Kant and the Meaning of Religion

The prospect of a Kantian non-conceptualism makes a compelling connection between Kant and Schleiermacher, for of course, in his On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers and The Christian Faith, the connection between piety and generally pre-reflective experience has an important role. Just how important a role remains controversial. In Religious Experience (1985), Wayne Proudfoot accuses Schleiermacher of enlisting non-conceptualism in the service of a protectionist strategy: by making religious experience essentially non-conceptual he effectively immunizes it against the criticism that it reflects this or that conceptual shortcoming. Proudfoot’s work has occasioned a large and productive literature and has gained a wide enough currency as recently to be labeled the “standard interpretation.”² At the same time, a countervailing current of scholarship has tried to place Schleiermacher’s interest in individual feeling, subjectivity, and the non-conceptual within a wider context of language, community, and causal explanation.³ Proudfoot himself has lately been more tentative about the details of Schleiermacher’s non-conceptualism.⁴

In this chapter I want to put the focus back on non-conceptualism. I will try to show that some familiar themes from the Speeches and The Christian Faith take on new life if, with Kant, we take seriously the thought that experience reflects a non-conceptual element. I have no light to shed on the broader issues of Schleiermacher scholarship, and, in particular, nothing to say about the relative importance of non-conceptualism in Schleiermacher’s wider thought. I am taking it that Schleiermacher is committed to a form of non-conceptualism and that he is to some extent deploying Kantian materials. With these two assumptions, the questions that interest me then emerge: How close is Kant’s non-conceptualism to Schleiermacher’s? Can Kant’s non-conceptualism be put to use, if not on Schleiermacher’s behalf, then on behalf of issues with which Schleiermacher is occupied? We will see that following this trail leads us to a position in which it becomes difficult to distinguish between epistemological and religious reflection.

When put in a very general way, we are probably all non-conceptualists.5 When a child first learns to say “dada” she is reacting to what is in front of her, to what is affecting her. She is not aware that this dada is one of many dadas, much less that dadas are enduring physical objects and not events or time-slices or undetached dada parts, etc. Probably there are no concepts in play whatsoever. She is simply reacting to having been affected in a certain way. In later life, as she passes through a familiar room, lost in reverie, she is in some sense aware of the bookcase in the corner and the lamp on the table, though, again, perhaps not in a conceptual way. Thus, the point is not confined to early language learning, and holds even when questions of ontology have been settled.

In the contemporary literature on non-conceptual content, this point is often framed in terms of belief. Thus, one finds the claim that the content of a mental state is conceptual if and only if it draws on the relevant belief or beliefs—say, that dada is before her, or that the bookcase is in the corner. On this view, it is the failure to be drawing on or even to hold these beliefs that makes for the non-conceptuality in these cases. Or, again, the claim has been made that we cannot possibly be applying concepts tailored to all aspects of the rich detail presented to us in perceptual experience—for example, to each of the different shades of color we perceive—the so-called “fineness of grain” argument for non-conceptualism. Kant’s non-conceptualism is of a different sort than either of these. Notice that both the child and adult must locate the objects in question at some distance from where they find themselves. The force of “must” here does not seem to be that of physical necessity. It seems, rather, to be presuppositional. If subjects like us are going to cognize dadas or bookcases or lamps at all, we must presuppose an expanse in which objects of cognition are located with respect to where each of us is. Notice too that the presupposed expanse does not stop with the edges of the objects of cognition, or with the walls of the containing room or the boundaries of the house or solar system or whatever. The presupposed expanse is continuous and therefore singular; in this case the whole, as Kant says, precedes the parts.⁶

By contrast, in discursive representation, the parts precede the whole in the sense that the subject draws on concepts composed of what may be “common to different things” (A 656/B 684). This is of course a central feature of Kant’s theory of concepts as I have been portraying it. Gareth Evans comes close to Kant’s view with what he calls the generality constraint:

We cannot avoid thinking of a thought about an individual object x, to the effect that it is F, as the exercise of two separable capacities; one being the capacity to think of x, which could be equally exercised in thoughts about x to the effect that it is G or H; and the other being a conception of what it is to be F, which could be equally exercised in thoughts about other individuals, to the effect that they are F.⁷

The distinction Kant wants is between the generality of F, G, or H (their potential applicability to more than one object), as contrasted to the singularity of the spatial (and temporal) expanses in which we must locate x, the object to which those general concepts apply (if they do). Since conceptual representation depends on generality, and since space (and time) are singular, we cannot give them conceptual representation; when we speak of spaces and times we are abstracting them out of a single expanse. In this way we arrive at the full sense of experience as it is portrayed in the Critique of Pure Reason: the cognition of objects in space and in time-relations to which general concepts are applied. Thus, when we apply general concepts to objects, the field of possible application is already narrowed to that of spatiotemporal somethings (ignoring for the moment reference to my own internal states). Since, for Kant, experience is the activity of applying concepts to objects we can say that all experience incorporates a non-conceptual aspect.

Considerations such as these lead Robert Hanna to dispute the standard, conceptualist interpretation of Kant’s famous remark that “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (A50–51/B74–76). Sellars and McDowell, for example, deny the cognitive independence of intuitions—either they are fictions or meaningless. Instead, Hanna proposes that

non-conceptual content can provide rational human animals with an inherently spatiotemporally situated, egocentrically-centered, biologically/neurobiologically embodied, pre-reflectively conscious, skillful perceptual and practical grip on things in our world. Call this fundamental normative fact the Grip of the Given, with due regard to the two-part thought that to stand within the Grip of the Given is also thereby to have a grip on things in our world. More precisely: To stand within the Grip of the Given is to be so related to things and other minded animals in our world, and thereby to have a grip on the positions and dispositions of things and other minded animals in our world, via essentially non-conceptual content, that we are poised for achieving accurate reference, true statements, knowledge, consistency and valid consequence in logical reasoning, effectiveness in intentional performance, goodness of means or ends, rightness in choice or conduct, and consistency and coherence of motivation in practical reasoning—in short, we are poised for achieving any or all of the highest values of our cognitive and practical lives.⁸

The main burden of this paragraph is to turn the Myth of the Given on its head. On the Sellars/McDowell reading, Kant has us in immediate contact only with sensation, on the basis of which we reconstruct the world of spatiotemporal objects. But that reading does not fit with the arguments sketched above, according to which the objects to which we apply general concepts—say, white, cold, and round—have already conformed to the (non-conceptual) modes under which we can be affected: space and time. We are, as Hanna puts it, already poised for success; we already have a grip. The object is presented through empirical intuition by its two defining features, immediacy and singularity. We then judge of the object that it is, say, a snowball.

In the first instance, then, what puts Kant on the side of non-conceptualism is the thesis that our forms of sensibility introduce a formal, structural element of non-conceptuality in all those judgments that depend on empirical intuition. Putting the point in this way leaves open the question whether we can isolate the non-conceptual aspect of empirical cognition in the sense of entertaining it itself as a conscious state. Can we “have” a Kantian non-conceptual experience? Does Kant think we can? We will have to come to some clarity at least about the first question in order to illuminate the comparison with Schleiermacher. For the moment, I will simply note a passage emphasized in this connection by Manley Thompson. For Kant a perception is mere sensation insofar as it relates “solely to the subject as a modification of its state” (A320/B376). Here there is no question of awareness, no conceptual or non-conceptual structure—a mere sensory manifold. A next step involves the subject apprehending the object as “something given in space and time—of a spatiotemporal something—it is an empirical intuition, an objective perception, and a species of cognitive representation.”⁹ Finally, we can speak of the subject applying concepts so that the object now has sensory qualities; it is an object of possible experience in the full sense. The question whose treatment I am postponing is whether Kant’s view is that we do or at least can actually experience the middle stage for itself; whether we can experience objects as mere spatiotemporal somethings without implicating conceptual representation. The passage Thompson emphasizes seems to suggest that Kant thinks we can. Kant writes that only with the application of concepts do “we first obtain knowledge [cognition] properly so called” (die Erkenntnis in eigentlicher Bedeutung) (A78/B103). Thompson comments that Kant’s “phrase ‘first obtain knowledge properly so called’ suggests that he was prepared to recognize something which occurs prior to conceptual synthesis and which may be called ‘knowledge’ in some sense.”¹⁰ The question is whether this takes us beyond non-conceptual content to non-conceptual experience.

Let us take an example. Suppose I claim to have cognized an effect before its cause. Kant learned from Hume that, as a matter of logic, my claim is unproblematic. It is not self-contradictory; it can at least be thought. But when I subject my claim to the rules of time-determination it must then pass a stricter test. If I am to cognize a series of events as a series my cognitions must occur in one temporal stretch—otherwise the notions of “before” and “after” make no sense; and without them, the very idea of a sequence of events falls apart. But then each moment must emerge out of the preceding one, and so each successive event in time arises out of prior events. In outline, so argues Kant in the Second Analogy. But this two-stage arrangement—that is, requiring of a piece of purported empirical knowledge that it pass both logical tests (e.g., is it self-contradictory?) and epistemological tests (e.g., does it conform to the rules of time-determination?)—brings us back to Kant’s distinction between general and transcendental logic. As we saw in chapter three, general logic, overseeing the unity of thought, is indifferent as to whether I claim to have cognized the cause before the effect, or the effect before the cause; since neither claim is self-contradictory, both satisfy its requirements. But in extending my thinking beyond mere objects of thought to existing objects outside me, I draw into play the synthetic a priori rules—among them, those of time-determination—that make possible the unity of experience. This is the domain of transcendental logic. Note that I do not exhibit these rules by offering an explanation of how, in the present example, “the nature of time” orders human cognition. That would again be to fall back on a causal, naturalistic, inferred necessity—an explanation rather than a Darstellung. I can only exhibit my cognition as in conformity with the rules of the unity of experience, and thereby establish contact with objects of experience and not merely with objects of thought. I do not of course establish that what I say about them is true, but, as long as I exhibit my conformity to the “formal conditions of empirical truth,” I am assured that my empirical inquiry will at least remain in contact with those objects. I take it this is what Hanna means by his talk of “having a grip on things in our world.”

