“We should do everything with religion, nothing because of religion”: Agency, Atmospheric Feelings, and the Religious Dimension of Ethics in Schleiermacher’s Speeches

This paper interprets a cryptic passage in Schleiermacher’s Second Speech as a provocation for a contemporary rethinking of the relationship between ethics and religion. In it, Schleiermacher simultaneously asserts the autonomy of ethics vis-à-vis religion even as he affirms the ethically salutary - even necessary - relation between religious feelings and the central object of ethics, namely, human action. On this view, religious feelings are not to motivate or rationally justify moral conduct; their proper role consists rather in orienting and accompanying it. And while one’s conduct might be impeccably moral without religious accompaniment, he claims that it remains deficient as human action. Drawing on recent work in philosophy of emotion, I reconstruct Schleiermacher’s early account of religious affections as atmospheric feelings, highlighting their peculiar intentionality, phenomenality, and supra-personal character. I then consider the significance of this ostensibly general feature of human agency for contemporary moral philosophy and religious ethics.