Bildung and strategy: The fate of the 'beautiful sciences'

Kant's 1798 Conflict of the Faculties makes an explicit case for viewing philosophy as the romantic transdiscipline. Philosophy served not only as the propadeutic to the study of these disciplines - students had formally to pass through the lower faculty before being admitted to one of the higher faculties in the eighteenth-century German university - but also served to organize the content of those disciplines themselves. Indeed, by the end of the eighteenth century, philosophy seemed to have exceeded its propadeutic vocation and was developing towards a romantic transdisciplinarity in which the philosophy of law, the philosophy of medicine and philosophical theology, united with the philosophy of art, sought to absorb and take the place of the vocational orientations of the higher faculties and produced an extraordinary fusion of civil (Bildung) and military energy. For far from undergoing an eclipse in the eighteenth century, the technical discipline of rhetoric migrated, first, into the 'beautiful sciences' and then into philosophy.