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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:04.472)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary. I'm here today with Dr. Jennifer Hurt, the professor of Christian ethics at Yale University and Yale Divinity School. We have her book today, Forming Humanity, Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition. Dr. Hurt, wonderful to have you on today.
Jennifer Herdt (00:23.893)
Thank you, PJ. I'm delighted to be here.
PJ Wehry (00:27.482)
So Dr. Hurt, just as a kind of standard question I always start with, why this book?
Jennifer Herdt (00:33.415)
Yeah, well, it evolved as most projects do. I think that I originally got interested in this project because I was deeply shaped by traditions of Christian ethics that focused on virtue, ethical formation, and the importance of community and practices and that. And I wanted to think about what happens to those ideals in the context.
of modernity. It seemed to me too simple to just tarnish individualism and throw it out. There were good things to be said about liberal ideals, about individual freedom and self-realization and so on. So I wanted to look at this German tradition, which is where I really thought those ideals matured and to think about them in relationship to that older tradition of virtue.
education. And what I found was even richer and in some respects more troubling and so on than I was prepared for. But it was a wonderful journey of discovery.
PJ Wehry (01:38.371)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (01:47.15)
Yeah, I mean, so the right in sub subtitle there, we have the term build on and so just kind of not asking you to just fully elaborate because obviously that's the point of the whole book, but to kind of situate our audience. What is the word build on there mean?
Jennifer Herdt (02:07.473)
Yeah, absolutely. So it's scary always to put a foreign word in your title. And then people are always, I don't know if I want to say that, but at least it's in the subtitle, right? You know, so you don't have to. You can just say for me, humanity and be good. So I use the German word building. And throughout the book, I don't use it in translation because there really is no good English translation of the word. But it can mean a bunch of things. It can certainly mean
PJ Wehry (02:17.955)
Yeah
Jennifer Herdt (02:36.069)
education, cultivation, formation. It carries over some connotations of agricultural cultivation, like cultivating the vines of a grape vine, of a grape plant and so on. And I end up thinking that ethical formation is the best term for the strand of meaning that I'm most interested in in this book.
So how is it that, what is the process and what is the product of formation toward what is seen as the ideal human? So I treat building and humanity as concepts that are tightly linked in this tradition because building is not just any old sort of
cultivation or education or formation, it is teleologically oriented. So it's oriented to an end that is the end of realizing humanity. And that's understood on both an individual level and on a social and a collective level, that we're all in the process of realizing the human. And so that's a task that comes to us and it's very different than
PJ Wehry (03:40.27)
Hmm.
Jennifer Herdt (04:03.901)
say just figuring out what I like in life, like figuring out what my basic personality is or something like that. It's responding to a task or a responsibility, but it's also, it's a very rich idea because these thinkers did not think that there was sort of a pre-given model of the human that you were supposed to approximate and that it was internally diverse.
PJ Wehry (04:08.824)
Yeah.
Jennifer Herdt (04:33.723)
There are many, many ways to be human.
PJ Wehry (04:37.198)
And that's where education, you said probably closest translation for what you're working on is ethical formation, but the education part comes in because of the enlightenment and even though they're responding to the enlightenment, like education is seen as like an essential part of that, right? Like this idea of reason is an essential part of ethics. And so you have to cultivate the mind, makes education kind of one of those leading words alongside it.
Jennifer Herdt (05:06.485)
Absolutely. So there is this sense that we are in a time period here in the late 18th, early 19th century. We're in a time period when there's possibility for more and more human beings to be educated and to become people who are capable of self-government. So there's a political dimension to this as well. But they have to go through something of a process in order to get there.
So there isn't this sense of, let's give the vote to everybody tomorrow. There is a sense of, there's a process that's gonna be required to arrive at a level of maturity where you can exchange reasons with others about what is the common good. And you can think together in a reasonable way about how we should live together.
PJ Wehry (06:02.198)
And I think, especially within the tradition that we're working with, we have to talk about the history of it, right? Like it would be so it's not like when you talk about the building, like coming out of and their appropriation of that kind of classical and scholastic tradition. Can you talk a little bit about Greek Pidea? Sure. I'm butchering these. then the Roman humanities and how that they
both critiqued and appropriated those two.
