A philosophical essay to return ultimate meaning to the poetical enterprise.
A text for Blast Press by by Gregg Glory This Book Published By BLAST PRESS Copyright © 1992 324B Matawan Avenue Cliffwood, NJ 07721 (732) 970-8409
Unimagined Things
Archetypes
CRITIQUE OF HUME
"Kant's Last Certainty"
"Kant Back-Talk"
REFUTING HUME NOTES
IMAGINATION: KANT'S SECRET WORKHORSE
RELIGION AND THE SELF
NOTES
RAMIFICATIONS FOR POETRY
The world must change if we but imagine it. Copernicus squinting traded in his lamps For furious mysteries; Galileo tossed Aristotle out For a swinging stone, back to the turbulent sea of thought Because his ghost had no bones. What new paradigm Will rinse us shining from the misbegotten foam? Unimagined things grow real, grow real. Nietzsche knew pale Apollo well, that he Must step lightly from red Dionysus' side; Michelangelo's high man and God, that mirrored touch, Poured the raging heavens into our daily cup. What matter that before unimagined things grow real They must first condense in thought? Man's a drunkard With his dreams and will piss them to the sod. Unimagined things grow real, grow real. Aging wrong and aging right cannot Endure our scorn or enhance our thought (Morality's an old, old play, with curtains that must fall) But new worlds imagined, that body in the breech. Einstein knew that his equation unravelled no new sky ---That were indifferent--- but was a chant to change his mind. Unimagined things grow real, grow real.
If the well of archetypes or anima mundi is the suprahuman source of our idea of causation or imposition of a pattern on received sense impressions, then the sense impressions spilling in on us from our blind bombardment with actual reality or the thing-in-itself are met by an opposing non- or supra-human reality and thin-in-itself, namely the meaningful pattern of the archetype rushing up from our foothold on the collective unconscious and grappling with the sense impressions that compose our preconceived Kantian universe. We have a direct, unacknowledged channel to actual reality, the thing-in-itselfness of the anima mundi.
But isn't it just as well to argue that the idea of causation, having once occurred to the self-aware portion of the mind, becomes itself a sense impression or perception equally with all of the effects registered on our consciousness through the action of our bombardment with actual reality's thing-in-itselfness? And if the idea of causation in the self-aware mind becomes equally a sense experience or impression of that mind, what is to keep that idea from rational interaction with the discrete sense impressions that constitute the sum of our sense experience? The idea of causation, once so perceived, must be allowed the same measure of reality granted to every other sense experience and not dismissed, as it was by Hume, as a non-experiential non-component of discretely perceived impressions.
The embodiment of the idea of causation as a sense experience allows it to touch other discretely perceived sense experience and to be considered rationally along with those other experiences and to be put in some RELATION to those other experiences and itself as an experience. Causality can be found through Hume's microscope, since anything "seen" through that microscope (rf Robert Frost's poem about the eye and the microscope) must include the totality of sense impressions connected to it in the enlightened process of self-aware viewing of discrete phenomena. As Schrodinger's Cat has so purrfectly shown, one cannot neglect the observer's impact on any observation.
This is not, however, to say that the idea of causality is merely or randomly "associated" with the discrete phenomenon going on under the microscope (or, more correctly, in the sense experiences going on in our perception of "under the microscope"). Not at all. It is to say, rather, that a critically self-aware viewer at the microscope cannot witness the goings on under the microscope without the idea of causation being present as a necessarily adjunct phenomenon.
To debate about the source of the various sense experiences does not enter the picture, since it is proven that the thing-in-itself, as the possible source of all our sense impressions, can never be known. Since this is so, or at least widely accepted to be so, Hume's dismissing of the self-aware sense experience of the idea of causation as a mere "mental" construct is faulty, since without the idea of causation he cannot show what the source of the sense experience of the "idea of causality" is or could possibly be. He cannot posit an abstract, mental purely non-experiential cause of the idea of causation without refuting himself by using the idea of causation to prove its non-existence. He cannot posit that the idea of causation holds true for proving or disproving purely "mental" or abstract constructs, since we have no knowledge of these constructs except as they register themselves on our consciousness as competing sense experiences or impressions. He cannot jump beyond this radical equality of sense impressions to make an argument about the mental source of the idea of causation because that mental source has the quality of a thing-in-itself and remains inviolable and untouchable except through the sense experiences imprinted on our consciousness through blind bombardment with it.
