Heinrich von Kleist and Kantian Philosophy

1.

Goethe's words, that "everything living creates an atmosphere around itself," apply in a very special way to great philosophical thought formations. They do not merely exist in isolation in the empty space of concept and abstraction, but rather prove themselves in various ways as living spiritual driving forces. Their true essence fully emerges only in this multiplicity of effects they exert on their time and on great individuals. But in this breadth of effect lies, of course, an immediate danger to the sharpness and definiteness of their concept. The more powerfully the stream swells, the harder it becomes to recognize the purity of the original source within it and its course. Thus, the historian of philosophy and general intellectual history often finds himself confronted with a peculiar methodological dilemma. He cannot refrain from tracing a fundamental philosophical idea of systematic power and significance into its historical ramifications and further developments: for only in this form of activity is its concrete historical being fulfilled. But on the other hand, the characteristic definiteness, the unity and coherence that the idea possessed in the mind of its first originator, seems to be increasingly lost. As the idea appears to progress, it subtly shifts from place to place. It seems to gain the richness of historical effectiveness only at the cost of its logical clarity; the initially firm outline of the concept blurs more and more, the further we follow its indirect and derived historical consequences.

Nowhere is this state of affairs and the fate of the great philosophical systems more evident than in the development of Kantian philosophy. From its very first appearance, Kantian doctrine proved its inner vitality by attracting the most diverse spiritual elements and forces and, with and from them, creating a new, distinctive atmosphere around itself. But through this haze that envelops it, the actual intellectual core of the Kantian system seems to become increasingly unrecognizable. The history of philosophy, like the general history of ideas, shows the same typical development here. Just as heterogeneous and conflicting as the theoretical-speculative interpretation of Kant's fundamental doctrines by Fichte and Schelling, by Schopenhauer, Fries, and Herbart, was the impression received by minds such as Herder and Goethe, Schiller and Kleist. They all sought in it not primarily an abstract-conceptual doctrine, but rather felt it as an immediate force of life. But in absorbing it in this way, they simultaneously imbued it with their own characteristic sense of life. In a positive and a negative sense, in the resistance they offered to Kantian doctrine and in the power with which they allowed themselves to be seized and determined by it, all these men simultaneously expressed their own overall view of the content and meaning of existence and brought the fundamental direction of their striving to subjective consciousness and clarity.

No one experienced this significance of Kantian doctrine more deeply and intimately than Heinrich von Kleist – and precisely for this reason, it stands out all the more powerfully in his case, as he resisted it with all the strength and passion, with all the personal energy of his being. If Goethe, from the outset, confronted Kantian philosophy with a certain cheerful serenity and assurance, only to fall more and more under its spell due to motives inherent in his own development; if Schiller, after his first closer acquaintance, surrendered to it with unconditional zeal and did not rest until he had thoroughly permeated and mastered it through intensive methodical study; – Kleist seemed to possess the strength for neither the one nor the other. He struggled against the idea that he too should become one of the “victims of folly” for which Kantian philosophy already had so many on its conscience, but on the other hand, he felt powerless to tear apart the dialectical net, which was drawing tighter and tighter around him, with a swift decision. He succumbed to an intellectual force that he could not interpret – which he felt to be alien to his own being and nature. And with that, the entirety of his spiritual existence was annihilated. “My sole and highest goal,” he lamented, “has fallen; I have none left.” For it was not this or that result of world-view that was stolen from him by Kant, but the entirety of what he had hitherto carried within him in terms of purely inner demands, of logical and ethical postulates. The concept of truth itself had lost its meaning and content. “Even as a boy,” Kleist wrote in that well-known letter to Wilhelmine, “I had adopted the idea that perfection was the purpose of creation. I believed that one day after death, we would progress from the level of perfection we attained on this star to another, and that the treasure of truths we gathered here could also be used there one day. From this idea, a religion of its own gradually formed, and the endeavor never to stand still for a moment here below, and always to ceaselessly advance towards a higher degree of cultivation, soon became the sole principle of my activity. Cultivation seemed to me the only goal worthy of striving for, truth the only wealth worthy of possession.” But now, Kantian philosophy, as he understood it, showed him how a mere illusion of the intellect was hidden in this goal. “We cannot decide whether what we call truth is truly truth, or whether it only appears so to us. If the latter, then the truth we gather here is no more after death – and all striving to acquire a possession that follows us into the grave is in vain... Since this conviction, namely, that no truth is to be found here below, entered my soul, I have not touched a book again. I have walked idly around my room, I have sat at the open window, I have run out into the open, an inner restlessness finally drove me into taverns and coffee houses, I have visited plays and concerts to distract myself – – – and yet the only thought that my soul, in this external tumult, worked on with burning anxiety, was always this: your only, your highest goal has fallen.”

With the objectivity and precision that already characterize the great poet, the inner struggle that Kant's doctrine aroused in Kleist is depicted here. And yet, when one reads Kleist's letters to his fiancée and sister from this period again and again, when one compares them to earlier epistolary expressions and with the totality of what is known about his youth and educational history, new riddles and problems constantly arise. First, there is no doubt that it is not the very first impression of Kantian philosophy that is expressed in these Kleistian letters. The letters to Wilhelmine and Ulrike were written on March 22 and 23, 1801; but already in August 1800, a letter to his sister had mentioned and requested the sending of a separate writing by Kleist on Kantian philosophy, which must have been composed in Frankfurt. And around this time, he had not only become superficially acquainted with Kant's doctrine, but he had already assigned it a specific place in his own "life plan" – one knows what weight this word held for the young Kleist. In November 1800, he spoke to Wilhelmine about the plan to go to Paris to transplant the latest philosophy to France, where it was still entirely unknown. Could Kleist have conceived such a plan before he himself was familiar with the basic tenets of Kant's doctrine? And in fact, as a closer examination of the correspondence shows, he had at that time at least familiarized himself with Kant's doctrine to the extent that the Kantian conceptual language and terminology had become generally known to him in its main features. A passage in a letter to Wilhelmine from May 1800 subordinates a question he poses to her, which he develops with the well-known pedantic circumlocution of these youthful letters, to the three perspectives of what understanding, what judgment, and what reason are capable of grasping in it; these three functions being precisely delimited and contrasted with each other according to the instructions given in a passage of Kantian anthropology. Even more significant and characteristic, however, is that Kleist at this time stood entirely on Kantian ground in his philosophical-religious convictions. It has rightly been pointed out that his letters contain numerous literal echoes of individual passages in Kant's "Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason."[1] The idea of pure moral rational faith, as Kant developed it and as he had opposed it to all religious sham service, had become completely alive in Kleist. On the basis of this idea, he also dismisses the question of the individual's continued existence as mere speculative brooding. Neither in transcendent beliefs about a God and an afterlife, nor in the fulfillment of external religious customs – he declares – can the true core of religion consist; for otherwise, religion itself would become an ambiguous and changeable thing, different at every moment and in every place on earth. "But within us, a precept burns – and it must be divine, because it is eternal and universal, it says: fulfill your duty; and this sentence contains the teachings of all religions. All other sentences follow from this and are founded in it, or they are not contained in it, and then they are unfruitful and useless. That there is a God, that there is eternal life, a reward for virtue, a punishment for vice, all these are sentences that are not founded in that one, and which we can therefore do without. For certainly, we are meant to be able to do without them according to the will of the Deity itself, because it has made it impossible for us to see and comprehend them.Wouldn't you still do what's right, even if the thought of God and immortality were just a dream? I would. Therefore, I don't need these concepts for my righteousness; but sometimes, when I've done my duty, I allow myself to think with quiet hope of a God who sees me and of a joyful eternity that awaits me... But whether this belief is mistaken or not – no matter! Whether a future awaits me or not – no matter! I fulfill my duty for this life, and if you ask me, why?, the answer is easy: simply because it is my duty. I therefore limit my activities entirely to this earthly life. I don't want to worry about my destiny after death, for fear of neglecting my destiny for this life... In doing so, I am convinced that I will certainly intervene in the great eternal plan of nature, if I only fully fill the place she put me in on this earth. Not in vain did she assign and set me this present sphere of activity, and I dreamed this away and investigated the future – isn't the future a coming present, and do I want to dream this present away again?

