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Nineteenth-Century Philosophy of Religion Friedrich Schleiermacher

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Nineteenth-Century Philosophy of Religion Friedrich Schleiermacher This article was downloaded by: 10.3.98.104 On: 03 Oct 2021 Access details: subscription number Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG, UK Nineteenth-Century Philosophy of Religion Graham Oppy, N. N. Trakakis Friedrich Schleiermacher Publication details https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315729602.ch3 Theodore Vial Published online on: 31 Jul 2013 How to cite :- Theodore Vial. 31 Jul 2013, Friedrich Schleiermacher from: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy of Religion Routledge Accessed on: 03 Oct 2021 https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315729602.ch3 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR DOCUMENT Full terms and conditions of use: https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/legal-notices/terms This Document PDF may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproductions, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The publisher shall not be liable for an loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. 3 friedrich schleiermacher Th eodore Vial In many ways the personal history of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) refl ects the most important changes in European philosophical, theological, political and educational history at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Schleiermacher was born as a subject of the Prussian monarch to a family that had been rationalists but had undergone a spiritual awakening and enrolled him in a Moravian boarding school to be raised as a pietist. In his On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (hereaft er Speeches), published in 1799 and commonly taken in the history of theology to mark the beginning of the era of modern liberal theology, Schleiermacher writes, “Religion was the maternal womb in whose holy darkness my young life was nourished and prepared for the world still closed to it” (1996: 8). He had, however, a sceptical streak (he and some friends smuggled into the school and discussed the forbidden works of Kant). In a painful letter to his father the eighteen- year- old confessed that he could not bring himself to believe in the vicarious atonement and the divinity of Jesus. His father disowned him, writing that he no longer knelt at the same altar with him. Yet in 1802 Schleiermacher returned to the Moravian seminary and famously claimed that it was the religion he learned there that carried him through the storms of scepti- cism: “I have become a Herrnhuter [Moravian] again, only of a higher order”.1 Th us Schleiermacher lived through the crisis occasioned in the West by scien- tifi c epistemologies and the rise of historical consciousness during the Enlighten- ment, and he was the fi rst major theologian to respond to this crisis and rethink the nature of religion and theology and their relation to other spheres of human endeavour. His work has tended to be under-appreciated in English- speaking countries for two reasons: in so far as he is identifi ed primarily as a theologian (as opposed to his famous philosophical contemporary at the University of Berlin, 1. An extended version of this account can be found in Gerrish (1984), which is still the best and most accessible introduction to Schleiermacher’s theology in English. 31 Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 02:08 03 Oct 2021; For: 9781315729602, chapter3, 10.4324/9781315729602.ch3 theodore vial Hegel), scholarship has been confi ned to seminaries and divinity schools; and in so far as these schools fell under the towering infl uence of Karl Barth and neo-orthodox theology in the twentieth century (the ‘neo’ indicates a return to Calvin aft er the ‘wrong turn’ in nineteenth- century liberal theology initiated by Schleiermacher), Schleiermacher was avoided.2 Recent work in many parts of the academy, in and beyond seminaries and divinity schools and departments of reli- gious studies, to a great extent occasioned and supported by the ongoing publi- cation beginning in the 1980s of a Critical Edition of Schleiermacher’s works (Kritische Gesamtausgabe, published by de Gruyter), is beginning to make clear to English- speaking scholars that in managing to absorb and come through the Enlightenment, Schleiermacher’s thought is foundational in modern theology, philosophy and education. hermeneutics A convenient way into Schleiermacher’s thought is through hermeneutics. He is frequently cited as the father of modern hermeneutics in textbooks. Paul Ricoeur (1977) identifi es his most important contribution as conceiving of hermeneutics as a general discipline, one involved in every human act of communication, rather than as a set of specifi c techniques for dealing with problematic ancient texts. For Schleiermacher, thought is the inside of language, language the outside