Bildung a la Burckhardt

“In an age of crisis and revolution, individuals cannot escape the impending sense of powerlessness and alienation through recourse to materialism, egotism, or violence; rather they must seek the solution within themselves and within the spiritual continuum of the past that unites all humankind. Bildung consequently provided Burckhardt with the necessary bridge between his day-to-day existence and his ascetic and aesthetic impulses. The very centrality of the goal of holistic self-realization to Bildung reveals the extent to which it was conceived as an essentially ascetic phenomenon. The pursuit of inner knowledge and self-exists cultivation as a spiritual calling, as a means of personal salvation in a time of crisis. Bildung consequently represents ascetic self-mastery and self-possession, the requirement of true culture and education. Devotion to this ideal empowers and liberates the subject. An exercise in the power of mind over body, it represents a self-imposed dedication to the spirit and the control of corporeal temptation. In an age in which both the mind and the body were being increasingly managed by a society that was refining its controls over the subject, Bildung emerged as the only source of true individual freedom.” — Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity, John Hinde, p. 135-136.