Kleist’s Letter of 15 AUGUST 1801 to his fiancée, Wilhelmine von Zenge, has often been seen as the clearest statement of a profound loss of faith in the traditions of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in which he had been brought up. “Was haben sie genutzt?” he asks, reflecting on the works of Rousseau, Helvétius, and Voltaire: “Haben sie das Rad aufhalten können, das unaufhaltsam stürzend seinem Abgrund entgegeneilt?” (SW, 2:681). Dismayed by the contradictions he witnessed in post-revolutionary Paris between the supposed benefits of advances in technology and the moral decline he regarded as an inevitable by-product of such progress, Kleist conjures up a forlorn image of Man “wie Ixion, verdammt ein Rad auf einen Berg zu wälzen, das halb erhoben, immer wieder in den Abgrund stürzt” (SW, 2:682). As the letter unfolds, this skeptical view of the progress of civilization is followed by an apparently equally pessimistic view of the inscrutability of moral judgments:

Whether these words can really be read as an attempt on Kleist’s part to embrace a full-blooded relativist theory of morality seems questionable; nevertheless, they do point to a recognition that the increasing complexity of the post-Enlightenment world made judgments of morality anything but straightforward. However, it is not just Kleist’s apparent skepticism regarding morality and historical progress that has prompted many scholars and creative writers to claim him as a precursor of “die Moderne.” His reading of Kant, and his much-quoted conclusion that “wir können nie entscheiden, ob das, was wir Wahrheit nennen, wahrhaft Wahrheit ist, oder ob es uns nur so scheint” (SW, 2:634) have — regardless of the rightness or wrongness of such an interpretation — been cited as evidence of an essentially modern cast of mind in matters of epistemology. This, together with his observation, in another letter of 1801, that “die Sprache … kann die Seele nicht malen, und was sie uns gibt sind nur zerrissene Bruchstücke” (SW, 2:626), has persuaded some that Kleist’s oeuvre should be seen as anticipating postmodernist critiques of logocentric modes of representation.