Friedrich von Schlegel

Schlegel, Friedrich von (1772–1829)

Schlegel was the major aesthetician of the Romantic movement in Germany during its first formative period (1797–1802). In these years he developed his influential concepts of Romantic poetry and irony, created an original approach to literary criticism and edited the journal of the early Romantic circle, Athenäum. Along with F. von Hardenberg (Novalis), F.W.J. Schelling and F.D.E. Schleiermacher, he was also a guiding spirit in the development of a Romantic metaphysics, ethics and politics. His metaphysics attempted to synthesize Fichte’s idealism and Spinoza’s naturalism. His ethics preached radical individualism and love against the abstract formalism of Kant’s ethics. In his early politics Schlegel was very radical, defending the right of revolution and democracy against Kant. In his later years, however, he became much more conservative. His final works are a defence of his neo-Catholic mysticism.

Schlegel began his intellectual career as a classical scholar. His Über das Studium der Griechischen Poesie (On the Study of Greek Poetry) (1797) attempted to write a history of Greek poetry and formulate a neoclassical aesthetics. Schlegel wanted to do for the history of Greek poetry what J.J. Winckelmann had done for the history of Greek sculpture. Like Winckelmann, Schlegel admired the ancient Greeks for attaining a purely ‘objective’ norm of beauty, which was independent of national taste, personal caprice or even moral and political ends. He criticized modern literature because, rather than observing such a norm, it pandered to national taste with novel and striking gimmicks. Schlegel believed that the artist should attempt to imitate the purity and simplicity of classical models; in the recent works of Goethe he saw promising signs of a new classicism in Europe.

However, as early as 1797, largely under the influence of Friedrich Schiller, Schlegel began to have doubts about his neoclassicism. He now started to appreciate some of the distinctive values of modern Christian culture, especially its ideal of the infinite, its ethic of love and its emphasis upon personal freedom. In his Athenäums Fragmente (1798) Schlegel then gave a condensed account of his new Romantic aesthetic. The aim of the Romantic artist is to express the characteristic feature of modern culture: the striving for the infinite, the longing for the kingdom of God on earth, the struggle to realize Kant’s ideal of the highest good (see Kant, I. §11). What is distinctive of Romantic art in contrast to classical, Schlegel wrote in his Gespräch über Poesie (Conversation on Poetry) (1800a), is that it expresses sentiment, especially the feeling of love, which is the longing to realize the infinite. In attempting to express such a grand ideal, the Romantic artist should attempt to cultivate irony, a critical detachment towards his own productions, for any of them are limited and therefore inadequate to express his unlimited ideal.

In several essays of the late 1790s, ‘Über Lessing’, ‘Georg Forster’ and ‘Jacobis Woldemar’, Schlegel developed a new method of literary criticism, which he described as ‘characterization’ (Charackteristik). The aim of this method was to understand a work as a unique whole, to reconstruct an author’s characteristic style. Rather than criticize a work according to some norm of objective beauty, Schlegel insisted upon evaluating it according to its own aims and upon exposing its inconsistencies. This internal approach to a work was, according to Wilhelm Dilthey, an important step in the development of hermeneutics (see Hermeneutics).

It was also in the late 1790s that Schlegel made his most important contributions to the ethics and politics of Romanticism. His ‘Versuch über den Begriff des Republikanismus’ (’Essay on the Concept of Republicanism’) (1796 (1996)), one of the most radical writings of the 1790s in Germany, was a defence of the right of revolution and direct democracy against Kant. His Athenäums Fragmente (1798–1800) and Lucinde (1799) were also far ahead of their time in championing such progressive causes as sexual liberation and the emancipation of women. Along with Schleiermacher, Schlegel developed an ethic of love and individuality in reaction to the abstract formalism of Kant’s ethics (see Kantian ethics). He maintained that love cannot be understood as a legal obligation, and that it should involve a sensualization of the spirit as much as a spiritualization of the senses.

Schlegel’s contribution to the metaphysics of Romanticism is his Vorlesungen über die Transzendentalphilosophie (Lectures on Transcendental Philosophy), delivered as lectures in Jena in 1800. This work is an attempt, several years before Hegel, to develop a synthesis of naturalism and idealism, of Spinoza and Fichte. While Schlegel argued that Kant and Fichte had wrongly separated the self from nature and history, he also criticized Spinoza for his static and ahistorical conception of the divine substance.

In the early 1800s the flame of Schlegel’s early radicalism dimmed and his thought moved steadily in a conservative direction. He became disillusioned with the French Revolution, which seemed to end in anarchy, commercialism and military dictatorship. Increasingly, he saw the defence of the Catholic Church and the old social hierarchy as the only safeguards against these disturbing trends, and as the only pillars of spiritual and communal values. His growing conservatism culminated in his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1808 and in his diplomatic and literary activity on behalf of Metternich between 1809 and 1818. In his later political writings, especially his Signatur des Zeitalters (Sign of the Age) (1820), Schlegel defended a virtually reactionary position: that the basis of all right is tradition, that society should be organized according to estates, and that social order depends upon the restoration of the Church.

His later works are mainly an apology for his neo-Catholic mysticism. His Philosophie des Lebens (Philosophy of Life) (1828) taught that the aim of philosophy should be to develop the spiritual life of a person, their receptivity for a divine revelation. His Philosophie der Geschichte (Philosophy of History) (1829) held that world history is not a progression towards greater rationality, but an attempt to return to spiritual grace and harmony with the divine. Although this work does give great importance to non-Western cultures, Schlegel still sees European Christianity as the turning point of history and the culmination of civilization.