Science & Tech Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Schlegel draws a hard line between living decently and making work that remakes reality. “Form your life humanly” is almost curt: be ethical, be kind, build a tolerable character - fine, “you have done enough.” The sting comes next. Enough for what? Enough for life, not for greatness. In one move he demotes moral self-cultivation from the Romantic era’s favorite project to mere baseline, then claims art and science demand a different fuel: “something divine.”

That word is doing double duty. In Schlegel’s Romantic context, “divine” isn’t just church piety; it’s the surplus beyond rational method and social virtue - inspiration, intuition, the sense that beauty and truth aren’t manufactured so much as received. He’s defending a view of genius that can’t be reduced to technique or good intentions. The “height of art” and “depth of science” aren’t achievements you climb to with diligence alone; they’re thresholds you cross when the human mind brushes up against what feels absolute.

The subtext is a polemic against Enlightenment sufficiency. If reason and morality were supposed to be self-contained, Schlegel argues they still leave the most ambitious human projects underpowered. He pairs art with science to make the provocation harder to dismiss: even science, the emblem of modern rationality, has moments of leap, vision, almost-religious awe. It’s a flattering doctrine for creators, but also a warning: the most serious work asks for surrender to something larger than the self - or else it plateaus into competence.