Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher

Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst (1768–1834)

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was the most notable German-speaking protestant theologian of the nineteenth century. He gave significant impetus to the re-orientation of theology after the Age of Enlightenment (see his speeches Über die Religion (On Religion) (1799), and also Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study) (1811a)) and he enjoyed a wide audience in Berlin both as preacher and Professor of Theology and Philosophy. Throughout his life he was a fervent advocate of the union between the Lutheran and the Reformed Church established in the so-called Old Prussian Union, and his compendium Der christliche Glaube (The Christian Faith) (1821, 1822) is held to be the first dogmatics transcending the denominational boundaries between the Reformation Churches. His translation of Plato attained the status of a classic. In his university lectures and academic speeches on philosophy he made a profound and lasting impression on his audience, both in his historical and systematic thought. He also had an important hand in the reform of the German Universities. In theology and philosophy he strove to find an independent and intermediate position between the Enlightenment, German Idealism and Romanticism.

1 Life

Schleiermacher was born on 21 November 1768 in Breslau, the second child and eldest son of the Reformed Church chaplain Johann Gottlieb Adolph Schleyermacher and his first wife Elisabeth Maria Katharina Schleyermacher (born Stubenrauch). After a childhood spent in Breslau, Pless and Anhalt (Upper Silesia), Schleiermacher was educated among the Moravians (Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine), a small Lutheran community established by Zinzendorf in 1727. He was a pupil at the Pädagogium (grammar school) in Niesky and then went to the Seminarium (college) in Barby. After leaving the Moravians, he studied theology and philosophy at the Friedrichs-Universität in Halle an der Saale from 1787 to 1789. From Johann August Eberhard he gained familiarity with ancient and contemporary philosophy. Schleiermacher sought to find his own position within the intellectual dialogue that was being conducted between the Leibniz–Wolff school and Kant’s critical philosophy, which had begun to gain ascendency in Germany. He passed his first Church examination in 1790 and took a post in Schlobitten, East Prussia, as tutor to the family of Count Dohna. After successfully negotiating his second Church examination in 1794, he became a preacher in the Reformed Church, initially at Landsberg an der Warthe; then, from 1796 to 1802, at the Charité hospital in Berlin and eventually at Stolp in Pomerania. In 1804 he was appointed Professor of Reformed Theology in Halle an der Saale, but after the Prussian defeat at the hands of the French and the truce at Tilsit in 1807, he moved back to Berlin. He participated in the literary discussion concerning the reform of the university, the subject of his Gelegentliche Gedanken über Universitäten in deutschem Sinn (Occasional Thoughts on Universities in the German Sense) (1808a). In 1809 he married the widow of a friend, Henriette von Willich (born von Mühlenfels), and took up the pastorate of the Reformed Church at the Dreifaltigkeitskirche in Berlin. In the following year Schleiermacher also became Professor of Theology at the newly founded Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, and a member of the philosophical section in the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin. In this capacity he gave lectures both in theology and philosophy at the university. As secretary of the philosophical section from 1814 and, from 1826, also secretary of the section in history and philology, he undertook the reorganization of the Academy, becoming secretary of the historical-philosophical section in 1827. While Schleiermacher worked actively in the Prussian reform movement after 1807, participating officially in educational reform from 1810–14, he took a stance in opposition to the government during the Restoration era. He continued his official ecclesiastic and academic duties in Berlin until his death on 12 February 1834.

