Ricerc@Sapienza

The present contribution considers the intellectual profile of Friedrich Schleiermacher, who is placed by Dilthey at the origins of contemporary hermeneutics. We will here consider three points of view: his socio-cultural context of origin (Romanticism); his concept of religious experience - which is distinct but not separate from religious institutions; the consequences of this conception on the methodological level of textual exegesis, in which "psychological interpretation" is intertwined with "grammatical interpretation".

The essay reconstructs some steps of the increasing use of “sacred” in order to define religious experience in the first decade of 19th century in Germany. The starting point is the definition of sacred in Eschenmayer’s dialogue Der Eremit und der Fremdling (1805) that establishes some important features of this idea: its difference to knowledge, ethics and aesthetics; its unattainability by rational knowledge and its accessibility through a paradoxical non sensible perception.