Jennifer Herdt (06:32.797)
Yeah, because there really is such a rich background to this concept. And we're talking about a time period when German thinkers were infatuated with ancient Greece and infatuated with classical culture. And so they were very much looking back to these as models for their own thinking. So Paideia from the Greeks is really a notion of
formation for citizenship in the polis. So we think about what's the Greek ideal? The ideal is to be not just living in a polis, but to be a citizen of a polis. So you are engaged in determining what common life is going to be like. And they understood this in a very holistic way. It's not just learning.
politics, it's really learning philosophy and music and art and athletics. so there's very many dimensions to this, which is why it's also natural to think about it as a kind of holistic formation of the human becoming more fully realized as a human being through this process. And the other thing to be said about it is that it is extremely elite.
So it was available only to a very small percentage of the population. I you had to be male, of course. You had to be a citizen. You had to be very well off. You had to be able to afford this education. So that's kind of baked in from the very beginning, that it's in some sense an essentially human ideal, but it's not a universally human ideal.
And then when we think about the Roman context, humanitas was really the Latin translation of paideia. And it becomes a virtue for the Romans. But it's very interesting virtue because it tends to be discussed as a virtue of rulers. You can afford to have the sort of soft virtue of humanitas.
Jennifer Herdt (08:55.165)
If you're in charge, you're on top of the heap. And so then you don't have to maintain the strict and stern traditional Roman Republican virtues. You can have the humanitas of the Roman Empire. So it's really, I think, enlightening to keep that history in mind. Humanitas as a virtue is something you owe to yourself.
PJ Wehry (08:56.887)
Yeah.
Jennifer Herdt (09:24.019)
Like I am so cultivated that I ought to treat these underlings with a little bit of humanitas. It's not something that you owe to them. It's not something that could ever be demanded from you.
PJ Wehry (09:39.442)
So we're talking like, I mean, there's lots of examples, but Marcus Aurelius would be kind of the essential example of humanitas, like this idea, like everything he talks about is really him focused, even though it is kind of this paragon of virtue.
Jennifer Herdt (09:55.221)
Absolutely.
PJ Wehry (09:57.932)
Yeah, I think of two when you talk about the the elite. My wife is very patient. We go on a three mile walk every morning with our kids. And when we do that, I talk through whatever I'm currently reading. And so we were talking about the Greeks and she was like, wow, the Greeks are really cool. I was like, well, let's remember this. This idea of excellence was for like five, 10 percent of the population. mean, when you look at Socrates, a lot of people like, he's kind of the ultimate Greek.
And it's like, you have to be pretty wealthy to be able to just walk around and ask annoying questions all day. Right? Like, if I went around one, I don't think I could get away with walking around doing that all day. But even if I could, I think people like, don't you have work to do? You know, it's like. So, yeah.
Jennifer Herdt (10:46.355)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's sort of a tough thing to have to recognize that it does take a lot of resources to make the philosophical life possible, right? And those resources for you being produced by other people.
PJ Wehry (11:02.92)
And I think that leads to a question I'd love to get to at some point. I don't know if this is the right time. Maybe after we really get into the Bildung side of it with Herter, but maybe to look ahead a little bit, there's this interesting idea of like, we obviously want to educate people. when you put people in like positions of leadership, for example, or like you want an informed citizen.
Like there's a certain level that you would expect for them to make good decisions. And there is a difference between someone who can make those good decisions and someone who can't. then what, and there's just this tension between the aim of maturity and not excluding people who for different reasons haven't reached that maturity. And that's something you dwell at length in your book. So I don't, maybe we should talk about herder first. Sorry, I I got excited.
Jennifer Herdt (11:58.869)
That's good, you've planted the seed.
PJ Wehry (11:58.894)
Cultivating, cultivating. we've talked about that. It really seems to start off like there's a really Christian reception of these. You talk about, I think Meister Eckhart and Luther into Herder. What is that kind of final link between the two?
Jennifer Herdt (12:27.485)
Yeah, well maybe it helps a little bit to unpack some of that history, prehistory I guess we could say, because it's really fascinating that this whole idea of Bildung is a translation into the sphere of human agency of something that started out as divine agency. So it's originally, especially in the context of German mysticism, you mentioned Meister Eckhart, key thinker here.
this idea that God is forming and reforming the human soul. And in that context, there's really no sense that human agency has a meaningful role to play. were, humankind was created in the image of God and we have fallen and it's up to divine grace to reform us in the image of God. And that's really what's important. So I mean, yes, as human agency, it's mostly negative, right? It's mostly expressed in sin.
