Schleiermacher's Construction of the Subject in the Introduction to "the Christian Faith": Subjectivity, Tasks, and Discourses
Dissertation, Emory University (
1995)
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Abstract
At the beginning of the nineteenth century Friedrich Schleiermacher inaugurated a revolution in dogmatic language. He understood the content of that revolution to be an overcoming of the dichotomy between orthodox and rationalist thought which characterized eighteenth century theology by means of making his theology a wissenschaftlich description of the doctrinal claims implied in Christian self-consciousness , where self-consciousness is understood as feeling. When the discourse of the Introduction is understood as having a task distinct from that of the dogmatics itself, namely, the apologetic task of arguing for theology as a public discourse meeting the same criteria of coherence and intelligibility as every other wissenschaftlich discourse, then Schleiermacher's construction of the subject in the Introduction can be seen as pursuing this apologetic task, and the perennial confusion of the discourse of the Introduction with psychological, philosophical, or confessional discourses can be avoided. In light of two postmodern critics of modernity, Michel Foucault and Mark C. Taylor, I argue that Schleiermacher's revolution was characteristically modern in that it establishes theology on a turn to the subject, where the subject is understood as self-reflective and the source of meaning. However, Schleiermacher's subject exceeds the critics' descriptions of the modern subject in that it is not autonomous nor first of all cognitive, but is rather centered on feeling, and is both relatively free and relatively dependent on others, while being absolutely dependent on the Whence of existence. The feeling of absolute dependence both displaces modern reductions of the subject and yet avoids the postmodern dissipation of the subject by centering subjectivity on the expression given to the feeling of absolute dependence as this expression is structured within a community of faith through what can be called a grammar of affections. Subjectivity is formed through participation in particular communities that model ways of feeling, thinking, and acting in the world. As subjectivity is divided by participation in several communities the basis is provided for formulating political critiques and the possibility is established for personal, social, and political transformation