 Schlegel’s critique of first-principle philosophy is rooted (like Novalis’) in a sense of the ungraspability of the absolute or unconditioned. (As Novalis puts it in the first of his “Pollen” fragments: “Everywhere we seek the unconditioned [das Unbedingte], but find only things [Dinge].”) More specifically, Schlegel holds, against Reinhold and Fichte, that “there are no first principles that are universally suitable [zweckmässig] companions and guides to truth” (KA XVIII.518, #13): even “self-evident” propositions can be doubted and so require demonstration (thus opening up an infinite regress), and any proposition can be proved in an “infinite” number of ways. For Schlegel “every proof is infinitely perfectible” (KA XVIII, 518, #9), and the task of philosophy is not one of searching to find an unconditioned first principle but rather one of engaging in an (essentially coherentist) process of infinite progression and approximation.