The Poetics of Otherness in Antonio Machado's 'proverbios Y Cantares'

Nicolás Fernández-Medina

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780708323229
• eBook ISBN: 9781783164356
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Antonio Machado (1875-1939) is one of Spain's most original and renowned twentieth-century poets and thinkers. From his early poems in Soledades. Galerías. Otros poemas of 1907, to the writings of his alter-ego Juan de Mairena of the 1930s, Machado endeavoured to explain how the Other became a concern for the self. In The Poetics of Otherness in Antonio Machado's "Proverbios y cantares, " Nicolás Fernández-Medina examines how Machado's "Proverbios y cantares, " a collection of short, proverbial poems spanning from 1909 to 1937, reveal some of the poet's deepest concerns regarding the self-Other relationship. To appreciate Machado's organizing concept of otherness in the "Proverbios y cantares, " Fernández-Medina argues how it must be contextualized in relation to the underlying Romantic concerns that Machado struggled with throughout most of his oeuvre, such as autonomy, solipsism and skepticism of absolutes. In The Poetics of Otherness in Antonio Machado's "Proverbios y cantares, " Fernández-Medina demonstrates how Machado continues a practice of "fragment thinking" to meld the poetic and the philosophical, the part and whole, and the finite and infinite to bring light to the complexities of the self-Other relationship and its relevance in discussions of social and ethical improvement in early twentieth-century Spain.

Chapter 1

The Problem of Subjectivity: How to Know the Self and Other

The external appearance of things is only a symbol which is the task of the artist to interpret. Things have truth only in the artist; they only possess an inner truth.

Charles Morice, La Littérature de tout á l’heure

Machado returned to the concept of Other again and again over the years. He understood that the ‘real’ Other in the world often eluded comprehension, and it was in these moments of evasion when poetry could establish what Mairena called ‘el diálogo amoroso en que se busca la comunión por el intelecto en verdades’ (1971a: p. 67). Philosophy was also important because it provided concepts that could help ‘el intelecto’ define these common truths between self and Other, and it could provide a way to understand the significance of this dialogue in everyday life. Philosophy and poetry, then, like two complementary halves, were intertwined with the discovery of otherness. ‘Sólo el pensamiento filosófico tiene alguna nobleza’, Mairena declared, ‘[p]orque él se engendra, ya en el diálogo amoroso que supone la dignidad pensante de nuestro prójimo, ya en la pelea del hombre consigo mismo’ (1971a: pp. 117–18). Likewise, ‘hay hombres . . . que van de la poética a la filosofía; otros que van de la filosofía a la poética. Lo inevitable es ir de lo uno a lo otro’ (1971a: p. 137). It is through Mairena’s teachings that Machado’s concept of Other has most often been explained, since he theorized extensively on the subject in his ironic and witty manner, yet Machado’s Proyecto de un discurso de ingreso en la academia española of 1931 – a lecture he prepared for his induction into the Royal Spanish Academy – is one of his most revealing writings on the subject, and it condenses almost three decades’ worth of his ideas on how poetry and philosophy explore concepts of self and Other.¹ Through the Proyecto de un discurso, it is possible to begin delimiting the so-called ‘problem of subjectivity’ (the difficulty of knowing the self and world) that occupied Machado for most of his life, and reveal to what extent it influenced the PrCs.

