Religious Studies, Page 1 of 25 © Cambridge University Press 2012
doi:10.1017/S0034412511000254
Bridging the gap between social and
existential-mystical interpretations of
Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’
ˇ
GORAZD ANDREJC
Department of Theology and Religion, University of Exeter, Amory Building,
Rennes Drive, Exeter, Devon, EX4 4RJ, UK
e-mail: ga246@exeter.ac.uk
Abstract: The article engages with two contemporary understandings of
Schleiermacher’s notion of feeling which are in important aspects in conflict: a
social understanding (Kevin W. Hector and Christine Helmer) and an existentialmystical understanding (Thandeka). Using the phenomenological category of
‘existential feelings’ drawn from the work of Matthew Ratcliffe, I argue that they can
be brought into a coherent overall account that recognizes different aspects of
feeling in Schleiermacher’s work. I also suggest that such an interpretation of
Schleiermacher’s concept of religious feeling offers a different and better
understanding of the role of feelings in religious experience and belief than the
contemporary ‘perception-model’ of religious experience.
Introduction
The notion of feeling (Gefühl) in the works of Friedrich Schleiermacher has
been disputed in various ways. In part, this is undoubtedly because his concept of
feeling, ‘far from being merely ambiguous, is polysemous: “feeling” occurs with a
very different meaning in different contexts’ (Sorrentino (), ). This is not to
say that there is no agreement on the understanding of ‘feeling’ in Schleiermacher
whatsoever. For example, it is widely agreed that many formulations of feeling in
Schleiermacher have important common emphases, like the thought that feeling
is distinct from reasoning and action, and that it is ontologically prior to both; it is
also widely agreed that the notion of feeling holds a central place in
Schleiermacher’s theological and philosophical thought. Beyond that, the
differences among the contemporary interpretations are sometimes striking.
In the present essay I focus on a particular set of apparently opposing views,
the contrast being that between social and existential-mystical interpretations.
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The former is represented by Kevin W. Hector () and Christine Helmer (),
and the latter by Thandeka ( & )).
Hector claims that ‘feeling’ in Schleiermacher should be understood as
attunement to social circumstances – sociality is therefore constitutive of feeling.
With somewhat different emphases but similarly, Helmer relates Schleiermacher’s
understanding of the Church and Christ’s person-forming activity in individual
believers to his ‘social mysticism’ – the Church is co-constitutive of the distinct
Christian experience, which at its centre involves religious feeling. On the other
hand, Thandeka’s interpretation sees the feeling of at-oneness with nature
through our organic being as the central and key understanding of religious feeling
for Schleiermacher (not mentioning the Church or community).
My choice of interpretations that belong to opposite ends of a spectrum is
deliberate – it serves the main aim of this article, which is to show that the social
and the existential-mystical interpretations of feeling in Schleiermacher can be
successfully brought into a compatible account. This is done by employing the
notion of ‘existential feeling’ developed recently by Matthew Ratcliffe, which can
encompass most of the central claims of both interpretations. The second aim is to
argue that the phenomenological reading of Schleiermacher on feeling that I
present here is relevant for contemporary philosophy of religion, in particular by
shedding light on the role of feelings in religious experience.
A note of clarification is in order before we proceed. Despite some exegetical
suggestions, the main thrust of this article is not exegetical in the sense of offering
historical textual criticism of Schleiermacher. My interpretative approach involves
decisions about what is more and what less important in Schleiermacher’s work, as
well as decisions regarding a more modern philosophical and theological language
which can be used to take up and develop some of Schleiermacher’s insights on
religious feeling. These decisions are partly guided by my own philosophical and
theological convictions. While Schleiermacher’s immediate context, influences,
and audiences are by no means ignored, the overall vision that encompasses both
interpretative and philosophical aims of this article is to locate the discussion of
interpretations of feeling in Schleiermacher in relation to the wider contemporary
philosophical discussion of feelings and their place in religion.
Social understanding : Kevin W. Hector
In a recent article, Kevin W. Hector (, ) argues that
Schleiermacher’s notion of feeling should be understood as ‘one’s non-inferential
attunement to one’s circumstances’. He notes that, despite their differences,
several of Schleiermacher’s explications of feeling indicate that feeling for him
denotes ‘a pre-reflective harmony or at-one-ness between oneself and one’s
environing circumstances . . . [which is] prior to knowing and doing, yet providing
direction for each’ (Hector (), ). He quotes Schleiermacher’s statement
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Interpretations of Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’
that in feeling ‘the subject-object opposition is entirely excluded as inapplicable’
(Dial O, ; Hector’s translation), and the description of the feeling of absolute
dependence as an ‘immediate self-consciousness of finding-oneself-absolutelydependent’ (CF §), to interpret Gefühl as ‘how one finds himself’ (Hector (),
) in one’s circumstances. This corresponds to Heidegger’s concept of
attunement, to which we will return in a later section.
Beyond these interpretations, but still in a Heideggerian tone, Hector claims
that, for Schleiermacher, such attunement is inherently social. By this he seems to
mean more than the thought that feeling is merely circulated in the community
(clearly expressed in CF §.–, §.). Hector claims that, since it includes a
normative dimension which is a ‘product of one’s socialization in certain normladen practices’ (Hector (), ), we can explain ‘a good bit’ of what
Schleiermacher meant by ‘feeling’ as internalization of custom. All practical
examples of non-inferential ‘feel’ for circumstances that Hector provides in order
to make clear how to understand feeling as attunement are examples of one’s
attunement to some aspect of the social world (ibid., ).
Hector bases these claims on Schleiermacher’s understanding of kindconsciousness (CF §.), which could be described as a disposition, essential to
human beings, towards social/interpersonal way of existence with other human
beings. Kind-consciousness is for Schleiermacher closely related to feeling:
‘Everybody . . . always finds himself . . . involved in a multifarious communion of
feeling’ (ibid.). Kind-consciousness is in a dialectical relationship with selfconsciousness – the two are mutually shaping each other. Moreover, kindconsciousness and its expressions are necessary conditions ‘for the continuous
existence of the God-consciousness in every human individual, and also for its
communication from one to the other in proportion to the different levels of
human fellowship’ (CF §.; see also §.–, §.). For Schleiermacher then,
sociality, at least in the context of the Christian community, is constitutive of
feeling. Applying a pragmatist strategy to theology in taking social practices as
‘theology’s explanatory primitive’, Hector suggests that all higher theological
notions such as redemption and indwelling of the Holy Spirit are to be explained
in terms of the former (Hector (), ).
A question which suggests itself to Hector is: what about a particularly crucial
instance of attunement in Schleiermacher’s theology, namely Christ’s Godconsciousness? According to Schleiermacher, Christ’s God-consciousness was not
constituted by the community. Since it was not merely social customs, to what
‘situation’ was Christ attuned, when he was completely ‘in tune with God’?
[Christ] must have entered into the corporate life of sinfulness, but He cannot have come
out of it, but must be recognized in it as a miraculous fact [eine wunderbare
Erscheinung] . . . His peculiar spiritual content . . . cannot be explained by the content of the
human environment to which He belonged, but only by the universal source of spiritual
life . . . (CF §.)
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Christ’s God-consciousness is understood here as ‘something completely original’
(Marina (), ), which transcends mere attunement to social practice. Hector
seems to accept this solution by positing that Christ’s complete attunement with
God preceded the founding of a community where this attunement circulates
(Hector (), ; cf. Hector (), –).
Social understanding : Christine Helmer
At first glance, Christine Helmer’s () conclusions in her article on
mysticism in Schleiermacher may seem different from Hector’s interpretation.
