Idealistic Studies

published on November 15, 2014

Friedrich Schlegel's Break wth Fichte and the Historical Transformation of Critical Philosophy

In 1796, the lack of historicity in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre was one of the issues that provoked Friedrich Schlegel’s criticism of the Grundsatz tradition and paved the way for his early-romantic approach to philosophy. Schlegel argues that the critical development of Fichte’s approach demands its transcendental historization, i.e., a philosophical explanation of the temporal, evolutionary process whereby reason has reached Fichte’s self-conscious standpoint. The full understanding of this aspect of Schlegel’s break with Fichte demands a systematic discussion of a major, though still partially reconstructed, aspect of his thought during those years that preceded the new standpoint of the Vorlesungen über die Transzendentalphilosophie of 1800–1801: Schlegel’s critically historicized approach to philosophy. This paper reconstructs this path of Schlegel to early romanticism, and points to one of his virtually neglected sources: the early logical-historical thought of August Hülsen, between 1799 and 1800 a collaborator of Schlegel in the early-romantic journal Athenäum.