Kantian Metaphysics and the Need for Realness

From the Proyecto de un discurso’s initial question ‘¿Qué es la poesía?’, Machado defines what he considers to be the crisis of contemporary lyric poetry, yet under his criticisms of Verlaine, Joyce and other poets, we find a more searching analysis of how Western philosophy from the Romantic age onwards had destabilized the very idea of objectivity. For Machado, a tradition of transcendental metaphysics that began with Immanuel Kant had set into motion a critique of objectivity in the nineteenth century that had slowly eroded the belief in a unified, homogeneous and individual object. ‘Casi todo [el siglo XIX] milita contra el objeto’, Machado contends, adding, ‘Kant lo elimina en su ingente tautología, que esto significa la llamada revolución copernicana, que se le atribuye. Su análisis de la razón sólo revela la estructura ideal del sujeto cognoscente’ (2001b: p. 693). Kant’s Copernican revolution, broadly conceived, synthesized rationalism and empiricism into a coherent theory of experience and knowledge, and in his quest for a universally and scientifically valid basis of experience, he proposed that the subject, through an a priori understanding of space and time, was in fact the producer of experience. Although there is considerable debate on the ramifications of Kant’s Copernican revolution, one of its most important insights was that the thing-in-itself – the noumenon, or object of inquiry – remained inaccessible as such to the subject. Thus, the forms of our thinking apprehend things as they appear, not as they intrinsically are.

Kant’s philosophy appears often not only in Machado’s Proyecto de un discurso, but throughout his poetry and prose, and it offered Machado a springboard from which to examine the foundations of nineteenth-century metaphysics and its theories of subjectivity and objectivity. In poem xxxix (CC) of the PrCs, for example, he describes Kant as both an innovator (‘sabio profesor’) and an anachronism (‘y volar /otra vez, hacia Platón’):

Dicen que el ave divina,
trocada en pobre gallina,
por obra de las tijeras
de aquel sabio profesor
(fue Kant un esquilador
de las aves altaneras;
toda su filosofía.
un sport de cetrería),
dicen que quiere saltar
las tapias del corralón
y volar
otra vez, hacia Platón.
¡Hurra! ¡Sea!
¡Feliz será quien lo vea!²

Machado refers to Kant’s dove metaphor in the image of the ‘ave divina’ and various other references to birds and flight (‘aves altaneras’, ‘sport de cetrería’, ‘volar’). In the introduction to the 1787 edition to the Critique ofPure Reason, Kant explains how his philosophy differs from that of his predecessors such as Berkeley and Hume, and he discusses the relationship between metaphysics and knowledge by speculating that a dove (metaphysics) might think it could fly more easily without the impediment of air around it (experience of the world). ‘The light dove’, Kant explains, ‘in free flight cutting through the air the resistance which it feels, could get the idea that it could do better in airless space’ (p. 129). As Kant goes on to suggest, such a bird would, of course, discover that flying in a vacuum is impossible, and he refers to Plato’s ideal Forms to explain his distrust of any metaphysics that ignored the role of experience in how we acquire knowledge of the world:

Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding. He did not notice that he made no headway by his efforts, for he had no resistance, no support, as it were, by which he could stiffen himself, and to which he could apply his powers in order to get his understanding off the ground. (p. 129)³

For Machado, Kant’s metaphysics also suffered in that it too failed to realize that the theory of pure reason (a priori understanding and the inaccessibility of the object) is problematized by our experience of the world. In the first four verses of the poem, Kant is imagined clipping the wings of the ‘ave divina’ and transforming it into a ‘pobre gallina’. As Machado interpreted it, ‘Kant, con su crítica de la razón teórica, corta las alas al pensar metafísico, mostrando la incapacidad de la mente humana para toda construcción ideológica que no sea mera estructuración y ordenamiento de la experiencia sensible (1971b: p. 218).⁴ Kant not only transforms the ‘ave divina’ into a ‘pobre gallina’, but Kant himself is portrayed as wanting to ‘volar / otra vez, hacia Platón’: in other words, he attempts, philosophically speaking, a similar speculative flight into a vacuum as did Plato, and in this light, the last verses of the poem can be interpreted in a much more ironic manner: ‘¡Hurra! ¡Sea! / ¡Feliz será quien lo vea!’ Kant’s pure reason is too restrictive and limiting, according to Machado, and it represents the metaphysical dead end – the ‘callejón sin salida’ – that he refers to in his Proyecto de un discurso when he alludes to solipsistic thinking leaving little room for otherness beyond constructions of the understanding. In poem IV of the Apuntes, parábolas, proverbios y cantares published in La Lectura in 1916, he further criticized Kant’s philosophy, particularly its twelve apriori concepts termed ‘categories’ by which the world is experienced and known. For Machado, these ordered categories represented a privative and empty understanding:

Sobre la blanca arena aparece un caimán,
que muerde ahincadamente en el bronce de Kant.
Tus formas, tus principios y tus categorías,
redes que el mar escupe, enjutas y vacías.

