ross, nathan_friedrich schlegel on the cultivation of common sense in aesthetic and political...

Friedrich Schlegel on the Cultivation ofCommon Sense in Aesthetic andPolitical Critique

Nathan Ross

1. Introduction

In the wake of Kant, a fruitful ground opens up for connecting aes-thetic philosophy and political critique because of the way the aestheticjudgment of taste is defined as a kind of sensus communis—a mode ofjudgment that unites subjects prior to their conceptual thought. Theearly work of Friedrich Schlegel has particular importance in develop-ing this connection, left largely underdeveloped by Kant, both becauseof his focus on the development of literary critique as a creative, philo-sophically motivated enterprise, and because of the staunch defense ofradical republicanism found in his political thought. This essay willseek to develop the connection between Schlegel’s method of aestheticcritique as a mode of sensus communis and his political philosophy bylooking both to the way he redefines the Kantian common sense of aes-thetic experience and the application of this common sense in hisexplicitly political writings.

Schlegel’s theory of aesthetic experience rests on the notion of self-reflection, both as a standard for critiquing works and as the value thesubject gets from the work. Walter Benjamin formulates what is dis-tinctive in Schlegel’s method of critique as follows:

With this, the basic principle of the Romantic theory of object-knowledge is given. Everything that is in the absolute, everythingreal, thinks. . . . The germ-cell of all knowledge is thus a process ofreflection in a thinking being through which it gains knowledge ofitself. . . . Where there is no self-knowledge, there is no knowing atall.1

Benjamin is concerned with defining the knowledge of works of art as aprocess of immanent reflection, uncovering the work of art in its capac-

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Graduate Faculty Philosophy JournalVolume 34, Number 1, 2013

ity for self-reflection. However, this definition of object knowledge hasfruitful implications for the philosophical knowledge of political soci-eties, as I will seek to demonstrate, since it relates to the object of aes-thetics not primarily as a matter of passive enjoyment, evaluation, orclassification, but as an object that acts and expresses a degree of self-awareness through its objective form, a quality that applies also topolitical forms in a critical way.

It is possible to consider the state as an object and classify its laws,its constitution, and its political and judicial procedures, but suchknowledge only succeeds in being normative, and hence critical, whenit understands the object of knowledge as related to itself as self-com-prehending and as capable, at least ideally, of effecting a modificationin its own understanding. Political philosophy looks not only at lawsand institutions, but understands them in terms of notions such aslegitimacy, justice, and democratic representation. These are norma-tive terms that involve not merely objective organizational qualities,but self-reflective qualities on the part of the object in question (that is,society). What is more, the self-reflection that is significant in this con-text is not that of a cognizing individual subject but of a social being, anetwork of individuals bound together by relations of power and depen-dence. In his key early work on politics, “Versuch über den Begriff desRepublikanismus [Essay on the Concept of Republicanism],” Schlegelseems to have formulated this problem in political philosophy, in thathe argues for representative democracy while, nevertheless, describingthe very notion of political representation as a “fiction.” This means, Iwill argue, that, according to Schlegel, the degree of political represen-tation in a society must be critiqued aesthetically, in terms of its ownlevel of self-awareness.2 However, before exploring the application ofspecific aesthetic insights to political critique (in the third section ofthis essay), it will be imperative to demonstrate the social and intersub-jective basis of aesthetic critique in Schlegel’s thought.

2. Aesthetic Critique as the Education of Sense to Self-Awareness

Schlegel inherits from Kant the problem of grounding the potentialcommunality of aesthetic experience. Rather than seeking to groundaesthetic experience in the cognitive faculties, the tools of objectiveknowledge being allowed to “play,” [sugg: where the tools of objec-tive knowledge are allowed to “play,”] Schlegel will base aestheticexperience in the development of “sense” (Sinn). While Kant is largelyconcerned with the problem of aesthetic pleasure, a pleasure that startsfrom the senses but derives from the structure of the mind, Schlegel

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sees the index of aesthetic experience as the “formation” or “education”(Bildung) of sense. Aesthetic experience comes to fruition to the degreethat it allows us to use our senses in ways that are increasingly self-aware. This self-awareness of sense allows for reciprocity, community,and interactivity with others, and this represents a distinctive form ofsensus communis. In Schlegel, the community of aesthetic experience issupported not by the universality and necessity of cognitive faculties,but by the reflective activity that develops in specific ways through theexperience of works.

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant seeks to steer clear of two com-mon pitfalls in aesthetic theory: Either aesthetic responses are just amatter of taste and cannot in any way be explained as resting on someground that is common to all subjects, or the philosopher seeks to for-mulate a set of objective rules and criteria that make certain works ofart beautiful.3 Kant seeks to avoid these two extremes by arguing thatthe pleasure we get from aesthetic experience is quite different fromthe kind we get from the stimulation of our senses. The enjoyment of awork of art is different from the enjoyment of a delicious food or apretty color, in that my enjoyment of the food or the pretty colordepends upon the actual contact of the object with my senses. I am notcontent to merely enjoy the image or the thought of a steak dinner.Alternatively, the work of art brings pleasure solely by means of itsrepresentation.

