ResponsAbility - Dialogues on Practical Knowledge and Bildung in Professional Studies

Edited Podcast Transcript:

ResponsAbility
Dialogues on Practical Knowledge and Bildung in Professional Studies
By Michael Noah Weiss and Guro Hansen Helskog

#2 Bildung and the Purposes of Education | Steen Nepper Larsen

00:00:05 Michael N. W.
Welcome to the ResponsAbility podcast! My name is Michael Noah Weiss. It is a
pleasure to be your host today.

00:00:11 Guro H. H.
And my name is Guro Hansen Helskog, and I am the co-host of the show.

00:00:16 Michael N. W.
The guest of today's episode is Steen Nepper Larsen. Welcome, Steen!

00:00:21 Steen N. L.
Thank you.

00:00:22 Michael N. W.
You are associate professor at the Department of Education Sciences at the Danish
School of Education at Aarhus University, where you focus on critical theory,
educational philosophy, and the intersection between science and society. You are also
a critique and the author of several books and articles. Two of them are
Evalueringsfeber og evidensjagt in Danish, which can be translated to “Evaluation fever
and evidence hunt” in English. The other one is “Blindness in seeing”, a philosophical
critique of the visible learning paradigm in education. And especially with the latter
Steen, it becomes obvious that you are criticizing the well-known John Hattie with his
visible learning approach, which I think is a bit funny because you two wrote the book
The Purposes of Education together. Can you tell us a bit about this book? The
background, why you did it together with John Hattie, and how did the two of you come
along philosophically?

00:01:28 Steen N. L.
Ah, very good question. So from the beginning of the century and the beginning of the
2010s, John Hattie was a predominant figure in Danish educational debate and also
among politicians. They had a strong belief in his idea about visible learning, and that
you can more or less come up with your ideas of the most effective learning goals you
could have in education. A lot of schools, a lot of politicians, relied heavily on John
Hattie, so I started reviewing all his books one by one and criticizing them, tearing them
apart for being not very good thinking. After a certain while I had done the top of what I
could offer the public. I said why not go to Melbourne and contact John himself and then
make a book with him. I wrote him a letter and he said, “Well, come around in May
2018!”. I was there for a fortnight, and we had six whole days of debate with a lot of
recordings. He was very positive, and he was also very curious to know my scientific
epistemological critique - my more philosophical, sociological, critical critique. I said
“teach me about it - tell me about it. I want to know about your stuff”. But I found that
his scientific approach was kind of weak. And then we decided to make a long book with
Routledge based in our conversations, and the outcome was a book of 330 pages which
came out in May 2020 during the corona. Therefore, we could not travel and present it
for the public all over the world. That was kind of irritating.
Basically, what we debate in that book is whether or not learning is a visible
phenomenon at all, and whether or not there is something called immediate
gratification in education. I have this view that during your lifetime you find out what was
important to learn 10 years ago, but you could not like measure it 2 seconds after you
had a lesson on the subject. And I also have this idea that the more profound questions
of existential ways of being in the world, like what is it to be a human being, and how can
you be a “gebildete” or a “dannet” (edified) human being - how can that be debated? It
cannot be reduced to output in figures of learning goals and all that. And I also had the
idea that the force was sneaking in to politics when they are relying heavily on
quantitative studies and not talking to the pupils, which he does not do, actually. He is
basically not talking to the students or talking to the pupils at all.

00:04:12 Guro H. H.
Hmm. So what would be your main critique of John Hattie, despite that he's not talking
to the pupils?

00:04:21 Steen N. L.
Yeah, he is objectifying the students, and he is objectifying the pupils, but basically the
title you just read before from educational science, the clue is blindness in seeing.
It is actually a lumen clue that every time you come to see something, there is
something that you cannot see at the same time. So, in the moment you are debating
the effect of something you don't ask a question about the ontology of the effect. You
just take for granted that there is such a thing as effect, and you “know” what an effect
is. Thus, I am more into philosophy and imminent critique. So, I tell him “well, John
Hattie, what is your ontological concept of an effect?” And he says, “well, that is kind of
weird. I am just a statistician. I look at certain relationship figures. I never doubted the
existence of effects”. I think that statistics is a kind of a construction of reality, and a
very reductionist approach to reality, like Theodor W. Adorno would say in his positivism
criticism, and also Hans-Georg Gadamer said the same in the debate about positivism
in the 60s and the beginning of the 70s. So, I am maybe relying more on critical
hermeneutics, critical theory and Niklas Luman and so on, stating all these kinds of
critical questions. But basically he is forgetting about the existential – about what it is to
exist in the world.

