Abstract

Without suggesting that Kant is responsible for the rise of hermeneutical philosophy, there are some developments in his philosophy which are important in relation to hermeneutics. Kant made the distinction between things‐in‐themselves and phenomena or appearances (see Article 2, kant). The world we know depends on a conceptual projection of categories of our mind; we do not have access to the things‐in‐themselves, but only to interpretations of things such as they appear to us, after they have been edited by the understanding. This domestication of rationality led to the fideism of Jacobi: if reason can not bring us to reality, the only instance that can give us any sense of an objective and real world is faith with a kind of “knowledge” which is higher than our rational knowledge. In his early On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799) Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) followed Jacobi in denying the pretensions of rational knowledge and determined religious sentiment to be a source of “knowledge” which transcends rational understanding (Vedder 1994). This background of Schleiermacher's hermeneutics is important to acknowledge. Therefore in this essay I will emphasize the fragility of hermeneutical knowledge for Schleiermacher. First I shall explain the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher; then I shall examine the relation between hermeneutics and dialectics.