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Annales Philosophici 5 (2012)
THE FORMATION OF THE THEME OF INDIVIDUATION IN
SCHLEIERMACHER’S ÜBER DIE RELIGION. REDEN AN DIE
GEBIELDETEN UND IHREN VERÄCHTERN: RELIGIOUSNESS AND THE
DYNAMICS OF PRIMORDIAL INDIVIDUATION
Vlad Mihai Moldovan
Babeş-Bolyai University
Cluj-Napoca, Romania
[email protected]
Abstract: The present study treats concisely the theme of
individuation, such as it appears, disparately, in the first Romantic
work of the philosopher F. D. E. Schleiermacher. The articulation of
the dynamics of individuation, as present in the Reden, is, before
anything else, a non-metaphysical (but religious) mode of developing
the primate of intuition in the understanding of the quality of being
religious, with the aspect of mediation which the religious subject puts
to work once he has understood himself as an individual marked by
religiousness.
Keywords: F.D.E. Schleiermacher, individuation, intuition, religion,
mediation
Acknowledgement: This work was made possible by the financial
support of the Sectoral Operational Program for Human Resources
Development 2007-2013, co-financed by the European Social Fund,
within the project POSDRU 89/1.5/S/60189 with the title
“Postdoctoral Programs for Sustainable Development in a
Knowledge Based Society”.
Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (1799) şi
Monologen. Eine Neujahrsgabe (1800)1 represents the Romantic moment of Schleiermacher’s
thought, and as a consequence – the stage at which the ethical-hermeneutical structure of the
dynamics of individuation is formulated in its essence. At the same time, with On religion and
Monologues one realizes that Schleiermacher reaches the central themes of his entire ethicalhermeneutical thinking, which will follow in his mature years.
In the two texts, there occurs a significant mutation of ideas, and thus – on the basis of
a discourse on religion and of a monologue on the history of his own individuality –
Schleiermacher moves on to formulating previous intuitions under the aspect of an ontological
1
See F. Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtasugabe, hvg. J. Birkner, de Gruyter, Berlin, 1986 – Tb2
(KGAII), p. 185-327, and F. Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtasugabe, hvg. J. Birkner, de Gruyter,
Berlin, 1988 – Tb3(KGAIII), Schriften aus derBerliner Zeit 1800-1802, hvg. G. Meckenstock, pp.1-63.
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thematisation, in which the relation between Finite and Infinite, as well as the mode of
finitisation and individuation of the Infinite, are clarified. On the other hand, we cannot but
observe, with D. Thouard, the complementarity of the two works. 2 To make things clearer, let
us notice that the two works comply with two dominant orientations: a) On religion insists on
the aspect of dependency and passivity that articulates the dynamics of individuation, by
situating the subject in relation to the profound element that grounds him existentially, and his
finitude being understood as a prime product of the Universe, or the Infinite, and b)
Monologues stresses the freedom of finite subjectivity, understood from the perspective of an
“ethics of individuality”. What is relevant in order to understand the dynamics of
individuation is the fact that it can only be conceived as a co-articulation between the primary
passivity of the existing subject and the productive freedom that completes and answers this
passivity. In the following pages, I propose a general analysis of the Discourses on religion,
with view toward outlining this dynamics specific to individuation, leaving the Monologues
for another study.
In On religion, the subject is understood in a fundamental way as dependent on the
Universe which exceeds him. The individual is part of a totality that gives itself only by
means of determinate individuations. The religious sense or intuition (Anschauung) eminently
indicates that any individuality is a product of the individuation of the universe, and that it
participates in the universal motion of individuation in its turn. If in the Reden (the
“discourses” of which On religion is composed) individuation appears as the turning finite of
the Infinite, as the determination process of the indeterminate, in the Monologues one finds
the primate of humankind’s self-determination as individuation of the universe and of the
individual who participates and achieves humanity by his own individuation 3. Therefore, in
the Reden individuation is treated at an ontological-cosmological level – the religious being
the space in which this dynamics is revealed –; whereas in the Monologues, Schleiermacher’s
project is focused on the pre-eminently ethical terrain of individuation, that is, on humanity.
Let us follow then how the contours of this individuation are traced in the Reden.