of thought (Schleiermacher 1998: 7). Even unexpressed thoughts of an individual are conceived linguistically. Producing and understanding any speech act (oral, written or thought) involves two parts: the language that makes this act possible (Schleiermacher calls this the ‘grammatical’ part), and the particular and indi- vidual use of this language by a person (the ‘technical’ part). Proper under- standing is the reverse of expression, the goal being to understand in a speech act what the expresser meant to say to his or her intended audience. (Schleiermacher famously claimed that on occasion the interpreter can know this better than the expresser.) In each speech act the very personality of the actor is expressed. Brent W. Sockness (2004) has demonstrated that Schleiermacher is best classifi ed as an expressivist, along with Herder, Humboldt and Hegel, using Charles Taylor’s schema of post- Enlightenment thinkers. Expressivism, for Taylor (the roots of this category go from Taylor back through Isaiah Berlin to Ernst Troeltsch), is an attempt to overcome the rift between nature and the human subject that one fi nds in the Enlightenment, including in Kant. Expressivists argued that human beings and nature are both dynamic powers (Kräft e). Authentic (free) human action 2. Gerrish (1984) reports that in the mid- twentieth century his own teacher, H. H. Farmer, remarked that things had become so bad that he felt he had to check under his bed for Schleiermacher every night before retiring. 32 Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 02:08 03 Oct 2021; For: 9781315729602, chapter3, 10.4324/9781315729602.ch3 friedrich schleiermacher expresses the human subject. Actions do not merely make manifest a form that is already complete; rather, the very act of expressing gives self- clarity and allows the subject to develop. Language and art, especially poetry, become the paradigmatic human activities. Human beings realize or express themselves by transforming nature. In so doing they make determinate, or clarify, their individual subjectivity. Th e key terms are development (Bildung), freedom and self- clarity. Style – what each individual does with the grammatical resources at their disposal – is key to human development (individual and communal), and to getting at the meaning of an author or speaker. Th e grammatical part of interpretation means knowing the speaker’s language as well as the speaker, or as close as possible. One can accomplish this only by reading everything written by the author, as well as the author’s contemporaries. Of course one can read only one text at a time, and one must begin somewhere, not everywhere, so as one reads further one’s facility at grammatical interpretation improves. As one then re- reads texts, one approaches them with a diff erent under- standing and a diff erent set of questions, and so reads them diff erently. Th is is the famous hermeneutical circle. Th e language available to speakers and listeners (the grammatical part) is a cumulative product of previous speech acts (a combination of the grammatical and technical parts). It contains in it the personalities (styles) of previous speakers, to a greater or lesser extent (to profoundly alter the use of language is one of the marks of genius). Each speaker in his or her (technical) use of the language to a greater or lesser extent subtly shift s the (grammatical) tools available to others. In this way we are changed and shaped by our interactions with others. Th e ‘tech- nical’ acts (and Schleiermacher will include here not just language but gestures and facial expressions) of others aff ect the ‘grammatical’ range of ideas and expres- sions we can have, and vice versa. Note that since thinking is always in language for Schleiermacher, this makes human beings fundamentally, not secondarily, social beings. Th rough the history of such interactions groups with common customs (Sitten) form. Language forms the basis of every important community, from family to religious community to nation. In Schleiermacher’s later lectures on hermeneutics he added what he calls the psychological part of hermeneutics to the technical. Th ere has been an unfortunate tendency in the secondary literature to see the psychological part as a replacement of the technical, rather than as an addition to it, and further to see the psycho- logical part as an eff ort mysteriously to get into the head of the speaker. If the task of technical interpretation as a whole is to understand a speech act (oral or written) as the product of an individual (rather than merely as the product of the language available to that individual), then we can see two diff erent aspects of this technical task. One’s personality or individuality infl uences one’s speech acts both as an “indeterminate, fl uid train of thoughts” (the way one thinks in general), and as “the completed structure of thoughts” in this speech act (why one speaks in just such a way in this act) (Schleiermacher 1998: 101–2).
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