Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism (review)

That history—not only in the form of the lived experience of a writer, but also the history of the appropriation of a text—should be of supreme importance in grasping the meaning of a body of work, is a theme that runs throughout Richard Crouter's book on Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), arguably the most significant Christian theologian since the middle ages. Exploring several facets of Schleiermacher's oeuvre, the book investigates "religious debates and questions within the complex details of personal, social, and institutional history" (9). Schleiermacher's influence, however, extended beyond the field of theology: he made lasting contributions to philosophy, in particular, in the fields of hermeneutics and the theory of knowledge. Significantly, Crouter makes use of Schleiermacher's own insights into hermeneutics in an effort to understand him. Schleiermacher stressed the ineradicably subjective and perspectival element present in all apprehensions and expressions of human knowledge. Hence, it is important to situate a person's utterances in their historical context in order to understand them. This situating is the task of Crouter's book: Schleiermacher's work is positioned not only in relation to his own life and practice, but in relation to the thought and practice of both his contemporaries and that of later thinkers, who were in some way influenced by him. Furthermore, Schleiermacher's "cultural location between Enlightenment and Romanticism" (1) is explored.

The first and last chapters frame the common themes of the book. In the first chapter, "Revisiting Dilthey on Schleiermacher and Biography," Crouter discusses the general question of whether biography, and hence the context of a life and the way that it has been lived, is important to understanding a body of work. Dilthey had claimed that this was especially true in the case of Schleiermacher: unlike Kant, Schleiermacher's significance could only be grasped through his biography. Yet, Crouter not only examines claims about Schleiermacher's personal impact, but also provides an analysis of Schleiermacher's own position on the relevance of life for understanding a body of work. Significantly, he quotes Schleiermacher: "No writing can be fully understood except in connection with the total range of ideas out of which it has come into being and through a knowledge of the various relations important to the writers' lives of those for whom they write" (32). In the last chapter of his book, on the other hand, Crouter discusses the relevance of the history of a text's effects, its Wirkungsgeschichte, in assessing the text's meaning. In this case, the issue is not the history and context of the origin of a work, but rather the history of its reception. What is it that makes a text, in this case Schleiermacher's On Religion, a classic? Crouter cites Francis Watson's dictum that "the significance of a text takes time to unfold" (249). As such, along with Kierkegaard's Johannes Climacus we can affirm that our access to the history of a text's effects privileges our position in accessing its meaning. So Crouter: ". . .we have not grasped the underlying force of the stream that animates these various rivulets [of a text's effective power] until we ourselves witness the temporal unfolding of his [Schleiermacher's] significance" (266). However, while he affirms the "relative" truth of Watson's dictum, Crouter claims that access to this Wirkungsgeschichte is no substitute for letting the text itself work immediately upon the reader. Ultimately, argues Crouter, our interest in classic texts such as On Religion lies in "its immediate power, in its claims to replicate and refocus the world of the reader in ways that destroy time" (267).

Framed by the two hermeneutical problems discussed above, the book is divided into three parts. The first is entitled "Taking the Measure of Schleiermacher." Chapters in this section place Schleiermacher's work in the context of the social, political, religious, and intellectual concerns of his contemporaries or near contemporaries. Chapter two, "Schleiermacher, Mendelssohn, and the Enlightenment," compares themes common to...