Figures of Simplicity

Sensation and Thinking in Kleist and Melville

Birgit M. Kaiser

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781438432304
  9781438432298
• eBook ISBN:
  9781438432311
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

A fascinating comparison of the work of Heinrich von Kleist and Herman Melville.

Figures of Simplicity explores a unique constellation of figures from philosophy and literature-Heinrich von Kleist, Herman Melville, G. W. Leibniz, and Alexander Baumgarten-in an attempt to recover alternative conceptions of aesthetics and dimensions of thinking lost in the disciplinary narration of aesthetics after Kant. This is done primarily by tracing a variety of "simpletons" that populate the writings of Kleist and Melville. These figures are not entirely ignorant, or stupid, but simple. Their simplicity is a way of thinking; one that author Birgit Mara Kaiser here suggests is affective thinking. Kaiser avers that Kleist and Melville are experimenting in their texts with an affective mode of thinking, and thereby continue, she argues, a key line within eighteenth-century aesthetics: the relation of rationality and sensibility. Through her analyses, she offers an outline of what thinking can look like if we take affectivity into account.

Chapter 1

Aesthetics

Sensation and Thinking Reconsidered

On March 22, 1801, Heinrich von Kleist wrote a famous letter to his fiancée Wilhelmine von Zenge, telling her of his shocking encounter with Kantian philosophy: “I recently became familiar with the more recent so-called Kantian philosophy, and I may impart one of its leading ideas to you without fear of its shattering you as deeply, as painfully as it has me.”¹ Kleist-criticism has read these and the ensuing lines to Wilhelmine—together with the letter written to his sister Ulrike the following day (ADE, 97–98/SW IV/1, 512)—as markers of an intellectual crisis, provoked by the encounter with Kant: an encounter that crushed Kleist, the young officer, and out of which Kleist, the writer, emerged in 1802 with his first literary work, Die Familie Schroffenstein. Much has been written about this crisis and the potential texts by Kant to which Kleist reacted so strongly. Despite differing suggestions to which of Kant's texts the “crisis-letters” of March 1801 refer,² the often held conviction is that the letters give evidence of the experience of a tremendous loss due to reading Kant. Kleist is seen to have lost his formerly held naïve Enlightenment belief in progress and transparency, in the possibility to perfect one's life and mind through education, and to acquire objective truth and lasting knowledge. With this ideal gone, Kleist-criticism largely saw Kleist emerging as the melancholic poet of the Fall.³ Friedrich Cramer articulates this in his preface to Christian-Paul Berger's study on Kleist's On the Puppet Theater. Seeing Kleist's oeuvre as articulating this experience of loss, Cramer notes that Kleist's essay On the Puppet Theater symptomatically marks a decisive turn in the larger European history of thought: from the static, closed-off Leibnizian system that described nature as a continuum—natura non facit saltus—of the material and spiritual world, hierarchically organized by monads, in view of perfection, to a Kantian limitation of reason and a system of critique. “At the turn from the Enlightenment to modernity stands Kleist.”⁴ This epochal turn from an ideal and enclosed Enlightenment world labeled as Leibnizian to a modern world—from Leibniz's continuous and hierarchical world of monads, in which increasing perfectibility was possible and desired, to Kant's contention that we cannot know anything beyond our senses (except for the reflective knowledge of this finitude of our knowledge and our incapacity to conceive of the things in and of themselves)—Cramer sees exemplarily marked by Kleist's work. Although Kant argues that we nonetheless have to strive—within those limits—to purify philosophical thinking from all empirical residues in order to attain transcendental a priori knowledge, Kleist is generally thought to have lost his “highest goal” (ADE, 95/SW IV/1, 505), as he himself declared at one point. And in fact, as his letter of March 22, 1801, to Wilhelmine von Zenge confirms, he was familiar with Leibniz before becoming acquainted with Kantian philosophy. The letter notes that he “already as a lad (I think by the Rhine, while reading Wieland) adopted the idea that Perfection is the goal of creation” (ADE, 95), probably referring to Wieland's poem Die Natur der Dinge oder Die vollkommenste Welt, which considers the concepts of perfection and truth as presented in Leibniz's Theodicy. It encouraged him to believe, Kleist notes, “that after death we should progress from the level of perfection achieved on this planet to a higher one beyond, and that we should be able there to make use of the trove of truths collected here” (ADE, 95).⁵ Familiar with Leibniz's philosophy, as can be expected at the end of the eighteenth century, which still stood under its influence, Kleist then also read Kant. He tries to convey the new insights to Wilhelmine—hoping that an account of Kant's central positions will not shock her as much as they had shocked him—in said letter of March 22, 1801.

