WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Heimliche Hemlock: Friedrich Schlegel

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

I discuss Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophical Fragments with Ellia He.

You're listening to Heimlichah Hemlock on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7. Hello and welcome to episode two of Heimlicha Hemlock, a podcast where I talk about romanticism. Today I'm here again with Elia He, and we're going to talk about Friedrich Schlagel's philosophical fragments. Friedrich Schlagel was born on the 10th of March 1772, and he died in 1829. and he was a poet-literary critic, philosopher, and endologist. And fun fact, he ended up marrying Regina Olson, with whom Kierkegaard broke off an engagement because he said, and I quote, there was something spectral about me,

something no one can endure who has to see me every day and have a real relationship with me. So, aside from that little funny tidbit, he wrote some fragments that are very different from Novalz's Blutenstab. As you can see, Elia. Yeah. And we're going to talk about a few that are especially fun or whatever you may call them. Spicy baby.

Spicy, exactly. Anyway, would you like to start? All right. Well, should we start from the front matter? Sure. Here, number eight, how about this? A good preface must be at once the square root and the square of its book. What do you make of that?

I find it very interesting because he wants a good preface to at the same time reduce the whole thing, like get to the root. I guess square root, if it's the radical, you would get to the root of that entire book. But you also want to square it. That makes sense. Seems that he's talking about a kind of. kind of base kernel from which everything arises in a kind of harmonious relation to the other sides in which it branches off maybe. It reminds me a lot of something that came up in the

Theatetus when Socrates starts talking about the different functions of numbers with his young interlocutor. Yeah, but also having it to be the square of its book, I mean, that's like, Yeah. I don't know. It's like, have I ever seen a preface that's done that much for a book? I don't know exactly. That seems like a sort of thing where you could be too much telling rather than showing if you do it incorrectly. Yeah. But there is a certain extent to which you may be able to start something out.

I wonder, though. I guess there are certain books where the prefaces have become more famous than the book themselves. I don't know. if that's what he's going for. But, I mean, that is definitely a goal to aim for. That's true. I think that, as we'll see you later in this, he makes a lot of generalizations about writing

that may apply pretty well to particular forms of writing, but don't necessarily apply across the board. I'm going to start on one, because I think it's very, I don't know, It's very apt. It says many so-called artists are really products of nature's art. I think that with this, he's getting at the idea that a lot of artists try to produce something that is an expression of their emotions or of what they think.

But really, you're going to have to channel something better than yourself if you want to engage your audience, because a lot of people really aren't that interested in what you have to say. if it's just your feelings or something that doesn't get it then. But there's typically a nature behind a lot of the things that you may feel or want to express that is much more interesting, frankly, than what your immediate impressions may be. Yeah, and perhaps he's being very romantic in the sense that he does not want to just be a product of his own time and culture. and he wants to somehow reach beyond that. That makes sense, but the beautiful thing about this also is that

your relationship with your time and your culture and what has gone into what you are is able to form some sort of dialectic with the universal truths. Right. Yeah, and it kind of reminds me of, in an opposite manner, like Lewis says at the end of mere Christianity that you shouldn't just try to be original all the time. You should simply try to state the truth as truthfully as you can and beautifully as you can. And by doing that, even if you feel like you're repeating what everybody else has all said for thousands of years, it's like that's when you actually find something really worth thinking upon.

That's certainly. All right. Do you have any segments that you found us for? How about you go again? All right. I found 20 really interesting. A classical text must never be entirely comprehensible. But those who are cultivated and who cultivate themselves must always want to learn more from it.

I found this one great. I really... One of the things that annoys me the most, especially from people who have started on the road to educate. education. Or those who, better put, I think, would be those who have started reading what we typically call the great books. I don't know how many freshmen or even seniors I've met who say, yeah, I've read The Republic by Plato. And, you know, maybe they've read it twice because they've had two in a class. Maybe they've even read book 10, which is very rare. but then they'll say okay yeah I've read it um and therefore they seem to imply that that makes them

the master of it somehow and that they can't really get much more out of it and that that strikes me is incredibly arrogant to think that you've exhausted a text by that i mean i've gone back to the republic at least three times now and i still every single time I'm not really astounded because I've noticed it a bit earlier but every single time

