Religion, Naturalism, and the Paranormal in Heinrich von Kleist’s “St. Cäcilie” and “Der Zweikampf”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I argue that readings of Kleist’s “Die Heilige Cäcilie” and “Der Zweikampf” generally fall into religious, naturalistic, or poststructural camps, all of which fail to appreciate the full strangeness of these texts. Taking my cue from the discourse about the paranormal (spirit-seeing, clairvoyance, magnetic healing, etc.) with which we know Kleist was familiar, I demonstrate that these texts reflect a logical structure peculiar to such phenomena. More specifically, I use Jeffrey Kripal’s recent definition of the paranormal as an empirical “meaning event” grounded in a radical breakdown of the subject-object divide to show why it is easy to develop a “religious” or “naturalistic” reading of these stories, but very hard to make it stick. Like the paranormal, Kleist’s unerhörte Begebenheiten only mimic our cultural imaginary. I conclude by reflecting on what this might mean for religious and scientific experience generally.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".