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Fragments
Book by Gournay, Marie Le Jars de.
344 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1797
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About the author
Friedrich Schlegel
361 books59 followersAugust Wilhelm von Schlegel also edited a literary magazine with Friedrich Schlegel, his brother, a philosopher, poet, and critic, whose essays formed the intellectual basis of German romanticism.
This scholar critically led.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedri...
This scholar critically led.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedri...
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
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October 20, 2016I suppose Friedrich Schlegel considered this to be a truer philosophical form, these little fragments. Much like his stylistic and, to a certain degree, intellectual descendants, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Schlegel crafts these elegant aphorisms espousing an early Romantic philosophy deeply rooted in the thought of Spinoza. For students of German philosophy, a must-read. And for that vast rest-of-us, a remarkably witty, thought-provoking, clever bit of philosophizing.
April 23, 2011
Lovely -- if you're a romantic :P very poetic and intuitively true
July 30, 2025
How did a word once reserved for God, creative, become a descriptor of humans?
Three points:
(1) Intellectual shifts rarely happen overnight, but the way we talk about art is an exception. Before Immanuel Kant’s “Copernican Turn,” art was understood in Aristotelian terms, valued for its mimesis (imitation) and techne (craft). Shakespeare, for instance, saw himself primarily as a craftsman. He never would have considered himself an “artist.”
This framework collapses after Kant. The rupture is marked early by a figure like Wilhelm von Humboldt, who draws a sharp distinction between technical and aesthetic judgment. The former follows “external and mechanical rules,” while the latter rises to “inner life” and addresses “universal man.” This is the turning point: art is no longer measured by adherence to tradition, but by the finished work itself and its impact on the viewer. In this, we begin to glimpse an emerging understanding of what it means to create. There isn’t space here to treat figures like Fichte, Schiller, or Schelling, but the philosophy of art in post-Kantian Germany was so revolutionary that it has often been seen as the spiritual counterpart to the French Revolution.
(2) This shift, catalyzed by Kant’s critical philosophy, redefined art not as imitation or skill but as the site of self-formation. This means the subject’s unity is effected through its reflective acts. In this broken mirror, the artist emerges as the exemplary figure: not because he is uniquely gifted, but because he performs the logic of subjectivity itself. The artist is the one who produces both the work and himself in the act of creation. In doing so, he becomes a new kind of person: one who can generate himself.
What follows is a radical transformation in the experience and conceptualization of art, one that installs creativity at the very center of the human. But this is not “creativity” as mere novelty or originality. It is sheer self-production, the process by which the subject forms itself through its own self-constituting activity.
(3) Friedrich Schlegel writes, “Think of the finite formed into the infinite, and you have man” (Ideas, 98). The subject is no longer a recipient of form; he becomes its source. That is why Schlegel calls the artist a priest, not metaphorically but structurally: “the mediator is the one who perceives the divinity within himself,” and the artist “reveals,” “communicates,” and “represents this divine to all mankind” (Ideas, 44). Literature collapses into theology. “Poetry and philosophy are different forms of religion” (Ideas, 46). The Bible is not cast aside, it is reabsorbed: the “plural book,” the “infinite… eternally developing” book, not a "particular" or "isolated" one. It becomes the prototype for artistic revelation itself, the “new, eternal gospel” Lessing prophesied (Ideas, 95). In this new dispensation, the artist does not imitate the sacred, he incarnates it.
But even this is not enough. The artist must undergo death. “The hidden meaning of sacrifice,” Schlegel writes, “is the annihilation of the finite because it is finite” (Ideas, 131). Then, in a devastating sentence, Schlegel shows us what becoming an artist means: “All artists are Decians… In the enthusiasm of annihilation, the meaning of the divine creation is revealed for the first time.”
What Schlegel reveals, often despite himself, is that the self in modernity is no longer a gift. It must be produced, modeled, performed, exhibited, and ultimately sacrificed.
Three points:
(1) Intellectual shifts rarely happen overnight, but the way we talk about art is an exception. Before Immanuel Kant’s “Copernican Turn,” art was understood in Aristotelian terms, valued for its mimesis (imitation) and techne (craft). Shakespeare, for instance, saw himself primarily as a craftsman. He never would have considered himself an “artist.”
This framework collapses after Kant. The rupture is marked early by a figure like Wilhelm von Humboldt, who draws a sharp distinction between technical and aesthetic judgment. The former follows “external and mechanical rules,” while the latter rises to “inner life” and addresses “universal man.” This is the turning point: art is no longer measured by adherence to tradition, but by the finished work itself and its impact on the viewer. In this, we begin to glimpse an emerging understanding of what it means to create. There isn’t space here to treat figures like Fichte, Schiller, or Schelling, but the philosophy of art in post-Kantian Germany was so revolutionary that it has often been seen as the spiritual counterpart to the French Revolution.