In his discussion of receptivity in the Speeches, Schleiermacher does not follow Kant in distinguishing between an exhibited and an inferred necessity. He cannot follow Kant in this matter because—to my knowledge—the notion of a priori constraint has no place in his thinking. Without such constraint to display Schleiermacher has to construe the fundamental relationship between a thought and its object in causal terms. This picture comes out clearly in a familiar passage from the first edition:

I entreat you to become familiar with this concept: intuition of the universe. It is the hinge of my whole speech; it is the highest and most universal formula of religion on the basis of which you should be able to find every place in religion, from which you may determine its essence and limits. All intuition proceeds from an influence of the intuited on the one who intuits, from an original and independent action of the former, which is then grasped, apprehended, and conceived by the latter according to one’s own nature. If the emanations of light—which happen completely without your efforts—did not affect your sense, if the smallest part of the body, the tips of your fingers, were not mechanically or chemically affected, if the pressure of weight did not reveal to you an opposition and a limit to your power, you would intuit nothing and perceive nothing . . . (OR, Crouter, 24–25 [213–14]).¹²

Schleiermacher is commenting on the physical interactions between an organism and its environment. The account is naturalistic in that sense. In the recent literature much emphasis has been put on the middle sentence in the above passage: “All intuition proceeds from an influence of the intuited on the one who intuits, from an original and independent action of the former, which is then grasped, apprehended, and conceived by the latter according to one’s own nature.” Theodore Vial thinks the last clause shows a departure from Kant in that “intuition is shaped by our culture and language.” And Proudfoot, agreeing with Vial, takes it to show that “neither intuition nor feeling is prelinguistic for Schleiermacher.”¹³ On the line of thought I am developing the real point of divergence between Kant and Schleiermacher lies elsewhere. In fact, Kant is happy to admit that our reaction to sensory impingement is concept-laden—say, that someone who has never seen anything remotely duck-like will be unlikely to see Wittgenstein’s duck/rabbit as a duck. As far as I can see, such an admission does not call into question the status of the impingement itself as pre-linguistic and non-conceptual for either Kant or Schleiermacher.

The real divergence here between them is over what the subject of the impingement is entitled to say about its source. Schleiermacher portrays the subject of the impingement as able to make inferences to the origin of the affection (“mechanical” or “chemical”). In Kantian terms, Schleiermacher is appealing to an inferred and not an exhibited necessity. It is not a Darstellung.¹⁴ It cannot be, since, to get an exhibited necessity you need unavoidable rule-governed constraints on thought and experience available for exhibiting—if not those rules favored by Kant then ones that play a parallel structural role. Without them, you have a causal naturalism. Other critics, more persuaded than Vial and Proudfoot of the Kantian pedigree of Schleiermacher’s treatment of intuition, tend to put much weight on the prominence Schleiermacher gives to the passive aspect of experience. For example, Manfred Frank notes that, in the Speeches, “in contrast to concepts . . . intuitions are maximally ‘passive’.”¹⁵ But from a Kantian point of view, this unqualified passivity will make trouble—in the form of Proudfoot’s original criticisms—for Schleiermacher’s broader account of receptivity. What is crucial to Kant’s picture of intuition is not simply the passivity inherent in being open to affection by the world—so much we could construe, with Schleiermacher, in causal terms—but passivity under a priori, partly non-conceptual constraint.

Because in the first edition of the second Speech Schleiermacher transplants the Kantian notion of Anschauung, intuition, into a causal context, the topic of non-conceptual content or non-conceptual experience does not arise there as it does for Kant. Ironically, it is only with Schleiermacher’s well-documented move, in the later editions of the Speeches and The Christian Faith, away from the first edition’s more Kantian-sounding talk of intuition that we come to a deeper encounter between him and Kant over the sense in which experience reflects non-conceptual content. When Kant speaks of the “passivity” or “receptivity” of the senses, he is trying, as Thompson puts it, “to capture something of our sense of being in a world we never made, of having to cope with a reality outside and independent of our consciousness.”¹⁶ The contact with reality at stake here is more basic, more primitive than can be captured by appealing to causation. It is not the result of observing an organism interact with its environment, and so it does not mark an inferred necessity. With this Kantian orientation comes a fundamental sense of dependency and an immediacy and independence from concepts and beliefs which, at the same time, carries a reference to the pre-individuated world pressing itself upon us. We are, I take it, heading into Schleiermacher’s dialectical neighborhood.