The concept of individuality (Eigenthümlichkeit) and its specific dynamics is
undoubtedly, as Vattimo observed, the generative centre of Schleiermacher’s entire thinking.
In the Reden it appears together with the specification of the types of knowing adequate to the
process. One notices here a true gnoseology and ontology of individuation, Schleiermacher
being the first to undertake an authentic phenomenological approach of the quality of being
religious, and to derive within this approach the dynamic aspects of individuation. In fact, the
very structure of the work shows this dynamic at the level of the rhetorical construction
(Thouard). It is conceived as a progressive translation from an abstract metaphysical tier used
to describe the constitutive forces of the real and of life towards ever more concrete levels of
human experience. It is here that, for the first time, the idea that reality consists of “two
opposite forces” appears (see the first discourse), while the following discourses construct the
particular horizon of the reality of this individuation, which moves from the essence of
religion (the second discourse) towards the role that religion plays in humankind’s self
cultivation, thus in the communal institution of religion (the fourth discourse), and finally to
the “positive” historical aspects that religious traditions contain. Thus, starting from the lived
2
The interpretation of this complementarity is very pertinently undertaken in chapters IV (pp. 108-38)
and V (pp. 141-50) of D. Thouard Schleiermacher (Communauté, Individualité, Communication),
VRIN, Paris, 2007. I will refer to some of Thouard’s ideas in this study.
3
Thouard, p. 143.
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Annales Philosophici 5 (2012)
experience of the religious, the discourses aim to reanimate and evidence the positive
historicity (because based on a living, individual intuition) of the great religions.
The first discourse is a critical apology in which the polemic spirit targets the
alienated forms of religion, whereas in the following discourses a genuine reconstruction of a
religious hermeneutics can be noted, starting from the seminal centre of religiousness and
going through its historisation and finite phenomenality. The determinate historical aspects
represent the concrete form that this infinite motion acquires starting from its ontological
religious essence. The articulation of the dynamics of individuation, as it is described in the
Reden, is, before anything else, a non-metaphysical (but religious) way of developing the
primate of intuition in understanding religiousness, with the aspect of mediation, which the
religious subject puts to work once he has understood himself as an individual marked by this
dimension of being religious.
Intuition and mediation become in the Reden equally important for the reconstruction
of the dynamics of individuation. Although the text insists on the primacy of intuition in the
religious experience (“To become familiar with this concept: the intuition of the universe.
This is the key to my discourse…”), individuation presupposes the awareness that the universe
gives itself, as Thouard points out, as activity, that is, as pure dynamics in which the subject is
caught and engaged, thus becoming in his turn a mediator of this universal dynamics. 4 On this
conception of a universally mediating dynamics, Schleiermacher gives the meaning of the
figures of the mediator (Mittler) and translator (Dolmetscher) of religious intuitions, which
ground the positive religions within the invisible diffusion of religiousness. The hypostasis of
mediator or translator will become paradigmatic for the hermeneutic act.
The idea of background that functions in the Reden, which comes from the de facto
Spinozistic conception Schleiermacher shares with all the representatives of early
Romanticism, is that the infinite is, on the one hand, revealed immediately as sentiment, but
that it also shows itself indirectly in distinct forms which are not separated from it by the
dynamics of interaction and self-formation of the finite particular. There are three points
Schleiermacher posits in his particular interpretation of Spinozism: he agrees with 1)
Spinoza’s monism (that is, the conception that substance is the necessary background
condition for the whole of existence), 2) the principle of co-inherence (that is, the idea that
particulars cannot be separated from the infinite, because they are an inherent part of it, and
therefore they cannot be separated amongst themselves either, since only together do they
form an organic whole), and 3) the harmony of the universe (the idea that the particular is not
opposed to the universal, but becomes a unique way of revealing it). These three
presuppositions stand at the basis of the dynamic conception of individuation and the
individuation reciprocity of finite subjects. Starting from them, the philosopher constructs his
dynamic view of the universe, such as it appears in the Reden: the infinite universe is
conceived as a unity articulated by active forces that act in reciprocal continuity and make the
universe manifest at each instant. Thus, individuation is the result of a dynamic of the two
fundamental forces uniquely combined in each individual: attraction and repulsion:
You know that the divinity, by an immutable law, has forced itself to
divide its great work to appear in the infinite, to fuse each determinate
being, by the action of merely two opposed forces, and to realize each
of its eternal ideas in twin forms hostile to each other, which yet exist
4
Thouard, p. 120.