00:05:47 Guro H. H.
So, what was the response to the book?

00:05:50 Steen N. L.
Yeah, you can see it. It has 16 chapters, each of them approximately 20+ pages, and it is
actually a very interesting book to read. I got a lot of credit for it, both from colleagues in
favor of John Hattie's approach, and also from very critical people, like Gert Biesta, who
also read it. A lot of people reviewed it, so I cannot complain. And John Hattie was open
minded as well. “I am not a specialist in epistemology, philosophy, sociology nor history
of the sciences, but basically I learned a lot from you”, he said.
He came to Denmark once with his wife, and then we had a bottle of champagne in the
beach, and he had fun when making the book. But it was maybe also a little bit out of his
comfort zone because normally he is a big man in the in the 2010s and the beginning of
the 20s, but now he is nearly forgotten. But basically, he had so many supporters
clapping his back and celebrating his voice, so maybe he liked to be a little bit
challenged.

00:07:06 Michael N. W.
Steen, my next question would be the following. In The Purposes of Education you
describe a concept of Bildung (edification) and you also say that Bildung is central both
to educational practice and educational research. Can you say a bit more what Bildung
is for you? Can you describe it a bit?

00:07:26 Steen N. L.
Yeah, of course. It is something that I still deal with. There is no final answer to a big
question, and it has been there for 200-300 years in the German debate as you know. It's
not a new concept, but it is also a German concept. It is also a Danish concept, because
we have this double word play in German and in Danish, where you can say Ausbildung
and Bildung, and in Danish you say Uddannelse and Dannelse. Also, in Norwegian and
Swedish you have the same. But basically, you do not have that same word pair in
English, and also you do not have it in French. So of course: How do you
translate Bildung? Bildung can maybe be called formation of character. It can also be
called edification. It may also be called culture but they do not really know what to do
about this concept in the US and the UK. So very often they have to rewrite Bildung.
Bildung was a kind of an utopian idea from the German enlightenment and the romantic
philosophers around the end of the 1700`s, where you have Herder and also Immanuel
Kant, and in the beginning of the 1800`s you have Hegel, and then for 250 years we have
debated what is the substance of Bildung?
The best definition I know comes from a very early Danish sociologist whose name was
Claudius Wilkins. And he wrote in a very big encyclopedia volume called Salmonsons
Konversationsleksikon in Danish in 1916, something that I will have translated to this:
“It is not the amount of what a human being knows or has learned with decides
his Bildung or formation, but it is the inner processing and acquisition of
tradition, i.e. a curious vitality and an independent judgment”.
Here you can see Bildung is not to fill an empty engine with fuel, or to write on an empty
board with no letters on. Nor are you an empty vessel being filled by educational matter.
You are yourself, inheriting tradition, giving an independent judgment. Being “gebildet,”
or edified, gives the individual a certain validity and a certain life enhancing dimension. I
do not just give you an advantage on the labor market or good marks in school. It is
actually giving a predominant influence on your way of being in the world. Bildung has to
do with the inner side of education. You can say that you get to be refined, and you get to
be independent and you come to inherit and transgress tradition. So it is kind of a
critical hermeneutical, existential ontological, and a very critical concept, and I like to
defend Bildung as critique, both when it comes to science, and when it comes to every
individual student and pupil who is going through a more or less mandatory school
program - that there is an inner dimension. How do we exist in this world of claims and
ideas for study programs and so on, and ideas for exam? How are we being formed as
humans? How do we maintain our freedom in the midst of control and
expectations from the state? So, I see the formation or the Bildung concept as a very
critical concept that has to do with our being in the world, our way of thinking, our
independent judgment. It's also very important because the educational terminology
has won the game more or less internationally. You always talk about education,
education, education. My colleague Jens Erik Kristensen called it educational
imperialism, where the idea of Bildung is just a kind “happy go lucky”, something you
could do it after we have had the serious stuff. And I'm absolutely against that. I think
there is a Bildung element in any educational logic, but it's very often being killed, ot not
being accepted. So, I see Bildung as a critical concept.