And if we have a task, it's to open ourselves up to divine formative agency. And that really carries on into the pietist tradition. So immediately before the time period that we're talking about for the classical Bildung era. And the pietists, I think it's really a reaction that the pietist movement is a reaction to
growing rationalism, growing enlightenment ideas, and they panic a bit because they feel as though human agency is being given too much power. And so they're trying to pull back and say, no, no, no, we need to give ourselves over to divine agency. In doing this though, they develop this elaborate vocabulary for
introspection because they're trying to perceive in their inner life the workings of God. They're trying to be able to see, what is God doing in my life? And so we see sort of a parallel very much to the Puritan movement in the Anglo context, people keeping diaries of their spiritual lives. And they're just really trying to trace the hand of God in their lives.
Jennifer Herdt (14:53.447)
So, well, that's a lot of subjectivity, right? That's developing in that context. A whole vocabulary for describing these experiences. real life of the imagination, which they problematized if it was human imagination, and that kind of seemed threatening and dangerous. But of course, know, they're in imagine, in examining their inner lives.
They're using a lot of imagination to work that out. So we get this really interesting dynamic among the pietists of creating a thought world that then gets taken over by thinkers who are actually very interested in human agency. And some of them are secularizers. Some of them really see human agency as the only game in town, and they are
PJ Wehry (15:25.752)
Hmm.
Jennifer Herdt (15:52.007)
You know, they think, well, there was all this fancy talk, but it really was human imagination at work. It wasn't God at work. And then there are others who are more complex and they don't see it as an either or between divine and human agency. But maybe their understanding of God is not God is out there far away and in some transcendent realm, but very much that God is imminently working in the world and in human experience. And so there's a range of theological positions that gets worked out. But
They are interestingly drawing from Pietism even while they do things that the Pietists would have been aghast at.
PJ Wehry (16:33.342)
I actually love that. I literally the word that came to mind was aghast. Like I love that. I almost said it. That's it. Yeah. It's interesting too. And this is probably why it was brought into other traditions, but it kind of falls apart a little bit to continually reference your passivity as you're writing everything down and doing way more like inner dialogue than like
Jennifer Herdt (16:37.493)
Thank
PJ Wehry (17:01.23)
anyone has done before, it's like, wait, that's pretty active.
Jennifer Herdt (17:05.925)
Mm-hmm, exactly, exactly. And that kind of tension was something they never really worked through to their own satisfaction even.
PJ Wehry (17:16.494)
And I mean, speaking of tension, we have this continual movement. I have to be careful because I don't know. I've been reading your book and I've been reading Dr. Beiser's book. And so I'm not sure which I'm like, wait, where did I read that? But there's this movement for herder from kind of listening to Kant going back over to Heyman and then coming back to Kant. And it's him kind of wrestling through how much
Jennifer Herdt (17:29.685)
Yeah.
Jennifer Herdt (17:38.837)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (17:45.684)
his divine agency, how much of it is human agency, and that really does seem to shape what he's working through with Bildung. Can you talk to us a little bit about Herder's vision of Bildung? And then, you know, we can contrast that with Humboldt, who I've been reading for Charles, like the series on Charles Taylor. And I was talking to my wife and I was like, you know, I was like, really like Herder. And I read Humboldt and I was like, I can immediately like I didn't read any critical literature beforehand. I was like.
Well, that has some definite Nazi tendencies. Like immediately I was like, that's not good. Anyways, but please.
Jennifer Herdt (18:16.117)
you
Jennifer Herdt (18:20.487)
Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating because they're often spoken of in tandem, right? These are two key Bildung thinkers, and they're so different in so many ways. But yeah, mean, Herla is a fun thinker to read, really interesting. He was a theologian, he was many things, but he understands Bildung as human participation in really
the divine working in creation and in history. human beings can participate in the finite expression of the image of God in the world. And we can do that as individuals, but for Herod, perhaps even more, he sees humans as participating in this as peoples and as cultures and as language units and so on. So,
You mentioned what seemed like Nazi tendencies in Humboldt. mean, what's interesting in Herda is, he just studies with Kant. Kant is developing scientific racism and Herda won't have anything of it. I he's going, no. He's often spoken of as a pluralist. So he thinks of...
Divine Providence is at work in human history and in the development of all these different cultures and languages and so on. And each of them is an expression of the image of God. Each of them has its own worth. And it's our problem if we're not seeing that. So he's very critical of this incipient scientific racism. And he's also scathing in his takedowns of European colonial empire.
