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Bridging the gap between social and existential-mysticalinterpretations of Schleiermacher's ‘feeling’

GORAZD ANDREJČ

Religious Studies / Volume 48 / Issue 03 / September 2012, pp 377 - 401DOI: 10.1017/S0034412511000254, Published online: 16 February 2012

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0034412511000254

How to cite this article:GORAZD ANDREJČ (2012). Bridging the gap between social and existential-mysticalinterpretations of Schleiermacher's ‘feeling’. Religious Studies, 48, pp 377-401 doi:10.1017/S0034412511000254

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Bridging the gap between social and

existential-mystical interpretations of

Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’

GORAZD ANDREJ C

Department of Theology and Religion, University of Exeter, Amory Building,Rennes Drive, Exeter, Devon, EX4 4RJ, UKe-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: The article engages with two contemporary understandings ofSchleiermacher’s notion of feeling which are in important aspects in conflict: asocial understanding (Kevin W. Hector and Christine Helmer) and an existential-mystical understanding (Thandeka). Using the phenomenological category of‘existential feelings’ drawn from the work of Matthew Ratcliffe, I argue that they canbe brought into a coherent overall account that recognizes different aspects offeeling in Schleiermacher’s work. I also suggest that such an interpretation ofSchleiermacher’s concept of religious feeling offers a different and betterunderstanding of the role of feelings in religious experience and belief than thecontemporary ‘perception-model’ of religious experience.

Introduction

The notion of feeling (Gefühl) in the works of Friedrich Schleiermacher hasbeen disputed in various ways. In part, this is undoubtedly because his concept offeeling, ‘far from being merely ambiguous, is polysemous: “feeling” occurs with avery different meaning in different contexts’ (Sorrentino (), ). This is not tosay that there is no agreement on the understanding of ‘feeling’ in Schleiermacherwhatsoever. For example, it is widely agreed that many formulations of feeling inSchleiermacher have important common emphases, like the thought that feelingis distinct from reasoning and action, and that it is ontologically prior to both; it isalso widely agreed that the notion of feeling holds a central place inSchleiermacher’s theological and philosophical thought. Beyond that, thedifferences 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.

Religious Studies (2012) 48, 377–401 © Cambridge University Press 2012doi:10.1017/S0034412511000254

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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’sunderstanding of the Church and Christ’s person-forming activity in individualbelievers to his ‘social mysticism’ – the Church is co-constitutive of the distinctChristian experience, which at its centre involves religious feeling. On the otherhand, Thandeka’s interpretation sees the feeling of at-oneness with naturethrough our organic being as the central and key understanding of religious feelingfor 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 socialand the existential-mystical interpretations of feeling in Schleiermacher can besuccessfully brought into a compatible account. This is done by employing thenotion of ‘existential feeling’ developed recently by Matthew Ratcliffe, which canencompass most of the central claims of both interpretations. The second aim is toargue that the phenomenological reading of Schleiermacher on feeling that Ipresent here is relevant for contemporary philosophy of religion, in particular byshedding 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 offeringhistorical textual criticism of Schleiermacher. My interpretative approach involvesdecisions about what is more and what less important in Schleiermacher’s work, aswell as decisions regarding a more modern philosophical and theological languagewhich can be used to take up and develop some of Schleiermacher’s insights onreligious feeling. These decisions are partly guided by my own philosophical andtheological convictions. While Schleiermacher’s immediate context, influences,and audiences are by no means ignored, the overall vision that encompasses bothinterpretative and philosophical aims of this article is to locate the discussion ofinterpretations of feeling in Schleiermacher in relation to the wider contemporaryphilosophical discussion of feelings and their place in religion.

Social understanding : Kevin W. Hector

In a recent article, Kevin W. Hector (, ) argues thatSchleiermacher’s notion of feeling should be understood as ‘one’s non-inferentialattunement to one’s circumstances’. He notes that, despite their differences,several of Schleiermacher’s explications of feeling indicate that feeling for himdenotes ‘a pre-reflective harmony or at-one-ness between oneself and one’senvironing circumstances . . . [which is] prior to knowing and doing, yet providingdirection for each’ (Hector (), ). He quotes Schleiermacher’s statement

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that in feeling ‘the subject-object opposition is entirely excluded as inapplicable’(Dial O, ; Hector’s translation), and the description of the feeling of absolutedependence as an ‘immediate self-consciousness of finding-oneself-absolutely-dependent’ (CF §), to interpret Gefühl as ‘how one finds himself’ (Hector (),) in one’s circumstances. This corresponds to Heidegger’s concept ofattunement, 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 tomean more than the thought that feeling is merely circulated in the community(clearly expressed in CF §.–, §.). Hector claims that, since it includes anormative dimension which is a ‘product of one’s socialization in certain norm-laden practices’ (Hector (), ), we can explain ‘a good bit’ of whatSchleiermacher meant by ‘feeling’ as internalization of custom. All practicalexamples of non-inferential ‘feel’ for circumstances that Hector provides in orderto make clear how to understand feeling as attunement are examples of one’sattunement to some aspect of the social world (ibid., ).Hector bases these claims on Schleiermacher’s understanding of kind-

consciousness (CF §.), which could be described as a disposition, essential tohuman beings, towards social/interpersonal way of existence with other humanbeings. Kind-consciousness is for Schleiermacher closely related to feeling:‘Everybody . . . always finds himself . . . involved in a multifarious communion offeeling’ (ibid.). Kind-consciousness is in a dialectical relationship with self-consciousness – the two are mutually shaping each other. Moreover, kind-consciousness and its expressions are necessary conditions ‘for the continuousexistence of the God-consciousness in every human individual, and also for itscommunication from one to the other in proportion to the different levels ofhuman fellowship’ (CF §.; see also §.–, §.). For Schleiermacher then,sociality, at least in the context of the Christian community, is constitutive offeeling. Applying a pragmatist strategy to theology in taking social practices as‘theology’s explanatory primitive’, Hector suggests that all higher theologicalnotions such as redemption and indwelling of the Holy Spirit are to be explainedin 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 God-consciousness? According to Schleiermacher, Christ’s God-consciousness was notconstituted 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 §.)

