Bildung, Culture and Self

Abstract

This article proposes a dialogue between Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concept of Bildung, Ernst Boesch’s concept of culture as action field and Jaan Valsiner’s concept of culture as semiotic mediation for psychological processes, comparing their respective implications for the understanding of self-other relations. The focus on self-other relations touches on the issue of ‘self-culture engagement’, since the other is understood as an active interactor who at every moment transforms the possibilities and limits of a given sociocultural constellation into concrete reality. This debate is felt to be justified by the connecting thread of hermeneutics, methodologically viewed as essential by the three authors being studied (Gadamer, Boesch and Valsiner) for understanding culture-self relations. On the one hand, in each of these theoretical propositions both culture and individual are similarly conceived as constructors of meaning and constructed by one another. On the other hand, some aspects of this process of meaning construction and interpretation of constructed meaning are conceived differently by each of them, leading to some differentiation in the ‘hermeneutic task’ as a route for deepening the understanding of the ‘self-culture engagement’. From this perspective, a discussion on the propositions we can derive from their hermeneutic views with respect to the self-culture-other relations can be interesting.