the experienced are also synthesized. The person has a liberating sense of being able to become aware of an (irrational) cog-nition and to change this. The experience and the experienced are insofar brought into a synthesis as a person has a positive experience of becoming aware of an (ir-rational) cognition in demarcation from negative feelings of frustration and inte-grates this into a complex emotional experience of a recognition of significance. In self-determination, subject and object are not simply independent entities.87

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Nowadays it has become somehow fashionable to use the German term Bildung in international educationalist and philosophical discourses that are predominantly English-speaking. A reason for that development could be the continuously grow-ing awareness that there are some important aspects of human development and of pedagogical interactions which cannot be properly and precisely grasped by the English term “education”.

However, this awareness seems to be merely an intuitive one. For it is not quite clear which significances of Bildung cannot be translated into the concept of educa-tion. So for example the humanistic ideal as articulated by Wilhelm von Humboldt in his theory of Bildung does not really mark a distinction between “Bildung” and “education”. Rather, this ideal is also a central feature of several distinguished Eng-lish and American theorists of education. The most prominent of them is probably John Dewey who emphasizes—not unlike Humboldt—the intrinsic value of educa-tion as unlimited development and flourishing of the potentials and capacities of the single human person: a development and flourishing that is to be understood according to both Humboldt and Dewey as an end-in-itself—and not primarily as a tool for the achievement of extrinsic economic or political goals of a given society. Generally speaking, this notion of human development as an end-in-itself is a main feature of the Anglo-Saxon concept of “liberal education”. So why not then just translate “Bildung” as “liberal education”?

In this paper I will argue that there is indeed a specific meaning of Bildung, a meaning that marks a very important legacy of the German idealism in whose


5The Concept of Bildung and Its Moral Implications

Krassimir Stojanov

K. Stojanov ()Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, 85071 Ingolstadt, Germanye-mail: [email protected]

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context the modern connotations of Bildung occurred. This is the meaning of Bil-dung as world-encountering that is understood as a necessary condition of self-development. World appears here as a universal and ideal realm that transcends every particular environment, everything that is factually given. My claim is that this particular significance of Bildung is indeed not so easily translatable into the term “education”, or even into the term “liberal education”. However, one misses this crucial significance, if one ties the concept of Bildung to “post-modern” or to poststructuralist approaches and diagnoses that pretend to “deconstruct” all kinds of universalistic ideas and meanings. This is why in the first section of this paper I shall show why the attempts to spell out Bildung in “post-modern” terms make this concept redundant.

In the second section I shall briefly reconstruct Humboldt’s and Hegel’s explo-rations of the interplay between self and world as the core dimension of Bildung. With the next step, in the third section, I shall discuss the ways, in which the classic notion of the world-relatedness of self-development is being spelled out within the framework of the contemporary neo-analytic philosophy—namely as relatedness to conceptual contents; a relatedness that comes into play in practicing the social game of reasoning and argumentation. In the forth section, I shall argue that be-coming capable of playing that game requires one to have sustainable experiences with empathy and respect. My final claim will be that these two forms of social relations imply the central moral standards that educational institutions and single educators shall meet, if they shall be capable of initiating and supporting Bildung.

5.1 �Bildung—A “Post-Modern” Concept?

Nine years ago an issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Education exclusively focus-ing on the concept of Bildung has been published. While this issue could indeed be seen as a milestone in the new international reception of that concept, several of its articles might be rendered as somewhat one-sided, for they link Bildung exclusively to “post-modern”, or post-structuralist patterns of thought. Lars Løvlie and Paul Standish thus assert already in the introduction that a major common aim of all essays collected in the issue is to rewrite Bildung in the context of postmodernity, whereby “postmodernity” figures as the signature of the contemporary age.1

According to Gert Biesta’s contribution to the collection the classic idea of Bil-dung as relationship of the individual to something that goes beyond the present and the particular, that is, to something which is “general” or universal, has nowa-

1 Løvlie and Stanish (2002, p. 320).

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days become obsolete, for in the postmodern situation the very idea of a general or universal perspective must be seen as a problem: the postmodern “Enlighten-ment”—so Biesta—teaches us that there are only present and local practices that in some cases manage to be widely recognized as having universal validity. So the universal appears solely as an asymmetrical expansion of the local.2 However, one might put the following question here: If we were to give up the idea of getting beyond the present and the local in order to encounter the universal, would the very idea of Bildung make sense anymore? In fact, Biesta offers a positive answer to that question by indicating what significance the term Bildung could have in a “postmodern” context. One can summarize this answer as follows: Bildung should be understood indeed as the process of getting beyond the present and the par-ticular. However, drawing on Bruno Latours network approach, Biesta insists that “… beyond the present and the particular we will only find another present and particular, and never the general and the universal”.3 Thus, the task of Bildung is not to grasp the universal, but to enable the individual to see and to imagine alterna-tive “presents” and particularities as well as to endeavor “counter-practices” without claiming, however, that these practices are the better ones.4

This understanding of Bildung comes very close to Richard Rorty’s notion of “edification”, that is, of finding new ways of describing our reality and expressing ourselves by our exposure to the “power of strangeness”5. According to Rorty these new ways of seeing and experiencing should not be evaluated upon the ques-tion whether or not they are true, whether or not they can claim universal validity, but only upon the question, whether or not they “take us out of our old selves” and “aid us in becoming new beings”.6

However, by giving up the universalistic dimension of the concept of Bildung we are ignoring a very important normative insight which is inherent in that concept and without which it ultimately loses its originality. Let us imagine a person who did re-invent himself as a Nazi and who is now performing terrorist “counter-prac-tices” to the “normal” ways of living in a liberal–democratic society, thereby using violence against immigrants, or against persons with another skin color. Shall we call this person’s transformation to a Nazi terrorist who fights against the “present” principle of human rights a process of Bildung? I think, this would be obviously counter-intuitive. The intuition this example runs counter to is that not all possible

2 Biesta (2002, pp. 380, 386–387, 388, 390).3 Biesta (2002, p. 388).4 see ibid., p. 389.5 Rorty (2009, p. 360).6 ibid., p. 360.

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transformations of a person should be understood as Bildung but only the ones that lead to a better status of that person, or to a higher stage of her human development.

The talk of “better” and “higher” requires some criteria by which different di-rections and forms of human developments and human practices can be evalu-ated. Since Bildung—as Biesta admits—implies getting beyond the present and the particular, those criteria cannot simply be extracted from any particular societal structure or culture. Rather, they should claim universal, trans-cultural validity. That is to say that the universal criterion for Bildung is not simply a getting beyond the present and particular, but a coping with trans-cultural views and meanings, instead of simply adapting oneself to new and “alien” cultures. By the way, trans-cultural, universalistic norms and principles are needed in our age of globalization more than ever: global forms of political and economic communication can only then be democratic, non-oppressive, and “non-imperialistic”, if they are grounded in trans-cultural, cosmopolitan norms and principles, and if the world citizens do appropriate those norms and principles more and more. By doing so these citizens are performing a process of Bildung in the sense of Wilhelm von Humboldt, accord-ing to whom Bildung is the attempt of the person to accommodate as much world as possible. Let us try to understand how Humboldt spells out this attempt.

5.2 �Bildung as Interplay Between I and World and Between Subjective and Objective Spirit: The Legacy of Humboldt and Hegel

Wilhelm von Humboldt defines Bildung as the “most general, most intensive and most free” interaction between the individual and the world.7 According to Hum-boldt, a successful process of Bildung is characterized by a permanent enrichment of the individual through her continuous efforts to acquire as much as possible of the world.8 Humboldt even claims that not single things but the world as the unity and the “all-ness” (“Allheit”) of all things is the only subject towards which the pro-cess of Bildung must be directed.9

These well-known claims of Humboldt have two implications, which have often been overlooked. First, we shall be aware of what exactly Humboldt understands by “world”. According to him world is the “indefinable centre” towards which all

7 von Humboldt (1980, 235 f.).8 see ibid., p. 235.9 ibid., p. 237.

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particular languages and cultures are directed.10 The world cannot ever be com-pletely grasped by any particular language and culture. Rather, human beings can only approach the world by bringing as many alternative cultural perspectives to it as possible and by translating between different vocabularies that articulate the reality in different ways. In other words, “world” is here a name for universality that cannot be objectivated. Hence, to refer to the world does not simply mean to deal with any kind of objects that are just given outside of the subject, but to grasp uni-versal meanings by transcending any particular and contextual horizons of reality perception and interpretation. In the paradigmatical case of Humboldt’s theory it does mean to transcend the limitations of any particular language by comparative linguistics and by intercultural translations.11 It is precisely the world-relatedness of Bildung that grounds its difference from the concept of learning, which focuses on the individual’s interactions with her particular environments only—and not with the world as such.

