Schlegel’s Incomprehensibility and Life: From Literature to Politics

This chapter focuses on the concept of Life in Friedrich Schlegel’s first writings, which combine aesthetics, politics, and the theory of knowledge. The author pursues Schlegel’s idea that the creativity of life that led to the emergence of man and his rational faculties results in further processes and phenomena that do not necessarily respect the norms of rationality. On this approach, the sphere of the unknowable is not simply treated as negative, though. On the contrary, in Schlegel’s philosophy, what escapes the kingdom of reason is intrinsically productive. Furthermore, reason needs to cope with the continuous formation of meaning in art works and to sustain its analysis and critique of political institutions. However, it must renounce the imposition of a universal norm and a sovereign criterion.