Cosmic Absorption: On the Aesthetics of Schleiermacher’s Romantic Religion

This paper situates Friedrich Schleiermacher’s 1799 speeches On Religion within the aesthetic framework of Romantic universal poetry. While Schleiermacher’s definition of religion as “intuition and feeling” of the universe has typically been read as a critique of Fichtean intellectual intuition, these affects also play an important role in late Enlightenment and early Romantic art criticism, where they become associated with problems of attention and imagination. In On Religion, Schleiermacher transforms two key problems of attention that emerge at this time: 1) a Pygmalion-like attentive overinvestment, which seeks to animate, even copulate with the work of art, and 2) the Romantic problem of a distracted, excessive imagination that ignores the artwork. For Schleiermacher, both excessive attention and distraction – paired together – become positive means of ascent toward an experience of religious-erotic cosmic absorption that has no specific object because it participates in the universe’s endlessly proliferative process of self-representation.