Friedrich Schleiermacher
Romantic · Europe · 1768 to 1834
German thinker who held that religion is a feeling of dependence on the whole, and that interpreting texts is an art.
What it is
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 to 1834) was a German theologian, pastor and philosopher, born in Breslau. He is remembered for two things: his attempt to reconcile the criticisms of the Enlightenment with traditional Protestant Christianity, and his work on the theory of interpretation and translation. One scholar judges him perhaps not among the very greatest German philosophers of his time, but certainly among the best of the second rank.
He grew up in a strict pietist community, the Moravian Brethren, and moved on to the more liberal University of Halle after doubting some of its teaching. In the late 1790s he lived in Berlin in the same house as Friedrich Schlegel, and the two developed shared ideas about interpretation. He was also a masterful translator of Plato.
The main ideas
- Interpretation as an art. He made the theory of interpretation, hermeneutics, one of his most important philosophical subjects, building on a philosophy of language and mind.
- Language and thought. His account of language is scattered through lectures on psychology, dialectics and hermeneutics. It rests on ideas that come from Herder.
- Meaning belongs to a whole. His semantic holism, the idea that words get their meaning in connection with others, makes translation harder, because no word has a simple equivalent.
- Translation. Because of that challenge, he developed a theory of translation on the foundation of principles about thought and language, and put it to use in his German translation of Plato.
- Method applied. He used his careful method to read the life of Jesus, in lectures from 1819 to 1833, and to write the history of philosophy.
- Faith and reason. A pastor as well as a philosopher, he tried to reconcile the Enlightenment's criticisms with traditional Protestant Christianity.
What it looks like in practice
Think of translating a poem into another language. Schleiermacher would say there is no fixed word-for-word exchange, because each word draws its meaning from the whole language around it. The translator has to decide, again and again, whether to bring the reader to the author or the author to the reader. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writing.
Books and moments
- On Religion and the Soliloquies are early works from his Berlin years among the romantic circle.
- His translations of Plato into German are still widely used and admired.
- His lectures on hermeneutics, psychology and dialectics hold most of his philosophy of language and mind.
Questions and criticism
- Second rank? One scholar ranks him below the greatest of his age, even if the second rank of that age was extremely good.
- Scattered ideas. His philosophy of language is not set out in one place, so readers have to put it together from several lectures.
- Who first had the ideas? His shared hermeneutic ideas with Schlegel make it hard to say which of the two was the more original.
Close neighbours
Johann Gottfried Herder shaped his philosophy of language and mind, and Wilhelm Dilthey later took up and extended his hermeneutics. The pages on Plato, whom he translated, and on Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel show other thinkers of his time.
Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.
Who they connect to
Influenced
- Wilhelm Dilthey · Dilthey wrote his life and built his theory of understanding on Schleiermacher's work on interpretation.
Other Romantic thinkers
- Johann Gottfried Herder · 1744 to 1803
Sources we used
- Friedrich Schleiermacher · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 29 October 2026
- Friedrich Schleiermacher · Wikipedia, read on 29 October 2026