Second, the world-reference as an indispensable part of the semantic structure of Bildung marks the difference between that concept and certain “self-centered” terms regarding the constituting and growing of subjectivity, such as “identity”, or “identity-development”. Again, Bildung does not simply mean a constitution and development of a self, or of a personality, but it rather displays this constitution and development as inherently interwoven with the opening of a world-horizon of meanings by and for the self. Exactly that inherent link between self-development and encountering the world, thought as a universal, trans-cultural and trans-con-textual entity, is what shapes the uniqueness of Bildung.

However, Humboldt’s short remarks on the relation between I and world, be-tween self-development and world-encountering do need further clarification. What does it precisely mean to get in touch with ideal, “wordly” contents that claim universal validity? In which sense are these contents not immediately given objects? In which sense does the interaction with such ideal contents lead to a process of Bildung?

We can rather find possible answers to these questions in Hegel’s powerful Phi-losophy of Spirit, than in Humboldt’s fragmentary theory of Bildung. At Hegel we should distinguish a larger from a narrower sense of Bildung. Bildung in a larger sense can be understood as just another name for the whole process of the develop-ment of the spirit, of its permanently self-dividing and subsequent coming to itself, whereby the spirit permanently gets to a higher, more mediated stage. Here Bildung appears as a process of objectivation of the self first in other concrete persons, then

10 see von Humboldt (1905, pp. 27–33).11 see ibid.


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in collective beliefs and finally in universal ideas, followed by a subsequent self-recognising of the self in these objectivations.

Bildung in the narrow sense denotes a particular phase in the development of the spirit. This is the phase where the subjective spirit does not interact anymore with fragmented things, nor with single persons, but with the immediate general-ity of a system of beliefs and norms of a particular community. These beliefs and norms occur now as ideal and yet external entities.12 The process of Bildung con-sists here in overcoming the perception of these beliefs and norms as unquestion-able truths that ground external rules for individual’s behaviour. At that stage the subjective spirit recognizes these collective beliefs and norms as expressions of the objective spirit in its development, thus negating the immediateness and the exter-nality of those beliefs and norms.13 That is to say that the subject now understands collective, ethical beliefs and norms as objective concepts. The subject’s interaction with them is her being-for-herself that is the precondition for her being-in-herself, being as a subject who has a concept of herself as a subject, that is, as somebody, who is capable of understanding, of interpreting, of justifying or of criticizing collective beliefs and norms.14

The crucial question is here: what does it mean to deal with concepts, and to conceptualize external and internal entities? Roughly speaking it does mean first to group these entities on the ground of identical features, and second, to discrimi-nate between general features that build up different concepts. This grouping and discriminating means to assert inferences between entities, inferences which are true, that is, which have objective validity that comes into being in correct judg-ments. And judgments are correct, only if they can be justified by arguments that are acceptable for every reasonable being. That is to say that true judgments display inferences between conceptual contents that constitute a universal logical space which transcends every particular environment, every particular social and cul-tural context. That is why we could use this universal logical space as a synonym to the classic term “world”.

This link between articulating conceptual concepts, reasoning, and Bildung as interplay between self and world is a central theme of the new analytic philosophy of social pragmatism; a philosophy we should now turn our attention to in order to reconstruct that link in more concrete and precise terms.

12 see Hegel (1821/2009, p. 163).13 see Hegel (1807/1980, pp. 264–266).14 see Hegel (1807/1980, p. 266; 1821/2009, 162 f.).

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5.3 Conceptual Articulation, Reasoning and Bildung in the New Analytic Philosophy

By talking about a “new analytic philosophy” I have in mind in first instance the philosophers of the “Pittsburgh School”, and in particular Robert Brandom and John McDowell. Certainly, these philosophers are in the first place engaged with the business that analytical philosophers always have done—namely the analyzing of concepts and of conceptual thinking, as well as the establishing of criteria for the correctness of concepts. However, the really new moment in the work of those philosophers is that they analyze concepts not as forms of an atomistic mind, but as articulations of genuine social practices.15

According to Brandom, already the propositional claims, that is, the ascriptions of predicates to subjects are to be understood as a kind of social practice. Tradi-tionally those ascriptions that claim to be true have been interpreted as the most basic acts of building up concepts. As Ernst Tugendhat states, propositional as-sertions refer not to phenomena in the individual’s environment ( Umwelt), but to objects in the world ( Welt), while the latter operates as the common framework within which those objects can be identified as the same entities from all single subjective perspectives, despite the irreducible differences between them. More-over, this framework does not exist prior to the propositional claims that ascribe the just-mentioned “sameness” to the objects, but it is in itself constituted by these claims.16 Now, according to Brandom, propositional claims are not simply linguis-tic acts. Rather are they social practices of undertaking commitments and assuming one’s own entitlements to do so. Correspondingly, to recognize an expression of a speaker as a correct propositional assertion means to ascribe a commitment to him and to justify his entitlement for that claim.17 To undertake a justified commitment does mean to make a proposition that can serve as a premise for further assertions which can be made either by the speaker himself or by the speech community, within which the proposition is being distributed. So for example if I articulate the propositional claim “Justice is equality of opportunities” and if the speech commu-nity recognizes that my justification of that claim is convincing, that is, that I am entitled to commit that claim, the latter will function as premise for several other claims within that community—for instance for the claim that it would be unfair, if children who are deprived by their family background, or by their health, are not

15 I first developed the following interpretation of Brandom’s theory of conceptual articula-tion in my article “Intersubjective Recognition and the Development of Propositional Think-ing” (Stojanov 2007)16 see Tugendhat (2003, pp. 15–17; 2003, pp. 19–21).17 see Brandom (1994, pp. xiv; 159–172).


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being compensated by an educational policy of redistribution of resources in favor of those children.

Brandom calls this activity of committing propositional claims and justifying the entitlement of the speakers to these commitments “deontic scorekeeping”. To undertake a justified commitment (i.e. a commitment with a proven entitlement of its undertaker for making it) means to alter the deontic score of both the speaker and the speech community within which that commitment is being distributed. Ev-ery commitment can be understood as a score-altering move in a game (like goals in soccer, or touchdowns in football), namely in the game of giving and asking for reasons.18

This practice of discursive scorekeeping proceeds between at least two differ-ent perspectives, in fact between the perspective of the person who undertakes the commitment, and that of the one who attributes it to the speaker. These perspec-tives are different in the sense that the claimed proposition activates “collateral commitments”19, that is, collateral sets of inferences, which are different on the undertaker’s and on the attributer’s sides, because of their different backgrounds. So playing the game of giving and asking for reasons requires the players to keep si-multaneously two “sets of books” of score, to move back and forth between the dif-ferent perspectives toward the claimed. Contents are rendered objective precisely by this movement between different perspectives; a movement by which identical propositions are being extracted and so the primarily perspectival set of inferences is set up as an object in the world. Brandom20 states:

Conceptual contents are essentially expressively perspectival; they can be specified explicitly only from some point of view, against the background of some repertoire of discursive commitments, and how it is correct to specify them varies from one discur-sive point of view to another. Mutual understanding and communication depend on interlocutors’ being able to keep two sets of books, to move back and forth between the point of view of the speaker and the audience, while keeping straight on which doxastic, substitutional, and expressive commitments are undertaken and which are attributed by the various parties. Conceptual contents, paradigmatically propositional ones, can genuinely be shared, but their perspectival nature means that doing so is mastering the coordinated system of scorekeeping perspectives, not passing some-thing nonperspectival from hand to hand (or mouth to mouth).

And furthermore: “The representational dimension of propositional content is conferred on thought and talk by the social dimension of the practice of giving

18 see Brandom (1994, pp. 183, 188, 496–497).19 Brandom (1994, p. 509).20 Brandom (1994, p. 590).

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and asking for reasons, in virtue of which inferentially articulated contents are es-sentially perspectival”.21

To sum up: The interplay between self and world is, according to Brandom, carried out by articulating the conceptual contents, that is, by the subject’s commit-ting propositional assertions; assertions that by definition must be justified through reasons that the community of argumentation can accept. To speak in a Hegelian terminology, conceptual concepts are not immediately given, but they are mediated by other, propositionally articulated, conceptual contents, for conceptual contents always exist as premises for and as conclusions from other conceptual contents. To assert these inferences of presupposing and concluding means to be involved in an activity of reasoning.

So the conceptual articulation and justification takes place in a particular social practice, namely in the game of giving and asking for reasons. Playing this game means to transform subjective notions into concepts. This is only possible on the ground of the interaction partners’ mutually taking the perspectives of others. This mutual taking of other’s perspectives presupposes the common assumption that there is a world in itself, towards which all particular perspectives are directed and which can only then be approached by these perspectives, when their particular limitations have become conscious for the actors who try to overcome them in order to “score” by acquiring entitlements for propositional claims.