Interpretations of Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’



Christ’s God-consciousness is understood here as ‘something completely original’(Marina (), ), which transcends mere attunement to social practice. Hectorseems to accept this solution by positing that Christ’s complete attunement withGod 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 onmysticism in Schleiermacher may seem different from Hector’s interpretation.Notably, Helmer positively values the mystical element in Schleiermacher’stheology of redemption, whereas Hector does not believe that his strategy ‘wouldbe attractive to those who appreciate Schleiermacher’s “mystical” tendencies’(Hector (), ). After a closer look, however, these two perspectives appear tobe fairly compatible, even mutually supporting.Helmer argues against an influential interpretation and rejection of

Schleiermacher by Emil Brunner, who famously accused the former of conflatingnature and spirit, and of abandoning the witness of the Bible by putting ‘mystichuman subjectivism’ on the pedestal instead (quoted in Helmer (), ). Inthe context of her argument against Brunner’s accusations, Helmer effectivelyinterprets Schleiermacher as a Christian ‘social mystic’ for whom the redemptionof the individual believer ‘is coconstituted with the creation of community’ (ibid.,) – the Church. She traces Schleiermacher’s descriptions in the Speeches ofmystical, felt communion, or even union, not with God but with all of humanitythrough loving relationships between human beings (OR –), to his later‘soteriological and ecclesial construal of mysticism’ (Helmer (), ) inThe Christian Faith, where Schleiermacher relates the subjective or mysticalelement of feeling closely to the communal element (life of the Church) (CF §.–,§., §.).

People are assimilated into Christ’s God-consciousness through theecclesial mediation of Christus Praesens. One’s relations to Christ and to theChurch are therefore interconnected and related to the same kind of feeling; inHelmer’s words, ‘Christ’s redemptive activity effects simultaneously the newcreation of the individual and the constitution of the community’ (Helmer (),). Helmer feels that in this way, the dangers of some of Schleiermacher’s earlymystical leanings, which tend to annihilate individuality through a felt union withthe universe (either with non-human nature, or ‘humanity’), are avoided viahis emphasis on Christ’s person-forming activity in individual believers. The latteris achieved through the spiritual community of the Church. Helmer’s formulationof the social nature of Schleiermacher’s mysticism and his theology ofredemption – the two are inextricably linked – is well summed up in her claimthat ‘[for] Schleiermacher, the positivity of the Christian church is the condition for

GORAZD ANDRE J C



the possibility of a distinct Christian experience, which is the foundationalredemptive experience of the believer with Christ’ (ibid., ). This claim isgrounded in statements of Schleiermacher such as these: ‘[Within] Christiancommunion, there can be no religious experience which does not involve arelation to Christ’ (CF §.) and ‘the Christian feeling can only exist side by sidewith 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’ aspectsof interpersonal relatedness and internalization of customs, is constitutiveof distinct Christian experience, which for Schleiermacher is characterized byfeeling. This ‘multifarious communion of feeling’ is a manifestation of kind-consciousness, which ‘dwells in every man’ (CF §.). () Both give a central placeto Schleiermacher’s claim that Christ’s God-consciousness is circulated andtransmitted through the community and that by this process an individual believeris brought into a redemptive relation with Christ (by partaking in Christ’s God-consciousness). () Neither is sympathetic to nature-mystical strands ofSchleiermacher’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 offeeling is found in the works of Thandeka ( & ). She takesSchleiermacher’s Dialectic as the key to unlocking the meaning of Gefühl bothhere and in other works of Schleiermacher. In this important workSchleiermacher attempted directly to answer a philosophical question which wasleft unanswered by Kant and which Fichte, Jacobi, Hegel, and Shelling were alsotrying 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 groundof our being. Since neither reflection nor action can provide the linking of differentmoments into a whole, which must be the basis for the continuing Self,Schleiermacher argues in the Dialectic that it is only feeling that ‘contains animmediate 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




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’, thepoint of transition between thinking and willing, that the special experienceof ‘feeling of being’ can happen. At this pre-cognitive and pre-reflective stageof consciousness we simply are the feeling of our nonindividuated self as a part ofnatural world. The reality of the world is indistinct from our own reality as anonindividuated 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 non-individuated at-one-ness with the ‘nexus of the natural world’, which includes akind of cancellation of individuality, that Thandeka sees as central forSchleiermacher’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 thatwe are embodied beings. What cognitive thinking cannot do – namely, to grasp oreven ‘glimpse’ the transcendental ground of itself, which is life, our embodied,organic being – only feeling can. And because the feeling of being in which thesubject–object distinction is cancelled is ‘the natal hour of everything living inreligion’ (OR ), Thandeka (, ) emphasizes that ‘Schleiermacher, in starkcontrast 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 fitstogether with the notable lack of attention in Thandeka’s book () to therelation 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 atleast suggests such a reading. Clearly, it is with an existential nature-mysticism, notsocial mysticism, that Thandeka connects Schleiermacher’s notion of feeling.

