Bildung, self-cultivation, and the challenge of democracy: Ralph Waldo Emerson as a philosopher of education

‘Where do we find ourselves?’ (Emerson, 1983, p. 27) is the question which opens Ralph Waldo Emerson’s classic essay ‘Experience’. In admiration of Emerson, Nietzsche warns, addressing his reader, that answering this question may lead into ‘countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would bear you through this stream; but only at the cost of yourself’ (1997, p. 129). Instead Nietzsche suggests a path into the unknown. The attention to Bildung and self-cultivation in this special issue is an attempt to explore Nietzsche’s rephrasing of Emerson’s question, ‘But how can we find ourselves again?’ (1997, p. 129). The contributors to this issue, in their writing and thinking, stay with this question, rather than giving it a hasty answer. Such a posture, for Emerson, characterizes democratic life.

Emerson has long been admired as a writer and important figure of American culture and literature. His works have inspired philosophers such as Nietzsche, John Dewey, George Santayana and others, but until recently his writing thrived mostly on the peripheries of the discussions in professional philosophy. In philosophy of education, his work has shared this fate. Emerson is widely admired but not often thoroughly and explicitly discussed.¹ Still, as Heikki Kovalainen has argued: ‘Emerson might be understood as the nexus author par excellence of […] various line of American Bildung. Not only was his philosophy of Bildung decisively shaped by Europeans and Americans, it also exerted subsequent influence on them, particularly Friedrich Nietzsche and the three classical American pragmatists, Peirce, James, and Dewey’ (Kovalainen, 2012, p. 183). Nietzsche’s prominent text on education, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, can be seen as the work which is most indebted to Emerson. There, he pronounces the idea of education as a matter of finding oneself and finding oneself again; a form of education in which educators or teachers are thought of as cultivators, where cultivation is a liberation from set paths and bridges and other idolatrous gods that determine the goal of the journey (Nietzsche, 1997, p. 130). In this conception of education resound Emerson’s words: ‘Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul’ (1971, p. 80).

Education, for Emerson, is a form of cultivation of the self. But this is not all. If Emersonian education begins with questions like ‘Where do we find ourselves?’ then education as self-cultivation is not only a matter of Bildung as an enculturation in the hands of others. It also makes us ‘responsible for our own self-cultivation’ (Bates, 2012, p. 28). The tension between our dependency on others for provocation and education and our own improvisations in cultivating ourselves is a recurrent theme in this special issue. It is present in questions of inheritance and novelty, of language and our application of words, in positioning ourselves as scholars, in orienting ourselves as private and public beings between the political and the personal. These tensions are not intellectual riddles, but, as is demonstrated in this issue, experiences of life, in life. It has been largely due to the commendable work of Stanley Cavell and his extensive endeavors to reclaim for Emerson the status of a philosopher to be taken seriously as philosopher that Emerson’s work has received renewed attention within academic philosophy. Cavell emphasizes Emerson’s anti-foundationalism in what he calls ‘Emersonian perfectionism’. If the question of where to find ourselves is an educational concern of orienting ourselves, then education is not a matter of knowledge acquisition, at least not acquisition of the philosopher’s justified true belief. Finding ourselves is not a matter of finding secure foundations for our lives external to the lives lived, but more a matter of finding ourselves in our being, in our own living.

Both Emerson’s self-cultivation and the German concept of Bildung can, at first appearance, seem excessively individualistic. However, Emerson’s approach, with a closer reading, will appear far more intricate and complex. He orients himself and places his readers in the tensions between the individual and the community, the private and the public, the inner and the outer, the universal and the particular, inheritance and transformation. The contributions to this special issue have these tensions as a common focus.

In the first paper of the special issue, Claudia Schumann introduces the contemporary discussion on the notion of Bildung between critical and recuperative voices. She argues that Emerson’s transformation of the concept provide a valuable springboard for developing the idea of an ‘aversive education’ as a call for Bildung to be turned upon itself, drawing particular attention to its political dimension. Following Aletta Norval’s interpretation of democracy as aversion to conformity, the imagining of a further and different self as well as a different community beyond the present state becomes the precondition for the continuous renewal of the democratic conversation and its ability to transform it so as to become able to register those voices who in the present state of affairs cannot be heard.

Niklas Forsberg further explores the tensions Emerson is working within, exemplifying how they emerge in scenes of learning from teachers. Teachers are here exemplary, and learning from them is less to be understood as a matter of learning about what they say, but rather about learning to speak our own words, learning to use a language which is our own, yet still inherited and shared. The teacher as an exemplar helps us to develop a sense of criticism as self-criticism; cultivation of the self also becomes a cultivation of the public or the shared world. The gap between the inner and the outer, the private and the public is not bridged by self-cultivation, but dissolved through it. Thus, Forsberg concludes that there is no self in self-reliance that relies. Rather when self-cultivation becomes a form of perfectionism, it is found in the acknowledgment of imperfection. Shared language and practice in the form of conformity seems to negate this fact, but Emerson, in Forsberg’s reading, destabilizes this sense of a perfect state to which the self conforms. Instead he poses an image of a self in the process of perfecting, a self which is always moving beyond itself. Education as self-cultivation means relying on a self and its expression which is not here, but still to come.

Naoko Saito, in her contribution to this issue, shows the contemporary significance of Emerson’s and Thoreau’s writings by turning to Cavell’s adoption of their transcendentalism as a form of perfectionism. She does this partly in conversation with Dewey’s description of Emerson as a philosopher of democracy and partly through following Cavell in his reading of the classic Hollywood comedy Mr Deeds Goes to Town. In reading the film Saito negotiates the role of political emotions, particularly happiness, for democratic life. As Saito points out, it is precisely the personal and private emotions that give Cavell’s (and Emerson’s) philosophy its political force without losing sight of the fragility of the polis, or the public. Our private emotions, my happiness or unhappiness, thus are not something to be set aside in political discourse, or in the conversation of justice, but something that shapes and transforms it as the private experience is expressed in speech. Education, the cultivation of the public as well as the private, happens in those surprising moments where we face such speech of emotion being voiced.