For all we know the thing-in-itself of "out there," the traditional source of sense experience and phenomena, and the thing-in-itself of unconsciousness or of whatever source of sense experiences arising "in here", may indeed be one and the same thing-in-itself. Since there is no way for us to have certain knowledge of the thing-in-itself of actual reality, it may well have the quality of being able to give rise to BOTH "outer" sense experiences (under the microscope) AND "inner" sense experiences (the idea of causation) AT ONE AND THE SAME TIME. They may be the same thing-in-itself, or they may be connected along a continuum of unity in some unknowable manner.
All certain knowledge derives from the senses, as sense experience. The idea of causation (i.e., that one event is logically compelled to follow a previous event), according to Hume, is nothing more than an imposition of order by the mind upon sense experience through a "habit of association" which in itself has nothing to do with sense experience. Causation is a false notion because "causation" never comes before the mind as a sense experience; we can neither smell nor see nor taste the experience of causation, therefore it is not of the category of certain knowledge. This is Hume's formulation of the problem of causation, and leads inevitably to his conclusion about causation's senseless meaninglessness.
The idea of causation, however, arrives in the mind, not through some weakly postulated "habit of association," but via the mind's careful and sensitive experience of itself. It is through this original process of self-aware self-notation, a notion not available to Hume in his seventeenth century array of preconceptions, that the mind or consciousness first becomes aware of the sensation of the notion of causation. Causation is a sensation or sense experience that occurs in the mind, or perhaps physically in the brain, and therefore may be considered as belonging to the category of certain knowledge known as sense experience.
Perhaps all ideas are such sense experiences that simply have their physical origin within the perceiver. Perhaps as such sense experiences all ideas have a single cause. There is a whiff of God or Imagination about such a notion, I know, but that should not vitiate its claim for consideration.
It is this ability to self-perceive, or to be self-aware that allows consciousness or the mind to be a source of sense experience as well as its repository. Hegel saw that any response to Hume or Kant must move along the lines of self-awareness, but he raised the stakes in his Idealist response by mixing Kant's categories of Man and Faith and making the Universal Spirit the repository of sensation-generating self-awareness instead of starting with Man and overturning Hume on his home territory. For, if the mind is a blank slate, it is one that can diagnose its own condition, note the color and age of the slate, and KNOW that it should not discount itself as a source of important sense impressions that invade or are to be included as part of any "incoming" sense experience. Causation occurs as a sense experience, but its "hypothetical" source is not outside the perceiver but rather indwelling and rushes up to meet "outer" sense experience and add its own dab of color or weight to the experience inextricably until any careful noting of the entire sense input must indeed include causation as one of its tangible elements.
An empirical stress on sense perceptions is fine, but it must include ALL of the sense perceptions of a given experience and not exclude some on the basis of their origin. To perform such a selective examination of the evidence is perhaps proof of a "habit of disassociation;" such selectivity could lead to the assertion that an orange is certainly orange, but it is not necessarily round.
To say that the mind is only a repository and receiver of sense experience is to generalize and abstract the nature of "mind" from a few incomplete instances of its manifestation. There is no basis in sense experience for such a generalization, and yet it is exactly this type of generalization upon which Hume's argument rests--- at least to the extent that it vitiates the claim of causation to be considered as a sense experience. Every idea, once articulated, has sensual aspects; to the extent that the "soul" of an idea is concrete and has extension in time, it must be considered as part of the structure of reality, and not merely a wistful imposition (imposed without a foundation in sense experience).
Because you are born blind doesn't mean that light doesn't exist.
Kant's last certainty -- that the categories of human cognition are themselves absolute (and thereby able to sustain the epistemological certitude of Newton and science in general) was revealed as faulty by Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein and company. What has been revealed instead is the absolute ability of the human imagination to re-structure, re-invent, and redefine the perceiving categories of its own consciousness, either in absolute freedom or along a moral spectrum of choice.