Now, I think, it is obvious what kind of self-development belongs to the so-described social practice of world-disclosing via propositional articulation. Here individuals are developing into subjects who are able to transform their opinions, notions and intuitions into conceptual contents. The individuals are developing into undertakers and ascribers of commitments and entitlements, into scorekeep-ers who are capable to apply the norms, which constitute the socio-linguistic game of giving and asking for reasons.

Brandom’s colleague John McDowell, who is another prominent representative of the “Pittsburgh school”, uses the German word Bildung to denominate the pro-cess of becoming capable of playing the game of giving and asking for reasons, or of “having one’s eyes opened to reasons”:

If we generalize the way Aristotle conceives the moulding of ethical character, we arrive at the notion of having one’s eyes opened to reasons at large by acquiring a second nature. I cannot think of a good short English expression for this, but it is what figures in German philosophy as Bildung.22

21 Brandom (1994, p. 590).22 McDowell 1996, p. 84


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The crucial question here obviously is, which kind of “second nature” that is, i.e. which habitualized attitudes and patterns of social action does the process of Bil-dung imply?

The general answer to this question seems to be not that difficult. The atti-tudes and patterns of action which Bildung implies are identical to the attitudes and patterns which the fluent playing of the game of giving and asking for reasons presupposes: first, this is the attitude always to search for sound reasons for one’s own and other’s opinions and claims, second, this is the readiness and the ability to transform one’s own intuitions and beliefs into justifiable conceptual contents, and finally, this is also the willingness and the ability to discriminate between good and bad reasons, that is, to distinguish reasons that have an inter-perspectival validity from those that are only expressions from private, purely subjective positions and interests.

The more complicated question is, however, how that set of attitudes and abili-ties can be cultivated. Which forms of social and pedagogical interactions and insti-tutional structures are appropriate to enable the development of these attitudes and abilities, which forms of these interactions and structures are likely to hinder that development? The considerations in the following chapter are looking for possible answers to that question.

5.4 Discursive Initiation, Empathy and Respect as Necessary Conditions of Bildung

The first obvious prerequisite to become a fluent player of the game of giving and asking for reasons is to gain access to that game, to be included in it. Although this seems to be quite a trivial claim, that access is often enough denied to children and young people all around the world. This is for example the case, when schooling takes the form of indoctrination. In that case the students are obviously not encour-aged to ask for reasons for the assertions that the textbooks entail, and for the doc-trines which the students have to internalize. Nor are they encouraged to examine the validity and the justifications of those assertions and doctrines.

With Richard S. Peters we can argue that education always entails a moment of initiation.23 The question is however: “Initiation into what?” If the considerations in the previous chapter have not been completely senseless, we should conclude that not the initiation into particular systems of beliefs or worldviews is the Bil-dung-supportive one, but the initiation into discursive practices of reasoning and

23 see Peters (1966, pp. 49, 55).

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argumentation, of weighing up between different claims and their justifications. I would like to call this kind of initiation “discursive initiation”.

Putting aside the barriers from the access to the game of giving and asking for reasons and encouraging the students to argue are, however, necessary, but not sufficient conditions for the students’ participation in that game. In addition, they should also be motivated to participate in it. But how is this motivation possible?

We should be aware that—as I argued in the previous chapter—playing the game of giving and asking for reasons is basically an activity of conceptual articulation of one’s own beliefs and notions. Before their conceptual articulation these beliefs and notions exist merely as intuitions that mirror the social experience of the individual as well as her desires and fears. So the first and foremost prerequisite for the stu-dent’s discursive initiation is the empathic acknowledgment of her pre-conceptual beliefs and notions, and of her desires and fears that stand behind them. These be-liefs and notions should be brought to expression in the classroom and this expres-sion should be seen as the departing point of teaching and learning.

A further form of intersubjective recognition apart from empathy is needed for the process of discursive initiation, namely the form of respect. This form is needed for the cognitive “jump” from the only narrative expression of one’s own beliefs and opinions to their conceptual articulation. For respect means—to speak with Peters again—to regard a person as a “distinctive centre of consciousness”24, as someone who has his own “assertive point of view”25, and who is capable of valuation, choice and judgment26. To be capable of judgment implies to reflect upon one’s own beliefs and notions, to evaluate them critically, to provide them with reasons. Thus, to respect someone means to recognize her as (at least potentially) being capable of reasoning. It is evident that discursive initiation is possible only if this (prospective) recognition of the student’s capacity to reason is provided by the initiators.

We can better realize how lack of (emotional) empathy and lack of (cognitive) respect preclude the process of discursive initiation, and finally of Bildung, if we look at the following two cases: consider, first, the case of a non-emphatic philoso-phy teacher who is holding on solely to the canon of his subject and whose single task is to transmit that canon into the heads of his students. When this teacher is going to discuss the topic of justice in the classroom he will probably present dif-ferent theories of justice, and he will then be expecting the students to reproduce these theories during the examinations. It could be the case that he would demand that the students should not only memorize those theories, but also “understand” them, that is, that the students should be able to reconstruct the logical structure

24 Peters (1966, p. 59).25 ibid., p. 210.26 ibid., p. 210.


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of the theories in question. However, a teacher of that kind would not regard the intuitions of the students about justice and their experiences with injustice, and he would not encourage them to express these intuitions and experiences in the class-room. Consequently, the students will not link the “stuff ” they learn to their own selves. Their reasoning on that stuff will remain only a superficial and formal one, for this reasoning will be not accompanied by self-reflection and self-articulation. And since self-reflection and self-articulation as prerequisites of self-development are necessary components of every process of Bildung, the reasoning that is limited only to the logical structure of the textbook stuff cannot be a Bildung-supportive one.

Consider now the opposite case of a very emphatic but structurally disrespect-ful teacher. This teacher would encourage his students to tell their intuitions about justice, and he would show a great compassion for their experiences with injustice. However, he would not “bore” the students with theories of justice. He would be satisfied, if the students expressed their notions about justice in a purely narrative way, that is, he would not encourage the students to provide reasons for their no-tions, to develop them into conceptual contents, to worldly meanings. By doing so he would structurally deny the capacity of the students to think conceptually, to transcend the limitations of their purely subjective experiences and perspectives, to play the game of giving and asking for reasons. So he would also fail to perform a pedagogical action that is Bildung-supportive.27

5.5 Moral Implications

My claim in the previous chapter was that every process of Bildung presupposes so-cial interactions and pedagogical actions which are characterised by empathy and respect. My further claim now is that empathy and respect are not only necessary pedagogical tools to support Bildung. In addition, they are also moral requirements for all educators.

Empathy and respect are forms of referring to another person as an end-in-itself, and not primarily as a tool for the achieving of some external—economic or political—goals. To speak with Axel Honneth, the original modus of all forms of intersubjective recognition—including empathy and respect—is to confirm posi-tive features of the recognized person for the sake of this person herself.28 That is

27 Albert Ilien describes the first type of teachers as “The Stuff-Transmitter”, and the second one—as “The Students’-Friend” (see Ilien 2005, pp. 94–105, pp. 164–185).28 see Honneth (2010, 110 f).

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why the recognition forms have a moral impact, for since Kant we should identify the core of moral attitude in the treating of persons as ends-in-themselves.29 If I am “empathic” to a person in order to manipulate her in the way that she will act use-fully for me—for example by working for me without any rewards—this would be a perverted form of “empathy”, for in that case I would not really put myself in her shoes, nor would I identify with her personal features and interests. Accordingly, manipulating a person contradicts clearly the norm of respect, for respect implies the recognition of the person as a distinctive centre of consciousness, as having her own aspirations, goals, judgments.

What follows from these considerations is that it is a fundamental moral re-quirement for all educators to treat their students and the processes of Bildung of the latter as ends-in-themselves. Only if the educators meet that moral requirement they will be able to interact with their students in an empathic and respectful way and so to initiate and to support the processes of Bildung of the students. Hence, educators and educational institutions would act immorally, if they treated the stu-dents as bearers of “human capital”, or if educators and educational institutions de-fined the continuation of particular traditions, or the flourishing of certain cultural identities as their main task.

Furthermore, educators and educational institutions would act not only unpro-fessionally, but also immorally, if they did not regard in the classroom the intu-itions, desires, fears and biographies of their students, or if they denied the potential of their students to conceptually articulate those intuitions, desires and fears, and so to play the game of giving and asking for reasons.

The thus sketched moral impetus of the concept of Bildung makes from it a central category of a critical social theory whose main business is to re-construct social pathologies, that is, social patterns that hinder human development. But this is another story for a new paper.

References

Biesta G (2002) How general can Bildung be? Reflections on the future of a modern educa-tional ideal. J Philos Educ 36(3):377–390

Brandom RB (1994) Making it explicit. Reasoning, representing, and discursive commit-ment. Harvard University Press, Cambridge

Hegel GWF (1807/1980) Phänomenologie des Geistes. In: Bonsiepen W, Heede R (eds) Gesa-mmelte Werke, Bd 9. Meiner, Hamburg

29 ibid., 110 f.