So, given these different and apparently contradictory interpretations ofSchleiermacher’s notion of feeling, are we not forced to choose between social(Hector–Helmer) and existential-mystical (Thandeka) understandings? Or do wehave to recognize a significant disunity in Schleiermacher’s work? Or are thesedifferences simply a result of selective focusing on some of Schleiermacher’s textsand taking those as the key to interpret the whole, while ignoring or downplayingthe 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 lendsupport 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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Schleier-macher’s work on the subject. While not insisting that Schleiermachermust have been consistent in everything he said on feeling, I do suggest that theanswer to the first question above is ‘no’: the two interpretations considered canbe brought into a considerable proximity by a unified account of feeling inSchleiermacher. In order to do that and at the same time relate aspects ofSchleiermacher’s discussion to the modern views on feeling(s) in religiousexperience, we have to engage briefly with modern philosophy of feeling generally.

Philosophy of feeling

Developments in the philosophy and psychology of emotions and feelingsin the last three decades have brought about many differing views, not all of whichcan be mentioned here. We will, however, draw on some familiar distinctions thathave come out of these debates. These distinctions will prove useful forinterpreting Schleiermacher’s notion of feeling in the setting of moderndiscussions on feeling in philosophy of religion, to which we will return in thelast 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 thebelief–desire distinction (Hutto & Ratcliffe ()). In this scheme, feelings donot have any philosophically significant role (epistemological, ethical, or meta-physical). Even in emotions – usually seen as compound states consisting of amixture of beliefs, desires, and feelings – the latter are not considered to be anessential part of the combination. It is not hard to see why this is so. Althoughcompounded, emotions are considered to be intentional states: they are ‘directedat something’ (Deigh (), ). One is afraid of an approaching dog, hopes for avictory in a coming football game, or hates the fussy boss. Feelings, on the otherhand, 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 essentialconstituents of mind: beliefs and desires (both intentional). Peter Goldie hascalled such a view –which he challenges – an add-on view of feelings, according towhich ‘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 tocognition/knowledge. Michael Stocker argues against the tendency to reduceemotions to the reason/desire duality and claims that this picture distorts ourunderstanding of emotions. He argues that ‘affectivity’ or ‘psychic feelings’ areindispensable for emotions, as well as for other ‘affective’ mental states likemoods, interests, and attitudes (Stocker & Hegeman ()). Goldie ()




argues that feelings can be intentional: an emotion such as fear of a burglarinvolves a ‘feeling towards’ an object (burglar) and should not be analysed interms of a pre-existent belief plus an unintentional bodily feeling. Rather, claimsGoldie, the kind of feelings he calls feelings towards are a case of ‘unreflectiveextraspective 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 toGerman Romantic philosophy, to which Schleiermacher belonged, its mostinfluential expression can be found in Heidegger’s Being and Time. There,Heidegger first objects to the misrepresentations of affective states in much ofWestern 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 offeelings which he calls Stimmungen – traditionally translated as ‘moods’ – are verybasic, primordial ways of our finding-ourselves-in-the-world. These are non-intentional states which are ontologically prior to the intentional ones and makethe 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’sfeeling in the contemporary context. While rejecting the ‘add-on’ view of allfeelings as inadequate (although with limited applicability in some contexts) andaccepting that feelings can be intentional (for example, at least some feelingsassociated with ‘basic emotions’ such as fear, anger, love, hate, and hope), I willuse especially the Heideggerian view that there are non-intentional feelings(not directed at specific objects/events) that have an important, world-constitutingrole in human experience. We will have to proceed on these assumptions withoutengaging with different positions here.

‘Heideggerian’ phenomenology of existential feelings

At the centre of Heidegger’s Being and Time is the question about themeaning of Being, i.e. about a sense of what it is to be (Heidegger (), –); inparticular, the goal is to understand the human being’s kind of being, whichHeidegger 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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allusions: The reflexivity of finding oneself; feeling; and being situated’ (Gendlin(–)). Heidegger explains (, ) that we should view our ‘being in themood’ (Stimmung) as Befindlichkeit or attunement. The mood is ‘so far from beingreflected 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” norfrom “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 understandingbeing-with’ (ibid., ). Moods do not have a subject–object structure and are inan 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 theabstract 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 pickout some feelings that do not fit well into the category ‘emotions’ or ‘emotionalfeelings’. He argues that categorizing all feelings as ‘emotional’ would ‘obscure theimportant difference between states that are intentionally directed at particularobjects, events or situations in the world, and others that constitute backgroundsto all our experiences, thoughts and activities’ (ibid., ). Existential feelings aredefined 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 asomewhat different concept. First, when Heidegger describes examples of‘moods’, he discusses only a very restricted list, focusing for the most part on thecontrast between an everyday mood and that of anxiety or angst. While Heideggerdoes include also ‘elation’ or ‘joy’, ‘boredom’, and possibly a few more (Smith