This was necessarily so because what the Kantian duality really set up was competing realms of fiction: the interior AND the exterior. To the interior or perceptual realm all nature and science were consigned. All certain knowledge became a series of relationships between equally competing perceptions or sense experiences. Since the relationships conjured by man's mind are as often irrational, impulsive, Freudian, and metamorphic as they are logical, coherent, causal, and rational, it was only a matter of time before science,--- consigned to the interior realm-- began to reflect these mental structures in its theses, experiments and "objective" results.
The alternate fiction of the "thing-in-itself," the unknowable reality through which our consciousness swims like a blind fish, was left free to manipulations by all sorts of religious impulses and doctrines which, as a result of the exterior realm's utterly unknowable nature, HAD TO be based on a leap of faith. Unprovable and inscrutable assertions were promptly resurrected, and religions had all of "actual" reality (itself a hypothesis) to splash about in.
Kant's assertion, his "last certainty" in the absoluteness of the categories of perceivable data as arranged by the mind, was also doomed because of the radically contingent nature of the cosmos itself. As parts of a radically contingent "whole" (the Cosmos) we ourselves were necessarily contingent, in our existences as well as our properties. We could be unbounded but not infinite. An ABSOLUTENESS in the mind's governing structures must, by the nature of being absolute, partake of the infinite. But, since we are contingent parts of a radically contingent whole (the cosmos itself), we could never by definition contain any such quality or nature of absoluteness. Kant's assertion had the character of saying that the spectacle on stage may vanish on the instant, but the spectator will always continue to perceive it.
One must backtrack to the very roots of Kant's fanciful duality and erase it in order to return to man anything like meaningful participation in his own existence. This requires an overturning of Hume's radical skepticism and the resultant hothouse blooms that have flourished in man's enclosed mental landscape.
IMAGINATION creates the categories through which the mind allows the world to be perceived. Piaget's stages of childhood are simply the history of maturing imagination. New senses and new objects to be perceived can be created by the imagination's positing of new categories. Synecdoche and synesthesia are examples of these "new worlds." Emily Dickenson's fly that had a "blue, uncertain buzz" is an example. This is what gives each man his total freedom and total responsibility.
The structure of the mind pre-ordains the structure of perceivable reality. To study the structure of the mind and come to a phenomenological understanding of it is therefore to study the structure of reality-- on an empirical basis. If this can be done, then what arises from the structure of the mind can no longer be dismissed as a non-perceivable non-object and must instead take its place alongside oranges and other objects of "certain" phenomenological knowledge. One of these structures of the mind has been repeatedly revealed as causation. Let science stand again.
Religion, or ecstatic insight, or the god-sting, etc., consists of a vision or revelation of the ding an sich, the thing-in-itself. The actual piercing through the merely phenomenal through divine intervention. This is the kingdom of heaven that "lies all around you."
Hume's own construction is completely non-utilitarian, which is, of course, immensely attractive, and he himself did not use his philosophy as a basis for his own action in the world but instead plodded forth every day, setting his alarm clock, and brushing his teeth to prevent tooth decay on the unfounded assumption that the sun would rise each day and that plaque CAUSED cavities.
Hume informs us that there is no such "thing" as causality--- there are only discrete sense perceptions. God, if he exists, must be causeless. perhaps, with Hume, we can see through our own self-deluding tropes about "causation" and thus come to causeless, uncaused God at last. He is all about us thus.
Units of consciousness--- largely grouped as the unconscious and the conscious--- partake of a dual nature: that of immaterial mind imposing a priori categories on experience (as in Kant) and that of matter. Each unit of consciousness is like a wavicle in that we don't know which realm it represents (material or immaterial) until it manifests itself as experience or evidence (material or perceptual in terms of certain knowledge) or as the inspector of the evidence (immaterial, behind the blue contact lens through which that "consciousness" which we call ourselves views the world).
The idea of causality is one of these uncertain wavicles of the mind.
Hume has outlined causality's properties when it manifests itself immaterially as an inspector of the evidence brought perceptually to the mind by the senses, but has not outlined its properties as a manifested concept, occurring in this manifestation as itself a perception or sense experience. What can causation do when available to us perceptually, as an uttered fact?
