Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Schlegel is doing a sly bit of Romantic judo: he starts with a familiar-sounding piety and then flips it into metaphysics. “God is each truly and exalted thing” quietly swaps the old, centralized deity for a dispersed divinity lodged in whatever achieves intensity, beauty, or moral height. The shock comes in the addendum: “therefore the individual himself to the highest degree.” If God is present in “each” exalted thing, the individual isn’t a mere creature looking upward; the individual becomes the sharpest instrument of the divine. It’s not quite “you are God,” but it’s close enough to be provocative in a post-Enlightenment Europe where the authority of church doctrine is fraying and the self is rising as a cultural project.

The second sentence is where Schlegel’s intent turns from uplift to complication. “But are not nature and the world individuals?” reads like an afterthought, but it’s the trapdoor. If the individual is exalted because it concentrates divinity, then what happens when you treat the whole of nature - or the world itself - as a higher-order individual? The Romantic cult of subjectivity suddenly has a rival: an organic cosmos with its own unity, agency, and “personhood.”

Context matters: early German Romanticism (with Schlegel at its center) was obsessed with reconciling the Enlightenment’s analytic reason with a sense of wholeness: art, nature, spirit, and self as one living system. The subtext is a power struggle over scale. Schlegel wants the individual to be sacred, but he refuses to let individualism become solipsism. The line forces a question that still stings: is your inner life the summit of meaning, or just one eddy in a much larger self called “world”?