In His Remarkable Study of the stories of Heinrich von Kleist, Bernd Fischer characterizes Kleist’s relation to philosophy as follows: “Kleist [verfügt] über keine Theorie, die geeignet wäre, das idealistische Paradigma zu überwinden. So untypisch Kleists Verzicht auf eine geschichtsphilosophische Ästhetik für seine Zeit ist, so notwendig dürfte ihm die Beschränkung auf die bloß innerliterarische Reflexion sein.” Dissatisfied with all extra-literary theories, Kleist’s only recourse, Fischer contends, was to lie in an “ironische[n] Metaphysik,” a philosophical outlook expressing deep skepticism about the presentiments of the major philosophical systems of his day. Moreover, Kleist could not locate an adequate literary program within the intellectual framework provided by post-Kantian philosophy. Fischer detects strong overtones of irony, particularly in the narratives, and a sense of despair over the inability of language to communicate authentically. The image of Kleist that emerges from this portrait of the author is that of a man at odds with the age he lives in, doomed to a life without faith or knowledge, and doomed, furthermore, to be the precursor of an “unreliable” modernity — a modernity without any adequate theoretical underpinning for its own projects.

This idea of a Kleist who ultimately founders on the paradoxes of the emerging modern age can be regarded as typical of current critical opinion. Taking a position midway between the later Enlightenment’s rational transcendentalism and, in the same period, the Deists’ timid wavering on the question of rational theology, Kleist’s legacy, it could be concluded, was to point to the dilemmas and aporias that naive positivism in its many forms is likely to bring about. It is a skeptical Kleist that the modern age favors — a Kleist who had no idea about how finally to approach the world, but who was aware, at the very least, of what he did not know.

I would like to put forward a quite different Kleist for consideration from this “metaphysical ironist” who felt compelled to withdraw into purely intra-literary reflections (as if it were possible to say that literature exists as a domain in itself, far from any theorizing about the world). The “other” Kleist I would like to consider saw the question of philosophical systems as an open one; he was less concerned to express dissatisfaction with idealistic notions about the world.