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  • The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, ed. by Jacqueline Mariña
  • Lori Pearson
The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher. Edited by Jacqueline Mariña. Cambridge University Press, 2005. 348pages. $29.99.

This volume provides a solid and accessible introduction to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s thought and to the newest research on his work by established [End Page 1032] scholars in the field. These new readings offer the non-specialist a chance to move beyond outdated interpretations and caricatures of Schleiermacher and to gain a more solid and sophisticated grasp of his work on its own terms. The volume yields a set of insights that challenge, for example, common criticisms of his conception of religion: namely, that it is rooted in an essentialist appeal to a private, individual, and non-conceptual experience. In addition to problematizing this accusation, the contributors give a more rounded portrait of Schleiermacher’s theology and philosophy while also shedding light on underexplored dimensions of his thought, including those related to politics, music, society, and art.

Section I, on “Schleiermacher as Philosopher,” is arguably the most important portion of the book because it offers insight into central aspects of Schleiermacher’s thought that have been neglected (among non-specialists) in the English-speaking world. Knowledge of Schleiermacher’s views related to metaphysics, epistemology, hermeneutics, and ethics is crucial for understanding those texts that are most well known and widely used in Anglophone contexts: The Christian Faith and On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Although the essays in this section are uneven in terms of their accessibility to the non-specialist, they nevertheless offer dynamic and instructive insight into what are often compelling and surprising features of Schleiermacher’s thought.

The Dialectic—Schleiermacher’s essential text on metaphysics, knowledge, and truth—provides the evidence that enables many contributors in the volume to describe Schleiermacher’s philosophy as realist and non-foundationalist. Manfred Frank argues that Schleiermacher is a realist because he “defines reality as the cause of knowledge” (28) and defines truth as “the correspondence (or agreement) of thought with its object” (16). According to Andrew Bowie, Schleiermacher espouses a pragmatic, more nuanced form of realism than is usually signaled by a correspondence theory of truth. This is because correspondence, for Schleiermacher, “is only the postulate of completed knowledge” (78; my italics). Since we can never know or demonstrate whether our thoughts correspond to objects, we can only strive for an “endless approximation” to the “identity of Being and knowledge” (79). Thus, we “presuppose” some kind of “immediate grasp” of the object under consideration in order “to get the ball rolling” in what is always a revisable, open-ended, fallible, and unfinished search for truth (87). Thus, Bowie shows that the Dialectic provides not an absolute science of knowledge but (quoting Schleiermacher) “a doctrine of the art of disagreement in hope that one can thereby arrive at common bases for knowledge” (80). This pragmatic, communicative dimension of Schleiermacher’s conceptions of knowledge and truth relates directly to his non-foundationalism.

In his works on hermeneutics, Schleiermacher anticipates contemporary sensibilities. According to Bowie, Schleiermacher recognizes both receptive and spontaneous—or what many today call structuralist and intentionalist—dimensions of textual production and understanding. In other words, Schleiermacher acknowledges both (1) the degree to which language and meaning are [End Page 1033] structured by contextual forces and (2) the ability of each person to work with language and convey meaning. Schleiermacher’s innovation is that he insists that all acts of interpretation achieve both structuralist and intentionalist aims. Further, for Schleiermacher, there is no purely objective or purely subjective discourse (84). Julia Lamm, too, emphasizes that, in his translations of Plato, Schleiermacher viewed the receptive (structuralist) and spontaneous (intentionalist) dimensions of interpretation as interdependent. In fact, Schleiermacher’s work on Plato enabled him to develop the theories he would later express in his Hermeneutics (92). Both Christine Helmer and Richard Crouter (in Section II) emphasize the extent to which Schleiermacher anticipated contemporary sensibilities about the nature of historical understanding and interpretation. As Crouter notes, Schleiermacher did not believe in value-free inquiry (114). “For him,” writes Crouter, “empirical historical work is not compromised when it is informed by...

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