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Hegel GWF (1821/2009) Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. In: Grotsch K, Weisser-Lohmann E (eds) Gesammelte Werke, Bd 14,1. Meiner, Hamburg

Honneth A (2010) Anerkennung als Ideologie. Zum Zusammenhang von Moral und Macht. In: Honneth A Das Ich im Wir. Studien zur Anerkennungstheorie. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/Main, pp. 103–130

Ilien A (2005) Lehrerprofession. Grundprobleme pädagogischen Handelns. Verlag für Sozi-alwissenschaften, Wiesbaden

Løvlie L, Standish P (2002) Introduction: bildung and the idea of a liberal education. J Philos Educ 36(3):317–340

McDowell JH (1996) Mind and world: with a new introduction. Harvard University Press, Cambridge

Peters RS (1966) Ethics and education. Allen & Unwin, LondonRorty R (2009) Philosophy and the mirror of nature, 30. anniversary ed. Princeton University

Press, PrincetonStojanov K (2007) Intersubjective recognition and the development of propositional think-

ing. J Philos Educ 41(1):75–93Tugendhat E (2003) Egozentrizität und Mystik. Eine anthropologische Studie. Beck, Münchenvon Humboldt W (1980) Theorie der Bildung des Menschen. In: Flitner A, Giel K (eds) Wil-

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Bildung and freedom—this topic presents a provocation in itself. Bildung is being associated with many things; the subject of freedom however is a secondary object. Every respective search will lead to a discussion about the problem of participation, with Bildung mostly seen as an instrument to make participation possible. Other search processes will lead to the result that freedom, in connection with Bildung is thought of as programmatic and more neo-liberal, either concerning the access or concerning the possibility to choose freely between institutions and offers which promise Bildung. Bildung therefore is not given an innate value, especially a connec-tion between Bildung and freedom is said to be non-existent, even if this connec-tion is seen as intrinsic and thus dissoluble in the field of philosophy.

Following thoughts are not only about this relation. Rather they try to assert the concept of Bildung (and its notions) in all complexity against the trivializations which it nowadays constantly has to endure—in public and political debates as well as in disputes, which are subordinated to the peculiar imperialism of educational research which says of itself to be empirical. Indeed: This fight seems to be Don Quichote like in light of the astounding power of the trivial understanding of Bil-dung—particularly as one’s own thoughts could end the same way as the books Don Quichote throws into the fire; with this fatal campaign he wanted to secure Bildung. The problem in fact is that appropriate thoughts have to be complicated in a way that they seem to be even contradictory. It cannot be ruled out that the triumph of


6Bildung and Freedom

Michael Winkler

M. Winkler ()Institut für Bildung und Kultur, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Am Planetarium 4, 07743 Jena, Germanye-mail: [email protected]

Translated from German by Anna Dobler (Bad Abbach near Regensburg, Germany).

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the trivial is connected with the complexity the world and its contexts have gained and which only leaves one wish: Simpler please. Probably this also accounts for the understanding of Bildung; the success of PISA and its likes (to say it flat) is linked to this then understandable desire for simplicity.

This indicates the structure of this text. Speaking methodologically the con-siderations are structured systematical, critical, and constructive: A first systematic section illustrates the elements which are seen as the intension and the meaning of Bildung. This section seems apodictic and comes close to something which is gladly and misleadingly said to be a definition, which Adorno rightfully stigma-tized as a “rechthaberische Erkenntnistheorie, die dort auf Exaktheit dringt, wo die Unmöglichkeit des Eindeutigen zur Sache selbst gehört”.1 It is about the approach of a theory—in a strict sense—which advances the concept as it was historically build, so that its system at least becomes accessible to heuristic and hermeneutics of current reality of Bildung. The critical second part analyses the current discourse of Bildung in its trivialization. The systematic approach is also the basis for the con-structive attempt to find sense in present events. It is assumed that the trivialization of Bildung implies a social sense, which is not free from an utopian dimension—it hints at the promise to be able to win back the undisguised concept of Bildung as an utopia of humanity. To phrase it more cheeky and provocative: Facing the size of the possibilities of reflection which the concept of Bildung gives, people probably will not forever engage with and count on the stupidity the currently common stupid chitchat about that what Bildung expresses today.

6.1

Friedrich Schlegel once said that the historian is a prophet looking backwards. This phrase, applies particularly to the analysis of Bildung—Schlegel naturally had this in mind2: The affirmation of the idea of history and of the theory, which are inher-ent to the concept of Bildung, both are a kind of normative framework for thinking. This frame is normative, because it holds onto and brings forward that which is to be unexamined when we think about Bildung. As old and out-of-date it seems to be, we need the classical Bildung to account for that which is not mentioned in current discourses or is completely missing in ostensibly or truly empirical results about Bildung: Quite a lot indicates that this framework nowadays stays empty, especially

1 Adorno, 1964/1965/2006, p. 198.2 cf. Schlegel (1991, p. 45).

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when it comes to the aforementioned connection between Bildung and freedom.3 This connection does not play a role in respect of social and especially economic progress which is anticipated from Bildung today; the human being is made the addressee of organizational and pragmatic efforts. The past loses its empathetic subjective meaning and substance, which is mostly used to give an impulse to the Bildung anticipated from society, politics and experts, but this can actually only come from the subjects themselves. You feel reminded of Max Horkheimer’s main philosophical work4: “The Eclipse of Reason”; It is about the darkening, the eclipse of Bildung. The German title, “Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft” tells us what happens: The demand of education is being exploited; it is required yet the im-pulse is taken away. This is not insignificant: One has to assume that the trivialized concept of Bildung is successful, because people bow to pressure of social circum-stances and therefore follow ideas in which these circumstances are shown. On the other hand it has to be mentioned that against all experiences of suffering from new educational realities the ideal and normative content of the concept of Bildung is strong enough for people not only to engage in but also to push events. In other words: There is a lot of evidence which tells that background concepts—which are to be systematically shown—of education stayed so powerful that people are willing to follow this discourse which—if looked at matter-of-factly—denies this concept. If Bildung, at least its discourse, is being so successful, even if the social and cultural reality, programmatic developments, structures, organizations, institutions and pragmatics are hybrid and full of tension, contradictory and torn5, it is initially and primary the basis of what was to be erased: Apparently there are many, fundamental intuitions about what a human being is; these are historically comprehensive (i.e. anthropological), at least in what is said to be modern and is therefore normative relevant because they have to be secured practically. The concept of Bildung insofar underlines a fact which cannot be ignored and makes critic and praxis possible. Today this is more important than ever before. Modernity is not a trustworthy state. Rather it is a possibility which always has to be critically secured, also and especially because it can be lost:

• The first intuition states: The concept of Bildung was examined and developed in the context of Enlightenment and Romanticism, the German classical period and German Idealism. In a sense it dictates, disillusions and radicalises those.6 Contemporaries did see these connections: Moses Mendelssohn assigned them

3 see Vieweg and Winkler (2012).4 see Horkheimer (1991).5 cf. Münch (2007, 2009, 2011).6 cf. Beiser (2003), Seigel (2005).

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to the newcomers of the book language. The development of this concept de-fines the core of the bourgeois revolution: every human, every single person and at the same time everyone is born free, they design their lives and their society freely and they have to manage this freedom by themselves. Humboldt further sharpens this argument, certainly lesser in his “Theorie der Bildung des Menschen” but in his “Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen”. For: “Der wahre Zweck des Menschen—nicht der, welchen die wechselnde Neigung, sondern welchen die ewig unveränderliche Vernunft ihm vorschreibt—ist die höchste und proportionirlichste Bildung seiner Kräfte zu einem Ganzen” (7 [The true aim of any human being—not that given by changing impulses but that which is given by the unchangeable reason—is the highest and most proportional Bildung to a very wholeness]). This sentence is followed by another one, which oddly enough is not mentioned very often, especially educationalist are not interested in it. It states: “Zu dieser Bildung ist Freiheit die erste, und unerlässliche Bedingung” (8 [For that liberty is the first and in no way conditioned Bildung]). Humboldt goes on that the individual human always has to fight for Bildung; the approaching „Eigentüm-lichkeit der Kraft und der Bildung“ is only allowed „durch Freiheit des Handelns und Mannigfaltigkeit der Handelnden gewirkt [zu werden]; so bringt sie beides wiederum hervor“ (9 [the individuality is caused by the liberty of actors and by the multiplity of actors]). Finally he summarizes: „Bewiesen halte ich demn-ach durch das Vorige, dass die wahre Vernunft dem Menschen keinen anderen Zustand, als einen solchen wünschen kann, in welchem nicht nur jeder Einzelne der ungebundensten Freiheit geniesst, sich aus sich selbst, in seiner Eigenthüm-lichkeit zu entwikkeln, sondern vorn welchem auch die physische Natur keine andere Gestalt von Menschenhänden empfängt, als ihr jeder Einzelne, nach dem Maasse seines Bedürfnisses und seiner Neigung, nur beschränkt durch die Gränzen seiner Kraft und seines Rechts, selbst und willkührlich giebt“ (10 [that can be seen as an evidence that true reason wishes that any individual enjoys an unbounded liberty to develop himself from his innate given individuality and in his own individuality. And even his own physical nature may only be limited following measures which are given by his individuality itself]). The state can operate for the welfare of society and the individual person, but only freedom can be the center. Freedom is being worked at through Bildung.

