Introduction
The notion of feeling (Gefühl) in the works of Friedrich Schleiermacher has been disputed in various ways. In part, this is undoubtedly because his concept of feeling, ‘far from being merely ambiguous, is polysemous: “feeling” occurs with a very different meaning in different contexts’ (Sorrentino (Reference Sorrentino, Sockness and Gräb2010), 99).Footnote 1 This is not to say that there is no agreement on the understanding of ‘feeling’ in Schleiermacher whatsoever. For example, it is widely agreed that many formulations of feeling in Schleiermacher have important common emphases, like the thought that feeling is distinct from reasoning and action, and that it is ontologically prior to both; it is also widely agreed that the notion of feeling holds a central place in Schleiermacher's theological and philosophical thought. Beyond that, the differences among the contemporary interpretations are sometimes striking. In the present essay I focus on a particular set of apparently opposing views, the contrast being that between social and existential-mystical interpretations. The former is represented by Kevin W. Hector (Reference Hector, Sockness and Gräb2010) and Christine Helmer (Reference Helmer2003), and the latter by Thandeka (1992 & 1995)).
Hector claims that ‘feeling’ in Schleiermacher should be understood as attunement to social circumstances – sociality is therefore constitutive of feeling. With somewhat different emphases but similarly, Helmer relates Schleiermacher's understanding of the Church and Christ's person-forming activity in individual believers to his ‘social mysticism’ – the Church is co-constitutive of the distinct Christian experience, which at its centre involves religious feeling. On the other hand, Thandeka's interpretation sees the feeling of at-oneness with nature through our organic being as the central and key understanding of religious feeling for Schleiermacher (not mentioning the Church or community).
My choice of interpretations that belong to opposite ends of a spectrum is deliberate – it serves the main aim of this article, which is to show that the social and the existential-mystical interpretations of feeling in Schleiermacher can be successfully brought into a compatible account. This is done by employing the notion of ‘existential feeling’ developed recently by Matthew Ratcliffe, which can encompass most of the central claims of both interpretations. The second aim is to argue that the phenomenological reading of Schleiermacher on feeling that I present here is relevant for contemporary philosophy of religion, in particular by shedding light on the role of feelings in religious experience.
A note of clarification is in order before we proceed. Despite some exegetical suggestions, the main thrust of this article is not exegetical in the sense of offering historical textual criticism of Schleiermacher. My interpretative approach involves decisions about what is more and what less important in Schleiermacher's work, as well as decisions regarding a more modern philosophical and theological language which can be used to take up and develop some of Schleiermacher's insights on religious feeling. These decisions are partly guided by my own philosophical and theological convictions. While Schleiermacher's immediate context, influences, and audiences are by no means ignored,Footnote 2 the overall vision that encompasses both interpretative and philosophical aims of this article is to locate the discussion of interpretations of feeling in Schleiermacher in relation to the wider contemporary philosophical discussion of feelings and their place in religion.
Social understanding 1: Kevin W. Hector
In a recent article, Kevin W. Hector (Reference Hector, Sockness and Gräb2010, 230) argues that Schleiermacher's notion of feeling should be understood as ‘one's non-inferential attunement to one's circumstances’. He notes that, despite their differences, several of Schleiermacher's explications of feelingFootnote 3 indicate that feeling for him denotes ‘a pre-reflective harmony or at-one-ness between oneself and one's environing circumstances … [which is] prior to knowing and doing, yet providing direction for each’ (Hector (Reference Hector, Sockness and Gräb2010), 222). He quotes Schleiermacher's statement that in feeling ‘the subject-object opposition is entirely excluded as inapplicable’ (Dial O, 287; Hector's translation), and the description of the feeling of absolute dependence as an ‘immediate self-consciousness of finding-oneself-absolutely-dependent’ (CF §32), to interpret Gefühl as ‘how one finds himself’ (Hector (Reference Hector, Sockness and Gräb2010), 223) in one's circumstances. This corresponds to Heidegger's concept of attunement, to which we will return in a later section.
Beyond these interpretations, but still in a Heideggerian tone, Hector claims that, for Schleiermacher, such attunement is inherently social. By this he seems to mean more than the thought that feeling is merely circulated in the community (clearly expressed in CF §6.3–4, §60.2). Hector claims that, since it includes a normative dimension which is a ‘product of one's socialization in certain norm-laden practices’ (Hector (Reference Hector, Sockness and Gräb2010), 227), we can explain ‘a good bit’ of what Schleiermacher meant by ‘feeling’ as internalization of custom.Footnote 4 All practical examples of non-inferential ‘feel’ for circumstances that Hector provides in order to make clear how to understand feeling as attunement are examples of one's attunement to some aspect of the social world (ibid., 223).
Hector bases these claims on Schleiermacher's understanding of kind-consciousness (CF §6.2), which could be described as a disposition, essential to human beings, towards social/interpersonal way of existence with other human beings. Kind-consciousness is for Schleiermacher closely related to feeling: ‘Everybody … always finds himself … involved in a multifarious communion of feeling’ (ibid.). Kind-consciousness is in a dialectical relationship with self-consciousness – the two are mutually shaping each other. Moreover, kind-consciousness and its expressions are necessary conditions ‘for the continuous existence of the God-consciousness in every human individual, and also for its communication from one to the other in proportion to the different levels of human fellowship’ (CF §60.3; see also §6.2–4, §60.2). For Schleiermacher then, sociality, at least in the context of the Christian community, is constitutive of feeling.Footnote 5 Applying a pragmatist strategy to theology in taking social practices as ‘theology's explanatory primitive’, Hector suggests that all higher theological notions such as redemption and indwelling of the Holy Spirit are to be explained in terms of the former (Hector (Reference Hector, Sockness and Gräb2010), 242).
A question which suggests itself to Hector is: what about a particularly crucial instance of attunement in Schleiermacher's theology, namely Christ's God-consciousness? According to Schleiermacher, Christ's God-consciousness was not constituted by the community. Since it was not merely social customs, to what ‘situation’ was Christ attuned, when he was completely ‘in tune with God’?
[Christ] must have entered into the corporate life of sinfulness, but He cannot have come out of it, but must be recognized in it as a miraculous factFootnote 6 [eine wunderbare Erscheinung] … His peculiar spiritual content … cannot be explained by the content of the human environment to which He belonged, but only by the universal source of spiritual life … (CF §93.3)
Christ's God-consciousness is understood here as ‘something completely original’ (Marina (Reference Marina2008), 210), which transcends mere attunement to social practice. Hector seems to accept this solution by positing that Christ's complete attunement with God preceded the founding of a community where this attunement circulates (Hector (Reference Hector, Sockness and Gräb2010), 230; cf. Hector (Reference Hector2006), 318–319).