00:12:26 Guro H. H.
In the book “At ville noget med nogen” in Danish”, which can be translated “To want
something with someone” you argue – and I think this relates to what you just said - that
Bildung is the prerequisite for social critique. How have the themes of Bildung come
under pressure these days, and what do you mean by stating that pedagogy nowadays is
submitted to that paradigm of the competitive state?

00:12:51 Steen N. L.
Yeah, I have had this view that we live - when we are going through education - and that
has to do both with students in the university, but also with little pupils being 7 or 10
years old- we have, in a way, a triangular approach to what's going on.
First of all, there will always be a teacher or a program. The teacher and the program is
standing on one edge and then here that is the pupil or the student. But right in the
middle between them, there will be a subject matter. Like “study this poem of Rilke”, or
“try to learn the logic of grammar”, or “try to use has and have in the right way in building
up an assertion in English”. OK. So, the substance between us, I call it the magic of the
third, has to do with bringing something to language together. In Wahrheit und Methode
(1960), Hans-Georg Gadamer had this beautiful phrase stating that we bring “Sache zur
Sprache”. That is PR for language, so to speak, meaning basically that you bring matter
to common knowledge, and I think that is the most important. Actually, it's not just
about qualification. It is actually opening your horizon for something you didn't know,
and that is under pressure. Instead of making a conversation where pupils and their and
teachers study the third in its own right, you take now the study program and say that
“you are supposed to reproduce this for exam”. There is no magic in the classroom any
longer when you are instrumentalizing the third among the two, that is between the
teacher and the students.
We could also say that when you have the learning paradigm, you start to say it's more
important to learn and be able to be a learning subject, than to learn something specific.
That has to do with the of course, the critique of the old authoritarian, biblical or
nationalistic school. It has some certain critique validity, but today it means that the
substance of the in between has lost its power. And I think it is very important for the
Bildung concept to build up a new respect for common and mutual investigation and
curiosity of coming to understand a poem of Rilke, or of the problems of mathematics or
of what's going on in philosophy. The second is that every pupil entering a room, there is
a certain subject form giving pressure going on - that you should be tuned towards the
labor market, and you should have a fast visit here in education and then finish your
master program, or whatever. It's a big pressure in Denmark right now to reduce the
master programs just to 14 months instead of two years. And when I started it was
probably five years. OK, so I had the idea that Instead of pressing people to be
objectified to certain societal needs, you should set people free to be part of politics
and democracy, and find their own voice in society. So instead of either having
instrumentalized objectivity, or objectified student positions, it's a question of bringing
people to exist as democratic citizens. Instead of being a user or user driven, you should
be a kind of a political creature - res publica.

00:16:36 Michael N. W.
In that respect, in one of your recent publications which in English can be translated
“Evaluation fever and the chase for evidence”. Today, at the universities most of the
teachings have to be based on evidence. You are questioning whether learning can be a
visible phenomenon at all. What are your main arguments against this “chase for
evidence”?