The categories introduced by Kant are only imagined "possible realities" that, once introduced to our mental perceptions, allow these perceptions to take on a feeling of permanence that is so strong as to be unthinkable--- from this point on in our mental existence, wee cannot out-imagine the "completely" imagined system of our present sensibility, since to do so would be to turn reality inside out and upside down. Kant's categories, unable to be expanded or added to, become the "mind forged manacles" Blake must rant against-- a self-limiting self-imposition that is utterly unnatural. Wallace Stevens puts a delicate point on the matter when he notes how easy it is to give a bird twelve toes in the imagination-- but how difficult to come up with, out of nothing, the idea and category of "bird."
If we did not have an imaginative conception ("perception") of our senses, would they exist?
To say that something can't be conceived ("imagined") is only to disallow its subjective existence. Not its actual existence. We can imagine a Mind that would be capable of imagining a universe without time and space; but this only gives the possibility of such a universe the same subjective existence that it was previously disallowed. Or is this merely verbal posturing? Are ideas given to us by how we "happen" to arrange words? Or are the words arraigned according to ideas? Forgive this digression. What we have in Kant are the absolute laws of a SUBJECTIVE UNIVERSE. The only problem with the universe is that it isn't 100% subjective: significant transfers of perception can exist. This argues for the existence of a true "reality" or neumena.
Without the faculty of imagination, kant's categories would be unpresupposable; we would have no "place" to put these ideas into--- nothing would be there to catch the tossed ball of philosophy. Imagination is the category that all the other categories are nestled in. In the same way that space and time allow objects to exist (be defining the qualities that make the objects objects), imagination allows space and time themselves to exist (ie., to be perceived or invented). Imagination is the perceiver or inventor of the things it acts upon. in its most solemn sense, it is the creative principle that makes the universe live and exist.
The false paths of the imagination that lead to an enervating sort of mental doodling, and that Kant warns against only shows that some of the products of the imagination animate their generating faculty to a greater or lesser degree than others. Some of the strongest, and earliest, leaps of individual or collective imagination have never been outdistanced or equalled (the full articulation and apprehension of an alternate reality). Time and space are illusions of this order, their corollaries gaining stability from their almost unavoidable creation/existence. The consistency of their illusion only goes to show the strength of the imagined principle of consistence.
Imagination, in the large and variegated sense that I use it in here, is on a level par with that which is called Reason, if not, indeed, superior to it.
Out of Nietzsche's nihilism and great "transvaluation of all values" Sartre built his great individual faith. Since we create the world that we allow ourselves to see, we are ultimately responsible for what we do in that world. As John Butler Yeats wrote to his son: "a people who do not dream never attain to inner sincerity, for only in dreams is a man entirely himself. Only for his dreams is a man responsible--- his actions are what he must do." But, since the crux of Kant and resuscitation of Berkeley maintain that existence is "not reality" and is "a vision," or, if you will, a dream, Man, in this Sartre-esque reading of his heritage, must be responsible for his life radically and totally--- hence the black hole singularity of existentialism. But Nietzsche swam this issue to its source, as his determined nihilism suffices to show. Sheer schizophrenia, a detachment from all that pulls us from ourselves, a rampant unreality, touching nothing and unable to be touched by anything in return, as the solemn psychiatrist himself perceived.
The fact that Kant was followed by the German Idealists should come as no surprise, since even all empirical activity had been banished to inside the human skull, traditionally the seat of dreams and abstractions. the most rigorous empiricists now had to be involved in studying the "last reality" left to them by Kant's analysis of the human condition--- the phenomena registering on human consciousness and the mental categories man whipped up to allow himself to perceive these phenomena/.