Notably, Helmer positively values the mystical element in Schleiermacher’s
theology of redemption, whereas Hector does not believe that his strategy ‘would
be attractive to those who appreciate Schleiermacher’s “mystical” tendencies’
(Hector (), ). After a closer look, however, these two perspectives appear to
be fairly compatible, even mutually supporting.
Helmer argues against an influential interpretation and rejection of
Schleiermacher by Emil Brunner, who famously accused the former of conflating
nature and spirit, and of abandoning the witness of the Bible by putting ‘mystic
human subjectivism’ on the pedestal instead (quoted in Helmer (), ). In
the context of her argument against Brunner’s accusations, Helmer effectively
interprets Schleiermacher as a Christian ‘social mystic’ for whom the redemption
of the individual believer ‘is coconstituted with the creation of community’ (ibid.,
) – the Church. She traces Schleiermacher’s descriptions in the Speeches of
mystical, felt communion, or even union, not with God but with all of humanity
through loving relationships between human beings (OR –), to his later
‘soteriological and ecclesial construal of mysticism’ (Helmer (), ) in
The Christian Faith, where Schleiermacher relates the subjective or mystical
element of feeling closely to the communal element (life of the Church) (CF §.–,
§., §.).
People are assimilated into Christ’s God-consciousness through the
ecclesial mediation of Christus Praesens. One’s relations to Christ and to the
Church are therefore interconnected and related to the same kind of feeling; in
Helmer’s words, ‘Christ’s redemptive activity effects simultaneously the new
creation of the individual and the constitution of the community’ (Helmer (),
). Helmer feels that in this way, the dangers of some of Schleiermacher’s early
mystical leanings, which tend to annihilate individuality through a felt union with
the universe (either with non-human nature, or ‘humanity’), are avoided via
his emphasis on Christ’s person-forming activity in individual believers. The latter
is achieved through the spiritual community of the Church. Helmer’s formulation
of the social nature of Schleiermacher’s mysticism and his theology of
redemption – the two are inextricably linked – is well summed up in her claim
that ‘[for] Schleiermacher, the positivity of the Christian church is the condition for
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Interpretations of Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’
the possibility of a distinct Christian experience, which is the foundational
redemptive experience of the believer with Christ’ (ibid., ). This claim is
grounded in statements of Schleiermacher such as these: ‘[Within] Christian
communion, there can be no religious experience which does not involve a
relation to Christ’ (CF §.) and ‘the Christian feeling can only exist side by side
with monotheism’ (CF §.).
I designate both Hector’s and Helmer’s accounts of feeling as social since: ()
both argue that the life of the Christian community, which involves ‘deep’ aspects
of interpersonal relatedness and internalization of customs, is constitutive
of distinct Christian experience, which for Schleiermacher is characterized by
feeling. This ‘multifarious communion of feeling’ is a manifestation of kindconsciousness, which ‘dwells in every man’ (CF §.). () Both give a central place
to Schleiermacher’s claim that Christ’s God-consciousness is circulated and
transmitted through the community and that by this process an individual believer
is brought into a redemptive relation with Christ (by partaking in Christ’s Godconsciousness). () Neither is sympathetic to nature-mystical strands of
Schleiermacher’s thought nor to interpretations which emphasize those strands.
It is to one such interpretation that we now turn.
Gefühl as relating to more-than-human
One of the more radical interpretations of Schleiermacher’s notion of
feeling is found in the works of Thandeka ( & ). She takes
Schleiermacher’s Dialectic as the key to unlocking the meaning of Gefühl both
here and in other works of Schleiermacher. In this important work
Schleiermacher attempted directly to answer a philosophical question which was
left unanswered by Kant and which Fichte, Jacobi, Hegel, and Shelling were also
trying to solve (Frank (), –). The problem can be formulated in this way:
What in our consciousness binds together ‘thought’ or cognitive receptivity and
‘will’ or our active spontaneity? Schleiermacher claimed that the answer is feeling,
the ‘immediate self-consciousness’ (Dial O, ) that is the transcendent ground
of our being. Since neither reflection nor action can provide the linking of different
moments into a whole, which must be the basis for the continuing Self,
Schleiermacher argues in the Dialectic that it is only feeling that ‘contains an
immediate reference to existence; it is the “feeling of Being” ’ (Frank (), ; cf.
Bowie (), –).
Thandeka (, ) thinks that this ‘existential encounter’, which happens
through the feeling of Being, ‘lies at the core of Schleiermacher’s life and work’.
The most primordial stage of human consciousness – which Thandeka calls the
‘initial stage of consciousness’ – is a mystical experience of being:
At this stage, thinking is object-less and the self is subject-less. Schleiermacher’s
reconstruction of the self is the self that emerges from this immediate encounter with the
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fullness of life. The self that emerges is human nature certain of itself and celebratory of
itself as an inextricable part of the nexus of natural world. (ibid.; italics added)
According to Thandeka, it is at the ‘null point of objective consciousness’, the
point of transition between thinking and willing, that the special experience
of ‘feeling of being’ can happen. At this pre-cognitive and pre-reflective stage
of consciousness we simply are the feeling of our nonindividuated self as a part of
natural world. The reality of the world is indistinct from our own reality as a
nonindividuated part of this world.
We are not individuated because thinking, which is the means by which we individuate,
has been cancelled. Thus, as a nonindividuated part of the natural world, we are life, all of it!
We are the world. (Thandeka (), )
So, in apparent contradiction to Helmer’s approach, it is exactly the nonindividuated at-one-ness with the ‘nexus of the natural world’, which includes a
kind of cancellation of individuality, that Thandeka sees as central for
Schleiermacher’s notion of feeling.
Thandeka (, , , ) also emphasizes another aspect of this insight of
Schleiermacher: that feeling is a manifestation in our consciousness of the fact that
we are embodied beings. What cognitive thinking cannot do – namely, to grasp or
even ‘glimpse’ the transcendental ground of itself, which is life, our embodied,
organic being – only feeling can. And because the feeling of being in which the
subject–object distinction is cancelled is ‘the natal hour of everything living in
religion’ (OR ), Thandeka (, ) emphasizes that ‘Schleiermacher, in stark
contrast to Kant, celebrated the body as part of the human link to God’.
Importantly, this most basic feeling of being is, according to Thandeka, not only
pre-reflective, but also ‘pre-religious’ (Thandeka (), , ). This fits
together with the notable lack of attention in Thandeka’s book () to the
relation of feeling to any aspect of community, Church, or interpersonal context.
While this does not amount to claiming that the feeling of being is pre-social, it at
least suggests such a reading. Clearly, it is with an existential nature-mysticism, not
social mysticism, that Thandeka connects Schleiermacher’s notion of feeling.
So, given these different and apparently contradictory interpretations of
Schleiermacher’s notion of feeling, are we not forced to choose between social
(Hector–Helmer) and existential-mystical (Thandeka) understandings? Or do we
have to recognize a significant disunity in Schleiermacher’s work? Or are these
differences simply a result of selective focusing on some of Schleiermacher’s texts
and taking those as the key to interpret the whole, while ignoring or downplaying
the others?
By way of answering the last question, I suggest the answer is ‘yes’ to a certain
extent. Both interpretations have their favoured texts, which do seem to lend
support to the greater claims they make about Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’.
