Jacqueline Mariña 1 Friedrich Schleiermacher and Rudolf Otto Two names often grouped together in the study of religion are Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1884) and Rudolf Otto (1869-1937). Central to their understanding of religion is the idea that religious experience, characterized in terms of feeling, lies at the heart of all genuine religion. In his book On Religion Schleiermacher speaks of religion as a “sense and taste for the Infinite.”1 It is “the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things, in and through the infinite” and is “to know and to have life in immediate feeling” (OR, p. 36). In The Christian Faith Schleiermacher grounds religion in the immediate self-consciousness and the “feeling of absolute dependence.”2 Influenced by Schleiermacher, Otto too grounds religion in an original experience of what he calls “the numinous,” which “completely eludes apprehension in terms of concepts” and is as such “ineffable;” it can only be grasped through states of feeling. (The Idea of the Holy, p. 5). In this paper I will critically examine their views on religion as feeling. The first part of the paper will be devoted to understanding how both men conceived of feeling and the reasons why they believed that religion had to be understood in its terms. In the second and third parts of the paper I will develop the views of each thinker individually, contrast them with one another, and discuss the peculiar problems that arise in relation to the thought of each. Common Elements in Schleiermacher and Otto Both Schleiermacher and Otto insist that religion cannot be reduced to ethics, aesthetics or metaphysics. Schleiermacher notes it cannot be “an instinct craving for a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs” (On Religion, 31) and indeed insists that religious feeling is grounded in an original unity of consciousness from which both theoretical and practical reason proceed. Otto famously notes that both the rational and the irrational element in the holy, the numinous, are “sui generis and irreducible to any other;” (Idea 7) for this reason the holy “is a category of interpretation and valuation peculiar to the sphere of religion” (Idea, 5). Hence religion cannot be explained through categories that lie outside of it, but can properly be understood only “from within.” In order for it to be properly understood, religious feeling either must be presupposed or Jacqueline Mariña 2 evoked. To think that one can understand religion by reducing it to concepts derived from the natural or social sciences is to completely miss the mark. There are several reasons why Schleiermacher, and Otto following him, believed that the category of feeling was the most appropriate for understanding religion. First is the influence of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant had argued that the concepts of the understanding could find application only insofar as they were schematized by the forms of intuition, namely space and time. As such, the categories of the understanding were applicable only to finite empirical objects given through sense perception; we therefore could not have knowledge of things in themselves. The object of religion, however, is not an object alongside other objects in the spatio-temporal continuum. It is not a thing limited in its being by other things. As such, it cannot be known through the schematized concepts of the understanding. Second, if the object of religion is indeed infinite, then it cannot be an object that stands over against a subject, for then it would be limited by that subject. For Schleiermacher a grasp of the Infinite is possible only through an original unity of consciousness that precedes the subject-object dichotomy. In the Speeches Schleiermacher notes: How now are you in the Whole? By your senses. And how are your for yourselves? By the unity of your self-consciousness, which is given chiefly in the possibility of comparing the varying degrees of sensation. How both can only rise together, if both together fashion every act of life, is easy to see. You become sense and the Whole becomes object. Sense and object mingle and unite, then each returns to its place, and the object rent from sense is a perception, and you rent from the object are for yourselves, a feeling. It is this earlier moment I mean, which you always experience yet never experience. The phenomenon of your life is just the result of its constant departure and return. It is scarcely in time at all, so swiftly it passes; it can scarcely be described, so little does it properly exist (Speeches, p. 43). This consciousness of the Infinite, in which both self and world are united, is given in a moment of immediate awareness that precedes the subject’s awareness of itself as a subject over against a world of objects. The use of concepts, however, presupposes self- consciousness, that is, consciousness of the self as accompanying each of its representations, as well as an awareness of a representation as distinct from that which it represents. Since consciousness of the Infinite can be given only through such a moment Jacqueline Mariña 3 of immediate awareness that precedes self-consciousness, the Infinite cannot be apprehended through concepts. It is rather, given directly in an intuition and is apprehended through feeling; no representation, and hence no concept, can ever be adequate to it. The feeling of which Schleiermacher speaks is not an empirical feeling aroused by an object given to the senses. In the Speeches he notes that since this moment of unity precedes the moment in which the self is conscious of itself as over against the world, knowledge of the Infinite can only be had through anamnesis or recollection, a movement towards the inmost depths of the self (Speeches, p.44). In The Christian Faith Schleiermacher argues that the God-consciousness – the feeling of absolute dependence – can only be given in the immediate self-consciousness: . .any possibility of God being in any way given is entirely excluded because anything that is outwardly given must be given as an object exposed to our counter-influence, however slight this may be. The transference of the idea of God to any perceptible object, unless one is all the time conscious that it is a piece of purely arbitrary symbolism, is always a corruption, whether it be a temporary transference, i.e., a theophany, or a constitutive transference, in which God is represented as permanently a particular perceptible existence (CF, 18, §4.4). If the God-consciousness is to be experienced as a feeling of absolute dependence, then it cannot have anything in the world as its object, for anything in the world is ‘exposed to our counter-influence.’ As such, the self could not experience itself as absolutely dependent upon it. Rather, what is experienced in the feeling of absolute dependence is the “Whence of our receptive and active existence,” which is ‘not the world, in the sense of the totality of temporal existence, and still less is it any single part of the world” (CF, 16, § 4.4). Hence there is an important sense in which the feeling of absolute dependence is logically prior to experience of the world, since it does not arise from it. In The Idea of the Holy Otto also speaks of both the rational and irrational aspects of the Holy as being a priori. He notes that in accounting for the concepts through which we think of God (such as absoluteness, completion and goodness) we are “referred away from all sense-experience back to an original capacity of the mind implanted in the ‘purest reason’ independently of all sense perception” (Idea, p. 112). More importantly, the irrational aspect of the holy, the numinous, is apprehended through a faculty in the Jacqueline Mariña 4 deepest recesses of the self, what mysticism calls the fundus animae, that is, the ground of the soul. In explaining how this faculty relates to the experience of the numinous Otto makes reference to the first lines of the Introduction to Kant’s first Critique, where Kant notes that “though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.” If religion functions in such a manner, there can be no development of religion outside of historically conditioned experience, that is, the experience of the holy begins with experience. As such there can be no such thing as “religion in general,” but only the historically conditioned expressions of the numinous and the feelings that correspond to them. On the other hand, Otto’s point in referring to the holy as an a priori category is that experience of the numinous is not something that we can simply acquire through our ability to be receptive of stimulus from without. The numinous is not something that can be simply encountered in the world. As Otto notes, “it issues from the deepest foundation of cognitive apprehension that the soul possesses . .” The experience of the numinous is already present within the self and merely requires certain occasions for it to be brought to consciousness. As such, things in the world experienced as “holy” are not holy in themselves; they are rather mere occasions for the experience to be brought to consciousness. Beliefs and feelings about such objects are not evoked by natural sense perception, since it is not the objects themselves that are the source of the experience. Otto’s next points are worth quoting at length: They are themselves not perceptions at all, but peculiar interpretations and valuations, at first of perceptual data, and then–at a higher level–of posited objects and entities, which themselves no longer belong to the perceptual world, but are thought of as supplementing and transcending it.