## 1. Life and Works



The youngest of five sons, Schlegel was born in Hanover into a
distinguished and culturally prominent literary family. His father,
Johann Adolf Schlegel, was both a clergyman and literary figure; his
uncle, Johann Elias, was a dramatist and aesthetic theorist; and his
elder brother by five years, August Wilhelm, was to become the great
German translator of Shakespeare and one of the most prominent
literary critics of the time.



Schlegel attended the universities of Gottingen and Leipzig,
originally to study law, but his intellectual interests began to
widen, centering especially on classical literature, and he turned
after 1793 to a life of literary freelancing. In the succeeding couple
of years, he wrote several early essays on Greek literature amid plans
for a history of classical poetry. Only one volume of the intended
larger study was published, in 1798, as *Geschichte der Poesie der
Griechen und Romer*, but the essay "On the Study of
Greek Poetry" (*Uber das Studium der griechischen
Poesie*, finished 1795, but not published until January 1797),
with its sharp distinction between ancient and modern modes of
literature, is taken to be representative of this early,
"classicist" phase of Schlegel's intellectual life.



An important influence on the young Schlegel was Caroline Bohmer,
future wife of his brother (and ultimately of F. W. J. Schelling).
Schlegel met her initially in 1794 in Dresden, and her life
experience--the daughter of a famous Gottingen professor,
she had become pregnant by a French officer in occupied Mainz and been
imprisoned as a revolutionary--had a particular effect on the
awakening of his interest in political and social issues. In the
summer of 1796, Schlegel moved to join his brother and new wife in
Jena, the city which, since Fichte's momentous arrival two years
prior, had become perhaps the liveliest intellectual scene in all of
Germany. Schlegel remained in Jena for almost a year, but then moved
to Berlin, where he became a regular visitor to the salons of
Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin and established contact with several
important figures of the Romantic movement. Among them were Friedrich
Schleiermacher, who became Schlegel's roommate and collaborator on a
number of intended projects, including the translation of Plato's
dialogues (a project that in the end only Schleiermacher would
actually carry out); the writers Ludwig Tieck and Wilhelm Heinrich
Wackenroder; and the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), who had
been a fellow student with Schlegel in Leipzig and who was partly
responsible for opening up the philosophical problems of Fichtean
idealism to the young Schlegel.



Among the works most famously associated with Schlegel's name from
this period is the project of the journal *Athenaeum*, which
published in the years 1798-1800 a set of fragments written by
both Schlegel brothers, Novalis and Schleiermacher. During his time in
Berlin, Schlegel also began a relationship with Dorothea Veit,
daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, who had left her banker husband Simon
Veit in 1798. The publication in 1799 of Schlegel's novel
*Lucinde*, with its frank (though by today's standards hardly
risque) portrayal of a sexual liaison widely thought to be
autobiographical became for Schlegel a major scandal.



In September 1799, Schlegel left Berlin to join his brother and
Caroline again in Jena. He gave lectures on transcendental philosophy
at the University of Jena from October 1800 to March 1801, although
these were apparently not well-received. (Among those in the audience
for some of those lectures was probably Hegel, newly arrived in Jena,
but there is considerable dispute about what Hegel--a bitter
rival of Schlegel's for the remainder of his life--may or may not
have gained from hearing them.)



Schlegel remained in Jena until December 1801, and his departure on
this occasion came at a time which marks a significant turning point
in the history of Romanticism: the end of the "Jena
circle" and its collaborations. Novalis had died in March, and
Schlegel had become somewhat distanced from his brother and Caroline.
After a time in both Berlin and Dresden, Schlegel moved to Paris in
June 1802, where he founded another new journal, *Europa*, and
turned significant attention to the figurative arts. Among other
things, Schlegel wrote accounts of the paintings in the Louvre and
began, at the behest of the notable art collectors Sulpiz and Melchior
Boisseree, a series of lectures on art and art history.