One might conclude from this that there lies a serious inconsistency in
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Interpretations of Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’
Schleier-macher’s work on the subject. While not insisting that Schleiermacher
must have been consistent in everything he said on feeling, I do suggest that the
answer to the first question above is ‘no’: the two interpretations considered can
be brought into a considerable proximity by a unified account of feeling in
Schleiermacher. In order to do that and at the same time relate aspects of
Schleiermacher’s discussion to the modern views on feeling(s) in religious
experience, we have to engage briefly with modern philosophy of feeling generally.
Philosophy of feeling
Developments in the philosophy and psychology of emotions and feelings
in the last three decades have brought about many differing views, not all of which
can be mentioned here. We will, however, draw on some familiar distinctions that
have come out of these debates. These distinctions will prove useful for
interpreting Schleiermacher’s notion of feeling in the setting of modern
discussions on feeling in philosophy of religion, to which we will return in the
last section of the article.
A traditional school of thought associated with much Anglo-Saxon philosophy
and so-called Folk Psychology tends to talk about the human mind in terms of the
belief–desire distinction (Hutto & Ratcliffe ()). In this scheme, feelings do
not have any philosophically significant role (epistemological, ethical, or metaphysical). Even in emotions – usually seen as compound states consisting of a
mixture of beliefs, desires, and feelings – the latter are not considered to be an
essential part of the combination. It is not hard to see why this is so. Although
compounded, emotions are considered to be intentional states: they are ‘directed
at something’ (Deigh (), ). One is afraid of an approaching dog, hopes for a
victory in a coming football game, or hates the fussy boss. Feelings, on the other
hand, are usually viewed as affects which ‘do not have “directions” ’ (Solomon
(), ). According to this picture, feelings are therefore defined as mere
‘subjective colourings’ which are secondary feedbacks of bodily goings-on
(Frijda et al. (), ) – they are a non-essential addition to the essential
constituents of mind: beliefs and desires (both intentional). Peter Goldie has
called such a view – which he challenges – an add-on view of feelings, according to
which ‘they can tell us nothing about the world and how to act in the world’
(Goldie (), ).
Another school of thought in contemporary philosophy of emotion sees feelings
as vital to human orientation in the world and decision-making, and even to
cognition/knowledge. Michael Stocker argues against the tendency to reduce
emotions to the reason/desire duality and claims that this picture distorts our
understanding of emotions. He argues that ‘affectivity’ or ‘psychic feelings’ are
indispensable for emotions, as well as for other ‘affective’ mental states like
moods, interests, and attitudes (Stocker & Hegeman ()). Goldie ()
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argues that feelings can be intentional: an emotion such as fear of a burglar
involves a ‘feeling towards’ an object (burglar) and should not be analysed in
terms of a pre-existent belief plus an unintentional bodily feeling. Rather, claims
Goldie, the kind of feelings he calls feelings towards are a case of ‘unreflective
extraspective emotional engagement with the world beyond the body’ (ibid., ).
The later Robert C. Solomon accepted a similar view (Solomon ()).
In addition to these two treatments there is what we can call a Heideggerian
view of feelings. Although this view can be traced through Heidegger back to
German Romantic philosophy, to which Schleiermacher belonged, its most
influential expression can be found in Heidegger’s Being and Time. There,
Heidegger first objects to the misrepresentations of affective states in much of
Western philosophy, which portrays them as merely ‘accompanying phenomena’
with no relation to cognition (apart from their tendency to distract and obscure it)
(Heidegger (), ). But beyond that, he develops what some consider to be a
‘highly original thesis’ (Solomon (), ) which says that certain kinds of
feelings which he calls Stimmungen – traditionally translated as ‘moods’ – are very
basic, primordial ways of our finding-ourselves-in-the-world. These are nonintentional states which are ontologically prior to the intentional ones and make
the latter possible (Heidegger (), –).
This brief review of the three groups of views serves only to delineate basic
distinctions and will enable us to position our interpretation of Schleiermacher’s
feeling in the contemporary context. While rejecting the ‘add-on’ view of all
feelings as inadequate (although with limited applicability in some contexts) and
accepting that feelings can be intentional (for example, at least some feelings
associated with ‘basic emotions’ such as fear, anger, love, hate, and hope), I will
use especially the Heideggerian view that there are non-intentional feelings
(not directed at specific objects/events) that have an important, world-constituting
role in human experience. We will have to proceed on these assumptions without
engaging with different positions here.
‘Heideggerian’ phenomenology of existential feelings
At the centre of Heidegger’s Being and Time is the question about the
meaning of Being, i.e. about a sense of what it is to be (Heidegger (), –); in
particular, the goal is to understand the human being’s kind of being, which
Heidegger calls Da-sein (ibid., ). In order to illuminate the phenomenological
‘structure’ of our basic experience of being (‘Da-sein’s being-in-the-world’),
Heidegger introduces several concepts; we will limit our attention to two of them:
Befindlichkeit [‘attunement’] and Stimmung [‘mood’].
Heidegger coined the term Befindlichkeit from the common German question
‘Wie befinden Sie sich?’, which translates as ‘How are you?’ or ‘How do you feel?’,
but also as ‘How/where are you situated?’ ‘“Sich befinden” . . . has three
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Interpretations of Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’
allusions: The reflexivity of finding oneself; feeling; and being situated’ (Gendlin
(–)). Heidegger explains (, ) that we should view our ‘being in the
mood’ (Stimmung) as Befindlichkeit or attunement. The mood is ‘so far from being
reflected upon that it precisely assails Da-sein in the unreflected falling prey to the
“ ‘world” ’ of its heedfulness’ (ibid., ). So, ‘[it] comes neither from “without” nor
from “within”, but rises from being-in-the-world itself as a mode of that being’
(ibid.). To simplify, Heidegger defines ‘moods’ as primordial feelings (not ‘merely’
but ‘also’ internal states of mind) that disclose our relatedness to the world.
Importantly for our discussion, the social dimension of Heidegger’s ‘Da-sein’s
being-in-the-world’ is constitutive of it: it ‘is always already with others’ (ibid.,
), so that even ‘knowing oneself is grounded in primordially understanding
being-with’ (ibid., ). Moods do not have a subject–object structure and are in
an important respect ‘pre-cognitive’:
[Heidegger] departs from the traditional conception of feelings as sensuous states that
“merely accompany” the so-called ‘higher faculties’ of will and reason, and from the usual
practice of classifying moods according to their qualities of pleasure, pain, and desire.
Heidegger’s basic idea is that moods are a unique and primary way of disclosing Dasein’s
Being-in-the-world, and a disclosure that is prior to the ‘cognitive’ disclosure of the
so-called ‘faculty of reason’. (Smith ())
Moods, therefore, constitute our sense of belonging to the world before the
abstract conceptualizations of the ‘world out there’ and ‘me inside’ (the subject)
take place. While moods are not intentional (they are not directed at an object)
they make intentional states (including beliefs, emotions, and articulated desires)
possible (Heidegger (), ).
More recently, Matthew Ratcliffe () has introduced the concept ‘existential
feelings’, which is developed out of Heidegger’s concept of ‘moods’. In part,
Ratcliffe’s motivation for introducing this phenomenological category was to pick
out some feelings that do not fit well into the category ‘emotions’ or ‘emotional
feelings’. He argues that categorizing all feelings as ‘emotional’ would ‘obscure the
important difference between states that are intentionally directed at particular
objects, events or situations in the world, and others that constitute backgrounds
to all our experiences, thoughts and activities’ (ibid., ). Existential feelings are
defined as:
non-conceptual feelings of the body, which constitute a background sense of belonging to
the world and a sense of reality. They are not evaluations of any specific object, they are
certainly not propositional attitudes and they are not ‘mere affects’. (ibid., )
Although similar to Heidegger’s ‘mood’, Ratcliffe’s ‘existential feeling’ (EF) is a
somewhat different concept. First, when Heidegger describes examples of
‘moods’, he discusses only a very restricted list, focusing for the most part on the
contrast between an everyday mood and that of anxiety or angst. While Heidegger
does include also ‘elation’ or ‘joy’, ‘boredom’, and possibly a few more (Smith
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()), Ratcliffe (ibid.) thinks there can be much greater variety of EFs, with
corresponding variety of expressions of them. Second, he claims that the role of
the body in our experience (including feelings) is essential, yet it is not addressed
by Heidegger’s account. For this reason, Ratcliffe builds his account of EFs also on
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology with its emphasis on our embodied existence.
