On Hegel’s Philosophy of Bildung

Marina F. Bykova (North Carolina State University)

Abstract: The idea that Bildung is central to Hegel’s account of the unending, historical development of individual human subjects and of humanity at large is widely recognized. However, there is no agreement about the exact meaning in which Hegel uses the term, nor about its systematic significance within his philosophy. In my talk, I will outline the basic connotations of Bildung, how Hegel conceptualizes it, and discuss the role this concept plays in his philosophy. I will show that in Hegel’s philosophical systematic, Bildung is conceptualized as a fundamental, social-historical project of the spirit’s self-cultivation, a path toward rational autonomy and actively attained freedom from natural immediacy of life, a path, which unfolds through contradiction, difference, dialectic of alienation, and intersubjective interactions within the social realm, and on the plain of cultural history. In this sense, Bildung, which is prominent throughout all of Hegel’s work – from the Phenomenology to Philosophy of Right and to the Lectures on the World History – provides important insights into his humanistic philosophy and is instrumental to understanding of his philosophical project.

Bio

Marina F. Bykova is Professor of Philosophy at North Carolina State University (USA). Her area of scpecialization is German idealism, with a special focus on Hegel, and recently also on Fichte. She has written Hegel’s Interpretation of Thinking (1990), Absolute Idea and Absolute Spirit in Hegel’s Philosophy (1993, co-authored), and The Mystery of Logic and the Secret of Subjectivity (1996).   She has also edited a new Russian edition of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (2000) with a new commentary, and most recently, Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit: A Critical Guide (Cambridge UP) and The German Idealism Reader: Ideas, Responses and Legacy (Bloomsbury), both forthcoming in 2019. Currently, she is co-editing (with Kenneth Westphal) The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, which is under contract with Palgrave Macmillan.