The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought

Chapter 12: Metaphysical Realism and Epistemological Modesty in Schleiermacher’s Method

• Chapter 12 • Metaphysical Realism and Epistemological Modesty in Schleiermacher’s Method    How are we to understand religion? It is undeniable that religion, and religious motivations, have played a very large role in shaping world events. As such, the question of how to understand religion has become increasingly urgent. At one extreme are those who adopt a comprehensive scientific naturalism. They approach religious beliefs and practices in such a way as to reduce them to nonreligious social or psychological factors; for them religion is part of an ideology or an infantile wish projection that must be outgrown. At the other extreme are many of the religious believers themselves, who take their own religion as absolute truth and take themselves to be in a privileged epistemic position to apprehend it. Both extremes are dangerous: the first because it fails to take both religion and the religious drive seriously, and so ignores an integral facet of human life; the second because it is exemplary of the dangers of religion itself, which can take absolutist and Manichean forms. When religion does take such a form, it degenerates into idolatry, for it mistakes what must always remain a finite and conditioned apprehension of the transcendent for the transcendent 319 320 • Jacqueline Mariña ground itself. Often coupled with such a mistake comes a failure to recognize the validity of other perspectives, as well as a violent exclusion of everything that is other or unfamiliar. Schleiermacher’s theory of religion charts a third course allowing us to avoid the pitfalls of these two unappealing alternatives. Against reductionism, it takes religion and the object of religion seriously: this I will call its realism. Religion cannot be reduced to psychology, anthropology , or ideology. It is not a “mass of metaphysical and ethical crumbs.”1 It demands understanding on its own terms because it is directed to the Absolute, or, as John Hick would put it, to the Real as such. However, Schleiermacher also recognized that the only access we have to this Absolute is through experience. Yet it cannot be stressed enough that this focus on human experience does not amount to a mere speaking about humanity, as it were, “in a loud voice.”2 Schleiermacher ’s emphasis on experience does not ignore the fact that religious experience is always experience of the Absolute, and that it is to the Absolute that religious symbols point. Moreover, from the standpoint of Schleiermacher’s metaphysics, the Absolute is that which establishes and preserves everything that is; it is that which ultimately works in and through history to transform human beings into Godlike persons. Schleiermacher’s theory of religion decidedly does not reduce religion to mere anthropology; to claim that it does is to misunderstand him on a grand scale. Nevertheless, Schleiermacher is quite attentive to the conditions of human knowing and experiencing. Concern with these conditions was not new to theology; Thomas Aquinas had already noted, “The thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower.”3 What was new to theology was the comprehensive character of Schleiermacher ’s account of human subjectivity, an account that both recognized and stressed the finite and conditioned character of all human apprehensions. This account, heavily influenced by Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology, went beyond even Kant in recognizing not only the contribution of the human subject to all knowing and experiencing , but the contribution of human communities—themselves historically conditioned—to human knowing as well. These insights were especially applied to religious experience. Because Schleiermacher’s theory begins with a comprehensive account of human subjectivity, it is theoretically equipped to recognize the validity of different religious experiences without degenerating into relativism. This I will call its perspectivalism. This paper will be a discussion of these two themes— Schleiermacher’s realism and his perspectivalism—and their significance for a theory of religion. Realism Schleiermacher called his own brand of realism a “higher realism.” The later Schleiermacher contrasted his own position with the idealism of Fichte, in which the I knows only itself. Fichte, famously, eliminated Kant’s thing in itself and all of Kant’s dualisms: for him there is nothing distinct and “outside” the self with which the self interacts. There is nothing that is in itself, that is, apart from its relation to the subject, unknowable by the subject. For knowledge to be possible, Fichte argued, there must be a subject-object identity, and hence...