njemački

Hölderlins Idee vom „Bildungstrieb“ – ein Modell von gestern?

The term Bildungstrieb, which was used toward the end of the 18th century by thinkers like Gottfried Herder, Immanuel Kant or Friedrich Schiller, but which is obsolete in today’s vernacular, was of great importance for Friedrich Hölderlin. In this paper, 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 second part of 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 Aesthetic 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, which was held up again and again, 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.

Bildungstrieb; kreativer Impuls; organisch; "aorgisch"

English translation by Marie-Elise Zovko for the proceedings of the conference: Bildung & paideia. Philosophical Models of Education, Hvar 2013.