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inseparably only through the other […] Each life is merely the result
of continual attraction and repulsion; each being is determinate due
merely to the unique combination of the two primordial forces of
nature: yearning attraction and the expansion of the active, living self.
It seems that even the spirits, once transplanted in this world, must
obey this law.5
All individual things are therefore a unique articulation of the two forces that are in
constant opposition. These, as manifestations of the “divine work of the universe” continually
attract and repel each other: the two forces are in opposition because, on the one hand,
attraction “tends to attract in itself everything around it, including everything in its own life”,
and, on the other, repulsion “tends to extend its inner self ever farther, thus penetrating
everything from within, acting indefatigably”6.
Besides their relative opposition, there exists also a common direction of the two,
both being forces or instincts of assimilation, and working therefore towards developing
individuality, since attraction conforms the outer to the inner and repulsion moves beyond
itself, assimilating itself with the outer by penetration.
As we have seen in the fragment quoted above, Schleiermacher also gives the name of
life to this immanent dynamics of finitisation of the universe. The dynamics specific to life is
individuation; things are single out by means of the unique combination of the two forces, and
by the proportion in which the two are present in each entity or subject. This project is
common to all and takes place at all ontological levels (anorganic, organic, vegetal, animal,
human), which consequently only differ in degree. They are differentiated by the way in
which the two omnipresent forces are articulated. Although all phenomena (phenomenal
“presentations”) are in some way identical, because they are formed and caught in the
individual articulation of the two forces, it can be observed that there exists an essential
differentiation coming from the quality of the articulation and the sublimation of the forces:
the ethical world, entirely human, the apex of spiritualization for Schleiermacher, becomes the
complex and decisive manifestation of the dynamics:
It consists of the fact that not only are all possible combinations of
these forces present in humankind […] but also of the fact that a
common bond of their coming into awareness comprises them all, so
that each person, although it cannot be other than what it must be,
still recognizes all the other just as clearly as one does oneself, and he
understands perfectly the individual manifestations of humankind.7
In Schleiermacher’s vision, the fact that humankind reaches the awareness of its own
individuation, and that it can know and understand all forms of individuation becomes
distinctive and defining. To outline the essential here, let me note that for Schleiermacher the
infinite does not exist outside of its manifestations and presentifications in the finite. It
becomes present precisely by this constant dynamic, the transformation, development and
interaction that individuation makes possible. The dynamics by which the infinite turns finite
5
KGAII, p. 191..
Ibid.
7
KGAII, p.192.
6
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Annales Philosophici 5 (2012)
is organic and integrative, being concomitantly 1. the actual expanding space of individuation
(its extension) and 2. the internal instance of the life of this individuation, the fact that
individuation grows out of itself (its intension). The infinite presents itself as a “totality, as
unity in multiplicity”>
We do not feel dependent on the Whole as long as it is an aggregate of
mutually associated parts – of which we are one, but only because of
the fact that at the basis of this coherence there exists a unity that
conditions all things and our relations with the other parts of the
Whole.8
From this perspective, what matters is the comprehension of this dynamic process
itself in which each individual is engaged from within, at the level of development and
cultivation, of growing one’s own self, as well as at the level of participating in higher-order,
more general socio-cultural individualization.
This aspect of the infinite as dynamics appears in the definition of the “essence of
religion” as intuition of the universe. The first two discourses represent in fact a genuine
polemic argument, in which Schleiermacher circumscribes the “province of religion” in its
essential difference from metaphysics and morality. By the outline of authentic religiousness,
he understands the dynamic and non-metaphysical structure of subjectivity, as it appears in the
“intuition of the universe”. The definition of religion in the second discourse dissociates it, as
I have said, from metaphysics and morality. Metaphysics aims to deduce the universe by
prefiguring the prime causes and by demonstrating the necessity of reality. Schleiermacher
opposes global apprehension, developed by the religious sense (Sinn) to intellectual search. 9 If
this sense present in religious experience represents a concrete synthesis of the dynamics of
the universe’s individuation, metaphysical intellection proves to be bereft of the special
synthetic ability of the former; it behaves purely analytically and can only dissect (“fragment
and anatomize”) the whole into parts, missing its background coherence. As an undertaking of
systemic ordering of beings, metaphysics misses the originality of life and the singularity of
individuals. In its view, the individual is not a living organism, but a mere element that can be
explained to the extent to which it is integrated in a rational, universally valid hierarchy. In his
critique of metaphysics, Schleiermacher targets the rational Enlightenment, the Kantian
dualist system, even Fichte’s “transcendental idealism”. To Schleiermacher, religion and the
new type of realism it contains can heal the destructive work of transcendental idealism and of
its systematized and conceptual subjectivity.
