This collection of essays by Fodenyi revolves around the idea of man’s shadow, what is not a part of him, yet what he can never get away from. A recurrent theme in the essays is Fodenyi’s attempt to throw shade on the entire project of the Enlightenment and of our contemporary age of reason. “During the Enlightenment… the conviction that only time and intellectual preparation were required in order to eventually cast light upon all things… became ever more resolute…. In the history of human cultures until that point, only God (or the gods) had the right to absolute autonomy.” Fodenyi urges a reconnection with metaphysics. “Even in a secularized age, a sense for metaphysics can be maintained and nurtured: this is the sense for the uniqueness of our life, for the exceptionality of our existence within this universe, for the great wonder of the incomparability and unrepeatability of each moment of every one of our lives…. These two unknowns—preceding and following existence—form the roots of susceptibility to metaphysics.”
In his first essay, “Mass and Spirit,” Fodenyi asserts that modernity has tried to impose the will of man upon the entire cosmos. “Humanity became haunted by the thought that history was something that could be made and formed…. Humans now regard themselves as the prime movers of the universe. In other words, they wish to usurp the role of the Creator.” As man has sought his independence from nature, he has become undifferentiated from himself. He has become the mass-man. “The souls and the spirit had to “become massed together,” namely, it was necessary for people to grow indifferent to their spiritual roots…. The mass comes into being when every one of its members has been freed from differentiation and they all feel themselves to be uniform.”
Fodenyi, in his title essay, seeks to take on Hegel’s conception of history. He defends Dostoyevsky’s primacy of the individual within time. “If someone truly feels and experiences the weight of his own existence, then he is, so to speak, torn out of history, and that same weight—one that is beyond history—weighs upon him in Semipalatinsk as it does in Berlin.” Fodenyi defends that which in life is irrational. “In the name of rationality, one must look away from the most crucial human experiences. One must look away from suffering, from death, from the unverifiable, namely from all that of which man is not lord and master…. When Hegel reduced world history, God, and the absolute spirit to a common denominator—subordinating them to the principle of rationality—he was ultimately turning his back on freedom. Rational freedom is not freedom. What is rational is always confined; freedom is unconfined…. Hegel became the victim of the mistaken belief that he could explain the unexplainable…. He is terrified of everything that he cannot comprehend with reason.” Modern man is also a child of reason. “Never has humanity been so satisfied with its own self—like a spoiled and careless child, left to itself, allowed to do whatever it wishes. But that same child, when evening descends, having no idea of what to do with its freedom and fearful, is suddenly filled with anguish…. We have murdered God with our ambition—an ambition which at the beginning might have even met with the approbation of God himself. And it is none other than our drive to find an answer for everything.” The quest to encapsulate the world within the bounds of reason has become our hell on earth. “When the entirety of existence, the cosmic whole is reduced to a world that can be technically manipulated—this is hell. It requires no devils, no tongues of flame leaping into the heights or lakes filled with boiling tar. All that is needed is oblivion and the illusion that the confine of humanity is not constituted by the divine but by the tangible, and that the nourishment of the human spirit is not the impossible but the possible—monotonous beyond all measure, and rational.”
In his essay, “Kleist Dies and Dies and Dies,” Fodenyi deals with the theme of fiction and death, while recounting the famous double suicide of Heinrich von Kleist. Fodenyi affirms the porous bounds between the page and the real world, “a [fictional] work may be read exclusively as a self-contained autonomous system, [but] there are always fictional protagonists who step out from the cover of that book containing them with ease, freely moving between reality and fiction.” As regards to Kleist, Fodenyi has particularly in mind Goethe’s young Werther, Kleist’s obvious model. “Suicide is one variation of a dialogue carried on with the world, even if its goal is the final suspension of this dialogue…. It is impossible to read even one line of Kleist without thinking of how he put an end to his own life. His suicide preceded, as it were, his life’s work.” For Kleist, the quest for encapsulating reason is what destroyed him. He wrote to his sister in the midst of his “Kantian” crisis, “The thought that we here on earth may know nothing, nothing at all of Truth, and that what we call truth, has quite another name after death, and that therefore all attempts to win possession that goes with us to our grave are quite vain and fruitless: this thought has shattered me in the innermost sanctum of my soul.—My single, my highest goal has sunk from sight and I have no other.” Fodenyi explains why all Kleist had left for himself was to be the master of his own death. “For Kleist death would be a kind of positive reference point: the one irrefutable truth, the single incontrovertible certainty which rises like a cliff out of a creation that has lost its purpose.” Kleist’s purpose was to reclaim the Self in the age of the mass-man. “The great dream of Kleist was for the singular to be granted its own right, and for the momentary to be made conclusive. He tried to grasp the Whole so that at the same time the part—the single, the personal, the individual, the unrepeatable, the ineffable—would also remain eternal.”
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