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chapter 2
Philology’s Roommate: Hermeneutics, Antiquity,
and the Seminar
Constanze Güthenke
The project to which this essay contributes looks at the intersections of
philology and theology, or, differently put, at the long arm of those often
disavowed interactions, an arm which has reached into and shaped modern
disciplinary configurations. The aim of this volume is not to call for
a reinfusion of the theological into the philological. Rather, it is to see
more clearly how those constellations have continued to shape disciplinary
living and doing. This prompt resonates with my own continuing work on
disciplinary forms of thinking and being in the long nineteenth century,
and especially my interest in the make-up and the dynamics of knowledge
in and of scholarly communities.1 In many ways, then, this present con-
tribution is about the single letter that separates the seminar and the
seminary, and their status as founding communal sites. In an early version
of this book’s project description, the editors asked, metaphorically, to
what extent philology and theology were ‘roommates’. This is the question
I will address quite literally, taking my departure from a description of the
short period of cohabitation, from 1798 to 1799, that involved two seminal
thinkers on the matter, namely, the ultimately more institutional theolo-
gian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher and the ultimately more
free-wheeling writer and philosopher Friedrich Schlegel.
In the period around 1800 the intercalation of thinking that occurred in
theology, philosophy, philology and poetry is overwhelmingly obvious. For
the purposes of this essay, I choose to highlight the theme of academic,
intellectual, and social community, its role in disciplinary memory, and the
potential it may continue to have for and in disciplinary reflection now. In this
context, it is above all Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) who emerges as
a noteworthy and prescient thinker, as someone worth reading and re-reading
not only as a voice on understanding and hermeneutics, but as a guide to
1
Güthenke 2016; Güthenke 2017; Güthenke 2020.
12
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reflecting on the relationship between the ethical and knowledge in a broad
sense, and on sociability as a key to its formulation and expression.2
The career of Schleiermacher, theologian, preacher, and, from 1810,
professor of theology at the newly founded Friedrich Wilhelm University
of Berlin, exemplifies in many ways the confluence of philosophical,
theological and philological thought, and the gradual solidification of
disciplinary frames that took place around 1800. His translations of the
collected dialogues of Plato, begun with Friedrich Schlegel, proved seminal
for modern Plato scholarship and were quickly and appreciatively inte-
grated into contemporary classical scholarship, as was some of his work as
an editor and historian of philosophical texts. Even so, Schleiermacher
himself, for all his success as a thinker, administrator, academy member,
and educational policy-maker, has remained at the margins of classical
philology as a dedicated, circumscribed field.3
In what follows, I will outline two different and complementary routes to
approach the interaction of philology and theology between scholarly socia-
bility and institutional formations. The first, taking a perspective from larger
institutional history and a history of practices, is to focus on the seminar as
a site of knowledge production. The second is to work outwards from the
specific instance of the temporary community between the thinkers Schlegel
and Schleiermacher towards an understanding of scholarly collaboration.
Their interaction has normally been seen as a key to the symphilosophical,
intellectual, and literary projects of early Romanticism; what I will add is an
attempt to link Schleiermacher’s early writings on sociability in particular
with his later thoughts on institution-building and academic practice. In this
way, the focus of this essay will shift towards reading Schleiermacher’s early
collaborative thinking and writing with a view – and as a counterweight – to
the emergence of later disciplinary certainties.
From the Seminary to the Seminar
One first way to give an account of the interaction of theology and philology
with regard to academic community and sociability is to approach it by the
2
On Schleiermacher, with a view to the topics covered in this essay, see, recently, Forster 2005; Mariña
2005; Thouard 2007; Arndt 2013b; Gjesdal 2014; Arndt 2015; Forster 2017; Ohst 2017; Gjesdal 2019.
3
Wilamowitz includes Schleiermacher in his History of Philology in a vignette that is complimentary
and chooses language that emphasizes Schleiermacher’s theological credentials and charisma: ‘His
German Plato chased away the nimbus and with it the fog that had, since his [Plato’s] death,
surrounded his true image, and with the treatises on Diogenes of Apollonia and Heraclitus alone he
resurrected (hat erweckt) the study of the Presocratics’ (Wilamowitz 1998: 51).
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route of institutional history. This is the story of the development of the
seminar and its relation to the seminary, and such a narrative would have to
take on some of the following points, which I here summarize, relying on the
excellent work of especially William Clark on academic charisma and the
ultimate rise of the research university; and of Chad Wellmon on forms of
knowledge and its institutional organization in an Enlightenment and post-
Enlightenment world.
The research seminar is, in the long run, a consequence of the Protestant
Reformation, which had left a vacuum for the intimate, informal, collegi-
ate forms of learning that the medieval university was built on. Such forms
continued to be preserved, as well as transformed, in such models as the
collegiate universities of Oxford and Cambridge, but also in Catholic,
especially Jesuit styles of learning. At least in part, they also persevered in
the so-called convictoria, essentially organized boarding houses, both
Protestant or Catholic, that provided basic levels of board and lodging
within the reach of the early modern university.4
Religious learning centred on the seminary, not least since the Council
of Trent in 1563 had stipulated that the training of clergy should take place
(only) in seminaries. Both the Jesuit pedagogical seminary and the
Protestant seminary testify to this, and it is the Protestant pedagogical
seminary in particular, as a training institution for preachers and teachers,
that eventually bridged the gap between instruction in the religious and
secular spheres. With this mission in mind, it was also the Protestant
pedagogical seminar that catered specifically to poorer students. The
pedagogical seminars relied on training in the ancient languages, biblical
scholarship, and biblical exegesis, combining textual criticism with moral
education and the production of ‘particular subjective experiences’, thus
producing better scholars and better Christian ethical subjects alike.5
The philological seminar, from Göttingen in the 1730s to the fully
fledged research university in the 1830s, was a site of training future
teachers, civil servants, and researchers. What made it novel, compared
to earlier forms, is the confluence of a type of (public) funding – not
dissimilar to the Protestant seminary – with the expectations of the private
learned societies on the one hand, and the aims of the pedagogical seminary
on the other hand. This fusion of a style of funding with a style of teaching
led to the typically ‘German pursuit of knowledge as research.’6 The
simultaneous interaction of bureaucratization and Romanticization made
4 5
Clark 2006, Chapter 5 ‘The Research Seminar’, 141–82. Wellmon 2015: 236–7.