2 Philosophical work

Schleiermacher’s main philosophical interest was in the field of ethics. As a member of the Berlin circle of Early Romantics he anonymously published several small essays on ethical themes in the Athenaeum journal of the Schlegel brothers (1798–1800) (see Schlegel, F.). His poetical early writings were in part dedicated to the exposition of his ethical views: Monologen. Eine Neujahrsgabe (Soliloquies) (1800a) as the manifesto of an individualist ethics, and his Vertraute Briefe über Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde (Letters concerning Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde) (1800b) as the Romantic interpretation of erotic love. His first systematic work was Grundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre (Principles of a Critique of all Doctrines of Ethics Hitherto) (1803), which was a critical examination of ethical systems from Antiquity to Kant (§§9–11) and Fichte (§6). Schleiermacher laid the plans for his own exposition of ethics in his lectures, but never published them. Instead he published detailed ethical investigations in the course of his academic treatises (1819–30). Areas to which he directed much philosophical attention were his research into the history of philosophy (for instance, Herakleitos (1808b)) and to his translation of Plato’s works (1804–28). However, Schleiermacher also undertook comprehensive systematic studies in the course of his lecturing career and it is here that he made his seminal contribution to hermeneutics, pedagogics and psychology. He never managed to work out his rich and diverse lectures on different philosophical disciplines for publication; his philosophical system has to be reconstructed from the relevant posthumously published manuscripts and his students’ notes of his lectures.

3 The system of sciences

Schleiermacher’s system follows the ancient division of philosophy into dialectics, physics and ethics. His idea of philosophy is the perfection of knowledge in the mutual interpenetration of six basic sciences (Grundwissenschaften), four with regard to the material aspects of knowledge and two to the formal. He structures the system of material sciences with the help of the dual opposition between reason and nature on the one hand and essence and existence on the other. The sciences of nature and reason, which differ with respect to their objects, fall under the modal distinction of the speculative and the empirical. The science of nature and the science of reason are thus subdivided into a speculative science of the essence of nature and reason respectively and into an experiential science of the appearance of nature and reason respectively. Schleiermacher calls these four material sciences ‘physics’ and ‘the study of nature’ (Naturkunde), ‘ethics’ and ‘the study of history’ (Geschichtskunde). The formal sciences are dialectics and mathematics. Dialectics is the supreme science, which replicates the supreme knowledge formally, just as mathematics is concerned with the form of the particular as such.

Schleiermacher did not explore the natural sciences to any great degree, and in this domain he relied in particular on the work of Henrik Steffens (Grundzüge der philosophischen Naturwissenschaft, Berlin, 1806). What he did attempt to reconstruct philosophically was the self-realization of reason in the process of history. The study of history illustrates the doctrine of ethics and the doctrine of ethics structures the study of history. Since there is no transition, but rather a hiatus between ethics as a science of essence and the study of history as a science of appearances, both ethics and history have to be related to each other in theory and in practice through critical and technical procedures. Critical procedure is investigative, whereas technical procedure is regulative. While critique (Kritik) judges the particular appearances as representations of the ideas, technology (Technik) gives instructions as to how, under different natural conditions, the production of particular appearances might take place. Psychology, aesthetics, political science and the philosophy of religion belong to the critical disciplines, while hermeneutics, pedagogics and political wisdom belong to the technical disciplines.

4 Dialectics

Schleiermacher’s elementary philosophy, which sets out the procedural rules for the production of knowledge, he calls ‘dialectics’ (first lectures 1811). In his dialectics he expounds the principles according to which speech (both dialogue and monologue) which is aimed at attaining knowledge must proceed, if it is to fulfil its task of developing contested claims into completely accepted, universally valid knowledge. Dialectics is an artificial doctrine, designed to avoid conflict and doubt in the field of pure thought and reach a permanent and harmonious accord. Thus it stands opposed to scepticism. But since dialectics presupposes a conflict about knowledge, it cannot be the beginning of all knowledge. It thus gets its meaning from its intermediary position between the already extant will to know and the perfection of knowledge. The historical and social limitations of dialectics result from the fact that all thought is bound to language.

Schleiermacher’s dialectics joins metaphysics (transcendental philosophy) and logic (formal philosophy). In the transcendental part he deals with the fundamental principles, conditions and structures of knowledge, and in the technical part he gives directions as to how knowledge is to be produced. In the first part dialectics is prima philosophia, in the second it is a logical apparatus (‘organon’) for the construction of the totality of knowledge and for the evaluation of individual items of knowledge.

The mutual play of reason and sensuality lies at the root of all knowledge. Reason as an intellectual function gives overall unity and determines the form of thinking. Sensuality as an organic function furnishes the manifold material contents. All concrete perceptions are conceptually structured, and all concepts are saturated with experience. Logic and ontology are parallel. Forms of being and forms of knowledge correspond to one another.

