Schleiermacher and Friedrich Schlegel

AbstractSchlegel and Schleiermacher met in Berlin in 1796. Although working independently, they shared much in common, particularly in philosophy. In his later years, Schleiermacher went back to the period of “symphilosophy” with Schlegel in early Romanticism, as shown in the first section. The second section describes briefly the encounter between Schleiermacher and Schlegel, as well as the development of this relationship, and the traces it left on Schleiermacher. The third section demonstrates how Schleiermacher introduced early Romantic philosophy into the epoch dominated by Hegel as well as the post-Hegelian philosophical epoch. He did this by appropriating the store of ideas created in the “symphilosophical” laboratory of ideas in a systematically directed way, and in doing so transforming it into a discursive form beyond the paradoxes of early Romanticism in the fields of hermeneutics, dialectics, and with the translation of Plato’s dialogues. The last section describes the divergent paths Schlegel and Schleiermacher took after their quarrel about their joint project to translate Plato, which was a breaking point in their relationship.