Rowson, J. (2021). What’s the Point of The Realisation Festival? Perspectiva. Written for the first Realisation Festival, St Giles House, Dorset, July 2021.
Rowson explains the festival’s purpose through Bildung, which he renders in English as “Realisation” in three senses: the “aha” of realising something, the realisation of the self, and realising an idea by making it manifest. He traces Bildung to Comenius and to the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s distinction between inner and outer Bildung, describes the Nordic folk schools, and, drawing on Mark Vernon, recounts how Shaftesbury’s aesthetic view of nature reached Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt. The essay frames the festival around a “post-conventional imperative” with five strands (post-tragic, post-growth, post-rational, post-exploitation and post-tribal). The wiki takes from it the inner and outer Bildung distinction, the Shaftesbury lineage that joins the formation of persons to a relational science of nature, and the argument that beauty and imagination are needed to see a viable future.