Coleridge and German Philosophy: The Poet in the Land of Logic 9781474211642, 9780826495433

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Abbreviations and works cited

Coleridge Aids Aids to Reflection, edited by John Beer, CC 9 (1993) BL Biographia Literaria, edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols, CC 7 (1985) CC The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, general editor Kathleen Coburn, Bollingen Series, 16 vols (Princeton University Press, 1971–2001). Individual volumes in the edition are given separate entries. CL The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956­–71) CM Marginalia, edited by Heather Jackson and George Whalley, 6 parts, CC 12 (1980–2001) CN The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 5 vols. Vol. 4 edited by Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen; Vol. 5 edited by Kathleen Coburn and Anthony John Harding. Each vol. is in two parts, text and notes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957–2002) Lay Sermons, edited by Reginald James White, CC 6 (1972) PhL Lectures 1818–1819: On the History of Philosophy, edited by J.R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols, CC 8 (2000) Logic Logic, edited by James Robert de Jager Jackson, CC 13 (1981) OM Opus Maximum, edited by Thomas McFarland, CC 15 (2002) PW Poetical Works: Part 3. Plays, edited by J.C.C. Mays and Joyce Crick, 2 vols, CC 16 (2001) SWF Shorter Works and Fragments, edited by H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols, CC 11 (1995) TT Table Talk, edited by Kathleen Coburn and B. Winer, 2 vols, CC 14 (1990) The Friend The Friend, edited by Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols, CC 4 (1969)

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Hegel Phenomenology G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller, with an analysis of the text and foreword by J. H. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) Werke G.W.F. Hegel, Werke, based on the edition of the Werke of 1832–45, newly edited version by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 21 vols (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970)

Kant Werke I. Kant, Werke, edited by Wilhelm Weischedel, 12 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977)

Schelling System F.W.J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, introduction by Michael Vater, translated by Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978) Werke F.W.J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, edited by K.W.F. Schelling, part I, vols 1–10, part II, vols 11–14 (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856–61)

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to various people for ideas and help important to me that they probably were not aware of giving at the time, among them Andrew Bowie, Howard Caygill, Jim Chandler, Lilla Crisafulli, Michael Kooy, Peter Dews. At Queen Mary University of London I have been fortunate in working with a cohort of inspiring graduate students who have never let me stand still. Two current ones, Rowan Boyson and Molly Macdonald, kindly read and commented on parts of the draft. This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Patrick Hamilton (1916– 2005), who encouraged me to delight in a shared philosophical passion a long, long time ago.

Chapter One

Coleridge in the Land of Logic

Coleridge and post-Kantianism My Dream – History of Scotus, deranged as a youth / imagining himself in the Land of Logic, lying on the Road & in the Road to the Kingdom of Truth, falls into a criminal Intercourse with a Girl, who is in Love with him, whom he considers as the Daughter of the King of the Land / – impersonation & absolute Incarnation of the most Abstract –. Detected he defends himself on this ground. O it was a wild dream, yet a deal of true psychological Feeling at the bottom of it . . . (CN, I, 1824) This book is about Coleridge’s informal philosophical adventures. Informal in the sense that their systematic presentation was never completed, and also in the sense that their psychological satisfactions are palpable and approachable not exclusive and remote. If we become familiar with the predominantly German philosophical idiom in which they appear, then their adventurousness merits the racy tale told in the Coleridgean epigraph above. As this cryptic, early Notebook entry suggests, the story of Coleridge’s philosophical connections was always going to be complicated and compromised. Spontaneously his intellectual biography assumes dramatic form, staged vicariously through the dream of another logician, Duns Scotus. The contemporary master-trope of philosophical dispute in Coleridge’s time was Pantheism. Truth, as Schelling’s major opponent in the revived quarrel over Pantheism, Jacobi, maintained, need not, perhaps should not, be gained philosophically. If that is so, then philosophy can be accused of a sort of intellectual dalliance, at best distracting from true seriousness, at worst a ‘criminal’ pleasure. A defence of philosophical activity, though, lies in Scotus’ claim that such intercourse is in any case of such a degree of abstraction that its otherwise scandalous desire may actually coincide with an ultimate mission to understand the final things. After all, ‘impersonation & absolute Incarnation’ describes accurately Schelling’s alternative to Jacobi’s theology: a God of becoming, one whose self-production in shapes proportionate to human faculties of apprehension is what renders him a personal God, in line with the demands of Christian dogma. I will frequently, however, try to avoid explaining Coleridge’s philosophical adventures by attributing to him a partisan position within the repeatedly



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reviving Pantheismusstreit, which Coleridgeans mostly know from McFarland’s classic if engagé account.1 Instead, I will concentrate on the eroticism of Coleridge’s philosophical engagements, if you like; the sheer overwhelming pleasure the man obviously took in surfing the waves of German idealism and post-Kantianism that followed each other in close succession. A book taking this approach is not going to be zealous in uncovering exact sources, preferring to look for the amplification by each other of Coleridgean and German philosophical views and ideas. Coleridge’s sympathies and antipathies towards certain philosophical positions are not always extricable from each other, as the guilty entanglement above suggests. Especially significant here, for example, is the fact that, within the bounds of the Pantheismusstreit, Schelling’s response to Jacobi is both theologically aggressive and insistent on the importance of philosophy. Against his opponents, Schelling claims that philosophical inquiry is required for the adequate articulation of any theology worth considering. (In the philosophical terminology of the time, this amounts to saying that it must be possible to have a system of freedom, in which God’s alterity is nevertheless connected to Reason.) It is a short step from this to see philosophy as self-sufficient, capable of sketching unaided the shape of ultimate explanation or of schematizing the limits of what it is sensible to say. In the commonly accepted interpretations of the dispute, the autonomy of philosophy from theology, the fact that it could say all it wanted to without theological assistance, incriminated it. The echoes of the Atheismusstreit that had removed Fichte from his Chair at Jena, defeated professionally by the amateur Jacobi, must have constantly encouraged Schelling to translate his grounding of Absolute philosophical justification into theological terminology. But it is also true to say that the absorption of theological speculation by contemporary philosophical ontology endowed philosophy with all the passion and psychological investment normally associated with religion. Scotus’ infatuation was due to the degree of abstraction made erotically available through its personal response to him. Not the girl but the fact that she might be the daughter of the King of Logic attracts him. To do so, she must displace desire from its usual object, excusing the philosopher’s lust by having it symbolize the bodily, affective relationship that takes over when we become intimate with the generative sources of logic or philosophy – so becoming both the most material and least objective of objects of desire. Our postmodern age is comparably interested in the mobility of affect, or, following modernist Dinggedichte, the possible superiority of representation to original as a source of vividness or a standard of intensity. The Romantic philosophers after Kant rather understood the necessity of representation to symbolize, as in Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’, an ultimate grounding exceeding representation and so only graspable through affect rather than knowledge. And Coleridge was one of that postKantian company, involved in the controversies of just what was to count as a legitimate exercise in ontological disclosure and what was not. In Wordsworth’s case, Coleridge always seemed to think that the jury was still out.



Coleridge in the Land of Logic



Writing to T.S. Eliot at a time when he was finishing his own book on Coleridge, I.A. Richards told the poet that he had found what he wanted in Coleridge but that he’d had to use a fair amount of coercion. Richards’ book was a critically epochal discussion that moderated major critical debates of his time. Mine cannot claim that importance; but it does try in its more modest way to use Coleridge in a comparably instrumental manner as the point of many departures and returns, and looks for the same tolerance or latitude from the reader. First it sets Coleridge’s mode of thinking within a German Romantic philosophical context as the place where his ideas can naturally extend themselves, stretch and find speculations with which to compare themselves. Secondly, it argues and it is hoped wins converts to the idea that Coleridge found philosophical speculation in the dominant idiom of his times exciting, vertiginous and as imaginatively engaging as poetry. We are accustomed to looking for the philosophical possibilities in poetry, encouraged by that overriding ambition of writing a philosophical poem shared by Coleridge and Wordsworth. But the siren power of philosophical writing, its indigenous challenge to our responsive readerly constitution perhaps gets underestimated or taken for granted in the Romantic rush to find in poetry the measure of everything. Philosophy for Coleridge had to be already engrossing for its poetic absorption to be so important an aim. ‘Not only the poet but also the philosopher has his raptures (Entzückungen)’ wrote Schelling in The Ages of the World.2 Like most of us, if we could only admit it, Coleridge thought and wrote largely vicariously: that is, he needed the vehicle of another person’s system to carry the freight of his own originality. If there is anything original in this book, it is certainly thanks to Coleridge and the philosophers facilitating his own self-expression. Not for Coleridge the stark Blakean antithesis of creation of his own system or enslavement by another man’s. Coleridge, when times were fraught (most of the time) could express this dependency dramatically. ‘My nature requires another Nature for its support, & reposes only in another from the necessary Indigence of its being.’3 But, in the philosophy of the time, this drama was being extracted from its pathology and given theoretical legitimacy. The notion that the creative act, however much it appeared to be individual, was actually collaborative, was developed in different directions. The Romantic construction of the unconscious (a performance once plausibly attributed to Biographia Literaria by Catherine Belsey) endowed original expression with an afterlife it could not have intended.4 The critical reception’s extension of significance beyond a piece of writing’s stated purpose, whether that statement be the author’s or the implication of the work’s genre, removed the writing from the jurisdiction of both. Nevertheless, new interpretations and the critical fecundity of great art across time still reflected favourably upon the artistic reserves of the maker. Neither subject nor object held sway here, since the ontology of the work partook equally of both. Meanings which were unconscious at the time of the work’s inception were revealed to the artist by his or her work, the object here taking priority. But these illuminations only



Coleridge and German Philosophy

made sense, only identified themselves, by illustrating things belonging to the prior initiative that produced the work. This dramatic interchange, in which an aesthetic work is always further realized by the efforts of others – vicariously – normalizes Coleridgean ‘Indigence’. Formulated at critical moments – in Friedrich Schlegel’s Athenaeum Fragment 116 and almost simultaneously at the crux of Schelling’s System of 1800, plundered by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria – this progressive dialectic of the unconscious unleashes the plurality of self-expression. Drama also underwrites the fact that the critical elaboration of an original can take place in another idiom. Post-Kantianism did not consider that to reinterpret was necessarily to reduce the living spirit of something to the dead letter of exposition. The hard-won doctrine of aesthetic autonomy emerging from Kant’s third Critique and most memorably deployed by Friedrich Schiller would seem to endorse this isolation of the aesthetic ‘object’ from subsequent criticism of it. But post-Kantianism was a philosophical battleground in which the master himself was subjected to the logic of the vicarious, or the various ways in which his successors spoke through him or in his spirit. Coleridge agreed with Kant that ideas of reason were uncontainable within our understanding; but he followed those who transformed the regulative effect to which Kant restricted our apprehension of ideas into a sense of their progressiveness and productivity. Ideas embodied ‘an infinite power of semination’. Coleridge had to devise a new rhetorical term to pinpoint the permanent ideality so infinitely differentiated. He called it ‘tautegory’. Tautegory could be used to describe the expansion into many discourses, under the pressure of historical difference, of an Absolute truth originally only revealed in one discourse.5 Coleridge notoriously tried to shuttle between poetry and philosophy, theology and science, criticism, politics and just about everything else available. He would have agreed, surely, with Friedrich Schlegel that poetry’s inherently dramatic dimension gave the lead to other discourses to collaborate, join forces, amalgamate and help form the new mythology needed for intellection to be adequate to modern reality.6 Coleridge’s most comprehensive descriptors of this ambition were words like Logos, Logosophia, anti-babel, even ‘the last possible epic, The Fall of Jerusalem’.7 For Friedrich Schlegel and the Jena group of 1798–1800, ideas were ‘the continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts’, but this drama was already recruiting a still wider cast.8 The ‘anti-babel’ is perhaps the most fruitful of Coleridge’s wish-list to pursue here. In the first paragraph of the ‘Transcendental Doctrine of Method’ of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant fascinatingly regarded the preceding ‘Doctrine of Elements’, or transcendental deduction of the conditions necessary for experience to be possible, as an ‘estimate (Vorrat) of the building materials’ required for the Babel of pure reason he had been critiquing. While we can think ‘the idea’ of such a totality, the materials at our disposal restrict us to building on ‘the plane of experience’ instead. More than this, though, ‘the confusion of languages that unavoidably divided the workers over the plan, and dispersed them throughout the world,



Coleridge in the Land of Logic 

[left] each to build on his own according to his design’.9 Coleridge’s notebook entry 3254, examined in Chapter 4, must ‘build’ on Kant’s metaphor. It was precisely this given idea of experience that the post-Kantians, starting with Fichte, wanted to understand progressively. They wanted to do this by breaking down the isolation of discursive disciplines from each other, and getting them to engage in dramatic dialogue. From Fichte onwards, ideas of production began to circumscribe those of representation. Kant had analysed the manifold necessary for cognition to work and the dialectical tractability of reality this functionality was obliged to assume. His successors studied the dynamic production of the former by the latter. Imprisoned as Kant thinks we are within representation, the ‘X’ outside representation must be, as he says, ‘nothing for us’.10 Their answer to this ban is to develop out of Kant’s other critiques of aesthetic and teleological judgement a productive rather than representational paradigm of correspondence. The consequent striving of cognition to get on terms with its own production energizes a drama present from Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (Science of Knowledge, versions from 1794 onwards) to Hegel’s 1806 Phenomenology.11 Between these two, more and more discursive resources are requisitioned for the task. The delegation or relay of purely philosophical authority matches that of the subject. For of course the subject must be still unconscious of what remains its potential, though a potential which, like Schlegel’s prophetic historian, we must think of as the productive future in our past. We only need to look at the exorbitant criteria Coleridge sets the unfortunate Wordsworth for the creation of the philosophical poem he thought he should have written instead of The Excursion to feel the exhilarating pressure of the post-Kantian idea to create a concerted but indeterminate discursive front in pursuit of ends of which it was evidently not fully conscious.12 If philosophy’s ultimate task is to explain not only how we represent the world, but how we think the production of those representations rather than others, then it has something close to a creation-myth on its hands. This can lead in many directions, not all of them doctrinal ones. For a Christian like Coleridge, though, theoretical discourses closest to a theodicy would feel the most benign. But while Coleridgean knowledge is, according to the famous climax of the first volume of Biographia Literaria, a finite repetition of ‘the infinite I AM’, this acceptance of being spoken is close to anxieties Coleridge was voicing before reading the Germans, anxieties heard louder after he had read them and published and re-published the mystery poems, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ in 1816–17. In the fourth of the Philosophical Lectures of 1819, Coleridge sets out an acceptable version of truth’s divine ventriloquism. I know, intuitively know, that there is a power essential to my nature, and which is ‘I ought, I ought not, I should not’, and that voice is original and self-existent, not an echo of a prior voice (I mean the voice of prudential self-love) but the very source out of which self-love must flow. (PhL, I, 178)



Coleridge and German Philosophy

This passage sounds uncharacteristically Fichtean in its reliance on conscience, but the use of ‘love’ to validate our ‘very source’ suggests Schelling’s moral psychology. The mystery poems, though, play through various ideas of repetition, and in their narratives the meaning of repetition ranges from the progressive domestication of an original dynamism in ‘Kubla Khan’ to the fear of an imposing instrumentalism evident in the other two. In ‘The Rime’, puzzling in its mixture of arbitrariness and moralizing, ‘an enigma in the form of an explanation’, repetition is the master-trope at all levels.13 However accepting and resigned the mariner’s homily at the end appears, he is nevertheless driven by the desire to re-tell his tale for his chosen audience, as forcefully as the dead crew of his ship had been possessed to man their stations again. Indeed, Anna Maria Cimitile has recently argued from a knowledgeably European theoretical perspective, that insofar as the poem’s central fantasy reflects upon itself in the poem it produces a spectral slavery.14 In the context of Coleridge’s post-Kantianism, the spectral quality of slavery in fact locates it in Coleridge’s deepest anxieties about the human power lovingly to accept its determination or vocation. Far from dematerializing slavery, the spectral aspect lets it stand for the most fundamental violation Coleridge could imagine – a savage perversion of that amiable dispensation normally allowing us to enjoy a self-determining human subjectivity in the act of representing its production of us. As Cimitile states simply: ‘Slavery is the absence of subjectivity’.15 That the poem appears unconscious of its indictment of the slave trade lets slavery figure for the post-Kantian philosopher the blighting of all past and future sources of human possibility. ‘Christabel’ also dramatizes the fear of being spoken by another, here presented as the unpleasant contraction of the individual, like a dove being clasped by a snake, the movement of their breathing indistinguishable. Geraldine, the snake, then substitutes for Christabel, the dove, and proves her success by engaging in an otherwise incestuous dalliance with Christabel’s father, Sir Leoline. The impossibly elfin child at the end spells out the implications. ‘Kubla Khan’ moves through a succession of re-enactments of an originally unfocused creative energy without reaching resolution. Coleridge’s three great mystery poems appear caught in a sceptical philosophical moment. Their trademark reflexivity – the extent to which they are about their own production – is curiously dubious about its own achievement. Their circularity, far from providing exemplary images of self-production, suggests the limitations of purely imaginative solutions and encourages a readership which will be culturally urbane enough to appreciate this progressive self-criticism. Certainly, this book argues in the next chapter, both Schelling on Dante and Hegel on scepticism help us fill out a picture of the reading skills Coleridge’s poems require. Such skill is above all historicist: the talent to detect the persistence of the past in the present, its creative repetitions constructed to a new finitude, and gesturing towards a future. Schelling’s fullest exposition of this historicism took place in his unpublished masterpiece The Ages of the World (Die Weltalter) which remained in draft form after his death. Coleridge, as the



Coleridge in the Land of Logic 

editors of his Marginalia point out, would have heard of it because Schelling describes his essay Ueber die Gottheiten von Samothrace as a supplement to Die Weltalter, and Coleridge read that.16 But Coleridge appears to find his own way of expressing the historicist possibilities for Schellingian philosophy after the Freedom essay and Schelling’s reworking of its main thought against Jacobi in the Denkmal a few years later. Coleridge calls the identity persisting through historical changes an ‘idea’; he thinks of the changes as ‘infinite semination’. The rhetorical figure capable of symbolizing such exchanges is a ‘tautegory’. The social class he invented to make the study of tautegory, or permanence in progression, its profession and something it embodied, was to be the ‘Clerisy’.

The road-map The following chapters try to make good these claims about Coleridge and the German philosophical context I use to explain each other.17 Inevitably boosted by supplements from marginalia, letters and notebooks, which the Bollingen edition of the Collected Coleridge makes so freely available, the book focuses on central prose texts by Coleridge – Biographia Literaria, The Friend, the Opus Maximum – and keeps re-examining some of the major poems along with Coleridge’s own conflicted analysis of Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’. These are the main areas of concentration. The first chapter writes Coleridge into the German philosophical background with some determination. Hegel is a neglected figure in Coleridgean studies. No wonder, since Coleridge only read a few pages of his work. But Hegel, especially in his Phenomenology, remains not only the foremost commentator on the speculations of his age, but makes out of that commentary his own philosophy. For Coleridge’s eclectic thinking to be out of the loop here would therefore be unusual. One of the benefits of the freedoms this book takes with a conventional history of ideas is to keep Coleridge in the Hegelian picture to which he evidently belongs.18 Coleridge’s philosophizing only comes fully alive within the ambit of that of his avant-garde German contemporaries. Coleridge’s favouring of Schelling only reveals its full force if we know about the intellectual quarrel between Schelling and Hegel. All Coleridge’s other intellectual borrowings and investments do not really set up an alternative theoretical establishment: but they do fuel his power to intervene in the dominant philosophical idiom of the time. Schelling, though, was the post-Kantian philosopher of dynamic productivity most congenial to Coleridge. The explanation of the two imaginations and fancy central to Biographia Literaria lose their main philosophical force unless they are referred back to Schelling’s ontological explanation of the world as the doubling and repetition in differentiated form of an original identity. After Biographia Literaria, Coleridge began disparaging Schelling in earnest, especially the scheme of Schelling’s Freedom essay which was the published



Coleridge and German Philosophy

culmination of Schelling’s philosophy up to that date (1809) and the basis of its further development in unpublished seminars, written drafts and lectures for the next 45 years. As Raimonda Modiano points out, Coleridge’s letters to J.H. Green distancing himself from Schelling seem founded on a reading of the much earlier Einleitung of 1799. He also seems to buy into Jacobi’s argument that Schelling perpetuates the elenchia – or what Modiano calls a ‘violation of hierarchical standards’ – of deducing a superior power from an inferior one.19 But it is the Freedom essay he admired that lies behind notebook entries such as the following. In short, Schelling’s System and mine stand thus:– in the latter there are God and Chaos: and in the former an Absolute Somewhat, which is alternately both, the rapid leger de main shifting of which constitutes the delusive appearance of Poles . . . (CN, 4,4662) Here, Schelling’s polar logic is an illusion; so is Schelling’s idea that God is grounded in an Unconscious prior to putting on his individuality, a reserve on which subsequent tautegorical repetitions draw. Coleridge, desiring more explicit revelation, thinks this leaves ‘all hanging in frivolous & idle sort. Schwebend.’ (CN, 4,4664) This seems pretty clear-cut. Coleridge Christianizes Schelling’s ontology, replacing its logic with doctrine. Two considerations should give us pause though. Firstly, as just noted, Coleridge was always fascinated in his poetry by images of how productivity could go wrong, those scenarios of instrumentalism from which we needed Christian virtue to rescue us. In other words, he appears to look for ways of describing how we can seek the chaos behind benign creativity, as if we could choose from it another creative purpose, one enslaving others to its selfish interest. Secondly, Coleridge’s use of tautegory, and (as we shall see) Schelling’s later appropriation of it, show him continuing to practise Schelling’s ‘leger de main’ in ways Schelling recognized and appreciated. Coleridge, here as elsewhere, participates in post-Kantianism so as to return it constantly to the issue of expression. His early dramatic writings are already part of a project in line with his philosophical interests. When the philosophy begins to enlist different discourses in the service of new standards of theoretical adequacy, it translates the earlier sense of dramatic interplay into its own idiom. Chapter 3, ‘Drama as the Motor of Romantic Theory’, examines how this happens. Dramatic philosophy takes place in a setting traditionally thought hostile to drama because of the typically Romantic habit of introspection. In fact, post-Kantian theory brings the two together, and the dialogic quality of self-understanding, an idea going back to Shaftesbury, is explored. The self, eluding conclusive representation, is more like a play we produce than a single character. This insight connects with the larger post-Kantian strategies for dealing with questions of ontology. The next chapter, ‘Coleridge’s Stamina’, examines Coleridge’s central metaphor for the ‘ideas’ with which his writing – poetical, philosophical,



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political – strove to get on terms. Usually, ‘ideas’ are tied exclusively to such locutions of Coleridge and Goethe as ‘the translucence of the general / universal in the particular / individual’. The strains this claim for representation puts on its symbolism are evident, and the claims of symbol have been conspicuously critiqued in twentieth-century theory from Walter Benjamin to Paul de Man. I reconsider that critique and argue that it must not be allowed to let the productive, historicist dimension contrived for symbol by Coleridge and Schelling to be effaced. Then, in Chapter 5, Coleridge’s literary autobiography, Coleridge’s ‘Coleridge’, is read as a case study of Coleridge’s power to evoke the production of a self and to use it as a model for philosophical understanding. His autobiography is presented as a biography, as a Biographia, and that impersonality along with the writing’s dramatic exercises in vicarious expression are again argued to connect fruitfully with the complexities of the post-Kantian critique of representation generally. Around the time he published Biographia Literaria, Coleridge also projects his ‘rifacciamento’ or re-making of The Friend. This endeavour is far more than the 1818 revival of the periodical of a decade earlier. In renewing his idea of philosophical friendship, Coleridge’s plot appears to be, overall, to explore the role of affect in philosophical explanation. His admiration for and distrust of Kant’s alleged Stoicism, already a topic in my earlier chapters, is clarified through Coleridge’s stipulation of relationship and communication as fundamental requirements of the concept of truth. There is a helpful conjuncture here with recent postmodern discussions of friendship as the politics for an age in which politics appears in need of rehabilitation. How contemporary are Coleridge’s philosophical concerns? Occasionally, I find it necessary and easy to slip into the idiom of modern and postmodern thinkers and their areas of interest (Heidegger and Wittgenstein on ontology, Derrida on friendship, Deleuze on Stoicism). The penultimate chapter, ‘Reading from the Inside’, looks both at the details of Coleridge’s construction of ‘tautegory’ and at its transmission through different critical reading practices and theory to the present day. While reading from inside an obligatory conceptual framework, European philosophy has always felt the need to address our sense of these boundaries, and the kind of delegations of its own authority it has to make to other discourses in order to evoke what for a monologic philosophy, bound to the task of explaining the logic of representation, must, as we heard Kant say earlier, remain ‘nothing for us’. Many, though, have suspected this degree of philosophical inclusiveness and generosity as it appeared in Schelling. Friedrich Engels, a member of the audience of Schelling’s late Berlin lectures, found him to be all things to all people. ‘Protean’ is another ambiguous adjective to have been applied. Karl Jaspers pointed out, more sympathetically, Schelling’s trick of gesturing as much outside his current system as making his present one cohere from within. Schelling is currently in vogue. Two recent, indeed overlapping, books on the ‘new’ Schelling – new as in the ‘new’ Nietzsche, Bergson and Sartre – indicate an intensity of interest which builds on a continuous revival from

10

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Heidegger onwards.20 Evident is a willingness to discount Schelling’s apparent mysticism in the interests of foregrounding something else: the discursive mix it takes – aesthetic, ethical, mythological, psychoanalytical, theological – to make that existential apprehension, discovered by philosophy but beyond its powers of expression, remain credible. Coleridge in his way began the work needing to be done here, with his ideas about tautegory. Hegel, arguably, is always new. Certainly the episode of the Phenomenology that his critics use to try to explode his system changes over time. Postmodern thinkers like Deleuze elaborate a Stoic resistance to conceptual principle intended to go beyond Hegel’s power to control. For Alexandre Kojève and his existentialist followers it had been the master/slave episode which they had tried to elaborate unmanageably. Otherwise a totalizing Hegel, intolerant of the individual’s right to resist generalization, supervenes. But still more recently, re-appraisals like Gillian Rose’s have theorized more persuasively the saving gaps and theoretical openings in Hegel’s logic so as to recover a truly speculative Hegel. Hegel’s self-departures from his own system, it is argued, can be attributed to him. It is the peculiar nature of the speculative proposition, formally postulated but never investigated across different discourses, that allows Hegel to take credit for the speculative provisionality his critics have otherwise opposed to his system. Hegel, while writing across many historical discourses in the Phenomenology, is reticent (and restricted to formal investigation in the Science of Logic) about the implications for philosophical expression of such speculation. Again, as with Schelling, this leaves work to be done which Coleridge, with his inveterate recourse to discussions of language, helps inaugurate. The final chapter looks at Coleridge’s mode of addressing the speculative problem at its broadest, using Schelling, Hegel and Wordsworth as the most helpful points of orientation. Coleridge’s conclusion that ‘our modern philosophy is spelling throughout’ competes with the virtuosity of Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ when it tries to make poetry adequate to the task of describing us Absolutely. In its approach to the poetic challenge, philosophy, to use current analytic terminology, can be either foundational or anti-foundational: it can claim a privileged grounding in truth or it can be willing to delegate its authority in order to make possible the evocation of what philosophy can uniquely think but not express. In the latter mode it can concede to other ways of writing the function of ascertaining an Absolute that by definition exceeds the powers of its own discernment. It can live vicariously. Poetry, when epistemological on its own account, can only be foundational.21 When does one hear of poets opting for the strategically prosaic in order to get across an especially poetic felicity? Coleridge worries that a foundational poetic contact with what we Absolutely are, necessarily immediate, would render such ultimate authenticity as a sort of nonsense, epitomized by Wordsworth’s ‘child Philosopher’ of the ‘Immortality Ode’. ‘What we call knowledge’, wrote Schelling in the ‘Introduction’ to the third draft of the Weltalter, is ‘more of a striving toward knowledge than knowledge itself’. Like Wordsworth in his



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11

famous remarks to Isabella Fenwick on the ‘Ode’, he described ‘anamnesis’ as the goal producing this philosophical quest to get behind itself. Coleridge worries that Wordsworth’s own poetic striving towards the same Platonic goal takes the immediacy of its own poetic success to be a sign of immediate epistemological success – what Tim Milnes calls ‘a philosophy-transcending “poetic” truth’.22 Another way of putting this, Hegel’s way, is to say that immediacy, under analysis, empties itself of the particular ‘here and now’ supposed to demonstrate its certainty. It becomes uniform and universal in its range of reference. It is always the same because our guarantee of its truth is that it has no need of mediating characteristics which might distinguish its examples and occasions. Intriguingly, though, Schelling launched an attack on Hegel’s entire system on much the same grounds. There is, Schelling argued in his Lectures on Modern Philosophy, a sameness about the presence of the Absolute at each stage of Hegel’s Phenomenology, a common principle of contradiction rather than a something new each time on analogy with the continual development of a personality out of an unconscious past. Schelling here is seeking to use the philosophical nuclear option of the time against Hegel, the accusation of Pantheism. God in everything means that everything, theologically, is the same. Particular differences go by the board, as a truth for which mediation is irrelevant is therefore allowed to shine through all things in equal measure. This is extremely close to Coleridge’s attack on Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’. Pantheism does not let us make sense of the world. The speculative Hegel has his own means of escaping this attack. Wordsworth’s defence, or the best one that we can find for him, is to attack: to defeat philosophical objection with the winning sufficiency of his poetry. Schelling and Coleridge could argue that Wordsworth’s bid for universal authority just looks eccentric. His ‘Ode’ retains the particular, idiomatic character which it was its Absolute project to shed. Wordsworth would do better to charge our ordinary usage with the numinous than devise unbelievable characters and scenarios. Adorno commended a language that in its descriptions could be simultaneously ‘identical and non-identical’. Resuming the post-Kantian tradition, he argued that ‘through the deity, language is transformed from tautology to language’.23 After Nietzsche, after theology, he must have thought, we are still left with the burden of maintaining non-identity if language is to flourish. To avoid tautology, our language has to cultivate in us, as Coleridge wanted it to do, the power to respond to historical change without slavish acquiescence in the prescriptions of civilization we have inherited. Our ‘cultivation’ is the central mission of the Clerisy in Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each (1830). But to opt out of identity altogether, certain of our unaided, immediate poetic grasp of ourselves outside the limitations of identity, won’t do either. We cannot disport ourselves with Wordsworth’s poetic children in some utterly liminal landscape without hypostatizing in effect another identity, an impossibly Absolute one. So, finally, has Coleridge won and Wordsworth lost? The answer offered by the post-Kantian thinking this book studies is that this contest is actually

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a collaboration. Both sides are part of a movement in which, over time, as Schlegel and others argued, both can vacate their original positions for new, more composite forms of speech. Wordsworth’s poetry can tell us of our unquenchable and self-defeating desires for our immediate reconciliation with our destiny. Coleridge’s philosophy heightens our sense of the impossibility of such a vocation and the strangely indefensible intellectual postures to which it drives us. Wordsworth’s poetry can then rid us of this feeling of being ridiculous by its unanswerable exhibition of a need and longing which, he persuades us, we do indeed experience. Coleridge questions the credentials of that experience to call itself experience, and Wordsworth finds for those doubts an existential expression. And so the process continues, tautegorically rather than tautologically, the same only different each time. Poetry and philosophy are each other’s extension. They are on the stage, at the same time, in dramatic dialogue. The reader of both is the winner.

Chapter Two

Coleridge’s Philosophical Moment

The Difference between Fichte and Schelling When Coleridge excitedly told Thomas Poole in a famous letter of 1801 that he had ‘extricated’ the notions of Time and Space, and overthrown the doctrine of the association of ideas or mainstay of British empiricist psychology along with its (associated) determinist metaphysics, he was also describing his entry into the arena of German philosophy.1 Not that the Germans noticed. For Coleridge, though, the break was obviously revelatory. Crabb Robinson describes how ‘a German friend’ listening to Coleridge’s 1811 lectures convinced him that ‘Coleridge’s mind is much more German than English. My friend has pointed out striking analogies between Coleridge and German authors whom Coleridge has never seen . . ,’2 The corollary of this would be Coleridge’s frequent claims that he found Kant and the post-Kantians anticipated by earlier philosophers, by Bruno, Boehme, the Cambridge Platonists and others. His point, although expressed with his customary mixture of apology, rivalry and emulation, seems, in effect, to be less about precedence and more about his enjoyment of the contemporary German idiom in which he found perennial philosophical concerns updated and historically expressive. Coincidentally, in the same year as Coleridge’s coup de foudre, Hegel was also trying to extricate himself from his native philosophical inheritance. In his essay on The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy, he championed Schelling’s development of the ‘spirit’ of Kant’s philosophy over Fichte’s. In early letters (1795) to Hegel from the Tübingen Stift, the educational establishment he attended with Hegel and Hölderlin, Schelling wrote of an entrenched fidelity to the letter of Kant’s philosophy, and of the contrary need to discover the premises of which Kant’s philosophy may have given the result, but which it itself lacked.3 In the variable of ‘spirit’ also lay hidden the growth that was to culminate in Hegel’s first major philosophical achievement, the Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807. By then Hegel had broken with Schelling, and Schelling was on the way to criticizing Hegel’s own philosophy as too idealist, too focused on conceptual possibility and neglectful of ontology: those ‘premises’ or ultimately prior explanations of the astonishing fact that anything exists rather than what it has become. Potentially mystical, this ontological focus on the determination or attunement (the German Bestimmung carries the

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same vocational loading) of existence powered not only Kierkegaard’s existentialism but also Marx’s materialism, in which nature is characterized not by its (Hegelian) logical essentials but by its potential to be historically transformed into our authentic reality. Human beings, thought the young Marx, overcame their alienation under capitalism by transforming nature into their proper abode. Thus they allowed their true natural history – their determination as a species being – to begin.4 Hegel’s break with a Fichtean version of Kant is one of the first moments provoking the new ways of thinking.5 Coleridge sides with Schelling and Hegel against Fichte, and eventually with Schelling against Hegel, although he can be placed illuminatingly within Hegel’s speculative history. The critique of Fichte, though, expresses itself as the reinterpretation of Kant, and Coleridge shares this post-Kantian philosophical self-understanding too. According to Hegel in his 1801 Difference essay, Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre or ‘Science of knowledge’ drew the full implications latent in two related tenets of Kant’s philosophy. Kant thought that the categories of the understanding possessed absolute jurisdiction in questions of knowledge. Kant also claimed that a transcendental unity of apperception – an ‘I think’ accompanying all acts of understanding – was necessary for any experience to be possible. Experience had to belong, had to be someone’s, could not be free-floating. Joined together by Fichte, these two precepts generated the notion of an Absolute subject or possessor of the exemplary experience. It is a short step to say that knowledge and experience are nothing other than the self-positing of this Absolute. Nature then becomes for Fichte merely the ‘not-I’, the negative of self-projection, posited in order for understanding to have something to act upon. What the self-conscious ‘I’ simultaneously knows is an effect of its own activity. As long as that activity continues, the ‘not-I’ will never be conclusively understood. Schelling appropriated this picture of the production of reality from a developing ground of which we are never fully conscious. But he took the Fichtean striving out of the exclusively subjective realm at the expense of the coherence of Fichte’s system. This was no failure on Schelling’s part, as some commentators have thought, but what Schelling wanted to do – to reconceive ideas of philosophical adequacy outside received notions of system.6 In his final formulation, Fichte calls the production of ‘not-I’ from ‘I’ an ‘original duplicity’.7 In Hegel’s critical view, such a merger only added another tier to ‘the philosophical construction’ of the faculty doing the synthesis.8 To try to amalgamate reflection with action in this way did not make Fichte’s reality any less ideal. Schelling thought Fichte failed, and exploited that failure. Hegel thought that Fichte remained consistently a philosopher of reflection, and that his system remained static and unhistorical as a result. Hegel’s own phenomenology exhaustively analysed all the historical varieties of self-consciousness and the worlds they implied. But then he arguably doubled Fichte’s negation to show the reverse production of the ‘I’ from the ‘not-I’ or realm of ‘Spirit’ (the not ‘not-I’) whose progress was then recounted by the rest of his phenomenology. As soon as ‘Spirit’ becomes an independently productive agent, it



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is no longer just an epiphenomenon of the ‘I’, such as the ‘not-I’, but has become the negation of that negation. Coleridge seems to have found his way round these difficult negatives on his own. In a note to Fichte’s Grundlage, he asked pertinently: ‘Is not a portion of the Obscurity of the Wissenschaftslehre attributable to the choice of the “Ich” instead of Soul or Spirit?’ Coleridge’s note then continues in Schellingian terms: ‘With the “I” we habitually connect the present Potence of Consciousness’.9 Potenzen or potencies were the different powers of the Absolute (in analogy with the mathematical idea of numbers to the power of their squares, cubes etc.) as it manifested itself at different levels of existence – mineral, chemical, animal, psychological. Hegel preferred to record these variables as the history of Spirit. But in the Difference essay Hegel appreciated Schelling’s move to save nature from entire absorption into the philosophy of the Fichtean subject. Nor did Schelling’s nature exist in itself, so as through some final potency to encompass subjectivity as well. The Absolute was the identity of both subject and object: whatever continuum they shared in order to make their comparison, identification or opposition possible. This, at any rate, is the emphasis that distinguishes Schelling’s earlier Naturphilosophie from the Identitätsphilosophie, ‘identity philosophy’, in which it became incoporated. Coleridge’s note to Fichte clearly places him inside this debate, exercised by its options and possible variants. Coleridge’s marginalia tend to be aggressive. He affects astonishment at Kant’s bêtises. Fichte is roundly castigated and repeatedly compared unfavourably with Kant. So is Jacobi, and his attack on the Kantian and post-Kantian tradition in Über die göttlichen Dinge is marked down as ungenerous despite its evident anti-Pantheistic stance. But then Jacobi is defended in Coleridge’s notes to Schelling’s response in his Denkmal; and, generally, Coleridge’s hostility to Schelling grows in proportion to the closeness with which his thought glosses Coleridge’s own fundamentally religious orientation. It is just after his copious use of Schelling and criticism of Fichte in Biographia Literaria that he tells J.H. Green that ‘Fichte was far nearer the truth than Schelling’.10 Coleridge’s conflicted reception is especially obvious with Schelling’s Freiheitschrift or Freedom essay (Untersuchungen über das Wesen des menschlichen Freiheit) where Schelling’s escape from Pantheism, and his appropriation of an incipiently Trinitarian structure for ontology is not immediately congenial to Coleridge. Coleridge still told Henry Crabb Robinson in 1812 that Schelling was at his ‘greatest’ in this work. Yet in his annotations to Schelling’s Denkmal he can be as reluctant as Jacobi had been to engage with the broad argument of the Freedom essay. His sweeping claims that Schelling’s ‘uncouth mysticism’ simply reworks Kant’s explanation of freedom as ‘the paramouncy of the Reason over the Will’ refuses Schelling any advance on his predecessor and rules out of court his actual advance with Kantian disapproval.11 At this point, the temptation for Coleridge’s reader is confidently to offer un-philosophical explanations for Coleridge’s barbed and defensive attitudes. Clearly he feels threatened. He displaces his worries about his own originality onto speculations about Schelling’s unacknowledged indebtedness to Jakob

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Boehme, a Coleridgean tic convincingly documented by Norman Fruman in his attack on Coleridge’s plagiarisms.12 Thomas McFarland famously maintained that Coleridgean rhetoric always argued a measured intellectual fastidiousness; an unwillingness to subscribe to any individual, finished systematic exposition in philosophy because of his profound suspicion (shared by Jacobi) that such completeness falls in with monism. Philosophical monism can be idealist or realist, positing a reduction of reality to what is either conceptually or naturally possible. For Jacobi and Coleridge, this Spinozistic ambition left us no logical room for the idea of an external God free to welcome us to the otherworldly provision or afterlife in which Coleridge needed so desperately to believe. But Schelling in particular shows a way out of this impasse, opening up an area of Being about which, since it remains undifferentiated, Coleridge can think what he likes. But, in a way, that freedom is the problem, because, unlike Schelling, Coleridge wants to be able to exert doctrinal control even over this area of ultimate liberty. Many of Coleridge’s personal remarks in marginalia, striking in their assumed intimacy – of the form ‘a man of Kant’s / Jacobi’s / Schelling’s genius would not . . . etc.’ – might well derive from his recurring sense that they were articulating a sequence in the history of thought to which he belonged; a moment in which he was embedded, an over-arching ‘Spirit’, as Hegel put it explicitly, in which his own individuality needed to inhere. The mixture of subjection and empowerment this historicity entailed then pressurized his readings of others. ‘What may not an ingenious man make out against another’, wrote Coleridge in Schelling’s margins, ‘if he will put his own definitions on the other’s words’.13 But this sensitivity to translation informs everything Coleridge wrote about other philosophers and, indeed, seems to be what he thinks they are up to. Schelling (in the Darlegung), for example, reinterprets Kant ‘in the Spirit of Kant’ despite claiming a closer affinity to the best of Fichte.14 In this context, the word ‘Spirit’ suggests a Hegelian category historically overriding the individual’s own introspective certainty of what he or she is on about. Coleridge himself wanted to have Schelling in ‘common life words’, although the pleasure he took in Kant’s severe review of Herder’s history shows his antipathy to the ‘metacritical’ practice, stemming from Hamann and Herder, of taking a stand against the ‘Spirit of Kant’ by opposing Kant’s philosophical departures from ordinary language.15 When Coleridge was confident of imposing his own terminology on Schelling, he drew on the Christian pattern to which he believed that Schelling’s thought, to be correct, must conform. He is, I believe, at his most hostile when he thought Schelling was doing things the other way round, and approving Christian theology when it mirrored philosophical arguments to which, in order to be correct, it must conform.16 Or Coleridge’s inveterate habit of desynonymizing could appear to have a life of its own. Coleridge thought that ‘the inconveniency of using one word for two Relations’ meant that Schelling often ‘equivocates’, exhibiting ‘the ill effects of an ambiguous (i.e. double meaning) word even on highest minds’.17



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When Coleridge himself is read critically, this mode of correction can appear symmetrical with that act of putting one’s ‘own definition on the other’s words’ he was so keen to oppose. But, if practical criticism is the substance of Coleridge’s philosophy, as I.A. Richards thought, it certainly informs his interventions within the German philosophical framework. In other words, it is in his interest in and grasp of the problems of expressing and communicating various philosophical positions that Coleridge could make his own contribution. This originality, now metacritical, did not appear in grand modifications of metaphysical schemes but in criticism of the language of those schemes, criticism that could vary from nit-picking and minutely suspicious commentary to a fairly worked-out rhetoric of ‘tautegory’ that was almost free-standing. It is the key to understanding his use of Schelling. He envied ‘the many unstranslatable Words’ available to the German philosopher and finally found one of his own.18 We can get a better idea of the philosophical opportunities on offer to Coleridge by looking first at his (much less productive) quarrel with Fichte. In marginalia to perhaps Fichte’s most accessible text, The Vocation of Man, Coleridge inveighs against Fichte for two main reasons. As did Jacobi and Fichte’s other opponents in the Atheismusstreit (the outcry over Fichte’s critiques of theology that cost him his Chair at Jena in 1799), he abhors Fichte’s attribution to religion of an entirely moral foundation: ‘Fichte says that Duty . . . or the Law of Conscience is the Voice of God, for man the only Voice, the sole personality of God’.19 The religious sufficiency of the moral law repelled Coleridge. Like Schelling and Hegel, he found such an inner imperviousness to natural circumstance and emotion a further complication, not a solution to questions in either moral philosophy or the philosophy of religion. Agreeing with Schelling’s objections to The Vocation of Man, he called it ‘the maddest bellow of Bull-frog Hyperstoicism, I ever met with under the name of Philosophy’. The reference to Stoicism is quite precise. If Coleridge (unusually) is read from a Hegelian perspective, as we will do a little later in this chapter, Stoicism is an important stage of self-surpassing in his own career. On this view, Fichte’s critique of all revelation leaves him stranded inside barren inwardness rather than enriched by a Stoical freedom from external oppression. Stoicism, as Hegel argued, was inhuman in its imperviousness to what would reduce the rest of us to misery. It was also irredeemably eccentric in its self-sufficiency, offering no general rules of behaviour, taking (or resisting) everything on its merits. Coleridge also objected to Fichte’s ‘egoism’. He sometimes phrased this second objection in an unfairly personal manner; at other times his disquiet is evidently based on a technical understanding of Fichte’s idealism: ‘a Juggler’s trick of dividing his Individuality into the knowing and the acting . . . Man!’20 Both these two worries, religious and philosophical, converge in Coleridge’s picture of ‘This Man, who page after page can rant away in the perfect silence of all human Consciousness! Grounding all on the equivoque of the word “I”!’ For Coleridge, a consciousness that remains mutely uncommunicative

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can scarcely be human. His 1809–10 periodical, The Friend, was a largely philosophical venture based on this premise. His re-creation of it in 1818 shows the perennial quality of his communicative ambitions. Fichte’s solution to the potential infinite regress in Kant’s account of self-consciousness was, as we have seen, to make the ‘I’ absolute, encapsulating ‘all human Consciousness’. Like Hegel, Coleridge would be put off by the lack of relation or consequence in Fichte’s absolute, by its ‘silence’. Coleridge was much more sympathetic to Fichte’s Kantian starting points. It was from Kant that Fichte’s moral version of religion came. Coleridge’s fierce belief in immortality certainly shows him in sympathy with Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, where the immortality of the soul is a practical requirement for moral behaviour to appear to us to be a rational course of action in the long run.21 Coleridge expressed or rather surpassed this postulate with characteristic force in marginalia to Kant’s ‘Dreams of a Spirit-Seer’: . . . it is not any Hope of future Reward that impels me, nor any Fear of future Punishment which keeps me in the Road – but the thought, that all, I can do, is but a dream, and that not myself only but that all men & all things are but dreams, that nothing is permanent – which makes the mortality of man a stupefying thought to me. I cannot conceive a supreme moral Intelligence, unless I believe in my own immortality – for I must believe in a whole system of apparent means to an end, which end had no existence – my Conscience, my progressive faculties, &c. But give up this, & Virtue wants all reason – Away with Stoic Hypocrisy! . . . . For if the Law be barren of all consequences, what is it but words? To obey the Law for its own sake is really a mere sophism, in any other sense –: you might as well put abra cadabra in its place . . .22 More like Hegel, Coleridge has here turned the postulate – that the possibility of our endless progress is required for the good life to continue to be a rational end – against Kantian formalism, by filling out Kant’s concession with more affect and existential force than either he or Fichte would have allowed.

Schelling’s philosophical moment If Fichte’s philosophy appears to eschew communication, Schelling’s can be read to some extent as being primarily a philosophy of communication. Coleridge’s use of it to amplify his own metaphysical sensibility certainly works through a notion of Logos or ultimate information-flow. Schelling began as an adherent of Fichte and then supplemented Fichtean idealism with his own philosophy of nature or Naturphilosophie. He then sought a unity behind this opposition, and his Freiheitschrift of 1807 through the unpublished Stuttgart seminars and Weltalter (Ages of the World) are backed by the philosophy of



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identity, which they finally surpass, but which is most fully expounded in his System des gesammten Philosophie . . . (System of the Total Philosophy . . .) of about 1804, also left unpublished at the time. If the communicative emphasis is correct, this would fit with Schelling’s intellectual environment in Jena from the late 1790s through to the end of the System. The Jena Frühromantiker – composing at various times the Schlegels, Tieck, Novalis, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Caroline Schlegel, Dorothea Veit, and intermittently in touch with Schiller and Goethe – was much concerned with merging disciplines, seeking out fruitful discursive collaborations, Sympoesie and Symphilosophie, or a new mythology to be the adequate bearer of contemporary scientific discovery. Schelling’s philosophy of identity explains how to think an absolute unity existing behind all the differentiations and contrasts with which we make sense of the world. Identity, Absolute, Being, Unity, God – these transcendental terms are often interchangeable in this kind of philosophy, and the interchangeability of the God-term both supports the theology Coleridge approved and deprives it of its privilege. In the Kantian tradition, the discriminations fronting transcendentalism are understood reflectively; the classifications and explanations with which we understand the world mirror our capabilities and requirements for experiencing anything. Schelling, though, presented the unconditioned requirement for experience as something ontological, as Being. Hence his more voluntarist formulations of an Absolute he believed we apprehended in a more fundamental manner than that permitted by the logic of reflection expounded by Kant and Fichte and, Schelling eventually believed, by Hegel. Already claiming to oppose Hegelian argument, Schelling insisted that this primal identity did not cancel or transcend (aufheben) our world-making activities. As we shall see, it is arguable that Hegel meant the self-cancellation or Aufhebung of finite things (the not not-I) to concede the different, ‘speculative’ kind of expression that Being demanded. But Schelling’s Absolute remains a communicator requiring a more positive response. In the 1804 System, we hear that ‘the self-affirmation of the Absolute [Coleridge’s ‘infinite I AM’] . . . bestows on the particular in everything a doubled life’.23 Consistently, the 1810 Stuttgart Seminars ask us to understand our world as a repetition or ‘doubling’ (Doublirung) of the Absolute in the particular lives around us, to be clarified analogically, by a communicative initiative.24 The humanist analogy here invoked to explain the ‘doubling’ of the Absolute in finite things is taken from our own experience. Retrospectively, we recall our unconscious, unified existence prior to our ability to reflect upon it. So now we possess ourselves only in a doubled image. Trapped forever on the reflective side we nevertheless can imagine enjoying a freedom of reality anterior to reflection. It is the same, Schelling concludes somewhat spectacularly, ‘with God’ (So Gott).25 Manfred Frank and Andrew Bowie have been patient expositors of Schelling’s anti-Hegelian claim that our apprehension of Being is pre-reflective and so escapes Hegel’s otherwise inexorable logic of mediation.26 Left open is the question of the best use of language to communicate this mode (unreflective, therefore immediate) of evoking the world so as to describe the scene of

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our original, unselfconscious belonging. It has decreed what we are. But how do we revive its ‘symphony and song’? Lacan famously declared that the Unconscious had the structure of a language. Julia Kristeva has probably been the most ingenious discoverer of locutions unsusceptible of reduction to reflective consciousness.27 Schelling and Coleridge did not have the benefit of Freud’s science of tropes and were heirs to stricter rhetorical proprieties and discursive distinctions. Arguably their resistance to these constraints was at least in the spirit of Freudian innovation. Schelling’s clearest statements of this linguistic challenge come after the extraordinary privileging of the aesthetic at the climax of his 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism as the ‘organ’ of philosophy. The aesthetic possessed the ability simultaneously to express the artist’s conscious purpose and to encode another unconscious meaning still to be uncovered in successive critical receptions, re-stagings, repetitions of the artwork. But the aesthetic example does not seem to have sufficed; other relays were needed. From within philosophical discourse, Schelling continues to reword this structure of repetition that also, I believe, shaped the core thought of Coleridgean speculation. The two key questions for Coleridge remain. What happens to religion if philosophy can so adequately absorb its theological underpinning? This nervousness about religion’s discursive autonomy perhaps loomed larger for him than fear of pantheism. Also, which uses of language best serve to express our religious sense of belatedness? It would have to be a rhetoric celebrating our grounding in a prior Absolute’s free determination to set things in a human perspective. And that, read in one direction, perhaps reversing Schelling’s humanist analogy, can indeed sound inescapably religious. God’s is the model of our own problematic self-experience. On the linguistic question, I will argue, Coleridge is eventually more inventive than Schelling who, in a notable instance, follows Coleridge’s lead and is happy to concede that he has done so. In 1804, Schelling described the life not knowingly repeating God’s as a life of appearance (Scheinleben), one witnessing (as Frank puts it) negatively to its grounding. This allows Dieter Henrich’s argument for more affinity between the development of Schelling and Hegel than either might have acknowledged.28 For ‘appearance’ suggests a form to be progressively seen through and relativized as we approach more adequate versions of absolute truth. But we had thought that Schelling’s identity philosophy had identified as immediate an apprehension of the Absolute as we were permitted, one that may have been lacking an adequate language (which would have to forego its normal descriptive and expressive functions) but which we possessed now, not an apprehension still to be attained. Henrich is helpful when considering Coleridge’s marginalia to Hegel’s Logic. Coleridge’s annotations to Hegel were very brief compared to others, but very relevant to our subject. Coleridge read the opening of Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik and instantly criticized its opposition and then assimilation of Being (Seyn) to Nothingness (Nichts). This choice of antithesis was Hegel’s ‘primary error’. Being should have been opposed to ‘nicht seyn’, or ‘non-being’.