Schlegel and Dorothea moved to Cologne in 1804, where Schlegel studied
German Gothic architecture, gave lectures on the development of
philosophy (*Die Entwicklung der Philosophie*) and turned, with
some hopes of finally establishing himself in an academic position, to
a new intellectual interest: the study of Sanskrit and Hindu religious
writings. Schlegel's work on the grammatical connections between
Sanskrit and the Indo-European languages, published as *On the
Language and Wisdom of the Indians* (*Uber die Sprache und
Weisheit der Indier*, 1808), represents an important moment in the
development of the study of comparative grammar (a term which Schlegel
himself coined in the text).



The study of Hindu thought marked an important shift in the
development of Schlegel's religious thought, as did a second and
important event of the Cologne period: his conversion, together with
Dorothea, to Catholicism, in April 1808. The shift in Schlegel's
religious stance corresponded with an apparently new political one as
well.



In March of 1809 he was appointed to a position in the Austrian civil
service and moved to Vienna, where he was to live for the rest of his
life.



During these Austrian years, Schlegel was, among other things, the
editor of an anti-Napoleonic newspaper, founder of two other prominent
journal projects (the *Deutsches Museum* and
*Concordia*) and an apparently popular public lecturer on a
wide range of topics. Metternich asked him in 1813 to draw up
proposals for a future German constitution, and Schlegel served (until
he was recalled) as first secretary of the Austrian legation to the
Diet of Frankfurt. He died in Vienna in January 1829.


## 2. The Romantic Turn



Schlegel's intellectual biography begins in what is usually
interpreted as a "classicist" phase. In his early
*Studium* essay, Schlegel claimed that Greek poetry was
"beautiful" while modern poetry was only
"interesting" (*interessant*): ancient poetry
strove for an ideal and was "objective," while modern
poetry was "characteristic" and strove for an originality
that was "individual" or "mannered." (A
similar distinction, as many critics have noted, can be found in
Schiller's contemporaneous work *On Naive and Sentimental
Poetry*. Schlegel apparently arrived at his distinction
independently, although when he did encounter Schiller's essay, it
prompted him to reconsider his approach to more contemporary
literature: see Eichner 1970, chapter 2, and Schlegel's later preface
to the *Studium* essay.)



In the years following the *Studium* essay, Schlegel moved not
only to a distinction between the classical and the romantic, as
opposed to that between the ancient and modern, but moreover began
distinctly to privilege the romantic. What Schlegel meant by the term
"romantic" (*romantisch*) and its apparent cognate
*Roman* (usually translated as "novel," but having
among the Romantics a much wider sense) has long been disputed.
Perhaps under the influence of Herder (see Eichner 1956), Schlegel saw
the historical origins of "the romantic" in the wide
mixture of forms and genres that characterized medieval literature and
took it as the point of departure for a genre-transcending notion that
allows even Shakespeare's plays or Dante's *Commedia* to be
classified as *Romane*. Seen from this historical perspective,
the *Roman* becomes the central dividing line between ancient
literature and the literature of the current age: Greek poetry, he
claimed in 1800, "began with and finally again converged in
epic; our poetry began with and finally again will converge in the
*Roman*."



The shift between Schlegel's classicist and romantic phases presents
an interpretive challenge that is frequently discussed in the
literature. On the one hand, scholars have stressed that what Schlegel
now commends in romantic poetry are the very same facets he had
previously condemned (for example, Eichner 1970, 49, who lists here
the tendency toward the purely imaginative; the mixing of genres; the
trend toward didacticism, irony and parody; the fusion of poetry and
philosophy). On the other hand, many have noticed that there are seeds
in the *Studium* essay of the later view--Schlegel's
praise of poets like Dante, Goethe and Shakespeare often seems at odds
with the essay's valorization of ancient poetry.



One of the most important expressions of Schlegel's claims for the
romantic can be found in the much-discussed
*Athenaeumsfragment* 116: Romantic poetry is said there to be a
"progressive, universal poetry, ... the only kind of poetry
that is more than a kind, that is, as it were, poetry itself: for in a
certain sense all poetry is or should be romantic." The task of
such poetry, he claims in this fragment, should be to "fuse
poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the
poetry of nature; and make poetry lively and sociable, and life and
society poetical; poeticize wit and fill and saturate the forms of art
with every kind of good, solid matter for instruction, and animate
them with the pulsations of humor." In a similar vein, he raises
the stakes for what should be achieved by the genre that is not merely
a genre--the novel: a "genuine theory of poetry would be a
theory of the novel," he claims.