We had to compare these two passages – one from a letter dated September 19, 1800, the other from a letter dated March 22, 1801 – with precision and in detail: for it is in this juxtaposition that the problem inherent in Kleist’s inner relationship to Kant’s doctrine emerges with full clarity. What was it about Kant’s doctrine that so gripped Kleist, already a student of Kant in September 1800, that he suddenly saw his entire past and all his previous aspirations vanish before him? What new element caused this upheaval of all his former fundamental convictions? Was it the progression from Kant’s ethical and philosophical writings on religion to his main theoretical works, was it the intensive study of the “Critique of Pure Reason,” that brought about this sudden shift in Kleist? It has been generally asserted, without, as far as I can see, any truly conclusive proof being provided. For the traditional catchphrase of Kant as the “all-destroyer,” whose power Kleist too had now experienced – a catchphrase that regularly recurs in this context – fundamentally explains and says nothing at all. Kant might have appeared as the “all-destroyer” to the older generation, Mendelssohn’s generation, who had gradually grown accustomed to seeing not only truth, but the truth itself, in the tenets of the prevailing Wolffian school system and in the dogmas of rationalist metaphysics. However, two decades had passed since then, during which the positive power and content of Kant’s doctrine had unmistakably emerged on all sides. “What particularly repelled Kleist about Kant’s doctrine” – thus writes Wilhelm Herzog, who has dealt with Kleist’s relationship to Kant more thoroughly than any other Kleist biographer – “was the questionable relativity of all things, was the icy skepticism that grinned at him from that sober limitation. He longed for the absolute, and Kant taught him that nothing is fixed.” But where and when did Kant, did the “Critique of Pure Reason,” teach anything of the sort? One might at best, though extremely inaccurately and misleadingly, describe critical philosophy as the doctrine of the relativity of all things: but a relativization of the concept of truth is clearly the exact opposite of what it historically and systematically aimed for. Hadn’t Kant himself, with increasing emphasis and passionate vehemence, contrasted his “transcendental” idealism with Berkeley’s psychological idealism, and hadn’t he placed the difference between the two doctrines in the fact that Berkeley’s idealism transformed the sensory world and experience into mere illusion, while his own intention, conversely, was to comprehend and establish the truth of experience? Or was it a truth of a different form and origin than empirical truth that Kleist found destroyed by Kant’s doctrine? As for so-called “metaphysical” truth, as for the attempt to judge transcendent problems and objects from pure theoretical reason, Kant’s critique had indeed pulled the rug out from under him. But Kleist himself, as his assessment of religious questions in the letter of September 1800 proves, had already inwardly renounced it. And however he might judge it: one thing was certain for him, that our judgment about the meaning and value of life itself could not and should not in any way depend on the resolution of this question.For this value – as Kleist had just emphasized in truly Kantian terms – cannot be based on the acceptance of this or that doctrine, not on knowledge that is beyond our reach, but must be founded on the value that the personality gives to itself, and which it alone, independent of all external supports and aids, is able to bestow upon itself. And as for this ethical self-worth as such and its certainty, there was not the slightest doubt that Kant had always and everywhere, in his theoretical as well as in his ethical and religious-philosophical writings, asserted it with the same unshakable certainty – that he regarded it as universally valid and necessary, that he viewed it in every sense as absolutely “unconditional,” indeed, as the actual expression of the unconditional itself. Thus, only the truth of science remained: the truth of mathematics and physics, which Kleist could have considered threatened and destroyed by critical doctrine. But could he have overlooked that mathematics in the “Critique of Pure Reason” was everywhere described and praised as the “pride of reason,” and that it is precisely its share that, in the critical system, also establishes the truth and scientific value of all other theoretical disciplines? Must not Kleist, who at that time was himself striving for physics and its scientific understanding, have grasped and appreciated the immense theoretical work that Kant had undertaken to find the first “a priori” grounds of this science and thereby give it the solidity of a closed system? Did not the fundamental question of the “Critique of Pure Reason”: the question of how synthetic judgments a priori are possible, always point back to this goal, to the goal of the objective foundation of physical knowledge in general and necessary rational propositions? But even if one assumes that Kleist, who read Kant not with cool factual criticism but with the highest subjective passion and subjective bias, overlooked all these subtle methodical differences and merely surrendered to the overall impression of the doctrine of transcendental idealism, not all difficulties are thereby eliminated. For this very doctrine, in its general outlines, must have been known to Kleist even before the decisive letter to Wilhelmine. It is presupposed everywhere in Kant’s ethical and religious-philosophical writings, and it forms the latent center to which everything else always leads back. One cannot take a step forward in Kant’s writings, whatever topic they may deal with, without encountering this premise, which dominates Kant’s entire world of thought, everywhere. Kant’s doctrine of the intelligible, of the “noumenon” of freedom, remains incomprehensible without its necessary, methodical correlate – without the doctrine of the phenomenality of sensually-empirical reality. If, therefore, Kleist was now seized by this doctrine in a completely new sense and overwhelmed by it, then it must have been a new intellectual motive that confronted him from it; – it must have been a completely new illumination in which he now beheld the whole of the critical-idealistic doctrines.'}]}```

We see, then, that the less we content ourselves with mere general catchphrases, the deeper we try to penetrate into the intellectual process that took place in Kleist, and the more concretely we try to shape our understanding of this process, the more the riddles and difficulties multiply. But what if another work, other than the “Critique of Pure Reason,” could be named, from which Kleist might have drawn his new view of the nature of transcendental idealism, and from which the new stance he now takes towards it would also become immediately understandable? In his report to Wilhelmine, Kleist speaks of “the newer, so-called Kantian philosophy,” with which he had recently become acquainted. An expression that must certainly be striking, for at that time in Germany – as an often-quoted verse states – “every child” knew of Kant and his doctrine, or thought they knew something about it. So what did this strange circumlocution mean? One would understand it immediately if the work to which Kleist refers here, while presenting and proclaiming itself as a faithful expression of Kantian doctrine, was still subject to debate as to whether this claim was justified. Now, in the year 1800 – barely a year before Kleist’s letter to Wilhelmine – a text had appeared which, even in its preface, stated that it intended to present completely all that was useful from the “newer philosophy” outside of the school: – “presented in the order in which it would have to develop for artless reflection.” “The deeper preparations made against objections and excesses of sophisticated understanding, that which is merely a basis for other positive sciences, finally, what belongs solely to pedagogy in the broadest sense, i.e., for the deliberate and arbitrary education of the human race, should remain excluded from its scope… The book is therefore not intended for professional philosophers… It should be understandable for all readers who are capable of understanding a book at all… It should attract and warm and powerfully draw the reader from the sensual to the supersensual…” Anyone familiar with the way of thinking, with the educational ideals, and with the inner intellectual development of the young Kleist will have to admit how much the very announcement of such a goal must have captivated him. And that his interest was directed to the book to which it belonged, for that, if nothing else, the mere title of the book had to ensure. The “Vocation of Man” was to be taught in it. But that was the great theme that reappeared again and again in Kleist’s youth letters, that constantly occupied him himself, and that he discussed with tiring persistence again and again with his friends, with his sister, with his fiancée. “Let us both, dear Wilhelmine,” he wrote, for example, from Würzburg in 1800, “keep our vocation fully in mind, so that we may one day fully fulfill it. To this alone we want to direct all our activity. We want to develop all our faculties, precisely only to fulfill this vocation… Judge for yourself, how can we limited beings, who can only survey such an infinitely small part of eternity, our span-long earthly life, how can we dare to fathom the plan that nature designed for eternity. And if this is not possible, how can any just deity demand of us to intervene in this eternal plan of hers, from us, who are not even able to conceive of it.But the purpose of our earthly existence, that we can undoubtedly discover, and to fulfill it, that God can therefore rightfully demand of us.” Let us assume that Kleist, in the intellectual mood expressed in this letter, arrived back in Berlin a month later: wouldn't he almost necessarily and with the keenest interest have reached for a book that had just been published then, and which had the purpose of man as its theme and Fichte as its author? Fichte was then—apart from everything else—at the center of general, public-political, and public-literary interest. The atheism dispute, which had forced him to give up his teaching position in Jena, was still fresh in everyone's memory. Berlin had been the first refuge he had found against the continued persecution of the Saxon government, and the house of Friedrich Schlegel and Dorothea Veit offered him the first hospitable reception. If one further considers that Kleist, when he returned to Berlin from his Würzburg journey, had already made his first contact with the literary circles there—a letter to Ulrike from that time reports that he rarely attended social gatherings, but that of all circles, the Jewish ones would be his favorites, if they weren't so pretentious with their education—then one must consider it very unlikely from the outset that he would have passed by a phenomenon like Fichte and a work to which he was so diversely directed, and which also recommended itself to him through its promised popular form of presentation, without taking notice.

But of course, all these external factors alone have no probative force. We can only arrive at a decision by examining the substantive content of Fichte's work and comparing this content with Kleist's letters. The "Vocation of Man" is of decisive importance for Fichte's own literary and philosophical development: it precisely and sharply marks the turning point at which the "Science of Knowledge" takes on that new direction, through which it finally transitions into the later religio-philosophical version of the system. In this turning, Fichte is under the determining influence of Fr. Heinr. Jacobi's doctrine of faith. The entire third, positively constructive part of Fichte's work is dedicated to the development of the concept of faith and the demonstration that all true reality accessible to us is given to us only in faith and mediated solely through it. Jacobi's words, that we are all born in faith, are explicitly quoted and reinforced here. But what form does the theoretical doctrine of transcendental idealism now take, viewed from this point? From now on, it no longer constitutes the definitive, absolutely conclusive result, but only a transitional point of contemplation, which, however, is indispensable as such. From the standpoint of doubt, as developed in the first part of the work, and from the standpoint of knowledge, as developed in the second part of the work, the necessity of that faith, to which it aims to lead us as the ultimate result of philosophical reflection, first becomes apparent. Doubt arises and sharpens more and more as we compare our concept of "nature," with which our unbiased contemplation necessarily begins, with the moral postulates, with the idea of freedom and self-responsibility, which we also carry within us as an undeniable demand. Nature, insofar as it is conceived at all, can only be conceived as an absolutely seamless connection of things and forces, only as a self-contained sequence of events, in which every later state is completely and unambiguously conditioned by the preceding one. All phenomena of human consciousness, all that we call volitional decision and volitional expression, must also be thought of as integrated and subordinated to this connection. The will itself is only a special form of the active forces of nature, which stands in the closest connection with the totality of its other forms and remains dependent on them in the strictest sense. It is not I who acts, but that general potential, that system of forces, which we designate by the name "Nature," acts within me: and to the I remains only the observation, only the reflective consciousness of this activity. Everything that exists is thoroughly determined; it is what it is, and absolutely nothing else. "In every part of being, the whole lives and works, because every part is what it is only through the whole; but through this it is necessarily that." "Give nature the course of a muscle, the bend of a hair on a specific individual, and it will, if it could think as a whole and answer you, tell you all the good deeds and all the misdeeds of his life from beginning to end. The virtuous is a noble, the vicious an ignoble and reprehensible, yet necessarily resulting from the context of the universe, nature."