Yet, ironically, what attracted Machado to Kant’s dove metaphor was precisely what urged the latter to include it in his first Critique: the dangers of using metaphysical ‘flights’ to speculate about how the self understands the world. And just as Kant censured Plato for his faith in ideal Forms, Machado too censured Kant for his faith in transcendental idealism. Metaphorically speaking, the impossibility of these metaphysical ‘flights’ had definite didactic value, since in Machado’s eyes Kant’s philosophy, like his dove, had attempted to fly into a speculative beyond, and rather than expand our knowledge of reality and the world, it had drastically limited it to subjective concepts: ‘Kant nos da – aunque en verdad de una manera equívoca – una limitación de lo real al campo de lo fenoménico y categorías subjetivas’ (1971b: p. 92). For Machado, Kant’s transcendental idealism, and its core idea that the objects of experience are real but transcendentally ideal, regarded the object through the veils of perception, cognition and categories, and sidestepped the object’s very essence there in the world and how it affected us on a more intuitive and personal level. Mairena elaborates on this point steering the discussion to the questions of otherness and objective reality, stating:

Si nada es en sí más que yo mismo, ¿qué modo hay de no decretar la irrealidad absoluta de nuestro prójimo? Mi pensamiento borra y expulsa de la existencia – de una existencia en sí – en compañía de esos mismos bancos en que asentáis vuestras posaderas. La cuestión es grave. (1971a: p. 212)

Oftentimes Machado’s readings of Kant are partial and overly critical. Only in 1914 does he begin mentioning Kant’s broader philosophical oeuvre (conscious of the plural ‘Críticas’), and even then he rarely refers to the Critique of Practical Reason or the Critique of Judgment until later on (and mostly in a fragmentary fashion through his alter-egos, who sometimes reveal, as in Mairena’s case, his more low-brow Kant criticism: ‘en leer y comprender a Kant se gasta mucho menos fósforo que en descifrar tonterías sutiles y en desenredar marañas de conceptos ñoños’) (1971a: p. 70).⁵ Indeed, his appreciation of Kant might have been rather different had he earlier spent more time on the Critique of Judgment, which addresses the ‘incalculable gulf’ between concepts of nature and freedom and confronts questions of sociability and universal communicability in aesthetic pleasure. Likewise, a better grasp of Kant’s moral philosophy in the Critique of Practical Reason and Metaphysics of Morals would have been more illuminating in terms of the broader ethical implications of Kant’s categorical imperative (the self-Other relation considered through the lens of the Kantian idea that every man is an end in himself). Yet Machado’s readings of the German philosopher gravitated toward the topics of subjectivity/objectivity and transcendental idealism presented most thoroughly in the first Critique, which he had read several times and knew well thanks to Morente, Cassirer and Natorp.⁶ We cannot underestimate how deeply Kant and the first Critique influenced Machado’s poetry. ‘Mi pensamiento está generalmente ocupado’, he admitted as early as 1912, ‘por lo que Kant llama conflictos de las ideas transcendentes y busco en la poesía alivio a esta ingrata faena’ (2001b: p 346).