6
Clark 2006: 158.
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the seminar a place of state-funded and state-overseen activity, that was
both highly regulated and demanding of charismatic research and
leadership – and that promoted an ethos of industry and diligence as
much as it prized originality.
Clark sums up the trajectory as follows, with a keen eye for some of the
underlying DNA of the older forms of community: ‘The convictorium
and seminary’s spirit, best described as orthodoxy and piety, gave way
through institutions such as the seminar to our modern industrial and
bureaucratic sensibility at the university . . . the seminar, rather, altered
attitudes about labor, competition, and leadership.’7 And further: ‘The
convictorium and seminary of the juridico-ecclesiastical regime had
sought to produce uniform types, namely, the orthodox and the pious.
The research seminar of the modern politico-economic order seeks,
however, to fashion the seminarist as a normalized but individualized
personality.’8
What it meant to be and act as an individual, though, was around 1800
one of the central territories of intellectual debate, as social, private and
state spheres, identities and interactions were in flux. In other words, it was
a prime period for thinking hard about forms of intellectual sociability,
reciprocity, and freedom – and academic sociability was one of its key sites.
Schleiermacher and Schlegel
A second way to approach the question of intellectual sociability is through
a more personalized story. In January 1798, the writer and philosopher
Friedrich Schlegel moved into a shared flat with Friedrich Schleiermacher.
Schleiermacher had at this point already encountered several of the early,
very different types of seminar/y and communities that were mentioned in
the previous section: he had been a student at the pedagogical seminary of
the Pietist Herrnhuter, the Moravian communities in Niesky and then
Barby; he was a student attending lectures and collegia at the University of
Halle, both in theology and philosophy; and, for a while, he had been
a secular trainee teacher at Friedrich Gedicke’s pedagogical seminar in
Berlin, a state-funded institution at the Gymnasium Graues Kloster, the
school Gedicke directed. This pedagogical seminar did not only train
teachers practically, but also required its members to produce regular
research work. He had also, after his stint with Gedicke, been
a Hilfsprediger in Landsberg on the river Warthe for two years. He returned
7 8
Clark 2006: 172. Clark 2006: 175.
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to Berlin in 1796, into a position as preacher and chaplain at the Charité
hospital, recently established as a charitable institution for the poor.
Finally, Schleiermacher was a keen participant in a range of learned
societies and salons of Enlightened Berlin. In fact, Schlegel and
Schleiermacher had met in the intellectual salons of Berlin, first at the
‘Wednesday Society’ (Mittwochsgesellschaft), a reading circle and association
convened by Ignatius Aurelius Fessler, a liberal ex-Catholic cleric who would
later join a Pietist orthodox community, but for now was gathering an
intellectual debating circle in Berlin. Shortly after, they met again and
frequented regularly the literary salon of Henriette Herz.9 Schleiermacher
was connected to Herz in a particularly close friendship, and one of the bonds
or media that connected them was ancient languages: Schleiermacher read
Greek with her, and it is clear from other evidence that from her Jewish
background she knew Hebrew. Schlegel, newly arrived from Jena, was
preceded by his reputation as a fierce new thinker and writer;
Schleiermacher, after theological training first at the Pietist seminary, then
at the University of Halle and some time as a private tutor, and now since
1796 as chaplain at the Charité hospital, had for some time already been
exposed to intellectual Berlin life, but was also still a relative newcomer.
In a biographical account of the philosopher, Wilhelm Dilthey (himself
a theorist of understanding who was central to the development of the
humanities and its German nomenclature of Geisteswissenschaften)
describes their cohabitation as a meeting of two different but complemen-
tary characters.10 On the one hand there is Schleiermacher the deep
thinker, characterized by Innerlichkeit or ‘interiority’ – a term that suggests
Pietist virtue as much as reflective, educated introspectiveness – newly
exposed to ‘life’ and sociability in Berlin. On the other hand there is
Schlegel with his genius, intuitiveness, yet incomplete grasp of clearly
9
On the salon culture in Berlin, see, extensively, Wilhelmy 1989; Schultz 1997; in the context of
Berlin intellectual life around 1800, Baillot 2011. On Henriette Herz as its first salonnière, Wilhelmy
1989: 49–55, and on her importance for Schleiermacher, Foley 2006. Her salon complemented that
of her considerably older husband Marcus Herz, whose meetings focused on the sciences, while her
own gatherings emphasized a different generation of thinkers and literati, though there was overlap.
Wilhelmy points out how indebted her social groupings, especially the notion of the Tugenbund, or
small, virtuous friendship circle, was to the overlapping tendencies of the Sturm und Drang
sentimentalism and of rhetorical Pietist impulses in terms of the debating culture and notions of
sociability, above and beyond her Jewish enlightened interests.
10
Dilthey was an admirer of Schleiermacher as a central figure in the development of hermeneutics; in
fact, one of his first publications was an intellectual biography of Schleiermacher, intended to be in
two volumes, the first of which was published, and widely received, in 1870. The second volume
remained in incomplete, drafted form amounting to some 800 pages, gathered in Dilthey 1985. On
Dilthey as a biographer of Schleiermacher, Crouter 2005: 21–38; Güthenke 2020: Chapter 5.
