Hermeneutics and Orientation: Retracing the ‘Sciences of the Spirit’ (Geisteswissenschaften) in the Education-Related Writings of Fichte, Schleiermacher and Novalis

In this chapter, Fichte and Schleiermacher’s rival submissions for the founding of the University of Berlin are made the subject of a brief comparative analysis. The article begins by tracing out the effective history of both founders’ respective views on optimal program design, the nature of academic disciplines and such hallmarks of Berlin’s educational philosophy as academic freedom and the autonomy of research. The question is then raised, whether later readings, from the hermeneutical traditions of the early twentieth century, indicating the human sciences were first mobilized as a distinctive part of the University of Berlin’s break with older traditions, and that this occurred roughly at the same time that hermeneutics was being expanded into the Berlin-theology curriculum during Schleiermacher’s tenure there, are accurate. This commonplace interpretation, like the ‘myth of Humboldt’ itself, is shown to poorly fit the facts. By contrast, the article provides strong reasons for rethinking the importance of Schleiermacher’s close confidant Novalis’ contributions to the cultural debate about romanticist education—contributions which live up to the literal meaning contained in the phrase, ‘sciences of the spirit’— and demonstrates that Novalis’ influence helps Schleiermacher extend Fichte’s ‘artistic’ approach to self-knowledge and buttresses Schleiermacher’s trans-critical approach to teaching and learning. In closing, the chapter suggests that Schleiermacher’s turn toward hermeneutics, in his own symposia-like seminars, acknowledges the unique problems faced by grounding the university in a time of cultural recession and foreign occupation, and that academic philosophy at the University of Berlin in its first turbulent decade had more to do with the socio-political problems of cultural orientation in occupied Prussia, than with refining pedagogical ways for parsing textual meaning in the classroom. Finally, the lasting contribution of the Berlin model remains its unique synthesis of forensic and collaborative forums for teaching and learning (Konversatorien; Seminaria), which fused the opposing viewpoints of Fichte and Schleiermacher into an institutionally effective design innovation, and breathed new, educational, life into the Socratic method.