Concomitantly with metaphysics, morality is differentiated in its turn from the
religious. It “lacks the fundamental sentiment of the infinite living nature, whose symbols are
diversity and individuality”. Morality is a system of norms whose finality is the command and
the interdiction of actions by unlimited authority. Although religion, morality, and
metaphysics all share the universe as the object of their knowledge, religion is the original
way of relating to it. Its essence does not consist of thinking (metaphysics) or action
(morality), but of “sentiment and intuition”. Religion:
8
9
KGAII, p.195.
Thouard, p. 113.
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[…] wishes to intuit the universe, desires devoutly to capture the
manifestations (Darstellungen) and actions of the universe, in its
childlike passivity it yearns to be touched and filled by the
immediate influences of the universe.10
The first moment of the opening of religious sentiment is “stupefaction” (Thouard 11)
of consciousness faced with the sublimity of the universe. A breach appears in being, by
which the finite becomes aware of its own precariousness. The subject feels overwhelmed,
engulfed in the boundlessness of the infinite. His own perspective is revealed to be a mere
limited outlook in an infinity of other outlooks, all contained and surpassed in the infinite
dynamics of the universe: “the universe is in a state of ceaseless activity and is revealed in
each instant”.12
There is an essential impossibility of the subject to objectify the universe, to transform
it in an objectively fixed representation. On the contrary, in the religious sentiment the
universe is given as pure activity, as constant becoming, that only intuition and sentiment can
account for. This infinite eludes any totalizing metaphysical perspective. It takes, however, the
form of a specific world: the indeterminate universe is realized in determinate forms. Man is
not a separate subject in this cosmic dynamics; he finds himself a singular participant in this
process. The religious experience thwarts man’s rationalist tendency to explain and place the
elements of the dynamics in a system of categories; it compels him to “see” in every particular
finite being the absolute, the imprint (Abbild) and the presentation (Darstellung) of the
infinite. Intuition, as developed by Schleiermacher in the Reden, outlines the primordial
passive aspect of individuality, since the one who intuits receives the actions and revelations
of the universe and, in an initial moment, he does not act in any way while inside this
reception. The universe affects the individual, and in his turn he has a moment of
contemplative vision of the universe’s structures and its action as such.
Insisting on the ontological dependence of the finite on the infinite, Schleiermacher
defines, as Thouard observed, consciousness as primordial openness to this incommensurable,
an openness that becomes aware of its own dependence and thus of its own participation in the
sublime dynamics of the universe.13 Therefore, individuation is not an autonomous and
autocratical constitution of subjectivity, as Fichte’s idealism conceived it. On the contrary, its
dynamics is a product of its primal passivity, a fact that carries forward the universal
dynamics. Nevertheless, things do not end here for Schleiermacher. Although individuality
proves to be primarily passive and receptive, it is at the same time a spontaneous and
productive singular response in this already given dynamics. Passivity is merely the
primordial condition for the manifestation of individual activity in the world. The active side
of the religious experience occurs in the part the mediator plays in historical religions. At the
moment of intuition, the one who intuits achieves and expansion and an encapsulation – albeit
limited – of the infinite. A transformation thus occurs in his own affective state, a
metamorphosis and an awareness of the fact that the infinite constitutes the individual, and
that through the individual the universe achieves a singular aspect, a face and a punctual
experience of determination. Or, it is exactly the production and finitization of the infinite as
10
KGAII, p.211.
Thouard, p. 119.
12
F. Schleiermacher, Discours sur la Religion (R), trad.I.J. Rougé, Aubier, Paris, 1944, p.56.
13
Thouard, p. 122.
