Schopenhauer on Kant/Wallace Stevens Chimes in on Guitar

Was just examining one of those philosophical chimeras last night that I knew would probably look exactly the same way in 2012 it did to the Pre-Socratics.

But I looked anyway.

The question I had was whether anyone has any tenable concept of a reality outside of the human, not filtered through human consciousness or entities which exist only in self-reference to human consciousness.

Short answer: Of course fucking not.

I'm not saying neuroscience won't someday pluck this argument out of philosophy's bosom, but as of this century it hasn't really budged an inch in that direction from what I've read.

I was always charmed by Kant's idea of the noumenon and the thing-in-itself (whether these concepts are synonymous is a sore dividing point for Kantian partisans--I tend to agree with the not cadre).

It's the old war between the mystics and the empiricists. It's all philosophy ever is.

I am charmed by Kant's noumena and I do think they're rooted in some sort of mystical mathematical idea of one-to-one correspondences, intuition of dark matter (yes, that many centuries back) and the intution that human consciousness simply cannot be the be-all, end-all arbiter of existence.

This even makes rational sense because when we look at the continuum of consciousness we can see how "blind" those with less evolved senses are.

And yet somehow the notion that we are the "paragon of animals" has stuck.

That our senses are somehow complete and total about such things as time and space and their QM infrastructure.

Schopenauer does funnily demolish Kant's mystical streak by asserting that it's simply Kant being obtuse about the distinction of phenomenon vs. noumenon in Greek philosophy.

But I still understand how Kant rationally arrived at an "unspeakable" the same way Wittgenstein did.

There's just no apodictic in philosophy.

Nothing can be certain in a universe apparently designed along the lines of ideological paranoia. Infinite ideological paranoia.

Too many theories can work.

And now we have fucking Michio Kaku spouting off about alternative universes and quantum inevitability where simply everything must happen.

How is that not even more mystical than Kant?

I think many of the fundamental philosophical problems are really about the problem in the way that the abstract categories of numbers relate to the concrete categories of matter.

That "edge" in philosophy is sharper than most people tend to realize.

It's not just nominalism. There's something else floating there.

Anyway, here's Schopenhauers probable misunderstanding of what he perceives to be Kant's misunderstanding of Greek philosophy...

Schopenhauer's critique

Schopenhauer claimed that Kant used the word incorrectly. He explained in "Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy", which first appeared as an appendix to The World as Will and Representation:

"But it was just this difference between abstract knowledge and knowledge of perception, entirely overlooked by Kant, which the ancient philosophers denoted by noumena and phenomena. (See Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book I, Chapter 13, ' What is thought (noumena) is opposed to what appears or is perceived (phenomena).' ) This contrast and utter disproportion greatly occupied these philosophers in the philosophemes of the Eleatics, in Plato's doctrine of the Ideas, in the dialectic of the Megarics, and later the scholastics in the dispute between nominalism and realism, whose seed, so late in developing, was already contained in the opposite mental tendencies of Plato and Aristotle. But Kant who, in an unwarrantable manner, entirely neglected the thing for the expression of which those words phenomena and noumena had already been taken, now takes possession of the words, as if they were still unclaimed, in order to denote by them his things-in-themselves and his phenomena." [31]

The Noumenon's original meaning of "that which is thought" is not compatible with the "thing–in–itself", which signifies things as they exist apart from being images in the mind of an observer.

Poets never really have original philosophical ideas.

More original arrangements of philosophical ideas.

But what makes Wallace Stevens one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century was his ability to reify the greatest philosophical conundra.

He showed one of the strongest gifts I've ever seen in poetry for reification. I can't really think of anyone who matches him for his close readings of the history of human philosophy. There's a reason Santayana and he were such good friends.

And he did this with such charm and musicality.

Yes, he was often fey and flippant and there's poetic bargeboard fucking everywhere.

But some of the poems just seem like they're going to accompany the human animal forever.

And one of those poems would be his "The Man with the Blue Guitar."

Because it funnily goes in and out of the holes in the Swiss cheese of the exact question I asked (oh so pointlessly) again last night about consciousness and its self-referential nature.

Funny that a poem so plangent and so utterly moving (to me anyway) should be metered out along a singsong, Seussian prosody.

But this was long before Seuss.

And there is concinnity in the choice of singsong meter.

Because it's the gentle mockery of the theme: letting philosophy know it's doomed to a perpetual infancy.


THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR

I

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

II

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero's head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

III

Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,

To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,

To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,

To bang from it a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings�

IV

So that's life, then: things as they are?
It picks its way on the blue guitar.

