Humanism and Bildung

Herder, I claim, therefore still matters widely for contemporary literary-legal studies, for a practical approach as advocated by Martha Nussbaum to cultivate humanity with the help of the combined study of the humanities in higher education,⁵⁷ as well as for a return to a more fundamentally humanistic ap-proach that Costas Douzinas envisages. Douzinas turns to the term humanitas in the Roman republic, in the sense of theeruditio et institutio in bonas artes that we would now callBildungas Herder saw it, because it goes beyond the aux-iliary function of the humanities as instruments of education and encompasses an attitude and the worldview of preciselyHumanität, of empathy, one that orig-inates in the circumstance that as humans we can stand back as it were from an actual experience and reflect on it.⁵⁸

Underlying the literary themes ofSturm und Drangwas the idea of the for-mation of the human and his individual personality to attain the ideal of Human-itätand Goethe’sWilhelm Meister exemplifies it. At the same time, the ancient

nent, habent quoddamcommune vinculum(the common bond of those arts pertaining to hu-manity [trans. and italics mine]) et quasi cognatione quadam inter se continentur.”

 Cf. Ergang,German Nationalism,.

 Cf. Berlin,Vico and Herder,.

 Martha C. Nussbaum,Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Educa-tion(Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard UP,).

 Costas Douzinas,“A Humanities of Resistance: Fragments for a Legal History of Humanity,”

inLaw and the Humanities: An Introduction,eds. Austin Sarat, Matthew Anderson and Cathrine O. Frank (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,):–,.

idea of tragic conflict resulting from the clash between the individual and the (moral) law returns inTasso.This bond as far as the latter is concerned with Greek tragedy is good cause to again think in terms of the educative function of the literary work as noted above in paragraph one. SinceBildungis the key word in German neohumanism that developed on the basis of Humanität,⁵⁹ the former as an example of theBildungsromanshould alert us to the possibility of renewed use of the genre and concept in circumstances different from those of its origins. While Sloterdijk may be right that in contemporary societies literature by now has reached its final stage as a subculturesui generis, I disagree with his conclusion that the era of humanism andBildungis therefore over.⁶⁰I contend that it is precisely in our commonHumanitätthat we can find the justification for our continued effort to bring in the humanities to discuss and confront issues that traditional approaches deal with only from an instrumental, socio-political point of view.

In this view, theBildungsromanand its characteristics deserve our continued attention because, as Moretti claims, it was the narrative form that dominated the‘Golden Century of Western narrative,’ i.e., the nineteenth century.⁶¹ Since that is also the epitome of modernity, the novel of formation and acculturation remains an acute topic also from a point of view of the history of ideas in that

“the conflict between the ideal ofself-determinationand the equally imperious demands ofsocialization”is reflected in the development of nation-states and their struggle for national legal systems, ⁶² free from the empire that was Roman law. What is more, the dichotomy when perceived at the level of an indi-vidual’s struggle offers a fruitful paradigm with which to view diaspora situa-tions when combined with both mechanisms of textual organization that Moretti sees at work in theBildungsromanas a genre. That is to say, the“classification”

principle that makes“a story [is] more meaningful the more truly it manages to suppress itself as story,”with marriage and the renouncement of freedom as the emblematic form of closure, and “the transformation principle” that creates meaning by means of “its narrativity, its being an open-ended process.”⁶³ The idea of socialization as the possible renunciation of a person’s individuality can be elevated to the diasporic group to discuss subjects such as assimilation,

 Hans-Christof Kraus,Kultur, Bildung und Wissenschaft im. Jahrhundert(München: R. Old-enbourg Verlag,).

 Sloterdijk,Regeln für den Menschenpark,.

 Franco Moretti,The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London:

Verso,):.

 Moretti,Way of the World,.

 Moretti,Way of the World,.

the cultural assumptions internal to a diasporic group, and the possibility of cul-tural transformation. This is especially acute when we think through the circum-stance that in diasporic situations when memories of home occur in a different cultural context, there is always the risk of a distortion of views so that a herme-neutics of suspicion remains urgent for our readings of diaspora.⁶⁴While I am well aware of the fact that the era of production of theBildungsromanis behind us and we should therefore keep in mind its historical contingency, I am never-theless convinced that my argument holds in the sense that the process of be-coming, not being, is crucial in literary-legal diaspora studies.

So the need to question one’s own reflection and stand back as it were in order to (re)view one’s situation is always in order and with Herder’s humanism and theBildungsromanwe have an interesting starting point for a methodology of self-knowledge, in the individual life as much as in the larger setting of society.⁶⁵I wholeheartedly agree with Slaughter when he contends that“an in-fringement on the modern subject’s ability to narrate her story” was a good lens with which to view abuses of human rights and I claim that it can equally fruitfully be applied to diaspora discourse.⁶⁶That is to say, the humanistic idea of narrative self-determination and an independence of voice seen in terms of modernity’s emphasis on the individual when combined with insights derived from Herder’s linguistic and culturalist view ties in with current debates in Law and Literature, and can provide a new form of investigation in the way in which various cultural forms and cognitions work in the world, particularly, of course, when “culture-bound knowledge confronts its own limits” as is the

 And think of diasporas of the kind experienced by the Hungarian people when after the Treaty of Versailles () they suddenly found their country reduced to one third of its original area, and as a consequence a great number of people found themselves in the bizarre diasporic situation that the country had left them.

 Early on inLaw and Literature, Robin West already argued that the bond between law and literature also consists of the narrative component itself that every theory of law has and that can be fruitfully analyzed in a way analogous to the methods used in literary analysis, on the view that any theory is a form of narrative. She applied Frye’s subdivision of narrative to juris-prudential developments. The two contrasting methods of story-telling which Frye calls romance and irony are linked to natural law and legal positivism; the two contrasting world views, the comic and the tragic vision, find their legal counterpart in liberalism and statism. This connec-tion of a typology adopted from literary theory to legal theory has undeservedly disappeared from scholarly sight and needs reviving in the context of literary-legal contributions to diaspora discourse. See Robin West,“Jurisprudence as Narrative: An Aesthetic Analysis of Modern Legal Theory,”New York University Law Review():–, referring to Northrop Frye, Anat-omy of Criticism(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,).

 Joseph R. Slaughter, “A Question of Narration: the Voice of International Human Rights Law,”Human Rights Quarterly():–,.

case when literary-legal insights are combined with, or applied to diaspora discourse.⁶⁷