Abstract

This study examines the phenomenon of the aestheticization of the construct of humanity in the Bidungsideal of German Humanism. It focuses specifically on the writings of Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Thomas Mann, paying particular attention to Schiller's Uber die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra, and Mann's Doktor Faustus. ;Chapter one focuses on Schiller's aesthetic writings, specifically, his Letters on Aesthetic Education. Partly an amalgam of Kant's moral and aesthetic thought, Schiller's theorizing is an attempt to provide a sensuous basis for the attainment of the moral state. However, in the process of attempting to reunite the reasonable and sensual poles of humanity's dual nature in the aesthetic state, Schiller redefines humanity as coextensive with that state. This move also places the aesthetic in a privileged position as a sort of lynch-pin between human being and the transcendental noumenon of moral law. ;Chapter two argues that Nietzsche's radical transvaluation of all values has its roots in the Bildungsideal of the likes of Schiller, and that Nietzsche remains humanist, all too humanist, employing the philological tools of Hermeneutik and Kritik at least in part, as the hammer with which he philosophizes. Chapter three examines Nietzsche's aesthetics in terms of his program for the reformation of humanity. I claim that Zarathustra is a kind of super-humanist pedagogue concerned with the uberbildung of Ubermenschlichkeit. Nietzsche's philosophy, I argue, needs to be considered in light of the Bidungsideal against which the later Nietzsche vituperates. Nietzsche is both heir and radicalizer of the German humanist tradition; he works from within its conceptual framework. ;My final chapter examines Mann's critique of German humanism in Doktor Faustus and agrees with Mann that Nietzsche is linked to the humanist tradition and to the Bildungsideal. However it departs from Mann's formulations in locating the seeds of Nietzsche's radical aestheticism in Schiller's idealism, and in the conceptual associations of the Bildungsideal generally. My final claim is that Mann opposes critique to aestheticism as the basis for a new humanism