In his introduction to Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present , Kurt Mueller-Vollmer gives us a very Hamannian Schleiermacher: “Man, the linguistic being, can be seen as the place where language articulates iself in each speech act and where each spoken utterance can be understood in relation to the totality of language. But man is also a constantly evolving mind and his speaking can only be understood as a moment in his mental life ( Tatsache im Denkenden ) . . . . Through verbal articulation the mental fact becomes exemplary. This is so because for Schleiermacher mental facts articulated as speech are not independent of language. Or, in Schleiermacher’s own words: ‘Speech as mental fact cannot be understood if it is not understood as linguistic signification ( Sprachbezeichnung ), because the innate nature of language modifies our mind.’”

This Schleiermacher is not guilty of psychologism since “even the purely intentional mental side of speech - speech as a mental phenomenon - is not free from language. It is always conditioned and modified by its linguistic form.” Yet Schleiermacher doesn’t believe we are confined to the prison of language, since language “while it forces patterns upon thought, in return must suffer the influence, the labor of thought upon it.”

The echoes of Hamann are not accidental.

In an essay in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (Cambridge Companions to Religion) , Andrew Bowie notes that Hamann’s critique of Kant “influenced some of the most important subsequent thinking about language in Germany, including that of Schleiermacher. Hamann argues that ‘words are both pure and empirical intuitions as well as pure and empirical concepts : empircal because the sensation of sight or sound is affected by them, pure in so far as their meaning is not determined by anything which belongs to those sensations.’” In other words, “Words would not have meanings if they were merely objects in the world, so they require spontaneous cognitive activity associated with concepts, but meanings would not be possible without the objective existence of the signifier.”

Schleiermacher took this to heart, since he found in Hamann the notion that “aspects of both structuralism and intentionalism are inescapable in any serious engagement with a text.”

If Schleiermacher is indebted to Hamann, perhaps he did a better job of countering, and not merely accommodating, Kant than is usually thought.