Caught between his loyalty to Gottsched’s school and a genuine interest for an aesthetics of affects close to that of the Zurich circle, Johann Elias Schlegel’s ambivalent stand shows in both his theoretical and comedy writing. Specifically as a comedy writer, Schlegel identifies the ultimate goal of comedy in the representation of the inborn ambiguity of human behaviour, rather than in the censorship of vice. His work ridicules both the ipercultivated courts and those new-born classes’ attempts to adopt courtly modes of interaction. A canonical piece of 18th-century German literary history, "Die stumme Schönheit" stages the characters’ wish of distinction together with an absolute cult of reason. Social change shows in its link with a new understanding of human nature grounded on a poise between intellect and sensitivity. Such balance appears already tied to that same paradigm of totality which is gaining the stage in mid-18th-century philosophical and aesthetical discussion.