And third, EFs include a variety of states that can be ‘(a) short lived, (b) sustained
over a period of time or (c) retained over the course of a life as habitual
temperaments; but the English term “ ‘mood” ’ only seems suited to (b)’ (Ratcliffe
(), ). Accepting these reasons as weighty enough for the choice of a different
term, we will from now on use Ratcliffe’s notion of ‘existential feelings’ rather than
‘moods’.
Ratcliffe claims that EFs are never absent, since ‘all experience is structured by
some variant of existential feeling’ (ibid., ). Examples of expressions of EFs can
be the following: feeling ‘complete’, ‘separate and in limitation’, ‘at home’,
‘invulnerable’, ‘at one with life’, ‘at one with nature’, ‘real’, ‘part of the real world
again’, ‘disconnected’, or a sentence like ‘All is empty of meaning’. In the Christian
religious context, they may be expressed by ‘feeling God’s presence in everything’,
‘feeling full of the Holy Spirit’, ‘being alienated from God’, or by ‘The world is a
miracle’. Often, the descriptions of EFs are highly metaphorical, which implies
that they are not easily categorized or conceptualized (ibid., –). Nevertheless,
we can and do communicate about these states.
Many varieties of EF are ‘mild’ and constitute the background of what we
consider normal life-experience or senses of reality, like moderate ‘disconnectedness’ (which may last for days, months or longer), or special times of feeling
‘more real’ or ‘intensively alive’. In addition to such cases, Ratcliffe also includes
(phenomenological descriptions of) unusual experiences, such as the experiences
of people who suffer from schizophrenia, the Capgras illusion, and the Cotard
delusion (ibid., –), as well as those that are usually understood as more
‘healthy’ but still unusual, like mystical experiences (ibid., –). His
methodological approach, which also uses relevant psychiatric research, entails
the view that it is often by analysing the unusual cases and dramatic changes in
EFs that an awareness and appreciation of the more ‘normal’ variants of EFs is
possible for us.
In relation to the involvement of the body in feelings, Ratcliffe opposes the
contrast between ‘feelings of the body’ and ‘world-directed feelings’/‘feelings
towards’ (e.g. Goldie, Stocker). Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, he claims that feelings
can () be a direct experience of something other than the body (emotional
feelings) through the body, () constitute our relatedness with the world (nonintentional, existential feelings) as embodied, as well as () be ‘self-directed’ when
the body feels itself or any part of it (‘bodily’ feelings) (ibid., ).
So, EFs are ways of experiencing, not the embodied self alone, but also the world
and the relation between the two, ‘the three aspects being inextricable’ (ibid., ).
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Interpretations of Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’
While EFs constitute the background of our discursive thought, emotional feelings,
and other intentional states, there is a multi-way relation between these so that
sensory perceptions, beliefs, and emotional episodes can help focus one’s attention
to, but also reshape and co-influence, one’s sense of reality which is constituted by
EFs. However, Ratcliffe argues that ‘the dependence is not symmetrical’ (Ratcliffe
(), ): EFs determine the possibilities for thought, emotions, action, etc.
more fundamentally than the other way around (ibid., –).
Schleiermacher and religious existential feelings
It is now time to bring this discussion of feelings into relation with
Schleiermacher’s writing. We will do this by way of a phenomenological reading of
the much-discussed second speech (OR –). The Speeches as a whole contain
early formulations of most topics and positions which were later developed by
Schleiermacher in more detail and sophistication in other works. And, while the
highly rhetorical, personal, and at times poetic style of the first edition of Speeches
(), which I use here, may include a notable degree of conceptual ambiguity
(MacKintosh (), –; Proudfoot (), –; Forster ()), the work
contains efforts to express certain feelings and direct readers’ attention to their
own feelings, which is useful for our interpretative aim.
In the first edition of the Speeches, the essence of religion is located in feeling
(Gefühl) and intuition (Anschauung). These two always go hand in hand; one
without the other is ‘nothing’ (OR ). Intuition here stands for, broadly speaking,
a non-conceptual form of insight or cognition (Crouter, in OR , n. ; Adams
(), ) while the intuition that is the objective side of feelings essential for
religion is described as ‘intuition of the universe’ (OR –). Andrew Dole
describes it as ‘a view or an impression of some overarching, structural feature of
the world as a whole or of all that exists; to have an intuition of the universe is to
have a sense of its overall character’ (Dole (), ). We need to remember,
however, that Speeches is not a systematic text, and the conceptual distinctions in it
are not always consistent. In my view, several senses of both ‘intuition’ and
‘feeling’ can be detected in the second speech alone, and this may be the main
reason for the existence of very conflicting set of interpretations of both concepts.
Furthermore, both concepts underwent changes of use/sense from Schleiermacher’s
earlier to his later work, and intuition in particular became almost entirely displaced
by ‘religious feeling’ as the descriptor of the essence of religion by the time of the
second edition of the Speeches (), and soon became associated much more
with scientific knowledge instead (Adams (), –; Forster ()).
So, while some have argued that ‘intuition’ in the first edition of the Speeches is
non-conceptual (Crouter, in OR , n. ; Adams (), ), others have suggested
it is not only conceptual but ‘an interpretation’ (Grove (), ; Grove (),
). In terms of intentionality, Brandt’s fully cognitivist ‘perception-model’ of
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Schleiermacher’s religious intuition, where intuition is intentionally directed at
‘the Infinite’ and is prior to religious feeling (Brandt (), –), may be an
extreme example, but it is not unusual to see intuition as implying at least some
kind of intentionality for the feeling-intuition pair (cf. Adams (), ). A
minority of interpreters have interpreted intuition in the Speeches as an unfinished
‘religious act’ that does not reach full intentionality although constituting a
pull towards the religious ‘object’, which is, however, not really an object
(Dupré (), ). Similarly, Ten Kate sees intuition as a mediatory act between
(non-intentional and non-conceptual) feeling and (intentional and conceptual)
belief and knowledge, itself ‘not coinciding with these opposite poles’ (Ten Kate
(), –).
We cannot continue this exegetical debate here. But this should suffice to
make us wary of expecting neat and simple exegetical conclusions regarding the
meaning of ‘intuition’ in the first edition of the Speeches. In his recent treatment of
the topic, Dole is wise enough to leave the question of the relation of intuitions of
the universe to religious feelings in the Speeches open:
The idea of ‘accepting everything individual as part of the whole and everything limited as a
representation of the infinite’ suggests either a kind of apperceptive habitus that provides
fertile ground for the having of intuitions of the universe, or an awareness of the relatedness
of all things that is stimulated by the impact of one or more such intuitions.
