10 - The Political Implications of Friedrich Schlegel’s Poetic, Republican Discourse

Summary

Millán Brusslan focusses upon what was unique about Schlegel’s philosophical lens, a lens uniquely suited to capturing social injustice. She undertakes an examination of the roots of Schlegel’s philosophical pluralism and his project of blending philosophy and poetry. She argues that Schlegel’s push to blend disciplines was part of a project to reform our approach to truth, a topic explored in Sections One and Two of the paper.The new philosophical lens developed by Schlegel allowed him to see what other thinkers overlooked and to address urgent social issues that needed attention, especially the exclusion of women from philosophy.The reforming spirit of Schlegel’s thought is most systematically developed in an essay on Kant’s Perpetual Peace, and so in Sections Three and Four of the paper, Kant’s essay and Schlegel’s critique of it are analyzed to highlight the political implications of Schlegel’s thought.