00:17:11 Steen N. L.
Yeah, again, a very good question. The book was even mentioned on the front page of
Morgenbladet in August 2022. So, I was very happy to see that they actually used a lot of
pages to debate this book. Basically, evaluation fever has to do with this idea that the
more people are treated as somebody who knows they are going to be evaluated, and
they should make self-evaluations, the more you reify yourself as a strategic human
being, and the less you get “gebildet” - or edified, because then you will only have a
strategic approach to gaining knowledge and to writing and to presenting stuff for
exam. And if you have that double “I am myself knowing now that I am being evaluated”,
then you start forgetting the soul of life and the most important stuff that could happen
to you in in education: that you come to learn something that you didn't know of before,
that you come to open the gate maybe not paradise, but maybe to profane areas of
understanding and to aesthetics, and to the lives of other human beings, to other
cultures and so forth. You are trained now as a strategical, self-affirming, individualized,
winning person on the market. And I think that's really stupid.
The second question that you actually asked was most important, what about
evidence? OK. I have a strong belief that evidence is of course important when it comes
to bridge building. You should of course test if this concrete or this steel would stand
the pressure from big wagons or from hurricanes or from heavy rain, and also test the
soil where it is placed. Of course, we need heavy evidence when you are doing a
doctor's work or an engineer's job or whatever. We do.
OK. The problem is now when it comes to pedagogy and a pedagogical situation. Every
situation is not like the other one. And you can never reduce pedagogy to a causality
logic. Of course, there will be correlations of all kinds of types. If you are just a mean
teacher and people are very insecure, you could probably say with John Hattie, that the
if the teacher is not looking at the subject matter through the eyes of the pupils, he will
be a destructive creature, and we have we have figures for that. We could probably use
evidence there in a very restricted way.
But when it comes to the content of the matter, whether or not this specific pupil will get
something out of reading a poem, or whether or not the person should better go to the
workplace to handle a big machine, which the Danish State is now thinking that's better
to get away from the humanities and from the superfluous knowledge that comes from
aesthetics and from stupid long hair to left wing people, and let them get to the market
and train themselves with machines and with specific tasks and tools, you know that is
all around Denmark, the Social Democrats are the worst.
But basically, if you look at things that way, I'll say you can never, ever come to make an
evidence-based logic of what is the enigmatic or the second birth of human beings,
which is actually happening in school - that is so full of drama, so full of individuality, so
full of context, that will be very hard to reduce it down to a cause-effect logic which. is
actually normally what you do in evidence.
This is also OK. Like my mother here. She's 92. She got a new hip out of steel, and that's
probably better than plastic or cement, right. So, I'm absolutely in favor of a new hip for
Mum, 92, in a hospital that they have tested their steel hips in comparison to other hip
constructions. Of course, you need it there, but do you need it in education? Well, I
doubt that you can reduce complex pedagogical matters to evidence-based
sceneries. At least I questioned that.

00:21:56 Guro H. H.
So, inviting you kind of becoming a little bit utopian. What would an education without
what you call evaluation fever and the chase for evidence look like?

00:22:10 Steen N. L.
I actually think it happens all the time. You also have profane moments of seeing
students being born. Right there on that Tuesday, 10.25 you see the, eyes that are like
full of light, and then you see afterwards - I am now reading 60 papers from an
epistemology course on the theory of science, and I actually can detect whether some
of these students in the classroom - this guy, this woman, they were really wakening up,
and now they're writing really nice papers.
It is actually happening. The moment you take seriously the questions and the need to
experiment and to understand, I have the ideal university. But basically, would I like to
have a little elite super class with just 10 best students, and then drink whiskey sitting
Chesterfield chair, making Oxford University version 2.0? No, of course not. That would
be stupid, because now we have mass universities and under these conditions there are
some tools we can invent to create paradise, at least in a profane way.
One is that I have made a res publica on the Internet with people. They have a so-called
discussion forum in their Brightspace portal, and I say you can ask your questions to
understand the argument of the text and what I have presented in lectures. And then you
can also present your ideas of which kind of written assessment paper will you like to
write, and then ask for literature, and ask for comments on your ideas. The reason is
that what we have cancelled supervision, because there was not enough money for it.
So, I say I'm against the rules. I'm a quasi-anarchist, so I'm again, I'm in favor of giving
you all supervision in public. Just come with all your questions. And there have been 150
exchanges now, where everybody is asking questions like “I don't understand why Kant
says that about that”, and “why is Descartes doing this and that”.
So, they present their questions “Ohne Angst verschieden zu sein”, you will say in
German. Like with Adorno, they should present without fear of “am I posing a wrong
question” or “am I not so clever when I ask about that”, and “What does the other
person think or mean”. But they have forgotten about that, and they pose their
questions for understanding, and they present their ideas becoming written assessment
papers. In that very moment where they read the other student`s ideas and start
commenting on them, using them, then you have made a res publica in university,
instead of instrumentalizing and individualizing it, and reducing the person just to one
who should be a performing agent in a neoliberal state.
So, what would the ideal university be? It would of course be a university where people
could study ten years of Kant, if they want to. The state should not ever decide the
freedom for an individual - in any respect. So I'm in favor of Nietzsche's view from Über
die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten, where he writes all this dream like, utopian
ideas, and also of course, Derrida, he wrote this very, very good book called “The
University without condition”, there's only one condition for the university, and that is to
be able to ask questions with no answers. Nothing else should decide what goes on in a
university. Only the right to pose good questions with no answers, or no immediate
answers. Everything else should be unconditioned.
I love that – Jacques Derrida, Nietzsche, Adorno - who criticized “Halb-Bildung”, as you
know, and I think that we are in danger of “Halb-gebildete” logics in education.