I go back to it I just realize how much of it I didn't catch the previous times and I think the great tics are really like that yeah definitely I like the word cultivated here who are cultivated and who cultivate themselves must always want to learn more from it because you get this image of a garden

and pruning and you growing not like in isolation by yourself through by your own means but being guided by some type of master and in and placed in some type of ordered structure. Yeah something that strikes me about that as well, that cultivation image is that in a lot of ways your memory is kind of what serves you. and in this case you have plants that wither with the seasons and in a similar fashion your memory withers when you go a little while without reading it and you can once you kind of know how to cultivate the ground and you have the methods in place you can you may have better luck

unless you exhaust the soil I guess we're pushing this metaphor quite far but yeah if you're making too much tobacco then that's then they'll ruin the soil and then you no more memory sorry no but if you use it for the wrong purposes that might also yeah but your memory like the plants goes away so you have to renew it right yeah and there's always a new facet to be like

you're listening to hymn lock on radio free hillsdale 101.7 okay I really liked 26 as well novels are theocratic dialogues of our time and this free form has become the refuge of common sense in its flight from pedantry. Yeah, that one struck me as all, definitely. Yeah, it's funny to me how internal a form the novel is. Yeah, you're right.

And it's like, we rarely, yeah, I guess the dialogue form of reasoning and writing prose has kind of died out in the modern age. But novels are some, I mean, some of the literature that we have now, that literally, that literally has dialogue in it, but also you are getting inside the mind of this author who has all these different voices debating. I don't know, but I wouldn't, I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that the dialogical form has gone away, or the dialectical form has gone away, because even though we don't have as many formal platonic dialogues that we see, we do have a lot of things like Cormac McCarthy or Hemingway, where all you see within the reader's mind is what is on the page and what he does and what he says,

which may be very limited, but that gives you, I mean, you still see novels like that. Yeah, in the novels, it definitely flourishes. Yeah, and I guess one of the things about the art of the novel is, and he mentions this later, he's trying to square the idea of the classical forms like tragedy and comedy in the Aristotelian sense of them with what the novel is. Maybe we'll see a bit more of that later. Maybe not. We'll see how much time we have.

Anyway, did you find anything else on that page or elsewhere? Yeah, go ahead. Gracefulness is life lived correctly. Is sensuality intuiting and shaping itself? that's 29. I was reading this one and I was wondering what he meant by sensuality. Yeah, I think it's a very different, it's important to say that sensuality in this meaning,

he seems to mean more about being applicable to the senses rather than what we think of the word now. And also gracefulness, he seems to be talking about a more chivaler. meaning of gracefulness, where it's the kind of harmonized way of being in the world where it is ordered but also free. So that would be more like harmony is life lived correctly, is... More like perception? Yes. What is available to our sense perceptions, intuiting and shaping itself.

Right. Kind of like Aristotle, like finding the goal, I mean not... Or finding the right action for every situation. Yes, and it also seems very Aristotelian in its shaping of itself, because that is a very teleological view. Yeah. Of how this grieffulness is. Okay, this one. I'm going to tackle the writing.

37. Let's see how this one strikes us. In order to write well about something, one shouldn't be interested in it any longer. To express an idea with due circumspection, one must have relegated it. it wholly to one's past. One must no longer be preoccupied with it. As long as the artist is in the process of discovery and inspiration, he is in a state which, as far as communication is concerned, is at the very least intolerant. He wants to blurt out everything, which is a fault of young geniuses or a legitimate prejudice of old bunglers. And so he fails to recognize the value and the

dignity of self-restriction, which is, after all, for the artist as well as the man, the first and the last, the most necessary and the highest duty. Most necessary because wherever one does not restrict oneself, one is restricted by the world, and that makes one a slave. The highest because one can only restrict oneself at these points and places, where one possesses infinite power, self-creation, and self-destruction. Even a friendly conversation which cannot be freely broken off at any moment, completely arbitrarily, has something intolerant about that. But a writer who can and does talk himself out, who keeps nothing back for himself, and who likes to tell everything he knows is very much to be pitied. There are only three mistakes to

guard against. First, what appears to be unlimited free will, and consequently seems and should seem to be irrational or super irrational, nonetheless must still at bottom be simply necessary and rational. Otherwise, the whim becomes willful, becomes intolerant, and self-restriction turns into self-destruction. Second, don't be in too much of a hurry for self-restriction, but first give rein to self-creation, invention, and inspiration, until you're ready. Third, don't exaggerate self-restriction. This one seemed possibly quite questionable. There's some good points. I definitely agree with the first point about unlimited free will, where he says still at the bottom,