And, you know, said, well, we seem to think that we're the center of the universe and they, you know, who's to say that we're bringing civilization to them, you know, the very fact that we're out there grabbing their land shows that we're not civilized. So, I mean, really no bones about it. So it's interesting because he's sometimes been seen as a nationalist, nationalistic thinker. I think that's really a misnomer. So,
Jennifer Herdt (20:44.137)
He does value culture and language and he does see human beings as deriving a lot of their identity from their membership in these kinds of social entities. But he doesn't, for instance, think that a state has to coincide with a nation or a people. So you could have a political state
It has a bunch of different cultures in it, and that's totally fine. And the job is to figure out, how can they live harmoniously with one another? And that, more generally, is what he sees as the full expression of humanity, is figuring out how we take this rich plurality of expressions of the human and
find ways to bring it together into harmonious interrelationship. So not stamp out the diversity, but allow it to come together not in conflictual ways and not in oppressive ways and not in exploitative ways.
PJ Wehry (22:00.874)
And he doesn't, I will say, and I think you referenced this a couple of times, he's not big on fully working out his ideas. So he has like all these really interesting ideas, but they are like, well, there's some, there's some holes in that logic that I could see how you could fail them, but like you could fill them multiple ways or I'd need you to do a little more work before I just like totally bought into that. And I think, so there's a, I mean, that's one aspect to this. another thing, and I think this is worth noting, I didn't know about all the
anti-colonial, anti-colonizing writings. And part of it is Hoda's reception is very based on who he influenced and how they used him and the fact that there's just no English translations really. Like the stuff that you are writing, you translated yourself, correct?
Jennifer Herdt (22:55.027)
Yeah, mostly. mean, as you say, there's bits and pieces that are translated. So whether it was an existing translation, I tried to use it just to make it easier for English readers, but I did a lot of translation myself. Yeah. And it's true that his ideas have been used for, yeah, not. Yeah. He would, I mean, because really what he says is very clear in condemnation.
PJ Wehry (23:13.976)
He would have been aghast, right?
Jennifer Herdt (23:23.891)
And so this idea that, I mean, yes, yes, he thinks that we flourish in community, we flourish in as peoples, we flourish in those collective identities, but that's just not, that doesn't license exploitation, that doesn't license oppression.
PJ Wehry (23:44.134)
And you mentioned him being pluralist. think part of the reason I mentioned he doesn't fully work out all the logic of his thinking is he's a pluralist, but not a relativist. He does think there are under like kind of universal virtues. And I think you mentioned this kind of in passing, but it seems really not in passing. It's because he doesn't really develop it. That his critique to go across cultures is that the end goal should be human flourishing and we can.
gauge cultures by that. Can you speak a little bit more to that?
Jennifer Herdt (24:18.257)
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to say too much because I'll get to a point where I'm just kind of, you know, using him as a mouthpiece for my own work, how you would go with this. mean, so one of the critiques that I make of Hilda is that he falls into this providentialist optimism. And his philosophy of history is basically that it's all going to work out just fine. And that
PJ Wehry (24:27.062)
Yeah, it's what you think, yeah.
Jennifer Herdt (24:48.533)
In that sense, he is like, say, Hegel in thinking that, well, yeah, bad things have happened in history, and there's been a lot of oppression, exploitation, and whole peoples have been extinguished, and genocide, and so on. But good comes of it, and we're all moving toward a fuller humanity. So it's not clear if that's completely consistent with.
with his denunciation of these evils. It's a sort of historicist justification of them. It doesn't quite go so far as to say, well, it was okay that people did these things, but there is a kind of optimism about where it's all headed. So that's one thing where I'm pretty clear. Not only does he not kind of work it out, but to the extent to which he works it out, he works it out in problematic ways.
Say again, what was the specific thing you wanted me to.
PJ Wehry (25:50.442)
I think you mentioned that, one, I think you kind of answered it there, but I just he has this critique that the end goal of a culture should be human flourishing. so we can use that to part of the reason I say this is maybe to give some background. I love that you're redeeming this tradition. And I personally find myself invested in that.
Jennifer Herdt (26:03.103)
I'm sorry.
PJ Wehry (26:15.48)
And I'm reading Humboldt and I'm like, ooh, that's not good. Right. Like he like talks about, you know, these people are savages, you know, like they're uncivilized and you're like, I can see where this is going and it's not going to end well. Like, you know, we have hindsight is 2020.
But then he gets to one part and he's like, these people are cannibals. And I'm like, well, I do feel like I'm comfortable critiquing that, right? Like it's like, and so there is like, so how do we critique across cultures without like, without this kind of paternalistic colonizing, you know, there's that, I think someone, you know, when you talk about Rudyard Kipling's, the white man's burden,
Was that satirical? Did he mean it? It's hard to tell with the culture of the time. That sort of thing. How do we navigate that tension?
