As Most Scholars Readily Agree, agonistic elements are not deployed merely for dramatic effect in Kleist’s works; they also point to a more deeply felt conviction of the author about the fundamental state of reality. Conflictual relations pervade Kleist’s tragedy Penthesilea, for example, from the very beginning. Describing how the Amazons fight the Greeks like Furies, Odysseus speaks of opposing forces that allow for no resolution, no “third” position: “Kraft bloß und ihren Widerstand, nichts Drittes” (1:326; line 126). Concerning Penthesilea, daughter of Mars, and her adversary Achilles, son of the sea goddess Thetis, Odysseus continues: “Was Glut des Feuers löscht, löst Wasser siedend / Zu Dampf nicht auf und umgekehrt” (lines 127–28). The fiery heart of Penthesilea, which desires to pull down Helios, the sun-god, “bei seinen goldnen Flammenhaaren” (1:368; lines 1384–86) just as he passes the zenith at his fullest brightness, truly cannot be moderated by Achilles’s symbol, the elemental force of water. Penthesilea, for this reason, declares her heart to be “verflucht” (1:345; line 720). Bernhard Greiner is of the view that Kleist’s works can be approached as a series of separate but related thought experiments whose origins are to be found in Kleist’s profound engagement with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant in the early crisis years of 1800–1801. If we extend from this insight, it might be pertinent to ask in a similar vein whether, and to what extent, the idea of mutually opposed elemental forces that is discussed in Penthesilea is a problem taken up more generally in the Kantian “aftermath,” that is, whether Kleist’s discussion of this problem might be placed alongside attempts undertaken by Kant’s philosophical successors that seek to account for, and deal with, the dualism in Kant’s critical philosophy that is encountered under the aspect of the subject-object relation.

Prominent among these post-Kantians was Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In his major work Die Wissenschaftslehre (first published in 1794 and 1795) Fichte proposed an alternative view of the problem of knowledge by radicalizing the consequences of the Copernican turn toward the conditions of self-consciousness. Instead of the epistemological question of external objects and the psychological question of mental states, which for him would invite the challenge of skepticism, Fichte proposed to examine only the principle of the “I” (Ich) in self-consciousness and what this I posits through its own activity.