It is in vain that our moral feeling and moral desire protest against this firmly established system of determinism: determinism, which is nothing other than the expression of thought itself and its supreme principle, the “principle of sufficient reason,” ultimately “explains” even these seemingly contradictory desires and is capable of understanding and deducing their necessity. On the basis of the concept of nature, no other solution is therefore possible; here there is no escaping the ultimate decisive consequence. But what if we were able to elevate ourselves above this very foundation in our reflection, if we were to realize that it possesses not absolute, but only relative validity? Is what we call nature, what we call the being and reality of things, a fixed, impenetrable fact that cannot be further resolved by us – or is it rather a concept that we ourselves, that our intellect and our knowledge bring to the contemplation of phenomena? And if that were the case: – then we would, of course, be freed at once from the inescapable compulsion with which things have hitherto threatened us. Let us substitute the idea of things for things in themselves, let us develop the rules according to which this world of ideas develops and builds itself up from original elements, from the first initial data of sensation: and the whole question immediately takes on a different form. The compulsion of being melts away and dissolves, to the extent that we grasp being itself as a mere image that thought projects before itself. And it is precisely in the mediation of this insight that the characteristic task of knowledge consists. Knowledge is not a reproduction and representation of an absolute being existing independently: rather, it shows, conversely, that this supposedly absolute being is an illusion that our reflection and our imagination project before us. The deception is overcome as soon as it is seen through; – as soon as we have realized how it arises and must arise according to the laws of thinking consciousness. Now we feel ourselves removed from the fatalistic necessity of the world and its interconnectedness: for we understand that it is only the independent and yet involuntary and insofar necessary acts of intelligence, that it is its original positing and acts, on which the possibility of any idea of an existence of things rests. Freedom is given back to us, while at the same time the absolute, the dogmatic substantiality of the world sinks away. –

Let us now return to Kleist and his letter, before we pursue the further elaboration of this fundamental idea in Fichte. It is well known that Kleist, in order to clarify the basic tenets of transcendental idealism to Wilhelmine, starts from a popular comparison and example. “If all people had green glasses instead of eyes, they would have to judge that the objects they perceive through them are green – and they would never be able to decide whether their eye shows them things as they are, or whether it adds something to them that belongs not to them, but to the eye. So it is with the understanding.” If this comparison were intended to sum up the teachings of the “Critique of Pure Reason,” it would be strange enough; for Kant, precisely, had always warned against attempting to illustrate and clarify what he called the “subjectivity” of the forms of intuition and the categories by means of “utterly inadequate examples” drawn from the realm of the subjectivity of sensory qualities. For him, as a critic of knowledge, there is a fundamental methodological difference here that cannot be blurred; for, as he concisely and emphatically stresses, no synthetic a priori judgments, no truly universally valid and necessary cognitions and truths can be derived from colors and sounds. Thus, the intuition of space, for Kant, is never on the same level as the sensation of color, but remains entirely different from it in terms of its truth character. The situation, however, was different as it presented itself in Fichte. We will not find the comparison with seeing through green glasses in his work; for here, as Kleist himself explains in a later letter to Wilhelmine, it is Kleist’s own addition, which he only temporarily used for popular clarification of the idea. “I have,” – he writes – “only used the eye in my letter as an explanatory example, because I could not present the dry language of philosophy to you myself.” But what was actually presented in this language by Fichte was not only the doctrine of the subjectivity of colors and sounds, but of the equally unconditional and exclusive subjectivity of our entire world of perception and intuition. “In all perception,” – thus the Fichtean “Spirit” instructs the “I” with whom he holds his dialogue in the “Vocation of Man” – “you first perceive only yourself and your own state; and what is not contained in this perception is not perceived at all. I would not tire of repeating it in all turns, if I had to fear that you had not yet grasped it, had not yet indelibly imprinted it upon yourself. – Can you say: I am conscious of external objects? – By no means – replies the I – if I take it precisely; for seeing and feeling, etc., with which I apprehend things, is not consciousness itself, but only that of which I am first and most immediately conscious. Strictly speaking, I could only say: I am conscious of my seeing or feeling of things .... Now, never forget again what you have now clearly understood. In all perception, you perceive merely your own state.”}]}```

And not the slightest change will be made to this fundamental decision if we now move from the sensory qualities to the objects of mathematical-physical knowledge, if we move from the world of tactile sensations, of smell and taste, of visual and auditory sensations, to the world of space and bodies in space. Space is certainly not a content of sensation; for every content of sensation is, as such, an absolutely unextended entity, related to a mere infallible point. But that we now go beyond this mere point – that we extend it to a line and a surface, and that we finally expand the surface into a body – this is also a necessity that is founded solely in the laws of consciousness, in the laws of our intuitive intelligence, and in nothing else. We do not grasp the absolute existence of an “external” thing in this, but only the necessity of our own intuition, which, by virtue of its nature, possesses this power of “going beyond” the mere punctual content of sensation. What we usually call the certainty of the “external world” is, therefore, nothing other than the certainty of that objectifying meaning inherent in intuition itself. We do not grasp space and the world of bodies by passively receiving them into our consciousness and merely mirroring them as something independently existing within it; rather, in both, we only perceive our own function of connecting points, lines, and surfaces. It is not a matter of an image of the “external” by the “internal,” but of a projection of the internal to the external. Thus, without any reservation, it holds true here as well: “the consciousness of the object is merely a consciousness of my production of a representation of the object, not recognized as such.” “You therefore see that all knowledge is merely knowledge of yourself, that your consciousness never goes beyond yourself, and that what you take for a consciousness of the object is nothing but a consciousness of your positing an object, which you necessarily accomplish simultaneously with sensation according to an inner law of your thinking.” “And now” – so the “Spirit” continues in its instruction to the “I” – “now it will be perfectly clear to you how something that originates from yourself can, indeed must, appear to you as a being outside yourself. You have penetrated to the true source of the representations of things outside you... You yourself are the thing; you yourself are, by the innermost ground of your being, your finitude, placed before yourself, and cast out of yourself; and everything you behold outside yourself is always yourself. This consciousness has been very aptly called intuition... (It is) an active looking at what I intuit, a looking out of myself from myself – – –. Therefore, this thing is also completely transparent to the eye of your spirit, because it is your spirit itself. You divide, you limit, you determine the possible forms of things and the relations of these forms prior to all perception.... There is no external sense, for there is no external perception. But there is an external intuition – not of the thing – but this external intuition – this knowledge appearing outside the subjective and floating before it – is itself the thing, and there is no other.”

This, then, is the circle in which, according to Fichte, the Ego and its knowledge are confined – and in which, indeed, both simultaneously reign as absolute masters. For the thought of a blind compulsion of nature, holding the Ego captive, is now eliminated along with the thought of the absolute existence of such a nature. The Ego has become free; for if, in the realistic fundamental view, it appeared as a mere part and product of nature, now nature, rather, appears as its work, as the work of its knowledge and its understanding. The condition, of course, to which this self-liberation remains tied, is that the newly acquired concept of the world and knowledge is not altered; that is, knowledge is recognized not as knowledge of reality itself, but as knowledge of representations, knowledge of images. Again, this result is presented with unrelenting harshness in Fichte’s "The Vocation of Man." In vain does the Ego once more rebel against all the consequences inherent in this thought: it must accept and acknowledge them. "There is nowhere anything enduring, neither outside me nor within me, but only an incessant change. I know nowhere of any being, nor even of my own. There is no being... Images are: they are the only thing that is, and they know of themselves in the manner of images: – images that float by, without there being anything for them to float by, that are connected by images of images, images without anything depicted in them, without meaning and purpose.... All reality transforms into a wondrous dream." Despairingly, the Ego seeks some help and salvation from the spirit from whom it received this doctrine, against this complete sinking into nothingness: it is only pushed back into this nothingness all the more deeply and mercilessly. "You wanted to know about your knowledge. Are you surprised that on your path you learned nothing further than – what you wanted to know about, your knowledge itself; and would you wish it to be otherwise? .. All knowledge, however, is only representation, and in it something is always demanded that corresponds to the image. Your demand cannot be satisfied by any knowledge, and a system of knowledge is necessarily a system of mere images, without any reality, meaning, or purpose.... And that is the only merit I claim for the system we have just found together: it destroys and annihilates error. It cannot give truth; for it is in itself absolutely empty. Now you are indeed seeking something real lying beyond the mere image – by your good right, as I well know – and a different reality than the one just destroyed.... But you would strive in vain to create it through your knowledge and from your knowledge, and to encompass it with your understanding. If you have no other organ to grasp it, you will never find it."

