Stevens is not an anti-realist. The attempt to interpret him in this way reduces the work of the imagination to the frictionless spinning of fancy.

However, to say that Stevens is not an anti-realist does not entail that he is what we might call a transcendental realist. For the latter, all human activity is equiphenomenal to a subject-independent material realm explicable by the natural sciences. Such would be the contracted world, free from the cognitive, aesthetic and moral values that give colour and texture to the world we inhabit. Steven's poetry is overwhelmingly concerned with reality but he believes that the real can be apprehended under different aspects or categories -- the contracted, the transfigured. Simply stated, his conviction is that a poeticized, imaginatively transformed reality is both preferable to an inhuman, contracted and oppressive sense of reality and gives a truer picture of the relation humans entertain with the world.

[...It is right] to link Steven's transfigured sense of the real with Kant's thesis on transcendental idealism, that is, a world that is real for us, and hence consistent with empirical realism, but which has been produced in accordance with the categories of the understanding. The source of the categories lies in what Kant calls the transcendental or productive imagination, where 'Synthesis in general...is the mere result of the power of imagination'. However, I believe that it might also be helpful to make a connection here with Heidegger's critique of the entire realism/anti-realism debate in Being and Time. Heidegger criticizes both realism and ant-realism for having an inadequate account of the real, where the question of the 'reality' of the external world gets raised without any previous clarification of the phenomenon of wold as that meaningful existential context that is most familiar and closest to us. As Stevens writes, 'Realism is a corruption of reality'.

Steven's poetic deepening of the though of transcendental idealism might be said to lead him towards a more phenomenological sense of the real. But what does this mean? What is phenomenology? Phenomenology is a description of things as they are that seeks to elicit the sense or significance of our practical involvement with the world. Again, more paradoxically stated, phenomenology brings out the meaning of the fact that, in Merleau-Ponty's words, 'we are condemned to meaning'. Phenomenology gives us the meaning of meaning. Or so we say. Phenomenological descriptions, if felicitous, foreground things as they are experienced in the everyday world we inhabit, the real world in which we move and have our being, the world which fascinates and benumbs us. From this phenomenological perspective, the problem with Kant's approach is that it presupposes two things: first, a conception of the subject as what Kant calls the 'I think' that has, at the very least, a family resemblance to Descartes' res cogitans, even if it is a cogito without an ergo sum, where it performs a logical rather than an ontological function, i.e., what Kant calls 'the transcendental unity of apperception' is logically entailed from the fact that experience has a unity and coherence, but it does not imply any ontological insight into the nature of the self or soul. Second, it presupposes that the subject's relation to the objective world is mediated through representations, what Hegel calls 'picture thinking', Kant's and Fichte's Vorstellungen. If we place in question these two presuppositions, then it might lead us to abandon the entire lead us to abandon the entire epistemological construal of the relation of thought to things and mind to world. The world does not first and foremost show itself as an 'object' contemplatively and disinterestedly represented by a 'subject'. Rather, the world shows itself as a place in which we are completely immersed and from which we do not radically distinguish ourselves: 'Real and unreal are two in one.'

Pp. 27-29

¶ 7:21 PM