Jens Zimmermann
The German theologian and philosopher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834), is an important figure in hermeneutic history for at least two reasons. First, he initiated the transition of hermeneutics from rule-governed interpretation in particular disciplines—such as theology, law, and philology—to a comprehensive analysis of human understanding as such. Second, he is not only the father of general hermeneutics, but also of modern theology. Arguably comparable to such theological giants as Origen or Augustine in his efforts to integrate Christianity and culture, Schleiermacher tried to reconcile Christianity with the intellectual trends of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, guided as he was by his own critical engagement with post-Kantian philosophy. Consequently, although Schleiermacher developed philosophical principles for a general theory of understanding, his hermeneutics cannot be separated from his sincere Christian convictions. As Karl Barth rightly pointed out, Schleiermacher was “first a pastor, then a professor of theology, and last a philosopher (1982, xviii).” Indeed, the irenic thrust of Schleiermacher’s interpretive theory toward unity, community, and reconciliation of difference is grounded in his theological conviction that in Christ all things are reconciled and unified. Yet this theological foundation was ideally suited for, and was arguably also shaped by, the post-Kantian philosophical struggle to overcome the Cartesian subject–object division and the Kantian separation of knowable “appearances” (phenomena) and unknowable “things in themselves” (noumena).
In developing his hermeneutic principles, Schleiermacher seeks to avoid three one-sided approaches to reading classical and biblical texts. He steers a middle path between the rationalist Enlightenment interpreters, who reduce religious and historical truths to universal reason, on the one hand, and the historical-critical philologists, who never look beyond small textual units on the other. The third extreme he eschews is dogmatic biblical exegesis that, when it emphasizes the text’s divine inspiration, results in disregard for historical particularity. His early work, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (Über die Religion 1996), remains the most eloquent literary testimony to this balancing act. In this eloquent defense of religion, Schleiermacher depends on the foundational assumption that reality is determined by the basic striving of every particular, finite element toward unity with the whole. Participating in this movement, human understanding strives to grasp “the undivided impression of a whole” and the way in which every part fits into this whole (Schleiermacher 1999, 122). Neither a universal reason that devalues particulars and has no room for originality, nor pedantic preoccupation with detail (what Schleiermacher calls “fruitless encyclopedic excursions” that deny a greater overarching purpose) does justice to this reality. Schleiermacher believes in the ultimate harmonious correlation of universal and particular, of individual and collective, wherefore he rejects any dualistic views of reality.
Schleiermacher posits an absolute, unifying ground of knowledge, of which we are part, but which we can never comprehend. In the Romantic context of his Speeches, Schleiermacher calls this unity the “world-all,” or even the “world-spirit”; however, in his later and more sober lectures on the basic underlying principles of knowledge, the Dialektik, he identifies the absolute with God, the incomprehensible unity of being and thought (1986, 25). For Schleiermacher, equivocating God and the absolute is not an apologetic claim that truth can be known only in conjunction with a religious knowledge or postulate. After all, we can never fully know God. Yet some such entity as God is required for Schleiermacher, who argues in the Platonic vein, and against Kant, that any real, objective knowledge requires the unity of mind and being (1986, 23). And the correspondence of thought and being on which true knowledge depends derives from the original identity of thought and being in the absolute (Schleiermacher 1986, 32). He believes that Idealist and Empiricist philosophies have failed to unite thought and being. Human reason, however, is endowed with a sense of the absolute, and all disciplines of human knowledge strive for this regulative ideal of a total unity. This innate sense of a greater, transcendent unity allows us glimpses into the interconnected whole that is the universe, evoking a feeling of absolute dependence (or god-consciousness) that, though not constituting a religion, proves a proto-form or “schema” (Schemata) of religion. Therefore, all human science depends on God, for “[w]e are thus engaged in the living contemplation of the deity insofar as we work on the completion of the concrete sciences” (Schleiermacher 1986, 31). Schleiermacher never really departed from his argument in the Speeches that both science and art depend on the same proto-religious impulse toward unity.