(Dole (), )
We will briefly return below to the question whether and how Schleiermacher’s
notion of ‘intuition’ from the first edition of the Speeches might be put to use in
contemporary discussion of religious experience. But now to the notion of
‘feeling’: It is clear that Schleiermacher strictly distinguishes feeling from
discursive thought (beliefs, knowledge, and ‘metaphysics’) on the one hand, and
from action (involving one’s will and morals) on the other (OR –). What is
often overlooked, however, is that Schleiermacher in the Speeches distinguishes
between different kinds of feelings. Perhaps the clearest distinction is between the
more important feelings in religious context which are ‘the essence of religion’,
and those which, despite being characteristic for religious lives in the broader
sense, are not a part of religion’s essence. Dole notes that in this second group are
feelings – for example, feelings of tolerance towards fellow human beings, of
reverence in the face of the eternal and invisible, of compassion, and of remorse
over sin against others – which flow more or less directly from the feelings that are
religion’s essence, and are a part of what he calls Schleiermacher’s ‘ideal religion’
(Dole (), ).
But there are even more senses of ‘feeling’ discernible in the Speeches. We read,
for example, about ‘powerful and disturbing feelings of religion’ (OR ), which
are incompatible with the ‘calmness of mind’ that is needed for proper moral
conduct. In contrast, the proper religious feeling can and should accompany every
action according to Schleiermacher – hence the claim: ‘We should do everything
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Interpretations of Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’
with religion, nothing because of religion’ (ibid.). To be driven by passionate
feelings for one’s religion is something quite different from living a (moral) life that
is accompanied by a background consisting of proper religious feelings as by
‘a holy music’ (OR ). One notable difference between these ‘bad’ passionate
feelings ‘for one’s religion’ and the feelings which are the background of
appropriate religious life according to Schleiermacher seems to be that the former
are intentional, and the latter a non-intentional background to religious life.
A few paragraphs later (OR –) Schleiermacher again compares certain
kinds of intentional feelings – this time more ‘noble’ kinds, which, according to
Schleiermacher, his readers tend to mistake for religion’s essence – with what he
considered to be such. He claims that even in the feelings of ‘fear of the material
forces’ like thunder or sea, or in the feeling of ‘joy at the beauty of corporeal
nature’, like the bloom of the flowers or brilliance of sunsets, we nevertheless
cannot ‘recognize the presence of an almighty being’. ‘You will then find that these
phenomena, no matter how strongly they move you, are still not suited to be
intuitions of the world’, although they can be ‘a beginning’ of religion (OR –).
Schleiermacher’s view here appears to be that, although several kinds of feelings
are part and parcel of religious life – some appropriately so, and some not – only a
very special, restricted kind of feelings is characteristic of religion’s essence. That
kind is related to ‘communion between a person and the universe’ (OR ), or to
‘intuiting each thing as an element of the whole’ (OR ). ‘[In] religion everything
strives to expand the sharply delineated outlines of our personality and gradually
to lose them in the infinite in order that we, by intuiting the universe, will become
one with it as much as possible’ (OR ; italics added). So, the picture is
considerably complex: There are feelings which are only falsely called ‘religious’;
and, while there may be intentional and non-intentional feelings that are an
appropriate part of ‘ideal religion’ (including emotional feelings towards Jesus in
Christianity, or towards one’s own Church, or towards particular creations like a
flower or a mountain), only some feelings constitute the essence of religion: the
ones that involve some degree of ‘losing’ oneself in a deep relation with the whole.
Albrecht points to the highly metaphorical ‘mystical moment’ passage in the
second speech as central for interpreting Schleiermacher’s view of religion’s
essence: the ‘religious ur-affection’ (religiöse Uraffektion), as Albrecht calls the
highest and inexpressible religious feeling of oneness with the universe, is prior
and superior to both intuitions and [other] religious feelings that make up ‘ideal
religion’, and a person’s piety is genuine only in so far as other elements of that
person’s religious life (feelings and intuitions, beliefs, practices etc.) flow out from
this Uraffektion (Albrecht (), –).
Such religious ur-affection, then, is pre-reflective and transcends subject–object
structure, and, although one can be aware of it but for a fleeting moment of
consciousness according to Schleiermacher, it ‘constitutes a background sense of
belonging to the world and a sense of reality’, like existential feelings do according
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to Ratcliffe (and ‘moods’ according to Heidegger (cf. Herms ()). The
similarities between the phenomenological category of existential feeling and
Schleiermacher’s formulation of religion’s essence in the Speeches do not stop
there. A significant feature of Schleiermacher’s account is that many feelings that
‘are religion’ are possible (OR ), as Ratcliffe claims that there are many varieties
of existential feelings (Ratcliffe (), , –, ). Moreover, Schleiermacher
develops his argument on the basis of his description of ‘two examples’ of religious
feelings by lightly sketching, as he puts it, ‘some of the prominent religious
intuitions from the realms of nature and humanity’ (OR ; italics added). Like the
feeling of oneness with the natural, more-than-human world, the case of intuiting
humanity (through feeling) as a whole also involves transcending subject–object
structures and relations.
One result of this is the realization that an overly individualistic understanding
of human personality is illusionary (or a misleading construction, we might say).
Instead, ‘everything human is intertwined and made dependent on one another’
(OR ). These, of course, are early formulations of the social-mystical strand of
Schleiermacher’s account of feeling which Helmer picks up in her interpretation
and which is more prominent and explicit than the nature-mystical strand.
Similarly, Ratcliffe focuses mostly on the role of EFs in our relation to the
surrounding social world or interpersonal context (Ratcliffe (); ()),
although he recognizes that EFs characterize our relation to the more-thanhuman or ‘impersonal world’ (Ratcliffe (), ) as well.
So, for the Schleiermacher of The Speeches it is through one’s relation to of the
universe as a whole that one moves from the finite to the infinite. But this
transition happens through one’s immediate context of experience: ‘[In] our
relationship to this world there are certain transitions into the infinite, vistas that
are hewn through’ (OR ). This may be the relation to the immediate
surroundings of the natural world (like stars at night, or a lake and trees), or
one’s social environment (like the religious community of which one is a part
of, or one’s lover). Importantly, these ‘worlds’ are not experienced as objects
(Frank (), ) but rather as contexts in relation to which one can experience
anything from alienation to complete at-one-ness.
Before we move on, it is important to note that the ‘mystical’ point about
feeling – that it involves experiencing degrees of at-one-ness with one’s context
(or ‘losing’ of the subject-object distinction) – is not lost in Schleiermacher’s
later works either. In the Dialectic, it is explained that in feeling the ‘subject-object
antithesis remains completely excluded and is not applicable’, and that
‘immediate self-consciousness does not have knowledge of an “I” ’ (Dial O
() II, ff.). Similarly in The Christian Faith Schleiermacher insists that in
feeling ‘the subject unites and identifies itself with everything which, in the middle
grade (of consciousness), was set over against it’ (CF §.). But how is this related
to the specifically Christian context – the Christ-believing community?”
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Interpretations of Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’
Towards a complex picture of Christian religious experience
Before addressing this issue, let’s remember that in this article we are
addressing two questions: first, how can we reconcile the social and existentialmystical interpretations of Schleiermacher’s concept of ‘feeling’ via the unifying
account based on the concept ‘existential feeling’? And second, what contribution
can such an interpretation of Schleiermacher make to the modern efforts to
understand the role of feeling in religious experience and its relation to religious
belief?
