Schleiermacher

Works

Lectures published posthumously, plus the theology that made his name.

• The hermeneutics lectures, given from 1805 and published after his death, are the general theory; like the semiotics in this same lineage's other founding text, the book is an editor's reconstruction.
• On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799) grounds religion in a feeling of absolute dependence rather than in doctrine or morality.
• The Christian Faith (1821) is the systematic theology, and the feeling-of-dependence account is where Otto later begins and objects.
• His translations of Plato shaped German philosophy's access to the dialogues for a century.

Central ideas

Four, and the last is what got rejected.

• Misunderstanding is the default: understanding must be sought at every point rather than assumed to happen unless something goes wrong. That reversal is what makes hermeneutics general rather than remedial.
• The hermeneutic circle: a part is understood through the whole and the whole through its parts, so interpretation moves between them rather than proceeding in one direction.
• Grammatical and psychological interpretation as two required movements: an utterance is both an instance of a shared language and an act of a particular person, and a reading needs both.
• Divination: a grasp of the author's individuality achieved by a kind of transposition into their position. This is the psychological pole taken to its conclusion, and it is the claim his successors dismantled.

Distinctive vocabulary

Three terms whose later senses differ from his.

• Hermeneutic circle: the movement between part and whole. His version is about textual and linguistic wholes; the later existential version, about a reader's prior understanding, is a different claim under the same name.
• Divination: an intuitive reconstruction of an author's individuality. Not guessing, and not prophecy.
• Psychological interpretation: attention to the utterance as one person's act. Not psychology in the disciplinary sense, which did not exist yet.

Debates and disagreements

He is present in this lineage mainly as the position the others define themselves against.

• Whether an author's mental act is available at all, and whether it is the right target even if it were. Both later members of this lineage say no on both counts, which makes his presence here adversarial rather than foundational.
• Whether the psychological pole is separable from the grammatical one in practice, or whether the second always does the work the first claims credit for.
• How much of the published hermeneutics is his. Like the founding text of the semiotic lineage in this work, it is an editorial construction from lecture material.

Intellectual relationships

Almost everyone who followed him in this field disagreed with him.

• Dilthey took the psychological programme forward and sought a method that would give the human sciences the standing of the natural ones.
• Gadamer, in this same lens lineage, names the psychological aim as psychologism and denies the author's mental act is what understanding aims at.
• Ricoeur, also in this lineage, sides against him on the same question through distanciation: a text's autonomy from its author is productive rather than a problem to be overcome.
• Otto, a reference elsewhere in this work, corrects the feeling of absolute dependence from the other direction — calling it a self-feeling from which something is inferred rather than an encounter.
• German Romanticism supplies the concern with individuality that divination expresses.

How it changes this reading

Schleiermacher is named in the lineage of the Hermeneutic lens, and his role there is to mark the position this work does not hold.

• What survives him and is genuinely used is the reversal: misunderstanding is the default, so understanding is an achievement at every point rather than a state that obtains unless something interferes.
• The circle is the second survival, and it describes the actual movement of reading an artifact: no part settles until the whole is provisionally in view, and the whole is only ever assembled from parts.
• Divination is precisely what this work refuses. A reading that reconstructs an author's individuality from their text is doing the thing the claims about profiles and about confession are built to prevent, and he is the reference that names that operation clearly enough to refuse it.
• It is not evidence about any author's mind or intention.

Useful comparisons

The lens is complete with him, and it is an argument in chronological order.

• Friedrich Schleiermacher: understanding aims at the author's mental act, reached grammatically and divinatorily.
• Hans-Georg Gadamer: understanding is a situated event and the author's psyche is not its target.
• Paul Ricoeur: a text's distance from its author is productive, and understanding must pass through explanation and suspicion first.

Where the ideas meet

All three refuse the same easy picture.

• None treats a text's meaning as immediately available to a competent reader.
• All three hold that understanding is achieved through work rather than received.
• Each treats interpretation as answerable to the text rather than free over it.

Where they part

Two of three are written against the first, which is why the lineage cannot be cited as a school.

• He makes the author's meaning the target of understanding; Gadamer calls that psychologism and denies it, and Ricoeur's distanciation makes the text's independence from its author the productive fact rather than the obstacle. On the central question the lineage runs two against one.
• What the two later members keep is the circle and the priority of misunderstanding — the method's shape without its aim.
• So citing the hermeneutic lens for the recovery of an author's intention is citing the member the tradition was built by rejecting.

Limits

What this reference can carry here is narrow, and the aim is off-limits.

• The psychological programme is not available to this work: reconstructing an author's individuality from a text is the operation its claims about profiles exist to refuse.
• The published hermeneutics is an editorial reconstruction from lectures, so attributing a formulation to him carries that layer.

Criticisms

The objections were made by his own successors and have largely held.

• Divination has no method and no check; it names a hope rather than a procedure.
• Making the author's mental act the target confuses the occasion of a text with its meaning — the charge of psychologism that the twentieth century sustained against him.
• The separation of grammatical from psychological interpretation is difficult to maintain in practice, and the grammatical side does most of the demonstrable work.
• The text is a posthumous compilation, so the systematic Schleiermacher is partly an artefact of editing.

Common misreadings

Four uses this placement does not license.

• Citing the hermeneutic lens for recovering what an author meant, which is the position the rest of the lineage rejects.
• Using divination as a warrant for intuiting a writer from their writing.
• Reading his hermeneutic circle as the existential one, which concerns a reader's prior understanding rather than parts and wholes of a text.
• Treating the published lectures as a book he wrote.

What remains outside this idea

• It cannot establish what any author meant or intended.
• It cannot recover an individuality from a text, which is the specific promise it made and could not keep.