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On selected fragments from 1797-1801, "Dialogue on Poesy" (1799), and "Concerning the Essence of Critique" (1804).
What makes art "Romantic"? Friedrich Schlegel (and his older brother August Schlegel, whom we'll read for ep. 321) were both art critics based in Jena, Germany, which was also where Fichte, Schelling, Schiller, and even Goethe were based at the time. The Schlegels and their poet-pal Novalis ran a couple of magazines where they published their fragments (aphorisms).
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The famous Athenaum fragment 116 lays out what "romantic poesy" is (poesy meaning artistic creation in general, not just poetry, though that's certainly the chief case he has in mind): Poesy must be universal and progressive. The underlying metaphysics here is roughly Spinozan or transcendentalist: Underneath our individuality we are in some sense literally all one being, and art is about channeling that underlying unity, but (paradoxically) doing it in a very individual way.
In his Dialogue on Poesy (which is structured much like Plato's Symposium, with many speakers giving different views surrounding art and beauty), Schlegel posits that we (meaning his fellow German artists) need a modern analogue of what mythology was to the ancient Greeks. Mythology was something that all the classical playwrights and storytellers and sculptors could reference freely as the symbol of something transcendent. Much like Nietzsche did later in his Birth of Tragedy and other works, Schlegel had high regard for these ancients, but thought we could do better, because their virtue was based on instinct, whereas the modern spirit is reflective. Like Schiller, Schlegel mourned that with Enlightenment science, the intellectual climate had become too mechanized, too much based on rules and reason as against instinct, and so we need to rediscover what made the instinct of the Greeks result in so much great art and progressively forge a new version of that, but based on freedom instead of the blind determinism of instinct.
Schlegel doesn't really tell us what this "new mythology" would look like or how we can build it, but the goal is definitely a "bildung" (some cultural edifice he wants the Romantics as a group to build), and it's necessary that this be a group effort, not the task of one philosophy sitting down and giving us a grand, complete system a la Kant, Fichte, or Schelling. Instead, Schlegel takes himself to be building off of Fichte's idealist insight that each of our minds builds its own world, combined with this ancient idea most prominently (for these philosophers) popularized by Spinoza that all of reality is really just one giant mind (which one could call God, though it's not necessarily a Christian personal God). So each of us as an artist, if we're not just emptily obeying some formal rules about what we think art is supposed to be or just producing random garbage (Schlegel considered most art to fall into one of these categories), is imaginatively creating a world, but in doing so is channeling and aiming at something universal. Romantic art recognizes this very peculiar situation and so may make heavy use of irony, genre conventions, and other tools that make art not merely an expression of a private emotion (which might be what you'd think Romanticism amounts to), but an artful reflection on the human condition.
Creating art thus ends up being the same as doing philosophy, or rather the two are aiming at the same goal, which is realizing the true nature of the self as God (or as Spinoza puts it, individuals are "modes" of God). In effect, Romanticism is a type of mysticism, but it's not mystical in the sense of trying to blur together all distinctions, because as a critic, Schlegel was very demanding: All creative acts may stem from the same divine source, but they're not all equally successful, in that that some of them capture the profound truths about this source, and most don't.
However, Schlegel was also careful not to impose predetermined rules or limits on an artist's work. He was against "poetics," which would be using philosophy to come up with rules for what makes something beautiful or otherwise artistically effective and then using those rules to educate artists about the "right" ways to do art. If genius artists are in effect channeling God when they create, then sure, we want to study them to help point out what's so great about them to other people who might not be able to recognize this great art, but we don't want to take the internal laws of an artwork as prescriptions to judge other artworks that may have been constructed on a wholly different (though still divinely inspired) plan.
Browse Schlegel's fragments online (#116 is on p. 31, i.e. PDF p. 61). All of our readings for this and next episode can be found in Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings.
Image by Chris Warr (aka Solomon Grundy). Audio editing by Tyler Hislop.
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