Buddhist Romanticism

of humanity to the universe. Now, metaphysics and morality also have this
same relationship as their object, so Schleiermacher found it necessary to
show how religion differs from them. Metaphysics, he said, is concerned
with describing the place of humanity within the system of laws that
govern the universe. Morality is concerned with formulating rules for how
humanity should behave in the universe. Religion, however, is something
more immediate and personal than either of these. It is a feeling derived
from a direct experience of the infinite universe acting directly on one’s
consciousness.
Schleiermacher analyzed this direct experience as a combination of two
processes—intuition and feeling—starting from a moment in which both
processes are experienced as a single process and before they split into
separate phenomena. On the one hand, there is the intuition of the infinite
acting on one’s consciousness. Here Schleiermacher is using the word
“intuition” in his own technical sense. In line with the psychology that he
learned both from Kant and from Schelling, he notes that every intuition of
every kind is the impression of an object acting on one’s consciousness. This
impression does not tell you everything about the object, for two reasons.
First, it tells you only about that particular action of the object on your
consciousness. It cannot tell you anything more about the object than that.
This right here raises the question of how one could know that the
infinite was actually acting on one’s consciousness, as there is no such thing
as an infinite action that a finite mind could comprehend as infinite. All the
mind can register are finite actions, beyond which it cannot see. What feels
infinite may simply be Really Big but nevertheless finite. This problem is
fatal to Schleiermacher’s theory—how can one have a taste for the infinite if
one cannot know that what has left an impression is actually infinite?—but
he brushes right past it.
Schleiermacher’s second reason for why the impression does not tell you
everything about the object is that the level of your receptivity to the
intuition will determine how you register the impact and what you take
away from it. This “what you take away from it”—your subjective response
to the intuition—is a feeling. At the moment of contact, the intuition and
feeling seem to be one and the same, but when the intuition ends, the
feeling continues on its own. It then grows into a natural urge to express the
feeling to others.
In a case of the direct experience of the infinite, the moment when
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