Kinlaw, C. Jefferey. Review of Jacqueline Marina's TRANSFORMATION OF THE SELF IN THE THOUGHT OF FREIDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER. NDPR (January 2009).

Mariña, Jacqueline. Transformation of the Self in the Thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Oxford: OUP, 2008.

Jacqueline Mariña has written an important book, one that clearly, in this reviewer's judgment, is the best book on Schleiermacher in the expanding English-language literature on it. Her book has notable merits, principal among them being its defense of Schleiermacher's overall moral theory as both the cornerstone of his thought and the proper point of entry for understanding his theology. Mariña demonstrates with prodigious clarity and with unsurprising (for those familiar with her previous work) mastery of texts from Kant, Schleiermacher, and Leibniz that Schleiermacher's philosophical ethics deserves serious attention from contemporary Anglo-American analytic philosophers (the recognition of Schleiermacher's importance for contemporary philosophy has been commonplace in Germany). She shows how Schleiermacher developed, through his intensive engagement with Kant and to a lesser extent Spinoza and Leibniz, a consistent and coherent moral theory that combines assets of both an ethics of duty and virtue ethics. Her extensive discussions of Schleiermacher's efforts to confront problems in Kant's ethics and his appropriation of Kant's theory of subjectivity alone are adequate payoff for reading her book. Those interested more specifically in Schleiermacher would benefit considerably from working through her arguments for the importance of Leibniz in the development of Schleiermacher's mature theology, especially as background for explicating what for Schleiermacher constitutes our basic relation to the divine: the absolute feeling of dependence. The ultimate goal of Mariña's project is to provide a perspicuous account of Schleiermacher's theory of moral and spiritual transformation and to explicate the metaphysical concepts that underlie that theory. Accordingly, her book culminates with a discussion of Schleiermacher's Christology. Herein lies another important insight in her work. It is commonplace for theologians -- that is, those who actually give more than a cursory reading of his theological system -- to acknowledge the strong Christocentric foundation in Schleiermacher's theology. Mariña goes a step further, though without explicitly saying so, by locating the center of Schleiermacher's theology in his theory of redemption -- thus the salience of his moral theory. This is an important insight and, in my view, utterly on target. Her book therefore unfolds as a narration of the development of Schleiermacher's ethics, from his early unpublished essay On Freedom, through the Spinoza notes from 1792-1793, the Leibniz notes from 1797-1798 and the Monologen, to the 1805 Brouillon zur Ethik and finally his mature theological system The Christian Faith. She shows, correctly I think, that most of the components of his theory were in place by the time he began to lecture on philosophical ethics in Berlin in 1812/1813. Her most interesting, and indeed most controversial, claim is that Schleiermacher abandons the compatibilism he had defended most of his career when he writes his theological system and embraces a highly nuanced version of transcendental freedom, highly nuanced in the sense that absolute dependence on God is a necessary condition for transcendental freedom in relation to the world. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14925.