Continental · 1768–1834
Friedrich Schleiermacher
Berlin theologian and translator of Plato, father of modern hermeneutics
Schleiermacher turned interpretation into a general art of understanding: to understand a text we must reconstruct both its language and its author’s individual way of thinking, since misunderstanding is the normal case. He also grounded religion in a feeling of absolute dependence.
Life and thought
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) grew up among the Moravian Pietists, studied at Halle and joined Friedrich Schlegel’s Romantic circle in Berlin. His On Religion (1799) defended faith to its “cultured despisers”; he translated almost all of Plato into German and helped plan the new University of Berlin, where he taught theology from 1810.
His lectures on hermeneutics, given from 1805 to 1833, turned interpretation from a set of rules for reading Scripture or law into a general discipline. Understanding, he argued, has two sides: the grammatical (what the words could mean in their language) and the psychological (how this author, with this way of thinking, used them). Because misunderstanding is the normal case, understanding must be worked for at every point. Dilthey revived this programme; Gadamer later criticised its aim of reconstructing the author’s mind.