Reconciling the interpretations of Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’
In order to answer the first question we need to clarify briefly the notion of
‘mysticism’ and its relation to existential feelings. According to Ratcliffe, many
experiences which are considered to be mystical in the main religions can be
understood as involving an awareness of more intense or ‘deeper’ variations of
existential feelings, or significant changes in these (Ratcliffe (), –). If we
accept this view, there is an important continuity between what we consider to be
normal EFs, which most people seem to inhabit (for example feeling alienated,
disconnected, or in harmony with our surroundings, social, artificial, or natural),
and the more unusual ones, including those very special cases of which the
‘religious geniuses’ and mystics speak. By calling Schleiermacher’s position
‘mysticism’, then, we are here not implying a focus solely on extraordinary or rare
experience.
Granted such an understanding, we have seen that we can find at least two
strands of mysticism in Schleiermacher: nature-mysticism and social mysticism,
whereas Schleiermacher’s attitude to the inward ‘god-mysticism’ is clearly less
favourable (OR ). While nature-mysticism is detectable in the Speeches and,
according to a plausible reading, in the Dialectic, social mysticism is more
prominent and can be found in somewhat different forms in early as well as
later works, including The Christian Faith, as Helmer points out. Unfortunately, however, Helmer tries significantly to downplay the importance of
Schleiermacher’s nature-mysticism. Out of her theological worry that ‘problematic
implications arise tending toward the elimination of individuality’ if we accept
those early nature-mystical formulations, she relegates them to ‘the rhetorical
surface of the Speeches’, which is due to ‘Romantic influences’ (Helmer (),
–). This seems to suggest that ‘romantic influences’, like the emphasis on
the ur-affection of oneness, do not deserve a serious philosophical or theological
treatment, or that these ‘romantic’ ideas expressed by Schleiermacher are not
compatible with Christian theology and therefore corrupt that which is properly
theological in Schleiermacher.
Similarly, we have noted that Hector’s interpretation of ‘feeling’ as ‘one’s noninferential attunement to circumstances’, despite drawing (also) on Heidegger’s
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work and using Heideggerian vocabulary, focuses exclusively on the attunement
as internalization of social custom (Hector (), ). While such interpretation
is compatible with Heidegger’s understanding of Da-sein as ‘being-with’ others
(Heidegger (), ), it does not do justice to either nature-mystical strands in
Schleiermacher’s view of ‘feeling’, or Heidegger’s own claims about the
attunement to the more-than-human, natural environment. And Thandeka, as
we have seen, completely ignores the social in favour of one’s organic, bodily atone-ness with the natural world in her most extensive work () on
Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’.
How, then, can we resolve this tension? The first step in bringing the valuable
insights of these different accounts into a unifying account is to allow that both
nature mysticism and the ‘romantic’ kinds of social mysticism (which are not
specific to the Christian community) are creation-mystical experiences that reveal
to one one’s deeper, mystical connection with creation. EFs of at-one-ness either
with one’s social context or one’s natural environment – or, in contrast, EFs of
particular alienation from these contexts or transitions between different EFs – are
essential to such experience. Our bodily engagement with our surroundings is at
the core of both kinds of EFs. In feelings of at-one-ness, one’s separateness is
loosened or ‘dissolved’.
Next, we can recognize that those more specifically ‘Christian feelings’, which
are characteristic of the Christ-centred social mysticism in the Church, are
phenomenologically more complex: () they are deeply permeated and largely
structured by Christian concepts and stories, and () they are closely related to a
‘person-forming’ process that happens in the Christ-believing community, which
is also significantly conceptually structured. Because of the historical specifics of
Christianity, this redemptive Christian social mysticism needs to be seen as related
to the special experience of Jesus by the early Christian community (CF §,
postscript). This involves the ways in which existential and emotional feelings
as experienced and expressed by the early Christ-believers were related to JudaeoChristian concepts and beliefs. The Church, from the earliest times to the present
day, exists for the purpose of circulation of Christ’s God-consciousness, which
happens through social custom, and in this way the individual believers are
‘partaking in redemption in Christ’.
The way we can understand this specifically Christian social mysticism
phenomenologically is that it involves different aspects of experience intertwined
with one another or ‘fused’ into a unified whole (cf. Ratcliffe (), –):
emotional feelings towards other people, one-self (guilt, shame, pride, etc.), God
(conceptualized), and more-than-human segments of the world; discursive
thought; and importantly, existential feelings (non-conceptual). The latter are
constantly present in some form or another and ontologically prior to other states;
but it may be suggested that in Christian social mysticism EFs are of special variety
and depth, and connected especially to the believer’s relatedness to her ‘world’ of
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Interpretations of Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’
Christian community. Christian concepts and beliefs can guide the believer’s
attention to, co-shape, and enable the expressions of, certain feelings better than
others (Christian religious traditions have nurtured and ‘allowed’ expressions of a
considerable variety of feelings, but this variety does not, of course, exhaust all
possibilities). This picture corresponds well with Schleiermacher’s claims that only
particular, historical religions can include ‘actual elements of religion’ or Godconsciousness; a universal, generalized religion – which would presumably
involve something like an experience of pure EF – cannot be realized or
experienced by anyone (OR –). ‘Religion never appears in a pure state’
(OR ), since God-consciousness is always combined with other aspects like
people-directed ‘emotions’ (CF §.) and ‘cognitive activities’ (CF §.). Each
religious experience is for Schleiermacher ‘a situated experience of the transcendent; that situatedness cannot be abstracted from experience’ (Marina (),
).
In response to Helmer’s worry with nature-mysticism we can say that, from a
Christian theological perspective, these aspects of experience and the feelings
involved can plausibly be seen as related: through the EFs that involve one’s atone-ness with the world (or, a temporary but radical lack of it), the fragile and
often illusionary nature of our ‘I-constructions’ can become apparent. For
Schleiermacher, however, this mystical ‘losing’ of one’s individuality can be
neither permanent nor absolute. In fact, it is portrayed as a fleeting moment
in consciousness of which we become really aware only when it is already over
(OR –). But it leads to genuine humility through a profound awareness of the
deeper relatedness of everything in the world. It is by this very fact that it opens up
the possibility for a new creation in Christ. Schleiermacher’s view that ‘immediate
self-consciousness does not have knowledge of an “I” ’ which ‘only arises through
the reflective self-consciousness’ (cited in Frank (), ) is a precursor to his
affirmation of the person-forming activity of God in Christ that happens only in the
community of the Church (CF §).
Such an understanding successfully accounts for the fact that the main themes
of Christianity are both social or deeply interpersonal and subjective-personal at
the same time. The relationship of a person with God is understood to be
inextricable from the interpersonal relations of that person with other people.
Therefore, the earliest Christian formulations of the problem of sin, as well as of its
solution in Jesus Christ, are concerned with interpersonal relations (and through
these necessarily also with relation to God), which involve growth in agape, the
‘difficult love’. ‘We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love
the brethren. He who does not love his brother abides in death’ (John .). As
Christ’s God-consciousness is circulated and transmitted through the Church, the
believers are assimilated into it through the ecclesial mediation of Christus
Praesens. As Hector argues, sociality, or intersubjectivity, is co-constitutive of
feeling in this context. One’s attunement with this special community, which was
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and is co-formed by Christian narratives and belief-commitments, and this
community’s customs, is – at its best – a holy partaking in a restored community of
interpersonal relations in Christ.
So, in short: the way to reconcile the social and existential-mystical
interpretations is to posit that deep existential feelings are characteristic for all
these cases: the existential nature-mystical experiences, various social-mystical
experiences, and the specific Christian social-mystical experiences, where in the
latter case, EFs are perhaps most ‘heavily’ fused with discursive thought and
with other, intentional feelings. There are relevant differences, however, in the
ways in which different EFs are co-present with other aspects of experience in
each case.
