Friedrich Schlegel

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Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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Friedrich Schlegel
Friedrich Schlegel in 1801
Born(1772-03-10)10 March 1772
Died12 January 1829(1829-01-12) (aged 56)
Alma mater
Era19th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
School
Main interests
Epistemology, philology, philosophy of history
Notable ideas
  • Grounding epistemology on reciprocal proof (Wechselerweis), not original principle (Grundsatz)[6][2]
  • Coining the term "historicism", (Historismus)[4]
  • Out of India theory

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich (after 1814: von) Schlegel (

Indologist. With his older brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, he was one of the main figures of Jena Romanticism
.

Born into a fervently

classical literature. He began a career as a writer and lecturer, and founded journals such as Athenaeum. In 1808, Schlegel returned to Christianity as a married man with both him and his wife being baptized into the Catholic Church. This conversion ultimately led to his estrangement from family and old friends. He moved to Austria in 1809, where he became a diplomat and journalist in service of Klemens von Metternich, the Foreign Minister of the Austrian Empire. Schlegel died in 1829, at the age of 56.[10]

Schlegel was a promoter of the

Schumann
.

Life and work

Hanover's Market Church
Oil painting after Domenico Quaglio (1832)

Karl Friedrich von Schlegel was born on 10 March 1772 at

Fichte, and Caroline Schelling, who married August Wilhelm. In 1797 he quarreled with Schiller, who did not like his polemic work.[13]

Dorothea von Schlegel (1790) by Anton Graff

Schlegel published Die Griechen und Römer (The Greeks and Romans), which was followed by Geschichte der Poesie der Griechen und Römer (History of the Poesy of the Greeks and Romans) (1798). Then he turned to

essays in which the principles of the Romantic school are most definitely stated. They are now generally recognized as the deepest and most significant expressions of the subjective idealism of the early Romanticists.[14]

After a controversy, Friedrich decided to move to Berlin. There he lived with

transcendental philosophy
. In September 1800, he met four times with Goethe, who would later stage his tragedy Alarcos (1802) in Weimar, albeit with a notable lack of success.

In June 1802 he arrived in

Madame de Staël
.

In 1808, he published Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of India). Here he advanced his ideas about religion and argued that

. The assertion of the common features of these languages is now generally accepted, albeit with significant revisions. There is less agreement about the geographic region where these precursors settled, although the Out-of-India model has generally become discredited.

Old photo of the cathedral before completion shows the east end finished and roofed, while other parts of the building are in various stages of construction.
The unfinished Cologne cathedral (1856) with medieval crane on the south tower

In 1808, he and his wife joined the Catholic Church in the Cologne Cathedral. From this time on, he became more and more opposed to the principles of political and religious liberalism. He went to Vienna and in 1809 was appointed imperial court secretary at the military headquarters, editing the army newspaper and issuing fiery proclamations against Napoleon. He accompanied archduke Charles, Duke of Teschen to war and was stationed in Pest during the War of the Fifth Coalition. Here he studied the Hungarian language. Meanwhile, he had published his collected Geschichte (Histories) (1809) and two series of lectures, Über die neuere Geschichte (On Recent History) (1811) and Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur (On Old and New Literature) (1815). In 1814 he was knighted in the Supreme Order of Christ.

Schlegel's grave at the Old Catholic Cemetery, Dresden

In collaboration with Josef von Pilat, editor of the Österreichischer Beobachter, and with the help of Adam Müller and Friedrich Schlegel, Metternich and Gentz projected a vision of Austria as the spiritual leader of a new Germany, drawing her strength and inspiration from a romanticised view of a medieval Catholic past.[16]

Following the Congress of Vienna (1815), he was councilor of legation in the Austrian embassy at the Frankfurt Diet, but in 1818 he returned to Vienna. In 1819 he and Clemens Brentano made a trip to Rome, in the company of Metternich and Gentz. There he met with his wife and her sons. In 1820 he started a conservative Catholic magazine, Concordia (1820–1823), but was criticized by Metternich and by his brother August Wilhelm, then professor of Indology in Bonn and busy publishing the Bhagavad Gita. Schlegel began the issue of his Sämtliche Werke (Collected Works). He also delivered lectures, which were republished in his Philosophie des Lebens (Philosophy of Life) (1828) and in his Philosophie der Geschichte (Philosophy of History) (1829). He died on 12 January 1829 at Dresden, while preparing a series of lectures.

Dorothea Schlegel

Friedrich Schlegel's wife, Dorothea von Schlegel, authored an unfinished romance, Florentin (1802), a Sammlung romantischer Dichtungen des Mittelalters (Collection of Romantic Poems of the Middle Ages) (2 vols., 1804), a version of Lother und Maller (1805), and a translation of Madame de Staël's Corinne (1807–1808) — all of which were issued under her husband's name. By her first marriage she had two sons, Johannes and Philipp Veit, who became eminent Catholic painters. She was the eldest daughter of Moses Mendelssohn which made the prodigious composers Felix and Fanny her niece and nephew.