Thus, Kant argues that there is a kind of pleasure that arises notfrom the stimulation of a bodily sense by an external object, but fromthe way in which the representation of an object stimulates my intellec-tual faculties.4 This latter kind of pleasure gives rise to a kind of “dis-interested” or contemplative pleasure that is dependent, not on therelation of an object to my senses, but on the way in which an objectstimulates my cognitive faculties. Since the object pleases my cognitivepowers rather than my senses, I can expect that all other humans willfeel the same way about the object. As sensual beings, we are particu-lar and see the world through different eyes, but, as rational beings,Kant believes that the conditions of our cognition rest on faculties thatare not singular and biologically conditioned in this way. But this doesnot mean that aesthetic experience can be reduced to rules in such amanner that if you make an object in conformity to certain rules, it willbe beautiful. This is impossible because aesthetic experience involveswhat Kant calls the “free play” of my cognitive faculties. Rather thanrelating objects of experience to determinate rules, as I must do inknowledge claims, I allow the formal qualities of the particular object tostimulate my imagination’s form, giving it qualities. In Kant, it is thisinterplay of cognition and sense that can be counted on as the basis for

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ROSS/ SCHLEGEL ON THE CULTIVATION OF COMMON SENSE

universality and necessity in aesthetic judgments. Thus Kant adds thecaveat that the notion of a sensus communis is not really to be takenliterally, as an aspect of empirical sensation,5 but as rooted in the inter-play of the cognitive faculties that make possible all universal and nec-essary knowledge claims through their a priori structure. Even thoughKant regards aesthetic experience as resting in a sensus communis, hedoes not think that all people possess the ability to judge in the samedegree, and he even holds that judgment is a knack that cannot betaught. In illustrating this point, he gives the example of a scientistwho knows all the laws that relate to a given sphere of experience, butlacks the “mother wit” to connect various experiences in the non-discur-sive manner described as reflective judgment.6 The reason judgmentcannot be taught derives from the very fact that reflective judgmentsare not based on rules that can be taught and made universal.

In contrast to Kant, Schlegel seeks to ground the potential sensuscommunis of aesthetic experience, not in the overarching universalityof the cognitive powers, but in the modification the powers of senseundergo in their engagement with works of art. Schlegel replaces thefree play of the cognitive faculties with the formation or education of“sense” through the work.7 He agrees with Kant that aesthetic experi-ence is not a mere matter of individual preference in which we areunable to come to any intersubjective agreement.8 Indeed, it is Kant’snotion of the sensus communis founded in aesthetic judgment thatallows Schlegel to claim that in politics our experience of the generalwill involves an aesthetic act.9 But there are a few key disagreementswith Kant. First, the sensus communis is not taken for granted as aphenomenon, but is treated as an ideal to be reached through educa-tion. For, unlike Kant, Schlegel does believe that aesthetic experiencecan be learned and taught. He argues that the sensus communis is onlyto be valued and sought out to the degree that it is a means to educa-tion, that is, to a more complete development of oneself. Secondly, hesees the sensus communis of aesthetic experience as a common, inter-subjective use of the senses, while Kant sees it as “sense” only in aderivative and metaphorical fashion, for the communality of aestheticexperience is actually guaranteed on the level of the transcendentalsubject of cognition. The following passage from the “Conversation onPoetry” draws a complex dialectic between individuality, intersubjec-tivity, and education in aesthetic experience:

Reason is only one, and is the same in each person: just as everyhuman carries his own nature in himself and his own love, so alsohe has his own poetry. This must and should remain unique, justas surely as he is the person who he is, just as surely as there issomething original in him. And no critique can or may take away


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his own-most essence, his inner-most power in order to purify himinto a universal image without spirit and without sense, as thosefools do who do not know what they want. But the elevated scienceof true critique should teach him how to form [bilden] himself intohimself, and should most of all teach him how to grasp every otherself-sufficient form of poetry in its classic power and fullness, sothat the blossom and the seed of foreign spirits may become nour-ishment and pollen for its own imagination.10

What we find here is that Schlegel does not make the universality ofthe use of the cognitive faculties the basis of aesthetic experience, butinstead starts from the striving of each individual to unfold theirunique potential of “spirit” and “sense.” While, for Kant, sense (Sinn) isinherently individual and private, Schlegel seems to be playing on theambiguity of the term, suggesting both sensation and meaning. So,while it is individual, it can be educated, not merely to universality andagreement with others, but to self-awareness. In fact, in the languageof this passage, it is the task of critique or education to preserve theindividual character of sense, while at the same time make this “own-most” faculty capable of communication with that of others. He writesin a fragment of the education of sense: “Sense that sees itself becomesspirit.”11

In seeking to understand its own potential use, sense becomes self-aware. But it becomes self-aware not through mere self-contemplation,or through the heterogeneous faculty of thought, but through engage-ment with works that represent formations of sense that are them-selves self-aware. Schlegel is conceptualizing an act of reflection that isimminent to sense rather than one based on a heterogeneous faculty.Aesthetic experience is a seeing that sees what it is seeing, a hearingthat hears what it is hearing, an imagination that is not merely a stor-ing of decaying sense, but an intensified reflection of sense experience.Thus, the distinction is not so much between the individuality of senseexperience and the universality of aesthetic experience, as in Kant, butbetween the limited individuality that lacks self-awareness, and thefulfilled individuality, which, through the education of foreign works,has learned the free use of the imagination and the self-awareness ofsense that makes up spirit. In speaking of the education of sense to“spirit,” Schlegel is not thinking of a transition from a lower to a highercapacity, but of a progressive organizational development within sense.In the fragment just cited he likens “spirit” to a “music of thoughts”and calls it an “inner sociability” (AF 339). This notion of “inner socia-bility,” which results from the education of sense, points to a kind ofsensus communis, a kind of self-awareness in the act of sensing that isdiscursive, capable of being shared, and entering into agreement

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with the sense of others [sugg: and so allows us to enter intoagreement with the sense of others].12

The process of the education of sense points to the potential for inter-subjectivity in the critique of works. He writes in a fragment, “Here weagree and are of one sense; but here we disagree because you or me aremissing some sense. Who is right, and how can we agree? Only throughan education that broadens every particular sense into the universalinfinite sense.”13 This fragment must be read as a repudiation of theKantian notion that aesthetic judgment is a “mother wit” or that a nat-ural sensus communis is based on the uniformity of the cognitive facul-ties. It speaks of education to a sensus communis, but it relates thiseducation not to general discursive rules for the recognition of beauty(as Kant rejects in Baumgarten), but to the progressive use of “sense,”by which sense becomes self-aware and thus able to relate to the senseof others.

