The German Genius

tentatively attempting—perhaps without being aware of it—to replace the theological concept of mankind with a biological understanding.
    One man of influence who took up these ideas early was Wilhelm von Humboldt. 55 Later on, Humboldt would be instrumental in the creation of the University of Berlin, an institution so important that it needs a chapter all to itself in any cultural history of Germany. To begin with, he was a student of Blumenbach and was much taken with his concepts of Bildung and Bildungstrieb. 56 Nature, for Humboldt, consisted of specific individual centers of energy and activity, each center revealing its own character in the activity it displayed. Activity—sheer movement—was key here. In classical (Newtonian) physics, motion was always the result of some outside source. However, many thinkers, dissatisfied with the application of Newton’s science as an explanation for living systems, preferred what they called “the living order of nature,” where nothing stood still, where “self-generated motion” meant that every living part of nature was constantly in movement and, moreover, “this movement was not haphazard.” Matter, to them, contained an immanent principle of self-movement. “Unlike mechanical concepts of force (magnetism, electricity, gravitation), these internal powers were thought to operate directionally: they had an implicit goal towards self-realisation ( Vervollkommnung ).” 57
    This revised definition of matter required a redefinition of nature. In this new view, there is in nature an inner character which speaks through it. “Nature’s telos could only be intuited, never fully revealed as transparent.” 58 Humboldt’s gloss, which was essentially Blumenbach’s view, was that matter was composed of general and individual Kräfte (powers or forces), each having its own nature. The most important of these immanent qualities were the general forces of Bildung, generation ( Zeugung ), and habit ( Trägheit or Gewohnheit ). These qualities produced the individuals of which a nation was composed, making the nation an analog of an organized body. “Reality was defined as the striving of active powers or ideas to actualize themselves, that is to acquire form.” 59
    Biology apart, the root concept of Bildung, a neologism of the eighteenth century, lay in Martin Luther’s use of Bild , meaning “image,” in two seminal biblical verses:
    And God said, Let us make man in our own image, after our own likeness…So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
(G ENESIS 1: 26–7)
     
    But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed unto the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.
(2 C ORINTHIANS 3: 18).
     
    It was, of course, the Pietists who had introduced the idea. For them it had an exclusively religious sense, but during the reigns of Friedrich Wilhelm I and Friedrich the Great, Bildung was secularized without losing the subjective ideal of personal perfection. “Even for those who rejected revealed religion and scriptural authority, Bildung offered a means of secular salvation through culture.” 60 Moreover, Bildung was open to everyone in a country where the public sphere was rapidly expanding (see Chapter 1).
    Bildung “was the culture of an emerging group that did not conceive of itself as bourgeois so much as it thought of itself as cultivated, learned and, most importantly, self-directing …a man or woman of Bildung was not merely learned, but was also a person of good taste, who had an overall educated grasp of the world around him or her and was thus capable of ‘self-direction’ that was at odds with the prevailing pressure for conformity.” 61 Bildung was in effect a secular form of Pietism: both embodied Leibniz’s and Christian Wolff’s notion of perfection.
    Bildung, then, for someone like Humboldt, was partly a biological force, partly a spiritual necessity, partly an aspect of the natural world, like gravity. It also had religious overtones, in that it had grown out of Pietism: just as the Pietists could “improve on the Creation” and move closer to God by practically helping their neighbors in this world, so Bildung was an interior process whereby an individual could work on himself, or herself, to improve his or her self-consciousness, to move closer to perfection. The concept of genius—individuals whose