Selected works

  • Vom ästhetischen Werte der griechischen Komödie (1794)
  • Über die Diotima (1795)
  • Versuch über den Begriff des Republikanismus (1796)
  • Georg Forster (1797)
  • Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie (1797)
  • Über Lessing (1797)
  • Kritische Fragmente („Lyceums“-Fragmente) (1797)
  • Fragmente („Athenaeums“-Fragmente) (1797–1798)
  • Lucinde (1799)
  • Über die Philosophie. An Dorothea (1799)
  • Gespräch über die Poesie (1800)
  • Über die Unverständlichkeit (1800)
  • Ideen (1800)
  • Charakteristiken und Kritiken (1801)
  • Transcendentalphilosophie (1801)
  • Alarkos (1802)
  • Reise nach Frankreich (1803)
  • Geschichte der europäischen Literatur (1803/1804)
  • Grundzüge der gotischen Baukunst (1804/1805)
  • Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808)
  • Deutsches Museum (as ed.), 4 Vols. Vienna (1812–1813)
  • Geschichte der alten und neueren Literatur (lectures) (1815)

Letters

  • Ludwig Tieck und die Brüder Schlegel. Briefe ed. by Edgar Lohner (München 1972)

Friedrich Schlegel's Sämtliche Werke appeared in 10 vols. (1822–1825); a second edition (1846) in 55 vols. His Prosaische Jugendschriften (1794–1802) have been edited by J. Minor (1882, 2nd ed. 1906); there are also reprints of Lucinde, and F. Schleiermacher's Vertraute Briefe über Lucinde, 1800 (1907). See R. Haym, Die romantische Schule (1870); I. Rouge, F. Schlegel et la genie du romantisme allemand (1904); by the same, Erläuterungen zu F. Schlegels „Lucinde“ (1905); M. Joachimi, Die

Weltanschauung der Romantik (1905); W. Glawe, Die Religion F. Schlegels (1906); E. Kircher, Philosophie der Romantik (1906); M. Frank "Unendliche Annäherung". Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (1997); Andrew Bowie
, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (1997).

Notes

  1. ^ Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 349.
  2. ^ a b Asko Nivala, The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophy of History, Routledge, 2017, p. 23.
  3. ^ Elizabeth Millan, Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy, SUNY Press, 2012, p. 49.
  4. ^ a b Brian Leiter, Michael Rosen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 175: "[The word 'historicism'] appears as early as the late eighteenth century in the writings of the German romantics, who used it in a neutral sense. In 1797 Friedrich Schlegel used 'historicism' to refer to a philosophy that stresses the importance of history ..."; Katherine Harloe, Neville Morley (eds.), Thucydides and the Modern World: Reception, Reinterpretation and Influence from the Renaissance to the Present, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 81: "Already in Friedrich Schlegel's Fragments about Poetry and Literature (a collection of notes attributed to 1797), the word Historismus occurs five times."
  5. ^ Angela Esterhammer (ed.), Romantic Poetry, Volume 7, John Benjamins Publishing, 2002, p. 491.
  6. ^ Michael N. Forster, Kristin Gjesdal (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 81.
  7. ^
  8. ^ "Friedrich – Französisch-Übersetzung – Langenscheidt Deutsch-Französisch Wörterbuch" (in German and French). Langenscheidt. Retrieved 20 October 2018.
  9. ^ "Duden | Schlegel | Rechtschreibung, Bedeutung, Definition". Duden (in German). Retrieved 20 October 2018.
  10. ^ a b Speight (, Allen 2007). "Friedrich Schlegel". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link).
  11. ISBN 0-395-82517-2, ...when Friedrich Schlegel, a German scholar who was an important early Indo-Europeanist, came up with a theory that linked the Indo-Iranian words with the German word Ehre, 'honor', and older Germanic names containing the element ario-, such as the Swiss [sic] warrior Ariovistus who was written about by Julius Caesar
    . Schlegel theorized that far from being just a designation of the Indo-Iranians, the word *arya- had in fact been what the Indo-Europeans called themselves, meaning [according to Schlegel] something like 'the honorable people.' (This theory has since been called into question.)
  12. ^ Schlegel, Friedrich. 1819. Review of J. G. Rhode, Über den Anfang unserer Geschichte und die letzte Revolution der Erde, Breslau, 1819. Jahrbücher der Literatur VIII: 413ff
  13. ^ Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory, 1993, p. 36.
  14. ^ a b This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domainBöhme, Traugott (1920). "Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von" . In Rines, George Edwin (ed.). Encyclopedia Americana.
  15. ^  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domainChisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
  16. ^ Adam Zamoyski (2007), Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, pp. 242–243.

Further reading

  • Crowe, Benjamin D. "Friedrich Schlegel and the character of romantic ethics." Journal of ethics 14.1 (2010): 53-79. Archived 2021-05-11 at the Wayback Machine
  • Forster, Michael N. and Kristin Gjesdal (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford UP, 2015)
  • Forster, Michael N. After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition(Oxford UP, 2010).
  • Germana, Nicholas A. "Self-othering in German orientalism: The case of Friedrich Schlegel." Comparatist 34 (2010): 80-94. online
  • Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, Albany: State University Press of New York, 1988. [A philosophical exegesis of early romantic theory focused on F. Schlegel, Novalis, and the Athenaeum.]
  • Lejeune, Guillaume. "Towards a pragmatic semantics: Dialogue and representation in Friedrich Schlegel and Schleiermacher." Language and dialogue 2.1 (2012): 156-173. online
  • Millán, Elizabeth. Friedrich Schlegel and the emergence of romantic philosophy (SUNY Press, 2012).
  • Newmark, Kevin. Irony on Occasion: From Schlegel and Kierkegaard to Derrida and de Man (Fordham UP, 2012).
  • Paulin, Roger. The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel, Cosmopolitan of Art and Poetry (Open Book Publishers, 2016). online

External links