It is important to note that Proudfoot is writing of the later editions of the Speeches. Many critics have noted that in the first edition Schleiermacher displays a certain disinterest in specifying the object of religious consciousness. Thus, we have Van Harvey’s well-known remark that, “so far as the concept of God is concerned, Schleiermacher seems to have regarded it as almost irrelevant to religion in the first edition.”¹⁹ But in the later editions Proudfoot’s remark has a more vivid target, for there, as Richard Crouter observes, Schleiermacher “reveals a deliberate effort to give the earlier argument a more theistic interpretation”²⁰—that is, he is more concerned to specify the object of religious consciousness.

The initial criticism, then, is that an account of receptivity that relies solely on sensory impingement cannot make sense of justifying a belief or experience. This criticism brings us into the thick of a contemporary discussion in the theory of knowledge. Thus, McDowell has pressed this objection against Quine’s program of naturalized epistemology. McDowell might as well have been writing of Schleiermacher: “The only connection he countenances between experience and the acceptance of statements is a brutely causal linkage that subjects are conditioned into when they learn a language. . . . Quine conceives experiences so they can only be outside the space of reasons, the order of justification.”²¹ Now Quine has open to him an initial move that is not available to Schleiermacher. Quine is happy to adopt a third-person point of view, that of the cognitive psychologist who is charting in someone else’s case the input of experience as against verbal output. In that sense, as Quine says, epistemology becomes “contained in natural science, as a chapter of psychology.”²² This move, whatever its prospects, is not open to Schleiermacher because he follows Kant in casting his reflection in the first person—as reflection on the nature of his own experience. This first-person orientation is, I take it, crucial to Schleiermacher’s purposes. That is, he is inviting his readers to reflect not on the nature of others’ experience, but on their own. McDowell’s point, and, I take it, Proudfoot’s, is that knowing that an experience has been caused does not by itself allow me to infer its cause. That knowledge—and, on Schleiermacher’s picture, that is all the knowledge available—makes for exculpation, not justification.

One strategy for avoiding this problem would be for Schleiermacher somehow to incorporate reference to or identification of the object of religious experience into the act of cognition itself, thereby avoiding the need both for a causal explanation of the cognition and an inference to its origin. I take it Proudfoot reads Schleiermacher as pursuing just this strategy in the following passage: “Your feeling is piety in so far as it is the result of the operation of God in you by means of the universe” (OR, Oman, 45 [63]).²³ Proudfoot comments: “reference to a belief about the cause of the experience is built into the rules for identifying the experience.”²⁴ He is alleging that Schleiermacher is trying to slip justification in through the back door.

In the later editions of the work, Schleiermacher calls upon the notion of “immediacy” to take up precisely this slack. Immediacy is present in the first edition, but there it is typically paired with intuition and contrasted with general, “abstract thought.”²⁵ In the later editions, and, as we will see, in The Christian Faith, immediacy plays an additional role. It modifies “consciousness,” as in the new definition of religion: “the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things, in and through the Infinite, and of all temporal things in and through the Eternal” (OR, Oman, 36 [53]). Now by “immediate consciousness,” Schleiermacher apparently means the awareness of an object of perception unaccompanied by self-awareness—and that usage of immediate is, as Vial points out in connection with The Christian Faith, unobjectionable.²⁶ No doubt we do often find ourselves experiencing this or that without inferring that we are experiencing this or that. We just experience it. In chapter five we will return to this point in connection with James’s notion of a “full fact,” which includes “an attitude towards the object” but also “the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs.” For Schleiermacher, an immediate judgment, in this new, second sense, is one in which this sense of self is absent. In recent work, Proudfoot agrees that this sense of immediacy carries no suspicion of protectionism or special pleading, as indeed it does not.²⁷ But Vial goes on to remark that “it is this [use of ‘immediate’] to a large extent that leads to interpretations in the English secondary literature that Schleiermacher intends a pre-linguistic, non-conceptual, and mystical point of contact with the divine.”²⁸ That is far from clear.

I am not in a position to make a counter-claim about the English secondary literature, but this unproblematic use of “immediacy” is not Proudfoot’s target in Religious Experience. In fact, in such passages from the second edition as the following, Schleiermacher retains, alongside the new one, the earlier use of the term: “all is immediately true in religion . . . But that only is immediate which has not yet passed through the stage of idea, but has grown up purely in feeling” (OR, Oman, 54 [73]). Here “immediate” is not modifying consciousness, but is describing a variety of cognition which clearly seems designed to carry a general sense of non-conceptuality. The trouble, as Proudfoot points out, is that Schleiermacher needs “feeling” here to include an element of recognition—and that requires the experience to have passed through the stage of idea. It requires an inference. When I judge that an object is this or that (say, “the universal existence of all finite things”) I have to bring into play the relevant concepts. This is so even if the consciousness is, in Schleiermacher’s second, new sense, immediate—that is, even when I judge the object to be this or that without attaching my own self-recognition to the judgment.²⁹

As I understand them, when taken together, Proudfoot’s criticisms present Schleiermacher with an unhappy choice: Either he makes the object of piety cause the feeling, in which case the object cannot be identified by the subject as the cause, or he builds it into the experience of piety itself, in which case the experience can no longer carry the desired sense of immediacy. In the next section I will argue that Schleiermacher fares better against these criticisms in The Christian Faith. But first let us look more closely at what can be said at this point on Schleiermacher’s behalf.