Let's imagine Kleist as a reader of these sentences – what impression must he have received from them! His pain, his despair, and his destruction would now be fully explained. In the preface to his "Vocation of Man," Fichte had wished for a reader who would not merely grasp historically everything said in the work, but who would genuinely and truly, while reading, engage in a dialogue with himself, ponder back and forth, draw conclusions, make decisions, and through his own effort and reflection, as if from within himself, develop and build up that way of thinking, of which the book merely presented an image. If there was ever a reader destined to fulfill these demands unconditionally, it was Heinrich von Kleist. He never merely absorbed historically a thought that came close to him; he lived in the great intellectual decisions into which he poured the whole fervor and strength of his soul. And everywhere, he insisted on unconditional truthfulness: on a ruthless either-or. If knowledge as such was truly absolutely empty, if it was a "system of mere images without any reality, meaning, or purpose," then for him, it had lost all value, even any relative or indirect value, with which a less unconditionally oriented spirit might have contented and comforted itself. "I have tried to force myself to work," he writes to his sister, "but I am disgusted by everything that is called knowledge. I cannot take a single step without being clearly aware of where I am going?" – Although the destruction of knowledge was not Fichte's final conclusion in his work; although, as we have seen, another spiritual "organ" was pointed to, by virtue of which the world of being, which had just been destroyed by philosophical reflection, was to be rebuilt on a new foundation and with new means. But even if we assume that Kleist followed these further developments with the same intellectual intensity and energy, we understand that they were unable to give him true calm and satisfaction. He undoubtedly could not fully comprehend the particular form and nature of Fichte's concept of faith, which appeared here as the ultimate solution. This concept is not yet developed with true sharpness and clarity in the explanations of the concluding part of the "Vocation of Man": – even the modern reader would have difficulty appreciating its peculiarity if he could not draw on Fichte's later works on the philosophy of religion for comparison and elucidation. Thus, Kleist might have seen in Fichte's decision, which removed the question from knowledge to assign it to "faith," only an escape into religious feeling, which he scorned and rejected as a mere compromise. Certainly: his wish and his longing, after he had experienced the collapse of knowledge within himself, often pointed him to such a way out. "Ah, Wilhelmine," he writes shortly thereafter from Dresden, recounting his participation in a Catholic service – "our service is nothing. It speaks only to the cold intellect, but a Catholic festival speaks to all senses. Right in front of the altar, on its lowest step, a common man always knelt, completely isolated from the others, his head bowed to the higher steps, praying with fervor. No doubt tormented him; he believed. – I had an indescribable longing to throw myself down beside him and weep. – Oh, just one drop of forgetfulness, and with pleasure I would become Catholic." But the unconditional sense of truth and the unconditional courage of truth, which Kleist held onto even to the point of inner self-destruction, always triumphs over every such mood and impulse.Even when Wilhelmine tried to comfort him with emotional arguments in response to his first letter, he calmly and firmly rejected them. He knew that the conflict, which arose from thinking, must also be resolved and brought to a conclusion on the same grounds. “I honor your heart and your effort to calm me” – he replied – “but the error does not lie in the heart, it lies in the understanding, and only the understanding can lift it. – – Dear Wilhelmine, I have fallen into error through myself; I can only lift myself through myself.” And indeed: what inner peace could it have granted Kleist if the solution to the problem was simply shifted from the realm of knowledge to the realm of faith? The verdict on the futility of knowledge itself remained sharp despite this. However, Kleist’s “life plan,” as he then understood it, was exclusively based on this knowledge, on pure theoretical understanding. If this knowledge was recognized as insufficient for the highest goal of human destiny, then he no longer had, no longer needed, any other goal. He cast it aside, as its essential content was lost to him. We are faced here with a process that is not only to be understood and judged as an external fate of Kleist, but which is deeply rooted in his character and his entire fundamental psychological orientation. We find here the same typical form that is peculiar to all great internal crises in Kleist’s life. Just as he stood before knowledge here, so later, after years of struggle, when he finally rejected “Guiscard,” he stood before his poetic calling. And just as later, so here he knew no limits, no contentment with a more or less. “In Paris,” he writes, “I read, rejected, and burned my work, as far as it was finished; and now it is over. Heaven denies me fame, the greatest of earthly goods; I throw all others at it, like a stubborn child.” For a nature like this, there was no mere compromise in thought any more than in life; once he had penetrated beyond a certain limit of comprehension, there was no turning back, however destructive the consequences he foresaw for himself might be. –

Finally, we can also point to an external factor here, which is nonetheless not insignificant in the overall scope of our consideration. In his first letter to Wilhelmine, Kleist reports that in his despair over the outcome he saw himself led to by "Kantian philosophy," he first confided in and entrusted his friend Rühle, and that Rühle had referred him to a recently published novel, "Der Kettenträger" (The Chain Bearer). "There reigns in this book," Rühle told him, "a gentle, friendly philosophy that will certainly reconcile you with everything you are angry about." "It is true," Kleist continues in his account, "he himself had drawn some thoughts from this book that had visibly made him calmer and wiser. I mustered the courage to read this novel. It spoke of things my soul had long since already grappled with. What was said in it had long since been refuted by me in advance... And this is supposed to be nourishment for my burning thirst?" The very rare "Kettenträger" has unfortunately not been accessible to me so far; but according to a summary that Minde-Pouet provided in his edition of Kleist's letters, it is about a "tangled novel, interspersed with impossible ghost, magic, and love stories, which aims to demonstrate that every human endeavor to control one's destiny is fruitless, as we are unfree and bound." And such a work could Rühle recommend to Kleist as a cure against the effect of reading the "Critique of Pure Reason"? What in the world did the "friendly philosophy" of this "Kettenträger" have to do with Kant's critique of knowledge, with transcendental aesthetics and transcendental analytics? If, on the other hand, one assumes that Kleist came from Fichte's "The Vocation of Man" and that he broadly outlined the content and train of thought of this book to Rühle, then this circumstance would also become clear. For we recall that all of Fichte's deductions on the value and disvalue of knowledge had originated from the problem of free will. To save the possibility of human freedom, the world of things had to be dissolved into a world of images that the understanding actively creates according to its own laws. But what if one renounced this goal; if there was a way to reconcile oneself with the idea of unfreedom of will and to make it appear in a milder and friendlier light? Then, it seemed, with the goal, the means also disappeared; then the realistic view could be maintained and with it, knowledge could retain the role of being an expression of absolute reality. Kleist, however, had already penetrated too deeply into the core of the problem to be content with such a pseudo-solution. At this very time, he pondered ever more deeply not only the possibility of knowledge, but also the possibility of willing, of free moral decision. And here, too, he soon found himself confronted with a limit of understanding. We believe we are free – but is not this belief also an empty illusion? Are we not tossed back and forth by the most unpredictable chance, which can intervene in our destiny daily and hourly and give it a completely new turn? When Kleist, because Ulrike half against his will offered him her company to Paris, is forced to demand passports for himself and his sister; when, to obtain these passports, he has to state scientific studies as the purpose of the journey and partly actually undertake them, while he was determined to escape science forever on this journey, then the feeling of how blind fate plays with man again becomes powerful within him.“Ah, Wilhelmine,” he writes, “we think ourselves free, and chance, all-powerful, leads us along on a thousand finely spun threads.” This reflection, and the mood it awakens in him, recurs again and again in his travel letters. Rightly has this been seen as one of the earliest essential seeds for Kleist’s first tragic work, for the conception of “The Schroffenstein Family.”[2] And even later, tragedy in Kleist is rooted in this fundamental feeling of his. What Goethe said of Shakespeare in his Strasbourg address, that all his poems revolve around the “secret point” where the peculiarity of our ego, the pretended freedom of our will, collides with the necessary course of the whole: this also applies to Kleist’s poetry. From this “secret point” alone can Kleist’s characters, Alkmene and Robert Guiscard, Penthesilea and Käthchen, Kohlhaas and the Marquise of O..., truly be interpreted. If Fichte’s writing was indeed what first presented the problem of free will in all its sharpness and clarity to Kleist, then it would be understandable that it must have meant more to Kleist from the outset than an abstract theoretical speculation: for the abstract conceptual discussion touched within him a psychological motive that was decisive for his entire poetic emotional conception of the world and the coherence of life. –

2.

More important, however, than the question of which source Kleist drew his knowledge of the doctrines of transcendental idealism from, is the other question of what inner transformation takes place in Kleist under the influence of these doctrines, and what significance the intellectual crisis he experienced here gains for the whole of his artistry. And here it can indeed be asserted – however paradoxical it may initially seem – that Kleist, in this crisis, not only arrived at a new theoretical worldview but that it was only in and through it that he truly grasped his fundamental artistic direction. This is the peculiar thing about Kleist’s development, which perhaps does not recur in this form in the life story of any other great poet, that it is a conceptual experience that simultaneously unleashed and freed the productive poetic forces within him and that first helped him to a full awareness of these forces.

The young Kleist's theoretical and ethical view of life, before the decisive influence of transcendental idealism, was shaped by the fundamental ideas of the eighteenth century, by the philosophy of the German Enlightenment. With precocious wisdom, the first philosophical essay we have from Kleist, his instruction "to find the sure path to happiness and to enjoy it undisturbed, even amidst life's greatest adversities," develops this conception. Some have believed to find echoes of Kant and traces of a first reading of Kantian writings in this treatise and in the speculations it contains on the relationship between happiness and virtue; – but on the whole, the unconditional and immediate identity of happiness and virtue, of felicity and worthiness of happiness, taught here, is far more opposed to Kant's fundamental ethical doctrines than akin to them. If one seeks any literary source and inspiration here, it could only be found in the popular philosophy of the eighteenth century, which Kant combated and supplanted, or else in ancient, particularly Stoic, teachings. Reminiscences of such teachings, of Cicero's or Seneca's moral philosophical writings, are unmistakable in the essay – and its overall result also aligns with the classical outcome of Stoic ethics, with the common saying that true happiness is not a consequence of virtue, but rather that it is virtue itself. In any case, this essay by the twenty-two-year-old amounts to little more than a belated school exercise, which, however, contains no hint of his later original fundamental outlook. The pedagogical ideals of education that Kleist develops in the letters of this period also do not extend beyond this circle. That all moral, all personality and character development is essentially conditioned by the enlightenment of the understanding is everywhere taken as a given. Only from such a view can one explain the pedantry, the dry seriousness, and the abstract thoroughness with which Kleist formulates the "questions for thought exercises" for his sister and his fiancée in his letters and relentlessly pursues them to a complete and satisfying solution. Everywhere reigns the conviction that only through such conscious work of abstract thinking can man be elevated to his peculiar, truly inherent worth. "To what other dominion" – Kleist apostrophizes his sister – "are you subject, than solely the dominion of reason? But to this, you shall also perfectly submit. Something must be sacred to man. To both of us, for whom the ceremonies of religion and the precepts of conventional propriety are not sacred, the laws of reason must be all the more sacred... Who assures us... our inner happiness, if reason does not?" Only by virtue of the progressive enlightenment of the understanding and the ever-advancing "clarification" of concepts can the self recognize and fulfill the place assigned to it in the great plan of the world – and furthermore, can it elevate itself above itself to a higher stage of spirituality. "To educate you, my beloved girl" – Kleist writes to Wilhelmine, informing her of his decision to live free from any external official or social ties – "is that not something excellent? And then, to place myself on a step closer to divinity – – oh, let me, let me! The goal is certainly high enough and sublime, there is certainly enough material for action – and even if I should find no place anywhere on this earth, perhaps I will find an even better one on another star."