Schlegel does seem to acknowledge at times that his claims for the
romantic border on the overly expansive (or, some would prefer, on the
inherently incomplete or uncompletable). In a 1793 letter to his
brother, he said: "I cannot send you my explanation of the word
'romantic' because it would be 125 sheets long"
(cited in Beiser, 1992, 410, n 67). Schlegel's bold envisioning of the
romantic and the *Roman* are, however, part of a larger project
in poetics and aesthetics concerned with finding a standard of
judgment appropriate to the individuality of artistic and literary
works.


## 3. Poetics and Aesthetics



The aesthetic standard that Schlegel develops--perhaps best
expressed in his claim that "criticism is not to judge works by
a general ideal, but is to search out the *individual* ideal of
every work" (*Literary Notebooks*, 1733)--owes debts
both to Herder's notions of the historical and cultural uniqueness of
individuals (Eichner, 1970, 42) and to Kant's stress in the
*Critique of Judgment* on the impossibility of judging beauty
according to some external *rule* (see Eichner, 1970,
35-36, for an account of Schlegel's successive readings of the
third *Critique*). Schlegel worked out his new criterion of the
"individual ideal of every work" in three important early
(1796) critical essays reviewing the work of Jacobi, Georg Forster and
Lessing that give a reader a sense of his distinctive approach as
stylist and literary theorist (Wilhelm von Humboldt called Schlegel's
method in the Jacobi essay one of "reviewing the whole
man"--i.e., the man visible precisely in his work).
Likewise, Schlegel applies his approach to critical judgment in a
famous review of Goethe's *Wilhelm Meister*, where he insists
that the novel "not only judges itself but describes
itself."



Given the importance Schlegel attaches within his romantic poetics to
the novel and to the novel which gives itself its own criterion,
critics have often examined Schlegel's own novelistic efforts in light
of his theoretical stance. The scandalous and unfinished
*Lucinde*, subtitled "Confessions of a Blunderer,"
was, according to Schlegel, an attempt at "shaped, artistic
chaos," a work that was meant to be "chaotic and yet
systematic." Part of the achievement of its "shaped
chaos" is that *Lucinde* presents, within the form of a
novelistic work itself , a romantic 'contest' of competing
novelistic possibilities (see, for example, the interpretation of the
famous chapter on the "Allegory of Impudence" in Behler
1993).



The notion of the individual work as giving itself its own
criterion--a notion that appears later in the hermeneutic
tradition and in Benjamin's famous essay on the concept of
criticism--is one of a number of distinctive new facets of
romantic poetics and aesthetics. Stylistically, Schlegel and the
Romantics also made much of the notions of the literary fragment, the
concept of irony, and of wit and allegory, as well as a revised notion
of the literary genres.



The fragment is among the most characteristic figures of the Romantic
movement. Although it has predecessors in writers like Chamfort (and
earlier in the aphoristic styles of moralists like Pascal and La
Rochefoucauld), the fragment as employed by Schlegel and the Romantics
is distinctive in both its form (as a collection of pieces by several
different authors) and its purpose. For Schlegel, a fragment as a
particular has a certain unity ("[a] fragment, like a small work
of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be
complete in itself like a hedgehog," *Athenaeumsfragment*
206), but remains nonetheless fragmentary in the perspective it opens
up and in its opposition to other fragments. Its "unity"
thus reflects Schlegel's view of the whole of things not as a totality
but rather as a "chaotic universality" of infinite
opposing stances.



If a literary form like the fragment opens up the question of the
relation between finite and infinite, so do the literary modes of
allegory, wit and irony--allegory as a finite opening toward the
infinite ("every allegory means God"), wit as the
"fragmentary geniality" or "selective
flashing" in which a unity can momentarily be seen, and irony as
their synthesis (see Frank 2004, 216). Although impressed with the
Socratic notion of irony (playful and serious, frank and deeply
hidden, it is the freest of all licenses, since through it one rises
above one's own self, Schlegel says in *Lyceumfragment* 108),
Schlegel nonetheless employs it in a way perhaps more reminiscent of
the oscillations of Fichtean selfhood. Irony is at once, as he says in
*Lyceumfragment* 37, self-creation, self-limitation, and
self-destruction.



