The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century
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The Dialectic starts from the premise that the foundations of knowledge themselves are in dispute. Thus the dialectic aims ‘to construct a doctrine of the art of disputation (Kunstlehre des Streitens), in the hope that through this one can reach the common premises for knowledge.’ (KGA II/10, 1, 372). The starting point is not disputed real knowledge.53 Hence the dialectic, irrespective of its transcendental philosophical approach, cannot be merely formal, but rather must also reflect the relation of knowledge to being; it is accordingly the unity of logic and metaphysics.54 The dialectic does not emerge, however, as a science, but rather as a Kunstlehre, which aims to ‘make’ the ‘inner connection of all knowledge’ (KGA II/10, 1, 75), which it, however, does not yet possess. The dialectic is knowledge in a state of becoming in a double sense: the becoming of real knowledge and the knowledge of knowledge. Its real goal is thus the construction of real knowledge, as developed in the second, technical part, and not the completion of pure or philosophical thinking in itself.
For Schleiermacher knowledge is that kind of thinking, which (a) ‘is produced in the same way by all who are capable of thought’ and which (b) ‘is represented mentally as corresponding to the being of the object of thought’ (KGA II/10, 1, 90). In all thinking the two sides, the organic and the intellectual, need to be differentiated.55 Both the ideal and the real are modes of being56 and form ‘the highest opposition’, which is to be regarded as the ‘upper’ boundary of thought and should be reduced to a non-relational identity. In this conception, knowledge is then limited to the realm of opposition, where it stands under the forms of the concept and the judgement.57
According to Schleiermacher, certainty in knowledge and action is grounded in feeling, because non-relational being cannot be known. In the 1822 lectures feeling is addressed as ‘immediate self-consciousness’, which stands in ‘analogy’ to the transcendent ground.58 Schleiermacher determines the transcendental ground as the unconditioned or absolute as the idea of God; its correlative idea is the ideal of the world as the idea of the totality of the conditioned, in which everything ‘stands in the form of the opposition’.59 This too lies ‘outside our real knowledge’, because the totality is never completed (KGA II/10, 1, 147f.). While the idea of God is determined as the terminus a quo of knowledge, the idea of the world is the ‘transcendental terminus ad quem and the principle of the actuality of knowledge in its state of becoming’ (KGA II/10, 1, 149).
The second, technical part of the Dialectic examines the conscious bringing forth of knowledge in construction and combination. Construction deals with the formation of concepts and judgements and explains how a given (and with that receptively discerned) thing is brought into the form of knowledge. Combination deals with the heuristics and architectonic of knowledge and explains how to extend already existing knowledge (heuristics), or the type of internal connection that the already present knowledge is to be brought into (architectonic). Construction and combination as well as the techniques they encompass are only relatively distinct and continually intervene in each other in practice in the knowledge process. Since the process aimed at the idea of the world can never reach completion, each state of knowledge remains relative to and dependent upon individuality, which as an ‘irrational’ moment needs to be compensated for critically through the unity of language and the unity of reason.
2.6 ETHICS
Schleiermacher’s Ethics can be regarded as the real centre of his philosophical work, but even the ethics did not find a completed exposition.60 Ethics is conceived of as an ‘objective’ philosophy, which mediates the individual and the universal.61 Ethics as the ‘science of history’62 is ‘description of the laws of human action’. The content of this action is the ‘animation of human nature through reason’.63 The determination of the highest good results from this, whereas the idea of a complete animation is just an ideal, since it lies in the area of the idea of the world as conceptualized in the Dialectic. It is the task of the Dialectic, not Ethics, to justify this idea in a real sense.
The Ethics is divided according to the classic scheme into doctrines of goods, virtues, and duties, whereby the latter has the actions of individuals as its subject, while the doctrine of goods addresses the functions, forms, and areas of the activities of reason in history as the formation of reason in and though nature. It marks, as Schleiermacher says, a ‘framework’64 of the activities of reason, which stand in interaction without negating each other. Here Schleiermacher differentiates between two modes of the action of reason: the organization as the formation of nature into an organ of reason on the one hand, and the symbolization as the use of this organ in the action of reason on the other. Both functions can be further differentiated according to whether individualization or the community predominates, which then results in the following fourfold scheme: identical organization signifies the social relation of nature and the corresponding forms of intercourse (labour, division of labour, exchange); individual organization private property and the private sphere; identical symbolization the field of knowledge; and the individual symbolization the areas of emotion (art, religion). These four spheres of action correspond to the institutions of the state, free sociability, the academy, and the church.