Two transcendental ideas which transgress the limits of real knowledge – the idea of the world and the idea of God – are none the less constitutive of all knowledge. The idea of the world signifies the totality of the oppositions which beset finite beings, and to which real thinking approximates. The idea of God means the unity without oppositions, which is presupposed by all knowledge, and to which knowledge cannot approximate. Schleiermacher pairs the ideas of the world and God, because God without the world would be an empty representation, and the world without God something purely contingent.

5 Ethics

Ethics, or the philosophical doctrine of morals (first lectures 1804–5 (1805–6)), next to which Schleiermacher places the Christian doctrine of morals (first lectures 1806 (1834–64: 1, 12)), is the science of the principles of history. In the ethical process of history, reason appropriates nature in such a way that their opposition is eventually overcome. History is complete when nature has become the organ and symbol of reason, and when what is individual and what is universal have been wholly evened out in a comprehensive process of interaction.

Philosophical ethics is a theory of culture and formulates the essential content of history, in so far as it understands the present as a phase on the way to perfection. Ethics is more descriptive than prescriptive. It tries to avoid the Kantian dualisms of duty and inclination, universal reason and individual will, ought and is (see Kantian ethics). Its central concern is the productive moral power of the individual, which manifests itself in different social situations. The morality of an individual is embedded in sociality. The moral law becomes analogous to a law of nature and understood as its improvement.

Schleiermacher divides ethics into the doctrine of the good, the doctrine of virtue and the doctrine of duty, and gives precedence to the doctrine of the good, as in ancient philosophy. The doctrine of virtue asks the question, ‘Who is good and who does good?’ and looks at the moral power of the individual. Following the ancient canon of cardinal virtues Schleiermacher recognizes four main virtues: wisdom, love, prudence and perseverance. The doctrine of duty asks the question, ‘What is good?’ and looks at the moral deed. It teaches a system of actions and modes of behaviour which shows how everyone can best promote the universal moral goal of the highest good. In the process Schleiermacher looks at the compatibility of the different fields of social action, so that law, profession, love and conscience might fit together. The doctrine of the good asks after the very concept of moral goods, which human beings produce through their moral powers and which constitute the world of ethical action. The doctrine of the good constructs the concept of the highest good through the interrelation of two pairs of opposites: the action of reason on nature is organizing or symbolizing, and it is individual or universal (identical). Accordingly Schleiermacher divides up the manifold of concrete actions using the following schema: identical (universal) organization is the concern of work, business and economics; individual organization is the concern of property, friendship, sociality and hospitality. Identical (universal) symbolization, which is articulate in speech and in thought, is the concern of science; individual symbolization is the concern of art and religion. These four fields of ethical or moral life become relatively independent through the institutions of the state, the household, the scientific academy and the church. Moral demands on the individual are embedded in the forms of community, within which morality is always already present. Imperatives aim at the development of the highest good and to this extent they can always be based upon the fact that reason has already become in some measure objective.

6 Psychology

Schleiermacher’s psychology (first lectures 1818 (1834–64: 3, 6)) complements and concretizes his ethics. The basic structures of ethics are traced to the characteristics of individuals and peoples. Schleiermacher argues that the soul, which must not be isolated from the body, is only present in the context of one’s life as a whole. The ‘I’, the basic structure of the soul, is not thought of as the aggregate of human faculties, but is disclosed through its opposite activities. The receptive activity processes the impressions which are received from outside, while the spontaneous activity is creatively directed towards the outside world. Both these directions of activity are always woven together and increase in determinacy only in the course of their development. The task of psychology is to comprehend both basic activities in terms of their genesis and their different characteristics.

Receptivity is characterized by the activity of the senses. This activity leads to a doubling of all perceptive consciousness into an objective consciousness of things and a subjective self-consciousness. Within objective and subjective consciousness there is a tendency towards ever greater generalization. By dint of its realization in concepts and language, objective consciousness strives towards knowledge in the sense of a rational species-consciousness (Gattungsbewußtsein). In subjective consciousness the tendency towards generalization is made manifest in the feeling of sociality and in the formation of an individual consciousness which presages the infinite at the limits of the finite. Spontaneity is likewise analysed in terms of its subjective and objective aspects. The acquisitive appropriation of the external world of nature is juxtaposed to the manifestation of the self in art and science.

