Art & Creativity Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Schlegel slips a small bomb under the modern habit of treating mathematics as cold, sterile, and proudly non-human. Calling it a "sensuous logic" is a Romantic provocation: math is rigorous, yes, but it is also felt. It has texture, cadence, surprise. In Schlegel's framing, a proof doesn’t merely compel assent; it seduces the mind with inevitability. The phrase "as it were" matters, too. He’s not trying to rebrand mathematics as art outright; he’s insisting that our experience of it already behaves like aesthetic experience, even when we pretend it doesn’t.

The second half is an analogy that quietly rearranges the intellectual hierarchy. Mathematics relates to philosophy the way the arts relate to poetry: not as subordinate ornament, but as a parallel mode that reveals what pure language cannot. Poetry, for the early German Romantics, wasn’t just verse; it was a privileged site of synthesis, where thought and feeling could meet without being flattened into doctrine. By aligning philosophy with poetry, Schlegel nods to philosophy’s aspiration to totality. By aligning mathematics with music and "plastic art" (the visual, shaping arts), he casts mathematics as philosophy’s nonverbal counterpart: a way of structuring the world through form rather than through argument alone.

Contextually, this fits Schlegel’s era: a reaction against Enlightenment compartmentalization. The subtext is a dare to intellectuals who worship abstraction while denying embodiment. If mathematics is "sensuous", then reason is never just reason; it has an aesthetic nerve, and philosophy ignores that at its own expense.