Ding an Sich

Das ding an sich is a philosophical term taken from Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Translated from the German, the phrase means: "the thing in itself." 
==The ding an sich in Kant==
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant posits two modes of being: the phenomenal, consisting of things as they appear to the senses, or in the mind, and the noumenal, consisting of things as they truly are, independent of observation. The noumenal is the realm of the ding an sich. It comprises the ultimate ontological ground of reality, but it cannot be apprehended by either the senses or by reason. The ding an sich, also called the noumenon, therefore, recalls Plato's notions of ideal forms in that it refers to an ideal totality of being which cannot be represented and therefore cannot be known.
For further reading on Kant, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/
==The ding an sich in Stevens==
The phrase ding an sich occurs in section 1, line 69 of "The Comedian as the Letter C," in which Stevens' poetic alter ego Crispin leaves home on a voyage to the New World, a voyage which precipitates and mirrors Crispin's internal voyage of artistic/intellectual growth. In the opening section, while at sea, Crispin experiences a profound displacement and is forced to confront his insignificance in the face of vast and indifferent nature. Moreover, Crispin is forced to recognize the inadequacy of his art and the failure of poetry's mimetic project. 
The key moment occurs when Crispin recognizes that reality, figured by the sea, exists independently as a thing in itself, and that any attempt to represent or conceive of the real is inevitably circumscribed by the limits of the human imagination and individual consciousness: "Here was the veritable ding an sich, at last,/ Crispin confronting it, a vocable thing,/ But with a speech belched out of hoary darks/ No way resembling his, a visible thing/ ...free from the unavoidable shadow of himself.... (i, 69-74). What results from this confrontation with the real is a revisioning of Crispin's identity and his artistic project. Crispin is "made new" (i, 80) as his prior romantic tendencies are "severed" from him (i, 75-7), replaced by the "strict austerity" (i, 80) of an as yet inarticulable, but somehow "untamed" (ii, 34) and "elemental" aesthetic (ii, 38-9). The allusion to Ezra Pound's famous dictum "make it new" in these lines is suggestive, in that it links Crispin's emerging aesthetic to the development of modernist poetics.
For further reading on Modernism, see the Academy of American Poets entry: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5664