Home > Positioning > Persons > Schleiermacher

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834)

Schleiermacher proposed that understanding has a general structure. Before him, interpretation was a collection of separate disciplines — one set of rules for scripture, another for classical texts, another for law. Schleiermacher argued that beneath these regional crafts lies a single art: hermeneutics as the art of understanding any discourse whatever, spoken or written, ancient or modern, sacred or secular. He gave that art two sides — a grammatical interpretation that works from the shared structure of a language, and a psychological interpretation that works toward the individual mind of the author — and held that misunderstanding, not understanding, is what happens of its own accord, so that understanding must be willed and sought at every point. In theology he made a parallel move: religion is neither a kind of knowledge nor a kind of morality but a province of its own, rooted in feeling. He is read both as the founder of modern hermeneutics and as the founder of modern Protestant theology.

Life

Born 21 November 1768 in Breslau, Prussian Silesia (now Wrocław, Poland), the son of a Reformed army chaplain. He was educated in the schools of the Moravian Brethren (the Herrnhuter) — first at Niesky, then at the seminary at Barby — whose intense, feeling-centred piety marked him for life even after he broke with their doctrine in a crisis of faith and left to study at the University of Halle (1787–1790). Of that break he later wrote that he had become “a Moravian again, only of a higher order.”

He took orders and served as a chaplain at the Charité hospital in Berlin from 1796. There he entered the circle of early German Romanticism, sharing lodgings for a time with Friedrich Schlegel and contributing to the Athenaeum. With Schlegel he planned a complete German translation of Plato; the project fell to Schleiermacher, who carried it out across 1804–1828 — a landmark of German classical scholarship, organised to show the dialogues as a developing philosophical whole rather than a set of isolated works.

After a period as university preacher and professor at Halle (from 1804), disrupted by the Napoleonic occupation, he settled in Berlin. He helped Wilhelm von Humboldt plan the new University of Berlin and, at its founding in 1810, took the chair of theology, holding it alongside his pulpit at Trinity Church and a secretaryship of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He preached and lectured until his death on 12 February 1834 in Berlin.

General hermeneutics

Schleiermacher’s decisive step was to generalise. The interpretive traditions he inherited were special hermeneutics — bodies of rules tied to particular kinds of text. He proposed instead a general hermeneutics that applies equally to all of them, because all are instances of one thing: a person bringing thought to language and another person understanding it. Hermeneutics becomes the art (Kunstlehre) of reconstructing that act.

He made the inversion that defines the field. The naïve assumption is that understanding happens by itself and misunderstanding is the occasional exception. Schleiermacher reversed it: “misunderstanding occurs as a matter of course, and so understanding must be willed and sought at every point.” Interpretation is not a repair undertaken when communication breaks down; it is the constant, active labour that understanding always requires.

Grammatical and psychological interpretation. Every utterance stands at the meeting of two things — a shared language and an individual mind — and so interpretation has two corresponding sides. Grammatical interpretation treats the discourse in terms of the language it is drawn from: the meaning a word or construction carries within the whole linguistic system available to author and audience alike. Psychological (or technical) interpretation treats the discourse as the act of a particular person: the thought as it took shape in this mind, this author’s distinctive use of the common stock. The two are complementary and unequal across cases — some texts yield most to the grammatical side, others to the psychological — and full interpretation oscillates between them.

The divinatory and comparative methods. On the psychological side especially, Schleiermacher distinguished two procedures. The comparative method proceeds by induction, ranging the work against others of its kind. The divinatory method proceeds by a tentative, fallible projection — the interpreter forms a hypothesis about the author’s individuality that goes beyond what the evidence strictly contains, then tests and corrects it. Divination is not mystical insight; it is disciplined conjecture, always provisional.

Understanding the author better than himself. Schleiermacher held that the interpreter may come to “understand the discourse just as well as and then better than its author” — an aim he treated as an infinite, never-completed task. The phrase has often been read as a claim to telepathic access to the author’s inner life; closer readings take it more soberly, as the claim that an interpreter can make explicit the rules and structures an author followed only implicitly.

The hermeneutic circle. Part and whole are mutually conditioning. One must grasp a text as a whole to understand any of its parts, yet can only build up the whole from the parts. Understanding therefore comes in degrees and advances by repeated passes, each refining both sides at once. The circle is not a vicious one; it is the form interpretation takes.

Theology and religion

Schleiermacher’s theology runs parallel to his hermeneutics: in both he isolates a domain with its own character rather than treating it as a department of something else. In On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799), addressed to the Romantic intellectuals who had dismissed religion as superstition or as a crutch for morality, he argued that religion is neither metaphysics nor ethics. It is not a body of doctrines to be believed nor a set of duties to be performed but a distinct mode of the mind — an intuition and feeling for the infinite, “the sense and taste for the infinite,” prior to and independent of both knowledge and action.

In his systematic work The Christian Faith (1821–22, revised 1830–31), he located the essence of piety in the “feeling of absolute dependence” (das Gefühl schlechthinniger Abhängigkeit) — the immediate self-consciousness of being utterly dependent, which he identified as the human relation to God. Doctrines, on this account, are articulations of religious feeling, not deductions from metaphysical premises. The move grounded a tradition of liberal Protestant theology that took inner religious experience, rather than dogma or natural theology, as its starting point, and it earned Schleiermacher the standing of the founder of modern theology.

Reception

Schleiermacher never published his hermeneutics as a book. It survives from the manuscripts of lectures he gave between 1805 and 1833 and from his students’ notes, assembled posthumously by Friedrich Lücke in 1838. For more than a century that conflated edition was the only access to the theory; only with Heinz Kimmerle’s critical edition (1959) were the manuscripts re-edited directly, as a sequence of drafts, showing how Schleiermacher’s conception shifted over nearly three decades.

Wilhelm Dilthey was the principal agent of the revival. His prize essay on Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics and his biography Leben Schleiermachers (vol. 1, 1870) made Schleiermacher the origin point of a hermeneutic tradition and carried the general art of understanding toward the methodology of the human sciences.

The sharpest later reading came from Gadamer, who in Truth and Method (1960) charged that Schleiermacher had “psychologised” interpretation — making the goal of understanding the empathetic reconstruction of the author’s original mental act, rather than engagement with the subject matter (die Sache) the text is about. On Gadamer’s account this located meaning behind the text, in a vanished moment of authorship, and treated the interpreter’s own historical situation as a barrier to be overcome rather than a condition of understanding. The reading has itself been contested: critics note that it fixes on the psychological side and underweights the grammatical interpretation that is equally central for Schleiermacher.

Where Schleiermacher stops

Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is built around a single regulative aim: the correct reconstruction of an author’s meaning. Both of its sides serve that aim — the grammatical recovering the language the author drew on, the psychological recovering the individuality that shaped the use. The interpreter’s task is to cross the distance back to the author; the interpreter’s own historical position figures as something to be bracketed, a source of the misunderstanding the art exists to defeat.

What lies outside this programme is the productivity of that distance itself — the possibility that the interpreter’s own situation, tradition, and prior understanding are not obstacles to be cleared away but the very medium through which a text speaks, and that the subject matter, not the author’s psychology, might be where understanding is finally aimed. These are the questions Dilthey reframed as the foundation of the human sciences and that Heidegger and Gadamer turned from a method of interpretation into an account of understanding as a mode of being. Schleiermacher opened the general question of understanding; the historicity of the one who understands was left for the tradition he began.

Key works

See also: Hermeneutics · Dilthey · Gadamer · Heidegger