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articulated perspective and synthesis, who, as Dilthey puts it memorably
(and in domestic terms), was ‘like someone who makes his way across
a completely dark room with great agility, without touching any of the
fragile furniture that is standing around’.11
Schleiermacher himself describes their living arrangements in a letter of
December 1797 to his sister (who continued to live in a strict Moravian
Pietist community):12
Schlegel’s staying here spells a marvelous change in my existence. How new it
is to me that all I need do is open a door so as to speak with a sensible soul, that
I can say and receive a ‘good morning’ when I wake up, that someone sits
opposite me at the table and that I can share in the morning the good mood
I bring home the evening before. Schlegel tends to rise an hour before me [. . .]
He lies in bed and reads, and I am normally woken up by the clinking of his
coffee cup. He can open the connecting door between our rooms from his bed
and thus we begin our morning discussion. After my breakfast, we work for
a few hours, without one knowing about the other; usually we have a little
break before lunch for some apples, when we talk about our studies. We
continue to work until half past one. My lunch is brought from the Charité,
Schlegel’s from an inn. Whichever arrives first is eaten together, then the
other, and we have some wine, so that we spend an hour altogether. The
afternoons are not quite so defined; I must admit that I am usually the one
who leaves first and returns home last. But not all of those half-days are given
over to social pleasures: I attend collegia several times a week, and I give some
to friends a few times, too. When I return between 10 and 11 at night I usually
find Schlegel still up, though he seems to have waited only for my return to say
goodnight and go to bed soon. I usually stay up until 2 in the morning to do
some work, and still get a good sleep until half past 8. Since Schlegel moved in
it has happened a few times that I didn’t go out at all, that we had tea from 7 to
10, and had a good talk all evening.13
11
Dilthey 1870: 230.
12
Letter no. 424 to his sister, Charlotte Schleiermacher, 21 November–31 December 1797, in
Schleiermacher 1988: 212–21, here 217–19.
13
‘Eine herrliche Veränderung in meiner Existenz macht Schlegels Wohnen bei mir. Wie neu ist mir
das, dass ich nur die Thüre zu öffnen brauche, um mit einer vernünftigen Seele zu reden, dass ich
einen guten Morgen austheilen und empfangen kann, so bald ich erwache, dass mir jemand
gegenüber sitzt bei Tische und dass ich die gute Laune, die ich abends mitzubringen pflege, noch
früh jemand mittehilen kann. Schlegel steht gewöhnlich eine Stunde eher auf als ich [. . .] Er liegt
aber auch im Bette und liest, ich erwache gewöhnlich durch das Klirren seiner Kaffeetasse. Dann
kann er von seinem Bett aus die Thür, die meine Schlafkammer von seiner Stube trennt, öffnen und
so fangen wir unser Morgengespräch an. Wenn ich gefrühstückt habe, arbeiten wir einige Stunden,
ohne dass einer vom andern weiss; gewöhnlich wird aber vor Tisch noch eine kleine Pause gemacht
um einen Apfel zu essen. Dabei sprechen wir gewöhnlich über die Gegenstände unsrer Studien:
dann geht die zweite Arbeitsperiode an bis zu Tisch, d.h. bis halb zwei. Ich bekomme mein Essen aus
der Charité, Schlegel lässt sich seines aus einem Gasthause holen. Welches nun zuerst kommt, das
wird gemeinschaftlich verzehrt, dann das andere, dann ein paar Gläser Wein getrunken, so dass wir
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Many of the different intellectual forms of being together, which were just
mentioned in the institutional narrative of the modern seminar above, are
invoked here too: conviviality; eating and living together; informal con-
versation; formal collegia and lectures; speaking as much as writing. The
two men continued to share lodgings for a year and a half, and it is during
this time that a number of Schleiermacher’s projects began to take shape,
not least through the needling of Schlegel, who encouraged him to write.
Those first forays into print included some anonymous pieces for Friedrich
and his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel’s symphilosophical journal
Athenaeum, among which is the extraordinary short Versuch eines
Katechismus der Vernunft für edle Frauen [Idea for a Catechism of Reason
for Noble Women] (1798), a paradoxical gloss on the ten commandments
and the prescriptive nature of a catechism, exhorting women to ‘aspire to
male learning’ and thinking, and to engage freely in their romantic and
intellectual choices. There is also the essay Versuch zu einer Theorie geselli-
gen Betragens [Attempt at a Theory of Social Conduct] (1799), which
postulated an inherent, almost Aristotelian, human (educated) desire for
free association and debate in which individuality is central (I will return to
this essay in more detail below). And finally, there was the seminal Reden
über die Religion, an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern [On Religion:
Speeches to its Cultured Despisers] (1799) and the Monologen
[Monologues] (1800), two series of speeches, one to a broader audience,
the other to the self in conversation with an absent ‘You’. The first of those
texts, the Reden, addresses the nature of religion as its own ‘Provinz des
Gemüths’ (‘province of feeling/sentiment’), a territory that is related to yet
not fully captured by either metaphysics or morals, i.e. a notion of religion
as feeling that is separate from universal truths or from social prescriptions.
The second text transfers this sense of an ‘intuition of the universe’,
experienced in the particular, to an ‘intuition of mankind’ experienced in
contemplation of the human individual. Both texts are deeply preoccupied
beinahe ein Stündchen bei unsrem Diner zubringen. Ueber den Nachmittag lässt sich nicht so
bestimmt sprechen; leider aber muss ich gestehn, dass ich gewönlich der erste bin der ausfliegt und
der letzte der nach Hause kommt. Doch ist nicht die ganze Hälfte des Tages dem gesellschaftlichen
Genuss gewidmet: ich höre einige Mal die Woche Collegia und lese einige Mal welche guten
Freunden. Wenn ich Abends zwischen 10 und 11 Uhr nach Hause komme finde ich Schlegel noch
auf, der aber nur darauf gewartet zu haben scheint mir gute Nacht zu geben und dann bald zu Bette
geht. Ich aber setzte mich dann hin und arbeite gewöhnlich noch bis gegen 2 Uhr, denn von da bis
halb neun kann man noch vollkommen aussschlafen. Seit Schlegel hier ist, ist es doch schon einige
Mal geschehn, dass ich einen ganzen Abend zuhause geblieben bin und dass wir zusammen von 7–10
einen traulichen Thee getrunken und uns dabei recht ausgeplaudert haben.’
