Ideas for Liberation –Friedrich Schlegel: Transcendental Philosophy (1800-1801)

Abstract

How to maintain intellectual work in an age when ideas lack? The question is all the more important, since having lost ideas, the Enlightenment’s great programme of emancipation is deemed to fail. This text attempts to redefine the Romantic notion of “idea” in relation to Bildung based on the work of Hegel, Humboldt, Schlegel and Spinoza. Yet its main focus remains the interpretation of Transcendentalphilosophie concluding with the necessity of reiterating a plurality of ideas in the production of culture.