Friedrich Schlegel

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel (Hanover, 1772 – Dresden, 1829) was a German philosopher, literary critic and philologist, and one of the leading theorists of early Romanticism. Together with his brother August Wilhelm, he belonged to the Jena Circle, the intellectual group that shaped Romantic aesthetics in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century. His significance lies in turning literature into an object of philosophical reflection and in giving the movement its name.

Born into a large Protestant family, he was meant for a career in banking, but preferred to study law at Göttingen and Leipzig, soon turning to Greek and Latin culture instead. In Dresden he wrote an essay on the study of Greek poetry, published in 1797, which contrasted ancient poetry, seen as an organic whole, with modern poetry, shaped by the expressive needs of the author. In Jena, alongside his brother, he founded the journal Athenaeum (1798–1800), the main organ of the group, where he argued that art should be self-aware, fragmentary and constantly changing.

His best-known idea is that of "progressive universal poetry", a literary form able to mix genres, prose and verse, philosophy and criticism. For him, Romantic irony expressed the unbridgeable gap between an imperfect work and the idea that animates it. He also developed the notion of Witz, a kind of wit that, at its highest level, joined the finite with the infinite and carried an almost religious sense. His novel Lucinde (1799), which loosely recounted his relationship with Dorothea Veit, caused a scandal in German literary circles and damaged his academic career in Jena.

In 1808 he and his wife converted to Catholicism, a step that distanced him from many former friends. From then on he moved toward conservative positions and worked in the service of Austrian diplomacy, first in Vienna and later at the German Confederation in Frankfurt. His work On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians (1808) places him among the pioneers of comparative philology: he compared Sanskrit with Latin, Greek and Persian, and argued that peoples of Indian origin had founded the first European civilizations, a thesis now heavily qualified. His influence reached Coleridge and Mickiewicz, and later literary theory still debates his ideas on irony and the fragment.