While Kant argues that aesthetic creation and appreciation cannotbe taught, Schlegel makes Bildung a central aspect of his aesthetic phi-losophy. This is not to say that, for Schlegel, judgment can be taught bymeans of a series of rules and formulas for interpreting works of art,but only through what he calls a “mediator,” that is, a person or ahuman creation that allows us to discover what he calls the “center” inour selves (I 44–5). Part of what a work of art does, in Schlegel’s view,is to teach others to use their senses in more active and self-awareways. The bad work of art enforces clichés and keeps its audience fromdeveloping their imaginations as active, form-giving, communicationinducing powers, while the good work of art gives them the chance todevelop their senses and imaginations in active relation to it. (Thus thetask of critique is not only to illuminate those forms that educate sense,but to actively destroy, by discrediting, those works that reinforce anun-self-aware use of sense.)14 Just as philosophy seeks to remove ourunreflective prejudices, Schlegel argues that the arts should seek to lib-erate the mind from its unreflective cognitive habits by educating theimagination in both its creative and its destructive capacities as a form-giving faculty.

As I have argued in this section, the basis for the communality ofaesthetic experience in Schlegel is the educative capacity of the work,the ability of the senses to reflect on their own usage in and throughthe work. This means that the task of the critic is not so much to distin-guish between good and bad works, or to act as an arbiter of works ofart for mass society. Instead, in Schlegel’s work as a critic, he seeks toengage in a direct experience of the work, and thus allow others to doso as well. As Benjamin writes of Schlegel, he allows the work to cri-tique itself, to engage in its own act of reflection, rather than assessing


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the work according to a critical standard that is outside of the work.15

The work contains its own self-awareness or reflection, and aestheticexperience merely draws this reflection out and allows it to happen.This is not to say that there are not good and bad works, works ofgreater and lesser value. Some works might have an inexhaustiblereserve of self-awareness, while others might only gain self-awarenessthrough the very act of criticism, through an engagement that com-pletes what is only nascent in the work. Some works might be so bad,so riddled with clichés and unreflective modes of experience, that theyonly serve as obstacles to the education of sense, in which case thecritic must engage with them in such a way as to “annihilate” them.But in each case, because the standard is not beauty or fitness but edu-cation, the act of critique must be understood not so much as a decisionor judgment, but in terms of a depth of experience, an engagement thatenters into the work and transforms itself in the process.

In what follows, I will seek to demonstrate how this model of aes-thetic experience informs Schlegel’s political philosophy. If Schlegel’sgoal as a critic is to view the arts as expanding fields of self-awareness,as mediums of reflection through which we discover our own powers ofsensation by measuring them up against the works of others, then it iseasy to see how the arts can serve as a metaphor or, perhaps, a micro-cosm and anticipation of the process of social and political developmentthat is equally in need of philosophical critique. Society can be viewedas a medium of reflection; a political institution or a culture can be cri-tiqued as allowing for or preventing greater self-awareness on the partof its citizens. While these goals put Schlegel in some relation to thepolitical philosophy of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on libera-tion and the autonomous use of the mind to critique social institutions,the specifics of his aesthetic theory also suggest a different approachthan the social contract theory of other Enlightenment thinkers.16

Schlegel’s aesthetics emphasizes the development of sense over the for-mality of reason, and the elusive, inexhaustible experience of worksover the definitive judgments of the pure spectator. Therefore, his polit-ical philosophy will be less concerned with rationalizing a legitimateform of government and more concerned with gauging progress in rela-tion to open-ended, unachievable political goals that take account of thedevelopment of the citizens’ sense for their government.

3. On the Critique of Fiction as the Ground of PoliticalPhilosophy

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Schlegel’s most explicitly political work, “Essay on the Concept ofRepublicanism,” begins as a review of Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” thatadmires the spirit of Kant’s work but offers a critique of his conceptionof government. The central issue of the essay is the core question ofmodern political philosophy: What makes a government legitimate as apolitical power? A republican government is one that “represents” thewill of its people. But this begs two questions: First, what is the moralvalue of representation or why is the development of representativegovernment a moral imperative? Second, how can one discern whetherreal representation is taking place? For Kant, the key to legitimacyrests in dividing the legislative and executive powers. In other words,the key is separating the power to enforce the will of the people fromthe actual will of the people. Once such a divided government is insti-tuted, Kant believes that government will represent the will of the peo-ple so long as it acts in an honest way, in accord with the maxim ofpublicity.17 According to Kant, a government can only represent the willof its people if it acts on maxims that could, at least in principle, berevealed to them.

Schlegel disagrees with Kant on three levels: (1) he argues that Kanthas not adequately defined the moral, normative core of republican gov-ernment and seeks to ground the values of representative governmentin the need for the subject to cultivate itself through common sense; (2)he questions Kant’s prescription of the structure of government bestsuited to bringing about these values, offering a critique of the presup-positions used to justify a division of powers between legislative andexecutive powers; and (3) in place of the Kantian and Rousseauian the-ory of government, he offers not a tangible form of constitution, but ageneral method of critiquing the progress of government toward thenormative values of freedom and equality. This method of critiquinggovernment, I will argue, makes use of the model of aesthetic experi-ence to understand the relation between citizen and government as arelation of reflection that must be judged in terms of the potential forself-awareness.

