Kleist, Kant, Descartes, Suicide. 

                                                                Heinrich von Kleist

Who knows why people do what they do? I don’t know why I have done many of the crazy things I have done. All you can really do is to speculate. People who don’t agree with Nietzsche’s philosophy often want to make a connection between his radical philosophy, his extreme life, and his subsequent insanity. I have often wondered whether Heinrich von Kleist’s suicide had anything to do with his apparent total embrace of Kantian philosophy, the implications of which he understood perhaps better than Kant himself. Kleist lived in a world of ideas and fantasies, no doubt. He passionately believed in truth and knowledge, that the point of Creation was to advance in it; that indeed, in a weird twist on the Hindu belief in reincarnation, we would take what wisdom we attain in one life into the next, with the end goal of perfection, divinity. Well, this was at least compatible with the ancient task of philosophy: wisdom, the profoundest truth about Being (including our own) that we might attain with our finite intellects. For Kleist, accepting Kant’s ‘axiomatically true’ claim that the world for us can only ever be a representation and that we are absolutely cut off from the ‘things-themselves’ undermined a belief system that had given his life meaning. Here in a letter is how he understood the implications:

 

Wenn alle Menschen statt der Augen grüne Gläser hätten, so würden sie urteilen müssen, die Gegenstände, welche sie dadurch erblicken, sind grün - und nie würden sie entscheiden können, ob ihr Auge ihnen die Dinge zeigt, wie sie sind, oder ob es nicht etwas hinzutut, was nicht ihnen, sondern dem Auge gehört. So ist es mit dem Verstande. Wir können nicht entscheiden, ob das, was wir Wahrheit nennen, wahrhaft Wahrheit ist, oder ob es nur so scheint.

 

If people all had eyes made of green glass, they would have to judge that the objects that they see through them are green – and never would they be able to decide whether their eyes revealed the things as they truly are, or whether they add something to the things that does not belong to the things themselves but to their eyes. It’s like that with the understanding (intellect, mind). We are never in a position to decide whether what we call truth is truly truth or whether it only seems so. [my translation]

 

Indeed, just to remain with perception, with vision, we know that what we see is conditioned by the way our eyes have evolved. Other animals – eagles, wasps, moles – have very different eyes than we humans, and thus the world they see appears different to them. Which way of seeing most closely corresponds to the way things really are? Does it make sense to get out of all eyes, all ways of seeing, and judge the way the world is seen by various creatures with the way it is in itself? Kleist interestingly connects, as he experienced it, the epistemological crisis to sin, the fall of Man from Paradise. Given that we are cut off from reality, we live our lives clumsily, awkwardly, like a swan out of water. That such a worldview can cause disorientation in a man as tightly wired and as noble in a way as Kleist, even despair, is intelligible to me. (I cannot understand how he could kill himself together with his lover.)

 

 

What suicide and what suicide means. It is through our responses to someone’s suicide that we know what suicide means, which is to say, that is how we know what it is. People respond differently. People disagree in their responses. Just like they do when they try to understand a great play, like Macbeth.