 Bildung and philosophy, as education to self-responsibility, are closely related to the realm of art. There are at least two dimensions of this relationship. First, Novalis is well aware that Bildung, the call to self-understanding and autonomy through an engagement with tradition and other cultures, cannot proceed by way of an appeal to formal methodology. No rule can ever guarantee the successful outcome of the individual’s education in culture. Rather, it is a matter of moving from the particular to the universal, but without a universal at hand by which this move can be justified. What is required is a context-sensitive judgment. The process of Bildung is itself an art (Kunst) in the sense that it takes tact or reflective judgment (such a use of the term “art,” as opposed to merely mechanical processes, was fairly common at the time and can also be found in the work of Herder, Kant, and Schleiermacher). Along these lines, Novalis speaks of the will to Fichtecize artistically (LFI #11), and also criticizes Fichte and Kant for being unpoetic (AB #924). The second sense in which art, philosophy, and Bildung are related has to do with art being one of the media, maybe even the privileged medium, through which Bildung is achieved. In this context, it is important to keep in mind that as far as the philosophy of art goes, Novalis’s period is one of transition. Around this time, aesthetics, as a Kantian investigation into the validity-claim of the pure judgment of taste, is established as an autonomous philosophical discipline with the Critique of Judgment. Yet it is nonetheless the case that historical and intercultural engagement was, until and throughout this period, largely a matter of studying religious and cultural artefacts from temporally or geographically distant eras. These objects were not necessarily approached aesthetically—that is, subjected to pure aesthetic judgment in Kant’s meaning of the term—but also, as in the works of Herder and Hegel, viewed as part of the larger fabric of the moral sciences. Novalis often leans in this direction, and at one point even follows Herder in addressing aesthetics as a psychological discipline (AB #423).