7 The philosophy of religion

Schleiermacher conceives the philosophy of religion as a critical discipline, which makes a structural comparison of the various forms of religion from the starting point of the ethical basis of religion. However, he never devoted any of his lectures specifically to the philosophy of religion. In his theological writings, Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study) (1811a), Der christliche Glaube (The Christian Faith) (1821, 1822) and über die Religion (On Religion) (1799), one can find numerous references to the philosophy of religion. The essence of Christianity can be ascertained from a comparison of the different forms of religion.

Religion is a sense for the infinite and is based on the feeling of absolute dependency in the immediacy of self-consciousness. It is a universal element of life which is based in the universal essence of mankind and it does not conflict with the knowledge through which it is vouchsafed in reason and experience. Christianity, philosophy and the causal sciences are all compatible.

Piety and understanding are the poles between which the life of the spirit unfolds. Philosophy, which remains a kind of negative theology, points towards its opposite pole, which it is unable to attain. Philosophy and Christian piety gravitate together in a continual process of approximation. Philosophy does not offer the foundation for piety, but provides religion with concepts for its exposition.

Theology has no space of its own in the system of sciences. As a positive science, it is functionally constituted through its external task of offering its knowledge and skills for the governing and management of the church. Dogmatic propositions describe the self-consciousness which is germane to Christian piety; their truth is grounded in this self-consciousness.

8 Aesthetics

Schleiermacher understands aesthetics as a critical discipline which speculatively comprehends art in the context of all human activities and encyclopedically grasps the historical occurrence of the different forms of art (first lectures 1819 (1819, 1825)). According to ethics, art is the symbolization of something individual. It is generated from the individual’s coming to self-awareness, from the individual’s sensitivity for the world and from the expressive power of the individual’s imagination. Art is the organ of the representation of what is individual. All human beings are therefore artists in this sense.

Schleiermacher’s aesthetics is an aesthetics of production. It begins from the standpoint of the activity of the artist, not from the content of the art work. It looks at art’s process of becoming and marks the stages in which feelings become objective in a work. The original datum is the becoming of the original image in the joining together of enthusiasm and temperance. The imagination fashions an internal image into the form of a work. This presentation in the material can then be experienced by others.

Schleiermacher’s aesthetics is an aesthetics of expression. It examines the expression of subjective feeling, which at the same time brings to appearance something that is universally human. What is only inchoate in nature is made complete and explicit in artistic activity. In art the productive spirit shows itself to be that which interprets and advances creation.

Schleiermacher’s division of the arts follows the fundamental distinction of his psychology between self-consciousness and object-consciousness. The visual arts of painting and sculpture proceed from object-consciousness, by forming and physically realizing representations in free imaginative productions in external media. Music and mimic art proceed from self-consciousness by creatively shaping the articulation of feeling through gesture and sound. Poetry unites both poles, although it is more strongly attracted to the pole of object-consciousness.

9 Hermeneutics

Schleiermacher removes hermeneutics from its traditional contexts of theology, philology and jurisprudence, and develops it into a general theory of understanding (first lectures 1805 (1819)). Hermeneutics allows for thoughts which are articulated in language to be partially understood and partially not, and thus it operates neither on the level of complete knowledge nor on the level of complete ignorance. It claims to reconstruct individual and concrete linguistic utterances methodologically, in order to determine the thought which they articulate. Diametrically opposed to dialectics, hermeneutics considers the transition between linguistic communication and universal reason. The process of understanding is open-ended and interminable, like the process of history. Every interpretative act must have a provisional grasp of the whole in order to comprehend the parts, which in their turn reveal the contours of the whole more precisely. Thus hermeneutics does have an ethical orientation, since it participates theoretically and practically in the realization of the highest good, in so far as it furthers successful communication and the formation of the scientific community.

