One has the impression that philosophy and life were conducting a debate; and looking at it from the viewpoint of ordinary life, Hegel’s polemic with the Romantics genuinely seemed to prove the rift of theory and practice. The role of philosophy, however, was much more a matter of life and death and cut much more to the quick than one might think today from the indigestible mass of textbook extracts. In its own way, classical German philosophy was as much an attitude toward fate as was the individual life and death of melancholic, prematurely deceased Romantics. “The mind is forever seeking to justify itself,” said Novalis, sensitive as he was to philosophy (Novalis, Ausgewählte Werke, 3:5). True philosophy is not a specialist branch of learning but an existential inquiry, or to use the words of Socrates, it is a preparation for death. Nowadays, the shock effect that contemporary philosophy had on the Romantics is almost incomprehensible. After reading Kant, Heinrich von Kleist suffered a breakdown, and melancholia overcame him; he drifted into such a creative crisis that he almost regarded his own existence as senseless. “Not long ago I made my acquaintance with the new, so-called Kantian philosophy,” he wrote to his fiancée, Wilhelmine von Zenge, on 22 March 1801. Then he resorted to the example of a pair of green eyeglasses to explain his despair: “If everyone saw the world through green glasses then they would be forced to judge that everything they saw was green, and we could never be sure whether our eyes see things as they really are, or whether they add something which pertains to the eyes not the objects. The same goes for the intellect” (Kleist, Werke und Briefe, 4:202).
Kleist asserted nothing less than that the only one capable of seeing things in their true reality was he who has no need of eyes as a means of seeing. To see, but without the contingency of earthly eyes — only a god could be capable of that. Or a melancholic, who saw through the surface of things, the way melancholic Kleist saw through everything. “Ah, there exists a sorry state of clarity,” he wrote to his half sister Ulrike on 5 February 1801, “from which nature has luckily spared people who see merely the surface of things. It shows me the thought behind every facial expression, the true meaning of words, and the motive behind action — everything around me, including myself, in its entire bareness, and my heart is starting to grow disgusted with that nakedness.” He wrote the following lines to Ulrike too: “The thought shook the sanctum of my soul, that we know nothing, absolutely nothing, about reality; that after death what we call truth here we shall call something else entirely, and consequently it is totally futile and fruitless to strive to acquire something that will follow us into the grave” (Kleist, Werke und Briefe, 4:202–3). Kleist thought his way carefully and consistently through Kant’s doubt about the knowability of reality; he hit upon a basic paradox of human existence: human cognition and the object that is to be recognized are inseparable from each other; we do not simply relate to an “external” reality, but are responsible for that reality.
By advising the Romantics that an individual is in reality whatever he makes himself out to be in reality, in practice, Hegel offered us sturdy footholds, but since he dissolved unique, irreplaceable individuality in totality, the reality he offered was one without man, one that would grow over man as a reality to which the individual could assimilate but essentially be unable to influence. Hegel disputed the absolute sovereignty of the individual, but in his hands the apparently solid category of “reality” was no more than the most characteristic feature of the modern world, which stifled individuality and had been placed in parentheses by the Romantics. What had bewitched and paralyzed the Romantics was the fact that there was no solid foothold beyond the ego. Prejudices, thoughts that had been digested or chewed over by others, became nullities for them just as uninteresting as the boundaries of existence “beyond” man. Novalis, by his own admission, was “enchanted” by Fichte’s philosophy, and with an almost Hegelian sensibility, called the philosopher the most dangerous of thinkers. Fichte considered being (Sein) and activity (Tätigkeit) to be identical, and thus for him reality was not a neutral object to be conquered but something created by man. Hegel said man was whatever he made himself in “reality,” but according to Fichte, man was what he made of himself — and along with the term “reality,” any accommodation or adjustment to reality was dropped from the sentence. Man was identical with his own possibilities, said Fichte by way of an answer to the Hegelian thought that man had to realize himself within reality. Actually, the Hegelian way of thinking was not “true to reality,” “real,” or even a “normal” way of thinking, but much more a system of prejudices that, having accepted and acquiesced in the structure of the existing world, presumed that the essence of man lay in complying with his circumstances. Although Hegel and philosophers who followed in his footsteps tried to differentiate between real and abstract possibilities, for the Romantics (primarily those of German background), who regarded the world not as finite but as contingent and transitory, drawing that distinction was no more than devious long-windedness; when Fichte and the Romantics (or later, Kierkegaard) held possibility to be more important than reality, it was not a matter of lack of basis, feverish daydreaming, or schizophrenia, but of the perception imbedded in melancholia that man was not born to accept the world but to create it.
