Jacqueline Mariña sets two goals for herself in Transformation of the Self in the Thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher: an exposition of the metaphysics undergirding Schleiermacher's mature ethics, especially the concepts of self-consciousness and personal identity, and an analysis of the development of his thought. Given Schleiermacher's changing thoughts on these issues and the various but limited material scholars have to work with, exposition of Schleiermacher's views requires attention to his development. Mariña's examination of relevant stages in that development is an important contribution to the recent revival of interest in Schleiermacher's philosophy and particularly his philosophical ethics.

Mariña argues that Schleiermacher moves from a Spinozistic determinism in his early work to an increasing emphasis on the freedom and individuality of the moral agent, with consequent changes in his conception of the relation of the self to God and of divine causality to human freedom. Though Schleiermacher does come to stress individuality and to reflect on moral responsibility and the virtues, Mariña is not convincing in her claim that he abandons his determinism in order to make room for transcendental freedom.

In an unfinished essay entitled On Freedom (1790–1792) Schleiermacher reflects on how moral obligation and motivation can be integrated with an account of character. In this essay he criticizes Kant's idea of transcendental freedom, and defends a compatibilist position. He distinguishes choice from instinct by the fact that the object of a desire does not directly determine action. Two desired objects are compared and the influence each has on the will is determined by the way in which it is represented. Mariña compares this to what Henry Allison has called Kant's incorporation thesis, but notes that it differs from Kant because Schleiermacher claims that a person's representations can be connected with her preceding states in a lawlike manner while Kant emphasizes the spontaneity of the subject. Schleiermacher recognizes that the moral life requires education and training, but Mariña argues that at this point he is unable to give an adequate account of an agent as the initiator of an action.

Schleiermacher's notes on Spinoza (1793–1794) show him combining Spinoza's argument for a single substance with a Kantian standpoint on the conditions of knowledge. We distinguish between different things, but that does not tell us whether those distinctions are imposed by the mind or track differences that are independent of us. In particular, a consciousness of personality does not imply a substantial self. We have no access to individuality or to transcendental freedom. Mariña takes this to be the most significant point that Schleiermacher makes in these notes.

In a set of notes on Leibniz (1797–1798) Schleiermacher focuses chiefly on the relation of the self to God. Leibniz remarks that the soul is what it is insofar as it expresses its cause and Schleiermacher wonders how God's infinite power could be communicated to the finite. Mariña connects this with On Religion (1799), in which Schleiermacher famously describes religion as ‘sensibility and taste for the infinite’. She says that genuine religion springs from an immediate relation of the self to the absolute that has the capacity to transform the self. ‘No thought remains unillumined by it, no desire not redirected by it, and no goal not recast by it’ (114). The ground of both self and world is given immediately in religion, but it cannot be an object of knowledge.

This might be a good place to ask what Mariña means by transformation of the self. She introduces the phrase with reference to Schleiermacher's discussion in The Christian Faith of the person-forming activity of Christ on an individual such that ‘all his activities are differently determined … and even all impressions are differently received – which means that the personal self-consciousness, too, becomes different’ (3). She clearly means to contrast it with Kant's view of the moral self and of the relation of religion to morality. For Schleiermacher, unlike Kant, religion does not consist only of schemata of the good principle and the moral life, but it does transformative work. But what kind of causality is at work in the transformation of the self? Mariña is not very clear on this issue. She cites Robert M. Adams's comment that no theologian has adhered more rigorously than Schleiermacher to the principle that God is known only by His causal effects. But she doesn't directly address the issue of how this transformation is effected.

Unlike Spinoza and Leibniz, Schleiermacher doesn't want to distinguish different causal series for matter and thought. On the contrary, Mariña rightly argues that Schleiermacher's integration of the two is one of his contributions. One could think of divine causality as underlying a nexus of causes that communicates its power through physical and social forces, including institutions and practices as well as personal influence. That causality is focused in the influence of religious leaders, analogous to the way in which artists communicate their individual styles to schools of those they have influenced. For Christians, consciousness of God is mediated through Jesus' person and work. Another model would be to build on Schleiermacher's point in On Freedom that the will is determined by the way an object is represented. Identifying the same object, practice, or event under different descriptions can determine, or at least play a causal role in, choice and action. This fits well with Mariña's comment above on the way a living faith has the capacity to transform the self by illumining its thoughts, redirecting its desires, and recasting its goals, and with her quotation from The Christian Faith saying that, for someone influenced by Christ, all his activities are differently determined and all impressions differently received. It fits less well with her claim that, for Schleiermacher, immediate access to the divine causality is given in religion, not through concepts or the structures of consciousness. These two models are not mutually exclusive, as the second can be included in the broader scope of the first.