00:26:09 Michael N. W.
I think that “Halb-Bildung” is the keyword here, and it also relates to the next question.
Guro and me we are working at a university for professional studies, and the question
would be how the concept of building is of relevance in today's professional studies?

Steen N.L.
What's going on when you are a professional teacher or professional nurse, after
education that you have presented for people for will be that they themself are
performing pedagogical situations. They are the ones who will something to someone
with for better or worse argumentation and of course legitimation in study programs and
laws. So, but basically you are training pedagogical agents, performing agents for the
future, OK.
And in that situation, it's really important that you train them not so much to be
controllers for the state, or anticipate paying labor market claims, but you in a way
double qualify or triple qualify your students, so of course they have to know the claims
from the state. They have to know the ideas of the labor market also to be able to have a
job, of course, it's not without importance, but what they should be trained for and
come to know is that there are always a more to the things as Adorno would have said in
his critical theory.
That means that now you are actually here, and what is the purpose of a university? That
is that you come to find your own voice. You come to find your own way of writing. You
come to find your own way of teaching. You come to find your own way of reading. So, it
is actually a second birth, as Hannah Arendt and Peter Sloterdijk write. And I really love
that. Education is, when it is best, a second birth. And there we are also self- governing
in that birth process. The second birth you are part of your own birth giving to yourself.
And that means that what you as a university teacher should see yourself as, is to
fertilize human beings` access to knowledge and to ways of being, as an elegant and
intelligent midwife. So basically, your role as professional teachers would not so much
be to use all this very, very awful language like “now you will come to experience a
practice shock. and therefore, we should give you classroom leadership” and all that
stupid, awful technical ideas. Get away from that stupidity, and instead of giving
individual supervision, you give collective supervision, and that's only there to save
resources, as everybody knows.
So, basically use your train coming teachers, coming nurses, knowing all the different
rationales, cutting through your practice as being a professional teacher. And knowing
how to make little access to freedom islands in the midst of over-control, labor market
claims and all kind of stupid psychologists and stating that everybody would not in well-
being, and that's a sphere of the young people's minds, blah blah blah. Or they can need
a cure from neuroscience, so they can need a cure from a pill. So, basically you should
get away from psychology, and enter into free philosophical, literary, aesthetic,
existential journeys.

00:30:11 Michael N. W.
That is a quite straightforward answer I think

00:30:15 Steen N. L.
Yes, and it's full of utopian ideas and hopes.

00:30:18 Michael N. W.
Yes, and let me ask you a follow-up question in that respect, and that is about the new
category of the European Qualification Framework which replace the category of
competence, namely responsibility and autonomy, and my question to you would be, is
there any relation between Bildung and responsibility?

