Prophetic Poetry, ad Infinitum: Friedrich Schlegel’s Daybreak

Abstract

This chapter revolves around Friedrich Schlegel’s Daybreak, a project that preoccupied him throughout his writing career, from the last days of early Romanticism to his notebooks from the 1820s. Based loosely on Jacob Böhme’s Aurora, Daybreak should have exemplified the genre Schlegel called “prophetic poetry.” Although Daybreak exists only in the form of posthumously published fragments, the first and lengthiest of these notes introduces nothing less than a cosmology on the basis of the mathematical infinite series, perpetually divided between 1 and 0. The order of number, however, does not yield a language purified of semantic ambivalence. Instead, a close reading of the fragment, along with a reconstruction of Schlegel’s engagement with Schelling’s philosophy of nature and Plato’s Sophist, shows the principle from which he derives the cosmos to have dire consequences for language and truth. For it leads Schlegel to the premise of infinite divisibility that Plato’s Socrates contests in order to establish the possibility of a propositional grammar that would allow for veridical distinctions. This divisibility, which Schlegel’s syntax reflects, results in an ontology akin to the confusion of tongues: the language of his prophetic poetry allows being and time to be parsed in many ways at once.