The Monologen (1800) show the continuing influence of Leibniz as Schleiermacher comes to understand the significance of individuality for moral agency. God, he says, is the source of whatever freedom one has in relation to the world. Each person receives the divine influence from his or her own perspective and actively expresses it out into the world. We come to know ourselves not directly, but only as expressed and as reflected in the self-consciousness of another or others with whom we are related. This last point differs considerably from Leibniz's conception of monads that don't interact with one another and is an advance over both Leibniz and Kant on the topic of self-knowledge.

Mariña argues that Schleiermacher's philosophical ethics is closely tied to his theology, and that it is purely descriptive. It is a description of how divine causality expresses itself in the world through individuals. In early reflections on the concept of the highest good he criticizes Kant's idea of the unity of virtue and happiness because it can't be realized in this world. Schleiermacher argues for the need to overcome Kant's bifurcation between reason and nature. A complete harmony of desires can come about only when reason not only orders, but transforms, desire. Though Schleiermacher's ethics may be purely descriptive, as Mariña says, it does not lack a normative component. As an ethics centred on virtue and its social conditions as well as on duty and the good, the normative is included in the descriptive.

In notes on ethics known as the Brouillon (1805–1806) Schleiermacher emphasizes the ethical significance of individuality and community. Individuality is to be appreciated and is not something that one should strive to overcome through reason. Each individual is unique, embodied, and apprehends the world through feeling. Mariña says that for Schleiermacher, unlike for Fichte, the ground that unifies self and other is located outside the self and outside consciousness. It is, she says, the Whence that is the object of the feeling of absolute dependence as described in The Christian Faith. She holds that it is given immediately in that feeling, but that it cannot be objectified.

Surprisingly perhaps, Mariña doesn't consider Schleiermacher's mature ethics, either in his lectures (1812–1817) or in his later Academy addresses, except for an occasional passing reference. That would have helped her examine the ways in which Schleiermacher views the self as formed by language, institutions, and other social and historical causes, and the conditions he takes to be required for a moral life. Even though he has come to a greater appreciation of agency and moral responsibility and of individuality than he had in On Freedom, it is not at all clear that he has given up his early determinism.

Mariña turns instead to Schleiermacher's discussion of the transformation of the self through the influence of Christ in The Christian Faith (1821/22, 1830/31). In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason Kant identifies the idea of Christ as a schema or personification of a life lived according to the moral law. He makes it clear that this idea is already present in reason and that it is not constitutive for the moral life. Kant says that the question of whether or not an historical figure actually existed who taught this idea and lived this life is irrelevant for morality. As Mariña notes, for Kant the resources for human transformation are already inherent within the self. Schleiermacher, though, emphasizes the causal efficacy of an actual historical person for transforming the self. He wants to avoid not only Kant's empirical view, as he calls it, of redemption, but also magical views that invoke some supernatural cause. Perfected human nature is that which expresses the divine. Jesus mediates the divine causality to others through the power of his God-consciousness. The efficacy of transformation or redemption is thus communicated through historical and social influence.

For an account of this transformation Mariña turns to Schleiermacher's discussion of the feeling of absolute dependence in the introduction to The Christian Faith and argues that it discloses a transcendental freedom. This feeling, Schleiermacher says, is an abstraction from Christian God-consciousness, but this immediate self-consciousness does not include consciousness of God. It is a consciousness of the self as absolutely dependent, or ‘that the whole of our spontaneous activity comes from a source outside us’ (198). This immediate self-consciousness is given along with sensuous self-consciousness. A feeling of freedom in relation to the world is key to the recognition of absolute dependence.