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Read from inside Schelling’s quarrel with Hegel (and it is almost impossible to make sense of it in any other way), Coleridge’s point is this: it is one thing to distinguish between what exists and its competitors – between, say, lions and unicorns – and another thing to go behind all differentiation to some ultimate imponderable.29 He makes the same point when Hegel discredits a Being or Absolute that can be equated with unknowable ‘things-in-themselves’. You actually need another Absolute, which Coleridge calls God, in order retrospectively to construct the undifferentiated one Hegel thinks nonsensical – ‘the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black’, as the ‘Preface’ to his Phenomenology famously put it.30 As we have just seen, our particularized, divided world presupposes some ground of absolute identity which its distinctions can have in common – some ground for their comparison. Schelling and Coleridge, though, think the same logic applies to the Absolute itself. An unknowable Absolute is implied by the one we know in this way. There is a double movement at work here. Coleridge appears to take up Schelling’s idea that: like us, So Gott. God only becomes God by emerging, as our identity does, from some still anterior unconscious ground to which God belongs (‘God, whose is the Almight’, writes Coleridge) as we do. God does so by freely choosing to be the Absolute identity subtending this world rather than another. This appears to be the gist of Coleridge’s cryptic gloss. No! [the thing-in-itself is] not the same as the absolute­; but as its Idea in God. In the mere Absolute (i.e. the Almight) there is neither Division nor Distinction; but in God, whose is the Almight, there is each as well as all, perfect unity, but yet distinction /31 Hegel rules out Schelling’s elastic ontology. Schelling, for his part, thinks that for Hegel to limit the meaning of the Absolute to the continuum between different stages of knowledge explains how things work, but without ever engaging with equally legitimate questions arising from the fact that there is anything there to work in the first place. Dieter Henrich, though, commendably persistent in keeping Hegel within the post-Kantian picture, has argued in detail in his chapter ‘Seven steps on the way from Schelling to Hegel’ that Hegel’s logic was actually capable of Schellingian versatility. In fact, Hegel could have learned from Schelling precisely how to maintain simultaneously two clauses saving his logic from Schellingian critique. First, the Absolute was to be thought of as identical with the particulars we experienced around us, but only insofar as they could suggest their ground of comparison. This assumed that the ground was not the same as what it grounded. In the words of a Coleridge notebook entry, ‘all Ideas are so far idea as being particular formally they are universal essentially’. After this he correctly adds, ‘S. T. C. 5 Schelling’ (CN 3. 4428). Second, this rising above particular differences could not, therefore, have been one of them, and so the Absolute could not find itself reflected in any individual difference. The Absolute has to be thought of as differing again, this time from the systematic differences defining things.

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Hence the Absolute doubles both as the Spirit (Geist) in which those particulars inhere, and as their difference or otherness (Anderseits), the boundary of the Absolute’s equally characteristic unconscious potential for subtending worlds as yet unrealised. In Henrich’s clever reconciliation, the reflection in otherness required for Hegelian self-definition merges with the doubling or repetition required for Schellingian self-definition.32 This careful finesse (common to Schelling and Hegel) was ignored by Jacobi in his polemic against Schelling’s alleged Pantheism in Über die Göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung (On the Divine Things and their Revelation), much to Schelling’s fury.33 Schelling had sidestepped Pantheism by arguing a different kind of acquaintance with Being from the mode by which we gained our knowledge of the everyday world. The ordinary world could be expressive of God, but God still belonged to a larger, undifferentiated, orbiting ground. Coleridge could describe this ‘Panentheism’ clearly and economically when he wanted, as when he discusses the possible indebtedness of ‘the leading Idea’ of Schelling’s theology to Kant and Boehme: ‘(I allude to his “Untersuchung über das Wesen der Menschclichen Freyheit”) namely, the establishing an independent Ground of God’s Existence, which is indeed God (to; qeion) but not God himself (O qeo~)’.34 Schelling insisted on an ‘infinite lack’ in Being, an ‘indivisible remainder’, which modern commentary has seen as the lasting interpretative challenge of Schelling’s philosophy. Attempts to get on terms with this defining deficit have lifted his work decisively out of the context of the pantheism debate (Pantheismusstreit) to address issues of cultural materialism and psychoanalysis.35 For Hegel, less attracted to Jena adventures in communicative logic, the second clause more prosaically placed the Absolute beyond any particular stage in its development. Hegel, we saw, evolved the concept of ‘Spirit’ to describe the doubled negative self-relation of Absolute identity (the not ‘not-I’) thus disclosed. The question then is whether Hegel’s logic of this negative self-recognition by Being’s otherness from the things that disclose it is a sufficient account of our sense of it.36 For Coleridge the answer was no. Like Schelling, he had recourse to non-philosophical languages to characterize our special orientation towards Being. This feeling of the directedness or fittingness of Being to our experience had already been expressed aesthetically by Kant and ethically by Fichte. But further possibilities opened up dramatically for a philosopher like Schelling who had been receptive to the dialogical ferment of Jena. It is worth re-emphasizing that Schelling was from 1799 to 1803 surrounded by the ironists and consummate wits of Jena, full of bold cross-disciplinary solutions to questions of how best to express this complicated philosophical situation in which particularity is understood as properly grounded only insofar as it is not itself. The world repeats an Absolute Being contracted to humanly appreciable proportions, an accommodation which, by definition, cannot be got at directly. Since, therefore, the Absolute can only be expressed through this deceptive differentiation into particulars, both poles of Schelling’s philosophy, particular and Absolute, are beset by paradox. Particulars, incapable of



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grounding themselves, then seek impossibly in their negative relation to others – their dependency on their difference from others for their own identity – a satisfying reflection of their negative relation to reality. And, in this doomed quest for closure, the particulars they differentiate themselves from are equally beholden to still other things they are not. Andrew Bowie has rightly seen here anticipations of Derrida’s grammatology of a language forever in pursuit of a transcendental signifier that would lock all its parts in place.37 Schelling likewise emphasizes the vanity of a striving towards our Absolute grounding. But clearly the linguistic challenges in expressing all these tensions are extraordinarily demanding. Eventually, in his positive philosophy, Schelling looks for an answerable style for the Absolute pole of his thought. Coleridge both matches this concern for the validation of the Absolute through the variety of difference, and suggests a rhetoric for a positive grasp of the identity thus indirectly intuited. The stylistic means (Stilmittel) Frank sees as appropriate to Schelling’s philosophical vision is ‘irony’. Wolfram Hogrebe enlarges on this general point to argue that Schelling’s early interest in a new mythology as the proper object of modern philosophy found collaborators in the Jena circle who encouraged him to persist in ambitions that resulted in the aesthetic focus obvious from the 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism to the 1804 Philosophy of Art.38 In particular, Schelling’s reading of Dante among the circle of Jena intellectuals led him to write about the Divina Commedia in a manner advancing his philosophical interest in aesthetics far beyond its source in Kant’s Critique of Judgement. In his 1807 public lecture, ‘On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature’, which Coleridge translated almost verbatim for his 1818 lectures, Schelling rehearses his philosophy of identity. That is, he appears to use the old neo-Platonic argument that like can only be known by like. If that were all there were to the affinity between mind and nature, science could do as good a job as could be done in expressing this identity. But, as we have just seen, Schelling and Hegel, contra Jacobi, believe this identity is not created by what depends on it, and that they have moved beyond the Pantheismusstreit. Nor, Schelling particularly emphasizes, is our awareness of identity dependent on our apprehension of things. We need another angle of approach to the identity subtending differences in order ‘to lay hold of it alive’. Sharing Hegel’s terminology once more, Schelling describes this unity as being of a geistiger Art, of a kind belonging to ‘spirit’.39 This has been the essence of his break-out from the Fichtean prisonhouse of consciousness into the new subject-matter of his Naturphilosophie. Now, Schelling begins to develop his ideas on this awareness beyond what he has said about it so far in the context of his Identitätssystem as well as his Naturphilosophie. We cannot get at what makes for meaningful comparisons between science and nature through reflection, which already belongs to the consciously scientific side of the contrast. Nature’s unconscious affinities are still modelled in graspable form for us by art, apparently as they were earlier in the 1800 System. Hogrebe, however, shows clearly that, from the beginning of his use of the example of art, Schelling’s strategy has been deepening. In Schelling’s

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1803 essay ‘On Dante in relation to Philosophy’ (Über Dante in philosophischer Beziehung), which really is an essay on the Dante created by the Jena group, we find perhaps the sharpest and most economical statement of this profounder philosophical art or ‘mythology’. For Schelling, the Divine Comedy is ‘the paradigm of the contemplation of the universe’.40 To achieve this status, the poem has had to overcome its historical character, and, using all the genres at its disposal, it has become independent of the kinds and disciplinary proprieties of its time. In doing this, it demonstrates itself to be ‘the poem of all poetry, the poetic art of modern poetic art itself’ (das Gedicht aller Gedichte, die Poesie der moderne Poesie selbst). In Schellingian parlance, it ups its Potenz; in Hegelian terms, it becomes Geist.41 Poetic creativity of this kind bursts its aesthetic boundaries, historicizing and rendering provisional (vorläufig) its starting point in order to become exemplary (vorbildlich) for a future, modern age. And that modern age must be prepared in its turn to forego the comforting framework of accepted human achievement specific to its time in order to recover a feel for the underlying universal identity. In Schelling’s essay ‘On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature’, he asserts that ‘only through the perfection of form can form be destroyed’, presumably a reversible insight.42 We have already encountered this aporetic dialectic. We saw Schelling use the humanist analogy of our experience to figure how we structure the Absolute. Just as we can belong to a productive past we are unconscious of, so God can figure his plenitude as a ground which was his but not him. Like Orpheus denied Eurydice when he looked back, we can only specify this undifferentiated Being by losing its characteristic lack of specificity. And we normally hold people responsible for the subjectivity or personality which thus emerges. Equally, to be anything, the Absolute needs to be specific, and so had to split itself off from its larger origins. Coleridge seems to manage this aporia quite adroitly, as when he takes a Schellingian view of time contra Jacobi. According to me Time begins perpetually, it being the necessary manifestation and life of Eternity, which implies Time as its Consequence even as Time implies Eternity as its Ground . . . In the case of ‘God’, though, these continuities are more problematic. The Dante example is important, and literary history more to the point than sheer chronology, when it figures a denial of its original nature in order to enjoy a life in time, the life of its successive critical receptions, and in order to have a future.43 To read Dante in this deeper sense allows his poem to model how we should think an Absolute which only exists dialectically: both as it is historically manifested, and as it exceeds these circumstances and is not the creature of them. Schelling’s Dante-model breaks out of medieval Catholic theology into a modern poetry whose own consummation is the destruction of its own definition as it seeks further incarnations whose supporting identity has been intuited. The trouble for Coleridge is that there appears to be no reason ever



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to halt this process, to ‘Weave a circle round him thrice’ and fix the poet’s meaning in doctrinal certainty. Universal progressive poetry, as Friedrich Schlegel would call it, knew no end of self-negation and of refutation of its individual historical expressions. Coleridge’s fear of Schellingian pantheism was less Jacobi’s fear of the heresy and more a worry that commitment to Schelling’s mythological philosophizing perpetually destabilizes the cultural establishment Coleridge needs to be in place for religion to occupy the pre-eminent place his faith demands. Such abandonment was precisely its mythological character. Consoling to Coleridge, though, was that throughout this continually destabilizing process a consistent symbolism of the unity underlying these discarded particulars remained. We were not committed to an eternally fruitless striving after an elusive transcendental signified. While Schelling thought that Dante did not possess a ‘symbolic mythology’ which might have brought his insights to consciousness, Schelling and Coleridge will use tautegory to do just that.44 In fact, Coleridge will go further and envisage an intellectual class specially attuned to the universal truths of symbolic tautegories, a class working to represent our universal interests in a re-imagined polity. But then it is just such susceptibility to a universal symbolism that freed Dante’s poem from its ostensible Christianity and accorded it such momentous philosophical significance. The dialectic goes on.

Hegel’s speculative history I want to prepare the way for a Hegelian portrait of Coleridge. Commentators on Schelling and Hegel, often the best ones, tend to illuminate one at the expense of the other. Perhaps they are irredeemably opposed. Coleridge, though, relates to both, although it is to Schelling, of course, that comparisons are almost exclusively made. Yet Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, published in Jena in 1807, provided the most striking philosophical dramatization of the period in which Coleridge lived. It was the most ambitious theory of his moment. On the back of the Jena achievement, it narrated, simultaneously, a history of classic stages of philosophy and the story of the evolution of a contemporary philosophical spirit. In a book which situates Coleridge philosophically, it is impossible to ignore. If ignored, the Phenomenology remains the proverbial elephant in the room. Post-Kantian through and through, it developed a content for the self-consciousness behind Kant’s theory of knowledge, obliged by him to remain purely formal. This apperception, or reflection upon the way in which one conceived of the world, was both historicized by Hegel and made the driver of historical change. Self-consciousness was no longer either empirical or transcendental – either historical awareness or a purely logical requirement for knowledge to belong to someone and so be knowledge – but both. Logical disputes therefore became imbued with all the historical desire, conflict, passion, terror and melancholy of conscious experience. Although he

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never read the Phenomenology, Coleridge’s career fits into the Hegelian plot in suggestive ways that picture him as a philosophical child of his time. Hegel was settling accounts with Schelling to some extent in his Phenomenology of Spirit. Both, along with Hölderlin, had been fellow students at the Tübingen Stift. Schelling’s success came first. A phenomenal philosophical prodigy by his early 20s, he provided a measure and then opposition against which the slower-developing Hegel defined his own thought. Coleridge was finally much more Schellingian than Hegelian, but, like Schelling, he could have found his story told in Hegel’s merging of contemporary individual aspiration with the history of philosophy’s exhaustion of conceptual possibility. Hegel tells his story twice in the Phenomenology, the first time emphasizing the individual consciousness’s striving for legitimation, the second time emphasizing the inescapably historical and individual character of successive incarnations of this apparently objective, universal authenticity. In the first, the progress is typically from the particular to the general; in the second, from the universal category to the individual one. Eventually, both histories merge in an Absolute Spirit where the individual can be incorporated without loss in the world, in community and institutional life. In turn, these generalities themselves can receive no more satisfying instantiation or membership than Hegel’s muchtravelled individual. Hegel makes the career of consciousness into the very process of philosophical argument. The Jena philosophers generically diversified philosophical discourse, looking for theoretical alliances between philosophy and modes of thinking, speaking and writing that previously had been the subjects on which, magisterially, philosophy would pronounce. Now philosophy used poetry, history, theology and the rest as stand-ins for theoretical tasks it could not accomplish on its own, or as temporarily and unproductively separate projects in need of philosophical interpretation to each other. Hegel, though, carries this broadening of the philosophical front even further and makes the examined life, as it were, into an argument, into philosophy itself. In this way he retains the idea of a master discourse which the philosopher speaks. We will look at Coleridge’s life-writing later, and can here anticipate judging it to be trying to have it both ways. He holds fast to the idea of a life that gathers itself in its entirety into a philosophically authoritative voice, but he also courts all sorts of discursive surrogates that suggest the immanence of theory in places traditionally thought ancillary to major philosophical effort – such as biography. This has been a problem when trying to understand Coleridge’s philosophical consistency. But taken within the arena of post-Kantian debate, rather than viewed from outside, his divergences make more sense. Schelling was the philosopher who came nearest to Coleridge’s theoretical positioning. Existential where Hegel was rational, Schelling felt able to be as philosophically inclusive as the Jena Romantics while claiming that a special philosophical insight licensed his acceptance of the diversity of the world and our different forms of orientation within it. As the repetition whereby an infinite, absolute activity took on definition, our primary experiences nevertheless became



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philosophically significant only as they made us think this difference, impossible to grasp in any other terms. And it therefore required an additional philosophical effort, as Coleridge insists in Biographia Literaria, to focus on things in this way. Getting from the first part to the second part of Hegel’s phenomenology, so that he can run the same argument backwards from absolute to individual consciousness – from ethics, culture, Spirit and ultimately Reason to the individual dilemma – shows him to be at once more and less certain than Schelling and Coleridge. His absolutes, until he calls the whole process of the phenomenology absolute Reason, are repeatedly historicized, found to be temporary stages on the way to some fuller knowledge. But we can, thinks Hegel, possess this final certainty of the whole. We don’t have to linger (as Hegel famously thought Schelling did) in the sense of our indefinable difference from it, thus indistinguishable from indifference, lost once more in the night in which all cows are black. So, on the road to absolute knowledge, Hegel busily demolishes, one after the other, the supra-individual bases with which he seemed keen to replace the certainties of self-consciousness which his phenomenology began by questioning. In his critique of Kant, for example, he argues that formal moral imperatives without presuppositions lack any content. Kant thinks that you can detect whether or not an injunction is a genuinely binding duty simply by virtue of its logical structure, of the contradiction, that is, involved in contravening it. What we require of everyone else, we are obliged to do ourselves, and that possible maximization assures us in individual cases that we are on the right lines. Sophocles’ Antigone, Hegel argues, shows two formally consistent positions in collision. In choosing one, therefore, supporting either Antigone’s or Creon’s cause, decisive for us must be not form but content. Otherwise, to repeat Coleridge’s criticism of Kantian formalism cited earlier, ‘you might as well put abra cadabra in its place’.45 But then our decision becomes an historical one, between two institutions and ethical backgrounds, that of Creon’s State and that of Antigone’s family. Antigone’s domestic authority to demand the right to bury her murderous brother is based on laws older than the polity Creon defended against him. But this does not make Antigone right, for Hegel, but rather raises the question of her place in the modern Greek State just as it shows that same State’s modernity surpassed by the historical pressure she puts on it. If Antigone’s demands look anachronistic, Creon’s State looks out of touch with an important constituency and in need of refurbishment itself. Such institutional oppositions are easily described as ‘self-estrangement’ of the social order or current version of what universally applies to all. Ethical disputes appear to be still those of an individual writ large, and Hegel must move on in order to re-establish the priority of an authoritative institutional basis. But this certainty of being able to leave the individual behind has always seemed problematic to some. The tyranny of a homogenizing Enlightenment is claimed to lie behind Hegel’s intolerance of political eccentricity. To others, the implausibility of Hegel’s ever being able to leave behind this process of

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moving on from inadequate universals has on the contrary been the saving grace of his thought. The transition from consciousness to Spirit has always been the crunch moment for Hegel’s project. ‘In a sense the PhG can be thought of as having two parts, whose frontier lies here’, writes Charles Taylor. Equally sympathetically, but trenchantly, Robert Pippin identifies it as the moment when we encounter ‘you can’t get there from here’ problems.46 Taylor, like Jean Wahl before him, takes up Rosenzweig’s suggestion that Hegel’s own stateless situation in Jena under Napoleonic hegemony rendered his position inescapably individual.47 In his time he was condemned to live the self-estrangement of his society, and at the moment the Phenomenology moved out of self-introspection to insist on harmony with historically existent institutions, the plan was bound to founder. Others see here the liberation of Hegel from the closed speculation that a finished political identification would secure, and the true immanence of his characteristic philosophical activity in temporal process and change. From Kojève to Derrida, interpreters have shown the explosive power of individual sections of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, arguing that these expansive individual moments cannot be subordinated within Hegel’s overall scheme. They burst out from the ‘restricted economy’ Hegel tries to impose on his own thought and establish alternative trajectories – revolutionary (Kojève on the master/slave episode), theological (Jean Wahl on ‘the unhappy consciousness’), grammatological (Derrida deconstructing any episode). But others query the assumption of a totalizing, closed Hegelian system these departures supposedly resist. For Gillian Rose, Hegel’s hallmark speculative propositions typically entertain the dialectical opposite of what they assert. They sidestep ‘the normal relation between subject and predicate’.48 Hegel’s assertions are never cut and dried but ‘acquire meaning as the result of a series of contradictory experiences’. The whole force of Hegelian logic is phenomenological, revelatory of the mode in which our experience obliges us to understand things. Phenomenology implies the historical determinations currently invalidating our claims to the whole truth, but also sets out a practice (not a negative ideal) for recognizing what Rose calls our ‘unfreedom’, and for thinking through its restrictions towards an absolute understanding.49 In the Difference essay, Hegel historicizes even this self-consciousness, his own epoch of ‘absolute subjectivity and absolute objectivity’.50 A reflective practice as selfcritical as this can then be argued to escape the criticism, levelled from Marx to Habermas, that Hegel simply absorbs any external criticism within his own dialectic.51 A speculative logic as suspicious of any presuppositions as Hegel’s, its defenders maintain, is at risk of being extremely obscure but not of being self-serving. It is worth, though, returning to Hegel’s acknowledgement that his speculative propositions are linguistically anomalous. In matching the ‘cunning’ (die List) of speculative reason, they do not, he writes, observe normal subject/ predicate structures. In order to lie open to the evolution of their content over time they must somehow invite a reading that does not attribute fixity to



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what they assert; that catches their sense of having been determined to express things in this way. The latter point is twofold. Hegel implies that the terms he is obliged to use are historically located; equally, though, this does not provoke him to otherwordly or ahistorical idealizations. Especially in the ‘Spirit’ section of the Phenomenology (where historical location precisely counters the unworldliness of extremes of introspective self-consciousness) and in the conclusions of the Logic, he says that the fact that the real is not for us as rational as he claims it is does not invalidate or idealize his claim: it diagnoses the current parameters of our world as temporary boundaries not absolute limits. It solicits the reader to read on. The kind of language Hegel first considers flexible and plastic enough with which to invite the proactive response he wants from his reader is aesthetic. In the Difference essay, earlier philosophies are not unsuccessful, obsolete versions of later ones. Both are as historically valid as each other. Just as classical art is not made up of ‘preparatory studies’ for a superior Renaissance art, so ‘every philosophy is complete in itself’. Philosophies perform their task at different times for different ‘cultures’ and gain an ‘interesting individuality’ in the process.52 What is this task? It is to ‘construct the Absolute for consciousness’; but since their historical restrictions make this unconditioned project selfcontradictory, philosophies must employ expressions which remain valid even if they are self-contradictory. ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes’, sang Walt Whitman of himself. But, even in the heady days of the Jena Frühromantiker when the Difference essay was published, it was not obvious that sheer poetic generosity would suffice. The belief that poetry alone is adequate to our experience of the Absolute seems to belong to an aesthetic ideology stemming from only the first part of Kant’s third Critique. Coleridge’s use of different ‘logoi’ – philosophical, religious, scientific, poetic, political – to expound his thought makes him less exclusive than this; discursively, at least, he offers more points of entry, is more democratic. Hegel, for his part, wants to maintain that philosophy opposes current ‘absolutes’ and then re-establishes new ones from the same source, its own abyssal Reason. It does so in speculative propositions which formally anticipate still further historical contradictions to come. Now Coleridge, with Schelling in his debt for once, also, as we shall see, addresses the strain this task puts upon language. Coleridge’s uses of ‘symbol’ and ‘tautegory’ are intended to house this absolute sameness within historical difference which poetry might exonerate but could not rationalize. Hegel’s mature philosophy explicitly leaves poetry behind or places it as a stage in its own philosophical progress. Hegel, though, does not spend time theorizing the speculative uses of language his thought demands. He would have remained unmoved by Coleridge’s reiterated lament that ‘it is among the miseries of the present age that it recognizes no medium between Literal and Metaphorical’.53 Yet the defenders of Hegel’s speculative propositions, including himself, do appear in need of this refinement. But, as Michael Rosen points out, Hegel’s undoubted investment in language as a

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driver of his thought does not make him interested in its formal characteristics, the rich diversity of which he considers subordinate to his own purposes.54 By contrast, Schelling and Coleridge both criticize Hegel’s logic by criticizing his usage and regard their own philosophical grammars as better explanations of a comparable historicism.55

Coleridge in Hegel’s Land of Logic When, however, we run Coleridge’s thought through the Hegelian phenomenological programme, the results are informative. They show the extent to which he fits and does not fit into the age’s most articulate version of its own philosophical moment. Provided one does this fairly informally, with an eye to Hegel’s relish for ‘interesting individuality’, the exercise need not be Procrustean. While consolidating Coleridge’s differences from Hegel, this mapping also shows how suggestive Hegel’s analysis of post-Kantianism is. Hegel begins his phenomenology by examining the insufficiencies of immediacy as a criterion of certainty. The incorrigibly certain sense-impression was the individual unit upon which generalizations of empirical knowledge were built. Coleridge announced his break with empiricist philosophy in 1801. In any case, however, his poetry always appeared interested in seeing things the other way round, seeking to compare the powers of communities to create individual possibility. In early poems such as ‘Religious Musings’ and ‘The Destiny of Nations’, Coleridge began with a fairly unconsidered trust in the Miltonic diction which the Unitarianism he then sympathized with used to redeploy Miltonic radicalism. Even a Unitarian community proved insufficient to validate Coleridge’s increasingly rich sense of individuality, although Unitarian tolerance argued a convergence of different religious beliefs verging on an absolute tolerance. Differences of religious mediation fall away in the presence of the ‘one Mind’. This led to an exemplary emptying of individual content from equally universal positions as it became a matter of indifference whether Coleridge talked Christianity or Lapland mythology. In keeping with the philosophy of David Hartley, so influential on Coleridge in the early 1790s, a succession of associations allowed the Unitarian subject eventually to ‘lose all self in God’. As in the ‘unhappy consciousness’ in which Hegel’s phenomenology of self-consciousness culminates, such sublimations and expansions cannot avoid traumatic confrontation with a worldly self impossible to give up. On the way to confronting the truth of his unhappy consciousness, though, Coleridge experimented in the ‘conversation poems’ with figures of a likeminded community more consistent with his own inwardness, in fact much more of an extension of it. The strong coercion of the audience to reflect the speaker’s views, sometimes, as in ‘The Aeolian Harp’, provoking resistance, does suggest Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, but more readily the stages that



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follow – Stoicism, Scepticism, the Unhappy Consciousness. Not only was this poetic readership artfully abstracted from his experiences of the less tractable life of Bristol: the potentially unsympathetic audience of his 1795 lectures on politics and religion and his journalism, or those whom he hoped to persuade to be subscribers to his periodical The Watchman. The conversational poetic form, in which the interlocutor was also imagined, removed debate to an inner arena impervious to the ups and downs of the external world. Poems such as ‘The Aeolian Harp’ and ‘The Nightingale’ appear stoical, not only in their acceptance of divine order, but also in their internalization of this acceptance as a permanent disposition, universally applicable to all circumstances. In this take on existence, the conclusion of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ held true: ‘No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.’ The cultivation of the inner life, fostered by an audience sympathetic enough to be incorporated in the poem’s imagined conversation, promoted a new absolute. Comparably, Wordsworth, in his greatest conversation poem, ‘Tintern Abbey’, was to set out a sequence of internalized substitutions for the real world. These Stoic consolations – ‘years that bring the philosophic mind’ – enjoy universal proportions -– ‘And roll through all things’. By 1797–8, though, scepticism of reality has become the outcome of Stoic inwardness in Coleridge’s mystery poems, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘Christabel’, as if a logical conclusion of that inner sufficiency. This outcome, though, is an increasingly unhappy one, full of the ‘self-engendered disorder’ with which Hegel characterizes scepticism.56 The mystery poems are presented, explicitly in the case of the ‘Rime’, as poems of pure imagination. But their annihilation in imagination of the world is simply its reproduction in another register, one which can get away with an extreme simplicity through its defamiliarization of the banal and ordinary. To call ice ‘as green as emerald’ is virtually tautologous, but never was emerald greener. Scepticism ‘affirms’, writes Hegel, ‘the nullity of seeing, hearing etc., yet it is itself seeing, hearing etc. It affirms the nullity of ethical principles, and lets its conduct be governed by these very ethical principles.’57 Of course it sounds too critically wooden to call these wonderful poems self-contradictory. But when they are finally published together in 1816 and 1817 they return with a coherence owing to their primary participation in a public rather than an introspective context.58 By the post-Napoleonic period, Coleridge’s political interventions through the Lay Sermons and in his autobiography, Biographia Literaria, were noteworthy for their attempt to invent a learned class whose intellectual distinction, gained through self-consciousness and reflection, would entitle them to fulfil the aristocratic function Coleridge thought had been abandoned by the actual landed class of that name. So we move from land to mind, but to make possible a specific political intervention. He believed that the responsibility for embodying a long-term national interest untempted by short term commercial or personal gain, that had been celebrated by Edmund Burke’s defence of the aristocracy against the French Revolution, should now pass to those acquainted with the unchangeable

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constitution of the human mind. And the class of people learned in these universal characteristics would be the patrons of permanent human configurations, less interested in specific interpretations and applications, more attentive to the unchangeable dispositions of faculties different ways of reading things might expose. They would therefore be the perfect audience for Coleridge’s mystery poems, appreciating the power of their scepticism to map the limits of self-consciousness. Equipped with their distinctive philosophical intuitions, this class, Coleridge’s ‘Clerisy’, could be relied upon to offer advice and instruction in line with ‘Ideas’, or an understanding of the manifestations of the Absolute in their time. In his late work, On the Constitution of the Church and State according to the Idea of Each, the vacant political space for the Clerisy to fill is part of the Absolute embodiment that the Clerisy would want to legitimate. An institutional position for themselves would be part of the truth they asserted. In Hegelian terms, the move from self-consciousness to Spirit would have been accomplished.59 Otherwise, in their original position (1797–8), the mystery poems lead to the unhappy consciousness of the verse ‘Letter to Sara Hutchinson’ of April 1802.60 In this agonized meditation, seeing and feeling are dissociated. The self is divided. Under the force of ‘dejection’, the subject’s genial spirits have failed. The poem exists in two main versions: the letter actually written to Sara and the published ode made out of it, ‘Dejection: An Ode’.61 The latter is more formal, less personal. Maybe inferior as poetry, it nevertheless solves problems intensified by the poetic facility of the former. Again, we encounter a break between Coleridge the introspective poet of self-consciousness and Coleridge the philosopher of his times. The verse-letter is ingenious and marvellously winning in its imagining of consolations that will not stand the examination of philosophical reflection. Much more sincere in his disclosure of the personal content of his misery, Coleridge, the narrator of the letter, reworks the Stoical consolations of the past, here returning as a bower in which Wordsworth’s wife to be, Mary, Sara, her sister, and Coleridge enjoy a blissful communion, his head on Mary’s lap, Sara’s eyelash playing on his cheek. But this happiness is uncanny – ‘My Spirit was awe-stricken with the Excess / And trance-like Depth of it’s brief Happiness’. In marginalia to Jacobi, Coleridge imagined how perturbing a thing was his religious heart’s desire – ‘it is actually a Fear, almost a Fright, at the thought that God lives’.62 That ‘almost a Fright’, uncannily succeeding biblical ‘Fear’ of God, surely has the shock of a fantasy realized rather than the beginning of wisdom? Similarly, the verse-letter’s bliss slips into scepticism, into trance, and then into pure imagining. In fact the only realistic scenario that gets the narrator near his beloved’s bed is one in which she is ill and he ministers to her. Once at ‘Home’ with her nearest and dearest, Sara’s company does not include him. Yet he persists with the fantasy, and expects that he ‘too will crown me with a Coronal’, perhaps trying to match the ceremonial joy still available to the narrator of the early stanzas of Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’. The later reference to a Lucy poem (‘As William’s self had made the



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tender lay’) reinforces the same bid for inclusion within Sara’s Wordsworth circle. Let me try to explain the Hegelian point of difference between verse-letter and ode I want to stress. In Hegel’s biography of the unhappy consciousness which emerges from scepticism, the subject understands the changeability it shares with other mutable individuals as something universal, as ‘individuality in general’ (überhaupt).63 The contradiction of scepticism, its constancy to inconstancy, appears resolved. Permanence assumes an individual form, the very form of that individuality that had been so dejected by its inability to rise above changing circumstances. Comparably, the narrator of Coleridge’s verse-letter turns the absence of his beloved Sara into a consolation: ‘Not near thee, haply, shall be more constant! / To all things I prefer the permanent’ (ll. 149–50). But, fairly obviously, this won’t work. The sceptic has an interest in bending the rules; confronted by the inconsistency of her lack of scepticism about her own ignorance, she finds no resting place and can only attribute that inconsistency to a general scepticism. Similarly, the agony of the unhappy consciousness’s sense of its transience is hardly alleviated by the realization that mutability is a universal condition: ‘the antithesis persists within this unity itself.’ The hope the dejected individual had of gaining recompense from identifying her own particular difficulties with everyone else’s ‘must remain a hope, i.e. without fulfillment and present fruition’.64 It can see what it wants, not feel it. Consciousness seems irredeemably fissured; this time it has plumbed its resources utterly. It has rehearsed all the versions of itself, all its candidates for the Absolute. All have been superseded. All are obsolete. Any further self-presentation can only repeat one of the vanished stoical or sceptical forms. In Hegel’s eerie way of putting it, ‘consciousness can only find as a present reality the grave of its life’.65 Defeated in its aspirations to attain a permanent condition overcoming contingencies, it is totally dejected. In this helpless condition, Hegel thinks, the divided, unhappy consciousness needs an other, ‘a Third’, to get it out of a dilemma from which it cannot progress any further on its own. In a way, the subject’s inability convincingly to generalize its own contingency suggests that the permanence it desires is indeed something different, something that might redeem it. Insofar as this alternative is conceived as a ‘beyond’ it implies the religious solutions that many have read into Hegel’s diagnosis here. But to the extent that the other signifies the need for a mediation from outside the internal agonies exhausting individual subjectivity, it presages the cross-over to Spirit that is the project of the entire Phenomenology. The crucial move is when in relinquishing immediate happiness, the consciousness transfers authority to the mediator (auf die Mitte . . . Diener . . . Vermittler); thus it ‘frees itself from action and enjoyment so far as they are regarded as its own’.66 Hegel rephrases the move as one of logic. This mediator (Vermittler) is like the middle term of a syllogism (ein Schluss) that gets consciousness individually related to the universal significance it could not appropriate on its own.67 But this surrender to the mediator is so radical – a surrender of the right to self-determination, property, enjoyment, freedom

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– that the single individual consciousness is effectually superseded and the entire plot of the Phenomenology must reverse itself. Now we look at ways in which various historical cultures construct individuals, not vice versa. The fact that Coleridge published his confession to Sara of his most intimate problems, turning an informal letter in verse into a highly wrought ode in the process, shows him seeking in generally accepted forms of closure a resolution of problems he cannot solve personally. The letter trumpets the claims of an originary self-consciousness: O Sara! we receive but what we give And in our Life alone does Nature live. Our’s is her Wedding Garment, our’s her Shroud – And would we aught behold of higher worth Than that inanimate cold World allow’d To the poor loveless ever-anxious Crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A Light, a Glory, and a luminous Cloud Enveloping the Earth! And from the Soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent Voice, of it’s own Birth, Of all sweet Sounds the life & Element. (ll. 296–307) Coleridge’s language is arrestingly comprehensive, allusive, versatile in its register, musical. The universal competence it describes and performs comes from the ‘Joy’ that nature gives only ‘to the Pure, & in their purest Hour’ (l. 314). Therefore, in the absence of this unmixed self-sufficiency, the divided self becomes melancholy and dejected. The writing’s technical proficiency already suggests a resolution to its irresolvable dilemma, and this formal contribution to the argument will override the personal voice even more spectacularly in the published ode. Because this dejected consciousness cannot ‘see’ things any other way, its failure impedes its ability to ‘feel’. And the consolations of ‘abstruse research’ only have the effect of sundering his manner of conceiving himself generally – as ‘the natural man’ – from any individual experience he might have. In the letter, Sara is to be the ‘Third’, her mediating role as ‘Comforter’ sharing the Christian (even Trinitarian) idiom in Hegel’s discussion of the unhappy Consciousness that Wahl and others have developed so brilliantly. But Sara is too implicated in the Coleridgean narrator’s desire, still too vaguely embowered, ‘nested with the Darlings of thy Love’, in a fantasy where ‘the conjugal & mother Dove’ can apparently mix their very different kinds of blessings, sexual and parental, unproblematically (ll. 326–8). In the final stanza of the ode, the ‘Lady’ replacing ‘Sara’ is a more obvious figure of transference. She is to possess the absolute facility he feels he has lost – ‘To her may all things live, from Pole to Pole, / Their life the eddying of her living soul!’(ll. 135–6). The narrator apostrophizes his paragon in the third person, and drops the nesting imagery. The raving wind, described with such



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conscious poeticism as the scene’s real dramaturge, is now a more dedicated forerunner of the fuller transference of authority to the Lady. The expunging of personal detail helps this process. At the same time, the writing has arguably abandoned a pure poetry, perhaps as impossible as the purity of a joyful personality. It relies on the institution of poetry or the public sphere implied by its readership to make tractable Coleridge’s introverted problems. And that would happen through seeing them as generic: no longer private, his troubles inhabit a shared form of writing for an intended audience. Taking the published ode and its shadow, the verse-letter, together, we can say that just to be able to turn such unhappiness into a generally accepted form is the solution. Elegy, comparably, replaces the potentially endless activity of mourning with the closure of its monument, just as tragedy displaces emotions on to a form where they can achieve catharsis. Coleridge’s unhappy consciousness is similarly ministered to by its ability to adapt to an accepted convention for its literary expression. Conformity to that current universal seems to be more important for the poem’s story than the individual poetic honesties of the verse-letter. Thereafter, Coleridge’s autobiography in its major gestures continues, in Hegel’s terms, to be Spirit-directed rather than a phenomenology of selfconsciousness; its subject is presented as shaped, that is, by substantial ethical, cultural, moral and religious orders. But this orientation does not sacrifice the individual to something abstract. Certainly we are told early in Biographia Literaria (1817) that the least of what Coleridge has written concerns him personally, and that his book is ‘the statement’ of his principles. This dictation of the self from its general maxims sounds unpromising. In fact, though, Biographia Literaria is a fascinating text whose correct interpretation has been contested since its publication. It struggles to establish those literary, political and religious communities from which Coleridge’s identity can gain satisfying form. His philosophical method for doing this varies between Schelling’s transcendental deductive method circa 1800, the ironies of the Jena group in which Schelling worked out most of his identity philosophy, but finally is preoccupied with the repetitions by which our individual interests can indirectly express an original, unified ground of everything. As we shall see, Coleridge’s desynonymizing language models this defining splitting-off from an unstatable unity or Logos. Hegel wrote much of his Phenomenology during his Jena period and published it at the end of it in 1807. His growing differences from Schelling should not be allowed to obscure their participation in the Symphilosophie of that moment. The diverse cultural discourses figuring the historical versions of the Absolute through which Hegel’s Phenomenology makes its grand progress suggest it learnt from or was supported in its inclusiveness by the Jena ambience. It must have been, by its own argument. A grasp of its own cultural determinants was necessary to its final speculative claim to freedom from them. Comparably, Coleridge’s theoretical writing from The Friend onwards starts from institutional and cultural life rather than from self-consciousness. The remake of The Friend in 1818, ten years or so after its first publication, emphasizes

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further the earlier version’s politics of affect and friendship. The Lay Sermons reformulate the desirable life of the mind from within an imagined polity, as would On the Constitution of the Church and State towards the end of Coleridge’s life. Aids to Reflection, as well as being a key text for nineteenth-century Anglicanism, works out a rhetoric of the individual religious experience that he and Schelling could use to provide an alternative historicism to that of the ‘higher’ criticism. Hegel’s crucial shift, in the middle of his bifocal project – a history of philosophy and a programme for the philosophical sensibility of his age – furnishes a largely unused complement to the usual commentary on Coleridge’s progress from poetic radicalism to established Toryism. The philosophical reverberations, always audible in Coleridge’s career, find a better sounding-board.

Chapter Three

Drama as the Motor of Romantic Theory

1. Hazlitt’s syndrome Coleridge’s easy transitions in the 1790s between the writing of plays and philosophical speculations strongly suggest that the supposed antagonism between Romantic philosophy and Romantic drama is illusory. The wider European scene in which he was still to collaborate, but towards which his natural temper of mind seemed to be driving him, would have recognized an affinity instead. Usually the mental theatre of empirical philosophy that preceded Romantic idealism is thought more congenial to an interest in drama. In fact, though, David Hume’s representative empiricist picture of the inner life is highly un-dramatic. It is of a stream of impressions which, if they pass across a stage, exhibit a uniform sameness, devoid of connection. Kenneth Burke wrote of Hume’s ‘turn from “causality” to the cult of sheer “correlation”’, a move he saw as inimical to the ‘dramatism’ with which he invested his own drama-led philosophy of action.1 Such action as we might attribute to impressions, if genuine, must itself reduce to further impressions or our ideas of them, perpetuating the same monotony. The Romantic successors of Kant, by contrast, are fascinated by the different roles made available to us in the process of self-understanding. They see that language, the matrix of identity, is never grasped in a form purified of the transactions of the communicative life. Such linguistic transactions are inherently dramatic and are figured as such in post-Kantian explanation. The anti-theatricality often taken to characterize Anglophone Romanticism is usually traced, therefore, to an assumption that Romanticism’s image of itself prioritizes inwardness. Romanticism’s concerns with self-consciousness and its modes, and, fundamentally, with the extension of self-consciousness to become a way of knowing everything, is inherently opposed to the outward looking and reflecting, socializing and acculturating activities of dramatic writing and performance. Scholarly re-evaluation over the last couple of decades of the importance of drama in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has usually taken itself to be adding something else to, something different from our knowledge of the period’s traditional self-image. Drama doesn’t have a leading role to play in a mindset that privileges investigations into the transcendental presuppositions for knowledge to be possible.2

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Nevertheless, other European romanticisms often took their cue from drama. In particular, enthusiasm for an English dramatist, Shakespeare, especially energized manifestos of the ‘long’ Romantic period, from the tempered recommendations of Voltaire and Lessing, through the Sturm und Drang, Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegels, Stendhal’s essay on Racine and Shakespeare, Hugo’s preface to Cromwell, and the practice of Büchner in Dantons Tod and Musset in Lorenzaccio – to name but a few examples. Usually this enthusiasm is understood as breaking free of neoclassical restraint into a psychological arena still consistent with anti-theatricality. Or ‘Shakespeare’ is taken not as standing for a specific dramatist but as a legitimating sign for dramatic novelty in whatever shape it appeared. And that shape could still ask for mental re-creation rather than stage production. Hugo tells us that drama is the completion of poetry, but his compliment does not substitute the imagining of for the production of drama, for he also asserts that such ideas result from the dramatic practice of Cromwell. My suggestion here is, on the contrary, that the dramatic metaphor embedded in Romantic descriptions of mental life shows that philosophical introspection could no more rid itself of a need for dramatic expression than drama of the time could fail to stage a Romantic imagination, philosophical or otherwise. In fact a normal dramatic function is something surely essential to our selfpresentation in real life. Its over-indulgence is what Thomas Love Peacock satirizes so wittily when he writes about his fellow intellectuals and poets in his novel Nightmare Abbey. When he makes a character, such as the Byronic Mr Cypress, ‘dramatic’, it is to show how ridiculous is his extrapolation from his private, inward life to public life. Sir, I have quarrelled with my wife; and a man who has quarrelled with his wife is absolved from all duty to his country. I have written an ode to tell the people as much, and they may take it as they list.3 Here, private only becomes public through a form of egoism. Mr Cypress ‘cuts a figure’, as Keats would say. Peacock repeatedly urged Percy Shelley to write in a more popular style. Peacock took it for granted that the inner life was potentially dramatic; morbid egoism, like Byron’s, or a recondite elusiveness like Shelley’s, was not un-dramatic but dramatically unsuccessful. Keats’s famous description of Coleridge’s circumambient conversational movements while walking with him on Hampstead Heath in the spring of 1819 is a brilliant conjuring of a wilful imposition of the private introspective drama. Its public spectacle is not so much pathological as allegorical, a continuation of Coleridge’s philosophical argument by other means. The medical demonstrator, Green, significantly disappears as another drama supervenes. Last Sunday I took a walk towards Highgate and in the lane that winds by the side of Lord Mansfield’s park I met Mr Green our Demonstrator at Guy’s in conversation with Coleridge – I joined them, after enquiring by a look



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whether it would be agreeable – I walked with him a[t] his alderman-after dinner pace for nearly two miles I suppose In those two Miles he broached a thousand things – let me see if I can give you a list – Nightingales, Poetry – on Poetical sensation – Metaphysics – Different genera and species of Dreams – Nightmare – a dream accompanied ,with. a sense of touch – single and double touch – A dream related – First and second consciousness – Monsters – the kraken – Mermaids – Southey believes in them – Southey’s belief much too diluted – A Ghost story – Good morning – I heard his voice as he came towards me – I heard it as he moved away – I had heard it all the interval – if it may be called so.4 Slipping from under Keats’s own highly allusive performance here, if we concentrate on Coleridge’s meandering peripatetic, something different is seen to happen. Precisely represented by Coleridge’s linguistic behaviour is the nature that repeats an inner determination, but in ways that do not repress the power to have chosen otherwise. This is the drama of double touch, when, grasping ourselves, we are both the sensor and the sensed, a body in conversation with its otherness. Put in motion too is the suggestion that such creative resistance to what gives us integrity would still be ours – our afflatus – but also our undoing, a nightmare. In the autumn of the previous year Coleridge had berated Schelling in marginalia to the early 1799 Einleitung for insufficiently distinguishing the self from such imaginary repetitions, ‘primary Consciousness’ from ‘secondary’.5 He had, after all, the year before tried, in the 1817 Biographia Literaria, to tie the two indissolubly together, much as Schelling had been doing in work unpublished after the Einleitung. Coleridge appears to have had many such dramatic successes, especially as a talker. In Seamus Perry’s felicitous turn of phrase, Coleridge’s ‘auditor stumbles into inarticulacy before the overwhelming plenitude of the voice’, clearly foundering once more, off the beaten track, lost in circuitous instruction.6 For Hazlitt, on the other hand, the age was not a dramatic age, and the dominant abstract reasoning, which allowed one to scale things down to what people had in common and were entitled to, furthered democracy at the expense of a relish for individuality he thought essential to great drama. In a typical passage we find: If a bias to abstraction is evidently, then, the reigning spirit of the age, dramatic poetry must be allowed to be most irreconcileable with this spirit; it is essentially individual and concrete, both in form and in power . . . It is hardly to be thought that the poet should feel for others in this way, when they have ceased almost to feel for themselves; when the mind is turned habitually out of itself to general, speculative truth, and possibilities of good, and when, in fact, the processes of understanding, analytical distinctions, and verbal disputes, have superseded all personal and local attachments and antipathies, and have, in a manner, put a stop to the pollution of the heart . . . when we are more in love with a theory than a mistress, and would

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only crush to atoms those who are of an opposite party to ourselves in taste, philosophy, or politics . . . The poet, (let his genius be what it will) can only act by sympathy with the public mind and manners of his age; but these are, at present, not in sympathy, but in opposition to dramatic poetry . . . It would be strange indeed . . . if in the same period that produced the Political Justice or the Edinburgh Review, there should be found such an ‘unfeathered, twolegged thing’ as a real tragedy poet.7 As a radical man of letters, Hazlitt is interestingly divided. For the reviewers, in Jon Klancher’s influential study, the ability to read, or frame, a piece of writing, signifies both disengagement from and power over it; the opposite, that is, of any willing suspension of disbelief, and the enactment, rather, of a reductio.8 To this way of thinking, the dramatization of a piece of writing always diminishes it. The fact that Godwin’s novel, Caleb Williams (‘unquestionably the best modern novel’, 5. 241), can be read as dramatising his Political Justice, and was made into a play, The Iron Chest, by George Colman the Younger, is dismissed a priori, immaterial to Hazlitt’s blanket condemnation of the age’s aptitude for drama. Adaptation, for Hazlitt, is evidence of decline and degeneration, not of success, nor of the original’s fertile susceptibility to reinterpretation and reincarnation. In any case, Jacobin writers – Elizabeth Inchbald is another – are suspicious of attempts to popularize. Jacobinism in poetry is a humbug, thinks Hazlitt, because it destroys the poetic privileges to which the reader should be given access. This isn’t simply to deplore ‘dumbing down’, but, more politically, to critique a notion of the popular that dispenses with cultural enfranchisement by dissolving its advantages. (That’s what’s wrong with the ‘levelling Muse’ of Lyrical Ballads for Hazlitt.)9 Hence he simultaneously critiques and contributes to what Greg Kucich calls ‘the robust quality of the period’s openness to women dramatists’.10 In the same series in The London Magazine of 1820 containing the above philippic, he praises James Sheridan Knowles’s Virginius for ‘all that we can wish for, or require, in dramatic writing. If such writing is not poetical, it is the fault of poets, who do not write as the heart dictates!’ (18. 347). The age can be opposed, although Sheridan Knowles’s unpoetic quality historically qualifies his success. In Byron’s The Two Foscari, the dying, deposed Doge distinguishes between the ‘people’, a body of representative citizens, and the ‘populace’, a popular audience whose judgement, though popular, counts for nothing because of the judger’s lack of social or political interest. Byron is no Jacobin, but his ‘stage fright’, as some critics have called it, is the other side of desire for a popularity that means something.11 Similarly, for Inchbald, Godwin’s novel ‘has too forcibly struck the minds and hearts of its numerous readers, to admit, on that subject, of any deeper impressions’. The ‘on that subject’ is an interesting qualification, suggesting an openness to transformation of the original implying a more fluid identity to the artwork that might welcome adaptation. Fundamentally, though, Inchbald believes that the adaptation obscures the ‘land of liberty’ inhabited by the novelist, forsaking it for existence under ‘a despotic government . . . the



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audience’.12 One might have expected the ‘despotism’ of the author to oppose the ‘liberty’ of the public. But, inflected also by her gender politics, Inchbald, like Hazlitt, wants to retain that authorial licence as an image of popular aspiration, not repudiate its political incorrectness. Hazlitt is equally dismissive of Joanna Baillie’s explicit attempt to write A Series of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind. These are ‘heresies in the dramatic art’ because they follow a theory – the idea of a ruling passion. ‘The language is very poetic’, said Anna Larpent of Baillie’s De Montfort, ‘the character forced’.13 She repeats Hazlitt’s sense of a dissociation between poetry and drama, but here, the reverse of Hazlitt’s review of Knowles, working to the detriment of drama. And, for Hazlitt, a theory by definition abstracts from the affective variety that drama typically orchestrates and from which it gets its histrionic substance. Hazlitt’s own writing, awash with quotation and historical contextualization of the present subject, does orchestrate its material in a dramatic way. But, of course, to prove his argument right, this writerly opposition to the spirit of the age signals a displacement of true dramatic activity onto critical activity. His own book, The Spirit of the Age, itself presents an interactive gallery of superbly dramatized portraits of contemporary thinkers and writers, whose intellectual positions are galvanized into extraordinary and often grotesque movement by Hazlitt’s readings and attacks. That such dramatic recreation of both old and new, however enfranchizing and empowering its use of literary tradition, has to happen proves Hazlitt’s point and sets his own work with the failed dramatics he attacks, both victims of the all-embracing spirit of the age. At a time when adaptation of novels was comparable to the film of the book we expect now, Hazlitt found it difficult to distinguish from the popularization he deprecated what he himself did as a critical writer and interpreter, welcoming in his ‘plain speaker’ style new audiences to the cultural archive, activating for them the excitements of a literary heritage. Drama, a form perpetually involved in revivals and rehabilitations, must have dramatized to him his own difficulties.