If everyone saw the world through green glasses, they would be forced to judge that everything they saw was green, and could never be sure whether their eye saw things as they really are, or did not add something of their own to what they saw. And so it is with our intellect. We can never be certain that what we call Truth is really Truth, or whether it does not merely appear so to us. If the latter, the Truth that we acquire here is not Truth after our death, and it is all a vain striving for a possession that may never follow us into the grave. Ah, Wilhelmine … my one, my highest goal has sunk from sight, and I have no other. (ADE, 95)⁶

These letters have been read as indicators that—due to gaining from Kant the devastating insight that reason cannot penetrate beyond what our senses give us and that truth is therefore only finite, preliminary, and not to outlast death—Kleist's Leibnizian, rationalist worldview collapsed. But was it Kant's limitation of reason that Kleist was so shaken by? Was he disturbed by the screen of sensibility that Kant slid between the world and our reasonable assessment of it? Did he, in other words, accept Kant's philosophical assumptions and work out the dismay they caused him in his literary writings? This book pursues these questions and argues that if we consider the unusual twist that Kleist's work gives to one of Kant's main assumptions, namely to the relation between reason and sensibility, the thesis of an acceptance of and suffering from Kantian philosophy might need to be revised. Kleist's characters opt neither for rational, conceptual thinking, nor for its romanticized flip side of sensitivity and irrationality. They instead display a peculiar steadfastness in what they do, a steadfastness that does not rest upon rational choices or articulable convictions, and we can, thus, not say that its reasons are “known” to them. But simultaneously, they operate with a “knowledge” that is surprisingly apt to the situations they are in, and that grants them more adequate assessments of these situation than mere feeling could. This makes one wonder if the strong reaction to Kant was really due to a disillusionment with the scope of rationality and rationally acquired knowledge. Reading Kleist's texts, it seems that they struggle less with the finitude of knowledge, but rather with another moment of Kant's philosophy, related to the former. As this book suggests, what Kleist cannot agree to and what his own work works out differently than Kant, is the strict separation of sensibility and understanding, by which Kant discarded the idea of a complex continuity between sensibility and thinking present in Leibniz and thinkers indebted to him. Not the question of perfectibility but rather the question of continuity is decisive, as I would like to suggest, in understanding not only Kleist's encounter with Kant, but also the aesthetic claims Kleist made on that basis. The effects of Kant in Kleist's oeuvre are underestimated, if they are read as the disillusionment of a formerly naïve (Enlightenment) belief in reason, and I agree with Carol Jacobs that one “is tempted … to call this confrontation Kant's Kleist crisis—at the risk of disrupting our conventional concept of time-order.”⁷ Instead of a assuming a unidirectional reaction, Jacobs continues that “Kleist's text is not that which necessarily follows from Kant's, although, it might be heard as a kind of repetition, an echo of the voice of philosophy, with results that are incalculable.”⁸ What is at stake here is the incalculability of these results, the observation that Kleist's texts echo the voice of philosophy and throw it back in a productively distorted—that is, in this case: literary—form. Kantian philosophy did not so much devastate Heinrich von Kleist's worldview—at least that is of lesser interest—but it triggered Kleist's literary texts, which echo the voice of philosophy, and by repeating philosophical concerns in a different voice these texts produce something unforeseen, something that is missed, if we assume a straightforward causal relation to Kant. A predominant concern that Kleist's texts—much like Melville's, as we will see momentarily—take up from Kant is the question of thinking and its relation to sensation and sensibility. The responses given to it, however, are different from Kant's. Throughout the preceding century, this question of the relation of thinking and sensibility had driven a field of inquiry that became known shortly before Kant as aesthetics, a field forming in the wake of Baumgarten and Kant as a branch of philosophy that investigates the relation of the senses, sensibility, pleasure, and desire to thinking. By taking up this concern in his texts, Kleist along with many others firmly asserts a position within this field—however, as we heard from Jacobs, with incalculable results. Howard Caygill phrases these various incalculable effects in his Kant Dictionary—significantly in the section entitled “Aesthetics”—and notes that the dissatisfaction by Kant's critics “was almost immediately apparent in the emergence of new forms of philosophical and para-philosophical writing in the field of aesthetics. These ranged from Schiller's edifying letters on aesthetic education, to Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel's fragments, to Kleist's short stories, Jean Paul's ironic manual for beginners in aesthetics and to Schelling's and Hegel's historical narratives.”⁹ Although Caygill lists Kleist's short stories among a whole list of responses to a dissatisfaction with Kant's answer for the “aesthetic problem,” my aim here is to carve out one specific aesthetic response: one that answers in the form of short stories (as opposed to responding, for example, by ironic manuals, historical accounts, or the logic of the fragment), and that answers specifically to Kant's separation of sensation and thinking by experimenting with the continuity between them and sketching a type of thinking we could call sensate, or affective thinking. In order to better carve out this specific response, this book couples two writers, whose responses are strikingly similar and whose conjunction helps to contour the affective thinking their texts engage with. As the following chapters will show, both Kleist and Melville expose a similar discontent with the transcendental settlement of the question of thinking as reason and conceptual thought, and devise figures of simplicity, which offer a more complex approach to the relation of sensation and thinking and claim their continuity. On this account, their figures have also allowed contemporary thinkers—prominent among them Gilles Deleuze with his philosophical concern for this question and his frequent recourse to both Kleist and Melville—to approach affectivity as a mode of thinking. In tracing these figures, this book wishes therefore not only to engage with affective thinking, its operations, its dilemmas, and its potentials, but also to challenge the disciplinary demarcations of the field of aesthetics.