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with the need for communication, exchange, and relation between indivi-
duals as essential to and as the perfect expression of individuality and its
development (or ‘Bildung’), whether such community is religious or
linguistic, and this mention of the resonant term Bildung alone should
show us how closely this term can triangulate between the fields of
(philological) education and religious being.14 For Schleiermacher, com-
munication (Mitteilung) is an essential, innate human drive that is, in turn,
directed at and expressed through language – this leaves philology, broadly
speaking, as the sphere that deals with linguistic, cultural and human
understanding, deeply bound up with the relation between self and
other, me and you, that Schleiermacher identifies as the root indicator of
religious as much as generally human, individual identity and forms of
being.
During this same period, Schlegel and Schleiermacher started discussing
another shared project, namely a large-scale translation of and introduction
to Plato’s works. In the end, Schleiermacher became de facto solely respon-
sible for the project and continued to carry it on in stages after he left Berlin
in 1802, first to take up, or rather move down to a position as a provincial
court pastor, then as professor of theology first in Halle, and finally as
professor at the newly founded university in Berlin, where he also served as
Secretary of the Academy and a well-regarded university administrator and
educationalist.15
The translations were imagined as a literary-critical ‘symphilosophical’
project of the kind that Schlegel had envisaged as a new way of thinking
and writing, and, as a result, both saw their own ways of philosophizing
reflected in Plato’s works.16 Schlegel eventually dropped out of the project
in default of contract, leaving some drafts on the order of the dialogues and
short introductions to the Phaedo and the Parmenides. Schleiermacher
managed to re-sell the venture to his friend and publisher Reimer in
Berlin, who published the first volume, with a general introduction, in
1804. Subsequent volumes appeared in 1805, 1807, 1809 and, after a hiatus,
in 1828, leaving the project, envisaged as a complete translation, well
advanced, but essentially incomplete.17 Interestingly, Schleiermacher
14
On Schleiermacher’s notion of Bildung as open-ended and ongoing, Gjesdal 2014.
15
On Schleiermacher’s philosophical and institutional career, see the comparison of Schleiermacher
and Wilhelm von Humboldt as close, in Thouard 2011.
16
For Schlegel’s investment in Plato, especially with a view to the Symposium, see Matuschek 2002;
Mergenthaler 2012. For Schlegel’s attention to classical texts and his ambitious reflections on the link
between philosophy and philology, see Benne and Breuer 2011, and Breuer et al 2013.
17
For a detailed account and timeline, see Dilthey 1870, as well as Schleiermacher’s own version of the
sequence of events laid out in a letter to his former student, the classicist August Boeckh, from
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began the project in earnest after he left Berlin in 1802 for an unhappy stint
as a provincial pastor in the Pommeranian town of Stolp. His letters make
clear that he held on to this project as a reminder of the aspirations of the
Berlin life he had left behind, and he continued the project throughout his
subsequent institutional career that took him back into a formal academic
context – a constellation that reflects the inherent backward glance towards
a previous form of personal, immediate sociability and exchange that is
already part and parcel of many of the Platonic dialogues themselves
(including the Symposium, the Protagoras, and the Phaedrus).18 There is
also a case to be made that this kind of nostalgic view of an original sociable
intellectual (Socratic) being-together, preceding more structured ‘aca-
demic’ work (Plato and then Aristotle) becomes an organizing trope in
the later nineteenth century in descriptions of the modern academy as
a successor to the ancient academy.19
For Schleiermacher, Plato’s texts enact in their very form, and in each re-
reading, the development of dialectic, of Bildung, and of individuality –
something that cannot be achieved other than in dialectical exchange.20
Again, it is no coincidence that this reads well in conjunction with his
deliberately provocative thinking on conversation in his 1799 essay Attempt
at a Theory of Sociable Conduct, which only slightly precedes his concerted
effort at the Plato project, sometime before the latter became increasingly
subsumed into the sphere of a comprehensive, academically-executed
venture. After discussing the essay in some more detail, I will then look
ahead to Schleiermacher’s programmatic essay Gelegentliche Gedanken über
Universitäten in deutschem Sinn. Nebst einem Anhang über eine neu zu
errichtende [Occasional Thoughts on Universities in a German Spirit,
together with an Appendix on One about to be Founded] (1808), as
a text that, now from an institutionally much more established vantage
point, returns to questions of community of knowledge, pedagogy, and the
scholarly individual.
June 1808, reprinted in Meisner 1916: 25–35. For evaluations, Arndt 1996; Lamm 2000; Rohls 2008;
for the mutual impact of Schleiermacher and Schlegel in terms of their hermeneutics, Patsch 1966;
Birus 1980; Lamm 2000; Lamm 2005.
18
Atack (2020) approaches the effect of this framing in a number of Platonic dialogues, with a view to
anachronism and temporal flexibility, by way of notions of ‘queer temporality’. This is a concept
that also allows consideration of moments of personal and historical crisis, which may in turn square
well with Schleiermacher’s multiple returns to Plato.
19
I have done so in Güthenke 2016.
20
Dialectic, in general, emerges as the key part of Schleiermacher’s philosophical thinking, its most
foundational, or capping, element; see Arndt 2015, with further bibliography. On Bildung and the
ramifications of Schleiermacher’s ethical thinking for the literary forms he chooses, see also Jackson
Ravenscroft 2019.