Schlegel’s method of political critique can be summarized as follows:A set of political relations makes up a legitimate form of government tothe degree that it mirrors the qualities of an effective work of fiction.This emphasis on fiction stands in stark contrast to the Kantian maximof publicity, which essentially equates legitimate government with thefunction of truth-telling. But a fiction is not the same thing as a lie. Asthe previous section argued, the function of aesthetic critique is theway in which it allows the act of sense to reflect upon itself and so gaina relation to the sense of others. We do not consider a novel better orworse to the degree that it accurately describes a set of worldly events;


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rather, we are forced to evoke a set of aesthetic criteria that might con-sist of such concepts as plausibility, insightfulness, freedom from cliché,originality, and appeal to the imagination. In short, we evoke the self-awareness of the text and of our own sense of it. In what follows, I willdemonstrate how Schlegel applies this critical standard both to ground-ing the core moral values of representative government and to cri-tiquing the progress of government in realizing these values.

4. Schlegel’s Grounding of the Normative Core ofRepublicanism

Kant justifies republican government as the only government thatmaximizes three imperative values of political philosophy: the freedomof members of society, the dependence of all upon a commonly estab-lished law, and the equality of citizens before the law. Kant argues thata republican government allows for freedom, dependence, and equalitythrough two features: a legislative procedure that represents the gen-eral will of the people, and a division of power between the legislativeand the executive powers of government.18 There is freedom (in thesense of autonomy) in that the people are only to obey laws that theyhave created; there is equality in that all play a role in creating the lawand bear the same relation to the power that enforces the law; andthere is dependence in that all are subject to the laws.

Schlegel’s account of republicanism begins with an attempt to morerigorously define the values upon which the very notion of republican-ism is to be justified. Schlegel argues that the Kantian values of free-dom and equality are merely “negative determinations,” but that everynegative determination derives from a position. He writes,

Both freedom and equality are nothing positive, but negations. Butsince every negation assumes a position, every condition somethingconditioned, so there must be a feature missing in the definition(and indeed the most important, which holds the grounds of theother two). (BR 11)

Freedom from constraint is not a value unless it is the freedom to dosomething valuable, and equality is not a value unless we determine inrelation to what value citizens are to be equal. Schlegel does not rejectthe importance of these two negative values—freedom and equality—ina republican society, but he argues that these two characteristics mustbe grounded in some positive feature that is not yet given. Schlegel’sargument is that Kant merely negates or erases the features of adespotic government, rather than giving a practical grounding for thevalues of a republican society.19

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It is clear that Schlegel, far more than Kant, seeks to base his politi-cal philosophy, and his argument for republicanism, in a fundamentalmoral imperative. Kant famously argues in his late The Metaphysics ofMorals that politics and morals must be based on differing principles,that the full rigor of the categorical imperative can never be brought tobear in critiquing political rule, since morality can never be legislatedin a positive sense.20 Schlegel, however, argues that all practical scienceis based upon the notion of categorical imperatives, which serve as theabsolute basis for moral knowledge. But Schlegel’s categorical impera-tive takes the following form: “‘The I should be’. What is the ‘I’ here?Self-determining subjectivity” (BR 12). Schlegel, borrowing heavilyfrom Fichte, argues that this principle must be at the root of all science,but also that it takes on modifications according to the different facul-ties of the human being—each distinct faculty involves a reinterpreta-tion and reformulation of this imperative. Thus, Schlegel’s “categoricalimperative” bears a strong relation, even in this earlier text, to thesupremacy of aesthetic concerns discussed in the previous section. Thehighest duty, and the basis of all other duties, is to cultivate one’s ownsensible being through the act of communication with others, in otherwords, to become self-aware in one’s mode of feeling through an aes-thetic act.21

This imperative to communicate the “I” leads directly to a politicalimperative. Insofar as the human being possesses the faculty of com-munication, i.e., insofar as we live in a world where we stand in rela-tions of dependence that effect one another, the pure practical impera-tive takes on the following form: “Community [Gemeinschaft] of manshould be, or the ‘I’ should be communicated” (BR 15). This imperativeis the basis of all politics as a practical science, not merely an instru-mental one. Politics is, for Schlegel, “a practical science in the Kantiansense of the word” (ER 100). Out of this, Schlegel derives the two prin-ciples discussed by Kant as the basis of his republicanism, those of free-dom and equality. Political freedom is imperative because in order forthe “I” to be communicated, it must also be in the singular individual;equality is imperative because in order to communicate the “I,” theremust be other “I”s. All humans within relations of geographical influ-ence must be in relations of communication. In order for this communi-cation to take place, there must be both the freedom to communicateand the relative equality in the act of communication of those commu-nicating.

Since the values of freedom and equality remain under-defined inKant’s argument, Schlegel argues that they must be defined in rela-tion to the notion of a practical “idea,” a rational postulate that canonly be realized through an infinite progression. Because these values


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can only be known in terms of an infinite progression, they can beexplicated in terms of a minimum (condition for beginning of progres-sion), a medium (real progress along progression), and a maximum(unattainable but ideal goal at end of progression). Just as Kant wouldargue that while no one ethical agent can profess to fully realize a“good will,” we can nevertheless make sense of the good will as a practi-cal ideal, Schlegel argues that a republican society can be analyzed interms of its progressive tendency. He breaks down the ideas of freedomand equality as follows:22

Freedom:

Equality:

Through this explication, Schlegel means to show that while Kant’s pol-itics resigns itself to the minimum, more emphasis must be placed onthe medium term, especially in its progressive relation to the maxi-mum. In criticizing and evaluating a form of society’s politics, we mustlook not merely to what is fixed (the rights and procedures that definethe constitution), but to the potential for progress embodied in its polit-ical life. The minimum of freedom would be that implied in a founda-tional document such as The Bill of Rights, which would guaranteethat I am free to do what I want so long as I do not limit the freedom ofother subjects (this is the notion of political freedom that, in distinctionto moral autonomy, Kant puts at the basis of his doctrine of right). Butfor Schlegel this would give us only an appearance of the kind of real,

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Minimum To do what one wants as long as it does not harm therights of others

Medium To follow laws that have been created by representativeschosen by the people

Maxiumum(unattainable)

Political freedom that corresponsds to moral freedom

Minimum All are equal in relation to the law

Medium No inequality exists except what a majority of the peoplewill

Maximum Absolute equality in the duties and rights of citizens,thus no relations of dependence or authority

positive freedom that would make a republican form of politics morallyimperative.