While Kleist read of Leibniz's philosophy in a poem on the banks of the river Rhine, Melville learned of Kant's philosophy crossing the Atlantic in October 1849. Exhausted by the many books he has written, but also by their waning success over the course of their publication, Melville took this first literary “business trip” to England—after he had sailed for years as a common sailor on whalers and navy vessels.¹⁰ On October 12, 1849, he notes in his travel journal: “Have tried to read, but found it hard work. However, there are some very plasant [sic] passengers on board, with whom to converse. Chief among these is a Mr Adler, a German scholar, to whom Duyckinck introduced me.”¹¹ George J. Adler, professor of German at New York University, was to remain Melville's friend and interlocutor on philosophy until Adler's death in 1868. The journal introduces Adler as being “full of the German metaphysics, &discourses of Kant, Swedenborg &c” (J, 4) and tells of Melville's increasing acquaintance with him, and with what he calls “metaphysics” during the four weeks of his sea journey. On October 22, he notes: “Clear &cold; wind not favorable…. [L]ast night about 9½ P.M. Adler & Taylor came into my room, & it was proposed to have whiskey punches, which we did have, accordingly” (J, 8). They had an “extraordinary time” and “talked metaphysics continually, & Hegel, Schlegel, Kant &c were discussed under the influence of the whiskey” (J, 8). We have to note that “talking metaphysics” with Adler and Taylor was no more a first encounter with it for Melville than had been the case for Kleist, as we saw in his “crisis-letters.” In Melville's case, Kant has already appeared in Mardi (1849). Neither, of course, are his conversations with Adler Melville's only known encounter with philosophy, and Melville-criticism has meticulously traced his extensive readings and intellectual stimulations.¹² But what the entry shows—also, when we hear that five days later, they were “riding on the German horse again” (J, 9)—is that Melville's encounter with philosophy was from the start more humorous than Kleist's. Melville was not shaken by it, but rather seems somewhat stoically amused, much the way his characters are a little more stoic than Kleist's stouthearted and rash ones. The appearances of Kant in Melville's texts are not dramatized by Melville—nor by Melville-criticism—as effecting a crisis, or an enlightenment. Familiar with idealist and Kantian philosophical positions, as much as with the American transcendentalist philosophy associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Melville distances himself from these by satirizing them: Emerson most notably in The Confidence-Man of 1857,¹³ and Kant most pointedly in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale and Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, which were both written after returning from his journey to England in 1849, and immediately preceded his turn to tales. When we come to Melville's tales in chapter 2, we will see that the tales move away from the explicit satire of philosophical positions in these earlier novels and transform their critique into the presentation of an alternative to the problem: the tales no longer express the dissatisfaction with Kantian, idealist, and transcendentalist parameters by way of satire, but their form, language, and characters perform a relation of sensibility and thinking that significantly differs from Kantian, idealist, and transcendentalist convictions. Thereby, they truly become “para-philosophical writings” in Caygill's sense: next to philosophy, their echo distortedly repeats and produces something new in the repetition, something the “simpletons” that predominate the tales under scrutiny in this book allow to emerge. But we must not rush ahead of things. Let us briefly stay with Moby-Dick, where Kant makes his most frequent and most commonly known appearance. Here, Kant figures alongside Locke, when both philosophers are likened to the heads of different whale-types. During Ahab's chase of the white whale, halfway through the novel, a sperm whale is killed and hoisted alongside the Pequod. The order is given, “if opportunity offered,”¹⁴ to also hunt a right whale, and when opportunity indeed offers, a right whale is killed.

