Abstract

Identity and Individuality are key subjects of modernity. They are categorically unfolded by Schleiermacher's conception, that individual identity is constituted by an ethic process and is closely linked to its complementary, the universal of sociality. In the first instance this essay explicates this conception in the poeticised romantic early work ‘Monologen’ and thereupon it connects with his mellower dogmatic-theological main work ‘Glaubenslehre’. In the ‘Monologen’ individuality is constituted by imagining a human transcendental ‘realm of spirits’ as the background for looking at the individuals in the ‘world’. On the other hand the ‘Glaubenslehre’ interlaces ethic-religious processes of the constitution of identity with institutionalised communication between empirically different individuals in the context of ecclesiology. Associated with a coupling of ‘spirit’ and ‘world’ this makes a structural openness possible for the real plurality right up to divergence and difference.