Mariña's exposition of Schleiermacher's account of the consciousness of Jesus helps to illumine what she takes to be the relation between divine causality and human freedom. Jesus' sensuous self-consciousness is perfectly passive in relation to his God-consciousness and this renders him fully spontaneous in relation to the world. Receptivity is thoroughly permeated with spontaneity and Jesus actively receives the whole world as the object of divine love. Insofar as Jesus expresses the divine, he imparts his God-consciousness to others and finally to the whole human race. Mariña writes that the consciousness of Jesus is completely original. Though he expressed himself in terms of the thought world of Second-Temple Judaism, she says, he was able to make use of that material to express something completely new. This accords with Schleiermacher's claim in On Religion, and Kant's, that Christianity was radically new in a way that did not transform, but was a complete departure from, its Jewish context.

Schleiermacher's Christology tilts toward the docetic, in which Jesus' human nature is given relatively short shrift. As Mariña remarks, his Jesus could not have been genuinely tempted. He was not only incapable of doing wrong, but his receptivity, his perception of the world, she says, is fully illumined by the divine consciousness. Schleiermacher tries in The Christian Faith to do justice to the historicity of Jesus by noting that he had to develop gradually in a way that depended on his surroundings, including ideas and practices that he appropriated and put to his own use, but he also wants to emphasize the originality of Jesus' consciousness and the fact that it cannot be explained by the content of the human environment to which he belonged. Mariña emphasizes this second strand and uses it to support her overall narrative.

Jesus' consciousness is divine and thus distinct from ordinary human consciousness. Nevertheless, Mariña's placing of this topic in her penultimate chapter, at the culmination of a portrayal of Schleiermacher's development from a defence of Spinoza's determinism and denial of plural substances to an appreciation of the particularity of the moral individual and her transcendental freedom, suggests that she means this depiction of Jesus' self-consciousness to serve as an ideal of a consciousness and freedom that is completely responsive, even transparent, to divine activity. This passivity of Jesus' self-consciousness in relation to his God-consciousness and the claim that Christianity is not in any way a product of its environment are radically different from Schleiermacher's focus in his ethics on character and disposition and his concern to set moral choice and action in their social and historical contexts, with attention to the causal antecedents of a person's desires and representations as well as to the effects of her actions. By choosing to bypass the later ethics and move directly to Schleiermacher's discussion of Jesus' consciousness and his relation to his environment Mariña reinforces her argument that he has moved from an early determinism to a conception of freedom and spontaneity that leaves that determinism behind. But Schleiermacher is as interested in the ethics and in The Christian Faith as he was earlier in the causal antecedents and effects of thought and action.

In a final chapter on religious pluralism Mariña returns to the feeling of absolute dependence as the heart of religious experience for Schleiermacher. ‘The first and most important point to be made’, she writes, ‘is that the feeling of absolute dependence is immediate, that is, it is not mediated by the work of consciousness’ (231). She says that ‘the foundational religious experience remains pure, that is, it is unaffected by cultural and linguistic categories’ (231). These come into play only when the experience is being expressed. This experience can never be had in isolation and is always informed by historically contingent language and practices, but she takes it to be possible, for philosophical purposes, to distinguish the pure experience from its contingent expressions.

There is considerable controversy among Schleiermacher interpreters about whether or not he holds that the immediacy of the feeling of absolute dependence means that it is unaffected by cultural and linguistic categories and, if he does, whether we can coherently identify that as experience. Mariña's interpretation here of the feeling of absolute dependence differs from one by Manfred Frank that she quotes approvingly earlier in the book. Frank, explicating a passage in the Dialektik that he takes to be describing this same moment of consciousness, writes that consciousness discloses a ‘reflective rift’ between spontaneity and receptivity. It then comes to recognize this missing unity as the effect of a determining power that lies outside of itself (198–199). This way of reading the passage does not fit with Mariña's claim that the experience is unmediated by the work of consciousness. Schleiermacher himself says that he uses the term ‘immediate’ to distinguish the feeling he is trying to describe from reflexive states of consciousness, for example, the difference between joy and sorrow on one hand and self-approval and self-reproach on the other.

Here, as in her account of his characterization of Jesus' self-consciousness, Mariña interprets Schleiermacher in a way that seems to offer an unmediated moment that is independent of historical and cultural contingencies. This differs considerably from the focus on social and historical context and causation that informs much of his philosophical ethics.