11
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Annales Philosophici 5 (2012)
singularity that can transform the individual into a mediator. He becomes the contact point
between the universe and humankind understood as multiplicity:
In the man in whom religion has worked from within and has revealed
there the infinite […] in that man it needs no mediator for any
intuition of humankind, but that man becomes himself the mediator for
many.14
Thus, the mediator, as point of equilibrium and intensification of the work of the
infinite, reflects more acutely and more attentively the dynamics of the infinite’s
individuation. This mediation is passive; it demands a reduced degree of activity from the
intuitive mediator. The universe practically mediates itself through the mediator. In
Schleiermacher’s vision, an individual is merely “the work of the universe”, a place in which
the infinite universe reveals itself and in which this self-revelatory dynamics is carried
forward.
As noted above, the central interest of the Reden is to circumscribe the essential
characteristic of religious experience. That is why the emphasis falls here on the passive
aspect of the dynamics of individuation, whereas the ensuing ethical approach of the
Monologen will tackle the relative freedom of the individual. Religion is, before anything else,
about the individual’s primordial relation to the universe. On the other hand, from
humankind’s ethical perspective, the individual manifests as free agent, acting and creating his
own world. We can distinguish first the universe, which is in a “state of ceaseless activity”.
But the universe is also revealed through its diverse figurations or aspects (Gestaltungen),
among which two are capital: nature and humankind. The universe manifests in these to the
extent to which it takes a determinate form and becomes a “world’. The general laws of the
dynamics of individuation act at all ontological levels, and thus at the level of humankind as
well. While the individual reveals an absolute dependence on the universe in the religious
experience, he can understand himself also as participant in the subsumed forms of
individuation. It is at this point that he discovers his freedom to act, which translates at the
level of humankind into a work of culture (Bildung) and into the productions of the
imagination.
The pertinence of the theme of individual dynamics introduces in the Reden three
additional aspects that will become central in the later ethical-hermeneutic project. These are:
1. the conception of the works of humankind as products of the continuous individuation of
culture and of the self-formation of man; 2. the positivity of historical phenomena, or the fact
that individuation translates into historicity; and 3. the organic character of all forms of
individuation. These ideas are developed in the Reden starting from the religious experience,
and they represent the modes of the comprehensive expression of the truth revealed in religion
at the level of human social-cultural spheres.
1. The conception of the works of humankind as products of the continuous
individuation of culture and of the self-formation of man
Once the individual is conceived as a dynamic bundle of human dispositions and
forces, sublimated singularly in each subject, we can understand that the works of this
14
KGA II, p.213.
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individuation will also contain in their meaning the pure dynamics. Thus, by configuring a
comprehensive attitude, Schleiermacher has his eyes set on a universal penetrability of
spiritual products, as well as on the necessity to reconstruct the dynamics of these products’
formation. This is why the works and actions that found religions are understood in the Reden
as monuments in which the original spiritual experience is recorded and condensed. Works
become testimonies of an individual life formed in the contextual dynamics of the age, from
which, by interpretive and comprehensive effort, the authentic and singular experience of a
religion is revealed and becomes a nucleus productive of reality.
By the act of comprehension, Schleiermacher has in mind, already in the Reden, an
account of the way in which one encounters in works the stimulus and the individuated sense
that produced them. The point here is to develop a receptive mode that will revitalize and
reconstruct individual life accreted in religious works. A second hypostasis can be identified,
therefore: the ethical posture of the mediator. If the first representation of the mediator
referred chiefly to the heroes who founded a positive religion after contemplating the
dynamics of the infinite that went through them as well, the second hypostasis refers to a
mediator as one who reconstructs, who enlivens historical structures, who manages to
extricate the living dynamics of individuation from mortified or foreign structures. This will
later become, in the hermeneutic texts, the hypostasis of the hermeneut.