In all of this, there is nothing that was not common property of German intellectual culture in the eighteenth century. Everywhere, that metaphysical view of the ego's position in relation to the world and to the divine resonates, a view that had found its perfected systematic expression in Leibniz's Monadology. Far beyond the circle of philosophical schools, this view had proven effective. It forms the true intellectual foundation for Lessing's "Education of the Human Race," just as it continues to influence Schiller's dithyrambic youthful philosophy, the poems of the "Anthology," and the "Theosophy of Julius." Everything we call being, everything we call the reality of things, dissolves for the contemplation of reason into a single spiritual realm, ordered by degrees of intellectual clarity and perfection. From the chalice of this spiritual realm, even the highest divine being first obtains its true infinity: it recognizes and knows itself by beholding itself in the fullness and diversity of "created spirits" as so many living mirrors of itself. The universe forms a single grand teleological coherence, which, to the human, sensually-limited, and sensually-"confused" view, appears only fragmentarily and imperfectly, but which reveals itself ever more purely and distinctly to the progressive insight of understanding. What we, from our limited perspective, tend to call defects of the world are therefore in truth only defects of our insight into the world and its teleological overall unity. They would disappear if we were able to place our eye – just as Copernicus had demanded for his re-formation of the usual cosmological view – entirely in the sun, in the light of pure rational knowledge. Leibniz once established it as a principle of this intellectualistic optimism: that the more things are broken down into their true fundamental elements, the more they satisfy the understanding. The same fundamental conviction also characterizes the earliest philosophy of young Kleist. The true ability of the "wise man" – so the essay states in finding the sure path to happiness – consists in "sucking honey from every flower"; "he knows the great cycle of things, and therefore rejoices in destruction as in blessing, because he knows that in it lies the seed for newer and more beautiful formations."

Even through the influence of Rousseau, which Kleist apparently experienced early on, no decisive change initially occurred in his overall view. Referring to Rousseau, he now champions the inalienable rights of feeling and heart against the one-sided and conventional demands of reason – but the spiritual structure of his worldview and its intellectualistic foundation remain untouched. This is historically entirely understandable: for Rousseau's critique of reason is politically and socially directed, but not epistemologically and metaphysically. It opposes arbitrary social statutes; – but it is the right of "nature," it is the original right of "reason" itself, that it brings to bear against these statutes. A new social order is to be established on the basis of reason, just as the inner world of the individual is to be freed from the constraints of religious dogma and is to shape itself according to its own law. When Kleist, in his Würzburg religious letter to Wilhelmine, states that the deity can indeed demand human actions, but cannot justly demand from him a belief in things whose knowledge it has once and for all denied him –: then not only Kant's view of religion speaks from the entirety of these considerations, but it is also the "Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar" that is evidently at work here. This confession of faith seamlessly integrates into the entirety of his worldview. For the maxim "Le tout est bien" holds for Rousseau, just as it had held for Leibniz. He too believes in a comprehensive teleological master plan of "Providence," which reason is capable of grasping in its existence and main content; he too believes in the original goodness of human nature, untainted by any "original sin" – and this twofold belief forms the prerequisite from which he combats the narrowness and limitations of social culture, of arbitrary human statutes.

Transcendental idealism, at this point too, marks the dividing line of ages and the dividing line of spirits. Just as it encompasses a “revolution in thinking” in theoretical terms, it also removes the ground from the practically-metaphysical concept of “perfection,” which had hitherto formed the common basis of philosophical systems. Both achievements, in their general intellectual-historical tendency, belong together. The critique of theoretical knowledge corresponds to the critique of theoretical proofs of God, especially the best-known and most popular among them: the teleological proof. The “failure of all philosophical attempts at theodicy” is thus established once and for all. Theoretical reason can no longer presume, with its concepts, to design an image of the “best world” and to assign the ego its place in this world. This consequence of the critical doctrine, of course, did not immediately become clear to Kleist when he first became acquainted with Kant’s writings. He initially, and tellingly, drew from these writings – from the “Anthropology” and “Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason” – those teachings in which Kant could appear more as the completer than as the destroyer of Enlightenment philosophy. Kant’s doctrine of “practical rational faith” and his rejection of all transcendent grounding of moral commands seemed to lie in this direction. But to the extent that Kleist then, from whatever angle and at whose instigation, penetrated to the actual, original meaning and content of critical idealism, the chasm between this doctrine and his previous view of the world and life also had to become clear to him. What was now demanded of him was the renunciation of that immediate unity of the theoretical and practical, of the coherence of thought and the moral coherence of the world, which had hitherto formed the naive premise of all his thinking. One understands how this demand, once he had grasped it in its full sharpness, must have profoundly shaken Kleist. For him, the moral comprehensibility of the world was now entirely abolished. The “truth” that we are theoretically capable of discerning with our understanding had at least lost its universal, its cosmic meaning. The structure of the universe, the “plan of providence,” remains shrouded for us in impenetrable darkness. The spirit that rules over the world – Kleist later wrote to Rühle – cannot, in the deepest core of its being, be an evil spirit; but it is and remains an incomprehensible spirit. Kleist felt the burden of this incomprehensibility more and more deeply from then on. The traditional optimism of his youthful philosophy now transforms into his own poetic, into the truly tragic worldview. In all his works, in the Schroffensteins and in Kohlhaas, in Penthesilea, in The Marquise of O..., in The Earthquake in Chile, this new tone is perceptible. Kleist’s characters, the poetic figures in whom he most deeply expressed his own being, all passionately strive for clarity; – they demand this clarity as their fundamental moral right. “God of Justice,” – Sylvester exclaims in the “Schroffensteins” – “Speak clearly to man, so that he also knows what he should do!” But this cry goes unheard; Sylvester must learn that a gruesome coincidence, a senselessly malicious fate, has played with him: “It’s done, if you kill each other, it’s a mistake!”... The world becomes a riddle to man, man becomes a riddle to himself, because God has become a riddle to him.No intellectual effort can unravel this riddle; we can only attempt to descend into the unconscious and find oblivion there. “Otherwise, the moments,” Kleist writes during his intellectual crisis in May 1801, “when I became aware of myself, were my most beautiful ones – now I must avoid them, because I can hardly think of myself and my situation without shuddering.” But this endeavor to submerge into the unconscious and find salvation there from the insoluble contradictions of being and thought remains clearly distinct from truly romantic tendencies in Kleist’s work. Romanticism also proclaims the doctrine of the irrationality of being, of the powerlessness of thought to grasp reality. But what Kleist experienced as a harsh renunciation that shook him to his core – for them, it merely presented an opportunity to rise above the world of things and its supposed necessity with free irony. They revel in the feeling of the incomprehensibility of being, they seek it out and intensify it, because they believe that only then do they become aware of the full power of artistic fantasy. Kleist is far removed from such aesthetic illusionism. What was merely a welcome handle for the Romantics for a superior play of imagination – for him, it led to a tragic collapse of himself and his inner world. It is significant that Romanticism, despite all theoretical efforts and speculations about tragedy, created no truly great tragic work of art. It loved to point to the unfathomable dialectic of being, to the “doctrine of opposition”; but precisely through its ironic-skeptical overall attitude, it stripped opposition itself of its sharpness and tragic seriousness. Kleist, on the other hand, is entirely filled with this seriousness. He does not seek the mystical shivers of the incomprehensible, not the interplay and blurring of all forms of the outer and inner world; instead, he sets both worlds against each other in clear and sharp outline, only to feel their incompatibility and irreconcilability all the more deeply and painfully. In this relationship of the inner and outer, in this position of “soul” and “world,” lies the conclusive feature of Kleist’s overall intellectual and poetic view. Romantic fantasy tends to dissolve not only objective but also subjective being; to abandon not only the real determinacy of the world but also the determinacy of the self. As in a floating and dreamlike twilight, the figures of the outer and inner, the images of being and the images of psychic events, merge into one another here. The determinacy of the tragic, however, demands the full determinacy of the self, demands the unity and cohesion of character and personality. It is this cohesion that gives Kleist’s poetry its uniqueness. Against all the confusion of the world’s course, against all the uncomprehended and ultimately incomprehensible power of fate, the inner world asserts itself here in its clarity, its purity, and its certainty. In this respect, all of Kleist’s poetic figures represent the struggle that he himself incessantly waged against world and fate. Of all of them, what he once said of Penthesilea holds true: that in her lay his innermost essence, all the pain and all the splendor of his soul. The unconditional and unwavering certainty of feeling, which never completely loses itself in the turmoil of external events but always reestablishes itself from this chaos in its own inviolable law, provides the consistent and unified direction of the fundamental tragic process in Kleist.Kleist, the storyteller, also dwells with preference on this dialectic; on this contrast between the confusion of the external and the inalienable and indestructible order of the inner world. When Kohlhaas receives the final confirmation of the injustice done to him, “in the midst of his pain at seeing the world in such monstrous disorder, the inner satisfaction of seeing his own breast now in order” surges within him. The tragic reversal, however, lies in the fact that at the moment he seeks to give external validity to this inner order, he again falls victim to violence, injustice, and the incomprehensible concatenation of the external. Instead of saving and setting the world right, he confuses and destroys his own inner being. His sense of justice, “which resembled a gold scale,” now becomes a “fanaticism of the most morbid and deformed kind,” which destroys him and the world around him.