2. The Drama of Romantic Philosophy To resume Hazlitt’s case, as soon as the self-reflective intellectual habit of the age is conceded, drama appears to suffer. At the same time, though, and taken to be symptomatic of this dilemma, the dramatic impulse becomes relocated in the very prose that condemns it. The revival of drama elsewhere, though, is taken to prove its inability to survive in its native forms. But Hazlitt’s syndrome, if I may call it that, need not perhaps be read in a single direction or sense. This, at least, is the question I raise. Instead of witnessing to the devaluing of drama, the high intellectual culture of the Romantic age reiterates drama’s central importance as a matrix or basic generator of all the ways in which we think. It does this by its use of dramatic idiom, figure and genre in order to

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progress its most apparently abstract formulations and investigations. In fact, the fluidity of expression, in which a purely transcendental or abstract criticism cannot remain monological, becomes the philosophical key to deducing the character of modern experience. Alan Richardson, in his relatively early defence of Romantic ‘mental theatre’, aptly clinches his argument at one point by quoting Bakhtin’s view of language as ‘not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated – overpopulated – with the intentions of others’.14 The accomplished speaker is more like the director of a play than someone looking in a mirror. Great deductive efforts, though, like Coleridge’s failed appropriation of Schelling in his literary autobiography, can appear to return to the mirror. Coleridge’s central autobiographical aim – ‘the heavendescended KNOW THYSELF’ – seems unerringly to rehearse a version of Fichtean reflection, expanded by Schelling, which functions at a level drained of all particularity. In fact, though, the writing of Biographia Literaria works to suggest the impossibility of this dictation when Coleridge, as Schelling and Hegel soon did, reverses the Fichtean trajectory. Things should be the other way round, and we should work out what it is to be a self from the historical variety of writing it takes to give that self expression. And the coherence of that writing is dramatic, not logical. Coleridge’s master narrative, his philosophical framework, ends up as the Chorus to the play in which he plays the leading (perhaps tragic) role. Nevertheless, in a short review like this, the case for finding effective drama in Romantic inwardness still looks hopeless. Wordsworth appears to raise the difficulty in his early drama The Borderers when the central, explanatory action of Rivers is actually devalued as action. Action is momentary, suffering is lasting. Action is transitory – a step, a blow, The motion of a muscle – this way or that – ’Tis done; and in the after-vacancy We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed: Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, And shares the nature of infinity. (III iv 404) This excerpt has a revealing history. After occurring in The Borderers, it reappears as an epigraph in later versions of Wordsworth’s poem The White Doe of Rylstone in the 1832/6 MS. There it succeeds a quotation by Bacon from his essay ‘On Atheism’ in which Bacon commends a Machiavellian pragmatism towards religion: religion tends to make people magnanimous irrespective of its truth; relying on it they gather ‘a force and faith which human Nature in itself could not obtain’.15 Religion, in other words, allows us to appear larger than life, to dramatize ourselves in typical acts of self-transcendence. Wordsworth’s protagonist Rivers, though, literally believes himself an Übermensch, and culpably forgets that all such superiority is only a form of self-staging. He forgets, that is,



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that self-projection is traceable to the common dramatic facility that constitutes having an identity. His false sense of being above the law comes, one might say provocatively, from philosophical ignorance. For action is what philosophers like Fichte and the young Schelling use to overcome the aporias of reflection, when every position from which I reflect upon myself seems to set up yet another ego awaiting its validation by yet another reflection, and so on ad infinitum. If, on the other hand, the central locus of the self is a kind of action, in which we are what we are by doing it, then that problem of an infinite regress disappears. Or, in Theodore Roethke’s slightly more accessible words, ‘I wake and take my waking slow, / And find by going, where I have to go’. We remember that Hegel and Schelling’s worries about Fichte were that his core intuition of the world had become an internalized moral action, one stoically in denial of external conditioning. This permanent disposition would not acknowledge changes in the development of the reality it was meant to guarantee. Instead, its own moral activity required and thus explained a corresponding expansion of reality for its vocation to be realizable. ‘Nothing is purely true but my selfsufficiency’.16 So any step out of the box of Fichtean egoism would be a step into an interactive environment in which what was to count as moral striving would to some extent be a matter of situation, culture and other people. A speculative slack was needed to make space for the fundamental drama of the Spirit or Identity of this movement, so contorted and exercised by the different characters playing out its historical possibilities. For Schelling, the drama of the individual’s emergent consciousness resumes that of metaphysics in general. So Hazlitt’s ultimate abstraction, ‘the general nature of men and things’, is founded on a personal, dramatic base.17 And the different languages, vocabularies, expressions brought in to flesh out this non-reflective form of self-orientation in the world are varied and mixed. They certainly aren’t purely aesthetic, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy tended to assume in their classic book on the Jena Romantics, The Literary Absolute. Before their book, imaginative investment in philosophy during the Romantic age was often underestimated. Nowadays, perhaps the variety of forms collaborating to produce what Friedrich Schlegel called a Symphilosophie is under-researched. The collaboration also involved the unpublished female members of the Jena group for whom self-reflection expanded naturally into discussion and dialogue with a number of people on the argumentative stage. The idiom of cooperation and the mixture of languages coordinating self-expression always have, in Schlegel’s discussions, the plausibility of a drama. To understand this it is instructive to move forward in time to a broad-brush version of the same thing, one presented if anything more polemically, with its confrontation of dramatic and philosophical conventions still more baldly staged. There is a puzzling but helpful passage in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, in which Nietzsche explains that although he regards Plato’s criticism of art in The Republic, and his general philosophical optimism, as misguided and damaging, he nevertheless also believes that philosophy in some way saved

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the impulse of Greek tragic drama. It did this through its form rather than its theses. Nietzsche writes: Plato . . . was nevertheless constrained by sheer artistic necessity to create an art form that was related to those forms of art which he repudiated . . . Thus Plato the thinker arrived by a detour (Umwege) where he had always been at home as a poet . . . If tragedy had absorbed into itself all the earlier types of art, the same might also be said in an eccentric sense (excentrischen Sinne) of the Platonic dialogue which, a mixture of all extant styles and forms, hovers midway between narrative, lyric, and drama, between prose and poetry; and so has also broken the strict old law of the unity of linguistic form . . . The Platonic dialogue was, as it were, the barge on which the shipwrecked ancient poetry saved herself with all her children: crowded into a narrow space and timidly submitting to the single pilot, Socrates, they now sailed into a new world . . . Indeed, Plato has given to all posterity the model of a new art form, the model of the novel . . . Socrates, the dialectical hero of the Platonic drama, reminds us of the kindred nature of the Euripidean hero who must defend his actions with arguments and counterarguments and in the process often risks the loss of our tragic pity . . .18 Nietzsche owes a lot to the Schlegels here, and the passage reads like a Romantic retrospect. He despised Friedrich for his early, Berlin and Jena liberalism, but he repeats his formulation of the novel, as he does August Wilhelm’s reservations about Euripides. Friedrich too asserted that ‘Euripides is to be considered as an attempt at a synthesis of poetry and philosophy’.19 Nietzsche notes that in Socrates ‘Instinct . . . becomes the critic’; Schlegel entered in his notebooks that ‘Tact is judgement from instinct’.20 For our purposes, Nietzsche’s is one of the most spectacular assertions of a philosophical assimilation of the dramatic. Recycled in Platonic dialogue is the core experience philosophy has to analyse. Philosophy deploys itself dramatically, or should be understood as doing so, because this core cannot be got at in any other way. It defies imagery, and its Dionysian origins lie in music rather than in discourse. Confronted with this recalcitrance of core, Dionysian existence to its own ratiocinative methods, philosophy must evolve in order to remain serious, and the dramatic tradition it appropriates to do so must also change proportionately. Nietzsche then worries about the dramatic loss involved in this transformation, ultimately resulting, as for Hazlitt, in the ‘death of tragedy’. In miniature, we have the Romantic absorption in its own theory of modes of dramatic articulation, followed by its reservations about the state of drama that could let this philosophical colonization happen. Read through Nietzsche, Hazlitt’s syndrome then repeats an ancient dilemma and anticipates a modernist one. It does so by typically bringing the spectator onto the stage, the impartial, objective, knowing spectator who at once frames the action and yet is also part of the play. He is the mask through which philosophy speaks, and for Nietzsche this collaboration works to their own advantage and to



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their own detriment. Philosophy is energized by its dramatic posture; drama, especially tragedy, is diminished. The philosopher, therefore, the more he pronounces, has less and less to frame, judge or just talk about. He stepped on stage to get on terms with seriousness, with our core experience; but his typical reduction of the plot to conscious knowledge baffles this ambition. In his most extreme version, taken up by Paul de Man, Friedrich Schlegel wrote that ‘Irony is permanent parabasis’. Irony, then, the exemplary philosophical attitude for Schlegel, figured his dramatic solution to the philosophical problem of defining self-consciousness. In this formulation, Schlegel grasped the self as an activity of framing and reframing our conceptions, not through an infinite regress but from the various perspectives thrown up by our experience like different characters in a play. In Schlegel’s writing, the Chorus stands for this taking up of the position of philosophy onto the stage in order to diversify dramatically its perspectives upon the truth. In Euripides, much to Nietzsche’s disgust, the democratic impulse in this Choral function was all too evident. ‘Through him the everyday man forced his way from the spectators’ seats on to the stage’.21 In Schlegel’s notebooks, from which the published Athenäums and Lyceums fragments emanated, he considers ‘historical reflection as the material of a modern lyrical Chorus’ (521), which suggests a complete re-evaluation of a traditional understanding of what history is. Parabasis tends towards the humorous, not that mastery of reading Klancher identified as a reviewing tactic (137, 383). It is both Antiform and Naturpoesie, an exposer of artifice and closest affirmation of the character of reality demanding such provisional and varied perspectives upon it. Parabasis that is simply the imposition of authorial selection is worth nothing (405, 427). Rather, parabasis must act as a monitor on the fictional framework of anything, however systematic, in a philosophically exemplary manner. Schlegel invents the dramaturgical word Centrolog to refine our ideas of dramatic composition. His neologism signifies the perpetual consciousness through parabasis of the framing of the project of any piece of writing, an awareness normally confined to its Prologue and Epilogue. The more central this function, thinks Schlegel, the more systematic the work. The dramatic function, in other words, guarantees a philosophical criterion for rigour and observation of philosophy’s systematic ambitions (933). These ambitions, for Schlegel, are always consciously fragmentary in the face of plenitudinous reality, and so philosophy must merge with fiction to some extent. It takes fiction to figure what an absolute system might look like (1682–3).

3. Coleridge’s syndrome In mainline German Romantic theory, the philosophical stance of a spectator reflecting upon experience is brought on stage to become part of the action s/he observes. This solves a logical problem extending onwards from Kant’s theory of a transcendental self required to think the unity of experience. The

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potential infinite regress in the logic of reflection is overcome by reconceiving the self as a dramatic actor, one whose essence is no longer caught in abstract reflection, nor in Fichte’s self-enclosed ‘original duplicity’ of reflection and action. The possibilities of experience emerge inter-subjectively in the course of employing different languages that contrast dialogically with each other, and quash any single vocabulary’s claim to exclusive authority. This ongoing and irresolvable process is signalled by the fragmentary quality of much Romantic philosophy and by its tendency to involve poetic, religious, political and other discourses as part of its articulation. Coleridge’s syndrome – the other side, for my purposes, of Hazlitt’s syndrome – is the worry that philosophy suffers from being embedded in drama after this fashion. Drama now contaminates the other discourse, rather than itself being appropriated and diminished. Hazlitt believes that drama suffers from its displacement, dissemination and reproduction in forms that he himself employs for the purposes of political enfranchisement through cultural means. To read Hazlitt is to experience Tom Paine’s plain style at a second stage in which supposedly elitist traditions are made colloquial and usable through Hazlitt’s accessible, winning and vividly crafted discourse. Coleridge, deploring the rise of the reading public, but locked into the German problematic and its outcome of a dramatic philosophy, notoriously appears to put off extreme philosophical difficulties in Biographia Literaria through his tactics of anecdote, deferral, self-addressed epistle, interlude, regurgitation of older material, self-citation and plagiarism – in a word, all the repertoire one might expect of a self-dramatizing autobiography. Yet his protests that this is not actually quite what he is doing attest his fears for a philosophy obviously gaining in currency and accessibility through these ironic tactics and perhaps, as a result, losing the authority properly belonging to a leading member of his desired intellectual class, the Clerisy. Biographia Literaria’s incorporation of Coleridge’s adverse review of a radical play, Maturin’s Bertram, disguises his own philosophy’s more important investment in drama. In an influential reading, Marilyn Butler suggested that the otherwise arbitrary inclusion of the review helps cement the ideological unity of Biographia Literaria: the elitist philosopher of the first volume is of one mind with the anti-radical reviewer of the second. But the transcendentalist discourse of Volume 1 is diversified by Coleridge’s frequent use of Jena philosophers’ more democratic theoretical tactics. And Coleridge’s outraged review of Bertram is perhaps as worried by the play’s evidence that ‘the spirit of Jacobinism seemed no longer confined to politics’ as by its contents. In the context of his attempts to hide his own failed transcendental deduction and the easy compensations from elsewhere he has found available, he is eager to scotch another image of the age’s typical dissemination of the character of one discourse to another – as eager as to refute, anachronistically, the Jacobinism that, in this case, happens to be what is being disseminated. But, for example, the refined desynonymizing, the coining of new verbal distinctions, such as that between fancy and imagination, cannot obscure his argument’s commitment to the collective drama of language – die Scene, Schlegel would call it – in which we are all located (405).



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Biographia Literaria’s attack on Jacobin drama, then, occurring first in Satyrane’s Letters and then repeated almost verbatim a little later, condemns it for inverting the natural order of things. Eighteen years ago I observed, that the whole secret of the modern Jacobinical drama, (which, and not the German, is its appropriate designation,) and of all its popularity, consists in the confusion and subversion of the natural order of things in their causes and effects: namely, in the excitement of surprise by representing the qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour (those things rather which pass amongst us for such) in persons and in classes where experience teaches us least to expect them; and by rewarding with all the sympathies which are the due of virtue, those criminals whom law, reason, and religion have excommunicated from our esteem.22 Again, the attack either amounts to rather banal moralizing, ‘outraged of Highgate’, or else it displaces Coleridge’s real worry that in his philosophical project he himself has actually participated in a sea-change in theory that did indeed invert the philosophical order of doing things inherited from Kant.23 Let me try to unpack this a bit more and so develop a little further the points I have been trying to make. In so doing, and in keeping with my argument about a dramatic outcome for philosophy, Coleridge’s thought will appear in what follows less introverted and more a product of intersubjectivity, of collaborative contemporary voices and audiences. Romanticism, in its dominant self-reflective character, has traditionally seemed opposed to the drama. Hazlitt’s sweeping generalizations carried the day. ‘The age we live in is critical, didactic, paradoxical, romantic, but it is not dramatic’.24 Hazlitt’s own interest in and even support for the theatre seem to belie this. In any case, psychologism was not to be the future of either writing or theory. Hugo tells us in 1827 that drama is the completion of poetry, but his compliment does not substitute the imagining of for the production of drama, for he also asserts that such ideas derive from the production of Cromwell.25 Historicist criticism in our own time has uncovered a busy dramatic industry and many good plays. And, in any case, wasn’t there a flourishing ‘mental theatre’ being written up at the time? In Julie Carlson’s apt comment on Coleridge’s Remorse, ‘as play, Remorse highlights the self-defense through self-splitting that comprises subjectivity as theatre’.26 Or to take another well-known example, Byron may have ostensibly despised the stage, at least as the proper venue for his own work, but nonetheless he found in drama the apt expression of inwardness.27 Manfred turns on the ironic clinching of Manfred’s superior originality through a self-possession expressed in conspicuously Miltonic language, the language given to Satan. The speech is doubly satirical – not Manfred’s own and belonging to someone similarly deceived about his own originality.

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The mind which is immortal makes itself Requital for its good or evil thoughts, – Is its own origin of ill and end – And its own place and time . . . (III iv 129–34) This is certainly psychodrama. Were we watching the play, in other words, we would be expected to see the drama of inauthentic inwardness. If we don’t think it’s satirical, then we have to refine further on the intertextuality of the passage, again hardly a demonstrative process. Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Blake’s prophetic books carry the ‘dramatic poem’ further into the psychological hinterland. But if one pursues this mental travel one never actually loses the sense of ‘subjectivity as theatre’. According to the postKantians, we find out what our passions are from the ways in which they have made us express ourselves. It’s not the case that we know in advance that we have certain mental faculties, possessing certain properties and attributes, and then we write a drama accommodating these in appropriate characterizations. But Coleridge’s faculty-based understanding of Kant (a psychological understanding, let’s call it) suggests that this is what we do. Biographia Literaria seems driven by Coleridge’s attempt to tell us how our minds are composed. Then will follow the literary criticism illuminated by his psychological analysis. In fact, though, it all goes wrong, and he relies on all sorts of expressions and, finally, on the literary criticism itself, to convince us that his autobiography was the appropriate medium of philosophical understanding, not its literary substitute. The drama of his life was not, it turns out, its presentation, but its substance. In this discovery he is truly post-Kantian. A related, supporting point can be made about Coleridge’s most famous contribution to literary theory in this connection, his idea of ‘poetic faith’ or the theatre audience’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. Coleridge uses his phrase to distinguish illusion from delusion. Delusion, as Stendhal pointed out, makes the American soldier shoot the actor playing Othello when he is about to strangle Desdemona. The ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, by contrast, deliberately co-opts the position of the spectator to sanction the dramatic spectacle. He or she becomes part of the play, a contributory character taken into consideration by the author, as necessary to the sustaining of the illusion as any actor’s part. But when that illusion is broken, we do not necessarily experience dramatic failure or breakdown. A comparable stylistic lapse in a painting, say, is very different from its defacement or mutilation. And in a play, the framing project may alter, and its illusion simply mutate into another genre. In the new genre – ‘ farce’, perhaps – the audience and actor again collude. They quickly recognize the new proprieties demanded, and we witness not a disaster, but a laugh. Entfremdung, Brecht’s breaking of the illusion of drama, can still only take place in a theatre. It too becomes conventional. On the other hand, the self incapable of dramatic interaction looks solipsistic or schizophrenic. Joanna Baillie capitalizes on this in her play De Montfort (1798), one of her ‘Plays on the Passions’. We know that the eponymous hero



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has lost it when his self-drama, the means of stabilizing his identity, becomes a delusional fantasy. No longer his means of participating in the social drama with others, it lets him think he can live in the imaginary. Baillie’s diagnosis of a ruling passion doesn’t present the paradigm to which Hazlitt and others objected but diagnoses a malfunction. There is a telling exchange between De Montfort and his servant, Manuel. Manuel: Nay, good, my lord! I heard you speak aloud, And dreamt not, surely, that you were alone. De Montfort: What, dost thou watch, and pin thine ear to holes, To catch those exclamations of the soul, Which Heaven alone should hear? (III iii 23–7)28 In a sense, this exchange calls the bluff of soliloquy. Baillie’s challenge miniaturizes, perhaps, her general interest in helping to establish a ‘counterpublic sphere’, as described by Anne Mellor. As dramatic convention, soliloquy supposedly consolidates our intimacy with the inner life of the protagonist. In Baillie’s genre of passion play, though, it confirms a breakdown in the dramatic function by which we gain identity through effective sociability. De Montfort talks to himself because he is going mad. This does not mean he is an antidramatic character, a lump of entropy in the play’s action. Rather he dramatizes psychological failure in Baillie’s writing through his failure to conform to the dramatic convention expected of other kinds of writing. In its way, this tactic is as disorientating as any of Coleridge’s autobiographical jeux d’esprit. Coleridge’s version of dramatic self-consciousness replaces the problematic reflexive model of self-awareness with a continuum of kinds of writing. In this move, I am suggesting, Coleridge follows the direction of post-Kantianism. In Kant’s own lifetime, the most telling criticism of his work came from the ‘metacritiques’ of his ‘critiques’ of pure reason, practical reason and judgement by Herder and Hamann. They both attacked Kant’s neglect of ordinary language and his invention of a technical terminology with which to psychologize in a purely logical universe, anterior to the messy world of natural languages. Schiller again plotted an ideal reconciliation of our constitutive faculties of reason, imagination and sense, but then argued more forcibly than Kant for the possibility of their embodiment in the real world. For Hegel, this apparently radical demand to fulfil our potential was the fantasy of an overcultivated sensibility – a ‘beautiful soul’ who thought that the intractability of the world to human purposes – fate – could be resolved inwardly. When Schiller talked of the ‘play’ of faculties through which we aesthetically grasped their ideal equilibrium, Hegel condemned this drama outright as ‘merely an insincere play (die verstellende Spiel) of alternating these two determinations’.29 Hegel’s verstellende combines the senses of misplacing and play-acting, and joins his critique of Schiller to that criticism of the misplaced drama of the Romantic age we saw in Hazlitt. Friedrich Schlegel, though, as we have seen, develops Schiller’s Kantian sense of aesthetic play but allies it to the metacritical

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alternative to Kant that relocates the philosophical starting point within our uses of language. Hegel had no philosophical time for the indeterminacies, provisional aphoristic conclusions, ironies and sense of eternal becoming that nevertheless help formulate the propositions of his own speculative logic. But Schlegel shares his attack on a notion of drama abstracted from the conflicts of the real world and instead uses a dramatic understanding of history to model the way we understand ourselves. In other words, had he been reading Schiller, Schlegel should have read the dramas first – The Piccolomini, Wallenstein and so on – and the aesthetics and philosophy – the Aesthetic Letters, ‘On Grace and Dignity’, ‘On the Sublime’, ‘Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’ – second. In Ernst Behler’s words, ‘To put his view of the matter in extreme terms, in terms of earlier and later [as I have just done], he claims that artistic poetry came first and a natural poetry became conceivable only after the former had come into existence’.30 And this poetry was as sociable and interactive as Symphilosophie had been, and was often indistinguishable from it. Now Coleridge, of course, translated Schiller as well as reading his theories.31 His translations provided, as Carlson has shown, ways of rethinking his interpretation of the French Revolution at the end of the 1790s. Again, though, I’d like to concentrate more on the process of reworking rather than on the political content, although I believe that the process is necessarily a politically significant one as well. Coleridge had begun his dramatic career with The Fall of Robespierre (1794), a collaboration with Southey so timely that it literally chased real historical events off the other side of the stage. It appeared very soon after Robespierre’s death, and provided a sort of dramatis personae, culled from newspaper and other reports, of the Thermidorean moment. The Dedication immediately raises the issue of the priority of genre much in the shape I have been discussing it. In the execution of the work, as intricacy of plot could not have been attempted without a gross violation of recent facts, it has been my sole aim to imitate the empassioned and highly figurative language of the French Orators, and to develope the characters of the chief actors on a vast stage of horrors.32 Like Sade, in his Essai on the novel, Coleridge here defers to historical actuality in matters of aesthetic excitement. While Sade saw this as a threat to the future of the novel, Coleridge rather sees it as an intensifying of the question of prescription: do we have a conception for which we find words or is our conception delivered by the form of words in which it appears? Here, it seems, the mode of writing leads aesthetic judgement, prescribing how it should pronounce, reshaping our preconceptions of what to expect from an apparently tragic production. In fact the play reads much more like exhilarated documentary, faction, reportage. It provokes reflection upon how creativity changes in response to historical circumstance. Further, it raises the possibility that what creativity is must be derived from such changes in writing



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and the critical understanding they invite. It cannot be dictated to in advance; there is nothing prior to the dialogue we have with each other. In terms of the writing of tragic drama in English, The Fall is jejune. As a use of drama to gain for recent events a heightened attention, an exemplary scrutiny, it is interestingly presumptuous, either as a product of the opportunism of two impecunious young authors, or a striking attempt to make the confusion of the Thermidorean days readable. Its seriousness is rendered more plausible where it knowledgeably differs from the ‘spectacle’ idiom with which the newspaper reports and Burke staged events across the channel. But the interest in producing understanding through generic changes in writing is a continual feature of Coleridge’s work and I want to finish on this point. Charles Lamb’s famous 1812 essay ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, considered with reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation’ is highly ambiguous in its disillusion with stage representations of Shakespeare, but its scepticism consistently follows the line that in viewing a production, ‘when the novelty is past, we find to our cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We have let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance’.33 But this also sounds curiously like Lamb’s verdict on Coleridge’s mystery poem, ‘Kubla Khan’, whose composition, according to Coleridge’s artful framing of it, involved a dream that could not be fully realized. Lamb called it ‘an owl that won’t bear daylight’, daylight here being not dramatic performance but publication – ‘typography & clear reducing to letters’. Coleridge did publish the poem, with ‘Christabel’ and other poems, in 1816. Arguably it could then have a quite specific meaning that did not diminish its poetry just because Coleridge was in those years arguing in his Lay Sermons, in Biographia Literaria and elsewhere for the political importance of an audience; an intellectual class, the Clerisy, who would be socially positioned in a life of scholarly leisure and pastoral responsibility, to do the poem justice. And to do this and the other mystery poems justice would be to realize how their highly self-reflective art, as poems of what Coleridge called ‘pure imagination’, releases a consciousness of the powers of interpretation, a psychology, that reinforces the authority Coleridge wants to give the Clerisy. Writing prescribes the faculties that can comprehend it, and the dramatic conflict of different interpretations of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ feed directly into the social drama of Coleridge’s own day in which he wanted to re-align the balance of classes and recreate a literate aristocracy to step into the place of the landed one. The historical change in the significance of ‘Kubla Khan’ between 1798 when it was written and 1816 when it was published lies in the Hegelian reversal of emphasis discussed above: the self-exploration of an individual consciousness defers to speculations about the nature of the community in which such individuality can make sense. Now Coleridge does exactly the same when he reworks Osorio and has it produced as Remorse in 1813 at Drury Lane. The Jacobin speech with which Osorio ends, spoken by the bereaved Moorish widow, Alhadra –

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Alhadra. I thank thee, Heaven! Thou hast ordain’d it wisely. That still extremes bring their own cure. That point In misery which makes the oppressed Man Regardless of his own life, makes him too Lord of the Oppressor’s –. Knew I an hundred Men Despairing, but not palsied by despair, This arm should shake the kingdoms of the World . . . (V ii 201)34 – is contextualized by a final speech of the hero, Don Alvar. In Remorse, the defusing of Jacobinism is obvious. When we are properly spoken for, then we are not ruled by the perilous aberrations of the mystery poems, but by ‘conscience’. Just Heaven instructs us with an awful voice That conscience rules us e’en against our choice, Our inward Monitress to guide or warn, If listened to; but if repelled with scorn, At length as dire REMORSE, she reappears, Works in our guilty hopes, and selfish fears! Still bids Remember! and still cries, Too late! And while she scares us, goads us to our Fate. (V i 287–94)35 But this, again, only partially covers the play’s main point which marries theme – remorse – with genre – a play revived and revised in order to exorcize remorse. In Julie Carlson’s fine reading of the play she brings to bear a passage from a Coleridge letter to Southey in which he distinguishes remorse from ‘virtuous Penitence’, seeing it rather as a kind of guilty ‘Self-contradiction’.36 Mediated by conscience, remorse is the repetition of an original experience in a different form. Getting it right when you remember it seems necessary to make remorse work. But remorse itself generates something new, since it seems part of the logic of remorse that it seeks closure, that it cannot be treated as a permanent state, that it is an act of contrition. Not to see this is to allow remorse too much power, the power to determine fate, to paralyse us as despair was described as being able to do in the passage from Osorio. Repressed guilt, the last lines of the play suggest, allows remorse this fatal power. Genuine remorse would seem to demand action of a remedial kind. Its impulse to make amends shows us our implication in history, our inability to assume the position of a spectator who isn’t already on the stage and has to continue acting.37 Coleridge is too clever to think that history can be gainsaid. The older play lingers on in the new, for a purpose. Coleridge’s accommodation of his youthful, radical past lies in the dramatic interplay between two dramas. He gives us no authoritative critical meta-language. His revisions in Remorse keep both plays in focus, redoubling, if it were needed, the dramatic sense that it is through the changing roles we play in history that we know what is happening. Here, indeed, the plays are ‘the thing’.

Chapter Four

Coleridge’s Stamina

Dissemination and Repetition Coleridge remains English literary history’s most instinctive intellectual. The advantages of this position ought to be self-evident. In a culture, however, which of all European cultures has remained the most distrustful of theory, Coleridge’s distinction incriminates him. His chequered publishing history, full of missed appointments, unacknowledged appropriations and failed promises, is often connected with his intellectualism: his inveterate habits of reflection and his metaphysical fascinations live so far from the practical pleasures of the English empiricism against which he rebelled. Had not theory, in any case, been persuasively associated, since Swift and Pope, with an experimental licence at odds with literary humanism?1 This prejudice replaced Dryden’s easy bestriding of two ‘royal’ cultures, monarchy and the ‘Royal Society’, in ‘Annus Mirabilis’. ‘We are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance’, wrote Dr Johnson reproachfully in his biography of one of England’s most radical poets.2 Theory as a sign of the dissociated sensibility, reliant on the accidental and neglectful of the essential, was a premise of Burke’s polemics against speculators and projectors in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Did Coleridge himself not join Burke’s side when he conceded, after all, that ‘abstruse research’ had offered a means of denaturalizing himself? The place of this opinion within the drama of the poem, ‘Dejection: An Ode’, in which it appears, is arguably to diagnose the distortions of a temperament which uses abstraction in that way, not to attack abstraction as such. Neil Vickers has argued in any case that if the ‘abstruse researches’ are biographically understood, they probably refer to Coleridge’s altruistic attempt to help his friend Tom Wedgwood alleviate a fatal nervous condition.3 These options, though, are forgotten in the simpler reading in which the poet agonizing over his forbidden love for Sara Hutchinson is made to confess that his intellectualism was a substitute for something better, something more psychologically indigenous, more generous, loving and creative. The partial reading of ‘Dejection’, neglectful of its criticism of an unsustainable moment of self-consciousness, is supported by a stock portrait of Coleridge. In that familiar depiction, too abstract a mind, too speculative a sensibility, leave Coleridge playing the part of Hamlet in a play in which what is

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valued is achievement, grasp of reality and mature self-knowledge. This drama is allowed to override the dramas of Coleridge’s own thought. But in these dramas, such experiential, Leavisite values are absolutes relative to the various philosophical stories in which they feature. For Coleridge, self-knowledge was a vanishing-point, an ideal convergence never to be achieved. In any case, the reflection of a subject by its objective existence modelled for Coleridge the pattern of all creation, a paradigm that must remain mysterious. Selfknowledge in the fullest sense belonged to an Other into whose care Coleridge sought to consign himself with doctrinal Christian anxiety. The coincidence of Coleridge’s desperate desire for religious consolation with the contemporary form of ultimate philosophical enquiry accounts, I believe, for the unignorable affective power in Coleridgean speculation. This dynamic, in turn, helps explain his stamina: the lasting attraction and intrigue of his ideas despite their highly variable output. Equally, though, Coleridge’s ‘stamina’ draws out the word’s other etymological options. (The stamen is the male seed-bearer of the flower, and also, metaphorically, the warp of a loom, an axis of textual production.) Despite his capriciousness, Coleridge undeniably wrote a massive amount, now collected in the magnificent new Bollingen edition. He was vastly and indiscriminately fertile. Furthermore, the basic unit of intellectual activity as he understood it figured his own kind of productivity. Ideas, for Coleridge, invoked an ‘infinite power of semination’. These mental stamina vitalized the many discourses his thought invaded. Once the mobile rather than fixed character of originality was conceded, then the exercise of intellect need not be defined by its conclusions, but could be recognized by its motility, its impulsiveness, its furthering of the principle behind what it had discovered. And, as (anglophone) appreciation of Coleridge’s German philosophical sources becomes more idiomatic, more a fluency in a way of thinking and less a search for sources, and as he becomes recognizably addicted to a common European Romantic habit of reflection, other corroborations of Coleridge’s intellectual manner appear. From Kant to Hegel, philosophy repeatedly strives in dialectical fashion to identify ‘the rules of the IMAGINATION’ with the ‘powers of growth and production’(BL II, 84). I.A. Richards’ favourite Coleridgean phrase in fact describes that crucial move which, in different ways, clinched the philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Introspection turns out to require, with varying strength of prescription, an unconscious collaborative ground. Driven underground in this way, Leibniz’s ‘pre-established harmony’, guaranteeing the fastening of our ideas upon a corresponding world, can become a troubling affiliation. It can, certainly, continue its underwriting of enlightenment or the validity of knowledge; it can also become more like an alarming return upon our spiritual selves of apparently alien material. A world instinct with spirit can reconcile subject and object with consoling or with spectral forms. Ambiguous in this way, the ‘companionable form’ introspected in the film of flame of ‘Frost at Midnight’ portends an absent stranger. I.A. Richards need not have seen himself as a materialist sympathizing with Coleridge’s opposite idealism if



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idealism of Coleridge’s kind could only make sense of itself as the production of a like-minded but absent (as it were) material world. As suggested, the materialisms of Leibniz’s successors vary. Fichte’s ‘not-I’, without which each act of self-consciousness would have nothing to discriminate itself from, is itself negated in the objectivity of Hegelian ‘reason’. Hegelian reason’s progress is finished only when its power to be commensurable with reality has turned into the power to be commensurate with itself (not-I again becoming I in an entirely universal sense). Just as strongly, though, the post-Kantian most influential upon Coleridge, Schelling, resists the notion of such ultimate programming, and retains the sense of a fortuitous, voluntary coincidence between our own intellectual dispensation and something anterior to it. Coleridge’s predominantly Christian expression of this good fortune cannot obscure the historical moment in philosophical history that makes it possible for him to think in this way. Eschewing the Hegelian goal of absolute self-transparency, the Schelling/ Coleridge moment is always open to mystery and obscurity. To be adequate, the presentation of what is lucid must be shadowed by what could have been different. The positive is haunted by an imponderable alternative. Coleridge’s Christianity has no monopoly on the theological idioms thus brought into play. Michael Rosen succinctly describes the movement from an Absolute which is simultaneously self-revealing and self-concealing (Schelling’s doctrine) to a position in which the manifestation of transcendence is at most an interruption or hiatus in the course of the finite (as in Hölderlin). Romantics, therefore, often seem to hover between affirmative and negative theology.4 Revealing by concealing and concealing by revealing foster a variety of entry points into the discourses with which we construct our world. Some of Coleridge’s poems, it is easy to claim, give us a version of Hölderlin’s discourse of interruption. The person from Porlock figures as a scheduled not an arbitrary interference in communication. His interruption of the writing of ‘Kubla Khan’, within Coleridge’s calculated framing of the poem, authorizes its form and content. Formally it is a Romantic fragment poem; materially, it speaks a hiatus between the absolute authority to decree that something happens, and the condition of endless simulation to which we are bound when we envision that authenticity. According to the poem’s Preface, the poet’s immediate intimacy with his inspiration is interrupted and so turns into a task of reconstruction at second hand. But this is what the narrator of the poem does, and, on reflection, what Kubla has done with the natural forces at his disposal; the poem makes its arbitrariness into its own content. The truest version of what is, the poem says, is gained through revelation; but revelation is always an appearance, an epiphany, a mixed prophecy of good and ill. The poem does not say, in a postmodern formulation tempting to us now, that the real has been displaced by the greater solidity of our representations of it

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– although Coleridge famously evoked his experience of poetic possession with the claim that ‘the images rose up before him as things’. The real is still what assures our representations of their purchase on something. But this grasp evinces the sense of a willed tractability characteristic of our ‘real’, a sense of election, a sense by which our foundation in the world feels like a gift. It feels gratuitous, spontaneous, free, voluntary and accommodating because at other important levels of explanation it also is causeless, unwarranted and arbitrary. The mysteriousness of the poem’s fountain and its eponymous hero’s fiat mimes an ultimate inscrutability only got at through an uncertain repetition, through the wonderment that what is, is. Epiphany, in our post-Joycean take on it, reveals a certain world in contrast to a delusory one deprived of God’s ontological backing. It also implies that this revelation can make us know more painfully our frequent out-ofplacedness, our lack of fit in the discovered world (like, say, the adolescent boy in Dubliners), our alienation from an environment that gives us our standards of welcome and reciprocity. The discovery that ‘Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her’ was surely the common ground of Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s temporary poetic collaboration? Yet, in Satanic or Byronic fashion, our incongruity can exploit a negative theology, as Rosen allows. Represented then is not an alternative to divine order, but the same order as it must extend beyond our reach into areas not constrained to fit our purposes. These inimical environments have been evacuated by the God who supports us, but perversely to explore them is to register still more of the Godhead, more of the possibilities he charitably did not adopt. The unassimilable too becomes the sacred or dreadful, the visionary, uncontrolled poet at the end of ‘Kubla Khan’: ‘For he on honeydew hath fed / And drunk the milk of Paradise’. In a familiar anthropological trope, the abjected achieves inviolable status. What makes it exceptionable also renders it exceptional – a type of the divine precisely by virtue of its alien character. With a shudder the community congratulates itself on being favoured by a God who has not taken this other road. Clearly, this theology is far from being systematic. It may result in a perverse iconology; or it may produce paradoxes verging on the nonsensical (as, I will argue in the final chapter, Coleridge suspects happens in the case of Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’). When one doesn’t take these liberties with it, this theology is also highly economical. Coleridge does not try uselessly and verbosely to describe what lies outside his own sphere of possibility. But he describes, as we shall see in more detail later, this inside as an inside. In its larger shapes, certainly, Coleridge would no doubt be keen to trace the outline of Christian dispensation. But in local detail, what the theology says is far more indiscriminate, something interchangeable even with ontology. Theology then tends to look like the personification of our exigencies when, deprived of a standpoint of scientific evaluation, we try to account for the fact that science works. We have languages in which to express the vocational character of our experience, and theology appears to add unnecessarily to or mythologize an



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expressiveness it should find adequate. Coleridge, by implication, applies Occam’s razor to theology most dramatically in his poetry. The symbiosis of Geraldine and Christabel, snake and dove entwined and univocal – that is to say equivocal because one has suborned the other – condenses an image of extraordinary compression, a conceptually unmanageable repetition. The nervousness of the poem’s Gothic, fragmentary expression maybe derives both from its arrogation to itself of theological sufficiency, and from the way that sufficiency reveals our fragile luck. What if the ‘Lord of thy utterance’ that you were obliged to repeat were a Geraldine? But Coleridge conjures comparable effects, if much less conspicuously, in every other discourse or form of words he employs. His descriptive performances, when aptly closing on something, whether a pot of urine in his Notebooks, a landscape, a philosophy, a person, a historical event, seem powered by the conviction that to defamiliarize is theology enough. Primary imagination, as formulated in Biographia Literaria, is indeed primary here, but by virtue of being a repetition. Because it repeats an originally divine contraction – ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the infinite I AM’ – it can define what is absolute for us. To say our absolutes are relative is nonsense: how could they remain absolute? But it makes sense to say that precisely because they are relative to God shows that God has chosen them with us in mind. Remove the God-term, and, again, you are left with a repetition carrying the awareness that our differentiations float on an ontology that could have been mapped in other ways, although this ontology is only disclosed in the fact that this otherness did not happen, is not accessible. Kierkegaard’s thought can plausibly be viewed as an extended attempt to retain a uniquely theological explanation of this repetition; and the Christian Coleridge’s problem often seems to be that he naturally adopts philosophical explanations, structurally symmetrical, for which this religious affiliation is not strictly necessary. To perceive fully – to employ the ‘prime agent of human perception’, the Primary imagination – is by philosophical implication to affirm some absolute contraction from a range of other possibilities into the world we find so attuned to our senses. We grasp this congruence as if it were the declaration of another self, an infinite ‘I am’, to whose assertion of its individuality we can relate. We are sure of our world as if it were someone speaking to us. But when Coleridge’s theology is not systematically superimposed on this explanation, then the ‘as if’ is sufficient. Awareness of the fact that this hypothetical mundane speech might have been couched in another epistemological language, one tailored to the capacities of another audience altogether, defamiliarizes the world and renews our nervousness or apprehensiveness of it. I prefer to call it ‘apprehensiveness’ (drawing on Charles Lamb’s positive response to Wordsworth’s poem, The Excursion: ‘how apprehensive! How imaginative! How religious!’5) to try to catch in one word the twin meanings of heightened consciousness of something and fearful awareness of the limitations this sharpened sense of outline lends. By definition, we can have nothing to say about the ineffable alternatives. The charged repetition we are left with is the staple of Kantian aesthetics, the

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philosophical tradition Coleridge and the post-Kantians developed in diverse directions. To some, this restriction of philosophical speculation to its own inside, aesthetically intensifying descriptions of what exists as a substitute for theological comparison, has looked impoverished. The fate of this art, as Jay Bernstein puts it, following Benjamin, is to induce a kind of mourning.6 We mourn the plenitude denied us, and this, redoubling our lament, is the only idea we can have of that fullness of which our experience is a part. Already in Coleridge’s time, though, aesthetic repetition was being unpacked to reveal more than the failure to signify something bigger. Schelling’s voluntarism, the Sehnsucht of his Absolute, would increasingly abandon this synecdochical understanding. On his view, it makes little sense to think with Schiller of the different person one might have been, if genuinely enfranchised by the aesthetic into a complete existence, as a complementary self, one of two halves making up a whole. For the Schelling of the Freedom essay, the very notion of a self would disappear or be annihilated in the merger contemplated. Or else its eccentricity in assuming its revolt against normality had absolute authority would be perverse and evil. If the emergence of human identity repeats Absolute self-definition, then the resulting exercise of human freedom has to be unconditioned. Hence arises the possibility of choosing not to repeat, the possibility of evil: the assertion of an absolute selfishness over and against the Absolute will. This paradox, like Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, opens avenues leading outside systematic neatness, but in existentially valid ways that Schelling welcomes. His Freedom essay, after all, is meant to establish the nature of human freedom.7 But Schelling is no legitimist, believing as a consequence that ‘Whatever is, is right’. His world, understood through its ages, its Weltalter, is evolving, historical through and through, and to be furthered in that involvement to the extent that we can intuit the meaning of its gift to us.8 Walter Benjamin characteristically developed the Jena departure from Kant of which Schelling’s Freedom essay was perhaps another delayed result. Outflanking the subject/object dichotomy, the defining progressiveness of the Jena artwork suggests, as we saw Schelling argue in his essay on Dante, a new ontology in which what an artwork is increases with each reception and reworking. This leads to a cognitive theory of art, one like Gadamer’s, where the aesthetic suggests new and different continuances by which something is brought into play without ever being objectified. The artwork, we might say, offers a benchmark for philosophical stamina.

Kantian contraception The aesthetic of Kant’s third Critique, so rich a resource, may prefigure but never formulates these escapes from melancholy underachievement. The beautiful and the sublime survive our loss of cognitive interest through their power to produce pleasure. This feeling, scientifically inarticulate, describes an



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irreplaceable sense of wonder. More recently, Peter de Bolla has re-examined and elucidated the wonder in which aesthetic experience trades.9 Above all it is mute, leaving us with two options. Under the first option, we take its refusal of paraphrase or exposition to be an advantage, one tied to the irreplaceability of art which Coleridge believed in down to the order of words in a Shakespearean sentence. In Richard Wollheim’s formulation, ‘it is not clear that we have any other way of talking about the objects themselves. Or, to put the same point in non-linguistic terms, it is not always the case that things that we see as expressive, we can or could see in any other way’.10 If you want the feeling, you have to quote the lines, observe the painting, listen to the music. The particularity of aesthetic judgement insisted on by Kant, the paradox of these concrete universals, prevents us from ever being able sensibly to generalize about a work of art. The only generality produced is the universal agreement about each particular case. We can no more refer to the class of Hamlets than we can to the class of historical events, the class of Spanish Armadas, battles, economic slumps and so on. This is not because other Hamlets have not been written, nor because further Spanish Armadas have not taken place, but because they are not the sort of thing that can recur. You can’t repeat a historical event, and that unrepeatability is part of what is meant by its being historical. It happened then. Any repetition of the event must already be built into the event’s description, and the event’s typicality resolved once and for all in that original resonance. Dissemination is ruled out. But Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel dissolve the artwork’s objective boundaries in the ever-changing generic field of its reception and, in Andrew Benjamin’s phrase, they go on to describe a ‘plural event’.11 Historical reinterpretation allows the same event to develop more of itself across time in art and history. The Kantian prophylactic (if that it not too comic a way of developing the metaphor in play here) is discarded. Emerging from isolation, the aesthetic is allowed to breed, to demonstrate its autonomy and originality in its discursive fecundity. Coleridge called such repetition of sameness with a difference ‘tautegory’. He contrasted it with allegory, in which we see a resemblance to something in an entirely different subject. Kant does not pursue this tautegorical notion of singularity persisting across time and so becoming different, while, like a changing person, remaining the same individual. Accordingly, his aesthetic has nothing more to say than its expressions of our sense of how we apprehend the world and, inseparable from this, our wonder that things should be so and our wonder at what else might be. This is to say that we pleasurably repeat, or sublimely fail not to reiterate, our experience. In either case, nothing more is said. Except that that is what the aesthetic as opposed to non-aesthetic description does say: that there is nothing more to be said. No scientific statement can get away with that finality or produce its pleasure. The second option, faced with expressions of this aesthetic ‘mutism’ as de Bolla felicitously calls it, is to feel challenged to evolve a new vocabulary, to feel unlearned in the description of affect and keen to be better equipped to

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describe our feelings. Perhaps existing aesthetic vocabularies are underused: the influential division of aesthetic experience between the categories of the sublime and the beautiful has for too long appeared adequate? In a once wellknown article, F.N. Sibley pointed out that in practice we already use a more comprehensive and variegated vocabulary of taste and aesthetic approval. He relies, one assumes, on the Austinian premise that ‘ordinary uses of words’ are the philosopher’s first resources, although, Austin conceded, ‘it seems that we shall in the end always be compelled to straighten them out to some extent’.12 Certainly the traditional sufficiency of the sublime and the beautiful has possibly made acceptable our otherwise culpable lack of practice in describing wonder. Or maybe we need to be still more inventive, to look for new or undervalued words, sleepers, awaiting aesthetic activation, potential but yet actual collaborators in our attempt to satisfy our need for aesthetic articulation? De Bolla cites I.A. Richards, whose interest both in ‘basic English’ and in ‘linguistic engineering’ is a byword for this kind of optimistic interventionism. We are to accept the distinctiveness of the aesthetic, but to feel provoked by it to be more discriminating. How else are we to engage in that activity inseparable from aesthetic appreciation – evaluation? It is all very well to assume a lapidary appositeness in aesthetic expression because Kant has proved that the aesthetic cannot be reduced to another discourse. But we still want to say that some art is better than other art, without falling into the nonsense of saying that they are two shots at doing the same thing. Michelangelo’s and Bernini’s ‘David’ can be educatively compared and evaluated precisely because we do not measure them on the same scale. This second option does appear to approach the Schlegelian exit from or development of the first option. Kant’s insistence upon the particularity of aesthetic expression is opened up and given a future. Aesthetic experience, de Bolla writes, is something ‘lived through’, in analogy with the way that Barnett Newman literally cohabited with his ‘inaugural’ painting (Onement 1) before he could say what he’d done. Insofar as the artwork has a material existence, it is made up of our affect in response to it over time.13 This temporal dimension recovers the post-Kantian response to a central dilemma of Kantian aesthetics. As de Bolla points out, Kantian aesthetics is founded on a catachresis. Kantian catachresis, by which we call our aesthetic experiences objects, and refer to works of art and their qualities as if they were things, returns us once more to ‘mutism’ and linguistic poverty. For we do not appear to possess another way of describing the universality and necessity we wish to attribute to aesthetic experiences other than to call them objects, which they are not. The aesthetic content has no language of its own; its vicarious expression points to a native silence. When we say that the painting, the nocturne, the sky, her expression are beautiful, we solicit the same degree of agreement about our subjective feeling for these things as we more confidently expect of shared objective knowledge. The absence of any private, idiosyncratic content to the feeling of satisfaction delivered aesthetically means that aesthetic judgements are habitually expressed as if referring to objects not subjects. There is just not another



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way of putting their claim to legitimacy. To point out that aesthetic judgements are therefore figurative, expressing subjective response in objective likeness, and so themselves produce more of what they are about, repeats the dilemma of ‘mutism’.14 They never break out of their own hermeneutical circle. In Kant’s aesthetic, aesthetic expression is irreplaceably particular for the same reason that it defies analysis or expression in other terms. In the end of his exposition of the connections beween ‘mutism’ and wonder, de Bolla is left with ‘dignity’, a very Kantian derivative. This dignity is not integrated with ‘grace’, as in Schiller’s treatise. Dignity, as de Bolla puts it, responds to the utter individuality of our fate, a destiny isolated both by its loneliness and in its inability to break through its limitations into another life. For Schiller, dignity considered on its own expresses the sublime attitude by which we accept, firstly, that we can never attain completion; secondly, that this realization of failure is the only way our ultimate vocation can appear to us.15 Again, the aesthetic circle is drawn tight. Characteristic of all accounts of the sublime from Longinus onwards has been its ‘turn’, whereby the apprehension of it replicates the same scenario of turning defeat into victory; or turning the failure to progress beyond physical constraints into the simultaneous expression of our grasp of the unconstrained.16 Sublimity demands sublime description, a reinforcement that is also a descriptive exercise in diminishing returns. The expressionism we are dealing with here, it could be said, becomes increasingly abstracted from everything else; hence, perhaps, that attraction towards the sublime typical of the painters, Newman and Rothko, whose work de Bolla writes about so revealingly in this context. Schiller, though, already has his exposition of ‘grace’. The natural expression of a happier schöne Seele, grace is reserved for those times when we don’t want to stand entirely upon our dignity. But it is worth remembering that Hegel’s critique of the graceful life of the ‘beautiful soul’ raises problems akin to those belonging to the sublime attitude. Like the Stoic, the beautiful soul proposes moral self-cultivation as a solution to the intractability of the world to human purposes. The aesthetic invention where this self-perfection is made possible replaces worldly contingencies; it claims itself to be nature. But Hegel suspects this aesthetic resolution of the conflict between is and ought, what we should do and what we can do. He suspects it of recasting the conflict as the effort to connect our rational with our sensuous being, as ‘merely an insincere play of alternating these two determinations’ (. . . die verstellende Spiel der Abwechslung diese beide Bestimmungen).17 Hegel’s verstellende combines the sense of misplacing with that of playacting; he thus deprives Schiller’s fictional morality of any aesthetic excuse for having been made up. Hegel’s word for Schiller’s psychologism is ‘abstraction’ (Abstraktion). When the particular aesthetic experience claims prescriptive universality it creates a self-serving nature abstracted from real nature: this is Hegel’s verdict on the inescapably figural character of aesthetic objectivity; ‘it is now the law that exists for the sake of the self, not the self that exists for the sake of the law’.18 In a stand-off between virtue and ‘the way of the world’ (Weltlauf), the latter, thinks Hegel, will always prevail.19

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For him the point is to discover the necessary (Reason) within and not at an abstract remove from contingent reality. When we internalize the world as a mixture of psychological aspects, and achieve a graceful harmony between it and all the other drives of our personality, the world reduces to a purely abstract expressionism. To put it crudely, Hegel thinks that Schiller’s account of the resolution of ethical conflict, between what our reason tells us we ought to do and what the world lets us do, describes the restoration of a feel-good factor. Doing the right thing is equated with achieving psychological equilibrium. The insincerity, for Hegel, lies in pretending that such therapy exhausts the meaning of morality. The experience of aesthetic equilibrium may work wonders for us; it may make us better persons when we return to the real world; it won’t answer any questions asked in the real world. On a broadly Aristotelian view, it is true, morality doesn’t make sense if it is divorced from a notion of human flourishing. The aesthetic can certainly supply educative pictures of the good life. In this context, though, the sublime still has a part to play in emphasizing the compromises involved in the Aristotelian pursuit of human ends, or the accommodation of human desires to Greek notions of Fate. In his Poetics Aristotle acknowledges that the ultimate therapeutic experience, catharsis, is gained through the purging of pity and fear. These are responses to the tragic exposition of humanity through its heroic failure to be happy or fortunate. The unacceptable is not made acceptable, but art shows that we reach our boundaries in contemplating the unacceptable, and that this experience satisfies us in a peculiarly comprehensive way. Hegel thinks Schiller’s graceful aesthetic entertains a much diminished version of this dialectic. Taken outside the fatal conflict, his aesthetic harmony idealizes its competing forces, forgetting that one of those is contingent and beyond our control. Emptied of that content, the nature-drive (Naturtrieb) falsely internalizes a constitutionally external force. Of course, the progress of Hegel’s own philosophy is to seek an evolving rational pattern in our successive definitions of what is external to us. Unlike Schelling and Coleridge, he is not interested in tracking the reverberations of an ontology continually disclosed through our repeated historical differences from it. Coleridge’s ‘Dejection’ ode does read like a Schillerian poem: ‘for in our life alone does Nature live.’ It just depends on how diagnostic one takes it to be. In deep depression, health may indeed appear like an impossible mastery over circumstances, an imaginative hegemony. ‘Hence viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, / Reality’s dark dream!’ Ultimately, though, all well-being depends upon something given to us, and on our power to accept and repeat it by means of our ‘shaping spirit of Imagination’; and that ‘dower’, the poem’s religious abjection makes clear, is as much out of our power to manufacture as is the grace of God. We have already seen his capitulation mime the crucial reversal in the plot of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Finally the poem’s narrator imagines the reproduction of the joy he wishes in the ‘Lady’, in his ‘friend’. In that altruistic benediction he perhaps escapes



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the pathological desire for original production symptomatic of his depression. He accepts as sufficient the repetition implied when our animation of the world can be described as ‘guided from above’. But there is no other access to what is ‘above’ other than to follow its ‘guidance’, or to see in our limitations a vocation, a calling, rather than a thwarting. Repetition, the recurrence of the same in different historical form, tautegory rather than allegory, fits the Jena idea that the aesthetic typically encourages its own reproduction. The artwork precipitates a plural event allowing it to be revived in different shapes no longer necessarily observing original aesthetic allegiances. This self-destroying perpetuation is a way of knowing, not an aesthetic abstraction from knowing, not the alternative to cognition it would be in Kant’s and Schiller’s aesthetics. Coleridge’s narrator finds his well-being finally reflected back to him when reimagined for someone else. Coleridge’s aesthetic maintains the sense that our creative perceptions are re-enactments, repetitions in different historical situations. The result is to defamiliarize what is described rather than to describe something else. There isn’t something else to describe. Nevertheless, an aesthetic that continually historicizes itself in this way, existing in its departures from any original moment, clearly overcomes the ‘mutism’ inherent in Kantian aesthetics. It reworks the figurative quality, which seemed to entrap aesthetic judgement in its own content, as an openness to reformulation that abandons selfish interests. In the personal drama of ‘Dejection’, the care of the narrator’s self is bequeathed to the other. In aesthetic terms, the selfishness abandoned is disciplinary, as the aesthetic legacy becomes a general facility to defamiliarize through the sense that our apprehensiveness is triggered when we realize that perception repeats something we cannot get at in any other terms. Equally, the apparent failure to gain immediate acquaintance with the ‘infinite I AM’ takes the form of a continuing discovery of the common ground shared by all our repetitions of the ‘infinite I AM’. They may all be repetitions, rather than original grounding discourses, but they are all repeating the same thing. The lack of a foundational discourse, therefore, is also what powers Coleridge’s striking idea of philosophy as an ‘anti-Babel’. Failure to posit becomes exposition, informative in its own way.

