Schleiermacher’s intellectual life until about 1792 was that of the youthful philosopher, whose immature intelligence moves amid generalities with significant instinct and logical acumen, but without critical self-possession. The years that immediately followed from 1792 to 1802, were the years that brought him his fundamental insights, and that also saw the first expression of these in the Speeches on Religion (1799) and the Soliloquies (1800). The further development, the manifold application, and the systematic formulation of what he took these insights to mean occupied him throughout the remainder of his life. This appendix will trace the development of his ideas in the first and third of these periods in some detail, but will pass more briefly over the second, despite its greater importance, because Schleiermacher’s own interpretation of this second period is given in the text of the Soliloquies, and I have already given mine in the Introduction (pp. xi-lx above).
Sec. 1. Earliest Manuscripts (1789-1793)
Before he commenced to write at all, Schleiermacher had been “nursed in the womb of piety” at home and in Moravian schools.1 He had also separated from the Moravian Brotherhood when he felt that to continue in its limited ways of life and thought would be to wear a “false mask.”2 He had become devoted to classical studies. Finally, he had begun to study the philosophers, principally Aristotle, Kant, Leibniz and Spinoza at first. The trend of these first philosophic studies can be inferred in the main from certain extant manuscripts which Wilhelm Dilthey examined, and in part published in an appendix to his Life of Schleiermacher. The manuscripts date, he believes, from the time of Schleiermacher’s initial philosophic studies at Halle and shortly thereafter.3
In these papers Schleiermacher appears to be wrestling, chiefly with Kantian philosophy, as with a veiled destiny, to win his own spiritual integrity. In what is presumably the earliest of them all. Über das höchste Gut, he accepts the Kantian definition of the summum bonum as morality plus happiness, together with Kant’s criticism of hedonistic ethics and conception of the moral law as a categorical principle of pure practical reason.4 Yet these formulations disturb him. He thinks the moral law should be related to the summum bonum as an algebraic equation is related to the geometrical curve described in accordance with it.5 It seems to him unreasonable for a moral law to enjoin conduct that surrenders a real part of the highest good. Being unable, however, at this time to formulate a more satisfying moral principle than Kant’s, Schleiermacher contents himself in this initial essay with a criticism of the theological postulates which Kant attaches to his ethics. He objects to the idea that morality requires belief in a God able to provide the perfect union of morality and happiness. A “good will,” the only essential requirement of morality, is not only possible, but all the purer if independent of such belief. Moreover, it is questionable whether even a God could unite what Kant has put asunder! If man remains a creature of the senses, will not deviations from the Kantian law of reason be inevitable even in paradise? On the other hand, if he be divested of his sensibility in the world beyond, will he then be capable of what Kant calls happiness?
Thus, at the very beginning of his philosophical career Schleiermacher rejected the attempt to found theism on moral considerations. An entry in his diary some years later reads:, “Religion must be justified on its own account.”6 In a letter to his friend Brinkmann (1789) he speaks of forwarding a manuscript of one hundred pages On Religion.7 Unfortunately, this manuscript has been lost, so that we do not know how far Schleiermacher’s thought on religion had advanced, before he joined the Berlin romanticists in 1796, toward the ideas expressed in his Speeches on Religion in 1799. The steps leading up to the Soliloquies of 1800 are easier to trace.