Friedrich Schleiermacher Quotes on Knowledge
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the principal philosophical theologian of early-nineteenth-century German Protestantism and the founder of modern philosophical hermeneutics, gave religious epistemology in On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799) the case that religion is at bottom neither metaphysical doctrine nor moral commandment but the immediate "feeling of absolute dependence" that constitutes the religious consciousness as a distinctive cognitive mode. The Hermeneutics lectures, compiled and published posthumously, develop in parallel the general theory of textual understanding as the divinatory reconstruction of the author's meaning from the side of the interpreter, against the background of the shared linguistic and historical conditions under which the text was produced.
Quotes
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Attributed to Friedrich Schleiermacher:
“Hermeneutics is the art of understanding.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Schleiermacher:
“Wherever there is misunderstanding, there is also the possibility of understanding.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Schleiermacher:
“We must learn to interpret each utterance both grammatically and psychologically.”
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“Jämmerlich ist freilich jene praktische Philosophie der Franzosen und Engländer, von denen man meint, sie wüßten so gut, was der Mensch sei, unerachtet sie nicht darüber spekulierten, was er sein solle.”
Pitiful, to be sure, is what the pragmatic philosophy of the French and English is. … They are considered to be so well versed in the knowledge of what man is, despite their failure to speculate on what he should be. Cited in Lucinde and the Fragments , P. Firchow, trans. (1991), "Athenaeum Fragments" (1798), § 355. -
“Pitiful, to be sure, is what the pragmatic philosophy of the French and English is. … They are considered to be so well versed in the knowledge of what man is, despite their failure to speculate on what he should be. Cited in Lucinde and the Fragments , P. Firchow, trans. (1991), "Athenaeum Fragments" (1798), § 355.”
Jämmerlich ist freilich jene praktische Philosophie der Franzosen und Engländer, von denen man meint, sie wüßten so gut, was der Mensch sei, unerachtet sie nicht darüber spekulierten, was er sein solle. -
“Friedrich Schleiermacher, A Critical Essay on the Gospel of St. Luke , 1825, pp. 185–186”
Moreover, in Christ's second discourse, the mode in which the mention of Jonas is understood in Matthew, verse 40, is wholly unsuited to the context and to the application which even there is made of it ; and if we do not take this for a later interpolation, for which no adequate inducement suggests itself, it must be considered as an erroneous comment of the reporter, which he has mixed up with C -
“Between the beginning of our existence and our present life and aims there lies a time in which lust was the prevailing power; in which it conceived and brought forth sin. If we are honest, we can say that there is a period on which we look back only with the feeling that we appear to ourselves to have become since then different men. That which was then our innermost I and Self has now become som”
The Necessity of the New Birth, Selected sermons of Schleiermacher , translated by Mary Wilson 1890, p. 89