Schleiermacher’s Ethical Socio-Political Theory

"I am human and consider nothing that is human alien to me."

—Roman playwright, Publius Terentius Afer, 163 B.C.

Unlike Martin Heidegger, theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher has an extensive explicit theory of Society, State, School, and the Church. Schleiermacher’s written work is massive with his sermons alone filling fifteen volumes, theology eleven volumes and philosophical writings nine volumes. The best short, but complete summary of Schleiermacher’s theology is theologian Robert Munro’s book,“Schleiermacher: Personal and Speculative,” Pub. Paisley, Alexander Grardner, 1903, which is not copyrighted [Pdf].

Munro’s book is divided into two parts covering Schleiermacher’s history and philosophy. The second part “Speculative Significance,” beginning on page 129 includes epistemology/ontology (p. 131), ethical doctrine (p. 222) that includes his socio-political theory. The epilogue (p. 287) is the most condensed summary of Schleiermacher’s thought and is worth reading first. Munro’s description of Schleiermacher’s epistemology is the best exposition of Kantian epistemology (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781) without the complex technical terminology (thing-in-itself) and is a philosophical masterpiece in itself. Schleiermacher did not agree with every point of Kantian transcendental philosophy, but he certainly had a clear understanding of Kant’s epistemology. I believe Schleiermacher’s onto-theo-ego-logy provides a philosophical foundation for a revived environmentalism movement.

On the first day of my first post-graduate class in philosophy decades ago, my first philosophy professor’s first words to the class were “Friedrich Schleiermacher!” Who? I could of saved decades of studying philosophy—and slogging through Heidegger—if I had not assumed I already knew what he meant by religious “feeling.” Besides, I wanted to go hunting in the philosophy of theologian Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) for a theory of spiritual experience. Interestingly, the German word "Geist" means both "Spirit," and "Mind." Also, political economist Karl Marx (1818-1883) offered a theory of existential alienation and I hoped to form a synthesis of the two philosophers. What I thought was in Hegel’s system turned out to really be Schleiermacher’s theology. Schleiermacher’s primary philosophical influence is Johann Fichte (1762-1814) who formulated the thesis-antithesis-synthesis epistemological model that Hegel gets all the credit for. Adorno criticized Hegel for turning Fichte’s dynamic dialectical model into a static mechanical formulation. It is easy to overlook, or underestimate the value of a solution to a philosophical problem if one does not really clearly understand the problem.

The Individual

Today the term “individual” is most likely to mean the mythic Neo-Liberal self-interested Smithian truck and barter Hobbesian economic savage. Modern libertarian ideology views the individual as an isolated economic monistic unit of activity driven by self-interest, competition, distrust, and greed. When Schleiermacher writes about the individual during the early 1800s, he meant “personhood.” A Person is not merely a material object, nor pure spirit, but rather wholly body and spirit. Personalism resists reductionist materialism that only recognizes human ability as labor to be exploited in a narcissistic society of competitive nihilistic drones. The person only exists as a member of community, as a ‘we’, and only in this social context morality is meaningful. Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950) wrote, that Personalism as a “philosophy of engagement,” a “fighting science” in a call to action against tyranny. Neo-Liberalism is anti-Human, because it is anti-Divine.

Fortunately, by chance, I found a contemporary point of view that essentially captures this aspect of Schleiermacher’s social philosophy of the individual:

"...societies are held together by a web of social bonds that give individuals a sense of being part of a collective and engaged in a project larger than the self. This collective expresses itself through rituals such as elections and democratic participation, or appeal to patriotism and shared national beliefs. The bonds provide meaning, a sense of purpose, status, and dignity. They offer psychological protections from impending mortality and the meaninglessness that comes from being isolated and alone. The shattering of these bonds plunges individuals into deep psychological distress that lead ultimately to acts of self-annihilation...." —Chris Hedges, On Contact, 1/12/19.

We will examine the relationships of the person, state, and church in greater detail later.