The tension between the inner and the outer, the individual and the world is deepened further in Heikki Kovalainen’s discussion of Emerson’s essay ‘Culture’. He accentuates how these tensions in Emerson’s work are directly related to questions of education and self-cultivation. Not unlike Saito, he argues that the apparent similarities between Dewey and Emerson regarding education hide Emerson’s specificity on the subject, not least because of the way in which Emersonian self-cultivation both draws upon and differentiates itself from the German Bildung tradition. Emerson does not only want to cultivate the self, but he is concerned with how this cultivation puts the self into intimate contact with the world. Kovalainen’s picture of Emerson is different from Cavell’s and other contemporary readers of Emerson in stressing specifically Emerson’s religious sensibilities. Emersonian self-cultivation, Kovalainen argues, opens for a religious vision of our lives and the world, without the limitations of a particular denomination.

Viktor Johansson in his turn focuses on Bildung as the ‘wild wisdom’ which children reveal in their playful, improvisatory way of engaging with the world, particularly in their way of inheriting, learning and improvising with language. By letting Kant and Emerson enter into conversation with each other, he explores the role of Emersonian self-cultivation as a form of improvisatory or wild Bildung in early childhood education, where the recovering of the wild gaze allows to transcend the conformities our inheritances instill on us. Johansson’s discussion of the tensions between domestic inheritances and improvisatory wildness shows how Emerson’s essayistic writing can be read in response to values set by curricula for pre-schools.

Paul Standish takes Cavell’s description of Emerson’s text as perfectionist as a point of departure for considering questions of race in Emerson’s work and what might be learned from considering these today. He begins by showing how Emerson’s essays, in particular his essay ‘Experience’, work in the large spectrum between philosophical prose and poetic expression in a way that forms the essay as an experiment with language. Emerson’s experiments with language are in Standish’s reading a perfectionist search for a nation yet to be discovered, a ‘new, yet unapproachable America’. Like the other contributors of this issue, Standish discusses the tension in the reception of Emerson’s writings; reading him either as expressing a crude (American) individualism or as concerned with the complexity of who we are both collectively and individually. Standish demonstrates that the repressed experimentalism and density of Emerson’s writing can be heard when we listen to how he has been received in the African-American philosophical and literary traditions. Emerson’s emphasis on the American Constitution as being founded on the repression of the black community becomes a perfectionist call for refounding America. The story becomes an education in how to depart from the repressed shame of the present state of society in order to call for a transformation toward a more just future.

All these contributors in various ways suggest that there is no easy solution or dissolution of the dichotomous tensions in Emerson. Rather it seems as if Emerson’s essays are small journeys through the enigmatic landscape of a human life that involves such poles. The contrasts between the ‘I’ and the representational ‘we’, between the inner and the outer, the particular and the universal voice, the individual and the community, can thus be understood, as Sandra Laugier puts it, as ‘the central enigma of politics’ (2010, p. 205). This special issue aims at understanding this sentiment. Emerson’s anti-foundational orientations in these tensions can become a means for reconsidering the role of Bildung and self-cultivation for our lives in contemporary democracies, as well as for transforming democracy itself. In a way philosophy of education following in the footsteps of John Dewey already has begun such reconsiderations. But the conditions for education, Bildung and self-cultivation are constantly shifting. The contributions to this issue hope to contribute with a fresh perspective on how a renewed understanding of Bildung can help us face the challenges of today. Bildung as self-cultivation becomes in Emerson, both in content and manner of his writing, a matter of a political endeavor, of struggling against conformism and positioning oneself in a community while at the same time transforming that community.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Viktor Johansson is a PhD in Educational Sciences from Stockholm University in Sweden. He currently holds a position as senior lecturer at the School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences Örebro University, Sweden and as a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Education, Health and Social Studies, Dalarna University, Sweden. He is the author of Dissonant Voices (2013), and has written several articles within philosophy of education, such as ‘Questions from the Rough Ground: Teaching, Autobiography and the Cosmopolitan “I”’ (2015), ‘Perfectionist Philosophy as a (an untaken) way of life’ (2014) and ‘The Philosophy of Dissonant Children: Stanley Cavell’s Wittgensteinian Philosophical Therapy as an Educational Conversation’ (2010). He is currently working on two monographs.

Claudia Schumann is a PhD student at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research focuses on philosophy of education, philosophy of language, critical theory and feminist philosophy. Recent publications include: ‘Boundedness beyond Reification’ (Ethics & Global Politics, 2012); ‘The Self as Onwardness’ (Foro de Educación, 2013); ‘Bildung’ (in Schneidereit/Demuth: Interexistenzialität und Unverfügbarkeit, 2014); ‘Graphic Contaminations: Cosmopolitics of the “I” in American Born Chinese and Persepolis’ (Studier i Pædagogisk Filosofi 2015); ‘Which Love of Country?’ (Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2016); ‘Knowledge for a Common World? On the Place of Feminist Epistemology in Philosophy of Education’ (Educ. Sci., 2016); ‘Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Education: A Feminist Re-Assessment’ (Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2016).

Notes

1. Some prominent exceptions can be found in the work of Naoko Saito, Paul Standish, and Heikki Kovalainen among others, who are also contributing to this issue. (cf. e.g. Saito 2005; Standish/Saito 2012; Kovalainen 2012).