Schleiermacher is careful to avoid the mistakes of either idealist or materialist philosophies, which either reduce matter to thought, or thought to matter. In a key passage in the Dialektik (1811), he explains: “The particular is that which is purely given in being but which does not purely resolve into thought, and the universal is what is completely given in thought but which cannot be purely shown in being. Hence, both are asymptotic and their identity can only be completed via relation to the Absolute as their necessary supplement” (Schleiermacher 1986, 41). While a particular only makes sense in light of its relation to the whole, Schleiermacher nonetheless maintains the irreducible alterity of the individual, and thus the possibility of original thought. Thought, however, remains understandable only when we can relate it to an objective, shared reality. Hence, Schleiermacher can say that “each person is a complete and self-contained (abgeschlossene) unity of consciousness,” yet we have access to another person’s thought through their expression in language based on a shared universal reason.
Contrary to some who claim that Schleiermacher advocates an empathic hermeneutic, in which we connect to another mind through intuitive feeling, he rather argues for access to the author’s ideas through the methodical analysis of language. Language serves as a reliable conduit because the human endowment of universal reason enables the translation of every linguistic expression into our own framework of reference. Truth, in other words, is never merely individual, but neither is an individual’s view merely an instantiation of universal reason. As Schleiermacher puts it, “thought is only ethical to the extent to which it is inscribed in language, from which teaching and learning develop, and the common possession of language is only ethical to the extent to which individual consciousness develops by it” (1981, 264).
This brief sketch of Schleiermacher’s general philosophical realism already reveals the basically hermeneutic nature of his participatory ontology. Reality, for Schleiermacher, correlates nature and spirit in a higher unity, and the human spirit shares in this unity through an inner disposition or feeling. Yet this intuition (Ahnung) is shaped and given content only through particular expressions by others. Being and thought, or world and spirit, are interdependent for Schleiermacher, both in the macrocosm of the world and the microcosm of human communication. He can call the world “the artwork of the Spirit, the mirror it created of itself (Schleiermacher 1984, 72).” Every human being is a microcosm of this mirror, wherefore Schleiermacher claims that what many call the world is humanity to him, and what they call humanity the world. Thus, the cosmic transcendent, the universe or God, can be approached in terms of content only through the thoughts of others, through concepts, through comparative religions and worldviews. These expressions of the human spirit can in turn be grasped only through the particulars of language and a person’s entire life context. Schleiermacher’s general philosophical ideas about reality, therefore, already provide us with some of the most important terms of his hermeneutic theory.
First, we have seen that mere bits of information are not knowledge but become such only when they make sense within a greater whole, that is, when they are understood in relation to something greater. Hermeneutics, as Hans-Georg Gadamer will later claim, insists that knowing is always a seeing “as,” that is, the interpretation of a detail in its relation to a greater whole. Thus, the hermeneutic circle, the interpreting movement between a part and a whole, is intrinsic to human knowing.
Second, Schleiermacher advocates what one may call a participatory ontology that assumes the correlation of mind and being, and therefore also the enfleshment of thought in language. He believes that “we cannot think without language,” and “only by the fact that we think in speaking do we arrive at a definite degree of consciousness and intention (Schleiermacher 1998, 156).” For him, “there is no thinking without words,” and thus language is the only access to the spirit’s self-expression in texts and art (Kimmerle 1977a, 193). Contrary to still prevalent views among analytic philosophers, language cannot be reduced to rules alone but also requires that one understand the context and individual spirit in which it is used, so that intuition or “divination” becomes an important part of the interpretive enterprise. As we shall explain in our detailed description of his hermeneutic principles in the following, Schleiermacher acknowledges the constraints of the material or structural side of language on the individual without, so that, neglecting the creative use of language by which an individual shapes these pre-given structures. On the basis of his integrative view of nature and spirit, Schleiermacher manages to correlate the receptive (structural pre-givens received by the speaker) and the spontaneous (the use of language by an individual) elements of linguistic expression.1
Third, we can see that the centrality of language in Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic also involves an intrinsic link between language and ethics. Hermeneutics, ethics, and language are linked, because the thoughts of another person grant me insight into humanity and the world as a whole. Every human expression, either text or artwork, represents an individual understanding of humanity and thus contributes to our self-understanding as human beings. In Schleiermacher’s words, “every human being is to portray humanity in his own way … so that in this way humanity may show itself and become real in all its infinite possibilities” (1984a, 80). Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic is thus intrinsically ethical insofar as communication ultimately aims at communion, in which the individual and the collective are united without surrendering their individuality. “It all comes down to the identity of the universal and the particular,” as Schleiermacher puts it (1984b, 146). One can only be understood through the other, which gives us, finally, the hermeneutic circle as the fourth main element of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic. The whole of humanity is only understandable through its individual parts, but each individual carries within himself the identity of the whole. The goal of hermeneutics is thus humanistic self-understanding. After these preliminary observations on the philosophical and cultural context of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, we now turn to his actual lectures on this topic.