Social understanding 2: Christine Helmer
At first glance, Christine Helmer's (Reference Helmer2003) conclusions in her article on mysticism in Schleiermacher may seem different from Hector's interpretation. Notably, Helmer positively values the mystical element in Schleiermacher's theology of redemption, whereas Hector does not believe that his strategy ‘would be attractive to those who appreciate Schleiermacher's “mystical” tendencies’ (Hector (Reference Hector, Sockness and Gräb2010), 242). After a closer look, however, these two perspectives appear to be fairly compatible, even mutually supporting.
Helmer argues against an influential interpretation and rejection of Schleiermacher by Emil Brunner, who famously accused the former of conflating nature and spirit, and of abandoning the witness of the Bible by putting ‘mystic human subjectivism’ on the pedestal instead (quoted in Helmer (Reference Helmer2003), 517). In the context of her argument against Brunner's accusations, Helmer effectively interprets Schleiermacher as a Christian ‘social mystic’ for whom the redemption of the individual believer ‘is coconstituted with the creation of community’ (ibid., 533) – the Church. She traces Schleiermacher's descriptions in the Speeches of mystical, felt communion, or even union, not with God but with all of humanity through loving relationships between human beings (OR 37–43), to his later ‘soteriological and ecclesial construal of mysticism’ (Helmer (Reference Helmer2003), 533) in The Christian Faith, where Schleiermacher relates the subjective or mystical element of feeling closely to the communal element (life of the Church) (CF §32.1–3, §100.3, §101.2).Footnote 7
People are assimilated into Christ's God-consciousness through the ecclesial mediation of Christus Praesens. One's relations to Christ and to the Church are therefore interconnected and related to the same kind of feeling; in Helmer's words, ‘Christ's redemptive activity effects simultaneously the new creation of the individual and the constitution of the community’ (Helmer (Reference Helmer2003), 533). Helmer feels that in this way, the dangers of some of Schleiermacher's early mystical leanings, which tend to annihilate individuality through a felt union with the universe (either with non-human nature, or ‘humanity’), are avoided via his emphasis on Christ's person-forming activity in individual believers. The latter is achieved through the spiritual community of the Church. Helmer's formulation of the social nature of Schleiermacher's mysticism and his theology of redemption – the two are inextricably linked – is well summed up in her claim that ‘[for] Schleiermacher, the positivity of the Christian church is the condition for the possibility of a distinct Christian experience, which is the foundational redemptive experience of the believer with Christ’ (ibid., 536). This claim is grounded in statements of Schleiermacher such as these: ‘[Within] Christian communion, there can be no religious experience which does not involve a relation to Christ’ (CF §32.1) and ‘the Christian feeling can only exist side by side with monotheism’ (CF §32.3).
I designate both Hector's and Helmer's accounts of feeling as social since: (1) both argue that the life of the Christian community, which involves ‘deep’ aspects of interpersonal relatedness and internalization of customs, is constitutive of distinct Christian experience, which for Schleiermacher is characterized by feeling. This ‘multifarious communion of feeling’ is a manifestation of kind-consciousness, which ‘dwells in every man’ (CF §6.2). (2) Both give a central place to Schleiermacher's claim that Christ's God-consciousness is circulated and transmitted through the community and that by this process an individual believer is brought into a redemptive relation with Christ (by partaking in Christ's God-consciousness). (3) Neither is sympathetic to nature-mystical strands of Schleiermacher's thought nor to interpretations which emphasize those strands.
It is to one such interpretation that we now turn.
Gefühl as relating to more-than-human
One of the more radical interpretations of Schleiermacher's notion of feeling is found in the works of Thandeka (1992 & 1995). She takes Schleiermacher's Dialectic as the key to unlocking the meaning of Gefühl both here and in other works of Schleiermacher.Footnote 8 In this important work Schleiermacher attempted directly to answer a philosophical question which was left unanswered by Kant and which Fichte, Jacobi, Hegel, and Shelling were also trying to solve (Frank (Reference Frank and Marina2005), 17–23). The problem can be formulated in this way: What in our consciousness binds together ‘thought’ or cognitive receptivity and ‘will’ or our active spontaneity? Schleiermacher claimed that the answer is feeling, the ‘immediate self-consciousness’ (Dial O, 286) that is the transcendent ground of our being. Since neither reflection nor action can provide the linking of different moments into a whole, which must be the basis for the continuing Self, Schleiermacher argues in the Dialectic that it is only feeling that ‘contains an immediate reference to existence; it is the “feeling of Being” ’ (Frank (Reference Frank and Marina2005), 27; cf. Bowie (Reference Bowie2003), 196–197).
Thandeka (1995, 13) thinks that this ‘existential encounter’, which happens through the feeling of Being, ‘lies at the core of Schleiermacher's life and work’. The most primordial stage of human consciousness – which Thandeka calls the ‘initial stage of consciousness’ – is a mystical experience of being:
At this stage, thinking is object-less and the self is subject-less. Schleiermacher's reconstruction of the self is the self that emerges from this immediate encounter with the fullness of life. The self that emerges is human nature certain of itself and celebratory of itself as an inextricable part of the nexus of natural world. (ibid.; italics added)
According to Thandeka, it is at the ‘null point of objective consciousness’, the point of transition between thinking and willing, that the special experience of ‘feeling of being’ can happen. At this pre-cognitive and pre-reflective stage of consciousness we simply are the feeling of our nonindividuated self as a part of natural world. The reality of the world is indistinct from our own reality as a nonindividuated part of this world.
We are not individuated because thinking, which is the means by which we individuate, has been cancelled. Thus, as a nonindividuated part of the natural world, we are life, all of it! We are the world. (Thandeka (1992), 448)
So, in apparent contradiction to Helmer's approach,Footnote 9 it is exactly the non-individuated at-one-ness with the ‘nexus of the natural world’, which includes a kind of cancellation of individuality, that Thandeka sees as central for Schleiermacher's notion of feeling.
Thandeka (1995, 27, 99, 108) also emphasizes another aspect of this insight of Schleiermacher: that feeling is a manifestation in our consciousness of the fact that we are embodied beings. What cognitive thinking cannot do – namely, to grasp or even ‘glimpse’ the transcendental ground of itself, which is life, our embodied, organic being – only feeling can. And because the feeling of being in which the subject–object distinction is cancelled is ‘the natal hour of everything living in religion’ (OR 32), Thandeka (1995, 27) emphasizes that ‘Schleiermacher, in stark contrast to Kant, celebrated the body as part of the human link to God’.
