"Considered subjectively, philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem"
About this Quote
Philosophy, Schlegel insists, doesn’t get the courtesy of a clean opening scene. It barges in mid-argument, mid-life, mid-confusion. The line has the swagger of early Romanticism: a refusal of Enlightenment neatness, the fantasy that reason can start from zero and build a flawless system upward. “Considered subjectively” is the tell. From the inside, as a living consciousness rather than a textbook method, thinking begins not with axioms but with the feeling that you’ve already been thrown into a world of language, history, desire, and half-formed convictions.
The epic-poem comparison does quiet work. Epics don’t begin with origins; they begin with crisis. Homer opens on anger, not genealogy. You enter a story already in motion, and meaning is reconstructed backward and sideways. Schlegel frames philosophy as narrative labor: not the discovery of first principles, but the art of orientation. That’s why the claim lands as both description and provocation. It deflates philosophical grandiosity while elevating the philosopher into a kind of poet-editor, stitching fragments into a provisional coherence.
Context matters: Schlegel is writing in the wake of Kant, amid German Idealism’s appetite for total systems. His jab is gentle but pointed: the subjective experience of thinking will always lag behind the system’s godlike perspective. Philosophy wants to be architecture; Schlegel reminds it that it’s lived as literature - interrupted, retrospective, and always arriving late to its own premises.
The epic-poem comparison does quiet work. Epics don’t begin with origins; they begin with crisis. Homer opens on anger, not genealogy. You enter a story already in motion, and meaning is reconstructed backward and sideways. Schlegel frames philosophy as narrative labor: not the discovery of first principles, but the art of orientation. That’s why the claim lands as both description and provocation. It deflates philosophical grandiosity while elevating the philosopher into a kind of poet-editor, stitching fragments into a provisional coherence.
Context matters: Schlegel is writing in the wake of Kant, amid German Idealism’s appetite for total systems. His jab is gentle but pointed: the subjective experience of thinking will always lag behind the system’s godlike perspective. Philosophy wants to be architecture; Schlegel reminds it that it’s lived as literature - interrupted, retrospective, and always arriving late to its own premises.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|
More Quotes by Karl
Add to List