Underlying Proudfoot’s criticisms is a claim about Schleiermacher and non-conceptual experience. Writing of the Speeches, Proudfoot claims that Schleiermacher is mistaken in thinking that “he has identified a moment of consciousness independent of thought and yet still having cognitive significance.”³⁰ This strikes me as the right thing to say. But it is important for my purposes here to measure the distance between Schleiermacher and what Kantian resources could be brought to bear on his behalf. Consider this passage from the second edition Speeches. Schleiermacher is working up (and working us up) to the famous “love scene,” in which the distinctive moment of piety is portrayed as incapable of being given conceptual expression:

Your thought can only embrace what is sundered. Wherefore as soon as you have made any given definite activity of your soul an object of communication or contemplation, you have already begun to separate. It is therefore impossible to adduce any definite example, for, as soon as anything is an example, what I wish to indicate is already past (OR, Oman, 41–42 [59]).

I take it we are familiar with the phenomenon or at least a close relation to the phenomenon that Schleiermacher has in view. Suppose I react to a bright light and then judge that the light is bright. We would, I think, want to say that the reaction is immediate in the sense that it is unavoidable. But we might also want to say that the judgment, too, is immediate in that same sense; I might find myself judging that the light is bright in a way that has nothing to do with conscious volition. Still, there is the difference that, for Kant, the judgment, but not the reaction, is composed of general concepts and can be true or false. But what can we say about the reaction? Not an easy question, for answering seems to require us to give linguistic representation to something which by its nature is intuitive and non-conceptual. This is the thread connecting Kant and Schleiermacher on the subject of non-conceptual content.

Have we hit upon, then, a proper sense of non-conceptual experience? I think we must answer in the negative. As I am reading him, what Schleiermacher has in view in the love scene can be elucidated by making explicit a fundamental distinction in Kant’s epistemology; namely, that between the intuitive representation that I must presuppose (the intuition, the brute reaction) and the discursive representation which I create (the judgment). Schleiermacher is right to take the former as immediate, and he is right that it is impossible to adduce an example. But he is mistaken to think that we have to do here with a transition from one kind of experience (pre-sundered, pre-separated) to another (ordinary, discursive). The immediacy and non-conceptuality at stake has the status not of experience at all; rather, it has the status of a presupposition. In judging that the light is bright I apply general concepts to what I presuppose as immediate and non-discursive: an intuition. Thus, what blocks non-conceptual experience in the sense that Schleiermacher wants—that is, the experience of an intuition—is our old friend, the spatial theory of concepts. Reference to this or that object will be by way of general terms, even when I cannot avoid coming to the judgment to which they contribute; even when the judgment is immediate in that sense. When, as in the current passage from Schleiermacher, we reflect on this presupposition it is tempting, but misguided, to think that we are reflecting on a form of non-conceptual experience. In the end, Proudfoot is right that Schleiermacher has not “identified a moment of consciousness independent of thought and yet still having cognitive significance.” In Schleiermacher’s terms: All cannot be immediately true in religion for the reason that nothing can be immediately true, whether in religion or elsewhere.³¹

I have tried to put this point in the positive, to say what real phenomenon Schleiermacher has in view; that is, the unavoidable presupposition of an intuitive, non-discursive representation to which we apply general concepts. To put the point in the negative, I am portraying Schleiermacher as having fallen victim to the Myth of the Given, as assuming the impossible burden of connecting concepts up with brute sensory stimulation. That, as McDowell says, is “fraudulent.”³² Schleiermacher assumes the burden of making this connection when he takes the transition from pre-sundered to ordinary experience as a move from one kind of experience to another. The challenge for Schleiermacher, in all editions of the Speeches, is how to give an account of what pre-sundered experience might come to using as materials nothing more than the “mechanical and chemical” stimulation of our sensory receptors while maintaining the point of view of one who reflects on the nature of his or her own experience. In the later editions, the difficulty is sharper because the subject must recognize the affection as directed toward a certain specified object—God, the infinite, the whole—and that manifestly requires the use of concepts. But what are the bearers of that content? It is hard to see what recourse Schleiermacher has except to answer that the content is just, as Hanna puts it, “the unstructured causal-sensory ‘given’ input to cognitive faculties, passively waiting to be carved up by concepts.”³³ But if, as required by Schleiermacher’s non-conceptualism, identifying concepts are not to be supplied by the subject (we can only help ourselves to that “which has not yet passed through the stage of idea”), then they will somehow have to be generated by the sensations themselves—and that would seem to require a bit of magic. To put the point in the idiom of Sellars and McDowell: to the extent that we place the workings of receptivity outside the space of concepts it is not clear how it can become available for awareness. At this point, Schleiermacher’s insistence on an extreme form of non-conceptualism—again, admitting only that “which has not yet passed through the stage of idea”—is working hard against him.