Jennifer Herdt (27:10.515)
Yeah, yeah, no thanks. That's really such an important set of questions. I mean, I would just start out with a kind of logical point that relativism is self contradictory. you end up, know, say, well, you know, whatever, this is true for me, but it may not be true for you. You're actually...
making a claim, right? You're making a claim that's non-relative, that all truths are relative to your context. Well, that truth doesn't seem to be relative to anybody's context. That seems to be universal. So I think just you hang on to that nugget that the assertion of relativism falls into pragmatic self-contradiction. Then
you're sort of on the right road already, which another way to get there is your own recognition. Well, I guess there are certain things that I really don't think we should just say, that's another culture. And yet, of course, we have experienced too much infatuation with our own cultural ideals and imposition of them on others in ways that
we look back on and cringe and recognize to have been evil. you know, somewhere in between those extremes is where one needs to land. And, you know, I think where Herida points us is toward something that is a useful idea, which is to say, what can be brought into an organic whole? Like, what cultures can recognize one another?
Where is reciprocal recognition possible and where is it not? So that's a way of saying that we test our own ideals in exchange with the ideals of others. Because there are so often there's something where we can say, yeah, that's not the way we do things, but I can imagine my way into that context and I can see.
Jennifer Herdt (29:26.983)
it as an alternative possibility for human existence that has some goods that are missing in my context. But often these things are holistic. You can't have both. You can't have both a strongly individualistic culture and a culture in which family relationships are really rich and intimate and...
PJ Wehry (29:54.669)
Hmm.
Jennifer Herdt (29:55.497)
you know, source of deep meaning. There's a tension between those two, but you can actually recognize, both sides can recognize some good in the other that is perhaps missing in their own. So it's this idea of what's possible for mutual recognition. That I think is, as far as Herod gets in terms of helping us.
puzzle through that challenge. But I think that's a helpful insight.
PJ Wehry (30:27.811)
Yeah.
I think too, as you're talking about that, so this idea of rather of maybe proclamation or just straight critique of dialogue, it's really important here that receiving, you mentioned listening a lot, right? And that was something I was, before I'd read any secondary literature, I like to read it first primary. And I'd been reading Humboldt and I was complaining about him to my wife and she was like, dude, it just sounds really arrogant. And I'm like,
Jennifer Herdt (30:40.661)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (30:58.636)
Yeah, that's I mean, that's really he's obviously he thinks he has it figured out, right? That seems to be that like even as he's talking about the incredible value of in variety of different cultures, he has he's like, but let me tell you what your culture is actually aiming for. And it's like, as he has like, no, you know, so there's that universalizing of his own, everyone else is doing good, but I'm doing better, if that makes sense. Is that like a
Jennifer Herdt (31:27.591)
Right, right. And I actually use the phrase, dialogical humanism in the book to try to characterize this more hereditarian approach. whereas, Mold is more paternalistic, as you say, right, he has more of a sense that I can position every, you know, all this diversity, I can position it and say, and assess it. And I know already from the gecko, I know what his contribution is or is not.
PJ Wehry (31:32.397)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (31:56.396)
And I think that moves us kind of into this question of, it's something that I, I'm really wrestling. mean, I homeschool my kids and I'm like, okay, what is my target for my kids? Right. Like a lot of times you talk to parents, it's like, well, they need to go to college. If they get a graduate degree, I've done better. Right. And it's like, is that like, some people are like, the more education, the better. And it's like, is that really what the child needs? And I really.
appreciated how you problematized something that was an unspoken tension for me that I had run into and hadn't fully worked out, which is, and I know you have to wrestle with this being at Yale. It's like there's, there's a level that you want to aim for because it's really valuable in terms of education. And that has a value in itself. How do you talk through that without, how do you keep that value without denying the value of people who
I've had multiple people on about disability justice. the Academy has had a hard time dealing with that many times because they don't know how to negotiate academic goals with what are the goals for someone who academia is not really an option.
Jennifer Herdt (33:17.639)
Yeah, no, that's terrific. This is a set of issues I don't fully deal with in the book, but I'm happy to try to think about. Just spit out that there's no answer. Yeah, so I think, though, speaking historically about this tradition and how it developed, one of the things that that did happen was and sort of happens in this period where Humboldt tries to institutionalize Bildung, and he does it by creating the
PJ Wehry (33:22.22)
Yeah, I'm not trying to spank the audio, but yeah. Yeah.
