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The term Bildungstrieb, which was used toward the end of the eighteenth century by thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder, Immanuel Kant, or Friedrich Schiller, but which is obsolete in today's vernacular, was of great importance for Friedrich Hölderlin. In this article, I explore the historical roots of this concept in the biology of the time, which was then still searching for the right concepts to describe the organic. Bildungstrieb is found in Kant's teleology in the Critique of Judgment, where Kant with the help of this concept works out the specificity of organic life as well as its vicinity and difference to the teleology of human acts and action. Kant himself refers to the Göttingen anatomist, zoologist, and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, in whose writings Kant found the term which he reinterpreted for his own purposes. Friedrich Schiller adopts the word Bildungstrieb in his work On the Esthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, reinterpreting it from the point of view of the history of ideas. It is Friedrich Hölderlin, finally, who in his Essay The Perspective from which We Have to Look at Antiquity, and in related texts, gives the Bildungstrieb an important role. The Bildungstrieb needs to be awakened, if art is going to draw in an original way from an undeformed source. During work on the tragedy The Death of Empedocles, the poet further developed the concept of Bildungstrieb to include the idea of an opposition between what he calls the 'aorgic' and the 'organic' , which mutually condition, complete, and penetrate one another, in a manner similar to Nietzsche's even more powerful formulation of the Janus-faced artistic impulse, as embodied in the opposition of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The raw, untrained, and childlike as the substance of the Bildungstrieb We dream of education, piety, pp and have none whatsoever; it is appropriated-we dream of originality and autonomy; we believe to be saying all kinds of new things and, still, all this is reaction, as it were, a mild revenge against the slavery with which we have behaved toward antiquity. (Hölderlin, 1799/1988, p. 39) It is Friedrich Hölderlin, the poet, who is writing these words, and who is seeking his understanding of himself as an artist with regard to Bildung, which is for him like a heavy burden, even a kind of bondage. He speaks of a Bildung-a term that has different layers of meaning, such as education, cultivation, formation-which isn't one. Bildung isn't, because we are only dreaming of Bildung. Hölderlin sees himself as part of a tradition which draws its educational canon from the riches of Antiquity, and enriches to the same degree as it chains human beings to a bygone age and takes the life out of the present. It is good to obtain education and culture, to preserve the acquired educational heritage; but this takes place, Hölderlin complained, at the cost of truly new creation.
The term Bildungstrieb, which was used toward the end of the eighteenth century by thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder, Immanuel Kant, or Friedrich Schiller, but which is obsolete in today's vernacular, was of great importance for Friedrich Hölderlin. In this article, I explore the historical roots of this concept in the biology of the time, which was then still searching for the right concepts to describe the organic. Bildungstrieb is found in Kant's teleology in the Critique of Judgment, where Kant with the help of this concept works out the specificity of organic life as well as its vicinity and difference to the teleology of human acts and action. Kant himself refers to the Göttingen anatomist, zoologist, and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, in whose writings Kant found the term which he reinterpreted for his own purposes. Friedrich Schiller adopts the word Bildungstrieb in his work On the Esthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, reinterpreting it from the point of view of the history of ideas. It is Friedrich Hölderlin, finally, who in his Essay The Perspective from which We Have to Look at Antiquity, and in related texts, gives the Bildungstrieb an important role. The Bildungstrieb needs to be awakened, if art is going to draw in an original way from an undeformed source. During work on the tragedy The Death of Empedocles, the poet further developed the concept of Bildungstrieb to include the idea of an opposition between what he calls the 'aorgic' and the 'organic' , which mutually condition, complete, and penetrate one another, in a manner similar to Nietzsche's even more powerful formulation of the Janus-faced artistic impulse, as embodied in the opposition of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The raw, untrained, and childlike as the substance of the Bildungstrieb We dream of education, piety, pp and have none whatsoever; it is appropriated-we dream of originality and autonomy; we believe to be saying all kinds of new things and, still, all this is reaction, as it were, a mild revenge against the slavery with which we have behaved toward antiquity. (Hölderlin, 1799/1988, p. 39) It is Friedrich Hölderlin, the poet, who is writing these words, and who is seeking his understanding of himself as an artist with regard to Bildung, which is for him like a heavy burden, even a kind of bondage. He speaks of a Bildung-a term that has different layers of meaning, such as education, cultivation, formation-which isn't one. Bildung isn't, because we are only dreaming of Bildung. Hölderlin sees himself as part of a tradition which draws its educational canon from the riches of Antiquity, and enriches to the same degree as it chains human beings to a bygone age and takes the life out of the present. It is good to obtain education and culture, to preserve the acquired educational heritage; but this takes place, Hölderlin complained, at the cost of truly new creation.
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