You Are Not a Function

Why the Race to Stay Useful is a Trap

The Triumph of Love and Beauty by Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert (1630)

In the autumn of 1809, Prussia was a country that no longer knew what it was for. Three years earlier, Napoleon had destroyed its army in an afternoon and walked into Berlin without resistance. The king fled. Half the territory was gone, the treasury empty. French soldiers were still garrisoned in the capital.

As Prussia began rebuilding from the wreckage, most people assumed it needed more officers, administrators, and engineers. People who could do things. The task of designing the new system of education fell to a thirty-two-year-old diplomat named Wilhelm von Humboldt. He gave them something else entirely.

In a series of memoranda written over the next year, he laid out a vision for a new university in Berlin organized around Bildung. The word has no English equivalent. “Education” is too narrow, “self-improvement” too thin. “Formation” gets closest but still misses its moral weight.

Humboldt’s Bildung means the free, harmonious development of a human being’s powers into a complete and consistent whole, through encounter with the world in its variety and resistance.

Mill, who took the idea from Humboldt, put it more simply: a human being is more like a tree than a steam engine.

Humboldt proposed a university where professors and students would be joined in the pursuit of knowledge, unconstrained by political demands. In a defeated nation hungry for officers and administrators, he was arguing for formation before function.

The ideal of the modern research university, with its union of teaching and inquiry, its seminar culture, and its commitment to academic freedom, descends from what Humboldt designed in those desperate months.

Today, the culture of Bildung that animated the university survives only at the margins, sustained by people stubborn enough to work against the grain of the institutions around them. Credentialism twisted the university into a vendor of certificates, and the formation of the student as a complete human being came to seem anachronistic. The cathedrals remain, but not the faith.

We are in a moment that rhymes with Humboldt’s own. Technological pressure is once again pushing education toward the practical. The evidence of institutional collapse is everywhere: flagship universities slashing PhD admissions, hundreds of degree programs have been eliminated, dozens of small colleges have closed, and a decline in the college-age population still lies ahead.

The loudest responses to the crisis have come from outside the university. Alex Karp tells young people to skip college and learn a trade. Marc Andreessen argues the university is a credentialing middleman and should be disintermediated. Both are right that the university is failing. But if the answer to a broken formation system is to skip formation altogether, you have already conceded that education is justified only by utility.

Neither is asking the question Humboldt asked: What is a human being, that education should serve it?

The Tree and the Trap

Before Humboldt, the Prussian system assigned students to a vocation, trained them in it, and delivered them into their function. Even on those terms, Bildung wins. Broadly cultivated judgment produces better doctors and better engineers. Technical skill on a foundation of general cultivation is more resilient and more humane than technical skill resting on nothing.

But if that were the whole justification, Bildung would be nothing more than a roundabout way of minting skilled professionals. A pedagogy can be justified by output. Bildung cannot.

A tree does not exist in order to produce lumber. You can make lumber from it, and good lumber is nothing to sneer at. But if you look at a tree and see only lumber, you have missed what is standing in front of you. Something is growing there under its own power, toward its own form, and the growing is not a means to some further end.

Humboldt’s claim about human beings is the same shape. A person is a self-developing being whose worth is not exhausted by function.

Bildung braids together the Kantian claim that no person is merely a means, the Greek ideal of harmonious excellence across mind and body and character, and the Romantic conviction that we develop through encounter with what resists us.

You have had the experience even if you never had a word for it. Real engagement with something that has its own demands—a hard problem, a serious book, a gifted teacher—changes who you are. You could not have planned the person you became.

Such formation is not the property of any particular university department. This is not a “save the humanities” argument. A coder who, after tackling a hard systems-design problem, comes out thinking differently about complexity, tradeoffs, and the limits of formal reasoning has undergone a kind of Bildung—but only if the encounter changed who they are, not just what they can do.

The resistance to all this is understandable.

In a world where your economic value can evaporate overnight, “Become a whole person” sounds like advice from someone who has never worried about next month’s rent. The utilitarian case for education has the force of necessity behind it. For millions of people, making yourself useful is what responsibility to their families demands.

Yet if the response to being replaceable is always to train for a different function, you have entered a race you structurally cannot win. The principle that makes your education valuable is the same principle that makes you disposable the moment the function migrates.