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A Free Sociability
Together with the Reden über die Religion, Schleiermacher’s essay on socia-
bility falls within his early attempts to push the envelope in new experi-
mental ways of writing. Encouraged in his efforts by friends, especially
Friedrich Schlegel and Henriette Herz, the essay was first published, anon-
ymously, in the journal Berlinisches Archiv der Zeit und ihres Geschmacks,
which Fessler, the convenor of the Wednesday Society, was co-editing.21 The
reflection on sociability was written during his interim tenure as a preacher
in Potsdam, just outside Berlin, a fixed-term position for which he had been
released from his regular post at the Charité. There, he knew that the King,
who had a residence at Potsdam, would be among his congregation. In his
essay, itself a response to contemporary handbooks of social etiquette (espe-
cially that of Baron von Knigge), Schleiermacher postulates, from the first
sentence, a natural demand for a free sociability (freie Geselligkeit).22 This is
not bound by any exterior aims, where the spheres of the individual are open
to be crossed and intersected by the spheres of others as much as possible:
A free society, not limited or defined by any external aim, is one of the prime
and most noble vocal demands of all educated (gebildet) human beings. . . .
There has to be a situation which complements the other two [sc. spheres of
private and professional life], and which enables the sphere of an individual
to be intersected by the spheres of others in as many ways as possible and so
that each of the points on that border allows the individual a vantage point
from which to look out into another foreign world; in this way, all phenom-
ena of mankind can by and by become familiar and even the most alien
minds and environments can be akin to friends and neighbours. This
challenge is resolved in the free interaction of sensible human beings who
actively form (bilden) each other.23
21
The text is quoted after Schleiermacher 1984, in my own translation. For a complete English version,
see J. Hoover’s translation in Richardson 1995, and the appendix of Foley 2006.
22
For discussion of the essay, see Wiedemann 2002; Kneller 2014, especially on the relationship with
earlier treatises on sociability, in particular Kant, as well as with a view to Novalis and Friedrich
Schlegel; for the importance of Shaftesbury generally, as a key interlocutor on sociability, see further
Horlacher 2003. See also Robinson 2018, for the essay’s situatedness in religious discussion and its
future-oriented embeddedness in Schleiermacher’s theological thinking.
23
‘Freie, durch keinen äussern Zweck gebundene und bestimmte Gesellschaft wird von allen gebilde-
ten Menschen als eins ihrer ersten und edelsten Bedürfnisse laut gefordert . . . Es muss also einen
Zustand geben, der diese beiden [sc. Sphären des häuslichen und beruflichen Lebens] ergänzt, der
die Sphäre eines Individui in die Lage bringt, dass sie von den Sphären Anderer so mannigfaltig
als möglich durchschnitten werde, und jeder seiner eigenen Grenzpunkte ihm die Aussicht in eine
andere und fremde Welt gewähre, so dass alle Erscheinungen der Menschheit ihm nach und nach
bekannt, und auch die fremdesten Gemüther und Verhältnisse ihm befreundet und gleichsam
nachbarlich werden können. Diese Aufgabe wird durch den freien Umgang vernünftiger sich
untereinander bildender Menschen gelöst’; Schleiermacher 1984: 165.
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He makes a distinction between societies (Gesellschaften) and commu-
nities (Gemeinschaften), though he does not use the terms in the sense in
which they became understood later on (for example in the social
sciences), that is, as denoting an organic, more original or ‘natural’
community, which precedes a more ‘artificial’ and constructed ‘society’.
On the contrary, for Schleiermacher it is, if at all, the opposite:
Gesellschaft signifies as the more highly valued term and aspires towards
a free sociability, as opposed to the more limited or restricted forms of
community that are determined by external objectives and serve specific,
instrumental aims.24 In a telling aside, he glosses both concepts through
the Greek terms synousiai (for society, or Gesellschaft) and koinoniai (for
community, or Gemeinschaft): ‘In every social group that is bound and
defined through an exterior aim all the participants share something in
common, and thus those groups are communities (Gemeinschaften),
κοινωνιαι; here they do not really have anything in common, but every-
thing is reciprocal (wechselseitig), which means it is truly opposite, and
those are societies (Gesellschaften), συνουσιαι.’25
Synousia is itself a Platonic term, as well as one that occurs in post-Platonic
dialogues, where it is increasingly used for what was thought to be
a particular Platonic sociability marking teacher-student relationships.26
For Schleiermacher, Gesellschaft (synousia) is explicitly not about what is
a shared property, but about reciprocity and contrast. Interestingly, one of
the examples he offers to illustrate Gemeinschaft, with emphasis on its
mistaken notion of commonality, is the lecture: despite the appearance of
being personally addressed, there remains a relation of passivity, which is
intentional and quite unlike the free exchange of thought and sentiments
that is designed to help in the exercise of individuality: ‘If we try to
disaggregate quite literally the concept of free sociability of a society
24
Arndt 2013b: 57–8.
25
‘In jeder durch einen äussern Zweck gebundenen und bestimmten geselligen Verbindung ist den
Theilhabern etwas gemein, und diese Verbindungen sind Gemeinschaften, κοινονιαι; hier ist ihnen
eigentlich nichts gemein, sondern alles ist wechselseitig, das heist eigentlich entgegengesetzt, und
dies sind Gesellschaften, συνουσιαι’, Schleiermacher 1984: 169.
26
It is in the Platonic dialogues, as well as in Xenophon, whose works were around 1800, if anything,
still more widely read than Plato’s, repeatedly used to denote conversation and the community of
teachers and students, though the broad associative range of intimate communion, from divine to
sexual, remains integrated. For Plato, for example, Phd. 83e; Theat. 150d; Soph. 217e; Symp. 176e;
Rep. 285c, and esp. Prtg. 316c8–d1, 318a3–b6, 335b5–b8, 337b3–338d7; 316c7, 318a4–c2, 336b2; for
Xenophon, e.g. Mem. I.2.13, I.2.60. For use in later pseudo-Platonic dialogue, where it becomes
even more strongly invested with notions of the divine as well as of eros, see Tarrant 2005, who treats
in detail earlier Platonic usages of the term. It is also an early Christian term used in Patristic
writings – though Schleiermacher deliberately upgrades it here over koinonia, which is definitely,
and more immediately recognizably, a term with Christian traction.