there must be necessary, there must be simply the necessary and the rational. Otherwise, when becomes willful and it takes over, and you become enslaved to that. So if it is to remain free, there must at bottom be principles and axioms. I think one thing he's trying to get at here, with which I do very much agree,

is something that I've, that has come to my attention. recently from this guy named to Glary McInerney who teaches, who used to teach about how to write, especially academically. And he makes the distinction of writing in order to formulate your own thoughts and then writing in order to change your reader's views about something. And a lot of people, especially expert writers, use the writing process in order to understand. things themselves because it's way too complicated to just do in your head. Like once you're, once you are the expert in that field and you're trying to convey something.

But that's not necessarily effective writing. And in the same way, I think right here Schlegel is talking about how some people are very blabby in the way they write. They just think that, yeah, they think that freedom and saying what comes to mind and flow, flow state, I suppose, is what is necessary. But in a lot of cases, writing really is a kind of discipline. Yeah, a distillation of the waterfall of yours. Yeah, at the same time, there seems to be something very antipotonic in what he says about how it should be rational.

I mean, there seems to be, there seems to be something in the irrational. that can be a great source of inspiration, especially poetic inspiration. Correct, yeah. Like the symposium. Yeah, I wonder what type of writing he is really getting up. Yeah, the symposium is just lingering in my head right here. Definitely, yeah, and Tamaeus. We have to...

I will do an episode on the symposium very soon. Okay. Should we go to 47? Yeah, let's do that. Whoever desires the infinite doesn't know what he desires, but one can't turn the sentence around. Man, Schlingle writes in a funny... Yeah. He writes a lot about wit, but he is truly a witty writer himself.

Very such, so. What do you make of that? Well, first of all, it is just humorous that when you don't know what you desire, that does not mean you desire the infinite. But to desire the infinite. I guess. If it is truly infinite, can we comprehend that? No, I think... I've heard from a lot of mathematicians.

And I guess it's true experientially as well. When you hear a big number, your mind kind of turns off. Right. And so you say something like infinity. This is just a heuristic so your brain has a way to grasp. That's a really big thing. Right. Or a really manifold thing.

Yeah. Part of me wonders if this has a negative connotation to it or if it doesn't. Because to not know what you desires, that he doesn't know what it is he desires, because that might not be such a bad thing to not be able to comprehend what you desire. That's exactly what I was thinking, because some things that are most worthy of desiring, like love, for instance, or the beauty or good. And you've, any of the transcendentals as well, like, they aren't simply available to our, like, I suppose they aren't easily reducible to what we can cognitively say or positively say or posit about them in a certain instance. I mean, their entire Socratic dialogues on what is beauty? Is it, like, what is this relation to the good? Yeah.

It reminds me of number 14, actually. We go back in it says, in poetry, too, every whole can be a part, in every part really a whole. And so it's like, maybe we only have a piece of an experience with what love actually is or what beauty actually is. But in some way, that has encompassed the entirety of it. In other ways, you will never understand. even if you had the entirety of an infinite, it would only be part, I suppose. Yeah. Which doesn't make sense, but in that way we can't comprehend.

But we desire to, nonetheless. Okay. We might only have time for one more, so I think I'll direct us to 55. A really free and cultivated person ought to be able to attune himself at will to being philosophical or philological. Critical or poetical. Historical. Ancient or modern. Quite arbitrarily, just as one tunes an instrument at any time and to any degree.

And this one hit me as saying, it doesn't necessarily say that you should be a dilettante, because that implies a kind of shallow, desiring of the infinite in a way. or your master of all Jack of all trades, master of none Exactly But rather what he seems to be getting at

Is something that I found a lot in Gertes's scientific writings as well When he's talking about What is truly beauty in adaptation And it seems to be more a perfection of form Or an adaptability A perfection of form Or an adaptability That allows you to be

fit enough to delve deeply into many different things. But it is, it does imply that you actually delve into them. It just means that you're not hindered by being overly specialized in one thing and completely unequipped in everything else. So it seems to be a kind of internal harmony that allows for all of this. Right. I mean, it's just liberal education written all over this one. Yeah. Yeah. You have a freedom not from things that you are not restricted, but you have a freedom for things that you're able and willing to understand and die. Wonderful.

All right, and with that, we must close the podcast. Thank you. Thank you. Well, thank you for listening to Hamlin-Hanlock on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM.