Marcus Herz was Immanuel Kant’s friend, a former student, and a well-educated man — he qualified as a physician and eventually became a professor of philosophy. Yet,
“when Kant gave the MS. of the Critique to his friend Herz, a man much versed in speculation, Herz returned it half read, saying he feared insanity if he went on with it.”
I’m reminded of Heinrich Kleist, who committed suicide at age 34. His reading of Kant had the following effect upon him, according to reviewer Ian Brunskill:
“Kleist in his youth had espoused with enthusiasm all the optimism of the Enlightenment. Reason would conquer all; happiness would come with experience and understanding. In March 1801, however, by his own account, he seems to have encountered the thought of Immanuel Kant (it is not clear what precisely he read), and his world fell apart. By testing the nature and limits of human knowledge, Kant had sought primarily to establish the possibility of a meaningful metaphysics. To Kleist, however, it was much grimmer than that: Kant had shown, he believed, that empirical knowledge was unreliable, reason illusory, truth unattainable and life quite meaningless. ‘My sole and highest goal has vanished,’ he wrote. ‘Now I have none.’”
Sources: Will Durant, “Kant and German Idealism,” Chapter 6 of The Story of Philosophy, p. 270 (or p. 265 of this Google Books edition, pp. 192-3). Kleist: “How Kant Ruined My Life.”
Related: My other posts on the significance of Kant.
Wow, this is a very interesting story. I myself changed when bad stuff happened to me (I knew nothing about philosophy then), and then I read first Seneca, and then Schopenhauer. My outlook of the world and life was changed forever. For the worst? No. I remember many years ago that I ‘wanted to know the truth, even if painful, and preferred that to a pleasant lie’. Now I often think of suicide, I am totally isolated, and I often think how exactly I would carry it out if things get out of control. I would not commit suicide unless absolutely necessary, simply because I don’t want to devastate other people’s lives. These people always loved me, and they are very few, but they are there and they are very special to me.
Well, I wanted to know the truth, and now I do, and am PROUD of it. Philosophy to me is like a religion now. I don’t believe that Kant ‘ruined’ Kleist’s life. As philosopher Eric Dodson said, depression is a state of lucidity. It means that we now truly see and understand what we got ourselves into, as Schopenhauer called it: ‘the trick that has been played upon us’.
If 15 years ago I had read thoughts like the ones below, I would have disagreed:
‘Time is always coming after us, never letting us take breath, like a taskmaster with a whip!’
‘The world is colourful and variegated, but once you see through the variety, you realize it is all made of the same paste’.
Another one often occurs to me: ‘We all have a death sentence pending on our necks’. I don’t remember if I have read this or possibly made it up myself (probably not).
Yes, it’s really hard. But this is the task of philosophers, to stand the pain and the sorrow. As far as possible. Schopenhauer, in his always lucid conclusions, wrote that it is good enough if only life can be tolerated.
Exactly. The problems really appear when it cannot be tolerated. It seems to me that the main reasons why even ‘unsuspecting’ people commit suicide, is bad health. This is what happened to many famous people: Kurt Cobain, Robin Williams, many others. I remember watching ‘Mork and Mindy’ on tv as a child. Robin Williams’s cold blooded suicide is anxiety inducing.
Being a philosopher, or even being a student of it, takes guts. Of course I am not criticizine Kleist or Williams or these poor souls; to the contrary, I completely understand them. It’s a dangerous situation. If one has some good friends or family, it’s exponentially better than if someone is alone or even worse, socially isolated.
Then again, it seems to me that philosophy oriented people always felt alone, even when they weren’t. I can certainly say this of myself. For these reasons, one cannot count on anyone else but themselves. I keep telling myself: ‘You are you best friend’. Seneca wrote something similar: ‘Lost much? You have the best part of yourself’.
But, as Kleinz duly noted, it’s not so easy and it might not be sufficient. I myself tried to read Kant because Schopenhauer wrote that unless this is done, his own work will be incomprehensible, but I was finishing easier to understand works first, such as these by Seneca. But now I am kind of worried about reading Kant, ha ha. (forced and awkward laughter).
Thank you very much sir for your posts and I wish you a great day.
I wanted to myself add to Eric Dodson’s thought as regard depression being a state of lucidity.
Of course, we assume here that we are talking about depressed philosophers, or people who have strong critical skills. If the ‘ordinary person’ is caught by depression, probably the opposite happens, i.e. they do NOT see things under their real light. For example, they believe that their girlfriend or wife ‘left them’, and that this is now the end of the world, which is truly foolish, and weak. Take the suicide of the great composer Jeremiah Clarke, he shot himself (if I remember correctly) because a girl rejected him.
Now, this is clearly a case of not being able to tell the leaves from the trees. A philosopher would have analyzed the whole thing far more efficiently, for example by forming thoughts such as:
”People can reject me. Rejection happens everywhere. It’s not uncommon at all. I might not be pleased when someone rejects me, but that’s how the world works.”.
”One cannot be dependent on what other people think of them. That’s weak.”.
”This is just a woman I found very attractive, who rejected me. So what? Big deal. Her loss. ”
Of course, most of us men become total idiots when we find a woman that we are strongly attracted to. That’s when philosophy comes to our aid, ha ha.
Have a great day.
Oh my. I am just reading about Henriette Vogel, who committed suicide with Kleist. Just what I had written before about bad health and when life can’t be just tolerated anymore.
”All will be clear.” – Schopenhauer
I have now read a wikipedia bio of Kleist (I mistakenly addressed him as Kleinz before, sorry about my writing sloppiness) and actually I think it’s all quite clear. Kleist seemed to have been relying on all the things that Schopenhauer advised against, i.e. the ‘claim for happiness’, which is an illusion, as are the idea of a safe future, comfort, certainty, etc. I mean, at 11, he wrote in a letter than it seems strange not to have a life plan (you probably know all that). Then he had read Kant, he realized he had been cultivating all the wrong ideas about life and he could not take it. It is intriguing to note that he claimed to have been relying on ‘reason’, which is strange, as ”relying on reason” if anything means to see the world for what it really is, i.e. more bad than good.
All bad? Maybe not, but it’s like a tiny nugget of gold being buried under a ton of dirt. I remember I watched an interesting lecture by Robert Sapolsky: at some point he mentioned how religion or any positive beliefs, are all well and good when -nothing goes wrong-. But what happens when it does? All of a sudden the beliefs are shattered. Which makes me connect all these thoughts to another thing I learned by reading either Wladyslaw Szpilman or Elie Wiesel, i.e. how when very religious people in a concentration camp, were staging and conducting trials against God. It is a dangerous thing, to believe the world is a good place, and then to suddenly realize it’s not. It can be too much for some. This is what seemed to have happened to Kleist, although of course we will never know with certainty. The troubles of her friend Vogel, and the fact that actually she was more desperate than him (since she was terminally ill) I think strongly influenced Kleist. In other words: a certain mindset to start with, happening in the ‘wrong’ place with the ‘wrong’ person.