7 von Humboldt 1792/1960, p. 64.8 ibid.9 l.c., p. 65.10 l.c., p. 69.

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This fundamental intuition of freedom interconnected with Bildung, means that Bildung is something in which the subjects constitute themselves, they consti-tute their humanity and themselves as relatives of the Genus Humanum, which itself needs this process of education—i.e. the humanization of humanity. This intuition indicates that the configuration the individual and the species at whole happens against society’s and cultural demands, yes, even against the bindings of religion. Again with knowing that one cannot outrun these demands and claims, that Bildung is connected to sufferings, an intentional bearing, which has to be taken over again and again. It can be added up into one formula: Bildung is con-nected to the pathos of freedom; autonomy is experienced as something possible and at the same time as something which is always denied.

• Surprisingly this intuition of freedom corresponds with—paradoxically phrased—a transcendent connection. Bildung cannot be separated from spirituality; there is a certain idea of belief, of religiousness, of transcendence in it. One gets the feeling that the idea of Bildung is being developed to provide a safety net, to give hope against the risk of modern freedom. This is probably connected to the feeling that educational processes in themselves are unsettling, that they cannot be separated from a sceptical, even ironical, point of view. Educated people do not take them-selves, their relations and general living conditions serious, because they count on contingency.11 This is not calming—therefore one looks for connections which last longer than one day. Indeed, this religious and transcendent characteristic is intertwined with the oldest trace of the concept of Bildung. This goes back to the idea of human representativeness of God, which is connected to the conception of human dignity and biography, as well as it points to mysticism, to a pre-rational, overall experience with spirituality.12 This mysticism is inherent in educational thinking, with a huge ambivalence by the way: On the one hand it is influenced by Pascal’s thinking, which holds onto a God given character of reality, on the other hand Protestantism forces Bildung as a learning project, but at the same time re-fers back to humanity inwardness. This brings us to the golden hour of German literature, as Heinz Schlaffer showed13, it leaves a psychological trace which con-tinues to have an effect, but also inserts this un-political, if not anti-political streak into educational thinking. Finally resemblance to God has a moment of transcen-dence. A transcendence for the subjects themselves as well as for the conditions in which they move, even if the crossing of those is only an imaginative possibility. Who approaches God is risking overreaching his/herself and being brought back to earth. It is possible to fall even deeper, at the end even into hell.

11 cf. Rorty (1991).12 cf. Lichtenstein (1966).13 cf. Schlaffer (2002).


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• The thought of freedom, religion and transcendence in a way stand for a struc-tural understanding of the human situation related to present times and future. The concept of Bildung serves as an antithesis, it concerns a historicity which is transported and at the same time illuminates the concept. This notion fights against a thinking which is only oriented at the present and commits itself to that which Henry Ford (and Aldous Huxley in Brave New World) fend off with his formula: “history is bunk”. Indeed, the concept and notion of Bildung (not the word itself) developed early, actually in the ancient world—just think of Plato’s Cave Allegory—and was reinvented in the Renaissance. Nevertheless it was only firmly established as late as the beginning of the 19th century. The concept therefore is not truly new, even if it is now perceived as new. It just unfolds its full meaning and is registered by people in those days. It becomes the leitmotif of their self-conception—in cutting out all forms of unreflecting certainty, in overcoming immaturity, at the same time it is a self-imposed duty, to find and develop what is now being shown as a possibility namely human-ity. The context is easy to identify14: The concept of Bildung was developed in relation to the Era of Enlightenment, to be more precise as its continuity and its critique of giving up its agenda. The connection with pedagogy plays a vital role in this context. Pedagogy is said to downsize itself to the level of bare educational techniques, which follow thoughts about necessity, but give up the individual. At the same time the concept of Bildung cannot be isolated from the development of the bourgeois society as a society which designed and developed humans as a project to be the reality of humanity: There is a strong relationship to the conception of the public, which initially just allows to talk about critique and demands knowledge over pure belief15; another relation concerns the project of emancipation, especially as it was followed through by the Jews who were fight-ing for their membership in bourgeois society. Basically this discourse about Bildung takes up a sceptical element as early as 1800. It is being discussed with a sceptical view concerning the endangering of humanity. On the one hand this can be perceived through the excesses of the French Revolution: Robespierre or Marat—inspired by Burke—suggested a more evolutionary way of development as an alternative for educational theoreticians. On the other hand educational theoreticians realized that bourgeois society was not truly honouring their own demands and therefore asking for radicalisation which asked even more conse-quently for the anthropological condition of Bildung. Schiller discovered a mea-suring modality of human existence in the game and difference of the aesthetic,

14 For the following part cf. Koselleck (1976, esp. 105 ff).15 cf. Koselleck (1976).

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Schleiermacher points to an anti-pole, namely the feeling of dependency, which only allows religion and transcendence, These seem to be in opposition, but in reality it concerns the constitutive dimensions of freedom, which characterize the educational connection.

• Bildung means conflict with nature, with its own nature and with history. Tradi-tions are lingering here as well: those of the early, radical Era of Enlightenment that saw the nature of humans as the basis of self-determination, those longer ones that understood history as the expression of this specific self-determina-tion, own actions and the own specificity of humanity—as it applies from Vico to Herder. The concept of Bildung brings together nature and intellect, links the very own connection between development and historicity which then allows the insight that humans really create themselves as one of nature’s creatures. They are naturally able to act in an undefined way: here the notion of a game has a specific function, not only does it take the idea of aesthetics as a basis (esp. Schiller, but also Winckelmann and Wieland) but it also displays the developing-assisting and self-determination form of human existence as can be seen in the often under-evaluated works of Fröbel.

• Bildung demands that one ascertains his/herself in comparison with each other. On the one hand this points to an inseparable connection between Bildung and reflection—reflection of the individual me, affirmation of oneself, sometimes in an contemplative way aiming at inwardness and retreat, sometimes ironic, exaggerating, even critical, sometimes even pessimistic or actually intentionally directed to ineffectiveness. There is this cautious, self-sufficient move in edu-cational thinking which can be interpreted as arrogance. This causes the view of Bildung as something apolitical. Maybe Thomas Mann was rightly accused of that. At times the educated refuses a productive, constructive performance in daily-live activities. The bourgeois entrepreneur is seen as someone not con-cerned with Bildung, only as a nouveau riche; the politician even more is seen as an ironic figure, as well as the busy pedagogue; these two together can only be endured through caricature. This is and will be by the way the Achilles heel of educational thinking, even if at the same time it helps to endure the circum-stances. Reflection is not less about them. Bildung may be accompanied with withdrawal, but this does not mean it is sitting in an ivory-tower. The exact op-posite is the case: Bildung takes the effort to get to know and understand the world; it is being realized especially in a sociable circle.

• Bildung means being committed to the liability of a cause, to a liability which first and foremost is accompanied by a general norm. This is the most challeng-ing element of the structure of education. Last but not least because it opens the door for all normative ideas and especially for pedagogical intentions. Bildung


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takes place in subjects and happens to them as their own deed. This procedure cannot succeed without substantiality—here in its widest sense, which encloses ideas. The crucial point is: Bildung cannot circle in itself; the educational process needs a foreign, so to say alienated object, whatever this may look like. This rep-resents the second intrinsic relation of Bildung: It is always connected to some-thing else. Even more: It is a constituent of Bildung, that this other is reflexively being averted to Bildung itself as one possibility of the own being of the subject or person. Hegel shows this through the relationship between lord and servant: Bildung demands being sure about the other’s position. Today one would call this “Perspektivenübernahme” (taking over the perspective of another person). But Bildung cannot be satisfied with that. The educational process includes a further step: examination concerning the possibility of generalizing the experi-enced objectivity. Hegel offers the possibility of universality as a debatable topic, which does not necessarily need a positive outcome. Bildung, however, allows the subject to see and appreciate the singular as something essential—by the way: one can see a connection to love, which will here not be pursued further.

