Kant himself was to fall victim to the antinomy, or perhaps the insoluble contradiction of his theory was the manifestation of the inner conflict of his own life. For Kant rejected the “rapture” and “fanaticism” that were also responsible for melancholia, but he was so fanatical in doing so,4 and he displayed such a rapture for a rational lifestyle, that he himself was overcome with melancholia. From the pages of three surviving contemporary biographies of him (by Ernst von Borowski, Reinhold Bernhard Jachmann, and Ehrgott Andreas Christoph Wasianski), one gains the impression of a man who compressed his life into a system of rigorous rules, but whose facial features were touched by a severe melancholia. “Everyone who knew him can testify that Kant’s most characteristic quality was the persistent endeavor to proceed in everything according to well-reasoned and, at least in accordance with his own convictions, well-based principles,” von Borowski wrote. “An endeavor to set himself certain maxims in large things or small, important or insignificant alike, maxims from which it was possible to start and to which it was possible to return. Over time, those maxims became so interlaced within his innermost ego that he still acted on that basis even when he was not thinking of them” (quoted in Felix Groß, ed., Immanuel Kant, 51–52).5 But for all the positive features of that life, it did have one drawback, of which Kant himself was also aware: “Once,” von Borowski writes, “in my presence he expounded to a lady, who enquired after his health, that in point of fact he was never healthy and never sick either” (52). To feel neither healthy nor sick is an indication of a severe personality imbalance. When a sense of the elusiveness of existence takes possession of man, terror will overcome him. Nothing could be more natural than to try to escape — to flee one’s fate. The goal, however, is unfathomable: in seeking sanctuary from a threatening existence, one is bound to realize that one can count only on oneself, yet even before one can take a rest in oneself, that threatening existence falls in like a vaulted ceiling. One becomes unreliable even to oneself, and no section of one’s being is left in which one might hide for relief: the soul becomes just as unpredictable as the body. Let us not forget that the eighteenth century was a century not just of the Enlightenment but also of hypochondria, or as it was called at the time, “melancholia hypochondriaca.” Even a lifestyle regimented from top to toe was unable to protect Kant from that: “Perhaps no person has ever paid more attention than Kant did to his body and everything connected with it,” noted Jachmann (quoted in ibid., 194); while von Borowski adds: “As long as I was acquainted with him, he paid constant attention to his own body, and he willingly conversed with others about all methods by which he might preserve his health; although he never had recourse to medical assistance for himself, he nevertheless had a predilection for studying medicine, paying lively attention to its innovations and results” (53). One dismisses the complaints and perennial anxieties of hypochondriacs as imaginary physical illnesses, but an imbalance of the imagination can induce genuine ailments. One should not think only of organic diseases that hurry to meet hypochondriacs, but rather focus on disturbances of the imagination — on the reasons behind those “groundless” complaints. Such disturbances are not merely a harbinger of an imaginary, and maybe later a genuine, physical complaint, but also a sign that the hypochondriac senses that all existence has become disordered for him. Reality condenses around hypochondriacs, but as with every vortex, here, too, everything turns to nothingness beyond a certain point. Kant was not spared terror at the thought of dying: “He concerned himself with reaching a ripe old age,” Jachmann wrote. “In his mind he compiled a whole list of people who had lived to see an advanced age, he liked to invite people in Königsberg who were older and of higher rank than him, and he was happy to push ever nearer to the front and to have ever fewer older people ahead of him; for many a long year he had the Königsberg police inspectorate send him the monthly mortality list so that he could calculate his life expectancy based on that” (quoted in ibid., 194; emphasis added). Was that a happy life? Did all that calculation make for a balanced existence? Was it able to drive the fear from him? By way of an answer, let us quote Kant himself as reported by von Borowski: “Is there anyone who has not read in his writings, or any friend who had not heard more than once from his own lips, that there were no conditions under which he would live his life again if he had to live it the same way all over again from the beginning?” (53).
Modern thinking marks its start from Kant, and the two paths that took him as their starting points so exclude each other that when their followers seek to refute one another, they are usually reduced to stumbling in the dark. Since the evolution of modern reality substantiated Kant’s “pessimistic” thinking and rendered it doubtful that human self-creation would lead to a harmonious community of free individuals, theoretical disputes in philosophy, after Hegel’s appearance, were characterized by the fact that whereas Romantics (melancholics) had based their arguments on the practical experience and cognition of reality, ideologues6 called them to account for promoting some kind of utopian idea of society (ignoring the fact that a utopia would be, just as much as reality was, a breeding ground for melancholia). Hitherto it had been perceptible, but from that point on it became obvious that there was no point of contact between the reality of melancholia and the ideology that condemned it: words just kept passing by one another, and the charges leveled against melancholia were subjected to the laws of the schematism denoted by Kant — they did violence to the object in order to be able to pronounce judgment on it. Disputing melancholic subjectivism and finding fault with it, Hegel attempted to show Kant’s tenets in a positive light. He tried to create a harmony between the individual conscience and absolute, general knowledge in which the individual’s finite and unique spirit could dissolve completely in the realm of the infinite spirit. But Hegel did not so much as attempt seriously to differentiate the finite and infinite spirit, and therefore he was also unable to express appropriately the value of uniqueness: that was the price he had to pay for eliminating the melancholic “subjectivism” of Kantian ethics. For that reason, the Romanticism that he rejected could have no role within his system: Hegel shaped reality into a monumental arch (pleasing and aesthetically entrancing though it may be in its own way, of course) in which only the transitions form “solid” footholds, but those autonomous (matchless, irreplaceable, unique) phenomena out of which one’s own life largely consists could not have any independent, absolute value. Kant believed in the absolute value of individual lives even though their realization — and the lives of numerous Romantics are proof of this — could be consummated only beyond the bounds of this earthly life, in death. Hegel had no such ambitious pretensions. Admittedly, he declared that free persons would regain their senses in one another’s freedom, and for an imaginary society, nothing could be more desirable than that. But autonomy, the possibility of which was developed by that same European culture that also provided the means for the Hegelian abolition of autonomy, dissolved irrevocably and became uninteresting in the Hegelian system. Hegel reproached the Romantic and melancholic Novalis for lacking a firm “bearing,” but actually, the main negative feature of his system was that the individual had no need of bearing in the Hegelian world structure: the individual was supported by the system, by the bridge of mediations. If Novalis jumped into the dark from that bridge of individual lack of bearing, then that was exactly a proof of bearing — a bearing that, entertaining no hope of the system, of its alleged totality, tried to be exclusively master of itself.