At the same time, I want to emphasize that, in one important respect, Schleiermacher is working with a better picture than is McDowell of our basic cognitive connection to the world. He is at least trying to make room for immediacy within his account of experience; that is, contra McDowell, for the boundedness of the conceptual. According to McDowell, “spontaneity is inextricably implicated in deliverances of receptivity.”³⁴ And again,

The impressions on our senses that keep the dynamic system in motion are already equipped with conceptual content. The facts that are made manifest to us in those impressions, or at least seem to be, are not beyond an outer boundary that encloses the conceptual sphere, and the impingements of the world on our sensibility are not inward crossings of such a boundary.³⁵

I am taking Kant and Schleiermacher to be united in the view that, on the contrary, the deliverances of receptivity are immediate and non-discursive—that it takes a related bit of magic to see what strikes me “as already equipped with conceptual content.”³⁶ What makes Schleiermacher vulnerable to the Myth of the Given is his treatment of this immediacy as itself a mode of experience—as, in fact, the location of piety. This commitment in turn requires him to produce a story about how immediacy and concepts could cooperate to produce any such form of experience—the impossibility of which cooperation McDowell and Proudfoot so persuasively diagnose.

For Kant’s part, the deliverances of receptivity are presupposed as immediate and non-discursive; that is, intuitive. As I argued in the first section of this chapter, what prevents Kant from falling into the Myth of the Given is the non-conceptual content supplied by the spatiotemporal context of all conceptual determination. As Kant sees it, in being open to affection by objects I must locate myself, and, so, the source of what strikes me, in one temporal and one spatial expanse. As we have seen, the arguments for these claims are not naturalistic. That is, they do not appeal to the nature of time and space. Rather they are designed to exhibit our unavoidable conformity to rules—in this case, rules dictating that I must locate the source of whatever strikes me in one, unidirectional sequence of events and at some distance from me. Thus, what strikes me has already conformed to the forms of receptivity. This in turn means that I apply concepts not to an unstructured, immediate “given” but to individuals with Kantian-style non-conceptual content; that is, spatiotemporal location. They are already equipped, contra both Schleiermacher and McDowell, with non-conceptual content.

I have said that the temptation for Schleiermacher is to view the immediacy of intuitive representation as itself a form of experience. In our explication of Kant’s view, the parallel temptation is to locate a Kantian sense of non-conceptual experience in the fact that I must cognize objects of experience as spatiotemporal somethings, to which conceptual determinations are added. This would be to reproduce Schleiermacher’s error—as though, again, this were a matter of moving from one kind of experience (non-conceptual) to another (discursively structured). Rather, as Thompson points out, “spatiotemporal something” applies equally to the object of any intuitive representation, in just the way “apple” can be applied to more than one object—and so the movement on which we are reflecting is carried out within the realm of general, discursive representation.³⁷

From Schleiermacher’s point of view, Kant’s non-conceptualism offers a mixed bag. On the one hand, it promises a way out from under Proudfoot’s objections. Because Kant is trying to exhibit the unavoidability in the following of certain rules he cannot be accused of tying the experience in question to any particular object in an arbitrary or unsupported way; since he rejects giving a causal, naturalistic explanation of non-conceptual content, the question of how to advance from exculpation to justification does not arise. While Kant does invoke a rich array of concepts in analyzing the immediacy and non-discursivity of receptivity—for example, the notion of something being forced into awareness is, by itself, concept-laden—he is merely using concepts (what else?) to reflect on the necessity of this presupposition. By contrast, as I have been arguing, Schleiermacher’s problem is that he has committed himself to a form of experience (pre-sundered, pre-separated) that cannot be had without drawing on our conceptual capacities. Kant’s strategy is to put the workings of receptivity outside the space of general concepts (and so outside the spatial theory of concepts), but not outside the space of reasons. The judgment that what strikes me is a spatiotemporal something is “an objective perception and a species of cognitive representation”³⁸—I may be mistaken about it, laboring under some form of illusion, etc. This means that non-conceptual content is no longer “raised above all error and misunderstanding,” which, for Schleiermacher, would be a bitter pill. On the other hand, by accepting the Kantian identification of thought with general concepts, Schleiermacher acquires what Proudfoot rightly points out he has not purchased for himself, namely “a moment of consciousness independent of thought and yet still having cognitive significance.”