The scramble into computer science was an early sign of the trap: students rushed toward the field that seemed safest, and then AI began destabilizing the very functions it trained them to perform. The flight to function looks rational from inside it; that is what makes it a trap.

Solitude and Freedom

Bildung cannot be specified in advance. Once you define what the formed person looks like, you have replaced formation with training. So how do you build institutions around it?

Humboldt’s solution was to design an environment rather than a curriculum. He based the University of Berlin on two principles: solitude and freedom, though they meant something precise in his hands. The university would not answer to the demand for immediate use and inquiry would follow the question wherever it led, unconstrained by predetermined ends.

The undoing of that design came in two phases.

First, a slow hollowing. The German research model crossed the Atlantic when Johns Hopkins was founded in 1876 on Humboldt’s model. But disciplines hardened into guilds and career tracks, postwar federal funding built research enterprises increasingly detached from teaching, and mass enrollment turned the degree into a sorting mechanism. The university no longer had a single organizing purpose, and no one was left responsible for the student as a whole person. By the mid-twentieth century, the university president Clark Kerr could describe the resulting “multiversity” as a collection of unrelated enterprises held together by a common heating plant.

Then, a rejection of the cure. Recently, at the University of Tulsa, the philosopher Jennifer Frey built a Great Books honors college from scratch. It was a serious formation program inside an institution organized around credentialing. The university removed her, restructured the program, and replaced the deanship with a directorship.

Back to Scholé

But even if the institutions had held, formation requires something they could never secure at scale: time.

Aristotle called it scholé. Humboldt had a related word for it: Muße. Both named a kind of structured freedom for the work of becoming, and for most of history that freedom was radically exclusive.

Aristotle could imagine the highest forms of human flourishing only for those relieved of labor by wealth and the work of subordinates and slaves. The good life required freedom from necessity, and in his world only a few could have it. But in the first book of the Politics he imagined something stranger: that if shuttles could weave by themselves and picks could play the lyre, craftsmen would need no subordinates and masters would need no slaves. The “self-guided machine” would mean that the material basis for leisure no longer depended on the unfreedom of others. It is one of the oldest thought experiments in Western philosophy, and we are now enacting it.

Aristotle did not celebrate the prospect. He understood that freedom from necessity does not automatically yield the pursuits that make such freedom worth having. In his account, those with wealth and leisure often turned to unlimited acquisition or bodily gratification rather than to the activities that justify leisure in the first place.

With AI, we are building something like self-guided machines. Whether these systems liberate or merely displace is not settled. But the possibility of leisure at scale is real enough to become a serious question.

If AI can compress parts of instruction, it may deepen learning where it is used and clear ground for formation where it gives time back. But only if it preserves productive struggle rather than bypassing it.

The alternative is already visible: autocomplete for life. Not just help with expression, but the slow outsourcing of judgment itself. That is Bildung’s antithesis.

Worse, the same technological society enabling leisure is also shaping the desires of the people who receive it. If our dispositions have already been trained toward optimization and outsourced judgment, the freed hours may arrive in hands that no longer know what to do with them.

For most of history, the conditions of formation were reserved for the few. The capacity for it was not. If scholé at scale is now possible, refusing to pursue it ratifies a world in which full human development remains the privilege of those who can afford time.

In the Afterglow

Bildung is, at its normative core, anti-servility: the effort to form people who cannot be reduced to instruments of external authority, whether state, market, or algorithm.

The people who use AI well right now are drawing on judgment they formed before these tools became ambient. They know when to trust an LLM’s output and when to push back because they learned to read, argue, and sustain attention under conditions in which those acts were not so easily outsourced. They bring something the tool cannot supply.

Nietzsche thought secular liberals were living off the moral capital of a Christianity they had officially abandoned: inherited capacities that could persist for a time even after the culture that formed them had ceased to renew them. The kind of judgment this essay is defending may be a similar afterglow, formed in a world before AI mediated everything.

Without that judgment, you get agency without autonomy.

If the capacities required for non-servile life in an AI world were all formed in a pre-AI world, what happens when that formation stops? You can live on an inheritance for a while. You cannot educate a civilization on inherited judgment forever.

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Cosmos Institute is the Academy for Philosopher-Builders, technologists building AI for human flourishing. We run fellowships, fund AI prototypes, and host seminars with institutions like Oxford, Aspen Institute, and Liberty Fund.