It was never as obvious as in the Romantic era that individual freedom and the unsparing regularity of the existing world could be congruent. Inevitably, one of them had to prevaiclass="underline" if (as was usually the case) objective regularity won out, then the schematism adumbrated by Kant was asserted and the individual submitted to the world, obeyed the rules, satisfied the expectations, renounced his own definitive freedom and the possibilities inherent in his personality. If, on the other hand (as with modern genius), subjective freedom won out over objective regularity, then the world looked at this with suspicion: people tended to talk about madness or, with greater restraint, about abnormality, even in the case of manifest genius. It is always those who transgress the bounds of any given society that are regarded as insane, but only Romanticism suggested the idea that brilliance verged on madness. Aristotle’s theory of the golden mean seems to hold to this day. With Aristotle, melancholics were outstanding and endangered personalities threatened, on the one hand, by mania and, on the other, by depression. In modern societies, geniuses are likewise outstanding and endangered personalities, and they are threatened, on the one hand, by facelessness and a gray monotony and, on the other, by insanity. Aristotle’s perception seems pertinent to the present day: men of genius and melancholics are likewise people on whom fate has imposed greatness fraught with sadness. Greatness intimates the proximity of the threat of insanity. Beyond a certain point, greatness breaks through all frameworks when the person in question is no longer great but insane. (Which, of course, does not mean that every madman started as a great man.) Sadness, however, signals a risk of becoming jaded, of falling in line: not only does a great man die in just the same way as anyone else, but life also does all it can to divest him of his greatness and rank him among the mediocre — and not always without success. A genius is not insane, but not healthy either (at least not in the quotidian sense; for that reason, people who would like to label a genius as ill or healthy are mistaken).7 Geniuses are not sick, just not well. They vitiate this exclusionary way of looking at things because they are characterized by a state that implies a fundamentally different lifestyle and outlook. “Genius,” writes August Wilhelm Schlegel, “spans a person’s whole interior, and it consists of nothing less than the energy and innermost harmony of all that is autonomous and boundless ability in human sensitivity and intellectuality” (Kritische Schriften und Briefe, 2:76). The genius and the melancholic are inseparable from each other: both stand at the boundary of human possibilities. They belong together. A melancholy genius dwells on the boundary: he is absolutely lonely, and this metaphysical solitude sets him apart from everyone. His loneliness is not the same as that of the mentally ill, who are closed and unapproachable, nor is it the occasional sense of loneliness of the healthy, which stems rather from a lack of company than from fate. “Nothing is sadder or more oppressive in the world than this situation: he [the solitary figure] is the sole spark of life in death’s broad dominion, the lonely center of a lonely circle” (Kleist, Werke und Briefe, 3:502). Kleist’s words do not relate to melancholics of genius in general, but to the solitary human figure in an oil painting by Caspar David Friedrich titled Monk by the Sea. The large painting depicts the tiny figure of a monk standing with his back to the viewer, in front of a vast sea and under an overcast sky. The solitary figure is the melancholic genius himself, born at the time of Romanticism. Friedrich, who according to reports from friends8 was characterized by the deepest melancholia and painted the most melancholy pictures of all time, had an infallible sense of all the touchstones of modern melancholia: metaphysical solitude, a compulsion for self-justification, suffering in self-enjoyment, a death wish merging into a fear of death, and a condition bordering on that of a genius.