By 1912, Machado is thinking of the Other when he tackles these questions of transcendental idealism as this Other was conceived after Kant. This involved reassessing how the world – both poetically and philosophically – had become increasingly confined within theories of selfhood throughout the nineteenth century. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy have examined Kant’s notion of subjectivity demonstrating how significantly he affected Romantic ideals of self and set the groundwork for a complex and ‘modern’ subjectivity by auguring the non-substantial representation of the subject:

What is formed or constructed by the transcendental imagination is thus an object that may be grasped within the limits of a priori intuition but is nothing that can be thought under the concept of eidos or Idea, an originary and genuine form of reason itself . . . What results from this is a cognition within the limits of possible a priori experience, but such a cognition is incapable of restoring anything like the subject. (p. 31)

Robert Pippin has also mapped various philosophical theories of subjectivity after Kant in an attempt to reconstruct the rise of the so-called ‘modern’ nineteenth-century subject while taking into account the sociopolitical implications of this project. For Pippin, it was after Kant, and after the discoveries of transcendental idealism, that ‘a human subject is, rather, a meaning-making subject ... a self-conscious subject, in this active, self-determining relation to itself in all experience as well as in all action’. Yet what is perhaps most significant, particularly as it concerns Kantian reason, is that ‘it is this project – reason’s examination of its own possibility and the attendant controversies over the nature of the object of such a study and the right implications to draw from it – that sets the agenda for an extraordinary flurry of philosophical activity [in the nineteenth century]’ (p. 30). Machado is well aware of the ‘controversies over the nature of the object’, to use Pippin’s words, and they lead him in his Proyecto de un discurso to defend the Other’s ‘realness’ (physicality and feeling) and show how this ‘realness’ might influence one’s sense of self. Once again, he returns to Kant noting that ‘del hombre kantiano no sabemos cómo sea el rostro, ni el carácter, ni el humor, ni sabemos cómo siente, ni siquiera cómo piensa, sólo sabemos cuál es el rígido esquema de su razón en el espejo de la ciencia fisicomatemática’ (2001b: p. 693). From this perspective, and given Machado’s criticisms of solipsistic thinking in the Proyecto de un discurso, Kant is conceived as setting the stage for a cult of the self in which the yo, with the appearance of Romantic subjectivity (Machado alludes in turn to Fichte, Schelling and Hegel to establish the trajectory of his argument), had strayed into a type of social estrangement:

Cuando el espíritu romántico desfallece como un atleta que agota su energía en la mera tensión de sus músculos, sólo se salva el culto al yo, a la pura intimidad del sujeto individual. Y una nueva fe, un tanto perversa, se inserta en la fe romántica en la soledad del sujeto. Se piensa que lo individual humano, el yo propiamente dicho, el sí mismo es lo diferencial entre hombre y hombre y carece de formas de expresión genéricas. Razón y sentimiento son cosas de todos, instrumentos ómnibus que el poeta desdeña en su afán de cantarse a sí mismo, no responden a la íntima realidad psíquica. (2001b: p. 695)

Kant does not advocate a cult of the self or solipsism, and in his ‘Refutation of Idealism’, which appears in the first Critique, he took great pains to differentiate his ideas from Descartes’ ‘problematical’ doubt and Berkeley’s ‘dogmatic’ esse estpercipi argument (p. 326). Yet Machado interpreted Kant’s transcendental idealism as a pivotal discovery in a broader sociocultural progression toward what he claimed was an insular subjectivity: a concept of self in which the Other was inaccessible except through a type of rigid and schematic reason. The objectivity question for Machado, particularly as he examined it through the Kantian lens, had to do with the limits of reason when confronted with the Other in the world. It was through what these limits of reason revealed about the self that he approached Schopenhauer and Bergson as original philosophical voices. Although he recognizes the Kantian inflection in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, he nevertheless admires the ‘acephalic’ potential of his theory of the will in revealing a new order of reality. Schopenhauer departed from Kant in the fundamental premise that the noumenon is knowable as volitional activity, and Machado reformulates this idea by alluding to the shortcomings of K...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Beyond the Lyrical and the Proverbial: Antonio Machado’s Poetic Thinking
• Chapter 1: The Problem of Subjectivity: How to Know the Self and Other
• Chapter 2: Towards Conceiving the Other: The Formative Years
• Chapter 3: From Art to Life: Critical Inquiries and a New Poetry
• Chapter 4: The God of Intersubjectivity
• Chapter 5: The Double Bind of Knowledge and Ignorance
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Notes