Importantly, this most basic feeling of being is, according to Thandeka, not only pre-reflective, but also ‘pre-religious’Footnote 10 (Thandeka (1995), 13, 104). This fits together with the notable lack of attention in Thandeka's book (1995) to the relation of feeling to any aspect of community, Church, or interpersonal context. While this does not amount to claiming that the feeling of being is pre-social, it at least suggests such a reading. Clearly, it is with an existential nature-mysticism, not social mysticism, that Thandeka connects Schleiermacher's notion of feeling.Footnote 11
So, given these different and apparently contradictory interpretations of Schleiermacher's notion of feeling, are we not forced to choose between social (Hector–Helmer) and existential-mystical (Thandeka) understandings? Or do we have to recognize a significant disunity in Schleiermacher's work? Or are these differences simply a result of selective focusing on some of Schleiermacher's texts and taking those as the key to interpret the whole, while ignoring or downplaying the others?
By way of answering the last question, I suggest the answer is ‘yes’ to a certain extent. Both interpretations have their favoured texts, which do seem to lend support to the greater claims they make about Schleiermacher's ‘feeling’. One might conclude from this that there lies a serious inconsistency in Schleier-macher's work on the subject. While not insisting that Schleiermacher must have been consistent in everything he said on feeling, I do suggest that the answer to the first question above is ‘no’: the two interpretations considered can be brought into a considerable proximity by a unified account of feeling in Schleiermacher. In order to do that and at the same time relate aspects of Schleiermacher's discussion to the modern views on feeling(s) in religious experience, we have to engage briefly with modern philosophy of feeling generally.
Philosophy of feeling
Developments in the philosophy and psychology of emotions and feelings in the last three decades have brought about many differing views, not all of which can be mentioned here. We will, however, draw on some familiar distinctions that have come out of these debates. These distinctions will prove useful for interpreting Schleiermacher's notion of feeling in the setting of modern discussions on feeling in philosophy of religion, to which we will return in the last section of the article.
A traditional school of thought associated with much Anglo-Saxon philosophy and so-called Folk Psychology tends to talk about the human mind in terms of the belief–desire distinction (Hutto & Ratcliffe (Reference Hutto and Ratcliffe2007)). In this scheme, feelings do not have any philosophically significant role (epistemological, ethical, or metaphysical). Even in emotions – usually seen as compound states consisting of a mixture of beliefs, desires, and feelings – the latter are not considered to be an essential part of the combination.Footnote 12 It is not hard to see why this is so. Although compounded, emotions are considered to be intentional states: they are ‘directed at something’ (Deigh (Reference Deigh and Solomon2004), 9). One is afraid of an approaching dog, hopes for a victory in a coming football game, or hates the fussy boss. Feelings, on the other hand, are usually viewed as affects which ‘do not have “directions” ’ (Solomon (Reference Solomon2003), 4). According to this picture, feelings are therefore defined as mere ‘subjective colourings’ which are secondary feedbacks of bodily goings-on (Frijda et al. (Reference Frijda, Manstead, Fischer, Frijda, Manstead and Fischer2004), 458) – they are a non-essential addition to the essential constituents of mind: beliefs and desires (both intentional). Peter Goldie has called such a view – which he challenges – an add-on view of feelings, according to which ‘they can tell us nothing about the world and how to act in the world’ (Goldie (Reference Goldie and Solomon2004), 92).
Another school of thought in contemporary philosophy of emotion sees feelings as vital to human orientation in the world and decision-making, and even to cognition/knowledge. Michael Stocker argues against the tendency to reduce emotions to the reason/desire duality and claims that this picture distorts our understanding of emotions. He argues that ‘affectivity’ or ‘psychic feelings’ are indispensable for emotions, as well as for other ‘affective’ mental states like moods, interests, and attitudes (Stocker & Hegeman (Reference Stocker and Hegeman1996)).Footnote 13 Goldie (Reference Goldie and Solomon2004) argues that feelings can be intentional: an emotion such as fear of a burglar involves a ‘feeling towards’ an object (burglar) and should not be analysed in terms of a pre-existent belief plus an unintentional bodily feeling. Rather, claims Goldie, the kind of feelings he calls feelings towards are a case of ‘unreflective extraspective emotional engagement with the world beyond the body’ (ibid., 96).Footnote 14 The later Robert C. Solomon accepted a similar view (Solomon (Reference Solomon, Dreyfus and Wrathall2009)).
In addition to these two treatments there is what we can call a Heideggerian view of feelings. Although this view can be traced through Heidegger back to German Romantic philosophy, to which Schleiermacher belonged, its most influential expression can be found in Heidegger's Being and Time. There, Heidegger first objects to the misrepresentations of affective states in much of Western philosophy, which portrays them as merely ‘accompanying phenomena’ with no relation to cognition (apart from their tendency to distract and obscure it) (Heidegger (Reference Heidegger and Stambaugh1996), 178). But beyond that, he develops what some consider to be a ‘highly original thesis’ (Solomon (Reference Solomon, Dreyfus and Wrathall2009), 291) which says that certain kinds of feelings which he calls Stimmungen – traditionally translated as ‘moods’ – are very basic, primordial ways of our finding-ourselves-in-the-world. These are non-intentional states which are ontologically prior to the intentional ones and make the latter possible (Heidegger (Reference Heidegger and Stambaugh1996), 126–131).
This brief review of the three groups of viewsFootnote 15 serves only to delineate basic distinctions and will enable us to position our interpretation of Schleiermacher's feeling in the contemporary context. While rejecting the ‘add-on’ view of all feelings as inadequate (although with limited applicability in some contexts) and accepting that feelings can be intentional (for example, at least some feelings associated with ‘basic emotions’ such as fear, anger, love, hate, and hope), I will use especially the Heideggerian view that there are non-intentional feelings (not directed at specific objects/events) that have an important, world-constituting role in human experience. We will have to proceed on these assumptions without engaging with different positions here.
‘Heideggerian’ phenomenology of existential feelings
At the centre of Heidegger's Being and Time is the question about the meaning of Being, i.e. about a sense of what it is to be (Heidegger (Reference Heidegger and Stambaugh1996), 2–3); in particular, the goal is to understand the human being's kind of being, which Heidegger calls Da-sein (ibid., 12). In order to illuminate the phenomenological ‘structure’ of our basic experience of being (‘Da-sein's being-in-the-world’), Heidegger introduces several concepts; we will limit our attention to two of them: Befindlichkeit [‘attunement’] and Stimmung [‘mood’].