• Finally: Despite this bond between Bildung and worldly objectivity, even though Bildung is always connected to working with substantiality and measure this substantiality with universality, Bildung is in all its aspects subjective—concern-ing the subject and all of his/hers achievements-, it is a personal matter, which does not close. Bildung is an individual process of development, which takes place in a subjective view of the world; it cannot be finished and certainly not be measured. The judgment that someone is educated wants to hold onto a certain state, but in the end it merely is a social distinction—as seen clearly by Friedrich Paulsen.16 Those who talk about Bildung have to be very careful not to try to connect Bildung with systematically organized, systematized, institutional and standardized, professional contexts. Bildung has a relatively weak, as bitter as this might sound—for example—to teachers, connection to pedagogy. Those who think systematically about Bildung will at most realize that education, if it wants to do justice to its concept, only tries to make processes of Bildung possible and to accompany how they are realized in a relatively contingent way through all individual peculiarity of developing subjects and against all worldly liabilities. If it does not want to drill, then education cannot do any more, but also not less concerning Bildung.

At latest with the beginning of the 19th century it became clear that Bildung is con-nected to the development of the individual subject, to the development of a per-son, who has to ascertain him/herself in an area of conflict which is given from the

16 see Paulsen (1903).

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experience of its regulations originating from its nature and social contexts. Bildung largely means coping with given contexts, bearing God’s given will in what is called profession17, acquiring one’s own body, understanding of the own and other, the individual subject enclosing nature, and lastly the understanding of given historical and social conditions. At the same time Bildung means debating about all of the above mentioned, overcoming and realizing a difference that develops from one’s own self-governed producing process, which in the end—as Schiller showed—is possible especially in the aesthetic practice and in a game. Both, the suffering of the subject as well as the active, seemingly self-governed, but nevertheless limited practice, are about being oneself, later being caught in the term identity, they how-ever are about freedom. Even suffering, that means having to cope with the given, includes the element of freedom—namely freedom as a proposition to act free with all certainty. This requires a distance that has to be built—even if only reflexive. Vice versa Bildung itself restricts this freedom, which is the basis of activity—para-doxically this is the meaning of autonomy which at the end of the 18th century can be and is defined: autonomy means cultivating one’s own freedom. Kant exemplary describes this as the main problem of education in his pedagogy: How can one cul-tivate freedom within constraint? But only Herder, Schleiermacher and Hegel truly grasp this problem because they refer it to rationality: Herder, who points out how subjects can find and define their freedom if they understand the historical process; Schleiermacher, who understands how a developing subject can only determine him/herself in ligations to others; finally Hegel, who reconnects Bildung to every-thing that is being found in practical morality within a real society—admittedly with the perspective that this society is a step in the development of the intellect and therefore proofs as an expression of reason.

6.2

Against this background one can now critically examine what nowadays happens with the concept of Bildung and the aforementioned intuitions. Prima facie it is noticeable that and how the concept of Bildung is described in a non-understanding and non-conceptual way. If one insists on evidence based thinking and action it does not really catch one’s eye that the discourse stays pre-theoretical, it is bound to talking which does not ascertain its own self, the actual situation and especially not the normative implications. This is surprising as every effort to win data from expe-rience is connected to antecedent rationality. Today this somehow differs: research

17 cf. Witte (2010).


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concerning Bildung, the educational praxis, political talk about it, they all pretend that Descartes, Locke, Hume and Kant did not exist, not to speak of the newer theoreticians of cognition and science, who were concerned with empirical studies. But it is not possible to take the easy road, even if it is often done today—unless one wants to blacken out the emptiness and hollowness of one’s own business.

What is executed as pre- and un-theoretical nothingness here in today’s dis-courses on Bildung indeed means that we are not talking about a concept of Bildung anymore, but that we can put the focus on a use of the word itself. By the way this is not methodological and methodically pretentious, neither in a sense of common language approach nor in a sense of theoretical discourse. Bildung today is only a word nothing more, this is what the widely noticed experts (or especially those) agree on and this actually could be an argument for the current discourse. Indeed a historical insight does not play an important role within educational debates and public as well as political contexts—Humboldt would probably turn in his grave if he knew who cites him when and what is cited—in addition the critical consider-ations, which were produced since the middle of the 20th century are blanked out. Those include Adorno’s “Theorie der Halbbildung” as well as Heydorn’s attempt to hold onto an idealistic concept of Bildung against the bitter comprehension that a society inspired by Marxist analysis implemented on him. But the reality is: The concept of Bildung was yet actually depleted in the 20th century. On the one hand it was—in the truest sense of words—used up and devalued by educational econom-ics, although the involved persons were more earnest than common today: During the 1970s there was a spate of reforms in which educational economics developed the notion of human resources and the human demand approach to skim the educa-tional reserves with all-day and comprehensive schools18. This approach was more earnest as it did not even use the seemingly moldy concept of Bildung, but from the beginning only talked about skills, which were to be measured and calculated in their value-adding notions. On the other hand historical analysis documents in a more or less bitter way that the concept of Bildung was contaminated as a bad formula which was only used to secure the status of the intelligentsia. It seemed to have been used as resentment to amalgamate the connection between the presump-tuous educational aspirations, ideas of intellectual ideality, a conservatism which feared mass society and quite simply brutal, antidemocratic ambitions of power, which all together destroyed the Weimar Republic. Georg Lukács already wrote this in his “Destruction of Reason”, even if there is a certain amount of scepticism against his interpretations; further evidence can be found in Georg Bollenbeck’s groundbreaking survey about the German pattern of interpretation of Bildung and

18 Critical on that Altvater and Huisken (1971), Huisken (1972).

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culture19, Martynkewicz illustrates the events through the connections between the publisher couple Bruckmann from Munich and the National Socialists20.

If looked at matter-of-factly the concept of Bildung became quite shabby, caution seemed and seems advisable—today’s canonization gives headaches: Bildung is an unholy concept, a zombie in many respects. In fact, not the concept Bildung is used today but only the word Bildung, though in a downright universal meaning, often recited in a kind of self-affirmation-attitude and connected to a requesting gesture. Bildung is a joker so to speak, which can open, carry on and endlessly lengthen ev-ery conversation, sometimes this becomes the quality of Dadaistic art, sometimes one feels like being in the middle of abstraction processes, which were practiced in the irritatingly so-called concrete poetics. Lastly even EHEC was connected with Bildung through consumer information and hygiene regulations. Some people call Bildung a container-term, a concept like a ship-container, either empty or filled with variable content.

But this image is limited because we are confronted with the word Bildung near-ly everywhere. What are the reasons for this ubiquity of usage? Negatively seen one would firstly assume that today language is used rather insensitive, that there is barely any accurateness to be detected. This applies to private language use which is in need of dictionaries to decode texts and emails, but it applies even stronger to the public and academic usage which tends to arbitrariness. Words are used to attract attention and provoke a stir. We are dealing with a successful word, its success de-pending on good luck. Like other consumer goods words are thrown into the mar-ket and tested there, just to silently disappear again. The word Bildung shows how modern societies are following the economics of attention-policies21. The value of an expression is decided not through its contents but through its ability to arouse excitement and—to tie it to a figure of Niklas Luhmann—to save “Anschlusskom-munikation” (following communication), preferably in various talk shows. With that it fulfils its duty, especially in a society where experts are proud of not any longer having time to read. How did these experts get their expert opinion? They do not have any, because for receiving expertise it is enough to talk publicly and juggle with words. Bildung is basically used without content; one should not wait for any substantial information. This gives us the impression that the agitated de-bates about the so-called “Bildungsstudien” (educational studies) are without effect, because they leave out the actual meaning—in the end it is the ministry of finance

19 cf. Bollenbeck (1994).20 Martynkewicz 2009.21 cf. Franck (2005), Türcke (2002).


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which decides about the educational reality. This reality did not really change in depth, but only on the level of talking about it.22

But then the ubiquity of Bildungs-chitchat or—mumble as this society’s key note is based on its role as an alternative for religion. A symptom for that would be the on-going repetition of the term and its usage at all times. If one cannot think of any-thing else, the word Bildung can serve as common ground, it seems to be a mystery but at the same time a disclosed one, which cannot be grasp rationally (and does not need to be). The structure is a rather catholic one: Bildung is the one and only true church, there are no other beliefs next to it—questions about security, equity, about a good life are possible, but they have to be asked sub auspiciis concerning Bildung. The word Bildung brings together all social protagonists and it can be car-ried around before oneself like a monstrance.