()), Ratcliffe (ibid.) thinks there can be much greater variety of EFs, withcorresponding variety of expressions of them. Second, he claims that the role ofthe body in our experience (including feelings) is essential, yet it is not addressedby Heidegger’s account. For this reason, Ratcliffe builds his account of EFs also onMerleau-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) sustainedover a period of time or (c) retained over the course of a life as habitualtemperaments; but the English term “ ‘mood” ’ only seems suited to (b)’ (Ratcliffe(), ). Accepting these reasons as weighty enough for the choice of a differentterm, 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 canbe the following: feeling ‘complete’, ‘separate and in limitation’, ‘at home’,‘invulnerable’, ‘at one with life’, ‘at one with nature’, ‘real’, ‘part of the real worldagain’, ‘disconnected’, or a sentence like ‘All is empty of meaning’. In the Christianreligious 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 amiracle’. Often, the descriptions of EFs are highly metaphorical, which impliesthat 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 ‘disconnected-ness’ (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 experiencesof people who suffer from schizophrenia, the Capgras illusion, and the Cotarddelusion (ibid., –), as well as those that are usually understood as more‘healthy’ but still unusual, like mystical experiences (ibid., –). Hismethodological approach, which also uses relevant psychiatric research, entailsthe view that it is often by analysing the unusual cases and dramatic changes inEFs that an awareness and appreciation of the more ‘normal’ variants of EFs ispossible 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’/‘feelingstowards’ (e.g. Goldie, Stocker). Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, he claims that feelingscan () be a direct experience of something other than the body (emotionalfeelings) through the body, () constitute our relatedness with the world (non-intentional, existential feelings) as embodied, as well as () be ‘self-directed’ whenthe 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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While EFs constitute the background of our discursive thought, emotional feelings,and other intentional states, there is a multi-way relation between these so thatsensory perceptions, beliefs, and emotional episodes can help focus one’s attentionto, but also reshape and co-influence, one’s sense of reality which is constituted byEFs. 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 withSchleiermacher’s writing. We will do this by way of a phenomenological reading ofthe much-discussed second speech (OR –). The Speeches as a whole containearly formulations of most topics and positions which were later developed bySchleiermacher in more detail and sophistication in other works. And, while thehighly 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 workcontains efforts to express certain feelings and direct readers’ attention to theirown 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; onewithout 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 forreligion is described as ‘intuition of the universe’ (OR –). Andrew Doledescribes it as ‘a view or an impression of some overarching, structural feature ofthe world as a whole or of all that exists; to have an intuition of the universe is tohave a sense of its overall character’ (Dole (), ). We need to remember,however, that Speeches is not a systematic text, and the conceptual distinctions in itare 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 mainreason for the existence of very conflicting set of interpretations of both concepts.Furthermore, both concepts underwent changes of use/sense from Schleiermacher’searlier to his later work, and intuition in particular became almost entirely displacedby ‘religious feeling’ as the descriptor of the essence of religion by the time of thesecond edition of the Speeches (), and soon became associated much morewith 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 suggestedit is not only conceptual but ‘an interpretation’ (Grove (), ; Grove (),). In terms of intentionality, Brandt’s fully cognitivist ‘perception-model’ of




Schleiermacher’s religious intuition, where intuition is intentionally directed at‘the Infinite’ and is prior to religious feeling (Brandt (), –), may be anextreme example, but it is not unusual to see intuition as implying at least somekind of intentionality for the feeling-intuition pair (cf. Adams (), ). Aminority of interpreters have interpreted intuition in the Speeches as an unfinished‘religious act’ that does not reach full intentionality although constituting apull 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 themeaning of ‘intuition’ in the first edition of the Speeches. In his recent treatment ofthe topic, Dole is wise enough to leave the question of the relation of intuitions ofthe 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’snotion of ‘intuition’ from the first edition of the Speeches might be put to use incontemporary discussion of religious experience. But now to the notion of‘feeling’: It is clear that Schleiermacher strictly distinguishes feeling fromdiscursive thought (beliefs, knowledge, and ‘metaphysics’) on the one hand, andfrom action (involving one’s will and morals) on the other (OR –). What isoften overlooked, however, is that Schleiermacher in the Speeches distinguishesbetween different kinds of feelings. Perhaps the clearest distinction is between themore important feelings in religious context which are ‘the essence of religion’,and those which, despite being characteristic for religious lives in the broadersense, are not a part of religion’s essence. Dole notes that in this second group arefeelings – for example, feelings of tolerance towards fellow human beings, ofreverence in the face of the eternal and invisible, of compassion, and of remorseover sin against others –which flow more or less directly from the feelings that arereligion’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 ), whichare incompatible with the ‘calmness of mind’ that is needed for proper moralconduct. In contrast, the proper religious feeling can and should accompany everyaction according to Schleiermacher – hence the claim: ‘We should do everything

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with religion, nothing because of religion’ (ibid.). To be driven by passionatefeelings for one’s religion is something quite different from living a (moral) life thatis accompanied by a background consisting of proper religious feelings as by‘a holy music’ (OR ). One notable difference between these ‘bad’ passionatefeelings ‘for one’s religion’ and the feelings which are the background ofappropriate religious life according to Schleiermacher seems to be that the formerare 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 toSchleiermacher, his readers tend to mistake for religion’s essence –with what heconsidered to be such. He claims that even in the feelings of ‘fear of the materialforces’ like thunder or sea, or in the feeling of ‘joy at the beauty of corporealnature’, like the bloom of the flowers or brilliance of sunsets, we neverthelesscannot ‘recognize the presence of an almighty being’. ‘You will then find that thesephenomena, no matter how strongly they move you, are still not suited to beintuitions 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 avery special, restricted kind of feelings is characteristic of religion’s essence. Thatkind 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 everythingstrives to expand the sharply delineated outlines of our personality and graduallyto lose them in the infinite in order that we, by intuiting the universe, will becomeone with it as much as possible’ (OR ; italics added). So, the picture isconsiderably complex: There are feelings which are only falsely called ‘religious’;and, while there may be intentional and non-intentional feelings that are anappropriate part of ‘ideal religion’ (including emotional feelings towards Jesus inChristianity, or towards one’s own Church, or towards particular creations like aflower or a mountain), only some feelings constitute the essence of religion: theones that involve some degree of ‘losing’ oneself in a deep relation with the whole.Albrecht points to the highly metaphorical ‘mystical moment’ passage in thesecond speech as central for interpreting Schleiermacher’s view of religion’sessence: the ‘religious ur-affection’ (religiöse Uraffektion), as Albrecht calls thehighest and inexpressible religious feeling of oneness with the universe, is priorand superior to both intuitions and [other] religious feelings that make up ‘idealreligion’, and a person’s piety is genuine only in so far as other elements of thatperson’s religious life (feelings and intuitions, beliefs, practices etc.) flow out fromthis 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 ofconsciousness according to Schleiermacher, it ‘constitutes a background sense ofbelonging to the world and a sense of reality’, like existential feelings do according




to Ratcliffe (and ‘moods’ according to Heidegger (cf. Herms ()). Thesimilarities between the phenomenological category of existential feeling andSchleiermacher’s formulation of religion’s essence in the Speeches do not stopthere. A significant feature of Schleiermacher’s account is that many feelings that‘are religion’ are possible (OR ), as Ratcliffe claims that there are many varietiesof existential feelings (Ratcliffe (), , –, ). Moreover, Schleiermacherdevelops his argument on the basis of his description of ‘two examples’ of religiousfeelings by lightly sketching, as he puts it, ‘some of the prominent religiousintuitions from the realms of nature and humanity’ (OR ; italics added). Like thefeeling of oneness with the natural, more-than-human world, the case of intuitinghumanity (through feeling) as a whole also involves transcending subject–objectstructures 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 ofSchleiermacher’s account of feeling which Helmer picks up in her interpretationand which is more prominent and explicit than the nature-mystical strand.Similarly, Ratcliffe focuses mostly on the role of EFs in our relation to thesurrounding social world or interpersonal context (Ratcliffe (); ()),although he recognizes that EFs characterize our relation to the more-than-human 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 thistransition happens through one’s immediate context of experience: ‘[In] ourrelationship to this world there are certain transitions into the infinite, vistas thatare hewn through’ (OR ). This may be the relation to the immediatesurroundings of the natural world (like stars at night, or a lake and trees), orone’s social environment (like the religious community of which one is a partof, or one’s lover). Importantly, these ‘worlds’ are not experienced as objects(Frank (), ) but rather as contexts in relation to which one can experienceanything 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’slater works either. In the Dialectic, it is explained that in feeling the ‘subject-objectantithesis 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 infeeling ‘the subject unites and identifies itself with everything which, in the middlegrade (of consciousness), was set over against it’ (CF §.). But how is this relatedto the specifically Christian context – the Christ-believing community?”

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Towards a complex picture of Christian religious experience

Before addressing this issue, let’s remember that in this article we areaddressing two questions: first, how can we reconcile the social and existential-mystical interpretations of Schleiermacher’s concept of ‘feeling’ via the unifyingaccount based on the concept ‘existential feeling’? And second, what contributioncan such an interpretation of Schleiermacher make to the modern efforts tounderstand the role of feeling in religious experience and its relation to religiousbelief?

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, manyexperiences which are considered to be mystical in the main religions can beunderstood as involving an awareness of more intense or ‘deeper’ variations ofexistential feelings, or significant changes in these (Ratcliffe (), –). If weaccept this view, there is an important continuity between what we consider to benormal 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 rareexperience.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 lessfavourable (OR ). While nature-mysticism is detectable in the Speeches and,according to a plausible reading, in the Dialectic, social mysticism is moreprominent and can be found in somewhat different forms in early as well aslater works, including The Christian Faith, as Helmer points out. Unfortu-nately, however, Helmer tries significantly to downplay the importance ofSchleiermacher’s nature-mysticism. Out of her theological worry that ‘problematicimplications arise tending toward the elimination of individuality’ if we acceptthose early nature-mystical formulations, she relegates them to ‘the rhetoricalsurface of the Speeches’, which is due to ‘Romantic influences’ (Helmer (),–). This seems to suggest that ‘romantic influences’, like the emphasis onthe ur-affection of oneness, do not deserve a serious philosophical or theologicaltreatment, or that these ‘romantic’ ideas expressed by Schleiermacher are notcompatible with Christian theology and therefore corrupt that which is properlytheological in Schleiermacher.Similarly, we have noted that Hector’s interpretation of ‘feeling’ as ‘one’s non-

inferential attunement to circumstances’, despite drawing (also) on Heidegger’s




work and using Heideggerian vocabulary, focuses exclusively on the attunementas internalization of social custom (Hector (), ). While such interpretationis compatible with Heidegger’s understanding of Da-sein as ‘being-with’ others(Heidegger (), ), it does not do justice to either nature-mystical strands inSchleiermacher’s view of ‘feeling’, or Heidegger’s own claims about theattunement to the more-than-human, natural environment. And Thandeka, aswe have seen, completely ignores the social in favour of one’s organic, bodily at-one-ness with the natural world in her most extensive work () onSchleiermacher’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 bothnature mysticism and the ‘romantic’ kinds of social mysticism (which are notspecific to the Christian community) are creation-mystical experiences that revealto one one’s deeper, mystical connection with creation. EFs of at-one-ness eitherwith one’s social context or one’s natural environment – or, in contrast, EFs ofparticular alienation from these contexts or transitions between different EFs – areessential to such experience. Our bodily engagement with our surroundings is atthe core of both kinds of EFs. In feelings of at-one-ness, one’s separateness isloosened or ‘dissolved’.Next, we can recognize that those more specifically ‘Christian feelings’, which

