“To Love the Rest of His Thoughts as Myself” – Translating Mendelssohn’s Singular Bildung
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Yuval Kremnitzer
Abstract
The conceptual history of Bildung, the German term for self-formation, encapsulates the ethical revolution of modern German thought, associated with the Kantian moment and its aftermath. Reshaped in modernity to respond to a post-Kantian, critical sensibility, the modern term emphasizes the reflexive, active process of self-formation, in contrast with the medieval theological sensibility which emphasized the receptive imprint of the image of God. In this article, I unpack Moses Mendelsohn’s idiosyncratic notion of Bildung. I show that what is unique, indeed, singular in Mendelssohn’s notion of Bildung is the way it merges the traditional, theological notion with the modern one. For Mendelssohn, to imitate God is to come to value one’s contingent being. The imitation of the ideal, the most perfect, is tantamount to embracing the perfectible, and the process of perfection or self-actualization. Jacobi, Mendelssohn, Bildung, Contingency, Pantheism affair, Moral Perfectionism
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Introduction
- Special Section: Bildung and Therapy: German-Jewish Self-formation
- Dogmatism, Criticism, Divine Ideals: Rav A. I. Kook’s Concept of God in Light of H. Cohen
- Selbst-Bildungen. The Tradition of Comedy and the Emancipation of German Jews in Carl Sternheim’s The Snob
- “To Love the Rest of His Thoughts as Myself” – Translating Mendelssohn’s Singular Bildung
- Simon Szántó, Nineteenth Century Viennese Writer and Educator: A Study on Integration, Particularism, and the Ideal of Bildung
- „Ein modernes Verdeutschungs-Unternehmen“. Über die historische Semantik der Buber-Rosenzweig-Bibel
- Other Contributions
- Marx and Rosenzweig on Community and Redemption
- When the “Ostjuden” Returned: Linguistic Continuities in German-Language Writing about Eastern European Jews
- The Unsung Buber-Leibowitz Coda to the German Jewish Swan Song
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Introduction
- Special Section: Bildung and Therapy: German-Jewish Self-formation
- Dogmatism, Criticism, Divine Ideals: Rav A. I. Kook’s Concept of God in Light of H. Cohen
- Selbst-Bildungen. The Tradition of Comedy and the Emancipation of German Jews in Carl Sternheim’s The Snob
- “To Love the Rest of His Thoughts as Myself” – Translating Mendelssohn’s Singular Bildung
- Simon Szántó, Nineteenth Century Viennese Writer and Educator: A Study on Integration, Particularism, and the Ideal of Bildung
- „Ein modernes Verdeutschungs-Unternehmen“. Über die historische Semantik der Buber-Rosenzweig-Bibel
- Other Contributions
- Marx and Rosenzweig on Community and Redemption
- When the “Ostjuden” Returned: Linguistic Continuities in German-Language Writing about Eastern European Jews
- The Unsung Buber-Leibowitz Coda to the German Jewish Swan Song