But this evidence—i.e. the contingency which correlates to the mechanism of a society full of attentiveness, the assurance of “Anschlusskommunikation” as the basis character trait of society and finally the ritualistic moment—are insufficient: In reality the linguistic use shows a discrepancy between a certain usage and emp-tiness of content. This arbitrariness can paradoxically be seen in the usage of the definite article. One needs “the Bildung”, it all depends on “the Bildung”. The inher-ent ambiguity for German terms ending in “-ung” disappears, process and product, procedure and result are named at the same time. Bildung points to an objective, fossilized object that can be measured. This petrifaction practically accompanies the unindulgent tendency to sum up Bildung in a process of regular and everlasting institutionalization for everyone at the earliest age. Bildung has since long ago been strongly and only connected to school. School—this disgusting modern kraken which sucks out the vitality of human life, pockets and suffocates it with its ten-tacles—is the reality of Bildung nowadays, which no longer concerns the subjects and persons but only the addresses. Only the observer, not the involved person is puzzled how this objectivity is accompanied with a psychology of learning that praises the constructivism and stands against teaching and individual learning, es-pecially in non-formal educational contexts.23 But, as soon as it comes to the very

22 The discussion about day-care centers could serve as an example: Some years ago they were seen as highly problematic as they did not communicate the seemingly necessary „Weltwissen“. Although proof is missing, if and how they fulfill their duties today, day-care-centers are obligatory for all children as early and as extensive as possible.23 Not to mention that here again all historical debates about the formal and official side of instruction is pushed aside; the debate concentrated strongly on mere formal learning as it is used in schools and tests. Social pedagogy and youth welfare excelled in this topic and suc-cessfully—and quite empirical—introduced non-school learning spaces, just to turn back to school as the only possible place of education.

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core, constructivism, life-long-learning and non-curricular contexts are pushed aside to make room for a institutionalised formatting of Bildung.24

6.3

Every speech about Bildung is therefore not really about Bildung itself. What then is the social sense of this Bildungs-chitchat? “Bildung” is not saying anything—and that is exactly why this word means reification and objectification and repudiates directness and flexibility. Young people are being specific behavioural patterns, which are seen as competences, by professional engineers of souls. These then are performative examined—contents have since long ago been left out because they cannot be connected to flexibility, fungibility and fleetingness as demanded by those societies, which determine the project as their own content and likeness of their members.25 The new educational discourse has the prior function of col-lectivization within the demands of current circumstances: The Tantra of Bildung with its pseudo-religious parts serves the construction of social integration; the Bildungs-chitchat secures the key note, the prosody—which is used to define a so-ciety and its members, though not in a Beachboys-Good-Vibrations way. It is not about the people themselves; they rather are to be erased within their humaneness. The function is in fact to press the individuals into the logics of consumer society, in which on the one hand everything becomes something that can be consumed, on the other hand everything stays a process, to be exact, stays performative, because one is not supposed to hold onto stuff, as society then would not be able to operate.

If seen this way we are concerned with a collectivisation of Bildung, with its commodification. The subjects of Bildung are becoming consumer goods and are oriented at market mechanism. Consequently the realization of Bildung in pro-cesses of institutionalisation and the disappearance of the debate with regard to content is getting cloudy, but it also calls attention to the integration of Bildung into

24 cf. Rauschenbach (2009). This is a truly perfidious phrase, as formatting means erasing earlier data. It thus deletes history so that new programmes can overwrite with new data.25 Within this all potential critics are being silenced. The curricular development serves as evidence for that: subjects are being abolished or freed from those contents which would need reflection. Thinking about society, power and authority becomes obsolete. The Bavar-ian G8 timetable for higher education cuts down topics like National Socialism to give more space to activities concerning the development of an industrial society. In Saxony history lessons have been more or less abolished. The shock over murdering neo-Nazis can therefore only be seen as hypocrisy. The question is: Isn’t the ministry of culture the supporter of that development?


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a society which is oriented on the exchange value of basic processes. This society is accompanied by a highly formal notion of freedom—namely freedom, which not only enables and enforces the reduction to being a consumer good and its embed-ding in trade, but also bents this as an integrated character trait on human existence in general. Bildungs-chitchat serves as a dynamo of performance which is powered by constructive learning. To make them stay on track they are caught in institu-tions—even family seems to be too high a risk, one could gain autonomy. Those who do not want to adapt these new norms of flexibility are threatened with strict institutions: youth welfare, psychiatry or even prisons. These are being enlarged nearly everywhere.

Bildung as mere chitchat, to be precise: the usage of the word without content and meaning, only with performative relevance, but then again attaining its social sense exactly through this usage, is indeed connected to modified social and cul-tural contexts. If Bildung really exists in modernity it has to have exactly this mean-ing—insofar critics are wrong, if they moan too strongly about “Unbildung” (lack of education)26. Unbildung is in a manner of speaking a character trait of society and its culture, one should not marvel about it. With actually enabling reproduction, Unbildung is a feature of this society. This can be seen through the sanctions which are implemented on those who do not want to be a part of this new educational formation, who do not want to be drilled to adjust themselves. This adjustment corresponds with a dimension of development in modern society. Old capitalistic structures are restituted in this dimension. Those can be seen in class relations, in new forms of social layering with a sometimes dramatic inequality and brutal social exclusion, which involves human life as a whole27. Social membership is overall defined in a negative way, either as a materialistic doom, or often as a stigmatising, random identification which is accompanied by controlling affected persons. An example for such an assignment to a specific group is the concept of “underclass”. That way a growing group of people daily fighting for survival is developing. Some-times they have seemingly decent employments, but often they are employed in the so-called “Niedriglohnsektor” (low wage sector). This sector spreads epidemic like and will become something which can—socially and individually—only be called a precarious system of full-time employment. Bourdieu said about these circum-stances: Misery of life is raging. Increasingly these new social differences end in so-cial exclusion i.e. exclusion from society: humans are being marginalized; their life is perceived as wasted or they are literally cleared away28. Humans become social and cultural garbage without any value, allegedly useless and unnecessary—or they

26 cf. Liessmann (2006).27 cf. Wilkinson and Picket (2010).28 see Bauman (2005a), Bude (2008), Bude and Willisch (2008).

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are only able to live off garbage. Sometimes they live their life directly in front of others e.g. when searching public garbage bins for usable stuff. More and more local authorities banish the poor and miserable. It is just a matter of time until bottle col-lectors, who try to improve their pension, have vanished from public areas. These living conditions firstly mean that humans do not even have the slightest chance to look into subjects in which there can be seen something like humanity. They are quite simply eliminated from the process of humanizing the humane—they even are bereft of the hope for spirituality as it is indicated in the—wrongly interpreted—dictum of religion as opium of the people. Social exclusion also means that they are forced to imprisonment or exclusion and being forgotten about. They are only able to receive Bildung if they find a way to themselves—but this seems improbable.

These cultural and social hardenings turn life something very icy indeed. They are escorted by a strange dissolution of social and cultural institutions which is accompanied by increasing dynamics of change. Worldly wisdom is defined by acceleration29, this has long been examined by French sociology30. Processes of change, which characterize modernity in a manner of speaking overwind and end in a certain “state”, the formative situation of liquid modernity31, in which all exist-ing aspects and dimensions become at first brittle and fragile, then liquid and liquid in love32. Identity becomes frailer or disappears, only the single moment count as an event which is prepared as a project33. Humans are forced by circumstances to absorb this notion and organize their own existence as projects – this is the new mode of their existence34. Continuity becomes unlikely, if not illegitimate. To end relationships one just has to press the power-off button. The up until now framing and binding milieus, churches and political parties, unions and clubs, all of which brought together people, are fading into the background. Only short-dated, fash-ionable life-style models are offered, the Synopticum replaces responsibilities as well as the old-fashioned surveillance system of the Panopticum.

This is followed by a dramatic situation which affects Bildung: Because living only in the status of an event the personal subjects being reduced to a mode of liv-ing in a project way and in presence of performance will not find an resource for a true life, no source of their self—to quote Charles Taylor. They will not find sources on which they can rely, which will strengthen their life or give them a kind strong-hold. There is nothing left of that we-experience in which sociality acts as solidarity

29 see Rosa (2005).30 cf. Aubert (2004, 2010), Ehrenberg (1991, 1995, 2000).31 cf. Bauman (2009).32 Bauman 2005b, 2007.33 see Keupp (1996).34 see Boltanski and Chiapello (2003), Boltanski (n.d.).


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and as a condition for socialization, in which people constitute themselves in their own specific character. Jean-Claude Kaufman shows how this mixture, which ex-ists between cultural absorption and coming-out, is being dissolved35; partly this means provocative de-socialization, which lies in secure socialization. This mixture was necessary for managing open societies, for the integration of individuals in it, the mixture contributed to integrating and reproducing the society itself. Atomised individuals are dealing with events, in all tragic aspects, but these events instanta-neous lose their eventful quality because their recapitulation is advertised with the promise of excrescence; heroes of oneself, hèros de soi-même appear, without notic-ing how the Culte de l’urgence corrodes their character36. That, which the individual has always perceived as a supporting and important, highly relevant fact of personal history, is denied. Society and culture become porous; they cannot offer any foot-hold to the individual. Shallowness and arrogance compensate this; sometimes they lose their grounding, their sense for reality. Dis-embedding becomes the relevant experience and a structural characteristic of socialization processes. These corre-spond to modern society, which demands a formal, market like subject that cannot be predicted and is only able to live as an artist of his/herself. Socialization then means this strange form of de-sociality, which allows deviance as a way of life. The modern individual, the individu hypermoderne starts within itself37, it is a-priori free, detached and relieved from all constraints and attachments. Distinguishing character traits are no longer interesting; the only thing that counts is the appear-ance, the acting and in the end the exhaustion, which develops from depressive breaking down over one’s own enforced nothingness.