The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, where fluke chains and other necessaries were already prepared for securing him. “Didn't I tell you so?” said Flask; “yes, you'll soon see this Right Whale's head hoisted up opposite that parmaceti's.” In good time, Flask's saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards the Sperm Whale's head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunderheads overboard, and then you will float light and right.¹⁵

Humorously fitted into the cetological section of the novel, which gives meticulous details of the art of whaling, Kant appears as the counterpoise to Locke, both equally weighing down on the vessel. This is no unusual pairing, as Ralph Waldo Emerson for example had suggested the same in his essay The Transcendentalist in 1842.¹⁶ Conceiving the difference between materialists and idealists, into which thinkers have generally divided themselves, along the lines of Locke on the one side, and Kant on the other, Emerson in his essay clearly leans toward Kantian positions. Melville's suggestion, on the other hand, is to throw both overboard; or, to be more precise and in line with the text: to just keep them hoisted alongside, as they are bound go down anyway: “Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will not be very long in following.”¹⁷ Both Lockean and Kantian philosophy, the passage suggests, unduly and one-sidedly tilt the vessel, either toward sensuality (Locke) or toward rationality (Kant). It would be too precipitous—given Melville's pronounced interest in philosophical questions—to conclude that the passage suggests throwing philosophical concerns at large overboard. Rather, it seems to recommend refraining from a too one-sided valorization of one of the two sides and perhaps consider the problem from a different angle.

In order to see what Melville's and Kleist's “para-philosophical” writings propose, we nevertheless need to first look at what they reacted to, and when we consider the recurring confrontation of Kant as a philosophical persona in their writings, w...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: On Subterranean Connections
• 1. Aesthetics: Sensation and Thinking Reconsidered
• 2. Sentimentalities
• 3. Affectivity
• 4. Insistence
• 5. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography