"Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself"
About this Quote
A caricature isn’t just a simplified drawing; it’s an exaggeration that reveals a truth by stripping away complexity. Schlegel’s line weaponizes that idea against the uneducated: without cultivation, you don’t become an authentic “original,” you become a crude outline of your own potential. The sting is that the distortion is self-inflicted. You don’t merely lack information; you become a version of yourself drawn by the bluntest available instrument.
Schlegel, a central voice in German Romanticism, is often remembered for celebrating irony, fragment, and the unfinished self. In that light, the quote is less a smug Enlightenment scolding than a Romantic demand: education is not credentialing, it’s self-expansion. Romantic thinkers were obsessed with Bildung, the lifelong shaping of the inner life through art, philosophy, language, and reflection. “Uneducated,” here, doesn’t mean “without schooling” so much as “without forming influences” - no encounter with complexity, no practice in revising the self, no discipline in seeing beyond first impulses. The result is a person stuck performing their own raw defaults: prejudices, appetites, inherited slogans.
The subtext is quietly political. In a Europe being reorganized by revolutions, nationalism, and the churn of modern public life, an unformed individual is easy to mobilize and easy to flatter. Caricatures are legible, and legibility is power’s best friend. Schlegel’s provocation implies that education is a defense against being rendered into a type - by others, or by your own laziness.
Schlegel, a central voice in German Romanticism, is often remembered for celebrating irony, fragment, and the unfinished self. In that light, the quote is less a smug Enlightenment scolding than a Romantic demand: education is not credentialing, it’s self-expansion. Romantic thinkers were obsessed with Bildung, the lifelong shaping of the inner life through art, philosophy, language, and reflection. “Uneducated,” here, doesn’t mean “without schooling” so much as “without forming influences” - no encounter with complexity, no practice in revising the self, no discipline in seeing beyond first impulses. The result is a person stuck performing their own raw defaults: prejudices, appetites, inherited slogans.
The subtext is quietly political. In a Europe being reorganized by revolutions, nationalism, and the churn of modern public life, an unformed individual is easy to mobilize and easy to flatter. Caricatures are legible, and legibility is power’s best friend. Schlegel’s provocation implies that education is a defense against being rendered into a type - by others, or by your own laziness.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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