Jennifer Herdt (33:45.801)
the university, the research university, and the ideal of liberal education, very much foregrounding freedom. it's important to maximize freedom for individual self-realization. And that's an ideal that, course, is going to benefit some more than others, because not everybody can benefit from independence. I mean, none of us is completely independent. We're all.
interdependent, but maybe some of us have both sort of financial, economic resources, also genetic dispositions and so on that are going to enable us to be more independent than others. it's not really something that we should get credit for in a sense. And so what happens through this is the emergence eventually of
PJ Wehry (34:25.262)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (34:35.982)
Hmm.
Jennifer Herdt (34:43.123)
what in Germany gets called the Bildungsbürgertum. So this is this idea that to be a good person is to have this kind of an education and that you have to like play an instrument and you've got to speak a foreign language and you've got to have this kind of civilizational polish. I think this is a huge departure from the core idea of Bildung.
in terms of forming humanity, which is really much more an ethical idea. It really wasn't about civilizational polish. So I think that that's a kind of deviation in the tradition that has gotten us confused. Not that there's not all sorts of value in a holistic education. It can enrich our lives.
but it doesn't determine our value as human beings. what it looks like, this is again, sort of back to the pluralistic idea of hera, what it looks like to flourish as a human being doesn't mean the same thing for everyone. And it's going to be tailored to our own abilities and disabilities. And the pluralism has to be capacious enough to...
to find that space for flourishing, and it's gonna be flourishing in relationship, right? This is always a social idea. Flourishing in relationship of that person within a cultural social unit. So we could see that as a kind of parting of the ways within this tradition of what it means to form humanity.
PJ Wehry (36:36.622)
Yeah, thank you. And that's a great answer. Let me first off say that I was not trying to throw you a curve ball there. Even to help give you some context, I had Dr. Dagmar Herzog on, and she has done a considerable amount of work on the history of what were the precursors to the concentration camps for Nazi Germany was they first targeted people with disabilities.
So there is a line here to trace between, I think, even like, if you put that kind of at the tail end of your book, you can trace that line of, oh, you know what, you know who the best people are, the middle-class people, right? Like middle-class above, civilizational, polished, that sort of idea. And so that's part of the link I was making, but I realized that I made a couple jumps there without telling you, so.
Jennifer Herdt (37:27.015)
Yeah, it's so important and it's so correct. Yeah, I focus in the book a little bit more on the connections with racism and empire and so on, but you're absolutely right. I mean, not even just at the beginning, but throughout the Nazi regime. I mean, the Holocaust was also a Holocaust of the disabled and of gypsies as well.
PJ Wehry (37:48.642)
Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
So forgive me. I'm just talking, talking through this. It seems to me that there is kind of, and I'm just trying to work this out in my own head. There's kind of like almost like four formational ideas here and they all interweave with each other. And I'm trying to make this make sense of this in my head. There's that institutional side, which, you know, it always shows up in particular ways. So in America, you know, this is people like, have to get a college degree. It's like,
why? It's like, well, you have to. Like, that's, that's how people know that you're educated. And it's like, does that necessarily mean that you're educated? I, you know, not to be too disparaging, but I think we've all met people with college degrees that you're like, I, I don't know if you, know, you'd probably drank your way through most of your four years. So, um, but then there is that what, that institution is trying to accomplish. And that is, uh, like an education that kind of almost civilizational polish.
you know, there's a, the well-rounded liberal education, which is kind of that ideal goal. And then, in between, like, I think that there's a third one, which is like good judgment, which does take education, which does take an awareness of your culture, what culture is and how it works. And we see that, especially for someone who's supposed to be in a leadership position, they need to be able to navigate those sorts of things.
they come by that education, of course, this is why I'm distinguishing it from institution, that that's not always the case that it comes through an institution. And then I think, specifically to what you were saying, there's kind of like this like fruits of the spirit, the virtues idea. And yet there is an interweaving between the fruits of the spirit. When you talk about discernment, that's not specifically part of it, but that is part of what you need to be ethically mature, you do need
PJ Wehry (39:49.708)
discernment, you do need wisdom, and those do seem to be maturing, formational, educational things. How do I'm trying to figure out how that all kind of fits together and how we can make sure that we are valuing people, but also pushing people appropriately to reach what they're supposed to become. And so I think it's that that I mean, you've mentioned a little bit about the very individualistic side, but what does that look like?
from perhaps, do you have any ideas about like a more, like how that would look practically?
