Bildung as a shared process of shaping individuality.

Some ideas on phenomenology, exemplars and identification based on Scheler

Abstract

We want to show that an authentic process of exemplarity consists in the invitation to follow one’s vocation. The main theories about exemplary phenomena have presented somewhat extreme and one-sided forms. This essay was born with the intention of integrating these factors and these modalities through a live comparison with the phenomenology of Max Scheler and with his “figurative” and “formative” conception of exemplarity, grounded on the idea of ​​Bildung. The main hypothesis is that any attempt to elaborate a theory of exemplarity that is not aimed at the process of individuation – but understood as the shared assumption of a plastic and incomplete form – risks to lead to stereotyped images and unconscious mechanisms of homologation, idealisation, infatuation, illusion and idolatry. At the ground of the exemplary training process imagined by Max Scheler lies not the theory of models of the Vorbild but, much more profoundly, his theory of Bildung whose core is the individual determination (Bestimmung).