The common element in all howsoever diverse expressions of piety, by which these are conjointly distinguished from all of other feelings, or, in other words, the self-identical essence of piety, is this: the consciousness of being absolutely dependent, or, which is the same thing, of being in relation to God (CF, §4 [32]).39

As Schleiermacher develops this passage in the next several paragraphs, we may identify several respects in which he makes contact with Kant’s non-conceptualism. Part of the sense of dependence comes from our recognition that we do not make the empirical objects toward which our thoughts are directed; we must be affected by them. Furthermore, Schleiermacher says the sense of dependence he has in mind cannot be pegged to the affection of any individual object, and, as we have seen, that is also true for Kant. To speak of individual objects is to already have applied concepts to what strikes us; by contrast, our awareness that we have not made the world, that we must cope with its affection, is prior to judgments about this or that object, and prior even to settling questions of ontology. To the extent that Schleiermacher writes in this spirit he can justly speak of what we presuppose as immediate and non-conceptual and, reflecting on it later, can describe it as involving a fundamental sense of dependence.

While this is not Schleiermacher’s line of thought, he does not explicitly reject it. What he rejects, consistently and with eloquence, is the thought that the sense of dependence he wants can be traced to the physical thrust of empirical objects on our sensory surfaces—the very naturalistic context he had developed in the Speeches. “While this does permit,” says Schleiermacher, “a limited feeling of dependence it excludes the absolute feeling” (CF, §4.4 [39]). The idea seems to be that, in a naturalistic context, we are aware of our own spontaneity in applying concepts to what strikes us, and this activity by the subject renders the sense of dependence less than absolute. To this point he is thinking along Kantian lines. The rules of thought that Kant tries to exhibit are, Kant tells us, selbstgedachte (B167)—self-thought, spontaneous. But instead of pursuing a Darstellung of these rules, Schleiermacher seeks an object suitable to the feeling of absolute dependence:

The Whence of our receptive and active existence, as implied in this self-consciousness, is to be designated by the word “God,” and that this is for us the really original signification of that word. . . . This “Whence” 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, §4.4 [38–39])

We can appreciate the logic: if the world and its objects prompt “a limited feeling of dependence,” then to prompt an absolute sense of dependence would seem to require going further; that is, outside the world. We can also appreciate the burden this move imposes: we have seen how difficult it is to explicate the relationship between finite objects and the subject; in what does the relationship between the subject and God consist? As I read him, Schleiermacher is, from §4.4 forward, reaching for an explication of the feeling of absolute dependence that does not require the concept of causation. What is it?

This is of course one of the knotty points of Schleiermacher interpretation. My interest in it is limited to its connection to Schleiermacher’s non-conceptualism. The overriding consideration is clear: Whatever the relationship between the subject and God turns out to be it must preserve Schleiermacher’s basic claim that religious feeling is “neither a knowing nor a doing but a determination of feeling or of immediate self-consciousness” (CF, §3 [19–20]). Robert Adams has recently suggested that the connection is inferential: The idea of God “is inferred from the description or interpretation of the essential religious consciousness as a feeling of absolute dependence.”⁴⁰ This would allow a distinction between, on the one hand, the feeling of absolute dependence and its non-conceptuality, and, on the other hand, the inference that delivers God as the content of the “whence.” As an interpretation of the text, Adams’s suggestion fits with Schleiermacher’s insistence that God is not given in the feeling itself. Of course there have been other suggestions, including the thought that religious feeling comprises “a different faculty or capacity that mediates God, or the absolute,”⁴¹ and there is Schleiermacher’s own eventual recourse to “the absolutely timeless causality of God” (CF, §52.1 [312]).

Other creative solutions have been proposed. However, at this point it becomes hard to resist the thought that what’s called for is not so much ingenuity as diagnostic insight. What to say about extra-worldly inferences, ad-hoc faculties, and timeless causation? Proudfoot’s assessment, in Religious Experience and more recently, is to say that Schleiermacher is stuck with ordinary causation whether he likes it or not.⁴² We might even say that Schleiermacher invites this verdict by his refusal to entertain any alternatives to his own except a causal naturalism. That is, when he tries to entertain alternative explications of dependence, he can only imagine someone who “means the dependence of finite particulars on the whole and on the system of all finite things, [so] that what is implied and made the center of reference is not God but the world. But we can only regard this explanation as a misunderstanding” (CF, §32.2 [203]). Kant, too, thinks the defender of non-conceptual content should regard this as a misunderstanding, but not because he insists on confining his explanations to this world. Rather, Kant wants us to see causal naturalism and causal supernaturalism as making the same mistake, namely that of failing to take seriously the rule-governedness of experience, which, in turn, as I have been saying, would invite a DarstellunG—a presentation or exhibition of that rule-following in action, in, say, my inability to hear tomorrow’s thunder today, or to locate an object anywhere except at some distance from me. Because he has nothing to play the structural role of conformity to a priori rules Schleiermacher has no way to formulate the Kantian notion of receptivity, and therefore no way to construe the basic cognitive relationship between subject and world except in causal or inferential terms.

The point is not that Kantian non-conceptualism succeeds as an explication of Schleiermacher’s notion of absolute dependence. The point is that the sense of dependence at the heart of Kant’s doctrine of receptivity is closer to Schleiermacher than any alternative construal he considers in The Christian Faith or, as far as I know, elsewhere in his corpus. Writing of Schleiermacher’s sense of absolute dependence, Adams remarks that “Introspectively, you should be able to find it in yourself; look for a feeling of not having made yourself to be as you are [of Sichselbstnichtsogesetzthaben] with respect to your whole condition (CF, §4.1 and 3).”⁴³ At this point Adams is strikingly close to Thompson’s characterization of Kantian receptivity as “intended to capture something of our sense of being in a world we never made, of having to cope with a reality outside and independent of our consciousness.”⁴⁴ Apparently we have reached a point at which the trajectories of religious and philosophical reflection are rather close.

That deserves, I think, to remain a controversial issue. The question is whether there can be, and indeed are, states of consciousness that are not conceptually structured but are best understood by us by analogy with the intentionality of conceptual thought. More than one influential philosophical movement is committed to a negative answer to this question, but it is not obvious that the negative answer is correct.45

On the line of thought I have been developing, it may well be that Kant’s non-conceptualism answers Adams’s question in the positive—and does so without having to rely on an analogy with conceptual thought. Following-out Adams’s implication, we must now feel the full weight of what Kant’s non-conceptualism can offer Schleiermacher: a sense of dependence that cuts deeper than the individuation of objects and is more basic than questions of ontology, a construal of the “whence” that need not be explicated in bogus causal or inferential terms and that floats free of cultural and linguistic practices, an intuition of the universe encompassing, as Melnick puts it, “the full scope of the only space and time that there is,”⁴⁶ and that does not carry with it the threat of arbitrariness or protectionism, and a form of consciousness that may justly be said to be “immediate, raised above all error and misunderstanding” because it is prior to the distinction between subject and object.

Now we may readily grant that no item on this list matches up precisely with what Schleiermacher has in mind. But, equally, I do not see how to avoid the conclusion that we are confronted with a deeply coincident diagnosis of our basic cognitive position in the world. At the same time, notice what little room Kant leaves Schleiermacher for theological purposes—that is, how the slightest deviation from the posture of philosophical anthropology threatens to bring transcendental illusion in its wake. If, for example, Schleiermacher proceeds with the derivations of the divine attributes (eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience) and Christian doctrines (sin, grace, Christ, regeneration, etc.), then illusion follows immediately. Schleiermacher is quite clear that all of these attributes and doctrines “must go back in some way to the divine causality, since they are only to elucidate the feeling of absolute dependence” (CF, §50.3). But to take causation out of the realm of possible experience is the very nature of transcendental illusion.⁴⁷ Alternatively, Schleiermacher can emphasize the strain of theological modesty running throughout The Christian Faith, the leading idea of which is that the divine attributes “correspond to nothing real in God” (CF, §50.3 [305])—in which case we will want to ask about the difference between modesty and skepticism. To be sure, Schleiermacher has open to him at least two familiar lines of reply. He can point out that, on his view, divine and natural causation “are one and the same thing, only seen from different viewpoints” (CF, §46.2 [269]). Then we will want to know what real work the former is doing in the world. The threat here is epiphenomenalism: granted we can describe events around us as sustained by divine preservation, but if all the explanatory (and interpretive, etc.) work can be done by appealing only to natural causation—as, indeed, Schleiermacher himself insists can be done—then why should we view these events in any other light?⁴⁸ If Schleiermacher answers that the feeling of absolute dependence gives us a rational justification for doing so, then he leaves theology behind for speculative metaphysics.

Second, Schleiermacher can argue that the Kantian critique confuses theology with speculative metaphysics—that, now emphasizing the second clause in the above quote, theology contents itself with “elucidating the feeling of absolute dependence.” But then it becomes unclear what to make of such apparent assertions about divine causation as, for example, that divine preservation sustains (Erhaltung) the entire system of natural causation. Is this not an assertion after all? Is it really only about a feeling? This line appears to leave Schleiermacher ripe for the neo-orthodox critique that was not long in coming—a piece of history that is no part of my concern here. But this last imagined exchange between Kant and Schleiermacher does lead to our next complex of issues. In implicating a form of self-awareness in which I do not take myself as an object, my portrayal of Kant’s non-conceptualism pushes him toward a doctrine of the self as somehow not a further object in the world. And that in turn may seem to invite talk of a substantial soul—something Kant explicitly disavows.

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EXPERIENCE