The anti-Babel Coleridge’s notebook entry where the ‘anti-babel’ appears describes how Preparatory to the great anti-babel of metaphysical Science, all sorts of materials psychological & logical must be brought together / some fit, some unfit – and as even this takes ages even before the commencement of the building, the Fetchers & Carriers build Cots & Houses of them, each according to his own Fancy, with different cements – still however they are

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but orderly Cumuli of materials, that must surely be taken to pieces – some times 5 or 10 stones may be taken at once, unloosened – &c (CN 3, 3254) There is a lot of activity in this building site. Fundamentally, Coleridge describes an assemblage of materials in need of breaking down before their common philosophical or metaphysical contribution can be gauged. Surely Coleridge cannot be unaware of the paradox of raising a great building to counter the hubris of the original tower of Babel? He had made the connection between building and language before in another cryptic entry about Kubla Khan: ‘Kublaikhan ordered letters to be invented for his people’ (CN 1. 1281). In Coleridge’s poem, Kubla’s ‘miracle of rare device’ is of course architectural. It repeats the original creativity of the ‘fountain’ from which the ‘sacred river’, Alph, ‘momently was forced’ from the ‘deep Romantic chasm’. Harnessed to cultivate the city, the river’s subsequent progress provides the setting for Kubla’s ‘pleasure dome’, where the noise of its past and future can mingle, an effect somehow linked with the perfect poise of the dome. Dependency on the river’s sacred passage, though, means that Kubla’s achievement can only generate further repetitions, and can never call a halt to these with its own authoritative, monumental statement. The invention of language is a comparably doomed display of control since it is confirmed by everyone else’s ability to use its words in their own way, in ways different from their donor. Language enfranchises rather than reduces a population; Coleridge, in Marjorie Levinson’s words, ‘makes his readers amass within them the amassing harmony’. But the alternative, as Levinson also points out, would be a culde-sac; the one that, I argued, Hegel criticized in Schiller’s schöne Seele; what Levinson calls ‘the appropriation of the actual and extrinsic into psychic space’.20 This repeats the presumption of Babel, not the originality that Babel originally presumed to emulate. Coleridge discusses Babel at length in The Friend. The discussion appears in the tenth of the Essays on the Principles of Method, that are the principal adornment of the 1818 ‘rifacimento’ of the original periodical, ‘the first elements, or alphabet, of my whole system’.21 The context is Coleridge’s analysis of the intellectualism properly belonging to ideas rather than to fixed images or idols. Ideas cultivate, sensuous images civilize or lead to the architecture of civilization – cities, musical instruments, artifice generally, convenience. But this devotion to the ‘agreeable’ must, like Schiller’s schöne Seele’s devotion to the ‘graceful’, have ‘assumed’ what it then ‘did not, in this respect, pretend to find’. In other words, even an apparently single-minded devotion to accessible pleasures is predicated upon an absolute provision revealing our situatedness in the world not just as convenient and timely but as a vocation. Forgetfulness of the contingency of the dispensation we enjoy leads to the abstraction which Coleridge thinks produces polytheism. Polytheism amounts to absolute claims for the facts of experience, claims that must appear a little ridiculous, ‘a whole bee-hive of natural Gods’. The trick here is to reverse the normal meanings of concrete and abstract. Usually we would think of the function subtending



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everything as an abstraction from their concrete variety. But in depicting an absolute that has temporarily contracted to be the ground of our determinations, all (determinate) concretions must seem abstract in contrast to its potential, undisclosed variety. Coleridge marries this philosophical discussion to his interpretation of the first book of Genesis. Investment of particulars of our experience with absolute authority makes each impossibly presume to exclude the other. The confusion of tongues (repeated with a difference, Coleridge seems to suggest, in the productive ‘diversity’ of tongues now which, as a linguist, he enjoys) is the sign of this philosophical malfunction. Confusion, in Coleridge’s interpretation, appears to preclude translation, which in his work as a philosopher he habitually practises. Diverse translation, as opposed to absolute posturing, is the continual amassing of significance that expounds more of the variety of the original it repeats. Or, as Friedrich Schlegel might say, description in one genre stimulates description in another and adds progressively to our sense of the universal precipitating both. Schlegel’s way of putting this gets at Coleridge’s post-Kantian rather than Kantian character. Again, the thought is led by the Jena idea of an aesthetic willing to sacrifice the exclusive autonomous realm won for it by Kant’s third Critique. Let us look at this distinction more closely, using a difficult but precise commentary by Werner Hamacher.22 Like Walter Benjamin before him, Hamacher understands Schlegel to claim a dynamic advance through a critique of Kant’s aesthetic isolationism as it survives in Fichte. We have already seen Coleridge’s robust objections to Fichte’s stoicism and its ‘perfect silence’. Fichte’s original insight, on Dieter Henrich’s famous reading, was to see the severe limitations imposed on the logic of reflection in any explanation of selfconsciousness. In Kant, the ‘I think’ that must accompany any experience for it to be someone’s, and so be an experience by a subject of an object, always exceeds its own jurisdiction and so remains unexplained. For our self-recognition to work we must enjoy another kind of acquaintance with ourselves that is unreflective. Hamacher reverses Henrich, and claims that Fichte’s call to understand self-orientation through action – or knowing something by doing it – still relies on reflection for identifying the active self. Fichte’s claim to have both a reflective and a performative access to the ‘I’ becomes an ‘irreparable inconsistency’.23 Again, in Chapter 2 we have already looked at Schelling’s and Hegel’s different takes on Fichte’s inconsistencies. Hamacher’s Fichte cannot conceive of an immediate self-consciousness that is not already mediated by some general term. As we have seen, these generalizations change with activity of the ego producing the ‘not-I’, but without any sense of Hegelian development. Hamacher’s Schlegel, on the other hand, takes the discussion of the grounding of experience outside the sphere of self-consciousness and relocates it in questions of genre and language. This, argues Hamacher, helps, because Schlegel’s explanation turns originality into a project rather than an object. We don’t witness a failure in reflection when the genre in which we currently catch our existence does itself not contain the genre describing it. Rather, this

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standing aside from it tropes it, like parekbasis or Chorus in a Greek play.24 Part of the same drama of meaning, the apostrophe to or commentary on individuals and events under scrutiny, expounds more of their being. The Chorus does not presume to pronounce absolutely but is another dramatic character interacting in a continuing drama of meaning. Or, deconstructively put (and de Man was greatly attracted to Schlegel), meta-writing is another genre of writing. For Schlegel, though, such commentary, unlike a mirroring reflection, is ‘progressive’, because, as we have seen with Schelling, repetition is here understood not as a redundant but as an expository activity.25 And this dynamic philosophy provides the genuine alternative to thinking of being as only to be understood if cognizable by its subject reflecting upon it. Now Coleridge’s anti-Babel, to the extent that he develops the idea, shares this escape from reflection. My comments so far on the function he attributes to repetition in his main formulation of imagination and on the disseminating power by which he defines ideas have tended to show this. Common to all Coleridge’s plans for an Opus Maximum is the idea of an encircling ‘Logos’ which is the ‘anti-Babel’ unifying the different ‘logoi’ or disciplines constituting Coleridge’s great work. In the ‘Essays on the Principles of Method’ in The Friend, Coleridge follows Plato, he claims, in defining Ideas as ‘living laws’, and Bacon in naming ‘laws of nature, ideas’. This growth makes for ‘the secure and ever-progressive, though never-ending, investigation of truth and reality by scientific method’. Thus, thinks Coleridge, ‘furnished with fit and respectable credentials, [he can] proceed to the historic importance and practical application of METHOD’.26 These credentials are Platonic and Baconian, corroborated by Hooker; but in the historical context of Coleridge’s philosophy, they are post-Kantian. The sameness with his precursor’s insight simultaneously measures the historical difference of his own expression of them, tailoring to altered circumstances the philosophical intervention he is using them to make, mutatis mutandis. Permanence and progression harmonize in Coleridge’s method not only as regards art and science, but also as regards politics. There the permanent political interest tends to hinder progressive forces, and the troping stops. But the structure of Coleridge’s argument is far from end-stopped, and Coleridge’s neglected general statements vaunting the enjambments of intellectual inquiry within his anti-Babel are worth rehearsing. The anti-Babel can be traced through Coleridge’s remarks on ‘the Logos, or communicative Intelligence, Natural, Human, and Divine’.27 This single word unifies the different words or ‘logoi’ of the disciplines which, if all put together, would constitute an enclyclopaedia of the kind for which Coleridge contributed his Treatise on Method. The Christian resonance of schemes of this kind are obvious; audible also is a less doctrinaire religiosity, the kind informing most of Coleridge’s speculations about life as ‘the language of God himself, as uttered by Nature’.28 These Christian and religious inflections do not add much to our understanding of Coleridge’s thought; they do, as I have already said, describe a coincidence by which Coleridge could link his religious



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passion to his philosophical curiosity. In the terms of our argument so far, this is to say that religion is another troping or progressive repetition of our situation rather than a unique revelation that might conclude this heuristic process: Should all words have their ground and highest source in the ‘Word’ that was from the beginning, it might appear that a dispute concerning words is the most important subject on which the mind of man could exert its reasoning powers.29 Sometimes Coleridge’s religious fervour drives him to wish to repeat the Incarnation and himself become a word, a word made flesh: ‘the redeemed & sanctified become finally themselves Words of the Word.’ He concludes this Notebook fantasy: ‘As he is in the Father, even so we in him.’30 Again the repetition is evident: here Coleridge’s desire to repeat Jesus’s incarnation of God. Philosophically speaking, though, a Schellingian nostrum appears, in which not to accept the absolute contraction to our capabilities, so that we can progressively follow through its implications, is to undo all possibilities of coherence – a temptation he diagnoses in Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’. On this belief, as suggested above, is based Schelling’s definition of an aberrant evil, or a growth outside the economy of the human self’s well-being, like a disease. For Coleridge, in a late (1829) Notebook entry, to imagine the ‘suspension’ of the Logos is ‘the synthesis of Nonsense and Blasphemy’. In ‘miracles of Religion’ we should ‘behold the abbreviations of the Miracle of the Universe’. We should, presumably, then set about unpacking these abbreviations and unfolding our universe rather than hope to discover an otherworldly alternative to it?31 Its laws are diverse enough in their applications for sheer existence to resonate with the miraculous. On the other hand, I don’t think it will do to see Coleridge as a philosophical rationalist for whom religion is a provisional troping of philosophical concerns, one to be superseded by the completion of philosophy. But I want to suggest that this is as unlikely as his espousal of the reverse view that philosophy occupies the rudimentary position to be consummated in religious apprehension. One Table Talk entry suggests Hegelian Aufhebung at work: I show to each system that I fully understand and rightfully appreciate what that system means; but then I lift up that system to a higher point of view, from which I enable it to see its former position, where it was, indeed, but under another light and with different relations; – so that the fragment of truth is not only acknowledged, but explained.32 Coleridge’s failure ever to explain this explanation must be due at least partly to his commitment to an idea that successive disclosure rather than cyclical recapitulation was the true shape of philosophical progress. At still other times, he sounds like Kant, or a pre-Jena philosopher: ‘the Noumenon, I say,

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is the Logos, the WORD . . .’33 To be committed to all of these philosophical positions would be, as Wellek insisted long ago, straightforwardly confusing and muddled. On the other hand, to exonerate such contradictory allegiances by saying they all trope each other would make criticism impossible. Nevertheless, the philosophy of poetry and the poetry of philosophy do come closer to each other in any attempt to understand Coleridge’s sense of an existence bound by its diverse repetitions of an original sameness. Ominously for Coleridge’s theology, as I have been emphasizing, this is the pattern, a philosophical pattern spoken in the language of the German philosophers, which continually recurs. Let me finish with a famous Coleridgean synopsis. Saturday Night, April 14, 1805 – In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering thro’ the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing any thing new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an . . . [obscure] feeling as if that new phaenomenon were the dim Awaking of a forgotten or hidden Truth of my inner Nature / It is still interesting as a Word, a Symbol! It is Logo~, the Creator! and the Evolver!.34 I believe many of the themes I have been discussing are here in this entry, but strung together, unsystematically, almost paratactically. Distrust of the new, yet appreciation that the historical repetition of the same is what defines difference, are sentiments linked to Coleridge’s overall feeling that his mundane affiliation is part of some sort of communicative logic at work in the world. Religious terminology beckons, but equally we are offered the idea that our self-consciousness is bound up with an evolving discourse that never lays claim to have abstracted from or imprisoned nature in psychic space, and to whose continuing stamina this particular philosopher must attune himself. Already Coleridge writes in an idiom that can be fruitfully glossed by the main philosophical idioms of his day, idioms that emerge from Kant and are developed by the Jena Romantics and are criticized by Hegel. Hegel’s inability to see off the Schellingian alternative emerging out of Jena allows that open philosophy most congenial to Coleridge to persist. Coleridge’s subsequent protestations, caught up in the embarrassments of plagiarism, obscure a deep affinity of temperament with Schelling. But nothing conclusive can be established. Coleridge’s conversation with the Germans, like the one they have amongst themselves, is ongoing, perhaps infinite. We are left with a tantalizing picture of the reflective temperament, and a quintessentially intellectual attempt to use poetic and religious discourse to see round the boundaries of factual description and to feel literal reality all the more intensely through the idea that it is spoken, addressed, to us.

Chapter Five

Coleridge’s ‘Coleridge’

Self-writing: the Romantic biography of autobiography Coleridge’s effect on biographers can be quite revelatory, starting, appropriately, with the effect he has on himself. This is due to two main factors. The first is the contemporary importance attaching to the idea of the self in philosophical explanation. ‘Self-consciousness is now the principle of all philosophy’, announced Schelling in his Abhandlungen of 1796/7, a work closely read by Coleridge.1 For the moment, all that needs saying in this regard is that post-Kantian philosophers interested in developing purposive or teleological explanations of our place in nature are obliged to use vocabularies usually thought of as belonging to personal rather than scientific judgements. Explanations of how science is possible seem to require the self-determination of an absolute reality to facilitate our relativist experience of it. Accordingly, reality’s proportionate response to our attempts to know it invites voluntarist descriptions. These could vary in sophistication from religious fundamentalism to Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’. Coleridge enthusiastically participated in this movement. The second factor is the peculiar nature of biography and its relation to autobiography. In the Romantic age, life-writing from Wordsworth’s The Prelude to Byron’s Don Juan, Godwin’s Life of Chaucer to Scott’s (and Hazlitt’s) Life of Napoleon, became an especially complex literary kind. ‘Shakespeare’s life was an allegory,’ wrote Keats, ‘his works are the comments on it.’2 One might have expected things to be the other way round, but the Romantic self remains a philosophical subject elusive to literal description and conventional biographical or autobiographical effort. Terms such as ‘personality’ and ‘egoism’ became as much technical terms of appraisal as pejorative criticisms nostalgic for neoclassical norms. I want to begin by looking at this second factor. One might begin unpacking the difficulties by saying that autobiography emulates the objectivity of biography, while biography aspires to the intimacy of autobiography. This supportive relationship between the two is problematic, though. Autobiography is, in an important sense, incorrigible; mistakes satisfy its expressive logic as convincingly as accuracies. The fact that someone gets particular facts of her life wrong will more than likely tell us more about her, perhaps about the kind of life she wanted to have led, perhaps about revealing

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repressions, fears, desires and affect generally that might not get expressed any other way. To catch someone out is still to catch them, to catch more of them maybe than is visible when they are not telling stories about themselves. Biography, therefore, by aspiring to the inwardness of autobiography, must aspire to an authority that is permitted to be mistaken in the same way. But of course biography cannot be granted this license: it would then simply tell lies or mislead by its errors unless, that is, we turn it into autobiography too and get more interested in the author than her subject. So autobiography’s desire to be objective like biography is undermined by the role model it itself has supplied to biography. The whole thing goes round in circles. It’s no use answering that biography tells the truth about the lies if it is in the act of lying that the most intimate revelation takes place. More as in Lacanian psychoanalysis, we detect ourselves neither in the truth nor in our disguise of it, but in the movement from one to the other. The biography would have to reproduce this act of departure from its subject to get that close; it would have to lie in a way that produced more of its subject.3 Consistent with this aporia, Coleridge suggests in his Opus Maximum that selfapprehension is always vicarious. Here once more he transposes from Kantian apperception into the more dramatic register of the post-Kantians. For if . . . by the ‘Self’ we mean the principle of individuation . . . it is manifest that the self in this sense must be anterior to all our sensations etc., . . .Now the self is ever presupposed, and like all other supersensual subjects can be presented [scored out] to the mind only by a representative. And again, what that representative shall be is by no means unalterably fixed in human nature by nature itself, but on the contrary varies with the growth, bodily, moral, and intellectual, of each individual. (p. 30) Self-coincidence is impossible. We have to delegate stand-ins, character actors, perpetually, at each stage of our experience. No doubt we take responsibility for our past and plan our future. But, in a radical sense, we are neither of these. This is not to repeat the biographical cliché of ‘She or he is not what they were’. We just don’t experience ourselves with a contrary immediacy. We are always not x, y or z. Our failure to be ‘presented’, Coleridge’s scoring out seems to be saying, is the way we are ‘made known’. And creatively interesting writing is the kind that, perhaps like Coleridge’s, can get round such reflective failings in a dramatically effective way. Schelling and Coleridge wrote in ways that showed that they believed, unlike Lacan, in this redemptive possibility.4 This worry is very abstract, one about the logical form of biography and autobiography. But do things get any easier when we descend to the kinds of writing involved? Biography or autobiography is usually disciplined by a strict awareness of the genre it has employed to make itself plausible. Conversion narrative, success story, case analysis, special pleading, apology, publicity, defence, faithful record – any number of models offer themselves. Without creating confidence that this is the kind of story to tell about someone’s life,



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the best that self-writing of either kind could do would be to try to replicate the continuum of a life, the flow of impressions one imagines was received by a certain person in a certain place at a certain time. As soon as an effort is made to represent also the sorting process by which this sequence hangs together and makes sense, genre of some kind begins. And of course, where genre supervenes, any uniqueness distinguishing the coherence of the individual experience is lost. This is the generic paradox of both biography and autobiography. In order to make sense it loses the singularity of description that was supposedly its intention. Yet biography does often, with unjustified insouciance, lay claim to that uniqueness. Built into the very concept of autobiography seems to be this aspiration that, logically speaking, appears misguided. Biography can regard its necessary genres as displacements or stand-ins, as masks hiding an irreducibly immediate experience that it is the task of self-writing somehow to express. The biographer promises us an intimacy that dispenses with the niceties of literary convention: the ‘real’ Coleridge, which, if as unlikely a find as ‘the real language of men’, forever exerts its sway. Rather like the fiction advertising biopics – Denzel Washington is Malcolm X, Judi Dench is Iris Murdoch – its publicity disables its own dramatic cachet. There seems no room left for acting until, that is, we remember that modern method acting is very precisely intimate with the fictional resources of our ostensibly literal self-presentation. Disregard for the need to advertise that I am acting someone is justified by claiming that I am introducing myself into the modes of acting by which the person imitated presents a face to the world – how she cuts a figure in the world. Biographical ‘method’ is the untested bridge thrown across this gap. So Richard Holmes, nothing if not confident, concludes his first volume of Coleridge’s biography: ‘and biography cannot stop, because it must conform to the complication, strength, and strangeness of life. (That is its power over fiction, the authority of truth.)’5 When Derrida died, The Times had an editorial making merry over the supposed uncertainty for a deconstructionist of the fact of Derrida’s death.6 The propriety of, editorially, dancing on his grave, is backed up by Holmes’s ‘authority of truth’. But it is of course the ‘endless’ quality of writing to which Holmes nods in his biographer’s credo that Derrida’s work tries never to forget. Quite how Holmes gets hold of this ‘endless’ without a few fictions embarrassing the ascendancy of his ‘authority of truth’ is puzzling. What would it amount to on the page, anyway? That this kind of endless writing closes on its subject with an exquisite conformity surpassing all fictional representation, yet, at the same time, succeeds in avoiding complete effacement, remains an article of faith. We should now remember the first factor energizing Coleridge’s own grasp of biography. At the time Holmes’s biographical subject was alive, Hegel made it his life’s work to show how the concept, separated from its object in order to produce information about it, might be reunified in an ultimate knowledge in which the rationality of the world has become totally transparent. This is a conclusion that Derrida’s grammatology rules out of court. But Holmes the biographer, somehow assured that his visible

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authorship and that of truth are transparently the same, makes as short work of the problem as a leader-writer. Biographers’ ignorance of the philosophical agon their sort of project caused at the time neglects hopelessly, in Coleridge’s case, a preoccupation central to a philosophical imagination like his. Equally neglectful, however, of the matrix of Coleridge’s philosophical grasp of the self are those accounts which say, effectively, that autobiography and biography are simply the descriptions of their own impossibility. Coleridge’s philosophical compeers describe the doubly paradoxical emergence of an individual self in a process of separation from its authentic but trans-individual origins in order eventually to receive articulation from inter-subjective generalizations. The impersonal source and the shared definitions appear to lose the uniqueness of the self twice over. But Coleridge’s thought, I have argued, does appear to negotiate this combination of Schelling and Hegel. Paul de Man, on the other hand, describes a revolving door of perpetual substitutions in which the self that is displaced in order, autobiographically, to view itself is in turn only grasped by revoking that substitution. The ‘face’ given to the subject in autobiography is taken back, leaving the subject ‘defaced’. The written self is obviously produced by the writer, but also reads her, and comes back out of de Man’s revolving door as quickly as she goes in. De Man believes this ‘turn’ exposes the condition under which all signification labours. He therefore values autobiography only as an accentuation of a general state of semiotic affairs. For the Romantics, though, the autobiographical impasse grounds and explains how knowledge is possible as well as showing the tortuous passages between individual and general involved. De Man’s ‘specular moment’ is really an undoing of Kant’s theory of apperception, in which the subject thinking itself must differ from its thought in a disabling manner. The later de Man is not so bound to the logic of reflection and looks instead to understand the performative dimension – parabasis or ekbasis – by which self-framing convinces us dramatically to overlook the aporia arrived at logically. In this later position, we find something more appropriate to the post-Kantian dilemma Coleridgean performance so singularly posed.7 The suitably endless biography is clearly an impossible task. The outdistancing of life obviously happens in life itself. Nevertheless there is an opposite view that is picked up by The Times (apparently a Hegelian newspaper). It is true to the phenomenology of our own experience that we only know what we’ve lived through personally when we’re able to write it down, when we generalize about it. But Coleridge, like Schelling and in keeping with the speculative strain in Hegel, is one of the most powerful examples of a subject who inspires his biographers to realize that when this articulation of experience is achieved the present quality of lived experience has departed. Like Hegel’s philosopher, the biographer is always wise after the event, although unlike Hegel’s owl of Minerva he or she has no sense of the belatedness of their image of life (Gestalt des Lebens).8 Coleridge’s advocacy of ‘the heaven-descended KNOW THYSELF’ in Biographia Literaria as ‘the postulate of philosophy’ is troubled by his earlier insistence that ignorance is as much a constituent of



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self-consciousness as understanding: ‘Until you understand a writer’s ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding’ (I. 252, 232). This (paradoxically) defining indeterminacy leads him continually from psychology to ontology, ‘the science of BEING altogether’. His subsequent religious glossings of this loss of self as embracement by God (BL I, 283) cannot erase his participation in the fundamental philosophical matrix of his day. In these formulations, he is usually lodged deep in passages from Schelling, deploying positions as a player in the contemporary debate about the grounding of philosophy in an absolute self-consciousness. The debate centres on the loss of coherence entailed by enlisting this authority. How can the finite identity contain a repetition of the creative act of an ‘infinite I AM’ (BL I, 304)? For Schelling, the creative act of the infinite is to realize just this contraction. To such philosophers, exactly this undifferentiated, conceptually unmanaged existence, ‘the IMMEDIATE, which dwells in every man’, is retrospectively constructed by every mediating and so distorting generic description we require to make sense of our own experience (BL I, 243). Were that ambiguous link, simultaneously masking and disclosing, not to exist, our specific abstractions from Being would lack an essential authority. We may envy an ontological intimacy that is unabbreviated conceptually, but we may only long for it retrospectively. Equally, our conventional self-consciousness can’t be produced without conjuring up its inchoate source. We enter a dilemma in which our experience only belongs to us because it doesn’t. It doesn’t in two ways. The authenticating source has nothing of the personal about it; and the differentiated identity by which we differ from it employs categories everybody else uses, and so does not distinguish us uniquely. Psychoanalysis is perhaps the most familiar attempt to orchestrate this dialectic. In Lacan’s revision of Hegel (via Kojève) our symbolic systems perpetually register, in ways open to unconventional reading, the plenitude we must belong to but can’t sensibly live in. Again updating Hegelianism, we can say that, inevitably logocentric, our expressions can only gesture at what they have annulled by putting a line through themselves, by appearing sous râture. But Coleridge’s chaotic life forces his biographers to attempt the vertiginous road back from Derridean modesty to the Romantic portentousness Heidegger admired in Schelling. Sheer diffuseness cannot, given Coleridge’s philosophical situation, just be written off. Something else is disclosed, akin to what we know in less articulate people, but also what we hold them accountable for having shaped and made selfdefining decisions about. This emergence from unconscious determinants for which we are held responsible fascinated Schelling in the drafts for his unfinished Weltalter, a biography on the largest scale of past, present and future. Can Schelling, in whose thought Coleridge was steeped, help us interpret Coleridge’s literary biography? Or can Coleridge’s autobiographical ruses widen our understanding of philosophy’s investigation of its own grounding, a preoccupation he himself lived through? Like Schelling, Coleridge thought that to move behind scientific explanation was to enter a realm of freedom. The cost paid for this enlargement, though, was the ability to describe it in the

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particularized way other things are described. A problem of communication lay at the heart of philosophy, and this crisis took the shape of the autobiographical question. So, if conspicuously generic biographies of Coleridge sound philosophically brisk, empathetic ones sound naïve and (literally) self-defeating. Autobiography, understood in the manner of Romantic philosophy, is a solvent of particular genres and the promoter of the idea of a universal genre. Schelling understands nature’s compatibility with our faculties and needs on analogy with a choice of genre. In his System it is the Iliad and the Odyssey of spirit; less specifically in the Freiheitschrift and then in the Weltalter, the Absolute contraction for our benefit into a world to which we can belong is a performance all parties unravel at their peril. Return to a precontractual existence is no specular substitution but an unmanageable increase in Being that Schelling calls evil. Coleridge’s autobiographical ambitions for philosophy do appear to anticipate this kind of approach: ‘Seem to have made up my mind to write my metaphysical works, as my Life, & in my Life – intermixed with all the other events / or history of the mind & fortunes of S. T. Coleridge’.9 No single genre, autobiography here reads simultaneously from the inside and the outside, or reads the outside as the inside, with all the expressive variety that entails. The historical precedents and accompaniments of this tactic now need looking at.

The unlikely Stoic The most thoroughgoing and picturesque critique of the idea of an autonomous self contemporary with Coleridge’s career is Hegel’s account of self-consciousness in his Phenomenology of 1806. Hegel’s excoriation of Stoicism, Scepticism and the ‘unhappy consciousness’ takes apart three versions of autobiographical absolutism. Hegel condemns Stoicism for its abstraction from the world. It attains an admirable self-sufficiency and claims to have established freedom, but only through an inward autonomy that declutches from actuality. Like the ‘beautiful soul’, the aesthetic version of stoicism, it achieves an equilibrium of self-consciousness because it retreats from that mutually reflective shaping of self and world essential to Hegelian dialectic. Hegel’s confidence that the external world is ultimately rational means that any foreshortening of the attempt to equate self-consciousness with reality diminishes the former, our own rationality, as much as it abbreviates the latter, its natural embodiment. In Charles Taylor’s words, it ‘leads us into a kind of formalism’.10 It leads also to scepticism and a religious otherworldliness, both of which gain authority only through detachment and a kind of conscientious objection to that struggle towards a rationally ordered world that Hegel understands to be the project of Geist. Taken to its logical conclusion, Stoicism’s ultimate assertion of freedom is suicide, the most extreme sequestration from the world, the choice of that famous late Stoic, Seneca.



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Stoicism has a long history and many forms. Hegel’s reading, as Robert Solomon states, is selective, weighted towards the later, Roman version of its thought, neglectful of earlier forms to which the young Hegel and his fellow student, Hölderlin, had been attracted.11 It is not evident, though, that Coleridge would have warmed even to these forms of Stoicism. In the ‘Prolegomena’ to his edition of the Opus Maximum, Thomas McFarland sees Stoicism as a prime target for the Christian Coleridge, not least because of the embarrassing precursor that Stoicism supplies for Christianity. The Hegelian progression from Stoicism to the ‘unhappy consciousness’ with which he has been thought by many to characterize a religious sensibility obviously vindicates these fears. But Stoicism also offends the Coleridgean sense of self in its older versions, the kinds evoked by post-modernist thinkers like Gilles Deleuze whose interest in anomie, event, and the logic of a sense immune to conventional moralism or generalization can be profitably reflected back on what I have called the autobiographical absolutism of Romantics like Coleridge. For Hegel, such presumption would conjure up Fichte’s “I 5 I”, an interiorization of the epistemological relation that tries to overcome the aporia of reflection with performance.12 We saw that Coleridge called Fichte ‘hyperstoic’. Performance, though, is just what undoes the conceptual management of autobiography in the postmodern reworking of Stoicism that also seems to recapture Romantic speculations. The Stoic attitude can be described as unprincipled to the extent that it remains indifferent to the vagaries of fate. This indifference has both an ethical and a scientific dimension. Ethically, Stoicism promotes disengagement from the struggle against oppression; it fosters a consistently inward disposition that makes one adaptable to all occasions rather than outraged by them. The philosophy of the slave, Epictetus, is the great example of this successful re-description of one’s labour as no longer reflecting the masters’ dominance but as providing the self-consolidating compensations of labour. Labour, in that now sinister phrase, can make one free. Its use as the slogan over the gates of Auschwitz, though, gives the lie, as Hegel would have wanted, to the slave mentality. You cannot claim absolute self-sufficiency for anything that does not engage with the project of aligning the world with freedom. Hegel attacked the Stoic consolations of philosophical alternatives to the way the world goes. Nevertheless, stepping aside from the path of Hegel’s dialectic, we can see how Stoicism has become interestingly fissured. On the one hand, it sounds like a potentially boring and ultimately culpable imperturbability; on the other, it disposes one to react creatively to each event, reformulating an inner integrity in response to each new challenge to its imperviousness to external circumstance. The Stoic is never outraged by a violation of principle in his or her treatment, never embarrassed or discomfited by the recalcitrance of reality to moral rules. What of the Stoic attitude to science? Stoicism opposes the scientific struggle to comprehend systematically, in terms of cause and effect, a recalcitrant reality. In Gilles Deleuze’s aphorism, ‘the Stoic paradox is to affirm destiny and

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to deny necessity’.13 The Stoic’s radical interiority also places him or her in a position of ‘pure exteriority’ to the chains of cause and effect supporting scientific generalization. The distinction between an internal mind and an external body no longer helps here. This slipping behind that ultimate division, or Urteil, constitutive of judgement, would obviously strike a chord with the young Hölderlin. Manfred Frank argues that Hölderlin’s philosophy of Being in his very early Urtheil und Seyn (Judgement and Being) claimed Schelling’s allegiance before Schelling was captivated by the dominant Fichtean idiom he was conclusively breaking out of by 1800.14 Deleuze admired Schelling as one ‘who brings difference out of the night of the identical’.15 Deleuze’s neo-Stoicism favours a Schellingian Absolute, which develops itself through original differences and occasions, over a Hegelian one, which he thinks proceeds always in accordance with the principle of contradiction. The Stoic deals in events rather than causes, and events, therefore, are best understood as being linked expressively: they possess the coherence of a repeated present, and are not to be explained as the conclusions of natural necessity.16 The compossibility of incompatibles in the Stoic view of the universe is most easily grasped on analogy with the inconsistencies of a self; for inconsistency does not in any way disqualify one from having a personality, indeed may help typify it. Self-difference testifies to its unconscious variety of motives and desires rather than disqualifies it or throws it into disabling contradiction. Ethically and epistemologically, then, the Stoic position might frighten Coleridge by figuring too closely his actual philosophical predisposition. ‘Of the sects of ancient philosophy’, he wrote in Aids to Reflection, ‘the Stoic is, perhaps, the nearest to Christianity.’ Yet Coleridge’s difference with Stoicism is here described not doctrinally but as a disagreement over affect. Stoicism denies feelings in order to be moral; Coleridge’s Christianity brings ‘Feelings to a conformity with the Commands of the Conscience. Its especial aim, its characteristic operation, is to moralize the affections’ (Aids 96).17 For Coleridge, Stoicism clearly goes against his philosophy of friendship which we saw insist on communicative action to halt the progress of Stoicism into scepticism and the unhappy consciousness. Hamlet, a character to whom Coleridge was notoriously attracted and whom he characterized as experiencing a disabling incongruence between inner resources and outward action, allied himself to the Stoical character he attributed to Horatio: ‘Give me that man / That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him / In my heart’s core.’ Hamlet’s enthusiasm for Stoicism would have made his double, Coleridge, anxious to prove that the Christian historicization of Stoicism had truly rendered it obsolete.18 ‘Something too much of this,’ he might have urged with the Prince. The difficulties in disaffiliating himself from Stoicism would occur where Stoicism more vividly coincided with the kind of literary, inventive sketches he was offering of the mind’s own self-experience in thinking in Biographia Literaria and elsewhere. Stoicism supplied a pagan near approximation of Coleridge’s own uninhibited self-apprehension. But inwardness out of control mutates into the fanaticism Coleridge frequently condemns in Biographia Literaria, what



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Kant called the Schwärmerei of unmanageable thought, the ‘magic rod of fanaticism . . . preserved in the very adyta of human nature’(BL I, 30, 197). This, if you like, is Coleridge’s version of an ‘unhappy consciousness’ from whose religiosity he could, like Hegel, disassociate himself. He constantly justified the range of his own self-exploration with exorbitant promises, manifestos, programmes, dismissals of the closures of other thinkers, and so on. These are the autobiographical ruses with which he formed an attack on convention, opposing any one set of rules for describing the self. It is a constant rhetorical struggle, though, to distinguish them from the Stoical and fanatical susceptibilities he simultaneously condemns. Always justified in the final instance by appeal to biography, his variegated writing acts, as we have seen, like a solvent on genre. The anti-Hegelian delight in Stoicism of a Deleuzean kind has made more visible for us the Stoic resonances in this alternative to going by the rules. Deleuze, though, happily accepted the risks to intellectual respectability involved. Politically, Stoicism favoured a kind of universal republic, suggesting what came to be known as cosmopolitanism. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge remembers his earlier description in his periodical The Watchman of British supporters of the French Revolution who typically ‘expatriated’ themselves (BL I, 190). To be a ‘citizen of the world’ could imply the unexceptionable consequence of humane learning in heroes as acceptable as Goldsmith’s; or it could recall the Stoicism stemming from Lipsius, Montaigne and others, that worried the Elizabethan and Stuart establishments in various thinkers up to Hobbes.19 Political Stoicism’s replacement of absolute external authority by absolute inner authority was early recognized, and the consequent Hegelian progression from Stoicism to scepticism anxiously anticipated. Acceptance of authority precisely because essentially it doesn’t matter, because it holds no sway in foro interno, is a shaky foundation for political obedience. Yet such pragmatism would be the consequence of a Stoical desire to preserve inner virtue at all costs. In Richard Tuck’s verdict, ‘Stoicism and raison d’état went together’.20 Unsurprisingly, Montaigne was instinctively conservative; so was that epitome of the ‘unhappy consciousness’, John Calvin. Both advised an allegiance to the political status quo which went hand in hand with a Stoical self-government renouncing any interest in reforming external political authority. Nevertheless, Calvinism inspired much religious conflict, and, later, the antinomianism feeding into spectacular Romantic discussions of the untrammelled inner life with its accompanying public disorder, such as Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. And stoicism clearly is an element in the Rousseauism attributed to the Jacobins. In a recent essay, Galen Strawson opposed ‘episodic’ to ‘diachronic’ selfexperience, claiming that the former had as strong claims to being a proper description of our inner life as the latter.21 Diachronic self-experience is fundamentally (though not necessarily) dependent on narrative, while the episodic mode deals in all sorts of ‘form-finding’ exercises, understanding the past as a charging or feature of the present moment. Strawson has lists

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of both diachronics and episodics, and among the latter he places Coleridge, the Stoics and Montaigne. He also notes that the diachronic mode enjoys a current dominance in explanations of self-experience, although he believes this is unjustified, and even undesirable. Although working within different terms of reference, he is as anti-Hegelian as Deleuze. Like Deleuze, he is also a Bergsonian, although he probably comes to Bergson inadvertently via Proust. Constantly reworked whenever it is accessed, the past cannot, according to Bergsonism, precede ‘the creative act which constitutes’ it.22 For Strawson, emphasizing matière more than mémoire, ‘it turns out to be an inevitable consequence of the neurophysiological process of laying down memories that every studied conscious recall of past events brings an alteration. The implication is plain: the more you recall, retell, narrate yourself, the further you risk moving away from accurate self-understanding, from the truth of your own being’. Clearly an episodic Stoicism, alive on every occasion to the ‘present-shaping consequences of the past’ might inform autobiography with a sharper historical sense than would diachronic narrative.23 But was there a tradition offering an orderly political alternative to the line privileging self-consciousness, which ran from Stoic to Sceptic to Christian, and which Hegel dismissed? Machiavelli, for instance, argues for a necessary connection existing between reasons of state and the creative adequacy of the great political leader to all occasions. In emergencies, when the republic is under threat, the Prince deploys an unscripted pragmatism in response to whatever fortune throws up; he shows himself equal to events not predictable within the diachronic narratives whose explanatory efficacy is suspected by Strawson. The exemplary prince possesses the power to inform (Coleridge’s integrating Einbildungskraft) the occasion. Hamlet, despairing of matching the example set by Fortinbras, inveighs against, amongst other things, his loss of Machiavellian credentials: ‘How all occasions do inform against me.’24 Again, a Stoical capacity to act rightly irrespective of rules and precedent is very much akin to a singular creativity; except that the biography of this defining facility will change with each occasion on which it has to make up its own rules. In Gramsci’s updating, the ‘modern prince’ has become the social class (not an individual) whose creative response to history is vindicated by its growing ascendancy or hegemony. Hegel’s desired coincidence of private and public reason is to be achieved in the direction opposite to that advocated in his Phenomenology. Public is to be transmuted into private, not vice versa, by the persuasive performance of a class rationalized by embedded, ‘organic’ intellectuals. They set the standard for consensus. Gramsci thought that the battle to win consensus was just that: a contest open to all political persuasions. To a degree, this is also the victory Coleridge must have envisaged for his intellectual Clerisy. Comparably embedded in the popular community, as its National Church, distinct from any religious denomination, it represented the section of society he wanted to take the political lead. It was to do so, in Coleridge’s imagery, by an infectious growth. The ‘germ’ in ‘every parish’, the Clerisy’s members work like a benevolent,



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civilizing virus to instruct the populace in their essential well-being, a selfunderstanding crossing as many boundaries as there are aspects of ‘progressive amelioration’ (BL I. 227).25 And it is towards the vindication of this authority that his autobiographical performance makes its contribution, resisting conventional boundaries and customary disciplinary demarcations. ‘Principles’, as he commends them in Biographia Literaria and elsewhere, seem intended to describe a consistency elusive to orthodox, rule-governed notions of order, an authority akin to that of an imitation organically intimate with its original in the way that a copy cannot be. Here the rule is no rule of thumb, learned inductively from the past: a principle is inseparable from the productivity that realizes the event, not retrospective but ‘the germs of a prophecy’. Coleridge’s chosen example with which to introduce the notion of ‘principles’ is the apparent contradiction of Burke in supporting the American and condemning the French revolutions. A private consistency, the consistency of a personality, sets a standard justifying the apparent inconsistency of ‘practical inferences’ (BL I, 191–2). Burke is valued by Coleridge not as a doctrinal figure, but as a viral force: ‘in Mr Burke’s writings indeed the germs of almost all political truths may be found’ (BL I, 217). Burke’s thought displays a rhizomatic, nomadic power unconfined to a single political territory, to adapt Deleuze’s and Guattari’s terminology, virtues elaborated by Coleridge in his clinching example following that of Burke.26 For Coleridge next goes on to discuss the influence of the great Venetian colourist, Titian. The prophetic principle or idea explaining his unique achievement has disseminated so widely and ungovernably that it demonstrates, in the anecdote told Coleridge by Sir George Beaumont, that ‘our very sign boards . . . give evidence that there has been a Titian in the world’ (BL I, 192). Summarizing these points, we can say that Coleridge’s free and easy attitude towards the writing of his autobiography evinces both confidence and trepidation. Coleridge’s autobiography is, by turns, droll, pompous and strategic. It toys with the varieties of inwardness at its disposal in a knowing, sometimes arch manner. It is evidently acquainted with post-Kantian attempts, following from Kant’s third Critique, to universalize the individual experience without using scientific concepts. It is both exhilarated and suspicious of this grounding of philosophy in an inward Absolute. He lived at a time when the major philosophical effort was to see round the limits of idealism, or a philosophy of self-consciousness, and glimpse a human character more integrated than the Kantian one divided between phenomenal experience and noumenal obligation. Hegel’s critique of self-consciousness portrayed inwardness as a progress from the slave’s inner freedom from his master to Stoicism, and then through scepticism to the unhappy consciousness that apparently trusts in an otherworldly religious consolation. Certainly it can only be helped by a third party prescribing from outside the exhausted dialectic of self-consciousness. In all three cases, Hegel detected a crucial de-clutching from practical action, or the political project behind his Phenomenology of squaring social reality with rationality. Coleridge, in his remarks on Stoicism,

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is also anxious about the interchangeability of pagan and Christian categories. But, understood contrary to Hegel’s critique, Stoicism could be described as a creative response to, not escape from, each moral and political event as it occurs. And there is a well-trodden tradition in political thought attaching to this response, the one that privileges reasons of state over conventional ethical or religious directives. Although this sounds initially unpromising in helping to understand Christian Coleridge, in fact it does assist. Machiavelli’s exemplary Prince produces history in response to the occasions fortune strews in his path, unexpectedly and unpredictably. An individual virtue redefines public policy, analogous to the way in which Coleridge’s Clerisy, composed of individuals philosophically acquainted with Idea and Principle – those prophetic, germlike powers of intellectual dissemination, unbound by strict rule and precedent and capable of unforeseen historical transformation (Titian and sign boards) – are to educate the populace. Where the self-dispersal of ostensibly capricious autobiography in fact mimes this process, as Coleridge frequently indicates it does, then Biographia Literaria is justified.

Behind the logic of reflection When, therefore, we confront Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, we are presented with a standing refutation of the ‘Coleridge’ of much conventional biography. Instead, the apparently dysfunctional dissipation of Coleridge’s autobiographical effort recapitulates the central philosophical effort of his age to understand the vocabularies of selfhood that model an understanding of Being. Logically speaking, Being is like a universal quantifier, provided we accept that no individual value can satisfy it. This is as much as to say that logical discourse just doesn’t work here. Anterior to the scientific realm, a purposive language of freedom rushes in to fill the void left by the categories by which we understand the world. In this spiritual alternative, the medium by which we understand each other is, according to Coleridge’s translation from Schelling’s Abhandlungen, ‘freedom’; and so ‘besides the language of words, there is a language of spirits’ (BL I, 244, 290). So Coleridge searches for a language adequate to freedom. It is understandably assumed this must be an aesthetic expression, specifically that language of poetry over whose definition he claims to be disputing with Wordsworth throughout Biographia Literaria. Further backing is added when in his System, the work Coleridge most openly acknowledges as his source, Schelling pronounces aesthetic intuition to be the objective form of the immediate intuition of freedom. In art, in other words, we can experience a repetition (‘a second intuition’, zweite Anschauung)27 of that contraction of absolute possibilities to finite form. The assumption that this second intuition has to be aesthetic is understandable given the way it fits into Biographia Literaria’s plot or one of them (to settle the controversy over what might constitute ‘a real poetic character’). But Schelling never says that the



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aesthetic is the only possible form of this repetition, and Coleridge’s ontology, largely couched in theological language, suggests he didn’t think this either. Yet the aesthetic concentration of solutions in Coleridge’s most famous work has fed a Romantic ideology that self-servingly ignores all other non-scientific forms of being in the world in favour of the aesthetic. In its peculiar, Romantic meaning, freedom becomes the name for something much wider than a single genre. Schelling’s early Abhandlungen (1795), from which Coleridge draws and plagiarizes much of the philosophical context in the first volume of Biographia Literaria, is actually an exposition of Fichte. Its full title, translated, is Treatises on the Explanation of the Idealism of the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’; and it basically addresses the question of what should be the fate of Kantianism after Kant. Schelling is not concerned with what stands in the way of the dissemination of Kant’s philosophy, but with the reasons why both adherents and opponents have fundamentally misunderstood it. And the reason turns out to be that Kantianism has been misinterpreted as being an academic exercise (nur von Schulphilosophen verstanden).28 Then comes the language of spirits passage, showing that from the start of his treatise Schelling is homing in on the languages of freedom he thinks that Kant is calling for in contradistinction to the technical, obscure, academic jargon with which his philosophy highlights this linguistic need. Since his days at the Tübingen Stift, Schelling had opposed the official post-Kantian establishment which, he thought, in its observance of the letter rather than the spirit of Kantian philosophy, had unscrupulously narrowed Kant’s meaning to support a reactionary religious establishment.29 The person capable of addressing Schelling’s central post-Kantian question – ‘What finally is the real content of our representations?’ – is above all not one ‘to whom his own existence is itself a lifeless thought (matter Gedanke)’.30 The sign of a fitting philosophical animation is to be aware, unlike devotees and opponents of Kant alike, that an immediate intuition is at the basis of Kantianism, and is preceded by a liveliness of sensibility (eine Affektion unserer Sinnlichkeit).31 And the languages of this integrated, characteristically human response employ the expressive resources of an entire culture, not the terminology of the schools. But they do so with philosophical knowingness, as a sign of the limitations of cerebration or formal reasoning. Ultimately this will involve both Schelling and Coleridge in the freighting of Reason with sense, imagination and affect. This transgression of the boundaries Kant drew round the different faculties can look initially like that anthropologizing of logic deplored by Kant, but it is actually its opposite.32 The logic of reflection, in other words, by which reality mirrors what we are capable of understanding of it, must give way to other more expressive forms of orientation, more akin to autobiographical performance, perhaps, if we are to grasp the production of knowledge in the round. Now Schelling takes Fichte as the precedent for all this, but Coleridge is well aware of the younger man’s existential originality here. Early on in the Abhandlungen, Schelling shows that he is moving on. He argues that ‘Mind / Spirit (Geist), while principally intuiting Objects, only intuits itself’.33 By

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the time of Schelling’s Darlegung of 1806, his final Fichtean exposition, Geist is interchangeable with das Seyn, or Being.34 But earlier, the neo-Platonic worry that knowledge of something is only possible by something of a like nature has already merged for the post-Kantians with the problem of joining together Kant’s two worlds of noumena and phenomena, moral and cognitive experience, more securely than Kant himself did. Coleridge shared this neoPlatonic matrix of the problem, but also made Schelling’s easy transition to Kantian problems (BL I, 114–15). Basically, Schelling views the realm of necessity and objective law, phenomena, as a repetition of the realm of freedom, or noumena. So far this is pure Fichte, for whom the external world is the not-I required for the I’s own self-defining activity to take place. But Schelling goes on to claim that ‘Spirit (Geist) is only Spirit insofar as it becomes an Object for itself, insofar, that is, as it becomes finite’.35 This statement has two implications, taking Schelling well beyond Fichte and accentuating his voluntarist position. The first is the implication that the universal subject here determines itself both by adopting objective form and by choosing to do so, determining objects and determining to do so in a voluntary sense. The second implication is that we then encounter the performance of eternal becoming (ewiges Werden) as our knowledge or science of the world repeats and maps the drama of a spirit that constrains itself (selbst beschränkt) in the endless act of producing itself. But grasp of what that constraint has involved is not to be gained from the point of view of consciousness, of mind or one side of the self-division of Geist. Rather, as with Kant, feeling has to come in to supplement philosophical thinking. The positive activity of Geist in bounding itself with objective form is to give it the possibility of becoming something; the negative activity in so determining and shrinking its boundlessness is felt as grieving or regret (Leiden).36 Sensibility, an affectivity that is wider than the merely aesthetic, comes in to supplement the deficiencies of philosophy in delineating the full parameters of the theory of knowledge. When Coleridge makes his own advance on Fichte in Biographia Literaria, it is more helpful to read it as this kind of insistence on a richer self active in philosophical thinking than a mistaken objection to Fichte’s ‘egoism’: mistaken since Fichte, as mentioned above, was discussing the universal subject needed to explain how knowledge is possible and how Kant’s two worlds of freedom and necessity connect. When Coleridge writes disconcertingly on his first page that ‘the least of what I have written concerns me personally’, he is similarly not disowning his autobiography but initiating a critique of the ‘personal’ (in an ‘Age of personality’ he deplored) as a sufficient definition of the self, (BL I, 5, 41). His attack on Fichte as ‘hyperstoic’ alleges that Fichte is insensible to nature, formal and devoid of affect in his theology, and ethically committed to ‘mortification of the natural passions and desires’. His inadequacy is then measured in a footnoted ‘dithyrambic ode’, where he is accused of forcing a false ‘syntax’ upon the world. I of the world’s whole Lexicon the root! Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight



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The genitive and ablative to boot: The accusative of wrong, the nom’native of right, And in all cases the case absolute . . . In the last chapter we will consider Coleridge’s own grammar or spelling of the world. In fact, the Fichte described here sounds like a parody of Coleridge, both because of Coleridge’s worries about the possible interchangeableness of Stoic and Christian inwardness, here given satirical force, and because Coleridge himself uses an idea of language throughout Biographia Literaria as a touchstone of generosity of philosophical understanding. We have noted this also to be Schelling’s anti-scholastic concern in finding a future for Kantianism. But what might the ‘language of spirits’ supplementing that of ‘words’ have meant for Coleridge? Schelling, as we have seen, viewed our experience as a repetition of an anterior activity whose choice thus to determine its variety also entailed a negative emotion (Leiden) at being curtailed in this way. Both positive and negative aspects of this scenario have to be registered by an adequate description of our effective historicization of Geist or Being. Hence the need for a philosophical approach less cerebral than formal ratiocination, but one whose affective expression exceeds ordinary linguistic usage. It is then significant that Coleridge, with Schelling’s Philosophische Schriften on his lap, as it were, dictates a series of attacks on bad historicism and failed repetitions in literary and philosophical practice. A quick word on plagiarism is needed here. Coleridge frequently translates verbatim without acknowledgement in the crucial philosophical expositions of the first volume of Biographia Literaria. There is no point in disputing this: in a university he would have been hauled up before the relevant disciplinary committee. However, once we abandon the attempt to extenuate, we can still note how interesting it is that as he embarks on his major plagiarisms in Chapter 9 he considers the question of whether or not philosophy is a science. ‘I began to ask myself; is a system of philosophy, as different from mere history and historic classification, possible?’ (BL I, 141). For philosophy is, in any case, in a funny disciplinary position. Complaints that philosophy hasn’t made much progress, that we shouldn’t still have to read Plato and Kant if their errors have been properly exposed and surpassed, seem beside the point. Equally unsatisfactory, though, would be to claim that philosophy, like art, is primarily of expressive value; that it will always be historically important in the way that other characteristic cultural productions are, because they articulate human concerns in an original way within their historical terms of reference. To settle for this is to ignore philosophy’s undoubted scientific interest in getting the terms of reference right. Philosophers want to prove each other right or wrong; they want to correct each other’s methodologies; they change the philosophical agenda out of a desire to write more effectively. Yet, all said and done, definitive conclusions escape them, no great philosophy is entirely laid to rest, and we do value philosophies as benchmarks of the human spirit, of the nature of aspiration, of the different choices of life that we can make.