Heidegger coined the term Befindlichkeit Footnote 16 from the common German question ‘Wie befinden Sie sich?’, which translates as ‘How are you?’ or ‘How do you feel?’, but also as ‘How/where are you situated?’ ‘“Sich befinden” … has three allusions: The reflexivity of finding oneself; feeling; and being situated’ (Gendlin (Reference Gendlin1978–1979)). Heidegger explains (Reference Heidegger and Stambaugh1996, 124) that we should view our ‘being in the mood’ (Stimmung) as Befindlichkeit or attunement. The mood is ‘so far from being reflected upon that it precisely assails Da-sein in the unreflected falling prey to the “ ‘world” ’ of its heedfulness’ (ibid., 129). So, ‘[it] comes neither from “without” nor from “within”, but rises from being-in-the-world itself as a mode of that being’ (ibid.). To simplify, Heidegger defines ‘moods’ as primordial feelings (not ‘merely’ but ‘also’ internal states of mind) that disclose our relatedness to the world.
Importantly for our discussion, the social dimension of Heidegger's ‘Da-sein's being-in-the-world’ is constitutive of it: it ‘is always already with others’ (ibid., 117), so that even ‘knowing oneself is grounded in primordially understanding being-with’ (ibid., 116).Footnote 17 Moods do not have a subject–object structure and are in an important respect ‘pre-cognitive’:
[Heidegger] departs from the traditional conception of feelings as sensuous states that “merely accompany” the so-called ‘higher faculties’ of will and reason, and from the usual practice of classifying moods according to their qualities of pleasure, pain, and desire. Heidegger's basic idea is that moods are a unique and primary way of disclosing Dasein's Being-in-the-world, and a disclosure that is prior to the ‘cognitive’ disclosure of the so-called ‘faculty of reason’. (Smith (Reference Smith1981))
Moods, therefore, constitute our sense of belonging to the world before the abstract conceptualizations of the ‘world out there’ and ‘me inside’ (the subject) take place.Footnote 18 While moods are not intentional (they are not directed at an object) they make intentional states (including beliefs, emotions, and articulated desires) possible (Heidegger (Reference Heidegger and Stambaugh1996), 129).
More recently, Matthew Ratcliffe (Reference Ratcliffe2008) has introduced the concept ‘existential feelings’, which is developed out of Heidegger's concept of ‘moods’. In part, Ratcliffe's motivation for introducing this phenomenological category was to pick out some feelings that do not fit well into the category ‘emotions’ or ‘emotional feelings’. He argues that categorizing all feelings as ‘emotional’ would ‘obscure the important difference between states that are intentionally directed at particular objects, events or situations in the world, and others that constitute backgrounds to all our experiences, thoughts and activities’ (ibid., 37).Footnote 19 Existential feelings are defined as:
non-conceptual feelings of the body, which constitute a background sense of belonging to the world and a sense of reality. 11They are not evaluations of any specific object, they are certainly not propositional attitudes and they are not ‘mere affects’. (ibid., 39)
Although similar to Heidegger's ‘mood’, Ratcliffe's ‘existential feeling’ (EF) is a somewhat different concept. First, when Heidegger describes examples of ‘moods’, he discusses only a very restricted list, focusing for the most part on the contrast between an everyday mood and that of anxiety or angst. While Heidegger does include also ‘elation’ or ‘joy’, ‘boredom’, and possibly a few more (Smith (Reference Smith1981)), Ratcliffe (ibid.) thinks there can be much greater variety of EFs, with corresponding variety of expressions of them. Second, he claims that the role of the body in our experience (including feelings) is essential,Footnote 20 yet it is not addressed by Heidegger's account. For this reason, Ratcliffe builds his account of EFs also on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology with its emphasis on our embodied existence. And third, EFs include a variety of states that can be ‘(a) short lived, (b) sustained over a period of time or (c) retained over the course of a life as habitual temperaments; but the English term “ ‘mood” ’ only seems suited to (b)’ (Ratcliffe (Reference Ratcliffe2008), 55). Accepting these reasons as weighty enough for the choice of a different term, we will from now on use Ratcliffe's notion of ‘existential feelings’ rather than ‘moods’.
Ratcliffe claims that EFs are never absent, since ‘all experience is structured by some variant of existential feeling’ (ibid., 40). Examples of expressions of EFs can be the following: feeling ‘complete’, ‘separate and in limitation’, ‘at home’, ‘invulnerable’, ‘at one with life’, ‘at one with nature’, ‘real’, ‘part of the real world again’, ‘disconnected’, or a sentence like ‘All is empty of meaning’. In the Christian religious context, they may be expressed by ‘feeling God's presence in everything’, ‘feeling full of the Holy Spirit’, ‘being alienated from God’, or by ‘The world is a miracle’. Often, the descriptions of EFs are highly metaphorical, which implies that they are not easily categorized or conceptualized (ibid., 36–37). Nevertheless, we can and do communicate about these states.
Many varieties of EF are ‘mild’ and constitute the background of what we consider normal life-experience or senses of reality, like moderate ‘disconnectedness’ (which may last for days, months or longer), or special times of feeling ‘more real’ or ‘intensively alive’. In addition to such cases, Ratcliffe also includes (phenomenological descriptions of) unusual experiences, such as the experiences of people who suffer from schizophrenia, the Capgras illusion, and the Cotard delusion (ibid., 139–216), as well as those that are usually understood as more ‘healthy’ but still unusual, like mystical experiences (ibid., 272–275). His methodological approach, which also uses relevant psychiatric research, entails the view that it is often by analysing the unusual cases and dramatic changes in EFs that an awareness and appreciation of the more ‘normal’ variants of EFs is possible for us.
In relation to the involvement of the body in feelings, Ratcliffe opposes the contrast between ‘feelings of the body’ and ‘world-directed feelings’/‘feelings towards’ (e.g. Goldie, Stocker). Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, he claims that feelings can (1) be a direct experience of something other than the body (emotional feelings) through the body, (2) constitute our relatedness with the world (non-intentional, existential feelings) as embodied, as well as (3) be ‘self-directed’ when the body feels itself or any part of it (‘bodily’ feelings) (ibid., 36).
So, EFs are ways of experiencing, not the embodied self alone, but also the world and the relation between the two, ‘the three aspects being inextricable’ (ibid., 37). While EFs constitute the background of our discursive thought, emotional feelings, and other intentional states, there is a multi-way relation between these so that sensory perceptions, beliefs, and emotional episodes can help focus one's attention to, but also reshape and co-influence, one's sense of reality which is constituted by EFs. However, Ratcliffe argues that ‘the dependence is not symmetrical’ (Ratcliffe (Reference Ratcliffe, Marienberg and Fingerhut2012), 25): EFs determine the possibilities for thought, emotions, action, etc. more fundamentally than the other way around (ibid., 24–28).