It is also no surprising matter that Hegel, who sought to unify matter and spirit under one philosophy (and so overturn Kant's absolute dualism) ended by finding contradiction at the heart of every truth. For he set sail in a craft of subjectivity, and no divine breath of Christlike imagination intervened to push him past his own sunset. Since the traditional idea of "matter" had been banished by Kant to the realm of faith, and since Hegel tried to work within Kant's conception of reality, or "proofs" concerning the nature of that reality while still trying to unite matter and spirit, he had no choice but to call his insights "contradiction" and "antithesis." Hegel HAD TO, working within these limitations, posit the existence of a concept larger than the human mind and its categories, since such a mind could only know the dream-like phenomenal world of subjective human consciousness. He came up with two" the Universal Spirit (Geist) and the endless dialectics of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Truth must be shaken out of a paradox box.
Hegel was beginning to discern the schitzophrenia that stabbed Nietzsche on his deathbed.
the history of philosophy and science consists of those who mistook their metaphors for other than an expression of human rootlessness, a cri de coeur of sorts.
Yeats, in describing a woman who "had after years of victorious prudery become the mistress of a drunken scoundrel" wrote that "because she has enough genius to make her thirst for reality, and not enough intellect to understand the temporal use of unreal thing, she is throwing off ever remnant of respectability." Many men of a fine and even distinguished temperament are like this girl, and indeed, most romantics have similarly misapprehended the crux of their situation in a fashion strikingly alike.
As for some connection with the thing-in-itself, I have been engaged in a life-long project to build-- artfully as much as rationally--- an accurate representation of my own sense experiences and the patterns that show themselves to me--- whether a windbreak or the grainy apex of a pyramid--- in the rapidly shifting sands.
Man is not, with his back against the wall, faced by a dazzled display of sense perceptions emanating from "out there;" rather, he is at the mountain's peak, dazzled front and back, inside and out, with breath-robbing intimations of the numenous.
On page 435 of The Passion Of the Western Mind, the author, Richard Tarnas, speaks of "the powerful contraction of vision" as a prelude in western thought to "reaching a highly critical stage of transfiguration." Something of this and something of the interior discovery of archetypes (one reading of the "unimagined things" of the poem with which I open this essay) pervades a line in the poem which asks rhetorically: "What if before unimagined things grow real/ they must first condense in thought?" Before any new paradigm of human consciousness can manifest itself, man must, like the good poet he is, align himself with nature mentally in such a way that knowingly includes unconscious content. This is one of the reasons that Einstein "chants" his equation-- because he is aligning himself with nature's revealed rhythms and not "merely" imposing a new paradigm on malleable phenomenal material.
The ideas that the poem articulates of the ruling paradigm of the imagination takes its impetus from the theoretic work of Popper and Kuhn and their historic studies of the ways in which science behaves; they discerned that science operates by a series of ruling paradigms or main notions that govern the research efforts of the entire scientific community until a new paradigm or deeply altered conception of the universe and how it works is put forward.
This thesis suggests to me the way in which religious, political and imaginative notions have gained or lost ground over the centuries. Christianity, Marxism, and Nationalism are three examples of the type of paradigms I mean. The current crisis in science requiring a new paradigm about the nature of the universe is concerned with the recent "chaos theories," and I make reference to this at the end of the first stanza, characterizing the present confusion as "misbegotten foam"-- since waves and foam demonstrate the sort of chaotic behavior under study and because they are "misbegotten" until they are properly perceived by a new ruling paradigm that can include their chaotic behaviors into some theory about how the universe operates.
More generally, it seems to me that the very nature of the creative enterprise of the imagination itself can be described in the terms outlined by Popper and Kuhn and indeed that these notions have parallels or forbears throughout the history of art and literature. Nietzsche and his notion of the poles of Apollonian and Dionysian nature outlined a similar dialectic or structure of the artist's efforts of construction. For him, creation always comes as the simplification and objectivification of the chaotic welter of deeply irrational experience, the wild cry of half-organized colonies of cellular life. The clean Apollonian line is extracted from the Dionysian scribble.
Since art and poetry have always been viewed as means through which man alters his image of himself, the relativism in the project of science itself, as revealed by Popper and Kuhn, has given me the courage to propose that scientific pursuits themselves take up the artist's function to some degree and help to shape and cement the myth of the world by which we live.