A million people on one string?
And all their manner in the thing,

And all their manner, right and wrong,
And all their manner, weak and strong?

The feelings crazily, craftily call,
Like a buzzing of flies in autumn air,

And that's life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.

V

Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,

Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
There are no shadows in our sun,

Day is desire and night is sleep.
There are no shadows anywhere.

The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows. Poetry

Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,

Ourselves in poetry must take their place,
Even in the chattering of your guitar.

VI

A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;

Ourselves in the tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place

Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them, on the blue guitar,

Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;

For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when

The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar

Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.

VII

It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.

When shall I come to say of the sun,
It is a sea; it shares nothing;

The sun no longer shares our works
And the earth is alive with creeping men,

Mechanical beetles never quite warm?
And shall I then stand in the sun, as now

I stand in the moon, and call it good,
The immaculate, the merciful good,

Detached from us, from things as they are?
Not to be part of the sun? To stand

Remote and call it merciful?
The strings are cold on the blue guitar.

VIII

The vivid, florid, turgid sky,
The drenching thunder rolling by,

The morning deluged still by night,
The clouds tumultuously bright

And the feeling heavy in cold chords
Struggling toward impassioned choirs,

Crying among the clouds, enraged
By gold antagonists in air--

I know my lazy, leaden twang
Is like the reason in a storm;

And yet it brings the storm to bear.
I twang it out and leave it there.

IX

And the color, the overcast blue
Of the air, in which the blue guitar

Is a form, described but difficult,
And I am merely a shadow hunched

Above the arrowy, still strings,
The maker of a thing yet to be made;

The color like a thought that grows
Out of a mood, the tragic robe

Of the actor, half his gesture, half
His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk

Sodden with his melancholy words,
The weather of his stage, himself.

X

Raise reddest columns. Toll a bell
And clap the hollows full of tin.

Throw papers in the streets, the wills
Of the dead, majestic in their seals.

And the beautiful trombones-behold
The approach of him whom none believes,

Whom all believe that all believe,
A pagan in a varnished care.

Roll a drum upon the blue guitar.
Lean from the steeple. Cry aloud,

"Here am I, my adversary, that
Confront you, hoo-ing the slick trombones,

Yet with a petty misery
At heart, a petty misery,

Ever the prelude to your end,
The touch that topples men and rock."

�

XV

Is this picture of Picasso's, this "hoard
Of destructions", a picture of ourselves,

Now, an image of our society?
Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg,

Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon,
Without seeing the harvest or the moon?

Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead

At a table on which the food is cold?
Is my thought a memory, not alive?

Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?



XXIII

A few final solutions, like a duet
With the undertaker: a voice in the clouds,

Another on earth, the one a voice
Of ether, the other smelling of drink,

The voice of ether prevailing, the swell
Of the undertaker's song in the snow

Apostrophizing wreaths, the voice
In the clouds serene and final, next

The grunted breath scene and final,
The imagined and the real, thought

And the truth, Dichtung und Wahrheit, all
Confusion solved, as in a refrain

One keeps on playing year by year,
Concerning the nature of things as they are.



XXX

From this I shall evolve a man.
This is his essence: the old fantoche

Hanging his shawl upon the wind,
Like something on the stage, puffed out,

His strutting studied through centuries.
At last, in spite of his manner, his eye

A-cock at the cross-piece on a pole
Supporting heavy cables, slung

Through Oxidia, banal suburb,
One-half of all its installments paid.

Dew-dapper clapper-traps, blazing
From crusty stacks above machines.

Ecce, Oxidia is the seed
Dropped out of this amber-ember pod,

Oxidia is the soot of fire,
Oxidia is Olympia.

XXXI

How long and late the pheasant sleeps�
The employer and employee contend,

Combat, compose their droll affair.
The bubbling sun will bubble up,

Spring sparkle and the cock-bird shriek.
The employer and employee will hear

And continue their affair. The shriek
Will rack the thickets. There is no place,

Here, for the lark fixed in the mind,
In the museum of the sky. The cock

Will claw sleep. Morning is not sun,
It is this posture of the nerves,

As if a blunted player clutched
The nuances of the blue guitar.

It must be this rhapsody or none,
The rhapsody of things as they are.


XXXII

Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark

That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.

How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,

Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.


XXXIII

That generation's dream, aviled
In the mud, in Monday's dirty light,

That's it, the only dream they knew,
Time in its final block, not time

To come, a wrangling of two dreams.
Here is the bread of time to come,

Here is its actual stone. The bread
Will be our bread, the stone will be

Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except

The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.