Schleiermacher and religious existential feelings
It is now time to bring this discussion of feelings into relation with Schleiermacher's writing. We will do this by way of a phenomenological reading of the much-discussed second speech (OR 18–54). The Speeches as a whole contain early formulations of most topics and positions which were later developed by Schleiermacher in more detail and sophistication in other works. And, while the highly rhetorical, personal, and at times poetic style of the first edition of Speeches (1799), which I use here, may include a notable degree of conceptual ambiguity (MacKintosh (Reference Mackintosh1945), 43–50; Proudfoot (Reference Proudfoot1985), 10–11; Forster (Reference Forster2002)), the work contains efforts to express certain feelings and direct readers’ attention to their own feelings, which is useful for our interpretative aim.
In the first edition of the Speeches, the essence of religion is located in feeling (Gefühl) and intuition (Anschauung). These two always go hand in hand; one without the other is ‘nothing’ (OR 31). Intuition here stands for, broadly speaking, a non-conceptual form of insight or cognitionFootnote 21 (Crouter, in OR 25, n. 9; Adams (Reference Adams and Marina2005), 36) while the intuition that is the objective side of feelings essential for religion is described as ‘intuition of the universe’ (OR 24–25). Andrew Dole describes it as ‘a view or an impression of some overarching, structural feature of the world as a whole or of all that exists; to have an intuition of the universe is to have a sense of its overall character’ (Dole (Reference Dole2010), 82). We need to remember, however, that Speeches is not a systematic text, and the conceptual distinctions in it are not always consistent. In my view, several senses of both ‘intuition’ and ‘feeling’ can be detected in the second speech alone, and this may be the main reason for the existence of very conflicting set of interpretations of both concepts. Furthermore, both concepts underwent changes of use/sense from Schleiermacher's earlier to his later work, and intuition in particular became almost entirely displaced by ‘religious feeling’ as the descriptor of the essence of religion by the time of the second edition of the Speeches (1806), and soon became associated much more with scientific knowledge instead (Adams (Reference Adams and Marina2005), 36–37; Forster (Reference Forster2002)).
So, while some have argued that ‘intuition’ in the first edition of the Speeches is non-conceptual (Crouter, in OR 25, n. 9; Adams (Reference Adams and Marina2005), 36), others have suggested it is not only conceptual but ‘an interpretation’ (Grove (Reference Grove2004), 295; Grove (Reference Grove, Sockness and Gräb2010), 111). In terms of intentionality, Brandt's fully cognitivist ‘perception-model’ of Schleiermacher's religious intuition, where intuition is intentionally directed at ‘the Infinite’ and is prior to religious feeling (Brandt (Reference Brandt1968), 101–117), may be an extreme example, but it is not unusual to see intuition as implying at least some kind of intentionality for the feeling-intuition pair (cf. Adams (Reference Adams and Marina2005), 36). A minority of interpreters have interpreted intuition in the Speeches as an unfinished ‘religious act’ that does not reach full intentionality although constituting a pull towards the religious ‘object’, which is, however, not really an object (Dupré (Reference Dupré1964), 110). Similarly, Ten Kate sees intuition as a mediatory act between (non-intentional and non-conceptual) feeling and (intentional and conceptual) belief and knowledge, itself ‘not coinciding with these opposite poles’ (Ten Kate (Reference Ten Kate2007), 396–397).
We cannot continue this exegetical debate here.Footnote 22 But this should suffice to make us wary of expecting neat and simple exegetical conclusions regarding the meaning of ‘intuition’ in the first edition of the Speeches. In his recent treatment of the topic, Dole is wise enough to leave the question of the relation of intuitions of the universe to religious feelings in the Speeches open:
The idea of ‘accepting everything individual as part of the whole and everything limited as a representation of the infinite’ suggests either a kind of apperceptive habitus that provides fertile ground for the having of intuitions of the universe, or an awareness of the relatedness of all things that is stimulated by the impact of one or more such intuitions. (Dole (Reference Dole2010), 82)
We will briefly return below to the question whether and how Schleiermacher's notion of ‘intuition’ from the first edition of the Speeches might be put to use in contemporary discussion of religious experience. But now to the notion of ‘feeling’: It is clear that Schleiermacher strictly distinguishes feeling from discursive thought (beliefs, knowledge, and ‘metaphysics’) on the one hand, and from action (involving one's will and morals) on the other (OR 22–23). What is often overlooked, however, is that Schleiermacher in the Speeches distinguishes between different kinds of feelings. Perhaps the clearest distinction is between the more important feelings in religious context which are ‘the essence of religion’, and those which, despite being characteristic for religious lives in the broader sense, are not a part of religion's essence. Dole notes that in this second group are feelings – for example, feelings of tolerance towards fellow human beings, of reverence in the face of the eternal and invisible, of compassion, and of remorse over sin against others – which flow more or less directly from the feelings that are religion's essence, and are a part of what he calls Schleiermacher's ‘ideal religion’ (Dole (Reference Dole2010), 83).
But there are even more senses of ‘feeling’ discernible in the Speeches. We read, for example, about ‘powerful and disturbing feelings of religion’ (OR 30), which are incompatible with the ‘calmness of mind’ that is needed for proper moral conduct. In contrast, the proper religious feeling can and should accompany every action according to Schleiermacher – hence the claim: ‘We should do everything with religion, nothing because of religion’ (ibid.). To be driven by passionate feelings for one's religion is something quite different from living a (moral) life that is accompanied by a background consisting of proper religious feelings as by ‘a holy music’ (OR 20). One notable difference between these ‘bad’ passionate feelings ‘for one's religion’ and the feelings which are the background of appropriate religious life according to Schleiermacher seems to be that the former are intentional, and the latter a non-intentional background to religious life.
A few paragraphs later (OR 33–35) Schleiermacher again compares certain kinds of intentional feelings – this time more ‘noble’ kinds, which, according to Schleiermacher, his readers tend to mistake for religion's essence – with what he considered to be such. He claims that even in the feelings of ‘fear of the material forces’ like thunder or sea, or in the feeling of ‘joy at the beauty of corporeal nature’, like the bloom of the flowers or brilliance of sunsets, we nevertheless cannot ‘recognize the presence of an almighty being’. ‘You will then find that these phenomena, no matter how strongly they move you, are still not suited to be intuitions of the world’, although they can be ‘a beginning’ of religion (OR 33–34).
Schleiermacher's view here appears to be that, although several kinds of feelings are part and parcel of religious life – some appropriately so, and some not – only a very special, restricted kind of feelings is characteristic of religion's essence. That kind is related to ‘communion between a person and the universe’ (OR 59), or to ‘intuiting each thing as an element of the whole’ (OR 62). ‘[In] religion everything strives to expand the sharply delineated outlines of our personality and gradually to lose them in the infinite in order that we, by intuiting the universe, will become one with it as much as possible’ (OR 53; italics added). So, the picture is considerably complex: There are feelings which are only falsely called ‘religious’; and, while there may be intentional and non-intentional feelings that are an appropriate part of ‘ideal religion’ (including emotional feelings towards Jesus in Christianity, or towards one's own Church, or towards particular creations like a flower or a mountain), only some feelings constitute the essence of religion: the ones that involve some degree of ‘losing’ oneself in a deep relation with the whole. Albrecht points to the highly metaphorical ‘mystical moment’ passage in the second speech as central for interpreting Schleiermacher's view of religion's essence: the ‘religious ur-affection’ (religiöse Uraffektion), as Albrecht calls the highest and inexpressible religious feeling of oneness with the universe, is prior and superior to both intuitions and [other] religious feelings that make up ‘ideal religion’, and a person's piety is genuine only in so far as other elements of that person's religious life (feelings and intuitions, beliefs, practices etc.) flow out from this Uraffektion (Albrecht (Reference Albrecht1994), 127–132).
Such religious ur-affection, then, is pre-reflective and transcends subject–object structure, and, although one can be aware of it but for a fleeting moment of consciousness according to Schleiermacher, it ‘constitutes a background sense of belonging to the world and a sense of reality’, like existential feelings do according to Ratcliffe (and ‘moods’ according to Heidegger (cf. Herms (Reference Herms1999)).Footnote 23 The similarities between the phenomenological category of existential feeling and Schleiermacher's formulation of religion's essence in the Speeches do not stop there. A significant feature of Schleiermacher's account is that many feelings that ‘are religion’ are possible (OR 46), as Ratcliffe claims that there are many varieties of existential feelings (Ratcliffe (Reference Ratcliffe2008), 8, 53–55, 285). Moreover, Schleiermacher develops his argument on the basis of his description of ‘two examples’ of religious feelings by lightly sketching, as he puts it, ‘some of the prominent religious intuitions from the realms of nature and humanity’ (OR 43; italics added). Like the feeling of oneness with the natural, more-than-human world, the case of intuiting humanity (through feeling) as a whole also involves transcending subject–object structures and relations.
One result of this is the realization that an overly individualistic understanding of human personality is illusionary (or a misleading construction, we might say). Instead, ‘everything human is intertwined and made dependent on one another’ (OR 40). These, of course, are early formulations of the social-mystical strand of Schleiermacher's account of feeling which Helmer picks up in her interpretation and which is more prominent and explicit than the nature-mystical strand. Similarly, Ratcliffe focuses mostly on the role of EFs in our relation to the surrounding social world or interpersonal context (Ratcliffe (Reference Ratcliffe2008); (Reference Ratcliffe2010)), although he recognizes that EFs characterize our relation to the more-than-human or ‘impersonal world’ (Ratcliffe (Reference Ratcliffe, Marienberg and Fingerhut2012), 6) as well.
So, for the Schleiermacher of The Speeches it is through one's relation to of the universe as a whole that one moves from the finite to the infinite. But this transition happens through one's immediate context of experience: ‘[In] our relationship to this world there are certain transitions into the infinite, vistas that are hewn through’ (OR 62). This may be the relation to the immediate surroundings of the natural world (like stars at night, or a lake and trees), or one's social environment (like the religious community of which one is a part of, or one's lover). Importantly, these ‘worlds’ are not experienced as objects (Frank (Reference Frank and Marina2005), 30) but rather as contexts in relation to which one can experience anything from alienation to complete at-one-ness.
Before we move on, it is important to note that the ‘mystical’ point about feeling – that it involves experiencing degrees of at-one-ness with one's context (or ‘losing’ of the subject-object distinction) – is not lost in Schleiermacher's later works either. In the Dialectic, it is explained that in feeling the ‘subject-object antithesis remains completely excluded and is not applicable’, and that ‘immediate self-consciousness does not have knowledge of an “I” ’ (Dial O (2001) II, 287ff.). Similarly in The Christian Faith Schleiermacher insists that in feeling ‘the subject unites and identifies itself with everything which, in the middle grade (of consciousness), was set over against it’ (CF §5.1). But how is this related to the specifically Christian context – the Christ-believing community?”
Towards a complex picture of Christian religious experience
Before addressing this issue, let's remember that in this article we are addressing two questions: first, how can we reconcile the social and existential-mystical interpretations of Schleiermacher's concept of ‘feeling’ via the unifying account based on the concept ‘existential feeling’? And second, what contribution can such an interpretation of Schleiermacher make to the modern efforts to understand the role of feeling in religious experience and its relation to religious belief?
Reconciling the interpretations of Schleiermacher's ‘feeling’
In order to answer the first question we need to clarify briefly the notion of ‘mysticism’ and its relation to existential feelings. According to Ratcliffe, many experiences which are considered to be mystical in the main religions can be understood as involving an awareness of more intense or ‘deeper’ variations of existential feelings, or significant changes in these (Ratcliffe (Reference Ratcliffe2008), 274–275). If we accept this view, there is an important continuity between what we consider to be normal EFs, which most people seem to inhabit (for example feeling alienated, disconnected, or in harmony with our surroundings, social, artificial, or natural), and the more unusual ones, including those very special cases of which the ‘religious geniuses’ and mystics speak.Footnote 24 By calling Schleiermacher's position ‘mysticism’, then, we are here not implying a focus solely on extraordinary or rare experience.
Granted such an understanding, we have seen that we can find at least two strands of mysticism in Schleiermacher: nature-mysticism and social mysticism, whereas Schleiermacher's attitude to the inward ‘god-mysticism’ is clearly less favourable (OR 65).Footnote 25 While nature-mysticism is detectable in the Speeches and, according to a plausible reading, in the Dialectic, social mysticism is more prominent and can be found in somewhat different forms in early as well as later works, including The Christian Faith, as Helmer points out. Unfortu-nately, however, Helmer tries significantly to downplay the importance of Schleiermacher's nature-mysticism. Out of her theological worry that ‘problematic implications arise tending toward the elimination of individuality’ if we accept those early nature-mystical formulations, she relegates them to ‘the rhetorical surface of the Speeches’, which is due to ‘Romantic influences’ (Helmer (Reference Helmer2003), 528–530). This seems to suggest that ‘romantic influences’, like the emphasis on the ur-affection of oneness, do not deserve a serious philosophical or theological treatment, or that these ‘romantic’ ideas expressed by Schleiermacher are not compatible with Christian theology and therefore corrupt that which is properly theological in Schleiermacher.