The minimum must be surpassed in that citizens strive to createlaws that not only allow them to do what they want, as much as ispractically possible, but also represent a commonly worked out concep-tion of the good. By the same token, the minimum degree of equalitywould involve equal treatment by legal institutions, while other formsof inequality, such as inequality in education, wealth, political involve-ment, and social authority would abound unchecked, as in modern freemarket democracies. Such a minimum would again lead only to theskeletal appearance of an equal public life, and it must be surpassed byseeking to use the law to eliminate these factual inequalities. In a per-fect republic there would be perfect equality, not necessarily in everyaspect of human life, but at least in all aspects that concern the rightsand duties of citizens to participate in public life. But what this makesclear is that freedom and equality are ideals that, though crucial to thenotion of republicanism, cannot be defined except through reference toa common good that remains the highest ideal of a republican society.Political freedom is merely a means to moral freedom and politicalequality is merely a means to common identification with the values ofthe republic. This leads Schlegel to the paradoxical thought that a con-stitutional republic that contents itself with the “minimum” determina-tions of freedom and equality would actually be less republican than apassing dictatorship that compromises on these minimum legal protec-tions out of a striving to achieve a higher degree of actual autonomyand social equality, a compromise that Schlegel calls “dynamic despo-tism.”23

5. Schlegel’s Critique of the Division of Powers

Kant defines republican government through two features: a legisla-tive procedure that represents the general will of the people and a divi-sion of powers between the legislative and the executive powers of gov-ernment.24 The justification for such a republican government is that itwould make possible the true freedom of the political subjects by creat-ing a political order in which subjects need only obey a law that is anextension of their own common will. For Kant and Rousseau, the needfor a division of powers in government is founded on what they see asan inherent flaw in human nature. Rousseau famously argues in book3 of The Social Contract that the “general will” can only animate thepolitical body when the whole state is in relation to itself, as it is in actsof public deliberation and elections.25 But in the event of any specificpolitical action, i.e. an application of law to a specific case, there is no


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general will, because in the specific case there is always a conflict ofprivate interests. There can be a general will only in the making oflaws, not in their application to specific cases, and so the power toenforce laws must be ceded to a special set of institutions charged withthis task. This leads Rousseau, and Kant after him, to the conclusionthat any government is despotic in which there is not a strict divisionbetween the power that creates laws (the voice of the people) and thepower that enforces these laws, since in such a government there is noa general will to represent. This is why both Rousseau and Kant havespecial reservations about the notion of democracy. Rule by all or ruleby the masses seems to imply that the same popular force that createslaws also serves to enforce these laws, thus leading to a despotism ofthe masses in relation to themselves. Though they defend popularsovereignty in the creation of law, they view democratic government asthe surest form of tyranny.26

Schlegel supports the basic definition of a republican government asa state that is governed according to the universal will. Yet he argues,using Kant’s own method against him, that such a state is an idea, aperfect standard that cannot be given anywhere in experience. If welook at the society around us and analyze the motives for people’sactions, we will always find only private interests at work. The notionof a general will is, Schlegel argues, an idea that corresponds to no pos-sible object of experience (BR 14). Thus, rather than understandingpolitical criticism as prescribing a set of rules according to which a gen-eral will can be manufactured, we must understand it the way thatKant understood the good will in The Metaphysics of Morals, namely asdescribing the approximation to an ideal that is always only regulativefor a process of striving.27 Schlegel rejects the notion that this ideacould be used to justify any kind of a priori argument about what kindof political constitution is republican. Rather, the political life of a soci-ety must be regarded in terms of the degree in which its entire politicalculture embodies a relation to the idea of republicanism (BR 18).According to Schlegel, the prescription for a division of powers devel-oped by Rousseau and Kant rests on a faulty philosophical premise:They assume that there is an unbridgeable gap between the generalwill that is active in law making and the private will that is inherent inindividual actions. But Schlegel argues that this central presuppositionin their theories must be rethought (BR 13). This lack of congruencebetween individual will and universal will is not a simple given, anabsolute fact, but is a historically relative condition: “Its opposite is atleast thinkable” (ER 97). Thus, Schlegel argues, relations of rule andauthority are not an unavoidable condition of political life, a necessityto be written in stone because of the frailty of human nature, but only

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justifiable under contingent conditions as a means to an end. Schlegelis not so naïve as to imagine that there could actually be a politicalstate without any executive power, but he argues that as a regulativeideal it might be useful to imagine a state without any need for govern-ment because of a perfect coordination between the individual privatewill and the universal will. Thus, while Kant regards government as astructural necessity, because there will always be a gap between thegeneral will of the people and the actual wills of specific individuals,Schlegel regards government as a far more provisional construct, whichis only legitimate to the degree that it seeks to reconcile the generalwill with the actual will of the people. If the function of government inRousseau and Kant is to enforce the general will upon those fromwhom it originates, then in Schlegel this function of enforcement is sub-servient to the greater goal of education. Since Schlegel regards the gapbetween particular and general wills not as an absolute but as a kind ofcultural contingency, it seems that this lends a special role to educationin politics.

