Die Bedeutung des religiösen Bewusstseins in den Psychologievorlesungen Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermachers

Abstract

The article discusses the significance of religious feeling as it appears in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s lectures on psychology. Previous research has primarily focused on his speeches, doctrine of faith, and dialectics, largely ignoring this central component of Schleiermacher’s philosophy and theology in his psychology lectures. In this article, I aim to show that Schleiermacher provides a genuine derivation of religious feeling from feelings of respect for humanity and nature, which cannot be found elsewhere in his work. Moreover, the concept of life and its interplay of spontaneity and receptivity provide the theoretical basis for determining religious feeling in his doctrine of faith as a feeling of ultimate dependence, as well as in his speeches and ethics as a feeling of predominant inner experience. Finally, I will sketch what the union of respect for humanity and nature in the religious feeling can mean for modern understandings of nature.