Noemi Bartolucci

The visual arts offer a distinctive way of engaging with the enduring question of self-knowledge. By challenging philosophy’s long-standing alignment of truth with introspection and rational enquiry, rooted in Socratic thought, this discussion frames the self as unstable, transitional, and accessible through its expressions, drawing on Klaus Mollenhauer in order to do so. With the rise of self-portraiture in the early modern period, Rembrandt’s self-portraits become a sustained meditation on the limits of self-understanding. Revisiting the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry reveals affinities between philosophy and literature, while positioning the visual arts as equipped in a distinctive way to explore the complexities of self-relation offers valuable insights for education.

A return to the etymology and emergence of Bildung in tandem with the novel offers a means of recovering dimensions of experience that have been somewhat muted in contemporary educational philosophy. The paper takes a critical stance toward recent appropriations of Bildung, particularly within philosophy of mind and education. Although prominent figures such as John McDowell and David Bakhurst bring some breadth to their accounts, their argument is grounded in primarily cognitive and intellectual terms. They interpret Bildung through reason, conceptual mastery, and the formation of the person as a rational being. In response, I turn to Bildung’s earlier associations with experiential, affective, and expressive formation, and to its literary articulation in the Bildungsroman, to show how the Bildungsprozess unfolds through struggle, uncertainty, and lived encounter. Works such as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man narrate the unruly and often turbulent nature of formation in their stories, where human becoming resists closure or neat resolution. Revisiting Bildung in this light restores to education a sense of movement, creativity, and transformation that are difficult to contain within intellectual or conceptual accounts alone.

This article explores the relationship between place and Bildung, in the context of the North American African diaspora. In the process it raises questions of identity and the troubled concept of America itself, and the fatefully compromised roots of this modern democracy (‘We the People!’—but which people are we?). It begins by elaborating on the central concepts of place and Bildung in light of the classic formulations of Heidegger and the more recent critical discussions of the humanist geographer Edward Relph. The development of the idea of Bildung has connected substantially with the literary form of the novel, and experiments in the novel have shaped and reshaped the understanding of what Bildung can mean. Hence, the strands of thought I have established are brought to bear, in the latter part of the article, on a consideration of one of the outstanding 20th-century Bildungsromane by a Black author, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. My discussion of Ellison is intertwined with reflections on William James Booth’s ‘The Color of Memory’—which deals more explicitly with the violence of self-formation in North American colonial contexts—generating thoughts that I thematize in relation to visibility. Consideration of the novel enables an exploration of the themes of insideness and outsideness, and hence, of alienation, as well as reflection on new ways of thinking and being, in which the relation between Bildung and place are altered and in some respects weakened.