The (Re-)Turn to Friedrich Schlegel

To my way of thinking, one of the most interesting developments in recent American intellectual life has been the rediscovery of, and a renewed appreciation for, the neglected figure of Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829). I suspect--but question whether it is worth taking the time to prove--that the Schlegel revival is in some way connected with Richard Rorty's late attempt to give academic philosophy a decent burial.

I have noticed that recent treatments of Schlegel's legacy (beginning at least as far back as Adam Carter's article in parallax, vol. 4, no. 4 (1998) "'Self-Creation and Self-Destruction': Irony, Ideology, and Politics in Richard Rorty and Friedrich Schlegel") have attempted to offer Schlegel as something of a palliative for those who recognize the significance of Rorty's call for a Pragmatic and Romantic and ultimately post-philosophical approach to life but who--for a variety of reasons--cannot bring themselves to let go of philosophy's lure.

Carter has genuine disagreements with Rorty's politics (which he finds insufficiently left-leaning-radical) and questions the consistency with which the late philosopher presented his views; others, like DePaul University's Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert, author of Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy (SUNY 2007), argue that Romantic philosophy in the wake of Schlegel is an attempt to reform the philosophical inheritance bequeathed by Kant and Fichte rather than an attempt to abandon it.

In any case, F. Schlegel emerges from these studies as a formidable intellect whose interests and literary output enrich and deepen our understanding of what Romanticism has to offer us after what Walter Pater termed the "long ennui" induced by the Kantian and post-Kantian attempts to marry philosophy to the model of the natural sciences.

I shall be returning to Pater and Schlegel (among many others) again and again as I attempt to chart New Romantic approaches to life, religion, and literature in subsequent posts.