The doctrines of virtues and duties address the ethical nature (Sittlichkeit) of the individual, who is regarded from the outset as part of the ethical whole. The doctrine of duties points out the dynamic in the individual ethical actions themselves; it is the ‘exposition of the ethical process as movement, and hence the unity of the moment and the act’.65 The doctrine of duties mediates between the doctrines of virtues and goods by relating the individuality of the individual described in the doctrine of virtues to the communal nature already presupposed by the doctrine of goods.
With its central notion of the animation of nature through reason, Schleiermacher’s Ethics represents a comprehensive theory of culture.66 Beyond the terminological and substantive differences to Hegel’s concept of Spirit,67 Hegel’s theory of objective Spirit is the sole comparable contemporary attempt at such a theory, also with regard to the integration of civil society and its forms of intercourse (labour, division of labour, and exchange).68
2.7 INDIVIDUAL DISCIPLINES (AESTHETICS, THEORY OF THE STATE, PEDAGOGY, HERMENEUTICS, PSYCHOLOGY)
As mentioned in section 2.6, a circle of critical and technical disciples are connected to ethics. Of these Schleiermacher discussed in lectures and in treatises written for the Academy of Sciences the following: Aesthetics and the Theory of the State as critical disciplines; Pedagogy and Hermeneutics as technical disciplines.69 Further, in the Ethics Schleiermacher mentions the empirical study of history, which stands in relation to ethics as a ‘picture book’ does to a ‘book of formulae’, but which Schleiermacher did not further elaborate.70
The place of Aesthetics as a critical discipline is clearly demarcated: art belongs to the activity of individual symbolization qua feeling and thus stands in the closest possible proximity to religion.71 Aesthetics itself has the task of deducing the ‘cycle of the arts’ from this foundation and of giving an exposition of the ‘essence of the various art forms’.72 At the centre is the exposition of particularity (das Eigentümliche), which is represented here as self-manifestation.73 From this vantage point, Schleiermacher’s Aesthetics is essentially an aesthetics of artistic production.74 The exposition of the individual arts follows the transition from the subjectivity of feeling to objectively directed representation. The accompanying arts (mime and music) are closest to subjective feeling, while the plastic arts (architecture, sculpture, painting), due to a cognitively directed imagination, form the objective counterpoint as reformulations of the beauty of nature. Both are related to each other through the verbal arts (poetry, drama, the novel), which in their specific ways comprise the whole spectrum of possibilities of expression.
The Theory of the State plays a prominent role in the technical disciplines; its aim is not to develop a normative concept of the state, but rath
er to provide a ‘physiology’ of the state (KGA II/8, 758). The Ethics already had situated the state in the sphere of ‘identical organization’. The state is not the ‘highest idea’, but rather ‘culture raised to the highest power’.75 The real task of the state is communal production in relation to nature, that is, the sphere of the economy. With that, questions of the constitution, law, and politics are secondary for Schleiermacher:
The constitution does not make the state; much less its outer form, whether monarchical, etc. …If the constitution made the state, England would be a mere negative state. The state is, however, much older than the constitution; it lives in the associations and corporations, the improving societies, the East India Company, banks, etc. and in legislation.76
In keeping with a tradition reaching up to Kant, Schleiermacher places civil society (as societas civilis) on the same level with the ‘state’ (as civitas), whereby he restricts the political role of the citizen to that of a state subject.77
The Theory of the State is divided into three sections: state constitution, administration, and defence, where ‘constitution’ here is not meant in the sense of a written constitution, but as the institutional solidification and legalization of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) in the process of the development of culture. The second, material part is politics, which addresses state administration and how it is determined through the organization of the economy. If the latter predominates, then the state becomes an ‘industrious state’ (as opposed to a ‘military state’, in which defence of the state as discussed in part three is the guiding principle). Education and finance policy are further basic areas of state administration. The inner and outer state defence finally comprises domestic justice, foreign war, and diplomacy. The activity of the state can be reduced in the course of civilizatory progress and finally disappear completely.
