The Philosophy of Art of Early Friedrich Schlegel

According to Friedrich Schlegel, theorist of German Romanticism, art is autonomous and idiosyncratic and is not subordinate to any utilitarian or mundane goals. Its essence is confined to manifestation of beauty and creation of visualized images that do not imitate the world’s visible forms but express certain essential foundations of human existence. F. Schlegel applies two art concepts: “expressive arts” that are based on the idealizing principle and “fine arts” that center around beauty, “depiction”, and spiritual fulfillment. Art is grounded upon the principles of diversity, unity, and integrity, and its main law is the internal consistency of a work of art with itself. Art combines fullness, harmony, beauty, and morality. Classical art created by a genius is always aesthetically relevant and symbolic and can never be fully understood. The supreme art is complete fullness, and an example of such is the art of Classical Greece. Schlegel often uses the terms of art and poetry as synonymous, viewing poetry specifically as the aesthetic quality of art. To Greek Classical art, he opposes contemporary Romantic art, which, in many ways, refrains from visible manifestation of the principle of beauty, knows no mythological roots, but is founded upon the laws of the characteristic, individual, interesting, disharmonious, contradictory, ironic, ingenious, and marvelous. Romantic art originates from Dante’s, Shakespeare’s, Cervantes’s, and Goethe’s “novels”. It is exactly Romantic art that F. Schlegel considered to be the future of aesthetic culture.