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It therefore appears more appropriate to look at the way in which we historicize the perennial philosophical urge to discover the truth. And, in the case of the philosopher, Schelling, whom Coleridge felt closest to, the issue of historicization was central anyway to his philosophical understanding of the infinite productivity of Being. The local examples of historicization Coleridge criticizes begin early in the first volume of Biographia. His attack on English neoclassical verse in Chapter 1 is an attack on poor imitation; and imitation is to be understood as borrowing from past writing. When it is poor, argues Coleridge, ‘all the propriety [is] lost in the transfer’ (BL I, 20). His example is Gray’s version in ‘The Bard’ of Gratiano’s speech on the ‘skarfed bark’, which returns from its voyage reduced to tatters by the ‘strumpet wind’, an example that itself tells a story of historical changeability. Furthermore, bad imitation, thinks Coleridge, may be based on even less successful historicizations that take place when an English pupil is made to write Latin verses at school. Then he is ordered to follow his Gradus ad Parnassum in order to concoct verse composed of synonyms of earlier models. You look up another word for each word in the line you are imitating and pass off your own as original. Coleridge coins a new word, ‘ferrumination’, to describe the effect. The editors of Biographia Literaria point out that the examples of this practice Coleridge gives are false, which still leaves him attacking a principle: the principle that the re-animation of the past in the present takes place through synonymy (BL I, 21n.). Coleridge’s entire philosophical effort, however, of which ‘ferrumination’ is a small example, is to desynonymize words of the same meaning, and thus to participate in and abet the progress of knowledge. Desynonymy shows language growing out of itself, like Schelling’s Absolute, leaving a welter of inchoate, unspelled sound behind. Synonymy is repetition without a sense of history, without a sense of propriety. Desynonymy respects the difference necessary for a truth to reproduce itself in history, under different historical circumstances. And Coleridge’s own desynonymized word for this is ‘tautegory’. Distrust of synonymy also helps explain why Coleridge sees the poetry of his own time as stereotyped – the product of indefinite variations on the same pieces of type. The French and Pope’s versions of Homer are to blame. Translation, geographically and historically understood, either authenticates or vitiates creative effort. For Coleridge, the true genius is less excited by personal concerns than by those in which origin and project displace present coincidence: ‘the man of genius lives most in the ideal world, in which the present is still constituted by the future or the past; and because his feelings have been habitually associated with thoughts and images, to the number, clearness and vivacity of which the sensation of self is always in an inverse proportion’ (BL I, 43–4). He comes to himself via a process of translation by which he grasps his own historical agency. This sounds idealist, but other of Coleridge’s metaphors are quite materialist. Forgery rather than exchange of currency is another image of the abuse of imitation. Even then, one has the sense that for Coleridge fiscal metaphors, when applied to usage or writing, signify the reading public left to their own devices, and finding their own



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level, of learning and expertise, with disastrous results. Coleridge’s attacks on the reading public, in Biographia Literaria and elsewhere, are certainly elitist, but they are also directed against the notion that the meaning of writing could ever be fixed by present reception. Critics who, in forming public opinion, try to do that betray the historical awareness that should have prevented them. They become arbitrary, just as the public opinion they help form becomes personal. General literacy for Coleridge means that ‘all men being supposed able to read, and all readers able to judge, the multitudinous PUBLIC, shaped into personal unity by the magic of abstraction, sits nominal despot on the throne of criticism’ (BL I, 59). To personalize is to abbreviate the origins of self in productive repetition as it was set out in the contemporary philosophy powering the thought of Biographia Literaria. Coleridge could put up with the Edinburgh Review, he later tells us, provided it neither personalized its criticism nor brought into play historically unconnected juvenile works of the author under consideration. Knowing more than what the author’s publication suggested was, in this case, to know less because of the ‘personal’ nature of the criticism for which such information was habitually used. Coleridge’s editors note that he is quoting unacknowledged and verbatim a passage from Lessing here (BL I, 108–9). The ensuing discussion of Southey that takes up the remainder of Chapter 3 appears fairly anodyne. But, as the start of the next chapter makes clear, the critical aim is to show that there was nothing new about him. Coleridge’s historicism makes him a critic of the ‘new’ anyway; the apparent digression into considerations of the misnomer of ‘a new school of poetry’ to which Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge supposedly belonged is keyed into this larger critique. The personal criticism driven by the ‘new’ comes at the end of a process of literary decline, a series of contractions without production, synonyms without linguistic birth or future, as books fall from possessing the status of oracles to being condemned as ‘culprits’. No wonder that authors, thinks Coleridge, return the compliment to their readers, and cater for the ‘personal’ reading public. Author and reader become interchangeable, synonyms for each other, mutually abusive. The figure Coleridge lights on to give a reductio ad absurdum for this synonymy is the ‘bull’ or pun. His example, ‘I was a fine child but they changed me’, is explained as follows: The first conception expressed in the word ‘I’, is that of personal identity – Ego contemplans: the second expressed in the word ‘me’, is the visual image or object by which the mind represents to itself its past condition, or rather, its personal identity under the form in which it imagined itself previously to have existed. – Ego contemplatus. (BL I, 72n.) We are close to Wordsworth’s speculations in The Prelude on feeling he was ‘two beings’. Strawson, too, writes: ‘It’s clear to me that events in my remoter past didn’t happen to me [that which I now apprehend myself to be when I’m apprehending myself specifically as an inner mental presence or self].’37 What

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the bull does is to vulgarize very precise and puzzling distinctions. We are connected to much of our origins through difference rather than resemblance, and the identity involved, recognized in law, for example, is not something we can consistently experience from a single, individual point of view. It is more dramatic than that. Nevertheless, the fact that we have been that other person seems irrefutable and complicates our sense of immediacy and inalienable intimacy with our present. That, too, will one day be distant and other. This fact must feature in our accounts of what it is to be us, diversifying and pluralizing the tactics of autobiography, desynonymizing ourselves, we might say. To obliterate these tensions is like making a crude pun. ‘A talent for mimicry’, writes Coleridge in the same vein in his next important footnote, ‘seems strongest where the human race are most degraded.’ Eventually this will sound similar to Coleridge’s attack on the kind of synonymy Wordsworth appeared to desire for his poetry by using ‘the real language of men’. By contrast, Coleridge, in his main text now, uses a quotation from Aristophanes’ The Frogs that he thinks tells of Bacchus’ refusal of mimicry. Instead, Bacchus tries to ‘bring back the spirit of old and genuine poesy’, rather as Wordsworth aspired to do according to the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (BL I, 76 and n.). But whether or not Wordsworth succeeded is, Coleridge argues, left undecided by his critics, because they opt for the synonymy of those who ‘satirize by copying’ (thus rehearsing Wordsworth’s fault where it exists) rather than the desynonymy of those who historicize (a Wordsworthian virtue if they could only detect it). Coleridge’s own early enthusiasm for Wordsworth’s poetry is then characterized by a critical appreciation of Wordsworth’s preservation of historical difference in order to intensify his expression of present experience. That, where properly realized, must be the lyrical content of his ballads. Coleridge interposes a quotation from The Friend: ‘To find no contradiction [the kind relished in punning] in the union of old and new; to contemplate the ANCIENT of days and all his works with feelings as fresh, as if all had then sprung forth at the first creative fiat; characterises the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help unravel it’ (BL I, 80). Coleridge’s autobiography concerns itself with a major departure in German philosophy. British empiricism, represented by David Hartley, fails to explain how knowledge is possible; it fails to avoid ‘all the difficulties, all the incomprehensibility . . . of intercommunion between substances that have no one property in common’ (BL I, 117). As Fichte thought, the activity of the mind seems to be the key to bypassing the limitations of a logic according to which the mind reflects its object in some undisclosed manner. Even self-consciousness, where subject and object are the same, opens up an infinite regress in which each self-reflection must entail a further validating reflection. If, however, Fichte means to reduce all matter to the ‘I’, and overcome the nature/mind divide in that way, then, in Coleridge’s terms, he appears to be engaging in a crude synonymizing. Schelling, on the other hand, effectively describes the subject’s continuing identity with its object as its productive diversity, as desynonymy. An original presupposition for any knowledge to be possible – Being’s contraction



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into identifiable objectivity – is repeated in miniature by every individual act of knowledge. The productive flair with which the larger Spirit or Being carries on its autobiography is then repeated by the tactics of the individual, such as Coleridge, in his biographical sketches of himself. Let’s resume the argument of this chapter briefly to see where it has led. Coleridge’s autobiography is notoriously unsystematic. Its enjoyment of its own inward diversity appears to have no need of strict principles. It therefore comes closer to an episodic, Stoical versatility in response to unpredictable and often adverse circumstances than to a persevering Christian narrative. Coleridge, though, could not have agreed with the major contemporary philosophical critique of Stoicism by Hegel because Hegel happily made the transition from Stoical self-sufficiency to religious otherworldliness into part of his critique of both. Postmodern reinterpretation of Stoicism does offer an alternative to Hegelian stricture, and suggests another dimension to Coleridge’s ambition to write his works as his life. Other attacks on a dominant view that the construction of self is necessarily narrative, like Galen Strawson’s, allied to scepticism that to be able to narrate the self is a sign of goodness or psychic flourishing, support Coleridge’s autobiographical solution. Furthermore, the coincidence of Coleridge’s autobiographical practice with an autobiographical absolutism developed from Fichte to Schelling rivals Hegel’s account. The charge of political irresponsibility that Hegel had levelled at the sequence from Stoicism to the ‘unhappy consciousness’ can, in any case, be answered by a Machiavellian tradition, replete with Stoicism, that chimes with Coleridge’s own political advocacy of a class of intellectuals, the Clerisy, embedded in the community, persuading the populace, to whom they minister, by force of private conviction. But the coincidence of the debate about the genres in which the self might be legitimately constructed with a Romantic philosophical problematic remains striking enough now for one to believe that it must have gripped Coleridge and fired his project. For, whether imagined in Hegelian narrative or Stoic episode, our mode of self-understanding determines for these philosophers just about everything else. And in the Schellingian version more congenial to Coleridge – and maybe a reason for his not continuing to read Hegel – the individual’s repetition of a dilemma of ontological awareness is not the hubris of that self-consciousness but its very possibility. The self repeats with a difference, desynonymizes; and this difference from its Being makes it socialized, articulate, viable. Yet, in a way acknowledged by so much Romantic writing the self is further assured of that functionality it has now achieved by accompanying feelings of regret or sadness or longing – Schelling’s Leiden in the Abhandlungen and Sehnsucht in the System and in German Romanticism generally. However unrealistic, this affect helps reconstruct what we cannot sensibly think, an ultimate trans-individual authentication of our individual selves; or, in Schelling’s grand metaphysical extrapolation, the understanding of the world as diverse productions from an undifferentiated unity. The requirement that the product identify its source appropriately escapes the

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explanatory sequence of cause and effect (except in quantum physics?), which, for post-Kantians, vitiated Kant’s related attempt to explain how the unknowable noumenal world might connect to the phenomenal world of our experience. Schelling’s post-Kantian expansion ‘completed’ Kantianism by recruiting more and more of sensibility to its philosophical purpose. Like Coleridge’s philosophical ‘friendship’, it used affect to fuel its own indirect reconstruction of metaphysical production. The existentialism that followed continued this process of the retrospective endowment of feeling – angst, care, love – with the authority for maintaining philosophical responsibility for an openness to the undifferentiated. This tactic for getting at Being philosophically is still widely suspected of harbouring a contradictory psychologism today. The first volume of Biographia Literaria, is, it seems to me, comparably controversial. If it does write Coleridge’s metaphysics in his life, as I am suggesting, it plots the same process. Its miscellaneous, anecdotal range makes for mixed, often lively reading, and must have been engaging at the time, appearing as it did on the back of Coleridge’s success with Remorse at Drury Lane a few years before, a success that had enhanced his public standing more effectively than his intermittent popularity as a lecturer at the British Institution earlier. But it is as a pioneer of the philosophical use of affect that Biographia Literaria fits into the pattern we suggested for understanding The Friend, in its reconstructed form a near contemporary of Biographia Literaria. And that success comes from a critique of the ‘personal’ that endows autobiography with Coleridge’s characteristic and fascinating philosophical intensity.

Chapter Six

Renewing Friendship: Coleridge’s ‘Rifacciamento’ of Philosophy

Affective communication Coleridge has long been thought of as someone who supplements dry philosophical schemes with considerations of affect. Epistemological and ethical orientations in his writings often result from his departure from original sources in order to inflect them with a recognizably personal response. Logical categories and categorical imperatives are often made to contradict their primary functions by being obliged, when Coleridge handles them, to implement strategies of relationship and love inimical to the founding purpose they possessed in their home philosophies.1 The formalism of Kantian ethics is one of Coleridge’s recurrent examples of an abstract sphere in need of emotional supplement. Earlier, we saw him argue that Fichte’s post-Kantian Stoicism only intensified Kant’s own Stoic, inexpressive tendency. Coleridge linked this to Fichte’s lack of philsophical interest in expression and communication generally. For Coleridge, as for most people, emotion is relational and social in origin. In Hegel’s Phenomenology and Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’, a consciousness devoid of relationship can only become constitutionally unhappy. Such dejection is the emotional equivalent of a solipsistic epistemology; a state symptomatic of consciousness detached from ‘Spirit’ for Hegel, one disqualified from enjoying a satisfying individuality because of its loss of a validating community. Coleridge’s idea of friendship is arguably his own comparable but more affectively charged solution to the same problem. Coleridge is, I suppose, thought of more as a Platonist than an Aristotelian, but in this salient and defining characteristic his thinking is more in line with the Aristotelian idea that a telos or special background is required for knowledge and moral belief to make sense. ‘Ought’ cannot be detached from ‘is’ because the affective naturalism explaining why we hold some actions to be virtuous and others not to be virtuous is only decipherable within a certain cultural map to which the overriding Kantian virtue of universalizability is too skeletal a key.2 But to this familiar framework Coleridge again adds the allimportant dimension of relationship. As a post-Kantian thinker, I would like to claim, Coleridge can only function when he is able to view the connections he makes in different discourses as kinds of dramatic relationship expressive

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of the person knowing, as much as of the integrative process by which that person ascertains his or her knowledge. His occasional philosophical originality and his difficulties arise from this disposition. Coleridge’s idea of tautegory, which anticipates Schelling’s historicist philosophy of revelation while Schelling himself is not publishing, is also a theory of how relationships can be maintained across time and between us and our productive origins. Differences with Schelling, especially on the affective possibilities open to such relationships, should not be allowed to obscure this basic affinity of purpose and project. But aren’t romantic poets everywhere in the business of spreading ‘relationship and love’? Coleridge’s problems and peculiar interests, though, arise when Wordsworth’s words are applied not only to the way we relate the different aspects of our experiences whose diversity and exclusive demands might otherwise unbalance or grievously narrow our perspective on the world. Coleridge would have no objection to seeing his task as to resist the monological tendency of different discourses to avoid dialogue: to ignore the fact that, despite their oppositions, such as that between science and poetry, for example, they are obliged to cohere within a single point of view, a human monad, deploying both of them, often simultaneously. Coleridge, though, takes this process of integration further by in effect claiming that such tensions inhere already within each of these distinct discourses, knowledges, politics or whatever. Intrinsic to their self-constitution must be the consideration that they belong by definition to an affective being who lives by dialogue and relationship, a being to whom any project will only belong if it reflects or expresses this defining orientation towards the response of others. Truth is one thing, according to The Friend, and the ‘reception of Truth’ is its further realization by which ‘we became what we are’.3 It would, Coleridge implies, be too parsimonious a definition of truth which regarded its affective role in human becoming as irrelevant. A cynical view of Coleridge (and one I have often been tempted by) is that this characterization is altogether a wonderfully convenient concession to make to someone as messy as our hero. Generosity of this kind has, after all, had many precursors, sympathetic readers who see Coleridge’s refusal to submit exactly to the protocols of the discipline with whose authority he is opining as indications not of incompetence but rather of that hermeneutic ideal – to know and voice the author you are reading with a knowledge superior to the author’s own knowledge. In hermeneutics, the reception of truth can critique the truth itself, or any notion of truth divorced from its reception. Norman Fruman’s ultimately unhelpful attack on Coleridgean scholarship in the 70s did convincingly insist on one point: that Coleridgean plagiarism often involved attributing to the person from whom he was borrowing just that same plagiaristic habit he was indulging, as if calling a police officer to distract the person whose pocket you are picking. Coleridge’s rhetoric created the myth of Coleridgean reading in which he understood the author better than the author did himself or herself because Coleridge could see through claims to be



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an original; claims, in effect, to enjoy an isolated individuality, one undefined by relationship and reception. Visible behind pretensions to singularity was the actual series of relationships with precursors which, while invalidating notions of sole ownership, also lit up that background of relationship and personal need ensuring that the knowledge under consideration could belong to us. Without that belonging, founded on communicability, knowledge foundered. Certainly this transparency was frequently diagnosed by Coleridge not as a window upon elective affinities between one author and another but as a glass through which he detected borrowings meriting the strictures that subsequent critics have then applied to him.4 Genial coincidences and divine ventriloquism prevail less often with Coleridge than the kind of verdict he pronounced on Sir James Mackintosh’s lectures – ‘a wretched patchwork of plagiarisms from Condillac.’5 But the antagonistic idiom, encouraged it has to be said by Coleridge himself, and taken up by his critics, obscures the other idiom of relationship and its significance to his view of understanding. Writing to Southey at a typically exciting and vulnerable moment of his philosophical career, Coleridge criticizes the associationist system of David Hartley (Observations on Man) that he is in the process of claiming to have surpassed, or convincing himself that he has surpassed, because: ‘Believe me, Southey! A metaphysical Solution, that does not instantly tell for something in the Heart, is grievously to be suspected as apocry[p]hal.’6 Coleridge’s choice of the word ‘apocryphal’ is arresting. He doesn’t say that the philosophy which makes no affective impression is mechanical, or soulless, or un-poetic, as he does on many other occasions. He says that, on its own terms, it is unclear. It tells us nothing. It hides any possible justification it might have. The heartless metaphysical solution will remain obscure, or have an essentially cryptic meaning beyond our ken, beyond, that is, what is legitimately revealed to us. Unless the sympathetic chord is struck, the philosophizing will remain internally incoherent, and the best we can do for it is postulate an explanation elsewhere, in a hidden place to which it does not and may never, short of apocalyptic happenings, give us access. The heart, in (dare one say it, given The Friend’s stern words on Rousseau) Rousseauistic fashion, contributes towards transparency, cutting through a potentially abstruse discussion to ensure that communication is achieved. Coleridge’s target is not, no doubt, those socalled civilized departures from the natural state which are Rousseau’s targets. Nevertheless, Coleridge is insisting that knowledge which is not communicable is nonsense, and that communicability depends not on the impersonal transmission of ciphers but on the affective resolution of information for a naturally relational being. Communication for Coleridge the philosopher became particularly difficult for him when he changed theoretical idioms from, roughly, the Dissenting radical tradition into which British empiricism after Hume had fallen – the tradition of Hartley, Priestley and Godwin, laced with the common-sense philosophy of Hume’s British opponents – into a German idiom.7 This change of idiom was of course itself complicated by Coleridge’s lasting commitment

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to Christianity, and, as Coleridge’s remark to Southey revealed, to the models of God’s communications to us – revelation embedded within Christian theology. It is, however, within the new German idiom that Coleridge’s major philosophical initiative within the history of British philosophy is most persuasively claimed to have taken place. J.H. Muirhead, an early and indefatigable champion of this view, saw him ‘as a stage in the development of a national form of idealistic philosophy . . . the voluntaristic form of idealist philosophy, of which Coleridge was the founder, and remains today the most distinguished representative’. Coleridge, he maintains, substituted a ‘personalistic metaphysics . . . for the pantheistic impersonalism of Schelling’.8 Philosophically speaking, the voluntarism of Coleridge’s idealism is a twisting away from Schelling, not a parroting of him. Like his modifications of Kantian ethics, his departure is once more intended to map a model of relationship, and so of communication, on to Schelling’s Absolute grounding of knowledge. He transformed the Absolute ground of Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) and Naturphilosophie generally into an activity demanding a personal response in order to ensure that its knowledge had been communicated to us and thus legitimated as knowledge. Theological implications, one might say, were a welcome bonus, but Coleridge must have thought philosophical requirements by themselves justified his search for relationship. Schelling did end up producing an exhaustive philosophy of revelation, but even there, and certainly on the way there in the Freedom essay and the Weltalter (Ages of the World), the convergence of his Absolute with a divine indifference is different from Coleridge’s God. Schelling’s God evolves out of a formless priority, one rotating obsessively upon itself. To escape this frustration, it contracts into existence (every pun intended) to gain identity in nature and history and so, as Logos, to render these categories legible at the same time. But, crucially, this God remains simultaneously unconditioned, and so unsusceptible of the kind of relationship Coleridge wants. As Schelling puts it in the Weltalter, ‘the unconditioned is indeed both being [undifferentiated] and what-is [the particulars of nature and the stages of history]. But not as that which is both being and what-is . . .’9 It cannot be the something it would have to be for us to be able to relate to it. If it were, it would become differentiated, and so conditioned, losing the Absolute character from which it arose. If we participate in it, like to like, as Schelling’s Freedom essay seems to want, this freedom is precisely freedom from the differential, relational knowledge necessary for identity. And it is ‘identity philosophy’ which Schelling’s ‘positive’ philosophy of the Absolute complements.10 Like the Unconscious, the Absolute can be articulate in every particular instance of nature and history, truly revelatory, something positive, while remaining undifferentiated, never graspable on its own terms. Arguably, this is the elusive habit of Schelling’s philosophy at all stages of his long career. As Karl Jaspers puts it: ‘Schelling sketched systems, but he always thought what was not contained in these systems’.11 Schelling’s need to understand the world as revealed signals the ‘fall’ measuring our distance from God; it also furnishes the means of our salvation.



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Salvation, though, is not achieved by undoing God’s manifest being and returning, impossibly, to his grounding indifference. Such unravelling, the Freedom essay makes clear, exemplifies evil. Instead we must unpack more liberally the notion of revelation. We become fulfilled in making ourselves the recipients of God’s communication of himself in the fittingness of his chosen world to our best selves. The languages of this compatibility or sense of proper orientation are many – aesthetic, moral, religious, historical. They handle the excess Schelling seems obliged to think beyond the jurisdiction of whatever systematic sketch he has in hand. They are certainly not exclusively Christian, nor Platonic, more Wittgensteinian in their philosophical assumption of the role of saying what it is that philosophy itself may show but cannot say at any particular moment. Here is a major difference between Schelling and Coleridge. In both, the quality of relationship is what legitimates the comprehensiveness of our knowledge of the world. But crucial for Coleridge is the personal, affective quality of such relationship, expressed in the caring love of a Deity who has ‘saved’ us or some suchlike thing. For Schelling, it is the variety of our attachment, pre-conceptual as well as conceptual, to a world that might have been totally different, which it is the function of God to underwrite. Relationship facilitates acquaintance without invoking an acquaintance or person, as Coleridge does.

Pantheism and relationship Schelling’s ingenuity in getting his Absolute/God to slip differentiation while remaining positive ensures its historical mobility as well. The contracting of God into the world has no timing. ‘Time begins perpetually’, as Coleridge’s marginal note to Jacobi’s treatise on Spinoza has it.12 As the ground of the world, it can only reveal what has always been the case since nothing can happen without its grounding. We can never, that is, get at the notion of God other than through material revelation, but that revelation, to be revelation, belongs elsewhere and has always happened. Yet it is only as revelation that the world is intelligible. It cannot as a subject master itself as object, nor as object can it contain a subject which knows it for what it is. Schelling’s God takes off from that conundrum. Recent re-readings or revivals of Schelling, from those of Manfred Frank to Slavoj Žižek’s, have taken the unidentifiable but inseparable unity of spirit and matter (subject and object) as anticipatory of subsequent materialisms.13 Subject rather than object loses out in this scenario. In these readings of him, Schelling sets out the beginnings of Marxist or Lacanian dialectics. Our loss of individuality in the attempt to define ourselves refers us back to forces of production indifferent to that opposition of subject and object on which our individuality depends. And any process so careful to avoid intentionality, whose left hand (ground, being) must above all not know what its right hand (the grounded, what-is, nature, history) is doing,

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would seem to favour explanation of human freedom and nature through an overall instrumentalism which elevates (rather than reduces) us to material existence. Coleridge criticizes Spinoza because he ‘saw God in the ground only and . . . not likewise in his moral, intellectual, existential and personal Godhead’.14 Clearly the criticism of Spinoza would have to be modified to take account of the greater elusiveness of Schelling’s God, a God who exists neither as ground nor as person but as their undifferentiated identity. Sometimes, indeed, in his eagerness to excuse God the relationship so essential to Coleridge’s thinking, Schelling in the Weltalter seems to subordinate God to his own process, so that even if we for a second caught his presence we still would miss his point. Again, the thinking here is similar to (and perhaps more accessible to us through) Freud, Bataille and Lacan. Just as our idea of the completion of ourselves, that state in which we had nothing left to will, would result in stasis, or the death figured in erotic satisfaction, or in an annihilating identification with the real or authenticity, so a God grasped ‘in the will that wills nothing . . . is neither this nor that, neither good nor evil, neither what-is nor being, neither affection nor aversion, neither love nor wrath, and yet the strength to be all of them’.15 Žižek again sees a psychoanalytic parallel, when the subject is cured by recognizing the typicality rather than the individuality of the forces producing him, and, as a result ‘freely assumes his own non-existence’.16 By contrast, he also, somewhat tartly, demystifies the Schellingian indifference, comparing it to the current recoveries of authenticity consequent on the breakdown of nation states under the effect of globalism. One way of explaining why fierce ethnic nationalisms rather than a benevolent cosmopolitanism may result from the latest shape of capitalism is on this model of a recovery of what one always already was. And when a social group chooses, contracts into, its ‘eternal nature’, the ensuing revelation of absolute authenticity can be murderous for those who (scandalous impossibility) do not share it, or who proclaim their own authenticity. It is worth getting involved in Schellingian complexities in order to see more sharply why the problem of Schelling for Coleridge is not just the problem of pantheism, as has usually been claimed. In any case, pantheism is a charge hard to press upon Spinoza, never mind Schelling. Panentheism is more plausible, but in fact it is easier to see Coleridge’s unproven theological opposition to this tradition, which turns Spinoza’s first cause into an Absolute grounding, as an opposition to panentheism’s avoidance of relationship. As a result it was easier for Coleridge to distort Kantian philosophical architecture to suit his purposes than to advance very far into Schelling’s scheme. Practical reason must become cognitive, and noumena or things-in-themselves must be acquaintable through this enhanced practical reason. ‘The Practical Reason alone is Reason in the full and substantial sense’: this is perhaps the foundational statement of Aids to Reflection.17 If we think of the Absolute as itself practical, as a will, then, contra Schelling’s will that wills nothing, we can identify with its purposes. We can, that is, enter into a relationship with



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God. And God’s purposes are set out, as far as Coleridge is concerned, in the precepts of Christianity, God’s definitive revelation to humankind. Ergo we can identify our practical reason with God’s Practical Reason once we have stepped inside the ideological circle of Christiantity. Sometimes Coleridge gives the impression that the speculative freedoms carved out by Schelling’s philosophy have been abandoned. ‘Christianity’, Coleridge famously wrote in Aids to Reflection, ‘is not a Theory, or a Speculation: but a Life; – not a Philosophy of Life, but a life and a living Process.’18 But rather than a straight contradiction of his philosophical drive towards relationship, I think Coleridge’s emphasis here is on the fact that once the relational success of divine knowledge has been established, that divine knowledge is so irradiated by our affective life that its logical justifications and philosophical origins no longer furnish its idiomatic expression. The theoretical and speculative criteria haven’t disappeared, rather their success is no longer to have to appear dominant. I don’t find this convincing but I believe it is what Coleridge thought. Coleridge could have approved Schelling’s philosophy of revelation, for, among other things, its use of feeling – especially if he contrasted it with Fichte’s severely cerebral Critique of all Revelation. A repetition of God’s plenitude we cannot get on terms with in any other way, revelation requires an affective response. We saw though, in Chapter 2, how Schelling believed this apprehension was being enriched in the way that our self-consciousness is by the pressure of the unconscious from which it has differentiated itself. It can do so in all sorts of expressions of belonging or nostalgia. However, the direct, Coleridgean personal relationship is obviously forbidden us where the power productive of or anterior to personality is concerned. When Coleridge did encounter a genuine Pantheism, his criticism is again expressed as an inability to make sense of particulars that are supposedly irradiated with a purpose, but that remain objects with which he cannot create a sensible relationship. Either they don’t communicate anything, or else what they communicate owes nothing to their communication of it – both meaningless positions in Coleridge’s view. I am thinking especially of his criticism of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and his ‘Immortality Ode’ (‘Ode: Intimations . . .’) in Biographia Literaria. I will return to this. The general point to be extracted at this stage, though, is one about Coleridge’s situation in the history of philosophy. He was fortunate enough to be born at a time when German philosophy had been forced to solve the problem of defining the unconditioned object of philosophical knowledge or certainty by positing a primal unity in which neither subject nor object were separated. This Absolute grounding – transcendental Ego in Fichte, Being in the young Hölderlin, Absolute Will in the later Schelling – must necessarily lose the individualizing character of knowledge it is there to explain. For Coleridge, such trans-subjective and ontological impersonality is only tolerable when he can focus it within his Christianity as a Providential Will. Out of Christian focus, it appears rather as a kind of Pantheism, a subtending significance beyond relationship altogether because prior to the individualizing dynamic

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it explains. Nevertheless, personalized, this grounding essential to the postKantian tradition obviously lent to theism an extraordinary philosophical resonance and authority. Coleridge often seems torn between the desire unscrupulously to annex the philosophical Absolute so advantageous for authorizing Christian theism, and his recognition that there is nothing inherently theistic in the exposition of subject and object by a unity prior to both. He tries to cover this conflict with a supervening insistence on the relational quality of all knowledge, including, per impossibile, Absolute knowledge. Hence, paradoxically, the ground out of which relations are constructed must itself be in relation to us for it to make sense on Coleridge’s affective criteria. All the post-Kantian attempts to eschew relationship in order properly to explain it go by the board. Like Coleridge, J.H. Muirhead was an advocate of German philosophy in Britain at a time when Britain was not receptive to this tradition. In Coleridge’s case, this arose from the novelty, uncompromising confidence and initial strangeness of a philosophical impulse, the texture and consistency of whose address to philosophical questions was to prove of extraordinary endurance and contemporaneity. Muirhead was competing with anti-German feeling during and after the First World War.19 The exigencies to which such cultural hostility drove the translator and assimilator were therefore well appreciated by him. Coleridge once asserted that ‘to be with me for any continuance and in any bond of sympathy, and not to feel attached to Germans, and to prize the intellectual Growth of Protestant Germany, is scarcely possible’.20 The untidiness of his use of German philosophical traditions should not obscure this commitment. Coleridge does try to assimilate supposed discoveries within the German intellectual idiom to positions held earlier in English neo-Platonic thinking, ostensibly undermining German originality in the process. He looks everywhere, as I have said, for relationship between any apparently monolithic intellectual achievement and other thinkers, not least himself. But he never underestimates the impact of the movement stemming from Kant, whose philosophy seized him with ‘a Giant’s hand’. The Protestant character he attributes here to his abiding German attachment is symptomatic of Coleridge’s take on philosophical problems. He is interested in any philosophy’s amenability to or compatibility with the scheme of revelation essential to his Christianity. The macrocosmic model of communication thereby tabled in his philosophical discussions is then matched by an insistence on relationship on the microcosmic level, the level of linguistic usage, of metaphor and symbol. When the limits of his sympathy for Schelling are conveyed through opposition to Schelling’s supposed Catholicism, Coleridge’s opposition is working on the macro-level, referring to disagreements with Schelling’s overall explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Obviously, still keeping at a very general level of discussion, the fundamental fore-understanding or pre-judgement of such Protestant opposition is that Catholicism underestimates the importance of a personal relationship with God unmediated by ecclesiastical institutions. That fairly stereotypical dissent



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from Catholicism then paves the way in Coleridge’s ‘Note on Spinoza’ for his attack on the abstraction of a notion of God he believes shared by Schelling and Spinoza. Lodged in Spinoza’s ‘reverential belief of the infinite transcendency of the divine Wisdom to all finite perfections’ is the unfocusable ‘infinity of attributes’ of Spinoza’s God which we have seen Schelling translate into his own idiom to safeguard God from particularization or differentiation. In the ‘Note’, pantheism is virtually dismissed as an irrelevancy or at best only a means of approaching Coleridge’s central preoccupation with the communicability of knowledge, including the communication of its grounding in an Absolute or God. On the microcosmic level, we can see the same preoccupation driving the discussion of Pantheism in Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ found in Biographia Literaria. In this case, Coleridge’s lament for the lack of relationship betrays not his religious or epistemological predisposition but his political fundamentals. Wordsworth, he complains, loses his subject. The overarching pantheistic scheme results in an indifference as to which symbol, or choice of symbol, might represent it in the poem. The ‘child philosopher’ of the Ode is implausible as a representative of ‘Spirit’, pretending to an authority it could only possess in a democracy beyond Coleridge’s political sympathies. Pantheism, especially in the German tradition, often worked hand in hand with a political radicalism opposed to the vested interests it saw in any clerical class or ecclesia. Pantheism made God available to all and sundry who had the wit to see him. ‘Spinoza and the radical Reformation’ is the grouping Frederick Beiser thinks characteristic of the dissident impulse in the early German Romanticism of Schleiermacher, the Schlegels and Novalis, an energy Coleridge would have increasingly tried to stem, and to which his famous use of Jakob Boehme makes no allusion.21 And again the logic of his condemnation would be to deplore what he understood as a breakdown in communication caused by the failure of relationship. Contrary to Blake’s vision, for whom particulars of any kind might be irradiated with divine purpose, Coleridge’s understanding of relationship is hierarchical. He is quite explicit about this in the Biographia’s criticism of Wordsworth. Wordsworth plays around with traditional expectations of rank; he mentions them in Lyrical Ballads and elsewhere only to highlight their irrelevance ‘where nothing follows which the knowledge of that rank is to explain or illustrate’.22 In Blake’s Jerusalem, we encounter ‘All Human Forms identified even Tree, Metal Earth and Stone’, a welcoming of precisely that lack of differentiation between subject and object that Coleridge took to be disabling when he asked of Wordsworth’s ‘child philosopher’ in the ‘Immortality Ode’, ‘In what sense can the magnificent attributes, above quoted, be appropriated to a child, which would not make them equally suitable to a bee, or a dog, or a field of corn, or even to a ship or to the winds and waves that propel it?’ (BL II,140). Expressing the ground prior to the distinction between human and other, Wordsworth implies a society so egalitarian that its members, in Coleridge’s view, are constitutionally unconnected, incapable either of relating

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to or communicating with each other. He puts to one side the fact that it was exactly such an undifferentiated state it was the ambition of his own postKantian philosophy to articulate. (We will revisit this conundrum in the last chapter.) And he uses the inappropriateness of the Absolute to participate in the relational knowledge it was meant to ground as a refutation of ideas of radical democracy. Microcosmic Pantheism makes no more sense to Coleridge than macrocosmic Pantheism. It permits infinite exchanges and substitutions as God indifferently imbues everything and anything with his significance; we are compelled to the conclusion in Blake’s Thel that ‘Everything that lives is holy’. As a result, in Coleridge’s critique, substitutability replaces relationship, and society becomes meaningless. Where all things are equally meaningful, meaning loses definition. Wordsworth’s poetry raises the spectre of the atheistic non-relational Absolute which philosophically inspired and shadows Coleridge’s providential schemes. It is not surprising that in response to this recurrent threat, Coleridge insists on the primacy of communication in philosophy, an insistence that overrides the deficiencies in his exposition of the German schemes from which he borrows. Biographia Literaria is carried forward by communicative initatives on several fronts. The notorious letter from a bemused reader cautioning a more accessible style invents a relationship within a monologic discourse with a shamelessness recalling Tristram Shandy. I have argued elsewhere that the two volumes are in any case soldered together by Coleridge’s devotion to desynonymy, or a dynamic crossing the subject–object divide to impel progress through the continual individualizing of life and meaning. Finally, the second volume ends with a Trinitarian exposition of the Logos, in which Absolute ground (‘the great I AM’), its incarnation as subject (‘the filial WORD’) and as comforting object (the universe’s ‘choral echo’) sit, of course, in relation to each other, between them composing the orthodox picture of God’s personhood. In any case, the composition of Biographia Literaria is surrounded by Coleridge’s work on the ‘rifacciamento’ of The Friend, a revival whose title mirrors its repetitive insistence on the importance of a definition of truth not confined to accuracy but incorporating all the moral considerations incumbent on sincere and effective communication. Critics have noted that The Friend can appear to say more on the subject of its desired readership than on the subjects with which it is supposed to entertain that readership.23

Philosophies of friendship In the philosophical literature, the idea of friendship puts to the fore concerns preoccupying Coleridge in his own long essay in the genre. We may claim to understand someone better because she happens to be a friend of ours, but Coleridge wants methodically to be friends with his readers in order to understand them better. In this ambition he has the backing of discus-



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sions extending from Plato’s Lysis, Aristotle’s Nicomachaean Ethics, Cicero’s De Amicitia through to Blanchot’s L’amitié and Derrida’s Politiques de l’amitié. In the Aristotelian tradition, friendship can only exist between virtuous persons. In friendship, I like someone for their own sake. For Aristotle, this amounts to liking them for that telos the properly governed individual shares with other human beings. Friendship with this virtuous individual even directs attention towards our common telos in salutary fashion. ‘The decent person’, therefore, ‘is related to his friend as he is to himself, since the friend is another himself.’24 Friendliness, though, informs this relation from the start with that wholeheartedness Coleridge found lacking in, say, the Kantian take on a human universal through a categorical imperative. Friendship sets certain standards of behaviour – truthfulness, helpfulness, openness and so forth – but its pleasures also facilitate the performance of these obligations. A Stoic contempt for feeling (as distinguished from a neo-Stoical deployment of intensities such as Deleuze’s) misses the philosophical significance of affect, and thus curtails itself philosophically. Coleridge is interested in the specific case of truthfulness. In The Friend he distinguishes between ‘verbal truth’, based solely on accuracy, and, following Spinoza, what he calls an ‘adequate notion’ of truth, responsive to an entire moral dimension which merely ‘verbal truth’ may omit. The conveying of truth based entirely on expediency and sympathy can result in the ‘pious frauds’ reprobated by Coleridge with the same force that he repudiates a view of truth solely owing to ‘accuracy’. Neither is ‘adequate’.25 Spinoza defines an ‘adequate idea’ as one which clarifies our ‘common notions’, releasing us from confusion and so contributing to that ‘happiness’ promoted by the correct functioning of the human intellect. Happiness thus gained creates the moral dimension that allows him to characterize his philosophy as an ‘Ethics’.26 Coleridge, therefore, can find support in Aristotle and Spinoza for a view of friendship as that reciprocal liking for the idea of humanity in another, an idea clarified and attaining adequacy through the mutual pleasure involved. In friendship, it is relationship which permits access to the trans-subjective truth the post-Kantians had felt obliged to position anterior to relationship altogether. Once his communicative premise is established in The Friend, Coleridge can make a striking transition from his own work into Wordsworth’s poetry, the relationship that his criticism in Biographia Literaria had precluded. He elevates the following passage from the footnote to which it was consigned in August 1809 to the main body of the text in 1818. Men are ungrateful to others only when they have ceased to look back on their former selves with joy and tenderness. They exist in fragments. Annihilated as to the Past, they are dead to the Future, or seek for the proofs of it everywhere, only not (where alone they can be found) in themselves. A contemporary Poet has exprest and illustrated this sentiment with equal fineness of thought and tenderness of feeling: My heart leaps up when I behold

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   A rainbow in the sky! So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So let it be, when I grow old,    Or let me die. The Child is Father of the Man, And I would wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.27 Relationship appears preserved at all stages of this composite passage. Self and other, self and past, and even the production of self through time define each other oppositionally through a kind of religious affection and friendship. To Coleridge, these relations seem necessary for human flourishing, and friendship is what keeps their symbiosis healthy. The biographical facts of Coleridge’s relationship with Wordsworth also emphasize the friendliness belonging to his use of this quotation, epigraph to the ‘Immortality Ode’, which must have intended some amends after the criticism of the Pantheism of the ode itself in Biographia. In this kind of initiative, I would argue, lies the rationale of Coleridge’s ‘rifacciamento’ of philosophy, to be understood concomitantly with his reworking of The Friend. The Quakerish title links with Coleridge’s Dissenting past (and his continuing approval in The Friend of the Quaker Thomas Clarkson’s energetic activism against the slave trade). It also ensures the friendly relationship of that past with his present philosophical concerns, as if anticipating the charges of apostasy levelled at his transcendentalism from Hazlitt to McGann. As well as Biographia Literaria, Coleridge had written his contributions to the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana just before his remaking of The Friend, and these find their way into the ‘Essays on the Principles of Method’ at the end of the ‘rifacciamento’. These essays are rooted in his new philosophical interests and stress the primacy of practical reason – ‘all true reality has its ground and its evidence in the will’ – and are couched in a post-Kantian idiom in The Friend (I, 520). Coleridge was worried enough about misinterpretation of his philosophical orientation to send ‘friends’ (as editor Barbara Rooke unselfconsciously calls them) a proposed addition explaining his differences from Pantheism. In his justificatory letter he simply asserts the conglomerate into which his religious commitment turned the Absolute: the living and personal God, whose Power indeed is the Ground of all Being, even as his will is the efficient, his Wisdom the instrumental, and his Love the final, Cause of all Existence; but who may not without fearful error be identified with the universe, or the universe to be considered an attribute of his Deity.28 Spinozistic ‘cause’ and post-Kantian ‘ground’ are interchangeable here. In Coleridge’s rhapsody they are forced into equivalence with the relational,



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personal God he contradictorily invokes, its relational constitution to be confirmed a few lines later in the letter by his assertion of a Trinitarianism mysteriously traceable back before the Incarnation to the time of the patriarchs.29 Thomas Allsop’s copy of The Friend is annotated at this point, when Coleridge felt vulnerable to charges of Pantheism, with an appeal to the reader’s friendship. The appeal to friendship once more unites self-knowledge gained from memory with attraction to the friend for his friendship’s reminder of just such illumination. On the basis of this relationship, Coleridge can then safely ascend to an apprehension of the Absolute Will, a notion too often elusive but here lodged feelingly in the experience of the ‘heart’: O Youthful Reader! (for such the Friend dares anticipate) thou, that in my mind’s eye standest beside me, like my own Youth! Fresh and keen . . . as is the Morning Hunter in the pursuit of Truth, glad and restless in the feeling of mental growth, O learn early, that if the Head be the Light of the Heart, the Heart is the Life of the Head; yea that Consciousness itself, that Consciousness of which all reasoning is the varied modification, is but the Reflex of the Conscience, when most luminous, and too often a fatuous vapour, a warmthless bewildering Mockery of Light exhaled from its corruption or stagnation. (The Friend, I, 523n.) Coleridge’s essays in friendship composing The Friend appear intended to allow him access to trans-subjective groundings in post-Kantian thought otherwise lying too close to an impersonal Pantheism or expounding a logic owing nothing to theism at all. Relationship and communication with friends extend our understanding of relationship and communication themselves. In friendship we move beyond the personal and into realms of universal value, a departure still conspicuously owing everything to the basis in personal encounter which inspired its attempt to communicate an ‘adequate’ idea of the truth. Coleridge’s philosophy of friendship corroborates his other efforts to swamp the post-Kantian idiom he found unavoidable with a theory of communication harnessing his sensitivity to language and preserving his Christian commitments. One might end, though, by pointing out difficulties suggesting, perhaps, the next stage in an enquiry into friendship and its use in Coleridge’s ‘rifacciamento’. For Kant, in a (little known) lecture on friendship, friendship is an Idea, unlikely ever to be instantiated, but the true measure of an effective politics – or, perhaps sharing Aristotle’s view that the justice of friendship renders politics redundant; friendship raises the idea of a society in which selfinterest and the care of others perfectly counterbalance each other. Derrida, in his recent book, Politics of Friendship, is of course fascinated by this instability, in which the Idea, because ideal, gives the rule to its own impossibility. Blanchot had already updated the Aristotelian mechanics of friendship by making the common essentials (chose d’essentiel) we recognize in our friend a kind of indeterminacy which, in postmodernity, has replaced confident belief in a

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human telos or project of enlightenment. As in Schelling, what grounds our shared identity (and to which the discretion of friendship must be adequate) escapes discussion, history, theme, and is, ultimately, indifferent. In friendship we write ‘for’ someone, in the sense of envisaging him or her as our audience, not ‘for’ them in the sense of putting words into their mouths, a presumption requiring a determinate knowledge of them escaping our knowledge of ourselves. Blanchot’s friendship is a kind of identity of indiscernibles.30 Derrida, too, pushes to their limits the implications of an impersonal standard found in friendship. He develops a remark of Cicero’s on the posthumous validation of friendship: friendship vindicated absolutely in funereal memory and commemoration confirms the paradigmatic (and thus everlasting) status achieved by the friend, the model of ourselves internalized by us, his friends, the survivors, his mourners. Which is Derrida’s version of that Schellingian quiescent will, the will that wills nothing, our self (you’ll remember) fatally completed both in its origin and in what Derrida calls an ‘absolute future’, one grounded (here, literally grounded, in the grave) in a process exceeding its individuation.31 Coleridge would have had nightmares reading Derrida’s book and watching friendship settle upon an indecideability annulling individuality in the very assertion of relationship, effacing personality through a logic as calculatedly elusive as that of Schelling’s Weltalter. It was this logic which Coleridge had taken the relational mode of friendship’s accession to the trans-subjective to displace. Of course Schelling’s idiom is not Derrida’s, but philosophers have recently argued for the value of seeing them to be in dispute. Derrida is very taken by the way in which friendship can ‘found and destabilize . . . perhaps all oppositions’.32 As one might expect, the deconstruction of relationship that friendship offers Derrida discloses not an Absolute ground or indifference, but the irreducible play of differences, not the Unconditioned but the rendering of every meaning conditional upon another. It is then a moot question (more a Deleuzean question maybe) whether or not an idea of the same or the unconditioned can be taken within a differential system which appears to require that at least this opposition remain intact for difference to be different from something – the belief of Schelling’s identity philosophy. In both cases, that of Absolute identity and that of all-consuming difference, the effect would still be the one which Coleridge deplored: the redundancy of relationship to explanations of meaning. The consequence he laments belongs equally to explanations which rely on grounding anterior to relationship (as in Schelling), and to explanations which rely on the infinite substitutability of relationship (as in Derrida). Derrida is repeatedly drawn to the persistence of affect in circumstances where relationship seems impossible. His typically postmodern ethic thus strikingly and definitively reverses Coleridge’s attempt, at the limits of Romantic hermeneutics, to reform circumstance to meet the needs of affect.33

