Friedrich Schleiermacher’s *Speeches* on religion is a classic text within the academic study of religion and theology. It also stands as one of the most debated texts in the field, generating contested understandings of religious feeling and intuition, the character of religious experience, the modern concept of religion, and the relation of religious piety to critical reflection and the public sphere. This session explores two fresh interpretations of Schleiermacher's *Speeches* that each draw upon significant original research. The first considers the important revisions to the second edition of Schleiermacher's *Speeches* in light of his ongoing work in translating and interpreting the writings of Plato. The second explores Schleiermacher's account of religious affections as illuminating the relationship and tension between ethics and religion.
This paper examines the revisions Schleiermacher made to the Second Speech (“On the Nature of Religion”) in the second edition of the Speeches (1806). I shall focus on his two most important revisions—changes that arguably reshaped his argument. First, Schleiermacher’s use of the terms feeling (Gefühl) and intuition (Anschauung). Historically, it is this issue that has preoccupied scholars for the past two centuries. I shall revisit the issue from a new perspective. Second, Schleiermacher’s reformulation of what can be called The Three: from metaphysics, morality, and religion (1799) to knowing, acting, and feeling (1806). Where the original formulation was simplistically drawn, the new formulation includes a complex, multi-dimensional typology. Moreover, Schleiermacher takes care in his reformulation to explain the interrelations of The Three. These two revisions also lend more coherence to Schleiermacher’s attempt to explain religion as it relates to violence and non-violence.
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.