Finally, it has to be admitted that the interpretative approach to Schleiermacher
adopted here has its own biases. Most notably, given the ‘existential feelings’
interpretation, it is hard to see how Schleiermacher’s formulation of religious
feeling that became central in CF – the feeling of absolute or ‘utter’ dependence
(FAD) – could be so central or ‘privileged’, in the Christian context or elsewhere. If
EFs are many and varied as is claimed here, and expressions of them equally so,
on what basis should they be reduced to a particular unified formulation or
expression? This difficulty might be somewhat lessened by noting that
Schleiermacher sometimes claims (e.g. CF §.) that the FAD is not an expression
of a particular instance of religious existential feeling – as the early Proudfoot (
(–)) and many others have interpreted it – but ‘a radical abstraction that does
not, by itself, occupy a moment of consciousness’ (Wyman (), ). If this is
so, FAD should not be understood as a description of the actual phenomenal
content in someone’s experience. However, it has to be admitted that
Schleiermacher is at least ambiguous on this: while, for example, in CF §. we
read that in the analysis of FAD ‘we abstract entirely from the specific content of
the particular Christian experiences’, in CF §. we learn that the ‘idea’ which the
term ‘God’ presupposes is ‘nothing more than an expression of the feeling of
absolute dependence’.
Philosophical significance
Beyond the interpretative question concerning Schleiermacher’s notion of
feeling, there are several interesting contemporary questions in philosophy of
religion which one can bring to the notion of ‘existential feeling’ and its use to
interpret Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’ in this context. For example, both Ratcliffe
(, –) and Mark Wynn () have recently suggested that religious
conversions can be understood by way of (usually dramatic) changes in EFs.
Moreover, the most discussed question in philosophy regarding Schleiermacher’s
‘feeling’ has been whether religious feeling, understood along the lines which
Schleiermacher understands it – sometimes limited to his formulation ‘feeling of
absolute dependence’ – can be conceived as either direct perception of God, or as
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‘evidence’ for belief in God. Can our interpretation of Schleiermacher’s feeling as
‘existential feeling’ contribute anything to this epistemological concern?
I suggest that it can. For the sake of brevity, we will leave the evidentialist
interpretations aside here and relate our discussion only to the ‘perception model’
of religious experience. Contrary to the approaches of several influential works of
the last four decades in epistemology of religion, where God-experience is said
to be a direct cognition – a ‘perception of God’ through ‘distinctive non-affective
qualia’ (Alston (), ), or ‘perceptive experience’ where God appears as ‘an
object’ (Yandell ()), or as a ‘supernatural thing’ (Swinburne ()) –
Schleiermacher wrote that ‘there is no such thing as an isolated perception of
deity’ (Dial T ), either through any kind of sense perception or by way of ‘feeling’
(ibid.), since ‘any possibility of God being in any way given is entirely excluded’
(CF §.). It is only with these qualifications firmly in mind that we can
consistently interpret, I suggest, claims like ‘God is given to us in feeling in an
original way’ (ibid.), or that God is ‘co-posited’ or ‘implied’ (mitgesetzt) in feeling
(ibid.), or indeed, the cognitivist-sounding claims about religious ‘intuition’ in the
Speeches.
But Schleiermacher did think that in certain special kind of feelings the world is
‘evoking a response’ (Bowie (), xvii), which properly or legitimately leads ‘in a
theological direction’ (ibid.), i.e. towards religious belief-formation. He wrote that
‘[religious] experience . . . consists precisely in this, that we are aware of this
tendency to God-consciousness as a living impulse’ (CF §.). In the Speeches we
read: ‘You cannot believe in [God] by force of will or because you want to use him
for solace and help, but because you must’ (OR ).
If we relate the concept of existential feelings to this debate, we might first note
that for Ratcliffe the religious belief in the monotheistic God is ‘symptomatic of a
felt way of belonging to the world’, although, according to him, ‘the same can be
said for other spiritual and mystical convictions that do not incorporate a
monotheistic God’ (Ratcliffe (), –). Also quite independently of
Schleiermacher interpretation, Wynn has suggested that Ratcliffe’s notion of
existential feelings may be taken to involve ‘a kind of apprehension of God’ (Wynn
), in line, not with the perception-model of religious experience argued for by
Alston, Swinburne, or Yandell, who operate within the ‘add-on’ view of feeling,
but with a theological understanding ‘that God is to be conceived not so much as
an individual entity or being, but as being or reality without restriction’ (ibid.).
On the basis of our interpretation of Schleiermacher, I want to suggest a
small step further from this suggestion. To do this, I will use Wittgenstein’s
description of his special experience in his ‘Lecture on ethics’ () as an
example.
The rare experience of ‘wonder of existence’ that Wittgenstein describes can be
seen as a special case of existential feeling. He tends to express it, he says, only in
‘nonsensical’ language like ‘What a miracle that anything should exist’, or ‘How
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extraordinary that the world exists’ (Wittgenstein (), ). These expressions are
nonsensical, he argued, since something can be a ‘miracle’ or ‘extraordinary’ only
relative to something else that is ‘normal’, whereas the existence of the world can
hardly be described as extra-ordinary (literally speaking).
What is most interesting for our discussion, however, is what Wittgenstein says
next:
[All] I wanted to do with [these experiences] was just to go beyond the world and that is to
say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men
who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of
language. (Wittgenstein (), –)
We do not need to engage with Wittgenstein’s early or later thought on religious
belief to see that, in these passages, he recognizes the nature of such feelings as
inviting religious expressions and possibly a religious attitude as well – this
despite his reluctance to see such language as ‘sensible’ at the time. These
experiences were pulling him strongly to ‘go beyond the world’ with language.
Schleiermacher, of course, thought that accepting the ‘religious-belief-inviting’
nature of EFs is appropriate and that one should follow by adopting religious
beliefs expressed in ‘God-talk’ and more. It is in this way, perhaps, that we can
‘save’ the problematic notion of ‘intuition’ of the first version of the Speeches for
contemporary relevance: by understanding ‘religious intuition’ as an unfinished,
instinctive act towards religious descriptions (Dupré (), ), mediating
between feeling and belief, itself ‘not coinciding with these opposite poles’
(Ten Kate (), –).
More generally, it may be suggested that at least some existential feelings as
experienced by many people have a religious-belief-inviting nature. This is not to
suggest that such a complex belief as belief in the monotheistic God is directly
invited by particular EFs. Rather, we might think of something like an immediate
pull, sometimes felt very strongly by many people, to describe the world, nature,
the existence of humans, etc. as a ‘miracle’ or ‘creation’ for example. Such
descriptions go beyond purely empirical, physical descriptions of the world, they
tend to treat the world or universe as a totality, and they are considered by many to
be particularly appropriate, or, indeed, ‘right’.
In my view, it would not be appropriate to think of this aspect of religious
belief-formation as ‘perception’ or even ‘direct cognition’ of God. Existential
feelings are non-intentional, and, if the view on the role of EFs in religious
experience and religious belief-formation presented in this article is correct, then
‘perception of God’ language runs the risk of seriously misrepresenting religious
belief-formation, as well as important aspects of Christian religious experience.
Legitimizing religious convictions in any community cannot but involve rhetoric,
as Schleiermacher was well aware when he claimed that rhetoric and poetry, and
not doctrine, are primary expressions of religion (CF §–).
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Interpretations of Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’
References
Works of Friedrich Schleiermacher
Ästhetik O: Ästhetik, ed. Rudolf Odebrecht (Berlin: Walter de Guyter, ).
CF: The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Mackintosh & J. S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, ).