Chapter Seven

Reading from the Inside: Coleridge’s contemporary philosophical idiom

The construction of tautegory Coleridge’s relationship to Schelling is usually thought of in one of two ways. Either the English thinker was irretrievably in the German’s debt; or else Coleridge should be understood as having done something completely different from Schelling. In Coleridge’s Poetics, I maintained that the former was true, but that the advantages and disadvantages of this falling-short were complicated. I would now put the argument more straightforwardly. Coleridge did not succeed in providing the transcendental deduction, modelled on Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism, necessary to the philosophical coherence of two volumes of intellectual self-justification, Biographia Literaria. Whatever the expressive compensations and ironic dividends, the gap between the first volume theorizing imagination and the second volume of corroborating criticism disabled Coleridge’s stated project. Another source for the work’s undeniable affective success on its readers had to be found. It appeared that the literary criticism of the second volume might indeed connect with the earlier philosophical effort if the philosophy were viewed as a protracted act of desynonymy. Biographia Literaria contains, in embryo, an argument for the homologous development of life and language. Both proliferate through a splitting and regrouping by which what was previously thought to be simple and irreducible actually spawns new individuals. At the levels both of biology and meaning, the philosophical understanding of life and the literary understanding of poetic expression, the same process of individuation is at work. They are different versions, or, in other Schellingian terms, ‘potencies’ of each other. The first volume’s metaphysics and the second volume’s critical discriminations belong to an identical activity. An organic view of language can be read reversibly to produce a startlingly modern-sounding grasp of life as the generation of (genetic) information. It can be plausibly maintained that Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria confronted the challenge to find an adequate expression for this philosophy of identity which followed Schelling’s System. Biographia Literaria refined on the degrees to which an absolute identity might disclose itself. Coledrige did so during the period when Schelling himself had fallen silent, the time after the

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Freiheitschrift of 1809, when Schelling’s lack of publications belied his highly original philosophical activity now recognized in the ‘Stuttgart Seminars’ and the drafts of the Weltalter. These writings continued to develop the ontological concerns behind the Freiheitschrift’s explanation of the origin and nature of evil. Coleridge’s theological bias always laid him open to these first questions. He was a Christian first and foremost. But his idiosyncratic continuation of Schellingian thought in the absence of Schelling’s publications adds an important dimension of pre-eminent philosophical significance to what he was doing. This Coleridgean afterlife for Schelling perhaps gets overlooked because of too rigid a style of critical comparison between the two thinkers. But viewed as exhibiting different degrees or potencies of an anterior identity, the two volumes of Biographia Literaria, primary and secondary, become intriguing repetitions of Coleridge’s main philosopheme. The uncanny feeling the reader has that Biographia Literaria is somehow a book about its own problems of achieving unity identifies a central philosophical preoccupation he shared with Schelling while looking like an aside or a distraction from an unachieved philosophical rigour and concentration. Interpreted in this fashion, Coleridge’s apparently divergent volumes can be seen actually to possess a unity of understanding issuing from the common matrix of language. Coleridge shows rather than says this. His demonstration is not the deliberate gesture of Wittgensteinian philosophical effacement at the end of the Tractatus. Nor does he offer philosophy as a therapeutic treatment of our need for it, as Wittgenstein does in Philosophical Investigations. Nevertheless, the confidence with which Coleridge moves towards the second volume’s final assertion of our divine universal spokenness – Logos – evinces a certainty Wittgenstein would have recognized, the certainty of someone caught ineluctably within the linguistic process of immanence of which he is trying to make sense.1 Many of his remarks elsewhere, published and unpublished, testify to his lasting conception of an ‘anti-babel’ made up of diverse ‘logoi’. The religious resonance of this overarching Logos, and Coleridge’s own tendency to hear himself this way, dulled his followers’ sense of his proleptic reliance on the idea of language as the new prima philosophia. Subsequently, it became easy to forget the philosophical charge which Coleridge’s appropriation of Schelling’s ‘dynamic’ Naturphilosophie had dissolved in language. Coleridge’s linguistic turn was undervalued. Now it is uncontroversial. Coleridge’s formulation of Logos as a collective of ‘logoi’ can be plausibly juxtaposed with the thought of Heidegger and others instrumental in the ‘linguistic turn’ which took so many forms in twentieth-century philosophy.2 Once this topicality was appreciated, however, something historical became obscured as a consequence. For Coleridge had not left Schelling behind when he cast logic in the shape of a philosophy of language. Another frequently ignored reversible relation in this area is Coleridge’s reading of Schelling. For Schelling also read Coleridge. Significantly, his most extended remark on Coleridge concerns language. In a footnote to the historical introduction to his late Philosophie der Mythologie (1842), Schelling



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writes that reading Coleridge is very like reading one of his own earlier works. He doesn’t put it quite so simply, and states instead that it is delightful to find one of his own works that had been neglected in Germany so well understood (Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake). But the hare of plagiarism is raised. ‘One ought not to charge a true fellow-genius (einem wirklich congenialen Mann) with that kind of thing’, says Schelling handsomely (Werke, II / 1, 196n.). Again, the issue of unattributed borrowings, that Schelling is prepared to overlook, has perhaps obscured the more substantial connection between his own understanding of mythology and Coleridge’s philosophy of language. To appreciate that link is to agree with Schelling that Coleridge had something to contribute to Schelling’s own argument. For Schelling’s discussion annotates his borrowing of the word ‘tautegorical’ from Coleridge’s Royal Society of Literature lecture ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus . . .’. The lecture was published in the Society’s ‘Transactions’ of 1834, nine years after it was delivered. Coleridge’s lecture has been ably and convincingly interpreted for the ways in which it might reflect upon his developing notion of a Clerisy or intellectual caste entrusted with the task of educating us in inalienable human qualities that tie us to a particular political and ecclesiastical establishment.3 The esoteric initiates of Samothrace recall Egyptian precursors and anticipate later formations of an essential theogony, knowledge of which is part of a perennial activity distinguishing intellectuals as the class capable of detecting the constitutional character of the divinely interpreted world. The elite initiates of the Samothracian mysteries arguably figure a pleasingly recherché source for intellectual authority. In Coleridge’s own day, their sourcing of contemporary mysteries in a still more ancient culture parallels the universality or ‘Idea’ that Coleridge seeks in his justification of a National Church staffed by his Clerisy. His contemporary ricorso of a perennial pattern is divinely potentiated, and this ‘potency’ makes it impossible to separate out the earlier from the later rationale, however superior to a Christian its current expression might appear to be. This explains Coleridge’s use of the words ‘tautegory’ or ‘tautegorical’ on which Schelling later seizes. Schelling’s remarks on Coleridge’s lecture suddenly crystallize into a pointed analysis that departs from the generalized approval making up the rest of the footnote. It homes in on Coleridge’s choice of expression: ‘I have called this article wonderful’, Schelling writes, ‘because of the language; though we want to abandon parts of earlier terminologies (Kunstausdrucke), or would like to quit them, if the subject allowed, he – if with some irony – without second thoughts gives his unaccustomed compatriots expressions such as subject – object and the like’. The outmoded subject/object terminology that tautegory’s conflation (‘subject–object’) supersedes does indeed occur in Coleridge’s lecture. ‘The Prometheus’, he claimed, ‘is a philosopheme and a ταυτηγορικον.’4 This means, as Schelling interprets Coleridge, that myth has to be taken less as figurative than as literal (eigentlich). Schelling himself would have preferred to characterize mytholology ‘not as artistic, but as natural’ (Werke, II / 1, 195), although this ‘natural’ turns out to be mythology’s own

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thing, not its explanation in other terms. Coleridge, though, in his Lay Sermons and elsewhere, famously bemoaned his age for having no third term, lying between the literal and the figurative, with which to characterize a truth that is sui generis. Coleridge christened the missing link a ‘symbol’. It takes its shape from outside nature, and so seems figurative, but is partially the same as what it signifies. The symbolic complex thus problematizes normal epistemological models based on a subject knowing an object. The difficulties myth creates for both science and rhetoric lead to Coleridge’s call for the act of desynonymy that will generate the term ‘tautegory’. The myth that does not describe but is achieves this knowledge-dissolving identity through a performance in which it ‘is an object that is its own subject, and vice versa, a conception which, if the uncombining and infusile genius of our language allowed it, might be expressed by the term subject – object’.5 The language does not allow it, inhibited here in finding expression for its mutual implication of knowledge and life, syntax and ϕυσις. Hence Coleridge’s difficulty in quitting a terminology Schelling’s philosophy has sought to abandon. Tautegory, though, is an up-to-date attempt to find a new term adequate to myth’s self-identity. This problematic self-identity is addressed from the start in Schelling’s Philosophie der Mythologie. Philosophy and mythology, he concedes to begin with, are two things so ‘strange and disparate’ (Werke, II / 1, 4) that any rapprochement seems unlikely. The key to bringing them nearer lies in the recognition that mythology is irreducible. Consequently, it cannot be translated into a set of other natural or historical facts. Mythology is the natural history that its gods require in order to appear. Not, it is vital to note, that Schelling thinks gods possess a noumenal reality of which these historical phenomena are partial substitutes. ‘The Gods are not something first existing in the abstract outside these historical conditions’ (Werke, II / 1, 7). They only exist, in an ontological sense, by infusing that same history with a sense of its grounding. We cannot recover some anterior whole (das Ganze der Mythologie), out of which they might have contracted to their current historical proportions. Their troubling of the historical sense by its own power retrospectively to suggest and simultaneously make unattainable such plenitude produces mythology. Or, put most succinctly by Schelling, we can have no theology (Götterlehre) without theogony, or the necessarily historical realization of what makes history (Göttergeschichte, oder wie die Griechen das natürliche allein hervorhebend sagen, Theogonie [Werke, II / 1, 7]). Schelling’s thought here is enormously suggestive. Despite the professed disappointment of the distinguished audience who attended the following Berlin lectures on ‘revelation’, they seem to have left an inheritance still in need of recognition. We are close here, for example, to the idea of repetition expounded by one of Schelling’s supposedly disillusioned auditors, Kierkegaard: the idea of repetition as the consciousness of being able to stand beside one’s life, seeing it at second hand, but not as different from its original. Its lack of ontological necessity creates that absurd space in which, for Kierkegaard, God’s possibility is infinite. Kierkegaard is pushed to echo the Schellingian language of potencies when he describes this awareness as



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‘consciousness raised to the second power’.6 Schelling’s refusal to assume an Enlightened superiority to the intimations gained through mythology marks him off from the ‘higher critics’ and young Hegelians of his old age. It also links him to postmodern critics of Enlightenment reason. His thought is as different from ‘higher criticism’ as Foucault’s historicism is from Hegelianism. Mythology expresses powers that are replayed in the discourses supposedly demythologizing them but actually inaugurating their own terms of mastery and dominance. The history by which we place the past places itself when our reconfiguration of the previous necessarily reveals a history of the present. Precisely this translatability was what infuriated Engels, who attended the lectures on ‘The Philosophy of Revelation’ which followed on from those on mythology, and who saw in their historical fluency, their apparent timeliness for all, a lack of principle.7 Insistence on this immanence, on the inescapability of overarching determinations, and the implication in their hegemony of the philosophical medium by which we chart them, reaches recent philosophical self-examinations. Scepticism about the foundations of philosophy along with the persistence of a need for philosophy appears in many different shapes and idioms. The temptation to extrapolate from these a universally applicable, authoritative formula immediately rehearses the problem their variety was supposed to displace. We are left with ways of reading our language from the inside. In Wittgensteinian fashion, philosophy can become a form of therapy against its own transcendental aspirations. Once these are abandoned, philosophy becomes the interpreter of discourses to each other, standing in for their ideal communicability without having to postulate some transcendental reality to which they all refer. Foucault was more interested in the historical character and sense of an epoch – the ‘spirit’, as his opponent Hegel would have put it – thrown up by these philosophical negotiations. Habermas emphasizes their counterfactual logic and the extent to which they can model a desirable political generosity. Cavell, summarized by Richard Eldridge, perhaps generalizes this situation most acceptably: Philosophy should not primarily imitate the sciences in supplying explanations of what has happened and predictions of what will, and it should not primarily draw lines between the scientifically accessible and knowable, on the one hand, and the poetic, superstitious, religious, mythical, and so on, on the other, though it may do these things by the way. Its central business is neither empirical generalization nor legislation, but rather reading, or criticism, or understanding from the inside.8 It is this reading from the inside, this understanding and criticizing of the network from within which one must work, think and act, that Coleridge so typically practises and encourages, although ‘by the way’, as if an aside from his ostensible projects. The larger linguistic dimension which interpretative activity

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throws up by default shadows all his work. For the later Schelling, though, to evoke our production in language is philosophy’s whole existence, and that is why he remains helpful and underestimated in estimating Coleridge’s legacy, to which we now return. Coleridge’s use of ‘tautegory’ in Aids to Reflection and in the Notebooks primarily opposes the notion of ‘allegory’. As its etymology suggests, tautegory is the same as what it figures in a way that allegory is not. In a theological context, Coleridge, like Schelling, wishes to refute any higher criticism that historicizes or relativizes the truth of Christian doctrine.9 To the idea that scriptural expression might be allegorical of anything, he opposes the claim that it is consubstantial with its subject. The symmetries here with the real presence at the Eucharist are obvious and pressing, and they tend to commandeer the agenda. Coleridge can sound more like Schelling’s friend and opponent, Creuzer, assuming a connection between the symbol’s particular intimacy with divine fiat – letting us see the universe as a specific option – and a particular divinity, or monotheism.10 If, though, the pressure to read Judaeo/Christian conviction back into other religions is resisted, the philosophical issues at stake visibly recompose themselves again. To begin with, though, one must note Coleridge’s fundamental premise that tautegory does not, its consubstantiality suggests, change the subject in the interests of interpreting it. No figurative, allegorical or symbolic gloss is provided by tautegory. Tautegory is ‘the consummate Symbol’, according to the explanation given in Notebook 29.11 It possesses an iconic self-sufficiency. This is what lets it guarantee the unchangeability of God’s word. Genuine religious expression obviously changes with different historical circumstances, but its embodiment of truth cannot be superseded: it can only be recycled. Symbol has had a bad press in twentieth-century critical theory, allegory a good one. This reverses a Romantic hierarchy in a way clearly necessary to modernist and postmodernist self-definition. Symbol has been construed as tied up with a discredited metaphysics of presence; allegory, on the other hand, has been thought to acknowledge rhetorically that any meaning it might have is generated by its difference from the subject which itself, the further implication is, must have allegorized something else in turn. That something can be allegorized impugns its own literal status. Pessimistically we might say with Walter Benjamin in his Trauerspiel book that we deal perpetually in monuments, in death’s heads, never closing on a living reality. In a now popular trope, our language always mourns, is always lament (die Klage) and elegizes the lost plenitude it seems intended to present.12 But, as already suggested, symbol can launch its own attack against Enlightenment certainties and stand for the eternal recurrence of whatever is needed – power, difference, death – to undermine any transcendental establishment. As soon as we proclaim our scientific transcendence over the myths of the past, a critical movement from Nietzsche to Foucault is ready to expose the sameness within that allegedly superior difference. Equally, the laying bare of this recurrent agreement to differ need not necessarily be pessimistic. It can use historici-



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zation as a model of political negotiation. This differential logic of sameness can produce a practical respect for otherness – respect deriving from credit given to the power of others already to be on terms with us and so assuming their capacity to give us the same credit. These reciprocal reflections, this time powering the more Romantic argument of Benjamin’s Kunstwerk essay, make of multicultural ideals a present satisfaction. Viewed from this angle, symbol is on the side of the angels. It describes the identity behind all our differences, acknowledging our common commitment, and thus uncovers what Schelling would have called the positive rather than critical dimension to the mythologies we live by.13 The undoubtedly conservative dimension to Coleridge’s use of tautegory need not therefore obscure its simultaneous picture of our production by language. Inescapable, immutable Christian truth figures, even if Coleridge does not wish to foreground this homology, our entrapment within a form of words. If, as Aids to Reflection has it, we must believe before we can understand, a philosophical dependency becomes as evident as the particular religious dependency Coleridge is usually assumed to be exclusively talking about here. Only by assent to a vocabulary can we activate our essentially linguistic being. This is also the perception of Schelling’s philosophy of mythology, and the reason for his sympathy with Coleridge (and for his interpretation of Coleridge’s sympathy for him). Schelling appreciates that Coleridge’s use of ‘tautegorical’ doesn’t quite match his own tautegorisch. But he does see inscribed in the Royal Society lecture Coleridge’s interest in original expression as original philosophy. Irrespective of its theistic content, thinks Schelling in the pages surrounding his Coleridge footnote, mythology points up our natural condition. In mythology we cannot distinguish content from form, raw matter from its clothing (Werke, II / 1. 195). Let us unpack the logic of this iconicity a bit more. To say, with Schelling, that myths are tautegorical is to say that they are untranslatable. There is nothing that they stand for, no literal meaning that they allegorize (Werke, II / 1, 247). In their identity with their subject, they therefore are instances of the fact that anything anterior to our knowledge can only disclose itself through our knowledge. But knowledge’s authority is compromised by possessing this power to be an accessory after the fact. Retrospectively it apparently legislates against itself. (This retrospective logic of construction is familiar as what makes it possible to think the Freudian Unconscious and Heidegger’s ‘Being’.) There is no epistemic relation involved here. It is precisely to cater for what happens when epistemology cannot cope with its own ambitions that figures like tautegory are evolved. Less compensatory than the aesthetic, though, tautegory does not so much exonerate epistemological failure as bypass the relation of subject to object necessary for knowing in the first place. For commentators like Douglas Hedley, primarily interested in finding for Coleridge a Trinitarian ‘rational theology’, it appears that ‘the concept tautegoric links insight and the Platonist maxim, homoion homoio, “like is known by like” ’.14 But in Schelling’s post-transcendentalism

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and post-Naturphilosophie writings, the self-consciousness of spirit, which Hegel so influentially historicized as a progressive search for its own likeness, is displaced by a Being that only has a self or identity through its embodiment. There isn’t something that materiality could reflect if that something only happens as a consequence of materiality. The logic of reflection is inappropriate here. Any lack in our understanding, or any remainder left over after our scientific mapping of what is, must still be grasped through Being’s choice, as it were, to submit to the kind of form that produces our kind of knowledge of it. That is what makes it an it, capable of being known; and that is also what relativizes our knowedge, making us seek expression for its situatedness, a location we can never get outside. Could we get outside, we could produce that putatively ‘higher’ criticism to which Schelling and Coleridge object. Their historicism is of a different kind. Locution for them is always location; but this place is one we can never get a perspective on, and so map in relation to something else. The mythological thus both declares its provisionality and asserts the irreplaceability of its function. It repeats a dilemma we can never get out of. Myth can never be demythologized, in the sense of being rendered obsolete.15 Subsequent philosophies of mythology can only explain it by historicizing it; not, to repeat, by allegorizing it, but by reconceiving its tautegorical structure in a new, contemporary form. This ontology, isomorphic with tautegory, connects Schelling’s middle philosophy (Freiheitschrift, Weltalter) with his later philosophies of mythology and revelation.16 The latter, positive philosophy, searches for philosophical expressions of the wonder that there is something rather than nothing. This project links up with the esoteric meaning of freedom used in the earlier works to describe the indeterminate ground (Ungrund), learned from Boehme, that fortunately contracts into our knowledge of it rather than producing something else we couldn’t know. Clearly this scheme would be attractive to a Christian Trinitarian. The ineffable that freely incarnates itself in a world and allows this predilection to be gratefully intuited can obviously be reworked as the triad of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. For the editors of Coleridge’s Opus Maximum, Coleridge is to be understood as insisting on the inviolability of this identification of philosophy with theology: ‘And if the Trinity was Coleridge’s final theological bastion, it was no less important to his ultimate philosophical position. The largest task of the magnum opus was to extricate and validate the idea of the Trinity against pantheism and evolutionary materialism’.17 The Christian, Trinitarian view, though, looks less like a historicization of the tautegorical function, more like a revival of allegory. Philosophy, here, actually means theology; despite appearances, its major categories fight a theological crusade, a battle against the very idea of a separate, secular realm in which questions claiming the same scope might be discussed. Tautegory, though, should not mean but be, in different historical ways. This slogan caters for the occasionally existential evocation of Christianity given by Coleridge. It also helps explain his attractiveness to ‘new criticism’ with its hatred of paraphrase,



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and the commitment to an immanent criticism of mentors of ‘new criticism’, such as T.S. Eliot and I.A. Richards. There are important distinctions to be made here though. Eliot and the new critics take their cue primarily from Coleridge’s frequent defences of an autonomous aesthetic category opposed to science. They neglect his larger, post-Kantian feeling for an overall articulation whose language we can only repeat as we try to formulate our sense of being dictated by it. Although like Eliot primarily curious about aesthetic definition, Richards, as much as Coleridge and Schelling, strives to formulate the linguistic structure of our lives. Finally, though, I return to that politicization of Coleridge’s imagination from which this discussion tried to make an original departure. The absolute indifference, which Coleridge and Schelling see as the form of ultimate expression, and which Coleridge figures as our linguistic immanence, looks as if it floats above all political questions. Political issues appear bound to a world divided between the interests of subject and object, conveyed through the relative authority of one or the other within specific epistemologies – empiricist, idealist and so on. Is the object traduced or mastered by the knowing subject? Or is the subject limited in its basic freedoms by being bound to the task of knowing only a specific kind of object? Yet power relations intrinsic to the political require epistemological definition; the refusal or dismantling of them can nevertheless contain their own powerful political charge. It need not be the case, in other words, that ontology consecrates existing establishments or leaves them critically untouched. Its rethinking of our worldly participation can set up a new kind of politics. The process begins at home, in disciplinary fashion, with philosophy’s necessary distribution of its own mastery among other discourses. Its purpose becomes one of getting us to re-interpret these aesthetic, religious, or affective idioms as telling expressions of the constitutive human situatedness it has discovered through its own limitations. This philosophical hybridity or discursive collaboration is very different from the confrontational disciplinariness that high Romantic theory or Hegelian hierarchies have been thought to encourage. In the new dispensation entrapment becomes proliferation, and immanence a kind of sharing of wisdom. And maybe that too was a Coleridgean destination?

Ruskin’s Turner By its nature this destination would never be fixed but always be an expanding horizon, dilating with the changing knowledge and experience of which it was the boundary. Its consequences would be historical through and through. In keeping with this mutability is Carlyle’s early fascination, learned from the Germans, for philosophical cross-dressing of a sort in Sartor Resartus, even if this flexibility was conclusively abandoned for the later prejudices of ‘Shooting Niagara’ and the like. Carlyle’s histrionics obviously owed something to the

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Jena intellectual stance, and his writing presented itself as a dramatis personae of collaborative discourses. One can also say that, like Newman’s ‘idea of a university’, Arnold’s ostensible side-stepping of politics in favour of a cultural criticism of life can be conceded. But Arnold’s engagement as an inspector of schools and Newman’s priesthood, to which their criticism deferred, can also be seen to serve a more local activism that in these postmodern days is more readily described as political. One of the most egregious creations of a critical object in the years following Coleridge’s era, an object which appears reciprocally to create the discipline adequate to it, was Ruskin’s Turner. In Turner Ruskin found or invented a subject that could expatiate the discourse of art criticism with which he wished to rehabilitate general commentary – commentary on art, clearly, but also on politics, ethics, society and the host of topics mandatory for a Victorian sage. But Ruskin also intuited collaborative, auxiliary relations between these varieties in a manner deriving from the Coleridgean expansiveness described above. In line with the open-ended drive of Coleridge’s thinking, Ruskin’s Turner can, without much forcing, be read as fluently applying Coleridge’s philosophical idiom and furthering its project through Ruskin’s idiosyncratic socialism. We start, though, with a contrasting example of censorship. May 3, 1862. my dear Wornum: As the authorities have not thought it proper to register the reserved parcel of Turner’s sketchbooks, and have given no direction about them, and as the grossly obscene drawings contained in them could not be lawfully in anyone’s possession, I am satisfied that you had no other course than to burn them, both for the sake of Turner’s reputation (they having been assuredly drawn under a certain condition of insanity) and for your own peace. And I am glad to be able to bear witness to their destruction and I hereby declare that a parcel of them was undone by me, and all the obscene drawings it contained burnt in my presence in the month of December 1858.18 My argument is that, given Ruskin’s full-blown interpretation of Turner, this act of vandalism was a contradictory one. Turner was certainly jealous of his reputation. He rose from humble origins to be a President of the Royal Academy who took his duties very seriously, lecturing students on perspective, helping fellow artists whenever possible, and contributing to annual exhibitions where he appeared to the public as a sort of wonder on ‘touching days’. While contemporary accounts generally emphasize the assiduous academician, they also insist that he retained unmistakeable signs of where he came from. It is how his material origins fit with his later elevation that is in question here. Is the former a riposte to the latter, or the latter a sublimation of the former, or, as the vision Ruskin constructed out of his reading of Turner’s paintings startlingly suggests, is there a collaboration of sorts? Constable recalled first meeting Turner at an Academy dinner of 1813: ‘I was a great deal entertained with Turner. I always expected to find him what I



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did. He is uncouth but has a wonderful range of mind.’19 Clearly the material integument of Turner’s life did not contribute to his admirable understanding. Presumably, on this view, the uncouthness inspired the sketches Ruskin burned. Turner’s artistic intimacy with the urges most constructive of his life produced a dissociated rather than an integrated sensibility. Constable’s Turner was no better than he should be; his imagination, as Ruskin was to put it, may have inhabited Carthage, but ‘practically’ he had to live in ‘modern Margate’. But Turner’s spots of commonness in fact indicated aspects of his sensibility which some of Ruskin’s most mesmeric interpretations were to focus. Turner knew the worth of his own labour and was impolite enough to point it out to those who, like Sir Walter Scott, wrote desperately for money but maintained a dignified silence on the subject. According to Scott, ‘Turner’s palm is as itchy as his fingers are ingenious and he will, take my word for it, do nothing without cash, and any thing for it. He is almost the only man of genius I ever knew who is sordid in these matters’.20 Early nineteenth-century critics and friends felt that Turner’s success was in spite of his social background rather than an expression of it. In his Recollections, a fellow artist, George Jones, asks us to remember ‘that in early life [Turner’s] education had been defective, his associates of a class unlikely to elevate his mind, his reading, nothing. He had no one to impress upon him that disdain of mercenary feeling which ought to accompany genius.’21 While Ruskin missed in Turner that disdain of the sordid, he evidently valued the practical contact with the realities of economics and labour demonstrated in his art. The appreciations of Turner in Modern Painters are materialist. At first sight, Turner’s progress is surely from the material to the immaterial. It is difficult to deny that his art becomes more atmospheric, impressionistic, less monumental, more interested in light. Ruskin builds, perhaps, on insights like those of Hazlitt. Hazlitt allowed Turner to be ‘the ablest landscape painter now living’; he also thought his ‘representations [to be] not so properly of the objects of nature as the medium through which they are seen’. Such phenomenology can, of course, pose as a form of realism. Hazlitt’s frequent citing of Coleridge’s opinion that Turner’s landscape’s ‘were pictures of nothing and very like’ is sympathetically buttressed by explanations of why they could be pictures of nothing, ‘depicting the first chaos of the world . . . [when] “All is without form and void”’.22 Ruskin arguably develops the ontological idiom here that links Turner’s art to the depiction of the ontology out of which differentiation is visibly emerging, the differentiation from within which we are obliged retrospectively to contruct our ideas of something anterior. Again we need the logic of Coleridge’s ‘tautegory’ to explain why such expression avoids collapsing into the nugatory. Ruskin’s interpretations almost always argue for Turner’s grasp of the material conditions, ranging from the social to the geological, which produce the scenes he paints. Turner’s vision of immanence, in Ruskin’s eye, solicits the collaborative activity required to produce the idea of genesis, the idea on which his last paintings close, when he seems able to paint what produces his own art.

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Turner’s painterly grasp of natural productivity is not, Ruskin insists, disinterested; it significantly places objects in a particular kind of society, a mutual society, one might say. ‘Composition’, Ruskin declares, ‘may be best defined as the help of everything in the picture by everything else.’ For Ruskin, this mutual assistance or ‘help’ lets Turner’s representation of nature describe the kind of society he wants to see established. The highest and first law of the universe – and the other name of life is, therefore, ‘help’. The other name of death is ‘separation’. Government and co-operation are in all things and eternally the laws of life. Anarchy and competition, eternally, and in all things, are the laws of death.23 There are undoubtedly limits to Ruskin’s socialism, but, as expressed here in Modern Painters, these limits are not metaphysical ones. Ruskin’s socialism becomes a socialism of nature, a scientific world-view inseparable from a politics, a partisan politics directed against the increasingly laissez-faire economism of his time. One might expect that paintings inspiring these critical principles would look unusual, or that they might at least transgress aesthetic convention. It is, though, an elaboration of Ruskin’s philosophy to see in Turner’s impressionism an immense confidence that spectators will feel the pressure of a collaboration of absent powers legitimating the sketch and its sketchiness – making it thinkable as a sketch, an aspect. ‘It is as the master of this science of Aspects,’ Ruskin famously concludes in his third volume, ‘that . . . Turner must eventually be named always with Bacon, the master of the science of Essence.’24 If some of Turner’s work strains our collaborative sympathy even now, the socialism behind Ruskin’s claims for Turner’s central representation of ‘help’ presumably does so as well. ‘Help’, thus understood, would not just have exonerated Coleridge from plagiarism, but would have made him exemplary: ‘The greatest is he who has been oftenest aided.’25 Sometimes it suggests a liberal idealization of class difference. Ruskin worked hard to remain an optimist: in Modern Painters, he repeatedly makes the move, so enviable for a Victorian, from the idea of a divine principle in the universe to the burgeoning science of geology, so often a main stumbling block at the time to religious belief. The political colouring reflected back to Ruskin by Turner’s view of nature’s activity must have solved a few other local problems as well. Help came from all quarters, and to Ruskin’s ear, ‘the “Holy” one’ was simply ‘softer Saxon’ for ‘the Helpful One’.26 Turner, author of the MS poem, ‘The Fallacies of Hope’, is ostensibly pessimistic, but only, I would venture, to the extent that his cooperative nature is presented as overriding immediate individual interests. Hence the characteristic canvases of disasters he conspicuously informed with the combinatory powers of nature. As negative images of auxiliary possibility, these share their socializing power with the contemporary pessimism of Leopardi. The Marxist critical tradition Leopardi excited was perhaps prefigured by the ‘softer Saxon’ of Ruskin’s response to Turner.



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Ruskin typically enhances Turner’s wordy titles by telling stories about the paintings or playing games with them. The reader is frequently told to cover up a detail in order to see how the entire composition is affected. Or collaborative plots are uncovered by critical detective work. Here is Ruskin on a scene Turner painted below a waterfall on the Rhine. One of the gens-d’armes is flirting with a young lady in a round cap and full sleeves, under pretence of wanting her to show him what she has in her bandbox. The motive of which flirtation is, so far as Turner is concerned in it, primarily the bandbox: this and the millstones below, give him a series of concave lines, which, concentrated by the recumbent soldiers, intensify the follow sweep of the fall . . .27 Victorians are always telling stories in paintings, or indulging in conspicuous literary pictorialism. More grandly, European aesthetic ambition in the nineteenth-century arguably develops from Schlegel’s Mischgedicht towards the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk before its original ontological relativity hardens into fin de siècle aestheticism. Ruskin’s story still retains the ontological resonance, though. The interpretation of aspects brings out the essence of the scene: this is Turner’s collaborative design, in which flirting and geometry help each other to depict their natural possibility. The more stories you tell, the further away from the picture you get in your commentary, the more you evoke the mass of pressures helping to make of it the image it is. When Turner paints his homage to Byron, in ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – Italy’ (1832), the generality of that ‘Italy’ focuses on the choice of aspect. Other works of the time – Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie or Lady Morgan’s (Sydney Owenson) Italy, Samuel Rogers’ Italy (also illustrated by Turner, a copy of which he presented to the boy Ruskin) – are inspired by Italy to a holistic portrait whose implausible range must put into question portraiture itself. In Turner’s case, the process of representation is rendered still more self-conscious by its reference to another example. Through his characteristic modifications of Claude’s Italianate idiom, the framework within which Hazlitt thought Turner did his best work, he perhaps suggests Byron’s own mixture, in Canto 4 of that poem, of regret for an idealized past with the determination of a modern poet to survive with an authority equal to that past, not as a beau idéal but as part of our language. But you have to read the whole poem before you can either quarrel with or accept this aspect as representative. Comparably, ‘The Field of Waterloo’ (1818) had shown the dead, among them the Cameronians (soldiers not covenanters) celebrated in Canto 3 of Childe Harold. The painting emphatically marginalized the glory of victory by the light of the burning farm of Hougoumont. Byron’s stanzas on Waterloo in Childe Harold are elevated and moralizing, rather like Turner’s own poetry. Byron only matches the painting later, in Don Juan. Turner’s chiaroscuro recalls instead the lurid contrasts of Goya’s Pinturas negras, the ‘black’ paintings which horrifically identify with the atrocities of the Peninsular War by lending to human gatherings the aspect of

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witches’ Sabbaths. Turner’s morbid aftermath of battle has to be scrutinized before we are sure of the helpfulness of the attitude of the women in the foreground. In ‘Ulysses deriding Polyphemus – Homer’s Odyssey’ (1829), the whole poem (or Pope’s translation of it) is once more evoked, although this time through a recognizable incident. We see the moment when Odysseus mocks the Cyclops, telling him that no one, οujδεις, has blinded him: that is what he should inform his father, Poseidon. The Cyclops reclines in agony, but his blighted strength looks to be of a piece with the brilliant atmospherics and even the monumental geological forms which bring out Turner’s painterliness. In the east, the horses of Apollo, another divine enemy against whom Odysseus has blasphemed, are visibly beginning to drag the sun across the sky. The sketch for the painting lacks Apollo and shows how Turner developed the plot. It is curious to try to read the painting in the manner I have attributed to Ruskin so far. For the painting sets story and image in opposition. Odysseus and Polyphemus scarcely help each other: the image is of the man’s vision pitted against the elemental son of the ocean. The man wins by blinding the primitive, and then triumphing in his difference. But, as a latter-day antiHegelian, Adorno, points out, Odysseus’s taunt likens him to what he scorns: ‘the subject Odysseus denies his own identity, which makes him a subject, and keeps himself alive by imitating the amorphous.’28 Or, to translate Adorno’s perception into a problem for Ruskin, we might ask why we should subscribe to Ruskin’s helpful, collaborative socialism of nature if it can be represented by an image of exactly the opposite. The same problem arose with the disaster canvases and Turner’s pessimism generally. But Ruskin could argue that what Odysseus sees is not what Turner sees; the magnificence of the painting comes from the victim of the triumph, and the light by which we see it reminds us further of Odysseus’s criminality. And this escapes simple moralism when one takes the further implication that the painting represents our own immanence within what produces our supposedly superior viewpoint, whose benevolence in so favouring us should not obscure our dependence upon it. This returns me to those obscene drawings. In their case, isn’t Ruskin a bit like Odysseus, seeing only an unsightly primitivism, uncouthly shrouded in vapour and obfuscation, when he should be seeing something else – the energies that harmonize Turner’s paintings? In burning them, as Adorno might point out, Ruskin only imitates the conflagration of powers surrounding Polyphemus. In 1989 the Clore Gallery staged an exhibition called ‘Turner and the Human Figure’. Some gestures were made towards including survivals recognizably belonging to Turner’s erotica. The catalogue reproduces two nudes in black and white. The kind of thing that distressed Ruskin is described, not exhibited. We are told of the 1834 sketchbook, that ‘several pages show two figures entangled. On f. 38, for example, the couple appear embracing as Titianesque lovers’.29 You can find these two sketches in larger editions of Turner’s work. The reason I haven’t reproduced them is, I suspect, the reason they did not appear in ‘Turner and the Human Figure’. They are steamy in



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both senses – the more involved the figures, the more atmopspheric and indistinct their rendering. Following the painterly logic of ‘Ulysses deriding Polyphemus’, the logic adduced by Ruskin on other occasions, these sketches reinforce the idea that the most powerful representations of the sources of our individuation are those which impress us with the degree of collaboration they elicit from our reading, the relevant stories they can make us tell, the number of painterly gambits we can see as aspects of an essence. They force on us a kind of grammar of assent, secular assent to the view of nature as a sort of divine cooperative in Ruskin’s not Newman’s sense. The extant erotic sketches are not graphic, not crudely explicit; but perhaps just because of that, Ruskin destroyed the rest. They were too typical of Turner’s art not to do the painter damage, and too much an invitation to Ruskin’s story-telling not to compromise the critic. Yet the human figures peopling Turner’s later work defer to atmospheric surroundings as the bearer of generative energy; or else they approximate to its entangled, undifferentiated weave. This is true of the vignette, ‘The Fall of the Rebel Angels (c. 1834)’, and also of that late amalgam of different stories, ‘Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – the Morning after the Deluge – Moses writing the Book of Genesis’ (1843). Moses, unlike Odysseus, is given a viewpoint inside what he is seeing; he helps the composition of what he is writing about; he is a cooperative agent in the history that produces him. For Turner, colour was a thing, a material to be worked onto a surface with conspicuous labour. From Turner’s last work you might surmise that the critical story has taken over from what it glosses, the theory from the representation. Turner’s marginalia to Goethe’s Farbenlehre reveal him thinking of light as an effect of colour, not something in itself. ‘The Angel Standing in the Sun’ (1846), then, shows the light of spiritual revelation to be a sensuous material thing, a surface scarred and pitted by manual labour. The painting confirms the paganism deduced by many from Turner’s deathbed remark that ‘the sun is God’; yet his achievement is a kind of reductio of the philosophy Ruskin articulated for him. This is because his Romantic explosion of light distils Turner’s art down to a painting of how he thinks representation works. Gone is the collaborative invitation, soliciting from the critic the periphrastic indirections whose society implies the impossibility of any single viewpoint on what produces our differentiations of it. Now, paint paints paint. Our situatedness is unforgettably figured in technical self-consciousness, in the impasto that arrests us with its sculpture of its own translucent effect. A painting which signifies its own mode of representation does what all paintings do to some extent, but self-referentiality to the exclusion of everything else produces both a perfect representation and a tautology. Paint paints paint. In this dialectic of representation rather than Enlightenment, we struggle towards perfect representation only to find that, when we achieve it, perfection gets in the way. Perfection turns out not to have been a quality of our representation but what we have represented. Turner’s sensuous success makes his lucidity grow opaque; clarity blinds us with the light of revelation. Those of Turner’s final

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works mentioned above can perhaps only be the corollary of Ruskin’s reading of Turner from the inside. Their tautology powerfully denies the possibility of an outside. That can be powerful enough, but it is only the premise from which the infinite critical conversation must begin.

Richards’s Coleridge This perception, grasped through the construction of Coleridge not Turner as critical object, is one of the main insights of I.A. Richards’s book, Coleridge on Imagination, first published in 1934.30 Coleridge’s ambition, for Richards, is to get on terms, philosophically, with our containment within a world-picture of whose painterliness we become aware through the further awareness that we cannot say anything about it directly that isn’t tautologous. Like Nietzsche, Richards thinks that all foundational discourses that do claim to describe us from the outside are myths. Science is simply a ‘specialized type of myth’ (p. 174). Like Schelling and Coleridge, he thinks that we can read into different myths the same relativism, and that some myths are (tautegorically) especially inflected with this consciousness. The ‘boundaries of the mythical’ are also for Richards ‘the bridle of Pegasus’. Myth is the category by which Richards settles the differences between ‘projective’ and ‘realist’ views of things, a questionable belief in whose opposition he thinks has been a damaging intellectual inheritance. ‘My Coleridge’, he tells T.S. Eliot, ‘ – after having been a goods train heavily if richly laden – has turned into a sort of meteor and gone up into the Heavens. It’s now a revelation of the essential mythopoeic faculty . . .’31 The external view of the nature to whose reality we contribute is something we can only access in the shape of a further projection that adds to rather than circumscribes that reality. We can say nothing of it and think nothing of it without producing a myth. It is the whatever it is in which we live: and there we have to leave it; for to say more of it is not to speak of it, but of the modes of our life in it. For us, it can be only – but it also must be – such that all the modes of our life are supported by it.32 Myth, then, signals the abandonment of a monologic science, one that, strictly speaking, ought to be tautologous, to take up a variety of discursive alternatives. It turns the abandonment of a single position of adjudication on the nature of the world into a post-metaphysical one full of collaborative, tautegorical compensations. It is a mistake to think of this immersion in variety as a decline. We should happily court ‘every mode of the mythopoeic activity by which we live, shape universes to live in, reshape, inquire, in a thousand varying ways . . .’ (p. 212). Richards carries further Coleridge’s objection to imposing an ‘Act of Uniformity’ upon poets and proposes a view of tradition as a confluence rather



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than a direct, monolithic mode of transmission. He has a lively awareness of the political disasters brewing in Europe at the time, 1934. His interest in Chinese philosophy and culture makes him sense the impending disaster of Japanese imperialism, and he sees no help in the ‘Anglo-Catholic tendency’ gaining authority in the English letters of his day.33 His book on Coleridge burst out of a scholarly format to become an essay in Coleridge, one in which the ineffability of ultimate truth is a rebuke to ‘the exorbitant claims of any one myth’ (such as an Anglo-Catholic one) and a spur to diversify intellectually in the awareness that this is sufficient indication of the linguistic scope of our existence. Richards is an optimist and a modernist. He can sound like an eighteenthcentury common-sense philosopher searching out a psychology on analogy with Baconian science. He shares the common-sense philosopher’s confidence, in his own case inspired by Coleridge, that, powered by a linguistic turn, philosophy can establish a science of mind. With Coleridge we step across the threshold of a general theoretical study of language capable of opening to us new powers over our minds comparable to those which systematic physical inquiries are giving us over our environment. (p. 232) This optimism must be situated, though, by the anti-foundationalism of the rest of his book. He constantly looks for both-and rather than either-or solutions. He is a partisan modernist to the extent that he can think that the literature of his own time is a progression in some respects over previous literature. But his championing of the enhanced psychological skill he commends in Joyce, Mansfield, Woolf and others never inhibits the philosophical generosity he believes he has learned from Coleridge’s demonstration that ‘to ask about the meaning of words is to ask about everything’ (p. xi). He privileges poetry over other discourses, and symbolist poetry over other kinds, at the expense of a just consideration of Coleridge’s theology. He mistakes Fichte for Schelling in Coleridge’s writings (pp. 68–9), and doesn’t pursue Coleridge’s historical understanding of ‘philology’ to its sources in Schellingian ontology (pp. 20–1n.), missing out on crucial historical support for his own argument and so leaving space for mine! But he writes as a ‘Benthamite’ and a materialist about a thinker he takes to be his opposite, ‘an extreme Idealist’, and expects his own remarks to be reinterpreted in their turn (pp.18–19). Ruskin, too, had been ‘brought continually into collision with the German mind by [his] own steady pursuit of Naturalism as opposed to idealism’.34 To champion Coleridge did not mean that Locke and the empiricist tradition were not ‘false’, but, once more, they do show Richards the unfortunate tendency of one of our language-games to arrogate all the others. Like Schlegel, Richards understands the poetic ordering of words in political terms as a broad republic, one ranging from a Lucretian-sounding federation of significant parts to a more centralized model. To call, with Coleridge, the critical preference for one society of words

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over another an ‘Act of Uniformity’, only resumes his ever-present, sharp sensitivity to the political figurations of linguistic expression.35 He happily quotes authors as diverse as Lenin and Chuang Tzu in support of his underlying claim that all we can say directly about ontology is that it exists outside our cognition, which non-statement is also the silence of the Tao. The rest is demonstration of the impossibility of cognition thus to get behind itself, and the collaboration of its different discourses in elaborating a consequent sense of situatedness: in bringing, in Coleridge’s and Schelling’s adaptation of Schiller, ‘the whole soul of man into activity’ (pp. 158–9, 184–6).36 This ‘synaesthesis’, as he and his friends called it in the 1920s, propels aesthetics out of isolation and into collaboration. The example of Richards brings into sharper relief how tautegory can be threatened as much by tautology as it was by allegory and its older Romantic rivals. In Schelling’s and Coleridge’s day, the reflexivity that could imagine a trans-subjective ontology was newly accredited as a philosophical exercise, whatever existence it already had enjoyed in other expressions. The logic of this achievement, though, was to return the insight to the other discourses, to intersubjectivity generally, since its import was that Being was only to be grasped indirectly through an increased sense of the humanness it had produced. Increasingly, though, the ambition must have arisen to make of that ineluctable mediation a discrete aesthetic object. The truer its representation, though, the more that medium must simply paint itself. Turner’s knowing, final adventures in this field are one thing. Richards’s targets are another: the authoritarian presumption either to pronounce, impossibly, on one’s own production, or to presume over other equally legitimate expressions of our mythic condition. Richards’s pluralism, learned from Coleridge’s linguistic turn, recovers Schelling’s and Coleridge’s original resistance to the historicism of the higher critics. They also assumed an enlightened power to decode the past that actually restricted their capacity to perceive different ways of being human. They privileged the religious understanding of their own day over those that they believed could be reduced to allegories of it; they thus forgot the mythic status of their own science. Put that way, their sins can be seen clearly to converge with those Richards so sharply attributed to his own opponents and his critique to revive the Coleridgean tradition he is describing.

Chapter Eight

Spelling the World

The Mammaloschen: The infant follows its mother’s face as, glowing with love and dreaming protection, it is raised heavenward, and with the word ‘GOD’ it combines in feeling whatever there is of reality in the warm touch, in the supporting grasp, in the glorious countenance. The whole problem of existence is present as a sum total in the mother: the mother exists as a One & indivisible something before the outlines of her different limbs and features have been distinguished by the fixed and yet half-vacant eye; and hence through each degree of dawning light the whole remains antecedent to the parts, not as composed of them but as their ground and proper meaning . . . otherwise than as the word or sentence to the single letters . . . which . . . occur in its spelling. Let it not be deemed trifling or ludicrous if I say that our modern philosophy is spelling throughout, and its lessons as strange . . . as the assertion is to a child when he is first told than [sic] A B is ab, or W H O is who. Be this, however, as it may, yet for the infant the mother contains his own self, and the whole problem of existence as a whole; and the word ‘GOD’ is the first and one solution of the problem. Ask you, what is its meaning for the child? [ie the meaning of ‘God’]? Even this: ‘the something, to which my [mother] looks up’ (OM, 131). J.G. Hamann, arguably post-Kantian avant la lettre, thought that poetry was the mother tongue of the human race. Coleridge here connects mothering and language even more closely in order, like Hamann contra Kant, to describe a primary articulation which any abstract thought must assume. The main editor of the Opus Maximum, Thomas McFarland, emphasizes the psychoanalytical implications in the density of Coleridge’s extraordinary passage, impossible for a modern reader to ignore. But Coleridge’s push towards Trinitarianism bids to explain rather than be explained by psychoanalysis. The passage tries to implicate the God-term essential to Coleridge’s theism in the process by which we come to have any identity at all. We saw that in the first part of his Phenomenology, Hegel was to make the self – other dialectic central to his explanation of the largest process conceivable, the movement of the Absolute or Geist. He uses our inner familiarity with the formal structure of self-development to

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make intelligible the abstractions of history and progress. Here Coleridge, like Schelling, works in the opposite direction, although he arguably arrives at this philosophical moment by writing in a sequence that can be read as following the path from the first to the second part of Hegel’s Phenomenology. In other words Coleridge by now constantly personalizes philosophical argument, while Hegel first of all philosophizes the dynamic of personal relationship. We have already observed that Schelling in his Stuttgart Seminars of 1810, similarly to Coleridge, uses our complex emergence as persons from an unconscious state as a model for the self-disclosure of ‘God’ or the ‘Absolute’ or ‘Being’. This equation humanizes theology, as the God-term is understood through a kind of psychoanalysis. Conversely, psychoanalysis translates into a philosophy of revelation. While this symmetry initially sounds like mystification or obfuscation, in fact it lets us project the uncertainties of introspection onto a wider, more visible screen. We understand ourselves by mythologizing ourselves in larger characters. Schelling revitalizes religious language by making it a living, dramatic mythology, a tautegory, and simultaneously increases the vocabulary with which we can trace our elusive subjectivity. He senses the problem of adequately expressing this philosophical moment and explicitly strives to say things in expressions of a more ‘colloquial and discursive’ (Pfau’s clever translation of Ausdrücken, auf allgemein menschliche Art) kind.1 Schelling uses ‘God’, ‘Being’ and ‘Absolute’ interchangeably, which he thinks makes him ultimately a philosopher and not a theologian who ‘abstracts’ from philosophy.2 But, from the Freedom essay through the Seminars to the Weltalter, Schelling shows that we understand how to impute responsibility to the character that determines our personality analogously with the larger picture of God’s free acceptance of limitation. Both are reciprocally illustrative revelations. Revelation, then, is the retrospective exhibition of an inchoate freedom whose current contracted, restricted form is necessary for it to have been exercised. This becomes the doubled subject (human and Absolute) of Schelling’s later ‘positive’ philosophy.3 Coleridge too is far from presuming on or prioritizing an inner acquaintance with ourselves. For Hegel, in the first part of the Phenomenology, we do have privileged access to the process by which we build on reflections of ourselves, seen in the responses we excite in others, to enlarge our sense of identity. We can use our inner, inalienable experience of this dynamic to grasp the progressive construction of the ultimate identity of Reason. Eventually, though, this confidence disintegrates in the complex self-baffling of the ‘unhappy Consciousness’, and Hegel’s argument goes into reverse, arguing from public to private knowledge. Coleridge, in tune with this turnaround, suggests we need any help we can get in understanding the complexity of the inner life. The exigencies of his autobiography demonstrate that fact if nothing else, as, like Schelling, he looks for ‘colloquial’ help from outside the strict philosophical terminology dominating the latter stages of Volume One. It is not often realized that, in departing from his plagiarized Schelling in this way, he is still like Schelling in confronting the problem of expressing philosophical



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insight. He manufactures that ‘inner art of discussion’ (Unterredungskunst) which Schelling thought ‘the proper secret of the philosopher’. (In Chapter 13 of Biographia Literaria Coleridge notoriously creates a dialogue with an invented reader through which his discourse and delivery of imagination changes.)4 Introspection does not reveal an unproblematic given: an interiority from whose workings we can then extrapolate to explain larger processes. Rather, we advance into the abyss of ourselves enlisting whatever available guides to coherence we have discovered or inherited from the public world. The second part of Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which individual identity is dictated by Spirit, realigns itself with this explanatory pattern. In fact, Coleridge happily begins with a map of ultimate identity as his guide to understanding personal identity. His arguments work to intensify our sense of our personal, inner selves through their convergence with the divine personeity argued for by his theology. According to the passage above, in the mother is present ‘the whole problem of existence . . . as a sum total’ for the child because she grounds things for him in the way God grounds everything else. Like the child following the face of the mother described here, we look up, and in looking up find conferred on that movement the meaning of a relationship. Something grasped on the model of divine intercession precedes and facilitates the emergence of the child’s sense of self. Startlingly, the name of the Deity is on Coleridge’s child’s lips as consciousness dawns. Coleridge sounds like Schelling’s opponent, F.H. Jacobi here; specifically, his thinking recalls a remark Jacobi made early on in his attempt to revive the Pantheismusstreit in controversy with Schelling. In Von den Göttlichen Dingen und ihren Offenbarung, Jacobi asserts that ‘For what typifies man’s mind (der Geist des Menschen) is that he knows God; that he perceives him, divines the hidden in nature, examines it in his breast, worships it in his heart. That is [the meaning of] his Reason, that the being (Dasein) of God is more revealed and more certain to him than his own.’5 Jacobi similarly prioritizes a divine apprehension over the process of self-knowledge, and makes this order of things constitutive of what it is to be human. Jacobi’s justifications of this claim, though, are always in terms of a faculty, whether neglected by others or discovered by him, a ‘feeling’ (Gefuhl) that precedes proof or demonstration and, indeed, seems to be a condition of the possibility of subsequent ratiocination. There are some similarities here with Schelling’s identity philosophy, where a continuity between opposites has to be assumed for differentiation to be possible. Jacobi’s theological version vigorously personalizes this identity and makes the faculty apprehending it one of religious belief – immediate, intuitive, incorrigible. For Coleridge, though, like Schelling, revelation is always much more of a process in which subsequent human witness to a divine origin is part of what divinity is. And, blanched of theological colouring, the shared thought is that the freedom lying behind the determined world we actually experience is only grasped by understanding in its present, contracted form from which can be inferred and repeated (if we accept rather than wantonly undo it) the worldly resolution of that original freedom.