Schlegel expresses this critique of Kant’s notion of republicanism inyet another way. While Kant seeks to describe republicanism as a formof constitution, as a general procedure for creating and implementinglaws, Schlegel argues that this ideal must be sought in the form of astate, in the actual soundness of its laws in relation to the needs andabilities of its citizens. Schlegel argues, with reference to the fact thatthe ancient Greeks often lacked sound constitutions, but embodied amuch higher actual degree of public engagement, that republicanism isnot just a form of government, but a form of political life

6. Schlegel’s Method of Political Critique

Schlegel’s political philosophy is based on the ideal of educating all citi-zens to participate in a “general will.” Yet he acknowledges that suchan education must begin from the reality of a “private will” (BR 15). Webegin by knowing our own individual interests in and perspectives onthe world, while the notion of a general will can only be made sense ofas an aspiration. Thus Schlegel reminds us that what has just beendeduced is, after all, an idea, a maximum toward which we must strive.However, we can only progress toward republican ideals by means ofan education in which individuals become increasingly capable of iden-tifying their private interests with communal ones. A similar move-ment is involved here as [sugg: strike] in Schlegel’s aesthetic theory:Aesthetic experience begins and ends with the subjective faculty ofsense, but internal to this faculty is the capacity for greater conscious-ness and hence greater identification with the sense of others. Politics,


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in a parallel manner, begins with the private will of the members ofsociety as the irreducible reality that must be represented and commu-nicated, but it demands that such a will express itself as a “generalwill.” The general will and the individual will do not relate like twothings that can act upon one another, nor do they relate simply as inthe relation of whole to part, as if one could get to the universal will byadding up the sum of individual wills. Rather, the general will repre-sents a certain ideal at the very core of each individual will, an idealthat can only be intimated or used as a measuring stick for existingreality. This leads Schlegel to a sharp metaphysical difficulty in recon-ciling a metaphysical ideal with the critique of political reality, a diffi-culty that he formulates in the following pointed question:

But how is republicanism possible, since the absolutely (and henceenduringly) universal will cannot occur within the realm of experi-ence, and can only exist in the world of pure thought? The individ-ual and the universal are quite simply cut off from one another byan infinite gap, over which one may only travel by means of a saltomortale. (BR 16)

Schlegel’s invocation of the salto mortale and his specification ofwhat he means points toward [sugg: and its specification pointtoward] what is truly distinctive in his approach to the issue of repub-licanism: his insistence that republicanism can only be translated intoa determinate, practical, worldly meaning through the use of aestheticpractice.

Hence nothing remains but by means of a fiction to let an empiricalwill count as a surrogate of an a priori thought of an absolutely uni-versal will; and since the pure dissolution of the practical impera-tive is impossible, to content oneself with the approximation of thispractical x. (BR 16)

In this key passage, Schlegel makes a bold conceptual move by evok-ing the notion of fiction as a positive, aesthetic construct to solve thekey metaphysical difficulty at the root of political legitimacy. All formsof government that hold themselves to be embodiments of the generalwill are, strictly speaking, based on a fiction—the fiction that a major-ity in an election is truly a universal mandate, or the fiction that a sin-gle person can think and will for a multitude of constituents. But a fic-tion is not the same as a lie. Schlegel considers a fiction’s function notin terms of its relation to true facts, but in its ability to promote a pro-cess of reflection in the reader that allows the reader to relate the givenconditions of experience to the subjective ideals that give these condi-tions their meaning (BR 16). As I outlined in the previous section, thefunction of a fiction is the ability of a sense experience to serve as a

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medium of reflection in which one becomes more aware of one’s ownsense, and hence more able to relate to the sense of others. Schlegelargues that we must apply some of the methods of aesthetic criticism tothe field of political criticism. In Schlegel’s theory, the art critic does notevaluate different works in terms of their creation according to a for-mula that is intended to bring about a certain effect. Rather, the artcritic views works in terms of their relation to an open-ended possibilityof human responses under varying degrees of cultural formation. Sotoo, he claims, we cannot determine whether a society is republicansimply because it holds elections and has a division between thebranches of government. Rather, we must look at the central institu-tions and events that have political meaning for a people and askwhether, under this people’s phase of cultural development, this politi-cal community finds its fiction to be one in which it recognizes a univer-sal striving toward the idea of a common life founded on freedom (BR22). This does not mean abandoning political critique to the relativisticsubjectivity of its participants, but critiquing this subjectivity in termsof its progressive relation to an idea. A society is republican if the formof fiction that holds sway in the public realm is one that promotes indi-viduals to act as if they were governed by an invisible general will. It isdespotic if the fiction that holds sway in the public realm is one thatdoes not enable individuals to develop their own relation to this invisi-ble ideal. Thus, although Schlegel does not prescribe any particularkinds of political institutions as inherently republican, he does arguethat the standard by which a state’s political “fiction” must be judged istwofold, namely in terms of degree of activity and in terms of degree ofequality.28 By this he seems to mean that its institutions should be con-figured in such way that each individual in the state, includingwomen, [sugg: in the state (both man and woman) is . . .] is capa-ble of establishing an active relation to the institutions that promote apublic identity and regulate common interests. A good novel is one thatempowers the reader’s imagination to focus on its own creative activity,rather than allowing it to settle into complacent clichés. In the samesense, a republican state serves to create a public life in which ourattention is turned away from our own private interests long enough tohave the premonition that our own process of self-development couldcoincide with a common, cultural process of development.

Schlegel’s method does not offer a prescription of one correct form ofgovernment, but instead offers a method for critiquing the progress of agovernment in educating its citizens toward republican goals.Nevertheless, Schlegel does develop some helpful discussions about theapplication of this method to several models of government. He makesclear that this political fiction does not sanction all forms of despotism;


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no individual will can completely concur with the universal will all ofthe time. Hence no individual can declare his own will to be the univer-sal will, and no family can choose itself to represent the universal willof all future generations. The fiction can only work if it is based on thelaw of equality. “The will of the majority should be the surrogate of theuniversal will. Republicanism is thus necessarily democratic” (BR 16).Thus Schlegel considers democracy not as the literal expression of theuniversal will, but as a form of fiction that at least does not contradictthe striving to create a society based on the universal will.