Dial O: Dialektik , ed. Rudolf Odebrecht (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs Verlag, ). Reprinted in Friedrich
Schleiermacher: Dialektik . II, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, ).
Dial T: Dialectic or, The Art of Doing Philosophy: A Study Edition of the Notes, ed. & trans. Terrence Tice
(Atlanta GA: Scholars Press, ).
OR: On Religion: Speeches to its Cultural Despisers [a translation of the first, edition of the German text], nd edn,
ed. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).
Secondary bibliography
ADAMS, ROBERT M. () ‘Faith and religious knowledge’, in Jacqueline Marina (ed.) Cambridge Companion to
Friedrich Schleiermacher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), –.
ALBRECHT, CHRISTIAN () Schleiermachers Theorie der Frömmigkeit (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter).
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Notes
. See Hector (, –) for an informative list of different meanings of Gefühl in several different
contexts in Schleiermacher’s works.
. In this article, my understanding of Schleiermacher’s embeddedness in his time draws especially on
Lamm (), Crouter (), Bowie (), Frank (), Bowie () and (), and Marina (),
among others.
. CF §; CF §; Dial O, ; Ästhetik O, –, .
. Hector (, ) presents his approach as a ‘pragmatist’ one. In case it needs emphasizing, the claim
that the community is prior to the individual in epistemology as well as in ethics is an important tenet
of pragmatism. I will mention two examples. According to Putnam, Dewey thought that ‘we are
communal beings from the start. Even as a “thought experiment”, the idea that beings who belong to
no community could so much as have the idea of a “principle”, . . . is utterly fantastic’ (Putnam (),
–). Similarly, Rorty (, ) writes that he sees knowledge as ‘a matter of conversation and of
social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature’.
. See also CF §, §, and §.
. Schleiermacher is careful not to define this ‘miracle’ in a sense of God’s revelation as something
‘absolutely supernatural’ breaking into natural history. See the footnote to CF §..
. Helmer’s account does justice to something which Hector doesn’t mention, namely that
Schleiermacher’s very definition of kind-consciousness is quite ‘mystical’: it is something ‘which dwells
in every man, and which finds its satisfaction only when he steps forth beyond the limits of his own
personality and takes up the facts of other personalities as his own’ (CF §.).
. Similarly, Manfred Frank and Andrew Bowie take the Dialectic as the most important source for
understanding Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’, but their interpretation, though similar to Thandeka’s, is
concerned with the philosophical aspect of feeling rather than the mystical one (Bowie (), –,
and (), –; Frank ()).
. However, Helmer makes clear elsewhere (Helmer (), –) that she appreciates the
central importance of the metaphysical understanding of ‘feeling’ in the Dialectic for our
understanding of ‘feeling’ in The Christian Faith. Yet, she still prioritizes the CF interpretation, since
it ‘fleshes out [the “feeling of the lack” as developed in the Dialectic] in Christian theological terms’
(ibid., ).
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G O R A Z D A N D R E J Č
. Thandeka quotes Redeker () on this point.
. Elsewhere Thandeka does note Schleiermacher’s attention to intersubjective context, but she again
emphasizes that Schleiermacher’s highest kind of feeling is ‘the unitive experience . . . [that is] empty of
thoughts and images’ (Thandeka (), ). For Schleiermacher’s nature-mystical leanings in The
Speeches, see (OR , –, –, , –, , ).
. For two collections of different contemporary views (philosophical, psychological, and some
neuroscientific) on emotions, including the “standard” one I am summing up in this paragraph, see
Solomon () and Frijda et al. ().
. Stocker goes even further when he claims that non-affective claims in principle cannot explain feelings
(Stocker & Hegeman (), ).
. See Deigh (), De Sousa (), and Wynn () for similarly ‘rich’ and intentional views of
feelings.
. This is not to deny that significant differences exist among the accounts of thinkers within each of
these, rather artificially delineated, ‘groups’.
. Gendlin (–) estimated that Heidegger’s concept of Befindlichkeit is one of the most
frequently misunderstood of his concepts, despite its central importance in Being and Time.
Several scholars and translators have had difficulties in translating and explicating it (Ratcliffe (),
). Joan Stambaugh, who had the privilege of having personal discussions about the term with
Heidegger, translates Befindlichkeit as ‘attunement’ (in Heidegger (), xv). She also approves
translating it as ‘disposition’, which is a term of choice for Strasser (). Stambaugh (in Heidegger
(), xiii–xv), Gendlin (–), and Ratcliffe (, ) all argue that Macquarrie and Robinson’s
translation of Befindlichkeit as ‘state of mind’ is inadequate.
. See also Gendlin (–).
. Compare Strasser’s (, –) treatment of ‘dispositions’.
. For a different view, see Solomon (, ), who insists that ‘moods’ should be understood as
generalized and sometimes confused emotional feelings which have the whole world as their object.
Ratcliffe (, –; ) offers several arguments against this view.
. For another, psychological application of Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit and Stimmungen to our bodily
relations to our environment, see Gendlin (–).
. For the relation of Schleiermacher’s use of ‘intuition’ to its Kantian origins see Ten Kate () and
Marina ().
. In addition to the works mentioned in this section, see also: Albrecht (), Lamm () and (),
Marina (), Proudfoot (), and Sorrentino ().
. Eilert Herms () agrees that Schleiermacher’s Gefühl can be understood similarly to Heidegger’s
Stimmung, but criticizes Heidegger for ignoring or not seeing the theological implications of several of
his views expressed in Being and Time. See also Herms (, –) for his phenomenologicaltheological reading of Schleiermacher’s notion of ‘immediate self-consciousness’.
. See Daniels (). This also helps avoiding the sometimes overstated contrast between ‘ordinary
believers’ and ‘religious geniuses’ – for example in James (, –) and sometimes in
Schleiermacher (OR –, ).
. I am here mainly following, not Schleiermacher’s use of the word ‘mysticism’, but the classification of
mysticism developed by Daniels (), where he distinguishes mystical experiences along two lines:
one according to the nature of the context of experience, and another according to the mode of
experience. Contexts – ‘objects’ in Daniels’s terminology, which I reject for reasons stated above – can
be: God, Community, Nature, Soul, or Mind. Accordingly, we can talk about ‘god mysticism’ (Daniels’s
‘theistic mysticism’), social mysticism, nature mysticism, monistic mysticism, and mental mysticism.
According to the mode of experience, however, Daniels distinguishes between monistic, dialogic,
synergic, unitive, and non-dual ways of relation between the subject and the context of
experience, corresponding to the extent to which the subject feels herself as existing opposite-to, or
at-one-with, that context. So, for example: nature mysticism can be experienced by a believer of a
monotheistic faith who interprets it – and usually experiences it – in accordance with his theistic
beliefs. Or, ‘god-mysticism’ may be experienced in a context of a polytheistic religion. The context of
mystical experience therefore is not necessarily the ‘ultimate reality’ of the belief-system of the mystic
(ibid.).
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Interpretations of Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’
. Admittedly, it is Heidegger’s later work which is more concerned with our relation to the natural
environment. See Foltz () and Wrathall (, –).
. This takes a middle position between constructionist and perennialist views of mystical experiences.
. Alston (, , –); Swinburne (, –); Yandell (, –, , –).
. For an emphatic atheist construal of ‘feelings of being’ (understood similarly to Ratcliffe’s existential
feelings), which critically engages with Heidegger’s notion of moods as well as Wittgenstein’s reflections
on EFs in the Lecture on Ethics, see Smith (). Smith calls for a strong resistance to any beliefformation in connection to such feelings which tend to go ‘beyond the world’.
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