Jennifer Herdt (40:27.743)
Yeah, that's great. I wish I'd had you as an editor when I was trying to this book. So I mean, first of all, would say I think actually institutions are really important. And I would say that ethical formation takes place in many different institutions. traditionally, of course, the churches have been a major site for ethical formation. And schools have been another, family is another.
PJ Wehry (40:32.494)
I appreciate that though.
Jennifer Herdt (40:56.529)
Ideally, they complement one another.
it's important that they do because it's possible for any site to become distorted. And one of the problems, say, in certain strands of theological reflection has been that they idealize the church to such an extent that it then becomes insulated from critique. well, that's sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic church would be one example, but we see this in all churches. It's really, really important that churches remain a site for ethical formation, but also be
subject to critique. would say the same thing is true of universities, the same thing is true of families. mean abuse within the family can be such a horrible thing. That doesn't mean that we say, well therefore ethical formation shouldn't go on in the family. So and that's you know it's part of what I try to accomplish in the book with the introduction of Karl Barth as an interlocutor. Karl Barth is in many ways very critical of the Bildung tradition because he sees it as a
as an assertion of human autocracy and in place of deference to God. then when you delve into it further, it actually seems as though he does really share the ideals of Bildung. It's just that he thinks we must always be listening for the word of God in whatever cultural formation we inhabit. And the word of God, he's thinking especially of
judgment, especially like kind of interruptive critique that that calls into question a particular way in which an ideal is being instantiated. I think that's such an important insight. It can of course be, you know, immediately understood theologically. But I think some dimensions of it are available even to people who don't have theological commitments. This idea that don't absolutize
Jennifer Herdt (43:02.373)
any site for ethical formation, any institution. And yet, it should be a redemptive critique, right? It should be open to the goods that are provided. Now, why am I being so insistent on institutions? Well, institutions sort of carry human practices. They carry our cultural identities, our social identities. so if we...
When we ditch them, we're ditching our historical memory, our cultural memory, this kind of sedimentation of what it is to be human. And we're getting closer to something that is radically individualistic, where I'm just supposed to make it all up myself. Well, we can't. mean, human beings are essentially cultural historical creatures. We work with our inheritances.
And we work with them critically, right? We're constantly sorting through and redefining virtues as we recognize, well, there's some element of paternalism there. gosh, that actually is really the very term virtue, right? Virtus is manliness, right? So does that mean like, what can be virtue? Well, we don't throw out the term virtue.
But that means that the critique goes really, really deep. It goes all the way back to the notion that, is manliness. So I hope that starts. I'm not going one, two, three, four through your four categories, but I hope that begins to respond.
PJ Wehry (44:34.743)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (44:40.366)
No, it's really helpful. And I didn't even really expect that. It helped me to kind of situate them because you'd have to have the institutions, right? That's part of Huerder's, probably some of the good things he provides, right? That it has to be particular. It has to be instantiated. It's the institutions that carry the culture. That makes sense to me. But seeing that kind of...
the ethical formation and seeing it along, think part of it is, and this is what we see, maybe if I'm hearing you correctly, the difference between Heerter and Humboldt is we can have the university, but we need to have the church and the family and the government and the arts all alongside. Right. It's not just like, it's not this one. mean, that seems like from the little I've read of Humboldt, it's very typical that he's like,
All right, I have the solution and it's like the university.
Jennifer Herdt (45:39.667)
Yeah, I think that's a great point. And Humboldt really is the most secular of any of these thinkers within the Bildung tradition. It's like, yeah, well, you could be religious, but that's kind of weak. And so he creates this religion of art, Kunstreligion. He really wants art to be a substitute for religion. So he really is trying to pare down the sites for ethical formation, as you're saying, and be really restrictive. So I mean, I think that's an important insight. And the other thing I would say about
PJ Wehry (45:51.854)
Yeah, right.
Jennifer Herdt (46:09.467)
about universities in terms of, well, what are their strengths and weaknesses? I I think that sometimes when we critique the sort of elite university, we are forgetting the ways in which it has been transformed over the last century. these, you know, what did the Ivy League used to be? It used to be just like for rich young men. And it was about basically civilizational polish.
Well, it's become major site of medical research, yielding all sorts of, like, how are we going to solve the problem of the climate crisis? Well, this is the research that's happening at these universities. It's going to help address these challenges. COVID, where is the research happening? But then the other thing that I would say is no longer are they just places for the wealthy.
the percentage of people with no resources, first gen, no financial resources, paying zero tuition, being educated at these places is going up and up and up. So they've really taken very, very seriously the critique and the responsibility to do something very different than just perpetuate a cultural elite based on their privileged status in the prior generation. So.