From another angle, we witness the same tragic process where it manifests not in action but in suffering – where the inner world, instead of attempting to impose its rule on external being and events, withdraws purely into itself and thereby establishes itself within itself. We do not merely project this opposition into Kleist's poetic figures through an external conceptual reflection; rather, he himself felt it and expressed it with surprising acuity. He once said of Käthchen von Heilbronn that she was the "reverse side of Penthesilea": a being as powerful through complete devotion as the latter was through action. And he repeated this statement, giving it an even more precise conceptual-epigrammatic edge in a letter to Collin: "whoever loves Käthchen cannot find Penthesilea entirely incomprehensible; they belong together like the + and − of algebra and are one and the same being, merely conceived under opposing designations." This opposition is not singular and accidental; rather, it runs through Kleist's entire body of work. Thus, the Marquise von O..., despite all the incomprehensible circumstances surrounding her, regains inner peace and security as her understanding, "strong enough not to break in her peculiar situation, surrenders completely to the great, sacred, and inexplicable order of the world." It is only in this that her true, purely inwardly directed heroism is revealed. And it is this same trait that evidently formed a fundamental motif for Kleist's conception of the story "The Duel." Kleist drew the material for this novella from Froissart's chronicle – and he retold it in "The Story of a Remarkable Duel" in the "Berliner Abendblätter" in a largely unaltered form. But this material only gained its true poetic form for him through the new element that Kleist's narrative adds: through the strength with which Littegarde "piles up like a rock" the feeling that lives in her breast and asserts it against heaven and earth, against the annihilating proof of guilt of the divine judgment itself. Even the divine judgment does not provide an unequivocal and certain answer; rather, as a recourse to an external means of proof, it becomes entangled in the dubiousness and ambiguity of all that is external. But by not doubting itself, even in the face of this highest power and authority, the inner world thereby discovers the true center from which clarity about the content and meaning of events is restored. The incomprehensible spirit that governs the world does not reveal itself to reason, nor to the weighing of "evidence." "Where lies the obligation of the highest divine wisdom," – so says Friedrich to Littegarde in 'The Duel' – "to indicate and express the truth at the very moment of faithful invocation?" The mysterious inner order cannot be unraveled by any intrusive questioning and searching; – it must suffice for man if, by surrendering to it, he preserves the security of his own self. Alkmene's character and Alkmene's fate also present themselves to Kleist in the light of this comprehensive view: – and from it, his treatment of the Amphitryon material first receives its unmistakably unique character, gaining what separates Kleist from Molière and what makes Kleist's "Amphitryon" the work of a great tragic poet.

Kleist's relationship with Goethe and the contrast between them can also be understood more precisely from this perspective. When Nietzsche says that Goethe turned away from Kleist because he sensed in him the tragic, the “incurable side of nature,” while he himself was “conciliatory and curable,” this judgment only identifies the contrast itself, not the intellectual motive from which it ultimately stems. This motive perhaps lies in the fact that Goethe, not only during the period of perfected classicism but from the very beginnings of his poetic development, approached the world and “nature” from an entirely different angle than Kleist. For him, the world comes alive and becomes internally comprehensible through the pantheistic feeling for nature of the lyric poet – and what this feeling gave him is later confirmed, step by step, in the work of scientific research, in the progressive deepening of the “scientia intuitiva” that he attains from the whole of being and becoming. Thus, he perceives everything he achieves as a poet or a researcher as the immediate validation of that initial fundamental feeling: as a “revelation developing from within to without, which allows man to intuit his god-likeness. It is a synthesis of world and spirit, which provides the most blessed assurance of the eternal harmony of existence.” And this harmony of Goethe's worldview is then elevated, in the classical era, to a demand, an unconditional postulate of Goethe's aesthetic theory. The strength and greatness, as well as the inherent limitation, of this theory are rooted in this connection. “Seek within yourselves,” Goethe once called out to young artists, “and you will find everything, and rejoice when out there, whatever you may call it, lies a nature that says yes and amen to everything you have found within yourselves!” To find such a nature, an “out there” that would truly correspond to his inner demand: this remained denied to Kleist. Since he abandoned his first immature attempts at a theoretical theodicy, he only saw the unbridgeable chasm between the law of the inner and the outer world, between feeling and the “fragile order of the world.” For what captivated him was not the image of nature, to whose abundance and “magnificent consistency” Goethe had always fled from all the confusion of human, social existence; rather, from the beginning, he was moved by human destiny in its incomprehensibility, its irrationality, and its contradiction. As perfectly clear and objective as Kleist makes every trait of his characters and every smallest detail of objective events appear in his letters and stories, he is just as sparing, as reserved and meager with any expression of immediate lyrical feeling for nature. If he occasionally – as in the Earthquake in Chile – creates a perfect landscape painting, this too is only meant to form a momentary bright background, against which the tragic confusion of human destinies stands out all the more sharply. But if Goethe turned away from this Kleistian image of existence – if he saw in it only hypochondria and self-tormenting disruption of the “eternal harmony of existence” – this judgment was indeed one-sided and unjust; for it suspected nothing of the complete psychic-spiritual context from which Kleist's poetic world grew and by which it remains determined.

However, we are only considering this fundamental form of Kleist's poetry insofar as it simultaneously reflects the fundamental change in his theoretical basic view. One now understands what the shock Kleist experienced through Kantian philosophy must have meant for his poetic development. It was only here that he became disillusioned with the unified telos of the world, which his early youthful philosophy had still unconcernedly presupposed: it was only here that he saw himself, even from the side of theoretical reflection, led to that pervasive dualism which forms his fundamental tragic motif. His world of thought only now becomes the adequate expression of his original emotional world. His language and style also acquire a new character from now on. He still uses the notes from his "magazine of ideas" in his letters, in the images he employs; but the conscious intellectual intentionality with which he had previously tried to convert scientific-theoretical material into material of intuition and creative imagination increasingly recedes from now on. To the extent that feeling becomes aware of its own law and its own inscrutability, it also gains its own language and form of expression. What Kleist had experienced seemed to signify the complete collapse of his intellectual world: but from it, his world of feeling and imagination now truly broke through and presented itself in its definiteness and individual peculiarity in objective artistic forms.

3.

After the period in which he, disappointed and desperate, cast off all knowledge, did Kleist ever return to Kant and his writings? As far as I can tell, there is no direct and unequivocal proof of this; however, a series of external and internal indications indeed suggest it. Kleist's letters, it is true, become increasingly silent regarding general theoretical questions and offer less and less insight. The broad discussion of specific theoretical problems, characteristic of Kleist's early letters, disappears as Kleist increasingly recognizes himself as a poet and new artistic plans and tasks take hold of him. Nevertheless, his shorter prose essays – among which the treatise "On the Gradual Production of Thoughts While Speaking," written in Königsberg, is a truly theoretical masterpiece and cabinet piece – show that general psychological and philosophical questions still frequently occupied him. A passage in the latter essay, which refers to the Socratic "maieutic" art, the "midwifery of thoughts," with an appeal to Kant, indicates that Kleist must have read Kant's lectures on pedagogy, edited by Rink, which had appeared shortly before.[3] Later, in a review of the "Berliner Abendblätter," a Kantian statement, supposedly taken from the "Critique of Judgment," is mentioned, stating that human reason and the human hand are two things necessarily belonging to each other and calculated for each other. Reinhold Steig, in his edition of Kleist's minor writings, wanted to deny the Kantian origin of this passage altogether, as it is indeed not to be found in the "Critique of Judgment": – in truth, however, it concerns a well-known statement by Kant in Anthropology, which Kleist freely reproduces here.[4] The quote as such is therefore admittedly erroneous; but this very error suggests that Kleist must indeed have known the "Critique of Judgment." Also, from his external life, it must be considered very probable that he was often led back to Kant's doctrine in detail and as a whole. The circle he entered in Königsberg in 1805 must have made such a return almost inevitable for him. Kant himself had died the year before; but those who had been in intimate contact with him until his old age and who still knew his personality and doctrine from immediate personal observation were still alive. Kleist entered into closer contact with War Councillor Scheffner, as reported in Scheffner's autobiography, shortly after his arrival in Königsberg; – and his study of state and municipal sciences led him to the man who, of all Kant's friends, had the deepest understanding of his spiritual essence and of the whole of his doctrine. Christian Jakob Kraus had always been esteemed by Kant himself as one of the foremost speculative geniuses; Kant's biographers report that he liked to compare him in sharpness and depth of mind to Kepler. Only Kraus's painstaking thoroughness and the conscientiousness, intensified to the point of hypochondria, with which he always re-examined and reshaped all his works anew before deciding to publish them, prevented him from writing larger theoretical works and ultimately pushed him entirely into the practical field. Accustomed to always measuring with the highest standards in the intellectual realm, he himself had increasingly fallen victim to that "misology" that Kant had noticed and deplored in him early on.[5] Nevertheless, one may assume that Kleist also received some deeper and more general intellectual stimulation from the lectures of such a teacher. Kleist had also entered into close relations with the man who now held Kant's philosophical chair in Königsberg, shortly after his arrival there. Through a peculiar chain of circumstances, he found in Traugott Wilh. Krug the husband of his former fiancée, Wilhelmine v. Zenge; – and after overcoming the initial awkwardness, a daily intimate exchange soon developed between him and the Krug household. One might perhaps surmise that philosophical questions were also discussed between Kleist and Krug, and that Kleist was thereby introduced to the details of Kant's doctrine more than before. For although Krug was in no respect an independent and creative thinker, he was nevertheless a faithful guardian of Kant's intellectual legacy, which he sought to uphold and assert as a whole against the speculations of his successors.

