ABSTRACT
At the time of his death, Walt Whitman’s brain was removed from his body, deposited in a glass jar, and sent to the American Anthropometric Society for weighing and measuring. Whitman had always been proud of his brain. Even before he was a famous poet, he had had his brain inspected, albeit through scalp and skull, by Manhattan’s best phrenologist, who rated the immenseheaded young man high for, among other attributes, “Self-Esteem” and “Amativeness”—important attributes for a poet who would espouse self-reliance and the sacredness of sexual love.1 In the preface to his first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman boasted that the poet’s “brain is the ultimate brain.”(9)2
Whitman’s brain under glass serves as a macabre emblem of the despair that haunted him and his contemporaries. This despair was brought on by Kant’s philosophy, a skeptical despair that we do not have direct access to reality. We are trapped within our own skulls, like prisoners in Plato’s cave. But while Plato offers philosophers the possibility of turning to face the cave’s opening and ascending to the sun to see ultimate reality, Kant offers no such possibility; there is no direct access to reality, ultimate or otherwise. After Kant, experience is always only our own, and reality, no longer signifying things in themselves but mere appearances, must always implicitly be qualified by quotation marks. This understanding, that we are sealed off from reality as if trapped within a glass jar, understandably causes some to despair.