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(Gesellschaft), then we find that here several people are supposed to have an
effect on each other and that such effect (Einwirkung) should in no way be
one-sided. Those who are gathered in a theatre or attend a lecture (Vorlesung)
together do not actually form among themselves a Gesellschaft.’27 At the same
time, Schleiermacher does not imagine Gesellschaft as a centrifugal gathering
of individuals. Instead, he thinks of any such society as also itself akin to an
individual writ large, brought together not by a leveling similarity but by
a similar way of thinking (Manier) and by an agreed frame of what is being
thought about (determining its tenor, or Ton). Such being-together and
perfection as an individual, finally, requires a certain amount of elasticity, an
agility to adapt, yet be one’s self in equal measure in all areas.
Schleiermacher explores one more aspect: the rhetorical equivalent,
the modes of speech that conform to this exploration and enactment of
free individuality based on an agreed frame and that assist in the process
of becoming oneself are all forms of indirect speech, or of indirect or
excessive meaning, forms that have in his opinion so far been looked
down upon:
All social expressions must therefore have a double tendency, a kind of
double sense: one, which I’d call common, which refers directly to the
conversation at hand and necessarily and immediately meets its goal; and
another, higher one, which is thrown out at will to see whether someone will
take it up and follow the allusions contained in it. I cannot tally here in how
many ways this may happen: in all ways in which ideas, or circles of ideas are
activated through their relations with each other. Just one comment: this
means a defense of two genres, which normally enjoy a bad reputation, but
which actually, when they are deployed properly, are the height of decorum:
namely, allusion and persiflage. The first means that the way an idea is
expressed relates to the known expression of another one, even though it
comes from a different sphere; the second means that something that
normally sounds serious also points to another meaning in which it is
amusing.28
27
‘Wenn wir den Begriff der freien Geselligkeit der Gesellschaft im eigentlichsten Sinn zerlegen, so
finden wir hier, dass mehrere Menschen auf einander einwirken sollen, und dass diese Einwirkung
auf keine Art einseitig seyn darf. Diejenigen, welche im Schauspielhause versammelt sind, oder
gemeinschaftlich einer Vorlesung beiwohnen, machen untereinander eigentlich gar keine
Gesellschaft aus’; Schleiermacher 1984: 169. While the English word ‘lecture’ could suggest quite
a broad range of public delivery and talks, the German ‘Vorlesung’, a ‘reading at, or in front of,
someone’, is usually quite specifically a scholarly lecture, delivered in an institutional context; or,
ironically, a moral lecture.
28
‘Alle gesellschaftlichen Auesserungen müssen dem zufolge eine doppelte Tendenz, gleichsam einen
doppelten Sinn haben, einen, den ich den gemeinen nennen möchte, der sich unmittelbar auf die
Unterhaltung bezieht, und seinen Zweck nothwendig und unfehlbar erreicht, und einen anderen,
gleichsam höheren, der nur aufs ungewisse hingworfen wird, ob ihn etwa jemand aufnehmen, und
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Irony and parody also belong in this category, he continues. Those forms
are in fact all modes of speech that tap into deeply philological and
communicative practices, if they want to be understood. Thinking beyond
Schleiermacher, these are arguably also the forms of speaking that we as
professional readers and philologists still now take greatest pride in detect-
ing and decoding. In addition, such a knowledge community, that recog-
nizes allusions, is also still the frame for judging a philologist’s skill and
status within this community of professionals.
Schleiermacher appreciates full well the possible social effects of this
philological stance. Even though he redeems pleasure in such forms of
indirect meaning, he is conscious that they also deserve their reputation of
creating in-groups and elitism (geheime Gesellschaften). Still, for him this
effect is shaped according to how and why any such society has been
convened: as a best-case scenario, the effect is not exclusion but mutually
supportive individuality recognizing itself. At the same time, all those are
ideals, he readily acknowledges in the end, and those moments when
a society functions ‘as a true/real whole (als ein wirkliches Ganzes)’ are
only achievable and sustainable temporarily (my emphasis).29 Much as
there is an underlying belief in a comprehensible world, reflected in
language and communication, Schleiermacher is also sensitive to the fact
that practices of reading, speaking, and understanding are provisional,
situated, and bound into constellations.
Sociability and University
Theodore Ziolkowski, in his important book on the institutions of
German Romanticism, already pinpointed the ‘ideal’ community of
die darin enthaltenen Andeutungen weiter verfolgen will. Auf wie mancherlei Art dies geschehen
kann, kann hier nicht aufgezählt werden; auf jede Art nämlich, wie Ideen, oder ganze Ideenkreise,
durch Verwandtschaft angeregt werden. Nur Eins: es liegt in dieser Regel die Vertheidigung zweier
Gattungen, welche insgemein in einem schlechten Ruf stehn, in der That aber, wenn sie nur recht
gebraucht werden, auf dem höchsten Gipfel des Schicklichen liegen; ich meine die Anspielung und
die Persiflage. Die erste besteht darin, wenn in der Art, wie eine Idee ausgedrückt wird, eine
Beziehung liegt, auf den bekannten Ausdruck einer andern, wenn diese gleich in einer andern
Sphäre liegt. Die letzte darin, dass etwas, dem gemeinen Sinne nach ernsthaftes gesagtes, zugleich
auch auf einen andern hindeutet, in dem es ein Scherz ist’; Schleiermacher 1984: 181–2.
29
‘Uebrigens liegt es im Wesen einer Theorie, und braucht also eigentlich nicht ausdrücklich gesagt zu
werden, dass die darin aufgestellten Ideen Ideale sind, welchen sich die Ausübung nur nähern soll.
Das ist denn auch der Fall mit dem hier durchgeführten Begriff, dass jede Gesellschaft eine Einheit,
ein Ganzes seyn soll. Eine jede wird unvermeidlich nicht nur Augenblicke haben, wo sie eigentlich
in mehrere Theile getheilt ist, sondern es wird auch für die vortreflichste ein besonderes Glück seyn,
wenn sie sich auch nur eine Zeitlang als ein wirkliches Ganzes erhalten kann’; Schleiermacher
1984: 184.
