Orientation Strategies at Apparatgeist Era: Distributed Cognition and Romantic Ideals of Education

Abstract

In this article, we examine digitalization in its relation to the problems of educational philosophy. We argue that the set of changes that have taken place in recent decades, referred to as the Apparatgeist era, has led to the necessity of rethinking education in terms of an orientational perspective. We will show how the philosophical notion of orientation relates to the digital transformation of space and the emergence of hybrid space on the one hand and to the German Romantic ideas about the essence of education on the other. However, we do not intend to take a comprehensive look at all Romantic ideas about Bildung: the involvement of education in politics and social structure, the emphasis on aesthetic issues, etc., may also find interpretations in today’s conditions, but the main focus of our research is on the problem of orientation in education and the realization of this goal on the basis of Romantic ideals. In doing so, we intend to pay special attention to specifically Early German Romanticism as having defined the non-classical vector of the development of the intellectual tradition in general and the later Romantic ideas in particular. Finally, we investigate how in the concept of distributed cognition, one can find opportunities for the implementation of the orienting function of education, corresponding to the Romantic notions.