ABSTRACT
‘Die Französische Revolution, Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre und Goethes Wilhelm Meister sind die größten Tendenzen des Zeitalters.’ Thus Friedrich Schlegel in the Athenaeum of 1798 (Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, II, 198), seeking the quintessential political, philosophical and literary moments of the new Europe that was emerging in the last decades of the century. Philosophically these decades in Germany lie in the wake of Kant, aside from whose presence no philosopher in the current of metaphysical idealism can preserve his meaning, and from the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (first edition 1781; second edition 1787) and, even more, the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1786), stem the lines of thought that dominate German philosophical life in the nineteenth century.