"Philosophy is the true home of irony, which might be defined as
logical beauty," Schlegel writes in *Lyceumfragment* 42:
"for wherever men are philosophizing in spoken or written
dialogues, and provided they are not entirely systematic, irony ought
to be produced and postulated." The task of a literary work with
respect to irony is, while presenting an inherently limited
perspective, nonetheless to open up the possibility of the infinity of
other perspectives: "Irony is, as it were, the demonstration
[*epideixis*] of infinity, of universality, of the feeling for
the universe" (KA 18.128); irony is the "clear
consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming
chaos" (*Ideas* 69). A literary work can do this, much as
Schlegel's *Lucinde* had, by presenting within its scope a
range of possible alternate plots or by mimicking the
*parabasis* in which the comic playwright interposed himself
within the drama itself or the role of the Italian *buffo* or
clown (*Lyceumfragment* 42) who disrupts the spectator's
narrative illusion. (Some of the more striking examples of such
moments of ironic interposition in the works of Schlegel's literary
contemporaries can be found in the comedies of Tieck--where, as
Szondi (1986) argues, it is not merely the actor or playwright who
"steps out" of his usual role, but in some sense the very
role itself.)



Along with his somewhat idiosyncratic appropriation of literary modes,
Schlegel offers a theory of the literary genres which undergoes
considerable revision as he attempts to take account both of the
historical development of forms and particularly of the rise of the
modern novel. Moving from the pragmatic classifications of the
Enlightenment to a philosophically oriented theory of the genres,
Schlegel shifts from a view on which the drama (as
"objective-subjective") develops out of
("objective") epic and ("subjective") lyric to
one on which the epic in fact unites the other two classical modes
(Szondi 1986, 85-86). The new stress on the epic genre
corresponds with his sense of the *Roman* or novel as the
"modern epic" which transcends the traditional genres and
with a fluid sense of genre classification itself: "One can just
as well say that there exist *infinitely many* [genres] as that
there exists only *one* progressive *poetical
genre*."



In all of Schlegel's writing about literary and artistic modes
and genres, there is also a powerful return to formative questions
about the relations art bears to its sometimes rivals in philosophy
and religion. Schlegel of course revived questions about the
philosophical shape of literature and the literary shape of philosophy
that ultimately run back to Plato's "ancient
quarrel" (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1978). And, like his fellow
Romantics Novalis and Schleiermacher, he also closely linked art and
religion in ways that picked up fundamental issues in the religious
discourse of his time (see Ziolkowski 1990, Smith 2019 and Hampton
2019): the relation of the infinite and finite ('only he can be
an artist who has his own religion, an original perspective on the
infinite' [KFSA 2.257]) and the notions of symbol and myth and
their connection to an increasingly pluralistic religious world
(Dieckmann 1959, Speight 2019). 


## 4. Philosophical Apprenticeship: Schlegel on Idealism and Transcendental Philosophy



Like many other members of the generation which came intellectually of
age in the 1790s--a group which includes not only the idealist
philosophers Schelling and Hegel but also the poets Novalis and
Holderlin--Schlegel's philosophical interests were framed
around a concern for somehow uniting Fichtean freedom of the subject
with Spinozistic holism. It is likely that Schlegel attended Fichte's
*Wissenschaftslehre* (*Theory of Scientific Knowledge*)
"nova methodo" lectures in Jena starting in October 1796,
and he was guided at least in part in his study of the new idealistic
philosophy by Novalis, whose own *Fichte Studies* represent a
fascinating window onto the effect that Fichte had on this generation.
Novalis and Schlegel had a famous conversation about idealism in the
summer of 1796, and both attempted to articulate an opposition to the
reliance on a single first principle which they thought characterized
the philosophical efforts of Reinhold and Fichte to set Kantian
philosophy on a systematic basis. (This Romantic contribution to the
anti-foundationalist *Grundsatzkritik* of the 1790's has long
been a neglected aspect of research on the development of German
Idealism, as has the work of those philosophers--such as Immanuel
Niethammer, Carl Immanuel Diez, Johann Benjamin Erhard and Friedrich
Karl Forberg--who pursued a similar line of thought against
Reinhold and Fichte.)



