The Argument for God from Experience: The Feeling of Absolute Dependence

In Premise 1 of my Argument for the Existence of God from Experience, I state: Human beings have experiences that evoke a profound sense of dependence, awe, and transcendence (what Schleiermacher calls the feeling of absolute dependence).

Since it is likely to be a phrase unfamiliar to those who have not studied Schleiermacher, my aim in this post is to briefly detail what he means by the feeling of absolute dependence.

The Feeling of Absolute Dependence

Schleiermacher radically reframes the study of theology when he places feeling at the center of his dogmatic schema. For him, it is a guardrail protecting belief in God from the religious deconstruction of Enlightenment thinkers. In On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, Schleiermacher famously contests those who would reduce faith to 'modes of acting' and 'modes of knowing,' He states:

"If you have only given attention to these dogmas and opinions, therefore, you do not yet know religion itself, and what you despise is not it." (1)

Instead, for Schleiermacher:

"The sum total of religion is to feel that...our being and living is being and living through God." (2)

As Schleiermacher develops this conception further in his Christian Faith, he calls this feeling the feeling of absolute dependence. To decipher what Schleiermacher means by 'feeling,' however, we must look briefly at his development of the German word he utilizes: Gefühl.

The Development of Gefühl

For some critics, Gefühl’s usage as a grounding principle meant that faith was subjective and left up to personal interpretation. For others, it meant belief was to be driven primarily by emotion, subject to whimsical change. But such notions were far from Schleiermacher’s intention.

When Schleiermacher was in his twenties and struggling to make sense of the faith of his youth, he found a home in the study of philosophy. It was in the late 1780s that Gefühl began to emerge as an important concept, becoming a central theme in the area of ethics, aesthetics, and more.

However, Schleiermacher’s appropriation of the term was unique among his contemporaries. We first find Schleiermacher using Gefühl as a mode of moral discernment in 1788 in his earliest surviving essay, Notes on Aristotle. (3) In this essay, Gefühl is a nurturing agent, leading the subject to the "better feelings" of a refined character. (4) 

In 1789, Schleiermacher uses Gefühl in his response to Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason,” On the Highest Good. Here, Gefühl becomes a faculty of moral discernment. It is a guiding light. Not at all emotional, Schleiermacher calls Gefühl a “dispassionate gentleness.” (5) 

As Schleiermacher continues to study works of past and contemporary philosophy, he refines his usage of Gefühl further. In his 1792 essay, On Freedom, Schleiermacher hones in more closely on Kant, using Gefühl to denote the capacity to know and act upon a situation’s highest good. For Schleiermacher, Gefühl accomplishes the work that reason alone is incapable of doing.

In 1799, Schleiermacher’s usage of Gefühl begins to reach maturity, and he utilizes Gefühl as the foundational principle of religion itself. He explains,

"The contemplation of the pious is the immediate self-consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things, in and through the Infinite, and all temporal things in and through the Eternal. Religion is to seek this and find it in all that lives and moves…It is to have life and to know life in immediate feeling [Gefühl], only as such an existence in the Infinite and Eternal." (6)

For Schleiermacher, to recognize the Infinite and Eternal 'in immediate feeling,' is to know the same in 'immediate self-consciousness.'

Central to my argument for God from experience, is the recognition that such experience is quite infrequently (if ever at all) one that can be felt consciously. It is best described as a non-sensate awareness.

Bottom Line

I am contesting humans experience God in their immediate self-consciousness. For Schleiermacher, this plays out as a feeling of absolute dependence. For others, this may be an experience of transcendence, a sense of awe, or a deep intuition. That these experiences are a source of valid knowledge is a blog post for another day.

For now, we will keep our conversation to the claims of Premise 1.

To that end, in my next post, I will explore my claim the human beings actually have experiences that correlate to Schleiermacher's feeling of absolute dependence.

(1) Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Ohman (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishing, 1958), 41.

(2) Schleiermacher, On Religion, 12.

(3) Julia A. Lamm, The Early Philosophical Roots of Schleiermacher’s Notion of Gefuhl, 1788-1794, Harvard Theological Review, 87 (1994): 71.

(4) Lamm, Early Philosophical Roots, 72.

(5) Lamm, Early Philosophical Roots, 73.