 The idea of Bildung, education in and through culture, remains one of the most significant contributions of late eighteenth-century philosophy. Even though it is most often associated with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (as well as his slightly later speech “On Classical Studies”), in which the philosophical mind retrieves its historical-systematic development as a succession of various philosophical paradigms and thought models, the notion was widely applied before 1807. We find it in the work of Herder, the young Schleiermacher, and, expanding the focus to the realm of literature, the idea of Bildung is operative in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Goethe’s work, as the sequel commences in the mid 1790s, follows Wilhelm through his youthful adventures and beyond, seeing how the protagonist gradually reaches an understanding of his formative experiences and thus gains an ever-increasing sense of freedom and self-determination.