Philosophers interested in Schlegel's early engagement with the
problems of German Idealism have, in addition to his published works,
two rich but tantalizingly incomplete textual resources to draw upon:
a set of fragments, the so-called "Philosophical
Apprenticeship" (*Philosophische Lehrjahre*), which date
from 1796 and reveal Schlegel's study not only of Fichte and Spinoza
but also of Winckelmann, Herder and Kant (this collection remained
unpublished until the critical Schlegel edition of 1963), and notes
from Schlegel's *Lectures on Transcendental Philosophy* at Jena
in 1800-01.



Schlegel's critique of first-principle philosophy is rooted (like
Novalis') in a sense of the ungraspability of the absolute or
unconditioned. (As Novalis puts it in the first of his
"Pollen" fragments: "Everywhere we seek the
unconditioned [*das Unbedingte*], but find only things
[*Dinge*].") More specifically, Schlegel holds, against
Reinhold and Fichte, that "there are no first principles that
are universally suitable [*zweckmassig*] companions and
guides to truth" (*KA* XVIII.518, #13): even
"self-evident" propositions can be doubted and so require
demonstration (thus opening up an infinite regress), and any
proposition can be proved in an "infinite" number of ways.
For Schlegel "every proof is infinitely perfectible"
(*KA* XVIII, 518, #9), and the task of philosophy is not one of
searching to find an unconditioned first principle but rather one of
engaging in an (essentially coherentist) process of infinite
progression and approximation.



Philosophy on Schlegel's view must thus begin with skepticism and tend
toward the absolute; the idealists have found no way to the latter
that avoids the difficulties of the former. Against Fichte's attempts
at system-building, Schlegel proposes a notion of what he calls an
alternating proof (*Wechselerweis*): "In my system the
ultimate principle [*der letzte Grund*] is actually a
reciprocal proof [*Wechselerweis*]. In Fichte's [it is] a
postulate and a conditional proposition" (*KA* XVIII,
521).



The Schlegelian philosophy that results from this engagement with
idealism is non-foundationalist, holistic and historical (see Beiser
2003, 123-26). Schlegel himself describes his philosophical
approach as resembling both a circle and epic poetry because it must
forever "begin in the middle": "Philosophy must have
at its basis not only an alternating proof [*Wechselbeweis*]
but also an alternating concept [*Wechselbegriff*]. In the case
of every concept, as in the case of every proof, one can in turn ask
for a concept and a proof of the same. For this reason, philosophy,
like an epic poem, must start in the middle, and it is impossible to
pursue philosophy piece by piece starting from a first piece which is
grounded and explained completely in and through itself. It is a
whole, and thus the path to recognizing it is no straight line but a
circle" (*KA* XVIII, 518).



Recent work has emphasized the Kantian inheritance that lies behind
Schlegel's notions of irony (Rush 2016, who sees Schlegel as
radicalizing Kantian regulativism in a way that makes it "more
contingent, historical and pragmatic") and of a
"progressive universal poetry" (Ameriks 2014). Others have
stressed the importance of Schlegel's philosophical work in ways
that open up his broader concerns with life and the world of organic
beings ( see the discussion of Schlegel's later work in Section
6 below, as well as Gorodeisky 2011 and Nassar 2014, 2015). As argued
below, these larger interests can be seen particularly in
Schlegel's contributions to ethical, social and political
philosophy.


