Heinrich von Kleist: Writing after Kant by Tim Mehigan (review)

The thesis that Kleist underwent a crisis engendered specifically by his reading of Kant, or of Kantian philosophy, in 1800–01 was for many years a dominant assumption of scholars. However, in the last twenty-five years or so, the thesis has come under critical scrutiny, as scholars have suggested that Kleist’s letters concerning his encounter with Kantian philosophy were a symptom of a wider existential crisis, or even a means of getting away from the confines of his life in Prussia and explaining to his fiancée his desire to escape to Paris. Tim Mehigan’s monograph Heinrich von Kleist: Writing after Kant sets out to re-frame the debate concerning Kant’s influence on Kleist. Mehigan sets aside the vexed question of which works by Kant or his followers Kleist may have read. He assumes a general influence of Kant on Kleist, but as his title implies, his main thesis is not that Kleist presents Kant’s ideas in his work, but rather, as the subtitle implies, that Kleist’s intellectual agenda was so profoundly shaped by Kantian philosophy that his work needs to be understood as “writing after Kant.” Mehigan argues plausibly that whereas Schiller’s encounter with Kant was shaped by the grounding provided by K.L. Reinhold, Kleist had few such supports, and that as a result he was “completely unhinged” by the encounter (4). Mehigan examines in some detail the evidence for how Kleist’s encounter with Kantian philosophy took place and suggests plausibly the thesis that the encounter may have taken place in two stages, the first in autumn–winter 1800, the second in February– March 1801. Mehigan regards the problem of self-consciousness and its reliability as a basis for knowledge as the key problem that Kleist addresses in his work. In his dense introductory chapter, Mehigan presents a view of Kant’s thought as a balancing act between Cartesian rationalism and empiricism, but argues plausibly that Kleist takes Kant’s starting-point—the acceptance of the limits of human knowledge—as a conclusion.

Part One of Mehigan’s book—gathering together Chapters One to Four—is simply entitled “Reason.” Some of the most interesting material is contained in the second chapter, in which Mehigan elucidates the relevance of Hume’s notion that “it is custom and habit that gives shape to our experience, not reason” for an understanding of Kleist’s writing (42). Mehigan goes on to read Der Findling as a critique of the rational project of enlightened education, which illustrates that “there is no natural virtue underlying human life” (47). Mehigan seeks not simply to trace Kleist’s responses to Kant, but rather to understand Kleist’s works as a set of responses to the post-Kantian intellectual landscape. The third chapter offers a reading of Penthesilea as a critical take on Fichte’s project for transcending the limits of self-consciousness. Chapter Four offers a stimulating reading of Michael Kohlhaas as a response to changing notions of law, from Hobbes’s emphasis on law as grounded on fear of disorder to Rousseau’s notion of a social contract based on common consent. Mehigan concludes that Kleist favours “a type of contractualism that is built on the equality of the contracting parties” (80).

Chapters Five to Eight in the Part Two of the book (on “Agreement”) explore further the importance of contracts, both between characters and between reader and writer, which Mehigan considers a key feature of Kleist’s stories. In his readings of “Die heilige Cäcilie” and “Das Bettelweib von Locarno,” Mehigan seeks to show how the texts systematically test hypotheses concerning the events that they portray. An incisive reading of “Die Marquise von O. . .” illustrates how the predominance of written (and often explicitly contractual) communication can be read as a reflection of the disrupted state of human relations in a fallen world. By contrast, the reading of Michael Kohlhaas in Chapter Eight imposes a rather rigid and unconvincing template of...