Idealism without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture

Beyond Beginnings: Schlegel and Romantic Historiography

93 Beyond Beginnings: Schlegel and Romantic Historiography
Gary Handwerk Zum Andenken an Ernst Behler It does not seem possible to ground any conviction about future facts upon the designs of providence, for even if the principle: “nature never acts without an aim” were set down a priori as a sure guiding thread for observation, still only an infinite understanding could determine a priori the aim and the means of nature for a particular case. “Vom Wert des Studiums der Griechen und Römer” Despite the publication of most of the thirty-five volumes of the Kritische Ausgabe of his works, Friedrich Schlegel remains known to critics almost exclusively for a small segment of his early writings. As in his own era, his fame as the theorist of romantic irony and as a guiding force in the Jena romantic circle has tended to eclipse a range of activity that extended far beyond these literary and critical projects.1 If the later Schlegel gets any attention at all, he is likely simply to be cited as a representative of late, reactionary romantic Catholicism, a case study of the more general romantic slide from progressive criticism into political and religious orthodoxy. To be sure, Schlegel’s publications after his 1808 conversion to Catholicism and relocation to Vienna were sporadic, and his general intellectual influence may well have been in decline. Yet he remained quite active as an 94 Gary Handwerk independent scholar, and enough material exists in the form of lectures, journals , and notebooks that we can seriously address the question of what we should make of Schlegel’s middle and late career. This was the era when G. W. F. Hegel was emerging as the preeminent German philosopher, and when Schleiermacher was achieving renown in Berlin as a preacher and as the architect of modern hermeneutical theory. Within that postromantic intellectual context, where might we best locate Schlegel? Do the writings of his later periods, that is, constitute an extension, a deflection, or even a betrayal of the early romantic impulses of his work? Pursuing this question is in one sense a biographical project, an attempt to measure the coherence of Schlegel’s personal intellectual trajectory. Yet it has considerably broader resonance as well, for Schlegel’s self-styled philosophische Lehrjahre or philosophical apprenticeship allow us to assess the logic and limits of romantic aesthetic and philosophical theories, and thus to examine the developmental tendencies within romantic thought. Schlegel’s intellectual interests had always been multiple and convergent , broadly cultural in orientation and insistent upon the intersection of theory and history. As Ernst Behler has noted, the idea that “The theory of art is its own history,” was a leitmotiv throughout his work.2 History was for Schlegel an amalgam of social forces, where politics, art, religion, and literature formed constituent parts of a given cultural landscape, no one of them comprehensible without the others. The famous Athenäum fragment 216 is notable, for instance, not just for raising Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre to equivalent status with the French Revolution as the three dominant tendencies of the age, but just as much for insisting upon the intrinsic relevance of that cataclysmical political event to the cultural productions of the era. Even more so than that early work, Schlegel’s post-Jena writings were ambitiously synthetic in aim and deeply historical in character. The recurrent topics of his concern—philosophy, literature, and language—were all seen by him as comprehensible only within their historical frameworks, and the remarkable scope of his interests gave him an unusually deep appreciation for their historical embeddedness. Yet it would be an exaggeration to contend that Schlegel developed a fully fledged alternative to Hegel’s philosophy of history or a clear methodological alternative to the positivist impulse of traditional political and diplomatic historiography.3 The partialness of Schlegel’s projects was at least in part intentional; he remained throughout his life impatient both with theoretical systems and with the detail required for empirical accounts of history. Behler quite rightly described the idea of an historical system as an “ironic metaphor” for Schlegel (KA 20:xxvii), useful for describing an imaginable goal, but intrusive and deceptive if too seriously embraced. Schlegel’s position across his career thus remained close to what 95 Beyond Beginnings it had been at the start. As a critic and an intellectual outsider, he was most...