By tracing this implication of Kant's (that science merely describes the world as revealed to us by the categories of our own perceptions) in such a way, the poem leads rhythmically to its final assertion that Einstein was a chanting poet concerned with myth as much as a delver into objective "reality." His tools, after all, were the same: pencil, paper, and the resources of his own mind.
Any poet must believe in poetry's ability to reveal or consolidate human insights that reach back in time and inward to that ground of being Grof recorded. To conquer time by living in eternity can only take place through some rhythmically appropriate type of Nietzschean recurrence. "Archetypes" or something like permanently recurring experiences permeate us inside and out. To know this, to be self-aware in this manner, and to live in touch with such "permanently recurring experience" is to achieve a brand of timelessness. A refreshing, spritzed bliss.
"Vision or imagination is a representation of what actually exists, really or unchangeably." --Blake or Yeats? [Blake! - ed.]
Vision or imagination in these terms clearly puts us in touch with the wellspring of archetypes, or eternally recurrent experience. Since we know that we can have no direct knowledge of the thing-in-itself--- either of the outer world or of the "inner" world, which may indeed be the same thing since there is no way for us to distinguish between the different sources of our "subjective" sense experiences or impressions--- vision or imagination or revelation itself may, in its deepest form, consist of a stripping away of the barrier between mere sense experiences and the thing-in-itself that gives rise to the sense experience. "Art is [literally] but a vision of reality [things-in-themselves]," W.B.Yeats.
The unconscious itself, since by definition it cannot be a part of our subjective conscious sense experience universe, may actually be a thing-in-itself, an actual component of actual reality trapped deep inside us and flashing us furtive signals concerning the numenous. Archetypes, or eternally recurrent experiences, then, are part of the sense experiences bubbling up spontaneously from the unconscious as a thing-in-itself. But, if the unconscious is a thing-in-itself, a part of actual reality, AND a part of ourselves, who can say that we do not occasionally--- in moments of rare vision or unaccountable ecstasy--- experience that actual reality with our conscious minds as well, as in some commanding symbol that may reshape life or some inexhaustible scent of remembrance?
Actual reality, the thing-in-itself, IS the transformed nature, the "something that moves beyond the senses," the "disembodied [because unable to be presented to us as manifested sense experiences] powers," the "invisible life," "a part of the Divine Essence," and the "unseen reality" of all great artists and all artistic achievement--- which demanded, under the old Kantian Covenant, a leap of "faith" in order for us to access it. This is why the Romantics HAD TO embrace the irrational in order to know reality; their intuition told them that philosophy was smaller than truth. A mental constriction on the depth and breadth of actual experience--- its entire subjective phenomenal manifestation. You can never play a piano in a straightjacket.
"Yeats pushes Romantic or Kantian Idealism into subjective idealism," (Archibald, Douglas). This is almost a heart-breaking description of exactly what I have been trying to do. The "trembling of the veil" is the inherent flux of phenomenalism; what lies beyond the veil--- actual reality-- is simply the thing-in-itself of Kant. Our intimations of this realm always come to us as supranatural simple because they are non-subjective sense experience. These images and intimations come to us through the troubled mirrors of our psyche. But how troubled is that mirror really? the thin-in-itself may be as close as our own unconscious, a simple dream-spasm away.
In Yeats' "The Man and the Echo" we see man in the radically subjective Kantian state--- nothing outside one's own sense experiences is knowable. But the "answers" of the echo are more heavily charged with meaning than simple echoes. Minimally, they must carry some unconscious charge of significance thrown back at the questioning consciousness (which is all that stripped-down Kantian man is left with). if so, and if the unconscious is an unknown part of actual reality, then we have a dialogue and not a soliloquy. Once the connection with the unconsciously charged material is severed--- by a stricken rabbit's cry, which may be an intimation of connectedness with "outer" actual reality--- the conversation grinds to a halt. The abandoned man is no longer a conduit for the two "actual realities" to interact through, the tenuous link with the real (marked by the man's devoutly hungry and questioning and LISTENING attitude) is severed and man is thrown back into the puzzle of himself to contemplate his experience.
This is, obviously, not an exhaustive reading and is only put forward to show that the ideas under discussion have some relation to the topic of poetry, and maybe a vital one.