2. The positivity of historical phenomena
Otto Pögeller, in Hegels Kritik der Romantik, noted very pertinently that
“Schleiermacher’s thinking is determined by the stress laid on individuality and the positivity
of history”. 15 Thinking the historicity of the individual is part of the dynamic aspect of
individuation that constitutes the subject as such. Individuation captures the singular temporal
progression which life develops from itself. In the final discourse, Schleiermacher presents the
temporalization of religious individuation thus:
This moment is a determinate point of his life, a circle of the personal
series of his spiritual acts, and altogether a fact like any other, set in a
determinate relation with a before, a now, and an after [in einem
bestimmten Zusamennhange mit einem Vorher, einem Jetzt, und
Nacher], and also this after and this now is in each individual
something singular, and the after shall be also like this [...] thus the
entire religious life devepos genetically, and consequently this life has
in each individual an entirely distinct determinate personality.16
G. Moretto indicates 17 that for Schleiermacher individuality and historicity coincide.
For this reason, my interpretation prefers the concept of a constitutive dynamic structure of
individuality, what Schleiermacher himself called “individualization” or “individuation”. He
insists on formulating the anthropological subject as subject to historical becoming, which
does not result in an empty abstraction, but has in itself the vitality of the organism. Tradition
15
O. Poggeler, Hegels Kritik der Romantik, Fink, 1998, p. 228.
F. Schleiermacher, Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern,(Reden) ed.
H.J.Rothert, Hamburg, 1958, p. 147.
17
G, Moretto,Etica e storia in Schleiermacher, Bibliopolis, Napoli, 1979, p. 213.
16
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will be understood as living connection, in which the history of individuations find a plastic
relationship with the whole, constituting the development of humankind:
Schleiermacher conceives the achievement of humankind’s purpose as
a spiral evolving in ever wider circles, and this amplification of
horizon occurs by means of the mutations and oscillations within
humanity.18
3. The organic character of all forms of individuation
The dynamics of individuation is nothing else than the dynamics of life as such. I
have already underlined the reciprocity this dynamics creates. Another of its aspects can be
expressed as the quality of being organic: individuation is an organic dynamics. Thise
becomes clear in the Reden, in the way that Schleiermacher conceives the church and
religious institutions when relating them to their authentic nucleus:
It is simply an erroneous expedience of past ages to divide the Church
into parts. Its nature is that of a polyp: out of each of its parts a new
whole develops.19
Religion is an individual experience, and consequently the institution formed around
it acquires the characteristics of an individuality, of a historical organism. It shares the “nature
of a polyp”, it subdivides continuously into fragments that will in their turn produce new
organisms. All these, be they socio-cultural, religious, or ethical, are diverse ways in which
man expresses and carries further the individuation of the infinite. The infinite is thought as a
perpetual and dynamic accomplishment in forms that are always new:
Remember the various ways by which man passes from the intuition of
the finite to that of the infinite, and the personal, particular character
our religion acquires, think of the various modifications under which
the universe can be intimated […] think that anyone who seeks a
religion must find it in determinate forms […]. Religion, in its concept
and essence, is to the intellect something infinite and immense; it must
thus contain itself as a principle pushing it to individualize, or
otherwise it could not exist, or be perceived; we are constrained to
postulate and seek an infinite multitude of finite forms in which it
manifests.20
The organicity of individuation indicates that the dynamics contains a nucleus, an
autotelic principle of organization. Any spiritual production also has a genetic nucleus around
which and starting from which its elements develop. Later, Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics
will take into account in the technical interpretation this genetic structure of the development
of spiritual works. But for a hermeneutics to become necessary and general, an explicit
18
Moretto, p. 221.
Reden, p. 228.
20
Reden, p. 350.
19
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account of language as medium and agent of the dynamics of individuation is required.
Schleiermacher does not achieve this in the Reden; he will when he formulates his 1805
ethical project. As is well known, this is the moment in which the necessity of an art of
comprehension is postulated at the level of the ethical domain of language.
To sum up, let me note that throughout the Reden, Schleiermacher develops a
dynamic conception about the individuation of the subject, in which the subject understand
himself as concomitantly an individuation of the universe but also, one level lower, an
individuation of humankind, and thus a subject constituted in communicational reciprocity
with other subjects. This structure can be represented, on the one hand, as a vertical
ontological axis (the relation infinite-finite, or universe-individual), and on the other hand, on
a horizontal immanent axis, in which individuality is constituted according to the community
it is a part of:
By making religiousness a constituent of self-consciousness,
Schleiermacher dismisses the conception of subjectivity centered on a
rapport with itself, in order to outline subjectivity in relation to the
universe, oriented towards individuation in language, in the historical
communities and the cultural forms.21
21
Thouard, p. 148.
46