The new model of Bildung, as it is shown in educational chitchat, matches this condition. It not only realizes a socially and culturally given freedom, it postulates growth freed from institutions and frames and at the same time wants to prepare this state. In this respect it is about a technique of power, namely mastering people in their new freedom—which includes that they themselves cultivated this free-dom. What is said to be Bildung and especially how Bildung is said to be leaves the subjects to fulfil structural empty conditions: to talk about Bildung without content, to abstain from true awareness of things, allegedly earning competence, which in reality is only performance, and in the end to be confined to the triviality of handling tests—all this composes Bildung and is as such functional. The new techniques of power which seem to be Bildung demand and enable complete flex-ibility, which furthermore is attained by throwing away all weight—cynics speak of

35 Kaufmann 2005, p. 287.36 see Sennett (1998), Aubert (2004).37 cf. Aubert (2010).

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the beautiful art of pauperising. Bildungs-chitchat as techniques of power means that the individual is being made available as they comply with demands and stan-dards, all of which strangely stay in the dark. Norms for one’s own physique are being formulated and used. The belief in fitness demands to stay fit i.e. to adjust to satisfy certain norms, which are open and volatile—at the same time substantial elements of modern identity fall into the domain of current society. Autonomy and self-reflection constitute basic regulations which are activated through the subjects for self-control. But without breaking an ethical agenda—as Hegel said in his Phän-omenologie des Geistes and in his Grundlinien der Philosophie—from which there could grow self-determination that would allow distance to social powers and irony against oneself.

Here at the latest one can see a counter movement: The new educational dis-course suffers from an inner antagonism. This antagonism develops because mod-ern freedom can only be handled through Bildung, otherwise—as the possibility of exclusion shows—the terroristic game of exclusion wins. But this is not working, as society then is not reproducing itself, least of all with its dynamics of chance and even lesser as a consumer society. This is one of the reasons for the success of educational chitchat: Bildung and freedom belong together; even the most modern modernity cannot avoid this without destroying its own requirements. This is even more valid in transient modernity: It is therefore quite true to say that Bildung is not dispensable. But the only dilemma is: Bildung in liquid modernity as well as the Bildung which is oriented on flexibility, projects and performances of subjects needs the requirements, the frames of securing terms and conditions. The more modern society ignores these requirements due to its own strangely empty edu-cational efforts, the more it only wants to generate the volatile subject, the more it demands competences which only care about manners concerning themes and motifs, social conditions and the subject itself, the more it abdicates the acquisition and mediation of contents, the more this society is trapped. It then needs even more protective terms and conditions to stabilize a subject which is no longer able to hold onto objects and to constitute itself through the association with objects. Society reacts to this with the aforementioned enforced institutionalisation and a tendency to professionalism and training. But through this it creates a prison like structure which contradicts its own fleeting and dynamic character.

Those who focus on Bildung cannot do this without the subjects; it is even less possible under the condition of an a-social sociality. This becomes the Achilles heel of modern society, which wants to save itself from reproduction problems—para-doxically said—through Bildung as mere educational chitchat. These reproduction problems are produced by society’s liquid structure. Educational chitchat here ap-pears to be some kind of magic formula, with which one can activate subjects to


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bow to those mechanisms modern society demands. To intensify the effect of this magic formula it is strengthen by a social–political promise, an appeal to equity and equality. This does the job wonderfully because on the one hand it distracts from the emptiness of the educational discourse, on the other hand it serves classic mechanisms of distinction as they appear in educational panic38: The way Bildung is talked about, namely empty, binds the individuals. They are forced to freely de-cide on Bildung. An enforcement which is intensified through talks about Bildung which transports a claim of universality, that is to be applied to free individuals. Thus Bildung ensures freedom and at the same time binds people. This is to ensure an identical starting point for everyone in the educational system. But at the same time everything is done to bring people to their starting blocks and to create com-petition. From the beginning the idea of cooperation is suspended although evo-lutionary biology and neurobiology give out warnings that basic human character traits are altruism and community which secure evolutionary progress39. Nobody is interested in the mere possibility of humans being able to actually generate the demanded efforts. Even worse: those who fail in competition have to take the whole blame; there are no longer any infra-structural systems to help.

It is no coincidence that these mechanisms function so well with talking about Bildung. This talking has to be aimed at the people themselves and is backed up by an invaluable benefit—it still sounds like the concept of Bildung and its assigned intuitions. Patterns of mentalities, hopes, utopian energies, which were born dur-ing a century long fight for Enlightenment, even more: the older religious feelings, which are aroused through the word Bildung and therefore are still viable in its con-tent—all that still exists, even if only rudimentary, sedated, in the depths of human souls. This may not be something modern technicians of education in pedagogical psychology like to hear as they do not know the soul because it is not measurable. But this is not something that can be hold against its existence; the exact opposite is true: That it cannot be measured actually proves its ability to resist.

The educational chitchat, the current educational discourses are parasitic, they attach themselves to the echoes that still exist in human ears. And this is exactly where Bildung becomes powerful. That what the concept of Bildung could reveal becomes a utopian energy which can be found in places where nobody wants to know about it. There is an even greater suspicion: because the concept of Bildung is empty today, it not only needs stuffing. It rather even wins its stuffing. The al-ternative grows through humans themselves, not only because they remember the intuitions, which back them up in their freedom, better and longer, but because they notice and know that there are relations and requirements that cannot be given

38 cf. Bude (2011).39 cf. Tomasello (2009, 2010).

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up, they do not want to give them up. Traditions are effective because they are cherished by people who are not satisfied with innovation and reform, but who ask about the content. Maybe the “Wutbürger” (someone who openly acts against things he/she does not like, mostly political) is the subject of a new educational thinking, which tries to affirm the concept of Bildung and takes in intuitions that mark this concept.

This reclamation of Bildung could be done in pedagogical praxis. Andy Har-greaves showed that even the daily teaching business could contribute to that40, other scouts and educators might assist—with all reservations against pedagogy, which still tends to legitimise power and control, repression and enforced happi-ness. What is there to say against this pedagogic optimism? It is the ability of resis-tance of Bildung in its inherent systematic sense, especially in its pedagogic context. The lasting and expanded talks about Bildung show this as well as the mere engag-ing in these talks even if people realize that these political, public and pedagogical discourses have not much to do with their intuitions about Bildung. The length of the discussion foils the statement of acceleration, fleetness, eventful character and points to a connection of a different quality. The talks about Bildung do indeed miss the material structure of Bildung—but this tattle beyond all constraints seems to be connected to a need that lies deeper. Neither the educational chitchat and murmur, nor those disgusting testing procedures constructed by featherbrained, pedagogic psychologists and educators who pass on substance and objectivity, nor the ludi-crous ignorance of affects and emotions—even against the moral and ethical—can destroy the inner core of Bildung. Even if it is only resisting as a word, it gives people hope to maybe find themselves, to develop something that could save their human-ity. That what they experience as a runaway world (Giddens) shows them what actually is important for them and their life—including the danger to trap oneself in a cocoon, to abandon the discussion with those who want to control them.

The educational chitchat nourishes a desire for Bildung, a desire for Bildung and freedom, as Schiller realized. People are looking for something else, not for an in-stitutionalised, standardized and constructed by experts of formatting pedagogical professionalism. At the moment we are still imprisoned in the time of PISA, which represents these wrong and evil concepts of Bildung. But this won’t be the case for-ever; the idea of Bildung will not be overheard for much longer. It will be accom-panied by a search for secure, stable spaces, for islands of de-acceleration; it will be accompanied by the effort to find new social logics, which will fight with a warming care for each other against the cruel cold logic of markets. The basic human mecha-nisms point to this development, lastly with the experience of evolutionary biology, which not only shows that joint activities and cooperation is primarily human and

40 Hargreaves 2003.


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enables communication, but also that it is the basis of the breathtaking cultural evolution. In the end the desire for Bildung embodies the search for humane co-operation, which—to say it in the words of French philosopher Levinas—does not reject the other, but does the exact opposite: it realizes this other as a condition for the possibility to flee the pitfalls of present times41. Those will be the topics of a fu-ture debate about Bildung, which is indicated in the wrongs, but cannot be avoided: The debate will be about stability, about a safety in which individuals can identify themselves; it will be about solidarity and objectivity which allows acquisition. The debate about Bildung will be carried out in a new way, indeed more with a view on the other, in search of concrete humanity which respects substantial freedom.

Acknowledgement Thanks go to all those who have given sharp critics to a forgoing version of the paper delivered as a lesson. For that the paper was rearranged completely. Nevertheless I do not know whether my argument has got sufficient clearness by now.

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becoming oneself: dimensions of 'bildung' and the facilitation of personality development

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