Life's Pleasures Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Schlegel is skewering a particular kind of Romantic swagger: the intoxication of metaphysics dressed up as literature. “Drink the Absolute like water” is a barbed image because it takes something supposedly rarefied - the Absolute, the philosophical God-term of German Idealism - and treats it like cheap hydration. The joke isn’t that writers think about big ideas; it’s that they consume them thoughtlessly, as if profundity were a lifestyle beverage.

Then he twists the knife with “books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite.” It’s comic on its face - talking dogs doing metaphysics - but the subtext is harsher: when everything in a novel is forced to signal cosmic depth, nothing feels deep. The Infinite becomes a verbal tic, a decorative flourish stapled onto characters who haven’t earned it. Schlegel’s satire targets the inflationary economics of meaning: once transcendence is mandatory, it turns into background noise.

Context matters. Schlegel sits at the fault line between early Romanticism and the philosophical systems of his day (Fichte, Schelling, the looming shadow of Hegel). German letters in the late 18th and early 19th century were obsessed with totality, unity, world-spirit - grand frameworks that promised to reconcile art, self, and cosmos. Schlegel, himself a Romantic theorist, isn’t rejecting ambition; he’s policing it. The intent is critical self-awareness: a reminder that literature can’t shortcut its way to the Absolute by name-dropping it, and that the hunger for the Infinite can easily curdle into parody when it becomes a reflex rather than a discovery.