It doesn't mean that everybody can go there. It wouldn't be, it's not possible. We have many other kinds of institutions that provide many really beneficial forms of education. yeah, there are particular element of it that isn't what it was a century ago when I think a certain kind of critique would have made more sense.
PJ Wehry (47:56.748)
Yeah, if I came across that I was saying universities are bad, I'm not saying that they have incredible use. I think what you've pointed to that returning to the earlier part of our conversation, they've become more the site of dialogue rather than just that straight kind of imposition, know, continuance of the empire kind of ideal.
Jennifer Herdt (48:20.839)
Yeah, absolutely. the American colonial college was much more formative, right? We know what the values are and we're going to pass those along. And maybe that worked at a particular moment in history and students were actually very young in those colonial colleges. So given where they were in their process of maturation, that was probably pretty age appropriate. But that's different. It's different because of where we are culturally today and it's
is different because of where our students are maturationally. And it really is much more, yes, of a site for dialogue and encountering views that you might be uncomfortable with and being stretched by them and then making judgments of your own.
PJ Wehry (49:06.83)
But informed judgments, right? Just because you actually have met the other instead of, you know, I don't know if Humboldt traveled a lot, but I don't get the impression that he did. Is that true, Alexander? Yes, I should have known that. I've read that. What's Andrea Wolf's book? You know, I read a good chunk of that, but it seems appropriate as we kind of want to be respectful of your time. But so a big part of what
Jennifer Herdt (49:16.713)
Well, his brother, brother, the child in minstrel.
PJ Wehry (49:37.102)
Bart talks about, and I think specifically you said this with Herder, but I could be getting that wrong, is kind this eschatological reference, the need for not looking for the end in history, but for looking beyond. And so, you know, mean, it's the last thing we'll talk about. So that seems appropriate, you know, to talk about the eschatological, yes. So can you talk a little bit about how Bart's...
Jennifer Herdt (49:58.729)
Last things.
PJ Wehry (50:04.717)
eschatological reference point really provides maybe the needed humility for the Bildung tradition.
Jennifer Herdt (50:13.139)
Yeah, no, thank you for asking that. And it does kind of take us back to what I said was the key weakness in Herda's thought, which is this sort of optimistic providentialism that, you know, it's all going to work out historically. And we're just kind of along for the ride. And Bart doesn't let us think that. First of all, there's no guarantee of historical progress. Like things could, mean, Bart is like, he's thinking about.
when he is at work historically, like I'm not seeing any historical progress here, right? But that also can't legitimize despair and hopelessness, right? But the hope comes in this reference point to God, right? And to the confidence that the fate of creation is in the hands of God, whatever is going on in human history.
And that frees us for a kind of agency. It doesn't mean we're not just along for the ride and everything's gonna work out fine. It actually in some ways means that it matters more what we do. It matters that we act in this very discerning way, like listening for the word of God, right? Listening for the judgment on some of our practices, which also means
the endorsement of others, It's this call to really, really sort through our commitments and to do that in, and how do we listen for the word of God? We listen in part in dialogue with others because the word of God can come to us in that dialogical engagement with others who are saying to us, hmm, I don't know, I don't express, I don't experience that as very liberatory. I experience that as, you know, a diminishment of myself.
And how do we digest that and how do we then take that forward into the sort of constant renovation of our practices and ideals?
PJ Wehry (52:20.878)
So just as a final question, again, I want to be considerate your time. What is one thing that you would have our audience take away from today's podcast? If you could just have them do one thing or just really meditate on one thing kind of throughout the next week, what would you recommend for them?
Jennifer Herdt (52:45.813)
Well, I think I would invite them to think about this vision of building, of being, of realizing the human. How is it that I am part and parcel of this realization of humanity? And they can understand that theologically. How am I the image of God?
or they don't have to understand it theologically, but how is it that I am the sort of realization of humanity in the world, in my particular embodiment, in my particular social situation and so on, and in engagement with others? How am I carrying that forward in a way that...
Jennifer Herdt (53:40.981)
is open to sort of ongoing becoming that is never content with having arrived, but is always sort of aspiring to become more fully human.
PJ Wehry (53:57.218)
Wonderful answer. Dr. Hurt, it's been an absolute joy having you on today. Thank you.
Jennifer Herdt (54:01.501)
Well, thank you. really enjoyed it. Wonderful questions.