00:30:46 Steen N. L.
I'm extremely thrilled and challenged by this question of yours, because I started
looking into these learning outcomes of this European qualification framework paper,
and I have two comments. Eight years ago, the OECD people, they started writing about
formation of character as a new measurement field. So actually, you should have
character formation as a new 4th component in this idea of knowledge, skills,
competencies. And that's called Four Dimensional Education 2018. It was a strategy
paper from OECD.
Now I see the new paper here, the EQF, it is actually more or less wanting to delete the
competence concept, maybe because it has gone “mental fatigue” in their concept, you
could say. So now they try to let new categories blossom, which are so positive when
you look at them at first glance;
Responsibility, nobody can be against responsibility. Verantwortung – you are also
answering your God in the right way. It has been there for hundreds of years, for
thousands of years. And autonomy, auto-nomos, you put yourself under your own logic.
Greek word. So, first Latin and then Greek. These two words end up like take
“responsibility for completion of tasks and works of study”.
“Adapt your own behavior to circumstances in solving problems”, “work and study under supervision with some autonomy”, with some autonomy. OK, you can. What is now? I feel that the false is
sneaking into the concept with end block, meaning that you take two positive words – it
is the same as John Hattie - nobody can be against learning. “I'm against learning!”.
Then you would be a madman running on the street. But Nietzsche and I would be
madmen running and say we are against learning, because I think it is a very bad
concept compared to Bildung, or to wisdom. it's not. Learning is zero to 1, when wisdom
and building with 10 or 11 or something on a scale. OK, but here we have
“responsibility” and “autonomy”. It is about self-management within the guidelines of a
worker study concept, can you see that it is already imprisoned?
When you read this material, the EQF setup is that “we know the starter guidelines, we
know what the purpose of everything is, we know where you are directed to, we know
what you should fulfill”. And within that “show responsibility and autonomy in the
prison of the EQF.”
I also was against the competence concept. As I do not like the learning concept, I do
not like the competent concept. I have always said with Wittgenstein: Don't ever use
these words without washing your mouth with soap, or as he will say, these are only
worth using when language is having summer holiday.
“Learning” and “competence” have a long time been failures, and therefore I would love
them to be thrown out, but not if replaced them by two other rubber terms, which is full
of the false. And I think this “responsibility and autonomy logic,” it has nothing to do
with Bildung. Bildung will also be the right to question the logic of the study program. It
will be to question the goals for the state: “Can it at all have the right to have a goal for
my socialization, my upbringing?” It means that nobody today should be forced under
the pressure just to give to the system what the system has said it would like you to
provide.
All good things have to do with the right to protest, right? To find your own way. Right to
write something else. Right to experiment with the form. Right to write an essay instead
of a closed assessment paper. So, I am absolutely against this new triangular logic
between responsibility, autonomy, knowledge and skills. I think it's a new idiotic way of
imprisoning students and pupils.

00:35:41 Guro H. H.
You are talking about imprisonment and blindfolding people. So how in this culture –
this really kind of dark culture that you're describing – what is needed from all of us to
become truly seeing?

00:36:04 Steen N. L.
I am a little bit worried that my project, or my view, or my mission can be seen as kind of
an elitist approach, because I have this idea that you should know what the system likes
from you. And then at the same time as you can perform within the show that people are
telling you to perform in, you should criticize it, smash it, irritate it, tear it apart,
deconstruct it. And that means that you should read other books. You should read
whole books. You should question authorities on their own ground, and being able to
serve them as alternative. Every time that happens, people are going for a second birth, I
would say.
But is it open for everyone in a mass university, or is it only open for the few superior
spoiled middle class? I could of course be worried because very many of my students,
they say, “well, we'll never come to read all these books that you have read, and we'll
never come to make it” Yet, but I don't know. I have now students -they are really
opening my eyes to that they have inner and outer energies, that are being born right
around me, and I really love that. But basically, I think you should experiment with your
own life from you are very young. Meaning that you should make your own podcasts that
is presented as your exam, make a poem, or write a text in essay form. Try to see how
Montagne is writing an essay? How is Elias Canetti writing an essay? Adorno collecting a
bunch of aphorisms to a unified essay: Minima Moralia?” How is Arthur Schopenhauer
writing in Parerga and Paralipomena? How is Nietzsche writing his harsh critique and
philosophize with the hammer? And then try to in a way not to do the same as them, but
to get inspiration and then try to play with the form.
And also review books. Find an agreement with an editor and say, “well, if you send me
this book, I write in my student magazine a little review of it, and I will afterwards e-mail
you the review”, and then you start building up your library full of review books. I have
maybe reviewed thousand books since I started when I was 23 as a university student,
and that's 42 years ago. So, I probably review one book every week, or every second
week. The moment you have developed a kind of way of being in the world, it get a
feedback loop on yourself, and then you're open for more. I think that the first time you
have made a review, it is kind of a task for you. Second time it is a kind of an Übung, and
then you have a practice, and then it becomes part of you - to always read new books,
check them out in the library, check new articles. And very often reviewing your
colleagues’ and academic friends’ new books to show them respect, for ’pure’ curiosity,
and to gain knowledge.
But I think it's against the current. I feel that right now in the university we are living in
and subjected to an idiotic kind ‘Balkan-logic’ where only the phenomenologists read
their phenomenological papers, only the positivist read their positivist papers, only the
Luhmann people read their Luhmann papers, but nobody are reading the other people's
papers, because they think it is a waste of time. So, we have this balkanized university
with no deep interest in cross disciplinary thinking way of being in the world. And we
should instead of training now our students to be super positivist, super critical
theoretical guys are super Sloterdijkians or super Adornians and super
phenomenologists, we should teach them to open their minds to all kinds and ways of
thinking.

