Goethe and Lawrence: Bildung and Wholeness.

Abstract

Those concentration camp officers who are said to have appreciated Mozart and Beethoven are often invoked as a knock-down argument against claims for the humanising function of high culture: claims which, in their modern form, stem from the European Enlightenment as, for example, in Friedrich Schiller. But what should be at stake here is not so much knowledge of high culture as the manner in which it is possessed. The contrasting conceptions of culture associated with Goethe and Lawrence, whi...