Similarly, we have noted that Hector's interpretation of ‘feeling’ as ‘one's non-inferential attunement to circumstances’, despite drawing (also) on Heidegger's work and using Heideggerian vocabulary, focuses exclusively on the attunement as internalization of social custom (Hector (Reference Hector, Sockness and Gräb2010), 226). While such interpretation is compatible with Heidegger's understanding of Da-sein as ‘being-with’ others (Heidegger (Reference Heidegger and Stambaugh1996), 116), it does not do justice to either nature-mystical strands in Schleiermacher's view of ‘feeling’, or Heidegger's own claims about the attunement to the more-than-human, natural environment.Footnote 26 And Thandeka, as we have seen, completely ignores the social in favour of one's organic, bodily at-one-ness with the natural world in her most extensive work (1995) on Schleiermacher's ‘feeling’.
How, then, can we resolve this tension? The first step in bringing the valuable insights of these different accounts into a unifying account is to allow that both nature mysticism and the ‘romantic’ kinds of social mysticism (which are not specific to the Christian community) are creation-mystical experiences that reveal to one one's deeper, mystical connection with creation. EFs of at-one-ness either with one's social context or one's natural environment – or, in contrast, EFs of particular alienation from these contexts or transitions between different EFs – are essential to such experience. Our bodily engagement with our surroundings is at the core of both kinds of EFs. In feelings of at-one-ness, one's separateness is loosened or ‘dissolved’.
Next, we can recognize that those more specifically ‘Christian feelings’, which are characteristic of the Christ-centred social mysticism in the Church, are phenomenologically more complex: (1) they are deeply permeated and largely structured by Christian concepts and stories, and (2) they are closely related to a ‘person-forming’ process that happens in the Christ-believing community, which is also significantly conceptually structured. Because of the historical specifics of Christianity, this redemptive Christian social mysticism needs to be seen as related to the special experience of Jesus by the early Christian community (CF §14, postscript). This involves the ways in which existential and emotional feelings as experienced and expressed by the early Christ-believers were related to Judaeo-Christian concepts and beliefs. The Church, from the earliest times to the present day, exists for the purpose of circulation of Christ's God-consciousness, which happens through social custom, and in this way the individual believers are ‘partaking in redemption in Christ’.
The way we can understand this specifically Christian social mysticism phenomenologically is that it involves different aspects of experience intertwined with one another or ‘fused’ into a unified whole (cf. Ratcliffe (Reference Ratcliffe2008), 272–275): emotional feelings towards other people, one-self (guilt, shame, pride, etc.), God (conceptualized), and more-than-human segments of the world; discursive thought; and importantly, existential feelings (non-conceptual). The latter are constantly present in some form or another and ontologically prior to other states; but it may be suggested that in Christian social mysticism EFs are of special variety and depth, and connected especially to the believer's relatedness to her ‘world’ of Christian community. Christian concepts and beliefs can guide the believer's attention to, co-shape, and enable the expressions of, certain feelings better than others (Christian religious traditions have nurtured and ‘allowed’ expressions of a considerable variety of feelings, but this variety does not, of course, exhaust all possibilities). This picture corresponds well with Schleiermacher's claims that only particular, historical religions can include ‘actual elements of religion’ or God-consciousness; a universal, generalized religion – which would presumably involve something like an experience of pure EF – cannot be realized or experienced by anyone (OR 97–99). ‘Religion never appears in a pure state’ (OR 21), since God-consciousness is always combined with other aspects like people-directed ‘emotions’ (CF §6.3) and ‘cognitive activities’ (CF §60.2). Each religious experience is for Schleiermacher ‘a situated experience of the transcendent; that situatedness cannot be abstracted from experience’ (Marina (Reference Marina2004), 133).Footnote 27
In response to Helmer's worry with nature-mysticism we can say that, from a Christian theological perspective, these aspects of experience and the feelings involved can plausibly be seen as related: through the EFs that involve one's at-one-ness with the world (or, a temporary but radical lack of it), the fragile and often illusionary nature of our ‘I-constructions’ can become apparent. For Schleiermacher, however, this mystical ‘losing’ of one's individuality can be neither permanent nor absolute. In fact, it is portrayed as a fleeting moment in consciousness of which we become really aware only when it is already over (OR 31–32). But it leads to genuine humility through a profound awareness of the deeper relatedness of everything in the world. It is by this very fact that it opens up the possibility for a new creation in Christ. Schleiermacher's view that ‘immediate self-consciousness does not have knowledge of an “I” ’ which ‘only arises through the reflective self-consciousness’ (cited in Frank (Reference Frank and Marina2005), 30) is a precursor to his affirmation of the person-forming activity of God in Christ that happens only in the community of the Church (CF §14).
Such an understanding successfully accounts for the fact that the main themes of Christianity are both social or deeply interpersonal and subjective-personal at the same time. The relationship of a person with God is understood to be inextricable from the interpersonal relations of that person with other people. Therefore, the earliest Christian formulations of the problem of sin, as well as of its solution in Jesus Christ, are concerned with interpersonal relations (and through these necessarily also with relation to God), which involve growth in agape, the ‘difficult love’. ‘We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love the brethren. He who does not love his brother abides in death’ (John 3.13). As Christ's God-consciousness is circulated and transmitted through the Church, the believers are assimilated into it through the ecclesial mediation of Christus Praesens. As Hector argues, sociality, or intersubjectivity, is co-constitutive of feeling in this context. One's attunement with this special community, which was and is co-formed by Christian narratives and belief-commitments, and this community's customs, is – at its best – a holy partaking in a restored community of interpersonal relations in Christ.
So, in short: the way to reconcile the social and existential-mystical interpretations is to posit that deep existential feelings are characteristic for all these cases: the existential nature-mystical experiences, various social-mystical experiences, and the specific Christian social-mystical experiences, where in the latter case, EFs are perhaps most ‘heavily’ fused with discursive thought and with other, intentional feelings. There are relevant differences, however, in the ways in which different EFs are co-present with other aspects of experience in each case.
Finally, it has to be admitted that the interpretative approach to Schleiermacher adopted here has its own biases. Most notably, given the ‘existential feelings’ interpretation, it is hard to see how Schleiermacher's formulation of religious feeling that became central in CF – the feeling of absolute or ‘utter’ dependence (FAD) – could be so central or ‘privileged’, in the Christian context or elsewhere. If EFs are many and varied as is claimed here, and expressions of them equally so, on what basis should they be reduced to a particular unified formulation or expression? This difficulty might be somewhat lessened by noting that Schleiermacher sometimes claims (e.g. CF §32.1) that the FAD is not an expression of a particular instance of religious existential feeling – as the early Proudfoot (Reference Proudfoot1985 (22–23)) and many others have interpreted it – but ‘a radical abstraction that does not, by itself, occupy a moment of consciousness’ (Wyman (Reference Wyman, Sockness and Gräb2010), 197). If this is so, FAD should not be understood as a description of the actual phenomenal content in someone's experience. However, it has to be admitted that Schleiermacher is at least ambiguous on this: while, for example, in CF §32.1 we read that in the analysis of FAD ‘we abstract entirely from the specific content of the particular Christian experiences’, in CF §4.4 we learn that the ‘idea’ which the term ‘God’ presupposes is ‘nothing more than an expression of the feeling of absolute dependence’.
