Friedrich Schleiermacher

German theologian and philosopher (1768–1834), the founder of modern universal hermeneutics and, in Gadamer's genealogy, the pivotal figure who deformed hermeneutics by detaching understanding from its subject-matter. In the wiki Schleiermacher appears chiefly as the foil of philosophical hermeneutics: the position Gadamer argues against in order to recover what romantic hermeneutics lost.

Key Points

  • Universal hermeneutics. Schleiermacher's decisive innovation was to relocate the unity of hermeneutics from the unity of the content of tradition (his predecessors Ast, Wolf) to the unity of a procedure — understanding as such, indifferent to subject-matter — because "alienation is inextricably given with the individuality of the Thou."
  • Hermeneutics as "the art of avoiding misunderstanding." This inverts the older relation: misunderstanding now "follows automatically" and understanding "must be desired and sought at every point" — which makes hermeneutics an independent method rather than an ancillary technique.
  • Divinatory / psychological interpretation. Modeling all utterance on the aesthetics of genius, Schleiermacher treats the work as an "aesthetic construct" and understanding as a "reconstruction of a construction" — a "divinatory" re-creation of the author's act, resting on the metaphysical thesis that "everyone carries a tiny bit of everyone else within him."
  • "Understanding an author better than he understood himself." Under Schleiermacher's hand this formula (originally, in Kant/Fichte, a principle of critique of the subject-matter) becomes a principle of philological interpretation that "expels critique based on understanding the subject matter."

Details

For Gadamer, Schleiermacher is the hinge at which hermeneutics goes wrong: by psychologizing understanding (the recovery of an author's inner production), he subordinates the Sache (subject-matter, truth-claim) to a re-creation of individual life, and so prepares the historicist reduction of the text to a mere "expression of life." Gadamer's positive program — understanding as agreement about a subject-matter, application as intrinsic, fusion-of-horizons rather than empathy — is built point-for-point against this. The buried alternative Gadamer excavates ("to understand means to come to an understanding with each other") is precisely what "totally disappeared" after Schleiermacher.

Connections

  • is the foil of philosophical hermeneutics — the deformation-point Gadamer argues against.
  • initiates the genealogy reconstructed by Gadamer: Schleiermacher → historical school → Dilthey → Heidegger → Gadamer.
  • is contrasted with Chladenius and Spinoza, who kept interpretation tied to the subject-matter (the historical detour as a limiting case).

Open Questions

  • This page represents Schleiermacher only as Gadamer reads him; a fuller, non-Gadamerian treatment (the Hermeneutics and Criticism lectures, the Speeches on Religion, the dialectic) is not yet ingested. confidence: medium reflects this single-source, polemically-framed basis.

Sources

  • gadamer-1960-truth-and-method — Ch 3, "Historical Preparation": "The change in hermeneutics from the enlightenment to romanticism" and "Schleiermacher's project of a universal hermeneutics" (pp. 181–202).