Life & Wisdom Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Schlegel’s line lands like a well-aimed boomerang: if philosophy has made a sport of interrogating every object it touches, then it should expect to be interrogated back. The “just reprisal” isn’t a tantrum against thinking; it’s a demand for intellectual reciprocity. Critique, in Schlegel’s framing, isn’t a neutral tool you wield without consequence. It’s a posture, a temperament, a power claim. When philosophy declares everything fair game, it implicitly exempts itself as the judge rather than the defendant. Schlegel calls that bluff.

The subtext is Romantic-era suspicion of Enlightenment confidence. By the late 18th century, “philosophy” often meant the swaggering authority of systems: Kant’s critical method, Fichte’s idealism, the sense that reason could audit reality and issue receipts. Schlegel, a poet-critic who helped invent modern literary criticism, is less interested in building a closed system than in exposing systems’ hidden metaphors, their aesthetic choices disguised as pure rationality. The sentence performs what it argues: it turns critique back on the critic, revealing that philosophical scrutiny has its own assumptions, fashions, and blind spots.

“Reprisal” is the key word: a little martial, a little comic, suggesting philosophy’s critique has been aggressive enough to merit counterforce. In Schlegel’s hands, the move is both ethical and strategic. If critique is the era’s dominant currency, then the most radical act is to ask who minted it, who benefits from it, and what it costs when nothing is allowed to remain unexamined except the examiner.