Kultur, bildung, geist

History and Theory

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 151-164

  Geuss, Raymond ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 0010158121     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2505359     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, "Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions" in Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology 47 (Cambridge, Mass., 1952)
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral (Leipzig, 1887), II. Abhandlung §§ 12, 13
3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen (Frankfurt am Main, 1952), §§ 1-240
4. Herodotus, Histories, Book III, 38
5. Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Leipzig, 1885), § 9
6. Cf. Jörg Fisch, "Zivilisation, Kultur," in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhardt Koselleck (Stuttgart, 1992), vol. 7
7. Thus Thomas Mann at the beginning of World War I (November, 1914) said: "Civilisation (Zivilisation) and culture (Kultur) are not only not one and the same; they are opposites (Gegensätze)" ("Gedanken im Kriege," in Der Neue Rundschau [Bern, 1914], Band 2)
8. Cf. Rudolf Vierhaus, "Bildung," in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1972), vol. 1. Note that Bildung is not etymologically related to the English "build." Bildung comes from Bild (sign, image) and so means the process of imposing an image or form on something, or the results of such a process, whereas "build" comes from a completely different Indo-European root having to do with "dwelling."
9. J. G. Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit [1774] (Frankfurt am Main, 1967), 35, 57
10. Herder J.G., Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, Ibid., 45
11. Cf. Fisch, "Zivilisation, Kultur," 711
12. For an excellent recent discussion of the highly complex history of conceptions of the "nation" (and especially of the "nation-state") cf. István Hont, "The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind: 'Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State' in Historical Perspective" in Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State, ed. John Dunn (Oxford, 1994)
13. Cf. Friedrich von Savigny, "Vom Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft" (Heidelberg, 1814)
14. J. G. Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation, esp. "Siebente Rede."
15. G. Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, esp. "Zehntes Stück" (2 June 1767)
16. "Elftes Stück (5 June 1767)
17. "Zwölftes Stück" (9 June 1767)
18. and "Fünfzehntes Stück" (19 June 1767) (all Hamburg, 1769)
19. Cf. end of "Erste Rede" and "Elfte Rede."
20. Cf. "Zweite Rede" and "Dritte Rede."
21. "Bismarcks Aussenpolitik und die Gegenwart," Gesammelte politische Schriften (Tübingen, 1980), 128
22. Cf. Rudolf Haym, Die Romantische Schule (Berlin, 1870), 134, 325ff., 375-383
23. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790
24. and Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (1793)
25. Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Riga, 1785), 39
26. Kant has a reply to this line of thought: Although no human could have a "holy will" we stand under a kind of second-class moral demand (what Kant calls a "postulate of practical reason") to aspire to approximate the unattainable ideal of holiness of will (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft [Leipzig, 1800], 219ff)
27. Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung, the last twelve letters
28. Cf. Schiller's essay Über Anmut und Würde (Leipzig, 1793)
29. Marxists see in this ideal of art as the specific realm of free, self-organizing subjectivity a sign of Germany's political backwardness. The West had concrete conceptions, if not of what we could call full political democracy, at any rate of some form of free constitutional political life, but such notions would have been so Utopian in nineteenth-century Germany that aspirations to free sociability had to be transferred to the world of art and aesthetic judgment. Cf. Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung, "Siebenundzwanzigster Brief"
30. also Georg Lukács, "Zur Ästhetik Schillers" in his Probleme der Ästhetik (Neuwied, 1969)
31. For the influence of Herder on the growth of Slavic nationalisms, cf. Bittner's "Herders Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit und deren Auswirkungen bei den slawischen Hauptstämmen" in Archiv für slavische Philologie (1929)
32. and Holm Sundhaussen, Der Einfluss der Herderschen Ideen auf die Nationalbildung bei den Völkern der Habsburger Monarchie (Munich, 1973)
33. Sundhaussen comes to the not surprising conclusion that the influence of Herder on the actual generation of Slavic nationalisms has been exaggerated. This, of course, is compatible with the view that Herder had an important effect within the German-speaking countries of legitimizing the various Slavic nationalisms. Note also that the Russian Slavophiles in the late nineteenth century were apparently very cool and distanced in their attitude toward Herder because they found in him no support for their claims to a unique superiority of Slavic culture. (Cf. A. Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy [Oxford, 1975])
34. It is important to qualify views like that expressed by Fritz Stern when he claims that the "idea of establishing a sharp dichotomy between civilization and culture was born at the time of German Idealism and has played an important and pernicious role in German thought ever since" (The Politics of Cultural Despair [Berkeley, 1961], 196, footnote
35. cf. similar remarks by Norbert Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation, Band 1, 7ff.). "Born at the time of German Idealism" doesn't mean "developed as a characteristic and integral part of German Idealism" because for Kant the distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation is not a strictly exclusive one and it is completely different from early twentieth-century versions of this distinction. Hegel's philosophy has no role whatever for any distinction like this, and although Fichte does have the germ of something which later develops in various ways, he doesn't use the terms Kultur or Zivilisation to express it
36. For further discussion of this cf. Fisch, "Zivilisation, Kultur," in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, VII, esp. 681ff
37. Cf. Hont, "The Permanent Crisis" in Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State