If the modern idea of education has any distinguishing characteristic, it is the claim to evoke more than knowledge and capability. It is thus distinctly characterised not by methodising teaching and accordingly subjecting the material to a didactic reduction. It is admittedly decisive that all should be able to learn everything, but in order that they may lead their lives as self-determining individuals excluded from social contexts. To this end, not only a confident command of knowledge and learning possibilities is presupposed in order to be able to form judgements; the qualification of self-determination is also required. Education, as one might say in summarising the programme, aims at cultivation of the personality, at dispositions or competencies which constitute the individual as an enlightened and self-determining subject. One can point out that such a programme of pedagogical science posits an object which neither is a) empirically conceivable, nor appears b) as a reflexive construction presentable without normativity. In this article, the author talks about the imaginary social horizons of educational theory and points out that a normative horizon for pedagogy is laid down for which determinations of educating have always to be answerable. He wishes to keep open the wound in scientifically identificatorical logic, which must be unbearable for the practicist style of pedagogy, perhaps even opening it further, by extending the horizon of the problem. The author refers to Charles Taylor's (1985) illustration of the modern self-understanding, to the aporia of "Enlightenment humanism" which he discovered, and which allows for the strengthening of the pedagogical dilemma.