Abstract

The founder of early German Romantic philosophy, Friedrich Schlegel, is a pivotal figure in the history of philosophy because of the way that he establishes many of the themes by which nineteenth-century continental thought separates itself from Kant. Yet our view of his depth and originality as a thinker has often been distorted by his proximity to Hegel, who propounded a highly polemical and reductive reading of Schlegel. One of the ways in which our view of Schlegel is distorted by Hegel's reading is our association of Schlegel with the stance of irony. While Schlegel considered irony as merely one of several fruitful ways to rethink the relation of the subject to the absolute, Hegel used a reductive reading of...