## 5. Ethical, Social and Political Philosophy



Although Schlegel's importance for ethical, social and political
philosophy has often been ignored or unjustly criticized, recent
interpreters have shown how Schlegel took himself as offering a
response to a number of key challenges in the philosophical ethics of
his era, from Jacobian worries about nihilism (Gorodeisky 2011) to
Kantian rigorism and dualism (Crowe 2010). For the young Schlegel,
consideration of ethical and political matters was never far removed
from consideration of the aesthetic. Like Schleiermacher and the young
Hegel, Schlegel puts a strong emphasis in his early ethical writings
on the notion of love. In his essay "On the Limits of the
Beautiful" (*Uber die Grenzen des Schonen*,
1794), he argues that love is the highest form of aesthetic enjoyment
and can only be realized between free and equal beings (Beiser 1992,
248). Part of Schlegel's larger political animus lay always (in early
as well as late phases of his career) in a refashioning of the
relationship between the sexes. In his early phase, Schlegel shared
with other Romantics a sense of the political and social importance of
the revolutionary period. In his "Essay on the Concept of
Republicanism occasioned by the Kantian Tract *Perpetual
Peace*" (*Versuch uber den Begriff des
Republikanismus*, 1797), a commentary on sections of Kant's
*Perpetual Peace*, Schlegel moves to a far more democratic view
of politics than Kant defended: Schlegel advocates not only the
"necessarily democratic" nature of republicanism and the
"majesty" of the people as expressed in a majority, as
well as the "political imperative" of making all nations
republican, but--especially decisive against Kant's restrictions
on political activism--argued that insurrection was legitimate in
certain cases. Schlegel's political radicalism in this period comes
much closer to Fichte than Kant and, in fact, rivals the claims for
universal extension of suffrage advocated by Herder and Georg
Forster.



It is all the more striking, of course, that the politics of the later
Schlegel, as he takes up a position in the Austrian court, turn
decisively more conservative. His late essay "Signature of the
Age" (*Signatur des Zeitalters*, 1820) attacks the twin
evils of idealism and British-American parliamentary government. As
opposed to the machine-like state, Schlegel advocates as his ideal an
"organic" Christian state consisting of
"corporations" that form a living whole around the monarch
(church, school, family, guild--a series of social institutions
similar to that visible in the corporatist philosophy espoused in
Hegel's philosophy of right during the same time period).


## 6. Later Philosophy of Life, History and Religion



In the final twenty years of his life in Vienna, Schlegel followed on
the success of his brother's famous *Lectures on Dramatic Art and
Literature*, given in that city in 1808,with several lecture
series of his own. He lectured on modern European history (1810),
ancient and modern literature (1811), the philosophy of life (1827),
the philosophy of history (1828) and the philosophy of language
(1828-1829, a lecture series that was never completed because of
Schlegel's death).



Given Schlegel's conversion and the more conservative tendency of his
later political thought, commentators have often raised questions
about the continuity between the earlier romantic phase and Schlegel's
later work. Blanchot puts this line of questioning most sharply:



> 
> [A]s a young man he is an atheist, a radical, and an
> individualist... Some years pass: the same Schlegel, converted to
> Catholicism, a diplomat and journalist in the service of Metternich,
> surrounded by monks and pious men of society, is no longer anything
> but a fat philistine of unctuous speech, lazy, empty, his mind on
> food, and incapable of remembering the young man who had written:
> 'A single absolute law: the free spirit always triumphs over
> nature.' Which is the real one? Is the later Schlegel the truth
> of the first? Does the struggle against a bourgeois who is banal
> engender no more than a bourgeois who is exalted, then weary, and
> finally only contribute to an exaltation of the bourgeoisie? Where is
> romanticism? In Jena or Vienna? [Blanchot 1993, 352]
> 



There is, to be sure, a rather different style and tone evident in
many of Schlegel's later writings and lectures. In some of the lecture
series, there is a good deal of repetition and argumentative
flaccidity of a sort the young Schlegel would no doubt have sharply
criticized. But it is far from clear that Vienna represented simply a
phase of ossification in Schlegel's intellectual life or even a turn
away from the most important philosophical and literary concerns of
the young romantic. The literary lectures reveal interesting shifts in
his treatment of the literary genres (Eichner 1970, 117-23), the
philosophy of life pleads not unconvincingly for a
"modest" conception of philosophizing that avoids the
excesses of merely abstract or empirical points of departure (Schlegel
1847), and the philosophy of language insists upon the essentially
dialogical character of human thought and expression (Schlegel
1847).