The question of what kind of constitution a state should have is sim-ply the question: What form of fiction does a people embrace? Schlegelargues that there is no a priori principle for determining what kind offiction will bring about a republican state. In his method of politicalcritique, there are two parallel factors that must be evaluated in rela-tion to one another: the form of constitution and the level of publicmorality. He considers the constitution (Verfassung) as the permanentset of established relations between political powers, while publicmorality refers to the actual degree of freedom and equality that a peo-ple experience in their public lives. On one hand, this public moralitycannot develop without at least a relative degree of technical perfec-tion in the form of constitution; on the other hand, it is clear thatSchlegel considers this second factor to be the one by which the value ofthe first is to be measured.29 He argues in this vein for either a monar-chy or a democracy, and against what he calls “ochlocracy.” He consid-ers an ochlocracy, the rule of society by a certain class, as the mostinherently flawed form of government, the “fiction” least prone to giveway to a representation of the universal will. In such a society, theinterests of a given class are isolated and not able to mingle with thoseof others. This leads to a stifling of the process of development ofhuman capacities within society. Schlegel considers monarchy as theform of government most appropriate to those ages and cultures inwhich the political education of the public is either immature or hasperished. The will of a single person can better approximate the idea ofthe totality of the general will than the will of a class of people. He con-siders it at least possible for the will of the monarch to approximate thewill of the whole. (Just as the state is a macrocosm of the microcosm ofthe human being, the individual can strive to represent the whole. Buta class is always defined by a one-sided position within the social divi-sion of wealth/labor—hence it will be less capable of representing amicrocosm of the macrocosm.30) Ochlocracy is inherently regressive;monarchy is, at least, potentially progressive. But Schlegel adamantlyrejects the Kantian interpretation of democracy as inherently tyranni-cal—he considers a society governed by a political process that gives

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voice to the majority as the only absolutely adequate fiction. So wehave two conceptions of an adequate fiction: on the one hand, themonarchy and, on the other hand, democracy. However, the value ofeach seems to depend on the development of the political culture in anysociety, democracy being the fiction best suited to a “mature” politicalculture, monarchy being a fiction that has a provisional value in rela-tion to the development of an immature political culture. Perhaps evenmore important than the provisional endorsement of monarchy or thecautious endorsement of democracy is Schlegel’s absolute condemna-tion of ochlocracy as a form of government that stifles public interac-tion, and hinders education or cultivation of political culture for thesake of preserving the privileges of a particular class.

Schlegel’s “Essay on the Concept of Republicanism” thus developsthe argument that the only form of government that responds to thefundamental imperative of subjects to cultivate self-aware communica-tion is a republican society. But the notion of republicanism, as we saw,is not so much a fixed form of government, as it is a critical construct inwhich the form of government is critiqued in relation to the level ofpublic morality. The relation between subject and government is to becritiqued not as a contract, but as based on the “fiction” of representingthe general will of the subjects. If this argument about the fictionalnature of political legitimacy is to be taken not merely as an arbitraryflight into moral and political relativism, then it must be considered inlight of the considerable resources offered by Schlegel’s theory of aes-thetic experience. Here it is important to remember that Schlegel seesthe function of literature and aesthetic experience as to educate thesubject by enabling sense experience to gain awareness of itself, andhence become common, shared sense. Thus, it is my argument that justas his aesthetics rests on a theory of knowledge that is based on thecultivation of self-awareness in one’s sense, Schlegel’s early politicaltheory depends upon both the moral imperative to cultivate one’s senseand on an aesthetic standard of what makes an object capable of pro-viding such cultivation. It is important to note that the “Essay on theConcept of Republicanism” is a very early work (1797), predating thefull development of his aesthetic theory in the Athenäum Fragments(1798–1800). In order to fully assess the relation of his aestheticthought to his social and political philosophy during this fruitful period,it would be necessary to consider his increasing emphasis on the frag-ment, both as a form of writing and as a conception of the relationbetween the individual and society.31 However, if the connection that Ihave been working on in this essay holds true, then the notion of frag-ment would overtake that of fiction as a different, perhaps more ade-quate, but also more recalcitrant, way of critiquing the never fully real-


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ized imperative of politics to embody the aspiration to the commongood.

NOTES

1. Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” invol. 1 of Selected Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Marcus Bullockand Michael Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp.144–6.

2. Recent scholarship on Schlegel has developed the thesis of an “anti-foun-dationalist” epistemology, a thesis designed to highlight the contrastbetween Schlegel and idealist philosophers such as Fichte. According tothis interpretation, the basis of knowledge is never given, but must con-stantly be sought as an ideal that guides inquiry (See Frederick Beiser,The Romantic Imperative [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003],pp. 123–30); this line of thought is developed in greater detail byElizabeth Millán-Zailbert in Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence ofRomantic Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007). My interpretation ofSchlegel’s political thought, and particularly his critique of social contracttheories of the Enlightenment, could be seen as an application of thisnotion of anti-foundationalism to the knowledge of political societies.Schlegel disagrees with republican theorists not on the basis of politicallegitimacy (the general will), but on the method by which this principlecan be used to critique political progress. To say that it can only be knownas an aesthetic fiction means that society can only be grasped in terms ofits approximation to this ideal.

3. This problem is presented most clearly in §§5–8 of Immanuel Kant,Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

4. Ibid., §12.

5. Kant writes of the faculty of aesthetic judgment that it “has the unfortu-nate honor of being endowed with the name of common sense (sensus com-munis)” (ibid., §40). He writes this after taking pains to note that we can-not universally communicate or expect others to understand our sensepleasures, but only those pleasures based on either the faculty of reasonor the powers that allow us to cognize objects (imagination and the under-standing).

6. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman KempSmith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), A133/B172.

7. While Kant downplays the literal meaning of “sense” in the sensus com-munis in order to preserve the cognitive nature of aesthetic judgment,Schlegel, as I will argue, intentionally plays on the ambiguity that dwellsin the German word Sinn (almost the same dual meaning is found in theEnglish ‘sense’): It means both “sensation” and “meaning.”