are characteristic of the Christ-centred social mysticism in the Church, arephenomenologically more complex: () they are deeply permeated and largelystructured by Christian concepts and stories, and () they are closely related to a‘person-forming’ process that happens in the Christ-believing community, whichis also significantly conceptually structured. Because of the historical specifics ofChristianity, this redemptive Christian social mysticism needs to be seen as relatedto the special experience of Jesus by the early Christian community (CF §,postscript). This involves the ways in which existential and emotional feelingsas experienced and expressed by the early Christ-believers were related to Judaeo-Christian concepts and beliefs. The Church, from the earliest times to the presentday, exists for the purpose of circulation of Christ’s God-consciousness, whichhappens 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 intertwinedwith 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; discursivethought; and importantly, existential feelings (non-conceptual). The latter areconstantly 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 varietyand depth, and connected especially to the believer’s relatedness to her ‘world’ of

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Christian community. Christian concepts and beliefs can guide the believer’sattention to, co-shape, and enable the expressions of, certain feelings better thanothers (Christian religious traditions have nurtured and ‘allowed’ expressions of aconsiderable variety of feelings, but this variety does not, of course, exhaust allpossibilities). This picture corresponds well with Schleiermacher’s claims that onlyparticular, historical religions can include ‘actual elements of religion’ or God-consciousness; a universal, generalized religion –which would presumablyinvolve something like an experience of pure EF – cannot be realized orexperienced by anyone (OR –). ‘Religion never appears in a pure state’(OR ), since God-consciousness is always combined with other aspects likepeople-directed ‘emotions’ (CF §.) and ‘cognitive activities’ (CF §.). Eachreligious experience is for Schleiermacher ‘a situated experience of the transcen-dent; that situatedness cannot be abstracted from experience’ (Marina (),).

In response to Helmer’s worry with nature-mysticism we can say that, from aChristian theological perspective, these aspects of experience and the feelingsinvolved can plausibly be seen as related: through the EFs that involve one’s at-one-ness with the world (or, a temporary but radical lack of it), the fragile andoften illusionary nature of our ‘I-constructions’ can become apparent. ForSchleiermacher, however, this mystical ‘losing’ of one’s individuality can beneither permanent nor absolute. In fact, it is portrayed as a fleeting momentin 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 thedeeper relatedness of everything in the world. It is by this very fact that it opens upthe possibility for a new creation in Christ. Schleiermacher’s view that ‘immediateself-consciousness does not have knowledge of an “I” ’ which ‘only arises throughthe reflective self-consciousness’ (cited in Frank (), ) is a precursor to hisaffirmation of the person-forming activity of God in Christ that happens only in thecommunity 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 atthe same time. The relationship of a person with God is understood to beinextricable from the interpersonal relations of that person with other people.Therefore, the earliest Christian formulations of the problem of sin, as well as of itssolution in Jesus Christ, are concerned with interpersonal relations (and throughthese 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 lovethe brethren. He who does not love his brother abides in death’ (John .). AsChrist’s God-consciousness is circulated and transmitted through the Church, thebelievers are assimilated into it through the ecclesial mediation of ChristusPraesens. As Hector argues, sociality, or intersubjectivity, is co-constitutive offeeling in this context. One’s attunement with this special community, which was




and is co-formed by Christian narratives and belief-commitments, and thiscommunity’s customs, is – at its best – a holy partaking in a restored community ofinterpersonal 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 allthese cases: the existential nature-mystical experiences, various social-mysticalexperiences, and the specific Christian social-mystical experiences, where in thelatter case, EFs are perhaps most ‘heavily’ fused with discursive thought andwith other, intentional feelings. There are relevant differences, however, in theways in which different EFs are co-present with other aspects of experience ineach 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 religiousfeeling 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. IfEFs 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 orexpression? This difficulty might be somewhat lessened by noting thatSchleiermacher sometimes claims (e.g. CF §.) that the FAD is not an expressionof a particular instance of religious existential feeling – as the early Proudfoot ((–)) and many others have interpreted it – but ‘a radical abstraction that doesnot, by itself, occupy a moment of consciousness’ (Wyman (), ). If this isso, FAD should not be understood as a description of the actual phenomenalcontent in someone’s experience. However, it has to be admitted thatSchleiermacher is at least ambiguous on this: while, for example, in CF §. weread that in the analysis of FAD ‘we abstract entirely from the specific content ofthe particular Christian experiences’, in CF §. we learn that the ‘idea’ which theterm ‘God’ presupposes is ‘nothing more than an expression of the feeling ofabsolute dependence’.