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So, in this passage, religious apprehension for Coleridge initiates the process of self-projection onto and subsequent separation from the mother by which the child’s identity is shaped. The mother ‘contains his whole self’, necessarily subsumed in ‘the whole problem of existence as a whole’ (no redundancy here), whose solution is ‘the word God’. Coleridge’s need to invert the natural process (for the child in reality does name its mother before any deity, surely?) may sound pathological to the psychoanalyst. Or else one could say that his theology is so warmly and maternally embodied because for Coleridge the comfort and psychological consolidation thus attained is for him indistinguishable from the originary love he (as a Christian) attributes to supernatural provision. The mother’s love repeats the Creation in the only sense meaningful to human beings. According to Coleridge, the atheist, pantheist or religious malingerer generally must be deficient in or must deny themself full consciousness of their own individuality. They must remain incomplete, not fully created. Our privileged inwardness with our own processes of formation might have been thought to aid a further understanding of God. But, no, Coleridge argues the other way round: belief in God sets the standard for personal awareness. It is with reference to God that we understand the full import of the creative ministrations of the mother to her child. Setting up God as the benchmark of identity is continued in the Opus Maximum when Coleridge desynonymizes ‘personeity’ and ‘personality’. He writes that We have proved that the perfection of person is in God, and that personeity, differing from personality only as rejecting all commixture of imperfection associated with the latter, is an essential constituent in the Idea of God (OM, 177). Certainly one’s first instinct is to read this as hortatory or edifying in its import. The homiletic drive is to get us to emulate the divine perfection, and lying behind this confident advice is a trust in the Incarnation and related Christian beliefs. If one shares the faith, these dogmas make the divine example a credible historical fact. But the linguistic production of the distinction of and continuity between divine and human identity also locates Coleridge’s explanation within a process of articulation, desynonymy, as the inspirer of further discriminations of what self-consciousness is. To get from God to us is to understand better what personality might amount to. And to get from us to God is to grasp him as inseparable from, or primarily manifest in, the project of a coherent individualism. We can begin to illuminate what is at stake here by again considering Coleridge’s dislike of Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’. His criticisms of its pantheism, as discussed elsewhere, are mostly political. The philosophical disagreement, though, is in connection here. For it might seem that Wordsworth, in his ode, is proceeding by ways of thinking analogous to those of Coleridge just analysed. Wordsworth’s child, ‘best Philosopher’, still bearing prenatal



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theological (or at least Paradisial) certainties, is best equipped to appreciate what he is and what his world is. In a doubling typical of the poem, though, it is ‘years that bring the philosophic mind’ mature enough to reconstruct this forgotten authority which itself had reconstituted divine authority. It is this break in the continuity between divine and human Coleridge so values that necessitates the doubled simulation or self-conscious fiction in which poetry is so expert and which here makes it the organ of philosophy. However, instead of being part of the philosophical poem Coleridge famously wanted Wordsworth to write, this move lets Wordsworth’s poetry, symbolized by the ‘child’, turn Coleridge’s philosophy into its pale imitation. Wordsworth’s poem presents human development – ‘The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star’ – as a narrative of imitation and compensation. The child performs his identity-conferring roles to create a second nature of holiday, festival, jubilee, and, in concert with this, nature itself impresses its splendour upon him as a foster-mother endeavouring to make him forget a primal divine parentage.6 Her fostering, though, becomes the vicarious expression of that original. In mature life, therefore, our deepest instinct is to undo the world we have built up. Wordsworth does not sing the forward-looking ‘simple creed of childhood’ but . . . those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings of a Creature Moving about in worlds not realized, High instincts, before which our mortal Nature Didst tremble like a guilty Thing surprized . . . He does not, like Hegel, describe the ‘vanishings’ of various stages of what will become our integration with Spirit, the fullest realization of our nature. Hegel writes of such a stage, scepticism (which I sought above to map on to Coleridge’s mystery poems), that it ‘pronounces an absolute vanishing, but the pronouncement is, and this consciousness is the vanishing that is pronounced’.7 Wordsworth comparably pronounces an ‘absolute vanishing’, but does not see that his poem manufactures its own absolute: he doesn’t accept the fact that his sense of our absolute origins is compromised by the fact that they have to be manufactured poetically. Hegel would situate his vision within an ongoing process. Schelling, closer to Coleridge here, would see this unrealizing of our given dispensation as misguided, even evil. Wordsworth uses the ‘Platonic fiction’ of anamnesis to go back to some unrealized state to which he claims we most essentially belong, and for which the poetic effort of the poem discloses through a rhetoric of capitulation and de-materialization.8 Our ‘mortal Nature’ is to be rendered ghostly as Hamlet’s murdered father (‘like a guilty thing surprised’), leaving us, presumably, in a reality usually thought of as artificial (the play of Hamlet). In fact, though,

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the poem has made illusory the boundaries we normally accept as realistic (mortality). According to such higher realism, the artificial is rehabilitated as the mode in which we can appreciate the compensatory motive hidden in natural beauty. Our amnesia of this is doubled by accepting nature’s provision for us as ‘ordinary’ rather than vicarious. The symbolic resonance redeeming nature’s insincerity restores a ‘primal sympathy’ with the origins of our identity, with our divine ‘home’. But Wordsworth’s successful poetic anamnesis must have seemed to Coleridge to make unnecessary the continuing affirmation in consciousness of the infinite ‘I AM’, along with its repetitions in the idealizations of the secondary imagination. Wordsworth’s philosophical uncovering of nature’s artifice reconstructs a poetry which has already accomplished philosophy’s task. Nevertheless, faced with such an array of dazzling paradoxes and inversions, the Schellingian Coleridge might have felt philosophically trumped. Wordsworth perhaps shows a greater adeptness in the logic of repetition by which an inchoate origin of absolute authenticity is echoed in nature’s simulation of its nurturing. Nature is most alive to us when, paradoxically, we see it as incorporating us in a festival of remembrance for defining affinities surpassing natural expression – ‘Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’ But Wordsworth’s insight is a ‘timely utterance’, its historicism matching that of the ‘higher critics’ we saw the different historicism of Coleridge’s and Schelling’s use of tautegory try to outmanoeuvre. The ode brings a particular ‘relief’, a catharsis or therapy that makes the poet ‘strong’ at a specific juncture. We encounter an occasional poem, not a perennial philosophy. Understandably, then, Wordsworth’s argument is poetically self-serving when it cancels the artifice of the child’s life as an actor, only to recuperate it at a higher level of awareness. And Wordsworth’s poetry, of course, is the discourse qualified to engage its readers on exactly that superior plane of understanding. Coleridge, I’m suggesting, has a more tautegorical view of repetition. That is to say, he is concerned not so much to validate the particular poetic strategy as to see in mothering God’s continuing articulation of the child’s existence – its actual repetition. He does not, therefore, need to privilege poetry for expressing a simulation necessary for the recovery of our authentic origins. For Coleridge, those are accessed continuously in a repeated process of normal selfconstruction out of an unconscious background. We don’t, so to speak, return to the ground of things and watch (‘the children sport upon the shore’); we conjure up the ground through our repeated resolution of its indeterminacies in our philosophical take on reality. And the expression of this philosophical orientation is often appropriately delegated to aesthetic, affective and other apparently non-philosophical discourses.9 Maybe this is the deeper significance anyway of Wordsworth’s repeated doubling in the ‘Immortality Ode’? But then Wordsworth’s child philosopher loses his privileged position. In the passage from the Opus Maximum heading this chapter, Coleridge’s model for understanding this repetition is not a particular, poetic use of language but the functioning of language in general. Startlingly, he has the



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child spell the mother. The child, that is, comes to construe the articulated quality of his mother as the type of articulation itself. Limbs and features become the instruments of relationship through their inherence in an original unity just in the way that letters are discursively animated through their belonging to word and sentence. The absolute grounding supplied by the Godterm is repeated in the relationship with the mother; and both are explained on analogy with, or even as instances of, what Coleridge calls ‘spelling’, the process by which A B becomes the Latin preposition ab or W H O the English interrogative or relative pronoun. Evidently, to spell, Coleridge is suggesting, assumes knowledge of grammar, or how the word we spell fits into a language and contributes to its workings. Coleridge defies charges of being ‘ludicrous’ or ‘trifling’ when he consequently asserts that ‘our modern philosophy is spelling throughout’ in this sense. In fact, though, he subsequently appears more worried that the success of the linguistic understanding of philosophical grounding, to which late twentieth-century readers are highly attuned by a number of dominant intellectual traditions, might render its connections with theology redundant. Coleridge is fascinated by the spectacle of a series of marks changing into the significant parts of discourse. (Paul de Man, by way of illustrative contrast, became fascinated by exactly the opposite: how a series of signs, drained of significance, could revert to brute materiality.)10 And he continually plays on the range of explanatory uses to which this transformation can be put. Spelling in the exalted interpretation just examined recurs whenever Coleridge considers ‘the absolute Will’. This Schellingian ground of everything is its own evidence. While this evidence is not present to the mind, the position is not indeed an idea at all but a notion, or like the letters expressing unknown quantities in algebra, a something conceded in expectation of a distinct significance which is to be hereafter procured. (OM, 19–20) Elsewhere, to reverse this process, to lose the significant dimension that transforms material into word or a group of marks in the matter of discourse, is to corroborate the first passage we looked at: losing a word, for Coleridge, is like a child losing its mother; and with the mother, the ‘witness of its own being’, goes the child’s sense of identity. Even as we sometimes dwell on a word that we had just written till we doubt, first, whether we had spelt it right, and at length it seems to us as if no such word could exist; and, in a kind of momentary trance, strive to make out its meaning out of the component letters, or of the lines of which they are composed, and nothing results! In such a state of mind has many a parent heard the three-years child that has awoke during the dark night in the little crib by the mother’s bed entreat in piteous tones, ‘Touch me, only touch me with your finger.’ A child of that age, under the same circumstances, I myself heard using these very words in answer to the mother’s enquiries,

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half hushing and half chiding, ‘I am not here, touch me, Mother, that I may be here!’ The witness of its own being had been suspended in the loss of mother’s presence by sight sound or feeling. (OM, 132) Identity, the mother and form – where form means the significant inherence of part in whole typified by language – go together in Coleridge’s ontology. The concept of ‘personeity’ focuses these different forces and shows their constructive collaboration. With the awakening of self-consciousness, the first sign or representative of which is not its own bodily shape but the gradually dawning presence of the mother’s, the conception of life is elevated into that of personeity. And as particular shape is beheld only in the higher and freer conception of form, so again this form itself, this whole, constitutent of its parts, is taken up into and becomes one with the yet higher, or rather deeper and more inward, principle of person. (OM, 134) And, as said, out of this collaboration come the mutually illustrative versions of individualism making sense of human self-consciousness and of our sense of the production of the world we are necessarily obliged to read from the inside. Finally, one can also say that perhaps the aspiration of the personal to its ideal personeity could have helped Coleridge excuse to himself the exigencies to which he seemed driven in his own literary biography. ‘The will’, after all, ‘cannot be an object of conception’ (OM, 18). Elsewhere he remarks, with a seemingly contradictory desire for a will to be conceptualized, that ‘a will not personal is no idea at all but an impossible conception’ (OM, 165). The point, though, is that where there is evidence of will, however random or disparate, as in the intentions accounting for the miscellany of Biographia Literaria, then, provided it is genuine evidence of will, the image of a personality undeniably is there to be found. Given the transition possible from personality to personeity, the Absolute will or personeity’s lack of differentiation can maybe underwrite the appearances of autobiographical incoherence, not by presuming, à la Wordsworth, that we can poetically coincide with our native self but to evince its unrealizability. To return to Coleridge’s working model in the Opus Maximum, a problem remains with its linguistic extension into ideas of articulation. This difficulty inserts Coleridge’s speculation into major philosophical controversy of his own day. It is a Hegelian rather than a Schellingian position to take up when we say something like the following. The gesture towards some ultimate grounding is superfluous if it is in any case already modelled by the process of articulation required to describe it. That requirement surely replaces the original legitimation. The supposedly second-order explanation assumes priority if it is a condition for any explanation at all to be possible. Such language displaces the claims of anything to ground it, and the construction of any such pretender



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to anteriority must be a retrospective act, and our experience of its priority a fiction. I have consistently argued Coleridge’s philosophical sympathies to have been, in this regard, more with Schelling than with Hegel. Consistently, therefore, we must remember Coleridge’s persistent attempts to formulate a symbolic or tautegorical use of language capable of being a potency of individuation: individuation calculated to a linguistic rather than to a mathematical or any other power. Again we encounter Coleridge’s presentation of the recurrence of the same in different historical form. The linguistic pattern repeats the absolute basis of knowledge just as the maternal experience is rehearsed in all our future developments. The reproduction of mothering in personal growth and the repetition of the eternal I am in linguistic competence are different historicizations of the same thing.

Coleridge (Schelling) and Hegel Coleridge’s personalizing of the epistemological relationship needs to establish itself in contradistinction from Pantheism. This Pantheismusstreit is rather different from the famous one started by Jacobi’s remarks about Lessing, and targeting Mendelssohn and then, later, Schelling. Coleridge fends off Pantheism by asserting the priority of conscience over consciousness. The world’s reflection back to us of an identity on which we can build comes with obligations attached. Here, the model of the child responding to its mother unpacks a system of kinship, with all the accompanying duties one might expect to be entailed, that frames our growing sense of self. We achieve selfconsciousness through relationship with another; and if the world is in this case our ‘companionable form’, to know the world means to be obliged to act towards it in an ethical fashion. The conscience, I say, is not a mere mode of our consciousness, but presupposed therein. Brutes may be and are scious, but not conscious. Here, however, our present language fails in affording a term sufficiently discriminative . . . (OM, 72–3) And it is this kind of lack of discrimination that Coleridge objects to in Pantheism. The moral charge implicit in the identification with an Absolute Will through epistemology, the moral activity of relationship, is dissipated in Pantheism. Pantheism, certainly, attributes a divine presence to objects. If, therefore, we apprehend God in all things, Coleridge seems to think, we again approach the ultimate in lack of philosophical discrimination: that intellectual and moral generosity Coleridge eventually condemns as Stoicism. In another Opus Maximum passage full of spectacular modulations, Coleridge transposes from a critique of polytheism, through one of Stoicism, to a final target that looks Hegelian. Pantheism involves God in a series of impersonations whose

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attractive poetic play of Naiads, Hamadryads, Dryads, Zephyrs and so on soon collapses into the impersonality to which Coleridge cannot relate. But this [Naiads and so on] and Polytheism in general are in effect the popular side of Pantheism. The unity indispensable to impersonation, is carried no further than consists with that plurality which the senses and imagination on their part require. As soon as this plurality is rejected, and the reason precipitates or deposits the heterogeneous ingredients supplied by the fancy and the passions, we have, then, in the first, and more timid stage, the Anima Mundi of the Stoics, and afterwards, when this too has been . . . dismissed as a crude . . . Anthropomorphism, . . . a metaphor, the original of which is itself but a figment of the fancy invented from the same imbecility, and for the same purpose, namely the giving separate subsistence to a unity abstracted from a multitude of effects and then idolized into the cause of the very thing of which it was but the generalization and, as it were, the abbreviature . . . We have the unica substantia of Spinoza, that mysterious nothing which alone is . . . (OM, 111–12) Although Spinoza is the final philosopher attacked, the conflation of everything and nothing Coleridge attributes to his ‘substance’ or ‘God’ sounds like the first stage of knowledge to be surpassed in Hegelian phenomenology. Hegel attacks the sufficiency of immediate sense experience because it means both everything and nothing. Coleridge here argues that Spinoza’s God is a retrospective generalization or abstraction, knowledge of which pretends to the kind of undifferentiated certainty which Hegel discredits. The ‘this’ by which I denote an unarguable certainty, asserts Hegel, is applicable to anything: ‘the universal is the true content of sense-certainty . . . Pure being remains, therefore, as the essence of this sense-certainty.’ Comparably, the ‘I’ enjoying sense-certainty becomes a subject-position open to all and specific to no one (‘Ich, als Allgemeines’). This is Kant’s ‘stoic principle’ carried to extremes.11 The Stoic indifference Coleridge found unpalatable in Kantian ethics here extends to epistemology. Hegel wanted mainly to convince us that all knowledge was mediated, and that these mediations could be historicized. Coleridge, like Schelling, wants to see the known world as the repetition of an original contraction from untold possibilities, or, as I think is meant by the way he puts it theologically, ‘the presence . . . of all things to God’ (OM, 113). Indifference can only belong to the Absolute, and the Absolute can only be grasped as the differentiated world for which it has opted and which, consequently, is its repetition. ‘The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical’, writes Wittgenstein in connection. The Absolute underwriting of knowledge inspires all our responsive vocabularies of election, choice, freedom to have been different and so on, which Coleridge inveterately makes religiose. But Coleridge shares Wittgenstein’s philosophical position that regards the solution to ontological problems, the problem of the world, as something not



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belonging to it. The solution is then the problem’s disappearance through a justly affective response to what is in the world, to use Wittgensteinian parlance again, and is neither Hegelian nor necessarily religiose.12 Like Schelling, Coleridge thinks Pantheism or the Stoic side-stepping of the mundane lays claim to an impossibly undifferentiated apprehension of a differentiated world. In so doing, it fails to meet the standards of Schelling and Wittgenstein’s kind of philosophical rigour. Coleridge’s doctrinal Christianity may help him towards this severity, but has no technical part to play in its insight. Coleridge feels threatened by a sloppy aesthetic excitement that remains unspecific and is never integrated in a recognizable, mature moral exchange. This, at any rate, is Coleridge’s polemical view of the climactic lines from ‘Tintern Abbey’: ‘ a sense sublime . . . rolls through all things.’ He writes that many a Man (I speak not without knowledge) who, lulled with these dreams and accustomed to interpret the Divine omnipresence in any sense rather than alone . . . safe and legitimate one – the presence . . . namely, of all things to God – has thought himself abundantly religious, yea! hallowing his Sabbath with the loftiest sort of devotion . . . (OM, 113) Such delusions, thinks Coleridge, such false sabbaths, are characteristic of ‘a transitional period in the process of intellectual growth’. But the making of this callow excitement into a lasting condition is an activity typical of ‘a number great and daily increasing [in whom] there may be observed an almost entire withdrawing from the life and personal Being of God . . . not a moral Creator and Governor’ (OM, 114). Coleridge’s option for the Governor metaphor strongly marks his distrust in the use of language to animate a version of the world which remains non-relational, unspecifically electrified by a formless numinous charge. He has just levelled this accusation against the Stoics, but its ramifications apply quite sharply to the philosophical context of his own time. However unfair this is to Wordsworth, it does once more follow the logic of tautegory central to Coleridge’s thinking. Again like Schelling, Coleridge believes that although we only grasp it in contracted, differentiated form, the Absolute is much more than this process through which it becomes identified for us. For Coleridge, this conviction is primarily religious in its implications. It fires his famous distinction between Pantheism, which he understands as the exhaustion of the concept of God in his processual immanence, and Panentheism, in which God’s natural immanence is surrounded by his other possibilities. Nature is something God can appear as, but clearly other divine aliases are possible. Schelling himself draws out the meaning of this difference in terms of his own dispute with Hegel. In his lectures ‘On the History of Modern Philosophy’ (Zur Geschichte der neuern Philosophie), probably written in the early 1830s, we again encounter a false Sabbath: Hegel’s immanent Absolute, identified with the adequation through rational process of the evolving world with our idea of it, puts God ‘in

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the process . . . He is rather the God of eternal, perpetual doing, of incessant agitation, who never finds the Sabbath (die nie Sabbath findet). He is the God who only ever does what he has always done, and who therefore cannot create anything new’.13 Translated into ‘God’, Hegel’s Absolute is everything and nothing. How can one conjure an affective response to so indifferent a Being? How different from spelling the world in analogy with responding to an articulating, formative love? Each different stage of the Phenomenology equally represents Hegel’s Absolute, and the whole is indifferently dependent on each stage for its completion. It is, thinks Schelling, a ‘Pantheism . . . in which divine freedom is all the more ignominiously lost because the impression was given of wanting to save it and sustain it’.14 All are equally essential, which is to say that none is essential. Only the whole matters, indifferent to the claims to priority of any part. But the whole is only got at, not through allowing for the possibility of an original departure, construable as a personal interest, but through the recapitulation of its already existing stages whose ‘true content’ (das Wahre), Schelling is effectively saying, is ‘the universal’ grasped by a ‘merely universal’ (nur allgemeines) subject.15 In a piece of philosophical effrontery, Schelling effectively locates Hegel’s entire philosophy in the structural dilemmas of sense-certainty that it supposedly begins its long, long progress by claiming to surpass.

Wordsworth: Poetry or Philosophy Let’s try to expound a poetic example of the philosophical moment at issue here. Again, Wordsworth offers a suggestive, near contemporary comparison. In the two-part Prelude, still awaiting its ‘glad preamble’, Wordsworth’s opening presents most directly the question that sustains his poem about the growth of a poet’s mind – ‘Was it for this?’ His ‘this’ possesses both an immediate haecitas and a universal emptiness. The word is self-reflexive, as the poet asks for justification of the very word he writes now. The reference therefore appears immediate, with nothing interfering, nothing coming between poetic form and content. Equally, though, the consummating ‘this’ is to be understood as resuming and justifying everything that has happened to the poet up to this point. Was it for this That one, the fairest of all Rivers, loved To blend his murmurs with my Nurse’s song . . . . . . For this, didst thou, O Derwent . . .16 And so on into the first ‘spots of time’ whose restorative power is cast as the lyrical scaffolding of the rest of the poem. We only understand everything else



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in this poetic constitution, the implication is, through this specific moment of empowerment. Yet this spot of time’s specific significance dissolves in everything else it evokes – has existence only in its evocation of everything else. The ‘this’ isn’t this at all; or, its pretence to immediacy turns out to be universally mediated, the stuff of mediation itself, distilled eternally and ubiquitously out of the very possibility of a life’s innumerable events having some sort of coherence and direction, moving ‘in one society’. There are poetic advantages for Wordsworth to reap from this philosophical contradiction. But the successes remain poetical at the expense of their philosophical coherence, a good thing viewed from an Arnoldian perspective, a bad thing viewed from the Hegelian perspective under consideration here. So much the worse for philosophy, we might say. Perhaps – but the poem, after all, has philosophical ambitions, and a poem whose probability arrests its own philosophical development surely weakens its own authority? Reflexivity can appear to reinforce poetic self-sufficiency; for Hegel, in his aesthetics, this absorption of the outward by an aggrandizing inwardness is just what’s wrong with Romanticism. In poetically questioning his own poetic authority, Wordsworth appears to trivialize his own question. His asking either renders the question redundant, or else it discredits itself. If the answer to the question is not ‘Yes, it was for this: your language now indeed justifies nature’s nurture of you as a poet’, then why should we trust the poetic language in which the question is put? The poem’s project of creating a reliable narrator expands into thirteen books under the pressure of these anxieties. But this development only compounds the problem. For, in adducing his entire past, his total natural life, in calling to the bar everything he can as witness to the judgement he desires, he makes the sense-certainty of his demonstrative – ‘this’ – take on an unmanageable range of reference. It becomes a universal quantifier capable of infinite satisfaction, and so never satisfied in any particular case. This, Hegel suggests, is the fate of immediacy. (I almost wrote ‘all immediacy’, a contradiction which makes his point even more concisely.) Again, arguably, this is part of the plot of Wordsworth’s poem. We would hardly want to say that it is disqualified from the start by Hegel’s philosophical objections to the idea of immediacy. The Prelude’s rendering of ‘Effort and expectation and desire, / And something ever more about to be’17 remains an unforgettable expression of our (perhaps philosophically misguided) need for immediacy in our lives. But then any poetic economy in which this characteristically human experience is to be rendered as such is bound to look inauthentic. And who can deny that the typical human project is precisely, in this sense, inauthentic: the project of closing immediately on a satisfaction and fulfilment that would extinguish the characteristic search for its mediated versions and substitutes that makes up the process, texture and experience of our lives? If we can still distinguish between poetry and philosophy, while conceding Friedrich Schlegel’s contemporary point that they have been kept separate long enough, at least for mutually explanatory purposes, we might

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say that philosophy has an unavoidable investment in the authentic in a way that poetry has not. Their projects here do remain separate: poetry unembarrassed and enhanced by a generosity that includes inauthenticity in its agendas and economies, philosophy troubled and diagnostic and so more attenuated than poetry because of its obligatory critique of our failure to meet authentic standards. We might now say (with more explanatory force, I hope) that Schelling’s critique of Hegel is like my thought experiment here – a Hegelian critique of Wordsworth that doesn’t allow him to progress beyond his poem’s opening and so ignores everything else he wrote on a priori grounds. The difference, though, is that Wordsworth could rightly point to a discursive difference that makes the philosophical critique of his poetry look foreshortened and narrowminded. It’s not so clear that such a defence is open to Hegel. Hegel’s escape lies in the ‘speculative’ character of his propositions, and in his sanctioning of their ‘linguistic anomalies’ through which we have seen modern sympathizers have understood him to try to forge a comparable flexibility. Now the reflexivity reinforcing poetic self-sufficiency would figure for Coleridge the dangers of Pantheism. In Biographia Literaria he does not write about The Prelude, but he does worry in his criticism of the ‘Immortality Ode’, I have argued, about the indifference of symbolism resulting from an entirely democratic notion of suitable representatives of ‘spirit’. At the conclusion of his audition of Wordsworth’s Prelude over a number of evenings on his return from Malta and Italy in January 1807, he finds himself in prayer. Such a gesture of reverence may have come back to haunt him. Here I wish to concentrate not on the political dimension of Coleridge’s anxieties, but on this symmetry between poetic self-servingness, of the kind I think Coleridge saw in Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ and elsewhere, and the idea of a world so replete with divine significance that it had no need of otherworldly support – the idea of Pantheism. In a telling moment in the poem Coleridge wrote about the experience of hearing Wordsworth recite The Prelude (in the 1805 version), he describes Wordsworth’s treatment of his own early enthusiasm for the French Revolution, confirmed by his travels in France with Robert Jones in 1790. The Revolution appears as a divine birth through the poem’s classical allusion to the nativity of a fully-formed Minerva, the goddess of reason and wisdom, plausibly invoking the Enlightenment. In Wordsworth’s transposition, the deity is explosively born to a Rousseauistic humanism succeeding her original father, thunder-dealing Jupiter, submission to whose authority is ‘immediate’ and therefore unconsidered, the proper target of Hegelian suspicion and not a benign presence teaching us to spell the world aright. Then, in a progress through poetic and religious hierarchies explicitly recalling that of Lycidas, the deity is sympathetically recalled to a truer, perhaps post-Enlightenment source. The ‘watchtower’ and its Miltonic authority is then in its turn overlaid by the contemporary paradigm of philosophical groundedness, the ‘absolute self’:



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Where France in all her Towns lay vibrating Like some becalmed Bark beneath the burst Of Heaven’s immediate Thunder, when no cloud Is visible, or shadow on the Main. For thou wert there, thine own brows garlanded, Amid the tremor of a realm aglow, Amid a mighty nation jubilant, When from the general Heart of Human kind Hope sprang forth like a full-born Deity! Of that dear Hope afflicted and struck down, So summoned homeward, thenceforth calm and sure From the dread Watch-Tower of man’s absolute Self. With light unwaning on her eyes, to look Far on – herself a glory to behold, The Angel of the vision! Then (last strain) Of Duty, chosen Laws controlling choice, Action and Joy! – An orphic song indeed, A song divine of high and passionate thoughts To their own Music chaunted!18 The classical goddess born of political excitement is quickly put in her cultural place by the context of polytheism in which she appears. She is ‘[the goddess] Of that dear Hope afflicted and struck down’. To make sense of the syntax of Coleridge’s line, we have to understand her as one goddess among many. She belongs to a culture alien to Christian monotheistic certainty, perhaps that polytheism we saw Coleridge refer to in his Opus Maximum as ‘the popular side of Pantheism’. Then, recalling the returning movement of the angel in Lycidas – ‘Look homeward angel now, and melt with ruth’ – as the poem targets its final Christian destination, the goddess of hope, the ‘Angel’ of this vision, is ‘summoned homeward’. But here the decisive orientation is provided ‘from the dread watchtower of man’s absolute self’. Coleridge is suggesting that the self-reflexivity of Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem takes up the role of figuring that religious authority. Wordsworth’s ‘high and passionate thoughts / To their own music chaunted’ are part of an ‘Orphic song’, recalling Greek mysteries whose religious initiates eventually provided a political classification so important for the late Coleridge’s theorizing of the Clerisy. Of course it is ostensibly a poem about Wordsworth’s initiation, as his friend saw it, into poetic greatness. It is entirely appropriate that the poem is so elegantly plumped with allusions effectively digested by its own poetic texture. Historicism rather than chronology reinforces Wordsworth’s membership of ‘The truly great’, for ‘Time is not with them, / Save as it worketh for them, they in it’. The tautegory is kept intact, ‘a linked lay of Truth’, a simultaneity guaranteeing the presence of the past in the present. But the tautegory also does something else in this case, something less desirable from the point of view of Coleridge’s theology: it again emphasizes the poetic monopoly over

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truth here, which the intertextuality of Coleridge’s delivery has been enacting: ‘Of Truth profound a sweet continuous lay, / Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes!’ Shakespeare, ‘warbling his native woodnotes wild’, is surely behind the unchallengable adequacy attributed to poetic naturalization here? Then, personally, it is as though the poem is an elegy on Coleridge; or, in terms of the presence of Lycidas, Coleridge is Edward King, a friend (so closer than King was to Milton) ensured immortality by being the poem’s addressee. The poem then takes in as well the image of inauthenticity, which Coleridge sees himself as wearing in contrast to Wordsworth. And Coleridge’s reading of Wordsworth’s poem, the implication is, emerges enriched, not deflected in its authority, by this honest registering of the baffled human character on whose philosophical corpse, as it were, the poem can strew its elegiac flowers. But to acknowledge poetry’s encompassing both of a philosophical project and its expressive or symptomatic failure – ‘Genius given and Knowledge won in vain’ – seems again to invoke for poetry the self-sufficiency of a religious discourse. Its reader becomes a ‘devout child’, spoken to by the ‘comforter and guide’. Again the all-encompassing experience of Wordsworth’s poem’s ministration is emphasized by the peculiarly indeterminate idea of ‘my being blended in one thought / (Thought was it? Or aspiration? Or resolve?)’. The poem’s ontological adequacy then triggers the concluding prayerful response. Pantheism, then, is a theology whose god is entirely indwelling. No otherworldly personage, scenario or vague dimension needs to be postulated as a guarantee for our sense of the numinous. In Keats’s down-to-earth expression, heaven is ‘a repetition’ of the here and now, ‘but repeated in a finer tone’.19 For Wordsworth writing the Prospectus to The Excursion, originally appended to the earlier ‘Home at Grasmere’ in 1800, paradise is arguably ‘the growth of common day’. Keats more obviously aestheticizes religion, but Wordsworth’s view is comparably supported by trust in a poetic generosity of apprehension. His intention seems to be to save religious notions from relegation to outmoded history or a dream and make them an ineliminable part of the process of perception. But this success, of course, could have the opposite effect of undermining religion by dissolving it into that intensity of experience to whose expression poetry is peculiarly suited. A poetic discourse so complete need never advance beyond referring to itself. Its reflexivity, its ‘this’, again poses as an immediate grasp of the universal. As its title suggests, ‘Home at Grasmere’ moots a polemical ‘at-homeness’ not in need of further supplementation. For Hegel, summarising in his Preface to the Phenomenology, to be ‘at home’ (worin es sich bei sich selbst weiss) in an experience in such a way, goes against the naturally progressive effort of ‘Spirit’ or Geist.20 Achieved immediacy or fulfilment of this kind precludes any scientific future. Or, in Freudian terms, it is as if we remain trapped within a primary narcissism in which the ego cannot accept the existence of any boundary between itself and the world.21 Arguably the conclusion of Hegel’s Phenomenology will be arrived at precisely when such transparency can be acknowledged; that knowledge, however, can never be gained immediately but only through the process of mediations recorded



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by Hegel’s entire phenomenology. These stages eventually culminate in an acceptance that the individual is designed by ‘Spirit’, properly identified by that ultimate communal form in which it can exhaust all its possibilities. From that conclusion, Schelling argues, Hegel illicitly believes he has produced a logic of the real. In fact, though, the notion of causality that drives his logic and phenomenology is ‘final’: ‘a cause only to the extent that everything strives towards it.’ Clearly Coleridge might be in sympathy with this insofar as he thought that the personality we learnt from the linguistic fostering of our mother language, standing in for God, strove towards ‘personeity’ or the perfection of personality. We were nurtured in this direction, but never completed, by the mothering language. By the same token, though, he would have found Hegel’s account deficient in its inability to acknowledge that we are positively pushed in this direction by affective responses to the sense that the world is limited. We have, as Wittgenstein stressed, nothing further to say than is mundanely delivered us, but the positive quality of the world, ‘that’ it is, requires articulation over and above ‘how’ the world is – the world considered from the point of view of understanding and its logic. Coleridge’s own Logic or ‘Elements of Discourse’ caters for the dimension of understanding. But it requires another kind of linguistic ingenuity to express the Schellingian character of this positive philosophy. This, though, is not a licence to find the mystical anywhere: Coleridge often seems to think that Wordsworth the poet’s arrogation of philosophical authority results in this Pantheistic lack of discrimination. And if we can’t discriminate, we can’t make sense of things. And the difficulties Coleridge has with Wordsworth’s ‘philosophical’ poetry suggest that he worries that to collapse positive philosophy into poetry will not do. The only philosophy Wordsworth mentions in his famous explanation to Isabella Fenwick of the role of Platonic anamnesis in the ‘Immortality Ode’ is confident that fiction can surround philosophy and that it is appropriate for him ‘to make for my purpose the best use of it I could as a Poet’.22 Poetic sufficiency breaks the link with theology. It attenuates the total linguistic cooperation Coleridge believed was required, imaged by the Absolute care of a mothering language. Wordsworth is fascinated by the temptation to essay a poetic intimacy with an unmediated dimension subtending the world ‘wherein we find our happiness or not at all’. His susceptibility to a kind of Hegelian critique, though, uncovers the characteristic of his poetry that troubled Coleridge: that difference between believing that ‘heaven lies about us in our infancy’ and the later reconstruction of ‘God who is our home’. Wordsworth’s poetic facility is such that he can evoke a break between the two. The philosophical distance from immediacy could have been predicted. What is unbelievably ambitious in Coleridge’s view is the independent poetic authority that can turn a child into our ‘best philosopher’. It is as if Wordsworth presents Jesus’ parable about the little children entering the kingdom of heaven as no longer parabolic. The astonishing ‘Immortality Ode’, like the ‘spots of time’ in The Prelude, can get us to read it in a way that concedes that the poem, by referring to itself, isolates an experience independent of subsequent differentiation.

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So ineffable a connection could belong to anything, thinks Coleridge, and that is for him the nonsense of Pantheism. But, as we have already seen, Pantheism is a problem for Coleridge not reducible to the terms of the Pantheismusstreit. Wordsworth’s ‘splendid paradoxes’ in the ‘Immortality Ode’ and elsewhere need a religious ‘binding’ (Coleridge clung to this etymology) if they are not to fall apart as they cease to hear the repetition of Being in a language we can understand and try to speak the original. Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ proposes that dissolved in the lyrical intensity with which childhood is experienced – in that immediacy – is all we need strive for by way of grasping our Absolute grounding – ‘this’: not a type of it, not a poetically conditioned absolute, but an unarguable ‘this’. Gone is the idea that yokes the mammaloschen to an increasingly articulate philosophy that can mesh with Coleridge’s belief in a Christian redemption. Gone, too, is the effort to see the repetition of the Absolute I AM in all perception, and so to ‘spell’ the world in these terms, if authority for sensing our grounding is isolated in the inimitable paradigm – linguistically as well as temporally impossible – of the little child, the infans, ‘Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!’ Wordsworth’s poetic success is politically egalitarian, and Coleridge would have problems with that. It is also theologically indifferent, and that would agonize him. But it is philosophically that he tries to refute an achievement precisely on the grounds of its poetic self-sufficiency. That unnerving adequacy, that extraordinary power to transform Romantic reflexivity into a world not realized, appears to Coleridge as threatening to undo the significant world for the rest of us. The equation of poetic with ontological difference that he detects in Wordsworth has tempted philosophers down to Heidegger, and will no doubt continue to do so. Typical, though, of the post-Kantian moment to which Coleridge belonged, was the understanding that a wider combination of discourses was required for ontological spelling than poetry. Poetry had come to represent the aesthetic for which Kant so memorably in his third Critique carved out an autonomy allowing its judgements to bridge the gap between phenomenal and noumenal reality. But post-Kantian critique of that difference, from Fichte onwards, had also questioned the exclusive role Kant apparently delegated to the aesthetic. Increasingly post-Kantian thought abandons the idea of a ‘literary Absolute’, except as it perpetually unpacks itself, progressively, into other discourses over time. The Jena idea of poetry, as Walter Benjamin famously stated, was prose, a much wider practice than any literary establishment might encompass, and something with a place for each of us. Tautegory and tautegorical thought become the historical extension in all manner of expressions and logoi of an original thought unconscious at the point of utterance – more of the same, not the same. This philosophy of revelation was Coleridge’s own formulation, which Schelling took to parallel the trajectory of his own thought after he stopped publishing in 1809. At any rate, it is in that arena of intensely argued German philosophical debate, that these issues, and perhaps that emancipation, are most visible.

Notes

Chapter 1: Coleridge in the Land of Logic   1 Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).   2 Die Weltalter: Fragmente In der Urfassungen von 1811 und 1813 herausgegeben von Manfred Schröter (Beck: Munich, 1966), p. 115.   3 CN, I, 1679.   4 Catherine Belsey, ‘The Romantic Construction of the Unconscious’ in Literature, Politics and Theory, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, Diana Loxley (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 73–4.   5 Although main passages on ‘tautegory’ are anthologized, neither ‘tautegory’ nor ‘Schelling’ is indexed in A.C. Goodson, ed. Coleridge’s Writings: On Language (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998). Schelling doesn’t feature significantly in Goodson’s earlier work, Verbal Imagination: Coleridge and the Language of Modern Criticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). I don’t think this omission is culpable, but it makes the point that Schelling and tautegory very differently have to come to the fore when we are tracing Coleridge’s connections within the history of philosophy rather than ‘the language of modern criticism’.   6 Athenaeum Fragments 123: ‘Isn’t poetry the noblest and worthiest of the arts for this, among other reasons: that in it alone drama becomes possible?’ trans. Peter Firchow in Philosophical Fragments/Friedrich Schlegel, foreword by Rodolphe Gasché (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).   7 See Elinor Shaffer’s study, which breaks ground in many ways, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Fall of Jerusalem’: the Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). The most ambitious claims for Coleridge’s ‘Logosophia’ are made in Mary Anne Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy: The Logos as Unifying Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).   8 Athenaeum Fragments 121. Kathleen Wheeler’s Sources and Processes in Coleridge’s ‘Biographia Literaria’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) is a pioneering study of Coleridge’s possible use of the techniques of Jena irony in whose debt I remain. This book tries to supplement her account of the collaboration with his reader solicited by Coleridge with reference to the more general philosophical project of self-dissemination to which these local ironic strategies contributed.

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  9 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 707 / B 735, translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Werke, IV, 609. 10 Ibid., A 104–5; vor uns nichts ist, Werke, III, 166. 11 See Fichte’s Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre, with First and Second Introductions, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (New York: Meredith Corporation, 1970), especially p. 237. Dale Snow, in Schelling and the End of Idealism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), gives a helpful account of Schelling’s controversy with Jacobi, the protagonists’ possible misunderstandings of each other, and compares the Denkmal to Schelling’s later diagnosis in his Lectures on Modern Philosophy of Jacobi’s philosophical ‘inability to deal with beginnings’ (pp. 205–13). 12 Athenaeum Fragments 80; (To William Wordsworth, 30 May 1815), CL, IV, 574–5. 13 The quoted phrase is Anna Maria Cimitile’s in Emergenze: Il fantasma della schiavitù da Coleridge a D’Aguiar (Naples: Liguori, 2005), p. 59. 14 Ibid., especially p. 81: ‘If chiasmus, repetition, self-referentiality are the textual characteristics of poetry in general, in ‘The Rime’ the spectre / fantasy (fantasma) of slavery, ghost in the machine of narrative selfreferentiality, invades them to subvert or only to use them, in the play of inversions and repetitions locked in a circle.’ Compare Slavoj Žižek’s discussion of the spectral body in Schelling: there is ‘no “pure” spirituality without the obscene spectre of “spiritualised matter”’, p. 46 of The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, an essay by Slavoj Žižek and the complete text of Die Weltalter in English translation by Judith Norman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). I am suggesting that these two authors’ insights complement each other. 15 la schiavitù è l’assenza di soggetività, Emergenze, p. 68. 16 CM, 4, 463. 17 Best for sources are the notes in the Bollingen edition by numerous editors, and classic studies by René Wellek, Gabriel Marcel, G.N.G. Orsini, Thomas McFarland, Raimonda Modiano, Kathleen Wheeler and others. 18 G.N.G. Orsini, for example, gives a catalogue of connections and putative affinities between Coleridge and Hegel in the chapter he devotes to Hegel in Coleridge and German Idealism (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), ch. 10, pp. 238–46. He doesn’t imagine how Hegel might have written Coleridge’s kind of thinking into his intellectual map of the age. For the most imaginative recent discussion of Hegel and Romantic theory, see Leon Chai, Romantic Theory: Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 19 Raimonda Modiano, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature (London: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 169–70, referring to CL IV, 874 and CN III, 4449., F.H. Jacobi, Von den Göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Öffenbarung in Streit Um Die Göttliche Dinge: Die Auseinandersetzung Zwischen Jacobi Und Schelling,



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ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967), pp. 278–9. Jacobi goes back to Aristotle for support and implies Schelling’s position is perennially wrong-headed. One might instead say that Schelling’s offences here against Lovejoy’s ‘great chain of being’ and ‘principle of plenitude’ show Schelling’s originality. The New Schelling, edited by Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman (London and New York: Continuum, 2004); Schelling Now: Contemporary Readings, edited by Jason M. Wirth (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005). The analytic philosophical terminology of foundational and antifoundational shows that I have learned from Tim Milnes here in his excellent Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See especially pp. 90–102 on Wordsworth. Milnes sees the writings of Coleridge’s central period as ‘conditioned by a triangular context between Kantian foundationalism, Schelling’s para-philosophy of intuition and dialectic, and an ironism which resisted any appropriation of its numinous aesthetic’, p. 147. The Ages of the World: (Fragment) from the handwritten remains of the Third Version (c. 1815), translated with an Introduction by Jason M. Wirth (Albany NY: SUNY, 2000), p. xxxvii. Knowledge and Indifference, p. 93. Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979), p. 15.

Chapter 2: Coleridge’s Philosophical Moment   1 CL, II, 706.   2 Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, selected and edited by Thomas Sadler (London: Macmillan and Co., 1869, 3 vols, I, 352.   3 Materialen zur Schellings Philosophischen Anfängen, ed. Manfred Frank and Gerhard Kurz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), pp. 117–20.   4 Karl Marx, Frühe Schriften, ed. Hans-Joachim Lieber and Peter Furth (Stuttgart: Cotta), I. 652: Die Geschichte ist die wahre Naturgeschichte des Menschen. See Early Writings, introduced by Lucio Colletti, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 391.   5 See Karl Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche: Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1995 – first published 1941), especially pp. 130–6. This commentary is an important starting point for later work like Manfred Frank’s Der unendliche Mangel an Sein: Schellings Hegelkritik und die Anfänge der Marxschen Dialektik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1992). But other important writing picks out this turning point, from Heidegger’s course of Schelling lectures to Jürgen Habermas’s post-doctoral thesis.

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  6 Nicholas Reid, in a closely argued chapter on Coleridge’s use of Schelling’s System in Biographia Literaria in Coleridge, Form and Symbol: Or, The Ascertaining Vision (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), agrees with Michael Vater that Schelling’s System fails: ‘As Michael Vater puts it, the solution “is extra-systematic since on the Fichtean model of consciousness – an activity ever-deflected from complete consciousness into unconscious and pre-conscious production – a fully transparent philosophical moment of self-reflection is not possible” (System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978), Introduction, p. xv) p. 115. But Schelling, as Hegel argued a year later, was trying to create a difference between himself and Fichte, to get behind the logic of reflection to new forms of understanding identity. This was a continual advance on Fichte, a verbesserten Fichteschen Lehre, as Schelling’s title of 1806 had it.   7 Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) novo methodo, ed. and trans. Daniel Beazeale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 365.   8 Hegel, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, translated by H.S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1977), pp. 124–5.   9 CM, IV, 625. 10 CL, IV, 874–5. 11 CM, IV, 402, 443. 12 CM, IV, 427; Norman Fruman, Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972). 13 CM, IV, 371. 14 The full title of the Darlegung can be translated as ‘Demonstration of the true relation of Naturphilosophie to the improved Fichtean teaching’. 15 CM, IV, 451, III, 365. See Jere Paul Surber’s useful anthology: Metacritique: the linguistic assault on German idealism (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2001). 16 This maybe helps decode the otherwise cryptic annotation in CM, IV, 372: ‘While in the Physics [of] Schelling I am amused with happy [con]jectures . . . but in his theology [be]wildered by Positions which in their [?be]st sense are transcendent (überfliegend) [but] in their literal sense scandalous’. 17 CM, IV, 388, 363, 393, 398, 418. 18 CM, IV, 358. 19 CM, II, 614. 20 CM, II, 614. On Coleridge and egoism see Stephen Bygrave, Coleridge and the Self: Romantic Egotism (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan and Co., 1986). 21 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, edited by Mary Gregor, Introduction by Andrews Reath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 102–3. On p. 4 Kant makes clear the relativism involved: ‘The ideas of God and Immortality, however, are not conditions of the moral law but only



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conditions of the necessary object of a will determined by this law, that is, by the practical use of our pure reason . . .’ CM, III, 317. Werke, I / 6, 187. Stuttgart Seminars of 1810 (Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen), reconstructed from MSS. Werke, I / 7, 425: Es ist vielmehr nur eine Doublirung des Wesens, also ein Steigerung der einheit, was wieder durch Analogie mit uns deutlich zu machen ist. Werke, I / 7, 425. See Werner Schulz, Die Vollendung des Deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings (Stuttgart and Köln: Kohlhammer, 1955). Schulz argues, effectively, that Hegel differs from Schelling by refusing to understand Being on the model of the emergence of subjectivity from nature but treats Being as an abstract category (bei einem subjektlosen Sein). Schelling’s critique shows that Hegelian idealism thus fails to secure Being on its own rationalist terms and so demonstrates it to be the completion (Vollendung) of a doomed project (pp. 107–8). Schulz’s further point is that Schelling is not a post-Hegelian but sets up the quite different philosophical viewpoint from which Hegel’s idealism can appear thus exhausted. The need to relay an alternative to Hegel’s philosophy through other discourses in order to become adequate to a subject which becomes itself as mythology (Es wird sich selbst zur Mythologie) is present, Schulz argues, in Schelling’s philosophy from the start (pp. 305–6). (Hence, on my interpretation, Schelling’s readiness for the Jena experience.) Manfred Frank, Eine Einführung in Schellings Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985) and Der unendliche Mangel an Sein (Munich: Willhelm Fink, 1992); Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1992). Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1980), especially chs 3 and 5; Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, with an Introduction by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Werke, 1 / 6, 187; see Frank’s discussion in Einführung, pp. 126–7; Dieter Henrich, ‘Andersheit und Absolutheit des Geistes: Sieben Schritte auf dem Wege von Schelling zu Hegel’ in Selbstverhältnisse (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1993), pp. 142–72. See Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, Translation, Introduction and Notes by Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 139–41. Phenomenology, Preface, p. 9; Werke, 3. 22. Like Hegel, though, Coleridge thinks that an immediate seizing of such an Absolute is nonsensical, and we will find that this thought helps us understand his anxieties about Wordsworth’s poetic version of this immediacy in his ‘Immortality Ode’. CM, IV, 995. Henrich, Dieter, Selbstverhältnisse (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1993), pp. 167–8. See especially Werke, I / 8, 26–9. Both Jacobi and Schelling are anthologized in one volume with an excellent introduction by Wilhelm Weischedel

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Coleridge and German Philosophy in Streit Um Die Göttliche Dinge: Die Auseinandersetzung Zwischen Jacobi Und Schelling (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967). CM, III, 330–1. See also the footnote to a letter to R.H. Brabant of March 1815 when Coleridge was writing Biographia Literaria. Correcting Spinoza, he writes of ‘the doctrine of The Living God, having the Ground of his own Existence within himself, and the originating Principle of all dependent Existence in his Will and Word’, CL IV, 548n. Hence the attempts of Frank in his Der unendliche Mangel an Sein, and Slavoj Zizek’s Lacanian The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso 1996) and his ‘The Abyss of Freedom’ introducing Judith Norman’s translation of The Ages of the World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). See Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2006), p. 96. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy, pp. 68–76. See also Peter Dews’ discussion in ‘Deconstruction and German Idealism’, in The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Modern European Philosophy (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 115–51. Wolfram Hogrebe, Prädikation und Genesis: Metaphysik als Fundamentalheuristik im Ausgang von Schellings ‘Die Weltalter’ (Frankfurt am Main; Suhrkamp, 1989), pp. 14–40. Werke, I / 7, 299. There is a partial translation of ‘On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature’ with good notes in David Simpson, ed. German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 149–58. The Dante essay is also partially translated in Simpson, German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism; see p. 144. Hogrebe, Prädikation und Genesis, p. 27: ‘Those who want to get to know the poetry of more recent times at its source, rather than according to superficial concepts, may test themselves against this great and severe spirit [Geist], in order to know the means by which the totality of the modern age can be grasped, and that no easily created bond unites it . . .’. Simpson, German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism, p. 148. Werke, I / 7, 305. See Hogrebe’s sketch, Prädikation und Genesis, p. 30, of the presiding figures behind Schelling’s philosophical trajectory from the Älteste Systemprogramm to the Weltalter – founder of religion, poet, seer. CM, III, 89; Hogrebe analyses this structure as the logical reciprocity of a pronominal existence prior to predication (like the universality of sense-certainty Hegel analyses at the start of the Phenomenology in which the indifferent application of ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he’ etc. is a kind of universality), predicative existence which is differentiated, and the propositional existence through which our world has a future. See Prädikation und Genesis, Section 13, ‘Zur Theorie prädikatever Elementarteilchen’, pp. 71–8. Simpson, German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism, p. 142.