8. Friedrich Schlegel, Ideen, in vol. 2 of Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabeseiner Werke, ed. Ernst Behler, Jean-Jacques Anstett, and Hans Eichner

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(Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1967), frag. 80; hereafter I, followed byfragment number; all translations of this text are my own, unless other-wise noted.

9. Friedrich Schlegel, “Versuch über den Begriff des Republikanismus:Veranlaßt durch die Kantische Schrift zum ewigen Frieden,” in vol. 7 ofKritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe seiner Werke, ed. Ernst Behler, Jean-Jacques Anstett, and Hans Eichner (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh,1966), p. 16; hereafter BR, followed by page number; all translations ofthis essay are mine, unless otherwise noted.

10. Friedrich Schlegel, “Gespräch über die Poesie,” in vol. 2 of KritischeFriedrich Schlegel Ausgabe seiner Werke, p. 285.

11. Friedrich Schlegel, Athenäum Fragmente, in vol. 2 of Kritische FriedrichSchlegel Ausgabe seiner Werke, frag. 339; hereafter AF, followed by frag-ment number; all translations of this text are my own.

12. In The Romantic Imperative, Frederick Beiser does much to emphasizethat education or Bildung represents the summum bonum of Romanticphilosophy, and he rightly argues that education can only be taken as amoral end in itself and not a mere means if it is related to the unfolding ofthe capacities of the individual (Beiser, The Romantic Imperative, pp.90–5). However, Beiser seems to conflate the Romantic notion of educationas Bildung with the Schillerian notion of aesthetic education (Erziehung),which fails to acknowledge the greater emphasis on the inner develop-ment of sense in Romantic terminology. A detailed comparison of Schlegeland Schiller’s philosophy of aesthetic education would show many paral-lels, but would also have to grant Schlegel a distinctive role in conceivingof aesthetic experience as a form of knowledge containing a dialecticbetween the individual element of sense and the universal element ofcommunication.

13. Friedrich Schlegel, Ideas, in The Early Political Writings of the GermanRomantics, trans. Frederick Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996), p. 131; see also AF 116.

14. For this sense of critique as an act of destruction, see AF 137.

15. Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism,” pp. 144–6.

16. Some important work has been done recently to resituate the early workof Friedrich Schlegel as a political philosopher. Most of this work has beenconcerned with situating him somewhere on a political spectrum betweenradical-revolutionary, liberal-democratic, and reactionary-conservative.Frederick Beiser ensures greater interest in Schlegel’s early politicalthought by showing his continuity with the liberal tradition of theEnlightenment (Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, andRomanticism [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992]). However,this work has focused more on figuring what side he was on than on hisdistinctive contributions to redefining the method of political philosophy.My work will demonstrate that even where Schlegel professes devotion togoals such as freedom and equality, his philosophical method for justifyingand cognizing these ideals represents a radical break with prior thinkers.


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17. Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays,trans. and ed. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1983), p.135; hereafter PP, followed by page number.

18. See PP 112.

19. This criticism seems to rest in some ways on the application of Kant’s eth-ical philosophy to critiquing his political philosophy: In his ethics, Kantworks to define freedom or autonomy not merely as a lack of limitation,but as acting according to a self-imposed moral law. While Kant’s politicalphilosophy is explicitly based on a more liberal notion of freedom—free-dom from constraint unless it is legitimately based on the common will—Schlegel seems to argue that this negative freedom must be based onsomething like a political version of Kant’s moral law (freedom to act on arationally willed notion of the good).

20. Kant had not yet written The Metaphysics of Morals, with its division ofpolitics and morals, at the time of Schlegel’s essay, and it is worth specu-lating that he established this division with the goal of correcting thosesuch as Schlegel and Fichte who sought to ground political philosophies ina moral categorical imperative.

21. In one of his early notebooks, Schlegel formulates this highest duty as fol-lows: “One lives not to be happy, also not to fulfill duty, but to cultivateoneself” (Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments from thePhilosophical Apprenticeship, in The Early Political Writings of theGerman Romantics, frag. 697). Beiser develops a strong interpretation ofhow education is regarded in Schlegel not merely as a means but as anend—the Romantic summum bonum (Beiser, Romantic Imperative, pp.90–5).

22. These conceptual progressions are developed by Schlegel in BR 12.

23. “Transitory dictatorship is a politically possible form of representation—therefore a republican form of representation essentially distinct fromdespotism” (ER 99). For the comparison of democracy and monarchy, seeBR 17.

24. See PP 112.

25. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston(New York: Penguin, 1968), bk. 3, chap. 6.

26. Kant writes, “democracy, in the proper sense of the term, is necessarilydespotism,” and goes on to explain that democratic government makespolitical representation impossible (PP 114).

27. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals trans., Mary Gregor(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 192–6.

28. BR 24. Friedrich Schlegel’s republicanism is most radical in his emphasison the need for equality to constitute the basis of the general will. In hisgranting of political rights to women he exceeds Kant and Rousseau; inhis extension of rights beyond the property class he exceeds Kant.

29. See BR 18–9.

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30. Schlegel’s friend Novalis would take this microcosm-macrocosm argumentfor monarchy much further than Schlegel. It should be noted that Schlegelprovides only a provisional defense of monarchy in comparison to the sti-fling effects of ochlocracy.

31. The Athenäum Fragments do not offer an overall political theory to paral-lel the “Essay on the Concept of Republicanism,” but many of these frag-ments reflect on the fragmentary nature of the relation between individu-als and political society. See, for example, AF 22, 118; see also, FriedrichSchlegel, Kritische Fragmente, in vol. 2 of Kritische Friedrich SchlegelAusgabe seiner Werke, p. 159, frag. 103.


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