6 - Absolution and Contradiction: Confrontations with Art in Heinrich von Kleist's “Die heilige Cäcilie oder Die Gewalt der Musik” and “Der Findling”

Summary

Die Behauptung “ewiger Wahrheiten,” ebenso wie die Vermengung der phänomenal gegründeten “Idealität” des Daseins mit einem idealisierten absoluten Subjekt gehören zu den längst noch nicht radikal ausgetriebenen Resten von christlicher Theologie innerhalb der philosophischen Problematik.

— Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit

[Both the contention that there are “eternal truths” and the jumbling together of Dasein's phenomenally grounded “ideality” with an idealized absolute subject, belong to those residues of Christian theology within philosophical problematics which have not as yet been radically extruded.]

In order to critique the philosophical concept of the absolute subject — the subject posited by German idealist thought — one need not dismiss wholesale all prior Western metaphysics, as did Heidegger. For his part, Kleist made narratives of such critiques. Casting a critical eye upon contemporary philosophical systems, he relentlessly denied absolution to the characters in his texts. His explorations of the fundamentally fragmentary nature of subjectivity implicated him in the same Romantic philosophical dilemma that I have been describing throughout. If an abyss can be said to have opened around 1800, Kleist fell into it. In this chapter I first lay the foundations for my explication of Kleist's fiction by examining his wellknown reaction to Kant (his own personal “Kant Crisis”), while simultaneously exploring how this crisis was related to the author's religious beliefs. I then examine two Kleist stories, in the first of which iconoclasm plays a central role, while in the second there is an encounter with a portrait. Both contain a confrontation with the visual arts, which is key for a proper understanding of Kleist's philosophy as well as his position among the Romantics.

After reading Kant in 1801, Kleist began to theorize in philosophical terms about the limitations on subjective knowledge. The realization that the infinite manifold of perception could only be known empirically, and thus only subjectively, engendered in him profound existential and religious consternation. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason made clear to him the divide between the appearance of things and things-in-themselves, or between subjective representations and the material world. It led Kleist to concur despairingly with what he took to be the philosopher's position that the world of objects was in itself unknowable; the material world for Kleist was negated.