In 1798 the Romantic writer Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) boldly reduced the age in which he lived to three dominant tendencies. That the French Revolution, the most significant single political and cultural development in modernity, should be written large no one then or now would dispute. Alongside this historical cataclysm, however, Schlegel ranks phenomena from the republic of letters: a philosophy, Johann Gottlieb Fichte's ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ (theory of knowledge); and a literary work, the novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–6; Wilhelm Meister's years of apprenticeship) by Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832). Schlegel's intention, of course, is to emphasise and provoke. But he clearly intends a fundamental relation between the Revolution, philosophy and literature in our epoch. Of what kind? The age around 1800, it will be argued with Schlegel, was one in which literature and philosophy self-consciously co-operated and competed for Germany's intellectual leadership. The Revolution ultimately determined their relationship. Both literature and philosophy sought words to express its meaning. Both hoped to launch actions out of those words.

The Revolution then as now was in fact seen philosophically – as the fulfilment of the project of Enlightenment, which Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) had famously defined as the emergence of humanity from its self-imposed tutelage, that is, as a race of fully self-conscious free beings. Concretely, as Kant said, Enlightenment meant rampant criticism – of all received forms of thought and action – by the new authority in matters of truth: human reason (KrV, 13n).