Schleiermacher did not leave behind any final, approved publication on hermeneutics. The most coherent pieces we have are the manuscripts for two addresses on hermeneutics at the Berlin Academy in 1829, which provide an incomplete summary of his thinking about hermeneutics five years prior to his death. The remaining, and largest amount of material, consists of Schleiermacher’s notes for lectures on hermeneutics entitled “Hermeneutics and Criticism, with Particular Reference to the New Testament Text,” which were first collected and published by his student and friend, Friedrich Lücke in 1838.2 Currently, the best English primary resource on Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is Andrew Bowie’s edition of Hermeneutics and Criticism (Schleiermacher 1998).3
Prompted by the need to establish, beyond specialized interpretive manuals in theology or philology, general theory of interpretation, Schleiermacher began to lecture on hermeneutics which he defined as “the art of understanding another person’s utterance correctly (1998, 5).” Long before Gadamer, Schleiermacher argued for the universality of hermeneutics. Interpretation takes place not only when we translate foreign languages or alien cultural contexts into our own, but also in face-to-face conversation (Kimmerle 1977a, 182–183). He defines hermeneutics as an “art” rather than a technique or method as it deals predominantly with linguistic expressions4 whose natural and spiritual aspects are only partially accessed through the mechanics of language and thus also require an intuitive grasp of an author’s meaning, which lies beyond the reach of mere rules.
As we have already seen, Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics tries to integrate the pre-given ontological structures of language that shape an author’s mind with the spiritual element by which a free agent impresses her individual, personal characteristics on these structures and shapes them in turn. Every linguistic expression thus contains both what Schleiermacher calls objective structural and subjective psychological aspects, which require the interpreter’s corresponding grammatical (or comparative) and divinatory (or psychological) skills for determining meaning. The grammatical or comparative work involves knowledge of the language, including the use of concepts and ideas within a particular cultural horizon. Beyond linguistic structures, the interpreter also has to compare the author’s use of concepts in all of his works with other works in his field and the larger culture. The divinatory skill complements this work by delving “as deeply as possible into an author’s state of mind” (Kimmerle 1977a, 185).
On account of this latter aspect of his hermeneutics, critics, including Gadamer, have accused Schleiermacher of an “intentionalist,” “empathetic,” or “psychologistic” approach to interpretation. This hasty judgment overlooks two important points, however. The first is that for Schleiermacher both divinatory and grammatical aspects are regulative ideals rather than achievable objectives. Completely reconstructing an author’s thoughts or fully grasping how the original audience would have received an utterance are interpretive ideals that one can only approximate with provisional results. The second is his insistence on the necessary interplay of both methods: “[full] understanding requires both of these methods, and no interpreter can fully understand if he leans so much to one side that he is completely unable to make use of what the other side offers” (Kimmerle 1977b, 204). What Schleiermacher means by “divinatory” is no more and no less than developing a sense for an author’s way of combining thoughts. For this reason, he also distinguishes between divinatory practice applied to psychological writings (for example, memoirs and letters not strictly controlled by one theme) and technical writings (historical works and philosophical treatises) (Schleiermacher 1998, 102–103). In either case, the author shapes the linguistic material differently.
The main point, however, is to develop an intuitive knack for the author’s way of putting things: “Indeed, just as in life we are most successful in understanding our friends, so a skilful interpreter is most successful in correctly interpreting an author’s process of drafting and composing and drafting a work, the product of his personal distinctiveness in language and in all his relationships, when the author is among those favourites with whom he is best acquainted” (Kimmerle 1977a, 185). The “divinatory” sense is our innate human ability to intuit meaning and then find words to describe it, which Schleiermacher likens to children’s ability to find an object’s proper name by a comparative sifting of words. Extending the same principle to hermeneutics, Schleiermacher argues that divining the author’s intention is simply a better trained and more accurate intuition based on long study of a particular author’s writings and historical context.
Indeed, Schleiermacher’s retention of intentionality as a regulative ideal rather than a realizable goal makes eminent sense when we grant that thinking takes place within language as the activity of a free agent whose notions are expressed within the constraints of culturally specific concepts and images. Belief in the freedom of the human spirit to shape linguistic forms allows Schleiermacher to recognize original, creative uses of traditional expressions. In the context of New Testament exegesis, for example, he can thus argue that Christianity was a revolutionary new spiritual outlook that transformed Greek and Hebrew concepts. Schleiermacher suggests that under the impression of the apostolic experience of Christ, Greek philosophical concepts were infused with new meanings appropriate to the Christian experience (1998, 43–44). In short, content and form, as Schleiermacher rightly argues (Kimmerle 1977a, 191), go together, so that “this insight into an author’s relationship to the forms imbedded in his literature is such an essential aspect of interpretation that without it, neither the whole nor the parts can be correctly understood” (Kimmerle 1977a, 189).
Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic circle, in which understanding takes place through the interplay of parts and the whole, flows naturally from his overall view of reality and education. Education and self-knowledge occur through integrating other people’s reflections on reality into our own intellectual framework. Indeed, the purpose of ethics or the moral life is to raise mere cognitive and sensual perception of the world to actual knowledge (Erkenntnis), something that occurs when we compare our own impressions with others’ ideas about the world (Schleiermacher 1984b, 188). Access to the totality of the universe is possible only through gathering and understanding the thoughts of individuals. Yet while every human being participates in a rational universe, and is endowed with the drive toward community through the perception of another’s irreducible individuality, we can access others’ impressions only through the symbols that express them (Schleiermacher 1984b, 166). And another’s use of linguistic symbols is determined by the interplay of his natural gifts, historical-cultural environment, and his own individual use of these ontological structures. There is no other access to another’s spirit save through the material, symbolic means of language and his life context (Schleiermacher 1984b, 208). In other words, Schleiermacher assumes the inseparable correlation of subjective and objective elements involved in interpretation (1984b, 220). Any objective knowledge is available only through the relative standpoint of an individual’s utterance (Schleiermacher 1984b, 246).
In practical terms, interpretation is both comparative and intuitive. Just as a word makes sense within a sentence, a sentence within a paragraph and a paragraph within an entire text, so interpreting the text itself requires understanding the author’s language, the genre he employs, and his entire life context. The more often the interpreter traverses this circle, the better his understanding (Kimmerle 1977b, 203). And even so, “every solution to the task of understanding appears to us as only an approximation” (Kimmerle 1977b, 201). What makes Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics attractive today is his effort to strike a balance between interpretive extremes. He avoids both the structuralist (and post-structuralist) “death” of the author and the isolated appeal to the author’s intention. His hermeneutics retains, however, intentionality as fixed by the author in the text, and the intended meaning’s approximate reconstruction based on historical-grammatical criticism. Moreover, while upholding the ideal of an absolute transcendent ground of meaning, his hermeneutics is thoroughly anti-foundational. And finally, his ultimate goal of interpretation is “to enrich our lives and the lives of others.” Such enrichment, as he rightly concludes, “is sublime,” wherefore our exegesis should not remain at the historical-critical level lest “we produce trivialities which demean ourselves and our scientific labour” (Kimmerle 1977b, 207).