Philosophical significance

Beyond the interpretative question concerning Schleiermacher’s notion offeeling, there are several interesting contemporary questions in philosophy ofreligion which one can bring to the notion of ‘existential feeling’ and its use tointerpret Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’ in this context. For example, both Ratcliffe(, –) and Mark Wynn () have recently suggested that religiousconversions 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 whichSchleiermacher understands it – sometimes limited to his formulation ‘feeling ofabsolute 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 ofthe last four decades in epistemology of religion, where God-experience is saidto be a direct cognition – a ‘perception of God’ through ‘distinctive non-affectivequalia’ (Alston (), ), or ‘perceptive experience’ where God appears as ‘anobject’ (Yandell ()), or as a ‘supernatural thing’ (Swinburne ()) –Schleiermacher wrote that ‘there is no such thing as an isolated perception ofdeity’ (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 canconsistently interpret, I suggest, claims like ‘God is given to us in feeling in anoriginal way’ (ibid.), or that God is ‘co-posited’ or ‘implied’ (mitgesetzt) in feeling(ibid.), or indeed, the cognitivist-sounding claims about religious ‘intuition’ in theSpeeches.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 atheological direction’ (ibid.), i.e. towards religious belief-formation. He wrote that‘[religious] experience . . . consists precisely in this, that we are aware of thistendency to God-consciousness as a living impulse’ (CF §.). In the Speeches weread: ‘You cannot believe in [God] by force of will or because you want to use himfor 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 afelt way of belonging to the world’, although, according to him, ‘the same can besaid for other spiritual and mystical convictions that do not incorporate amonotheistic God’ (Ratcliffe (), –). Also quite independently ofSchleiermacher interpretation, Wynn has suggested that Ratcliffe’s notion ofexistential 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 byAlston, 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 asan 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’sdescription of his special experience in his ‘Lecture on ethics’ () as anexample.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




extraordinary that the world exists’ (Wittgenstein (), ). These expressions arenonsensical, he argued, since something can be a ‘miracle’ or ‘extraordinary’ onlyrelative to something else that is ‘normal’, whereas the existence of the world canhardly 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 religiousbelief to see that, in these passages, he recognizes the nature of such feelings asinviting religious expressions and possibly a religious attitude as well – thisdespite his reluctance to see such language as ‘sensible’ at the time. Theseexperiences 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 religiousbeliefs 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 forcontemporary relevance: by understanding ‘religious intuition’ as an unfinished,instinctive act towards religious descriptions (Dupré (), ), mediatingbetween feeling and belief, itself ‘not coinciding with these opposite poles’(Ten Kate (), –).

More generally, it may be suggested that at least some existential feelings asexperienced by many people have a religious-belief-inviting nature. This is not tosuggest that such a complex belief as belief in the monotheistic God is directlyinvited by particular EFs. Rather, we might think of something like an immediatepull, sometimes felt very strongly by many people, to describe the world, nature,the existence of humans, etc. as a ‘miracle’ or ‘creation’ for example. Suchdescriptions go beyond purely empirical, physical descriptions of the world, theytend to treat the world or universe as a totality, and they are considered by many tobe 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. Existentialfeelings are non-intentional, and, if the view on the role of EFs in religiousexperience and religious belief-formation presented in this article is correct, then‘perception of God’ language runs the risk of seriously misrepresenting religiousbelief-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, andnot doctrine, are primary expressions of religion (CF §–).

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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, ).

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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).

ALSTON, WILLIAM P. () Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca NY: Cornell University

Press).

BOWIE, ANDREW () From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London:

Routledge).

() ‘Introduction’, in F. E. D. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings, ed. Andrew Bowie

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), vii–xxxi.

() Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

() ‘The philosophical significance of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics’, in Jacqueline Marina (ed.) Cambridge

Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), –.

BRANDT, RICHARD B. () The Philosophy of Schleiermacher: The Development of his Theory of Scientific and Religious

Knowledge (Westport CT: Greenwood Press).

CROUTER, RICHARD () ‘Introduction’, in F. E. D. Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultural Despisers.

nd Edition, Richard Crouter (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), xi–xxxix.

DANIELS, MICHAEL () ‘Making sense of mysticism’, Transpersonal Psychology Review, , –.DEIGH, JOHN () ‘Primitive emotions’, in Robert C. Solomon (ed.) Thinking about Feeling (Oxford: Oxford University

Press), –.

DE SOUSA, RONALD () ‘Emotions: what I know, what I’d like to think I know, and what I’d like to think’, in Robert C.

Solomon (ed.) Thinking about Feeling (Oxford: Oxford University Press), –.

DOLE, ANDREW () Schleiermacher on Religion and Natural Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

DUPRÉ, LOUIS () ‘Toward a revaluation of Schleiermacher’s “philosophy of religion”’, The Journal of Religion, ,–.

FOLTZ, BRUCE V. () Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics and the Metaphysics of Nature (Atlantic

Highlands NJ: Humanities Press).

FORSTER, MICHAEL () ‘Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher’, in Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Available:

<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schleiermacher/> [..].

FRANK, MANFRED () The Subject and the Text: Essays on Literary Theory and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press).

() ‘Metaphysical foundations: a look at Schleiermacher’s Dialectic’, in Jacqueline Marina (ed.) Cambridge

Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), –.

FRIJDA, N., MANSTEAD, A. & FISCHER, A. () ‘Epilogue: feelings and emotions –where do we stand?’, in N. Frijda, A.

Manstead, & A. Fischer (eds) Feelings and Emotions: The Amsterdam Symposium (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press), –.

GENDLIN, EUGENE (–) ‘Befindlichkeit: Heidegger and the philosophy of psychology’, Review of Existential

Psychology & Psychiatry: Heidegger and Psychology, . Available: <http://www.focusing.org/

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GOLDIE, PETER () ‘Emotion, feeling and knowledge of the world’ in Robert C. Solomon (ed.) Thinking about Feeling

(Oxford: Oxford University Press), –.

GROVE, PETER () Deutungen des Subjekts: Schleiermachers Philosophie der Religion (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter).

() ‘Symbolism in Schleiermacher’s theory of religion’, in B. W. Sockness & W. Gräb (eds) Schleiermacher, the

Study of Religion, and the Future of Theology (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter), –.

HECTOR, KEVIN W. () ‘Actualism and incarnation: the high Christology of Friedrich Schleiermacher’, International

Journal of Systematic Theology, , –.