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45 CM, III, 317. 46 Robert Pippin, ‘You Can’t Get There from Here: Transition Problems in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 58. 47 Jean Wahl, Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (1929, 2nd edition, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951), pp. 16–17; Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 167, 172n. 48 Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone Press, 1981), p. 52. See Phenomenology, Preface, p. 38: ‘Formally, what has been expressed can be said thus: the general nature of the judgement or proposition, which involves the distinction of Subject and predicate, is destroyed by the speculative proposition . . .’ Werke, 3, 59. 49 Hegel Contra Sociology, pp. 48–9. 50 Hegel, Difference, pp. 90–1. 51 For a sharp account of Hegel’s way with external criticism, see Michael Rosen, Hegel’s Dialectic and Its Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 49–51, and compare Stephen Houlgate’s defence in The Opening of Hegel’s Logic, pp. 35–42. 52 Hegel, Difference, pp. 88–90. 53 LS, 30. 54 Rosen, Hegel’s Dialectic and Its Criticism, pp. 122–3. 55 CM, II, 992–3; Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. A. Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 139–40. Contrast Houlgate’s discussion in The Opening of Hegel’s Logic (p. 96) with Andrew Bowie’s in Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 159–62. 56 Phenomenology, p. 125. 57 Phenomenology, p. 125; Werke, 3, 161–2. 58 For a fuller discussion of the context of publication see my ‘Coleridge’ in The Penguin History of English Literature: The Romantic Age (London: Penguin Books, 1994), pp. 200–10. 59 As Pamela Edwards argues in The Statesman’s Science: History, Nature and Law in the Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), this meant too that Coleridge’s Clerisy ‘discredited the Tory dream of the clergy as the watchdog of the landed interest’ (p. 215), a gloss on Sidney Smith’s quip about the Church of England as ‘the Tory party at prayer’. The Clerisy would have replaced the landed interest. 60 PW I Poems, Part II, no. 289. 61 PW I Poems, Part II, no 293. 62 CM, II, 76. 63 Phenomenology, p. 128; Werke, 3, 165. 64 Phenomenology, p. 129; Werke, 3, 166.

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65 Phenomenology, p. 132 Werke, 3, 169 66 Phenomenology, pp. 136–7; Werke, 3, 175. 67 Phenomenology, p. 136; Werke, 3, 174.

Chapter 3: Drama as the Motor of Romantic Theory   1 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1945, 1969), p. 183. James Chandler pointed out to me in conversation that I was following Burkean lines: ‘The titular word for our own method is “dramatism”, since it invites one to consider the matter of motives in a perspective that, being developed from the analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action’, p. xxii.   2 I am indebted to the entire conference on Romantic Drama held at Bertinoro on 4–7 November 2004 for support and response to the first version of this chapter. In particular, I am grateful for suggestions from Lilla Maria Crisafulli, Diego Saglia, Anna Maria Sportelli and Greg Kucich. Symptomatically, there is no chapter on Drama in a major guide such as Stuart Curran’s The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and only a short section on ‘Theatre’ by Gillian Russell in Iain McCalman’s An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).   3 The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, edited by David Garnett (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963), p. 410.   4 ‘To the George Keatses’ (15–16 April, 1819), The Letters of John Keats 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), II. 88–9.   5 CM, IV, 374–5.   6 Seamus Perry, ‘The Talker’, The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. Lucy Newlyn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 107.   7 The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe (London: Dent, 1930– 3), 21 vols, 13, 304–6.   8 Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences: 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).   9 Hazlitt, 11, 87. 10 Catherine Burroughs, ed., Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance and Society, 1790–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 52. 11 The Two Foscari, V i 255–61. See David Erdman’s ‘Byron’s Stage Fright: The History of his Ambition and Fear of Writing for the Stage’, in Robert Gleckner and Bernard Beatty, eds, The Plays of Lord Byron: Critical Essays (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997). 12 ‘To the Artist’, The Artist I: 14 (1807), p. 5; The British Theatre: A Collection of Plays with Biographical and Critical Remarks by Mrs Inchbald (1808), XXI. 1.



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Both quoted in Philip Cox’s excellent Reading Adaptations: Novels and Verse Narratives on the Stage, 1790–1840 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 25–6. See Jeffrey N. Cox, ‘Baillie, Siddons, Larpent: gender, power and politics’, in C. Burroughs, ed., Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance and Society, 1790–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 40. Alan Richardson, A Mental Theatre: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic Age (University Park and London: Pennsylvania University Press, 1988) – the quotation is from The Dialogic Imagination, translated Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 284. The White Doe of Rylstone; or The Fate of the Nortons, ed. Kirsten Dugas (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 87. Fichte, The System of Ethics According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftlehre, translated and edited by Daniel Breazeale and Günter Zoller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 17. See Frederick Burwick’s interesting comparison, ‘Schelling and Hazlitt on disinterestedness and freedom’, in Metaphysical Hazlitt, Bicentenary Essays, edited by Uttara Natarajan, Tom Paulin and Duncan Wu (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 137–51. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), section 14. See The Case of Wagner. For Friedrich Schlegel on Euripides see Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, 16. 314 and Literary Notebooks 1797–1801, paras 2042 and 2049. The Birth of Tragedy, sec. 13; Friedrich Schlegel, Literary Notebooks 1797–1801, ed. Hans Eichner (London: Athlone Press, 1957), para. 527. Subsequent references are to paragraphs in this edition. The Birth of Tragedy, sec. 11. BL, II, 221. BL, II, 190, 221. Hazlitt, 18, 302. Victor Hugo, Préface de Cromwell, (Paris: Petits Classiques Larousse, 2001): ‘La drame est le poésie complète . . . Les idées actuelles de l’auteur de ce livre sur le drama . . . ne sont . . . que des revelations de l’exécution’, pp. 36, 72. Julie A. Carlson, In the Theater of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 97. See his prefatory remarks to ‘Sardanapalus’ and ‘The Two Foscari’: ‘they were not composed with the most remote view to the stage’, Poetical Works, edited by Frederick Page, corrected by John Jump (London: Oxford University Press), p. 453. Five Romantic Plays 1768–1821, edited by Paul Baines and Edward Burns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 152.

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29 Hegel, Phenomenology, para. 633. 30 Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 82. 31 For Coleridge’s knowledge of Schiller’s ideas see Michael John Kooy, Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 58–65. 32 PW III, Plays, I, 12. 33 Charles Lamb, ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, considered with reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation’, in Lamb as Critic, ed. Roy Park (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 87. 34 PW III, Plays, Part I, 148. 35 PW III, Plays, Part II, 1189–90. 36 Carlson, In the Theater of Romanticism, p. 96. 37 For the logic of remorse and related ethical topics, see Christopher Cordner’s excellent Ethical Encounter: The Depth of Moral Meaning (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).

Chapter 4: Coleridge’s Stamina   1 See David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993) for an overview.   2 Samuel Johnson, ‘Milton’, in Lives of the Poets (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), 2 vols, I. 72.   3 Neil Vickers, Coleridge and the Doctors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), p. 110 passim. Vickers’ chapter on ‘Dejection’, ch. 5, is an exemplary antidote to empathetic biography.   4 Michael Rosen, Hegel’s Dialectic and its Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 109.   5 Quarterly Review XII (October 1814), 100–11.   6 Jay Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Cambridge: Polity, 1992).   7 There is a very clear discussion of all the implications here in Werner Marx’s chapter on the Freedom essay in Schelling: Geschichte, System, Freiheit (Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber, 1977), ‘The Task of Schelling’s Freiheitschrift’, pp. 101–49. Horst Fuhrmans’ apothegm on the paradox is apt here: ‘Der Verstand ist aus der Verstandlosen geboren, und Finsternis ist die Erbteil aller Kreatur . . .’, Introducton to Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999), p. 30.   8 ‘Die Geburt des Geistes ist das Reich der Geschichte’, Werke, I / 7, 377 (The birth of Spirit is the realm of history’).   9 Peter de Bolla, Art Matters (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 10 Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd edition with supplementary essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 33–4.



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11 A. Benjamin, The Plural Event: Descartes, Hegel, Heidegger (London: Routledge, 1993). 12 J.L. Austin, ‘How to Talk’, Philosophical Papers, ed. J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd ed., 1970), p. 134. F.N. Sibley, ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, revised version in Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers in Philosophical Aesthetics, edited by John Benson, Betty Redfern and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). Sibley, like Wollheim, attributes an absolute propriety to some aesthetic expressions, ‘ways of talking’ he calls ‘natural’ (p. 17). But this is a consequence of ‘taste concepts . . . [being] not, except negatively, governed by conditions at all’ (p. 8), and so being, in Kantian terms, irreducibly particular. So ‘natural’, in this usage, is already metaphorical if we can’t generalize about it, part of the aesthetic activity it describes, as Sibley partly concedes on occasion. 13 de Bolla, Art Matters, pp. 15, 24–5. 14 I discuss the law of diminishing returns here as it applies to Schiller’s version of Kantian aesthetics in ch. 1 of Metaromanticism Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003). 15 See Friedrich Schiller, Über Anmut und Würde, ed. Klaus L. Berghahn (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1970), p. 113: ‘So wie die Anmut der Ausdruck einer schönen Seele ist, so ist Würde der Ausdruck einer erhabenen Gesinnung. Es ist dem Menschen zwar aufgegeben, eine innige Übereinstimmung zwischen seinen beiden Naturen zu stiften, immer ein harmonierendes Ganze zu sein und mit seiner vollstimmigen ganzen Menschheit zu handeln. Aber diese Charakterschönheit, die reifste Frucht seiner Humanität, ist bloss eine Idee, welcher gemäss zu werden er mit anhaltender Wachsamkeit streben, aber die er bei aller Ansstrengung nie ganz erreichen kann’. 16 See especially Neil Hertz’s classic The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York : Columbia University Press, 1985). 17 Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 384, para. 633; Werke, 3. 466. 18 Phenomenology, p. 387; Werke, 3. 469: ‘es ist jetzt das Gesetz, das um des Selbst willen, nicht um dessen willen das Selbst ist.’ 19 Phenomenology, pp. 233–4; Werke, 3. 289–90. 20 Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), p. 113. 21 See The Friend, 1. 502–4, for the discussion of Babel, and a letter of November 1819, CL, VI. 1050 for the description of the Essays. Coleridge and his editors use various spellings of rifacimento. 22 Werner Hamacher, ‘Position Exposed: Friedrich Schlegel’s Poetological Transposition of Fichte’s Absolute Proposition’ in Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. Peter Fenves (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 222–61. 23 Premises, p. 235, n. 7. 24 Premises, p. 249: ‘With parekbasis prose falls out of the role of reflection . . . Poetic parekbasis constitutes an uncontrollable, dramatical-grammatical

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26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Coleridge and German Philosophy trope whose exorbitant movement displaces the framework for every epistemological paradigm of reflective representation.’ In Hamacher’s condensed formulation: ‘By positing itself, genre poses for itself a limit and posits itself, as self-positing, beyond this limit’, Premises p. 230. The Friend, 1, 492–3. CL, III, 353. ‘Hints towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life’, SWF, I. 486. Logic, II, 146. CN, II, 2445. CN, V, 5987, 5977. TT, II, 249. CL, V, 325–6. CN, II, 2546.

Chapter 5: Coleridge’s ‘Coleridge’   1 Schelling, Werke, I / I, 383.   2 The Letters of John Keats 1814–21, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1958) II, 67.   3 Biography appears trapped in the ‘ideological fantasy of self-consciousness’ which David M. Baulch, in ‘The “perpetual Exercise of an Interminable Quest”: The Biographia Literaria and the Kantian Revolution’, Studies in Romanticism 43 no. 4 (Winter 2004), insightfully argues is posited in Biographia Literaria. Building on earlier work by Spivak, Žižek and Forrest Ryle, Baulch can conclude that Biographia Literaria neither succeeds nor fails but teaches us about ‘a fundamental antagonism between meaning and desire’ – the antagonism ignored by the biographical practice I criticise here and, I argue, given dramatic expression by the post-Kantians. See also Frederick Burwick, ed., Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria: Text and Meaning (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1989) for a range of responses to the CC edition of Biographia Literaria.   4 For a strictly Lacanian reading of Schelling’s negotiation of individuation out of an undifferentiated plenitude, the ‘repetition’ shared with Coleridge and studied in this book, see Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996) and ‘The Abyss of Freedom’ in The Abyss of Freedom / The Ages of the World, translated by Judith Norman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). See Peter Dews’s critique in ‘The Eclipse of Coincidence: Lacan, Merleau-Ponty and Schelling’ in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 4:3 (1999), 15–23.   5 Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 364.



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  6 ‘Is Derrida Dead? A conceptual foundation for the deconstruction of mortality’, The Times, Monday 11 October 2004, p. 15.   7 Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’ (1979), in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 67–83. Compare ‘Excuses (Confessions)’, ch. 12 of Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 278–83.   8 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B. Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 23; Werke 7, 28.   9 CN I, 1515. 10 Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 158. 11 Robert Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 458–9. 12 Taylor, Hegel, p. 150. In ‘Fichte’s Original Insight’, trans. David Lachterman, Contemporary German Philosophy, (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982), I. 21. Henrich’s classic formulation of Fichte’s performative reads: ‘The reflection theory does indeed begin with a Subject – Self; but then it proceeds to think of it only as a force capable of acting upon itself. With this the theory gives up the distinctive sense of subjectivity that belongs to self-consciousness’. 13 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (London: Athlone, 1990), p. 169. 14 Manfred Frank, Eine Einführung in Schellings Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), ch. 4, pp. 61–71; Hölderlin’s Urtheil und Seyn is reprinted in Materialen zur Schellings Philosophische Anfängen, ed. M. Frank and G. Kurz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), pp. 108–10. 15 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994), pp. 190–1, 277. 16 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 144. 17 See McFarland’s discussion in OM, xliv–ix. The aphorism (Aphorism XV) from which the quotation comes is headed “THE CHRISTIAN NO STOIC”, Aids 95. 18 Hamlet, III ii, 66–9. 19 See Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). There is a wide-ranging discussion of the place of Stoicism in early modern thought in the second volume of Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), especially pp. 279–84. 20 Philosophy and Government, p. xiii. 21 Galen Strawson, ‘Commentary: A fallacy of our age. Not every life is a narrative’, Times Literary Supplement, no. 5298 (15 October, 2004), pp. 13–15. 22 Cilles Deleuze, Le bergsonisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), p.7.

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23 Strawson, ‘Commentary’, pp. 15, 14. 24 Hamlet, IV iv 32. This passage is in the second Quarto (1604–5) but not in the first Quarto (1603) nor in the Folio edition of 1624. This allows one to speculate that the new king, James I, might have been expected to appreciate a Machiavellian compliment that earlier and later had no point? It doesn’t add anything to our sense of Hamlet’s incapacity, as editors have pointed out, but then that is just its thematic point. 25 Pamela Edwards rightly plays on the meanings of ‘liberal’ when describing the ‘more liberal liberty’ to be brought to the people by a Clerisy not tied to defending ‘an old landed virtù’, The Statesman’s Science, p. 215. 26 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translation and foreword by Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), ch. 1. 27 System, I / 3, 625. 28 Werke, I / 1, 346. 29 Abhandlungen Werke, I / 1, 346–7. Only an explanation like this saves Coleridge from Rene Wellek’s charges of grotesquely distorting Kant to fit his own spiritual needs. See Immanuel Kant in England, 1793–1838 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931). Schelling’s crucial letters, mostly to Hegel, inveighing against the wrong use of Kant at Tübingen and elsewhere are reprinted in Frank and Kurz (eds), Materialen. See Frank, Einführung, ch. 1. 30 Werke, I / 1, 353. 31 Werke, I / 1, 355. 32 For the full-blown version, see Schelling’s later (1806) Aphorismen zur Einleitung in die Naturphilosophie, I / 7, 147: ‘Die Vernunft aber trägt in sich Sinn, Verstand und Einbildungskraft als ebenso viele Endlichkeiten, ohne selbst eine derselben insbesondere zu seyn . . ’ (But reason bears in itself sense, understanding and imagination in the same way as many finitudes, without itself being any particular one of the same . . .). 33 Werke, I / 1, 366. 34 The full title is Darlegung des wahren Verhältnisses der Naturphilsosophy zu der verbesserten Fichteschen Lehre. Eine Erläuterungsschrift der ersten (Demonstration of the true relations of the philosophy of nature to the corrected/ improved Fichtean theory). 35 Sämmtliche Werke, I / 1, 367. 36 Sämmtliche Werke, I / 1, 369. 37 Strawson, ‘Commentary’, pp. 14–15.

Chapter 6: Renewing Friendship   1 This is a common view persuasively asserted by Coleridgean scholars from Kathleen Coburn, L.S. Lockridge and Anthony Harding onwards.



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  2 This line is common to the work of philosophers otherwise as different as Philippa Foot, Bernard Williams, John Casey and Alasdair Macintyre.   3 The Friend, I. 68–9. See Tilottama Rajan’s discussion of revisionariness in romantic hermeneutics in Parts 1 and 2 of The Supplement of Reading (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990).   4 Hence Norman Fruman on Coleridge: ‘It is curious how freely persons of a certain cast of mind will borrow from those they affect to despise . . .’, Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel (New York: Braziller, 1972), 98.   5 To Thomas Poole, 13 February 1801, CL, II, 635.   6 CL, II, 161.   7 The classic study of the difficulties in the British Romantic reception of German thought is still Rosemary Ashton’s The German Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).   8 J.H. Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930), 117. Muirhead still seems to me valuably intimate with Coleridge’s project in a way that recent advocacy of Coleridge’s importance for the history of philosophy is not. Compare Mary Anne Perkins, Coleridge’s Philosophy: The Logos as Unifying Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) and my ‘Coleridge as Philosopher’ in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. Lucy Newlyn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).   9 The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World: An Essay by Slavoj Žižek with the text of Schelling’s Die Weltalter (second draft, 1813) in English translation by Judith Norman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 126. 10 See the helpful discussions in Alan R.White, Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983) and Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993). 11 Karl Jaspers, Schelling: Grösse und Verhängnis (Munich: R. Piper Verlag, 1955), p. 61. 12 CM, III, 89. 13 Jurgen Habermas’s chapter, ‘Dialektiker Idealismus im Übergang zum Materialismus’, Theorie und Praxis (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1969), pp. 108–61, starts the revival of materialist interpretations of Schelling most persuasively continued in Manfred Frank, Der unendliche Mangel an Sein: Schellings Hegelkritik und die Anfänge die Marxschen Dialektik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1992), and, psychoanalytically, in Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996). While not taking account of these, Douglas Hedley offers a militantly Platonic, anti-materialist reading of Schelling and German idealism in his packed and highly readable Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: ‘Aids to Reflection’ and the Mirror of the Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). He does, however, concede momentarily the exceptions of which I make the rule here, noting that in the formulations of the Freiheitschrift Schelling produces an ‘Ideal-Realismus . . . [which] barely remained an idealism at all. By insisting upon the polarity of nature and spirit as equal manifesta-

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Coleridge and German Philosophy tions of the absolute, Schelling was denying the primacy of spirit that is characteristic for idealism (and Platonism). Despite the great shift in his thought in the Freiheitschrift, Schelling retains his conception to develop a natural or physical basis for freedom, a concern that links this middle period to the early Naturphilosophie. Coleridge criticizes adamantly this aspect of Schelling, and his criticism has been well documented in scholarship’, p.28; see also pp. 74–5 and 79ff. ‘Note on Spinoza’ (1817), SWF, I. 609–10. Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, an essay by Slavoj Žižek and the complete text of Die Weltalter in English translation by Judith Norman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), p. 135. The Indivisible Remainder, 80 n. 12. For Schelling, at some point the process of grounding reality has to stop. Otherwise the regress would be as infinite as the series of reflections in Kant’s grounding of the subject in his theory of apperception. Hence arises Schelling’s need to work the Ungrund or groundlessness into his calculations to end-stop Absolute self-differentiation. The Ungrund can generate no further comparisons. That is its function. Aids, Appendix A, 277 n. See James Boulger, Coleridge as Religious Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961): ‘Kant’s notion of a categorical imperative giving support for regulative principles becomes in Coleridge’s deductions a mode of cognition dealing with areas anathematized by Kant’, p. 124. And Boulger repeats Muirhead’s belief in Coleridge’s theological distaste for an impersonalism endemic in philosophical discussion – ‘Coleridge realised that approaching the idea of God in this way, from a conception of the will as source of all being, involved the danger of entirely separating the objective Absolute Will from the subjective, personal God as Father’, p. 131 Aids, 136. Compare Werner Marx on life (Leben) as the ‘great Magician’ (grosse Magier) of Schelling’s Freedom essay. J.H. Muirhead, German Philosophy and the War (London: Oxford University Press, 1914–15). CL, V, 287. See Frederick Beiser (ed.), The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xx. BL, II, 134. See Jerome Christensen, Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981). Nicomachaean Ethics, 1166a. See The Friend, I, Essays 5 and 9. Spinoza, Baruch, Ethics, trans. Andrew Boyle, revised with an introduction and notes by G.H.R. Parkinson (London: Dent, 1989), Part III, props 1 and 3. See Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza (London: Harmondsworth, rev. edn 1962), 161–8. Genevieve Lloyd talks helpfully for our purposes of Spinoza’s ‘theory of human sociability and friendship, grounded in the



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physics [5 adequate ideas] of bodies’, in Spinoza and The Ethics (London: Routledge, 1996), 88. The Friend, I, 40. To William Hart Coleridge, 8 December 1818, CL, IV. 894, quoted in The Friend, I, 522 n. Gibbon has fun with the anachronism here, which is noted and defended by Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion, p. 20. Maurice Blanchot, L’amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 326–30. My remarks here are influenced by Richard Stamp, ‘The Discretion of Dying: Blanchot and the death of Bataille’, in Dying Words: The Last Moments of Writers and Philosophers, ed. Martin Crowley (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000) pp. 163–179. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, translated by George Collins (London: Verso, 2005), ch. 1. Politics of Friendship, 290. Nevertheless, for a fascinating reading of later (1820s, post Biographia and Friend) Coleridge as much closer to that convergence of post-Kantian grounding with the postmodern en abyme, see Anthony John Harding, ‘Imagination, Patriarchy, and Evil in Coleridge and Heidegger’, Studies in Romanticism 35 (1996), pp. 3–36.

Chapter 7: Reading from the Inside   1 For speculations on Coleridge’s possible etymological grasp of Logos, à la Heidegger, as signifying a ‘gathering together’, see the editors’ ‘Prolegomena’ to Coleridge’s Opus Maximum, in CC, XV. cix.   2 See Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by Ralph Mannheim (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 128, where the idea of Logos as ‘collecting collectedness’ is a way to signifying ‘neither meaning nor word nor doctrine’. For a good example of a convincing comparative reading of Coleridge and Heidegger see A.J. Harding, ‘Imagination, Patriarchy and Evil in Coleridge and Heidegger’, Studies in Romanticism 35 (1996).   3 Nigel Leask’s The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), which set new standards for the political interpretation of Romantic epistemology, is the key text here.   4 ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus: An Essay, preparatory to a series of Disquisitions respecting the Egyptian in Connection with the Sacerdotal Theology, and in contrast with the Mysteries of Ancient Greece’, SWF: CC XI, 2. 1267–8.   5 CC, XI, 2, 1276.   6 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling; Repetition, edited and translated by H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

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10

11

12

13

14

15

Coleridge and German Philosophy 1983), pp. 229, 304. For Kierkegaard, ‘repetition is a crucial expression for what “recollection” was to the Greeks’, pp. 131, 148–9. There are other Schellingian formulations and reprises throughout. See Alberto Toscano’s lucid discussion of the connections between Schelling’s versatility then and his appeal now to many different philosophical approaches in ‘Philosophy and the Experience of Construction’, in The New Schelling, ed. Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman (London and New York: Continuum Books, 2004), especially pp. 106–10. As Pfau notes, Nicolai Hartman had already described Schelling as a ‘Protean’ thinker, (Schelling, Idealism and the Endgame of Theory, trans. and ed. Thomas Pfau, pp. 1, 45n.1). For a sustained and lucid description of secularization as differentiation from rather than superiority over previous religious positions, see Colin Jager, The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2007). Richard Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism: Essays in Philosophy and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 193. See Edward Allen Beach’s knowledgeable and helpful contextualization of Schelling’s philosophy of mythology in his ‘Introduction’ and early chapters of The Potencies of God(s): Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994). Ibid., p.10–11 for a discussion of the controversy raised by Creuzer’s work; see Georg Friedrich Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders die Griechen (1810–12), 4 vols. CN, vol. 4, 1819–26, 4832. Still one of the clearest discussions of the linguistic terminology I am obliged to use here is Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (London: Macmillan, 1984). Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schwepenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), Band I.1, pp. 336–409; translated by John Osborne as The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: NLB, 1977), pp. 159–235. See also ‘Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen’, Gesammelte Schriften, II.1, pp. 140–57, translated by Edmund Jephcott as ‘On Language as Such, and the Language of Man’ in Selected Writings, vol. 1 1913–26 (Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 62–75. ‘Der Begriff der Kunstwerk in der deutschen Romantik’, Gesammelte Schriften, I.1, 11–122. See the last chapter of my Metaromanticism for further detail. Douglas Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: ‘Aids to Reflection’ and the Mirror of the Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 144–5, 135. Schelling’s main target here is Euhemerism, or ‘ungelehrter Euemerismus’, (Werke, II / 2. 233). He might as well have chosen to attack Vico’s socioeconomic reductions of myth although he might have felt affinities with his idea of their ricorsi or historical recurrence.



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16 See Elinor Shaffer’s discussion of Schelling’s ‘levelling of Christianity to mythology’ in ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Fall of Jerusalem’, pp. 139–40. While she doesn’t, I think, make as much as I do of the distinction between Schelling and the ‘higher criticism’, she is well aware of it and of Coleridge’s resistance to ‘the disintegrative effects of Biblical criticism through subtler means of interpretation’, p. 129. Her description of the afterlife of this ambition in Hölderlin and Browning is exemplary. 17 OM, xc. 18 Letter by Ruskin discovered by Andrew Wilton, quoted in J.M.W. Turner, ed. Guy Weelen (New York and London: Alpine Fine Arts, 1982), p. 115 n. 2. 19 John Constable’s Correspondence, II: Suffolk Records Society, VI (1964), p. 110. Constable’s phrase furnishes the title of John Gage’s fine book, J.M.W. Turner: A Wonderful Range of Mind (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987). 20 See Jack Lindsay, Turner: A Critical Biography (London: Cory, Adams & MacKay,1 960), p. 84. Scott was complimentary enough in his Journal and elsewhere about Turner’s illustrations to his Poetical Works. Scott’s publisher at this time, Robert Cadell, found Turner ‘very common looking’, quoted by Jan Piggott, Turner’s Vignettes (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1993), p. 53. 21 Collected Correspondence of J.M.W. Turner, With an Early Diary and a Memoir by George Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 2. 22 The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe (London: Dent, 1930–3), 21 vols, IV, 76n. 23 John Ruskin, Collected Works, ed. A. Wedderburn and E.T. Cook (London: George Allen, 1903–12), 39 vols, VII. 205, 207. 24 RuskinWorks, VII, 387. 25 ‘Finally, touching on plagiarism in general, it is to be remembered that all men who have sense and feeling are being continually helped . . . The greatest is he who has been oftenest aided . . .’ Works, V, 330. 26 Works, VII, 206 27 Works, VII, 222. 28 T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979), p. 67. 29 Turner and the Human Figure: Studies of Contemporary Life, ed. Ann Chumbley and Ian Warrell (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1989), p. 30. 30 I.A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1934, 3rd edition with a new Foreword by Kathleen Coburn, 1962). 31 Selected Letters of I.A. Richards, ed. John Constable (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 77 (to T.S. Eliot, 22 March 1934). 32 Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, p. 181. All subsequent page references in the text are to this edition. 33 Richards’s critical biographer, John Paul Russo, is sure that ‘the last chapters of Coleridge on Imagination should be read with the historical

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situation of the mid-1930s in mind. Depicting a “wrecked universe” and the competition of warlike myths, Richards never made a more impassioned plea on behalf of the “myth-making” power of imagination as the “necessary channel for reconstitution of order” ’; I.A. Richards: His Life and Work (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 384. For his description of how the Japanese invasion of China put paid to Richards’s attempts successfully ‘to put my recommendations based on Basic English’ to the Chinese government, see Complementarities: Uncollected Essays, ed. John Paul Russo (Manchester: Carcanet, 1976), pp. 262–3. 34 Ruskin,Works, V, 424. Russo claims that ‘Richards became a “devotee” of the fourth volume of Ruskin’s Modern Painters . . .’, I.A. Richards: His Life and Work, p. 593. 35 CL, I, 279 (to John Thelwall). 36 In Ch. XV, ‘Synaesthesis’, of Richards’s youthful collaboration with C.K. Ogden and James Wood, this genealogy is noted. ‘It is surprising that, whatever its value, Schiller’s theory has not attracted more attention. In Germany it seems to have been absorbed into metaphysical speculations such as those of Schelling . . .’ The Foundations of Aesthetics, reprint of 2nd edition of 1925 (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1974), p.86.

Chapter 8: Spelling the World   1 Schelling, Werke, 1 / 7, 432; Thomas Pfau in Schelling, Idealism and the Endgame of Theory (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 206.   2 Werke, 1 / 7, 423: Theologie mehr nur ein Abstraktum derPhilosophie ist.   3 Contra Leibniz, Schelling argues in the Seminars: ‘to have [God] elect the best world from an infinite number of worlds is to grant Him the least degree of freedom. One such act, thoroughly absolute, is what founds our character. Character also originates in a form of concentration [Contraktion] whereby we afford ourselves a form of determinacy; the more intensive this determinacy is, the more character we have. No one argues that man elects his character, which is to say that character is not the result of freedom in its ordinary sense; and yet it is imputable. Here, then, we have an instance of this identity of freedom and necessity’, Idealism and the Endgame of Theory, p. 204, Werke, 1 / 7, 430. Compare Die Weltalter: Fragmente In der Urfassungen von 1811 und 1813 ed. Manfred Schröter (Beck: Munich, 1966), pp. 177–8, translated as The Abyss of Freedom / Ages of the World (second draft 1813), by Judith Norman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 175–6.   4 Die Weltalter, pp. 113–14; BL, I, 300 passim.   5 F.H. Jacobi, Werke, reprint of the 1816 Leipzig edition, ed. F. Roth and F. Koppen, 6 vols. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976), III, 202: ‘Denn das is der Geist des Menschen, dass er Gott erkennet; dass er ihn



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11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18

19

20 21 22

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wahrnimmt, den Verborgenen ahndet in der nature, in seiner Brust ihn vernimmt, ihn anbetet in seinem Herzen. Das ist seine Vernunft, dass ihm das Dasein eines Gottes offenbarer und gewisser als das eigene ist.’ See James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and the Politics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984). Phenomenology, p. 125; Werke, 3, 161–2. Wordsworth, The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), pp. 61–2. See Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, translated by Joan Stambaugh (Athens OH, London: Ohio University Press, 1985), p. 116: ‘Things cannot become in God since God the existing one is purely He himself. They are godlike, and can only become “in” God if they become in that in which God himself is not He himself. And that is the ground in God. This ground in God has now undergone a new determination [and so the original divine determination is repeated] through this reflection.’ See especially ‘Phenomenality and materiality in Kant’, in Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, edited with an introduction by Andrej Warminski (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 70–91. Phenomenology, pp. 60–2; Werke, 3, 84–7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 6.432–6.54. Schelling, Werke, I / 10, 160. Translated by Andrew Bowie as On the History of Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 159–60. Werke, I / 10, 159. Phenomenology, pp. 60, 62; Werke, 3, 85, 87. Wordsworth, The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed, 2 vols (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), I, 271–7. Ibid., VI, 541–2. ‘To A Gentleman, Composed On The Night After His Recitation Of A Poem On The Growth Of An Individual Mind’, ll, 23–40; PW I Poems, Part II, no. 401. The Letters of John Keats 1814–21, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), I, 185 (to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817). Phenomenology, p. 15; Werke, 3, 30. I’m indebted here to Daniel Berthold-Bond’s discussion in Hegel’s Theory of Madness (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995). Wordsworth, The Fenwick Notes, pp. 61–2.

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Index

Adorno, T.W. 11, 116 aesthetics 4, 20, 22, 23–4, 29, 43, 57–63, 74, 80–1, 93, 109, 111, 114, 120, 126, 131, 133, 138 Alighieri, Dante 23, 58 allegory 59, 63, 108, 110, 120 Allsop, Thomas 101 anti–babel 4, 63–8, 104 Aristophanes 86 Aristotle 62, 89, 99, 141n. 19 Arnold, Matthew 112, 133 Ashton, Rosemary 153n. 7 Atheismusstreit 2, 17 Athenaeum Fragments 4, 45, 139n. 6 and 8 Austin, J.L. 60, 149n. 12 Bacon, Francis 42, 66, 114, 119 Baillie, Joanna 41, 48–9 Bakhtin, M. M. 42, 147n. 14 Bataille, Georges 94, 155n. 30 Baulch, David M. 150n. 3 Beach, Edward Allen 156n. 9 and 10 Beaumont, Sir George 79 Behler, Ernst 50, 148n. 30 Beiser, Frederick 97, 145n. 46, 154n. 21 Belsey, Catherine 3, 139n. 4 Benjamin, Andrew 59, 149n. 11 Benjamin, Walter 9, 58, 65, 108–9, 138, 156n. 12 and 13 Bentham, Jeremy 119 Bergson, Henri 9, 78 Bernstein, Jay 58, 148n. 6 Berthold-Bond, Daniel 159n. 21 biography 26, 33, 46, 48, 69–88 Blake, William 48, 97 Jerusalem 97 Book of Thel 98 Blanchot, Maurice 99, 101–2, 155n. 30 Boehme, Jacob 13, 15–16, 97, 110 Boulger, James 154n. 17 Bowie, Andrew 19, 23, 143n. 26, 144n. 35, 145n. 55, 153n. 10 Brecht, Bertholt 48 Bruno, Giordano 13 Büchner, G. 38 Burke, Edmund 31–2, 51, 53, 79

Burke, Kenneth 37, 146n. 1 Burwick, Frederick 147n. 17 Butler, Marilyn 46 Bygrave, Stephen 142n. 20 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 38, 40, 47, 56, 69, 115, 146n. 11, 147n. 27 Cadell, Robert 157n. 20 Calvin, John 77 Carlson, Julie 47, 50, 52, 147n. 26 Carlyle, Thomas 111–12 Casey, John 153n. 2 Cavell, Stanley 107 Chai, Leon 140n. 18 Chandler, James 146n.1, 159n. 6 Christensen, Jerome 154n. 23 Chuang Tzu 120 Chumbley, Ann 157n. 29 Cicero 99, 102 Cimitile, Anna Maria 6, 140n 13 and 15 Clarkson, Thomas 100 Clerisy 7, 25, 31–2, 46, 51, 78–9, 80, 87, 105, 135, 145n. 59 Coburn, Kathleen 152n. 1 Coleridge’s works ‘The Aeolian Harp’ 30 Aids to Reflection 36, 76, 94–5, 108, 109 Biographia Literaria 3–4, 7, 9, 27, 31, 35, 39, 45, 46–7, 48, 51, 69–88, 95, 97, 98, 99–100, 103, 123, 134 ‘Christabel’ 5–6, 31, 51, 57 ‘Dejection: An Ode’ 31–5, 53–4, 62–3, 89 ‘The Destiny of Nations’ 30 The Fall of Robespierre 50–1 The Friend 7, 9, 18, 35–6, 64, 66, 86, 89–102 ‘Frost at midnight’ 54 ‘Kubla Khan’ 5–6, 31, 51, 55–6, 64 Lay Sermons 31, 36, 51, 106 ‘Letter to Sara Hutchinson’ 31–5 ‘This Lime–Tree Bower My Prison’ 31 Logic 137 Marginalia 7 ‘The Nightingale’ 31 ‘Note on Spinoza’ 97

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On the Constitution of the Church and State 11, 31, 36 Opus Maximum 7, 66, 70, 75, 110, 121, 124, 126, 128 Osorio 51–2 Philosophical Lectures 5 ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’ 105, 109 ‘Religious Musings’ 30 Remorse 47, 51–2, 88 ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ 5–6, 31, 51 Table Talk 67 The Watchman 31, 77 communication 9, 17–18, 19, 22, 37, 66, 68, 74, 76, 91, 97, 99 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot, Abbé de 91 Constable, John 112–13, 157n. 19 Cordner, Christopher 148n. 37 Cox, Jeffrey N. 147n. 13 Cox, Philip 147n. 12 Crabb Robinson, Henry 13, 15 Creuzer, Georg Friedrich 108, 156n. 10 Curran, Stuart 146n. 2 de Bolla, Peter 59, 60, 148n. 9 Deleuze, Gilles 9, 75–6, 77, 78–9, 99, 102, 151n. 13, 15 and 22, 152n. 26 de Man, Paul 9, 45, 66, 72, 126, 151n. 7, 159n. 10 Derrida, Jacques 9, 23, 28, 71, 99, 101–2, 151n. 6, 155n. 31 on friendship 9, 101–2 desynonymy 16, 35, 46, 84–7, 103, 106, 124 Dews, Peter 144n. 37, 150n. 4 drama (discursive as well as staged) 3–4, 5, 8, 9, 35, 37–52, 72, 86, 89–90, 111–12 Dryden, John 53 Eco, Umberto 156n. 11 Edinburgh Review 85 Edwards, Pamela 145n. 59, 152n. 25 Eldridge, Richard 107, 156n. 8 Eliot, T.S. 3, 111, 118 Engels, Friedrich 9, 107 Epictetus 75 Erdman, David 146n. 11 ethics 10, 17–18, 22, 27, 31, 35, 43, 53, 61–2, 70, 75–6, 79–80, 82, 89, 93, 98–9, 116, 129, 131 Euripides 44–5, 147n. 19 Fenwick, Isabella 11, 137

Fichte, J. G. 2, 5–6, 13–18, 22, 23, 42, 43, 46, 54–5, 65, 75–6, 81–3, 86, 87, 89, 95, 119 original duplicity 14, 46, 65, 75 Critique of All Revelation 95 Science of Knowledge 5, 14–15 System of Ethics 43, 147n. 16 The Vocation of Man 17 Foot, Philippa 153n. 2 Foucault, Michel 107, 108 Frank, Manfred 19, 20, 23, 76, 93, 143n. 26, 151n. 14, 153n. 13 Freud, Siegmund 20, 94, 109, 136 friendship 9, 76, 87, 89–102, 129, 136 Fruman, Norman 16, 90, 153n. 4 Fuhrmans, Horst 148n. 7 Gadamer, Hans Georg 58 Gage, John 157n. 19 genre 3, 24, 26, 41, 65–6, 74, 87, 150n. 25 Gibbon, Edward 155n. 29 Godwin, William 40, 69, 91 Goethe, J.W. von 19, 38 Goldsmith, Oliver 77 Goodson, A.C. 139n. 5 Goya, Francisco de 115 Gramsci, Antonio 78 Gray, Thomas 84 Green, J.H. 8, 15 Guattari, Félix 152n. 26 Habermas, Jürgen 28, 107, 153n. 13 Hamacher, Werner 65–6, 149–50n. 22, 24 and 25 Hamann, J.G. 16, 49, 121 Hampshire, Stuart 154–5n. 26 Harding, Anthony John 152n. 1, 155n. 31 and 2 Hartley, David 30, 91 Hazlitt, William 37, 39–40, 41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49, 69, 100, 113 Hedley, Douglas 110, 153n. 13, 155n. 29, 156n. 14 Hegel, G.W. F. 5, 7, 10, 11, 14, 17, 140n. 18, 19–21, 23, 25–36, 45, 54, 58, 61–2, 67, 68, 71–2, 74, 78, 87, 89, 107, 121–2, 128, 130–4 and Fichte 14, 17, 43, 75 and Kant 27, 79 and mediation 19, 30, 33–4, 72, 130–3, 134, 136–7, 143n. 30 and Schelling 13, 19, 20–2, 25–6, 62, 68, 72, 107, 122, 128 and Schiller 49–50, 61–2, 64, 74, 149n. 18



Index

173

The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System 13–14, 15, 28, 29 Phenomenology, 5, 7, 10, 11, 13, 21, 25–36, 58, 62, 74, 78, 79, 89, 121–2, 136 Science of Logic 10, 20, 29, 30 Heidegger, Martin 9, 10, 104, 109, 138, 155n. 2, 159n. 9 Henrich, Dieter 20, 21–2, 65, 143n. 32, 151n. 12 Herder, J.G. 16, 49 Hertz, Neil 149n. 16 historicism 6, 30, 36, 83, 84–5, 90, 106, 108–10, 120, 126, 130, 135 Hogg, James 77 Hogrebe, Wolfram 23–4, 144n. 38, 42 and 43 Hölderlin, Friedrich 13, 26, 55, 75, 76, 95 Holmes, Richard 71–2 Homer 74, 116 Hooker, Richard 66 Houlgate, Stephen 144n. 36, 145n. 55 Hugo, Victor 38, 47, 147n. 25 Hume, David 37, 91 Hutchinson, Sara 53

Kooy, Michael John 148n. 31 Kristeva, Julia 19, 143n. 27 Kucich, Greg 40

ideas 4, 9, 31, 54, 64, 66 Inchbald, Elizabeth 40–1 irony 23, 45

McFarland, T. 2, 16, 75, 121, 151n. 17 McGann, J.J. 100 Machiavelli, Niccolò 42, 78, 80, 87 Macintyre, Alasdair 153n. 2 Mackintosh, Sir James 91 Mansfield, Katherine 119 Marcel, Gabriel 140n. 17 and 19 Marx, Karl 14, 28, 93, 114 Marx, Werner 148n. 7, 154n. 18 Maturin, Charles 46 Mellor, Anne K. 49 Mendelssohn, Moses 129 metacritique 16–17, 49, 121 Milnes, Tim 11, 141n. 121 Milton, John 30, 47, 53, 134, 136 Modiano, Raimonda 8, 140n. 18 Montaigne, Michel de 77, 78 Muirhead, J.H. 92, 96, 153n. 8, 154n. 17 and 19 Musset, Alfred de 38 mythology 4, 10, 23, 24–5, 56–7, 104–6, 107, 109–10, 118

Jacobi, F.H. 1–2, 8, 15, 23, 24, 32, 93, 123, 129, 143–4n. 33, 158–9n. 5 On the Divine Things and their Revelation 15, 22, 123, 140n. 19 Jager, Colin 156n. 7 Jaspers, Karl 9, 92, 153n. 11 Johnson, Samuel 53, 148n. 2 Jones, George 113 Jones, Robert 134 Joyce, James 56, 119 Kant, Immanuel 2, 4–5, 9, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 22, 37, 45–6, 47, 48, 49, 54, 57–63, 65, 67, 77, 81, 87, 89, 94–5, 99, 101, 130 and apperception 14, 18, 25, 45–6, 72, 154n. 16 Critique of Judgement 4, 23, 58–63, 65, 79, 138 Critique of Practical Reason 18, 142–3n. 21 Critique of Pure Reason 4–5, 140n. 9 ‘Dreams of Spirit–Seer’ 18 Keats, John 38–9, 69, 136 Kierkegaard, S. 14, 57, 106, 155–6n. 6 Klancher, Jon 40, 45 Knowles, James Sheridan 40 Kojève, Alexandre 10, 28, 73

Lacan, Jacques 20, 73, 93–4, 143n. 27, 150n. 4 Lacoue–Labarthe, Philippe 43 Lamb, Charles 51, 57, 148n. 33 Larpent, Anna Margaretta 41 Leask, Nigel 155n. 3 Leibniz, G.W. 54–5, 158n. 3 Lenin, V.I. 120 Leopardi, Giacomo 114 Lessing, G.E. 38, 129 Levinson, Marjorie 64, 149n. 20 Lindsay, Jack 157n. 20 Lipsius 77 Lloyd, Genevieve 154–5n. 26 Locke, John 119 Lockridge, L.S. 152n. 1 Logos 18, 35, 66–8, 104, 155n. 1 Lorraine, Claude 115 Lovejoy, Arthur O. 141n. 19 Lucretius 119

Nancy, Jean–Luc 43 Newman, Barnett 60 Newman, John Henry 112, 117 Nietzsche, Friedrich 9, 11, 43–5, 108, 118 The Birth of Tragedy 43–4, 147n. 18

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Novalis [Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg] 19, 97 Ogden, C.K. 158n. 36 ontology 2, 3, 8, 9, 13, 19, 56, 57, 58, 73, 80–1, 83, 87, 95, 104, 110–11, 113, 115, 119–20, 122, 128, 136, 138 Orsini, G.N.G. 140n. 18 Owenson, Sydney 115 Paine, Tom 46 pantheism 1–2, 11, 15, 20, 22, 23, 25, 92, 93– 8, 101, 110, 124, 129–132, 134–6, 137–8 parabasis 45, 117, 149–50n. 24 Peacock. Thomas Love 38 Perkins, Mary Anne 139n. 7, 153n. 8 Perry, Seamus 39, 146n. 6 Pfau, Thomas 122, 156n. 7, 158n. 1 and 3 Piggot, Jan 157n. 20 Pippin, Robert 28, 145n. 46 plagiarism 3–4, 68, 83, 90–1, 105, 114, 122–3, 157n. 25 Plato 11, 43–4, 66, 89, 93, 99, 125, 137 Poole, Thomas 13 Pope, Alexander 53, 84, 116 post–Kantianism 2, 4–5, 8, 9, 11, 13–14, 25, 30, 37, 48–9, 65–6, 69, 72, 79, 81, 83, 88, 89–90, 96, 98, 100–1, 111, 138 Priestley, Joseph 91 Proust, Marcel 78 psychoanalysis 3–5, 8, 11, 19–20, 21, 24, 54, 73, 76, 92, 95, 109, 121–2, 136 Rajan, Tilottama 153n. 3 repetition 19, 20, 22, 26–7, 35, 39, 52, 56, 57, 59, 62–3, 66–7, 83, 85, 95, 110, 126, 129–30, 136, 159n. 9 Richards, I.A. 3, 17, 54, 60, 111, 118–20, 158n. 36 Richardson, Alan 42, 147n. 14 Roethke, Theodore 43 Rogers, Samuel 115 Rooke, Barbara 100 Rose, Gillian 10, 28, 145n. 48 Rosen, Michael 29–30, 55, 56, 145n. 51 Rosenzweig, Franz 28 Rothko, Mark 60 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 91, 134 Ruskin, John 112–18, 119, 157n. 25 Russell, Gillian 146n. 2 Russo, John Paul 157–8n. 33 and 34 Sartre, Jean-Paul 9 scepticism 6, 31, 33, 74, 76, 79, 87, 107, 125

Schelling, F.W. J. 1, 3, 4, 6–7, 9–10, 15, 18– 25, 35, 43, 58, 59, 66, 68, 76, 80–1, 84, 86, 87–8, 92–3, 95–6, 102–11, 119–20, 126, 127, 128–32, 138 and Fichte 13–18, 42, 43, 76, 81–2, 86, 87, 119 and Hegel 20–2, 25–7, 128–9, 131–2, 137, 152n. 29 and the ‘higher’ criticism 107, 108, 110, 120 and Jacobi 1, 15 identity philosophy of 15, 18–19, 23, 35, 43, 92. 102, 123 Naturphilosophie of 15, 18, 92, 104, 153–4n. 13 positive philosophy of 23, 92, 96, 109, 137 and ‘potencies’ 15, 24, 103–4, 105, 107, 129 Abhandlungen 69, 80, 81, 87, 152n. 152n. 29 The Ages of the World (Weltalter), 3, 6–7, 10–11, 18, 58, 73–4, 92, 94, 102, 104, 110, 122, 139n. 2, 141n. 22 ‘On Dante in Relation to Philosophy’ 23–4, 58 Darlegung 16, 82, 142n. 14, 152n. 34 Denkmal 7, 15, 140n. 11 Einleitung 39, 152n. 32 The Deities of Samothrace 7, 105 Lectures on the History of Modern Philosophy 11, 131–2, 140n. 11, 145n. 55 On the Nature of Human Freedom (Freiheitschrift) 7–8, 15, 18, 22, 58, 67, 74, 92, 104, 110, 122, 153–4n. 13 The Philosophy of Art 23 Philosophie der Mythologie 104–6, 109, 110 ‘The Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature’ 23–4 Berlin Lectures on Philosophy of Revelation 9, 106, 107, 110 Stuttgart Seminars 18, 19, 122 System of the Total Philosophy 19, 20 System of Transcendental Idealism 4, 20, 23, 35, 80, 87, 92, 103 Schiller, Friedrich 4, 19, 25, 49–50, 61–2, 64, 120, 148n. 31, 149n. 14 and 25 Schlegel / Schelling, Caroline 19 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 19, 44, 97 Schlegel, Friedrich 4, 12, 19, 43–4, 45, 49– 50, 59–60, 65, 97, 115, 119, 133, 147n. 19 and 20, 149n. 22 Schleiermacher, F.D.E. 19, 97 Schulz, Werner 143n. 25 Scott, Sir Walter 69, 113, 157n. 20



Index

Scotus, Duns 1 Seneca 74 Shaffer, Elinor 139n. 7, 157n. 16 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of 8 Shakespeare, William 38, 51, 53–4, 76, 78, 84, 152n. 24 Shelley, Percy B. 38, 48 Sibley, F,N. 60, 149n. 12 Simpson, David 144n. 39 and 40, 148n. 1 Skinner, Quentin 151n. 19 Snow, Dale 140n. 11 Solomon, Robert 75, 151n. 11 Southey, Robert 50, 52, 85, 91–2 Spinoza, Baruch 16, 93–4, 97, 99, 130, 144n. 34, 154n. 14, 154–5n. 26 Spirit 13, 14–15, 16, 22, 23, 24, 26–7, 29, 33–5, 43, 74, 82–3, 89, 97, 107, 109, 121–2, 123, 125, 134, 136–7 Staël, Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, Mme de 115 Stamp, Richard 155n. 30 Stendhal [Marie Henri Beyle] 38, 48 Stoicism 6, 9, 10, 17–18, 31–2, 43, 61, 65, 74–80, 82, 87, 89, 99, 129–31 Strawson, Galen 77–8, 85, 87, 151n. 21 Surber, Jere Paul 142n. 15 Swift, Jonathan 53 symbol 6, 25, 29, 106, 108–9, 129, 134 Symphilosophie 10, 19, 26–7, 35, 43, 50, 111, 118 tautegory 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 139n. 5, 17, 25, 29, 59, 63, 68, 84, 90, 103–11, 113, 118, 120, 126, 129, 135, 138 Taylor, Charles 28, 74, 145n. 47, 151n. 12 theology 2, 18, 19, 20, 24, 30, 56–7, 66, 73, 82, 92, 108, 109–10, 121–4, 126, 135–7 Tieck, L. 19 Titian 79, 80 Toscano, Alberto 156n. 7 Tristram Shandy 98 Tuck, Richard 77, 152n. 19

175

Turner, J.M.W. 112–18, 120 unhappy consciousness 30, 31, 33, 75, 76–7, 79, 89, 122 Unitarianism 30 Veit, Dorothea 19 Vickers, Neil 53, 148n. 3 Vico, G. 156n. 15 Voltaire [François–Marie Arouet] 38 Wagner, Richard 115 Wahl, Jean 28, 34, 145n. 47 Warrell, Ian 157n. 29 Weelen, Guy 157n. 18 Wellek, René 68, 140n. 17, 152n. 29 Wheeler, Kathleen 139n. 8 White, Alan R. 153n. 10 Williams, Bernard 153n. 2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 9, 93, 104, 107, 130–1, 137, 159n. 12 Wollheim, Richard 59, 148n. 10 Wood, James 158n. 36 Woolf, Virginia 119 Wordsworth, William 2, 3, 11–12, 32–3, 42, 56, 85, 86, 90, 99–100, 124–6, 132–8 The Borderers 42 The Excursion 5, 136 ‘Home at Grasmere’ 136 ‘Immortality Ode’ 2, 7, 10–11, 32, 56, 67, 95, 97–8, 124–6, 134, 137 Lyrical Ballads (and Preface) 86, 90, 95, 97 The Prelude 69, 85, 132–3, 134, 137 ‘Tintern Abbey’ 31, 56, 131 ‘The White Doe of Rylstone’ 42, 147n. 15 Žižek, Slavoj 93–4, 140n. 14, 144n. 35, 150n. 4, 153n. 13