00:40:00 Guro H. H.
I just wonder, because you mentioned Johann Gottfried von Herder, and you know his
expression Bildung zur Humanität, and Herder says that for him, Bildung is about the
God-given in humans, and in this tradition the term building is connected to the idea of
being born in the image of God, Meister Eckhart being one of the first, at least according
to Gadamer, using Bildung in terms of human beings being created in the image of God.
But when you talked about Bildung, it is more like a social, cultural concept, and about
developing your ability to criticize this cultural society. What are your thoughts on this?

00:40:47 Steen N. L.
Wow, that is my favorite question, and I also wrote a lot about it, actually, here in there
in my books. Because when it is stated from not only by Herder, but it is also stated in
the Bible that you are created in God's image, as man and woman, he created them.
That is from the Genesis text in the Old Testament in the Bible (1.22). The whole idea is
that how can you phronezise within Enlightenment philosophy and romanticism? So
instead of “created in God's image”, these authors replaced God with - it could be
nature, or it could be language, or it could be culture. In Herder the idea moves a little
bit from God towards culture and history.
And then later comes Sprachansichten with Wilhelm von Humboldt, and then you are
created in the different languages, that man can create, and also in the open
interaction, what he called Wechselwirkung zwischen Mensch und Universum. So what
they try to do is now to replace the idea that you are created in God's image, with the
ideas that you are created in the image of either science, nature, language, culture,
history. And it becomes, of course, in the state later on. It gets fixated. Instead of God,
you fixate on the state`s claims towards you, and that was Humboldt`s idea. He was
very critical against the idea that you should be created in the image of what the state
wanted you to do. His idea was Bildung durch Wissenschaft. He was in favour of
Wissenshaft, also language science, philology and all that.
My interest is now to try to follow, understand, interpret, and to present critical analyses
of the shifting historical images and ideals in which you are told to look upon and form
yourself.
Later on, in the 1700s and 1800s we see and acknowledge that the enlightenment
philosophers and romanticists profanize (i.e. secularize) the theistic horizon. The
‘attributes’ of God are so to speak transported to man. The hopes, visions, and dreams
of an individual og social vivid freedom are widespread.
But in our contingent and instable contemporary time you seem to end up facing a blank
and emptied mirror in which you just have to learn and accept to become an effective
neoliberal agent. responsible for your own short- and long-term commodification in
market terms. The images and ideals are becoming de-substantialized and you are both
forced and nudged to create your own more or less fragile or strong reflection of your
present and future self.
So instead of having, like, “read Plato” or “be a believer in God”, or “do what the nation
tells you”, you get a blank slate and yourself as a strategic self-mirroring subject in a
nothingness - without substance- and that's also what Marx wrote about - that the logic
of capital is that it is destructing substance, and use values in order to have, well he did
not call it but in my books I call it ”economic autism”, meaning a new face and
appearance of the logic of capital. It doesn't matter whether or not you're earning your
money on natural exploitation or a whore having a business - or you write a big book
about Salman Rushdie. What matters is whether or not you can sell it on the market.
Capital has no interest in substance. OK, so the problem is if you end with a blank slate
only mirroring yourself, you are not any longer obligated to inherit anything besides a
strategic self-evaluating logic of your own. And then you just take the things, and
replace what can be in the mirror, and you never come to get the time and the chance to
engage in what Sloterdijk and I call Bewunderungsübungen - mirror yourself in, it might
be great literature, eye-opening assertions and arguments, art, music.
So, what is here in my worry is: We end up with “blank slates”
– “tomme spejle” in Danish, and you end up being a strategic agent and you yourself become self-reified,
now on the market. So instead of mirroring yourself in that we are created in the image
of God or the nation`s image or the science image, you get created in your own self
loving and very fragile competitive image of yourself as being a strategic agent in
capitalism.

00:45:15 Michael N. W.
Steen, I think this can be a good final word. It was a quite impressive and inspiring talk
with you. Thank you very much for that. I would also like to thank our listeners and we
hope that they will join us in some other episodes too. And in that sense over and out
from the responsibility Podcast.