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Romantic symphilosophizing in the university seminar, but he did so with
reference to Jena in the 1790s, at a moment when political and intellectual
radicals, including Friedrich Schlegel some time before his move to Berlin,
converged in that academic space.30 What I propose here, with a focus on
Schleiermacher’s writings, is that the institutional seminar, in a much less
extreme way and in other places, continued to be a possible site of reflec-
tion on free sociability, individuality, and knowledge.
In his 1808 programmatic essay on German universities, Schleiermacher’s
preoccupation with observing the relation and balance between differing
parts, which he had elaborated in earlier work, remained strong.31 The essay
discusses schools, universities, and academies as related units that want to be
seen in conjunction – rather than perceived through mutual rivalry or
arrogance. Likewise, he makes a case that ‘every form of mindedness,
scientific (wissenschaftlich) or religious, is formed (bildet sich) and perfects
itself within the life and community of several. By emanating from those
more gebildet, more perfected, it is first excited and awoken from its slumber
in the novices; it grows through mutual communication and grows stronger
among equals. And while the entire university is such a form of scholarly
living-together, it is lectures that are its particular sanctuary.’32
Schleiermacher retains some of the provocative energy of the Attempt at
a Theory of Sociable Conduct, with its indictment of an all too easy notion of
social prescriptiveness or commonality; but he also reconfigures and modifies
his usage of the term ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft, or koinonia), valorizing it
in slightly different ways. He does so, for example, with regard to the lecture,
which now becomes a site of new importance. In the 1799 essay, as we have
seen, the lecture was mentioned as a form of precisely the mistaken notion of
sociability Schleiermacher was out to dismantle. From a form of passive and
30
Ziolkowski 1990: 267–8, who invokes a kind of sympathetic magic when he speaks of ‘the
coincidence of the rudimentary form of the seminar, the familiar model of the Platonic dialogue,
and the lively exchange of the social setting that contributed in typically Romantic interaction to the
first true realization of the academic seminar’. Kneller 2014: 111 quotes this passage as a gateway to
discussing Novalis, Schlegel and Schleiermacher alongside each other. I suggest that
Schleiermacher’s continuing reflections on academic community in fact deepen the complexity
and bring out the paradoxes of this Romantic ‘ideal’ as it becomes integral to institutions of learning.
31
The text is quoted from the German critical edition of Schleiermacher’s works, Schleiermacher 1998,
with my own translations. A select translation is available in Menand et al 2017: 45–66. On the essay
itself, Crouter 2005: 140–68.
32
Schleiermacher 1998: 48. ‘Jede Gesinnung, die wissenschaftliche wie die religiöse, bildet und
vervollkommnet sich nur im Leben, in der Gemeinschaft mehrerer. Durch Ausströmung aus den
Gebildetern, Vollkommenern, wird sie zuerst aufgeregt und aus ihrem Schlummer erweckt in den
Neulingen; durch gegenseitige Mitteilung wächst sie und stärkt sich in denen, die einander gleich
sind. Wie nun die ganze Universität ein solches wissenschaftliches Zusammenleben ist, so sind die
Vorlesungen insbesondere das Heiligtum desselben.’
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rather misperceived direct communication, now, ten years later, the lecture
becomes a place for dialogue with a more universal interlocutor (I will return
to this below).33 The rejigging of some of the deliberate provocations of the
essay on sociability towards a more sober, realpolitisch reflection of institu-
tional politics and planning is also visible in his comments on the role of
universities in public life, as much as the relationships between, ultimately,
national cultures – there is an elastic that pulls his argument towards the
national university and national formations as prioritized and fundamental,
something that turns away from the more experimental energy of the 1799
piece.
There are several more examples of this return in the programmatic essay
of 1808, as he now addresses a different audience with a different motivation.
This time, Schleiermacher is actively engaged in the task of institution-
building as opposed to blue-sky Romantic symphilosophy, but the work is
not entirely free of some of the programmatic hopes of the earlier essay and
its reflections. Like the ‘free sociability’ he had envisaged then, the ideal
university mediates between, or complements, a domestic or private and
a professional and public space. This is a new space that reflects community
rather than isolation, and one that could and should thus not only be
determined and mandated by the state in its forms of communication –
even though that might not actually be achievable:
Given this connection it is inevitably mere appearance as if any scientist/
scholar could live only unto himself, in isolated work and projects. Rather,
this is the first principle of any kind of striving towards understanding:
communication; and nature itself has articulated this principle in that it is
impossible to produce anything in science, even for itself, without language.
For this reason, the drive for understanding has to create from itself, once it
has truly arisen, all the relationships that are necessary for its directed fulfil-
ment, namely the various ways of communication and of a community of
activities; and we would be mistaken to think that all such institutions, as they
appear now, could only be the work of the state.34
33
For the increasing importance of the lecture as a site of Romantic practice and ideology, see helpfully
Franzel 2013.
34
Schleiermacher 1998: 22. ‘Bei diesem Zusammenhange nun kann es nur ein leerer Schein sein, als ob
irgendein wissenschaftlicher Mensch abgeschlossen für sich in einsamen Arbeiten und
Unternehmungen lebe. Vielmehr ist das erste Gesetz jedes auf Erkenntnis gerichteten Bestrebens:
Mitteilung; und in der Unmöglichkeit, wissenschaftlich irgend etwas auch nur für sich allein ohne
Sprache hervorzubringen, hat die Natur selbst dieses Gesetz ganz deutlich ausgesprochen.
Daher müssen sich rein aus dem Triebe nach Erkenntnis, wo er nur wirklich erwacht ist, auch
alle zu seiner zweckmäßigen Befriedigung nötigen Verbindungen, die verschiedensten Arten der
Mitteilung und der Gemeinschaft aller Beschäftigungen von selbst gestalten; und es wäre irrig zu
glauben, daß alle dergleichen Anstalten, wie es jetzt scheint, nur das Werk des Staats sein könnten.’
