Abstract

Friedrich Schlegel is known above all as a man of letters and political interests, while his philosophical opus has received as yet a very limited interest and attention. Perhaps this new critical edition will enable him to carve a small niche for himself in forthcoming histories of philosophy. He was certainly not the most significant thinker; but his imagination, many-sidedness, sharpness, and his unmistakable speculative gift qualify him to be in the second rank of Romantic philosophers immediately after Schelling and Baader. The young Friedrich Schlegel was thoroughly under the spell of Fichte, but his later development—notwithstanding personal antipathy—carried him close to Schelling. The ethical pathos of Fichte's doctrine could not make Schlegel overlook the injustice done to nature, art, and religion. Though his celebrated conversion to Catholicism in the Dom of Cologne did not take place until 1838, Schlegel read Jacob Boehme and was a close friend of Schleiermacher, and thus was absorbed by religious problems years before. Already in his Cologne lectures he goes beyond the vague idealistic concept of the "divinity" in favor of a personal and transcendent God. These two volumes of the critical edition contain the following texts: Transzendentalphilosophie, lectures in Jena from 1800-1801. The text is the one published by J. Körner in 1935. The Development of Philosophy in Twelve Books and Propedeutic and Logic. The texts in Propedeutic and Logic are of a general introductory character. But in The Development of Philosophy a tremendous effort is made to give, if not an entirely systematic, at least a quasi-all-embracing, encyclopedic sketch of philosophy and its history. Here again we read nothing substantially new. The editor follows the text published by Windischmann in 1836 but does complete it with variants from other manuscripts. Métaphysique. These lectures were delivered in French to Madame de Staël. In addition to an already known text published by J. Körner the editor makes use of a manuscript in the hand of Schlegel which was found only after the last war. The preface of J.-J. Anstett is ascetically short and even the commentary consists only of sober and learned notes at the end of the second volume.—M. J. V.