Religious Self-Consciousness

Munro wrote that Schleiermacher did for theology what Kant did for philosophy. Schleiermacher emphasizes the personal religious spiritual life rather than abstract doctrine which should not be “fixed and immovable,” but a living ever-advancing development of Christian self–consciousness. This is the opposite view of strict textualism and dogmatism. Non-textual information such as intention, purpose, system objectives, designs, fundamental values, or goals is external --ex post facto-- to the interpretative meaning of text. Schleiermacher wrote, “The soul must be forever recreating itself, trying all its various modes, vibrating in all its fibers, raising up new interests for itself ”(Munro, p.126). In Schleiermacher’s view the individual personality has an “eternal idiosyncrasy” given by G-d that may be latent, but this idiosyncratic "indwelling being of God " must “still be regarded as existent if men are to be considered as created in the divine image” (Ibid., p.118). The individual is “self-determining,” “self-authenticating,” “a mirror of the universe,” and the center of finite being. The individual is not only the foundation of ethics, but within her the "indwelling being of God " finds an explanation of the whole of cosmic processes. For Schleiermacher, human existence “instead of being a necessary accident, like everything else in nature, is the ethical end, the teleological goal of the universe”(Ibid., p.139). Schleiermacher’s use of the term “feeling” does not mean mere affection, or “sensation,” which is “...the lowest stage in the development of the human spirit,” but rather “feeling, as immediate self-consciousness, is the last and highest stage in the same development.” Feeling is the synthesis of thought and will; it is the unity of our being:

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“One of the principal objections adduced by Hegel against Schleiermacher's doctrine of immediate self-consciousness and one that has frequently since been made is that feeling is the lowest grade in the intellectual process, and is not even distinctly human, being also possessed by the brutes as the sense-form of their consciousness. This objection, in itself psychologically false, fails to apprehend Schleiermacher's view, and confounds his representation of sensation with that of feeling. Sensation, it is true, needs to be supplemented by perception and thought: for it is the non-existence, or rather the prophecy of these. It is not so with feeling. This is not a subordinate stage of consciousness existing prior to the more advanced stages: it is the final stage of all the stage which, while implying the highest contrasted states of the conscious Ego, is itself higher than these, because reducing them to a unity present, immediate, and without contrast”(Schleiermacher: Personal and Speculative,”Robert Munro, Pub. Paisley, Alexander Grardner, 1903, p.200) [Pdf].

The integrated unity of feeling, reason, and volition is important for Schleiermacher’s concept of religious self-consciousness. Tyrannical societies deny the existence of individual intuition and teaches that feeling is only irrational sensation to be repressed. In order to maintain a monopoly on what is real, authoritarian societies disseminate as conventional wisdom sociological propaganda to repress both intuition and feeling because they are obstacles to the coarse regimenting of society as a whole.

The World and The Absolute

Human reason is an organizing activity that transfigures physical being and attempts to unite Reason (Logos) and Nature (phusis) to make it subservient to her purpose by shaping and classifying the world. Heidegger’s analysis of the Greek word “Logos” found it original meaning as “gathering together, to collect, to order.” However, empirical existence also shapes consciousness: “We are free in as far as we can act from our own inner being; we are not free in as far as we can be determined by the objective whole, of which we are an integral part”(Ibid., p.231). The “sphere of evil” is the unity of the empirical and human volition in which, “Everywhere it is the same all-dominating might, giving shape to spirit, and compelling it to submit to its rude, aggressive sway” (Ibid., p.181). Yet Schleiermacher says that sin exists in empirical existence not by absolute necessity thereby rejecting dualistic Manicheaism. Heidegger also described Dasein as “being-there,” and as “Fallen” by virtue of being in finite existence. Also, Heidegger borrowed from Schleiermacher the same terminology such as “ground of being,” “universal being,” “real being,” “finite being,” “Being,” “Absolute Being” and “Being of all beings.”

Schleiermacher makes no distinction between G-d and the World for material existence is only another form of “divine being.” He famously wrote,“ ...no world without a God, no God without a world”(Ibid., p.231). Some accused Schleiermacher of being a pantheist and this is also a common criticism of theologian Paul Tillich. Both theologians reject pantheism; Absolute Being is not an object. Yet, the intellect forces us to see the world as a conglomeration of entities. Through knowledge of ourselves and of the world we can gain knowledge of G-d. However, the idea that we can comprehend Absolute Being as if it were a thing, existing “is one of those peculiar anomalies of thought for which there is no accounting”(Ibid., p.288):

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”Schleiermacher hesitated to call God a person; for he felt how difficult it was to speak of Him as personal without falling into anthropomorphic misconceptions and confusion. Yet he equally felt the necessity why he should be thought of as personal. Without this conception we cannot interpret to ourselves, or to others, the fullness of our religious emotion and experience. And so, in preaching and conversation, he used the personal names; though, in exact thinking, he preferred to regard God as the living God. The epithet 'living' alone distinguishes the Absolute from materialism and pantheism, and atheistic and blind necessity”(Ibid., p.302).

In 1636 the Netherlands entered into a period of financial speculation called the Tulip Mania. Tulip speculators wanted rare tulips to sale for large sums of money. The Dutch Republic sent scouts to the jungles of the world to find unique tulips, collect them, and then burn down the jungle so that the collected tulip would be extinct, and therefore sell at a higher price. The implication of Schleiermacher’s theology is that Nature is the face of G-d, yet we mutilate His face daily.