"In a cleft that's christened Alt": he is down there, near the unconscious, below the busy, unthinking level of daily activity. "Under a broken stone I halt": the broken stone is the unconscious mind, which is broken because no longer able to think about reality, having been cast into Kantian duality.
The Man in "The Man and the Echo" is approaching Yeats' famous "Unity of Being," which exists when "all the nature murmurs in response if but a single note be touched." In the poem, nature DOES respond, and it is as if he himself were responding because he has achieved (in the confused moment of being alive) Unity of Being and is, to an echo's extent, answering himself because HE IS IN TOUCH with actual reality, outside of the Kantian bubble. And once in touch with that reality, he rapidly discovers that he is a part of it. The continuum of reality is a continuum of himself and constitutes "Unity of Being."
Once in touch with this actual reality, however fleetingly, he is instantly called upon to respond to a distant cry within it: the rabbit's shriek. He must respond, as nature and the echo responded to him. The cry "distracts his thought," which proves that he may be preparing for some response, some continuing contact with this "ecstatic vision" of actual reality. But this vision of actual reality consists of a "hawk that has struck" as well as the rabbit: paradoxes exist in the actual as deeply as they do in the mirror realm of solipsism. Must he respond to the rabbit, or feast with the hawk? And what is the proper response to his own crisis of finally existing in the actual world for an instant? Or is the hawk some form of rule-bearing Kantian super-ego swooping from the old self-consciousness to rob him of his dream of reality by "distracting" him and killing his questioning communion with nature (the living rabbit, able, like the echo, to respond)?
"'Vision,' meaning by vision the intense realization of a state of ecstatic emotion symbolized in a definite imagined region..." "Artists... sing amidst their uncertainty and their solitude" (their confinement to the subjective half of Kant's world-divide). "They find their pleasure in a cup that is filled from Lethe's wharf [the collective unconscious, the ability to forget and erase the very conscious and self-conscious Kantian division of self and reality], and for the awakening, for the vision, for the revelation of reality, tradition offers us a different word--- ecstasy." For the Kantian man, he must obliterate his self-consciousness in order not to be pinned down by the notion that the mind's categories are absolute, rational and immutable.
This was the philosophical situation for all of the Romantic poets, and it was a situation against which they rebelled. It was a gorgeous triumph of intuition on their parts--- beginning with Blake--- to say that the rational description is not all, that it did not incorporate the complete crash of existence. Still, the doubts imposed by Kant and Hume could not be entirely overturned because they were not met openly. The leap of faith was still necessary, and each day harder and harder to accomplish as poets came to realize that the anchor of their accomplishment was experience. Kant and Hume were subverted, discarded, ignored, talked around, but there was no St. George hopping out of the bush to put the beast to death and restore to sense experience its overarching unity with actual reality, or at least its continuum of response and contact with it.
Accordingly, they did not try to prove their argument through the correctness of its reasoning, but rather by its validity from the completeness with which they could characterize the entire experience of having being. It was an appeal to the entire mind, not just its more rational fragments or conscious and self-conscious 'tips of the iceberg.'
As Yeats put it in a letter to his father: "I think with you that the poet seeks truth, not abstract truth, but a kind of vision of reality that satisfies the whole being."
Yeats had said of his poem "Self and Soul" was a "choice of rebirth rather than birth," and later wondered if that choice was not "perhaps the sole theme" of his poetry.
And perhaps we have in the fable of consciousness an image of life playing with itself, dodging among the mirrors of its elaborate self-invention, revealing itself in dreams and half-fabricated memories, hiding behind the philosophic fictions thrown up to obscure our certainty, dancing before ourselves and its own self-consciousness in an abounding beauty that but gives the more because it will not give and demands that we take what cannot be taken or live in unabated desire and ignorance. And this ignorance is the most delicate of all our treasures, a horded butterfly affixed in our secret hearts, inviolable and fluttering. Indeed, to unmask our ignorance would be but to take the face from nothingness and leave us colorless, lacking particularity and passion as much as the smothering velvet of distemperate prejudice. For as all great prophets have been compelled to discover, to know is, in a certain sense, to cease to be.