the Legacy of Kant in Schleiermacher's Religious Experience: a Critique of Current Interpretations

Abstract

Schleiermacher's concept of feeling of absolute dependence was the starting point for discussions about religious experience among modern scholars. As the purpose of the religious experience debates in the contemporary, analytic philosophy of religion is to provide an empirical argument for the existence of God, many scholars have expected the feeling of absolute dependence in Schleiermacher’s Christian Faith had to serve the same metaphysical or onto-theological purpose. Are this expectation and its respective interpretations consistent with what we read in Schleiermacher’s Christian Faith? To clarify this, we have used a historical and hermeneutical method in this study. The application of our historical method guides us to Kant’s influence on Schleiermacher, and we will see that most of his concepts are actually Kantian. The application of the hermeneutic method also allows us to consider the feeling of absolute dependence in the light of Schleiermacher's theology as a whole, as well as the concept of religion in the Kant's philosophical system as a whole. Criticizing the dominant understanding of the concept of religious experience in Schleiermacher, this paper will suggest, instead of an ontotheological reading, that the feeling of absolute dependence is only a description of self-consciousness, which does not provide us with any proof for the existence of God.

Keywords

• schleiermacher
• kant
• religious experience
• moral argument for the existence of god
• feeling of absolute dependence