More significant, however, than all these considerations, which are based only on external relations and therefore possess only hypothetical value, are all those moments in Kleist's writings that point to a closer relationship with philosophy, and especially with idealistic doctrine. That he followed the development of this doctrine, and indeed intervened in it with his own original intellectual turn: for this, Kleist's later treatises from the "Berliner Abendblätter" in particular contain various proofs. "You write to me" – so it says, for example, in the well-known "Letter from a Painter to his Son" – "that you are painting a Madonna and that your feeling, for the completion of this work, seems so impure and carnal to you, that each time, before you take up the brush, you wish to take communion to sanctify it. Let your old father tell you that this is a false enthusiasm, clinging to you from the school from which you originate ... Man, to give you a striking example, is indeed a sublime creature; and yet at the moment he is made, it is not necessary to consider this with much sanctity. Indeed, he who would take communion for it, and go to work with the mere intention of constructing his concept of it in the sensory world, would infallibly produce an external and fragile being; whereas he who, on a clear summer night, kisses a girl without further thought, will undoubtedly bring into the world a boy who will then vigorously climb between heaven and earth and give philosophers something to think about." Here, alongside the mockery of a misguided tendency in the visual arts, the ironic turn against Fichte's philosophy is unmistakable; as indeed, in the rejection of the attempt to "construct the concept of man in the sensory world," even Fichte's terminology can be heard, in parodistic imitation. More precisely, and in a far more positive sense, the connection with contemporary philosophy then emerges when Kleist, in the most profoundly thoughtful and original treatise he created, in the essay "On the Marionette Theater," develops his own fundamental aesthetic view. It is motives and basic features of Kantian and Fichte-Schellingian philosophy that everywhere form the latent prerequisite here, and from which Kleist, in applying them to the specific aesthetic problem that occupies him, indeed derives a new meaning and a surprising consequence.[6] Kant's "Analytic of the Beautiful," as presented in the "Critique of Judgment," finds its final conclusion in the doctrine of genius. For transcendental critique, "genius" is the expression of aesthetic lawfulness itself. In it, not arbitrariness, but the highest rule prevails; but a rule that emerges not in reflection and abstract knowledge, but only in creation itself. It operates unconsciously, like nature itself – while what it produces is nevertheless a whole purposeful in every smallest part and therefore appears as the work of the highest artistic "intention." An inherent necessity prevails in it – but this necessity is immediately destroyed as soon as we try to bring it into the form of the concept and express it in abstract-general precepts. Thus, individuality and universal validity, freedom and necessity, conscious and unconscious, enter into an entirely new relationship within it.The doctrine that Kant establishes here with methodological intent, in order to critically delineate the transcendental autonomy of the beautiful and of art from the lawfulness of knowledge and will, subsequently becomes for Schelling the actual starting and end point, the alpha and omega of idealistic speculation. He links it with the idea of "productive imagination," from which Fichte had attempted to deduce the opposition of "I" and "non-I" and to genetically develop it in all its determinateness. Even what we call Being, what we call the world of things, arises for us, according to Fichte, only through an unconscious creative activity. This activity is necessary, insofar as it is founded in unconditional laws of intelligence and absolutely excludes any arbitrary interference, which only has its place in the restricted empirical I – but it is at the same time to be described as free in the highest sense, since it is only the intelligence's own original essence that expresses itself in it. In this way, through a lawful sequence of stages, the content of its world of sensation, the forms of space and time, the world of bodies as material objects, and the multiplicity of empirically psychological subjects arise for the I. Fichte himself had already – albeit only in an occasional aperçu – attempted to bridge this gap to aesthetic speculation from this point. The unique character of art – as a remark in the "System of Ethics" states – [7] consists in its making "the transcendental standpoint common" (i.e., natural). In art, what constitutes the actual problem in the realm of theory and conceptual knowledge, in the realm of the actual doctrine of science, is immediately revealed and resolved. The peculiarity of the theoretical I, which the doctrine of science as such seeks to comprehend and to recognize as necessary, consists in the fact that its unconscious producing transforms itself into the finished product of a world: into a product that, as long as transcendental reflection has not yet enlightened us about its origin, must appear to us as an absolutely independent and alien being. In art, on the other hand, we likewise objectively present a world of intuition before us: but this happens in such a way that we simultaneously know it to be ours, a work of productive imagination. And from here, the path leads directly to that speculative transformation of the concept of genius that we see accomplished in Schelling's "System of Transcendental Idealism." The genetic method of Schelling's idealism shows us how "nature" gradually unfolds into "spirit," how the "unconscious" struggles upwards to "consciousness." But after this entire process has been completed, a peculiar turning back occurs at the highest stage of the spirit itself. The highest spiritual activity rises just as high above mere reflective consciousness as this reflective consciousness rose above unconscious nature. The end of the process returns to the beginning: the creation of genius, as unconscious, again equals nature, while at the same time it characteristically distinguishes itself from it as the perfected expression of specifically spiritual activity. –

From these general premises, one can fully grasp the particular thesis that Kleist’s essay on the puppet theater carries out. Kleist, too, sharply and definitively separates the essence of artistic activity from all conceptual, all merely reflective consciousness. The latter, of course, acts as a factor everywhere, as long as we remain, as it were, in the middle of the aesthetic domain, as long as we consider the average artistic talent and its performance. But far from constituting the actual content of artistic achievement, it rather interferes with it in a disturbing and confusing way. All genuine artistic “grace” is based on naiveté, and thus on the exclusion of reflection. We must be below or above it; we must either not yet have reached reflection or have left it behind again, in order to satisfy the highest aesthetic demand. Mechanically unconscious action and the highest spiritual spontaneity – the puppet and the genius – are in this respect for us manifestations of one and the same truth. To the extent that reflection becomes darker and weaker in the organic world, grace emerges in it ever more radiantly and dominantly. “But just as the intersection of two lines, on one side of a point, suddenly reappears on the other side after passing through infinity, or the image of the concave mirror, after having receded into infinity, suddenly reappears close before us: so too, when knowledge has passed through an infinite, grace reappears; so that it appears purest at the same time in that human physique which has either no consciousness at all or an infinite consciousness; i.e., in the marionette or in God.” Here lies the point where the two ends of the circular world interlock. We must go forward, we must traverse the entire path of knowledge, in order to finally return to the state of innocence. “Paradise is locked and the Cherub behind us; we must journey around the world, and see if perhaps it is open again somewhere from behind.” –

Of course, this very epigrammatic turn of phrase would once again reveal to Kleist the unsatisfying nature inherent in any purely dialectical designation and solution to fundamental spiritual problems. The antithesis to reflection, as presented here, still belongs entirely to the realm and means of reflection itself. We only seem to be able to truly rise above this realm by shifting the question from thinking to doing. From the moment the great political tasks of the time seize him, Kleist increasingly takes this direction. Deliberation and speculation, theoretical reflection on general goals and tasks, are to be replaced by decisive action aimed at the immediate practical goal. Here, if anywhere, the true solution to life's conflicts must be sought. This theme is varied repeatedly in the "Berliner Abendblätter": it is found in the "Reflections on the Course of the World," as well as in the paradox "On Deliberation," in the parodistic presentation of a "Brand New Educational Plan," and in the reflection on "Knowledge, Creation, Destruction, Preservation."[8] Salvation lies solely in action; but action cannot wait until knowledge has finished its considerations and reservations. It must believe and dare; it must intervene in the course of things, unconcerned whether the effect and success of this intervention can be calculated in advance. But this is precisely the fundamental flaw of the Germans, that they have increasingly unlearned this immediately liberating action. Their intellect has – as it says in the "Catechism of the Germans" – become overstimulated by some astute teachers; they reflect where they should feel or act. That this remark by Kleist – however surprising it may seem at first glance – is primarily aimed at Fichte can hardly be doubted; it is directly confirmed by the epigrams Kleist directed against the "pedagogue" Fichte and his plan for a new national education in "Phoebus." All "pedagogy" now seemed to Kleist merely a cumbersome detour. Man does not first need to be "formed" by an elaborate education, he does not need to be artificially molded by any philosophical system, which always remains of questionable value: it is enough to show him the path of decisive action and then confidently leave him to his own devices. On what shaky ground would the edifice of human happiness and the future of the human race stand if it rested on the truth of any abstract theories! "How precarious morality would be if it had no deeper foundation than the so-called good example of a father or mother, and the flat admonitions of a tutor or a French governess. – But the child is not wax that can be kneaded into any shape in a person's hands: it lives, it is free; it carries within itself an independent and peculiar capacity for development and a model for all inner formation." One sees to what extent Kleist, who was once such a fanatical pedagogue himself, has now become resentful of all theories, insofar as they claim to have precedence over life and action and to shape both according to their pattern. Therefore, even the so energetic and active direction of Fichte's doctrine did not satisfy him. Fichte's system wanted to be, in the true and radical sense, a philosophy of action, but it seemed precisely for that reason to replace action with philosophy; it seemed to make reflection on action the starting point and condition of action itself. It was the politician Kleist who now turned against this demand of the theoretician of national politics.If we assume, by the way, that Kleist had already become acquainted with Fichte earlier – that it was "The Vocation of Man" that had once caused the decisive intellectual crisis in him – then new light would also be shed on his later attitude towards Fichte. He would then have experienced firsthand the destructive power that theoretical radicalism possesses when it directly intervenes in life and seeks to determine the overall direction of life: – and from this experience, he now turned ever more energetically against mere speculation and, in contrast, pointed to immediate practical decision and practical action as the only remedy.

