“Von der Überlegung”: Of Wrestling and (Not) Thinking

Socrates famously chastised the rhapsodist, Ion, for not thinking. When reciting Homer, Ion, like the men whose poems he “chant[s],” becomes an empty vessel. He is inspired by forces beyond himself and, as such, “possessed” to the point of no longer being “in [his] senses” (Plato, Collected Dialogues 219, 220 [Ion 532d, 533e–534a]). Socrates’ criticism of poets and rhapsodists, which continues in book ten of Republic, has had remarkable staying power in Western thought. It went largely unchallenged until the Romantics–taking cues from Plotinus’ Ancient “On the Intellectual Beauty” and Philip Sidney’s Renaissance “Apology for Poetry”–established a neo-Platonic position that ultimately overturned Socrates’ censure. The Romantics embraced precisely the mindlessness that Socrates had criticized. Poets were inspired and irrational, but this was what allowed them to see behind appearances and gain access to the Platonic ideals of Truth, Goodness and Beauty. The poets become, as Percy Bysshe Shelley writes at the end of “A Defense of Poetry,” the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Aspects of Shelley’s defense of not-thinking famously appeared already decades earlier, in German Romanticism, notably in well-known essays by Heinrich von Kleist such as “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts While Speaking” (“Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden,” 1805-6 [published post-humously]) and “On the Marionette Theater” (“Über das Marionettentheater,” 1810).

But an understudied short Kleist piece published just five days before “On the Marionette Theater” entitled “Von der Überlegung” (“On Reflection” or “On Thinking Things Over”) and subtitled “Eine Paradoxe” (“A Paradox”) makes the point most powerfully and succinctly, in a total of eight sentences, through the figure of the athlete–specifically, the wrestler. Kleist’s narrator begins by claiming that people wrongly “celebrate the usefulness of thinking things over to the four corners of the globe” (Man rühmt den Nutzen der Überlegung in alle Himmel) and announces that he is planning to present the following counter-argument to his son: “If thinking things over–Überlegung–comes into play prior to an act, or in the very moment of decision, it seems only to confuse, to obstruct and to repress the power to act, which flows from the glorious wellspring of our feelings” (3:337).¹ This father-narrator then introduces his only example: the wrestler, who, the father insists, will lose if he thinks too much before or during a match.

The few scholars to comment on “Von der Überlegung” read this argument straightforwardly, as if Kleist himself and not a fictional character (the father-narrator) were speaking: the athlete, a metaphor for modern man in general, needs to learn to think less, to be more like this spontaneous wrestler.² But Kleist’s goal is not to issue a pragmatic edict, if only because he understands, before Freud, that one cannot order oneself not to think. This is why Kleist introduces the fictional narrator between himself and the argument, and why Kleist prefaces the father’s speech ironically. The anti-thinking father thinks ahead of time about how he will criticize thinking ahead of time: “I think I will address my son one day…as follows” ([ich] denke meinem Sohn einst…folgende Rede zu halten). As I will argue here, Kleist’s position against thinking is not prescriptive but rather structural, and it depends specifically on the example of the wrestler–and not, say, the boxer or the fencer, whom Kleist writes about elsewhere.³ He requires the wrestler to literalize the essay’s title word: Über-legung (literally, “lying over or on top of”). In so doing, Kleist reveals thinking’s physical past specifically in wrestling, which unsettles the ideological (that is, idea-based) suppositions on which thinking establishes itself.⁴

A close reading of “Von der Überlegung” reveals that, far from offering an edict–Thou shalt be like the wrestler!–Kleist deploys the wrestler to demonstrate the necessary fragility of all reflection. In this analysis, we must differentiate between Kleist and his narrator. Although Kleist shares many opinions with his narrator–including a faith in radical physicality–he also distances himself at times, as when...