Bildung, unimportance, and moral progress

In this chapter I defend a line of thinking, inspired as much as instructed by Rorty, according to which moral and political education comes with the commitment to a form of anti-essentialism about ethical progress and our capacity to better ourselves and the world we inhabit. As against a seasoned understanding of Bildung, according to which education and progress would be a matter of acquiring an individual sense of importance for things, ourselves included, free of metaphysical and theological banisters, I shall claim that an equally compelling if disregarded picture conceives them as matters of appreciating the unimportance of things – that is their contingency and ephemerality, ourselves included. These two understandings diverge exactly in their accounts of the nature and point of the work of the self on the self at the heart of ethical formation and amelioration, which in the text I will present in the light of Rorty’s distinctive and subtle reading of the consequences of romanticism after pragmatism. The lesson from Rorty I shall try to treasure and put to work is that what is key to moral progress is not so much that it is a human project, but rather that it is a fallible one