However, it was precisely the national and political tendencies that now completely consumed Kleist that seem to have, on the other hand, opened up a new understanding for him of Kant's ethics and its decisive core idea: the equation of autonomy and freedom. For this last profound transformation that Kleist's relationship with Kant seems to have undergone, no direct evidence can be cited from Kleist's letters. But Kleist's poetry speaks a much clearer and more convincing language here. Only someone who completely misunderstands the style and character of this poetry could, of course, think of attributing any general philosophical “ideas” to it and trying to “explain” it through them. But just as “The Prince of Homburg” possesses a completely unique and new emotional content compared to Kleist's earlier dramatic works, with Guiscard and the Schroffensteins, with Käthchen and Penthesilea – so too does it unmistakably express a new intellectual overall attitude. The tragic problematic itself has deepened and expanded here. The tragedy of the Prince of Homburg, like that of all Kleistian characters, also stems from the “confusion of feeling” he experiences within himself. At the moment when he approaches the Elector in the highest triumphal feeling of victory and in passionate love and devotion, he finds himself rejected by him – he sees himself handed over to the rigid and unfeeling severity of the law. In vain, in his conversation with Hohenzollern, does he try to deny belief to the incomprehensible – in vain, despite the facts, does he try to retreat to his innermost feeling about the Elector: at the sight of the open grave, the self-certainty of this feeling collapses. And now everything else that gave value and substance to his life is simultaneously destroyed. It is a tragic paradox, but a moment of the highest psychological truth and power, that at this moment, when he sees all ideal content of existence sink, the feeling of existence itself, the mere instinct for life as such, breaks forth in him all the more powerfully. He clings to bare existence as the only thing left to him; he desires only to chase life, without content or purpose, in circles until it sinks down and dies in the evening. For he still understands the power confronting him only as a physical power, against which he opposes his unbroken and unconditional physical will to live. Only the Elector's letter brings about the peripeteia. At the moment when the Prince feels called upon to make a decision, this decision has already been made. For now his fate no longer approaches him as a dark compulsion against which he defends himself with all the forces of individual being and individual sensation. He understands the power to which he succumbs; and this understanding is synonymous with its free recognition. In the opposition between ego and world, as it otherwise presented and unfolded itself in Kleist's poetry, a new motif has now come into play. Kleist's heroes, whether they conceived this opposition passively or actively, whether they passionately rebelled against the “order of the world” or submitted to it, nevertheless had one trait in common: that they found themselves confronted by the world as something thoroughly enigmatic and irrational. They could surrender to it with their intellect and submit to it in silent endurance; but the exterior, fate and the world as dull and uncomprehended powers that determine man, always remained opposed to the unconditional clarity and certainty of the inner self. In the Prince of Homburg, however, a new relationship is established between the fundamental elements from which the tragic opposition and the tragic decision arise.Here too, the individual world of feeling stands against an “objective” power; but this power itself belongs to a different order than before. It is not the objectivity of being and happening, but that of what ought to be, that determines and binds the individual. However, this objectivity can only be overcome by the individual freely acknowledging it and thereby grasping it in its truly necessary foundation. “The law's strict bond binds only the slave's mind that scorns it”: where the demand made upon the individual's will is absorbed into that will itself, it has lost its external compelling force.

And not only in the Prince of Homburg himself, but also in the Elector, an analogous, albeit opposing, development takes place: and from the interplay of these two inner movements, the actual dramatic fundamental process emerges. When the Elector first confronts the Prince, – he is nothing more than the guardian and executor of the objective will of the law. Only the pure content of the law itself, only its unconditional and unyielding demand is spoken of; – not the subject to whom the demand is addressed. But now, in the conversation with Natalie, it suddenly becomes clear how, in this purely objective stance, in this judgment passed without regard for the person, the claim and the deeper right of free personality are also violated. And from this insight, the Elector's so closed and firmly structured world experiences an inner upheaval. "Confused" and "in the utmost astonishment" he listens to Natalie's report. At this moment, he understands and feels how the task of justice is only half fulfilled if only the objectively legal order as such is established and its command is obeyed. Just as he rejected the victory that chance and arbitrariness had won for him, so too does he now reject a form of legal judgment that seems founded on arbitrariness, because it appeals to passive obedience instead of to one's own insight and the subjective feeling of justice itself. Here he grasps the new task that he will henceforth carry out for himself and for the Prince. The truly moral, not the physical, fulfillment of the law lies not in the actual execution of the verdict; it belongs not to the world of events and existence, but to the world of consciousness. As soon as a clear and firm decision has been made in the Prince's consciousness, no further legal preparations are needed: for only from the center of will and free personality does the true, the truly secure, existence of the legal order itself emerge.

Between the Elector and the Prince, however, stands Kottwitz, – and for him, of course, that dialectical-dramatic development that takes place in both does not apply. For he is all of a piece: he is at the beginning what he is at the end. For him, there is no contradiction between what his feeling, what his heart, and what the law commands him: for what he recognizes as his duty is at the same time the content of his love and his free devotion. Thus, here, in the immediately concrete unity of personality, the true synthesis between the objective necessity of the command of duty and the right of free subjectivity is established. The law sets up the general rule of action; but the application of this rule, the final decision about what it demands in the given individual case, can only come from the strength and self-responsibility of the individual. No mere schema, no once-and-for-all fixed template can relieve the self of this original self-responsible decision. The scene in which Kottwitz defends this fundamental view before the Elector is entirely individual, entirely dramatically shaped; – it arises from the concrete perception of the situation and the particular characters. But nevertheless, this scene simultaneously acquires a general ideal character. The justification of the Prince and his deed flows as if by itself into the exposition of that "subtle doctrine of freedom" that Kottwitz now unfolds before the Elector. This again shows how strongly and uniformly the fundamental dramatic theme of "The Prince of Homburg" works through all the particular figures in the most diverse variations:

Words of this kind, gushing forth directly from immediate, passionate emotion, certainly won't be interpreted as mere dramatic paraphrases of abstract "philosophical" fundamental convictions. And yet, it's undeniable that Kleist, even in the purity of artistic creation, now stands within a new world of thought that shapes and moves him. Kant's name involuntarily comes to mind here. For who but Kant had proclaimed with such sharpness and clarity the contrast between "will" and "arbitrariness," between the changing impulses of "subjective" affect and the objectivity and necessity of the general and universally valid law? There's hardly a need for specific references here: for this is the consistent, recurring intellectual motif from which the entirety of Kantian ethics emerged. "Understanding, wit, and judgment" – as it says in the "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals" – "and whatever other talents of the mind may be called, or courage, resoluteness, perseverance in purpose, as properties of temperament, are undoubtedly good and desirable in many respects; but they can also become extremely evil and harmful if the will, which is to make use of these gifts of nature and whose peculiar constitution is therefore called character, is not good." This fundamental moral value of "character" can only be gained in opposition to the play of affects and feelings, which, however noble, however sublime they may seem, ultimately prove to be mere "impulses" and "surges" without lasting and continuous power. From this perspective, Kant takes up the fight against the arbitrariness, excess, and fanaticism of every mere determination of feeling, through which – as Goethe judged – he re-established morality, which had become lax and subservient before him, in its supersensible meaning and brought the epoch back from the effeminacy into which it had sunk.[9] "It is not yet the genuine moral maxim of our conduct, which is appropriate to our standing among rational beings, as humans, if we presume, as it were, as volunteers, to proudly disregard the thought of duty and, as independent of command, merely out of our own pleasure to do what no command would be necessary for us to do. We stand under a discipline of reason and must not forget in all our maxims the subservience to it, not to withdraw anything from it or to diminish the authority of the law (even if our own reason gives it) by self-serving delusion by placing the determining ground of our will, even if in accordance with the law, in something other than the law itself and in respect for this law." Here is the moment designated which, for Kant, from the psychological side, appears as the actual solution to the fundamental antithesis between the objectivity and unconditionality of the pure law and the subjective, human motives of action. Respect for the law itself belongs to the sphere of feeling: but it is not a "pathological" but a purely "practical" feeling. It does not arise from sensuous receptivity, but solely and exclusively from intellectual and moral spontaneity. By virtue of its origin, it never relates to things, but always only to persons. And in this fundamental ethical concept of the person, Kant now discovers the new correlate to the pure concept of law: a correlate by virtue of which the latter first gains its full content and its specific character. In the principle of the autonomy of action, the idea of the self and the idea of the law merge into one. "Man and generally every rational being exists as an end in itself, not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will... The practical imperative will therefore be the following: act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means."

If one considers this general conceptual outline of Kantian ethics and contrasts it with the poetic world of perception and mood in "The Prince of Homburg," the subtle and profound relationships between the two immediately become apparent. There is no need for a detailed parallelization here; in fact, such an approach would only inadequately and superficially describe the true spiritual connection. For "The Prince of Homburg," no more than any other work by Kleist, is a thesis play. The dialectic at work within it is thoroughly dramatic, stemming not from tendencies and ideas, but from figures and characters. Yet, it is precisely in the way Kleist now views his characters and their inner conflicts that a new trait emerges, a changed stance towards the totality of life's problems and major life decisions. We believe we can discern how Kant's doctrine contributed to this inner transformation; however, its own fundamental form underwent a significant metamorphosis in the process. On the foundation of Kant's concept of duty, a new concrete form of the universal arises in Kleist, in connection with the impulses of the time and his own political wishes and demands: the universality of a new national and a new state sentiment.

Thus, we believe we can see how what connects Kleist to Kant and what separates him from Kant is not limited to a single moment of his life, but how this relationship of attraction and repulsion recurs in all phases of life, albeit with varying intensity and clarity. Here again, it becomes clear what Kant's philosophy meant for his time, not as a scholastic system, but as an immediately living spiritual power. It has been said of Kleist that he differed from the "classics" of German literature – Goethe, Schiller, Herder – in that they acted not only as artists but also as exemplary types, pointing us towards a common ideal goal of education. "Kleist does not belong among the promoters of this enduring renaissance as a man who never served the gods of the past or the present, who never advocated an educational tendency or an idea of humanity."[10] Indeed, the true measure for Kleist, for his essence and his poetry, can only ever be derived from his individuality itself, not from the general development of German intellectual and educational history. The law and the inner norm of his artistry stand opposite this great developmental line as something unique and independent. Even when attempts have been made to grasp and deduce the entirety of Kleist's poetry from the "metaphysical" feeling for life at work within him, the feeling aimed at here is of such a peculiar nature and belongs so purely and completely to the artist's sphere that it immediately seems to obscure and confuse itself when one attempts to translate it into abstract conceptual language, into the categories and terms of systematic philosophy. But precisely because Kleist stands apart in this way, one feels all the more strongly the connections that nevertheless exist between him and the great intellectual movement of the time. For the profound impact that Kant's doctrine, in particular, had in all intellectual circles, the power with which it also intervened in the life and work of this solitary man, who seemed more inclined to resist it than to seek it, is convincing proof.