(2) This shift, catalyzed by Kant’s critical philosophy, redefined art not as imitation or skill but as the site of self-formation. This means the subject’s unity is effected through its reflective acts. In this broken mirror, the artist emerges as the exemplary figure: not because he is uniquely gifted, but because he performs the logic of subjectivity itself. The artist is the one who produces both the work and himself in the act of creation. In doing so, he becomes a new kind of person: one who can generate himself.
What follows is a radical transformation in the experience and conceptualization of art, one that installs creativity at the very center of the human. But this is not “creativity” as mere novelty or originality. It is sheer self-production, the process by which the subject forms itself through its own self-constituting activity.
(3) Friedrich Schlegel writes, “Think of the finite formed into the infinite, and you have man” (Ideas, 98). The subject is no longer a recipient of form; he becomes its source. That is why Schlegel calls the artist a priest, not metaphorically but structurally: “the mediator is the one who perceives the divinity within himself,” and the artist “reveals,” “communicates,” and “represents this divine to all mankind” (Ideas, 44). Literature collapses into theology. “Poetry and philosophy are different forms of religion” (Ideas, 46). The Bible is not cast aside, it is reabsorbed: the “plural book,” the “infinite… eternally developing” book, not a "particular" or "isolated" one. It becomes the prototype for artistic revelation itself, the “new, eternal gospel” Lessing prophesied (Ideas, 95). In this new dispensation, the artist does not imitate the sacred, he incarnates it.
But even this is not enough. The artist must undergo death. “The hidden meaning of sacrifice,” Schlegel writes, “is the annihilation of the finite because it is finite” (Ideas, 131). Then, in a devastating sentence, Schlegel shows us what becoming an artist means: “All artists are Decians… In the enthusiasm of annihilation, the meaning of the divine creation is revealed for the first time.”
What Schlegel reveals, often despite himself, is that the self in modernity is no longer a gift. It must be produced, modeled, performed, exhibited, and ultimately sacrificed.
January 30, 2018
3.5 stars. The Athenaeum Fragments, written by the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, and Schleiermacher, are weighty philosophical morsels, despite their relatively brief length (ranging from one sentence to a little over one page each). Contained within these fragments, which were more wide-ranging in scope than the Critical Fragments, is the first attempt to define Romanticism -- the primary reason I wanted to read this volume.
Far more interesting to me were the maxims contained in the section titled Ideas, which seemed to be Schlegel’s attempt to apply Spinoza’s monism to poetry -- that is to say, arguing that philosophy and poetry strive toward a kind of synthesis, and that in this unity humanity might encounter morality in a way that religion can only strive to achieve through its most sacred ideals, although rarely successfully. Therefore, to seek religion is to miss the mark. Instead, one must seek the poetic in the philosophical (and the philosophical in poetry) to attain the transcendental experience traditionally reserved for the religious. The two high marks for Schlegel running throughout these fragments are Spinoza and Goethe, although I would also add to those names Novalis, whose handful of contributions to the Athenaeum Fragments are some of the most stirring and memorable for me.
Of course, I’m not sure that my understanding of these fragments is entirely correct. Part of the experience of reading this work is grappling with one's own lack of understanding. Indeed, my edition included an essay by Schlegel at the end that addressed claims that his work was incomprehensible. (His response was to call into question the very notion of comprehension!) As such, it took me a few months to work my way through these roughly 130 pages, taking my time to piece together the component parts of these fragments while trying to make sense of them as a whole, if possible. It was a demanding and, at times, rewarding read, even if the experience made me want to seek out the philosophical fragments of Novalis rather than return to Schlegel at a later date.
Far more interesting to me were the maxims contained in the section titled Ideas, which seemed to be Schlegel’s attempt to apply Spinoza’s monism to poetry -- that is to say, arguing that philosophy and poetry strive toward a kind of synthesis, and that in this unity humanity might encounter morality in a way that religion can only strive to achieve through its most sacred ideals, although rarely successfully. Therefore, to seek religion is to miss the mark. Instead, one must seek the poetic in the philosophical (and the philosophical in poetry) to attain the transcendental experience traditionally reserved for the religious. The two high marks for Schlegel running throughout these fragments are Spinoza and Goethe, although I would also add to those names Novalis, whose handful of contributions to the Athenaeum Fragments are some of the most stirring and memorable for me.
Of course, I’m not sure that my understanding of these fragments is entirely correct. Part of the experience of reading this work is grappling with one's own lack of understanding. Indeed, my edition included an essay by Schlegel at the end that addressed claims that his work was incomprehensible. (His response was to call into question the very notion of comprehension!) As such, it took me a few months to work my way through these roughly 130 pages, taking my time to piece together the component parts of these fragments while trying to make sense of them as a whole, if possible. It was a demanding and, at times, rewarding read, even if the experience made me want to seek out the philosophical fragments of Novalis rather than return to Schlegel at a later date.
December 28, 2022
I didn't have to write a paper about this so I enjoyed it a lot more. Pretty silly guy. Methods and Themes Spring 2022
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews