Is (it) time to leave eternity behind? Rethinking Bildung's implicit temporality

Abstract

Motivated by Gadamer's identification of Bildung's 'Vorbild-Bildung-Nachbild' (model-process-result) structure, a historical tracing of the Christian messianic heritage in Bildung is conducted. As Bildung grows into an educational concept with global aspirations, this heritage might prove a substantial theoretical obstacle. As an alternative to the Christian messianic conception of time, Crockett and Malabou's concept 'plastic time' is presented. Whereas Christian messianic time collects its drive from the eternal which is (not) to come, plastic time collects its drive from the 'synaptic gap' instead, the creative and constructive space located and organised in the human body.Crockett and Malabou argue that plastic time might allow the deconstruction of Christianity, and, this article suggests, consequently also of Bildung. A formulation of Bildung that can go beyond Western thinking would be a shift that might have consequences for education generally. RETHINKING BILDUNG'S IMPLICIT TEMPORALITYA certain model of time appears implicit in the German educational concept Bildung. This model might be called Christian messianic thinking, and thus ties Bildung it to a specific metaphysical history, the present article suggests. The aim is to contour that model and present an alternative called 'plastic time' . Elaborated from Catherine Malabou's ontological principle 'plasticity' , 'plastic time' appears as a model of time that might challenge teleological thinking in education. As Malabou's philosophy is not yet widespread in philosophy of education, a few words on her main concept plasticity before we go further are in order. As part of what might be called the post-linguistic materialist turn in FrenchThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

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“…Since WWII, the socio-political dimension (emancipation) of the concept has been further emphasized [23]. Bildung can also been explained in the following way: "As an educational concept, Bildung incorporates culture, aesthetics, selfcultivation, political awareness and engagement" [24] (p. 3 ahead of print).…”