Introduction: Bildung and the idea of a liberal education

In 1962 Theodor Adorno published the article ‘The Theory of HalfEducation’. There he abandoned the hope that education for humanity—he used the term Bildung—could retain its normative power in our time. When educative experiences are products of the culture industry, when humanity has become a cheap political phrase, and when freedom is turned into an advertisement for Coca-Cola, then we live in the age of Halbbildung or half-culture. Adorno lambastes his own age for a cheap consumerism given over to the half-experienced and half-digested. This is bad enough as a contemporary diagnosis. Even worse is the fact that the prime source of German culture, the magnificent heritage of Weimar classicism in literature and philosophy, has dried up as well. Adorno maintains that this heritage has from its beginnings been coagulating into the half-cultured posturing of the German bourgeoisie—a Bürgertum rapidly deteriorating into a petty bourgeoisie, a Kleinbürgertum. This bourgeoisie has pursued selfassurance without a self and aesthetic style without taste, entrapped in cultural arrogance and dull conformism. ‘In the ideal ofBildung’, Adorno writes, ‘which sets culture on a pedestal, the dubious nature of culture shows through’ (Adorno, 1962, p. 93). Even as he appreciates Friedrich Schiller’s original vision of Bildung, he rejects the core content of German neo-humanism—that is, the ideal of the self-education of a bourgeoisie that saw its own inherent values as the true fount of wisdom and power. Adorno wrote in the transition from industrial society to the information society. His critique implicitly refers to the specific German history of a misfired revolution in 1848, the failure of democracy and the withdrawal of the educated classes from public and political responsibility between the world wars. In a collection of essays, The Transparency of Evil, Jean Baudrillard paints a garish picture of the information society we live in. Now narcissists and buffoons present half-culture in distorted mirror images that turn every pretension towards the education of character into a mere sham. In Baudrillard’s postmodern universe the cultivated self is not lost. It is rather recycled in the infinite reproduction of surfaces— the self as simulacrum. ‘We live’, Baudrillard writes in 1993, ‘amid the interminable reproduction of ideals, phantasies, images Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2002