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But the more developed [the tendencies towards understanding and
communication] are, the more they require instruments of many kinds,
and the authority of those linked together, to have as such intercourse
with others in a lawful way. And this, indeed, can only be achieved
through the state; hence, the state is encouraged with regard to those
who have, as we put it, formed a bond with each other with a view to
science, to recognize them as a moral person, to tolerate them and to
protect them.35
As with his insistence in the 1799 essay on Ton as shaped by subject matter,
and Manier as reflecting the individual – carefully calibrated as routes to
achieve common ground – here the shared framework is now that of
a shared language as the object of inquiry. This is philology in its most
capacious sense – the study of any products of culture arising from one
language; but it sets the object of inquiry in a much more rigid form than
the temporary, provisional agreements of shared matter and manner in the
free sociable discourse imagined ten years earlier, and draws stricter lines of
demarcation around such a field:
All scholarly activities formed in the area of a language have an exact
natural affinity which makes them more closely related with each other
than with anything else and thus lets them form a kind of discrete whole
within a larger whole. Anything that is produced scientifically in
a language and articulated in it participates in the particular nature of
that language, unless it is really only directly concerned with experiences
and mechanisms that are necessarily the same everywhere, such as in
mathematics or experimental natural sciences. It cannot be exactly trans-
lated into another language, and therefore it forms a self-same whole
because of the connection through language. It remains a necessary task
for scholars, though, to overcome the separation between different areas,
to break through the boundaries of language and to bring closer to each
other again, through comparison, what appears to have been divided; this
is a task that maybe finds its highest objective in the scientific study of
languages. At the same time, this task is apparently the highest challenge
for the community of knowledge and, because it is possibly never resolved,
in this way confirms the divisions as inevitable. If we think of scholarly
association as something that arises at all points from a free drive towards
understanding, they will flock together towards unity within the area of
35
Schleiermacher 1998: 22. ‘Aber freilich je mehr sie sich ausbilden, um desto mehr erfordern sie
Hilfsmittel, Werkzeuge mancher Art, Befugnis der Verbundenen, auch als solche mit andern auf
eine rechtsbeständige Art zu verkehren. Dies alles kann freilich nur durch den Staat erlangt werden,
und daher ergeht an ihn die Anmutung, diejenigen, die sich zum Behuf der Wissenschaft mitei-
nander verbunden haben, wie wir uns ausdrücken, als eine moralische Person anzuerkennen, zu
dulden und zu schützen.’
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one single language. This will be its closest bond, and each community
beyond that will only be secondary.36
In the essay on sociability, Schleiermacher had briefly, but pointedly,
expressed his opinion that building any such sociability could not simply
be achieved from a top-down perspective, but would have to grow from
a dialectical, mutual sensitivity to the behavior of concrete individuals and
be guided by attunement to pragmatic concerns and phenomena. In his
outline, theory and virtuosity ought to complement each other, and he
insists that neither top-down analysis nor practice alone could successfully
give shape to such free sociability. Likewise, to keep any such formation
and institutional body alive would need to rely on the contributions of
each individual, mutually implicated, so that rules of being together and of
conduct are developed rather than absolutely posited. Unsurprisingly,
maybe, the task of developing a reform program for a new university
inevitably had to contend with a different framework of expectations and
of institutional top-down implementation. But it is equally clear that
Schleiermacher continued to think with a language that arose out of the
imagination of mutual transformation and observation.37
Philology, and with it the (German) seminar as its institutional form of
being, carries over some of that language of Platonism, as I have suggested,
in terms of a dialectical process of learning, becoming and transformation
36
Schleiermacher 1998: 23. ‘Alle wissenschaftlichen Tätigkeiten, welche sich in dem Gebiet einer
Sprache bilden, haben eine natürliche genaue Verwandtschaft, vermöge deren sie näher unter sich,
als mit irgend anderen zusammenhängen, und daher ein eignes gewissermaßen abgeschlossenes
Ganzes in dem größeren Ganzen bilden. Denn was in einer Sprache wissenschaftlich erzeugt und
dargestellt ist, hat teil an der besonderen Natur dieser Sprache; wenn es sich nicht ganz unmittelbar
auf Erfahrungen und Verrichtungen bezieht, die überall notwendig dieselben sein müssen, wie im
Gebiete der Mathematik und der experimentalen Naturlehre, so läßt es sich nicht genau ebenso in
eine andere Sprache übertragen, und bildet daher unter sich vermöge des Zusammenhanges mit der
Sprache ein gleichartiges Ganzes. Für die Wissenden bleibt es allerdings eine notwendige Aufgabe,
auch die Trennung zwischen diesen verschiedenen Gebieten wieder aufzuheben, die Schranken der
Sprache zu durchbrechen, und, was durch sie geschieden zu sein scheint, vergleichend aufeinander
zurückzuführen; eine Aufgabe, in welcher vielleicht die wissenschaftliche Beschäftigung mit den
Sprachen ihr höchstes Ziel findet. Allein diese Aufgabe ist offenbar für die Gemeinschaft des
Wissens die höchste, vielleicht nie aufzulösende, und eben dadurch bewährt sich nur desto mehr
jene Absonderung als eine unumgängliche. Denken wir uns also auf allen Punkten aus freiem Triebe
nach Erkenntnis wissenschaftliche Verbindungen entstehend, so werden sich diese zunächst so weit
zu vereinigen streben, als das Gebiet einer und derselben Sprache reicht. Dies wird der engste Bund
sein, und jede darüber hinausgehende Gemeinschaft nur eine weitere.’
37
Foley 2006 makes a case that the reason Schleiermacher’s 1799 essay remained incomplete was his
expansion of thought on sociability in the direction of religious community and sociability. To see
his reflections reverberate in his writings on the shape of universities is not mutually exclusive with
such an interpretation, but shows how polyvalent those insights were for his thinking across a range
of areas.
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