() ‘Attunement and explication: a pragmatist reading of Schleiermacher’s “theology of feeling”’, in B. W.

Sockness & W. Gräb (eds) Schleiermacher, the Study of Religion, and the Future of Theology (Berlin & New York:

Walter de Gruyter), –.

HEIDEGGER, MARTIN () Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany NY: State University of New York Press).

HELMER, CHRISTINE () ‘Mysticism and metaphysics: Schleiermacher and a historical-theological trajectory’, Journal

of Religion, , –.() ‘Schleiermacher’, in C. E. Gunton & D. A. S. Fergusson (eds) Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth Century

Theology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell), –.

HERMS, EILERT () ‘Handeln aus Gewißheit. Zu Martin Heideggers Phänomenologie des Gewissens’,Neue Zeitschrift

für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, , –.

() Menschsein im Werden: Studien zu Schleiermacher (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck).

HUTTO, D. D. & RATCLIFFE, M. (eds) () Folk Psychology Re-Assessed (Dordrecht: Springer).

JAMES, WILLIAM () Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Penguin Books).

LAMM, JULIA () ‘The early philosophical roots of Schleiermacher’s notion of Gefühl, –’, The Harvard

Theological Review, , –.

() The Living God: Schleiermacher’s Theological Appropriation of Spinoza (University Park PA: Pennsylvania

State University Press).

MACKINTOSH, HUGH R. () Types of Modern Theology: Schleiermacher to Barth (London: Nisbet).

MARINA, JACQUELINE () ‘Schleiermacher on the outpourings of the inner fire’, Religious Studies,

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() Transformation of the Self in the Thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

PROUDFOOT, WAYNE () Religious Experience (Berkeley CA: University of California Press).

() ‘Immediacy and intentionality in the feeling of absolute dependence’, in B. W. Sockness & W. Gräb

(eds) Schleiermacher, the Study of Religion, and the Future of Theology (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter),

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PUTNAM, HILARY () The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge MA: Harvard

University Press).

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Notes

. See Hector (, –) for an informative list of different meanings of Gefühl in several differentcontexts in Schleiermacher’s works.

. In this article, my understanding of Schleiermacher’s embeddedness in his time draws especially onLamm (), 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 tenetof pragmatism. I will mention two examples. According to Putnam, Dewey thought that ‘we arecommunal beings from the start. Even as a “thought experiment”, the idea that beings who belong tono 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 ofsocial 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 dwellsin every man, and which finds its satisfaction only when he steps forth beyond the limits of his ownpersonality 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 forunderstanding Schleiermacher’s ‘feeling’, but their interpretation, though similar to Thandeka’s, isconcerned with the philosophical aspect of feeling rather than the mystical one (Bowie (), –,and (), –; Frank ()).

. However, Helmer makes clear elsewhere (Helmer (), –) that she appreciates thecentral importance of the metaphysical understanding of ‘feeling’ in the Dialectic for ourunderstanding of ‘feeling’ in The Christian Faith. Yet, she still prioritizes the CF interpretation, sinceit ‘fleshes out [the “feeling of the lack” as developed in the Dialectic] in Christian theological terms’(ibid., ).


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. 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 ofthoughts and images’ (Thandeka (), ). For Schleiermacher’s nature-mystical leanings in TheSpeeches, see (OR , –, –, , –, , ).

. For two collections of different contemporary views (philosophical, psychological, and someneuroscientific) on emotions, including the “standard” one I am summing up in this paragraph, seeSolomon () 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 offeelings.

. This is not to deny that significant differences exist among the accounts of thinkers within each ofthese, rather artificially delineated, ‘groups’.

. Gendlin (–) estimated that Heidegger’s concept of Befindlichkeit is one of the mostfrequently 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 withHeidegger, translates Befindlichkeit as ‘attunement’ (in Heidegger (), xv). She also approvestranslating 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’stranslation 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 bodilyrelations to our environment, see Gendlin (–).

. For the relation of Schleiermacher’s use of ‘intuition’ to its Kantian origins see Ten Kate () andMarina ().

. 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’sStimmung, but criticizes Heidegger for ignoring or not seeing the theological implications of several ofhis views expressed in Being and Time. See also Herms (, –) for his phenomenological-theological reading of Schleiermacher’s notion of ‘immediate self-consciousness’.

. See Daniels (). This also helps avoiding the sometimes overstated contrast between ‘ordinarybelievers’ and ‘religious geniuses’ – for example in James (, –) and sometimes inSchleiermacher (OR –, ).

. I am here mainly following, not Schleiermacher’s use of the word ‘mysticism’, but the classification ofmysticism 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 ofexperience. Contexts – ‘objects’ in Daniels’s terminology, which I reject for reasons stated above – canbe: 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 ofexperience, corresponding to the extent to which the subject feels herself as existing opposite-to, orat-one-with, that context. So, for example: nature mysticism can be experienced by a believer of amonotheistic faith who interprets it – and usually experiences it – in accordance with his theisticbeliefs. Or, ‘god-mysticism’ may be experienced in a context of a polytheistic religion. The context ofmystical experience therefore is not necessarily the ‘ultimate reality’ of the belief-system of the mystic(ibid.).

GORAZD ANDRE J C



. Admittedly, it is Heidegger’s later work which is more concerned with our relation to the naturalenvironment. 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 reflectionson EFs in the Lecture on Ethics, see Smith (). Smith calls for a strong resistance to any belief-formation in connection to such feelings which tend to go ‘beyond the world’.



bridging the gap between social and existential-mystical interpretations of schleiermacher's...

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