What characterizes Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, which counts as one of the technical disciplines, is that it prescribes a method. The method specifies four procedures with which given speeches or texts have to be reconstructed: grammatical, psychological, comparative and divinatory interpretation. Since every linguistic utterance is both the product of an author and a component of a linguistic system, grammatical (objective) interpretation examines the utterance in the context of language as a whole, while psychological (subjective) interpretation focuses on the context of the individual’s production of thoughts. The comparative procedure clarifies obscurities with the help of what is already understood, and to this end it requires particular historical and philological investigations. The divinatory procedure elucidates meaning and context intuitively, and to this end it is based on the autonomous productivity of the interpreter. The four basic procedures are normally put to use in combinations of two. The grammatical method is predominantly comparative, while psychological interpretation is mainly divinatory. Nevertheless, attention should be paid to all four procedures in the course of every interpretation.

The hermeneutic formula of method is complemented by its indication of the goal of inquiry – to understand a given utterance or text as well as its author, and then better than its author. So first of all interpreters have to attempt to put themselves in the position of the author, and then, distancing themselves from this proximity with the author, to make new sense of the text or utterance in the context of the linguistic system.

10 Pedagogics

As a technical discipline, pedagogics inherits its guiding concepts and basic structure from the field of ethics (first lectures 1813 (1834–64: 3, 9)). The ethical relation between individual and community, between nature and reason, provides education with its two guiding perspectives: individual education – the drawing out of the student’s individual nature – and social education – the integration of the student into ethical life.

Schleiermacher distinguishes three periods of education: the family upbringing and acquisition of language; school education; and vocational training. The activity of education which is directed towards the formation of character and capacities has to promote good and suppress evil. The intellectual capacities which involve the student’s Weltanschauung (worldview) are honed on the scientific study of history and nature; the ethical capacities, which concern their Weltbildung (their way of making the world) are formed through the undertaking of ethical and human tasks.

Since pedagogics as a technical discipline presupposes that a certain level of culture has already been attained, it imposes the twofold task of preserving the ethical status quo and ameliorating what is still ethically imperfect. Schleiermacher puts his pedagogics in the historical situation of Europe after the French Revolution, namely in the conflict between a traditionalism hostile to all reform and a revolutionism hostile to all tradition. His great aim is the overcoming of social inequality, of the division between aristocracy and bourgeoisie. The pedagogics of ethical perfection is supposed to smooth the path of progress without revolutionary force and thus shows itself to be in accord with the Prussian policy of reform.

11 Politics

Schleiermacher conceives politics as a combined critical and technical discipline (first lectures 1808–9 (1980–: 2, 8)). Politics indicates the general perspectives from which existing states are to be appraised. Thus political activity can be harmonized with the level of culture, which for Schleiermacher is characterized above all by the Prussian reform movement and the national uprising against France.

The state is constituted by the distinction between government and people, and by the presence of an accepted law. It is a social institution which regulates identical organization (the communal mastery of nature) and thus guarantees the subsistence of the citizens. The state therefore has a particular orientation towards administration and economics. In this way Schleiermacher downgrades the significance of the military. The progress of culture is furthered by labour. Schleiermacher rejects capital punishment, offensive wars, violent revolutions and enforced colonization.

The state has to overcome the basic tension between the individual and the universal will; it must take upon itself the task of restraining private interest where it threatens the public good, but must also restrict itself and leave private interest to its own devices where such interest serves the ends of humanity. The state must take appropriate measures to intervene in the labour process, in order to ensure that the universal interest is served. It must not become an economic subject in the process, however, but must guarantee social welfare in the way in which it would uphold a legal duty.

Schleiermacher holds constitutional monarchy to be the most appropriate form of constitution for large, modern nation-states. In a constitutional monarchy the legislative power extends from the people to the king, and the executive power extends from the king to his subjects. Standing above all private interests, the king is in an excellent position to guarantee the universality of freedoms and justice. Aristocracy has the disadvantage that it fixes differences in class and status. Democracy has the disadvantage that public and private interest can come into intractable conflict with each other.

Schleiermacher accords the state no primacy over other forms of community. He rather places the state beside church, household and academy of science, so that religion, free sociality and science are thereby removed from its jurisdiction