The Hermeneutic Community: Coleridge and Schleiermacher

Abstract

In using the word ‘hermeneutic’ I wish to call attention to the relationship, as yet largely unexplored, between the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and that of Coleridge in beginning to formulate a general hermeneutics, a secular hermeneutics that would subsume biblical hermeneutics, on the basis of a romantic aesthetics of creative Verstehen, or Imagination. Wilhelm Dilthey, Schleiermacher’s exponent and interpreter in the late nineteenth century, did call attention to. the relation between Coleridge and Schleiermacher, though in very general terms, identifying them both as belonging to that major group of thinkers who emphasised ‘die geschichtliche Natur des Menschen and der von ihm geschaffenen Culturformen and Verbände’, ‘the historical nature of man and the cultural forms and groupings created by him’.¹ More recently, Claude Welch has linked their names, in order to establish that Coleridge is of equal stature with Schleiermacher: ‘Coleridge must again be seen as a real turning point into the new kinds of theologising that mark the nineteenth century, a thinker as important for British and American thought as were Schleiermacher and Hegel’.²