Abstract

This book investigates the philosophic notion of self-consciousness found in the work of Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher. Its central focus is on Schleiermacher’s Dialektik, a posthumously published series of lectures delivered in Berlin between 1811 and 1831. In these lectures, we find Schleiermacher’s most detailed delineation of the two-tiered structure of feeling (Gefühl) that established him as the father of modern Protestant theology. We also find his solution to the gap between the noumenal and empirical self in Kant’s theory of self-consciousness that post-Kantian idealists attempt but failed to resolve. Schleiermacher correctly foresaw the nihilistic end to which the philosophical tradition of speculative self-consciousness would lead.