ABSTRACT
Karl Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829) is remembered as a central member of the Frühromantiker (“early romantics”), a group of avant-garde poets, literary theorists, and scholars who gathered in Berlin and Jena in the second half of the 1790s. Those at Jena included the poets Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) and Friedrich Hölderlin; and at Berlin, the theologian and linguistic theorist Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher and the poet Ludwig Tieck. While nineteenth-century romanticism was to become a conservative and backward-looking movement-a “counter-Enlightenment”, privileging tradition and religion over modernity and a sense of “progress”—it was, in its early phases, marked generally by a politically and culturally progressivist outlook and an experimentalist literary and aesthetic practice. Nor was romanticism in its early phases marked by the type of excessive emotionalism and rejection of rationalism with which it is commonly associated. The Frühromantiker had in fact been deeply engaged with the idealist philosophies of Kant, Reinhold and Fichte and developed distinctive points of view, especially aesthetic ones, within the emerging idealist form of philosophy. Together with his brother, the philologist and literary theorist August
Wilhelm, Friedrich Schlegel had edited and contributed to between 1798 and 1800 the main organ of early romantic aesthetics, the Athenaeum. Here and elsewhere, often in fragmentary aphorisms, he developed his distinctive philosophical theory of nature of modern “romantic” literature (as he christened it) and valorised the role of “irony” in modern thought. Socially, Friedrich and August Wilhelm and their remarkable partners, Dorothea Veit Mendelssohn, and Caroline Böhmer Schlegel, also formed the hub of a network of interlinking intellectual and personal relationships that bridged Jena and Berlin. Friedrich spent time in Berlin, where he had frequented the famous salon of Henrietta Herz, wife of Kant’s former student Marcus Herz. The relationship that he formed there with the then married Caroline was to become the topic of his philosophical novel, Lucinda (1799). From 1790 to 1795, FriedrichW. J. von Schelling (1775-1854) was a student
at the seminary at Tübingen, where he had developed close friendships with
Friedrich Hölderlin and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hölderlin was the first of the three to have made the pilgrimage to Jena, the centre of transcendental philosophy, and in 1797, after a period in Leipzig, Schelling too went to Jena, where (unlike Hölderlin) he came into close contact with the circle around the Schlegels. By the time of Schelling’s arrival Hölderlin had left to rejoin Hegel in Frankfurt, but later Hegel himself was to join Schelling in Jena. By then Schelling had been appointed to a chair of philosophy. At first Schelling had seen himself as simply developing the views of
Fichte’s idealism by augmenting Fichte’s more subjectivistic version of transcendental idealism with a philosophy of nature inspired by Plato and Spinoza. After Hegel joined him at Jena in 1801, however, and, possibly at Hegel’s prompting, Schelling became more critical of Fichte. For a few years, Hegel and Schelling worked closely together, during which time Schelling developed his “identity philosophy”, an attempt to combine transcendental idealism and philosophy of nature. The intellectual relations between Schelling, Hegel and the various Früh-
romantiker are complex and controversial. Schelling was more closely associated than Hegel with the Schlegel circle, and Schelling is most commonly thought of as the most philosophical representative of romanticism. Hegel was to become very critical of romanticism, which he particularly identified with the writings of Friedrich Schlegel, but had, nevertheless, been clearly influenced by both Hölderlin and Schelling and even, perhaps, Schlegel himself. Schelling’s personal relations with the Schlegels were complex, to say the least. Supposedly engaged to Caroline’s daughter from an earlier marriage, Auguste, Schelling was in fact having an affair with Caroline, the wife of August Wilhelm Schlegel. Things became murkier when, following Auguste’s death from an acute illness, Caroline divorced August Wilhelm and married Schelling. Local gossips were accusing Caroline of having murdered her daughter, and the ensuing scandal drove Schelling and his new wife from Jena in 1803. Around this time Hegel’s relationship with Schelling was starting to sour, and soon Hegel was clearly demarcating his philosophy from that of Schelling. In turn, Schelling later became critical of both Hegel and Schelling’s own earlier philosophy. By the first years of the new century, the Frühromantiker circle at Jena
started to break up. Fichte had been driven out of Jena in 1799; Novalis had died in 1801; and Hölderlin had succumbed to the psychosis that was to end his intellectual and creative life. Friedrich Schlegel gradually became more socially and politically conservative, in 1808 converting to Catholicism together with Dorothea. Hegel was later to take this as a symptom of the unsustainability of his initial “ironism”. Having relocated to Würzburg, Schelling published, in 1809, a proto-
existentialist work, “On Human Freedom”, that was to be his last work published before his death in 1854. He continued to write extensively; however, in these writings he became critical of idealism and philosophy
more generally and realigned his views more with traditional Christianity. During the years in which Hegel came to be celebrated, after his appointment to Fichte’s chair at the University of Berlin in 1820, Schelling remained largely invisible; however, he was appointed to that same chair of philosophy at Berlin after Hegel’s death in 1831, specifically to counter what was seen as Hegel’s dangerous influence. Here we will be concerned only with the idealism of his early period.