Philosophical significance
Beyond the interpretative question concerning Schleiermacher's notion of feeling, there are several interesting contemporary questions in philosophy of religion which one can bring to the notion of ‘existential feeling’ and its use to interpret Schleiermacher's ‘feeling’ in this context. For example, both Ratcliffe (Reference Ratcliffe2008, 273–275) and Mark Wynn (Reference Wynn2011) have recently suggested that religious conversions can be understood by way of (usually dramatic) changes in EFs. Moreover, the most discussed question in philosophy regarding Schleiermacher's ‘feeling’ has been whether religious feeling, understood along the lines which Schleiermacher understands it – sometimes limited to his formulation ‘feeling of absolute dependence’ – can be conceived as either direct perception of God, or as ‘evidence’ for belief in God. Can our interpretation of Schleiermacher's feeling as ‘existential feeling’ contribute anything to this epistemological concern?
I suggest that it can. For the sake of brevity, we will leave the evidentialist interpretations aside here and relate our discussion only to the ‘perception model’ of religious experience. Contrary to the approaches of several influential works of the last four decades in epistemology of religion, where God-experience is said to be a direct cognition – a ‘perception of God’ through ‘distinctive non-affective qualia’ (Alston (Reference Alston1991), 51), or ‘perceptive experience’ where God appears as ‘an object’ (Yandell (Reference Yandell1994)), or as a ‘supernatural thing’ (Swinburne (Reference Swinburne1991)) – Schleiermacher wrote that ‘there is no such thing as an isolated perception of deity’ (Dial T 31), either through any kind of sense perception or by way of ‘feeling’ (ibid.), since ‘any possibility of God being in any way given is entirely excluded’ (CF §4.4). It is only with these qualifications firmly in mind that we can consistently interpret, I suggest, claims like ‘God is given to us in feeling in an original way’ (ibid.), or that God is ‘co-posited’ or ‘implied’ (mitgesetzt) in feeling (ibid.), or indeed, the cognitivist-sounding claims about religious ‘intuition’ in the Speeches.
But Schleiermacher did think that in certain special kind of feelings the world is ‘evoking a response’ (Bowie (Reference Bowie, Schleiermacher and Bowie1998), xvii), which properly or legitimately leads ‘in a theological direction’ (ibid.), i.e. towards religious belief-formation. He wrote that ‘[religious] experience … consists precisely in this, that we are aware of this tendency to God-consciousness as a living impulse’ (CF §60.1). In the Speeches we read: ‘You cannot believe in [God] by force of will or because you want to use him for solace and help, but because you must’ (OR 54).
If we relate the concept of existential feelings to this debate, we might first note that for Ratcliffe the religious belief in the monotheistic God is ‘symptomatic of a felt way of belonging to the world’, although, according to him, ‘the same can be said for other spiritual and mystical convictions that do not incorporate a monotheistic God’ (Ratcliffe (Reference Ratcliffe2008), 272–273). Also quite independently of Schleiermacher interpretation, Wynn has suggested that Ratcliffe's notion of existential feelings may be taken to involve ‘a kind of apprehension of God’ (Wynn Reference Wynn2011), in line, not with the perception-model of religious experience argued for by Alston, Swinburne, or Yandell, who operate within the ‘add-on’ view of feeling,Footnote 28 but with a theological understanding ‘that God is to be conceived not so much as an individual entity or being, but as being or reality without restriction’ (ibid.).
On the basis of our interpretation of Schleiermacher, I want to suggest a small step further from this suggestion. To do this, I will use Wittgenstein's description of his special experience in his ‘Lecture on ethics’ (1965) as an example.
The rare experience of ‘wonder of existence’ that Wittgenstein describes can be seen as a special case of existential feeling. He tends to express it, he says, only in ‘nonsensical’ language like ‘What a miracle that anything should exist’, or ‘How extraordinary that the world exists’ (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein1965), 8). These expressions are nonsensical, he argued, since something can be a ‘miracle’ or ‘extraordinary’ only relative to something else that is ‘normal’, whereas the existence of the world can hardly be described as extra-ordinary (literally speaking).
What is most interesting for our discussion, however, is what Wittgenstein says next:
[All] I wanted to do with [these experiences] was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein1965), 11–12)
We do not need to engage with Wittgenstein's early or later thought on religious belief to see that, in these passages, he recognizes the nature of such feelings as inviting religious expressions and possibly a religious attitude as well – this despite his reluctance to see such language as ‘sensible’ at the time. These experiences were pulling him strongly to ‘go beyond the world’ with language. Schleiermacher, of course, thought that accepting the ‘religious-belief-inviting’ nature of EFs is appropriate and that one should follow by adopting religious beliefs expressed in ‘God-talk’ and more. It is in this way, perhaps, that we can ‘save’ the problematic notion of ‘intuition’ of the first version of the Speeches for contemporary relevance: by understanding ‘religious intuition’ as an unfinished, instinctive act towards religious descriptions (Dupré (Reference Dupré1964), 110), mediating between feeling and belief, itself ‘not coinciding with these opposite poles’ (Ten Kate (Reference Ten Kate2007), 396–397).Footnote 29
More generally, it may be suggested that at least some existential feelings as experienced by many people have a religious-belief-inviting nature. This is not to suggest that such a complex belief as belief in the monotheistic God is directly invited by particular EFs. Rather, we might think of something like an immediate pull, sometimes felt very strongly by many people, to describe the world, nature, the existence of humans, etc. as a ‘miracle’ or ‘creation’ for example. Such descriptions go beyond purely empirical, physical descriptions of the world, they tend to treat the world or universe as a totality, and they are considered by many to be particularly appropriate, or, indeed, ‘right’.
In my view, it would not be appropriate to think of this aspect of religious belief-formation as ‘perception’ or even ‘direct cognition’ of God. Existential feelings are non-intentional, and, if the view on the role of EFs in religious experience and religious belief-formation presented in this article is correct, then ‘perception of God’ language runs the risk of seriously misrepresenting religious belief-formation, as well as important aspects of Christian religious experience. Legitimizing religious convictions in any community cannot but involve rhetoric, as Schleiermacher was well aware when he claimed that rhetoric and poetry, and not doctrine, are primary expressions of religion (CF §15–16).