The character of Schleiermacher’s theory of the state and its place in its contemporary theoretical context are disputed just as much as the tendency of Schleiermacher’s political activity in the Prussian reform process.78 In the sphere of politics, Schleiermacher stresses conviction, while the institution and legal formalization of political and social structures recedes almost completely into the background, as is clearly shown in Schleiermacher’s non-engagement with the broad discussion of the Prussian constitution, which evidently he did not see as a problem: ‘The development of the state is its present condition (Zustand); and this is in fact the constitution; one usually, however, thinks of a written document (upon which I lay little value)’.79
For Schleiermacher, Pedagogy80 is a technical discipline, which develops a technical doctrine of educational practice building upon Ethics. The pedagogical process is based on the characteristics of human nature of receptivity and spontaneity; the first is broadened to a ‘worldview’ (Weltanschauung), while the latter is led to active participation in the perfection of the ethical in the sense of an ‘education of the world’ (Weltbildung). The family, school, vocational training, and the university are the institutions in which this educational process is carried out, whereby each of these institutions forms a focal point of the successive phases that correspond to the natural course of individual development. In this concept, the pinnacle of the pedagogical process is the philosophically grounded interconnection of all knowledge and action, which it is the task of the university to bring about.81
Among the technical disciplines that Schleiermacher lectured on, Hermeneutics is certainly the best known due to the particular attention it received in the twentieth century.82 At the same time, the place of Hermeneutics in Schleiermacher’s system was mostly ignored, while to a large extent his whole philosophy, and his Dialectic, was put into a hermeneutic perspective.83
From 1805 on, Schleiermacher lectured on Hermeneutics in Halle und Berlin.84 That Schleiermacher drew upon Friedrich Schlegel’s ‘philosophy of philology’ as a resource for his conceptualization of Hermeneutics—as he also did in his Dialectic—is undisputed.85 Corresponding to the two sides of the task of hermeneutics—analysis of the objective linguistic context and reconstruction of the author’s individual intentions and methods of composition—hermeneutics is divided into a more objective grammatical and a more subjective psychological or technical part. With that, two methods come to bear: the comparative method, which starts from the already known and through comparison clarifies that which is not yet understood; and the divinatory method, which anticipates contexts or connections. Here as well the objective element is dominant in the comparative method, while divination operates with the subjective intuition of the interpreter. Both methods are, just as with grammatical and psychological (technical) interpretation, dependent upon each other, in so far as neither can the objective mediations be fully grasped (for Schleiermacher this would have absolute knowledge of the ‘world’ as a prerequisite), nor individuality fully exhausted. On this basis, understanding becomes an infinite, never ending task, as is evidenced in an intensified form in the much-discussed problem of the ‘hermeneutic circle’.86
Schleiermacher specifies the relation of hermeneutics to dialectic as one of mutual dependency. Hermeneutics, however, does not constitute knowledge and thus is only an auxiliary discipline for the dialectic.87
Schleiermacher did not assign Psychology a specific place in his system of philosophical disciplines; it stands in a relation of tension both to Ethics and Physics (philosophy of nature) and to Dialectic. Schleiermacher divides psychology into an elementary part and a constructive part. The elementary part deals with the basic functions of human life, the constructive part aims on this basis to ‘show the individualities, the simple and the complex’, for example, a people or the human species.88 The starting point is the self-conscious human’s living ‘I’. It is based on two elementary functions, the ‘spontaneous’ or ‘outward-flowing’ activity, thus the original self-activity on the one hand, and the ‘receptive’ or ‘discerning’ activity on the other. In the receptive activity the senses are dominant at first, which in contrast to animals already open up to the totality of the world and through feeling enact a self-relation.89 Self-consciousness completes itself in an aesthetic and a religious feeling. For Psychology, this entails the supposition of an ‘unmediated orientation’ of the activity of the soul ‘toward the infinite’, which announces itself as the ‘absolute feeling of dependency’, as the dependency on something ‘that we cannot react against’, on an infinite or absolute being.90
2.8 CONCLUSION
Schleiermacher’s philosophical system is not systematic in the sense of a closed system; even the Dialectic is not a prima philosophia like Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre: one cannot deduce the particular disciplines from its principles. Schleiermacher’s general attempt is the balance of speculation and empiricism, and this attempt is to be realized by oscillating between them. Likewise the systematic coherence of the system must be realized by oscillating between the more speculative and the more empirical disciplines; one needs the other and vice versa and the centre of the system is not one basic discipline, for example the Dialectic, but the common gravitational centre of all disciplines. This is a unique position in the area of philosophical systems after Kant.
(Translated by Anita Mage, Berlin.)
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